Take that, your Face

Kicking a tiger: not a well-planned way of rousing it. Ever heard ‘let sleeping tigers lie’? ‘Cause apparently this guy’s foot hadn’t. And if that appendage couldn’t move quickly, it was about to get a set of disoriented jaws clamping down on it.

Baby blue tiger eyes blearily blinked at the man standing above him. Blinked, and widened. Ah. This was a man; not a punk mutant teenager in serious need of a lesson teachin’. If he had caught the guy’s leg, now would be the time he’d apologetically spit it back out. Either way, he’d be scrambling to his paws—his rather large paws—and ducking his head. His rather large head. It was hard for a tiger to look contrite, actually.

“Err, sorry about that. They were kind of attacking a crowd on the other side of the building just ‘cause they thought everyone was a human. I think everybody’s run by now, though... Err, I didn’t hurt you, did I?” There seemed to be a hazily fogged memory of air, air, air, soft landing, kick. The ‘soft landing’ might be a reason for the ‘kick’, come to think of it. “Err, I know a good doctor?” The tiger offered. His own singed fur should probably check with the DocProf before the night was out, actually, though he didn’t think he was in serious trouble just now.

“I, Sir,” the Bengal drew its head up proudly, standing at its full height—a fair bit over waist level, on this man; “am Calley, delinquent mutant fighter extraordinaire, protector of the peace, taker-on of unwise four-on-one battles, he whose fur currently smells alarmingly burned.” Making it sound dramatic took some of the sting out of the fact he’d just been hurled off of a rooftop by punk kids. The fact that he was a punk kid himself didn’t much help his pride, either. “May I ask who you are?”

>> "I think I'll be ok without a doctor... I know a few people that can help me if I really need it... Now... If you dont mind, I'm trying to find somewhere to live or work or SOMETHING. Gah this town really sucks sometimes... Hey, you know of anything like that?"

The tiger sat back on its volumous haunches, and began to groom the lengths of its forepaws with long strokes of its tongue. Poor fur. “If you were a mutant, it’d be pretty easy—you could just come with me back to the Mansion. Free room, free board, jobs if you want ‘em.” He was making the same exact mistake the punks had: he was assuming he was talking to a human. It was a fairly common mistake for a mutant to make, actually. Especially when one of their kind had no visible mutations. No matter what the news made it seem like, sometimes, Homo sapiens still outnumbered Homo superior in this city by a very wide margin. “I know a human-friendly bookstore that is hiring, though, for the job thing, as long as you don’t mind a mutant boss. The owner is a friend of mine. She’s trying to make the store a Switzerland between all the zealot and mutant factions.” And more power to her, though he fully intended to start lurking around in case she got shot at. Again.

>> "And are you always stuck in that form? A talking tiger... Or do you look human usually?"

He switched to grooming at one of his shoulders. Poor, poor fur. He was not supposed to have a black stripe there. “I can look human, but, err, if I switched back now, I’d be rather...” A delicate tiger cough. “Naked.” He flicked an ear, pausing in mid-groom as if suddenly realizing something. He was a tiger. In the middle of a New York street. A bit conspicuous, much?

A moment later, too quickly for normal eyes to catch, the tiger was gone. In its place, somewhat less dramatically, sat a small white cat with black spots here and there, just out of its kittenhood. “I could probably look less like an Animal Control hazard, though. That might be good.”

The cat only managed to look more regal as the man laughed down at it. Being a cat, and thus royal to begin with, this made it about thirteen and a half pounds of solid confidence. In a silken fur package.

“Bear, eh?” The little cat got to its feet, deciding not to question the hesitation and the sudden large grin that accompanied that naming. It wasn’t like most people gave their real names when he asked, anyway. Granted, most people he asked were mutants, and giving out their codename instead. Could you blame a human for hiding his name and social security number from a formerly sky-dwelling tiger, though? Calley really couldn’t. “Good name,” he replied instead. “Solid.”

>> "So... This friend of yours with the human friendly book store, is there any way I could meet with her to possibly get a job interview? That'd be great, I'm looking for just about anything right now... And as for the place to stay, I think I'll pass on the Mansion of yours...”

The little cat rubbed itself lightly against the man’s leg; if they guy didn’t move, that was. A slight purr hinted that now was the appropriate time to pet him. “All roads lead to the Mansion, I fear—I can introduce you to her there, tomorrow. Either that, or you could actually go to the store. But, err, I’ve never been there myself, so I’m not sure of the address. The name is Full Circle, though. It’s been in the news—the place the anti-mutant riot took place a few weeks ago? The girl who got shot is the new owner. You could probably look it up pretty easily.”

>> I'd rather just find an apartment, I've got some money saved, just not enough to last..."

If the man hadn’t started petting him by now, more demanding leg-twining would commence. If the man had started petting him by now, there was a rule that he should be aware of: no petting was ever enough. Therefore, more demanding leg-twining would, indeed, commence. “What have you been doing, hitting up hotels? That’s like opening your wallet and dumping it on the streets, in New York.” Insert demanding ‘merrack!’ here. Yes, form-shifting might have some influence on his personality. A bit. At the least, it certainly changed his views on having a strange man’s hands all over his body. “I’ve actually got an apartment near here, if you want to crash for the night. We can hit up the bookstore thing tomorrow. Or, of course,” if the guy was trying to avoid all this leg-twining, he’d better be pretty nimble; “you can keep on dumping your cash. I can give you the Mansion address, if you want, and you can drop by tomorrow and I’ll introduce you to the owner.”

If the man wanted big red Kool-Aid pitchers, particularly of the wall-crashing variety, he should look up Abyss at the Sanctuary. Oooooh yeah.

Victory: a foregone conclusion, for a feline. The little tomcat purred with great satisfaction as the fallen man finally realized the wisdom in petting him. When it came to cats, the world’s greatest wisdom came in obeying them. And when it came to cat tangos, it was best to just give in, and let the cat lead.

“No prob,” the little tom said, attempting to hop into the lap of his conquered prey. Some manner of holding him to the pavement would be necessary, if the guy aimed to stop him. “I can give her a call from my apartment, and set up a meeting. And probably get the store address, while I’m at it.” It was quite clear that Bear wanted to avoid the Mansion; Calley couldn’t blame him. A school full of pubescent mutants really wasn’t the safest or sanest place for a human to visit.

“So what’s this about a hospital? What’d you get into?” It might be a weird way of phrasing it; he was implying that the guy had done something to get himself hospitalized, not that he’d been in any kind of accident. Given the people Calley was used to talking to, though... yeeeeeah. It wasn’t as weird of a phrasing as it should be.

“The apartment is that way.” The cat gave a little flick of its tail, down the street. “About three blocks.” The serene manner in which he refrained from walking that way made one thing very clear: the little tom was expecting to be carried. Purr.

>> “Really, why you gotta hop into my lap like this?"

A purr and a tail swish were all the answer that earned. Steady blue eyes seemed to smugly smile at the man. “Merrow,” the little tomcat demanded of the hand that was ever so reluctantly petting it. But petting, it was. This hand, right here? This was a trainable hand.

A mugging. The cat’s purr rose and fell in a laughing wave. “Congratulations; you’re a true New Yorker now. Where were you from, before this?” He might be wrong, but the lack of apartment and mugging usually hinted at fresh mea—that is to say, a new citizen for their lovely Big Apple. The fact that this was a human that didn’t run from obvious mutants falling on him from rooftops was a pretty big hint, too. New York’s mutant population wasn’t doing so hot in the press right now, thank-you-Sanctuary-residents and punk-rooftop-teenage-gangs. Mostly Sanctuary residents. The biannual largely unprovoked human slaughters was getting a little tiresome, for those who at least liked to have a little reasoning behind their death counts. Personally, Calley preferred not to have a death count at all.

>> "Down that way huh? ...What? Fine..."

Purr, purr. Indeed: this one was highly trainable. The good thing about training humans? You didn’t even need to give them treats. They were so smart, they didn’t need them to learn. Heh. A small white body with black spots here and there warmly curled up in the man’s arms. His own throne, for the walk back to his apartment.

“You want to go nab your stuff? No prob, on this end. A little extra walking doesn’t bother me.” Large baby blue eyes blinked up from the man’s arms. Nope. Extra walking didn’t bother him in the least. They could do a lap around the city, and he dared say he wouldn’t even be winded. Heh. “Otherwise...” A curving arc of his tail briefly pointed the tip in the right direction again. It was rather a nice apartment. Clearly, carrying him there was a small price to pay for the privilege of sharing it for the night.

And perhaps the man would be so kind as to pour some of that delicious generic food into the little cat’s food dish, as well. And re-fill the water bowl, of course. Fortunately for Bear, the litter box had been cleaned yesterday. There were some dishes he’d been too lazy to do, though...

“This is a New York nighttime, and you’re a tall man in a long trench coat,” the cat tilted its chin upwards to point out. And to point out that the under-chin area was an excellent place for petting fingers to rove. “If you carried around cats and talked to them more, you’d probably get mugged less.” This was probably true.

In due time, they came to his apartment. It might have been a little more upscale than one would usually think of a tiger-cat-boy as possessing. For starters, it was a rather pricey Central Park facing unit. For another, its door opened into a decently sized kitchen, then a spacious white-carpeted living room; the single bedroom was off to the right, along with the full-bath-and-shower bathroom. The things that usually struck people—or would strike them, if Calley regularly had people over—were, first and foremost, the simplified luxury of the place. This was the apartment of someone who had enough money to be comfortable, but wasn’t rubbing it into anyone’s face. Working for the Kabal for the past two years would do that to a teen’s bank account. The second thing: the sparseness of the place. There was barely anything to show that Calley lived here. There were a bare minimum of dishes in the kitchen; most of these were sitting in the sink, waiting to be washed. The food was largely frozen and microwavable. There was one piece of furniture in the living room: a large white couch that matched the carpet, and had clearly come pre-furnished. The TV had been bought by his last roommate; it had been awhile since he’d seen Sonya. She’d left after he, err, threatened to kill her. To his credit, he’d been trying to spare her from an even worse death at the time, and hadn’t actually gone through with it.

The only touches of personality to the place were the cat dishes on the floor next to the kitchen cabinets, and the large stuffed tiger sitting in one corner of the living room floor, covered in cat hair. Another purchase from Sonya; his Christmas present. In the bedroom closet were a handful of dress clothes that he might or might not have stolen from a lawyer a couple years back. It was to those that the little cat gravitated after they entered. He leapt lightly down from the man’s arms, landing perfectly upon the black and white tiled kitchen floor.

“Wait out here, would you? I’m going to go slip into something a little more bipedal.” With black-tipped tail held imperiously high, the little cat slipped around the corner and through the crack in his bedroom door.

A few minutes later, a brown-haired Italian teenager with baby blue eyes emerged, buttoning up his black dress shirt. Khaki slacks fit him comfortably well, if a bit too long.

“So, here’s that human-me I mentioned,” he said, a bit nervously. He was always a bit more nervous, outside of a cat form. He stretched his arms out sheepishly to the side. “Tada.” Only now was he noticing how much bigger than him Bear was. Heh. At least the guy really didn’t seem to have a problem with mutants...