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Predatory Puddles (11) : Summer rains aren’t uncommon, so finding puddles dotting your path isn’t in itself particularly surprising or abnormal. However, as you walk past them, you feel the sensation of being watched, like eyes are on you. If you look into the puddles, you don’t see your reflection--nor the reflection of anything familiar to you. Instead, you see strange, decayed buildings, and odd, rotting plants. Something is watching you through the puddles, but before you can investigate, between one blink and the next, it’s all gone. When you look back, the puddles are oddly non-reflective, and then in the next blink, they’re all gone. The feeling of being watched doesn’t fade, though.
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Splash!
Splish, splash!
Slosh and slap!
The guardian cat bounced from puddle to puddle sliding and slipping around in the water, playing to his heart’s content. His paws pit-patting in the water. Swish and splat! He ignored the looks and the chatter, but happily played around with a little kid jumping in the puddles, both of them getting soaked much to the mom’s annoyance. Moving on when the various puddles dried out or he got chased away. Mel loved playing in the water. He enjoyed the way it sprayed around him, breaking into little spears of light and color. The way it splattered and scattered was just fun. F. U. N. Fun! He even found neat things in the water like coins and shiny metals, there was even a little red star charm that he just had to collect. He had gotten much better at collecting stuff in his little subspace, not that he understood how he was doing it.
He continued playing around until something made him pause. He felt like he was being watched and not by the humans that were still passing by. Unexpected movement from the puddle he was about to play in had the cat study it. He was expecting to see his own golden eyes staring back at him, or at least the buildings around him but what he saw wasn’t any of that. There were destroyed buildings. Crumbling and falling down all covered in dead and yucky plants. Seriously just nasty. Who did it? He looked up and down and up and down and up and down but really couldn’t figure out where that reflection was coming from. It wasn’t anything from around him. All the buildings looked normal and other than some brightly colored flowers here and there, there were no dead plants. Nothing matched up with the puddle. Not even those red lights that seemed to get closer and closer.
Confused and yet curious he started to reach out only to blink and find that the puddle was now no longer showing anything. Not the destroyed mystery city nor the city that was around him. Mel stuck his face over the puddle and couldn’t even see a shadow of himself in the bizarre puddle. He was about to just smash his paw into the water when it was suddenly gone. Just… poof!
Between one blink and the next there wasn’t a drop of water around him. All the puddles were gone. He hadn’t gotten a chance to play in any of the nearby puddles! Travesty! Farce! Perversion! Sham! Absurd! Just plain wrong! It was just wrong that Mel hadn’t had the chance to frolic among the water! UNFAIR!
BOO!
The guardian cat blew a raspberry at the now empty puddle, quite upset at his fun time being ruined. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched but it wasn’t a big deal for him. He was more concerned about finding another body of water he could cool off in. That really was the best way to enjoy summer! Splashing and playing in water… just as long as you didn’t end up in some messed up destroyed city or something.
