the fog comes on little cat feet | Glowfic Constellation

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Version: 1
Fields Changed	(Original)
Updated	Mar 03, 2023 3:14 PM
Content	the fog comes on little cat feet It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. (Cat Dusk origin story.) Denice Dimas Adelene It's April, not long after her thirteenth birthday, when Denice notices her first familiar. She doesn't familiarize him right away; the fluffy black cat is clearly busy, stalking through the underbrush after some unseen prey, and Denice has no way of getting his attention through the glass, or at least not without attracting more attention herself than she can afford. But he's out there; the felt sense of oh, that one is just like the stories say. He'll be back, probably. It's more hope than Denice has had in a long time, anyway. Two weeks pass before she manages to familiarize the cat. Most of it is waiting to be noticed; she seems just as interesting to the cat as he does to her, once she's spotted. The rest turns out to be much easier than she was expecting: all stories say that you need to touch your familiar to complete the familiarization process, but actually it's trying to communicate to him that he needs to stay away from this window during the day that brings on the warm sense of companionship and, unluckily, improved hearing. It's fine, though, it's fine, she'll need to find a second familiar to truly escape, but she's free, now, in a very real way; she can sit on the couch or lie in bed and drift away from her surroundings, seeing the world through her new familiar's eyes with no one the wiser. That only mostly works. The staff don't guess that she's found a familiar - and they wouldn't, she's been presenting as pig-spirited for years now and there are no pigs anywhere nearby - but they do figure out that something is wrong, and they can't make her stop but they can make themselves harder to ignore, changing her drugs around and tying more of her meal allotment to her compliance with their demands. Her new familiar becomes obsessed with hunting and scavenging, trying to ease the hunger he doesn't understand the cause of; she learns to soothe him across their bond, trying to reassure him that while the felt hunger isn't pleasant, they aren't in danger, merely in discomfort. It works out in the end, though. His new obsession sends him farther afield, into territories he'd usually avoid, and it's in this roaming that he meets another cat, a lanky grey female, and while he isn't as interesting to her as she is to Denice - which is common enough, and won't stop Denice from adding her to their group - she is willing to follow him back to the institution, with Denice prompting him the whole way. It's early July, then, by the time she familiarizes her second cat, gaining the other two types of mammalian magic in the process - telekinetic digging and a slow but powerful healing ability - as well as the ability to fully shapeshift into a cat. She doesn't stay long in the institution after that, waiting only until the night shift has settled in at their stations to assume her sleek grey kitten form, claw a careful six-inch tear down the edge her window screen, and wiggle out to join her familiars in body and not just in mind.
Version: 2
Fields Changed	Status
Updated	Mar 03, 2023 3:17 PM

It's April, not long after her thirteenth birthday, when Denice notices her first familiar. She doesn't familiarize him right away; the fluffy black cat is clearly busy, stalking through the underbrush after some unseen prey, and Denice has no way of getting his attention through the glass, or at least not without attracting more attention herself than she can afford. But he's out there; the felt sense of oh, that one is just like the stories say. He'll be back, probably. It's more hope than Denice has had in a long time, anyway.

Two weeks pass before she manages to familiarize the cat. Most of it is waiting to be noticed; she seems just as interesting to the cat as he does to her, once she's spotted. The rest turns out to be much easier than she was expecting: all stories say that you need to touch your familiar to complete the familiarization process, but actually it's trying to communicate to him that he needs to stay away from this window during the day that brings on the warm sense of companionship and, unluckily, improved hearing.

It's fine, though, it's fine, she'll need to find a second familiar to truly escape, but she's free, now, in a very real way; she can sit on the couch or lie in bed and drift away from her surroundings, seeing the world through her new familiar's eyes with no one the wiser.

That only mostly works. The staff don't guess that she's found a familiar - and they wouldn't, she's been presenting as pig-spirited for years now and there are no pigs anywhere nearby - but they do figure out that something is wrong, and they can't make her stop but they can make themselves harder to ignore, changing her drugs around and tying more of her meal allotment to her compliance with their demands. Her new familiar becomes obsessed with hunting and scavenging, trying to ease the hunger he doesn't understand the cause of; she learns to soothe him across their bond, trying to reassure him that while the felt hunger isn't pleasant, they aren't in danger, merely in discomfort.

It works out in the end, though. His new obsession sends him farther afield, into territories he'd usually avoid, and it's in this roaming that he meets another cat, a lanky grey female, and while he isn't as interesting to her as she is to Denice - which is common enough, and won't stop Denice from adding her to their group - she is willing to follow him back to the institution, with Denice prompting him the whole way.

It's early July, then, by the time she familiarizes her second cat, gaining the other two types of mammalian magic in the process - telekinetic digging and a slow but powerful healing ability - as well as the ability to fully shapeshift into a cat. She doesn't stay long in the institution after that, waiting only until the night shift has settled in at their stations to assume her sleek grey kitten form, claw a careful six-inch tear down the edge her window screen, and wiggle out to join her familiars in body and not just in mind.