30 Day OTP Challenge (Young Wizards), day 10: With animal ears

[dianeduane]

>

The ears itch, and they don’t seem to fit Kit’s head properly.

Which is peculiar, since they came with it as a set.

“Stop waving them around like flags, for the Tom’s sake,” says the voice from behind him. “It’s only going to make it worse. Hold still and settle.”

Easy for you to say, Kit thinks, bristling….which by itself is weird enough. All around him are incredible screeching and groaning noises, metal on metal. The darkness isn’t anything like as dark as it ought to be. His nose is being assaulted with smells, lots of very serious smells: stale water, rust, and a whole lot of the back-alley kind of smell you get in places where people haven’t felt like using a urinal or a toilet. It seems impossible that a place Kit thinks he knows so well could be so unsettling. When you’re human, the far end of one of the passenger platforms at Grand Central Terminal smells a whole lot different.

“I know,” says the voice behind him. “Sensory overload. There’s always a lot of that in the first few minutes of a change. But it’ll be louder where we’re going, so just hold yourself still and get used to it.”

Kit squeezes his eyes shut, which helps a little. His changed eyes don’t exactly see only in black and white, as too many humans think, but their light-gathering ability in these conditions is amazing, and somehow manages to fake the effect of color vision. It’s the infrared, I guess. And certainly you see a lot more texture with these eyes. But the noise… and the smell…!

What really annoys Kit, though—because he can feel two sets of attention fixed very critically on him—is that Nita seems to be having no trouble with today’s job, none at all. She’s sitting off to one side in the shape of kind of a brunette tabby cat, looking over her shoulder at her tail; and her ears are working just fine. No one’s paying her any attention. It’s all on Kit, who seems to just keep getting things wrong.

“Rhiow, you think we’ve got his presentation enough under control now?”

“Well, the fur’s better… At least it’s stopped sticking up all over him as if he’s just bitten a high-tension wire.”

Kit snickers—because his hair’s developed a tendency to behave this way lately—and is confused when the noise comes out as a hiss. His eyes pop open, then, and go wide. “Uh, sorry, I think something else is wrong here….”

This impression is reinforced by something whacking him upside one of those ears, though fairly gently. Kit sits down, hard, on reflex. He half expects to feel cold concrete against his butt, but no, there’s fur underneath him.

“Yes it is,” Urruah says. “So sit down. And breathe. You know I’m not annoyed with you; I just needed your attention, because we’re short on time. But your body thinks I’m cranky because of what I just did.”

The big brawny gray tabby comes around in front of him, looks Kit over. “Ears are good for all kinds of things, if you’re a Person. Enforcing discipline, for one. And the discipline needed here is that we can’t have you doing that laughing-hissing thing in front of other People, or this whole business will go straight down the drain. So pay attention.”

Kit pays very careful attention indeed to Urruah—for that ear’s ringing a little—as the senior tom for the Grand Central worldgate maintenance team sits down in front of Kit. Urruah puts his front feet together, wraps his tail tidily around them, and puts his whiskers and his ears forward.

“That’s it?” Kit says. “That’s a cat laughing? No noise?”

“No noise. At your age, if you want rolling-on-the-floor laughing, you do this.” He drops his lower jaw.

Kit drops his, and immediately feels the inherent humor of the gesture all through him. “I get it…”

“No you don’t,” Urruah says, “not right away. Don’t jump the gun.” He gets up again, walks around Kit.

Kit has trouble staying still, because he can actually feel Urruah behind him, and the young tomcat body is saying He might hit you, he might try to start a fight, he’s bigger than you, you have to get up and show him you’re not afraid, get up and face him!—but also Hold still, be quiet, he’s bigger than you, he can wipe the place up with you, crouch down and let him know you’ll behave!

“Yeah,” Urruah says. “That tension, right there: you’re going to have to learn how to cope with that. This is what you get when you do a proper shapechange—not one of those assisted-change routines things like you did out in the water, with the whalesark; where the tissue routines and neural data are superimposed.”

“This goes chromosome-deep,” Rhiow says, coming up beside Urruah now: a little black cat, the GCT worldgate management team’s leader. “And this kind of change brings a much wider spectrum of the instinctive behaviors with it. You’ve got to learn to find your balance; stay human while also staying, in this case, feline. When you’re doing undercover work like this, or even when the other People you’re dealing with know you’re human and just wearing Personfell, you cannot be sending out mixed kinesic signals, the way you did just then. When you try to laugh vocally, the way an ehhif would, you hiss. And when you do that, your ears go back, and everybody thinks you’re purposely being provocative.”

“The other People we’re dealing with aren’t wizards,” Urruah says. “They can’t read your mind or your heart. All they can read is your ears, your eyes, your whiskers and your tail. So, since we don’t have time to do the whole My Fair Kitty thing with you today, your job—both your jobs—are to get into the game, keep your ears and tails under control, go quickly and quietly where you’re told, sit where you’re told and how you’re told, and be bright and cheerful about it.”

Oh good, Kit thinks, just like school. Whoopee. …Also, Kit hates to admit it, but he’s not enjoying being criticized so steadily by fellow wizards; the feeling of stress about the day’s work is getting to him a little.

“Stop twitching,” Rhiow says. “Purr.”

“What?”

“Khit, you can’t be deaf; those ears are brand new. Purr.”

Kit purrs. And bizarrely, he starts to feel better: cheerier.

“It works the way smiling does for ehhif,” Rhiow says, as Urruah steps away to walk down the track and have a look at the spot where the worldgate hangs in nonactive mode, a smear of near-transparent distortion against the dusty, noisy air. “Do it and it improves your mood: it’s in the wiring. No point in waiting for something to make you smile first; you’ll be here all day. Smile, or purr, premptively.”

Kit purrs harder. “Do I look okay now?” Kit says. Apparently looking right is a significant part of this event, which is a feline game of great complexity and social meaning called hauissh.

Rhiow doesn’t speak for a moment, just stalks around Kit, regarding him. “It’s a good look on you,” Rhiow says. “Conservative. The black’s nice and solid, no tabby showing through. Not too much white, and what’s there is symmetrical. You’ll need to mind the white on the front toes: if that gets messy, others will notice if you don’t clean it up.”

“Rhi?” Urruah says from down the track. “Want to check these coordinates? We don’t want to come in too close and rumble ourselves.”

Rhiow heads down the platform. Kit turns to take a look at Nita.

And finds… that she’s sitting down with her back turned to him and one leg in the air.

Oh my God. She’s washing her butt.

…Yet to his considerable confusion—possibly due to the purring?— Kit finds that this doesn’t bother him, even though it should. It comes to him that this is because the shapechange really is starting to take properly on him as more than just a shape change. When you’re a cat, washing butt has about fourteen different meanings, depending on how you’re facing. And of course there’s nothing unsanitary about it, nothing at all.

Really there’s not, he tells himself. Really.

So that when Nita—doubtless feeling his regard: such ability to sense other-feline gaze is important to cats, for the game of hauissh if nothing else—when Nita looks over her shoulder at Kit in mid-wash with her tongue left sticking out, Kit finds, again to his astonishment, that this is not gross. In fact it’s kind of flattering, because the look she’s giving him by the way her ears and whiskers are set implies that she doesn’t consider the way he’s looking at her embarrassing at all.

Which, frankly, is a serious relief… and also itself strangely embarrassing.

Oh, weird. This is very, very weird.

“Khit,” someone says, so very close to him that breath tickles the hairs inside one ear.

Startled right out of his skin, Kit jumps straight up in the air with the ticklishness and the sheer shock of it. He comes down all puffed up, with his skin feeling like it’s trying to go six different ways at once, and his tail jumping around in annoyance and surprise.

“A little distracted there, hm?” Rhiow says. “You should have felt me coming up next to you.”

“Uh, yeah.”

Her whiskers are way forward: she’s finding this just hysterical. That, Rhiow says to him privately, is something else you’re going to have to work on.

Yeah, the human/feline thing, Urruah keeps telling me that —

No, Rhiow says, averting her eyes for the moment. Not the human/feline thing. The Kit/Nita thing. Your temporary uncertainties are getting in the way of your base perceptions when you’re otherskinning, and you’re going to have to work on dealing with it. It’s perfectly normal: something we all have to get to grips with sooner or later, and sometimes it takes a while. You should have seen me and Hwaith. But you’re going to have to shove it to the periphery today, because we don’t have time to deal with it.

“And in the meantime,” Rhiow says, as if following up on the overtly spoken part of the conversation, “you need to stop shutting your senses down and get a grip, because the game won't wait, and we’ve got to go.” She looks up toward where Urruah is just dropping down from having been up on his hind legs with his foreclaws buried in the control structures of the worldgate. It’s patent now, shimmering: waiting for them. “Queen only knows why we’re taking you two along to what’s probably the second most important bout of hauissh ever played on this continent…” Rhiow sounds resigned. “But the Whisperer doesn’t normally take me into Her confidence, and She says you have to be there, so let’s get sharp and hit the gate, shall we?”

She turns away, and suddenly Kit realizes that her ears are a little back. For the first time he can feel the tension by looking at them. And I couldn’t do that until the purring.

“Rhi,” Kit says.

She pauses, looks over her shoulder.

Kit licks his nose, because Rhiow is very senior indeed: has saved not only her own world at least once, but various others. Kit is aware of possibly being about to step over a boundary. Still…deal with the uncertainties. “Feeling the tension a little?”

Rhiow’s tail—stubbornly upright until now—jerks sideways a couple of times. Annoyed at being tense, Kit sees. But just the acknowledgement causes a slight slackening in the nervousness. “Caught that, did you.”

“I’ll purr for both of us,” Kit says. “We’ll help each other. You tell us what to do. We’ll get it right.”

She just looks at him for a moment: then her own whiskers ease forward and the tension in her tail eases. “So we will, cousin. Let’s be about it.”

And then Rhiow rolls her eyes as she looks past him. “Cousin, a little less washing might be in order now? We’re on.”

“Uh, sorry, I got distracted.”

Rhiow heads toward the gate. Nita gets up, shakes herself all over, and stalks over to where Kit’s standing.

“Stop fidgeting,” he says.

"The black's good on you," Nita says. "You shouldn't worry."

"Neither should you. You look good."

Her answer doesn't come quite as quickly as it should. One ear goes forward, one goes back. “The fur’s nice, yeah. But I’m brown.” It’s an annoyed mutter. “I’m so bored with brown.”

“What? What else would you want to be?”

“I don’t know! Anything else! Blonde! A redhead!”

Now both her ears are going back. Nonono, not good, Kit thinks.

He starts to purr again.

“Neets, I’m telling you,” Kit says, “you look just fine. If you want to do redhead? Do it. Though I thought that was Dairine’s look.” He shrugs his tail. How about that. I shrugged my tail! I just knew how. “You want to do blonde,” Kit says, “you should go ahead and do that. …But I know what I like.”

Nita looks at him in surprise.

And here’s another boundary coming. Kit works out where to step. “And Neets?”

“Yeah?”

“Mind your ears.”

And he leans over and washes the closer one of hers a little.

Nita’s eyes go wide. After a second, both her ears go forward.

As they do, Kit scampers off, tail up, down toward where Urruah’s holding the gate’s string structure open for access.

Behind him, Kit can feel Nita pause. Then she follows, her whiskers about as far forward as it’s possible for them to go without falling off.

Kit drops his jaw and jumps through the gate after Rhiow.

Game on!

---

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yay, the game of hauissh! I've always wondered how that was played. ^_^

[particle-person.livejournal.com]

I'm now wondering if this has a connection to the next book.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Fascinating creatures. Highly amusing at times, too.

[nightskywarlock.livejournal.com]

I'm trying not to fanboy all over you with each of these, but I have to say - of course this is how they would end up with animal ears. Perfect.

[greek-jester.livejournal.com]

Just getting caught up, & I'm loving this series. I've always enjoyed seeing day-to-day snippets of characters I'm used to seeing in full novels.

I'm pouting a little about the "French card game" though; when I upgraded to Windows 7 my little DOS version of the game that I've had for many years wouldn't play any more :-(