Someone stands beyond the wood and, instead of being permitted to enter, announces themselves with a shrill mechanical shriek that pierces the whole house at once. My human leaps up. Every time. Doesn't matter that I was asleep on the lap it had promised, in principle, for the entire afternoon.
The sound is the interesting part. It is not a bird. It is not the little rubber mouse. It is a scream with no throat, and my human, who ignores me when I scream with an excellent throat directly into its face at the hour of feeding, sprints toward this one like it owes something.
Then the ritual: the door swings open, warm outside air comes in, and a stranger is granted the threshold I patrol. Sometimes they leave a box. Sometimes they leave nothing at all, just words, which my human accepts as though words were meat.
I have studied the small glowing button they press. I understand it now. It is a device for summoning my human away from me, and every visitor knows the incantation, and none of them know mine.
So I have adjusted. When the shriek comes and the lap tips me to the floor, I do not protest. I simply proceed, ahead of the human, to the still-warm cushion it abandoned, and fold myself into the exact dent its body left.
It can answer the door.
The seat is answered.