[PRP] Are you sure you're a boy? (Masashi and Ruzanski)

[ShinyObsessed]

Masashi was extremely displeased. It was one thing to get dusty, but another thing entirely to be covered from nose to tail in mud. Who knows what was in that mud!? Masashi certainly wasn't thinking about it. He couldn't believe his siblings tossed him into it.

He made little distressed mewls as he hurried towards the watering hole to clean the mud off. Oh it was so gross. And it was between his toes... and on his face... and matted into his tail and... Uuuugh. Without a second thought he waded right into the water and began washing, beginning with between his toes and then his face and pink ears.  

[Princess_Feylin]

It had only been a few days since Ruzanski's mother had left, but Ru was already fairly certain that she was not coming back. She had never been away that long before, and he could only think of two reasons for her to have stayed gone. The first, she was hurt or otherwise incapable of returning. The second, she didn't want to come back. Although he had never been particularly demonstrative, Ru loved his mum and sincerely hoped that it was the former, even if that meant she was in pain or in danger, because it was preferable to the alternative.

And he had to keep his sisters safe. They had not really learned any of the survival skills Ru had picked up on his own, and he felt responsible for them. It was a struggle in his mind every morning, whether he ought to take them in search of their mother, or whether he ought to just try to find someplace safe for them to stay while he sought her out. Their wishes seemed to be more along the lines of keeping him close so that they wouldn't be completely alone, which he could understand, but it was a hindrance because it forced him to do all of his tracking at night and waste most of his days.

Today he had gotten away from his sisters by saying that he needed to hunt, which was true, and telling them that they were too loud and would scare the prey, which was also true. He wasn't big enough to take down real prey, so he had to content himself with smaller animals, who were naturally more wary. He was listening for their sounds as he crouched along the bank of a river when he hear the approach of something smaller than himself mewling. Hungry and tired of waiting, Ru didn't bother to wait until he got a good look at his prey. He just pounced as soon as it came into range, aiming for its blue body.  

[ShinyObsessed]

Or at least he would have started with his toes and then gone on to wash his ears if it weren't for being pounced on out of nowhere! Masashi went down all to easily. It was pretty pathetic actually. He tumbled into the ground with some dark thing on top of him and he would have let out a scream if he hadn't had the wind knocked clean out of him.

All he could do was raggedly bring in air to yell for his mother, but then he realized that she'd not be able to hear him from where he was anyway. Nooo! "Get off me. Get off me. Get off me! I'm sorry! Don't eat me! I'm not edibleble!" Masashi wailed once he got enough breath in his body.  

[Princess_Feylin]

The fact that his prey was speaking was a surprise to Ru, and he wasn't hugely pleased by it. Everything he'd ever killed or attacked in the past had put up some sort of a fight, if he gave it the chance, and some of the unfortunate creatures had screamed, but none of them had done so in an articulate manner. Ru wasn't entirely sure he felt comfortable killing something which was begging him not to kill it.

With a frustrated sigh he heaved himself off of the blue thing he'd pinned and stalked a few paces away, his green eyes narrowed irritably as he watched it and listened to it wail. He had never seen anything quite like it before, but he knew his experience of the world was pretty limited, and so that didn't really upset him. He was curious as to what, exactly, he had managed to take down, but he doubted any answers would be forthcoming until the wailing started.

"Stop that," he said sharply. "No one's hurting you. At least, not yet."

He paused for a few moments to let the implied threat sink in. Having grown up with siblings, even if they were both girls, Ru knew the value of a well-put and well-timed threat. Of course, his sisters knew how far they dared push him before he would actually seek vengeance or take violent action, and they knew how far he would go in both before their claims of kinship kicked in and protected them from the full extent of his wrath.

"What are you anyway?" he demanded. "Because I've never seen anything like you, and I'm not entirely sure that you aren't edible."  

[ShinyObsessed]

Masashi stopped wailing as soon as the other started talking instead of biting and eating. That was a relief. Or at least it was a relief until the other said something about him possibly being edible. With a sniffle and and short horrified gasp he sat up and peered at the other with huge baby eyes (that usually got him whatever he wanted from his mother).

"I promise I'm not edibleble." He had serious trouble with that word, and he knew it. He frowned a little at not being able to say it properly. "You're a lion." He was surprised. Surely lions didn't eat cheepard (what he privately called himself and his siblings) babies?! "Uh, anyway, my Mom's a leopard, and my Dad's a cheetah. So I'm a ... um, cheepard?" He hoped his mangling of 'edible' and his blatant stating of the obvious didn't make him sound stupid, not to mention his made up word.  

[Princess_Feylin]

Ruzanski gave the sniveling ball of blue fur a skeptical look. He was not convinced that the pathetic creature couldn't be edible at need, but he certainly wasn't sure that he wanted to go through all the difficulty of slaughtering it while it whined and whimpered and cried. Which wasn't to say he didn't enjoy scaring him, because he did have a streak of the sadistic, but he was pretty sure he was not going to end up eating him, or even killing him.

"Of course I'm a lion," Ru said tiredly. The adrenaline of the hunt was leaving him, though he remained wary. All this weakness and whimpering could be an act, after all.

He might have asked what else he would be, but then the blue thing went on talking and explained what he was (finally). A...cheepard? Ru had never heard of such a thing, but that didn't mean they couldn't exist, obviously. He didn't see, though, how a cat could find a member of a different species attractive enough to have cubs with. Maybe this cub's oddness was a mental defect from a bad cross.

"That's...interesting," he said. "Did you know lions will eat cheetahs and leopards sometimes?"

His mother had told a story where it happened, and the lion had been a bad creature in the story, but he was still of an age where the difference between truth and tale was a bit blurry. Particularly with the more realistic ones his mother told. Thinking of her made him scowl. She had abandoned him and his sisters, and he was certain it was deliberate. He wasn't pleased with her at the moment.  

[ShinyObsessed]

Masashi gave him a look of such horror that any onlookers would be surprised his heart hadn't stopped right there. Lions ate cheetahs and leopards?! That really wasn't cool. Especially with the situation he was in.

"Why would they do that!? We're not tasty at all!" Masashi was thinking about running home as fast as he could. Surely his parents could defeat him against this young lion. "Besides! I bet you could catch something much bigger'n me! I'm barely a mouthful!" His ears were back against his skull and he was ever so slowly inching his paws back to he could bolt for it.  

[Princess_Feylin]

Ru wrinkled his nose in disgust as the cheetah-leopard went back to repeating that he wasn't any good to eat. He was not impressed in the slightest by the blue fellow's protestations, but he certainly didn't intend to eat him. He'd already said as much, for goodness' sake, and while Ru was many things, he was not a liar. He didn't even play the word games his mother had tried to teach him and his sisters, where he said something which was technically true, but led people to believe something other than what he meant. It irked him that his word seemed to be in doubt.

"I'm not," he repeated, giving the negative both emphasis and an exasperated edge, "going to eat you."

He was sitting down, mostly relaxed, in a posture which did not indicate that he was likely to go pouncing after anyone. He was still alert, but he was not attack-ready at this point. His tail twitched, but some part of him was always twitching or in motion. Despite his best efforts, Ru was not much good at holding still for long periods of time, even when he was stalking prey. He had difficulties with it.

"Probably you should go home though. Clearly you're not safe out here."  

[ShinyObsessed]

With the second assurance that he wouldn't be eaten Masashi relaxed a little. "Oh. Um, thanks for not eating me. And I'm not going home till I get all this mud off." He pulled out his determined side. He'd definitely not go back till he was clean so that his family wouldn't mock him, unless of course there was a chance of being eaten, then he'd certainly flee home as fast as he could.

Masashi kept one eye on the lion that almost ate him and stepped into the water to wash. First he cleaned his paws, then his ears and finally rinsed all that disgusting mud off completely. What was revealed was a teal blue cub with pink markings and ears. "I heard Daddy telling Mommy that the hunting was good on the other side of the water hole." He said as a peace offering.  

[Princess_Feylin]

"That's good to know," Ru said, meaning the bit of information about the hunting being good. He really couldn't care less whether the part-cheetah, part-leopard had plans for washing off the mud, though he wasn't much surprised by his decision to do so.

Of course he would want to wash the mud off. That was exactly the sort of response Ru would have had, had their positions been reversed. And if Ru had been a girl and possessed of less common sense than your average hyena. He sighed in exasperation and told himself firmly that if the blue moron had parents to talk to each other about the hunting, he probably also had parents who were inclined to worry about him, and so it was absolutely not Ru's job to hang around and make sure nothing happened to him.

"Good luck," he bid Masashi, turning and walking away. He had two sisters to look after, and there was nothing in the world which required him to add to the number of people he was looking out for. Besides, he didn't even like the odd hybrid. He was too soft and weak, and probably stupid. He'd just have to hope he could scare up a hare or something on his way back to his sisters.  

[ShinyObsessed]

Freshly clean and in possession of all his parts Masashi went back to the den to tell Mommy all about the weird and frightening lion cu-...On second thought, maybe he should just leave out the bit about almost being eaten by a lion juvenile. Yes. That'd be best.