Kitty's First Heart-to-Heart

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Also known as Dinner and Discussions

You'd never think that a kitten riding around on his Solar mate's head could be so hungry at the end of the day, but Shadows does manage to hungrily devour four plates of food, appetizers, and dessert without once slowing down. His manners, or rather, his lack of manners; would probably put Shrike into fits and give Mari far to many ideas to keep her at a minimum of fifty yards from any sort of dinner party.

Afterwards, Shadows just sprawls out onto the floor on his back, arms raised above as his stretches his legs and arms with a massive yawn. Wearing a different human form than he did this afternoon, and yet another one than she's seen before, he gives her a large and warm grin.

"I love that you can get food all the time in cities. Its so much easier than getting it yourself... but," he adds after a moment of thought "Not exactly as much fun. Or as fresh. Still, its nice for a change." Looking out into the night sky for a few moments, he turns back and says with a grin. "Let's hope tonight isn't as exciting as our first night we met. I could do without another battle so soon."

"Yup yup," the little Night nods. "I mean, not like I don't like thumping deadites and baddies. But we didn't really have a lot of time to talk..."

Mari drapes herself over Kitty's tummy, so they're arranged in a vague X shape.

"Say, Kitty, we're mates, right? I was talking to Frosty, and he said that if you met a Lunar who was your mate, you'd know it. Well, I like Kitty a lot. So that must make you my mate, right?" she grins.[/QUOTE]

Shadows raises a hand to gently scritch at Mari's head before rubbing her neck and back. "I think so." Tilting his head to look toward your face, Shadows gives a soft smile "All I know is that once I caught your scent, I HAD to be here." Lifting his hand off of her back, he uses them to describe the following. "It was like wanting a piece of candy, and finding out that right over there was a piece of candy, wrapped in ice cream, wrapped in chocolate, wrapped in pie, wrapped in cake, wrapped in more candy. And there's only one piece of it left in the entire world and I had to get there right that minute or else it would be gone forever!"

Laying back down, he resumes his gentle massage before smiling toward you again. "I guess we are, since out of everyone I've met, I do like you the best."

"Awwww," she says, reaching up to stroke Shadows' face. Then she spends a while lying on his chest; she honestly has no idea what to say, but it's comfortable lying there, all curled up on his big strong chest.

"I like that you're small and cute and bite-sized enough to hold in my hands, and sometimes that you're big enough to hold me in your hands. But... I've never had a mate before... Do you know if there's anything special that mates do? Like, I dunno, sexing each other up or something?" she asks.

Shadows lets out a large sigh, as his usual chatty self falls silent while thinking about the question. Horror stories and tales flow back from his training and education among the Silver Pact, but its hard to apply such a face of cruelty and pain to the little girl laying on his chest.

A little girl that can carry warstriders, parry Dai-Klaives with her hands, and dent solid walls when she knocks... a thought bubbles up from the back of his head. Shadows looks to her eyes for a while, before trying to be delicate with his answer.

"According to the stories, sometimes Solar and Lunar mates do have sex. Sometimes, they don't get along. But from every tale I've heard, once they find each other they are always together. Considering your friend Blossom has a job of being the Goddess of Solar and Lunar marriages, I assume some of them loved each other very much." Yes he's dancing around the question, and he knows it too. "I don't think we have to do anything special for each other. I think we should just see what happens naturally. Maybe we'll be like brother and sister, maybe we'll be lovers." Grinning softly, he adds "Maybe we'll be like an old married couple that spends all day fighting with each other, but wouldn't consider for a second being apart."

"Heh, married... yeah, there's that too..."

Mari sits up on Shadows' chest. She looks like she's trying to compose herself; her expression is one of intense concentration, complete with lightly-bit tongue for focus, until her eyes snap open.

"Oh, yeah." Her tone seems more morose now. "Mari remembers that Mari used to have mates in her past life. One of them was a naughty, naughty man who liked sexing up other men and women and gods and goddesses and stuff. I think he sexed up Coral, which is why she likes me so much, but in the hend, his mate got fed up with his wanton sexings and stabbed him in the back. And then there was this lady called Five Moons, who also sexed up a lot of people. I think one of the starry people killed her in the end. But that's not important. What I remember was the look on her mate's face. He was so angry - but more importantly, he was so sad."

She goes down on all fours now, her knees resting on Mari's chest, her hands on either side of his head, her face looking down at his.

"Mari doesn't want Kitty to be angry or sad. Mari doesn't really like sexing all the people up anyway. But... if I do anything to make you angry or sad, tell me, okie? So I can stop doing it..."

Shadows face gets a very curious expression as he watches Mari concentrate and then lets out a great big long explanation. He's still quiet for a few moments more afterward as he looks off to the side, muttering softly "But.. if your previous life was stabbed by a previous mate..." as the weight of previous lives and their consequences start to press down. Wrestling with his conscious for a while, Shadows finally shakes his head and looks to you with a determined expression.

"I've never remembered a moment of a previous life, and I really don't care who I was in the past. I'm me, and you are you. Doesn't matter who we were and what we did before. It only matters what we do now." Giving you a brave grin, before relaxing it to a gentle smile. "And I will tell you if you do anything to make me sad, or if something you're going to do will make other people sad. I promise."

"Mmhmm mmmhmm," Mari nods. "Conscience kitty and memory kitty!" she enthuses."Say, Kitty, you've been all around the world, right? What kind of stuff did you see? What stuff did you like the best? And where did you come from, anyway?"

Shadows chuckles a bit, bouncing you up and down as you kneel on his chest. So many questions. "Well, lets see... I met this young girl named Mari once, she's pretty great. I've been probably over every direction and I don't like the North very much. Its far too cold. The South East is probably my favorite, cause there's these expansive plains of grassland which is just perfect for hunting, plus its nice and warm. Hunting down dinner or just sunning myself are wonderful ways to spend whole days."

"As to where I came from?" As he looks back down to Mari with a fairly curious expression, "Are you sure you want to know? Its a long story."

"I'd like to know, yup!" she nods vigorously. "Mari doesn't much remember where she came from, but Mari's always happy to know about other people!"

A frown erupts on Shadows features, "You don't remember where you came from?"

A gentle hand moves through her hair as he gently pulls her closer into a soft hug for a while. With that, he pushes himself up to walk over toward a couch and lays upon it, carrying her as if she were weightless. Laying down on the couch, he places her back on his chest as he lifts his hands to cast shadows puppets on the nearby wall to illustrate the story. You've never seen a shadow puppet show until you've seen one whose hands really can take several forms and be incredibly flexible... much less create extra limbs for the really complex scenes.

"A long, long time ago, deep in the forests of the East. There was a small village. In the village, there was a man. Brave, strong, and wise in the ways of the woods. He was the village hunter, like his father and his father before him. The village hunter was a powerful position, and so he was married to one of the beautiful maidens. Together, they had their first child, but since there was no doctor in the village, the maiden-wife did not survive childbirth. The child survived, a baby boy."

"The hunter mourned, but he raised his son as best as he could. The village tended to their own, so when the hunter needed to bring food, other women and men would raise the baby. As soon as the boy was old enough to talk, his father taught him to be silent. As soon as he was old enough to walk, his father taught him how to move over the game trails. As soon as he was old enough to hold a weapon, he brought down his first kill." Pausing for a few moments as he stretches out his fingers and getting a few extra ones for the next scene, there's plenty of time for any questions.

"Awww... if Seven were there I'm sure he could have saved her..." she mutters. "And how do you get so many fingers? I only have ten. Well, maybe twenty, if you count my toes," she says, bringing them up beside her hands.

"And... were you the daddy or the son?" she asks.

Shadows smiles and wiggles twenty-three fingers at her, "Secret Lunar Training. And I'll get to that part."

Settling back down, he lifts his hands and makes a scene of the village. "The child was raised to be a hunter, and he was quite good at it. As he grew, the position of hunter in the village was one of honor. And because of it, several of the maidens of the village started to pay attention to him. As the seed of pride was implanted in his heart, the boy decided to prove himself to the village. So the boy decided to track down a wolf pack and take the Alpha."

"After several hours of tracking, he found the pack and drew back his arrow. The arrow struck true, and the Alpha fell. However, the thing about pack hunters are that they fight as one. As one, the entire pack turned and attacked the boy. The boy fought wildly, swinging with a skinning knife as the pack tore flesh and ripped muscles. Soon, the attacks stopped. Some of the pack lay dead, the rest had left the boy to die."

"The boy was panicked, but his hands were steady as he cut open the wolves for the sinews, and used them to stitch up his wounds, before falling unconscious."

"Oh no!" Mari says, hiding her eyes, as though that would keep her from imagining the poor boy's terrible fate. "That's horrible! What happened? Did he survive? I kind of liked him..."

"Oh he did wake up. Several hours later. With little else to do, he got to his feet picked up the body of the Alpha, and started dragging it back to his village. Each step was full of pain, but the stitches held together. It took three long days of walking and dragging the body back, until he finally made it back to familiar territory. The mountains were right, the trees were right, the stars were right." As Shadows pauses for tension, before continuing on. "The village was gone."

"The boy fell to his knees. He didn't know what to do." Shadows pauses for quite a while, before he shakes his head to continue. "All he knew was that he hurt, each of his wounds, and his stomach was long empty. So he took his knife and sliced open the alpha wolf, pulled out its liver, and ate it raw. Once his meal was done, he pushed himself to his feet. The next step he took, he stumbled. But instead of falling, he found himself in Luna's arms."

"That's horrible," Mari whispers, clutching Shadows tightly.

Shadows loses himself in memories for a few brief moments, before a hug brings him back "Yes, it was horrible. It was..." as he just pauses and looks down into Mari's eyes. Smiling at her, he runs a hand through her hair.

"Well, doesn't matter now. As I was saying, he did meet Luna. But the boy didn't walk to the moon. Luna came to him."

Abandoning the shadow puppet show, he draws Mari into a hug that's a little more familiar than he's been since they've met. "Luna held the young boy for a moment, before gently rubbing on his forehead..." as he takes a thumb and idly rubs around Mari's permanent caste mark. "And then she leaned close, and whispered a secret in his ear. After that, Luna vanished, and the boy was left alone again. But when he took his next step, it didn't hurt as much as it did just a moment ago."

Letting you go from the hug, Shadows moves back to the puppet show. "The young boy hunted, and food became plentiful. When the boy looked for water, he never knew thirst. Miles passed under his feet, then under his hooves, then under his wings. For the boy became a Lunar, and he knew how to learn the forms of the animals. So the boy lived in the wilds of the East, until one day... he found himself being hunted."

"Yay! He wasn't hungry any more!" Mari enthuses. If she'd had whiskers, she'd have twitched them when Shadows rubbed her forehead.

"But you said he was hunted? Was it by the baldies? And what was the secret Luna told him?"

She's hanging on to him - and to his every word...

Shadows smiles and idly rubs his thumb gently over Mari's caste mark again, "No. It wasn't any 'baldie'. It was another Lunar who was a member of the Silver Pact."

"He's lucky it wasn't a baldie," Mari notes. "They're jerks."

"He came to guide the young boy to meet other Lunars, get his tattoos, and learn what it means to be a Lunar. So the boy was brought to the Silver Pact, and his story was told several times. They were also very impressed with how many forms he could take, as they said it was an honorable thing to be done. When the day came for him to be tattooed, everyone was expecting him to be a Full Moon like Killing Frost is. But as the final line of Moonsilver was placed in his flesh, all the members present learned what the secret was that Luna whispered to him months before."

Shadows needs two extra arms and hands to display both scenes on the wall in shadow of both the boy embraced by Luna and the finalizing of his tattoos at the same time as he tells the secret. "You are not a Warrior." Once that's done, he loses his extra arms quickly and goes back to dealing with just two arms and numerous fingers.

"The tattoos locked his caste to the Changing Moon. The social Lunars, who supposedly are suppose to guide mortal civilizations..." Shadows, for the first time in his story, takes a moment to speak his opinion, "Personally, I think they get along just fine without us... I mean, look at this city? Its huge and there's no Lunars guiding it... or, well, maybe there is and they're just really good at being sneaky."

He pauses for a few moments to consider the possibility; then he remembers that he's telling a story and continues on. "So the boy needed to learn how to be social, which wasn't the skills he learned since birth. So, while he wasn't a poor student, he certainly was never one of the better ones."

"Once the training was complete, the Silver Pact sent him to find a civilization to guide, but the boy always found something wrong. So instead he perfected his hunting skills, tracking down elementals, demons and every animal he could find to learn their ways and take their forms. Then one day, he caught a scent he had never known before. But this scent grabbed him by the very soul. He had to find that scent. He had to know what was causing it. So he traveled for many, many days. Which spread into weeks, which moved to months. Finally, he came to the end of the trail..." and Shadows pauses. Building up to saying that he found Mari standing atop a soulsteel warstrider.

But what he says is different.

"Only to find no trace of what was created the scent. His prey had eluded him. Something that hadn't happened since he was a child and first learning to hunt. The boy screamed in rage, vowing to become the very best hunter in Creation." Smiling oddly, Shadows admits slyly. "He probably went a little insane as well."

Mari listens patiently through the rest of the story, listening and patience being two things not normally associated with the mercurial Solar.

"Aww, poor boy, he couldn't find what he was looking for... but he'll keep looking, right? He doesn't seem like the type to give up like that!" she smiles. "Maybe I should help him! Although, I dunno how to help him..."

"Oh his story isn't done yet. So, the young boy turned his skills to hunting every type of animal there was. From the smallest insect to the large tyrant lizards of the South." Using the same phrase Mari did, Shadows adds with a smile "They're jerks too. From fish in the depths of the ocean to the birds that fly above the clouds. Elementals, Demons, and even really bad people who never knew that the fly on the wall was watching them. Nothing ever escaped him again."

"One day, he caught the scent again. It was slightly different than before, but it still grabbed him by the soul. Now, with hundreds of forms at his command, the Lunar raced across Creation. Vowing not to lose it again. What once took months was only weeks to him. Soon, as the scent became stronger, he found himself facing a large city. But rather than tear through the area, he chose a form that no one would notice as he wound through the streets. He was getting closer, oh so closer. The scent was so close it was like having your brain crackling with Essence and on fire at the same time. But in a good way." he adds at the end. "Suddenly, as he was getting closer, he felt some sort of desire along the scent. It was strange, as if the scent was a connection. And that desire consisted of only one word: Candy!"

"So the Lunar found a sweetened fruit, and carried it past guards who were specifically looking to keep everyone out of the area. Stepping lightly through the darkness of the building where the scent was coming from, ignoring the two people standing next to the machine, the Lunar stepped from the shadows and offered his gift to his Solar. And he's never let her get away since." Finishing his story with a smile, he leans forward and rests his nose against Mari's head, inhaling deeply before leaning back again.

"Yay! Candy and Solars!" she claps. "And he can turn into anything and everything! At once? Hmm."

"Well, not [I]everything[/I]. Creation is huge and filled with life, so he's not done with his vow yet."

"Oh well. But the important thing is, the Lunar found his Solar! Yay!

Beat.

"So who is he, anyway?" she asks. "The way you're talking about him, I think I should know him..."

At the beat, Shadows just looks into Mari's eyes to see if she's deliberately teasing or if she really doesn't know. She did ask for his story, but was the distraction of the shadow puppets and the idea of candy too strong for her to resist? Finding no sign of her teasing, he shifts a bit under her, before saying "I think he's a nice guy. But you're the only one I know who could answer the question if he's comfortable laying upon. Or sitting on your head."

"On... my... head... you? You mean, you were that boy? And that hunter? And that Lunar? Oooooooh... but, you're so big, and muscly, and strong..."

Mari gets on all fours, still perched on Shadows' chest, her small fingers poking and prodding her mate's sculpted form and running all over his arms and neck as she says that last bit.

"Well, you run all over Creation, fighting animals and hunting for food and you get strong. But even I can't lift a Warstrider. Well, not without using Essence."

"Oooh, that's easy! It's a bit of... hrm... Ever since I could remember, I've known how to sing a couple of songs. One of them makes me reeeallly hard, and the other one makes me reeeeally strong. I don't know why, but I always sing them in the morning, just as the Sun comes up. Maybe they're meant to greet the Sun?"

"Maybe. I usually just say a prayer to Luna at night. But there could be something I should be doing."

"It's hard to imagine you as a boy... I've played with boys before, they were small. Like... about my height."

She gets up on her knees, indicating the height with her hand. Then. with a flash of silver essence, the man's form vanishes and laying under Mari is someone to look to be her twin brother.

"Its really not that hard, taking forms as a Lunar and all. But for Changing Moons its even easier. I just have to see them and I can mimic them."

"Hey! You're me! Or... not. Hmm... my chest is flatter," she says, poking Shadows' newly-shrunken chest. In a more morose tone, she continues.

"Sounds like you've been travelling a long, long time, and you've seen so many things... Mari is sowwy she can't tell a nice story like Kitty..."

The Solar lowers herself again, until she's flat against Shadows' chest, her face grazing against his neck.

"Mari only remembers a few things. Not enough for a proper story. And most of that she sees in her sleep. They're not always nice things."

Shadows looks to Mari, still in the young boy form from before "When you sleep? You have bad dreams?"

"Yeah..."

Her entire body seems to droop as she says this.

"Sometimes, I dream of Malfeas. Like, I've been there before, and not just to rescue Blossom. I dream that I ran up the buildings and leapt from roof to roof and the sun was green and the sky was red. Sometimes I remember monsters that I beat up, and monsters that beat me up, and monsters I talked to..."

She rolls off Shadows, lying beside him.

"Sometimes I dream of the scary things I saw, and which I did, and which the monsters did to me. You know these?"

She pulls her dress off and turns around to show Shadows the tattoos of dueling Zsofika and Sondok on her back.

"They itch sometimes, and I remember that they hurt a lot going in. Sometimes it hurts so much I wake up in the middle of the night and scare Nee-san. Most of the times, it's not so bad. But still..."

Shadows moves to hold Mari while she remembers the painful memories of Malfeas. "That's sad. But you survived, and surviving anything makes you stronger." Pursing his lips, Shadows struggles to find how to be touching when he can't think of a simple way of comforting her.

She wriggles inside his embrace to study her genderswapped doppelganger. Then, a mischievous grin crosses her face!

"I wanna seeee! Let me see my dingy!"

Saying so, she tries to pull down Shadows' pants to glimpse the extrapolated extremity. Shadows tries to cry 'Wait!' as he scoots and struggles to maintain his dignity and keep the surprise in the relationship. They struggle for a few minutes, before the girl finally calms down. Oddly enough, the best way to suppress Mari's rampant security seems to be to hold her close. Invariably, she returns the embrace and forgets about stripping her partner.

"They aren't so bad now, the nightmares," Mari says. "They're just scary pictures in my head, and now I remember that I've got a lot of friends. Nee-san, Wrathy, Frosty, A Friend, Starry Lady, you... the really scary thing was that I was alone and I had no friends and everyone was against me. But now... now it's not so bad. I feel safe here."

She nuzzles the large Lunar as she closes her eyes.

"Mmm... nice... Kitty... so... soft..."

She yawns, wriggling around in Shadows' arms so she's curled up with her back to his chest. Mari certainly seems to be enjoying the attention Shadows is giving her as she drifts off to sleep...

Shadows resumes a larger human form so Mari has more to nuzzle. As his arms encircle her and gently rock the Solar, he nuzzles his nose against her hair and says softly "Well I'll do my best to keep you safe. And if I can't protect you from your nightmares, I'll find a way to give them something to be scared of. A very. Angry. Kitty." With a soft kiss atop her head, Shadows gently rocks Mari. He'll hold her until the lanterns burn out of oil if she'll let him... and perhaps beyond.