This is Lady Bad Luck's take on a backstory for Chaton. Minor Characters like her need more love!
The nameless cat that lived in the cottage in the woods was a bad cat. She was one of many bad kitties that lived in the cottage, under the watchful eye of the woman who was their god.
Their days were simple- wake up, eat, sleep again- and hope you aren't so much of a bad kitty that God makes you disappear. She did that to several kitties- when their miaowing became too loud, the woman would take one of them outside, and they would never be seen again. The kitties always ate well on those days.
The woman was a source of endless fascination to the cat. She had long black fur on her head only, like the cat, who had short ginger fur. She had long hind legs, and short forelegs, just like the cat, who moved in an awkward scrabbling motion because of this. But she walked only on her hind legs, and the cat wondered how she did this without falling over. It was magic, she eventually decided, like the magic that made days light and nights dark.
Once, she tried to stand up on her hind legs, just like the woman. The woman hadn't liked that at all. A thunderclap of righteous fist, and she was sprawled on the floor, a porcupine burrowing in her skull and blood in her mouth, and the kitties going crazy, yowling all around the smoky room. The woman yelled, Bad! Bad! And then grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, like a mother kitty carrying her kittens, and flung her somewhere where she couldn't see. She yowled in terror, thinking that she would be the next one to disappear like the other bad kitties, and panicked and ran into the walls, but only succeeded in knocking herself out.
She quickly learned not to stand up after that. The woman was God. She shouldn't- couldn't- disobey God.
Then, one day, she'd woken up, and the kitties were mewing hungrily at the woman's door. The morning light shone through the windows, warming great patches of the wooden floor, but there were no furry bodies lazing about in the sun. She'd joined the flock at the door, miaowing plaintively for their breakfast. No answer was forthcoming. They scratched at the door, and hissed at each other when the rowdy kittens pushed to the front. When the afternoon sun hung low in the sky, and her belly rumbled and her stick-thin legs shook, she stood fearfully on two legs once more, and pawed at the doorhandle. The kitties twined about her ankles, their hunger renewed.
Eventually the door had opened, and as the still, warm air billowed out, she caught a whiff of something strange and sick on the draught, and the kitties hung back, miaowing nervously. Then the youngest, innocent and fearless kitties moved forward, and they all flooded into the room, and leapt up onto the great pile of raggy cloth that was the woman's bed. The woman lay on it, her eyes open and her body still, and the cat had dropped back to all fours, hanging back fearfully in case God had spotted her blasphemy. But the woman didn't wake up, not even as the kitties jumped up onto her bed and started prowling all around, their needle-claws pricking into the woman's skin as they grew bolder.
Days passed. The woman didn't wake up. The cat's fear slowly melted away with each passing moment where nothing happened. The sick smell she had noticed on the first day intensified over the hours, as the days grew hotter and hotter inside the stuffy cottage, and soon, the flies began to appear. Big, fat, shiny ones, that gave the kitties amusement to try to catch despite their hunger.
Then God started to fall apart.
The cat passed the next few days in a state halfway between life and death, as the body in the bedroom was eaten down to bones by the flies and the kitties, and the food still did not arrive to sate her hunger. Her stomach hurt, and the water in the rain barrel ran out after the fifteenth day, leaving her and the kitties to dry out, alone in the cottage. She felt dark wings on the eighteenth day, and dragged her unresponsive body to the space behind the privy, and lay there amongst the stink and the darkness, listening to the beat of flies' wings as they landed on the bodies that had succumbed before her.
Then, at last, in the dark behind the privy, she heard the voice of a God once again. Light, and conversational, it floated through the cottage, and the last thing she remembered seeing before the dark wings smothered her was a face, pale and framed by long golden hair.
When she woke up again, the God was sitting beside her, reading a book. She hastily dragged herself out of the bed, hating the sheets that trapped her legs and fearing what he would do if her saw her, and miaowed as she painfully hit the floor.
"You're a strange one, aren't you," he commented, looking interestedly down at her.
She learnt so much in the next seven months she thought her head would explode. The God's name was Peta, he was looking for people who would fight with him, he could do magic, and, strangest of all, he wasn't a god. He taught her how to speak to humans, how to act like humans, and, once she killed a man for him, he taught her how to do magic. The secret was things called ARM in the human tongue, and he gave her several. One, which quickly became her favourite, turned her stupid round ears large and pointy, and made a long, proper-cat tail grow from the base of her spine. In delight, she sprang up to the retaining wall that surrounded the big house, and with her new tail, she stuck the landing perfectly.
The cat now called Chaton never looked back.
So. What d'you think?