Frontier (solo)

The man opened the door. He closed it, quite a bit faster.

"Let's be civilized about this, Mr. Mitchell." Came the muffled voice from the other side.

"I paid."

"Last month, Mr. Mitchell. You paid last month. I've simply come to collect your current insurance premium. Why don't you open the door, and go get your check book? We value loyal customers." The rubble across the street, brought low by a girl in a pink aura, attested to the other half of that story.

Mr. Mitchell got his checkbook. The panther man folded the page he tore out, and tucked it lightly into his vest pocket. His whiskers fanned in a polite smile under his bifocal lenses. "A pleasure doing business with you, Sir."

His short fingers made a claw tick next to William Mitchell (and wife's) address. A tick was a good mark. The X's next to other names made Mr. Mitchell close his door, and his checkbook, with relief.

Calley--called Miles in this form, in a token attempt to keep his more human form clean of certain associations--saw no reason to deal with the delinquents himself. They all knew the consequences, by this point. He'd been quite clear with Lori that he wasn't going to be smashing heads for her. Happily, she'd agreed. He had no particular moral qualms with turning the list of names over to the smashers: he just didn't care to do it himself. The panther man was clearly made of more sophisticated stuff than that. His tail twitched in a graceful arc as he moved to the next building. He rang the doorbell. Once. Twice. Knocked, three times. His rounded ears twitched at the noises inside. They could have at least muted the TV, instead of just turning the volume down. He gave them an X for effort.

Tracking down the particular black panther he'd used to make this form originally had been, in a word, annoying. Last year, Calley had been in the habit of zoo hopping whenever he was bored, and copying as many forms as he could. Almost all of those forms had been erased when he'd fought a certain X-Man outside of the former King Pharmaceuticals. His black panther had been straight up killed in the fight. That left the panther man chimera useless, until he regained the proper basic puzzle piece to fit back into it. And trained it basic to mastery. Which took significantly longer than finding the right zoo, for the record. He'd done the actual training back at the Mansion, after arranging for someone in the Sanctuary to feed his lobster while he was gone. Something about being trapped in one form in Isabel's turf still didn't feel healthy to him, even if they were on the same team now. The beribboned girl had yet to retract her gracious stabbing offer.

When he'd finally been able to shift back to human, he'd found that his lobster was still alive, and Lori wanted to see him.

Shhhhhick.

Who runs a knife along a brick wall. Honestly. That just couldn't be good for it.

The panther man's tail tip twitched as he came to a stop in the alleyway. An excellent shortcut to the next block, when unoccupied. "Gentleman."

"You're from that Sanctuary, right?"

An assenting bob of his ears. "Problem?"

"Yeah. You threatened my grandmother."

"That is a problem." The panther man raised his clipboard. "Her name and address?"

The teen behind him answered by tapping his baseball bat against the ground. The one in front drew his knife into a more standard position. The panther man produced a kitten from his pocket. It's amazing what people will instinctively hold, if you hand it to them. Particularly if it has charming blue eyes.

"Wha--?" The kitten stretched out its paw to the nice man's knife arm. Then the kitten cutely shifted to Bengal tiger. Knife and teenager went down, quite significantly overbalanced. "Wup--!"

Miles adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. His ear twitched as he glanced back at the bat welder. He looked rather on edge.

Perhaps it was the cat that the panther man was suddenly holding. The ginger tom murred as it dangled by its scruff. This cat was bigger than the kitten.

The kitten had become a rather large tiger.

"We didn't threaten your grandmother too, did we?" He asked, with the utmost of concern.

"N--no man. Just his."

"That's so kind of you, then, to donate your money towards her premium this month."

"Y-yeah. I--what?"

The tiger rumbled either a purr or a growl as the knife wielder tried to unpin his arms. When the panther man left the alley, he was tucked a wad of bills into his vest pocket. He checked the next address on his clipboard, and set off down the street.

Knock knock.