For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-663-5-minute-freewrite-wednesday-prompt-rat

Rat. Rat rat rat.

Take a rat trap and feed it to the bears. Ooooo scary bears. But then they eat a rat trap, and that's all that matters.

Let's try again.

There was a family of rats that lived on the starts hip. That's right. It was a starts hip. It begins the hip. The hip starts. I dunno. Let's abandon the nonsense for a moment, and go back to the fiction. The functional fiction.

A family of rats. These were intended, of course. There was always just enough. Just enough to support the rats. Rats who were occasionally available to the people of the ship, who were intended to sow fear, but who generally made the denizens breathe a sigh of relief. They ran through during the climactic moment of the puking challenge. They were meant to heighten the grossness for the audience at home, but for everyone on the ship, it meant the challenge was almost over. People started to get better after that. It was ironic, perhaps. Other than this, the rat family bred and lived and loved in the walls.

But Cutherine had befriended the rats. Well, kind of. She knew from her research that they existed. And she had spent some time in the archives of the learning computer learning about the rats that were their progenitors, so she felt like she knew them. She had a plan to, during all the chaos of the ship software sabotage, free the rats from their joyful existence, and bring them to her bunk with her, where their fates were far less secure. She nonetheless hoped they could breed beyond the population of four, and that she could have them as pets.