(no subject)

[first-catwoman.livejournal.com]

Time: July 25th, 2000
Setting: The Lobby
Status: Public - Complete.
Summary: In which Bast mopes then does some...stretches.

Bright amber eyes snapped open and Bast awoke in what was swiftly becoming her favourite sleeping place.

She gave a wide cat’s yawn, all rough pink tongue and white needle-point teeth, rolled outwards from the ball in which she had slept (again, almost dropping off the edge of the desk in the process) and gave a small sigh. She had been dreaming about the family again.

When the Egyptian pantheon had first come to the States, there had been bordering on a least a dozen of them. Now there was barely four – both Horus and herself being mostly confined to animal form, except in the most powerful of places, and the hawk’s mind had burned out with the last shreds of his father’s presence. Isis, the beauty-goddess, had always wanted to go out in style, and so had pulled a Marilyn Monroe with two thirds of a box of extra-strength aspirin and a bottle of white rum on the floor of one of the few five-star hotels in the state. Ra had just kind of withered away, and Osiris had literally leapt off a cliff when he felt Isis go.

Seth, the red-headed troublemaker of their pantheon, had been taken the death of his siblings hard (despite the fact that it was his fault/thanks to him that Osiris had been lord of the dead in the first place – he had been the Cain of sorts to his brother’s Abel,) but managed to carry on for another decade or so without them. Then one day, without warning, there had been a message left from him and Sekhmet, Bast’s warmongering, fierce, leonine elder sister, saying that they had got the wanderlust, and wanted to see the world before it got too late.

A year after that, none of them had had to read the paper to know that a power station in Chernobyl had gone nuclear, with Anubis’ parents standing together right at the heart of the flame –thick as thieves and closer than lobsters, right ‘til the end.

Bast was vaguely aware of salt-water streaming from her eyes and soaking her facial-fur, then she was suddenly furious with herself, head snapping up. Why the hell was she lying here thinking about death? She’d see her nephew when she got home – him and the bird still had another few hundred miles left in them.
She slid neatly from the polished wood to the floor, and cautiously gathered her wits. It felt like there was enough residual energy in this place- not just here, but in the whole mansion. Bast suspected that even she got as far away from the centre as she could while still staying indoors, there’d still be enough to do what it was that she wanted to do.

The small brown cat took a deep breath, then a made full-bodied, tip to tail stretch. And kept stretching. Her face flattened. The fur disappeared. The tail melted away. And soon there was a young, thirty-somethings woman with dark hair and amber eyes standing in the middle of the carpet, stark naked.

She took a step forward and fell flat on her face. Crap. Too long walking on four paws and having a tail had screwed up her balance for walking on two. It had been the best part of a thousand years since she had had a human-looking physical form (the whole thing with Shadow didn’t count – dreams and other planes were always much easier to work on). Well, she wasn’t gonna give up having opposable thumbs anytime soon, but the tail she could do something about.

Ten minutes of slightly uncomfortable prickling sensations later, Bast crossed the room and studied herself in the full mirror. A creature of about human height, most definitely female, with short brown fur, flecked with black, covering all of its body, an angular tabby cat’s head and a long striped tail, stared back at her. She studied it. It was a little too close to the way she had looked a very very long time ago, but she had the best of both forms this way and… hmm.
She briefly wondered if anyone would attack her if they saw her like this, but then decided she didn’t care. She hadn’t felt this good in a very long while. She sniffed the air. Something – meat – was cooking outside, and she’d be damned if see let it all be burnt, before she could steal a bit.
Bast walked away, tail swishing as she balanced carefully in her new form.