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Hiro was walking home from the very disappointing 'mission to Mau', idly trotting across the rooftops. His head perked up, thinking he sensed a familiar energy signature, but it disappeared almost immediately. Alunite must have been done for the evening, Hiro thought. Ah well, he'd catch up with his favourite Eternal senshi some other time.

A cat scampered into the alley below Hiro. He didn't pay it much attention, turning his back until a shrieked mroooowl and a crash had him darting to the edge of the roof and peering down. The smaller cat flailed from within an open dumpster.

Hiro snickered. The snickers evolved into chuckles as he watched the cat try to get out. Clearly it had severaly misjudged a jump.

"Stupid earth cat," he taunted from his high vantage point. "I can do better than that and I've only got one eye!"

It wasn't like normal cats would understand English or anything. But Hiro felt a little better about his wasted night, lounging there and laughing at a cat even less fortunate than himself.

Hiro was enjoying himself until the cat spoke back. An ear flicked backwards. A Mauvian? He did a double-take. A Mauvian who knew Hiro's name? That voice was kind of familiar...

"Alunite?" Hiro yelped. What. The. Hell.

In contrast to Alunite's failed attempt at scaling the building, Hiro made a graceful trip down. He leapt from rooftop to windowsill, to awning, to the edge of the dumpster where he perched precariously and stared down at the other cat. Definitely not an earth cat, Hiro was forced to re-evaluate. The trapped cat was a very unnatural shade of pink-and-black, in markings no earth breed of feline had ever sported.

"How are you a cat?" Hiro demanded. "You're not a cat! I would have noticed."

There were rumours that the Zodiacs had a cat who had not always been a cat. But Hiro was pretty sure that their Mauvian had also never been a senshi. This made no sense at all.

A cardboard box was half-in and half-out of the dumpster next to Hiro. One paw reached out and tipped it properly in, landing on an existing pile of garbage and providing an extra 'step' out of the giant metal bin. "Jump on to that," he advised Alunite. "And then quickly out. If it flattens under your weight, I'll have to go find someone with human arms to pick you out."

And Hiro was thinking Fluorite would really appreciate Hiro grabbing her for this sight. So Alunite might want to follow Hiro's advice and not end up needing a proper rescue.

"You didn't see anyone do this to you or anything?" Hiro asked. One ear flopped down. "Huh, my first guess was 'white moon senshi out to get us', but maybe not... Unless they were very ninja."

Hiro eye narrowed. That could be it. Alunite never saw the attack coming, some dastardly senshi sneaking up behind him and taking him out with some kind of... of... Hmm. Hiro was stuck trying to work out how this would happen. Maybe there was a Senshi of Cats who had the ability to turn people into cats? Alunite's own senshi abilities might be the reason why he'd become some sort of faux-Mauvian, rather than a normal cat. Shrugging, Hiro decided he'd go with that until other evidence presented itself.

"So how long have you been a cat?" Had that been Alunite he'd sensed a few minutes ago, or simply a break in the Mauvian natural aura suppressant? "Can't have been long. Your jumping needs work." Among other feline skills. Alunite did not a graceful-looking cat make. (Hiro spared no thought to how badly he himself might do as a human.)

Huh. Annoying to have the senshi ruled out. Though it could easily have been another senshi. Or, well, no, maybe not the Knights. Camelot had been a pretty open guy and fairly neutral about things. Maybe not all of them felt the same, but the ability to turn a person into a cat didn't sound like something the Pages or Knights or whatever could pull off. (Hell, he'd almost consider if a diabolical Negaverse plot, except why would they be taking out their own?)

Hiro sighed. More investigation needed before a conclusion could be reached. Ah well, he'd keep an ear out.

"Well, I suppose we need to inform Tanzanite," Hiro decided. "Maybe I should check with Zinkenite if he's heard anything. His spy network is usually decent." One way or another, they'd get to the bottom of this.

Alunite's excuse drew a snort from Hiro. "It isn't shrinking that's the problem - it's your new centre of gravity. You have no idea how to move as a cat." Silly two-legged things, humans were. Four legs gave much better balance - not that you'd know it to look at Alunite right now. "Alright, clearly you need some training in how to be a cat. Who knows how long this is going to last, after all."

Hiro nodded, belatedly recalling that Alunite also worked for Zinkenite's 'Veritas' organisation. "Well, let's aim to meet up with him first, then. He should be able to take you side-along to the Negaverse - I'm not sure I could manage it, myself."

Much as Hiro hated to admit failure in anything, the teleportation skills of Negacats were lesser to those of their human counterparts. Hiro could move himself in and out of the Negaverse, no problem. Perhaps even something smaller. But another cat that was so close to himself in size? Hiro wasn't sure how well that would go. Easier to find Zinkenite and put him to work.

"We'll train on the way," Hiro decided. He waited for Alunite to point them in the right direction before deciding. "Jumping first. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it-" a quick glare suggested that Alunite really, really wanted to accept it, "- is 'the ground is lava'. Spend as little time on it as possible."

To demonstrate, Hiro leapt onto a nearby trash can. From it, to a pile of abandoned construction materials. He paused and looked over his shoulder at Alunite.

"Only into and out of the Negaverse," Hiro explained. "Not around town or anything. Sorry, no kitty taxi service here."

Annoying, but Hiro could deal with it. So what if the human officers got to teleport around like like crazy? As long as Hiro could enter and exit the Negaverse when he needed to, he was perfectly fine using his own four paws. Cats were superior to humans when it came to endurance and the ability to stay on one's feet all day, of course. The humans needed the handicap.

If Hiro had known what Alunite was thinking, he would have blown a gasket. This was not a game, Alunite! This was training! Incredibly serious training!

As it was, all Hiro could see was that Alunite was learning to gauge his jumps, where to aim and how much force to apply to the leaps in order to safely land again. If Alunite was a little wobbly compared to Hiro, well, that was just natural, wasn't it? It was hard to be this good.

"Have you got jumping down?" Hiro asked after several minutes of travel. There were, unfortunately, several places where they had only normal ground to cross. But once they were out to the street there were stairs and doorsteps and those little / signs where each side leant against the other. Plenty of things for a cat to jump on. Spying a wooden fence coming up (some kids playground on the other side of something), Hiro warned, "Time to test your balance."

A leap, a graceful arc in the air and then Hiro continued trotting across the thin top of the picket fence. If it wasn't for the slight 'up, down, up, down' as Hiro moved across the ^^^^^^^ pointed tops, he might as well have been on flat ground. This, Alunite, was the grace of a cat. And Hiro would do his best to beat it into his suddenly-feline pupil.

Hiro paused when the sound of a feline yelp reached his ears. Looking behind him, he found no Alunite. With a sigh, Hiro turned a delicate 180 on top of the fence and walked back a few paces. He peered over the side of the fence, the look on his face very familiar to anyone who'd seen an 'excuse me wtf r u doing?' cat macro on the Internet.

"What did you do that for?" Hiro asked curiously. It wasn't that hard to walk a fence, was it?