Ivory Huntress

[Amrou]

((hooray for indulgent subject titles))

Amrou was angry, and didn't know why.

Sure, she was bored, but normally that was a largely apathetic--or at least lethargic--feeling, and she felt anything but. Her belly was full, from the stupid woolly creature she'd taken down earlier, and she was free. There were no fences, no human stink, no mind-numbingly infuriating neighbors. And yet, she felt a sort of gnawing fury bubbling under her ivory pelt...and she had no guess as to why it was there.

Heaving a great sigh, which came out in a growly-sounding bellow, the annoyed lioness stretched out in the grass, and set her chin on her paws. Maybe if she feigned being relaxed and content, her brain would eventually be fooled into calming down.

It didn't make any sense. She had everything that she had ever wished for, in all her long days of hellish captivity. Space, solitude, peace. Food. It was all here. And yet, she was far from happy.

It could not have been because she was lonely. Oh, no. The feline hated the company of others, especially any creature large enough to be counted as a peer and not as prey. The 'pride' instinct was lost on her, she was sure, it being a generally disgusting thought. So it couldn't be that. There was no way.

Flopping over onto her side suddenly, her tail lashed the grass, punishing it for sitting there and minding its own business while she stewed. From her now sideways vantage point, she stared out across the empty grass from her patch of tree-shade and simply...watched the emptiness.

She had no idea what she was watching so intently for, and that--of course--only made her even angrier.

- Meet Amrou -

[Karora]

((Ugh, sorry about the rather flat style – I obviously need more practice with writing lighthearted characters, heh.))

Karora managed to unhook his claws from the tree, but only after a massive effort of willpower; then, muscles quivering with tension, he inched back down the trunk. Even when he reached the safety of the ground, he could not make his fur lay smooth. The squirrel that had tempted him into the terrifying heights scolded him from a nearby tree. The hybrid hissed and sneered at the little bushy-tailed rat, but the fact remained that it had escaped – Karora had no intention of repeating his climbing experiment. Not until the memory of the thrill outgrew that of the fear, at least. Indeed, at the moment, he didn’t even want to look at trees.

Thankfully, he could easily free himself of their odious presence by returning to the grassland where the humans had first dropped him off. He thought it probable he would find a meal there, as well, one he didn’t have to hunt; the big cat had not yet cottoned on to the fact that his old keepers would no longer provide for him. A pleasant expression on his leonine face, Karora strolled through the woods, his progress marked by the sound of breaking sticks and stomped undergrowth, head full of meandering thoughts about the peace of the place. Meanwhile, the wildlife hid and waited for the monster to pass on by.

When he stepped free from the margins of the forests, he immediately became aware of a nearby big cat – he had the wind in his favor. Besides which, said big cat was white, a startling blotch in the shade of a tree. Karora hesitated, torn between his gut-level need for social interaction and dislike for the same. Other cats made him nervous – itchy, almost, somewhere under his skin where he couldn’t scratch. Besides which, lionesses did not always approve of strange males approaching them. The young male’s tail flicked behind him as he debated with himself, but finally, a hint of familiarity in the scent goaded him into approaching. Surely the female, being all alone, would not be too disinclined towards him.

He realized that he did know her, once he got a bit closer, albeit only as a neighbor in another cage; and that fact brightened his features and hurried his step. If she’d been a wild lion, they might not have been able to understand each other, after all. He stopped several paces from the lioness, not out of wariness, but simply because of his own aversion to physical proximity. After a few friendly puffs from between his lips – a vocalization perhaps best reserved for pride members – Karora grinned and greeted her with, “Fancy meeting you here!”

[Amrou]

The wind may have been in the other feline's benefit, but Amrou was not deaf. Sighing to herself, she hear the traces of a very large and clumsy beast come trampling through the nearby forest. She was also from a life of strict captivity like most of the creatures here, but goodness. That was just embarrassing. After briefly considering turning her head and getting a look at...whatever it was, she figured it wouldn't exactly sneak up on her, sounding like that. So, ears flattened backwards to follow the sounds, she waited.

She still refused to turn and face the other, when it sent a few obnoxiously friendly huffs her way. Must have been a lion. Fantastic. Just what she needed. Then it deigned to speak, and she couldn't exactly pretend she hadn't noticed it, any longer.

So, she decided to turn her head very slowly and deliberately, ears remaining flattened in the most perfect expression of annoyed indifference that she could muster. If she did a good enough job with her trademark icy stare, then it might get the picture right away and she wouldn't even have to speak to it.

The lioness's head pivoted slowly on her graceful neck, and fixed the offending neighbor with a look of pure contempt...but the look slipped and fell apart almost instantaneously. It was if someone had suddenly pulled out the pin that held all her unforgiving features in place.

Amrou's ears flipped forward before she could catch them, and her frosty-hued eyes widened in confusion.

What was it? And why did it act like they were friends??

"Uh..." she began, sounding far more unsure than she meant to. "...do I know you?"

She fought to return her facade to that of confident scorn, but she was having a difficult time. The patchwork creature had managed to catch her quite off guard.

[Karora]

When his approach met with no response, Karora began to fear that the lioness might be deaf; and while he could impress no one with his wilderness survival skills, the hybrid had been introduced to a large enough number of female felines to rue upsetting one. Besides the awkwardness of being introduced by humans in the past – the apes hardly made gracious hosts – the lionesses tended to view him as weird. Hissing and spitting and clawing ensued. The jaguars did not bear remembering. His hope that the female would receive his approach well due to her lonesomeness and his tenuous feeling that they’d once lived in the same facility seemed suddenly like little more than an illusory bird which fluttered away even as he watched.

When the lioness finally turned her head, he felt little comforted: what if she had simply decided to look the his way, and would be surprised to see him standing there? The idea of three hundred pounds of surprised lioness was enough to drop the grin from Karora’s face, and her expression when she had her face turned halfway towards him was enough to make him take a step back, although of course her irritation wouldn’t be directed at him if she really were deaf. An irritated, surprised lioness, though – his skin shuddered, and he took another step backwards.

He could have leapt for joy to see her expression confused and not startled, when she caught sight of him. Not exactly a pleasant start, but better than a face full of fangs. It didn’t preclude his deaf theory, either. All the same, his smile returned to the hybrid’s face, no doubt more obnoxious for its brief absence. When she spoke – and clearly had no problem with her hearing – a bit of confusion entered his features, and once his brain processed her words, he became more nervous still.

“I... sort of thought so?” The hybrid cleared his throat and looked away, all too aware that he might have committed a major faux pas. “I saw a white lioness, once, anyhow, and I thought you might be her.” He made an effort to smile in a friendly manner. “That doesn’t matter though, right? It’s good to meet another lion out here in the wild. My name’s Karora.”

He stood up straighter and puffed out his chest, head craned as if to show off his meager mane to the best potential.

[Amrou]

Amrou was beginning to compose herself.
When the mish-mash feline spoke of once meeting a white lioness, her ears flipped backwards and clung to her skull in sudden annoyance, as if he'd spit in her face.

If he had seen her once, that meant that he was from the same human-infested place she had come from. It was likely; she hadn't made a habit of paying any attention to her menagerie-mates, and really only remembered the vague sights and scents of her immediate neighbors, all of which had been female. If this was the case, and he was indeed talking about her, it meant that her past was following her. And, she was once more identified by her brilliantly outstanding coat. She huffed a long-suffering sigh...would she never be free from the burden of her own beauty, identifying and marking her wherever she went?

The second option was just as insulting, however. Another white lioness? The thought was disgusting. That was her identifying trait. As much as she resented the fact, the thought that there might be another white lioness was just appalling.

Might as well assume the first case, then.

"Hmmph. You seem vaguely familiar."

His posturing, and seeming to claim lions as his kind, incited a half-sneer from the lioness. "Yes...quite."
Really, the whole thing was ridiculous.

Her tail flicked disdainfully.
But, she didn't chase him off...for some reason that she herself didn't quite understand. She let him be and indulge himself in some leonine company if he really wanted to, but she wasn't going to act happy about it.

"...I don't mean to sound rude," ha. "But I don't believe I remember seeing many adult lions with spots before." Or a shaggy adolescent mane, or a strangely-proportioned body, or any of the male's more outstanding features.

[Karora]

((I know my own characters so well. He’s apparently a lion/leopard hybrid. Oops.))

Karora watched the lioness’s response to his words with a bit of trepidation, his gaze drawn by her flattened ears. He couldn’t be sure what had prompted her reaction, and that, in turn, left him annoyed and awoke the feeling of unease which haunted his social interactions. He shifted on his paws and glanced aside at her verbal reply, not at all comforted when she sidestepped the issue – if he’d done something wrong, Karora preferred to be called out on it, so that at least he could avoid his mistake in the future.

Her physical reaction to the second half of his statement made the hybrid’s ears flick back – he was cheerful, and, well, perhaps a bit socially clueless, but he could read a face as well as any cat and knew a sneer when he saw one. That her words did not match her expression confused him, however – she sneered and then... agreed? Neither socialized extensively nor possessing any inborn skill for reading mixed cues, he cast her an inquiring look, head tilted and ears perked. Her body language continued to communicate distaste, and yet she failed to so much as hiss to voice her displeasure.

Her ambiguity paled in importance next to her question, however. Karora winced and said, “Ah, well...” He didn’t know quite how to continue, but her response invited conversation, so he dropped onto his haunches to buy himself a second of time. He shifted on the grass – such a strange texture, compared to the more familiar surfaces of concrete and dirt – before he ventured, “Well, I suppose I’m not a lion per se.” He smiled distantly and considered a bug which ventured to crawl across one of his paws. “But it’s better to act like one in company, eh? Leopards can be kind of grumpy.”

He looked up at her and tried to smile to block the words that floated into the forefront of his brain, but he couldn’t quite clench his teeth around them before they slipped from him like the squirrel he’d attempted to hunt earlier. “Are you a hybrid, too?” He winced after he said it – socially oblivious or not, he could see how inflammatory the comment was. It would explain her weird social signals and white coat if the answer were ‘yes’, though, so he couldn’t quite regret it.