Why were those idiots always so noisy?

Pumyra, lying on her back with her hands behind her head, lifted her elbows so that her arms plugged her ears. The racket inside the Black Pyramid's common room lessened but did not disappear.

They lived here, all five of Mumm-Ra's generals. It wasn't like she had anywhere else to be, although the company left a lot to be desired. Even the dog gladiators in the cells below The Pit had behaved with more civility than these two. Eyes closed, she scrunched up her nose, trying to block out their voices through sheer force of will. Her bare foot, its leg crossed over the other, bounced in an increasing tempo until she could stand the noise no longer.

"Will you mangy mutants shut up?!" she roared, springing off the bench. The stark, cold, artificial lighting, the recycled air, and her abrupt return to vertical made her dizzy

How did she get here, and what had she been doing? wondered a small, anxious voice inside her head. She scowled until it lapsed, again, into silence.

Addicus and Kaynar looked at her, one glowering resentfully under shelf-like brows, the other faking an expression of polite interest.

Deliberately holding her gaze, Addicus bit a raw fish in half and then threw the other half at Kaynar. It hit with a wet smack, trailing guts down the jackalman's muzzle, and the game was on again. Hooting with vicious laughter, Kaynar picked up a greasy drumstick and clobbered Addicus with it. Addicus fell back with Kaynar on top of him. They wrestled around on the floor, bumping into the wall and the furniture, while dishes of rat-prepared food fell on them and broke.

They rolled one way, then back, colliding with the table's single leg, which wrenched the bolts out of the floor tiles. A bowl of jellied slugs slid off and upended all over Pumyra's feet. Slime oozed between her toes.

With a hair-raising screech, she dove on top of the monkey and the jackalman, but she was fighting for blood. She got it, too, when her claws raked across Addicus's face, leaving five gaping furrows from just below his eye to the opposite corner of his mouth.

Addicus bellowed in pain and threw a punch in her direction that missed. Her knuckles smashed into his already flat nose, driving the back of his head into the floor. He immediately went limp.

Kaynar doubled over in laughter at the sight of his partner, his open eyes half-rolled up, his tongue lolling, orange goop mashed into his mane. "What a nincompoop!" he howled gleefully.

Still tingling with a rage that felt like lightning shooting through her veins, Pumyra kicked him flat and then shoved her forearm into his windpipe. "Shut up," she growled into his face. "Shut up. Shut. Up."

"Ooo, you know I like it rough," Kaynar purred maliciously, if somewhat constricted. "Here, pretty kitty."

She dug her arm harder into his throat. He fluttered his eyelashes at her.

That time, her screech could have shattered glass. She raised her arm, fingers locked, claws extended, fully intending to rip the mass of putty he called a brain out through his nostrils.

Long fingers closed on her wrist and squeezed.

"Let go!" she rasped.

Vultaire did, so she jumped to safety, crouching low like the cornered animal she was. Breathing hard, she resisted the urge to scream obscenities. She hated being touched. She especially hated being restrained. It reminded her too much of . . . him . . . who had always grabbed her, held her back. Lessened her.

The door whooshed shut behind Vultaire. He studied the scene through narrow yellow eyes, his hands clasped behind his folded wings. Addicus lay insensate, blood mixing with drool, his sweaty bulk taking up half the room. His fish-breath could have knocked out a comolbur. The table and the rugs were a disaster.

Pumyra bristled from her corner. Vultaire's disapproval radiated from every feather. He didn't need to speak. She hoped he wouldn't. His stupid voice grated on her nerves.

Sober at last, Kaynar sat up, wiping strings of melted cheese and chunks of gravy out of his fur. He then licked the mess off his hand.

Revolted, Pumyra shot to her feet.

Her movement caught Vultaire's beady eye. "I wouldn't have expected you to sink to their level," the vulture observed.

"Who, a barbarian like me?" Pumyra asked with scathing sweetness. She and the three mutants dressed alike, in ragged, fur-lined skins, in leather thongs that wrapped hands and feet, in mismatched bits of metal and bone armor. It amazed her that the cats had never made that connection. Vultaire alone dressed as befit his former status. One of the reasons Slithe, Kaynar, and Addicus despised him so much.

"Yes, I suppose you're right," the expatriate returned without a trace of shame. "You and I never quite saw eye to eye, did we?"

"No," she said. She let her loathing drip from the single word like albumen.

Vultaire shrugged crooked shoulders. "So you say. I don't suppose those lunkheads left us anything to eat?"

"Sure," Pumyra said. She bent, scooped up a handful of slug jelly, and then flung it at Vultaire. "Knock yourself out."

A perverse pleasure flowed hot at the sight of Vultaire, staring in shock at her through a mask of slime. Head high, shoulders tense, and fists shaking, Pumyra marched out of the common room.

Sometimes, she longed for somewhere else to be.

She paced the blue-lit catwalk outside her quarters, hunched over her crossed arms, her cold hands tucked into her armpits. She couldn't work with these animals. It had been better out there, on her own, answering to no one but her beloved Master. Here, armed lizard guards and tattletale rat slaves kept them cloistered in one of the cell blocks. The monkey and the jackalman both were too lazy to consider breaking out and preferred gorging themselves all day long in the common room, growing fat with inaction. The only reason Pumyra didn't fight her way out was that she couldn't dream of disobeying her Master. Her love for Him transcended all, often replacing the need for sleep, or quelling her appetite. All she needed to live was Him.

But she had failed Him, hadn't she? She shook her head to rid it of the buzzing flies of doubt and confusion. She had let Him down, somehow.

She had allowed Lion-O to slip from His grasp yet again.

She had failed.

This, then, was her punishment. Boxed into close quarters with those fools Kaynar and Addicus, forced to answer to that smug, condescending Vultaire. She could not be trusted outside the Pyramid without Slithe for an escort, though she'd heard faint whispering doubt about the lizard leader, too, among the slaves. Distrust. Disfavor.

Mumm-Ra was disappointed in their performance so far. So He was punishing them.

"Master!" Pumyra lifted her head and called for Him, her love and her pain throbbing in her voice, which echoed down the empty corridor. He did not reply. She turned, calling the other way. "Master! Please forgive me! I serve only you, Master!"

The emptiness mocked her with memories of . . . him . . . walking away while she lay, trapped and dying, beneath a fallen block of masonry.

A sob caught in her throat. "Master," she whimpered, leaning against the bulkhead. She slid down it as tears poured down her face. "Please . . ."

No one answered.

..::~*~::..

Felline had forgotten how much Tygra and the others didn't know about the events of that day.

"You lost the Sword of Omens in a duel?" Tygra bellowed. He turned to face Lion-O, but the yoke of the Feliner jerked under his hands and the aircraft lost quite a bit of height, causing everyone to grab something solid. Busy resuming their altitude and calming the shrieking alarms, Tygra couldn't strangle his little brother, though clearly, he wanted to.

Lion-O winced. "Come on, Tygra, that was months ago. No need to shout –"

"And then you dueled the same guy again to get it back?" Tygra smacked the heel of his hand into his forehead and groaned. "What is wrong with you?"

"You weren't there," Lion-O said, struggling to keep his temper in check. "Trust me, this guy was on the prowl, and once he targeted me, he wasn't going to take no for an answer."

"Didn't you say he started to walk away after you said no?" Tygra said, seizing on an opportunity to poke holes in Lion-O's defense.

Lion-O bristled. "Maybe he would have walked, maybe not. There was something about him. He put our pride on the line. You would have done the same thing I did."

"Like fun I would have! I would have left the scene, especially since I knew people were waiting for me."

"And gotten a dagger in the back! I'm telling you, Tygra, this guy wasn't above taking a sword he wanted from a corpse."

"Lucky for you Felline was there, then."

"I had it handled!"

"This explains a lot," Cheetara said mildly while the brothers continued to shout at each other.

"That we're all crazy to follow this kid?" Panthro rumbled. He stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it, looking as though he wished he could render himself temporarily deaf. "I knew that from the start."

Tygra snarled through his sinuses. "You always let your emotions dictate your actions. You should never have let some mixed-species nobody worm under your skin like that."

"Everything turned out all right!" Lion-O insisted.

"Except now the Sword is broken," WilyKat said under his breath to his sister.

Tygra heard him. He grimaced in a way that showed clenched teeth, as though he was about to be ill but was determined to keep it down. He spoke with remarkable constraint, though. "All right, enough. That's in the past. This is now. Where do we find an itinerant swordsmith?"

His new clothes made him look older than twenty-one, a veteran soldier of the throne. Like Lion-O, his two-toned garments were edged in a golden alloy, and loose black trousers were tucked into the poleyns strapped over high, toeless boots. An open fur collar framed his jaw, and a short-sleeved tunic in black and gray supported twin pauldrons. His two favorite pistols rode in holsters attached to his utility belt, Javan's whip in a loop on the back.

Satisfied that the Feliner would hold her course, he fiddled with the strap of his fingerless gloves. "We can't continue to fly around Third Earth until we run into him, you know."

"Your superior intellect makes a fool of me again, Tygra," Lion-O said sarcastically.

"My intellect has nothing to do with it."

The brothers glared at each other. Felline smiled down at her lap, relieved that this, at least, was back to normal.

"I think we should split up," Cheetara said. She was resplendent in crimson. Her top bared her cleavage but hugged her midsection like a jealous lover, its one sleeve bell-shaped, tied tight at the wrist. A thick golden bracelet, which, she had hinted, held several secrets inside, adorned the opposite wrist. Her pants clung to her long, strong legs, paneled in armor, though they left her calves uncovered. Matching bracelets ringed her ankles. She crossed them, sitting forward. "Tygra and I could visit Swordtown."

"Yeah!" WilyKat cried. He jumped up, his tail the only thing that kept him from overbalancing on his coltish legs. He had cut his brown and white mane, shearing it in the back but leaving it long enough to flop across his forehead, which revealed his lopsided ears. He wore the same type of goggles as Kit's atop his head. His forest-green jumpsuit supported numerous harnesses and pouches across his chest, around his hips, and down his legs, its walnut-brown bell sleeves slashed to show the cream-colored shirt beneath. He held up two fingers in a V, his hand encased in a fingerless glove. "Kit and I can take the roads from there. Someone ought to have heard of him."

"Oh, no, you don't," Panthro disagreed. He stood up, scowling down at the young wildcat. His impressive sideburns, once black as soot, had grown long and white in the months since he had joined them, though his topknot was as glossily black as ever. His black harem trousers were familiar, but he now wore a sleeveless maroon shirt, one with a high collar closed around his thick neck with a heavy metal ring. He poked a finger between Kat's eyes, his prosthetic hands gauntleted in maroon padding. A segmented belt wider than Kat's head was long creaked around his waist. "I'm not letting you two run off alone again. You'll stay here with me. Repairing the Sword isn't our only problem. We've got to pinpoint the location of the final Power Stone before Ol' Scabby does."

"Oh, come on, Panthro," WilyKit whined. She jumped up to stand with her brother. They assumed identical postures, arms folded, hips and heads cocked like rifles. "You have Snarf to keep you company."

Panthro shot the petcat a suspicious look through narrowed eyes. Mischievously, Snarf held out a paw as though holding a spoon and said, "Aah."

A muscle jumped in Panthro's temple. Felline stifled a giggle.

"Besides," Kat went on matter-of-factly, "we'll use our hoverboards to save time. There's no way you can come with us. You're too heavy."

The muscle jumped again. "You callin' me fat?" Panthro demanded.

"No," Kit said with a coquettish tilt of her shoulders. "Sturdy."

"Why you little . . ." Panthro left the insult hanging and threw himself back into his seat, which squealed in protest. "Fine!" he exploded. He glared at Lion-O and Felline as if they were responsible for this insubordination. "That means you two better find where the Drifter calls home."

..::~*~::..

The necromechs had destroyed the original velocycles long ago when they had attacked the ThunderTank, but the berbils had outfitted the Feliner to make up for their loss, a surprise for their feline friends. Tygra and Cheetara boarded one of the new hoverbikes, equipped with the same hover technology as the twins' boards, only about ten times as powerful. Cheetara leaned into Tygra, her long arms wound around his waist, her chin on his shoulder. He twisted the throttle and the bike purred.

"Be careful out there, little brother," he said, his brown eyes serious. "Stay out of trouble. You can't rely on the Sword anymore, and I'm in no hurry to be king again."

"Pumyra isn't here to report our plans to Mumm-Ra. We should be able to fly under his radar for a few days," Felline reminded him. She looked at Cheetara. "Do you have your locator?"

"On and transmitting," Cheetara, who wore one of Panthro's new location devices clipped to her upper arm, assured her. The devices could not communicate with each other, but the Feliner's computers could locate each of the cats at any time. Splitting up may not have been the safest idea, but it was the best one they had.

WilyKit snapped her goggles over eyes, and WilyKat buttoned his own locator into one of his pouches.

"Be back here in three days," Felline said. "No excuses."

Both gave her a thumbs-up.

"I'll ask Hattanz-O to lend me something until the Sword of Omens is repaired," Lion-O promised Tygra.

"Good luck."

"And to you," Lion-O returned. The brothers briefly clasped hands and then Lion-O stepped back.

The canopy sealed, and Tygra's velocycle followed Kit and Kat out of the Feliner's bay in a rush of displaced air.

Lion-O hopped into the second cycle and looked expectantly at Felline. She nodded at him, but first turned to Panthro.

"If you find anything to do with the next Stone, come get us immediately," she said, patting the locator she wore clipped to her belt.

"Likewise," he rumbled. His prosthetic hand sought his topknot, and he cast a furtive glance at Lion-O, who revved the velocycle's engine. "Try to keep him out of trouble, will you?"

"I'll try, but it was my idea for him to fight the Duelist a second time to win back the Sword," she said, and then she laughed at his expression. She reached up, as high as she could, and brushed a kiss on his whiskery jaw. "We'll be back soon, Panthro, don't worry."

"How can I not worry?" he grumped, crossing his arms in his best imitation of a walled fortress. "Buncha kids."

"Snyar snyar," Snarf agreed, sitting on Panthro's big foot.

Gingerly, Felline slid in behind Lion-O.

"Hold tight," he told her, and sealed the canopy. The cockpit flickered to life around them, the noise of the engine and the wind outside cutting back to a low hum.

Though Felline couldn't bring herself to lean against him the way Cheetara had Tygra, she put her hands on his waist and tried not to gulp too loudly or grip with her knees too strongly as the velocycle leaped into the bright blue sky. The Feliner disappeared quickly into the concealing clouds behind them.


A/N: **EDIT** The last section of this chapter is new and was added on 8/21/19 in response to some very good comments my reviewers made. I feel like I originally ended this update too soon, so I hope this helps. :3

It's so nice when I feel inspired to write, and the words flow out (almost) effortlessly. That's largely thanks to you, Dear Readers, and all the encouragement you give me. And on that note:

Reviewer Thanks! KelseyAlicia, Heart of the Demons, St4r Hunter, Atea1793, Lionessa, The Night Whisperer, Hestia28 (hee, your happiness makes writing this so worthwhile! Thank you!), Seeds of Destruction, rosewhip889, and LunaStone115.

All my love,

Anne