The X-men run missions and work together with the NYPD, striving to maintain a peaceful balance between humans and mutants. When it comes to a fight, they won't back down from protecting those who need their help.
Haven presents itself as a humanitarian organization for activists, leaders, and high society, yet mutants are the secret leaders working to protect and serve their kind. Behind the scenes they bring their goals into reality.
From the time when mutants became known to the world, SUPER was founded as a black-ops division of the CIA in an attempt to classify, observe, and learn more about this new and rising threat.
The Syndicate works to help bring mutantkind to the forefront of the world. They work from the shadows, a beacon of hope for mutants, but a bane to mankind. With their guiding hand, humanity will finally find extinction.
Since the existence of mutants was first revealed in the nineties, the world has become a changed place. Whether they're genetic misfits or the next stage in humanity's evolution, there's no denying their growing numbers, especially in hubs like New York City. The NYPD has a division devoted to mutant related crimes. Super-powered vigilantes help to maintain the peace. Those who style themselves as Homo Superior work to tear society apart for rebuilding in their own image.
MRO is an intermediate to advanced writing level original character, original plot X-Men RPG. We've been open and active since October of 2005. You can play as a mutant, human, or Adapted— one of the rare humans who nullify mutant powers by their very existence. Goodies, baddies, and neutrals are all welcome.
Short Term Plots:Are They Coming for You?
There have been whispers on the streets lately of a boogeyman... mutant and humans, young and old, all have been targets of trafficking.
The Fountain of Youth
A chemical serum has been released that's shaving a few years off of the population. In some cases, found to be temporary, and in others...?
MRO MOVES WITH CURRENT TIME: What month and year it is now in real life, it's the same for MRO, too.
Fuegogrande: "Fuegogrande" player of The Ranger, Ion, Rhia, and Null
Neopolitan: "Aly" player of Rebecca Grey, Stephanie Graves, Marisol Cervantes, Vanessa Bookman, Chrysanthemum Van Hart, Sabine Sang, Eupraxia
Ongoing Plots
Magic and Mystics
After the events of the 2020 Harvest Moon and the following Winter Solstice, magic has started manifesting in the MROvere! With the efforts of the Welldrinker Cult, people are being converted into Mystics, a species of people genetically disposed to be great conduits for magical energy.
The Pharoah Dynasty
An ancient sorceress is on a quest to bring her long-lost warrior-king to the modern era in a bid for global domination. Can the heroes of the modern world stop her before all is lost?
Are They Coming for You?
There have been whispers on the streets lately of a boogeyman... mutant and humans, young and old, all have been targets of trafficking.
Adapteds
What if the human race began to adapt to the mutant threat? What if the human race changed ever so subtly... without the x-gene.
Atlanteans
The lost city of Atlantis has been found! Refugees from this undersea mutant dystopia have started to filter in to New York as citizens and businessfolk. You may make one as a player character of run into one on the street.
Got a plot in mind?
MRO plots are player-created the Mods facilitate and organize the big ones, but we get the ideas from you. Do you have a plot in mind, and want to know whether it needs Mod approval? Check out our plot guidelines.
Grades were up, finally. It had taken the professors about a week after finals to get all the projects and tests scored and all the entire years' worth of numbers crunched into one final grade. The task was made more complex by excused absences from classes for x-missions. At least one professor had been complaining about it loudly in the hall the other day that students should still have to make up the work, or they ended up hopelessly behind on those ever-so-important sequential subjects like mathematics.
Katrina sat at a computer in the library and hit “print” on her grade report. She hadn't actually looked at it yet. She preferred to wait until she had the hard copy in her hand. Being on paper made the floating meaningless numbers on the computer screen seem more real, like something that actually measured how well she had learned her material for the year.
The sheet printed out face down. Katrina pulled it from the printer and folded it in half. She didn't want to read it in the library where someone could look over her shoulder. Someone like the three other students who were waiting in line to use the computer after her.
With a suspicious glance at the girl next in line Katrina made her hasty exit from the library. Perhaps her bedroom would be the best place. She started up the closest stairway, which happened to be the one at the far end of the boys' hall. (The library wing was beneath the boys' rooms.) No one would bother her in her own room, except maybe her mother, who was hovering closer than ever these days. Maybe not her room then.
Calley's room? It was probably depressingly empty. She hadn't even checked today to see if he was back. He'd been gone over a week now. He had left a mysterious note on her bed saying he'd be “catting around town” whatever that was supposed to mean. It didn't sound like a very legitimate excuse for missing his finals.
At least it would be private. Probably no one would be looking for her in Calley's room if Calley hadn't even been there in a week. Therefore it was the perfect place to be alone, convenient too since she was already in the right hall.
It looks like we had a tie! Congratulations Circe and Martin, mutants of the month for May!
That means that everyone else needs to get their rears in gear and get on those nominations. The next poll starts on the first, and we have no candidates yet! Don't forget to nominate someone who you feel is doing an exceptional job this month. Find those people who are going above and beyond and excelling beyond their norm. Don't forget to explain why you are nominating them and if applicable, post a link to a recent post they have written that you feel really shows off why they should win.
First, Abyss says work is crazy busy right now so posting will be slow to non existent for awhile. He says you can skip his turn in threads if you need to do so.
Second, hugs and get well wishes to all who need them.
Katrina nodded, at little nervous to go first and sing in front of these three who were professional musicians. She was a musician, too, but her instrument was the oboe and it was impossible to sing and play at the same time. Her singing was a little out of practice except for what she did in the shower. Nevertheless, she would be brave.
She stepped up to the microphone and let the machine pick a random song for her. The song was Pinball Wizard by the Who. The words appeared on the little screen and changed color when she was supposed to sing that particular word. Since she didn't recognize the title of the song, she selected the easy mode which had the voice of the real singer very quietly in the background do she could hear the melody.
She was ready. She winked at Fausto and mouthed, “Here goes.”
After a few seconds of quiet an introduction to the song began playing, then the lyrics appeared. Katrina did her best to keep up and used her intuition to guess what the next notes in the melody would be, sometimes guessing wrong but usually getting close.
Ever since I was a young boy I've played the silver ball From Soho down to Brighton I must have played them all But I ain't seen nothing like him In any amusement hall That deaf, dumb and blind kid Sure plays a mean pinball
Wait, what? Was that really how the song went? Katrina couldn't review the lyrics because the song was moving along too quickly. The old words had already faded and new ones had appeared.
He stands like a statue Becomes part of the machine Feeling all the bumpers Always playing clean He plays by intuition The digit counters fall That deaf, dumb and blind kid Sure plays a mean pinball
By this time Katrina couldn't sing any more. She was too busy laughing. The computer had chosen the strangest song it could possibly have in its track list for her to sing. It was silly! How could a deaf and blind kind play pinball? Was he a pinball psychic mutant or something? As she laughed, the song rolled on without her.
He ain't got no distractions Can't hear those buzzers and bells Don't see lights a flashin' Plays by sense of smell Always gets a replay Never tilts at all That deaf, dumb and blind kid Sure plays a mean pinball
The song just got more ridiculous as it went on. Katrina was laughing so hard she had to sit down before she fell. The song finished and she got up, her sides still sore from all the laughter, and she scampered to a seat on the couch close to Fausto.
With a silly smile still on her face she leaned over towards him, “I think I didn't do so hot on that one. It was too crazy of a song, I suppose. Someone else should go next.”
The holographic Sam was defeated with a pounce and a command. He didn't even swing a holographic ice sword at them or anything. Katrina decided that if she was ever in charge of school security, she would make things a little harder to break into than this. What if someone figured out that the security was this lame and just waltzed right in here to steal the X-wing or the silvery hair styling chair with all the crazy tubes sticking out of the hat thing? Though, why anyone would want this contraption, Katrina couldn't be sure.
“What do you think this thing is? Has it got an owner's manual or anything?” Katrina followed Ghost down the catwalk so she could also examine the silver chair. There was a book about a chair like this that possessed a prince until some children from another world found him and helped him destroy it. Her father had read it to her a long time ago, she remembered. This chair didn't look like it belonged in a fantasy story though, it belonged more in the science fiction drama. It was clearly a device of some kind; it had dials and controls on it, but none of them were labeled.
“Maybe it's a really big movie screen. You sit in the chair, and the picture surrounds you so that you are actually in the movie. The helmet is where the speakers are, and the knobs control the volume. Maybe.” If that were the case, why were there not more chairs and movie nights every Friday? Katrina contemplated sitting in it, to see if it started up, but her backside was still sore from landing on it when she fell out of the vent and sitting didn't sound very comfortable at the moment.
(A quick note: since there are now so many people in this thread we're going to ignore posting order so things don't get really really slow. I'll delete this message once everyone has a chance to see it.)
It was nice to be off of the school grounds. Even when her mother wasn't extremely suspicious that she would run away at any time, she wasn't allowed to go anywhere without an adult. At least things like X-kid missions allowed her to get out without her mother actually being there. She liked Ghost, though, so she was glad that the task of supervising students that had decided to stay at the zoo that afternoon had fallen to the white haired aeromancer; she was more like a big sister and less like a teacher than the other X-men.
After wrestling and chasing each other for awhile, the lemurs decided it was time to take a nap in the sun. Katrina finished her soda and decided it was time to move on to a different exhibit. She walked over to where Ghost was resting on the bench and recycled her cup in the bin next to the bench.
Tigers were the next exhibit down, so Katrina thought she might as well look at them next. She doubted she'd spend a lot of time watching them. After all, she'd seen plenty of tiger up close. With a friend that could shift at will into a big striped feline, she'd had the privileges of snuggling next to a tiger for a nap, of going for a tiger-back ride, and of sweeping mounds and mounds of tiger fur out of her bedroom. Somehow the idea of watching tigers sleep in the sun from behind a railing and a moat wasn't all that exciting.
“Hey Ghost, wanna go see if the tigers here are bigger than Calley?” After that they could move on to more exciting exhibits.
Fausto was back. Katrina hadn't realized that all the work being done to built a big platform and set up lights and run cords all over the mansion lawn was for Corrosive Revolution, Fausto's band. She hadn't realized it would be him that was playing until about an hour before the concert was supposed to start and the workers hung the banners announcing the band's name. She didn't really like big crowds, but once she knew who would be there, she had to go listen. She tried to find Fausto before the music began, but she couldn't find him and the lawn filled too quickly with teenagers from the school as well as from the city. Apparently word of the concert spread even faster on the street than it had in the mansion.
Katrina found herself a seat in one of the trees a little to the side of center stage, but not too far from it. She could easily see everything that was going on from there. She was excited, more for seeing Fausto than for seeing the band perform. She had missed him while he was off trying to make a difference in the world, or whatever it was he had been trying to do. The way he had said goodbye had almost made it seem like he wasn't entirely sure he would be coming back. They still had some tangled up emotions they had to sort though at some point, but for now Katrina was just supremely happy to be able to see him again. He had made it home safely, and for now that was the most important thing.
The show started and Fausto and the band finally appeared on stage and began the show. With fire breathing green flames no less. As usual Takumi amazed her with his precise technical skill on the guitar. Cielle won the hearts of all the boys present, and possibly even some of the girls. All three of the dazzled with in the lights of the stage and the adoration of the fans. They almost seemed to become entities rather than three normal people.
At first the song seemed out of place on the mansion lawn, at a school that always preached about peace and standing up for people without powers and helping others as much as possible. At least, on the surface that's what the school talked about all the time. The face the school showed to the outside world, however, was not the only face it had. Katrina had heard worse things than these lyrics at X-men meetings in which at least one of the members present suggested that violent revenge against humans that wronged camp inmates was acceptable. Or watching those camp guards get mugged or murdered and doing nothing to save them, which in Katrina's mind amounted to about the same thing as pulling the trigger herself. She'd had classes in a room designed to train mutants to fight battles. Even the youngsters had “physical education” classes in the danger room. What was the purpose of training them to be violent? Who were they supposed to be fighting? Other mutants labeled as human hating zealots? Humans labeled as mutant hating zealots? She remembered that she'd had to look up the word zealot shortly after she had found out she was a mutant. Now it was a part of the everyday vernacular of her peers.
She even found that she could agree with ninety percent of the song. It spoke of the pain of being discriminated against. It spoke of the pain of being invisible to the greater part of society and not being able to do anything about it. It spoke to people who had felt helpless, who felt persecuted, who felt angry. It spoke to people who remembered the atrocities that humans had committed against their evolving brothers. It spoke to people who were dissatisfied and wanted to make changes. She might not agree with the two lines that hinted at rebelling against and bringing violence to humans, but there was a lot in the song that seemed to make perfect sense. The melody could easily hook a person in, and the lyrics had even more hooks in it than a fishing lure. It was a dangerous song for that reason, if you try to pull those hooks out again they cut.
The more she listened, the more she realized that Fausto was voicing not only his feelings, but the feelings of many of the young people present. Almost all of the mansion students were there, and many young teenagers from the city as well. The lawn was packed and there were many faces she didn't recognize. The crowd understood the pain portrayed in the song. It was there pain Fausto was singing about. They could sympathize, and they loved what they were hearing. There were a few grumbles that the lyrics went to far, but there were many more slaps on the back and shouts of “you say it kid” than there were grumbles. Some of the adults looked uncomfortable with the viewpoints being aired that dissented with the traditional peaceful front the mansion tried to put on. If they tried to stop Fausto now, though, they might be in for a small scale riot. The crowd was eating up the words and the melody and they wanted more. For now, Katrina stayed safe on her tree branch and waited to see what would happen next.
Katrina watched as a ring tailed lemur coiled up his springy legs and pounced on his brother who had been happily sunning on a rock and minding his business.
Zig!
The offending lemur raced off, with his brother close behind. Their stripy tails streamed behind like black and white banners as they bounded around the pen.
Zag!
At their hopping top speed, they turned around the base of a tree without losing even a bit of their speed by bouncing of the side of a rock.
Zoom!
Up the tree they went, each to his own branch where they laughed at each other with their strange squeaky barks.
Yup, it was definitely worth two hours of scrubbing graffiti off of the zoo's walls with the other x-kids to get a free admission ticket for each of helper. Katrina had chosen to redeem hers immediately. She hadn't been to the zoo in almost two years! One year she had spent at Mondragon Labs during the registration act and it would have been a pretty bad idea to try sneaking out just to go to the zoo, then a summers worth of cleaning and mansion repairs, then a year of school work and other general business. Now that the school year was over she could relax. She wasn't even worried about her final geography grade yet; grades wouldn't be out until the end of the week.
The sun was warm, the complimentary soda in her hand was cold, the lemurs chased each other, and Katrina was content.
Ghost learning to turn into a ghost involved a bit of embarrassment in front of her family. Zephyr's story included a bit of the same. First he fell into a dustbin, then accidentally caused gale force winds to repay the girls who had pushed him fifty times over for his own embarrassment. That kind of thing was always funnier when it happened to other people. Katrina was smiling by the end of the story, and in truth, had started that smile at the part when Zephyr sat on the ground with the rubbish from the bin all over him.
Even when he glanced over his hand to gage their reactions, she couldn't wipe the grin off her face. In her imagination he had a candy wrapper stuck in his hair as he sat glowering on the ground. It seemed so out of place that the prim and proper young man would ever have tripped and fallen, let alone in such a circumstance.
The moral of the story was that girls in Zephyr's presence should always wear pants. By accident or design, it seemed that skirts wind did not mix especially well and it ended up more embarrassing for the ones wearing the skirts than for the wind elemental. She couldn't tell if there was a moral to Ghost's story.
>>>“So, now that the awkward icebreakers are out of the way what’s next? Truth or dare? Hide and seek or something else?”
Katrina had mentioned hide and seek earlier, but she didn't really feel like playing now. Truth or dare was better left for late night slumber parties. She also didn't particularly want to lie, in case there were any awkward questions she didn't want anyone to know. Like any eighth grade girl, she had no desire to tell anyone whom she had a crush on, what her deepest darkest secret was, or any of those other things that were better left unsaid. Best to avoid that game completely.
“I know! Let's show Zephyr the attic. It's probably the only room of the place that didn't get completely water damaged over the winter, so there is a bunch of really cool stuff in there. There's a little access panel at the end of the girls' hall and when you pull the string, it opens and the stairs unfold. Let's go look!”
She bounced out of her seat, hastily put the left over pretzels away, and bounced back again to see if they were ready to go.
It was cold, lonely, and wet. All things that made standing outside all evening alone rather unpleasant. There was always an air of tension, even in the routine procedures. She hadn't gotten complacent, far from it. This job had to be bad for her blood pressure. Staying up late every night, waiting for people to jump out of shadows with knives every second of the day, suspecting every face in every crowd: it all was very stressful for her nerves. She could never truly relax, and it was very tiring.
Working with Sara did put her at ease. The woman always seemed so confident and so sure of herself, that it made the young illusionist feel better about the whole thing. She could never do this job by herself.
Katrina's eyes shifted to the cat woman across the square, then back to the group of invisible men making their sojourn across the open expanse, then the swept across the expanse itself. She peered into each shadow in turn, looking for anything suspicious, the let her gaze slide back to Sara to begin the visual sweep again.
Sara did a great job of blending in even without being invisible. Currently she was bartering with one of the lonely street vendors that had dared to come out on this rainy night. Likely the vendor figured that if even a few tourists came to the square, there might be a few dollars to make when all the competition was tucked into their warm beds. Then Were signaled to her, using her invisible tail that only the illusionist that had disguised it could discern.
That meant trouble. Sara gave a short, but very deliberate glance at one of the flag poles. Katrina glanced up it, but could see nothing as hard as she squinted against the dark and the drizzle. She trusted Sara's senses, though. If she said someone was there that even Katrina couldn't see, then someone was.
She would have replied immediately, but something else caught her attention at that very moment. A motorcycle roared out on the road, then cut out suddenly as the engine was killed at the edge of the square. Katrina might not have ever noticed it if she hadn't been so on edge, or if the square hadn't been quite so deserted, or if the rider of the bike hadn't been dressed the way she was.
Her attire helped her blend into the shadows, but it also marked her intentions fairly clearly. She certainly wasn't dressed for sightseeing. Katrina watched to see what she would do. She did seem interesting in seeing the square, or more specifically going over every square inch of the square. She almost seemed to be hunting for something.
Sara, we've got another suspicious character over here. Dressed in all black. You see her? Went her illusionary whisper to the lioness.
The woman she was watching balled her fists. Katrina saw a flash of green, like the growing green lantern eyes of a hunting cat. A moment later the disappeared beneath a hood. It was a moment too late. The woman was a mutant, and covering her eyes may have hidden her glowing irises, but it also revealed something. The woman didn't need to use normal vision to see where she was going.
She was moving again, this time without her normal vision. She wasn't moving by feel, taste, or hearing. Smell was a possibility, but not a likely one; she wasn't sniffing in any case. Either she had some kind of vision that allowed her to see through her own hood, or she had some sense with which Katrina was unfamiliar. Deduction: her invisibility and that of the president was compromised. Probably.
At least the woman found her before she found the president. As the mysterious woman got closer, she resumed her own surveillance of the square, checking for other possible accomplices. She finally got close enough to notice the shadow of Katrina, or whatever it was she could sense and she reacted by telling someone about it. There was definitely an accomplice then. And the invisibility was definitely not going to work against this woman.
This time her whispers went to the president and his men. Her rudimentary Mandarin whispers would reach only the ears of the five invisible men about half way across the square. She didn't even have to move her lips to communicate her message: Danger. Two or more. One by Mao can see me.
If possible, Katrina wanted to avoid a violent confrontation. Hopefully the president could slip away unharmed while she and Sara kept these possible attackers busy. She believed what she taught her students back at Pax Academy, that peaceful resistance was better than violence. If possible, she wanted to avoid any bloodshed today. For her first trick, she'd offer up a distraction. The woman may not be looking at her with her eyes, but she had other senses as well.
A voice whispered so quietly in the mysterious woman's ears that she might as well have been thinking the words herself. The voice was female, but it was not Katrina's own; it was a bit more husky and lower pitched than her own. It also carried a slight Chinese accent. It said, Welcome visitor. You seem to be looking for something. Can I help you with anything?
If the woman looked up with her normal vision, she would see a slight ripple in the black night and then a woman stepping forward from where Katrina had been standing. The woman was Katrina's height and build, but her face was Chinese. She looked about 30 and her hair had electric blue streaks through the black. She was dressed in slinky black pants and a pale blue top with a short sleeves and a plunging neckline. Silver bangles encircled her wrists and another pair adorned her ears. She probably would have looked relatively fashionable if she hadn't been soaking wet.
The woman with the blue streaked hair didn't seem to mind being wet. She smiled warmly and sincerely at the newcomer and she held out her arms in a welcoming gesture. Her lips hadn't moved when she had spoken, if the black-clad woman looked up before the words finished whispering themselves into her ears.
All she had been able to do was watch. As soon as she had heard Sara's “No” she had spun around on the runway to see what had made her react that way.
Time had slowed down. Katrina had followed her gaze up into the sky where Sam's jet ducked and dodged and tried to escape the missiles that were on its tail.
Katrina's eyes opened wide, disbelieving. She couldn't be seeing this. Someone was trying to fool her with some sort of hologram or illusion. Except she would have been able to tell if they were, and this was far too real.
Why hadn't she made the plane invisible as it took off as she had done when they left the graveyard? How could she have let something like that slip her mind? Now, Sam had to dodge the missiles that she could have helped him avoid. Katrina tried all she could now to make the plane disappear from the radar or whatever it was the missiles were using to guide themselves closer to the plane, but it was no use. Illusions didn't work on missiles that were already homing in on their target. They were just machines that didn't have any senses of their own.
Time sped up again. Sam's plane had exploded, flaming shrapnel fell from the sky over a mile away from where they stood, and Katrina couldn't tell where it landed from this far away.
She couldn't escape death. It had lured them to the graveyard and it had followed them back to Beijing. Death was hungry and greedy. A pit full was not enough souls, death had to take one more from her. Sam.
It was her fault. She had been careless with that takeoff, as her mind turned forward, thinking only of the path before her own feet and forgetting the paths that stretched before others. What's more, she had brought him here. She had asked him to take them to China, and it was Chinese missiles that had shot down his plane. She might as well have pressed the big red launch button herself.
Tears filled her eyes and she could not watch the sky anymore. All she could do was reach for Sara and cling to her, holding herself close to the lioness woman. Her breath came in chokes. Why did such terrible things happen to everyone she came near? She swore to herself as tears made trails down her cheeks that would do a better job of protecting Sara during this mission than she had done with Slate, with her students, and with Sam. No one else would get hurt because of her.
Syn was a woman who communicated with few words and many subtle gestures. She seemed pleased to have Kat there, but that was as much as Katrina could tell. Most likely it would take a long time of knowing this woman to be able to read her every gesture. Katrina's overall impression, though, was that Syn liked to let others do most of the talking while she sat back and listened. What she said was not perhaps as important to her as what she heard. Her green eyes seemed to be calculating everything the rest of the Sanctuary girls were saying, perhaps even everything Katrina was saying.
Isabel seemed very welcoming, like she didn't mind at all that a little girl from the mansion would come over for a sleep over. If she wasn't so tall and obviously older than herself, Katrina could almost have imagined Isabel being in some of her classes at school.
>>>"Well any friend of Abyss and Syn is a friend of mine. I'd love to see more of you around here, Katrina."
Isabel was also the one that explained the meaning behind the golden doors. They were certainly a highly noticeable symbol, and it made the Sanctuary very easy to find. If they wanted to give hope to mutants that had no other place to live, it seemed like it would be a very fitting icon.
Katrina nodded in agreement to the girl's final statement; hope was a necessary thing in this world. She could almost see how if something like that got stolen, a group of people would want to get it back. If it was planted somewhere, it was easy to see how they might blame the people who had possession of it for its theft. Perhaps the fight over those doors had all been a misunderstanding that had gotten too carried away. Someone had started it, but no one might ever know who would play such a joke.
Aura obliged to answer Katrina's curious questions about her powers: kind of stretchy, not bouncy, and without any particular feeling. Katrina nodded, listening to everything. Powers that had a physical manifestation were interesting. Her own ability didn't actually make anything real, so someone who could create something from nothing like that seemed very different from her own powers.
Then Aura, and several of the others in the room as well, were distracted by the big black snuffling shadow of a dog that had entered, accompanied by its owner that lingered even more shadow-like in the doorway.
>>>“That's Romeo,” she informed them all, but said nothing else. Even more than Syn, she seemed to want to listen. Her listening seemed less confident than Syn's, though, almost shy. Katrina waved and smiled at her, trying to be friendly, trying to send the message that these other girls were quite nice, no need to fear them whatsoever. As for the dog sniffing at the edge of the rug where her shoes were waiting, Katrina scratched his back as he walked by.
Seizure seemed to have grown tired of his solo game of pool, and bid them all good night.
>>>"I'm glad you came over , Katrina. Have a good time with the girls. I am sure you will be safe and have lots of fun. You are always welcome to come visit, day or night, with permission or not."
Wasn't that blanket permission right there? It was good enough for her. “Thanks, I'll try to come again soon. Thank you for talking with me. Sweet dreams!” She waved and smiled at his suggested activities for the rest of their now all-girl evening. Maybe they'd even do some of those girly things, like painting their nails and having pillow fights.
Katrina didn't realize that just then the rest of the mansion residents were frantically looking for her. She had gotten distracted from her own little private home drama by all the new faces here and wasn't thinking about how other people would react to her disappearance. She had assumed that her mother would just storm off to her room and stay there for the rest of the night. She never suspected that she would be missed at home, or perhaps some subconscious part of her chose to ignore the idea. She wasn't ready to go home and face her mother, therefore her mother probably didn't want to see her yet either. Right? The thoughts sat on the back burner of Katrina's mind, just barely simmering, and she wasn't even thinking about that small little pot when there were much more interesting things on the stove to pay attention to.
Now that Garrett was gone, she was left with all girls older than herself who knew each other better than she knew them. It was almost as if she had ended up at an older sisters' slumber party, not that she had any sisters to compare. She wasn't quite sure what she should say now. She scratched Romeo's ears as he made a second pass past her couch, then got an idea.
“Has anyone ever played the storytelling game where everyone gets to add a piece of the story? It's a good game for sleep overs. Here, I'll start. It was a dark and stormy summer night. Wind rattled the windows in the bedroom that the two little children shared. A boy and a girl huddled together, sharing one thin blanket. Their names were...”
She left the sentence hanging so the next person could fill it in. She was curious to see how the story would turn out with so many people contributing.
Katrina smiled at Koga's joke about straightening her out. It was a small half mouth upward twitch that was not entirely convincing, but it was a smile nonetheless. He had managed to trick it out of her even though she didn't feel much like smiling.
At least Koga was willing to listen to her rant without judging. At least she didn't think he was judging, he said he didn't mind. Even though she didn't get into all the details, he seemed to understand.
>>>”Well, did you tell him the truth? Fausto, I mean. If ssso, then that isss the best thing for him. And you. If you didn’t, then you’d be just sssetting youself and him up for a bigger upset.”
He was right, of course. It would have been much worse if she hadn't been truthful. Katrina nodded, “Yeah I told the truth. I don't want to deceive anybody, especially not about feelings.” It was difficult to be certain that the truth about emotions was really the truth. Since they got so tangled up, it was sometimes hard to see what the truth behind them really was. She had done her best, though, and she thought that she had done the right thing. That was the best she could do for now.
“Thanks again Ryooichi.”
Perhaps it was the hour or perhaps the dancing, perhaps it was the aftermath or riding an emotional roller coaster all evening, whatever the cause Katrina was getting tired. She yawned deeply and covered her mouth right as Koga asked how long she thought they were allowed to stay out.
“I'm not sure. It already feels like a hundred o'clock. Would you mind if we rested for a little while? I'd like to watch the dancers, but I think I'm all worn out for the evening.”
Katrina led the way over to a couch identical to the one where someone had been playing a game of “Will it Jiggle?” earlier in the evening. Perhaps it was even the same couch; Katrina couldn't tell. It was comfortable enough. She slipped off her fancy shoes and tucked her feet up under herself to keep them warm.
The dance seemed to be winding down. The live music had finished and there were only recorded tunes playing over the speakers now. Only a few couples were still sweeping across the dance floor, but the crowd had thinned considerably. Katrina recognized the the woman with white hair now that she was watching rather than trying to dance; it was Ghost! She still didn't recognize the man she was dancing with though. He had a tail. She sometimes wished she had one of her own.
As she watched the dancers her eyelids got heavier and heavier and she leaned her head on Koga's shoulder. It was so comfortable there with the soft music playing and the dim lighting.
Katrina knew the basics about caring for animals. They had all the same needs as people, pretty much: sleep, exercise, food, potty breaks, grooming. As long as she knew how much to feed Kenzie so she didn't either get too fat or go hungry, she'd be fine, and Sara had already asked that question.
“I can't think of any questions right now. At least, not any that haven't already been asked.” That had to be a first, having a curious nature Katrina usually had no trouble thinking of questions. Though, if she thought of some later, Sam lived in the same place as her and it wouldn't be too difficult to walk over to his room and ask for advice on the particulars of dog care.
Katrina continued scratching ears and chins, trying to give everyone attention. She wasn't the least bit intimidated, even by Bruno who was the biggest of the bunch. All the dogs were friendly, perhaps because some of Sam's personality had rubbed off on them. As she scratched here and there and everywhere, Kenzie even rolled half way over expecting to have her stomach scratched. Katrina obliged. The fur on her belly was very soft and it was a pleasure to run her fingers through the silky fur.
“Actually I thought of a question. What commands and tricks do they already know?” Thor apparently knew the word “treat” already, as Shin had demonstrated. What other things were they trained to understand?