[Phoenix]

Basics

NAME: echo in storm-dark sky
AGE: sixty moons
GENDER: male
CLAN: tribe
RANK: prey hunter

Identification

PICTURE: source
BRIEF: a smaller black tom with flat, pale green eyes and short fur
DETAILED:

he's a cat With black fur faintly mottled with gray, pale green eyes, and a slightly smaller than average build, Echo is hardly an impressive sight – indeed, his mother always said that he was nothing special to look at. Short dark-colored fur, generally impeccably groomed, stretched over a lean frame hides the muscles found on all the felines, Tribe or otherwise, who call the rugged mountains their home, and though he does not advertise it, he is stronger than he looks. Indeed, he seems quite harmless. Always quick to smile and never quite standing up straight, he has an innocently sheepish air about him, but it never reaches his eyes. Standing out in sharp contrast to the dark backdrop of his pelt, their pale color is missing something: depth. His gaze is flat and unchanging. And upon noticing that peculiarity, one might also see how still he holds himself. The stillness is subconscious, perhaps the result of an instinct perpetually torn between fight or flight, but if his thoughts have wandered, the dark-furred tom does not tend to fidget on his own. He holds himself like a statue – until he blinks and makes his tail or ears flick and everything is back to normal.

Behavior

SONG: toy soldiers
LIKES: earning the approval of others
DISLIKES: failure
DETAILED:

Echo is a soft-spoken tom, perhaps a little too polite, but otherwise mostly pleasant to be around. Though he has his occasional moments of brilliance, he will never be the most intelligent or cunning cat, and this general absence of critical thinking that lends to the air of innocence that lingers in the air around him, though he is far from deserving of it. In a childlike fashion, he is easily impressed by the accomplishments of others and very liberal with his compliments often guilty of unknowingly crossing the boundary between believable sincerity and overdone flattery. But he can’t help but find the competence of others awe-inspiring; having spent many long days working hard only to receive a disappointing result, Echo knows firsthand the struggle to learn and perfect new skills.

He knows his limitations. Neither the fastest nor strongest nor cleverest, he knows that he’s not inherently good enough, so he tries to make up for his imperfections by working hard. With the tenacity of a tick, he will latch onto a goal and not stop trying to meet it unless told otherwise. More than willing to let others take the lead, he prefers that others do the thinking and simply point him where they want him to go. Wanting little more than the approval of others, he lives to please. Never has he quite fit in – never has he really understood why – but if earning the appreciation of those around him is the best way to belong, then he is content to walk in the shadows of giants and hope that some of their greatness might rub off on him. Pride means little to him; though perhaps not as humble as he is simply indifferent to his reputation, his ego is nonexistent.

Quiet. Hardworking. Respectful. A perfectly pleasant tom. And yet…

It doesn’t take a genius to discover very quickly that something is horribly off about Echo. He can say all the right words and do all the right things, but there will forever be something missing. Those who peel back the layers of an unassuming cat-suit find an unnerving emptiness beneath. Emotions and all of their complicated, twisted facets are a foreign concept to him. As a result, he lacks the fundamental understanding of other cats as thinking, feeling individuals that comes with empathy. They are alien creatures to be studied, to mimic, and perhaps attempt to understand, but their interactions and decisions are, at times, nigh impossible to decode. Echo recognizes patterns in behavior, but he has trouble discerning the reasons behind them.

For him, the world is a series of events with incomprehensible causes. He understands possession in place of love and dominance in place of confidence. He understands the solitude from heartbreak, the avoidance from revulsion, and the rush from fear. Morals mean nothing to him – what is right or wrong to a cat for whom guilt or remorse does not exist? Violence and threats are merely a means to an end, and if the situation calls for it, he will resort to either – or both – with the same level of detachment he might have while squishing an ant. It’s nothing personal. It never is.

History

FAMILY

MOTHER: (moss) on cracked rock
FATHER: unknown
SIBLINGS: river that reflects the stars

KIT:

Born as the unwanted memory of an ill-fated romance, Echo in Storm-Dark Sky had only his mother for company for the first few moons of his life. His mother, Moss on Cracked Stone, had fallen had and fast for a rogue, who promised her the world if she left the Tribe of her birth, but instead gave her a single, strange burden and the responsibility of raising him alone – a duty she never asked for and one she performed grudgingly. Echo learned early on to never ask about his father, never once hearing the other tom’s name though he was made quite aware of his mile-long list of flaws. Flaws that, according to his mother, they both shared. Liar. More work than they were worth. Lazy. Rude. Thankless. Moss worked so hard to raise him on her own, and still she received not a single word of gratitude.

Echo said them – he said many of the things he thought she wanted to hear – but that didn’t mean she listened. She was an absent mother half of the time, leaving him to his own devices, and a disciplinarian the other half, always demanding that he treat her with respect. His childhood was spent constantly striving for the approval of a mother that seemed perpetually out of reach. But sometimes he earned it. Like a parched cat grasping at the last few drops of water, he lived for those little snippets of affection on those rare days when he caught her in a good mood. If he kept working for them and never gave up, they would come, and those memories of her fondness would be enough to carry him through the next drought.

When he was a few moons old, they returned to the Tribe. For his entire life, Echo had known only his mother for company, and suddenly he was surrounded by strangers as interested in him as he was about them. But it quickly became apparent that he never belonged with them either. An outcast for a mother, a scoundrel for a father – the sins of the parents were passed on to the child, and he paid dearly. The initial interest in the newcomer transformed into taunting and teasing, which only escalated in scope when they realized that he was different than them. He did not fight back, which made him easy to bully, but he also never cried. No one emerged the winner. The lack of reaction was not satisfying for his peers. The ridicule made it impossible for him to fit in.

He was not the only victim to his den mates’ particular affections, and as Echo watched the other cats around him reacting so strongly to situations that had him merely lifting a shoulder, he began to realize that their differences were not all manufactured. Something was happening there that he did not understand. He started watching their interactions, trying to find it – not knowing then that he never would.

TO-BE:

At nine moons old, he was assigned to a prey-hunter, an older tom by the name of Whisker of Silent Mouse. With a family of his own and a record of successful trainees under his belt, Whisker never quite figured out what to do with this strange, emotionless tom who had been placed under his tutelage. To his credit, he did his best to teach Echo, never begrudging him the extra time it took for him to learn even the basic concepts nor the lack of the close mentor-apprentice relationship that typically formed. Indeed, as the moons passed, what started off as a business relationship remained largely that. One side, perhaps, began to feel a sort of paternal instinct toward his young charge, but the fond sentiments were not returned.

Echo was too busy studying his peers. He had begun to craft his cat-suit, watching those around him and learning their mannerisms. He saw patterns in their behavior. He learned the proper words to say and the proper gestures to make. And he also began to notice she-cats. At first, he watched them in an attempt to see what the other toms his age saw in them. He listened to the way they spoke of them and absorbed the meanings of their words, and to his surprise, found that he began wanting them for himself. He wanted the pretty ones to look at him the way they looked at other toms. He wanted their attention, their affection, but they never gave it to him. He had no delusions of grandeur; he knew very well by now that he had so little to offer those who were so very hard to impress. He had to earn their devotion, had to work for it. And yet, they haunted his dreams, those pretty she-cats. He could never get them out of his head.

Why wouldn’t they look at him like that? Why, indeed.

Maturity and perhaps the attention of the ladies had made outright bullying him a less interesting past-time, yet even as he was partially accepted into the fold, he remained ostracized from his peers. One way or another, he always found himself on the outside looking in – not that he realized it. With she-cats to impress, toms, especially the cave-guards in training, found him more amusing than a threat, so they brought him under their wing as their weird little show-pony with all his strange little quirks. Echo wasn’t like the other wimps; at least he knew how to take a beating.

The black-furred to-be bought into their companionship and everything it entailed. Though he wasn’t supposed to, he learned there the basics of fighting, first as self-defense, and then as offence, because they wanted to see how far he would go. At their command, he targeted those weaker than him and took the blame if they were caught, because they were his friends and friends had each other’s backs. Never did he question whether they made fun of him when his back was turned – when she told him the truth, his mother called him stupid for not noticing, but that was nothing new. His relationship with Moss did not improve. She had a new tom in her life and a new litter on the way, but that did not stop her from belittling him. He bore it because she was his mother and because, after he began to drift away from the gang of toms, she and his mentor were the two cats around whom he consistently spent any amount of time.

PREY-HUNTER:

By the time he became a prey-hunter, Echo had learned how to assimilate into Tribe life. He never quite perfected his cat-suit, but it had been crafted with enough hard work and patience that it hid most of the emptiness beneath. It was never remarkable, but it was good enough. Passable was all it ever needed to be.

Moss had another litter, a stillborn tom and a scrawny little she-cat. Echo, having watched carefully the reactions of those whose parents had produced more offspring, played the doting older brother as best he could. His mother had other ideas. She loved the newborn kitten, the daughter she always wanted, and the new tom in her life, a full-blooded Tribe cat as was proper, was everything that scumbag rogue hadn’t been. The sweet little she-cat, River that Reflects the Stars, could not be contaminated by the company of her older brother. Moss’s new mate tried to reach out to his step-son, but their relationship never amounted to much. They were too different. That was fine.

While Moss was distracted playing family, Echo, too, sought the companionship of another. The time he had spent around his younger sister taught him that he was not as bad with them as one might have thought. He was quiet and patient, easily amazed by the feats of others – he was better with them than cats his own age, so he thought that maybe it would be nice if he had some of his own. There was a particular she-cat he wanted them with too. He had noticed her, like he had noticed all of the other she-cats, when he was still in training, but he had refrained from acting on his desires in favor of watching from afar. He learned what she liked and what she didn’t like and her favorite foods and her company of choice. He learned her habits, the way she groomed her fur, the way she curled up in her sleep as if she was waiting for him to curl up beside her and share his warmth.

It was over before it began. Echo came on too hard and too fast. He didn’t understand what went wrong. Everyone said that she-cats liked compliments and liked when toms paid attention to them and knew things about them. The attempt haunted him. With his own two eyes, he had seen mated pairs tell each other that they belonged together, that they were each other’s. That’s all he had wanted – someone to be his, someone to belong to him. Why did she run away?

From afar, he watched as River grew up under the watchful eyes of her parents, and just as she began training to be a cave-guard, Echo found himself with a to-be of his own. He had never been a leader, but it was this experience that cemented the distaste for leadership in his mind. As one who always strove for the approval of others, it was strange to be on opposite side of the spectrum, to be the one calling the shots instead of following orders. With no one to tell him whether or not he was doing it right, he felt adrift.

For all of his hesitations about the responsibility itself, he made for a decent teacher. Skilled at breaking down concepts and explaining processes, he had the patience to work with the slowest of cats and still remain very liberal with his praise. He was not, however, assigned to the slowest of cats; in fact, his was just the opposite. She was a sharp young she-cat, quick to learn and frustrated at being stuck with the Tribe idiot (though his flattery did temper her annoyance a fair bit). Training passed speedily, and they parted ways, cordial but not friends.

River, who had taken after her father, became an accomplished cave-guard and was even more cemented in their mother’s mind as the pride and joy of the family. Though she spent more time with her parents than her older brother, she seemed genuine devoid of the animosity their mother felt toward her son. In turn, Echo was equally neutral to her, and he found that he did not mind her position in Moss’s good graces. That spot had never been his anyway. His mother’s hold over him had begun to loosen since his failed courtship with the she-cat. The attempt stuck with him as he set his sights on the other ladies in the Tribe, and he kept finding his gaze drawn back to one particular she-cat – a cave-guard so strong and sickly sweet. This time around, however, he was careful to keep his distance; Echo might have been a slow learner, but he did learn. He would admire her from afar, until the time was right. But oh, how he wanted her.

Life wasn’t bad. Life wasn’t good. It simply was – and then it changed. Snow blanketed the mountains, untouched and fresh, and he and his mother were out on patrol. A single misplaced step caused a cascade of effects – the snow loosened and gave way, sweeping Moss down the slope of a mountain. When the white settled and Echo peered over the ridge, he saw here there. She had fought to the surface of the snow, but weaker in her old age, she could not pull herself up and out of safety. She called out to him, but he stood above her on solid ground, looking down on her for the first time in his life. He watched her struggle. When she saw him standing there, she started pleading with him to save her. When she realized that he was not moving, she started insulting him, calling him useless and thankless. A waste of time and space and energy, and he’d better hide when she freed herself because she would never forgive him for this. He just looked at her. And then he turned and walked away.

He would always remember the way her eyes bulged as he did so, the way she scrambled like the live mice he sometimes toyed with before he ate them. As she had always been his tormentor, he had never thought of her like that before: weak and scared. It was interesting, this new perspective.

Of course, his younger sister and step-father were horrified by the fate that had befallen their loved one, and how cruel it was that she had been swept away by an avalanche, lost forever. To the best of his ability, he played the grieving son who was trying to remain stoic despite his traumatic experience and heartache. For the first time in his life, he was fussed over and had earned the sympathy of those around him. The attention was nice. Eventually, however, life returned to normal. Mostly normal. River was still sadder than she had been before, and she had nightmares. Echo did not. He dreamt only of a pretty cave-guard, so strong and sickly sweet.