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The Chronicles of Rogue

Chapter Four

Disclaimer: I own the character Rogue, and the plot to this story. They are both copyright to me.

My breath was caught in my throat, and suddenly my mind summoned up so many instances where I had seen the same grey wolf and had attributed it to the not-so-uncommon feelings of nostalgia one gets when seeing someone who looks familiar, however you and that someone had never met. My thoughts were a blur of red lights and warning signs, however... I wanted to know why this wolf was stalking me. He repeated his salutation into his phone.

"Hello?"

I swallowed my nerves and tried to keep my voice smooth as I replied with the one thing I could say to let him know who he was talking to without a name. "You shouldn't be here..." I ended the sentence with my voice in a whisper.

Silence from the other end. Then:

"I was wondering when you would call the number. Have been since I gave it to you that night seven years ago."

I swallowed again. His voice was calm, collective. They say the most violent psychopaths are the ones who appear calmest on the outside.

"Who... who are you?" I tried to sound demanding. I couldn't help but have the inexplicable feeling that I failed miserably.

A pause. "Come to one oh seven five Astenberg Street. Come alone. All will be revealed- "

"No." I cut him off before I even knew why. I waited for a few seconds. "You come here. In the middle of the forest on the east side of town. Look for the clearing with the lonely soul." I disguised the discerning feature of my clearing, albeit not very well, it was pretty obvious I meant the clearing with only one tree in the middle of it. "... half an hour."

More silence. "So be it."

I hung up before I could do anything else. This entire thing seemed like risky business. I silently cursed myself and ran into the forest, the cool forest floor squishing down beneath my paw pads and springing back up after my paw left the ground again.

Within moments I was in the clearing with a huge tree in the center. It was actually quite beautiful there. There wasn't much light, because the tree in the center was one of those odd evergreen deciduous trees, and it had massive boughs that encased the clearing in a soft green light.

I started pacing, obviously a little stressed out that I had just invited someone who quite possibly stalks me as a hobby into the clearing where I was currently pacing. If he tried doing anything... odd... I promised to force myself to use... it. It is something I don't exactly understand. In fact, I'm not even sure I know what it is. I've only used it once in my lifetime, and even then I didn't know what I was doing.

I sat down at the base of the tree and calmed myself. Or at least, I tried to. I have this thing where, if I'm really stressed, I'll just sit down wherever I am and not move. Literally, not move. It's sort of like a comatose state in which I either think, sleep, or just zone out entirely for some random amount of time.

That's exactly what I did. I just sat there, and waited. I waited for a long time, just thinking about things. I got lost in my mind about how on earth I would write a story... I've always wanted to write something captivating, and I just never had the motivation, nor the subject matter that would captivate an audience. Maybe I could write about what was going on with the world... try and change it for the bet-

A twig snapped off to my left. Immediately I broke out of my trance and sprang out of my sitting position into a snarling combative pose. What made me take up that pose, I didn't know. It felt right, to be honest...

The wolf from earlier stepped out from behind a tree. He stepped on that twig on purpose, announcing his arrival. Furries don't just make simple mistakes when it comes to being in nature. It just doesn't work that way.

"Who are you?" My voice rang out clear and clandestine across the clearing, the canopy of trees producing an acoustic effect that made it sound like I was right in front of him, even when I only spoke in a low voice.

"Would you like my true name? Or would you like the name that was given to me at birth?" He asked.

"True name." I answered. I didn't know what a true name was. I just wanted what might be a straight answer, since he implied that he no longer used the latter option.

"My name is DracoFaris, but you can call me Wulf." He said, nodding a little.

I admit, I was skeptical. It was a fairly unoriginal nickname, in my opinion. But, whatever floats his boat will help him across the river.

"Have you been stalking me?"

His facial features contorted into a shallow mixture of pain and slight understanding. "Stalking? Oh I would hardly call it that. You see, I am in league with an agency that... well, I can't really tell you unless you join it, now can I? After all, you might refuse and run around blabbing to someone about it." He smirked. How dare he? Obviously he wasn't a very good stalker if he couldn't understand that I don't rat out anybody, nor do I ever just go around spewing secrets on a silly little whim.

Unless he was trying to get under my skin. It could be a trap. But that could be what he wanted me to think! Ugh. I hated people who got inside my head. Really hated them.

"I guess you could say that I... admire you. Your fur is a very unusual color, in fact, my organization's database has no one on record with any sort of color deviation such as yours. Tell me, do you dye it?"

I raised an eyebrow. "No, I don't."

"Very peculiar. Now, do you have any strange tattoos on your body, other than those marks on your muzzle and ears?"

"Why do you want to know so much about my body, pervert?" I accused him.

"Because I want to envision myself making love to you, and I want it to be accurate."

I nearly doubled over mainly out of shock and laughter, possibly out of terror. Was he joking!? I tried not to think about it.

"... Just kidding." He smirked again. I recovered and tried to relax a little. I failed. It was as if someone had stuck a giant, freezing cold, metal rod of my bum. Literally sitting on pins and needles, for no apparent reason. Yes, I knew I was gay, but no I had never felt attracted to another male before. At least, not a human one. I surrounded myself with humans because they are a bit more... sane? Was that the word I was looking for? Probably. Why couldn't I think straight? Nothing was making much sense for me.

"Seriously, who are you, and why did you show up at my school today?" I wanted to know, truly.

"We'll get to that in a minute." He leaned up against a tree on the edge of the clearing. "Let me envision you naked for a bit longer."

I felt myself blushing, though my dark red fur did wonders for hiding it. My eyebrow twitching, however, was clearly visible.

"Again, kidding."

"Stop that." I turned my head, looking at the treeline.

He started walking towards me, my head flicking back towards him as soon as he moved.

"I know a lot of things about you, Rogue."

I made a mental note that despite denial, he was indeed a stalker. "Like what?"

He smirked again. "Everything about you except for the past year when you went into that human", the word 'human' was accompanied by a growl, "School. That's when I lost track of you."

"Everything about me from ages nine to fifteen?" I questioned him.

"Indeed. That's why when I finally found you, I got a schedule to match yours and enrolled in the school."

I studied him dubiously. "If you expect me to believe that you're still in highschool, you're either very stupid to have flunked that many times, or you're just not very good of a liar. You'd be in college if you're still in school."

He chuckled. It was a good-natured chuckle, or that's how he intentionally made it sound.

"Obviously. To another furry it would be a simple matter of telling age. Humans, however, have no such talents for determining the age of a face veiled by fur."

"I noticed. So, who are you? I'm guessing you're around twenty, and had your fair share of a rough life." I motioned to one of his hand paws that was characteristically missing a few digits.

"I told you my name already, and I indeed am of twenty years of age. I grew up on the streets in one of the roughest neighborhoods you could be in. It was a tough life that demanded either experience or sacrifice, and killed you if you couldn't produce either. This, however," He lifted up said paw, "was the product of the ability to juggle, boredom, and multiple sharp objects. Particularly a chainsaw when it was on."

I now scratched out the note that he was a stalker and replaced the word 'stalker' with 'psychopath'.

"That's very reassuring of your stability." I told him. I heard just the slightest whisper of a sound that came from four different spots. It was the sound of a small breeze gently whistling through the strands of fur on a furry. It was coming from 'Wulf', myself, and two different spots directly behind me, one off to the left and the other off to my right. I contemplated this after a moment, and decided to let them think I was unknowing as to their presence. Slowly, I dug inside of myself, searching for something, searching for it, that massive, untapped storage of power that arrived with the transformation of my body. It was a power that built up over time, getting added to bit by bit every day. I had only used it once before, and I can't remember anything about the experience. It's just a large blank that slowly fades into a memory of me running away from something terrible. I didn't know what that something was, and I sure as hell wasn't going to look behind me to see what I was running from.

I vowed that day that I would never use it unless my life was in danger. I guess this counts.

I had never used it intentionally before, and multiple times I broke my vow and had taken a tiny, infinitesimally small portion of the power, as small as I could manage, away from the main body, just to see what it was like, and still ended up with a mass of power that I could barely contain and put back in the store.

I was lost in my memories, and my prolonged silence might have made 'Wulf' a tad unnerved. He cleared his throat. It certainly snapped me out of my trance, and almost made me take a much-too-large portion of the power instead of a pinch of a pinch. In my mind's eye, it was like me going up to the massive black orb that was so large it seemed like a wall, with no definition or curve evident. But I knew it was an orb. Anything else wouldn't have made sense.

But I imagined myself reaching into the orb, the disturbance causing a ripple across the surface of the entire black mass, and taking a handful of the power, quickly drawing my hand out from the orb. The orb kept moving, the ripples slowly losing their power. I swiftly took barely a pinch of the power I had in my hand, and threw the rest back at the gaseously textured orb of power. I guess it could be classified as a star, I mean it's an indescribably huge mass of gaseous matter that is so dense that its own gravity collapses it into a perfect sphere when undisturbed. But still, I took the pinch I held so delicately in my fingers and nearly let it go when Wulf cleared his throat.

I had to hold on to it. I don't know why, but some unknown instinct just told me to keep it gripped firmly between my fingers.

In any case, when I snapped out of my trance, Wulf had his arms crossed, one eyebrow slightly positioned above the other, head cocked to the side in the canine form of a quizzical look.

"You okay?" He asked me. "There might have been genuine concern in his voice, but I wasn't listening closely enough to determine if it were so. I had half my mind occupied by the power that was between my fingers in my representative imagination.

"Huh? Oh, yeah. I'm alright." I said, half listening.

"You seem tense." He commented plainly. His eyes narrowed in a suspicious look at my left paw, the paw I had taken the power from the massive orb with. "What's that?"

"Huh? What?" I looked down at my left paw. Clenched inbetween my forefinger and thumb was a small, perfectly round black marble around a half-inch in diameter. I was holding it so tightly my paw was shaking. "Oh. I... I don't know. I think it might be it in a physical manifestation..." I said, more to myself than to Wulf.

"A what of the what?" He looked absolutely stumped now.

I looked at the tiny marble of it in my hand and decided, hell why not just let it go and see what happens?

I slowly released my grip on the small marble of it, watching as, instead of following gravity and falling towards the ground, it hovered in midair for a bit, dissipating into a large expansion of black mist that swirled around me, gaining in speed until it started to compress again, the epicenter located right at my solar plexus. It was being absorbed into my body. As it continued to get more and more condensed, I could feel the marble being reformed in my sternum, and then it began dissolving again, possibly being metabolized and circulated through my body via blood vessels. I don't exactly know what happened, but I suddenly felt this massive surge of power, as if I could do anything that would require the physical activity of my body.

I didn't feel like I could stand still, and upon seeing this, Wulf let out a small howl, or bark, or yip, or whatever wolves do as an alarm noise, and I felt two bodies silently moving out of the bushes towards me, alarmingly fast. A small wave of 'Oh, shit' swept over me and I braced myself.