Ch. 3 In which Zelgadiss tries to adapt to his cure. And discovers bugs!

here and now, i feel that i'm embracing freedom

even tho i may be alone, that's ok

and looking out to a different sky will disengage me

absence is never the answer, i know, but it serves as my shade

~*~

Zelgadiss woke up to find himself curled up on a rug on the floor. That wasn't too unusual. He slept in strange places all the time.

What -was- odd was that he wasn't wearing any clothes and he couldn't quite remember how he got there.

He sat up and received another shock. There was someone in the bed he was next to.

Amelia.

Zelgadiss froze, feeling much like a deer frozen in the light of a Fireball. The analytical part of his mind commented that this -would- explain why he was on the floor.

Which lead him back to the question of why he was naked.

He paused, forcing himself to stop panicking and THINK.

Fact #1: He was inside a room at what appeared to be an inn. He'd been in a lot of rooms at inns in his life, and they all tended to have similar qualities that the individual feeling of houses and castles lacked.

Fact #2: It was late at night. He could see part of the sky thru the window shudders. According to his internal time sense, it was probably around Midnight.

Fact #3: He was in a room with the Princess of Saillune. Who was asleep and not likely to wake up anytime soon unless he moved around and woke her up.

He wasn't stupid enough to do that.

So what was he doing here?

The last thing he remembered was talking to the Kami back at the cave. Then he had been thrown out of the cave and...

And...

And...

Zelgadiss poked the hole in his memory much like a kid picked at a scab. He had flown out of the cave and hit a tree. And fallen down said tree.

He'd been injured, he remembered. Someone had picked him up and healed him.

He poked the memory some more, trying to get a better picture of what had happened. There was a heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach that he was missing something important.

Wait... Someone had -Picked Him Up-?!

As if that was the poke that was needed, his memory of the day finally flooded forth.

Amelia had picked him up and healed him. She'd been able to pick him up because he had been small.

He had been turned into a cat.

A small kitten, to be precise.

Zelgadiss flinched. 'A beast he was, lest a beast he become', indeed.

Well, at least he wasn't a dog.

He pondered over the rest of the days events. Amelia had evidently decided to adopt him, or at least until she found his owner. He'd ridden on her shoulder most of the day, having felt uncomfortable about being held against her chest, even as a cat.

A fact that he was grateful for. He had enough transgressions against the Princess just by sharing a room without her knowledge on his conscious with out inadvertently putting his hands, er, paws where they shouldn't be.

One of the guardsmen travelling with her had pointed out that he looked a lot 'like that one blue fellow she had travelled with'. Amelia had given his kitten self a searching look before agreeing.

She'd theorized that maybe that he was an escaped chimera project, hiding from one of the Black Sorcerer Guild. She'd seen such things on her travels.

Zelgadiss snorted, remembering the name she had given him with a wiry smile.

'Grey' or 'Grey-kun'.

Short for 'Greywords', his last name. He doubted anyone else had caught that.

And a definite improvement over most cat names. 'Tama-chan' for one. Or 'Snookims'.

His admiration of the Princess rose a few notches.

The rest of the day had been uneventful. Normal travelling, small conversation, boring landscape, all to end up at an inn to spend the night before doing it again in the morning.

The question was, what was he going to do now?

The Kami had said that she would remove his form and memories for most of the day, but not all of it. Considering the form he was in presently, it probably meant that during some part of the day he return to his humanoid chimeric state. The rest of the time he'd be... a cat. With the mind of a kitten.

He grimaced. That wasn't much help. His new found 'cat side' adored Amelia. He could leave, but what would he do? For one thing, he couldn't travel around as a naked chimera. And with his luck, he'd wake up and find himself back in Amelia's room with a head full of cat memories again.

So the logical answer was to continue travelling with Amelia. He had promised Phil that he would keep an eye out for her if he could anyway. Well, maybe his cat side could. If only he could remember during the day, he'd be able to help from behind the scenes even more.

But could he tell her?

He mused over this for a moment. She had seemed happy just to have a small companion or pet to travel with. The guards had been polite, even a bit friendly, but she had seemed lonely to his cat senses.

Would she be less happy if she found out that 'Grey-kun' was actually 'Zelgadiss'?

Probably. He decided. Especially since he acted like a cat. He didn't want her pity, which was bound to happen if she knew. Zelgadiss gave a quiet snicker. How far he had fallen in just one day.

So in the mean time, he'd do what he could to protect her in cat form. He just had to try to remember to remember in his cat form. There was a faint twinge, and he could feel himself start to change. He glanced out the window. It had only been about an hour.

He had to remember, he chanting in his mind as he shrank. He had to remember... he had to remember.... he had to-

There.

Senses alert and straining, he looked around the room, his strange train of thought gone. Something had moved. How dare something small invade -his- territory!?

Well, he'd protect his human from the invader! With a quick pounce, he landed on the shiny skittery thing. It clicked at him and tried to get away, waving its tiny legs at him.

He batted at it a bit, then bit down on it. He'd teach this thing to invade his territory!

Not bad tasting, he mused. And crunchy too!

~*~