Animal I've Become

"Be home by Eleven! And remember to keep your contacts in!" The girl's mom called as she watched her daughter take off down the street to visit a friend in need. She turned back to dinner.

The girl rolled her eyes at her mother's call. Pushing back the sudden desire to rip into something, anything. The urges had been becoming more and more frequent each year since puberty. She was good at holding them back. She rounded the cornor and froze when she found it blocked off by a nondescript white van.

"Hello, mutie, you're coming with us." The man that took a step forward had a grey camoflauge suit and a ski mask to match. "Get her." While the girl had been trained in martial arts, she wasn't sure of fighting against numbers like this, so she did the sensible thing and tried to run.

She didn't make it, and a taser knocked her unconscious.

She woke up, stiff, sore, and strapped to a lab table. The animal that she'd been holding back went nuts and she struggled to get free, breaking the metal hodling one wrist. A lucky punch to her eye knocked a contact out, revealing one golden eye. Similar to a tiger's, or any other large cat. A collar went around her neck, shocking her.

"It's mutation is physical and mental. We'll have to treat it like an animal to break it."

"Damping collars still unoperational, a shock collar will have to do."

Inside her mind, as the experiments and attempts at shocking her into submission continued, her animal mind began to take over. The non-sentience of the large cat began to erase her own mind, protecting her from breaking, giving into her captors wishes.

Eventually, all that was left of the girl she had been were her memories and her body. The inner cat had taken over, and that was how her mind would stay for a good long while.

She killed the men that held her. Her human mind had melded back into the cat, creating a hunter and fighter. She fought her way to the exit, killing all in her path. She barely remembered where she'd once lived. All that mattered was getting free and staying free. She escaped the prison, it was on the mainland.

Once she ate and bought clothes with cash she had stolen, she went into the shadows, living on a day to day bases, and hiding from the whoever it was that was hunting her.

She was adopted by a good family, a man and woman who wanted to help her.

If only she could feel like they did. There was something else in her. An animal. It was her, but not quite. it didn't understand fear, it was only self preservation.

There was no love, only loyalty. Hate was useless, but it occasionally threw a temper tantrum, proving there was anger. She kept that part of her suppressed, never to see the light of day. It didn't fit her life.

She was captured by men who wanted to mess with her DNA, and tortured. She used the animal to protect herself, keep her mind from breaking, but wound up erasing so much of her conscience in doing so.

She was a mutant that could self heal, with animal instincts so deeply ingrained that she lost the feeling of being human.

If she ever broke the ties holding her to the right side of the law, people would die. She knew that. She knew how close she was to what others would say the thin line between sanity and insanity.

But while her head told her one thing, her lack of feeling told her something different.

And even for a mutant, that made her an Outcast.

She stole cash when she needed it, never things because she knew how precious they were. She gained several aliases for underworld contact purposes.

One was Wildcat, a woman who was willing to steal secrets, for a price. The other was one when she felt like being a good girl helping those who needed it.

Panthera . . .

Okay, this is going to be a group of oneshots introducing some of the charcters for my next shot at a story. It will be set in Red Witch's Misfit verse. Partially because this group of characters doesn't quite fit into any story by themselves just yet. They'll be better explained in the actual story, but I wanted to introduce them, first.

Panthera is actually the genus of large cats, e.g. panthera tigris, for Tigers.