Allison snickered again, but turned away. “Trust me, if I was interested in peep shows, I could find much better options than muddy puppies. But sure, if you want me to talk to the wall, I can do that.”

She made a point of turning to the wall--despite the protests of the nurse, who apparently thought she should be good and stay still, thank you--and reaching out to give it something that was inbetween a pat and a one-sided high five, and, Allison guessed, probably as close as anyone could come to shaking hands with a wall. “Hello wall. Naked Boy Number Two doesn’t want me looking at him while we talk, which is really kind of stupid since he’s already hiding anything anyone would want to look at behind a pillow. But, anyway, would you mind reflecting our conversation for us? Oh, thank you very much, wall. Have a nice day!”

She grinned at the wall for a moment before addressing Caleb/Calley/Naked Boy #2, through the wall’s most convenient cooperation in reflecting the conversation for her. “So then, Naked Boy Number Two, what were you doing in the park if you live here?”

So if she wanted to go peeping, she could do better, huh? But anything that quote-unquote “anyone” would want to see was already covered? Calley was getting distinctly mixed interest levels, here.

And then she started talking to the wall.

“Oh, real mature,” he said, unaware of the irony that had briefly set one of the nurses into a coughing fit. The nurses were familiar with Calley. He’d, ah, stopped visiting the DocProf in cases of girl-induced trauma. Because the DocProf was creepy and could see where you go injuries, and had really been getting the wrong impression of Calley’s manly levels of manness.

Just as Lily was getting the wrong impression of his mental aptitude, if she thought he was going to stoop to the level of reflected-wall-talk.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Calley Swartz is not here right now. He’s got better things to listen to than a wall. If you’d like to leave a message, shove off.”

There. That’d teach her.

Allison snickered at Naked Boy #2’s comment on maturity, then laughed outright as he proceeded to be even more immature than she had. If mostly by virtue of having called her immature immediately previous.

“...shove off.”

Allison grinned. She then turned, ignoring the nurses as they gave up on keeping her still and merely dumped the rest of the bandaids they’d been trying to attach to her feet next to her on the bed, and neatly shoved Caleb off of said bed.

...Without the pillow. Which wasn’t really intentional, but was quite amusing, considering how paranoid he’d been previously. She kept grinning, and kept her eyes on his face, to avoid further annoying accusations. “So, can I leave a message now? Is there a beep?” She paused just long enough to take a breath and continued, ignoring anything he might say, or otherwise express. “Hello Naked Boy Number Caleb! ...Actually I have nothing to say, really, except idle curiosity but you seem quite determined not to cooperate and answer. Oh well. Now how do I hang up?” There was another half an instant long pause as Allison thought, then seized on the first thought she had. The pillow was immediately dropped off the bed, and onto Naked Boy Calley’s face. “That seems to work.”

“Beep,” said Naked Boy Number Calley, from under the pillow. He was on the floor. (The stick was on the floor.) The pillow was on his head, messing up his artistically mussed just-shifted hair. This was not where the pillow should be, or what it should be doing.

Calley discretely pulled his legs up to his chest, and tucked the stick into his mouth—

stickstickbleh

...He took it back out, with all due dignity, and delicately set it next to his well-aired posterior.

“Well. It’s sure a pleasure to meet you, Spot.” Her tattoos were much more noticeable in human form. For one thing, they were in color. For another thing, his human brain didn’t just think ‘oh hey cool I have spots too!’

“Is that part of your mutation, or do you just like marking yourself out as a freak even before people know about your genetics?”

Calley’s expression was perfectly pleasant under his pillow hat. Now if he could just get some clothes for the rest of him. Seriously, where were those pants? He was starting to think that nurse wasn’t coming back.

Allison snickered at Naked Boy Calley’s beep, burst out laughing when he started, and then quickly stopped, chewing on the stick, stopped laughing and raised an eyebrow at being called Spot, and felt her temper snap at his next comment.

She was not going to take snarky comments on being a mutant today. She didn’t take them well in any case; today, hilariously teaseable puppies or otherwise, was particularly not the time to test her on it. Fortunately for one of them--Allison had no idea who--her running, climbing and falling had tired her out, so the snap was more like a rubber band than a twig, and Caleb wasn’t punched, nor did she attempt to punch him.

Instead she slid off the bed and stepped forward, so she was as close to the sitting boy as she could be without touching him. It was blatant, and quite frankly, crude, tactics to intimidate, but she didn’t really feel like taking her time or being subtle. And, to some degree, satisfying; it was extremely rare for her to be able to be taller than someone, even if it was only because he was sitting on the floor while she stood; it wouldn’t affect the psychological impact much. She stared down at him with a mostly blank, and very slightly furious, expression. “Yes, in fact, to both. I’d rather let bigots know to stay away before they provoke me. What about you? Do you spend all your time hiding, when you’re not pretending to be an animal? And you said you lived here, and Lisa said prejudice doesn’t get in here. Those don’t seem to go together too well, now, so who’s lying, Caleb?”

Way too close.

Way, way too close.

She was shorter than him. If he’d been standing. Couldn’t be much more than five feet. She was thin, almost boyish. No real muscles of which to speak, tree climbing notwithstanding. Calley himself was also thin, but it was a lean sort of build: a muscles packed on quietly and discretely, no need to tip people off, sort of build. Running around on all fours half the time, flying, climbing up trees by his fingernails; Calley had never in his life tried to work out, but his mutation leant itself to such things. So he was bigger and stronger than her.

He was also naked on the floor, and she was a mutant. And he didn’t know what her mutation was. Back down. Get out. Avoid her. Find out what she does. That was the smart thing. It wasn’t his mutation that had been keeping him alive; it was information. Information was safety.

But I’m not seventeen anymore I’m not.

And putting a tiger in someone’s face had a certain visceral effect that went beyond power levels.

Calley shifted. The pillow rolled harmlessly to one side. The stick clicked quietly against the floor, as a heavy paw pinned it down.

“Lies, Spot?” The tiger purred, its vowels round and its consonants sharp over teeth never meant for human speech. It wasn’t growling, or snarling. It was simply standing, the half-lidding of its baby blue eyes and the slight backwards slant of its ears indicating a very special kind of amusement, for a very special girl. “I don’t care enough about you to lie to you. Truth is, you're a freak. Welcome to the family.”

Allison was very good at switching into fury mode instantaneously, provided she had some she was suppressing anyway. Such as had just happened. She was not quite so good at instantaneous switches out of fury, as just should have happened.

As a result, she spent a few moments glaring at the tiger that was now before her, before her brain made the leap from ‘there’s a tiger’ to ‘tigers are huge predators,’ and another moment to ‘that means it’s dangerous, smart one!’

Allison in fury mode was, outwardly, calm, and inwardly, a bit reckless. Allison in panic mode was outwardly unworried, and inwardly terrified. Allison caught between the two froze, still glaring but now tensed to run, while the tiger talked.

Tiger. Talked. The puppy hadn’t. That was probably not what she should be thinking about now.

“People hardly need to care to lie.” That, she knew far better than she wanted to. “And freak is a derogatory word. Using it only lowers the self esteem of anyone it’s applied to.” That was stalling. Stalling with a valid point, maybe, but still stalling. Not ingratiating herself to the where-did-that-thing-even-come-from dangerous predator, as the fear demanded, and not fighting against what had offended her in the first place, like the fury did. Which only made Allison angrier, if this time at herself, and she hissed as the glare returned, even if her posture was still more oriented toward running. Hissing was, probably, an even stupider idea at a tiger than a human, but that thought wasn’t nearly enough to get through the fury and fear. “I do not need family, of any kind. I’ve had coworkers that seem to share blood relations, but I have not had family, and I do not need one now, and certainly not one that insults itself.” Maybe that was an exaggeration. Or, maybe not. Allison didn’t really care, and wasn’t thinking clearly enough to even try to remember and figure it out anyway.

She was verbally backpedaling. Not that Calley would recognize that, or anything.

Her muscles had tensed ever so slightly; her scent had changed, by the same degree. Neither change went away after the initial shock. In fact, they hadn’t even started until after that initial shock should have worn off. So.

So she probably didn’t think she could take him.

The tiger’s tail began to sway, just the slightest bit. Its tip curled up in amusement when she hissed—actually hissed—at him.

“Family issues, Spot?” The tiger sat down, and brought a paw up to its mouth, keeping its blue eyes on her. Lick. “If you’re not looking for a freak family, then how about this: welcome to the freak club. Or did Lisa’s little sales pitch get your hopes up? We could always go down to the training room and program in a field of daisies, if you were looking for somewhere warm and happy to go skipping.” It raised the paw, and rubbed it behind one ear. A nice, casual grooming, for a nice, casual conversation.

She’d hissed at him. Heh.

The tiger didn’t immediately attack her. Or eventually attack her, so far. Instead, it was sitting down, cleaning itself, which was... about as intimidating as a housecat doing the same thing, really.

Okay, so it should be much more intimidating. Allison blamed the lack of fear on all the time she’d spent as a child trying to get the wolves and lions to play with her. Dangerous thing about zoos, that; teaching everyone not to worry, the giant predator might want to eat them, but all it could really do was run impressively along a window. So, tempting the dangerous things to eat you was actually a good thing. For entertainment, if not the zookeepers’ hearts.

Damn zoos. Still killed any of Allison’s fear that the tiger’s acting like a housecat didn’t, though.

Which left room for fury, again. If slightly more contained than before.

She repressed a glare and instead raised an eyebrow, folding her arms as she stared at the tiger. It was, technically, shorter than her. As long as it stayed on all fours or sitting, anyway. “I suppose you could call them issues, if I still wasted time on caring about them. So how’s your family? Did you scare them away with big teeth, or just get lost when you chased a squirrel, puppy?” And addressing a tiger as ‘puppy’ was probably one of the more absurd things she’d done, but it made sense. In the same weird way a lot of the things she’d done in the last few months had.

Like petting a dinosaur, having a naked boy fall out of the air... whatever it was that had happened when she met Maxine....

Maybe she should stop thinking about that now.

“I don’t think I can skip anymore, actually. At least not without dying of shame, but then I don’t suppose I should expect you to know what that is.” Her foot not-quite-entirely-accidentally shifted ever so slightly in the direction of the stick. “Also, daisies? Really, those are pathetic even by flower standards. Lilies of the Valley are far better. They're poisonous.”

“My family?” The tiger replied, its tail politely dusting the floor. “We keep in touch. They’re cool.” Which is to say: he kept in touch with his sister, to whose face he would never admit the words ‘you’re cool.’ He made sure to disappear off to her campus now and again to play catch up. As Calley’s disappearances were well documented amongst his observers, he trusted that his specific destination went unnoticed. She wasn’t a mutant. He had to keep her safe.

“What about you, Miss No Family? How’d that immaculate conception and spontaneous birth work out for you? Did a nice anti-relative put a vase of non-pathetic poisonous flowers by your crib-side?”

He moved onto the other paw, and the other ear. Lick, rub. The grooming wasn’t about being intimidating. The grooming was about not caring whether he was. And that, friends, was a nice feeling.

“Keep in touch? Well isn’t that the vaguest answer you could possibly give.” Still made her a bit distantly jealous, but not a whole lot. Love had been included in her family, but only conditionally, and wasn’t present now even if there were occasional attempts to keep up appearances. Strained mutual tolerance was probably the best description of her familial relations, and had been for a while. On the other hand, that was largely if not entirely something she could change; the lack of family love wasn’t nearly the issue for her that it would be for someone who... well, cared about it.

Who hadn’t been raised to see humans as chess games, to start with. It almost made her reluctant to get rid of the manipulating thoughts; who knew what would happen if she didn’t have that defense. She had enough to deal with already; breakdowns over her childhood was not on the list of things to be allowed to happen.

“Actually, the garden was outside my window, though I brought plenty of vases in. Probably a good thing I never got my cousins to drink any of the water from them, though,” she added thoughtfully. At the time she’d just wanted a bit of revenge-by-prank by making her cousins drink “dirty” water. It wasn’t until many years later that she’d learned it would have actually been poisonous to anything other than their self esteem. Not enough to kill an adult, but definitely would’ve made a kid sick.

Hm. She wondered what it would do to Calley. Maybe his animal forms would make him resistant? He might have some kind of herbivore form, too.

...No, not what she should be considering. Even if he was annoying enough to make her want to.

“So then, does your intellect resize with your form? You’re actually acting halfway mature now, you can talk as a human, and as a puppy... well. Maybe you remember that.” Her foot moved a bit toward the stick again, but more noticeably this time. “If so, I wouldn’t suggest turning anything cat sized. You might end up needing help breathing.”

Oh no, he could have been vaguer. He could always be vaguer. If she took the vagueness to mean he was lying, though, all the better. Caleb Swartz was a fairly common name, but he’d still prefer that no one try cross-referencing it against East Coast kids reported missing a few years back.

...Scratch that. He sincerely doubted his dad would have reported him missing, and his sister would have known how useless it would be. She’s the one who’d figured out his mutation, after all, when everyone else had just thought he’d been sneaking out of the house to ditch school.

The redhead had a garden, outside the window of the house where her non-existent family didn’t live. And cousins, who she’d narrowly missed poisoning. No relation, he was sure.

“Actually,” the tiger casually corrected, “my intellect is proportional to the intelligence of the form. As it turns out, puppies are idiots. Cats, now...” Well. The tiger paused in its grooming, tongue half-way out of its mouth and poised over a paw as it looked up at her. If she was insulting cats, then she was speaking to the wrong individual.

Or maybe the right one, given her manners.

“What about you? What’s your mutation?” The tiger asked, before wiggling around to lick at its shoulder. One blue eye was still turned towards her, of course.

“I suppose that’s logical. And I can hardly fault you for being absurd as a boy either, then.” That was a bit of an obvious insult, and kind of a stupid one since she’d met plenty of smart boys. (Plenty of awe-inspiringly dumb ones, too, but that was the way humans were, quite frequently. Some geniuses, most complete and utter morons.) But she certainly wasn’t going to be agreeing with someone that infuriating without including something insulting, not yet anyway.

She really didn’t need to bother, as the tiger’s next question gave her every opportunity she needed. She looked considering for a moment, then smiled sweetly at the tiger. “My mutation... is not your business.” The smile grew a bit too much to be sweet, but stayed. “If I liked you, maybe I’d tell you, but seeing as you’ve mostly been trying to threaten me the last few minutes... nope, not telling.”

Calley could fault her for calling him an absurd boy, but really... well, he wasn’t in his human form’s fan club, either. It really couldn’t be a coincidence that he could have hundreds of animal forms, but only the one human: this was clearly nature’s way of telling him that bipeds weren’t worth the time and effort. About the only thing they were good for was steady, reliable vocal chords. Which the tiger used.

“Oh, ouch,” it said in monotone, between shoulder licks; “my feelings are hurt. Your rapier wit has marred my sensitive soul. Stop, stop; I bleed.”

And then she proceeded to not tell him her mutation. In general: this was a practice of which Calley approved. Of which he avidly endorsed, especially to friends. Telling people your mutation never led to anything good. Really, for people who could blend: telling people you were a mutant never led to anything good, period.

But she clearly sucked at keeping the latter confidential, or she wouldn’t be so grumpy. So it irked the tiger slightly that she was being uptight about the former. What had she asked him, earlier? Something about hiding what he was?

Well, here was the tiger, talking. And there stood the mutant, playing at being a real girl.

“You started it,” the tiger idly said, its tongue moving on to its striped posterior. “The threatening.”

She had. With the getting in his face, and the not letting him know her power. There were mutations that could kill at a touch. Getting in someone’s face? That was a much more serious threat in mutantville than it was in humantown.

“You pushed me, too.” The tigger muttered. "What did I do to you?"

It was so very, very tempting an idea to whap the tiger’s nose for his--really, more annoying for how patronizing it was than anything else--response. She wasn’t, however, quite that assured of the tiger’s harmlessness yet, or that reckless, so she settled for a disbelieving look as she settled back on the bed and picked up the almost-forgotten bandaids, pulling a foot up to examine it. It was clean, apart from the oily whatever the nurses had smeared on several of the worse blisters. Her nose wrinkled and lip curled back for a momentary, silent ‘ew’ at the stuff before she started looking around for something to get rid of it with.

She didn’t care if it was supposed to clean them, or numb them or whatever. They were just blisters; hardly life threatening, and she had enough blister scars already that any more wouldn’t matter even if she had cared. And whatever the stuff was meant to do, it certainly had some kind of drug or chemical in it, and while Allison had yet to start hallucinating from tylenol like half her family did, she had no intention of finding out what would make her hallucinate when in a situation like this. Or act reckless. Or aggressive. Or anything else.

...Hm. That might be a possibility. She frowned at the stuff, wondering what exactly it was. If she knew it she could at least figure out if she’d ever used it before and if it might have affected her then.

It probably was a sign of something that Allison was more worried about the medicine smeared on her feet than the full-sized, live tiger that clearly disliked her and was sitting a few feet away. She decided that was something to think about later. When she didn’t have either tigers or potentially-mind-altering, probably-antibacterial stuff on her feet to deal with.

"What did I do to you?"

Allison blinked back out of her medicine-contemplation at the tiger’s question. “That... is a much better question than I expected from you. Would you like the full list?” She paused before continuing. “Also, you told me to push you. So you can’t blame me for that one.”