QUARANTINE!!

[nyme]

IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE
AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY

── ⋅ ⋅ ── ❊ ── ⋅ ⋅ ──

GOLDENPAW . 9 MOONS . HE/SHE/THEY . THUNDERCLAN

Goldenpaw lifts their head, eyes sticky with sleep, nose dticky with snot. There's uh...s'a problem, sounds like. That's no good...

She sets her head right back down for a long moment. Goldenpaw wants nothing to do with problems right now and for a terrific moment he thinks that maybe if he keeps his head down and focuses inward long enough, he'll skip forward in time to when the problem is no longer problem-ing. Only, the fuss continues. Sick kittens are on the move. Goldenpaw can hear a strange, distant commotion...what had it been? Rats? Aw, rats! Her chest hurts when she laughs herself awake again. What a stupid thing to hurt over.

Goldenpaw squints over toward where the prey's being kept and, now, raided. By rats. He hacks out a short, phlegmy cough before wobbling up to his brightly spotted feet and ambling over. Exhaustion makes the danger seem further away, and right now it all feels like more of a game. There's something...wrong, with these rats, but Goldenpaw doesn't quite register it. They swat at the nearest hairy little body and earn an angry nip in response, one that has blood welling up from their toe. Rude. He plops back onto his haunches, lifting his forepaws off the ground all meerkat for a moment of dizzy contemplation before going right back to the chore of swatting at the rat that had bitten him.

Goldenpaw is so, so lucky that this rat is impeded by the six others that it's stuck to, one of which being a literal dead weight thanks to Mudhound's stomping, otherwise it's extremely unlikely that she'd ever be able to kill one of them with these ponderous strikes. She gets after it until the one who has to pay for biting her pays thoroughly in blood, and it's by that time, too, that Goldenpaw realizes that they hadn't only been bitten just the once. There's a few fresh new nibbles staining the white fur of their foreleg, retribution from the rest of the King.

Dazed, Goldenpaw wobbles back to their napping place and collapses, licking their stinging wounds. They will be of no further use, here.