they are so cute <3333 yeah ignore me im just getting emotional abt this sweet fun date at the circus

[Where My Twin Watches]: Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood Episode 40

Last time: Our protagonists put on a play for Kimblee, Yoki actually proved to be useful, and Al lost his map. Onwards!

Really digging the new intro. And hey, just noticed that Al’s still got his “hair” cut short from his run-in with Buccy’s chainsaw. Continuity! Hey, you’re the Central jerks who told Armstrong the Great to go south while you took her chair! Boo! I mean yeah, she did kill Raven like you suspect, but he totally deserved it! In Central Armstrong the Great’s walking along when she oh ho! She’s run into her rival, Colonel Roy Mustang!

They snark at each other for a bit, although Armstrong the Great’s not that wrong when she accuses him of getting the post for being “well-connected”. Further attempts at flirting are shot down (she’s both an Armstrong and lives in freezing weather conditions, do not offer to buy her food if you value your bank account), as well as a final attempt to pass off his Flower Mountain. Oh yeah, she should visit her grandmother while she’s here! Here we go, Fuhrer King Bradley vs Major-General Armstrong the Great. He gets right down to it, demanding to know what she’s done with Raven. Knowing she can’t completely lie, Armstrong the Great plays it off as doing Bradley a service, cutting down a blabbermouth who spilled all sorts of secrets like immortality, the plan of the country, and Bradley’s true nature. And knowing all of that, she still came within striking distance of this monster. Because heck, she hears that there’s an empty General’s chair… Wow. Ok, that’s badass. From being summoned for killing one of Bradley’s men, she’s spun this into a seat of power to strike against the Goths. Sure, she has to play along for now, and put her troops in the center of the trap, but damn if I’m not impressed. You go, Ice Queen. Slightly less impressed with Bradley though, while he’s normally all composed and menacing he’s gone all Glowing Red Eye and Smirking At Wordplay here. Still better than Kimblee. Anyways, give it up for General Armstrong! While she’s in Central, her troops are still up north, glaring at those pompous Central officers swanning around like they own the place. Pfft. Their boss might not be in the area, but the soldiers of Fort Briggs still act as one, and when the moment comes to do more than glare at the Centries’ backs… [Buccy]: “From here on, the bears will fight the tigers.” Episode 40 - “Homunculus (The Dwarf in the Flask)” ...ok, I was misled before with thinking “The First Homunculus” would be about Uncle, but second time’s the charm! Gimme Big Bad Backstory! Hey Riza! Hope you’re feeling better after that run-in with the creepy kid. Still have that cut on your cheek? Roy takes a seat at her table and damnit Bradley, why’d you have to go and split up the power couple, with the whole hostage situation hanging over their heads it’s just awkward work conversation with hardly any good banter. I mean, all Riza can say is that Roy is a slacker, I know she’s got way better insults than that. Yeah, especially after the Selim encounter she has to be careful what she says. But she taps her mug to get Roy’s attention? Twice? And the Plotting Music has started up as Roy double-taps his own pen, and oh my Leto they’re talking in code yes. Now Roy’s in a bathroom going over his papers, listing off oh I see, the code is she says a name and he uses the first letter. Clever! Roy’s listing off the names, starts getting shocked as he goes along… yup, I’d say that SELIM BRADLEY IS HOMUNCULUS is something to get shocked over. Roy immediately destroys the paper, wondering what the heck’s about to happen in Central. Down below Uncle’s lounging in his Pipe Chair, taking a nap? Uncle Flashback! To a young man, being yelled at by an electronic voice? Looks like a guy in ratty clothes with a broom, an Alchemist’s Apprentice?

And there’s a bottled-up flask with a shifting black cloud inside, I’m guessing that’s the titular Homunculus. Flask seems disappointed that Apprentice isn’t shocked at being talked to, but is pleased at the lack of fear. Apprentice is apparently #23, oh so he’s a Homunculus working for the Alchemist. Or a slave? So wait, is Apprentice human? Flask is explaining what “deeded” means, says that Apprentice isn’t very bright and wonders how he was born “from someone as stupid as you”. Ok, so the Alchemist used some of Apprentice’s blood in an experiment, that created Flask. Flask is grateful, and decides to give Apprentice a name. Something noble-sounding, but not too complicated for his stupid little brain… how about Von Hohenheim? Oooh, so we’re getting Beard backstory which should lead into Uncle backstory. Hmmm. I see what you’re doing Flask, offering to teach Beardless, raise him up from his life as a slave. I mean yeah, slavery is awful and everything, but I’m getting the distinct impression that your goals aren’t exactly Good. The little arms and Red Eye and manic grin you’re sporting aren’t helping your case, either. [Flask]: “I’ll tell you what, Von Hohenheim, you can call me “The Dwarf In The Flask”, Homunculus.” Eh, I think I’ll stick with Flask for now. Time is passing, suns and moons flying past an hourglass that’s picked up by Beardless while a man in blue robes scribbles away in the background. There’s talk about how All Things Are One, Beardless standing on a cliff with Blue Robe to the side carrying Flask. Wait, is he giving Alchemy lessons to Beardless? For a guy who has numbered slaves to do the drudge work, that’s a surprising act. Unless this is just so Beardless can be a more effective worker for him, so jury is still out on Blue Robe. Beardless seems to impress his boss by talking about how if All is outside the One then it is Nothing or somesuch, Blue Robe says he passed and that Von Hoenheim is now an Alchemist. Really? You give your slave lessons and name him your equal? I really don’t know what to make of Blue Robe. Regardless, Beardless is humble and says he’s still only a servant. Flask chuckles at that. Later Beardless is thanking Flask for his life being improved with the knowledge the Homunculus gave him, earning his Master’s respect. Heck, maybe he’ll even get a girlfriend one day! Flask mocks humanity needing to procreate in order to continue existing, Beardless argues that it’s the bonds of friends and family that people live for. That leads to the question of what makes Flask happy. [Flask]: “Well… I’d hate to be guilty of asking too much, but I think I’d be happy if I could just leave this flask…” Mid-ep pictures of a scuffed-up Beardless (Slave Number 32) wielding a stick, and The Little One Inside The Flask with his huge grin.

Uh oh, creepy music in a darkened hall. Flask is resting on a cloth stand, asking why “someone with so much power and prosperity” would need immortality. Uh oh. Blue Robe snaps at Flask to mind his manners when in front of royalty, seems the noble that Blue Robe works for wants to be immortal. Blue Robe even threatens to smash Flask’s flask (so would that set them free or kill them?), but Flask talks back saying that he wouldn’t dare destroy such a source of knowledge. King certainly looks old enough that mortality is a pressing concern, he demands the secret from Flask who remarks on the age of the King of Xerxes- oh dear, that’s a name that we recognize. So for one we know that this will not end well for the kingdom, and also GOOD LETO Beard is freaking old if he’s from the Precursor civilization to our modern characters! So I think it’s safe to say that the little black-and-red grinning ball of smoke is Evil, it looks like the King’s ordered his people to dig “irrigation canals” all around the country. No sooner do they go to bed after a hard day of standing around and talking about how awesome their King is, that a bunch of soldiers come riding in and slaughter the workers to “carve out a crest of blood”. Dude, not cool. Later Beardless is carrying Flask around as townsfolk murmur about how villages have been getting wiped out, Beardless remarks that it’s an awful tragedy. [Flask, being totally sincere]: “Yeah, real tragic.” A couple more slaughtered villages later, an hourglass runs out and the King is woken up by Blue Robe, along with another Robe Alchemist and Slave Number 32 who is now rocking the Beard. The King just snarks that the TC took long enough. Time to get some immortality all up in this royalty! (Gee, I wonder if it’ll work…) The ceremony begins, the King giving some blood to an urn ask Beard looks on in awe, so happy to see his ruler achieve immortality oh gosh look at all that black smoke and red lighting, looks like things aren’t working out so well. Spindly black arms rise up from the ground to freak out the Xerxians in the circle, the King has just enough time to realize that this isn’t immortality before he and his flunkies start dying. Turns out the real center of the circle is where Flask and Beard are, Flask used the blood of his blood-brother to open the doorway for both of them. A great eye appears below a shocked Beard before enveloping him and growing to encompass the entire city, dozens of giant shadow arms erupting across a screaming nation before they descend on the eye. In the Whitespace Flask and Beard are Deconstructed and the light show ends. In the morning, Beard wakes up next to a broken flask, calling out for his Majesty and his Master before stumbling outside to a city of corpses. [Beard]: “Somebody… there must be someone left…” [Uncle]: “It’s no use. All of their souls have been taken from them.” Beard thinks that the one standing above him is his King and bows, but looks up to see his own face. Uncle says that he created a body using Beard’s blood, now he can walk on his own two legs. [Uncle]: “To thank you for your blood, I’ve given you a name, and I’ve given you knowledge. And now, I’ve given you a body that will live forever.” Yup. Beard’s immortal, carrying half of all the souls of Xerxes in his body. You know, I can kind of understand why he calls himself a monster now. Beard springs back to the waking world on a train, seems he dozed off. So where are you heading now? Finally going to join your boys and be useful, or are you still kicking around Amestris doing whatever it is you do? Ooh! Teacher! Looks like Izumi and Sig are on the same train as Beard! Wait, have they ever met before? Ok, Teacher’s talking about how she finally gets to meet Papa Elric, and Beard finally gets to meet the teacher of his sons. Uh oh, Izumi’s having some stomach problems, Sig goes to get her medicine before Beard offers to take a look. Right, he’s got his Philosopher’s Stone blood, he can patch her up. Sig is sent to “get a car” so he can talk to Teacher privately, he confirms that she’s seen the Truth and she sacrificed her internal organs. Ok, now he can WHAT WHAT NONONONONONONONONONONONONONO BEARD WHAT THE FUCK YOU JUST STABBED TEACHER WHAT THE FUCK I FINALLY SETTLED ON YOU BEING A GOOD GUY (barring you abandoning your family) BUT NOW YOU’RE KILLING OFF THOSE WHO HAVE SEEN THE TRUTH IS YOUR PLAN SERIOUSLY TO KILL OFF UNCLE’S POTENTIAL SACRIFICES SO HE CAN’T USE THEM FUCK THAT, FUCK YOU, KICK HIS ASS SIG wait Teacher is ok? She’s breathing easier? There’s no wound? Ah. Ok, well aside from Beard’s deplorable bedside manner and scaring the living daylights out of me, he’s done a good thing. He apparently can’t replace Teacher’s injuries as they were “a testament to her sin” (so is that the reason you haven’t fixed your kids yet with your Philosopher Blood?), but he did rearrange her organs to allow better blood flow. [Teacher]: “You’re the boy’s father, but who… who are you?” [Beard]: “Who am I? I am a Philosopher's Stone, in the form of a man. That’s what I am.” Post credits has Ed explaining Philosopher’s Stones to Sideburns, who’s skeptical about so much power being held in such a small package. Ed says he’s never seen a Stone larger than that, to make one you’d have to kill thousands. Cue image of Beard eating dinner with the Curtises. [Ed]: “Maybe it’s possible, but I would never want to see it.”

The Trouble with Alien Zombies

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Soon we’re going to be watching Zack Snyder leave behind the quest for a “grown-up” superhero movie and return to his old playground, the zombie movie. Army of the Dead looks like a huge amount of fun and leaves us wondering why nobody has made a zombie heist movie before (except for Train to Busan sequel, Peninsula), but one of the plot details that has leaked about the film is that Area 51 plays a significant role.

This suggests that the zombie plague may be extraterrestrial in origin. Like most subversions of the zombie apocalypse genre (although Army of the Dead promises a much smaller and more contained “apocalypse” so that all that cash they steal is still worth something) this is actually a plot twist you can trace back to the earliest roots of the genre.

In Night of the Living Dead, the zombie apocalypse (although again, by the end of the film the “ghouls” seem to have been mostly mopped up) is the result of strange radiation emerging from a probe that has returned from Venus. The trope goes back even further than that.

One of the few films that can make a claim to an earlier take on the zombie apocalypse than Night of the Living Dead is the timeless classic Plan 9 from Outer Space. In that film, which we will not be making any jokes about, aliens reanimate the recently dead and drive them to attack the capital cities of the Earth.

In fact, if you want to find pre-George Romero examples of zombie apocalypse stories, the original series of Star Trek has done two. In the episode “Miri” the Enterprise encounters an exact duplicate of Earth, except that humanity has been wiped out by a deadly pandemic that turns every adult human into a violent, raging monster. It’s a premise explored in more detail by Charlie Higson’s YA zombie series The Enemy, and the Netflix series Daybreak.

Star Trek also gives us the brilliantly titled “Operation — Annihilate!”, where a swarm of spacefaring parasites sweep through the galaxy, infecting humanoids and driving them to a violent rage.

Yes, zombie purists might claim both of these are close to 28 Days Later’s “Rage infected humans” than true zombies, but in truth, the genre is big enough to include multitudes, and anything that A: uses human bodies, to B: create more entities like itself, while C: Not appearing to be intelligent, will usually create a story that looks a lot like a zombie story.

Indeed, Star Trek would come back to space zombies again, once more in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode, “Impulse” and again in the pilot episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Is There Death on Mars?

Star Trek is not alone in drinking from this particular well. Early in its run Dark Matter had a space zombie episode. Doctor Who has done two space zombie episodes in the new series alone, “The Waters of Mars”, and “Oxygen” (which used zombie movie tropes for their intended purpose- bringing down capitalism), and that’s just including the ones actually set in space. Hell, even the primitive bandage-and-hospital-gown-wearing Cybermen from “The Doctor Falls” have a very George Romero vibe to them.

The appeal of putting a zombie in a spaceship for a TV show is easy to see. Zombies are a cool and instantly recognisable monster. Spaceships are a cool and instantly recognisable setting. What’s more, while your production values may vary, zombies on a spaceship is a pretty damn cheap concept to realise on screen. Zombies are just however many extras you can afford with some gory make-up. All you need for a spaceship is some suitably set-dressed corridors and maybe a couple of exterior model shots if you’re feeling swish.

And as with the zombie apocalypse genre as a whole, the audience instantly and instinctively understands “the rules” of a zombie story, allowing you to focus on your characters and the solutions they come up with.

The movies are no stranger to the space zombie either. The most straightforward example being The Last Days on Mars, which is pretty much a note-for-note remake of Doctor Who’s “The Waters of Mars” but without David Tennant. Mars is a popular venue, in fact as we see also Martian zombie apocalypses in Doom (2005) and Doom Annihilation (neither of which I watched to research this article, because there are limits). Even the “Ghosts” in Ghosts of Mars (which I did watch) may resemble more of a cross between Mad Max baddies and Evil Dead’s Deadites than zombies, but still, have a certain zombieness about them.

Most recently, in this last year Bruce Willis has starred in not one, but two movies with sub-Doctor Who production values where he fights space zombie-like adversaries (I have watched Breach/Anti-Life and Cosmic Sin, so don’t know why I thought I could get away with being snobby about the Doom movies earlier).

But Doom also raises another point about space zombies – a really popular venue for the extra-terrestrial undead is videogames.

This is for surprisingly very similar reasons to why space zombies are popular on telly and in film. Videogames will get far more creative in designing the appearance of their space zombies  – with the Dead Space trilogy setting the bar with their gloriously gory Necromorphs – but the AI for a zombie, environmental navigation aside, seldom needs to be much more complicated than that of a Pac-Man ghost. Space has been a popular videogame setting for as long as videogames have been a thing, thanks to the handy black background it offers, and once again, corridors.

We’ve seen them in Dead Space, in all the Doom games, but also the Halo games in the form of the fungal, cancerous looking, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis-inspired Flood. Mass Effect gives us colonists zombified by the sentient Thorian plant, as well as the more technological “Husks”. And of course, there’s that one Call of Duty map.

Even now the makers of the original Dead Space games are looking to get back in on the action with the upcoming game, The Callisto Protocol.

And yet, while the appeal of space zombies is undeniable, by the same token they just don’t feel quite like “proper” zombie stories.

In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Shout “Brains!”

The problem is this: Your archetypical zombie story is ultimately a siege narrative. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, even twists on the formula like 28 Days Later, Train to Busan, and Pontypool all operate on a similar premise. You and some humans you probably don’t get on with are trapped in a structure (in Train it’s a moving structure, but still counts). Outside of that structure, there are somewhere between hundreds and thousands of zombified humans who want to get in and kill you. The humans keep arguing until the zombies get in and kill everyone.

For this to work you need a structure with a lot of room around it, and a big population of people to be turned into zombies.

Unfortunately the living conditions in space, even in our wildest space future fantasies, tend to be A: Quite claustrophobic, and B: Don’t have many people in.

Even in Dead Space, arguably the best example of a space zombie story, you very often find yourself thinking that if zombies hadn’t killed off this mining ship/space station/mining colony, overpopulation would have.

At the same time, spaceships, space stations and colonies tend to have really good, robust metal doors separating any two parts of the habitat, quickly reducing any zombie plotline to this XKCD cartoon.

But there are workarounds, and ways to use these restrictions to your advantage. Zombies are, by nature, pretty rubbish, slow-moving, stupid, easy to kill in small numbers. Most zombie stories get around this issue by throwing loads of them at you. Space zombie movies can make use of those corridors we mentioned earlier, showing how much scarier a single zombie can be in enforced close quarters.

Zombies also have one major advantage over their living victims – they don’t need to breathe. This is a major plus point in space, offering you the chance to have hordes of zombies crawling along the outer hull of the ship – something we’ve seen in Dead Space and Doctor Who’s “Oxygen”.

At the same time, the space setting also emphasises another key aspect of the zombie story – resource management. In space there is no huge abundance of well-stocked shopping malls or bunkers full of firearms. One of the ways The Last Days on Mars manages to make its very small number of zombies threatening is that their small hab modules have very little that you could use as a weapon.

And yet, space zombies still lack a certain something of their terrestrial counterparts.

It’s Undeath, Jim, but Not as We Know It

The thing is, aside from anything else, zombies are a transformation of the familiar. They look like more beaten-up versions of your neighbours and co-workers. The zombie apocalypse is a scene you can easily imagine on your street, at your pub, your local shopping centre.

Army of the Dead gets this – no matter where you are in the world, the iconography of the Las Vegas strip is familiar and we enjoy seeing it overrun by the undead.

And spaceships just aren’t. You might conceivably end up on holiday in Vegas. You’re statistically unlikely to be an astronaut.

But it’s more than that. Zombies are far more than cheap monsters that require little in the way of make-up or AI programming. The symbolism they carry is incredibly weighty. Earthly zombies have been used to represent capitalism, conformity, Vietnam soldiers, couch potato culture, mob mentality, our instinct towards violence, poverty, our obsession with mobile phones, and our ability to dehumanise one another.

Divorced from our world, from us as we recognise ourselves, that symbolism becomes a lot harder to nail. The zombies in The Last Days on Mars are just zombies. Dead Space’s Necromorphs are maybe a legally-safe satire on Scientology? Pandorum gives us extremely pale evolved human descendants that are extremely zombie-ish, and they certainly exhibit some of the worst bits of humanity, but they also live in a darkened, claustrophobic Hell, so it’s hard to hold it against them.

Zombies rarely represent anything in the way Earth-bound zombies do.

At least, nothing human.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin features a sentient alien slime mould-like creature that, in its curiosity and need to explore, infiltrates and takes over the nervous system of the humans it encounters. To an outside observer, they look extremely like zombies, but the lifeform itself isn’t aggressive, just very, very alien. Andrew Skinner’s Steel Frame gives us not only space zombies, but space zombie mechs, and again the “Flood” (not the Halo one) that infects them is implied to be a kind of hivemind.

Most of the space zombies we’ve seen here aren’t what purists would call “true zombies” but are some manner of hivemind. This is true of Halo’s Flood, Mass Effect’s Thorians and Husks, and if we throw the doors to zombie-dom wide open, while they’re very different in the TV series, the Borg of Star Trek: First Contact come across as alien cyber-zombies.

One book to feature relatively harmless alien-created zombies is Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. In that book the aliens aren’t robots or little green men, we just encounter their leftovers and garbage, which are artefacts strange and incomprehensible to humans. That these artefacts somehow raise the dead as mindless automata is a minor side issue – the book is about how alien intelligence might be something so different from ourselves we don’t even recognise it as intelligence.

If there is a space for alien zombies and zombie astronauts in the zombie pantheon, maybe it’s there. Space zombies are scary because they look like us but think so differently that we can’t comprehend them, while Earth zombies are scary because we have oh so much in common with them.

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Chris Farnell is the author of Fermi’s Progress, a series of novellas about a prototype FTL ship that blows up every planet it encounters. The latest instalment, Descartesmageddon, features an alien planet undergoing a very different kind of zombie apocalypse. It is available at Scarlet Ferret and Amazon.

The post The Trouble with Alien Zombies appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Welcome to the Forsaken City!

We’re glad to see that you have arrived safely within the city limits.  You have three days to make your facebook and add the admins Z.Tao, Hoseok, and Seunghyun.  But be careful, the sun is rising quickly, and hunters are always on the move.

NAME, STAGE NAME, AND GROUP: Xukun, August, Nine Percent AGE: frozen at 20, 566 SPECIES:  Matagot

A matagot or mandagot is, according to some oral traditions of southern France, a spirit under the form of an animal, mostly undetermined, frequently a black cat, but rat, fox, dog or cow types are said to exist too. Matagots are generally evil, but some may prove helpful, like the “magician cat” said to bring wealth into a home if it is well fed. Traditionally, a wealth-bringing matagot must be lured with a fresh, plump chicken, then carried home by its new owner without the human once looking back. If the cat is given the first mouthful of food and drink at every meal, it will repay its owner with a solid gold coin each morning. In Gascony traditions, you must not keep the matagot all your lifelong: if the owner is dying, he will suffer a long agony, as long as he doesn’t free the matagot.

LIT RP SAMPLE:  It was a dry night tonight. There wasn’t much snow on the ground anymore, but still the bite of the wind as it rushed past made him shiver. Out here, on the edges of the city, it felt a lot more desolate than the artificially lit streets that people normally remembered. That’s what he liked. His arrival should be encased in a feeling of mystery, of doom, of the beginning of a tragedy… or something like that. Perched upon a tree with his legs swinging in the air, the matagot peered down towards the previously empty street. Only now, the previously abandoned crossroad was sparsely populated by four or five men, dressed in all black with suspicious baggage- the very image what people would deem shady on a night like this. They were doing a summoning, alright. He’d been hearing the call for a while, drifting across the country until on the fourth night, promptly as always, the cat had arrived at the location of the offering. This place was… Seoul, if he recalled correctly. Interesting. He hadn’t been here yet, in fact it was surprising he’d been summoned here at all. Few people beyond the magical community knew of his kind anymore. But certainly the ones below weren’t the usual witches and warlocks, no; they smelled like hunters. The kind that normally killed monsters, but… well. People didn’t simply kill matagots, not unless they were enslaved under you. Yet once you had one- why’d anyone want to kill something that brought them fame and fortune? Humans were all like that, really. Magical or not, he could always predict what they wanted. It was the reason for his existence, after all. He was supposed to be a curse and a blessing all at once, that’s what they said. All that work on an innocent little cats shoulders, did they have no conscience?

At this thought, the cat allowed a distinctly feline smirk to curl his plump lips, eyes glinting with interest. No, of course they… of course the humans wouldn’t. History had a tendency to repeat itself, somebody famous had told him that once. These ones would be no different than any other. Selfish, small brained, and greedy were the traits of the race, and it seemed that after centuries of breeding it remained strong. But that was good for him, wasn’t it? They’d do anything for themselves, so as long as it favoured them, they’d help his as well. And while he knew so many others in his world would spit at lowering their head for a hunter, it wasn’t a bother for cat. A matagot’s wants were very simple: good food, a warm bed, and to be pampered and cared for. There was little else a kitty could ask for in this world, after all. If humans wanted gold or whatever they dreamed of getting, then they should also know that the price for it was to treat him like royalty. Something of a ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ kind of thing. Nevermind that cats never had issues scratching themselves, it just felt better having it done by somebody else. After all, his instincts demanded the best of the best and if he was going to get it from these humans, then there wasn’t a reason to refuse. They already went through the trouble of finding the ritual and getting him such a nice chicken, it’d be a shame for him to refuse now and not take the bait, right?

The kitten in his arms let out a small meow of protest as he jumped, landing nimbly onto the cracked asphalt below. (A terrible choice for roads, he always thought. It hurt the delicate pads of his paws and stank like harsh chemicals. Dirt was much better.) It only took a moment, really, but he’s sure it was unsettling to have a phantom appear from the dark, cheshire grin glinting in the dark. Perhaps they weren’t expecting to see him come so quickly, for the bunch of them froze with the unexpected sight of the youth. Maybe he should have waited a little longer? It didn’t do well to his royal pedigree if he seemed too greedy for the food, he supposed, but at the same time he couldn’t keep honored guests waiting. What a dilemma for a cat. Ahh… or maybe it was because he didn’t look like he was supposed to. The matagot was dressed in human skin right now, courtesy of his last 'chicken’. It was just easier this way, but he supposed they would have been expecting a huge black cat or something alone those lines. Regardless, he wasn’t that far off the mark, a long tail sweeping the air behind him and two ears perched atop his head. Well, let them gawk if they had to. He had the grace and dignity to allow it. Although, he was getting just the slightest bit impatient. If they weren’t going begin the contract making anytime soon, he’d take it upon himself to inspect his offering for the day. It’d been a long journey getting all the way over here from another landmass, and he hadn’t been allowed much time to relax and enjoy a good meal for once.

Ah, but what’s this? Some frozen poultry, dead weeks ago, and not even fattened up enough for him to properly enjoy? Were they making light of him!? The pleased smile on his features descended rapidly into a condescending sneer. How dare they go at this like it was child’s play. He had such high expectations and plans ready to go, and now it was all ruined because one half of the equation didn’t do their part properly. Terrible, terrible, terrible. The worst he’d ever seen, really. He couldn’t believe it, this subpar treatment. A noise behind him drew him out of his thoughts. Somebody -one of the hunters probably- was saying something, and though he certainly registered the syllables, he didn’t bother to connect them into recognizable words. Human thoughts were… invaluable, to say the least. Yet he needed a proper explanation for this mess. “You. You were the one that summoned me?” Moonlight colored gaze slid across one of the hunters and if looks could kill, he’d be sliced to shreds by now. There was no need to wait for an affirmative, the cage and chain said it all. So it was one of those fools who thought that they, with their measly power, could toy with a messenger of the gods. How utterly, totally, foolish. Yes, he and his kin had a long tradition of agreements, bindings to the mortal world, but nobody would give a monster to a baby and expect it to stay tethered to its leash. So who’d ever give such a group of lowly beings the permission to even touch the likes of him? It was a disgusting to even think that he’d been expectant only moments ago, dreaming about a splendid master.

To be honest, this whole thing was a waste of his time. He loathed to get his paws dirty but occasion called, it always did. Fate had a way of always letting him down like that. At least the few of a red splattered sky was one of his favourite sights, even if the vessel that his paint had previously belonged to was unworthy of such as masterpiece. They moved first, greedy hunters, firing a single bullet that was aimed at his leg of all places. Were they expecting him to run away? If he had wanted to run, they’d be too slow to catch him. Just like how they were snails against his pace now, vicious claws ripping across a throat in mere moments. The beast’s leg, of course, was unharmed. It was over just as quickly as it began, angered shouting twisting to screams of agony until finally all that was left was a dying breath, wheezed out as blood bubbled with each gasp and twitch. What was he? Well, he thought it was obvious, considering that they’d ask him to come. “What are you saying? I’m the matagot, of course.” Then, belatedly, remembering to attach on the name of this current body, “Cai Xukun. Only a harmless little cat.” Of course he was harmless. There was no proof he was anything but, no carcasses left on the crossroads, not even proof that he’d even been there at all. Everything would disappear just like a bad dream, for him that is. One day the humans ought to notice the disappearance of their kind here and there but- who knows. Turns out you couldn’t count on them for anything, so maybe they treat each other the same way too.

A sigh broke the unsettling quiet at last, Xukun patting himself for some kind of tissue to wipe off his claws with. That was another failed contract, so it was time for him to go again. At least he was supposed to, but he was so hungry and the city seemed so very bright. Surely, surely it didn’t hurt if the population grew by just one… no two, wandering kitties with nowhere to go? “Seoul, huh. I think I’ll stay for a while…”