Welcome to Gaia! ::

A few days after this role-play.

Tama had been so proud of his human form. So enamored by it, so obsessed with it, that it almost got him killed. And now…

The cat summoned his human form and it appeared. But he could only hold it for a few seconds before — poof! — he was back into feline form. It was as if it were rejecting his will. Little did he know about the effects of a nearly broken starseed.

It would need time to acclimate to the Chaos that had been just so recently forced inside it.

That is when he felt it. For a third time. That same aura and smell of smoke and burning. No. The aura was different.

He placed a hand to his chest. No. It was he that was different.

His body no longer recoiled at a general’s starseed. But his mind was a different matter.

“You b*****d!”

As soon as Faustite entered the room, he — holding on to his human form by a thread — threw a well-aimed punch at the man’s face.



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Tama bit at the man’s boot, kicking with his back legs, furiously. But the general just dragged him across the floor like the sixteen-and-a-half-pounds of fur he was. His fangs were bared and his claws out and his hair raised, but that did not hide the fact that he was very small and very kickable.

What a pathetic thing that a moment earlier thought he could punch a general of the Negaverse in the face.

“I remember you!” The guardian cat hissed. He wondered what it all meant to the man in front of him. What? Had be come here to gloat? “I remember her!”

That woman with an aura that had overwhelmed him. The one who had told him…

Told him that…

“I remember him…”

His violet eyes grew sad for a moment and he stopped his hissing and posturing and just looked at the floor.

What did he remember? Perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t recalled any of it at all.



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Faustite. So that was the b*****d’s name. And he was a general, too.

Probably thought himself high and mighty, too, as he listed off the hierarchy of which he was conveniently placed on top.

Lieutenants, Captains, Generals.

Did he think he was an idiot? He knew as much about the Negaverse as a White Moon cat.

But the general did reveal one thing he had not known before.

Who the woman in his memory was. The Queen.

Perhaps he’d bow to her, but not this man.

“Rank? I’ll do what I want. Thanks.”

You. Faustite. Her. The Queen. Him?

That was more complicated. You see, while he remembered quite a lot as Faustite had implied, there were things he did not remember. He had no memory of powered individuals he had known. But he remembered the normal humans.

And that had created a curious split to one person’s identity.

Erytheia/Yuri. They could no longer be one in his mind.

“He doesn’t matter.” Yuri. That was the only one that existed anymore. “He left me behind.”



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Somehow, he doubted Faustite’s words. Hadn’t he messed up so throughly that he was here now, by some undeserved miracle still alive, listening to him talk about insubordination. He’d respect a person when they earned it.

Tama stared at the pen-tablet. It reminded him a bit of henshin pens. Was that really a starseed embedded in it?

He sniffed it and the smell of burnt metal assaulted his olfactory system.

“I’d prefer a paper manual.”



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Tama looked at Faustite as if he’d burned all the manuals himself in his strange, fiery grate of a torso.

The tablet recognized his face. It started to boot up the manual, as if responding to their conversation. He barely looked at it, could parse it later.

He didn’t need to read it to know the answer he sought right now would not be there. He knew what a manual held. A manual told you ‘how’. How to do that, be this.

But Tama wasn’t interested in ‘how’ to be in the Negaverse. Not yet. Not when another question loomed on his still aching starseed.

“Why?” Tama said, direct and not avoiding. “Why am I here?”



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Tama’s fur puffed up. Valuable? How absurd.

He couldn’t even protect himself, much less anyone else. Much less that one. He certainly didn’t feel very useful. He couldn’t even hold his human form for more than a few seconds at this point.

“I think I need to be alone for a bit. You know, to read this manual.” The cat was clearly lying, but he couldn’t stand to be by Faustite anymore. He couldn’t stand his reasoning, couldn’t stand it one bit. He could be telling the truth or lying, but it didn’t matter to the cat.

He wanted to be alone just as much as he didn’t want to be by himself.



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