Quest — the Moon, at the Cat Man on the regolith

The Original

It is ACTUALLY mine, he breathes. When his eyes open again they are wet, and you both pretend they are not

A cat in a hat, pacing the regolith with his tail lashing hard enough to knock over moon rocks, has an ancient, petty, and completely sincere grievance: the Hat Man, he insists, stole his entire identity. "I was the original. The Cat With The Hat Man. Then Dr. Seuss and this — this FRAUD ruined it all for me." According to him, the Hat Man once approached while he was eating tuna out of a can, said it was "for a friend, to promote your brand," and simply never gave the hat back. He's been wearing a tan placeholder ever since — "this is not the hat, the Hat is ME" — and needs it back, but can't retrieve it himself: "every cat on this rock smells like cat," and the Hat Man would smell him coming before he ever reached the door.

The heist

The Cat Man hands over a very convincing fake hat and a precise plan: get in through the door while the Hat Man sleeps, go straight to the corner, and wait — he'll stir, then settle, and the player waits through that too, until the sleep is genuinely deep. Only then does the actual crossing happen, and it has to be slow — "like syrup." Swap the real hat for the fake at the bedside, and leave the same way. The Hat Man, apparently, has never once taken the hat off, and will never check.

The payoff

Bringing the real hat back gets the Cat Man's composure to break completely. Whatever line is chosen, the scene lands the same way: he takes it with both paws, checks the seams, puts it on — and something in him that's clearly been held together for a very long time finally lets go. "It is ACTUALLY mine," he breathes, and his eyes are wet by the end, which both the game's narration and the player are invited to pretend not to notice. One reply option even gives him a line that reframes the whole encounter — "The ORIGINAL. Accept no substitutes." — delivered to nobody, to the empty regolith, sixty years of swagger arriving all at once.

The symmetry is the entire design

This quest and The Hollow Moon are the two other Moon-set Hat Man quests — this one opens as soon as the player is on the Moon, while the other is gated behind finishing Standing Slightly Closer first. The two are otherwise unconnected story lines with no shared requirements between them.

The game's own development notes are explicit that this quest was built specifically as a mirror of Standing Slightly Closer: in that quest, the player dresses as the Hat Man and watches strangers sleep. In this one, the player breaks into the Hat Man's own house and watches him sleep instead — the watcher gets watched. Nobody in either quest ever remarks on this, which is precisely the point; the parallel is left for the player to notice on their own rather than being spelled out. The actual heist mechanics (the corner, the stillness, the slow crossing, the bedside swap) are handled by the game's own scripted encounter machinery — this quest's dialogue only hands over the fake hat at the start and takes delivery of the real one at the end, letting the tension live entirely in the silent crossing itself rather than in any conversation.

The only way to wear a hat at all

Finishing this quest has a genuine, permanent mechanical effect: it's the one and only way the player's own character can wear hats as a visible cosmetic from that point on — implemented as the first owned hat automatically appearing on the character model. The waking Hat Man himself is unaffected by any of this: he keeps his usual post, his usual handful of dialogue lines, and a fake hat that's visually identical to the eye. The only thing that actually changes on screen is the Cat Man's own figure, which switches from the tan placeholder to the genuine hatman-black hat the moment the quest resolves.

Version history

• v1312 — added. Built from an operator-supplied transcript with the explicit goal of letting the player wear hats — a request that had apparently been sitting unimplemented until this quest gave it a proper narrative reason to exist.

Trivia

• Mirrors Standing Slightly Closer (v442) directly — the Hat Man quest that came roughly 870 versions earlier — down to the specific structure of standing still, waiting, and crossing a room slowly toward a sleeping figure.
• Neither quest ever draws attention to being a mirror of the other. The connection exists purely in the game's own development notes and in what a player who's done both might notice themselves.