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Cut Scene: Summoning Ritual

Abandoned Garage and Storage Space

She wrenches up and opens the rolling door with both hands, steam rising from her muscles due to her elevated body heat and exertion, as the cold rain collects in her hair and trickles down her body. There's nothing left of her clothing and her nipples are stiff from battle with the elements.

She hefts the roller up over her head, stands for a moment in maximum boobage, sighing with a long relief at being out of the rain, then steps forward and lets the door crash back down behind her in a screech of metal. Maybe someone heard it, or maybe it was muffled by the rain, at this point she really doesn't care. She lashes her leonine tail about to try and get the water out, her tail leaving a linear spray of small splatters across the abandoned dust.

Maybe there's a tarp or something in here she can tear into a rain vest. Everything abandoned, all the old oil cans collecting grit out of the air, the webbed boxes with startled spiders, suggests that this place hasn't been in active use for a long time. One of the hapless arachnids is probably being washed out a water-spout even now.

The garage seems to be a much later add-on, that shares a back wall with an older building made of gray damp stone, impressively thriving green moulds and moss in shielded spaces beneath the eaves and corners, but the air inside is relatively fresh for all that, blowing in with the storm. It seems to have been some sort of long dormitory divided into small cells that, to modern eyes, looks like a bathroom with no doors left in the stalls. Knowing the building styles of medieval times, each of these tiny spaces was someone's room, and probably quite good ones, given that all of them have their own small window high up near the top and plenty of headroom.

She takes a short wander through the free-standing structure as she dries off, alert for possible fallen roofing material or the sharp edges of broken stones, but this place was built to last back at a time when that meant several centuries, and so she finds nothing. The garage-most end was an open communal room, and has been partially colonized by assorted junk and painting supplies.

She finds a fairly decent canvas drop cloth folded up in one of the higher wooden boxes, totally splattered with white paint in a range of suggestive patterns she finds amusing, and settles in to enjoy the sound of rain and the fine hint of ozone on the breeze. The cloth seems to have been cut from the side of an old military tent, cammo-green, and there's part of a double-stitched hem with dulled brass rivets inset at one edge for fixing the guy ropes. An expert could probably tell exactly what campaign and battle the cloth currently chafing at her nipples is from.

There are worse ways to wait it out. The former tent is keeping her from losing any more of her body heat resisting the effects of the weather, and with no clothes left to dry out, she's reasonably toasty, all things considered. It's a chance to contemplate what exactly she should do next.

She really hasn't been that lucky with the weather lately. Without the added thermal resilience imparted by a fire-raising talent, the amount of rain, cold, wilderness and general discomforture she's been through this past year alone would be a serious cause for concern.

As it is, it reminds her of travelling through that belt of orogenic rainfall over wooded mountain slopes on the way out from Lacrunta. Everything wet, for days on end. It was no surprise that they hadn't met many people in that particular region, not when it got like that for several months out of every year. There'd been those old carved stones at the crossing, of course, but they'd probably dated to an earlier epoch where the conditions were more conducive to a living presence.

A little mental leisure having been allowed, she plans what to do next.

Get back to the rented rooms with the canvas concealing her lack of clothing, obviously, but this round of the cat-hunt will have to be put on hold. Even the commandos have tacitly given up and fallen back to damp watchtowers and their re-purposed barn, to await better weather, or another sighting that might comprise a lead hot enough to be worth following once conditions have dried up a little. She's starting to wonder whether this strange creature actually needs her help, given it seems to slip in and out of existence effortlessly and evade pursuit with no trouble at all.

If she hadn't seen it with her own eyes, she might agree with the newspapers and half the county that everyone was out chasing phantoms. But it's real alright, an alien big cat of no known species that seems to share few traits with an honest-to-goodness black dog of the eyes-like-saucers and teeth-like-daggers kind. This strangely beautiful animal is to a panther what the hounds they bred back in the sixteen-hundreds were to the little ladies lapdogs that were just starting to catch on.

Yeah, she's gonna have to call it closed.

Suddenly the beast is in the room with her, materialized out of shadows and nowhere, as though thinking about it in detail and imagining how it looks has somehow summoned it. She didn't see it come in through the door, and it couldn't have fitted through the windows (although, based on its past record, jumping and running up the walls to reach them would have been easy for it).

A cold draft inexplicably flows past her from an entirely different direction to any of the windows or doors, smelling crisply of snow with a faint, attenuated trace of sulfur, causing her to start and drop the length of tent-canvas, which leaves her sitting naked and surrounded by piled up folds of cloth, looking into the beasts beautiful golden eyes and the faint traces of pink that show through on its darkened nose. It yawns, lolls its huge long tongue that looks uncannily like hers, and huffs hot cat breath stinking of freshly sundered sheep at her, but otherwise does nothing threatening.

Very carefully, she reaches out and touches its muzzle, just gently. It nuzzles up to her and licks her palm with a sort of casual familiarity, as though it somehow knows her, or they are kin.

Given her history, she understands big cats better than most people. She spent years with lions in the wilds of Nubia, afflicted by her cycle in a way that made her both deliciously provocative and deserving of protection to them, and she can judge to the exact moment whether it will be a claw-slap or an intimate lick that is coming her way. She knows how not to provoke them, can survive the occasional mistake made learning in a way a human couldn't.

So it's quite a surprise when this impossible visitor behaves like a house cat, rubbing its face and the underside of its chin possessively against her, walking around her in forceful circles that push her off balance and that she knows to push back against. The feared beast seems perfectly happy, even affectionate, and uses its claws to patiently and systematically snag the tent fabric, pulling it up into a sort of nest so it can lie down next to her and rest its head up against her lap.

She does the only thing that seems reasonable, and pets it. The rain must have washed all of the human smells off me, she thinks stupidly, like some sort of ritual bath. And I'm wearing no clothes that would smell of anything either, and by myself I smell like a cat of some kind. Was it really that simple? Here I am, offered up, in a secure space where nothing else can get in, and it saw me try to help it in its hunt, like part of its pack or whatever strange alien cats that look kind of like dogs have, and so it came to say hello?

There's something distinctly mesmerizing about seeing it up close, the same effect that many of the other witnesses have reported, that makes them simply stand still and watch it, instead of the expected fight or flight response, until it's safely gone. Someone claimed that they saw it stare at a brace of hares and they just stood there, not moving, as it walked up, swatted one dead for a small snack, and padded off with the carcass in its teeth.

It has such deep, darkly flowing fur, very thick, as though it was adapted for rain and cold.

And the intelligence obvious in its eyes is so remarkable. Sometimes creatures that live in remote and hardy mountainous places breed an intelligence unlike the rest of their species, because they need it to survive, and it makes them destructive when they stumble on the works of man. This too seems to be true of her new friend, which is alert in a way she's never seen in any animal, with the possible exception of her riding cat, a long time ago.

She snuggles up to the fearsome beast, with her arms around it, in their nest of scuffed and paint-stained canvas, and they enjoy the shared fur-pile warmth of each others bodies, which holds off the cold. The rain is still falling heavily outside and raises a lassitudinous white noise off the thin sheet-metal roof of the garage attachment. The beast makes a relaxed rumbling breathing sound deep in its chest, not really a purr, and tilts its head back occasionally to blink at her and confirm that everything is okay. It has beautiful pale whiskers.

Eventually, because it's been a very long and tiring day, and a lot of things are running confusedly though her head, she falls asleep curled up next to it.

~*~

The next morning, inevitably, she awakens to sunlight streaming through the high windows and it is gone, but she gets the feeling something has changed. The beast seems to think of itself as her partner now, or that they're on the same team, and she suspects that although it would probably not come when called, she could maybe attract it back to her if she wanted to, in the same way a household cat cannot be called on command but will always show up again, letting itself into your home through open windows and narrow cracks, ready to make itself at home as well just as long as there is nothing better to do. It's the same sort of elusive.

She heads back toward town, lost in thought. The canvas blanket smells of two types of cat, not just her, and there are long black hairs caught up in it that prickle her, so it wasn't some sort of wish-fulfillment dream.

After a considerable amount of walking, and a drinks-only breakfast consisting of a large amount of clean rainwater she finds pooled in a rocky depression, she veers off toward the nearest croft, following a hint of diesel smoke, and manages to attract the attention of a farmer performing the usual rural tasks that are likely to be performed in the morning close to home and barn. This isn't too hard to do, as a good looking female wearing nothing but a drop-cloth.

She spins a hole-filled tale about being a journalist, following the commandos on their hunt after the beast without permission, finding herself in the line of fire, fleeing and falling into a swollen river and being washed downstream. This naturally explains why she had to shed all her heavier clothes, rain-wear and jackets not being very conducive to staying afloat. She offers no excuse for any absence of bra and panties. Let him think she's a trashy city-girl, everyone else here does.

In exchange for old and worn men's clothing with holes in it, perhaps a little too small on her in a way it wouldn't be for most women, she gives her name and the address of her rented rooms, as well as a promise to send him a token payment once she has her purse back. (Not that she really has a purse, a wallet is far more convenient, but you don't take your identification with you while playing cats and commandos across half the local countryside). Perhaps he's hoping for an excuse to come looking for her, or a show of gratitude involving her body. More likely he's just cheap, and being unwilling to part with unsaleable goods, but for a few bob, is what makes for a good farmer around these parts. He probably never throws anything away, if the clothes are to be gone by.

Following farm tracks and some rough directional instructions, folded tarp under her arm, she finds her way to a small road that wasn't big enough to feature in her mental snapshot of the map of the region, but which is definitely going in the right direction. A couple of hitched rides later, she finally manages to get back to base in the early afternoon. Fast travel this is not.