And so, having an idea (and working around the constraints of the author), Agate created an avatar. An avatar of an avatar... this was bound to be trouble.

Agate, the Avatar^2, was thus born. A near copy, she was close enough to the original to look rather sexless... unfortunately--or maybe fortunately, depending upon your (lack of) aversion to graphic content--this was not the case, personality-wise. Spinning her off to the Healing Den, the original Agate resumed his watch, gesturing over his shoulder for the author to hurry up and get on with the story, mentioning, in an off-handed manner, that backstory really was not so important. The author then began to fade to a line-break, considering that the original Agate was busy polishing the lense upon his camcorder and fishing for a proper tripod...

Her first attempt had been disastrous. And by disastrous I mean hilarious, in a disturbingly English or even Japanese sense of the word. Once she'd realized what she was doing, the digitigrade humanoid had decided to model a cat. A little white cat, she'd decided, and, closing her eyes, had thought very hard about this, imagined the form and sort of plucked it out of her mind, bringing it into reality.

Things had not turned out how she'd planned.

When she'd felt the change was complete, Agate had licked her paw, got to her feet in an unsteady, rather disoriented fashion, and approached a mirror to see what she could. It was strange, she'd thought, that she could still look down on the furniture of her tiny room, and, as she approached the mirror, she'd hissed in surprise. Like a reverse cat-taur, the woman had somehow managed... to fuse the upper half of the very cat that she'd imagined to her own body... hissing again, then realizing a fraction of a moment thereafter that the hissing head was her own, Agate had run fingers from where the silky fur ended (at the base of her neck), to the set of cat-paws that stuck out at ninety degree angles from the floor, to the tiny head atop all of this. It was horrifying. It was hilarious. Agate vowed never to do it again.

But now she had reason to, and she'd learned a lot from her mistakes.

There was a woman in town--well, at the den. Was the Healing Den a town? A dragonry? A magical-floating-rock-in-the-nexus-that-was-all-in-the-imagination? In any case, she was here. And wherever she went, she seemed to be attracting little felines, as if she were a crazy cat-hording woman in training. It helped that she seemed to appreciate the art of strutting in the nude, and that she was (thankfully, to spare the eyes of the unwary passerby) very attractive. Sometimes Agate thought that she thought too much, but then, if she didn't think as much as she thought she thought, then perhaps she wouldn't be able to cook up as many schemes as she thought she might not have thought that she'd thought about, after thinking a thought too much. After all of this thought, she'd rather made herself a tad dizzy, and had had to retreat to her room to recuperate. And then she'd come up with her plan.

It was as if she were drawn to this woman by some sort of extra-charactertural force, as if, were she not to at least attempt to approach this firey-maned, felinicly-followed lady, the story of her life could not go on. Thusly, Agate decided to adopt her own catty persona. After all, she'd probably have much more luck then, say, if she were to saunter over in her original form, drag the woman in by the waist, and smother her with an open-mouthed kiss of one variety or another. She wasn't even certain what kind of open-mouth kiss she would be able to attempt, considering that the woman would most likely already be scooping up her horde of claws and teeth and flinging them at the humanoid, before, perhaps, lighting Agate's head on fire and then, considering she had the right to do so, skipping away. No, it was only as a cat that Agate felt she had any right to be sauntering anywhere near this woman's presence.

Thusly, Agate now put her first tentative paw upon the floor. A little white cat (completely, now, not just the front half of a freak-show-mutant), she shook her body, bristled her fur, twitched a whisker... everything seemed as it should. Excitement ran high in her blood... or maybe it was just a hint of catnip in the air. Whatever the case might be, she could hardly restrain herself... in fact, she did not restrain herself at all. She bolted out of her cubbyhole room and darted off along the hallways... no doubt followed by the various cameras that littered the place like some gigantic Reality TV show setup. It wasn't hard to find her, the woman, I mean. She smelled of many various and sometimes lovely things, thought Agate couldn't have described them if she tried. Coming to a skittering halt outside one door, she briefly read (in masking tape scrawled with a thick black marker, the words in blocky, free-hand capitols) "KAT THE FIRE ELEMENTAL". Well. That explained the hair. And that tantalizing bacon smell...

She scratched plaintively at the door, the noise accompanied by a querellous mewl. It said "let me in?" at the same time as it said, "please, for the love of god and all that is holy, don't leave me out here in the cold! Surely your heart is not so very hard and empty that you couldn't spare at least two moments of your time to let a poor, nearly starved cat like me into your home? I desire pettings, and I'm not above grovelling for them!" Of course, she didn't actually say all of this. It was one of those intricate cat sounds, the ones refined over the centuries during which cat shaped man-kind, molding them to do a feline's bidding.

The door opened in a second, and, unsurprsingly, KTFE was already peering down at her. Looking up with eyes that might very well have been larger then her head, Agate mewled once more. A soft sound, it was designed to pierce the heart of even the toughest of enemies. Working on a woman like this, the effect was instantaneous. The red-haired elemental melted into a veritable puddle. (Mind you, she did not actually melt, considering that she was still looming over a cat-formed Agate, her own eyes grown huge, her mouth automatically opening to form an "awwwwww" noise, much like the kind when someone sees something so hideously cute that it makes their teeth rot in their gums.) And then she swooped. For a fleeting second Agate felt the urge to hiss and scratch and possibly spray, and then to run away and never come back. But no, Already KTFE had scooped her up and was stroking her back, rubbing behind her ears, cuddling her in a way that left the cat-form rather breathless. Bubbling up and out of her throat like some continuous belch, Agate began to purr.

"Excuse me," she added, when she realized that she was making such a noise.

The pettings stopped. The elemental turned her about and held her by her armpits, just so that Agate's body was hanging a few feet above the ground. Her tail twitching, Agate tried her hardest not to squirm. "You talk?" The red-head asked.

"Err..." Agate tried, ears twitching. "No? I mean. Meow?" She attempted to glare haughtily into those red eyes, but her attention was continuously drawn down...

"Are you looking at my breasts?" The fire elemental continued her interrogation, and Agate, much to her own chagrin, let out a sly purr before she could stop herself. Much to her relief, KTFE simply cackled. "You entertain me, kitty."

"Mrrrr." Twitching, now, Agate began to attempt to extricate herself from this awkward grip. Things were not going to plan at all. She was supposed to have come across the sly feline, then 'surprise! I'm more then you think I am! Though I'd still like pettings, if you understand my meaning!'. Instead she was getting armpit-held and was oggling like a socially deprived, near-pubescent boy, and being cackled at, to boot. Finally flailing to the floor, Agate put herself to paw-washing with a vengeance. This needed to change, or else she'd be stuck with the Kat's cat-posse. Shaking her paw out and changing her demeanor in the same instant, the little white cat gave the elemental a suave look. Or at least, as suave a look as a cat is possible of. "I demand 'nip," said she, her voice pompous and cat-like.

"No 'nip for the kitty!" Kat retorted, finger shaking, "then I'd have to give some to all of the other cats!"

"Oh?" Agate replied, tilting her head in a continuously suave fashion, "who says?" This accompanied by one or her brief-yet-compelling purrs.

To the passerby, this would be a surreal scene: a naked woman standing at the door and arguing with a small cat. Not to say that this didn't happen from time to time at the Healing Den... it was just less of a common spectacle, then, say, the hatching of a large clutch such as the Geperna or Swim, which is to say, it was very rare.

For a moment KTFE only stared. Then, repeating herself, she said, "You do entertain me, kitty. What would you do for some 'nip?"

Ah, this was going more in the direction she'd wanted. Agate glanced off through the space between the elemental's legs, as if spotting something that no one else could see, then, giving the woman the faintest hint of a grin, she asked, "What do you want of me?"

KTFE, unaware of the inflection of the cat-form's voice, replied in an excited tone, "entertainment!" This followed by a brief show of happy hands, finished off by a touch of arm flailing.

Agate stared up at her like her head had imploded and been replaced by a giant ball of mustard. That is, she simply stared. And then, unable to help herself, she snrked. "Entertainment whore." She couldn't help it. The words came straight from her mind to her mouth!

Crossing her arms, the elemental sounded a tad indignant. "Are you calling me entertainmentally promiscuous?"

"No..." Agate hurried, then evened out her tone again. "I'm just saying that you sound like a bored, high-class child, about the age of seven. And no," she added as an aside, certain that she was digging her own grave but unable to stop, "I do not come with batteries." She returned to her paw-licking, the vigorous motions enough to keep her from blowing her haughty cover.

"Oh." Said KTFE. She stuck out her tongue, completing the childish image. "Fine." This, though, was followed by such a sly grin that Agate could almost feel it. Her heart leapt. She wanted to leap out of her skin--her cat skin, not her actual flesh--and wrap herself around the other woman in a convenient fashion. Instead she settled for standing and twining between the woman's legs, and then shoving the thought that the elemental might actually be thinking something so bestial out of the back of her mind.

"Lucky for you," Agate purred, her tail tracing lazy lines about the woman's calves as she circled and twined, "I know a lot of ways to entertain..."

"Reaaaaaally now?" KTFE replied, her look just as sly as before.

Agate desperately hoped that she was playing along, and wasn't about to pick her up and use her inappropriately. Her mind was spinning off in different directions, now, and she only focused it with a will. "Rrrreally." She purred, worried.

"Sharing time!" The elemental cried suddenly, knocking Agate off of her dismal tangent with a sudden bout of pettings.

Thankfully, they were typical pettings, the kind adhered to the back and the stomach, the neck.... the back of the head.... Agate broke down into a mess of purring white fur. "Mmm... very nice. More to the back of the neck!" And the elemental obliged. Agate was nothing but a purring, ground-kneading automaton, eliciting another round of "awwww" noises from her petter. Suddenly scooped up, Agate found herself in the woman's arms--not quite as she'd wanted, but getting there, as KTFE slammed the door behind her. Nuzzling fingers that came near enough, she caught sight of a bed--Ooh, put us down there!--thought she, but no, they came instead to a couch, upon which the woman collapsed. Agate found herself conveniently atop her, and nuzzled a nearby breast, just because she could.

Still in the throes of cat-like happiness, Agate was only dimly aware of her original plan--that of transforming back to her normal self, once she'd made herself known to the woman she so desired. She'd made her way into KTFE's room, and to her couch, and had melted the elemental's heart a little... heck, she'd done everything she'd needed to! Worried that she'd be thrown out--or literally have her head burnt to a crisp (was that where that bacon smell had come from? Some unlucky suitor or salesman?), Agate was hesitant to let go of her cat skin.

Oh hell. Why not go all the way? If she did get cooked into the unfortunate likeness of a pork-like product, at least she'd have tried. She still remembered the thought that this story of hers couldn't go on, were she not to try. Taking a breath and steeling herself against immediate incineration, the cat whisked off her skin, leaving behind a rather damp humanoid. Pale skin and hair and eyes, skinny body veiled in a silk shift, long, digitigrade legs straddling KTFE's stomach, Agate blinked as her eyes adjusted.

Then began to think that scrambling away would be a very good idea. The elemental was staring at her in a very strange fashion, as one with a half-naked woman suddenly sprawled across their lap might be wont to do. Agate grinned feebly. This was the end.