Standing, half-dressed, in the larger of the two bathroom stalls, Jill froze.

She'd just been fishing a clean t-shirt—one without a huge coffee stain down the front—out of her duffle bag when the door slammed open. Just as swiftly, she heard it slam shut again, followed by the distinctive [i]click[/i] of a lock.

There was a quick scuffle of footsteps toward the smaller stall and a final [I]bang-click[/I].

Then nothing.

Jill scooped up a plain black tee and tugged it over her head. As she slid her arms back into the sleeves of a worn flannel shirt, she glanced toward the other stall. "Hey," she said, hesitant to embarrass someone who might be in the midst of a personal emergency, but concerned by the silence. "Are you okay?"

For a few moments there was only silence in the locked stall.

Then came a low, rumbling sound -- either a growl or a purr, it was hard to tell, but certainly it wasn't a sound that any little girl (or human) could make.

Jill froze a second time. She didn't know what was stranger: the idea that the person in the next stall might be growling at her, or the idea that that person might be playing some kind of recording, which seemed more likely.

...Or the idea that neither of those things might be true.

"The hell," she murmured, unable to stop herself. She slid back, just a little, and glanced downward, where she should have been able to see a pair of feet in the other stall.

She saw feet, all right. Or, more accurately: [I]paws.[/I]

"Hell!" 

Without even thinking about it, she scrambled on top of the toilet, bracing her hands against the walls. Shoulders hunched, she tried to slow her breathing, wondering what the odds were for her reaching the locked door before whatever—or [I]whoever;[/I] because this had to be someone in a costume, right?—was in the next stall got to her.

This had to be a prank. It had to. And yet, she couldn't make herself move—or take her eyes off of the very-real-looking tiger paws that seemed to belong to the bathroom's other occupant.