Username: Embergleam
Kitten #: 1
Cat Name: Rosydawn
Gender: Female
Rank: Mediator
Clan: In The Wake Of GiantsAge: 1 Year
Prompt: Rosydawn may have been born in the wilds, but she has the luxury-loving heart of a kittypet. Never is this more evident than when she's got the time to properly enjoy a good sunbeam. Simply basking in the sun for a few moments isn't enough. Oh no, she has an entire
ritual she goes through, a rite of ritual purification and smug hedonism distilled down to its finest form.
It starts, as all good things do, with a proper grooming session. She begins with her claws, systematically ridding them of any lingering grime left missed in previous grooming sessions. Then she turns her attention to her paws- or, more specifically, to the burrs that like to turn the curls behind each paw into helpless nests of snarls. Said burrs are banished with utmost prejudiced, pitched into the woods to never again inflict their presence upon her. From there she progresses up her legs, paying special attention to the soft, fluffy patches behind each front leg. (All manner of creepy crawly pests like to gather there, and that simply
will not do. Begone, pests! Befoul the temple of her body no longer!) Her tail deserves its own chapter, if only for all the leaves, twigs, and other miscellany she manages to groom out of it. Once that mess is dealt with, it's onto the comparatively simple parts: her chest, belly, and back. A thorough face-washing completes step one of her little ritual.
Only once she is immaculate, every curl and whisker in place, does she leap up onto a comfortably flat surface and settle in. It's elegant at first, a perfect loaf of caramel-colored cat, but as time goes on all that perfect posturing starts to fall by the wayside. A paw comes untucked. Her tail stretches out backwards. Doziness sets in, making her eyelids droop and her head heavy. Eventually she abandons all pretense of verticality and
melts, sprawling full-length in the sun with every limb outstretched to its utmost.
This part is
not elegant, a rare departure from her typical mien. Instead it's awkward and gawky and... a little bit silly-looking, if we're being honest, but that makes it all the more earnest. Here is Rosydawn at her rawest and most unfiltered, just her and her unabashed sun worship.
The final step in this whole process is murmuring a prayer: to Starclan, for guiding her to the Wake, to the Sun, for always warming her, and to all listening powers, that her time in sun might never be cut short.
Then, at last, she sleeps, and dreams of all the things that make life wonderful: warmth, softness, beauty, and blessed
sunlight.(442/500 words!)
Username: Embergleam
Kitten #: 2
Cat Name: Riverrun
Gender: Female
Rank: Hunter
Clan: In The Wake Of GiantsAge: 1 Year
Prompt: (Meant to continue directly from Rosydawn's entry!)...at least until Riverrun comes along to ruin her fun.
Two-legs have a saying about actions having equal but opposite reactions. Riverrun is the 'equal but opposite' to Rosydawn. The bane of neat-freaks and sun-worshippers everywhere, she's never met a body of water she didn't like, and routinely makes it
everyone's problem.
Take, for example, the humble mud puddle. Most cats would give such a nuisiance a wide berth. Riverrun, on the other paw, views mud pits as equal parts challenge and opportunity. Why carefully navigate around them when you can merrily sproing around the edges, mud squishing between your pawpads? Why flail for balance when one can simply embrace falling into the muddy depths? Once you've already got mud on your fur, is there really any harm in rolling around in a puddle of the stuff, splattering mud and water and less identifiable substances every which way? None whatsoever, if you ask her! Every mud puddle is thus an invitation for her to cause precisely the sort of merry havoc she lives for.
The end result, of course, is that Riverrun regularly ends up
absolutely coated in mud. It clings to her ear tufts, forms masses in her fur, dangles in unpleasant clumps from her great floofy tail. None of this appears to bother her. If anything, she seems to enjoy turning into the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Worse yet, she feels a need to share her muddiness with
anyone and everyone around her.Rosydawn, being her sister and self-professed Hater Of All Things Unclean, is of course target number one. The first signal Riverrun's found a mud puddle is usually Rosydawn screeching obscenities from wherever she's been bathing. Signal number two is two blurs streaking through camp, one creamy tan, the other... ambiguously brown. Signal number three is the sheer amount of
muck Riverrun manages to fling every which way when she inevitably ends up tackling Rosydawn to the ground. Then Rosydawn wriggles free, spewing profanities utterly at odds with her polished image, and pursues her walking biohazard of a sister straight out of camp.
(These games of chase somehow always end up circling back to the puddle where they began, where Riverrun cheerfully shoves her sister's face into the mud. Rosydawn retaliates by chasing her gremlin of a littermate to the nearest clean body of water for a thorough dunking. Both emerge clean, sputtering, and, yes, laughing.)
(No one else finds their antics nearly as funny as they do, but what else are siblings for?)
(419/500 words!)