|
Post by chamrosh on Sept 28, 2019 3:08:33 GMT -8
Paragonclan P3 Juuventud I'll code this properly once I have coding. For now this is just here, so just. bare with me.
There was a little calico cat, just visible through the undergrowth ahead. There was a clearing, where no trees grew in a loose oval, and instead, an old rocky pyramid rose up from the dirt at one end of the clearing. It was half broken down on one side, with a tree growing up through it, but it would still be easily climbable. The inside was still upright, and inside it looked dry, in sharp contrast to the utterly saturated mud outside of it. That was the clear answer to how dry the calico's fur looked. [/font] Her tail wiggled high up in the air above her, swaying back and forth for a few moments before darting backwards. It was clearly a small tail, belonging to a small cat, and even at this distance, it was not hard to guess that the cat would have to be both destined to be a very small cat in adulthood, and very young at this point in time - almost certainly a kit. And a kit was not to be harmed, even if they were crossing far into clan territory. Like this kit was doing.Oripendularstar and Crackerheart stepped cautiously up towards the edge of the clearing, creeping closer so as not to startle her. So they could watch for a few moments to work out what she was doing properly.She was inching closer and closer to a funky-looking caterpillar, bright green with yellow spots and long fur coming out from it in all directions. It was wriggling persistently across the top of the mud, and directly away from where all the trees were. Oripendularstar felt almost bad for it. Almost. It was just a caterpillar.The kit was getting just a paw length away from it, getting her paw pads just above the tops of the hairs, then nervously jumping back several steps and staring at it nervously, tail flicking back and forth for several seconds before repeating.Oripendularstar and Crackerheart watched for several repeats before either of them decided to step in. "Maybe oruga wants to go back to tree?" Crackerheart asked gently.The kit jumped - but not so dramatically as she had at the caterpillar's little wriggling movements. "Oh!" She exclaimed, her voice higher pitched than either of the adult cats would have guessed. "Hi? What's 'oruga'?""I think they mean a caterpillar.""They..? Oh!" There was a moment of confusion, and then of realisation on the kit's face. She was clearly young enough to have not come across many non-binary cats before. "Yeah. Probably. But I'm hungry, and I'm six moons now, so I should be learning to hunt. And it's going slow! I thought it'd be easy to catch but... I... I don't know if I should! It looks funny.""Should not. Is bright for good reasons. It's venonoso. Veno... venomoso?" Crackerheart checked, looking back at Oripendularstar to get some clarification of how accurate their guess was. "Close enough. Let's take oruga back to the trees, then we can get you some food, and see about teaching you how to hunt. You are six moons?"
The kit - well, apprentice - nodded. Good for her sakes. Old enough to be of good use to the clan already, while young enough to go unpunished for straying over the borders like this. Though... with only two cats, could they really call them borders?
What was she thinking? Of course they could. Ori had fought hard for the borders to be protected through the negligence of Boastar. If there was any fairness for the amount of effort that a cat put into something, those should definitely still count as borders, regardless of how well they could be defended.
"Alright. First, to get the caterpillar back to the trees."
"There's big leaves we can use. Let it walk onto leaf, pick up, move into foliage. Maybe you want to do this? Be brave."
"Uh. I... I'm not sure I can, I'm sorry. You... You have to get so close."
"You'll be fine."
"Are... are you sure?"
"Completely. Nothing can go wrong while I'm here."
The k- apprentice looked between the two warriors uncertainly, her yellow eyes focusing on Crackerheart for a moment, checking for confirmation. They nodded confidently. Nothing could go wrong with a leader Starclan had chosen here. The apprentice gulped, shook her ears nervously, and bounded neatly into the undergrowth, returning with a single long leaf. It was not the first plant she'd found that had had its leaf acquisitioned, but the apprentice could hardly be blamed. She was nervous, after having been taught something about how dangerous the environment was being. She was taking a sensible precaution, and yet still being brave and going ahead with it. However jittery the calico was now, it was clear that she was intelligent, resourceful, and willing to go through with scary things so long as she was allowed to apply her brains to them. Ori liked this apprentice already. She'd be a very useful warrior in time.
The apprentice shuffled in front of the caterpillar, laying the leaf down length ways. The caterpillar didn't seem to like the leaf at first, skirting around it, but after patiently moving the leaf around a few times, the apprentice finally got the insect to climb aboard. She sprinted - almost comically fast - back into the bushes, and flung the leaf as hard and as fast and as far away as she could manage - probably farther than Crackerheart could have managed.
Maybe the apprentice should be informed of how many other dangerous insects there were around. Maybe she'd be less worried about one caterpillar then.
Or maybe she'd be a nervous wreck beyond any use.
"Very good. Very promising." Ori said, looking down at the apprentice. "And you're here on your own?"
The apprentice nodded solemnly. "My mum went out to hunt one day, and she didn't come back, and then I... I found... On the road, see, I f-f..."
"Is okay to be sad. Every cat scared sometimes. Every cat sad sometimes. Important thing is keeping trying. Will happy again later."
"Exactly. If you join our clan, we can look after you, and we can make sure you grow up to be a strong warrior in turn. Of course, there's no obligation to stay yet. If you want to leave, there's a human village you could choose to be a kittypet in if it's not the life for you. We'll make sure you learn how to be a cat, and how to be a clan member, and then you can choose."
"Th- thank you? I'll get fed, right?"
"Of course."
"And taught how to feed myself?"
"Why would we be feeding you without teaching you how to feed yourself and to add to what food everyone can eat?"
The apprentice nodded fiercely. "Okay. I'll do it. I'm Catopsis. After the plants." It was like a fire lighting up in her eyes as she agreed. "I'll join your clan. For now, at least."
"Alright, Catopsispaw. This is Crackerheart, and I'm Oripendularstar. Welcome to Paragonclan."
The apprentice was clearly already learning well to not correct the little adjustment to her name. Ori had seen the little look of protest for a moment, until the two current members' names were given, the look of puzzling things over, and finally the acceptance at working out the pattern.
"We'll get right onto our first lesson, shall we?"[ Catopsispaw joins Paragonclan! ] [ Catopsispaw is apprenticed to Oripendularstar! ] [ Oripendularstar goes to the moonpool to ask for a cat* ] [ Crackerheart goes hunting! ] [ Catopsispaw goes training with her mentor, Oripendularstar! ]
*warrior or medicine cat, please!- 1240 PARAGONCLAN, CHAMROSH ANCESTRAL REQUEST:the spirits that watch over paragonclan pay heed to oripendularstar's request and send word that a medicine cat will be joining her clan. when the cat arrives, they also carry five different herbs of their choice. HUNTING:crackerheart caught +1 small fish. TRAINING:thanks to oripendularstar's tutelage, catopsispaw learned the hunting skill! MOD NOTES:the mentor section seems to link back to this thread sjdjsj the tortoiseshell longhair was done by amethyst14 on chickensmoothie! the lineart was done by Grey_Hoodie on chickensmoothie! [/div]
|
|
|
Post by chamrosh on Oct 7, 2019 12:28:48 GMT -8
Paragonclan P4 Ma'alo'ob I'll code this properly once I have coding. For now this is just here, so just. bare with me.
It was strange now, heading back to the pool. Ori knew exactly where it was situated, exactly the steps and jumps to get to it, but there was almost a different taste in the air leading up to it. A slightly sickly taste. Like something was just... slightly wrong. Which was nonsense, of course. What could be wrong about going to talk to Starclan? She'd done it before - twice - and it had been fine each time before. It'd be fine again, and that was almost a certainty. Ori jumped the last leap across the water, onto an almost-flat stretch of rock. The sides of it sloped out beyond vertical beside the water below. The rock was a slightly different tone in a few places now, in spaces about the size of her paws, and about as far apart as they would be as she walked, too. She could feel the damp of the rock, cold beneath the bare skin of her paw pads, the water soaking into the fur nestled between her toes. The light was bouncing off the pool again, rippling in a surreal way against the rocks of the cave, a strange, almost toxic, blue. The pool was full again, completely filled to the brim, so there was no difference between the peak of the rock and the water surface. The face of the moon could be clearly seen, a perfect half-circle, against the completely smooth surface of the pool. Ori stepped over to the edge of the pool, placed her feet gently within the water, and bent over the rock rim. She bent her head low over the surface of the water, and drank.
Crackerheart was sleeping, and Oripendularstar, her mentor, had gone off deep into the cave to speak to Starclan. There were no queens, or kits, or elders, which meant she had no one to ask her to do chores. There was no medicine cat to ask her to do petty ferrying jobs around the camp. And... she'd seen what had happened to her mother and brother in front of her eyes, so family was no longer an obligation. Catopsispaw would really far rather keep her mind off of that, and as she had nothing better to do... Going to play seemed like a good idea! Catopsispaw snuck out of the cave, low to her belly, keeping herself as quiet and as close to invisible as possible. The latter was easier than the former, in a cave. Even her fur - with most of it being pure white - was impossible to see in the thick darkness further back into the cave, but even the tiniest sound would echo further and further back, going almost impossibly far. It would get a little less clear at every point further away from its source, but the sound could still be heard. And she was meant to be sleeping. Crackerheart had told her to sleep. She had slept. She wasn't being disobedient. She'd just woke up, too. Very quickly. Catopsispaw jumped deftly out the cave, her tail moving from hanging down for subtly, to flicked straight upright for fun and happiness and play. She moved like a squirrel, a neat series of delicate, careful jumps and bounds, finding every tiny crack and fault on the cliffs to weave her way up to their top. Once she'd managed it, she instantly felt like a fool, and twitched her tail self-consciously. Now she was up here, she could see how close that tree's branches came to skimming the grass at the top of the cliff. Climbing up a tree was far easier than climbing up a rock face, and probably just as fast... and even easier than the tree was the gentle slope over to one side of the cliff. The top curved around and away in the other direction, and where it went was obscured by thick foliage (like most directions were), but the way the cliff curved meant that she could actually see down the slope to the right hand side. And in that direction, it really was just a gentle slope. Up where Catopsispaw was now, there was an open grassy patch, a couple of car-lengths wide in all directions, maybe a lorry length wide as it lined up along the top of the limestone cliff. There was a patch of some sort of plant there, at the opposite end of the grass clearing, something she'd only seen by the human settlement before. Catopsispaw moved over to the plants. There was a tree right alongside, pointing away from the , fallen over probably a few moons ago, judging by the prevalence of fungi and moss all over it, and the weird bugs and grubs crawling over the bark now. And from its side was a strange hole. Catopsispaw crawled forward slowly, cautiously. After how her family had been... disbanded, Catopsispaw could hardly be blamed for her caution... but she was still an apprentice. She could also hardly be blamed for her curiosity either. Her paws moved smoothly, and as she got closer... her white paws stood in stark contrast against the dark soil, which still wasn't quite grown over with plants. And suddenly, her paw connected with nothing. Just open air. Just. A drop to goodness knows where. Catopsispaw peered over the edge. There was something shimmering down there, but she couldn't see quite what. It was an extremely long way down. Catopsispaw didn't particularly want to know how far down, especially with the knowledge that her paw had been over that drop and there'd been nothing stopping her taking that fall, not really. Catopsispaw shuffled away from the hole, and turned back to the plants that had taken her notice. Catopsispaw stepped back to them, lifting her paws up to one of the plants and batting it a few times. It was several times taller than her - even if she were to stand up on her back legs, and about the same width as her front legs; the same dark yellowish-green as her mother's eyes had been. At the top was something white, poking out of a conical structure, peeking out from between several leaves that were flopping loosely away from the gridded white thing. It wasn't a flower, she knew that. She'd seen humans eating them before. But it was like a flower. It came in lots of colours, and it was always at the very top of the plant... Functionally, it was a flower. Catopsispaw reached out, batting at the stalk, testing how stiff and strong it was, seeing how much force it took for the stem to be moved. Where she hit, the stalk already looked a little old and frayed, having lost some of its colour, alongside every part of the plant above that point. A lot, it turned out. Catopsispaw's mouth closed around the stem of the plant, and she started gnawing at it. It was a satisfying texture, a satisfying feeling. After a few seconds, she drew her head away, and batted again. She liked the game of batting at this plant. It was satisfying to see the way that it swayed, and moved away from her paw, and bounced back to the same place. And, if any of the adults started arguing about it, it would be extremely easy to just argue that she was practicing her fighting skills. Practicing applying more force to do more damage more quickly. Oripendularstar had said training how to fight was important to do soon, so, presumably she'd be happy if Catopsispaw was already starting to learn how to do it. Catopsispaw was at it for a while, slowly wearing more and more away at the stem of the maize, with the sun slowly warming up her fur more and more where it hit her back through the trees. And then. There wasn't a stalk any more. There was a snap, and a pain against her paws, and a hard impact against her nose. "Oowwww!" Catopsispaw cried, rocking back onto her haunches, and lifting her paws up against her nose. "Ow! Whyyyyy?" But Catopsispaw was sure she could say exactly what Oripendularstar would say about the reason for why she'd just been smacked on the nose by a maize stalk. By the time she'd recovered from the pain, and her paws had loosened from around her nose, the top of the maize stalk was already slithering down the hole. Catopsispaw tried to grab the stalk, scrabbling after, but it was ahead of her, and as it sped past her paw into the darkness, she had no intention of following it. Suddenly, wind ripped against her fur, pulling her ears, her tail. She could feel herself being pulled subtly towards the hole. Her feet scrabbled against the dirt, pushing back harder and harder and harder, as the ground felt softer and slicker and squishier and more and more irrelevant to her desire to not fall down into the abyss. She pressed herself deep into the mud, staining her beautiful white fur, but now... it was pulling her too harshly. Catopsispaw yowled, and twisted as fast as she could, wrapping her paws around the closest maize stalk. This one was a lot thicker, greener, healthier looking, than the one she'd knocked down. Her paws were barely enough to do anything to hold her in place, but it was, at least, enough. She was staying in place, and she wasn't moving any further than the bending of the stalk allowed for. And suddenly, the wind died down. ... Hey? What was she doing this close to the edge of the hole? She'd just been playing with the plant a second ago? And for that matter, where had the top of the plant gone? It was just vanished, like the sun behind a cloud. It made no sense! How had she moved, and where had it gone? ... Oh well. Catopsispaw knew she'd had fun! Practicing fighting plants was great! Hopefully she'd get to do it again soon! She couldn't wait to repeat it again.
Ori blinked twice at the new cat who had appeared in front of her. She was... if anything... she was even bigger than Crackerheart. She was enormous. Quite frankly, Ori was left wondering if the molly had some sort of growth disorder, as that was the only explanation she could see for how a molly could grow that huge. Maybe this molly made a little more sense to have suddenly appeared than Crackerheart had. Tortoiseshell fur was always a fantastic camouflage. More colours meant more break up of a cat's shape, and tortoiseshells had to have at least three colours. Meanwhile, Ori only had one colour, and it was hard for her to sneak up on more observant prey in much else than the dark of night or the midst of the caves. And yet... This molly was simply too large for her colouration to in any way account for her sudden appearance. Or the stranger thing, of how she was standing where the pool of water had been just a moment before without even the slightest trace of water on her. Where had that water gone? Oripendularstar had never seen anything like it. Surely no cat had ever seen water just vanish like that... And if it were caused by anything natural, surely the fur of the cat would be damp, or else there'd be a faint glistening on the rocks where the water had been. But no. There was... there was nothing. It felt... somehow, it felt like a question she couldn't possibly have had before. She'd remember having experienced anything like this before. "Hello." Ori stepped forwards gently. "Hola, Ritorcidoeek'e'; úuchij ya'ab k'iin co... Hm. Ma' , tech t'aan Neolengua , Ta correcto? Je'e. Hola, Oripendularstar." Oripendularstar's ears twitched. That was the same language Crackerheart spoke, and the strange accent, too, the stresses all in the wrong places. "You know me?" "Of course. How knowing that would I not be? Asked you the ancestors to be sending you a medicine cat, and being here am I, as you had been asking." There was a soft lull behind the cat's tone, as if she was trying to stress particular words for emphasis, but with the accent being so unfamiliar to Ori, even after a few months with Crackerheart, she wasn't entirely sure what was meant by those stresses and their placements. The order was a little confusing, but she supposed it was less confusing than having to guess what random words meant with Crackerheart. "So you're a medicine cat." "Yes. Am I so." The molly twisted on her feet, shifting her huge bulk in a way that Ori would have guessed to be impossible until that very moment. "Are you leader. And living to your namesake, think I." She twitched her eyebrows a few times. "Med cat not start family, no, but no tom, no kits, no family, no distractions, no Code Break. Ta correcto?" The lilt changed to be even stronger, swinging the tone entirely. There was no doubt about what that lilt signified. "Ta... correcto." Oripendularstar supposed that did have to be correct. The medicine cat code was extremely explicit about the reason for not allowing medicine cats to have mates only being because having kits would cause a distraction. If this cat wasn't going to be a mother at any point (and frankly, how many toms were there who wouldn't be intimidated by the raw size of her? So many toms were so unduly insecure about their heights when so few mollies really cared), there really wasn't anything in the code against her gaining a female mate, and being in a gay relationship. "What's your name, then, medicine cat?" "Panch'eelyoot'el." "Panche... Pancheeeel? Pancheh, Pan..." "Toucanfur." She made a little shrug-like gesture, as close as a cat could get to the proper thing. "Touc."
Crackerheart was the one showing the medicine cat where her new den would be. There was a separation of the river beneath, with a ridge coming out from the wall high above, so that the river could only really be heard down below, rather than any hint of lights reflecting off the water from below. Over to the right hand side, there was a wider, flat area. Touc only had to step over the gap in the middle - it was narrower than her usual stride by a wide margin... but the difference between her size and, for instance, Catopsispaw, was enough that it was unlikely that Catopsispaw would be coming into her den unnoticed. The way that the rock walls were made, with their hanging rocks, and their strange stacked shelves, was absolutely perfect for a medicine cat den. There was an enormous potential for storage space. It wasn't a small space either. In one corner was a slightly raised platform, in a neat circle - that was going to be her bed - and below, in the main area of the den, was space for several patients. Here was a medicine cat den - perhaps the only medicine cat den - that was proportional to the sheer size of Toucanfur. Crackerheart didn't need to talk to communicate with Touc, to explain what was happening. It was mostly a thing constrained to the nealingua cats that they needed to actually talk. With the sheer sizes of the two cats, and their wordless communication, the explanation would have looked like two monsters sizing each other up as opponents in a fight, had any cat cared to look and see.
[ Toucanfur joins Paragonclan! ] [ Oripendularstar goes to the moonpool to ask for a warrior ] [ Oripendularstar and Crackerheart go hunting! ] [ Toucanfur goes herb-hunting! ] [ Catopsispaw goes training with her mentor, Oripendularstar! ] [ Paragonclan consume 1x Squirrel - 2 portions - there's nothing else to eat! ]
PARAGONCLAN, CHAMROSH ANCESTRAL REQUEST:
starclan heeds oripendularstar's request and sends a warrior to join paragonclan.
HUNTING:
oripendularstar and crackerheart caught +1 small fish.
HERB GATHERING:
toucanfur gathered +1 hawkweed and +1 celandine.
TRAINING:
thanks to oripendularstar's tutelage, catopsispaw learned the fighting skill!
MOD NOTES:
the gray-and-white shorthair was colored in by H155! [/div]
|
|