Night's Omen

Doc Mitchell and Kenji Matsumori were consulting in the infirmary, which was for once blessedly empty of injured Hunters and other casualties.  The Doc looked grave, and even Kenji's stoic solemnity was more pronounced than usual.  "Blood tests have turned up some very disturbing results," the guild doctor began.  "Erik was infected with no ordinary tiger elavie blood.  I'm not an expert on elavie biology, but I know enough to spot the differences.  The DNA is impossible--  no tiger alive today, shifter or otherwise, has some of the gene pairs that Erik carries now."


Kenji was perched on a swivel chair, thoughtfully nibbling a Snickers bar.  "From direct observation, his form is certainly that of a tiger," the raven reasoned, "but I agree, he is far larger than any tiger on record.  At least two feet longer, and a few hundred pounds heavier, if I were to make an estimate.  His bone and muscle structure seem more dense and stocky than a normal tiger as well."  He took a break to chew his candy bar.  "Could he be a throwback of some kind?"

"I was thinking along those lines," Mitchell admitted.  "Not so far back as a prehistoric smilodon or anything; he lacks the saber-teeth and bobbed tail, for one thing.  But yes, certainly an older, larger ancestor to the modern tiger.  There were dire wolves during the Pleistocene epoch.  Who's to say there weren't dire tigers as well?  It might even be more recent than that-- a mutant, or something.  Who knows how long that Chinese cult was preserving the bloodline of their 'God Tiger'?  It could have been centuries, maybe even longer."

Kenji inclined his head slightly.  "Regardless of how old the bloodline is, it has been kept remarkably well-maintained.  You almost have to give them credit for preserving such a powerful creature.  Unfortunately, this means problems for Lucio."

"Indeed," Mitchell agreed grimly.  "Such a powerul, primal beast isn't easily controlled, even with training.  Worse, Erik is new to all of this.  He was infected, not born with this shape, so it's going to be even more difficult for him to learn how to reign in his beast.  We may need to call in some help from the other large feline elavie."

"That might not be a bad idea."  Kenji considered this, gnawing on the remains of his Snickers.  "He could use all the help he can get, at this point."

"But would they?" the Doc asked.  "Tigers aren't really the most social of cats."

"True, but they're still half human," Kenji pointed out reasonably.  "And I believe we have other big cats working for the guilds.  We'll ask them, first."

"All right.  In the meantime, what do you, as his partner, suggest we do with him?"

The raven considered that in silence for a moment.  "Though Lucio will not be pleased with me, I will continue to monitor him," he decided.  "I will exercise more caution in approaching him while he is in tiger form, or in danger of shifting, however.  If he can indeed take control of his beast on his own terms, then that would be for the best.  Otherwise, we shall request the aid of more experienced shifters for special training."

"That sounds like a plan."  Doc Mitchell sighed and stretched.  "I just hope we can help him get this under control before he hurts somebody."

Kenji did not respond to that, for there was a knock at the door.  He recognized his partner's scowling face in the doorway.  "Ah, Lucio-kun.  We were just talking about you."

It's never a good thing to walk into a room and be informed that they were 'just talking about you', and Erik knew that it was especially bad to be walking into the infirmary to find that his partner and one of the doctors was just talking about him.  That was never good, and he was pissed off enough as it was.

"Were you?  Bad news, I'm sure," he snorted, and he had ideas along those lines.  He'd just gotten back from speaking with Connor, who wasn't happy, but apparently wasn't as sore as Erik expected.  The guild leader had complemented him on his formerly sturdy table, though.  It made Erik wince, realizing that Connor knew it was sturdy because he'd gone through it. 

At least he hadn't been taken off of hunts, though.  Connor seemed to think that refusing to allow him to hunt might not be good for him trying to deal with a potentially aggressive shifter side, like the hunting might be a good release to keep the cat content.  Erik was willing to take that theory and roll with it.

Now, he'd get more theories, and probably more bloodtests.  Great.  He was so sick of being the little guinea pig here.  "So, what's the deal now?  If you tell me I need more babysitting, I'm probably going to freak out," he warned, shooting a look from Ken to Mitchell and back again.  He was even more sick of being treated like he couldn't be trusted than he was of the needles.

Kenji's eyes shifted evasively.  "Then I will not tell you." 


Doc Mitchell shot Ken a whithering, but mildly amused look, before turning back to Erik.  "You'll still need some monitoring until you've got your shifting under control," he informed the Hunter.  "But we may have figured out why you're having so much trouble.  And we might have a solution."

Taking over from here, Kenji told him, "Your tiger form is unusually large, even for an elavie.  We think it may be a prehistoric throwback or mutant of some kind, kept alive in the blood for who knows how many centuries by that cult.  In other words, you've got more primal power than the average tiger shifter.   It's going to take some... extra work on your part.  If you can't take control of it yourself, we're considering having another big cat shifter from the guilds do some training sessions with you."

Erik just STARED as Ken first tried to avoid the subject, and then the two men jumped into their theory.  What.  The.  Fuck.

"You're trying to tell me I'm some sort of mutant?" he demanded, that word having caught and stuck in his mind.  The rest DID manage to sink in, however, and he pushed past the 'mutant' comment to take in the other important information.  More primal power...kept alive by the cult...oh shit.  "Wait.  So you think the reason the tiger I had to go over there to kill was so huge and insane because it was from some sort of old, nasty bloodline that those crazies kept going for centuries?"

He didn't know too much about shifters, but he knew enough about how the infection was passed along that he understood that it was possible.  As long as they continued to use the last tiger's blood to infect the new one, they could have been doing it for a really long time.

"Oh, shit."

Suddenly, sitting down was a good idea, and he completely ignored the idea of some other cat shifter trying to help him get control.  Just the realization of exactly what his situation consisted of was horrifying.  They'd tried to keep that bloodline alive by passing it along to him.  He'd killed their cat, and they made him the new one, which meant that the crazy tiger he'd been so mad about having to kill was now him.  Had that guy been in his situation in the beginning?  Kidnapped and locked up while the infection went nuts?  God.

Doc excused himself to go sort through his medical texts, or something.  Which left Kenji to deal with Erik.  "It's the best theory we've got right now, but you have to admit, it makes a certain sense," he mused.  "And I doubt that the cult ever bothered to tame the beast.  They just locked it up, like they did you, and let it out when it suited them.  But now it ends with you.  You will be the one to gain control over the tiger in you.  Once you do, you'll be..."

He actually looked up at Erik then, and realized that his partner wasn't really listening to him.  "Lucio-kun... what's wrong?"

Great.  He was already freaking out and feeling horrible for the guy he'd killed, and Ken went and suggested that it was their common practice.  That man had most likely been locked up as Erik had been since the moment he was infected, only released to go terrorize the village that he'd been called in to protect.  What he didn't understand was how the cult handled the tiger.  He believed it wasn't tame, but how the hell did they keep it from killing one of them?  How'd they call it back?  None of it made sense, even after having seen the inside of the cat's mind.

Of course, he was glad that he hadn't gotten the chance to find out.  Knowing what had apparently been done to people before him didn't help keep him from thinking about what they'd planned on doing to him.  At all.

His head shot up to stare at Ken when the man addressed him by name, and asked what was wrong.  That was quite the question.  What wasn't wrong?  "I...it bothers me.  How many people do you think they did that to?  I mean, I was lucky that people came to get me, but how many times did they get away with snatching someone and throwing them into that hole?"

He wasn't even going to mention how the hell they could have controlled a shifter like that.  He still didn't understand it, but the idea that it may have worked (most likely would have, considering their past successes) was scary.

Kenji blinked slowly.  Leave it to Erik to ask the difficult ethical questions.  It was embarrassing to admit that he hadn't really thought about that aspect of the situation. 

"I suppose it's been going on for hundreds, maybe thousands of years," he speculated.  "Depending on the individual life spans of the infected shifters..."  He let that idea hang in the air, unfinished, but no less disturbing.  Shaking his head, he concluded, "There's no way of knowing for certain, but I have a feeling it's in the range of 'a whole lot'."

And there was Kenji, making what passed as a joke for him, trying to lighten the mood.  Standing from his chair, he approached his partner and patted him once on the shoulder.  "Don't think about it too much.  There's nothing you could have done about that, aside from what you already did.  You broke the chain."

Once more, Erik found himself just staring at the raven, not sure he believed what Ken had just said.  He was used to his partner being brutally honest, but that was a little more than he wanted to think about.  Hundreds or thousands of years.  Probably two or more tigers, two or more men per century.  Good God.

Even Ken's 'joke' wasn't enough to get to Erik, though he normally would have actually laughed at it.  Kenji made those jokes so rarely that he usually laughed just at how unexpected they were.  Not this time.  The physical contact from someone who wasn't usually interested in any sort of touching was surprising enough to have his attention, though. 

Broke the chain.  Why was it that whenever someone said something like 'it's going to be fine', 'it'll be easier from here' or anything similar, Erik instantly got the feeling that they'd just been doomed?  Why?  Because, for whatever reason, it always seemed to work out that way for him.  He remembered calling in to report the kill when he was in China, laughing and saying, 'It's all cake from here'.  Boy, had he been wrong.

He wasn't going to drop his paranoia on Ken, though.  Let Ken think it was all fine, and he'd just hope his partner was right.  "Yeah.  I didn't break it, though.  You guys did, when you busted in there.  I was screwed," he admitted, just another symptom of his bad mood: admission of the truth.  He knew he wouldn't have gotten out if he hadn't had help.  He'd have tried, but those people had been through it before.  Many times before, from what Ken had suggested.  He doubted he was any different from the countless others in his situation.

Kenji just cracked one of those barely-there smiles that counted as an outright grin for him.  "I did my part, but you are doing yours, Lucio-kun.  If we are careful, you won't infect anyone else, and the chain will be broken for good.  The blood will die with you--- and let us hope that will not be for a long time."

It wasn't a normal thing for the raven to be this... well, for him, it was downright compassionate.  As he'd said before, though, he made a lot of exceptions for his partner, and Erik seriously needed some cheer.  It was the least Kenji could do, after being so dreadful to him on their journey back from China.  "Again, don't worry too much about it.  You will get through this, and when you are kicking even more vampire ass than you do now, you will look back upon this time and laugh." 

Ken was trying, and Erik appreciated that and the smile, but it didn't make everything better.  Ken had a point, though.  Worrying about it wouldn't do anything for him or anyone else.  He sighed and nodded, then stood and stretched a little to cover it all up.  Look more casual.

"I hope so, man.  Really, I do.  So, what the hell are we doing about this?" he asked, more than willing to change the subject.  This was too touchy feely, as far as he and Ken went, for his tastes.

Besides, he had big problems, and they needed to figure it all out.  Ken seemed along for the ride, so Ken could help.  "Am I being given a chance to get over this without scaring the hell out of another person?  If I'm some sort of mutant jungle cat, I don't know if I want to throw that information around.  What the hell is big enough to take on a mutant tiger, anyway?"

He didn't even want to think about it.  As far as he knew, a lion and a tiger were about the same size (usually, since siberian tigers were considered the largest cat in the world), and if he was crazy big?  Not good.

Kenji had to think about that for a moment, and he returned to his chair to do so, perching upon it and chewing his thumbnail now that he lacked candy to occupy his mouth.  "The camera surveillance will continue, obviously," he said finally, "but beyond that, I'm not certain how we should proceed.  Let's just keep going with what we've been doing so far, and if you are still having trouble by the end of, say, two weeks... we can think about calling in someone to help teach you."

Though honestly, even Ken didn't know what sort of shifter could handle that giant tiger, aside from maybe a bear, and nobody had even SEEN one of those in a good while.  They tended to keep to themselves anyway, and there was no guarantee that even if they HAD one handy that it would be of any help to Erik.  Bears weren't cats, after all.  Slightly different set of instincts.

"We'll think of something."  It really wasn't like Kenji to be so lacking in a solid plan by this point, but then again, it wasn't exactly your every day situation to have your partner turned into a monster tiger with control issues.  Still, he was confident they'd work this out.  Somehow.

Erik certainly noticed the lack of a plan on Kenji's part, though the man did put up a good front.  If he hadn't known the raven so well, he probably wouldn't have even realized that 'we'll think of something' had been Kenji's way of reassuring him without having an actual, solid plan.

Erik was hoping the surveillance would actually do them some good, so that he didn't have to WORRY about a new plan.  Hopefully, he could just get this under control without some other shifter having to get involved.  That would be the best option, but things just didn't seem to be going his way lately. 

Damn Chinese Crazies.

Ken did have the excuse, though.  Erik would give him that.  This was a hell of a situation to have to make plans for, and you don't get anything to prepare you for it anywhere else.  "Ooookay, so the new plan is to just keep doing what we were doing.  Excellent."

Hey, he didn't say he would give Ken verbal CREDIT for having the excuse.

Kenji gazed at him with cool dignity.  "Precisely," he confirmed, at Erik's sarcastic summation. 

"Well, if we've nothing else to discuss, I should be off.  I need to file some reports with Batten."  He moved to exit the infirmary, touching Erik's shoulder briefly as he passed him in what counted as a friendly pat for the raven.