Usui has a minion!

Dandelion the Pride

premade profile by Chen

"Wh-what happened to your FACE?!"

"I don't follow?"

"Your NOSE--!"

Usui turned and looked at his face in the mirror, placing one sharp-nailed paw over his nose as he did so. After a moment or two of carefully scrutinizing his features, he slowly lifted his paw from his face and let it dangle off to one side.

His nose was missing. As in, not there. Completely gone. Like something had bitten it off and it healed over somehow.

Usui beamed at his reflection and nodded approvingly.

"Yup!" he said loudly and cheerily as he turned back to the horrified girl, whose hands were still clinging to her gaping mouth. "All's as it should be. I'm nose-less, madam," he said, tilting his head a little as he spoke, crossing his paws in front of him.

The girl couldn't take it. With one last glance, she ran shrieking in the opposite direction.

Usui chuckled a little as the front door slammed shut behind her, and gave his reflection another glance. Where a nose should have been, under the white fur, there were specialized nerve ends to pick up scent, rendering a physical nose rather useless.

Usui lifted a paw and placed it over his "nose," waited a moment, and lifted it again. Still nothing. He shrugged. He was never good at noses. With a flick of his translucent tail-stump, he trotted into his shelf-less pantry area on his hindquarters and fished a bag of popcorn from the mess on the floor. He liked eating the hardened kernels--they helped keep his razor-sharp teeth dull. Biting one's lip or cheek with a tooth as long and sharp as a shark's is never pleasant.

Crunching merrily away, Usui shuffled over to the old-school television he had propped up on a couple of dictionaries and fiddled with the antennae until he saw a picture.

"...News. We interrupt this program to bring you news of an escaped criminal, sentenced to years in jail for extortion of the elderly."

Usui grinned, then shuffled over to his half-collapsed couch that he'd found in a junkyard and sat down. Once it looked like he was settled, he flipped upside down so that his feet were facing the ceiling and his ears were brushing the floor, letting his sunglasses drop off in the process.

He wasn't being goofy--the direction of his blood flow made it more comfortable to sit inverted. His Pride, Dandelion, happened to push his kitty flap open right then and bounded over to his master, rawwwring once to beg for a seat on the couch with him. Usui patted the cushion at his side, and the little lion-cub cat curled up next to him in a happy rainbow ball.

"The escaped convict was shipped with 100 others to a bioengineering lab, where they were to be tested on and eventually made into a superhuman of sorts that could aid greatly with the current war. The testing was not harmful, though many of the convicts escaped. One was sighted near the area--he is thought to be a shape-shifter, and highly dangerous. If any of your relatives or friends start acting strangely, please report them to the authorities--they will make sure they aren't someone else in disguise."

Usui somersaulted forward off the couch, laughing, and poked the TV off. So he could morph his body to a certain extent--his current rat-like form still didn't look anything near human, and he wasn't going to get any closer no matter how hard he tried.

Still, it wasn't all that bad being a monster. He had a prehensile tongue that he could eat with, thus keeping his paws clean, and this nifty belly-pouch, eliminating the need for clothing and heavy backpacks. And NOTHING got better than scaring people every day like some year-round Halloween.

So why did he leave? Were the experiments illegal? Were they painful? Was the surgeon some twisted torturer who made the inmates beg for mercy?

"Nahh."
Well, beyond the bad-tempered inmates themselves, of course. The scientists were very nice, and nothing hurt, though some wussies had tried to kill themselves when they started losing their humanity. The real reason Usui had escaped was simple--he was bored. Most the other inmates were depressed or suicidal, and nearly all of the ones that weren't were either insane or hated everything too much to notice they'd changed shape at all. Doesn't do much for company when all you have are space cadets or killers, so he split.

He built himself a house, adopted a pet to solve his companionship problem, swiped a couch and various other things from the local dump and junkyard, and decorated the front of his makeshift building with wild plants so that it would look abandoned, prompting daredevil teenagers to wander in. He'd lead them on with a little noise here, a squeak there, down to the back of the hall to the big empty room with no lights and one single closet that he crouched in. When they were finally in his grasp, eyes wide in the lack of light, breaths coming short and fast as they knew something was back there, watching them--bam!--he's grab their wallet.

"What, were you expecting bloodshed? I`m a thief, not a killer."

"Anyway, the changes didn`t bother me at all. Not the slightest."

"It`s simple, really. When life spits on you, make lemonade!"

"...Wait..."