Cat's in the cradle (Melia and Taliesin)

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The string of events that had happened since he'd come home last night continued to give Matt more and more questions, however having a complete stranger in his house had him reaching for the fire poker.

As far as he was concerned, Kristie didn't look fine. And though she seemed to know this creature... Vampire (apparently), he was very near to leaping across the room and bring the heavy steel down on the vampire's head.

Still he was caught off guard when the other said that he was already involved. "What'd I do?" he demanded. "I've been minding my own damn business-"
 
The vampire chuckled, shaking his head. "I doubt anyone with such levels of paranoia can really be considered to be minding their own business. But that is besides the point. The moment you asked that foolish old woman's butler if she had a cat, someone in the government started to put the pieces together. And now here we are." He gestured around the room extravagantly, far too much so for his rather rundown place. "Oh and, spare your fire poker, I'd hate to break it."

"He did?" Kristie glanced at Matt and then realized what happened. She let herself ease back down on to the couch with a groan. "I see. So they followed him back to me. Damn it. That's still no reason to bring him more into the crossfire though."

The vampire shrugged carelessly. "His house was close, and I felt he had the right to know what was really going on. After all, he stumbled so close to the answer before."

In an instant, Kristie was back on her feet with all her furr bristling. "How dare you go poking around in my-!"

"Shh!" The vampire said sharply. "I did no such thing. I've been keeping tabs on you, and once you ran into him, Matt as well. I can understand why you couldn't help yourself, he is quite the intriguing individual."
 
"I'm just making sure other people are minding their own damn business..." Matt muttered under his breath. "I am never going to talk to anyone again," he said with a huff, sitting back in his chair with his arms folded and his knees pulled up, decidedly trying to make himself as small as possible. He still held the fire poker though. "It's steel," he continued mumbling, more to himself than to anyone else.

He was still very much confused about what was going on before him. He was confused about Kristie more than ever, and now this fellow. He didn't realize it of course, but his nervous tics were starting to come out in droves. His hair was starting to get worked into a fuzzy mess and he was pinching the end of his nose, something he did when he was flattered.
 
Kristie frowned at Matt for a moment and sighed. She supposed there was no helping it now. Matt would have to have a proper explanation and then she could start to think about what she was going to do. "Why did you help me, really?" She turned her regard to the vampire. "He wasn't the best father but surely you didn't hate him so much that it was your only motivation."

"Do I need a reason? I like you. I didn't feel like seeing another creature get taken. Take your pick." The vampire was serene despite Kristie's suspicions.

"So you let them take Tessa?" Kristie growled softly.

"I am only immortal, not invulnerable. I knew they would not unduly harm her."

Kristie closed her eyes, still visibly upset but holding herself together. "Right." She smiled weakly at Matt. "So, I can see the questions practically spilling out if your head. I am a neko, a half cat demon. And yes, 'Scarlett' and I are one in the same. He is a vampire, son to my 'foster father'. The government hunts people like us because they fear and do not understand us. What other questions do you have?"
 
"Does he have a name?" Matt asked quite snippily. He glared at the vampire, still blatantly upset that he was in his house uninvited. He tucked the fire poker at his side and pulled his laptop off the floor. Once it had started itself up again he began furiously typing away at it, mumbling to himself something about aliens, while glancing up at the two of them periodically.

He would quietly read for awhile and then go back to typing, ignoring any words they spoke. Finally after much typing and reading, he announced, "It's actually not the government that's after you, surprisingly. It's a group, who have named themselves as part of the ministry of defense but they're actually not officially part of it. Which is good and bad news. The good news is, they don't have the law on their side. And the bad news is, since they dint have the law on their side and aren't officially part of the sector, they aren't obligated to be exactly strict about following the rules. Also they think you may be aliens, which," he glanced up at them, "you could be, technically. Distantly. But that doesn't mean anything because aren't we all? But that's what they've named you, to help in distinguishing their different projects. Vampire alien and cat alien. You probably already know this though," he said to Kristie.

"I've been sorta following them, mostly because of the whole alien thing. They're the group that goes and investigates shit like Roswell and stuff. They've just sort of managed to make themselves seem official enough to be government without actually being...government."

He sat back and looked the two of them over. "Myth and lore come from somewhere, don't they?"
 
"Good question." Kristie answered with a tight chuckle, turning a questioning eye on the vampire. "What is your name? Master never spoke of you."

"Ah, yes how rude of me." The vampire chuckled. "Octavian is the pretentious name father gave me."

Kristie winced. "Sounds about right, what do you go be then?"

"Avin." He smiled briefly before kneeling down to examine her wound, which she allowed only warily. "He didn't do a bad job. It will hold well until the poison is completely out of your body and your normal healing can deal with it."

Kristie gave the wound on her leg a frustrated look. "I can't wait for that. I don't want Tessa with those people any longer than necessary." She didn't want to stay with Matt any longer than she had to either. It was bad enough with Tessa.

Avin glanced towards Matt, wondering what he was up to. "Unfortunately, you must. Infiltration is your specialty and we'll need that to get your friend back."

Kristie waved the statement away with irritation. "Like you could not do what I do."

"I don't have your touch." Avin shook his head and the two fell silent for a while, looking occasionally in Matts direction. They both looked a little stunned as Matt finally re-entered the conversation. "As expected of him." Avin murmured to himself, a bit admiringly.

Kristie recovered herself first and nodded slowly. "Most of the things you hear about in myth, they are real. Living day to day and trying their best to stay under the radar. Partially to avoid the- well, the group you mentioned and others like it and just to avoid panic and retaliation in general."

"Aliens. Well, who knows. Even our personal lore has nothing to say on how we arrived or developed." Avin mused to himself. "Regardless, it doesn't excuse their actions."
 
"No," Matt agreed hesitantly, still eyeing Avin with some distrust. He glanced at his computer again. "It kinda seems like they've moved away from just aliens and its stretched to all sorts of supernatural stuff. Not sure if they still think it's all aliens or if they've just sort of taken to naming everything an alien as habit... there's a dragon alien and a werewolf alien... and a werewolf two and three... Oh. There's a lot." He paused, getting side tracked by one particular project that seemed to involve actual aliens.

"I mean... I kinda thought it was all bunk... like some self important Doctor Who fans or something..." He eyed them back and forth again. Outside of his initial shock at Kristie's appearance, he got used to the idea of her difference pretty quickly. After all, she was still recognizably his friend, and the red cat and read hair just... made sense.

"...so... what now...?" he asked finally.
 
Kristie hid an amused smile with her hand at Matt's distrust of Avin. Honestly she did not particularly trust him either. Before today she had not known he existed and had only picked up on what he was because he smelled much like her master. It didn't take a genius to put two and two together at that point. She found herself drifting into her own thoughts, perhaps because she was so tired and unwell.

"For the moment, there is not much we can do." Avin said, pulling Kristie out of her thoughts. He glanced around for a moment and then settled himself on the part of the couch Kristie wasn't sitting on. "We need to plan, but for that we need more information. And in the meantime there will probably be at least one attack before Kristie is properly healed up."

Kristie blinked a couple of times before putting her hands on her face and groaning. "They will be better prepared this time too, now that you've shown yourself." She paused as a thought occurred to her and she stared at Avin with narrowed eyes. "And what about your house, can we stay there?" It would definitely be better defended than this place.

Avin shook his head. "Well you could, if it was not so far away. I would prefer not to lead them to my home as well. Yours is compromised. Mine is not and I have other supernatural's residing there."

Kristie wilted just a bit. "Right..." She murmured, catching a heavy sigh just before it escaped. She was too professional to let this keep her down. "We need to find Tessa..."
 
I did not give you permission to sit on my couch, asshole, Matt thought violently, jutting his chin out in annoyance. Personally, he felt sure they would have 80% less problems if Avin hadn't gotten involved at all.

"Great," he muttered sarcastically and disappeared into his computer room, leaving Kristie and Avin behind in his living room. With laptop in tow, he immediately went about putting in all of his security measures and backups. He was not happy with the situation to say the least.

He hadn't really had time to even think about the implications of supernatural beings yet, either, though oddly, nothing about it particularly excited him and he wasn't quite sure why that was. Anyone else probably would have fainted, or been thrilled, or frightened. He was none of these things, seemingly accepting everything just as it was. As he sat in the dark of his computer room, madly picking his way through his complex security system, he let the thoughts cross his mind occasionally, realizing that they were sitting in just the other room and he wasn't being a very nice host.

At the same time, though, his home was about to become a war zone, which he was none too pleased about, and having such news like that, he figured he had the right to protect himself even a little bit, so he didn't much care about being a little bit rude, not that he was well known for being polite in the slightest.
 
Kristie and Avin spoke for a while longer, discussing various strategies and how to best defend the house. Occasionally their voices from the living room would raise in volume, mostly involving Kristie berating the vampire. She was doing her best to not let her anger at his actions to get the better of her but as far as she was concerned he had just made things more of a mess. It was all very well to come save her but involving poor Matt in this mess was going too far, even though it did probably save her life.

Thus, she finally hit a point where she couldn't be in the room with the vampire anymore and with a pained grunt lifted herself off the couch and limped into the computer room and shut the door behind her and giving Matt a weak apologetic smile. "Sorry...I just can't stay in there any longer or I'll try to attack him. And that wouldn't end well." She spoke knowing quite well Avin could hear her. Fighting a vampire was pretty damn hard in general, as she knew quite intimately. In this condition...well there would be no contest. She sighed softly and in a moment there was a shimmer and her cat form emerged. " Thank goodness, it's finally wore off enough. You don't mind if I stay like this for a while do you? It's a lot easier to limp around on 3 legs rather than one." The cats mouth seemed to be working perfectly normally, it was just making normal human speech instead of cat noises.

To demonstrate she hopped agilely across the room and laid down next to his chair. "I'm sorry you got involved in this too...I would have gladly let them take me rather than let this happen." They wouldn't have had a reason to take Tessa then either. In theory. The more she thought about it the more she realized it probably would have happened anyway. Tessa knew too much and was too attached to her, she would not have just moved on if Kristie had been taken.
 
Matt stiffened as Kristie came into his computer room and closed the window he was working on solely out of pure habit that he didn't like it when people looked over his shoulder. Many years of paranoia had engrained this into him, specifically because his early years had been him sneaking out and using the computers at the public library. He had to make an effort to mentally remind himself that Kristie had already seen everything that he did, and there was no purpose to hide it. As she slipped into her cat form, it eased his mind some, recalling the times she had been in there as a cat anyway.

He was surprised when she started speaking in this form, however, and completely stopped what he was doing to give her his full attention. "So, wait, you could have talked to me when you were staying here spying on me and you- just-" He rubbed his forehead and his hairline, causing the front of his hair to stand straight up. "Why didn't you just- say something to me? You had me really freaked out..." The answer was obvious, of course, but now that she was his friend, he couldn't really think about a time when they weren't friends, so it no longer made sense to him. There was a bit of a social disconnect there.

"Anyway," he said, going back to the subject at hand, "I think you have to take care of yourself first, worry about others later, so you did the right thing. Y'know, the whole put your oxygen mask in the plane first and then help others put their oxygen masks on? That sort of thing. We'll get Tessa help soon."

He went back to what he was doing on his computer, with slightly less speed and intensity. "Kinda wish you were actually aliens... maybe you would have some secrets on how to make a spaceship..." He clicked open a window where he was monitoring the group that was after them. "Shame such a violent group has to be the ones monitoring and 'keeping it under control'... maybe they are a secret branch of the government... would explain why they're so corrupt... I can't really get into some of this stuff," he said finally, stumped. "Maybe they have alien technologies... Maybe they're aliens! Oh.."
 
"They could be." Kristie mused to herself. "They certainly are far more advanced than your average human. They have to be to find and capture supernaturals like they do." It was a bit of an odd thought, but her existence itself was odd. She generally didn't think of supernaturals as aliens but she never put much thought into where they came from either. She usually had many much more pressing things to think about. This organization, namely, and the things she'd done it the past, getting her business' up off the ground, etc. "We don't have much information on said technology since most who come under their gaze do not re-enter society." As to whether they lived at all was entirely unknown as well, let alone their conditions if they were.

She couldn't see very well from where she was so stood up and awkwardly pulled herself up onto the arm of the chair with her front paws, taking a moment to adjust her greatest hurts before staring intently at the window he had open. "Hmm...I wonder what they're up to in my shop." She almost wondered if they were keeping Tessa there as bait for herself, or at least left some kind of clue. If they couldn't get her location out of Tessa then the best next option would be to bring Kristie to them. There was also her computer to consider. She wondered if they had realized what they were seeing was a dummy system and broken into the real thing yet. "Do you have an extra laptop or computer around here? Something you wouldn't mind me just trashing if something goes wrong with my remote access?"
 
Matthew moaned quietly. "Noooo, I don't..." He said, dragging his words slightly and with a hint of a whine in his voice. "I destroy everything with fire and will probably die from cancer from the high concentrations of nasty electronic chemicals in the air... Like hell if I'm gonna let anybody else touch my stuff out of concern for the environment," he mumbled the last part more to himself than to Kristie. Not that he didn't care about the environment, he did. But not enough to let anyone other than himself dispose of his electronics.

"I guess you can use my laptop just..." He pulled it into his lap and started redirecting everything, grimacing a bit as he worked. Finally he had everything set up to his satisfaction and made a spot on the desk and set it in front of her, a bit confused how well she would do with the computer in cat form.

"I'll just get another one if I have to... Just don't let them trace my IP address or I'll have to move probably... You should be okay though, I think." He hoped.
 
"It'll be fine." Kristie said confidently, slipping off the arm of his chair and into his lap, at which point there was another shimmer and Matt suddenly had a much bigger lap-full of Kristie than he had before. "Sorry." She said distractedly as she opened up a command prompt and started typing away. It was times like this that she tended to forget humans didn't always do well with nudity unfortunately. Even more unfortunate was the pathetic rags that had been left of her clothes had not transformed with her and she was quite naked and on his lap.

On the laptop several camera feeds were coming to life. They were all various angles on her store and the outside. Her store was trashed and it seemed her computer was missing. A sly smile crossed her face. "Oh so they moved it. Well that is a relief." She hummed happily and shifted a bit in his lap. There was no sign of men still being there, let alone Tessa. They might be upstairs but if they were she would think they would have men downstairs too. They also wouldn't have taken her computer, they would have tried to crack it right there. She could try to go back and check it out more thoroughly but she didn't think she should be running around alone for at least another day.
 
To say that Matt was flustered at Kristie's transformation in his lap was more than an understatement. His face had immediately flushed red, concentrating in the tip of his nose, his cheeks and his ears. He looked away out of courtesy but was making small strange noises in his throat and was nervously pinching at his nose. The more she shifted the more nervous he got.

As curious as he was about the state of her store, he couldn't bring himself to even glance at the screen for fear of accidentally looking at her and he wanted to be respectful. It was certainly the first time he had had a naked girl in his lap. Despite his will though, he was curious what was she was doing and he glanced a few times at the screen, each time catching a glimpse of her skin which resulted in numerous embarrassed apologies and more nervous touching of his face.
 
Initially Kristie paid no mind to the noises Matt was making. She was much more interested in cataloging what had happened to her store and making her own plans. She was so involved that even the first couple of times he started stammering apologies she didn't realize what was going on. Eventually though the apologizing started to get on her nerves and she quickly shut the program down and did her best to erase any traces that she had ever done such a thing. At which point she slipped off his lap and turned to face him with her hands on her hips, tilting slightly in the direction of her good leg. "Just what is-?" Only then did she register what the problem might be and sighed softly.

"Honestly." She rolled her eyes. "You humans...it's just skin." A second later she reverted back to her true form which he had saw earlier. "Does the fur make it better? It's not like you hadn't seen most everything while treating my wounds anyway."
 
"You were still kinda wearing clothes before..." Matt began. It was the first time he'd really properly seen a girl naked. Outside of the one time one of his foster sisters had snuck into his room and tried to convince him to have sex with her, which had been weird and it had been dark.

"Sorry," he mumbled again and pinched his nose again. "Everything's mostly alright though? Outside of the obvious..." He shifted in his seat and tried to gather himself, busying himself with the laptop. "I can help you with your store, if you need. Didn't look so great..."

Finally he looked back over at her. "This might be a weird question but does Mr. Howard know about any of...this?"
 
Kristie sighed lightly, annoyed at herself for getting annoyed at him. She was letting the stress of the situation get to her, it wasn't like he could help being a human or being raised with human ideals. "I'll worry about the store later." She grimaced and leaned back carefully against the wall. "Now that I've been found out..." She would have to leave, Completely disappear and build herself a new life somewhere else. She knew she would have had to at some point, if nothing else but because of the lack of aging, but that didn't make it any easier.

"Anyway," She squared her shoulders and winced at the mention of Dominic. "No, he doesn't know anything about any of this. He is far too good of a man to accept what I've done and I would not bring him into this world of mine so long as I have a choice in the matter..." The same with Matt, though obviously she had not had the choice. "It was never going to be any more than a fling. There's no way it could ever be any more than that." She couldn't quite keep the sadness from her voice.
 
"I wouldn't say that..." Matt murmured, averting his gaze. He stood so he was facing her. "I mean... if you approach the topic right..." he was no expert on that technique though, considering the way he'd barged his way into Dominic's office one day like a windstorm and left everything uprooted in his path. "Sometimes he's really kind. He took me to see Tau Ceti, like actually see Tau Ceti. We took a trip down to the states to Hawaii and he rented out the whole observatory for a night. Well. I paid for that but he pulled the strings. It was really nice. And I got to actually see it. You can't really see it here... I'm not really sure where I was going with that...Just that he doesn't seem to like me very much most of the time but sometimes he understands."

He kept his gaze down. "Anyway, I think you should do what makes you happy." There was an awkward silence before he shifted and made his way to the door. "Is that weirdo still out there?" He poked his head out into the hallway, unsure of whether he should be looking for a man or a bat. Then he snuck across the hallway, trying to avoid being spotted and into his bedroom where he crawled into bed without bothering to remove his clothes, fully intending to take advantage of the calm before the storm to rest. If there was going to be a storm, though he was sure that there would be.
 
Kristie was somewhat in shock to be receiving advise from Matt. It was such a turn around from what had been their relationship thus far that once he left she sat down very carefully in his chair and stared blankly at the wall for a few minutes. She didn't know that she would take the advise but Matt had known Dominic for quite a while longer than her. It was just odd to see that turn around between them, and in some ways it was comforting for her. Her world had been turned upside down and shaken apart in one short day and Matt's acceptance of that while stepping up to help her still was very much what she needed at the moment.

She had to admit she would really like to be able to lean on Dominic right now, even if it would just be for the emotional comfort. She didn't know that she could do that to him though.

Luckily for Matt, Avin had once again flown outside to have a look around. He was unsure what to think about the lack of expected attack and hoped he would be able to sneak up on anyone trying to get the jump on them. He found no one though and was rather concerned when he returned to the house. He let himself into the computer room only to be immediately pushed out by Kristie. "What-" He spluttered as he was grabbed by the suddenly lively Kristie and removed from the room.

"Just stay out of there." She responded tiredly and settled against the wall. "I take it you didn't find anyone?" She didn't really like the vampire much more than Matt did but Avin was an asset that she needed very much right now. She frowned at his negative response. "So...they want me to come to them." That was her best guess anyway. They did have Tessa, they knew she would have to come to them at some point and that she had a powerful ally. She supposed it wasn't a hard decision for them to make.

"Probably." Avin agreed, still uncertain and constantly watching all of the windows for shadows that never came. "You should probably rest some more. I will keep watch."

Kristie eyed him a little dubiously before nodding. She once again shrunk into a cat and in a hopefully well received move, let herself into Matt's room and curled up next to him. He wasn't Dominic but he would do for some physical comfort right now.

Avin perched on the roof in his bat form, but even well after the sun passed the horizon there was no sign of any intruders.
 
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