Anthropomorphic

Tonkinese Cat 

Character Portrait

Margot Popplewell

In Anthroxville, where neon dreams go to get spangled sideways and pick fights with reality, the anthropomorphic Tonkinese cat, Margot Popplewell, cuts a figure as incongruous as Sid Blitzkreig's sobriety at last call. She's a walking paradox: prim and proper on the outside but with a mind that operates like a gyroscope in a centrifuge – spinning wildly yet somehow maintaining its own batty equilibrium.

Her oversized polka-dot specs, perched precariously on her delicate snout, reflect the garish glow of Anthroxville's perpetual twilight. The blue bow atop her head isn't just decorative; it's a finely tuned instrument for detecting disturbances in the criminal underworld's force field. Her black dress, cut with the precision of a neurosurgeon's nervous breakdown, clings to her frame like it's afraid she might suddenly dematerialize – a not entirely unreasonable fear, given her tendency to appear and disappear around town like a devious specter. Those pristine white gloves clutch a handbag that's seen more action than the complaint box at the Anthroxville Police Department.

But it's Margot's eyes, magnified to comical proportions by her outlandish glasses, that truly betray her nature. They dart about with the frenetic energy of a pinball machine possessed, processing the carnival of absurdity that is Anthroxville at a speed that would make most supercomputers throw up their virtual hands in despair.

The anthro Tonkinese cat is more than just Marcel Gizzard's partner in Anthroxville's Detective Agency of Hunch and Premonition; she's the yin to his yang, the fizz to his pop, the method to his madness, the square root of minus one to his basic arithmetic. Where Marcel relies on gut feelings and sudden inspirations, Margot brings a certain... structure to their chaotic endeavors. Margot's got a system, you see. Her mind is a labyrinth of interconnected theories, each one more outlandish than the last, yet somehow grounded in a logic that only she fully comprehends, making advanced quantum physics look like finger painting.

Margot's methods are as diverse as they are questionable. On Mondays, she might be found consulting a worn deck of tarot cards, spreading them out on the cracked sidewalk and muttering incantations that sound suspiciously like nursery rhymes run backward. Tuesdays could see her scaling the town's tallest (and most structurally unsound) building, armed with a handmade weather vane that looks like it was cobbled together from an old coat hanger and a discarded bicycle wheel. Her determination to read the winds of criminal intent is matched only by her blatant disregard for gravity and common sense. From her precarious perch, she'll scream prophecies to the bewildered populace below, her voice carrying on the wind like the wail of a banshee with a stubbed toe.

Wednesdays are reserved for what Margot calls her "Olfactory Oracle" sessions. She can be seen sniffing her way through town like a scent-seer on some of Jackson Jiffy's finest amphetamines, her nose twitching furiously as she inhales the myriad scents of Anthroxville. "Ah ha!" she'll exclaim, pressing her nose against a lamppost, "Chicanery is afoot." Thursdays are dedicated to her "Sonic Surveillance" technique. Margot wanders the streets with a bizarre contraption strapped to her head, an unholy marriage of a gramophone horn and satellite dish. She listens intently to the cacophony of Anthroxville, convinced that the secret rhythms of crime are hidden in the town's soundtrack. 

Fridays are perhaps the most dreaded day of all, for that's when Margot conducts her weekly aura readings. Armed with a kaleidoscope of her own design - a monstrous thing that looks like it was birthed from the unholy union of a telescope and a disco ball - the anthro Tonkinese cat squints at unsuspecting passersby, reading their auras with all the subtlety of one of John Knuckle's unprovoked haymakers.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss Margot as merely eccentric. Behind the quirky façade lies a mind sharp enough to cut through the fog of Anthroxville's perpetual ennui. Her leaps of logic, while often baffling to others, have an uncanny way of landing uncomfortably close to the truth. It's as if she's tapped into some extraterrestrial frequency that broadcasts the town's secrets directly into her brain.

On any given day, you might find her outside a gin joint, teahouse,  or opium den, perched on a chair that creaks ominously with every shift of her weight. She'll be sipping a concoction that smells like it could strip paint at fifty paces, while scribbling furiously in a notebook that looks like it's been through a war with a glitter factory.

"Marcel, darling," she crowed on one such occasion, her voice a cocktail of cut-glass accent and gutter brawler, "the exact angle of Mia Culpa's eyelash two Saturdays ago, when correlated with the peculiar cloud formations over Anthroxville and the fluctuations in Ivan Spaffovovich's nostril flare, the lunar cycle's effect on Mungo Mugwort's inexplicable urge to yodel at traffic wardens, and the precise trajectory of Marty Shuffle's spectacularly public projectile vomiting outside The Knotted Knacker... indicates a 73% probability of some daring kidnap of President Clint Bigot. Crouching out of her chair, she licked the pavement and declared with absolute certainty that the fiends' plan was to replace him with a genetically modified turnip of roughly equal intelligence but vastly superior charisma.

Margot's eyes, magnified to the size of dinner plates behind those specs, sparkled with the mad excitement of a woman who's just discovered the secret of perpetual motion in her morning toast. The anthro Tonkinese cat turned to Marcel, and rising to her feet leaned in close, her breath a curious mix of peppermint and petrol fumes.

"But that's not all, my dear Marcel," she continued, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that could likely be heard in the next county. "The lunar cycle's effect on Mungo is particularly crucial. As the moon waxes, Mungo's yodeling increases in both volume and frequency, reaching a crescendo at the full moon, when he's been observed madly cursing at parking meters for hours on end. This cosmic ballet of lunacy and off-key crooning is the key to pinpointing the exact moment when the kidnapping will take place."

Of course, when she's wrong, it's not so much 'missing the mark' as it is 'nuking the entire bullseye zone'. There was that time she convinced half the town that their left shoes were plotting a communist uprising. The resulting chaos made a standard full-blown riot look like a balmy poolside martini by comparison. When Florence de Looselips, Norie Bluffbork, Luther Popshot, Wesley Smidge, and Fabia Dinkplop were once seen to be near the...