Kathy didn't know why she felt the need to check up on her family tree. Maybe the incident
with the Game turning her into a mouth-piece puppet to mutate her family and everybody
nearby had left her curious about that period in history.
Sadly all the archives about such things were in Glendale, and after the horror of Kurse,
Kathy felt even less eager to return to that cursed town.
This left Kathy with some faded family albums, the words of her grandparents (her
mother's, father's, and step-father's), and a 'sweet dreams' fairy figurine goodluck charm
that had been in the family for generations accord to her real father.
The half-dragon twins (born after her mother had remarried) were of course scared stiff by
what happened, but had quickly recovered and now wanted to know all they could about
the game (likely fantasizing using it to becoming full dragons, or super heroes, or ninjas,
or pirates).
Glendale had been under the effects of a plague at the time, so records however dealt
mostly with that rather than the so-called myth of witchcraft.
Finding a family tree in the attic with yellowing paper, Kathy found that her family had
come across the atlantic around the year 1800, and had split up settling in Salem,
Frostvile, and Glendale. Of course Kathy knew that already, her family had relocated here
because they were fellow Felman here.
Kathy was glade the curse at least hadn't turned her into a leoman, or a gargoyle, or a
lupman.... all their fur colors were so drab, so faded, so dark, so bland. Kathy's
grandparent had said they had to be logically related to the Wolf Pack, since those
wonderful bright colors in the lupmans' fur had to come from somewhere.
Kathy remembered somewhere that the Indian word for vegetarian was 'bad hunter', she
didn't know if it was true or not, but had been a joke among the other hunting species
eons ago that felman were pathetic hunters since they had all the sublimity and stealth of a
marching band due to fur color that you'd also see on poison arrow frogs.
Some even figured that felman had survived BECAUSE their bright fur colors made them
resemble poisonous creatures, like supposedly some species of butterflies had wing
patterns that imitated more poisonous species of insect.
While leomans might have invented civilization, humans and felmans were the first to pick
up on it, lupmans and dragons stubbornly rejecting it for half of recorded history of the
species' of man.
Kathy found what she already knew, that her tattoos (and those of her brothers, mother,
father and one set of grandparents) were ancestral and were supposed to contain bits of
her family history if she knew how to read them. Apparently it was a trait felman in Africa
had picked up from the local leoman, which had since mostly fallen out of style.
Apparently some felman had been brought over as 'discount' slaves from Africa, brought
over purely as an afterthought since they couldn't fit humans into the space they had left.
This had been in the 1820s.
'At least that explains where the half-naked members of my family came from.' Kathy
thought.
However, for leomans, only the matriarch of the Pride was tattooed anymore. And the only
felman besides Kathy and her relatives who still practiced it were some fundamentalist
pockets in Africa, and a the first born of families in Asia... There were some teenage
felmans in Japan who still apparently ancestral tattooed themselves. But their style was
considered a total bastardization and generalization of the tradition and style even by
those who didn't practice the ritual tattooing.
Kathy couldn't find anything with her limit research material on WHY her forefathers had
come across the ocean. She figured it must have been opportunity, or good old fashioned
curiosity (though Kathy cringed at the stereotype).
Kathy also figured it might have been the traditional fear of oblivion, and wanting to
spread their seed as far as possible least another plague hit Europe. After all, even today,
there were only sixty million felman in the world.... one percent of the entire world's
population. Dragons numbers were even smaller.
"I hope my letter gets to that boy... he was a real hero for someone who wasn't gifted to be
born a felman... Well, it's not like I'm going to get a response in a day.... " Kathy wasn't
about to let it consume her ever waking thought however, and thought instead of the
modeling agency that had offered to hire her as soon as she graduated.
++++++++
The nine cubs took one look at him as her shadow fell across them. The purple lupman
boy struggled under the loving weight but only look somewhat desperate to escape rather.
They didn't respond all at once like Gillie thought they would knowing what she did about
their origin. Their expressions weren't all the same either. Four had Elise's fur color, with
four others were the dirty orange of Fox's. The ninth of course was Mary, reddish gold, like
her father.
Gillie crushed herself, she was a police officer, she was supposed to be observant. She she
had seen Brian Hardy was also experiencing loss, but it hadn't registered since she was
distracted by their badges they now had.
"Chief?" One of the black furred cubs asked looking surprised and seemed to have better
maintain fur than the other.
"What are you doing here?"
"Shouldn't you be at work?"
The forth one said nothing.
"I don't think mom and dad will be able to come onto work for a while." Mary said.
"Chief?" Said the purple teenage wolf.
'Chief of Glendale police." Said one of dirty orange ones.
"OH! I! Am I in trouble?" The purple lad asked.
".... No... you're not... I just came here to find the girls."
"Why?" Another of the dirty orange ones.
"Whatever it is I didn't do it." Said another dirty orange one with slightly more wild fur than
the rest.
"You're not in trouble." Said Gillie firmly.
The wild furred seemed relieved at that.
"I... just came here to see how you were all doing."
The eight girls all suddenly looked sad. And Gillie remembered what Amy said about these
were supposed to be now Elise and Fox's children...
'But they're supposed to be just Elise and Fox cut into four pieces dammit! They should be
the ones acting alike, thinking alike, looking -exactly- the alike... Not Frank, Julie and
Daryl!'
The copper colored lioness wondered what she was even doing here.