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The first Savage story. Introduces Savage, The Rat (later Ratbat) and other recurring characters.

Savage

by Strega

It was The Rat who finally said what everyone was thinking. "But what are we going to do with them?"

Stature, who was still trying to staunch the bleeding from the cuts in his stony hide, replied instantly. "Turn them over to the cops."

The fires were mostly out. Chill had dropped a thick blanket of frost on the burning factory, then another, and another. By the time the fire engines had showed he had it down to an occasional spurt of flame from the fuel tanks at the back of the building. He was still conferring with the emergency crews, an icy figure glittering in the spotlights. Even from the rooftop a block away they could see him gesture, an animated glass figurine.

Doomknight tilted his head to activate his communicator. The spreading horns on his helmet almost tangled with the spikes protruding from his shoulders, just like always. "Chill, have you told them what caused the fire?"

The whisper of a voice came back on all their communicators. Chill's voice even sounded cold. "I was about to, why?"

"Tell them we don't know how it started."

"But why...OK." Chill had heard Doomknight suck in a breath. No one wanted to piss off Doom. He wasn't the most powerful hero out there, perhaps not even the most powerful in the Four, but he was the most intimidating.

The Rat hadn't taken his eyes off the prisoners. They had stripped the power gauntlets off Merc, but the huge augmented muscles in the villain's biceps writhed as he tried to free himself. Sidle was unconscious and would stay that way, a gadget of Doomknight's invention keeping her in a deep REM sleep. Without that she would have melted into the shadows; previously they had tried flares or spotlights, but she could sink even into the puddles of shadow beneath her own feet. A glass cell was the only way, and there wasn't one of those this side of the super-supermax at Denver. A strip of rebar was wrapped around her; Stature had started to tie her up like the others before remembering.

The really dangerous one was the Professor. Thin, in a flamboyant blue and gold costume and eye-hurtingly bright indigo cape, he smiled around his gag. They had learned from hard experience not to let him talk. A dozen strips of rebar wrapped him up, his hands up in front of him as though he was praying. Even without his gadget belt they wanted to be able to see his hands at all times. He was the one Rat was really watching. Sidle was annoying, Merc was dangerous, but the Professor had escaped from jail a twelfth time just last month and it was a minor miracle they had caught him at all. They had expected to next hear about him on CNN as he announced his latest plan to conquer the world. This time they had got him before he built a device to pull down the moon, or some damn thing.

Chill was still gesturing in the distance. A light snow fell even on their rooftop as the iceman pulled moisture out of the air. The smoldering factory turned into a white blur as a blizzard descended on it. The fire chief must have worried about hot spots re-igniting.

"How many people were in that factory when it went up?" Doomknight's voice, pitch-altered and distorted, hissed out of his helmet.

"Maybe a dozen. Some of them got out." Rat's nose twitched. In this form his nose was as good as a real rat's. He could smell burnt flesh. "Some didn't." He twisted his left arm forward and back to make sure the tendons and muscle were healed. Merc had almost torn it off, but Weres were hard to kill. His tail was still regenerating, halfway back from a stump. He lost his tail in fights a lot.

"So what are we going to do with them?" Stature had packed brick dust into his wounds. Stopping the bleeding was all he really needed to do; there wasn't that much flesh in his statue of a body.

"What's this week's code to call Savage?"

******

He lay stretched out on the circular roof of a water tank, peering over the edge while, twenty feet away, the tip of his tail just hung over the opposite rim. Savage was in full tiger form tonight. Orange with black stripes is not suited to city work, so his pelt was a patchwork of grays and browns. The stripes that normally encircled his eyes and ran across his forehead had repositioned themselves into vertical columns, the better to blend in with the skyline should someone catch a glimpse of his face atop the tank.

He was watching a drug deal go down. Small time stuff, just a Mercedes stopped so the driver could talk to the shabby man on the corner. Savage's vision was suited to seeing in the dark, not picking out fine details, but his ears were cupped to pick up every sound. It was not the dealer he wanted. He was waiting for the dealer's boss to show, or for the dealer to head home. Then he would follow, slinking along the rooftops, knowing perfectly which would support his ton and a half of muscle. He had been watching this particular corner for three nights, now, and he had a sense that he would learn something useful soon.

His stomach rumbled, but Savage ignored it. He had eaten a nest of rats and a mangy feral dog earlier, but it'd been just a snack. He felt a bit bad about the dog. He knew the homeless man living in the cardboard box two alleys over liked it, but there hadn't been time to stop by the meat packing plant and hope they'd left him a nice barrel of meaty bones. He'd had an understanding with the workers there since he put an end to the protection racket the local gang had set up. Then there was the time the plant foreman had let him know about a drug deal going down in the local playground. In return for such favors he often got fine meals from the plant's leavings. In a sense, he considered, he had his own protection racket going.

Dogs howled, Savage's ear swiveled, and he stopped thinking about his stomach. A whine audible only to animals, certain superhumans, and of course him sounded. Three long blasts, then a pause, then two short ones. He waited. Ten seconds later, another long whistle.

The dealer below was still haggling with his mark as Savage stood up. He stood six feet tall at the shoulder in this form, so as he stood he pulled back from the edge of the tank. Movement might attract someone's eye. He had just gotten the asphalt top of the tank nice and warm to lie on, but it couldn't be helped. With an easy leap he cleared the twenty feet to a nearby rooftop, the top of a WW2-era prefabricated concrete warehouse. The trail of his scent was strong in his nostrils as he moved from carefully chosen roof to carefully chosen roof. "His" part of the city was crisscrossed with these trails, the product of years of stalking the criminal element. He could close his eyes and by scent alone navigate through the city, and had, when blinded by supervillains. One time had to do it by hearing alone.

The whistle sounded once more, but he did not need to correct his course. He had smelled the factory fire and assigned it as the most likely location for his fellow heroes.

*****

Chill had joined them and was arguing heatedly with Doomknight. Stature and Rat stayed out of it, keeping their eyes firmly on the Professor and, secondarily, Merc. They listened, though. Doom was talking about breaking the law.

"What else are we going to do with them?" Even set at a low volume, the tech-knight's voice boomed. "The Professor checks in and out of jail like it has a revolving door. You know what he did to Paragon!"

"They'll figure out how to hold him eventually, and what about the other two?" Chill's voice had never risen above the whisper. Rat hasn't sure it could.

"Rat says at least five guys died in that fire. We don't even know what he was after, but let me tell you, whatever it was, we don't want him to have it. We don't want him to finish whatever his plan is this time. Remember the fungus army? Remember the gray goo?"

"I remember. But there must be..." Chill's voice trailed off. One of his powers was sensing heat. The three supervillains were orange blotches against the cool rooftop. A big, warm body was like an illuminated billboard to him, and it was it the absence of such a big, warm body he had just noticed. There had been a...shimmer, he'd say, on a nearby rooftop. Turning his full attention to it, he could make out a distortion. Everything was the same temperature, but part of the wall behind the rooftop was closer than it should have been. There was just the tiniest spark of heat, floating in midair.

Then suddenly a broad, hot, fanged grin and hot, slitted eyes. Savage took his paw from in front of his face, where it'd covered his warm nose and eyes, and faded into visibility. As the adaptive camouflage morphed to his normal stripes, he changed shape. His long feline torso thickened, his hind legs became just legs, his forelegs arms, and eventually he was as humanoid as he ever got.

It wasn't very humanoid at all. Changing shape did not change his mass, and he was an ogre of a tiger-man, twelve feet tall and fearsomely broad, all fur and superhumanly tough muscle. He wore no clothing, but a thick patch of fur covered his private parts. He'd had a good thing going with Jaguaress before her death. Back then he had been almost a comical figure, like an animated plush toy stalking the rooftops. There were rumors that he'd shacked up with this or that heroine and even, maybe, a curious norm or two. These days he was darker.

They said he was Chinese, originally, part of their super-soldier program. Various countries had dabbled in animal-man supersoldier projects. Supposedly the Russian program had produced Wojtek, the were-grizzly who was Prague's protector. Then there was Capwolf and American Eagle, over in Washington.

Savage lost the grin as he looked at the smoldering factory. He could smell the burnt flesh as well as The Rat.

Doomknight put away the whistle, which he'd just lifted to his lips as Savage arrived. "We caught the Professor and his goons."

Savage eyed their rooftop, and didn't leap over. Then Stature waved. He weighed almost as much as the tiger, and after another moment's hesitation Savage bounded across. He landed on all fours and the whole building shuddered, but the roof held. "Did others get away? Why do you need my help?"

"Savage...." Chill's voice was an even lower whisper than usual. "Savage, jails can't hold the Professor. He's killed a dozen people since he's escaped, and that's just this time." There was a long pause.

No one wanted to be the next to speak. Savage's long striped tail slid slowly back and forth, rustling on the tar paper Rat and Stature suddenly found their task of watching the Professor utterly absorbing.

It was known in the hero community that occasionally, people that Savage caught just disappeared. Among the people the cops had found, beaten up by massive paws or restrained inside cars with crushed-in doors and roofs (something of his specialty), there was a certain class of criminal that was simply absent. Rapists. The supervillain who had killed Jaguaress had raped her. Savage didn't like pimps, either, but them he just beat up if he disagreed with their managerial style. Rapists - the ones Savage was sure were guilty - just disappeared. Or at least, that was the theory Doomknight and the other genius heroes had evolved.

Savage was too big to live in a house, too big to use a public toilet. It was common knowledge, and this much was backed up by actual photos, that he used manholes as his toilets. He knew the ones with open sewer channels beneath them and popped the lids off with his claws.

All of this led inexorably to the conclusion that he was eating those few criminals and depositing whatever bits were indigestible into the city sewer system. Even a few supervillains had vanished in his part of town.

Savage's belly rumbled, and he grimaced. He was hungry. But... "You're asking me to break the law. I could go to prison, to a cage."

Doomknight held up a gadget. "Do you know what this is?" It was his memory eraser. Everyone knew he had it, and that he used it on norms and supervillains who learned his identity or just knew too much. Very Men in Black, it was adjustable for length of memory erasure. It'd caused havoc when Techmaster duplicated it, putting half the city into a repeating loop of memory.

"We've talked it over. I'll erase our memories after you...afterwards. Except me, it won't work on me. Me you'll have to trust." Ironic, that, as Doomknight very publicly did not trust anyone at all. He spent far too much time figuring out how to defeat his friends and allies, and at least twice that'd bitten the superhero community in the ass when villains got hold of his files.

Savage was shifting slowly and perhaps unconsciously back into his full tiger form. His voice was an almost unintelligible rumble at the best of times, and as he changed it was hardly more than a snarl modulated into words. "I am going to trust you four, then, because you are my friends. And I think this needs to be done." He was looking around, but the rooftop they'd moved the supervillains to was chosen with care. A parapet on one side and blank brick walls on three others made it all but impossible to see what was happening here from any distance.

He was going to start with the most dangerous of the three, with the Professor. He padded over to the captives, a flowing river of muscle and twitching tail. Parts of his pelt changed color randomly. Doomknight recognized a pattern meant to confuse surveillance cameras. His shadow fell across the Professor, still bound and gagged, and now from all directions save where the heroes were standing, it was just heroes on the roof. Savage's half-camouflaged form covered all three of the villains.

The Professor wasn't wearing much after the painstaking search Doomknight and Rat had performed, but as the tiger's claws slid over him he wore even less. Savage carefully tore away the armored cloth without disturbing the bands of rebar. When he had the Professor completely naked he rolled the scraps into a ball and sniffed it. The Professor mumbled through his gag and twitched. He looked harmless now, but no one underestimated him. Slight superhuman strength was the least of his abilities. He was the third smartest man on the planet, after all. Possibly the second, with BrainTrust missing.

Savage left the ball of clothing where it was and began to sniff the Professor himself. He had never fought him, but must know enough about this villain to worry. Might the Professor have somehow predicted this and painted his skin with a poison engineered to attack Savage and only Savage? Did the man's hair smell odd, or was that just shampoo? He poked and prodded the man's belly to feel for implants. The story was that one time he had been blown almost in half after swallowing a supervillain. Who would have though a minor hood like Brickbat would have a bomb in his chest? Luckily, his healing powers extended to pulling himself back together after fiascoes like that one.

Savage had nosed the Professor in rude places and was sniffing the man's hands now, seemingly interested in his fingernails. The Rat watched, fascinated. He would never have thought the huge tiger would be so paranoid. Was he like this every time he ate someone?

Then the tiger's head snapped to the side and the Professor's head and shoulders vanished. The Four hadn't known how this would work, but they'd assumed the meal would be bloody. Surely even a massive tiger would eat people in bites. Doomknight had mentioned carnassials and Rat had proven surprisingly knowledgeable about a big cat's digestive system. Perhaps he worried that as a rat-themed hero, he might eventually end up in one.

Savage wasn't biting off chunks, though. He clamped down on the Professor's shoulders, the man's head in his mouth, and lifted until the Professor's rump hit the tar paper Then he pushed his head down. Rat and Doomknight watched as the tiger effortlessly slid his jaws over the Professor's entire torso. The bands of rebar that restrained the genius supervillain went in too. Then he snapped his head upward and gobbled up the thighs.

Rat couldn't look away. Savage was flipping his nose up and using the Professor's inertia to hold the villain in place as he thrust his head forward. With three more tosses of his head even the feet disappeared. The Professor was just a bulge in his cheeks how. It hadn't gone the way The Rat had expected. One he realized the tiger was going to swallow the Professor whole, he expected it'd be a gradual process. The tiger would swallow the man's head, then get the shoulders into his gullet, and so on. Like a snake, or a bird maybe.

Savage looked to both sides, his cheeks straining with their wiggling cargo, then he stretched out his neck and swallowed. It was that fast. One moment the Professor was kicking and squirming in the tiger's mouth, the next a massive bulge sagged down through the furry neck and was gone. The Rat watched with almost horrified fascination as the tiger's belly bulged out. Under those layers of fur and muscle was the Professor, now.

Doomknight had watched as intently as The Rat, but for different reasons. "What about the rebar?"

"What about it?" The tiger shrugged. "I can digest it. I want to wait a bit before I continue."

Chill and Stature had looked anywhere but at Savage as the Professor was devoured, but now that the tiger was again a friend, and not a beast in the act of eating a human, Chill spoke up. "I wonder what his plan was this time."

That led right back to the fact that Savage had just eaten the Professor, though, and an awkward silence followed. Into the silence rose gurgling noises as the man was digested. It happened remarkably quickly; The Rat watched the heavy bulge soften and flatten over the course of just a minute or two. It seemed Savage's shape-changing powers extended to making his stomach do very odd things, or at least very rapid ones. The Professor's bulletproof skin apparently provided no protection at all.

Savage burped once, softy, and spoke. "All right, I don't think he'd getting out of there. I was worried he might blow up or poison me or something." He poked his belly thoughtfully with a massive paw. "Maybe I should have chewed him up. But I didn't feel any change. No flicker as he teleported out and replaced himself with another body, or anything. I think he's cat food."

"Has that actually happened?" Savage ignored Stature, though, and looked Sidle over.

"I don't know this one. Shadow powers, maybe?"

"She can sink into shadows. That widget on her forehead keeps her unconscious. It has to stay in place or she might wake up and escape, even out of your stomach."

Savage shrugged at Doomknight's proclamation and began to strip the skin-tight black suit and black cloak off the woman. Sidle had no super-strength so there was just the one piece of rebar, and it was easier for him to rip her clothing free. As with the Professor, he rolled it up and sniffed it. Then he began going over Sidle, sniffing carefully and everywhere.

It was uncomfortably like a rape. He even licked her groin, and it looked like he forced his tongue in. The Rat wasn't sure what he would have said had Savage actually moved to mount her, but it didn't seem to occur to the tiger. It was part of the process, perhaps, making sure nothing untoward was going to happen during or after the meal. When you thought about it, eating whole supervillains was pretty dangerous.

The search finished, Savage examined the device on Sidle's forehead. "She seems fleshy enough...how easily might this be dislodged?"

"Not easily, but..." Doomknight pulled a roll of duct tape out of a compartment in his armor, and everyone laughed. A moment later the widget was securely taped in place and Savage was looking over his second meal of the day. Merc had passed from his beating a while back but awoke just in time to see Sidle's feet disappear into the huge tiger's maw. He grunted through his gag and struggled to get away, but Stature put a stone foot on his neck and held him still.

This time it went faster. Savage swallowed Sidle feetfirst, presumably so he could keep an eye on the taped-down device. He did not ball her up in his cheeks as he had the Professor, but slid her feet into his gullet and started swallowing. Sidle was of slight build even for an Asian and went in easily. Perhaps a tiger Savage's size, but without his powers, could still have swallowed her whole.

With a flip of his muzzle he eased her shoulders and head into his mouth, then with a gulp she was gone. Her long hair slid in after and disappeared past his wet black lips.

In a moment the bulge in the tiger's belly got bigger. The intervening fur and muscle was too thick for any shapes to show, but it had the same hard bulge that it'd had when the Professor went in. There followed the same horrible gurgling as the tiger did whatever it was he did to speed up digestion, and the bulge softened, but remained larger.

"I don't have to do that with norms. It's uncomfortable," Savage rumbled. H looked at Merc. "There's a lot of metal in that one. I can digest it, but it'll give me heartburn. Ah well."

"Wait a minute." Stature spoke up suddenly. "Wait...wait a minute. Doom, that thing works on villains, right?"

Doomknight looked at the device in his hand. "Of course, why?"

"The Professor was the one we were worried about. Not his goons. Couldn't you just zap the memory out of Merc?"

Savage tilted his massive head. "If that is the case, then the shadow-walker might have been spared." The gurgling in his belly had died down, but only after reducing Sidle to a soft, drooping bulge. It had happened even faster than with the Professor.

Doomknight's red LED eyes blinked. "That would...work." He made an adjustment on the device. Savage swallowed Sidle's clothing after giving it another sniff.

Doom "flashed" Merc, and the supervillain sagged back, unconscious. "I've put him out for a few minutes. I don't think you should be here when he wakes up."

Savage had the Professors balled-up clothing in his mouth but seemed in no hurry to swallow it. Maybe he was waiting for Sidle's clothing to dissolve first, as he had with the Professor's body before eating her. Worried about some chemical reaction, maybe. The big cat mumbled around the ball.

"Zap the others before I go."

"Wait." It was The Rat this time. "I want to remember. I won't tell anyone, I promise."

Savage looked him over as he continued. "I have similar powers to yours, just lower-level. I want to remember how you did that, maybe learn something new about my own body."

Savage considered. The Rat was a Were rather than a mutated animal, something of a mirror image of him. Still, of f the Four, Rat was closest to his own street-level habits, and to his powers. They had worked together before.

"All right."

Chill and Stature had no such interest in remembering the horrific feeding, and were soon "flashed" and unconscious. Savage gave the two remaining heroes and nod and leaped back to the other rooftop. As he moved he faded, switching between an urban-colors pattern and the more energy intensive adaptive camouflage. With a last barely seen flick of his tail, he was gone.

"Hopefully that's the last we'll see of the Professor, barring a clone, other-dimensional counterpart, robot duplicate, time travel..."

Doomknight wasn't listening. "That wasn't why you wanted to remember, was it?"

The Rat smiled, his chisel teeth hanging out as always. He was thinking about the glimpse he'd had of the tiger's wide-open maw. It had looked...inviting.

"Maybe."

*****

Savage was back on the water tank, lying half on his belly and half on his side. It allowed the bulge from his meal some freedom, while his forepaws and nose stretched sphinx-like to the rim so he could watch the drug dealer down below.

He put the thought of the meal firmly behind him. It did not pay to think too much about that sort of thing, or else the little drug dealer would slide squirming down his throat, and then the next drug dealer, and the next gang-banger, and eventually the heroes would come looking for him with less than friendly intentions.

The Professor's balled-up cloak and armorcloth outfit still lay between his paws. In an hour or so, when he was sure the shadow-walker's clothing was well soaked in acid and hopefully mostly digested, he'd swallow it. It was very unlikely the Professor had done something as odd as treat the two outfits with the two halves of an explosive compound, but you never know. Just as important as being secretive about his occasional eating habits was being cautious about them.

300 or so pounds of supervillains had made him a fine meal. He could go without eating for a day or so now as long as he didn't have to regenerate a lot of damage, shapechange, or use his adaptive camouflage too much. The flip side of that was on the rare occasions when he ate far too much, he could burn off fat by shape-changing. It kept him in fighting trim as much as roaming the rooftops did.

Tomorrow he'd deposit what was left of the two villains in a convenient manhole and stop by the meat packing plant. Maybe for a snack, but not for a serious meal. He'd heard rumors that the local gangs we trying to start up a protection racket again.

The protector of the neighborhood lay his chin on his paws and dozed a little. He was content and well-liked. After all, what better superhero for the stockyards district than a giant tiger?