Catseye and Morgan- Becoming A Kitty

[x-catseye.livejournal.com]

Curious about Morgan's moving, Catseye visits after classes to chat and convinces her to try being a cat.

With her copy of Midsummer Night's Dream in one hand, where it had been almost continuously since she'd learned she had a part in the play, Catseye found Morgan and Laurie's suite door to be open and knocked with the other before pushing it open. "WrongNamesWoman?" she called out quietly. "Catseye noticed things in boxes and came to talk about WrongNamesWoman leaving."

Morgan was sitting cross-legged on the couch. She was sharpening knives, which likely made it look like she was plotting some untimely demise for some person or another. She paused when she heard the knock and craned her head to see who it was. "Hey, Kitten, c'mon in." Frowning to herself, Morgan started to gather the knives and place them in the lined box in which she kept them. She didn't think having sharp, shiny things lying around the students was a particularly good idea. "I'm not gone for good. Just relocating's all. I'll still be around some of the time. You'll just have a new self-defense teacher's all."

"Oooooooo, shiny!" Catseye exclaimed involuntarily, eyes darting to the knives. "They look like shiny claws for WrongNamesWoman." She sat down beside Morgan and poked the handle of one of the knives with her own clawed finger. "WrongNamesWoman should use them instead of the bow next time she hunts."

Morgan pointed a finger at the purple-haired girl and made a sound high in her throat like you made to a cat when you were telling it to not do something. "The shiny's very, very sharp. Watch where you poke. You don't want to get cut." She kept putting the knives into the box until she flipped the wooden top closed on them. "I don't think the school at large would appreciate me walking in covered in blood, which is exactly what would happen if I used knives instead of arrows. I'm not sure I'm fast enough or good enough to get that close to a deer or rabbit on my own, anyway."

Upon hearing the sound Catseye drew her hand away from the box, watching it curiously as Morgan closed the lid. She twitched her tail at the blue woman's statement that she wasn't fast enough to get that close to a deer. "Blood comes off in water. Catseye can always throw WrongNamesWoman in the lake to clean. WrongNamesWoman needs to be a cat to get that close?" she asked.

"But some of us need to wear clothes and blood doesn't come out of that with just water." Morgan narrowed her eyes at the girl suddenly. "And we are not throwing me in water when it's near or below zero out there! I don't have fur, I get cold easily and my suitemate's already got pneumonia. I don't need to get it from being dumped in the lake by a cat, you know." She shook a finger in Catseye's direction, but there was a decidedly playful bent to the action. "Though I guess being a cat would make it a lot easier to get close."

The catgirl cocked an eyebrow at Morgan's mention of clothes, confused as to why getting her clothes dirty should be an issue for a huntress. "Humans have lots of clothes. Blood gets on them, just get some more. And Catseye would keep WrongNamesWoman warm after the laking. BigCat is veryvery warm." She gave a vigorous nod at the comment about the benefit of being a cat. "WrongNamesWoman should try being a cat sometime!" They'd talked about it before, but it had slipped Catseye's mind of late, what with everything that had been going on.

Morgan actually laughed. It was so simple when you were looking at the world through the lens of a cat mind, wasn't it? Just get more clothes. And the funniest thing of it was that it made sense. Morgan wasn't exactly hard-pressed for money. It wasn't like she wasn't friends with a woman who designed clothes for a living. "I take it as a great luxury that my clothes are not blood-stained or dotted with bullet holes, actually, so I sort of like to keep the ones I've got around if I can." Though, technically, she could just wear the blood-stained clothes every time she went out hunting. That would conserve, wouldn't it.

The metamorph grinned at Catseye. "Yeah, I guess being a big cat would be warm. We might need to keep me away from certain people as a cat, though. I might bite a few surly folks as punishment for being surly." Manuel came to mind, which said a lot about Morgan's relationship with the man, she thought.

"If WrongNamesWoman doesn't want to get clothes dirty then WrongNamesWoman should just be a cat," Catseye countered. "But no biting." She waggled her finger as people tended to do to her when she was in catform. "BigCat is..." how could she explain the differences, the fact that in BigCat form she lost her human intelligence and was forced to exist on animal instinct, some instincts nearly impossible to control? "BigCat is like a SillyKitten. BigCat doesn't understand that mansion humans are friends. BigCat only hunts, eats, sleeps. WrongNamesWoman should only use BigCat for hunting, off grounds, far away from humans. But SmallerCat thinks like Catseye. Catseye thinks the same as SmallerCat and as Catseye the human," she tried to explain, though she wasn't sure if she was making sense. "Does WrongNamesWoman want to try being a cat?"

So the cougar form was a cougar, end of story? That was interesting. Morgan had a little voice that warned such a thing could be very dangerous, just as the catgirl warned, but that voice was largely silenced by Morgan's curiosity at experiencing such a thing. "So as a little cat it's you just in a kitty body, yeah? But as a bigger cat it's not you really, just a big, purple cat? Could be fun." She grinned, "I won't get cold outside, right? Because it'd be really pathetic to need a sweater like those stupid lap dogs. You realize I need direct contact for upwards of an hour and a half to copy your powers, right?" She couldn't remember if she'd disclosed that stipulation to the girl the last time this had come up.

Catseye nodded in response to all three of Morgan's first three questions, then canted her head at the fourth. "Does 'direct contact' mean petting?"

"I guess it could. But it has to be continuous. If contact's broken then we end up having to start all over again." Of course, Catseye tended to lay on Morgan's arm half the time when she was stealing bed space so the woman figured if the cat lounged over or against an arm the other could go about petting her. "Or it could be napping. Petting and napping."

Remembering the book she'd been carrying everywhere, Catseye held it out to Morgan. "Petting and reading?" she suggested. "Catseye likes veryvery much when humans read to her. Catseye can't read very fast. Will WrongNamesWoman become a human Catseye after she copies? Or be a WrongNamesWoman that turns into a cat? Or only a cat?" She knew that Morgan copied mutant powers and that hers was shifting into the cat, but the specifics of both her own mutation and what Morgan's could copy confused her.

"Hmm, well, technically I should be a human Catseye," she told the girl after a few moments of thought. "But I've never copied a shapeshifter and I don't know if I will turn into a human Catseye or if I'll be a feline Catseye if you are in cat form when I take the copy. It works on a genetic level so I'd think I should be a human but if you're a kitty and that's what I'm copying maybe I'll be a kitty?" She really wasn't too sure, honestly. On the one hand, Catseye was the same height as Morgan and had a smaller build so if she shifted into a human version at least her clothes wouldn't be a problem. If she shifted into a kitty version, well, finding her way out of her clothes could be an issue. So could figuring out how to shift back or shift into the larger cat form.

Morgan took the book that had been held out to her. "I can read to you. Unlike movies, books can keep my attention. Where were you in it?"

The catgirl flipped the book open to her current page as she thought about what Morgan had said. "Catseye thinks maybe Catseye will stay human for copying. That way WrongNamesWoman can talk to Catseye about how to shift because maybe WrongNamesWoman would think it would be a badthing if WrongNamesWoman copied a cat and then did not know how to shift back into human and was stuck as a cat forever?" Not that she could really articulate how to shift, but it still seemed safer for Morgan to copy the human so they could at least try and talk it out together rather than taking on the cat form directly, since Catseye wasn't sure if they would be able to communicate- and get Morgan back to being a human- as cats.

"Probably a good idea," she agreed. "I can sort of think things through like you would once I've got the mimic, so if you explain it in terms you'd understand I can sort of shut off my way of thinking about things and figure it out. Or you can explain it to me now and then be a cat the rest of the time. I just need to know how it works, basically." She wasn't sure if that made sense to the teenager, but it was the only way she could explain the weird mental aspect that helped her figure out powers. Then again, since Morgan was a shifter it might be easier than usual to figure out shifting into and out of the cat forms.

"Catseye will teach," the purple-haired girl assured Morgan with a sage nod. "Catseye and WrongNamesWoman will have funfunfun being cats together." She cuddled up against the blue woman and looked down at the book. "Reading now?"

"Yes, reading now." Morgan shifted and draped her arm around the girl's shoulders. The positioning resulted in Morgan's arm resting against the back of Catseye's neck through her drape of hair and her hand resting against the girl's arm. It was enough contact to get her the copy she needed for the mimic. She put on her best storyteller voice as she began to read aloud.