[center][img=http://i1090.photobucket.com/albums/i374/bensundeitestutho/raptor-man_zps06c95bcc.png][/center]
[center][b]Zac Wilson[/b] | [b]Kelly Brown[/b][/center]
Zac woke up to the smell of smoke. Behind the cover of smoke stood a forest of trees, or at least that what it looked like to Zac. While the smoke did not impair his sight too much, it still produced a foul odor, causing Zac to cover his mouth. Next to him was Kelly, who was also starting to wake up from their recent encounter with the ‘S.T.R.I.K.E.’ agent.

Zac wrapped his arms around his girlfriend, trying to give her some solace from all the hectic things that had happened to them over the last couple of days. Kelly, in response, pressed her head against Zac’s chest, welcoming Zac’s caring embrace.

Then Kelly and Zac heard a piercing cry that sent chills down their spines. Both of the young metahumans turned their attention toward the cry and started to wade through the smoke in that direction. Once they made it out into the clearing, they saw a huge fire engulfing an abandoned RV.

As Kelly and Zac approached the burning inferno, they saw an old car driving off away from the area. However, for the moment, Zac and Kelly focused on what they saw before them.

As they came closer, Zac and Kelly spotted a silhouette in front of the burning vehicle. Whatever it was, it was tethered down by a rope. It paced back and forth on all four legs; occasionally it would cease from pacing and try to claw at the stake that pinned the rope down. Once while it was pacing, the thing happened to catch sight of both Zac and Kelly. For a few seconds, it stared at the two metahumans; however, immediately afterwards, it turned its head away, almost as if in shame.

“Do you see that?” Zac asked his girlfriend, gesturing toward the silhouette.

“While I am not 100 percent certain, it looks almost like a cat. That’s what my guess would be.” Kelly knew that something seemed off about this creature, but she could not place her finger on it. Was it the head?

“It can’t be a cat. It’s too large for a regular housecat.” However, after Zac replied to Kelly’s guess, both of the youths heard a ‘meow’. Kelly turned to her boyfriend after they both heard the creature’s voice, crossing her arms and tilting her head to the side as if she was signaling that she was right.

“Really? Do dogs ever ‘meow’?” Kelly replied to her boyfriend with a smile. Zac just shrugged his shoulders and advanced toward the silhouette.

When Zac and Kelly saw that whatever was in front of them did not make any aggressive moves or calls at them, they continued to approach it until Zac was in reach of the tether. Zac grasped the rope with one hand and sliced through it with the claw on the other. Kelly swooped down and picked up the creature into her arms.

The creature was shaking profusely, although it was not caused by being cold, but by shock. Kelly tried to calm it down by rubbing its back with her hand. Knowing that it would probably help calm it down, Kelly moved her hand up to the creatures head, rubbing between its ears. However, when she placed her hand on its head, she felt a different hair texture than the hairs that she felt on its back. In fact, she grasped a ponytail in her fingers!

Kelly immediately turned the creature around in order to see what exactly it was. It was definitely a cat, or at least from the neck down. Zac was correct that it was not a regular sized housecat, but it was cat nevertheless. The cat had to be that size because it needed a body that could support its human head. 

Kelly screamed when she saw the bizarre appearance of the cat, immediately dropping it from her hands. Stereotypically, the cat landed on all four feet, even in spite of Kelly’s shock from seeing what looked like a cat with a human head. It backed away from Kelly, although it made sure not to go too far back because of the burning vehicle that was in the vicinity.

“What the hell?” Kelly exclaimed, “It looks like something straight from Tim Burton’s imagination!”

“Um, Kelly.” Zac said to his girlfriend as he realized whose head was attached to the feline body.

“What?”

“I think you should look a little more closely,” Zac said, taking a deep breath before he continued, “I think that’s your long-time friend, Sammy.” As Zac completed his statement, the cat turned its head toward Zac and began to shake her head up and down, appearing to acknowledge that Zac was indeed correct in his assumption.

Kelly bent over in order to get a better look at the cat’s face, lowering her head to Sammy’s eye level. “Sammy?” Kelly engulfed her transformed friend in a giant four-armed hug, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Zac placed his hands on Kelly’s shoulders, attempting to pull her off from her best friend. “Kelly, I think you’re suffocating her.”

Kelly pulled away from Sammy, placing her hands over her mouth. After Kelly released her grip on her friend, Sammy stumbled backwards, coughing her lungs out as she tried to catch her breath. Once Sammy recovered from Kelly’s strong grip, she started to scratch something into the ground.

“What is she writing?” Zac peered over Sammy, trying to get a better view.

Once Sammy had finished digging her feline claws into the earth, she stood back and revealed what she had just written. Three letters was engraved into the hard ground: C-A-R. Kelly and Zac pondered what this could mean. What does a car have to do with anything?

“Wait,” Zac said as a light bulb illuminated within his head, “I remember seeing a car leave when we caught sight of the fire.” Zac turned to Sammy, crouching down so that they could see eye-to-eye. “Did the person who did this to you leave in a car?”

Sammy again bobbled her head vertically. Therefore, Zac embraced his girlfriend, planting a kiss on her forehead, between her antennae. Then, immediately afterwards, Zac dashed in the direction that he had seen the car depart. Kelly tried to reach out for her boyfriend, but she just extended her hands in vain.

“I hate it when he does that.” Kelly turned her glaze to her feline friend, pulling back her hair into a ponytail. “I almost died the last time he left all the sudden.”

Sammy walked up to Kelly and rubbed her side against Kelly’s leg. Kelly picked up her friend and cradled Sammy in her arms. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything once all this is over.” When she heard Kelly’s promise, Sammy purred. She reached up and licked Kelly on the cheek.

“Okay, that was weird.” Kelly looked down on her friend, wiping off the saliva from her cheek and flinging it off her hand. “You’re not secretly into girls, are you?” Kelly giggled as she pressed one of her hands against Sammy’s nose. After she heard her friend jokingly accuse her of being a lesbian, Sammy’s eyes grew as she opened her eyes wide and she responded by rapidly shaking her head horizontally.

“Is it because your head is attached to a cat’s body?” Sammy shook her head for a second time, but in the opposite direction. “Don’t worry,” Kelly promised while smiling at her friend, “I won’t tell anyone that you like girls.” Sammy hissed at her friend in response to Kelly’s false statement.

“God, it was just a joke.” Kelly rolled her dark eyes in response to Sammy apprehension toward Kelly’s so-called joke.

Suddenly, four vehicles, two of which were local Albany police cars, pulled up to the site. Almost a dozen officers and agents leapt out of their vehicles and pointed their weapons at Kelly, not taking any risks against a metahuman.

“FREEZE!” one of the FBI agents yelled as he slowly approached Kelly. “Put your hands up and slowly move away from the...” However, when the FBI agent saw what, or rather more accurately who, Kelly was holding, he found that no words could come out of his mouth. Even after his initial shock dissipated, the agent could only utter a few words. “What the hell?”