Breakfast largely went quietly, and Jensen did not miss the depressed looks on the faces of many of the pups. He also noticed that the pride's cubs had not come in. A lot of it he guessed probably had to do with the chaos that had come about in the fight with Kurse, which for the Pride had to be worse with the death of Elise and Fox. The arrival of the police chief and her reunion with her grandfather was one brief moment of joy, but that likely wouldn't change the mood of everyone, and Jensen knew he had a large number of wounded wolves to check on. But it would be best to check on how the ones he could see were doing.
"Jenny, is something wrong?"
Jensen's eldest daughter looked up toward him and her mother seated beside him, and the played with the meat in front of her with one claw.
"Just reminded of stuff," Jenny answered.
"That was the Curse, dear," Kaylee spoke up and moved to her eldest daughter.
"And look at all the trouble it caused," Jenny whimpered, "we got attacked, Miss Penny got hurt because of a misunderstanding that resulted from that attack, part of the pack was enslaved to ghosts, and two members of the pride were killed. The cubs lost their mothers and Mister Brian and Mister Gary lost mates. I wish Bart and I had never run into that Billy..."
Kaylee hugged her, and pulled Bart in as well. Marcy and Kevin both whimpered and looked to their elder siblings.
"What came out of it was bad, certainly," Kaylee said softly, "it's why "Transform or Dare" is considered a curse by many. And sadly there is nothing that can change that. You wanted to show your father and I that you and Bart could help us... and the Curse seized on the opportunity to attack. It isn't your fault. Martha's forgiven you, the other Omegas feel there's nothing to forgive..."
"But what about Miss Penny? Or Miss Elise and Miss Fox?" Bart asked.
"How do you know?" Jensen asked.
"Moja and her sisters and Tano and her sisters began crying about the loss of their mothers on the way to breakfast," Bart explained slowly, "If we hadn't done what we'd done, they'd be alive now."
"Maybe," Jensen sighed, "but it still wasn't your fault. As your mother said, it is called a curse for a reason."
"And given the power the game had been gathering over the years, Bart-san, Jenny-san," Amy spoke up, "you can not be certain that the fight with Kurse would not have come if you hadn't met the boy who asked you the game."
"It is the way we feel," Jenny whimpered again, making Kaylee hug her tighter, in the hope that a mother's love would somehow fix the problem.
Jensen only sighed and looked over to Amethyst, "Amethyst, given how down the pups are, I doubt much progress would be made in schooling them today. I'd just let them relax and recoup... possibly even try to comfort the pride's cubs. The loss of Fox and Elise will no doubt be hard on them."
"Of course, Alpha-Jensen," Amethyst nodded.
Penny meanwhile sniffled in her seat. This wasn't like losing Kirk. She proved she was capable of bringing Kirk back, of even bringing Gillian back... but Fox couldn't be brought back. Her closest friend in the Pride was gone, leaving behind four daughters without a mother. She would miss Fox terribly, partially as she had hoped that Fox would be her maid of honor at the wedding, and while the other lionesses in the Pride were good friends with her, her friendship with Fox was extremely close. After sniffling a bit, she turned to Kirk, seated beside her.
"We must talk with Gary today," Penny told him, "Tano, Sita, Saba, and Nane will need a mother figure."
"Gary loves his daughters," Kirk told her.
"I know, and it isn't like we'd be stealing them, but the will need someone to show them how to be lionesses... help them hunt, things males do not know," Penny spoke.
"Male leomen have hunted before," Kirk commented, "we aren't entirely like our mundane cousins."
"Most of them have not had the benefits of a pride, and many of the others were thought to be rather effeminate," Penny commented, "WE do the hunting, YOU defend the territory. It's the way leomen have always done things... and our mundane cousins are somewhat similar."
Kirk slowly nodded, as Penny did have a point there.
"And besides, I owe it to Fox to take them in," Penny spoke, "She'd want that. Gary can visit as much as he likes... and I'd even encourage it."
Kirk nodded, "Hopefully he'd grew to it then."
++++++++++
1682
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Griselle asked as they approached the edge of pack's land, "we ought to wait until they come into town."
"The wolves rarely do that," Goldwyn answered, "and their pups do that even less. We have to go to them."
Goldwyn then scratched behind one of Herodias's ears.
"Besides, this will be done undercover," Goldwyn continued, "their mean and evil adults won't even think twice about us."
Griselle glanced to Gita and then nodded. As the three stood together, they once again tapped into the Infinite Chaos to put forth their latest scheme. Their clothing vanished as their bodies grew taller and more muscular. Non-retractable claws grew out of their fingers and toes while their ears became triangular and moved to the top of their heads. Wolf muzzle's pushed out from their faces as their human hair fell away, and then fur began to appear on them. But unlike most lupmen who were usually various shades of black, gray, white, brown, with some occasional mixtures of these colors and an occasional shade of gold, blond, reddish-brown, and even some orange shades, the witches fur was colored like the rainbow. Bright reds, blues, greens, purples, and in various shades appeared on them.
"I hate this," Griselle complained, "they'll expect us to follow their rules."
"No they won't," Goldwyn answered, "they'll think we're fellow wolves and won't try to throw us out, and besides, it's their pups we want to interact with, not their adults."
"How will we get their adults away?" Gita asked.
"Leave that to me," Herodias spoke as Goldwyn set the black cat down.
"Be careful," Goldwyn called after her.
"Like the most inferior member of the dog family could ever catch me," Herodias answered confidently.
The three temporarily transformed witches watched as the female cat made her way into the pack's grounds. After a few moments they slipped in themselves and made their way toward the manor, though trying to stay out of sight...
++++++
"Oh certainly this failed," Lawrence commented, "rainbow colored fur? Even if we were color blind we'd notice the difference."
"That is where Herodias came in," Marie explained, "and the brightly colored fur isn't necessarily THAT much of a handicap. Many of your brightly colored wolves are successful at hunting."
"Mostly because we've altered our hunting tactics," Lawrence explained, "our brightly colored pack mates wait until those of us that have natural camouflage take up possible ambush points and then converge on the deer in plain sight. When the deer flee, they run into the others. It's an alteration in tactics that's allowed it to work."
"I'm not arguing that," Marie answered, "but in a way, that is what Goldwyn was using. Herodias would distract any adult lupmen much the same way that she had earlier led Joseph Running-Bear through Glendale. The adult wolves were too distracted to notice that Goldwyn, Gita, and Griselle were too different to be members of the pack..."
+++++++
The pack's pups were at presently being watched by a grayish black female that served along side the Pack's omegas as the pups engaged in various games of wrestling in a small clearing near the manor. At present things were quiet, but she felt something odd in the air. Something that made the fur on her back stand on end, and it was coming closer. After a moment she turned to see a lone black cat hiss at her from the other edge of the clearing. At first she only gave a low snarl at it, as a house cat wasn't a threat to the pups in any way, but that strange feeling only got stronger while the cat was there.
"What is it, Mary?" one of the pups asked her.
"I don't know," the grayish black female, named Mary, answered, "Stay here within sight of the manor. I need to investigate something."
She then heard some footsteps coming from a different direction, and assumed it was one of the hunting teams. They could sure look after the pups while she dealt with whatever was making her feel uneasy.
"Fred, Daryl, Jennifer, could you look after the pups for a moment," Mary then called, without even looking, "I need to check on something."
Mary then moved off slowly toward Herodias. The cat, while it didn't attack Mary, didn't do anything to show that it feared the lupman female. It only trotted a little as Mary approached to stay just outside of immediate sprinting distance. Almost like the cat was taunting her. To Mary, this seemed suicidal, as she remembered one of her litter mates had enjoyed chasing stray cats that had wandered onto the pack's grounds, and did catch them on occasion. But Mary didn't have that interest. The only reason she was even following it was that something felt "off" about the cat.
"She called us by male names," Griselle grumbled as she and her sisters emerged into the clearing and approached the gathered pups.
"Hush," Goldwyn answered.
"Wow!" a young female pup spoke in awe, "You're pretty!"
"Thank you," Goldwyn gave a fake smile, that the pup didn't notice.
"Didn't help her much," a black furred male grumbled, "went after a buck and it saw her coming likely... lost an eye to its antlers."
"Do you have to be a no-it-all, Julian?" the female shot at him.
"It's alright, young one," Goldwyn spoke, "he can be stupid if he wants."
"Who are you?" a different female asked.
"I am Goldwyn and these are my sisters, Gita and Griselle," Goldwyn explained.
"You're new here, aren't you?" Julian questioned from where he was, "you ought to report to the Alphas and ask to join."
"We're merely traveling through," Gita spoke, "and we've brought gifts."
"Is it food?" Julian asked back.
"No," Gita answered, "it's a gift that'll help you all look pretty like we do."
"Pretty like you?" a different male asked, "but I don't want to be a girl."
It was an odd statement to make, considering that Gita, Goldwyn, and Griselle could easily change all of their genders, but that wasn't their idea.
"I suppose you'd prefer to be handsome?" Goldwyn asked the male.
The male pup shrugged.
"How did you get all the bright colors in your fur?" the first female asked, "is it paint? I don't smell paint."
"It's magic, and I'll show you," Goldwyn answered as she placed her hands on the pup's shoulders. As she did so, the plain green in her fur seemed to drain away and go into the young pup.
"Cool..." the pup gasped as her own fur was suddenly green as opposed to the mixed brown and gray that it had been.
"Me next!" "No, me!" "Me next!"
++++++++
When Mary returned about ten minutes later, unable to ascertain what about the cat that had made her feel so "off" about it, she practically gasped at the sight. All the pups that she had been watching were still there, but other then Julian who seemed to sulking by a crabapple tree, most of the pups were some bright color.
A green female and a red-violet male were playing a game of tag with pups colored like rubies, emeralds, sapphires, as well as a few that even seemed to be the color pink, while a pair of pastel green females watched. A dark blue male and a sky blue female were conversing about something.
"Omega Kaylee is going to kill me," Mary thought as she observed the scene.
+++++++
"Kaylee is the Alpha Female," Lilly spoke up.
"The Kaylee you know is, but I doubt she's over three hundred years old," Marie sighed, "This was merely a different wolf with the same name."
"Oh. Sorry."
++++++++
Back in human form, and fully dressed, Gita, Goldwyn, and Griselle made their way down the streets of Glendale.
"I still don't see how that'll work," Griselle grumbled.
"It's easy," Goldwyn answered, "the lupmen are all slaves to their laws... and what makes it worse is that they're WILLING slaves to it. The pups will be thrown out of the pack because of their brightly colored fur and we will be there to rescue them. They'll never have to follow anyone's rules again."
+++++++++
"She honestly thought that they'd be thrown out of the pack? At that age?" Maddex gasped, finding himself more and more "POed" with the behavior of the witches.
"She assumed that since the brightly colored fur would stand out and make it impossible for them to hunt the normal way, that the pack would evict them to remove what they would see as ultimately "dead weight" from the Pack," Marie explained, "then once that was done, she and her sisters could then swoop in, blame their expulsion on the Pack's rules and hierarchies, which technically would be true if all went according to her plan. And with the brightly colored pups on their side, they'd have plenty of willing "test subjects" to try and stop or even reverse the aging process in a way that wouldn't require the constant use of magic."
"But certainly she'd had to have known that their parents would never allow such a thing or that the pack would alter the way it hunted to give the brightly colored ones a chance at surviving," Betty commented.
"By this time, the witches had already forgotten anything and everything they had learned about family love or of the intelligence of the various species of man," Marie sighed, "their grandmother was the last person that they did truly love and with her dead, there was nothing that could really anchor them down. Their grandfather and father had been killed by diseases. Their mother had been killed by paranoid "witch hunters", which had spread through Europe like a plague at the time well before they began to develop. It is possible that if Balthilde had lived that she might have been able to prevent their "fall", as she understood their magic better then Running-Bear did, but even still it would have been a daunting task. And given that by that time, Balthilde was dead, that discussion is moot..."
Marie then sighed heavily.
"And since most species of "man" lived under various laws and hierarchies, they'd all assumed that as a "slave to laws" that they'd throw out their children," Marie then sighed.