Cuppy froze up and dropped the puzzle box he had been messing with in his stupor. It tumbled out of his hands and bounced across the carpet where it stopped on its side and lay forgotten. Some new stimuli had risen sharply from Cuppy’s gut and supplanted his focus on the mental exercise, attuned to a familiar presence that was reemerging somewhere in the city. The memory of what it had felt like to hear Richie’s heartbeat through the medical string left in his body came rushing back into Cuppy’s mind, and he realized that something much like that was happening now, in the dead of night. He could feel a pulse - a beat - from someone his strings had connected to in the past. Was this akin to phantom limb pain, with his long-dissolved strings acting as an extension of his own body, flaring up in their incorporeal being somewhere over the urban expanse wherever Cuppy had used them? Under the streets, in the sewers, perhaps? No, it didn’t feel like it was coming from beneath his feet, although he still felt something vibrating the ground near the location he sensed. There were too many stimuli blocking his signal, and it was too difficult to isolate the beat he felt from the presence he had connected to. He shut his eyes and covered his ears, turning his attention inward, desperately trying to relax his body and mind and feel the beat widen until it encompassed his very being. A black and white network of sorts appeared in his mind, a rough map of what must have been Station Bay. Cuppy supposed this was something like what echolocation must feel like for bats. That feeling was crossbred with what a spider must feel when something is caught in their web, and echoes through the strands of ensnaring silk.
“He’s back.” Cuppy realized, and let a goofy smile stretch over his face.
Cuppy looked back at Freyja, conked out and sleeping on the couch they had brought back, and decided not to wake her. They could all formally greet each other in the morning, but first Cuppy needed to collect Richie from the train station where he would be arriving. Cuppy slung his travel bag over his shoulder and stepped out into the cold night, waving his puppet brother goodbye and resealing the door with sigil spellwork to keep malignant spirits and entities at bay once again in his absence.
Holly recognized Cuppy as the boy jogged across the city, his distinctive green hood blown back in the night wind from the speed of his run. The incognito Institute mole lounged in the hanging infinity pool of the luxury hotel penthouse overlooking the streets so far below. The glass bottom beneath her feet was crystal clear, offering a surreal and excellent view as she waded in the warm water, cradled from the nippy gusts even as she wore only a purple swimsuit. Her eyes widened momentarily before she collected herself, but she was still shocked to see her young student going on a jog well after midnight.
“Something about that kid seems strikingly familiar.” Holly adopted the thinker pose. “Hmm. Bob?” she summoned a personal customized telescope dragonfly.
It buzzed in place above the pool, looking at Holly with the multi-panel eyes of an insect servant awaiting orders.
“Follow that kid a few blocks and tell me if he comes up in the data banks anywhere. His name is Cuppy, and I can’t help but feel like I recognize his face, even before he entered the school system. But if he lived here and I passed him on the street once or twice before, he should have been attending school already, right? Something is off. Report back here with whatever you find, if anything.” she instructed the cyborg insect.
The telescope dragonfly buzzed and flew off after Cuppy. As the boy sprinted, he heard the buzzing of wings at his back, even over the wailing of the wind that parted around his form. Whether his senses were enhanced from the connection to Richie’s beat he was experiencing, or whether his potential strings had accustomed themselves to recognizing things they had previously encountered, vibrating in the ambient air, he wasn’t sure. Either way, he instinctively knew that the nuisance was at his back, and he let a nigh-invisible trail of detecting strings fall behind his body through the imperceptible holes in the fabric of his cloak where the fibers were woven together. Their ends brushed the tips of the dragonfly’s wings for only a moment, but it was long enough for Richie to confirm that he was being followed by something small and discreet. He looked back over his shoulder as he ran - throwing out a likewise invisible net of strings to detect obstacles like street posts before he could run into anything - and saw that he was indeed being followed by one of those dumb toy bugs.
Holly, on her end via the psychometric connection she had linked to the insect, saw Cuppy distinctly look back at them with concerning recognition in his eyes.
“How could he have known to look?” Holly asked herself.
As much as she wanted to tail Cuppy via her psychometric host to his end destination to see what was happening, Holly needed to confirm that the drone had positively identified Cuppy first. If it turned up nothing, then her hunch was wrong and the boy’s late night jog was a coincidence, and just another one of the boy’s quirks. If the dragonfly revealed it had seen him before and had reason to commit their encounter to memory, however…
“Bob, come on back now.” Holly decreed.
The robotic insect retreated, leaving Cuppy to continue on his job unbothered.
“Yeah, you better run.” Cuppy said after the retreating bug.
The boy turned back to the business at hand, following the sound of a distant train whistle to help guide him along the abstract grid of the city map trying to come into focus through waves of varying pixel resolution in his head. The faint shapes of railroad bridge pillars and beams materialized out of the darkness amidst a vista of distant hills near one of the junctures between concrete and park grounds. The oddness of the robotic insect’s surveillance was out of his head in seconds, even as the telescope dragonfly reported back with its news and Holly, drying with a towel wrapped about her waist, accessed the Institute’s records via her computer to pour over the Bunyip Incident. Cuppy had been there, along with a girl in dark clothes. So why wasn’t Holly informed about Cuppy’s connection to the scene? Had this been deliberately concealed from her? Did Chelsea know?
Holly decided to call Chelsea, and was profoundly confused when a woman claiming to be a nurse answered the phone. After the initial trading of words and clarifications, the nurse broke the bad news to Holly that Chelsea had been attacked by someone, and was suffering both anemia and short-term amnesia. So - did she ask the Director up front about whether or not he knew Cuppy was in her class - or did she try to jog Chelsea’s memory and get the scoop from her? If Mason knew about the connection, then it was likely he left Holly blind specifically to monitor the boy through her.
Holly shrugged and brought up the archived footage to study.
Cuppy jumped a concrete border and dropped fifteen feet into a stretch of darkened forest framing a shortcut to the old train station area. His kid-like feet pattered across the dirt and grass, and the stirring ruckus caught the attention of a nocturnal predator in his midst. A creature not unlike a large lynx or a small mountain lion perched itself on a jutting rocky ledge outcropping its shallow cave den, and its glowing amber eyes matched the rugged tawny fur of its pelt. It looked like the product of repeated incest, having six legs and two tails, and a protracted set of incisors that gave it a slightly overbit jaw appearance. It raised its hackles, tails swishing, and dropped down into the grass to give chase towards the oblivious prey, a moppet who had clearly wandered away from its herd and was an easy target.
Except, Cuppy was totally aware of the extra-limbed wildcat, thanks to his perceptive trailing strings, and he clicked his tongue. “Oh, just a wampus cat.”
He nonchalantly dodged right and left of the bounding thing every time it made to pounce, quickly drawing the mutant cat’s ire. When a sticky web of string snagged a corner each of the framing shrubs Cuppy passed through and led the cat to run smack into the trap, it growled anger through the strands woven between its massive fangs, then savagely tore the net to pieces. It leaped too late to grab Cuppy by his departing feet as he made good use of the options the tall dark trees afforded to him, swinging from branch to branch by his conjured string ropes, indulging in the Tarzan call all the while. The cat, not to be evaded by an arboreal route, scampered up the trunks and into the canopy after the boy, lunging and leaping from treetop to treetop, fangs gleaming as it gave off bloodcurdling jaguar shouts of rage. Cuppy, for his part, didn’t care, and began to hum to himself. At the apex of a string swing, the wampus cat jumped at his back, determined to drag him down to the grassy floor and bite his jugular, only for Cuppy to swing full-circle over and around in a loop-the-loop, planting twin feet in the airborne cat’s ass, driving its face into a tree trunk. The wampus cat slammed like a pancake against the solid wood, and slowly slid down with a smearing sound.
“I wouldn’t taste very good, kitty cat, I’m way too stringy.” Cuppy waved from his perch on one of the branches down at the dazed cat, which had dislodged from its imprint in the trunk and fallen to the ground.
It flipped back over on its six pawpads and looked up at Cuppy, hissing murderously.
“Sheesh, just let it go!” Cuppy advised, and dove from the tree branch into the darkness beyond again.
The cat would not let go of its quarry, and sprinted up and across the treetops again, flying through the air at the frame of Cuppy’s billowing green cloak just standing there amidst the trees. Seconds before it pounced, the empty cloak was lashed back to the forest floor by a timed string tether, and thrown about Cuppy’s shoulders again as he waited there patiently on the ground, emptying a spread of barbed caltrops from his bag over the dirt before skipping along his merry way. The wampus cat’s eyes widened as it saw that the decoy costume had concealed a metallic wire string pulled taut from one tree to another, forming an uncompromising clothesline. The cat’s own lunge carried it into the trap, catching it under the neck and flipping it over backward to crash into the forest floor again. This time, it landed in caltrop hell, and yowled and screeched as it mindlessly danced and pranced about, trying to be rid of the recurved area denial weapon jacks left embedded in its pelt, undercarriage, and paws.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Cuppy didn’t seem to lose much ground, wind, or good cheer for the sprinting game of deadly Chess he was quite clearly kicking the wampus cat’s ass in. He was a master trickster if nothing else, and every time one of his clever little traps played out perfectly, he allowed a dumb little grin to cover his face, happy as a clam, and more eager than anything else to show Richie just how much he had improved his abilities with some fun experimentation. He heard another enraged cat wail behind him as the ill-fated feline predator got caught in a string-derived tiger snare that lashed its six feet together and carried it high off over the ground, swinging from a tree branch. The snare triggered one of Cuppy’s repurposed quick-escape voodoo dolls of himself to drop down on the bound wampus cat’s hindquarters and begin mercilessly spanking its ass as though it were an ill-behaved toddler.
It certainly screamed like one.
Finally, beyond the thinning trees, Cuppy made out a ridge running alongside a shallow creek that the railway bridge passed over, and he scaled its slope to come to the tracks themselves, knowing that if he followed them a short ways, he would arrive at the station proper to wait for Richie’s arrival under the creature comfort of a gazebo-style roof and a bench to sit at. As he jumped across the laid wooden planks of the old, classical train tracks, he heard the wampus cat scamper up the hill after him, not having slashed itself free of the snare trap in time to avert bright pink spanking marks on its star-shaped puckered cat’s asshole. It was frothing animalistic rage at this point, and Cuppy couldn’t really blame it.
But, he had priorities to meet, so the pesky stalker was going to have to heck off now.
“Will you just,” Cuppy turned and made a finger gun at the wampus cat, from which a dart-like inch of string fired out of his fingertip and struck the feline in its sensitive black nose, eliciting a yelp and a stumble, “cut it out, already?”
Cuppy slid his half of the scissor blade free of his long sleeve, and inverted the weapon, grabbing it by the dulled blade end. He swung it like a homerun baseball bat strike, catching the stumbled wampus cat right upside the jaw with the hard plastic handle on the other end. The thing had snot and saliva knocked out of its face as its cheek swelled up, and it went rolling side over side back down the hill.
“Sheesh, take a hint, weird cat thing!” Cuppy snickered, as if to say “I told you so.”
Looking back over the covered railway bridge he stood before, Cuppy saw the flashing circles of train headlights, and heard the follow up steam whistle screech in his ears. He trotted down the rest of the length of the rails before realizing he wouldn’t make it to the standing platform in time to avoid getting run over. Instead, he sidestepped the barrelling steam engine and lashed a string to its side, yanking himself up alongside it. At the waiting station, he dismounted and made himself look presentable for the arrival of his returning friend. With a burst of steam from every gap and space between segments, the train doors opened wide, and a confused-looking, but visibly relieved Richie stepped down from the carriage.
The dragon boy was wrapped in his jacket and favorite scarf again, but seemed to have picked up some stylish new silver knuckle dusters while he was out. Cuppy gave him a congratulatory thumbs up at this, to Richie’s confusion. There was a certain notch-up in maturity that seemed to have settled over his features in a way Cuppy couldn’t quite describe. His eyes looked older, wiser, as if they had seen many things to learn from in a very short, compressed while. His ginger hair, still a bedhead of chaotic boyish red spikes, was windswept back and more regal in appearance, almost like a kingly lion’s mane. His scrawny physique had seemingly taken on more muscle, enough to make his shoulders bulge somewhat through his jacket.
Cuppy let himself smile broadly and wave excitedly at his long-lost roommate.
“Richie! Welcome back from wherever the heck you got warped to! Did you bring me any souvenirs?” Cuppy giddily bounced up and down.
“Cuppy?” Richie let his gaze pour over the diminutive boy in green whose insistence on exploring the godforsaken sewers had drowned Richie into near-death experience in the first place.
He quickly grabbed Cuppy by the throat with one hand, effortlessly lifting him off the ground and energetically shaking him.
“WHERE IS MY FUCKING ICE CREAM, CUPPY?!?” he roared at the little shit.
Cuppy quickly broke into frantic sign language as his throat closed up and his face began to turn purple, that vacant grin not affected even as his wandering eyes were.
Richie dropped Cuppy unceremoniously, allowing the little green lump to compose and explain himself.
“I think I owe you five scoops, yes.” Cuppy said when he was finished hacking. “I’m just so glad to see you! I was so worried!”
“About me coming back to put footprints in your little ragdoll ass, I’m sure.” Richie sighed, scratching his head. “Any idea what happened to me?”
“Well, kind of, but I was hoping you could e-” Cuppy began, then ducked under the lunge of the wampus cat, who skidded in front of Richie, glared at the newcomer, and took a vindictive swipe at him.
Richie jumped back and entered a guard position. “Hi?” he asked the mutant cat.
“Can you just give us a few minutes to catch up, you pest?!” Cuppy grumbled at the cat.
The beast wildly zigzagged at, through, and around their ranks, erratically circling them. After it made a failed lunge at the two boys that sent it flying over their ducked heads, its twin tails trailed behind it and moved to encircle their necks and drag them to the ground behind it. Instead, both Richie and Cuppy foresaw the noose trick and turned and twisted their bodies, catching either tail in a two-handed grip and instantly folding themselves forward. The wampus cat was caught by its twin tails and lashed backward, thrown tumbling paws overhead several yards back by the modified shoulder throw.
“Making friends with the local wildlife?” Richie asked Cuppy.
“It’s complicated.” Cuppy shrugged.
As the cat hunkered down in a crouched position, wiggling its hind quarters and tails in anticipation of sprinting for them again, Cuppy snapped his fingers to the right of the cat’s face, and a bungee-like string tether he had attached to the cat’s jaw yanked a nearby garbage can into the side of its jaw, slamming the cat into the side of the parked train. Richie sprinted after the sandwiched cat, dropping into a Level 3 scaled shoulder charge that rammed the beast backward, lashing the string in the crossfire and sending the improvised projectile spinning off the platform. Richie spun into an outside crescent kick with his left leg that nailed the wampus cat in the opposite jaw, dizzying it and briefly forcing it to stand on its hind legs like a drunk grizzly bear.
“It’s rude to interrupt guys when they’re talking!” Richie growled, laying into the vertical wampus cat with a quick flurry of jabs to the stomach, culminating in a Level 1 airball projectile that launched the dumb thing into a bannister.
The boys took the opportunity to jump off the train platform back into the woods, and begin the jog back home.
“So, how was the trip?” Cuppy asked as they ran alongside each other.
“I’d like to tell you, but it’s kind of foggy. Let’s get settled in back home and get something to eat first.” Richie said.
“That can be arranged. It will be dawn soon anyway, so I’ll be waking Freyja up in a few hours or so.” Cuppy chirped.
“Freyja?” Richie scratched his head.
“Our new roommate!” Cuppy flashed a happy grin.
“Are you trying to bring back stray pets again?!” Richie balked in horror.
Cuppy looked up, owl-like eyes focusing, and turned back to see that the persistent cat was once again on their tail.
“He doesn’t fucking quit, does he?” Richie asked, nudging Cuppy.
“No, he sure doesn’t. Gloves are coming off, let’s give him a proper spanking and get him out of our hair.” Cuppy slid to a stop, unfurling his collapsible fishing pole and catching a patch of ground the cat was running toward with his hook.
Cuppy yanked the line back, reeling it in instantly, and dislodged the topsoil out from under the wampus cat’s feet as he did so. The six-legged cougar tumbled about helplessly, skidding across the grass, right into Richie’s kick to its back. The thing yowled, kicking its legs up into the air wildly before flipping itself back right side up. It lunged and snapped its jaws closed around Richie’s arm, only to find its teeth nearly cracking as they failed to penetrate the boy’s sudden dragon scale armor coating his forearm. Richie unceremoniously kicked the dumb thing right in the junk, and it made a pathetic little whimper of a kitten’s meow, its eyes nearly cracking with sudden tears.
“Now, will you please,” Richie said, stepping back and stretching out his leg.
“Just,” Cuppy said, sprinting toward the cat alongside Richie, his fishing pole raised overhead and spinning the line, hook, and float ball like a great flail.
“BUTT OUT?!?” they said in unison as Richie’s heel caught the cat under the jaw in time with Cuppy’s 40 pound float ball flying up to do the same.
The twin uppercut attacks launched the wampus cat a few dozen feet up, spinning, and both boys stepped back as Cuppy revealed that he had attached a bungee cord to the predator’s underbelly on one end, and the other end sunken into the ground as it flew up. The cord pulled taut, then rocketed the wampus cat back to the earth, slamming it face first into the soil. The remote piledriver broke its face, cracked its neck, and continued up its back, cracking several disks as well, and buried the outmatched monster up to the chest in the dirt.
Amazingly, its twin tails were still swishing irritably after all of this punishment.
“He’s stubborn, I’ll give the freaky deliverance cat that much.” Richie folded his arms, whistling.
“Give it a second.” Cuppy said.
The predicted second later, one of Cuppy’s special surprise pellets, tethered to the cat’s ass by another bungee string, slammed into the thing’s sphincter, haunches, and undercarriage. This pellet - a red one - exploded into shimmering flames that threw embers several feet in every direction.
“An incendiary round I came up with yesterday.” Cuppy said.
“Nice work.” Richie nodded approvingly.
The cat plucked itself out of the ground, yowling and yelping in a panic, running around in circles desperately trying to bite at its tails and back end and snap the licking flames out. In a maddened dash, frothing at the mouth in terror, the wampus cat ran back across the train tracks unthinkingly, and fell right over the side, making a great splash in a meandering creek on the other side.
“Now you cool off and think about what you’ve done.” Cuppy said, nodding his head emphatically.
He and Richie continued their idle chatter as they walked at a brisk, but much more relaxed pace than it had been when simply outrunning the wampus cat was still an option, back to the apartment complex they called home.