And Look At Me Now
(OOC NOTE: this first section of my story may be immensely disturbing to some people, not for it's content, but because except for the little intro prior to the part about my past, everything up to "That set the stage for how things went for the next four years," where I introduce the fictitious character of my foster mother, I swear that every single word of it is the absolute truth.)
(another note: this one is just my background story, prior to my arrival at Shokushu, the background of my time AT shokushu will be in another story which I will write shortly)
It's scary to think what a few months can do to you. As I write this, I'm starting my sixth month at Shokushu, and what little time here has, in almost every conceivable way, drastically altered every aspect of my being, built up over 22 years, and ripped to shreds in less than half of one. To truly know the horrors of this place, you'd have to not only know me as I am now, but how I used to be. A couple people who know a little about my past accuse me of over dramatizing, that for me the way things are here isn't all that different from the life I led before. They are fools. My past, rough as it was, didn't seem all that bad at the time. I'm just lucky I was an early reader. Curiosity by some odd chance led me to an open book when I was 2 or so, there weren't any pictures I could recognize, so I wanted to know what all the spidery ones were. Thank Laya that I was lucky enough to get the answers I wanted. That's really the only good thing either of my birth parents ever did for me, my mom teaching me to read. I'll be damned if I knew why I was dumped in a gutter two years later though. I remember that night as clearly as though it were etched in stone in my mind. It was raining, we'd been in the car all day. We were near an undeveloped area, though I didn't know the word at the time, it looked to me like a park, grass, a hill, some bushes, the occasional tree. The car stopped. My father asked if I wanted to get out of the car and go play, my mother was strangely silent. I nodded, and quickly scampered out into the grass. I got a little scared when I heard a dreadful screeching behind me, and turned around to see that the car was gone, but I figured that they'd come back for me. It started raining a few hours later, I went looking for a way to get out of the rain, logic having always been a strong point of mine, even if my naivete has still remained an Achilles' heel. Around the other side of the hill, I found a thick screen of bushes, and tried to crawl under them to get out of the rain. I was quite surprised to find that behind the bushes there was a fairly large hollow in the hill, it smelled kinda funny, but I didn't really care about that at the moment, so I crawled in and curled up as I waited for the rain to stop. It started getting dark, and since I couldn't hear my parents calling out to me, the way they had when I'd gotten lost in a park once before, just a block or so away from the house, I figured out that they weren't coming back. I don't know how long I cried, I just remember that as I started to drift off to sleep, that I'd just passed my fourth birthday. Hell of a present, don't you think?
The next morning I was woken up by something fuzzy poking at me, when I opened my eyes, I saw a small kitten, her fur, though dirty, was visibly white, and her eyes were bright green, and seemed to almost radiate comfort. A few minutes later, one by one, several other cats started showing up, about 5 in all. I was somewhat scared, since I've always been quite a runt, still am, and at least 4 of them were bigger than me. The next few days were pretty bad, they forced me out, so instead I just curled up and slept nights next to their place instead of in it. The little white kitten actually came out and stayed with me instead of with the other cats, which hurt a lot, since in my mind, I'd caused her to be abandoned too. About a week passed this way, I followed one of the larger cats when she left in the mornings, to learn where it was that she got food, and thus figuring to get mine in the same way. I don't know if it was that they'd noticed this, and decided I was just a really weird, big kitten, or what, and I don't know how I could tell that was what they meant, but they took me in, I was part of their group. Like them, I wandered around, looking for food and such during the day, and came back and slept with them during the night. The first time I saw them cleaning themselves, I tried to do likewise. Yes, with my tongue. I failed miserably. The white kitten came to my rescue, and helped me out with that. When she started licking at my crotch to clean it, I felt an unbelievable rush of pleasure, and didn't understand why at all. I guess I started to get wet down there, because she started getting upset for some reason, and started licking faster, as though trying to keep up with something. It wasn't long at all before I climaxed, then I simply lay there on the ground panting heavily as I tried to get my breath back. She was curious as to how it felt I guess, and knew that she didn't react to licking herself there, so walked up by my head, turned around, and stuck her crotch in my face. I didn't mind at all, and started licking. That was the first night she and I made love. We did that together just about every night from then until the day she died. That's why people say it isn't much of a shift for me to be here at Shokushu, they say I'm already used to sex with beasts, but cats aren't animals to me, in my mind I'm at least as much a cat as I am a person, I purr, I meow, heck, after a month or so with them, I WAS able to clean myself with my tongue. After that first session, she went to sleep shortly afterwards, but I couldn't, the little gears in my head had started whirring. I figured that I could probably get more food giving other people pleasure between their legs than I could by scavenging. I was right. No matter how upright that city pretends to be, I know how it truly is, I know that despite all it's pretensions, it's still got plenty of men living there who'd LOVE to screw a toddler. After about a year of living that way, sleep for a few hours on either side of sunrise, scavenge daytime, sell myself nights, I finally noticed the buses full of kids in the mornings, mainly because I changed where I was scavenging because people were starting to put locks on their trash cans. I was intrigued, because the kids looked like me except that they were cleaner and better dressed, so I followed the bus, not all at once, because I couldn't keep up with it, but until I lost it on one day, then waiting there for it the next morning to follow it again until I lost it. It took me a week or so to finally find the school itself, and I went exploring. The janitor found me, and dragged me to the office, kicking and hissing. Yes, hissing, by then I'd forgotten most of what little of the English language I'd learned, I spoke cat far more fluently. They asked me basic questions, like my name, address, etc. and were a little confused when I responded with a perplexed mew. I still doubt that they were anywhere near as confused by my answer as I was by their questions. I'm guessing they enrolled me in kindergarten or the like, because then they led me to a classroom and kept gesturing at the ground in front of the door. I haven't the slightest idea how, but one of them finally managed to get it through to me that I should come back each morning. After they were confident I understood that part, they led me inside, and I joined the class. I was the object of substantial curiosity from the other students, since unlike them, I was dirty, my hair was unkempt, my "clothes" were the tattered remnants of what I'd been wearing the day I'd been abandoned, while they were all chubby, I was unhealthily skinny, and to top it off, as far as they could tell, I couldn't speak. The teacher seemed interested in me too, since I did the little peg-in-hole puzzles without all the banging associated with wrong guesses, I just looked at the pegs, looked at the holes, and put the right peg in the right hole, seemed perfectly normal for me, I remember wondering why all the rest of them couldn't manage it. The teacher, bless her, instead of forcing me to take maps like the rest of the kids, set herself at trying to teach me to read and speak english. The school year finished up without me yet saying anything they could recognize as a word, the teacher and I were both getting frustrated. I was held back in kindergarten for two more years, living with the cats, and in my fourth year of kindergarden, she tried teaching me to write instead. It turned out the sounds were my actual problem, I didn't know how to make the ones for human speech. In about a week I'd once again picked up the alphabet, a month and I'd surpassed the written vocabulary of the other kindergartners, by the end of the year, I'd covered all of the writing and reading curriculum up through what they gave their "gifted" fifth graders. I still spoke in cat. I had read the dictionary during free time, even. I ended up becoming that teacher's special project the next year, she was dedicated at getting me to speak, and I thank her for it. To the other students of the school, I had long since ceased to be an object of curiosity, and was now an object of ridicule. I was degraded in every way they could imagine. I don't fear being humiliated by the monsters of Shokushu for a simple reason, the mind of a monster can never be as evil as the collective minds of an elementary school that is totally united in who it belittles. Even though it just made them hate me all the more, I still got the last laugh that year. In the middle of May, I finally started speaking English, even though it was with the weirdest accent anyone there had ever heard. My pronunciation sucked, but my vocabulary was worlds beyond theirs. The class I had initially been in kindergarten with was finishing up sixth grade, and I was placed in the class, and for the rest of the year I was simply making up the tests I had missed. I finished in time to take the last test of the year with the class. When all was said and done, I had outperformed them all on every single quiz, test, everything.
That set the stage for how things went for the next four years, school genius mornings, time with my family in the afternoons, and if anyone's particularly dense, I mean the cats, whoring for food money nightly, getting a little sleep around sunrise. I did well on swim team, but nobody cared except me, I wasn't fastest, but I sure as hell wasn't slowest either! Then I met a woman who changed my life. It was raining again, but I was still out working the streets, hoping there'd be a customer, she saw me, and invited me in. I've had that be a prelude to a business transaction before, so I went. She had me sit down with her at a small table, and asked me to explain why I was out on the streets in rags, in the rain. I told her. She stared at my eyes for several minutes, which, to tell the truth made me REALLY uneasy. Eventually she said "Bring any of the cats that'll come with you, be back at my front door sundown tomorrow. You're moving in." She most definitely said it as a command, not a suggestion, and she WAS a lot bigger than me. The white kitten who I was so close to was the only one who would come with me, and so, with her curled up in the crook of my elbow, I stood there at her door as the sun went down. About an hour past sunset she bellowed "Are you coming in or not?!" which I took as my cue to do so. That began a new phase of my life, mornings stayed the same, but afternoons and nights were FAR different. My foster mother taught me her... well, I guess religion is the most accurate word, although it isn't really even close, since there's no worship involved. She taught me what it is to be a summoner. She really only did the preliminaries though. When she thought I was ready, she took me before Laya-sama, the same great spirit she herself had forged a contract with. Laya-sama accepted me, and I too made a blood contract with her, and my souledge was forged. There was no love lost between my foster mother and I, she provided food and a roof, and nothing more, so long as I continued with my training, and that was all there was between us.
Fours years later, I finished high-school on time, and started trying to apply for college. Since I couldn't provide a social security number, or even a definite date of birth, most colleges wouldn't even talk to me, despite the fact that I'd received numerous awards for winning competitions in nearly every branch of science, when I received a curious looking piece of mail, from something called "The Shokushu Foundation." I very nearly fainted when I found out they were offering me a research fellowship! The part that was putting me against it was that they wouldn't allow animals in the dorms, and there was simply no way I was going to part with the cat with whom I'd spent almost my entire life. I sat down to write out a "thanks, but no thanks" letter, and just as I finished it, I heard a screech and a soft thud outside. I went out the front door to look, and there she was, splattered and bloody under the front wheel of a sports car. The driver just sat there, grinning stupidly. I wanted to walk over to him and peel his face off with a cheese grater. I couldn't bear to live there anymore, to every day have to walk past the place where my heart had died. I looked over their letter again, and it included a boat schedule out to the island, and that one was leaving the next day. I burned the first letter I'd written, and sent one saying that I would probably arrive around the same time my letter did. I didn't really have anything to pack, I had some notes, some designs for potential machines I'd come up with, but aside from my computer I'd built from scavenged parts, and my collection of bootleg anime I'd amassed after accidentally being exposed to it looking in a store window, everything could fit in a small backpack. I gave the cat who had helped shape my existence a decent burial, and after packing a single suitcase with everything I owned, I actually spent those last two days camped out on the dock the ship was supposed to leave from. I was woken up by a pair of gruff voices laughing raucously, I opened my eyes to see a small boat tied to the dock, and a pair of burly men looking at me with a decidedly predatory gaze. I stood up and dusted myself off, "this wouldn't happen to be the boat to Shokushu would it?"
They didn't answer me right away, but talked among themselves first, making jokes like "Not to often we see one THIS eager to get in!" and the like.
I grew somewhat agitated, raising my voice to glass-cutter pitch "I SAID, ‘IS THIS THE BOAT TO SHOKUSHU!?!'"
They both shuddered, then nodded silently. I've always loved the fact that swimming has given me one hell of a lung capacity. I smiled sweetly at them, stepping onto the boat, hefting my suitcase in behind me as I sat down. "I'm ready when you are gentlemen." After waiting a few hours, to see if there was anyone else, I guess, the boat pulled out of the dock, headed towards Shokushu. Looking back, even if I'd known back then that the word Shokushu meant tentacle, I probably still would have gone......