Trapped Like a Cat

When Rain finished his shower he dried his damp fur off with one of the towels before wrapping the other around himself. His practiced habits of modesty, instilled in him by his many group homes, were still with him even here in the giant empty changing rooms of the stadium.

As Rain walked down the cold tiled floor to the locker room, he heard a distant pop of a small explosion and the faint cheer of the crowd outside. “I need to hurry up. I’m missing the games,” Rain thought as he hurried as fast as his towel would allow, back to the locker that Ansel had shown him.

Rain opened the locker and was surprised to find nothing inside. Second guessing himself, Rain opened the lockers to the left and then right of the first one and found nothing. Growing concerned that someone had stolen his clothes, Rain looked around and saw his hat on the doorknob of an open door to a private changing area.

Rain walked over to the hat and saw that inside the changing room his clothes were laid out somewhat sloppily. “Ansel must have come back and laid out my stuff?” Rain thought as he grabbed his hat and walked into the room. Rain was walking over to his clothes when he thought he heard an electric chirp somewhere not so distant.

Rain swiveled an ear and listened for what should be a rapidly repeating chirp if it was a Null Collar alarm, but none followed. He dismissed the noise as misheard Mana Games and, again out of the habit of privacy, Rain closed the door to the changing room ninety percent of the way so that only a crack of the outside remained.

Excited for the games Rain put on all of his clothes as quickly as he could. He was almost done and about to try on his new jacket, when he felt a sudden static on his whiskers. Then, right before his eyes, the door in front of him slammed itself shut with enough force for him to feel the wind of it on his fur. Rain flinched and jumped back, his little cat ears ringing from the loud unexpected noise. He recovered from the rude surprise and went to reopen the door, but before Rain could cross the meter of space he heard the door’s deadbolt thud itself into place.

“Ah what the… Hello?” Rain’s words trailed off when he grabbed the door handle and turned it, getting no result. “Hey, I’m in here. Hello?” Rain shouted and then listened. He thought he made out the clop of increasingly distant footsteps. Like the noise a hard heeled shoe would make or… metal shoed hooves.

Rain pounded on the door with his fists and yelled for help but none came. After a while Rain took a break from yelling to get dressed, finding momentary happiness when he finished putting on his uniform and looking in the mirror. The new stiff thick fabric of the uniform made Rain look inflated as it pillowed from his body.

“Well, I can grow into it,” Rain joked to himself. He spent the next few minutes adjusting the uniform as best he could. When he folded over the waist of his pants and cinched his belt tight, the pants fit well enough, and if he tucked in the jacket and rolled up the sleeves, the jacket felt less awkward.

After Rain finished his alterations he admired his reflection in a wall hung mirror. For a moment he was happy until a cruel thought crept in, “I look like a kid who dressed up like a Shadernaut.” The thought succeeded in returning his mood to mediocre. At first he had torn himself down so he could be inoculated from the taunts of others, but now he was inwardly cruel out of habit and the need to be “realistic.”

Rain, still feeling the effects of adrenaline with nothing to spend it on, began to pace the room, occasionally mumbling to himself rhetorical questions about his situation. “I just had to fall for the first trap someone set for me? Didn’t I? Oh no Ansel I’ll be fine no need to worry about me! Look at me! No one knows or cares where I am right now. It will be hours until anyone notices I’m missing and I will have missed my application interview and then… It might be another year till I can reapply. If the Feds don’t get me…” An explosion emanating from somewhere outside interrupted Rain’s thought spiral.

The crowd outside of the once crisp, now cracked and faded green walls, cheered as a loud series of pops erupted. Rain guessed that they were playing Mana Gauntlet. His anxieties renewed as he visualized the spectacle that was going on only a few meters away. Rain brought his hand to his collar and grasped it wiggling his fingers between his neck and the collar.

“I’m sure if I just pulled hard enough it would come off then I could teleport to the other side of the door and no one would know… but they would find out,” he thought. Rain knew, through instruction not experience, that most Null Collars were designed to come off if they were ever to be caught on something. He also knew that if a Null Collar was damaged the collar would glow red and chirp every second to alarm anyone nearby of the potential hazard of an uncontrolled Mana user. Sure he could smash and stash his collar, but at some point Rain would be caught not wearing a functional Null Collar and that could jeopardize his Shadernaut ambitions.

A familiar thought crept up behind Rain. He could just remove the klacking collar and teleport wherever he pleased. A lack of money would be no hindrance to a teleporting Anthro with no scruples. He had heard about the different pirate gangs that ran the coasts of Thromerica. The Doomriddle Syndicate being the most notorious and geographically proximate. He had heard someone say that they held a few small islands off the coast and that they controlled vast territories to the distant south. With his powers surely he could fall in with them and rise through their meritocratic ranks. The idea would spark in him sometimes, but there was never any fuel for the incendiary thought to cling to and the ideas would fade like a wisp of smoke.

The minutes ticked by and Rain had to endure the sounds of celebration as one game gave way to the next. Rain could make out enough to guess at what was going on and envy the spectacle everyone else was partaking in. He tried a few more rounds of banging on the door and calling out for help during lulls in the action but his efforts did nothing to change his situation.

Finally, after a bout of pulling and banging on the door, Rain lost all composure and sat back on a bench and cried, holding his head in his hands and rocking slightly. It felt good in a way, as the ball of stress that had wound up in him that day uncoiled itself and unraveled through his tears. After several minutes of uncontrolled sobs Rain took a deep jagged breath and sat back propping himself up with his arms.

The release of tension was soothing and Rain lay down on the bench. All the teleportation and healing, and now his futile escape attempts had taken a lot out of him. Rain was now something beyond tired and he bargained with himself that he would just take a quick nap then try yelling out some more. He laid his head down, curled up with his black furry tail hugged to his chest, and fell asleep.

When Rain awoke it wasn’t because he meant to, but because he was alerted by a foreign noise that had found its way into his consciousness. It was a hard clop, not dissimilar to the one he had heard before, the biggest difference being the hard footfalls were approaching. Rain bristled. Was it a staff member who might help free him? Or was it Rodney? Come to torment him through the door?