Ah, yes -- once you've lived with a cat for a year or so, you begin to know more about her.  When we first brought Squeek home, she pretty much made her peace, made her place and stayed out of the way.  She played -- all kittens play -- sometimes pretty roughly, in fact, with Gord.  All things considered, she was a diffident little cat, almost the 'textbook cat' in many ways.  Didn't much take to petting, only occasionally crawled on my lap -- usually when I was sitting in front of the computer, just after I'd got out of the shower and was still wearing my bath robe.  She had food and a warm place to sleep, and nobody hammered her, so as far as she was concerned, everything worked.

So I don't know exactly when the little incursions started.  Maybe it's natural that, once a cat reaches adulthood, she'll decide she has to either suck up to the other cats or make up with the humans to cement her place in the hierarchy.  It's fairly well known around here that Tink is the boss.  Squeek never argued about that, really -- it's never seemed to be her goal to be the boss.   She's smaller than both Tink and Gord (who also is not the boss, but never quite seems to internalize that knowledge), in a league with Doodle-sized cats, and nowhere near as fierce/vicious as Doodle can be if she feels threatened.

Gord, for all he's the biggest cat in the house, seems much more concerned with his job as 'human ingratiator' than he is with being the beta/gamma cat, let alone changing his spot on the cat ladder.  He'll occasionally shoulder Tink off one of the animal furniture towers, if there's no other warm spot he wants to sleep in, but mostly he's much more concerned with lap access and the feeding schedule than being boss.   If the Southern Ohio Porch Cats were a corporation, and the humans in the household were assumed to be the nominal 'owners' of said corporation, Tink would be the CEO, Doodle would be middle management, and Gord would be the maintenance guy.

Where does Squeek fit into that analogy?   I guess she's sort of the receptionist.  Nobody picks on her, she gets along okay and kind of 'runs stealth' around here.  She and Tink occasionally play, but it never gets too rough; she has the occasional 'pissing match' with Gord, still, but it still seems more like a kid smacking a piñata at a birthday party than anything with any ultimate purpose.  If strangers come in the house, Tink sits at the top of the stairs and glares; Doodle hides under the bed; Gord lurks around the edges of the room.  Squeek flops down in the middle of the floor and stares at everybody as if she were producing a movie about it.

She also climbs in bed with us, some nights.  She makes that loud, whistly purr that sounds more like it's coming from a puma than a nine-pound house cat.  She'll let you pet her, then; she'll even let you rub her belly.  Well, us -- she's still diffident with strangers, though she does seem utterly unafraid of them.  Not sure how she'd react to a stranger sleeping overnight here.  Only Gord 'makes up' to strangers, and we're pretty much convinced he does it because he thinks if he's the friendliest cat in the whole house, he'll get more food than the rest of the cats.

Squeek can't be bribed.  She does what she wants, and she does it when she wants.  Don't pick her up -- she won't bite or claw you, but she will holler up hell from the next dimension until you put her down again.

She still won't eat out of a bowl, either.  She takes almost the entirety of her sustenance from a TV tray placed between our computer chairs in the family room.  It's easier to keep the other cats out of it, that way, and nobody ever runs her off from her food if she's hungry.