Look at this! LOOK at it! Sonic the stuffed Hedgehog has been ASSASSINATED, and I’m going to guess by the claw marks in his belly and this whisker near the scene of the crime that the perpetrator was none other than the despicable Mr. Fuzzles.

Yah, Mr. Fuzzles. My cat. C’mon, my girlfriend named him. I wanted to call him “Odysseus,” you know, said with a booming voice. But when you’re trying to call over “Odysseus,” and your girlfriend is cooing, “C’mere Mr. Fuzzles!” well, you know who wins that one.

Anyways, back to the tragedy at hand. I won this stuffed Sonic from the claw machine at Denny’s fair and square. The other night I noticed that Mr. Fuzzles was creeping across the living room floor with his belly low to the ground. In a blur of fur and fury, he suddenly leapt from the center of the room onto the couch where he landed on Sonic, all four sets of claws extended, and attempted a disemboweling.

I pulled him off of his victim just in time. “Bad Fuzzles! Bad, BAD Mr. Fuzzles!” I scolded. But it’s not like he cared. He looked back at me with two mismatched eyes as if to say, “I did what I did... for freedom.”

The next day I hid Sonic in my bedroom, which is a cat-free zone. In the morning when I was getting ready for class, Mr. Fuzzles managed to slip between my legs unseen as I walked in from the bathroom. He also apparently tucked his bell under his collar so that it didn’t ring. I opened my closet and picked out a shirt, and when I turned around, there he was on the bed, jaws clamped around Sonic’s neck. He looked up at me -- like, “busted!” -- and then took off in an orange steak.

Sonic looked all lopsided by then. One eye was partially detached and one limb was hanging in a really uncomfortable way. That was it! For his own protection he was going into the household equivalent of the Witness Protection Program: The basement. Inside the storage closet. That place is strictly kitty-free and the basement door is always closed.

This morning Mr. Fuzzles strolled into the family room licking his chops. I just KNEW some sort of operation had gone down. I checked my socks, scoped out the laundry, checked the kitchen garbage -- nope, all clear. He musta pulled down something BIG.

So I went to the basement and checked the closet. What did I find? THIS! And the closet door slightly ajar. And, nearby, the screen to the basement skylight slightly ajar. When I stuck my head outside to look up, I saw that the trellis under the bedroom window was in disarray. That’s right: Mr. Fuzzles had slipped into the bedroom, down the side of the house, infiltrated the basement, pushed open the closet door, knocked down Sonic, assassinated him, then slipped unseen back outside and into the house. The entire operation was pulled off with the precision of a Charlie’s Angels movie. It’s like my cat is a superhero stealth Fox-Hound operative from the Metal Gear games.

I yelled at him, but he sorta just stared right through my head. He and I both knew, down inside, that he deserved some sort of medal.

[Daily Victim idea submitted by GameSpy Reader Neil Hughes.]