As the young woman with soft pink hair left the bookstore, turning back once to wave enthusiastically, a nearby ear perked. Two eyes blinked lazily before a content yawn was followed by the cat in question un-loafing herself to stand up and stretch, from her whiskers all the way to the sideways v of her half-length tail.
You see, this cat had been watching the human as well as could be from her perch. Or rather, she'd surreptitiously followed the human for half a block before the girl had entered this store; though not, the cat noticed, before circling the entrance a couple of times and a copious amount of wringing her own hands.
Humans were odd creatures. Hitherto the tortie cat had found nothing particularly charming about them, from the slow oldies to the screaming youngsters - but this human...
----
Someone was following her, she was certain of it. The hair on the back of her neck had been standing up for a couple of streets, but every time Tibbie looked behind her there'd been no-one there. Well, that wasn't entirely true - the first time there'd been no-one there but a small black and red flash of movement, but the second time a family had been walking behind her. The third had yielded completely different pedestrians moving in her wake and frankly she was getting a bit confused here.
Was this the beginning of some horror movie? In the middle of the day? That seemed to be a bit of a silly time to be up to something nefarious, in her opinion, but then she sat heavily on the lawfully good side and was probably not the person to be asking in the first place.
Which really didn't help at all. The fourth time she turned around she did it with a bit of nervous flair, but the only one there was a startled bird who squawked indignantly and quickly took flight.
No... actually, that wasn't quite true - as Tibbie looked behind her, fists clenched, breath heaving in nervous gasps and eyes just a bit wild, she clearly saw something moving.
She made a strangled sound and took half a step back before her brain computed the fact that the movement had been so low to the ground that it couldn't have been made by a human following her. Unless they were literally crawling on their belly. She stopped, scrunched her eyes shut and took a deep breath - probably not the best action if she was actually being stalked by a villain, but nothing at all happened for the few seconds she took before being ready to face the world again. Slowly, she opened her eyes, blinked, and did a quick scan of her surrounding - absolutely nothing had changed. Just as she thought so, there was another flash of black and red movement, but even the quick, panicked jerk of her head wasn't fast enough to catch what it was.
And again, it definitely didn't look big enough to be human.
Right, this was getting too spooky for her liking. Hunching her shoulders and throwing a defiant glare at her surroundings, the young woman quickly strode off back to her home. She was having absolutely none of this creepy stuff, thank you very much.
