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Sniffing it Out

Aug9

This is for [personal profile] lilfluff‘s commissioned prompt in my call for prompts which, loosely, was for more Cali Catpeople/Bay-the-catgirl.

This also includes the “vibrassa” story-bit, and the character from the story to [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt on a Cali slavegirl who wants to be a slaveboy.

Tír na Cali has a Landing page (and on LJ)

Bay was discovering the advantages to her new form, as well as the strange disadvantages. Shoes no longer fit comfortably, but her walking was getting smoother and easier. She liked the claws; always a small woman, she had learned early to fight dirty, and liked the added advantage of a hidden weapon. She liked the teeth, too, although they took some getting used to, to talk around, to eat with. But the vibrissae, as their handlers insisted on calling them… those took more than a little adjustment. They felt as if the whole world was pulling on her face with every move. And, while they gave her a sense of body space that was new, and windflow, she wasn’t sure they were worth the drawbacks.

She had discovered, while experimenting with this form, that her sense of smell was a lot sharper, and her hearing clearer and more directional. She could swivel her new ears to find secrets whispered behind corners, and smell out strange and new things.

In the deep-underground facility where the Agency was training them, there shouldn’t have been much to smell out. Most of their confined world smelled very carefully neutral; as if anticipating their noses being sensitive, the slaves who cleaned this area used very mellow chemicals, and their handlers did not wear perfume or cologne. Nothing was there to distract and offend their noses, nothing but dinner… and the people themselves.

After she’d gotten her nose bapped once by a handler, Bay had stopped sniffing the royals and free-citizens who trained them, but they didn’t seem to mind if the cats sniffed each other, and her nose was un-attacked when she started sniffing the slaves who took care of them. People smelled fascinating, each one a new bouquet of hormones and sweats and the food they’d had for dinner the day before. The tall one with green eyes and red hair liked her food very spicy. The one with the short-cropped black hair and blue eyes was fond of mint – and was dressed as a boy.

Bay waited to get her alone, which took some doing, and cornered her in a room, barely resisting the urge to pin her to the wall. “Why?” she demanded.

“I told Em you wouldn’t like the curry,” she grumbled. “Sorry, it won’t happen again. You can tell the kitchen staff yourself, you know.”

Bay shook her head impatiently. “Not that.” Three weeks in, and she was still fighting to make her new mouth use words properly. “You’re a girl.”

“You’re mistaken.” The slave shook her head. “No. I’m Jas, and I’m a boy.” Now, she stank of panic, as well as the underlying smell of girl. Bay curled up on the bed, still between “Jas” and the door, but trying to look less threatening.

“This nose can tell,” she explained, or tried to, pointing at her face with one hand-paw. “You’re close, but you still smell like a girl. Why’d you want to be a boy, anyway?” Bad enough, being a girl slave. Why downgrade even further?

Jas sat down, looking pale. “You won’t tell anyone?”

“Handlers won’t get it. Dunno about slaves. The other cats…” she tapped her nose again. “The smell will tell them. Why?”

“It’s… it’s complicated,” she said weakly. “But the Lords at my former Mistress’ House…”

“Ah.” Bay understood that. Some of the high-bred men would leave you alone. Some made it the Lady’s blessing, and it was lovely, and proper. Some were just ham-handed and mean. “But you’re not there anymore.”

“No.” She shook her head slowly. “I’m not. You think I can mask my scent?”

“May-ay-be. The curry covers everything. And then some. But this place… there’s no Lords, not like that.” There were always Lords and Ladies, but the Agency tried to stay outside the hierarchies.

“No,” Jas admitted, “but I got to like it. I feel more at home as a boy than I ever did as a girl.”

“We..e..el,” Bay pondered. “You’re not the only one down here pretending. And if they can turn us into cats..”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/102656.html. You can comment here or there.

Vocabulary! New word of the Day – Vibrissa

Aug6

I took this vocabulary test, and was, being me, a bit miffed at the words I didn’t know. But I wrote them down, so I have a new word-a-day for the next month!

Today’s word is vibrissae:

Plural of vibrissa

1: any of the stiff hairs that are located especially about the nostrils or on other parts of the face in many mammals and that often serve as tactile organs
2: any of the stiff hairs growing within the nostrils that serve to impede the inhalation of foreign substance
http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/vibrissa

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/vibrissae offers in addition:
[From Late Latin vibrissae, nostril hairs, from vibrre, to vibrate; see vibrate.

I haven’t visited the Cali Catpeople in a while…, so…

Bay liked the claws; always a small woman, she had learned early to fight dirty, and liked the added advantage of a hidden weapon. She liked the teeth, although they took some getting used to, to talk around, to eat with. But the vibrissae, as their handlers insisted on calling them… those took more than a little adjustment. They felt as if the whole world was pulling on her face with every move.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/100234.html. You can comment here or there.

Drakeathon: Origins, Cali, Catpeople

Feb20

from [personal profile] moonwolf‘s prompt “More on the Cali Catpeople.

She had been born the smallest kid in her litter, the runt, and so she’d learned early on to be quick and clever where size sufficed for her peers; she learned quickly how to dodge, and how to entertain herself, because she was often left out of their games – tiny, weak, dark where the other slave kids were often as pale as the masters, sharp-tongued and quick-witted.

She found herself, in that small age before they had regular duties, “volunteered” quite frequently for chores that no-one else wanted to do, “volunteered” by being shoved forward to the front of the pack of kids.

But from being volunteered, she learned that the masters and the foremen liked slaves who were eager to work, who stepped forward to do the unpleasant tasks. They liked them, and they rewarded them. For a runty house slave born to a kitchen drudge, the chores forced on her by her peers became a ladder out of the kitchen.

She grew up, although she never grew too tall. Her eyes faded to a funny yellow-green as she reached puberty, and the slave children of her litter took it as even more reason to hate her: the alien princess. The brownnoser. The runt. The volunteer.

When the men from the Agency came to peruse the slaves of the Countess’ house, the foremen remembered her. There were four foremen for the house (it was a very large house, with many slaves to maintain; three stayed silent. Bay was a good worker, with initiative hard to find in those born to the collar, and an asset. They didn’t see the backstabbing and the namecalling, because it behooved them not to see it.

The fourth, however, had seen the bruises and heard the thin excuses: “I fell down the stairs” is not that believable the third time in a month, especially from someone as lithe and quick as Bay was. And the girl had all the traits the government men were looking for, so the fourth foreman put her name forth.

They asked her to volunteer for the program. It would be hard, and it would hurt, but it would, they told her, earn her freedom eventually.

Bay waited for them to finish talking only because it was the polite thing to do, and because they were free and she was a slave, before she said “I volunteer.” She was the volunteer, after all. The freak.

They took her away from the other children, from the Countess’ home, from the foremen; they gave her a new collar, one that was small, shiny, and gold, and a small room she shared with another volunteer. They gave them a week to acclimate to the new place, and to each other, the forty new volunteers in their bright, clean, new dorm. There was a lot of sniffing of tails, a lot of pecking-order establishment, but many of them had been the runts, the freaks, the brown-nosers where they came from, and they were more inclined to band together than they were to fight for dominance.

They had settled into loose social groups and alliances when the Agency men came to change everything.

They brought them into another room, a wide, white room with no furniture and no windows, in groups, not coincidentally in the groups they themselves had established. They herded them into the center of the room, and three royals with their grey eyes and their red hair, men with the arrogant pose of titled nobility, surrounded them.

Bay leaned against her roommate, a tall, scruffy looking slave named Jon from the far North of the country, and one of their closer friends, Natasha, a short, busty girl from the far south. She didn’t know what was happening, and she was a bit scared, but she’d volunteeeeeerrrrrrrrreed….

“Awwwwrrrwwwww.” The yowl startled her; was there a cat in the room? There had been only them, and… “noawwwww.” She hissed, trying to shut herself up, and stared at her fingers, at her paws, at her what?

“‘ay,” Jon called; she twisted to look at him, to see that his hair had grown into a pelt of soft tabby-striped fur, his nose had flattened, his teeth had sharpened.

“What did they do?” Natasha moaned, her words garbled but understandable. Bay, staring down at her strange new feet, could only shrug philosophically.

“We did volunteer.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/13497.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute Ficlet: Anger

Feb4

Originally posted here, in repsonse to the prompt:

“Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before – it takes something from him.”

I think it’s Tir na Cali –> Catpeople, but I’m not certain.

The rage was never as solid as it was that Wednesday, never as hot, never as silent.

The worst of it, for me, was knowing that no-one else would either see it nor care if they did. Anger, from one such as me, was /cute/, was adorable, pat-head and chuckle, like a kitten whose teeth aren’t a threat yet. No-one cared when I was angry, no one feared, no one worried.

I wanted them to worry, to quake, to run, but I’d learned to smile through the anger. I had learned, since my anger caused only amusement, to not give them the pleasure of being amused at my expense on top of whatever insult had angered me.

So I smiled. I smiled so they couldn’t see the teeth that their science had made sharp; I smiled so they couldn’t see the anger that they had bred, all unknowing, into me, the rage that demanded that I kill or be killed. I bowed, so very low, and I smiled, so very sweetly, and I did not acknowledge the insults with anything louder than a “yes, sir.”

That is what they expected, was it not? They expected a cute and defanged little pet, someone who would purr in their laps, someone who would snuggle against them and keep their bed warm, who would make cute little noises on cue. They had trained me for that. They had trained me to be domestic; they had forgotten, if they ever knew, that they had also bred me to be feral.

Though the smiles, through the bows, through the trained-animal dances that they put me through, through the day and into the night, the rage sustained me. Through the morning and the next day of the same. It had been, after all, a very great insult, and it would take a long time for the rage to build properly, while I bowed, while I danced, while I smiled.

When I slipped into his bed that next night, when my claws opened his belly from ribs to hip, I could see the surprise in his eyes as he gurgled out his last. I could see his confusion, that his good little pet had rebelled. That his kitten had claws that could rend flesh. That my anger was not to be head-patted and brushed off.

I left with his blood still wet on my claws, to find a master who would put no other pretty little thing before me.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/4344.html. You can comment here or there.