Fang set out down the stairs. Down meant out. Out meant sky, bright moonlight, and delicious ratty prey. After all, some things were universal, and the delicious taste of squirming rat blood was one of them.
…Even if the last proper rat he’d caught had tasted rotten and disgusting. Rats were for catching and eating. Even Alice knew that; she always made the loudest happy human noises he brought her a rat, especially if it was still alive. She was often even so impressed that she threw it outside with him so he could eat it.
Fang trotted down the stairs, reaching the bottom and scratching at the door for a few moments. Just to prove he was there. He would never forget that he could simply teleport.
Once Fang had blinked to the other side of the scratched up door, padded across the lobby, padded the other way across the lobby to investigate the crisp smell of paper and feathers emanating from the front desk, and then padded back to the door after knocking around a few quills and tipping an inkwell over onto the floor, Fang at long last blinked out into the cool, refreshing night air, full of the smells of nature and prey.
Then Fang marked his territory on the side of the door, and slinked off into the moonlit courtyard that smelled of nature, prey, and cat.
The first thing he did was investigate the spot where he’d seen the rat. There were many other scent-trails and markings of prey along the way, but through Fang’s indomitable feline will, he didn’t get distracted investigating more than one or two dozen of them. When he arrived at the spot, the rat’s trail was easy enough to pick up. But it didn’t smell like a proper rat. There was a dusty, old scent layered over it that made his nose twitch and even coaxed a sneeze out of Fang that sent him jumping nearly a foot in the air.
He glared at the spot, then followed the trail in the direction he remembered the rat going, keeping his nose a good bit away from the dusty smell as he tracked it. After a couple short detours to bat at glowing bugs and a quick break to gag at the taste when he bit one, Fang arrived at a building, tall and windowless, moulded out of dark, smooth stone with no seams between bricks or blocks. The scent disappeared into a burrow at its base, rat sized, or maybe rabbit.
Fang eyed it warily. Last time he’d chased something into a burrow like that he’d ended up in the forest with all the tasty sunshine critters but no human pets. It looked like he could maybe squeeze through the opening and wriggle his way down, but his whiskers itched at the thought of going into such tight quarters with no end in sight and no way to turn around.
Instead, Fang stalked away from the burrow, leaning his side against the dark stone of the building and loafing, settling in to wait for his prey to emerge.
The calm, peaceful night, the faint bit of warmth still emitting from the black stone, and the lack of anything immediately happening soon had Fang nodding off, eyelids drifting downwards into a comfortable doze, even as his ears remained perked and alert.
The warmth from the building slowly filtered into his core, and while it faded over the next few hours, it didn’t quite disappear. Some faint little thrum in the stone kept a faint wash of sunlight bound just below the surface, and Fang happily cozied up to its filling warmth, purring in sync with the faint disturbances running through it.
No rats appeared for a long while. So long in fact, that the sun came up, first lightening the sky, then allowing its first rays to land on the tip of the tall building he was sitting beneath, before ever so slowly creeping down the side.
Fang was indignant when he noticed that the sun was sparing rays for the top of the building where no one was, but not for his hunting/napping spot, where he was. He debated meowing a complaint at the hidden orb of sunshine, but he’d tried that before. Many times. And it didn’t listen. Controlling the sun was just something that couldn’t be done. Just like controlling fire. So Fang had a decision to make. Stay where he was and continue observing the rat burrow, waiting for the dusty, bed-smelling rat to come out? Or go seek out a better sunbathing spot.
Considering how easy the rat was to track down, and how bad it smelled, it didn’t take Fang long to rouse himself from his loafing and start padding around looking for a way up. There were a few humans around with prey on or around them, but they were far away across the grass, and Fang was feeling cozy after his nap. He’d liberate these humans and teach them proper hunting techniques another time. For now, there were trees to climb and rays to catch.
The building next to the rat-hole was one of the strange tree-house-trees, and once Fang arrived at the corner, it was just a window sill, an awning, and a short scramble shimmying up the corner to get on top of the blocky house-shaped base. From there, the branches of the tree took a more natural set of twists and turns, with the occasional pathway or small room adding straight lines and bulges. It was far easier to navigate and had some pleasant napping spots, but the thick layer of leaves above made it a poor choice for sunbathing. Fang simply made a note of it for a hot day and kept climbing.
Higher up there were only winding human paths along the branches and the occasional bench here and there. The sunlight filtered through better at this height and angle, producing pleasant, shade-dappled and green-tinted mosaics of light against Fang’s fur. It reminded him of hunting the flashy birds back in the forest, but it still wasn’t quite right for sunbathing. As he padded higher and leaped between branches, he realized that there was also a thrum of… Fang wanted to call it sunlight, but it wasn’t. Not quite. There was a thrum of sunlighn’t traveling through the wood under his feet. Not as warm or good as his own sunlight, or the sort that came from the sun, or his familiar, or even the sort that buzzed in the other building. But nice nonetheless.
Fang padded along a thinner branch as he pondered the different sorts of sunshine. Sunlight was good of course. He had soaked it up all day for as long as he could remember, whenever the dastardly clouds didn’t hide it away. But this world had so many types of sunshine. The sunshine he felt against his whiskers, the sunshine that soaked from the sky into his core, the sunshine his familiar used, the sunshine he absorbed from the big rock in the clearing. Then there was the sunshine from the marble he’d taken from the big boar’s head. It had felt like the sunshine from the rock, but angry. Fang didn’t know how sunshine could be angry, but he pondered it as he arrived at the tip of the branch, head peeking out through the broad, flat leaves.
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True sunshine warmed his nose at last, but this spot was too precarious to nap in. Luckily the big black building was only a little more than a jump away, and unlike the sheer sides, the top was sloped and shingled, surrounded by a big blocky stone crenelation which was just covered in interesting things. There were big dead leaves and strange stone statues and even some strange glowy lines. Fang leaped off of the end of the branch, blurring through the air and blinking to stick the landing on the wide, blocky crenelation that ran around the outer edge of the roof.
The same sunshine as he’d felt leaning against the side of the building buzzed against his paws as he landed, and he noticed it was more or less also the same as the sunshine that had buzzed through his original stone napping spot. Though that stone had felt… big… or wide or far or something. This one just felt like nothing. Not good, not bad, not strange, just blank. Fang couldn’t put his nose on it. He could put his paw on it though, as when his paw landed on one of the carved, glowy lines, the feeling of the blank sunshine grew much stronger. It slowly filled his core, and seemed to change inside it to match the rest of the sunshine inside him. …Which also didn’t feel like real sunshine, it felt almost like…
The sunlight beaming down from above on the other hand, felt glorious.
Fang did a cursory examination of the roof to make sure there were no hidden delicious birds or bugs. He batted a big, crunchy leaf over the edge and watched as it twirled down, down, down, all the way down to land as a distant speck on the grass below.
Then he noticed a bug hiding beneath another leaf and pounced on it, crunching through the leaf and squishing it. He gave it a sniff, then ignored it.
Fang padded up the slope of the roof, quickly reaching the top, where a view of the entire campus lay spread out around him. It spread out from the quad and tower, the most magical buildings surrounding the tower and the tallest surrounding the quad, rings of buildings extending from there outwards, slowly decreasing in size. Farther out, there were buildings that almost looked familiar to Fang, with wooden construction or actual mortared bricks. And while the buildings themselves got less magical towards the outskirts, the magic signs followed no such pattern, if anything rising in reverse. The flashing and glowing sign of one pub pressed up against the outer wall was so large and bright that Fang could read it from his spot on the tower.
Or he could have, if he had learned how to read.
And speaking of the wall, the outer wall made a perfect circle around his perch, looming over the small houses and businesses clustered in its shadow. It must have been at least half the height of Fang’s Tower, as he had mentally dubbed his new napping spot. It was thick too, enough so that the smattering of tents and stone buildings clinging to its top barely took up any space compared to its width.
A colossal feat of engineering and human effort that Fang soundly ignored as he twined around the metal rod affixed to the peak of Fang Tower’s roof. The Fang of Fang’s Tower. Fang purred in satisfaction at his impeccable naming sense as he curled around the metal rod, letting it hold his stomach in place while his front and back legs stretched down the slope of the roof. Like a strange branch to sprawl out on, getting gravity to do the hard work of stretching his body out and magically creating even more surface area to catch the sun. Especially with the low angle and weak rays of the morning sun, lying on a slope and stretching to catch every speck of warmth possible was vital to good sunbathing technique.
It certainly helped that Fang Tower’s Fang was positively thrumming with its own sunlight, the same sort of blank sunshine that filled the other parts of the tower. As his eyes drifted shut to multitask with a short nap, Fang could almost imagine that the spire was the purring warmth of another cat. Purring in harmony, Fang dozed off.
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Fang didn’t doze long. Only long enough for the sun to go from kissing the horizon to nearly directly overhead.
Realistically, he would have had to wake up and move soon anyway, as the sun was no longer pointed directly at him, and he would need to shift to a flat surface soon for maximal exposure.
But this time it was not his own well-honed sunbathing instincts that disturbed his slumber, but a sense of sudden alarm coming over his familiar link.
He certainly wasn’t getting any more peaceful sunbathing in so long as that continued, so Fang stood from his perch, circling the Fang in an effort to figure out exactly what was going on with his familiar.
The sudden alarm had faded, but the feeling was still there, a little anxious niggle at the back of Fang’s mind that made it difficult to settle back down. It could be that his human was just alarmed by standing up and suddenly being so far from the ground, or something silly like that. But it was also possible that the rat had found her. With his human’s feeble hunting instincts, a rat could be a big threat to her, and she didn’t stand a chance of defeating it.
Fang picked his way down the slope of Fang’s Tower, and paced along the stone edge, looking down at the immense drop that someone had put there while he was sleeping. How was he supposed to get down to his human with all that space in the way?
Fang made his way to the corner of his Tower and climbed up on top of the statue adorning it. Rough, dark stone depicting something like a shaved human. At least, assuming humans shrank the same way as cats when they lost their hair. It also had wings like a bat and pointy ears for some reason, but Fang wasn’t really interested in further critiquing the lacking aesthetic sense of humans. It wasn’t a cat, and that was all that really mattered.
Fang peered down from his perch on the statue’s head. He could sense his familiar moving around in the direction of a big stone building. She was getting further down, instead of coming upwards. Fang meowed a complaint to the air and settled in on the rough stone of the statue to wait. It had less sunlight running through it than his Tower or its Fang, and it was a different flavor as well a strange, mixed one. But he had a view of the building his familiar was in, and the statue had absorbed the warmth of the sun itself nicely, combining with the sun overhead to make a tolerable spot to wait until his human realized she was going the wrong direction and came to find him.
It wasn’t long before his white-robed human came out of the front doors of the building and finally started getting closer, looking all around as though she could somehow miss his magnificent presence. Fang stood and leaned forward meowing pointedly down at the girl as she approached Fang’s Tower, still looking everywhere but up.
Humans.
Fang had just finished drawing in breath for a proper yowl when the stone beneath his paws betrayed him, sending his front paws sliding down the sloped front of the statue’s head. A gust of wind conspired with the stone, knocking him even further off balance, beyond even his incredible feline agility’s ability to correct.
Fang tumbled forward, tail over whiskers, spinning around just in time to see a pair of green, glowing eyes on the ugly statue that he had been standing on, and a clawed hand reaching out for him. Then they raced away upwards as Fang plummeted down towards the distant ground, yowling at the top of his lungs.