11

"Hey!" a jackal snickered, shoving one of his fellow jackals out of his way. "It's MY ball!"

"No way!" The smaller jackal tried to take the red ball back but was unsuccessful, and the jackal Mutant who had stolen it kicked it from foot to foot as he ran.

A woman from the other team laughed and darted in front of him to kick the ball out of his reach, maneuvering it skillfully down the makeshift court towards the back wall, where a chalk goal had been drawn.

"Go, GO, Lizdi!, caaaaw!" cried one of the vultures on her team.

The guards that were on duty at the lowly prison were having a game of torskkk, a Plundaarian ball game consisting of two teams, two goals, a kick ball, and few rules. Any way you could get the ball to touch the wall or fly into the net, sometimes even using baskets or barrels as the goal, was accepted with one exception: hands could not be used. Tails could though.

"Hey!" Lizdi hissed as a large male from the other team stole her ball with his large tail and batted it across the room. Everyone, both teams, laughed as it splatted against the wall. "You were lucky!" Lizdi accused with a coy grin.

The big lizard leered at her. "Maybe in more ways than one."

She cocked her head. "Mayhap." She took the ball, rolled it up again, and drop kicked it to one of her teammates. "IF your team can win!" She ran after it, accepted a pass, and darted by the big lizard with it, a clear challenge.

He looked surprised for a minute, then grinned widely. "You're on!"

In the damp, filthy cell Cheetara had been thrown into, she lay back on the mattress against the rough walls. She did not even want to know what kind of vermin were in this place, and what kinds of parasites; fleas, lice, mites, anything. Plundaar probably had parasites she had never heard of.

She was sure of one thing: the prison was not in the almost painfully clean, antiseptic looking main city. She was sure she and Snarf had been thrown into this hellhole of a dump because they were Thunderians, and deserved no better. She growled. She would show them.

They had taken her staff and her wrist guard, including the sheath where she kept her weapon. They had even found the small dagger she kept in her boot. Well fine. That just made it a challenge.

She was trying to psyche herself, and she knew it. She wanted to pace, but her head hurt too much to permit it without a lot of discomfort. She wanted to kick the place apart, but if she couldn't even pace, that was out, too.

Even despite the offending headache, the ThunderCat jumped to her feet instantly at a bray of raucous laughter that suddenly exploded in the hallway beyond, as someone, a group of people it sounded like, came through an outer door. She heard the sound of it being locked afterwards.

A group of plug-ugly, sweaty Mutants came into her line of sight at her door, and one of the big males unlocked it. He was a Reptillian, and he was looking pretty damned happy about something.

Cheetara growled at them, knowing that now was not the time. She would be downed before she could think about moving, even with her speed. There were too many of them, and they were blocking the door. "What did you--" she began to demand angrily, when a smaller Reptillian, one she thought might have been female, hurled a bright red ball at her, knocking her over. She had not expected a ball to be thrown at her, although as she landed, the impact sending many interesting looking shapes of light and pain through her throbbing head, she noticed this ball felt curiously warm, and smelled suspiciously like...

Only clinging to the barest consciousness, her companion she had worried about sprawled out on the ground, and lay there, panting for breath. "Snarf!" Cheetara forgot about her own headache when she saw the condition her friend was in, and became genuinely alarmed. At first when he had sprawled out, she had thought he was dead, but a closer look showed he was breathing, although it was clear this was not a pleasant task for the Snarf's body. "Oh Snarf, what in the name of Thundera did they do to you?" She gently touched his shoulder, eliciting a sharp, almost feral, outcry of pain. She abruptly pulled her hand away. "I'm sorry."

Growling low, she got once again to her feet and yelled out the bars of her cell, "HEY! Hey you miserable Mutant bastards! Someone get in here, Snarf needs medical attention!" She got no answer, although she knew there was a guard outside the door. She had not understood anything they had said, as it had been in their own language, but she'd heard one of them plunk his tail down in a chair outside the door. "I know you hear me! You want one of your prisoners to die!?" Stupid question. She was speaking to a species whose fathers, or grandfathers, or whoever the hell it was that had fought that last series of wars, annihilated the species for whom she was trying to get some help. She sighed and went back to him.

"Snarf...Snarf, I'm going to move you to the mattress, okay? It's going to hurt, but lying on this cold floor you'll probably catch pneumonia, or something."

Snarf managed a slight nod of his head, and gritted his teeth. He didn't move his head again. It hurt too much.

"Okay. Brace yourself." Cheetara slipped her hands beneath the Snarf's limp body, trying to put out of her head his pained cry. As gently as she could, she set him down on the filthy mattress, having the sudden grim thought that as dirty as the place was, moving him to a warmer spot was probably a useless gesture. She'd have been better off leaving him on the floor.

The cheetah sighed and sat next to him, softly smoothing back the fur on his head, which seemed to have taken little abuse compared to the rest of his body. It had come out the least scathed, as his head had been tucked in when he was made into a Snarfball. "By Jaga, Snarf, I'll get us out of this pit. I swear." But as she lay back against the wall perpendicular to the one that the mattress lined, she doubted her vow. She doubted it a great deal.

***

It had been three days since the ThunderCats had been hurled to all the corners of the universe, and across Time itself. On Third Earth, Lion-O and the others had managed to locate and get rid of all the portals, using the scanners on the Feliner's, and closing them by tossing a pebble or a stick through. They could only pray that no innocent creature, or no ally of theirs had unwittingly walked through one, as there was no way to tell for sure. They looked in each one, but found no one. And so they hoped.

Bengali on his world has been falling for three days. He had gotten used to it, almost as if he were hovering motionless in the air, had it not been for the wind. The first day had gone by endlessly, and he had often tried kicking out in air, trying to move himself, trying in vain to get somewhere there was something to hang onto, to stop this endless, mad fall. He had found nothing.

After many hours of this, long after he normally would have stayed awake, he fell into an exhausted sleep. And that was one of the strangest things he had ever done; sleeping in midair.

The next day, he had awakened disoriented, wondering why the wind was blowing so hard into the Tower of Omens, And then the memories slowly surfaced, and he became completely awake, clenching his fists and screaming as loud as he could; screaming in frustration and fear, and anger. He wanted to strike out. He wanted to lash out at something. He wanted a wall he could kick, or a door he could punch through...but there was nothing to strike. There was nothing to hit but the air.

After he had calmed down, he had passed through a thunderstorm. That had been equally fascinating and terrifying. He had always liked storms, and being in the midst of one fascinated him to no end, but it was dangerous also, as lightning flashed through the system, which could have been miles wide. One was close enough for him to feel the heat, warming the rain that had drenched him, and scaring the living daylights out of the young ThunderCat.

Then he had moved out of it, out to the side. This was an interesting experiment, as he was traveling at the same rate it was, so he could watch the storm rage on, right at his eye level. If he ever got out of there, he thought that as horrifying as this experience was, it would have some details he would love to tell the others about. The storms raged here and there, sometimes ending in a few minutes, and some like this one raging for hours on end. Sometimes he could see three or four of them around him, and more in the distance. The atmosphere chanelled the light from the stars, making it seem like midday in the strange doughnut of air, one of the rarest ecosystems in the universe.

Wouldn't Tygra have a field day in this place?

Between fits of shakes caused by his growing frustration of being in a constant fall, and angry lash-outs where he struck at the heavy, humid air of that alien world of atmosphere, he experimented. He tumbled in the air, or turned over, so that the maddening wind was not constantly hitting him in the face. He found that he could move by turning a somersault, although to stop, it took several minutes to stabilize himself. He could move from side to side. Finally coming to the realization that he would die of hunger if he didn't do something, he began to move steadily to his left, hoping beyond hope to encounter something. Anything.

After a second period of sleep, Bengali began to feel despair. He was ravenously hungry, and had seen no other signs of life on this planet, although he did not think it was a planet anymore, as he saw no signs of land. But that was the only thing he could call it. There was no word in any language he knew that could describe this. And so he only fell, edging slowly to one side of the massive loop that was the world he had fallen into.

***

On Thundera, Lynx-O and his crew had finally reached the little city they had been looking for. "You know I remember something about that," Pumyra said.

"Sorry?" Lynx-O inquired. It had been a tense few days, and even he was out of temper and moody.

"That creature. The Wolfbeast."

"What did you hear?"

"Well I remember hearing that on the news-cast. The Wolfbeast had escaped someone's private zoo/aviary, and gone on a rampage through the town, and was killed by a pair of...hunters... Wow."

Lynx-O thought about this and nodded. "I do not remember the story, but those hunters we met were meant to kill that beast. We are fortunate that it did happen. Who knows who might have been killed by it had they not. Perhaps you or I."

Pumyra remained silent.

A good deal later, they stood at the modest, yet comfortable looking house of the Thunderian they had sought the last three days. "Well we're here," Pumyra said."

"Yep," Snarfer agreed. He was too tired to say more.

Lynx-O sighed, as weary as the others. "All right, let's talk to him."

Part 10

Part 12

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