purrfectenemy | Overflow

[continued from here.]

Catra gives the girl's hand a squeeze. "Been with? You make it sound like we're doing more than holding hands." She winks. While there wasn't some instantaneous spark of magic when they first touched, it feels... good. If it brings to mind pleasant memories she's trying to put aside, well... for now, at least, she can live in the moment. Anyway, the implication of the rest of that sentence is finally sinking in.

"What do you mean... there are really only humans where you're from?" Catra seems genuinely confused. While there are enclaves in parts of Etheria where one race are a majority, it is hard to imagine not seeing a myriad of diverse people every day.

"And, offer accepted," she adds as an afterthought.

Edited Date: 2021-01-13 05:58 am (UTC)

[ Continued from here ]

Ah, the kid's just delusional. That seems like the best explanation for the "king of the pirates" thing. But, whatever, Let him dream.

"Yes. I... do have fur," Catra agrees. The eyes had sometimes gotten comments before, but people tended to stop that if you bit them hard enough. At least, that was her strategy as a kid.

"Are you also from somewhere that only has humans around?" She thought the other girl who'd brought that up was an outlier. Could they be from the same weird place?

Edited Date: 2021-01-13 06:38 am (UTC)

Luffy's comments aren't insults, or at least, he doesn't mean them that way. He's just saying what he sees, which is a girl who has fur and weird eyes! And it doesn't seem to be a transformation like people who can alter their forms. He could be wrong. If so, he'll likely take that in stride too.

"No, we have Fish-Men and mermaids and giants and things like that! There was this one place that had ghosts and another that had living toys but those were actually just people anyway. So nope, not just people." He says all of that totally matter-of-fact too. Really, Luffy takes everything in stride, but most people who sail the Grand Line, especially into the New World, have to get used to seeing some very weird things.

He looks down at their hands again. "I don't feel different. It's supposed to feel different?" He hadn't listened to the whole explanation, the intimacy thing (would it have made a difference?), but he can read. He knows what the alerts say, blah blah Manna Synchrony whatever. Surely that should feel different?

[ Continued from here. ]

"We both need to get out of here," Catra says firmly. She lets her hand slide down to hold the other girl's, not wanting to lose her, but also not wanting to put too much weight on her if she didn't have to.

"I'm Catra," she offers.

"Humans without cat ears, or other traits, I mean," she nods, "aliens where I'm from are ugly," she then observed to the side, deep in thought, "in hindsight, closer to monsters."

However, that realization makes something realize some of her own biases. When she looks at Catra again, a human-like person that just happens to be part feline, Daisy comes to wonder how much of an alien she really was.

And it confused Daisy. When she had to think of where was the line drawn.

"You're the better option for someone pressed against me, though," Daisy tries to wave it off with a joke, returning the squeeze and and trying to press her chest against Catra... but, the accelerated heartbeat betrays her actual feelings, as well as the excess of her own leaning against her.

A joke is a truth wrapped in a smile.

It took her a while to notice the waiter arrived a little earlier than expected. Daisy's concentration broke, returning to the same nervousness.

First thing that came to her mind, from the offered menu, was a shrimp cocktail. She leaned back to let Catra order her own dish.

Kanade hesitates a bit at the gesture, but it's more in the vein of not being used enough to it to know how to react. All those years of being alone in the battlefield and being able to rely on nobody but herself haven't melted away with the few months she's known other fighters from another dimension.

But after a moment, her fingers clench to return the gesture. Somehow, it seems to ebb at the strength of her fever just a little, and she grins again.

"Kanade Amou. Just Kanade's fine," she replies, before shaking her head with a bit of a dry laugh. "Guess we're just a cat and a bird out here making our way. But they're both good at getting where they need to go, so I'm sure we've got nothing to worry about."

It's not an optimistic statement so much as just grittingly determined. Kanade's had enough of being stuck in one place, unable to move on - now, at this point in her life, she's not giving up on survival that easily.

"I'm a person, too," Catra has to point out. But really, it doesn't seem worth debating the semantics. "Oh, forget it."

Catra follows his gaze down to their hands. "Yeah, I think it's supposed to do something. Maybe it just takes longer?" She definitely sounds doubtful.

"They made it sound easy, and I know that I felt something with people back in the crater. Maybe mortal danger is the key to getting close to someone quickly...?"

"Of course you're a person," he says, matter-of-factly. It escapes him that he implied she wasn't, somehow. Fish-Men and mermaids are people to him, as are many other types of creatures. He doesn't really think of anyone as being different as much as looking kinda different.

"Huh, maybe! Or maybe there's something else we gotta do." He wasn't listening at all the the description of what qualified. If he had, some of it probably just would have gone over his head. But it hadn't seemed terribly important at the time. Or maybe it just hadn't been interesting enough.

He considers. "Oh! I felt something when I talked into that snail thingy about finding the rest of my nakama!" He means the device, which he's analogised to the transponder snails in his own world, but it probably just sounds like nonsense. "We weren't in danger then, though. But we can go do something dangerous if that would help!"

[ Continued from here. ]

"Ration bars, mostly." Catra answers. "Brown ones. Gray ones. Sometimes ones that your annoying comrade has mushed up and reformed into cute shapes..."

She wonders what Scorpia is up to, actually. Looking for her, probably. Anyway.

"I'm not... actually sure what they're made of, but they're nutritionally balanced, keep basically forever, and are, well, not... unpleasant."

[ continued from here. ]

Catra is barely conscious when the lupine man scoops her up and starts running with her, but being out of that particular cloud of chemical steam combined with the odd sense of stability that comes from being held close like this helps clear her head.

While her body is still burning hot, there's no flame when she blearily looks up at him. "What? Who...?"

[ Continued from here. ]

Catra takes the offered hand with a friendly smile, even if it's a little forced. "I just thought it might be worth a try?"

"I'm Catra," she responds in return, but the question means nothing to her. "Mutant? I don't think so. What's that?"

"Aliens," Catra repeats. Without even having the concept of stars, the word doesn't translate directly for her, though 'monsters' gives her a better picture.

"I should hope I'm a better option than a monster," she replies with a smirk. But then there are more important things, like the promise of food. Though, as on the space station, the options are incredibly overwhelming for someone who has spent her entire life eating ration bars that come in two bland flavors. Despite technically being able to read all of the words, she can't even begin to guess what most of these things are.

"Uh, I'll have what she's having," she says, passing the menu back. Hopefully that's not a mistake.

The word from before comes back to her, though, and she can't help but ask, "What are 'aliens'?"

"Damn straight," Catra replies with a forced grin. "I haven't lived through everything else just to let some rocks stop me."

She squeezes Kanade's hand again, gaining more confidence as they pick their way across the rocky wasteland. She still feels terrible, but she's there to give the other girl as much support as she needs, too.

"So do you know how you got here? It's all weird for me. Almost like I was dreaming until I stumbled outside into this."

There's way too much weird stuff to unpack here.

"That... snail thingy?" Catra asks. She has absolutely no idea what Luffy might be talking about or why he would have been talking to it about finding his comrades.

"If you have something that worked that isn't dangerous, I'm all ears."

Luffy nods, completely unaware of why she doesn't follow. He can follow his bonkers logic, after all, so why can't someone else?

With his free hand, he digs in his pocket for the device that connects to the network. He has a vague understanding of what all it does, but it's shaky at best. Sanji had showed him, but it's not like Sanji is a tech expert either, and Luffy has chronic can't pay attention disease. But he does remember how to use the video part, so that's a start.

He holds it out to her, screen facing her, though it's blank at the moment.

"This thing! It does what the snails do and talks to people somewhere else! I broadcast a message looking for them and me and Sanji felt like...uhhh...kinda warm? Or like you do after you eat when you haven't for awhile and you have more energy. I think that's what the alerts are trying to get us to do."

Kanade keeps her footing sure as they move forward - there's a lot of tumbled rock and potential slips, and if the air here is so toxic already she doesn't want to know where going down a crevice is going to land them. Thankfully, her line of work tends to involve a lot of walking over either rubble or rough terrain, so it's not as if she's unused to it.

It does take her a moment to answer the question, though, possibly because she needs that moment to even try to think of what happened before she arrived.

"I think it might've been the same for me...I had a pretty full-on day, so I definitely remember coming home and crashing really late. And then I was walking through that maze instead. Seems real sudden for a world jump."

Kanade's jumped dimensions before, and it's usually a bit more obvious than this was. And deliberate, for that matter.

"Nice to meet you Catra. And Mutant...well, it's a, how should I put it...Offshoot of homo sapiens, a evolutionary leap some people say. Basicaly, to ignore the science, it gives people powers, and can change how they look at a basic level."

Jubilee raises up her other hand as colored balls of plasma emerge from it, floating in the air, glowing brightly. "See? And this is actually fairly basic. I've seen people who can read minds, heal from any wound, control metal, all sorts of things. One of my old professors at school was actually covered in blue fur."

Catra recognizes the communications device even though it isn't exactly like the model she has, but it doesn't bear any resemblance to a mollusk.

"What the fuck does that have to do with snails? Snails... let you talk to people somewhere else?" She realizes that animals in different worlds might be different, but she's highly skeptical.

Still, what he describes sounds similar to what she'd felt. But what did sending a message looking for friends and getting rescued from turning into crystal in a toxic wasteland have in common? "Maybe you just have to really want to be with the person...?"

[ I can let Catra say fuck if I want to. u_u ]

"A world jump?" The concept that there even could be multiple worlds is one that Catra wasn't familiar with until very recently, and she hasn't considered that this weirdness might be related. Catra still can't clearly remember what happened after she pulled the lever to open the portal back in the Fright Zone, but it had been sealed, hadn't it?

Her hand flushes warm in Kanade's grip, the spike of anxiety at the memory pulling her away from the burgeoning connection.

"What do you mean?"

"Snails let you talk to people, yeah!" Luffy says. He's not fazed by language anyway; he's a pirate, after all, and he's been around pirates since he was a kid. Besides, he grew up with Ace and Sabo running wild. Not to mention knowing Zoro and Sanji and their tempers. Sanji's favourite word is shit, after all. He knows all the worst words and probably a few others.

But it doesn't occur to him that Catra wouldn't follow his train of logic. He knows the device isn't a snail; even Luffy isn't that big an idiot. But it's the best comparison he has in his brain.

"Oh, maybe. I was already with Sanji and we both felt it, but Sanji is nakama. Of course I wanna be around Sanji. So we just have to want to be around each other more?" He makes a face like he's trying to manifest that desire somehow. That's how things work, right?

Kanade notices that reaction, but she doesn't feel like this is the time to directly pry - she does look over at Catra's face, though, to see how noticeable any surface reaction might be. The rise in temperature makes her think there might be a matter of personal experience here, but then, she has that herself too.

"It's kinda weird, but it can happen where I come from. I've met people from another dimension before, and been over to theirs, so it's the first thing I thought of when we all just showed up here," she explains, though she still sounds a bit like she's thinking on something. "But usually you gotta do it intentionally. There's a gateway kinda thing we use. Not just getting swept off in our sleep."

So while this is something she can connect to what she knows, it also functions differently to what she's used to. Cause for even more confusion, since even having a logical explanation, the Gjallarhorn relic that causes the gateways where she comes from doesn't make a whole lot of sense to her.

Just keep moving forward. Legosi could stay sane in all this if he focused on that. This girl's life was in his hands. Legosi could withstand anything for someone else. His eyes flicked down as he heard speak up a little.

"Sorry, we don't know each other, but, I'm getting you somewhere safe! My name is Legosi!"

"That sounds rather sweet of them," Sapphire offers. Or- well, she thinks so.

"Well… if they're not bad, then that's good enough. But… I take it that means things were very different where you're from, then?"

Daisy turned back to Catra the moment she pondered if she was better than a monster. After the 'catgirl' asks what are aliens, Daisy can't help but be glad. Catra IS a better option than a monster.

When the shrimp cocktails are delivered, Daisy gently pulls Catra's own dish towards her. She rests Catra's head against her breasts, then lifts a piece of shrimp close to the shorter girl in a flirting tease. Seafood and calamari became Daisy's favorite foods ever since she and her companions got their trainer stuck in an island for days. If Catra was anything like a feline, she knew she would adore it.

"In earlier days, it used to mean 'foreigner'," she feeds Catra, then eats some of her own cocktail herself, "nowadays... think of how an organism adapts to an environment, and its children in turn adapt to a different one with different variants, and so on. But, think of planets that either have a higher gravity, or don't have oxygen. You end up with creatures that can be scaly and have four jaws, crabs the size of people with opposable thumbs and language that breathe methane, and so on. They won't look anything like we do."

Daisy then smiled to Catra, "I am wondering how you came up to be, though."

Catra stares blankly at the explanation. The words get through, but the meaning is utterly lost on her. But when Jubilee summons those shining colorful balls, she backpedals, pulling away and not even taking in the rest of the explanation.

"Whoa, whoa, wait, are you some kind of Princess?" The way she says it makes it pretty clear she's not talking about hereditary royalty.

Even though she's seen how fallible Etheria's Princesses can be, Catra can't shake the two decades of Horde propaganda warning her just how dangerous glowy magical girls can be.

"Ugh, forget it." Catra lets go of his hand and shakes off his grip. "This isn't working. At least not like this."

Her tail swishes behind her in mild annoyance, but she sighs. "Thanks for trying. Um." This is an all new kind of awkward social interaction. It seems rude to just bail on him.

She glances around, as if some rescue will appear out of thin air. None does, but her sensitive nose does pick up the scent of roasted meat from a food cart on the far side of the square selling skewered strips of red meat. The varieties of food here are still novel and sometimes even weird to her, but this particular smell makes her mouth water, and she does still have a bit of the living stipend they were turned loose with.

"Uh. Do you want to get some food?"

"A...princess? No, not at...all. I'm not royalty in any sense of the word." The glowing balls of plasma dissipate, some of them evaporating and some being re-absorbed into her hands. "Why, are mutants considered royalty where you're from?"

Jubilee shrugs and holds out her hand. "In any case, want to try making a connection of some sort? I'm not sure HOW, but well...we can figure it out."

Luffy frowns, almost looking for sad for about two seconds before he lets it go. Well, if it wasn't working, then they probably do need to try something else. Or figure it out later, whatever. He's not really the type to be bothered by things like this for very long.

He probably wouldn't care if she bailed, because his idea of what's rude and other people's aren't exactly the same. Though he also might follow her out of boredom or curiosity.

But then she starts speaking his language and his face lights up.

"Food? Yeah, definitely! That meat looks amazing! Come on!"

Before she can answer, he's already off and heading for the meat cart. Catra and the poor unsuspecting cart guy have no idea what they're in for here.

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Catra

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