Story: Nine Lives (chapter 2)

Authors: MadPanda

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Chapter 2

Title: Chapter 1: It Takes A Village...

[Author's notes: Annette and Naya hide out in Greenwich Village.  As the two women learn more about each other, the Control Squad does some digging of its own.]

Disclaimer: The building described in this chapter actually exists at the \'odd intersection\' mentioned below...which also exists.  Do a Google search of the intersection, and be amazed!  Oh...story\'s mine, characters are mine, too.  Just so you know.

Ikimashou!

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Chapter 1: It Takes A Village...

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The last car of the Manhattan-bound “A” was practically empty, save for a man who seemed to be asleep in one end of the car. Annette entered the car and moved to the other end, keeping an eye on the other passenger. She waited until the train pulled out of the station, hoping the noise would cover her conversation with her own little passenger.

“Where are we going? Do you know where to get off?”

“Sure I do,” Naya said, poking her head out of Annette\'s coat to take in her surroundings. “We take this to West 4th Street. From there we walk.”

“But what about the...what was it? Chimera, you said? What about that thing?”

“Like I said, they won\'t let it loose there. Too many people...that\'s one of the reasons we\'re going there. When I first got out, I had already set up a back-up hideout in case something happened to Gear Works.” Naya licked her nose once, then frowned. “Ugh...something smells horrible!”

Annette flushed for a moment, then sneered at the cat. “Hey, I took a shower today! It\'s probably that guy over there! Besides, don\'t you have a hightened sense of smell or something in this form?”

Naya shook her head. “Cat. C. A. T. True, my senses are much better in this form, but sense of smell only goes so far for my feline side. You want a more discerning nose? Get a dog!”

“Sorry...no need to get all huffy about it. Just asking...” The reporter closed her coat as the train made its way into the Broadway-Nassau stop. “You know, maybe we should wait until we get wherever it is we\'re going before I ask anymore embarrassing questions, okay?”

“Maybe that would be best.”

Annette thought Naya took the slight a lot harsher than she should have. Finding out why would have to wait.

- - - - -

Sir...the Overseer wants a status update. Should I patch you through?”

“Stall him.”

For how long, sir?”

“Until I tell you to stop, dammit!” Losing track of Naya was ticking the burly man off to no end. “Nevermind...just put him through. No sense delaying the inevitable.”

Will do, sir.”

The room darkened and a large LCD screen lowered from the ceiling. A set of color bars was soon replaced by the head of an extremely angry-looking man wearing a chocolate-brown military uniform. Behind him was an empty wall, save for a room-sized flag pole from which the American flag drooped.

The burly man stood at attention and saluted the screen. “Captain Armbrister reporting, sir.”

“Let me guess, Armbrister...you still don\'t have her, do you?”

“Straight to the point as usual, sir. No, I do not. I do have surveillance covering her possible escape routes, so it\'ll only be a matter of time until--”

“Can it, Captain!” The Overseer leaned closer to the screen. “You\'ve already had a year, and that puts us a year behind schedule. You do realize we have a staging area already set for the near future, don\'t you?”

In the back of his mind, Capt. Armbrister ran through the file that listed sites near the Gulf of Bahrain as possible \'staging areas\' for their latest \'tests\'. “That I do, sir. And I can assure you, we will be ready when the time comes. The package will be delivered and ready to be deployed well in advance of the target date, sir.”

“It had better be, or I know who my next \'test subject\' will be. Am I making myself clear, Captain?”

“Irrefutably transparent, sir.”

The monitor went dark without another word, it then returned to its hiding spot in the ceiling, and Capt. Armbrister stood once again in the small, now-lit room. He was sweating profusely, and his fists were balled so tightly it seemed his knuckles would pop out of their own accord.

“Davies!! Get Cortez of the Control Squad into my office ASAP!”

- - - - -

“Ah, that\'s so much better!” The relatively fresh air was, well, like a breath of relatively fresh air for Naya as the pair made their way through the streets of Greenwich Village.

“Shhhh!” Annette whispered into her coat. “You don\'t want people to hear you, do you?”

Naya dialed her voice back a few decibels. “Sorry...forgot myself for a moment there. Really, I\'d think if the city opened up the bathrooms in the subways, there wouldn\'t be so much--”

“What part of \'shut the hell up\' don\'t you understand?”

That comment received a few odd stares from some late-night strollers. Annette noted the stares and tried to cover herself. “Oh, I\'m sorry! I..I didn\'t mean you! It\'s my girlfriend on my cell...she never knows when to keep quiet!” After getting no reply from the passers-by, she let out a huge sigh.

“You know, we could just go with that! With so many people talking on their headsets or hands-free cells these days, you\'d think they were all insane if you didn\'t know better.”

Naya had a point, the reporter had to admit, but talking on your cell is one thing; talking to a cat with it talking back to you is something else entirely. Annette just let it drop right there, not wanting to make herself seem any crazier than she already felt.

And that was becoming a problem in itself; the closer the duo got to their destination—wherever that seemed to be—Annette felt more and more stressed, as if she was going somewhere she really shouldn\'t. Soon they came to an intersection, and what little hairs the reporter had on her skin practically screamed to disloge themselves.

“Where...where are we?”

“You tell me,” Naya said, almost teasingly.

Annette looked for the street signs, and when she found them, her jaw dropped.

“That\'s...impossible...isn\'t it?”

“You\'ll get used to it, trust me.”

Annette had a hard time figuring out how two streets that normally ran parallel—albeit six blocks apart—had managed to cross each other at right angles. Yet, there they were, two street signs that read “W 10 ST” and “W 4 ST”, perpendicular to each other, on the same lamppost.

“That makes no sense whatsoever!”

Naya laughed. “Of course it doesn\'t...that\'s why I like it! Let\'s go inside...it\'s the brownstone over there, by the office supply store.”

Annette took one more sideways glance at the street signs, shook her head, then entered the building. She loved the idea of living in a brownstone; coming from a tenement herself, it had always been her dream. Unlike this building\'s designers, however, she had the good sense to dream of having an elevator installed.

“Come on, it\'s only four floors,” Naya chided as she nimbly ran up each flight and waited at the landing of the top floor, swishing her tail in mock impatience.

“Remind me...(pant)...to feed you...(cough)...to the Chimera...stupid cat!”

“I\'m far from stupid, I\'ll have you know. I have degrees in both genetics and biophysics. They don\'t just give those away in cereal boxes.” She waited until Annette neared the top of the staircase, then went towards the door of her apartment. “Just turn the doorknob. I would do it myself, but I seem to have lost my thumbs in the transformation.”

The reporter took a minute or five to catch her breath, then opened the door. “Aren\'t you afraid someone\'s gonna come in and steal your stuff?”

Naya snickered and entered the apartment. “That would be difficult, unless they knew where to look. There are two switches on your right as you come in. Use them, please?”

Annette felt along the wall until she met the switches, and then pushed them. The resulting glare seemed to swallowed her whole. After taking a minute to adjust, she noted that it wasn\'t that the light was so bright, but that the walls, ceiling, and even the tiling on the floor were wedding-gown white. The small foyer had nothing to break up the all-emcompassing whiteness. There were no wall decorations, no furniture, not even a trash can or a stray hanger. The foyer was so empty, in fact, the dust even seemed to be missing.

“I like what you\'ve done with the place,” Annette sarcastically drawled. “Very obsessive-compulsive.”

“You\'re just looking in the wrong places, Annette. Have a seat...I\'ll be out in a minute.” The calico walked into a small room, leaving the blonde to fend for herself.

“Yeah, I\'ll just pull up an imaginary chair.” The reporter looked around the foyer, trying to assess her surroundings. Three doorways led away from her; one to a small kitchen, in the same shade of white save for the large appliances which were covered in stainless steel. There were no visible utensils or dinnerware, nor small appliances like a coffee maker or toaster. Another doorway led to a modest-sized yet incredibly empty room. Even with its lights out, the room glowed from having the same color scheme as the foyer. The third door marked the room Naya had walked into.

“I don\'t mean to sound rude, but this place creeps me out to no end. I keep expecting guys in white haz-mat suits to come decomtanimate me.”

“Or you just do that yourself. The shower looks pretty nice, and I hear the water\'s usually hot. I\'d recommend it.”

Annette had gotten so used to hearing Naya\'s voice come from below her that having it eminate from directly behind her head startled her. She turned to say something, but was surprised further to see Naya back in her human form, wrapped in a full-length robe.

“For a reporter, you\'re quite skittish.”

“My stories don\'t usually scare the bejeezes out of me!” She gathered her wits, then followed Naya to the kitchen. “I\'ve been meaning to ask you...why did the Chimera chase us--”

Me,” Naya interrupted. “It chased \'me\'. It didn\'t even acknowledge you.”

“Okay...why did it chase you when you changed into a cat?”

“That would take quite a while for me to explain, and a few more years of graduate school and military training for you to understand, I\'m afraid. Let\'s just say I have a homing beacon installed somewhere deep inside my body. When I transform into feline mode, the beacon sends a signal back to the command center, or in this case, the building you thought was a power plant. They then send out the Chimera to retreive me if my \'mission\' is done, or to kill me if the mission is compromised in any way. It responds to the same beacon, and ignores all other targets.”

Annette closed her eyes for a moment, giving her brain time to process the information. “So, what you\'re saying is, if you didn\'t change into a cat, then that thing wouldn\'t have chased you, right?”

“Right. I knew you had a good head on your shoulders.”

“Then why did you...” Before she could finish the question, the reporter\'s mind played the scenario through: She changed into a cat because you wouldn\'t have believed her if she said she could do it. Just as you didn\'t really believe the power plant was a secret government laboratory. She did it to prove herself to you, because she trusts you...enough to put her life in danger. Now don\'t you feel stupid? “...oh. Nevermind. I\'m sorry, Naya.”

The white-haired woman smiled and put a hand on Annette\'s shoulder. “It\'s okay. Thanks for proving me right.”

“Can I ask another question?”

Naya smiled. “Sure. What is it?”

“Well, when we got away from the Chimera, why didn\'t you just change back into a human before we got here?”

“You do realize cats are naked, right?” Naya\'s smile grew wider, and Annette swore she saw a hint of mischeviousness in the other woman\'s left eye. “I\'ll give you a second to imagine what would happen.” When Annette\'s face burst into a deep crimson color, Naya let out a melodious laugh. “And on that note, the interview is over for the night. Let\'s get some sleep.” She let go of Annette\'s shoulder and walked into the threshhold of the bare mid-sized room. She stopped and lifted her right hand, forming a paw which she used to beckon the blonde.

Annette smiled at the gesture, then remembered the lack of furniture. “Sleep...where??”

- - - - -

Capt. Armbrister was deep in thought. Normally, he\'d be deep in dreams right about now, but the events of the last few nights have robbed him of that pleasure. Instead of images of his wife and twin daughters enjoying a nice little vacation in the Alaskan wilderness, the only image in his head was of a lab experiment gone rouge, a defiant smirk on her face. What bothered him most about the whole affair was that he was the one who selected Naya in the first place, and now that choice had bitten him in the ass.

A sudden rap at the door tore the captain away from his thoughts. “Enter,” he barked.

The door opened, and a tall man entered the room. He immediately closed the door behind him, and stood in front of it at full attention, as if to keep anyone else from entering the room. His eyes quickly scanned the room, then fell on Capt. Armbrister. The newcomer showed a nanosecond of displeasure before returning to his stone-faced countenance with a quickly-snapped salute. “Sergeant Guillermo Cortez, reporting as requested, sir.”

“At ease, Cortez...no need for formalities.” The captain remained seated in the chair behind his desk, making not a move to stand or return the salute. Instead he grabbed the folder from the top of his desk and closed it, offering it to the black-clad sergeant. “I\'m sure you know why you\'re here, so I won\'t keep you. Here is your target. I want her back alive, and in one piece.”

“That may prove to be...difficult, sir.”

“I\'m sure you can find a way...provided you and that pack of wild dogs you call a squad can restrain yourselves from being a weapon of mass destruction.”

Cortez turned up a lip at the remark. “We do our job, sir. How we do it is irrelevant—as long as it is done, and your ass is covered. We cannot be held responsible for things such as collateral damage.”

“Not having a conscience must be quite the luxury.” Armbrister watched as the wiry young man moved quickly across the room and recovered the file. “Whatever you need to know is in that folder.”

“Correction, Captain—whatever we need to know, we already know. You\'ll hear from me soon.” The man moved back to the door and gave another salute, this time waiting for the captian to reciprocate. “By the way, sir...your daughters are quite beautiful. I wonder how they\'d look with cat\'s eyes...or worse...” He left the room as quickly as he entered it, not giving the now smoldering captain time for a retort.

Armbrister made a move to clear his desk in a fit of anger, but he stopped short when he saw the picture of himself and his family. He picked up a briefcase, tossed the picture in along with a few other folders, and left the room, slamming the door shut.

- - - - -

The smell of coffee caressed Annette\'s nose, and alerted the rest of body that morning had come. “The best part of waking up,” she half-sang.

“You might want to stop there, sleepy-head; otherwise the copyright police will be after us as well...and I hear they\'re worse than the Chimera.” Naya offered a mug of coffee to her yawning guest, before setting her own mug on the floor and sitting next to it. “I take it you slept well.”

Annette took the cup in one hand and fumbled for a place to set it neatly on the floor; a difficult task, given she was surrounded in linen and laying on a double-thick comforter. “Considering I slept on the floor, yeah, it was actually pretty nice. Where did you get this?” She patted the comforter, marveling at its thickness.

“From a friend of mine. She never could get used to sleeping in Western-style beds. She left it to me when she...went back home.”

The lowering of Naya\'s tone signaled Annette to change the subject. The petite blonde rubbed her eyes and took a good look at the other woman. Despite the wildly-colored hair and oversized paw-print pajamas—or maybe because of them—Naya struck quite the cute figure as she stared deeply into her mug of coffee. Annette thought she looked like a character from one of her anime; considering the girl actually could turn into a cat, the thought wasn\'t that much of a stretch.

“You wouldn\'t happen to have cat-ears under all that hair, would you?” When her attempt to lighten the mood got no response, Annette sat upright, gathering one of the sheets around herself. “Sorry if I brought up a bad memory, Naya. I didn\'t mean to...”

“It\'s okay...actually I\'m the one who should apologize.” Naya lifted her hed away from the cup. “You did nothing wrong. I just have to remember that what\'s past is past. I have more pressing issues to worry about.” She took a sip, and her hair seemed to bristle for a second. “Mmmm! Oh, and to answer your question...” She scooted over to Annette and placed her head in the reporter\'s lap, face up. “Check for yourself!”

Annette flustered, struggling to keep her mug from spilling. She sat it on the floor and huffed, “You could have just told me whether you did or not!”

“But what would be the fun in that?” Naya said with a grin.

“True...” Annette was amazed by the softness of Naya\'s hair; she started at the top, letting her fingers work their way deep into the other girl\'s mane. It was heavier than it looked, but the reporter surmised that came from the sheer volume of it. She moved to the spot where she figured a cat\'s ear would be if Naya had them, but finding nothing but more hair she let out a small whimper.

“Disappointed?”

“Sorta,” Annette answered with a pout.

“I could always go to the costume shop on Sixth and pick up a pair, but they don\'t have them in calico...”

The blonde removed her hand from Naya\'s hair, using the fingers to lightly flick her on the nose. “Fake ears are definitely unacceptable!”

Naya nodded empathically. “Real ears are much more useful! Same with fake tails...they do nothing for you if you can\'t use them for balance or language or other things...I always miss not having mine in human form. But then I don\'t really need one this way, so--”

Something about what Naya said didn\'t sit well with Annette. “So you prefer being feline to being human?”

“Of course!” Naya said matter-of-factly. “It\'s only natural, considering...” Naya saw the slack-jawed look on her guest\'s face and realized something had been lost in the conversation. “Ah, I seem to have omitted a very important fact.”

“You were a cat before you were human??”

Naya snickered. “Looks like I\'m out of the proverbial bag.”

- - - - -

A black SUV made its way along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, taking advantage of the light northbound traffic. Six black-clad figures sat silently in the vehicle, as the seventh—the driver—briefed them on their mission.

“As you can see, the target shouldn\'t be hard to notice...at least not in her human form. Your gear is equipped the usual equipment, but for this mission we\'ll be using special trackers. They\'re smarter than the Chimeras, and much faster.” Cortez spat out the window before turning his eyes back to the road. “Be sure to look over the operations sheet when we return to base. We will deploy the trackers at intervals throughout the boroughs. She has a limit to how long she can maintain her human form, so we will just wait her out. Between them and the traffic cameras, we should be able to spot her within 24 hours. Any questions?”

“The report states that the target must be taken alive and unharmed. Should we use the tranquilizers, sir?” a young male voice asked.

A female voice chimed in. “That could be troublesome, as she has excellent vision and reflexes. I\'d rather just shoot her and get it over with, but seeing as that\'s not an option. I\'d suggest the trap-and-crate method, sir,”

“Depending on the situation, we might be able to use both...or worse.” Cortez noticed the exit sign, and quickly swerved to utilize it, crossing two lanes without so much as a second thought to what little traffic was behind him.

- - - - -

It took about an hour for Naya to unscramble Annette\'s brain. Years of cartoons, bad sci-fi movies and tales of government experiments gone horribly wrong had led the reporter to believe that all species of abnormal humans were either the result of normal humans being altered in some freakishly senseless way, or beings from another planet posing as humans bent on world domination. Trying to explain life as a cat prior to life as a human was quite the challenge in itelf; explaining her mastery of subjects even normal humans have trouble with, that was a entirely different matter.

The blonde did her best to follow the mental road map Naya had laid out for her. “Okay, let me see if I got this right; You were rescued from a shelter by the government, implanted with some sort of DNA-altering enzyme or whatever, and then raised in a laboratory for awhile before you turned human and went to school? Even the worst fiction writer wouldn\'t dare come up with a story as weird as that! No one would believe it!”

“My point, exactly,” Naya said with a smile. “You see, this is the way things work. The more impossible things seem to be, the more likely someone has already done it covertly.”

Annette thought for a minute, then remembered the news story of the people who swore they saw someone shoot down a passenger plane with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. At the time the government dismissed the incident, saying no such weapon even existed. Years later, those very same weapons were being used in the Middle East.

“But still,” she whined. “That\'s just so...incredible. How old were you when you...er, um...changed...for the first time?”

“When adjusted using the human-to-feline age ratio, and accounting for certain hormonal changes and bio-chemical checks and balances, I\'d estimate it occurred in my mid-teens. All in all, pretty normal by anime or comic-book standards, right?” A slow nod was all Naya got in response. She stood and walked to the doorway, facing away from Annette. “It was pretty painful—and confusing—at first. I mean, there\'s an entirely different set of thought processes in play, not to mention body parts and senses that didn\'t exactly perform a smooth transition. One night I\'m sleeping curled up in a ball on a pillow; the next my senses are all screwed up, my whiskers and tail are gone and I can\'t keep my balance...and everything—even my skin—hurt! I cried, but it sounded strange, which scared me even more. I was sedated and kept in an \'isolation tank\' for a month, my body switching back and forth of its own accord.”

“There\'s no words that can describe how terrible that must\'ve been for you, Naya.” Annette got up from the floor and walked towards the other woman, finding a spot a respectable distance away from her. “I\'m sorry.”

“Thank you, but there\'s no need. Once the changes started to normalize, I began to get used to my new self. It took almost a year, but I figured out how to change on my own, and once I got used to human senses and their limited physiology, I learned to manage movement. Surprisingly, my brain seemed to process things pretty quickly—I\'d like to say it\'s because cats are just plain smarter than humans. We already have language, desires, and a basic sense of morals, so learning their human counterparts was just a matter of translation. The sciences were a bit more complex, but I guess you can say I did pretty well...so much so, in fact, the government saw to my schooling up to and including post-graduate studies. Of course, I had to do this as a human, and no one was the wiser for the most part.”

Annette let out a long whistle. “And anyone who even had an idea that you weren\'t human would soon disappear under \'mysterious circumstances\', right?”

“You watch way too much television, you know that?”

“There\'s no such thing as too much TV!” The sheet-clad woman took a step closer to Naya. “But characters in situations like are usually lonely, and bitter about being a lab rat...sorry, lab cat.”

The white-haired woman turned to Annette with an approving smile. “You\'re learning...this is good!” Allowing herself to take in Annette\'s return smile, she turned her head away again. “At least they got that part right. I had no friends in the lab, and classmates and acquaintances at the university...thank goodness for Megumi. I\'d probably end up being a crazed killer if it weren\'t for her.”

Annette peered around to see the slight blush in the other woman\'s face. “Megumi, huh? So the futon belongs to her?”

“Belonged...past tense. She left it to me when she went back home. I had confided in her about what was happening with me; instead of shunning me as some kind of freak or exposing me, she consoled me, and we became very close.”

“Too close, I\'m guessing...”

“Yeah...” A long silence followed. Naya felt Annette\'s hand gently take one of her own, and she let it be taken. “We knew it would happen, but we didn\'t care. She said I was entitled to some happiness, and that if she could provide it—even for a little while—then it was worth any price she would have to pay later on. Those were the last words she said to me before she was escorted on a plane and told never to come back.”

Annette wanted to apologize again, but she knew it would be rebuffed. She gave Naya\'s hand a soft squeeze instead. “Can I ask another question?”

“You wouldn\'t be you if you didn\'t, would you?”

“Where did you get the coffee? There\'s nothing in the kitchen—literrally—yet, you got coffee. How?”

“SeattleSips, of course! They\'re everywhere...and they have beautifully large cups!”

Annette rolled her eyes, then thought of something more important. “Wait—you went out like that? What about the people who sent the Chimera? Don\'t you think they still looking for us?”

“True, but their coffee is worth the risk!” Naya left the doorway and returned to her spot on the floor, where her now tepid coffee waited for her. “Maybe I should just put some ice in it...” Seeing the incredulous look on Annette\'s face made Naya take a serious turn. “Not to worry...I know the janitor here; he saw us enter earlier, and thought we might need a jump-start this morning. Then again, knowing him, I think he might have had more than coffee on his mind after seeing us together.”

Annette took a sip of her own cool coffee and nodded. “Not a bad idea, that...” she mused to herself.

Or so she thought, as Naya snickered. “Better be careful; I hear bestiality is illegal in New York...”

“I did just say that out loud, didn\'t I?” Annette gathered up the rest of the sheet and buried her face in it.

Naya laughed at her guest\'s expense. “Come on out of there...one of us has to go get breakfast, and I don\'t have money...”

“...or a conscience!”

- - - - -

After a shower and a little more ribbing from Naya, Annette made her way downstairs to the local bakery. On the way back, she passed a middle-aged woman in a motorized wheelchair. A capuchin monkey rode in the woman\'s lap.

“Um, excuse me, Ma\'am, but is that a \'helper monkey\'?”

“Yes, she is,” the woman said politely. “Her name is Gina...say hello, Gina!” On cue, the little monkey moved from the woman\'s lap to her left shoulder. She screeched a greeting and then returned to her spot. “She\'s very smart! I would be lost without her!”

“She\'s adorable!” Annette gushed. She waved goodbye to the woman, and the monkey waved back. The reporter smiled and returned to Naya\'s apartment.

The woman guided her chair to an intersection and looked around to see if anyone was looking. She then pressed an extra button on the top of her blouse. “Unit WV checking in. Commencing canvas.”

- - - - -

A black SUV rolled to a stop in front of a schoolyard. Sgt. Cortez rolled down the driver\'s side window and was about to pick up his binoculars when a sharp beeping sound came across his handset. “Check, Raptor Unit.”

Raptor Unit reporting update on status, sir,” the male voice on the other end answered. “Manhattan\'s covered from the Battery to Houston. Ditto for Northwest Brooklyn and Southwest Queens. We are experiencing delays in the South Bronx, but Staten Island, Roosevelt Island and the Rockaways are in play. Owl Unit has 85% of the street cams, as well as all subway and airport security cams. We should have full coverage within 90 minutes.”

“Good work, Raptor Unit. Come back in 30.”

Will do, sir. Raptor Unit out!”

Cortez allowed himself a smirk. He watched two redhead girls chat with their friends before they all went into the school. He then pulled the SUV from his surveillance position, merging into the rush-hour traffic.

- - - - -

“What took you so long?” Naya\'s voice echoed from the bathroom, as Annette set the baked goods on the kitchen counter.

“You don\'t have an elevator, remember? Not all of us are physically gifted.”

“Some of are more \'gifted\' than others...” Naya appeared at the entrance of the kitchen, dressed the same full-length robe. She also wore a leering grin, which made Annette a little nervous. “You have a nice body; you just need some conditioning, that\'s all.”

“Um...thank you?” The comment made the reporter think twice about eating the two glazed donuts she bought for herself. “Speaking of which...I\'ve been wondering. When you change into human form, where does all the fur go? And what about the colored patches on your back?”

“Well, you\'ve already seen my right eye...come here for a second...” Annette came a few steps closer, and Naya turned to face away from her, untying the sash on the robe. “Now look at my back. Don\'t worry...I won\'t drop the robe.”

The blonde took one hand and lifted most of the hair from Naya\'s back, revealing the same pitch-black shade of skin on the woman\'s neck as over her right eye. As she slid the robe over her shoulders, she saw patches of brown, grey and orange among a sea of black. “How...how far down does it go?”

“It stops just above my tail, and around my sides. I have some spots around my stomach, but it isn\'t nearly as bad. I\'m used to it, but it\'s not exactly something I can wear a strapless dress with now, is it?”

Annette took a finger and outlined one of the brown patches just under Naya\'s left shoulder blade, marveling at the softness of her skin. “So, the hair just retracts then, right?”

“Not exactly. Since humans have more surface area than cats, the hairs spread themselves out more and appear to be much finer. They\'re there...you just can\'t see them.”

“Wow...” Annette was practically stroking Naya\'s back, making the other girl start to squirm.

“You might want to stop doing that...unless you\'re planning to take some responsibility!”

“What? Oh...OH!!”

Naya laughed heartily listening to the blonde try her best to compose herself. After catching her breath, she covered herself and moved to the counter, taking the glazed donuts out of the bag. “For me? Thanks! I\'m going to need all the sugar I can get for our next trip!”

This caught Annette by surprise. “What \'next trip\'?”

“Later,” Naya mumbled through a mouthful of donut. “It\'s breakfast time!”

=====

End of Chapter 1

=====

 

 

[End notes:

Most of the major players in the story are in place...there's still a couple more to come.  How are y'all liking it so far?  Let me know...read and review!

By the way: As I'm posting this on January 1, 2011, I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year!  I hope it's filled with interesting stories so you can share them with everyone!

Until next time..."So long, and thanks for all the fish!"

]

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