::Mutual Cat Daddies – Failure in Vigilance::

It had taken Eric Cartman no less than two hours to realize that his wrists had been bound behind his back with a single-looped knot; the sort that could be easily pulled apart, even with the limited mobility of his hands. Two hours of crying out, sobbing, screaming, and throwing the mother of all tantrums in a desperate attempt to attract the attention of somebody, anybody nearby.

There was a point where he became angry- it occurred rather early. His cries for his mother turned to intense cursing of every person he even mildly suspected of being behind his abduction and unceremonious dumping. When anger became exhausting, the firy burn of it began to give way to a cold edge of fear. It was a frozen knife-point that ran down his spine and shook his system with a terrible chill as a thought came upon him that he might be well and truly alone; abandoned, helpless, blind, and lost. That this may not have been anyone trying to humiliate him, but a real attempt to possibly kill him by dumping him off in the wilderness.

That fear brought on real tears. What had been the insane braying of a two-year-old inhabiting the body of a pre-teen turned into the pathetic whimpers and honest sobbing of a lost adolescent who was certain of his own powerlessness... and all-out crying inside a rough hood got gross, fast. More pressing, however, was that wriggling about in the snow led to sodden clothes, soaked through with freezing melt and made colder by the biting wind.

I've been left behind. I might die out here.

Maybe the first realistic thought he'd had since his cat had gone missing, early that morning, and it was a horrible one. The kind that chased him right back into the fantasy of The Coon.

The Coon would not die here.

It was a few moments after that, after literal hours of sobbing and shivering in the cold, that numbed fingers finally realized there was a loose lead on the rope that held his hands behind his back that he could pinch and tug. Said rope had already worn his skin down to blotchy red hell from all his struggling, pinpricks of skin torn by the rough fibers stinging terribly with every wiggle of his wrist as he grasped with his fingertips and pulled on the trailing end. Eventually he felt the loop pop out, and the knot loosened for his wrists to twist free in to the burning embrace of the wind.

Liberating himself with nothing besides his wits, The Coon was free!

Celebration came in the form of an ugly smile that was mostly covered in snot and composed of intensely chapped lips as he was finally able to shake the restraints off and pull the rough hood off of his head. Finally, for the first time in hours, it was time to get a look at wherever the fuck he was.

A glance around wasn't encouraging. Late afternoon light streaked the sky in vibrant orange and delicate pink, making a few scattered clouds look like puffs of cotton candy as shadowed underbellies appeared dusky violet and fluffy edges that caught the last rays of the sun highlighted in bright fuchsia. It was an intensely picturesque backdrop, one that almost made Cartman wish he had his camera to capture the way dark navy shadows of the treeline were falling against the snow in stark contrast to the glittering flakes that covered the ground, but a mixture of cold, hungry, and wet made the scenery his enemy. He stood next to a narrow lane that was a mixture of overturned gravel and ice- not even paved, though it appeared someone had plowed it out. Looking in one direction, said lane disappeared into dense woods, evergreens rising up on either side. Looking the other way, he could just barely make out the gray strip of much more effectively plowed out roadway that he could identify as the highway.

First course of action was to go for his cellphone. Hands dug into his pockets, and he retrieved the device... to find it either dead or broken. The screen was black and it wasn't powering on.

"Son of a..."

Abandoned and alone, left for dead, The Coon had no choice but to fight his way back to civilization. A new threat had come to his city- perhaps now he could rally his allies against it, but he'd need to make it back to warn them, first. Once they realized the peril they were all in, perhaps then they'd realize just how much they needed his amazing abilities to lead them against it.

"Fucking hate hitchhiking. Someone better have a fuckin' sandwich. Fuckin' weak."

[ Subject ] Urgent
From: "AssMaster9001"
To: "DocKartwright"

I have a situation here that could really use some extra information if you've got it. Understand if you don't, figured I'd ask.

Amelia Reynolds, arrested thirty years ago for a drunk and disorderly, disappeared for a decade. Affinity for cats. Disappeared from Park County. Reappeared in Jersey, been chased by the authorities, she is here in South Park. Cats are going missing, friends and I are investigating. Any info would be useful. We suspect she's powered, in relation to the cat affinity.

Also, when the hell are you going to be bringing the data on my family from when they were being studied?

[insert witty signature here]

[ Subject ] re: Urgent
From: "DocKartwright"
To: "AssMaster9001"

I thought you were on vacation, kid? What happened to 'I'm just gonna take a break from the bullshit and try to live normal for a hot second'?

Believe it or not, scientists studying virulent pathogens don't get access to the database of powered people flagged by the US Government... and I have the very distinct feeling that my every move is being watched right now. Since I got back from DC, the bosses have been pressuring me to go take a vacation- the same bosses who were on the edge of firing me after my experiment fell through. You ordered the dicks from Washington to lay the fuck off, but I don't think they extended those orders to the people directly above my head... and I don't appreciate dicks on my head. I really don't. Not my idea of a fun Saturday night.

That said, I'll give it a try. I'll send you whatever I find in the morning.

And I should be in your neck of the woods before Thanksgiving. It's not the kind of vacation my bosses had in mind, but if they're gonna push me to take some time off, then I can use that to pay for a plane ticket to Colorado.

Keep yourself safe, kid. You mighta gotten the men in black off your ass, but that's no reason to relax.

-Dr. Haley Kartwright, PHD

Dee had suspected as much when she read the e-mail she got in return from Kartwright. She knew it was a long shot; just because one required clearances to work with possibly world-ending diseases in the halls of the CDC didn't mean that Kartwright had access to every shred of information that the government had to offer on the abnormal and strange. They were their own insular information network, with their own roadblocks to keep things on a need to know basis... and a load of bureaucracy to keep things even dumber than that- an issue that Kartwright frequently complained about. She described it as a if you are willing to move a mountain and someone can be bothered to let you know system... which gave Dee a distinct impression of why the woman always had such a lack of patience with people. She could relate to having to go to hell and back for simple fucking shit.

Walking back to her home, she noted her phone's battery- 17 percent. It had maybe an hour left in it, probably less, but it was enough to get her home... but that thought filled her with apprehension. What if her grandmother had decided to spend the night? What if the woman was still arguing with her parents, carrying on in her entirely rude manner? She didn't want to walk into that situation. Staring at her phone, there was a very intense temptation to just tell her mother that she was going to stay the night at a friend's place and run back to Kenny's house. He wouldn't mind, right? Ah, but would she even have the guts to crawl back into bed with him? Whatever. She'd sleep in Karen's room over going home right now.

She decided. She tapped over to the messenger app while stopping beneath a dim and flickering street lamp, her shoulders shivering in the cold as her hoodie offered little defense from the bitter wind that kicked up snow crystals around her. Pulling up the messenger conversation with her mother, she sent her text.

[Sent, 10:56] Gonna spend the night at a friend's place. Ms. Stotch is gonna pick me up in the morning to see Butters get released from the hospital

Pressing the send button felt like an act of rebellion. She hadn't asked her mother, she'd told her, and she very specifically had not said which friend's place and hoped that social stigma would keep her mother from calling all the other moms at this time of night just to figure out where she was to come drag her back home. The feeling in her stomach spun in circles of ugly guilt and angry thrill- it was her mother's fault that Grandma was even there, anyway. She was the one who had decided to get reconnected; her and dad. Why did she have to suffer for their shitty families and their shitty decision to talk to them again? If Grandma was that bad, what was the rest of the family even like?

Did this count as running away from home? … it felt kinda like it, but she hadn't announced any intent to stay away indefinitely.

Adrenaline wore on her tired system, striking raw nerves that had experienced far to many hot bursts of intense energy that day. She nearly jumped as her phone buzzed, and she blinked blearily in the dim light as she realized her mother had responded.

[Received, 10:58] I understand, sweetie.

[Received, 10:59] Please be safe, I'll see you tomorrow.

That response had not been expected. She figured she would either suffer a long silence and no confirmation that her message had been seen, or be hit by a barrage of messages demanding she come home this instant before her parents called the police to find her... then again, maybe she'd earned an extended leash in recent months. Something about running the President out of town and saving a friend from a potentially fatal gunshot wound in the same night, without getting murdered herself.

Well, okay, that was only half true. She had gotten murdered that night, but there had been two of her. That hardly counted.

There was another thought that attacked her, however- What if her mom was letting her go without a lecture because she would just make shit more awkward with Grandma?

What if I'm not wanted at home?

[Received, 11:00] I love you, Lyssie.

She blinked. A simple enough declaration between mother and daughter, but it seemed to come in direct response to the horrible doubt that had been biting into her chest with vicious fangs composed entirely of pitch black despair. The horror of being unwanted abated, but she found something else wriggling about inside her ribs instead. A squirming creature made of the conflict as she read something else in that text besides heartfelt sincerity. Maybe it was a trick of her own mind, or a facet of projection, but she read an intense loneliness in that text from her mother. In an instant, she felt regret for her decision, like she was ducking away and taking the coward's way out by deciding she wasn't going to go home and deal with this.

Well are you gonna go home or are you gonna walk back? Pick one, bitch, before our feet freeze.

A sharp sigh was let out, producing a cloud of fog in the chill air as she shut her phone off to preserve battery. Her decision was made, and Kenny wasn't guaranteed to have a micro USB around for her Android when he had been sticking with the iPhone for years. She might need that last few percentage points of battery in the morning. Her phone buzzed and flashed the manufacturer's logo before the screen went black. Satisfied, she tucked the object back in her pocket and turned on her heels to depart from the streetlight and return back the way she came.

To an utterly spent brain, the world could very much feel as if it were operating in a sluggish slow motion. Perceptions from various senses operated less in harmony and more seemed to block one another out, like several large files each fighting for bandwidth over a restricted web connection. One could be prioritized over the other, or all could come in at the same time with an extreme sacrifice to speed. At this moment, the sense that had greatest influence was touch- the sensation of her toes slowly going cold inside her boots despite their thickness, the sharp stab of the breeze through her hoodie, and the somewhat woozy sway that came when she over-balanced in her one-eighty turn to retrace her steps in the snow. It superseded the muffled whistling of that breeze, or the faint ambiance of a raccoon digging through someone's trash in the distance. It distracted from the long shape her shadow made, thrown out by the single dim streetlight she'd been standing under and now wandered away from.

It distracted her enough that she almost didn't notice the second shadow that appeared along side her own.

Breath caught, and her ears finally informed her of important information that had been delayed- the sound of footsteps behind her.

Running, running footsteps; they approached rapidly, closing in on her. It was fast, too fast, sluggish limbs slow to react after a full day-

A weight collided with her back, and she stumbled forward with a guttural shout.

::The Author's Corner::

Holy short chapter Batman!

Then again, the previous one ran a little long, so it all evens out in the end? And really, there's no rule demanding that every chapter land somewhere between 3000 and 3500 words. That's just my general benchmark for how long is 'long enough'

ONWARDS!

-Buttlord