Utterly Mad

Pricetown slept, and as it did, a form was moving amongst the trash of chief street. The form was small and black, a relative rarity in the desert hub in the elevated portion of the Arizona desert. Cousin saw the creature and turned back, making not a sound. Cousin was mad, but he wasn't stupid. The shattered helm would see the screamer and blow it away. Cousin could bark at it and alert people to it's presence, but cousin was just one coyote. In a one on one, the solo screamer would rip him up. Cousin was again turned aside though by something more dangerous. It shambled, moving it's grotesque, swollen body along the narrow alley and breaking out into the open on chief street. Cousin had to scurry, practically yelping, out of the mycus horrors way and made it just in time to evade it's attention. It mumbled and rasped insanely to itself.

"Rita... Rita... My queen... My everything... Rita... My... Heeead..."

The screamer saw it right away and took shape, black ooze streaked with trash and sand formed into something like a small chimp with a pumpkin on it's shoulders where it's head should have been. That gourd of a head opened on a bleak abyss from which came the deafening shreik of Pricetown's most dangerous pest.

The effect on the fungal monster was immediate and galvanic. It clutched at what had once been it's head and screamed in furious agony. When the pitch of the screaming thing lowered and became more like a howl, the exploder keeled over and howled right back. The screamer went on and on, seeming to hold the mycus in place until there came a thunderous boom, cutting through the din and splattering the screamer into smaller safer gobbits.

"Rita..." The thing huffed before one of the responding guards put it to the match. There was no need to worry about it exploding on them, the screamers howl had made sure of that.

---

"It's the same principal as the howling tower you're working on Catnip." Efram told her after being asked how the screamer had stunned the exploder. The events of the night before were big in local news, and all the bigger since it had happened on chief street, Pricetown's main avenue.

"It doesn't like the sound or something?" She asked again, getting a similar answer to the one she'd received before. Efram sometimes puzzled over Catnip. She wasn't a Misling, he knew that for a fact now. Her tail was too long, ears too pointed, muzzle too narrow. The project had also never produced a Misling fitted with a neural neutralizer before. Most Mislings were equipped with a simple tracking chip with their identity imprinted on it. Catnip though was still possessed of an unremovable control module, and a device that would likely kill her if ever activated. Without the control pin though, the module was useless and the still active kill switch could not be turned on. Efram listened carefully when Catnip explained where she was from and her history. What she said meant that perhaps the region beyond the Rockies wasn't lost, or not entirely lost, to the Mycus. He judged her mental age to be somewhere in her late teens, but this too was a reason for wonder. The girl claimed to be twenty four "Christmases" while his advanced medidoc put her age at somewhere between "null" and "indeterminate."

Catnip had been coming in to his office for a weekly check up since she and Minx had strode into his clinic a couple months prior, and today was another of Catnip's appointments. So far, she was still clean and still interesting. She told Efram about her sister and her sisters man. About her girlfriend and all the interesting characters of the farm. In return, he told her the little things one needed to know about Pricetown. Some of the big things too. From him, she learned about the Mycus and the Mislings, and about life in Pricetown. More and more though, he noticed that she seemed disinterested in that last subject. Like the town held no interest to her, a place she saw herself as "passing through."

"You're free to go Ms. Walker, don't forget your coffee, and have a good day at work." He said, finishing up his notes and placing a mark on her chart. Catnip was given a styrofoam cup filled with coffee, spiked with hot cocoa, and ushered out. Efram watched her go with a bit of worry. The girl was said to be rather energetic and talkative, but over the last couple weeks she'd talked less and less. Either she was getting depressed, or she was scheming. Catnip would say the latter, because it was true, but also because she didn't know what the former meant.