The cat was a wily, suspicious creature.
That was fine, Cai Renxiang was patient. She had first noticed the cat hanging about her friend, Meizhen, and had initially assumed it belonged to her. Meizhen fed it, petted it, and Renxiang often saw it snoozing peacefully in Meizhen's dorm room. It always showed up to wind around her legs after class, and occasionally left dead mice in her room. Cai Renxiang was honestly very surprised to learn that it was, in fact, a stray, and though it hung around their other classmates occasionally, particularly Han Jian and Gu Xiulan, more often than not, it simply wandered around the streets, doing its own thing.
Despite apparently being well able to look after itself, Meizhen had confided that she was concerned about what the cat would do when term ended and all the students had to return home to their families. Winter was coming soon, and would the cat be able to look after itself then? Meizhen would dearly have liked to take it home with her, but her grandfather was very strict in his no pets policy.
By this point, Cai Renxiang had been friends with Meizhen long enough to hear her unspoken plea to look after the stray. So long as Renxiang kept her grades up, her mother was very permissive about what she did with her time, and Meizhen knew that not only was her home nearby, but that her family had more than enough resources to look after a dozen stray cats if they wanted. Renxiang had sighed, and promised to look into the matter. At least the cat was very neat and toilet-trained, unlike Liling's ugly hound.
Some students had let it into the school, under the mistaken impression that a wild dog would be perfect as their club mascot or something, and it had proven an utter menace. It frightened the younger students with its barking, stole food the second anyone left some unattended, and it pissed and shit in the most inconvenient places. Cai had finally gotten sick of it, and called her cousin Xuanshi, who worked part time at the local pound, to get rid of it. This he had done most admirably, but then Liling just had to go rescue it. Ugh. Thank goodness the teachers had at least forbidden her to bring it anywhere within the school compound.
But back to the cat. It was a rather gangly, awkward looking creature, but still, much better than Liling's filthy dog. It was neat, quiet, and fairly unobstrusive; its dark pelt letting it blend well with the shadows. It had excellent table manners, and never stole from Meizhen, or any of their classmates whom it stayed with, but always waited politely to be offered food, unlike Liling's ill-mannered mutt. It was also fiercely loyal. Renxiang had first seen it hissing and spitting as it placed itself between Meizhen and a group of taunting boys. The one fellow who had tried to kick it away had gotten quite badly scratched up for his presumption, and then Guangli had leaped into the fray to free up Meizhen and keep another boy from kicking its ribs in.
Since then, the cat seemed to have mostly accepted Guangli and Renxiang as Meizhen's friends, enough to not run away when it saw them, and to occasionally accept a tidbit when they offered. It was still a terribly suspicious beast though. Once, Renxiang had left it a whole chicken leg, and instead of eating it then and there, it had picked up the food and run off, as if worried Renxiang would try to take it back. Another time, when Renxiang had left out a bowl of cat food for it, it had sniffed it suspiciously, and then only eaten it once Renxiang pretended to not be paying attention to it at all. It had also hunted down and left dead mice in the bowl a few nights later, as if thinking it had to repay her or something.
Renxiang found that food was more likely to be eaten if it was left outside on the street, rather than directly outside her room door. And that the cat, despite its rather distrustful nature to anyone not named "Bai Meizhen", was in fact a rather generous animal. On the second night or so of the food being left out, Renxiang witnessed it shepherding along two smaller cats towards the food, and then keeping a weather-eye out to make sure no other strays could interrupt their meal. One of the cats had a rather bushy tail, and the other had markings around its eyes that looked rather like spectacles. Both were much smaller, and clearly much weaker than Meizhen's cat, and it would clearly have been the easiest thing in the world for it to drive them off, but it seemed to be looking after them instead. How peculiar.
In any case, soon after Meizhen had made her unspoken request, Renxiang had decided she needed to up her game if she wanted to persuade the cat to come home with her. Simply leaving the occasional tidbit and bowl of food out simply wasn't going to cut it.
She started with the classic laser pointer trick. The cat seemed to enjoy running about and chasing the little red dot of light, and when the game was over, she rewarded it with a fish-flavoured cat treat. She played with it and rewarded it a few more times, and then finals happened and she quite forgot it for a while. Then there had been a great hullabaloo as the teachers discovered that Yan Renshu had been blackmailing his classmates into stealing from his fellow students, and on the same day, Renxiang returned to her room to find a rather proud-looking cat with her favourite ring in its mouth. She had thought it lost some months ago, but the cat had apparently found it for her. That was when she had decided she really needed to lure the cat home for its own sake, and not just because Meizhen had asked her to. Animals weren't supposed to be that clever, were they?
She had attempted to lure it home directly by waving a small fried fish in front of it, and dropping pieces of the fish on the way to her mansion, but just before they managed to reach her home (where Renxiang had carefully prepared much nicer food and even a comfy basket for it), it had freaked out over nothing that she could sense, and dashed away. Renxiang had seen neither hide nor hair of it for a week or so, but after that, it had started popping up around her much more frequently. Warily watching her from a distance, it appeared and vanished unpredictably, but it seemed to be stalking her. Renxiang made a point of behaving normally, and not making a big fuss the first time it perched, warily, on her windowsill, observing her with its blue, slitted eyes, and then stayed in her room for longer than five minutes at a time. The cat didn't know it yet, but soon enough, it would be hers. After all, a Cai always got what she wanted.
((So, my second omake in this thread! What can I say, I was inspired by the various alt!universes people were exploring.
@yrsillar I don't know if you saw or counted my
first omake, but I hope my second one counts!
P.S. Just confirming but the maximum amount of omake successes have already been dedicated to our upcoming mission right?))
my code looks like this:
