I. Before Anybody Had Pants
In the beginning there was only void, soup, and a suspicious cosmic rumble that sounded exactly like a stomach growling at 3 a.m., which in hindsight was probably the first cat asking where dinner was.
The universe sneezed out stars, rocks, and one extremely rude comet that would later become the patron saint of bad ideas and the first toy ever batted across the hallway by a celestial cat.
Earth arrived like a hot pizza stone hurled through infinity by a drunk god who had lost the manual.
The oceans boiled, the mountains screamed, and the sky looked like a rainbow had been punched in the throat.
For several million years nothing happened except lava doing jazz hands and microbes learning the subtle art of existing very damply.
Then one tiny cell looked at another tiny cell and said, in the oldest language known to science, "bro."
This was the first friendship, the first startup, and according to certain forbidden tablets, the first time a cat looked at sentient life and thought, "excellent, interns."
Soon the planet was full of slime entrepreneurs merging, splitting, vibrating, and generally behaving like variables in a bad CSS demo while the invisible cat-overlords watched from beyond time, occasionally knocking meteors off shelves for entertainment.
The moon watched the whole thing with the tired expression of an underpaid babysitter.
And thus the prelude to humanity began, not with dignity, but with goo, supervision, and the quiet certainty that some ancient cat had already claimed the warmest corner of reality.