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Save Point: Her Wooden Sword

"I was totally adorable when I was little," explains Cleo. "Lionesses develop more quickly than humans, obviously, and so I was sort of stretched out and healthy and lean where most kids are short and a bit stubby and kind of clumsy and drop stuff a lot. It was all greatly to the relief of my father, who was constantly worried that he might have made mistakes that would only show up later on. To his credit he wasn't all over-protective, instead he encouraged me to get out and do stuff in case it all went bad tomorrow."

~*~

"She's a cat!"

"She'll be just as beautiful and smart as a human. Look at her cute little legs and toes."

~*~

On the wall there is a bright happy picture with brilliantly green grass and a yellow circle sun, the background superficial because she has concentrated all her efforts on a special picture of her in her best pink dress, riding on a big cat creature that is just as big as the really huge doggy she saw the other day, but it is a cat and it is just like her and is very intelligent! (She is riding by knotting her hands into a sort of tuft or mane of fur just behind its ears, because she cannot draw hands or fingers very well, and so this way she doesn't have to draw them). The sky, puffy white clouds left uncoloured, is pink instead of blue, but that's just because it looks pretty and she couldn't find the blue pen. Sometimes the sky is like that anyway when it is sunset and soon it will be dark. At the top she has written "faster!" because she is telling the big kitty to go faster and the air is whistling past like when the window is down.

One day she will have a big kitty just like her drawing and they will ride wherever they want!

She is working on the next picture, but for now it is a secret, and she has hidden it in her book where no-one will find it until she is finished.

~*~

The rainbows she loves to draw confuse any number of child-care professionals, because each of the colours is technically correct but she always draws another one below the red, using a mixture of whatever shades are handy to try and get it right. Eventually, her father is obliged to explain to an over-zealously helpful minder that the extra shade is of course infrared, which she can see, and for which there are no suitable crayons.

About a week later he comes back with a large box of very odd crayons, at least from the point of view of anyone else, which he has made from a supply of fine clear wax extracted before the dyeing process, mixed with a colouring agent designed to be visible to infrared systems.

She seizes it with joy and is finally able to draw proper rainbows, and living things, by coating on the existing colors with clear wax. To everyone else it looks like a gloss finish, raising no questions other than why some things get more gloss and others don't.

~*~

"There were some issues with scent-marking when she was a kitten, but we've mostly trained her out of that, and she hardly ever licks herself anymore."

"You're not an animal. You're not a person. You're you."

~*~

When she's about five or six, she bites another kid. In all fairness she was being mercilessly teased, but the result, rather than just the usual row of teeth-marks, is a long series of deep bloody punctures all the way around his arm.

She gets in a hell of a lot of trouble for it and her father has to buy off the other kids parents by providing medical treatment, to fix it completely and heal it up without any scars. He then throws in a series of extra upgrades for free to make the other kid stronger and faster, "...so it'll be more fun the next time you try and bite him."

From this she learns a valuable lesson. Always make sure to finish off your opponent the first time if you can, otherwise he will come back stronger and faster. Also, that it is far more fun when they want you to bite them, because then you can refuse and say no.

~*~

When her father wants to buy her some toys to play with, he's forced to confront the fact that the available choices are, well, somewhat limited. They're all unnaturally slender, heavily stereotyped idealizations of pristine Azatlani girls, with occasional token minorities, and he can see nothing in them he can imagine reflecting anything of herself she might admire back at his daughter.

To find something a little better he's forced to turn to a line of fantasy action and military figures marketed towards boys, not something as soft or loving as he might hope for, but still far more encouraging in their potential. He's nervous she might not like them, but they're happily received when he hands them over in a sort of brightly colored tin box and lets her open it.

Cleo plays with the toys for hours, constructing strange and inexplicable narratives featuring the characters, unaware her father has selected carefully from the manufacturers catalogue of several hundred assorted figures to try and find those that might make her feel more normal and happy.

There's a sort of lion warrior, admittedly clearly male, but he has muzzle and mane just like hers, and an outline of a lion on the snakebite leather chest-plate he is wearing. He has a big ax in one hand and light sword in the other and is clearly, she thinks excitedly, getting ready to wreak havoc, which is phrase she has heard her dâyâ use but she doesn't quite yet understand.

To match the lion there is a crocodile warrior, in a sort of slouching claw-crouch, but she rejects this easy identification. Yes, he looks a bit like a crocodile, and they are probably supposed to fight each other, but that would be silly. Clearly he is a dragon, a special dragon that can walk around a bit like a person, and they will team up and have adventures!

A sort of long-legged hyena-man completes the set. She doesn't play with him as much, because she has decided that despite his tribal-looking loincloth stuff he is actually very clever and likes to build things. The weapons he carries are a give-away, they are angular and have grooved lines in them like pieces taken from a machine, with cloth wrapped around the grips to make these tools easier to carry. He is an important participant when she is building something out of blocks, bases and castles and big ruins and fortresses a specialty.

Although she doesn't know it, there was also an assortment of riding animals of various types in the range that was available, but her father didn't like them for the same reason he instinctively rejected the dolls. There was something very aggressive about them, anonymous armored figures in closed helms laying about as though everyone else was expendable.

So while he bought matching farm animals, and there is everything she needs to imaginatively envision some remote frontier settlement in one of the administered provinces, the riding beasts are from a different competing line. Built to a much larger internal scale from soft plastic, leaving them looking sort of alive-looking and slightly more poseable, yet kind of cheap compared to their more expensively detailed counterparts, the bigger models are an unexpected success as the monsters that her lion warrior and crocodile fight against, except for the big panther, which is their mount to carry them around when she sits them on top of it.

Each of the monsters, since it is soft and alive, has its own narrative explaining what it is and why it is fighting and stuff. They sometimes appear in stories of their own where the wolf is a king and lords it over its subjects in a big palace room made of square and triangle blocks, and passes petty and absolute judgments because it is mean and not feeling too well.

This is mainly since it keeps eating things that it shouldn't, like whole xocholatl bars and huge cherries and sweets the size of its own head. It is very greedy and wants to have everything for itself.

Her father watches her play and smiles when he sees it, as she dances the wolf around its throne room, knocking over blocks and making incoherent snarly threats she tries to duplicate with her high kittenish mew. For some reason that is not adequately explained, the model dinosaurs always act as the wildlife when she plays this particular game, even though she is very insistent that correct normal farm animals appear exactly where they are supposed to be in every other scene.

Very shortly, the lion and the crocodile warrior will show up and make the giant wolf share with the others again, which is what happens every time, in endless variations. Sometimes the hyena-man is also involved, usually to pull out the wolf's sore tooth, which is what is making it go on the rampage.

He leaves her to it, narrating the story to herself and doing all of the voices, carefully playing with the figures to act out the tale. She's very creative - he has no idea where she gets all this stuff from.

~*~

The little cat-child, striding around with her wooden sword.

"One day you'll have a real sword, your mâyâ's sword," her father tells her, as the insects hum in a low and noisy drone and the sun shines down, and she swats industriously at the bees, which she does not like. (Ugh! Nasty sting-mice! They are bad!)

She already has a knife of her own, a real one, in fact she has several. Whereas most parents would bring home for their girl-child a nice dolly to play with, and some clothes, her father has ultimately presented her with an entire range of knives, of all different sorts, after several very careful lessons and making it very clear that they are really, really sharp and not toys to play with but tools, things to make stuff with or, if you have to, to scare away bad people who would hurt you. He got her a small one first, a pocket-knife, but when she was interested and showed that she would be good and use it carefully to make things, he got her another. "The world is a dangerous place, and you need to know how to make stuff and keep yourself safe," her dâyâ explained.

Several knives later, after a number of broken blades and a menagerie of industriously hewn toy animals and model aircrafts made from wood, the latest one is an actual military combat knife, the black ceramic-bladed type, which is being phased out in favour of something far more deadly that her dâyâ is somehow involved with. She doesn't really ask questions, it is awesome that her dâyâ will let her have a proper knife and not just the silly things that all the other little girls have, but it needs to be secret and no-one must know she has it, or she will get in trouble. That way if there are bad guys, they will be very surprised. So she keeps the knife safely in its sheath except when she is carving up fallen branches and bits of leftover building and firewood in the back garden.

She is also allowed to use some of the carpentry tools if she wants, to cut the branches down to size, but not anything remotely flammable. Her dâyâ saw her eyeing up a slender metal flask of fire lighter stuff one time, after they had barbecued meat cooked over actual coals on a grille that got slippery with melted fat, and was quick to take it from her and prevent another of the dangerously incendiary food experiments which she has tried several times in the past. She's fascinated by things that make heat and how they work, including ovens, old heat lamps with filaments in them, toasters and microwaves, and since most of them are associated with food preparation in one way or another, her experiments tend towards whether it is possible to cook various novel and unexpected foods in surprising ways.

Her dâyâ will allow her to cook toast, if it is winter and they are having an open fire. She gets to skewer the bread on a long, two-pronged cooking fork and hold it over the flaky ashes once the fire has burned down and the embers are all glowy. The toast always tastes different and better than normal boring bread cooked in a toaster, all smoky and delicious.

As she swings her wooden sword at the bees and mostly misses them completely, buzzing off to investigate colorful open flowers instead, she wonders what the bad guys look like, if they're actually not like the evil baddies in her favorite cartoons. Do they also have knives like hers? But wouldn't that mean she was bad too, if she was fighting with them? It's really rather confusing. Maybe she and the bad guys could get together, compare notes, show each other what different knives they all had and not have to fight at all. It wouldn't be as much fun, but then they could all cook toast together and no-one would need any sticky plasters.

She laughs with delight at this silly idea and chases the escaping bees, which are getting away. She's sure that by the time she has her mothers sword, she will know exactly what to do and who to swing it at.

~*~

Aged eleven, she looks at the rock (rounded chromatite pebble from a stream, green, silvery flecks, part of child-safe geology collection) and the magnet (small, dense, superconducting magnetite doped with ytterbium, part of a broken speaker).

The rock is aerodynamic and perfectly shaped for launch from the hand-held heavy catapult she's built out of odds and ends. The magnet, conversely, is enormously interesting and does all sorts of strange things when bought near metal surfaces, the other speaker, and the other magnet in the other speaker.

She twists up her muzzle in a moment of intense decision....

...then loads the magnet into the catapult. It is far denser and harder and heavier than the rock and has sharper edges, and may well do cool stuff when fired at or just past suitable surfaces. Crisis averted. This will be awesome!

~*~

"Erm... hello, dâyâ?" she whines, having been caught out masturbating, totally bare-skinned and her fingers still slick with juices.

The nearest thing to an upside is that she has her legs spread away from him, so he's only looking over her shoulder. Otherwise it would be really embarrassing.

"Oh, don't worry about it," he exclaims, shaking his head. "You should have seen your mâyâ going at it. Talk about determination."

"Ughhh, dâyâ!"

"You do your thing. Just remember to wash your fingers after," he advises her affectionately.

You'd think it would have completely spoiled the mood, but she finds herself doing it again the instant the door is fully closed. This is something that she needs.

It is shortly after this that her little medical problem becomes apparent, when she comes home from school one day having been diagnosed with a mental illness. The very professional and quite tactful note, complete with a blank for recording the disorder of choice, has been filled in so as to imply that she suffers from some odd form of sexual mania, as distinct from merely being a teenager.

Instead of the well-known term that everyone recognizes as describing exactly what they're implying, it employs an allusive phrasing, spelling out an ironic acronym in Azatlani, meaning exactly the same damn thing. Cleo is somewhat bemused, despite freely admitting to herself that it is partially her fault for trying to charm the school psychiatrist, actually a quite striking woman but more repressed than her career would suggest.

She has also failed to mention certain things that haven't happened, that you might really expect to have occurred by now, and her father hasn't bothered to ask. However, it is difficult to ignore an official diagnosis of being a slutty kitty in heat.

Her father reluctantly engages the sliding diagnostic equipment in the spare study, which pulls out of the wall and retracts when not in use, and gets her to lean back in it, something she hasn't had to do for a couple of years now as everything stabilized and it started to seem likely that she'd make it to her full growth without anything sudden and awful happening. The scanner doesn't really have a chair or a cradle for you to sit in, just a row of diagonally placed padded rods like an absurdly thin staircase, the heights between the steps varying to form an approximate human contour.

It's actually very old and outmoded now, but that's how her father was able to get it and bring it home, and she likes it because her tail fits in and can stick out between the bars.

Her father of course is quite busy, but for something like this you really have to make time and so he spends a couple of hours looking at stuff, then concludes she has an impressively complicated hormone imbalance, featuring stuff from big cats, humans, and a couple of other weird ones that he can't quite place exactly. It just wasn't apparent until she started to grow some extra tufts of fur in odd places and began stalking boys (and girls).

She kind of has to mention that stuff which hasn't happened at this point, after he says that he's surprised she's still fertile (not that there are in fact any matching males, but still). It's not a discussion anyone would want to have with their father, but everything is sort of working, after a fashion. It's all there and surprisingly well lubricated.

The hormones and other stuff seem to play essential parts in regulating all sorts of important biological functions, some of which neither of them may yet be fully aware of. As a test, he configures her nanotech to break up a moderate proportion of the elevated compounds, taking them down to something approximating normal human levels.

Barely three days later, she feels sick and weak and tired. She's literally dead inside and her usual lust for life is almost entirely gone.

Something essential is missing, and the nanotech alone can't keep up with repairing the side-effects, either too slow or unaware that damage is being done. It's like she has no blood in her.

Finally, she makes the executive decision to turn her own values back up to normal, rather than begging him to do it, because he might say no. It's her body and she should be in charge of it. Only after she's done it and locked the settings does she tell him.

The good point, such as it is, is that she is officially cleared of being a slutty kitty after her father sends the data he's collected to the school psychiatrist, annotated with footnotes and numerous external links casually referenced in a style designed to be utterly demoralizing and intellectually condescending to anyone else who isn't completely brilliant.

Sure, she's blown all chance of dating the woman forever, but there are plenty more delicious fish in the sea, some of them of quite impressive size. She'll stretch to conquer!

~*~

Even if the first time hurts, curiosity and horniness get the better of her and soon she finds herself back with him again, slipping it in very slowly as she double-checks every sensation against her own biased memories and deciding that actually, it's not that bad... in fact it's really kind of fun... and soon the blood is rushing hotly to her cheeks as she grinds herself back against him and is confused at just how quickly her feelings have turned around. There must be something to this natural instincts thing.

She orders him to do it again for a third time, and then even once more. She's slathered in moist sweat and would normally be yearning for a shower after even a fraction of this, but it somehow seems to be absolutely fine and she's wide awake, which is more than she can say for him. Who knew that such strong boys could be tired out so easily? She's discovered a little secret, which is that she is the strong one one on the inside.

There are other things she'd like to try, maybe next time, once he's pulled himself together. Dirty things, some of them. She wants to try them all and see if she likes them just as much as this. Today she is the riding cat.

~*~

The sheath of the sword is interwoven diagonally with blue leather of two different colors, dark and pale. The hilt is wrapped in coarse wire, into which some sort of wax, also blue, has been worked to increase the grip without compromising the wielders dexterity. The pommel, at the end of the grip, is a polished and shiny silver sphere that that embraces the light-map of the world around it, somehow without reflecting back any tell-tale sparks that might reveal its position.

She looks at the weapon and tries to decipher it. Pulling the blade forth a fraction of an inch cracks open a ridge of dried oil, suggesting that it hasn't been drawn in quite some time, but the metal of the blade isn't what she expected. It almost looks machined, rather than hand-forged, and no evidence of corrosion is to be seen. It's almost like someone oiled it because they expected that that was what you were supposed to do to a sword, rather than it actually being necessary.

A few test sweeps show that it will cut bone-gauge firewood, fine silken material as it's falling through the air, a piece of drifting paper (very neatly) and finally one of her own hairs as it is carried in the draft from the door across the sunlight. Holy hell it's sharp.

What the fuck is this thing?

She tries, in the most non-destructive possible way, to take it apart looking for a makers mark, or stamp, or something that might give a clue as to its impossible origin, but all she discovers, quite accidentally, is that she can't even scratch it. The very precise outline of a round, circular pin that holds the blade to the grip is clearly visible in the exact centre of the hilt, but it won't budge, even when she picks at the edge with her favorite knife. When the point slides out of the groove and skitters sideways, it doesn't even leave a mark.

She goes so far as to clamp it in a vice and then hit the pin from the side with a hammer and a small iron rod intended to dislodge adjustable-chair gas struts and other cased pistons. She belts herself painfully in the hand, when the hammer bounces away to the side, and the blade rings harmonically like a bell but with no note of distress. Further investigation would seem to be unwise.

She tries it out against a segment of ballistic armour, part of a shattered plate that her father bought home as part of one of the mysterious projects that he's always working on. The rest of the set is still draped around a torso-shaped display mannequin, with material holding the ceramic in place, but most of the broken bit can be slid out sideways and removed.

The first couple of hits skip off, but they score the plate. With her aim in, a point-first stabbing motion punches straight through and leaves a neatly blade-shaped aperture. Pulling out takes a certain amount of yanking, but that's more an issue of leverage than anything else.

And this is without any formal training, unless you count the wooden sword, coincidentally the exact same length and size but so much lighter, which still resides behind the opened door of her room, along with various other toy weapons including a sort of club-like wand she made from hollow bronzed shower-pipe with a ball-bearing in one end and a large colourful marble in the other. Only last week in a moment of unmerciful horniness she'd rutted herself with this childhood toy and found it surprisingly satisfying, but now she can't bear to throw it away and finds herself sentimentally attached, unwilling to part with it. And she doesn't see why she should have to if she doesn't want to, so she's keeping it for now, and it gets to stay behind the door where hopefully no-one else will touch it.

The piece of paper she slashed at, and which she now crumples in her hand, is the address for a class where they teach how to use a number of edged weapons, including ones a lot like this. It's run by one of the weird asian immigrants who hang out down on the waterfront, passing down their traditional skills enhanced with a scattering of modern combat styles. She's known about the class for quite some time, but she was always afraid to take it because of the possible effect on her social status if her friends found out. Training with melee weapons in the modern day and age is a weird thing to do, like some sort of slightly-pathetic heroic fantasy embraced by the same sort of social outcasts who engage in role-playing games, or obsess over historical recreations. What use is a sword against a shotgun?

And yet... she really wants to. She remembers playing with her wooden sword when she was just a kitten and it was the most fun thing ever and she was always the hero. Her friends just wanted to be pretty princesses and other predictable things like that, and get saved from the monsters by the handsome prince, but she was a lioness, dammit, and she didn't see why she couldn't be the prince if she wanted, and dress up in a rakishly smart-looking outfit, and fight monsters with her sword and save the girl.

And she should get her own riding beast to ride on, and the monsters might be quite fun to hang out with when they weren't trying to eat anybody. She remembers her father playing a game with her when she was little, where he held up his hands like claws and went "Rrraaarr!" and she, startled, would go "Rrraaarr!" at him too, a tiny little roar like a cub mewing, and they would both keep it up until the loser was whoever the first one was to be laughing too much to go "Rrraaarr!" anymore. It's fun to play monsters when you get to be one of them.

Mind made up, she thrusts the tattered piece of paper into her pocket.

~*~

"Girl number three with the giant cat-boobies, get over here and do the cheer routine!"

"Wait, seriously?"

"You're far too busty to do it properly and you'll have to lose some weight, but you might do."

"Oh, I'll show you."

The sword-training guys have a routine of their own, which involves flailing dramatically with a replica weapon made of lightweight tin that flexes and buckles easily, causing it to catch light and look impressive. It's totally unrealistic and completely for show, but at least they are up to acknowledging that, and it does give you a chance to practice all the basic moves as well as the more fun ones that would be a lot harder to do for real. She knows, she's tried it with her own sword, and changes have to be made to accomodate the rigidity, weight and balance of the real deal. Since it's not a traditional Asian or even Azatlani weapon - she's not sure what history or school it might come from, although her mother must have gotten it somewhere - she's had to research the history of melee weapons, just a bit, to find a guide to what sort of grip, holds and moves can be substituted where single-handed striking is unsuitable.

But what matters here is that the flashy sword-dance, intended for assorted spears, machetes or at most a cold-cast bronze shortsword with diamond cross-section, assumes only one single light weapon and so includes a range of flips, tumbles and somersaults that would be blatantly impractical with something bigger. In short, she already knows how to do this stuff.

Before she knows what she's doing or can think it through, she's out on the field with all of the other cheerleader girls, most of whom are, frankly, rather mean. And yes, it's just so dreadfully stereotypical, pretty blonde bitches cliquing out and stomping on the hands of everyone below them on the social ladder, and there's the little problem of her weight, which has always been twice that of a normal human and so, naturally, still is.

Of course, having twice as much muscle makes up for it when it's just her, so she's never going to be the one preening at the top of the pyramid, obviously. But there's no getting past that she is definitely hot, all the boys can definitely attest to that, and she's pretty sure that she'd make a really good pusher, launching the other girls skyward and supporting their weight.

They normally borrow a few muscular guys from the sports teams to do that, and she's much prettier than any of them. What the parents and officials will make of a lioness in cheerleading skirts is another matter, but she allows herself to dream.

There are firsts for everything, and with the recent fashion for elective transgenesis as a much more dramatic break with one's parents than say, getting drunk and having a tattoo, perhaps a lioness cheerleader isn't such a big deal as it might once have seemed.

She doesn't bail on the routine any worse than anyone else, and sticks the landings a lot better than most of them. It seems 'lands on your feet' trumps 'over-sized cat-boobies' any day at the office, snarky female coaches with clipboards be damned.

They even let her try a boosted somersault, and although it takes two of the male pusher guys co-operating to make it work, she surprises everyone with how forcefully she can jump, nearly kicking their grasp apart with the spring. Because, despite being nearly twice as heavy, she can still leap twice as high. A speculative look comes in to the coaches eyes.

"That, uh, wasn't totally bad."

"Can I do it again? That was awesome! I'm having a total rush here!"

"You'll need a lot more practice, and we'd have to work out how to fit you into the routines to allow for your, uh, special skills."

"I could fit some stuff in." She'll have to cancel some of the sword classes, but hey, no big deal right? It's not like she'll ever be using it for anything. Besides, the styles don't quite match, and really she'd need, like, some sort of specialist military trainer and more focused individualized lessons to get the best out of it. Which might be kind of hard to justify.

"And no slutting around!" The coach actually whacks her crisply on the side of the ass with her clipboard, making her jump in startlement, but she's clearly firmer than expected in the rear curve department and even this comes off as a sort of athletic spring-away.

"I promise!" she exclaims without thinking.

Well, maybe not tonight.