The group trooped into the dorm, and filtered through to their rooms. They were all on the fifth floor, up several flights of stairs, and Charlie was puffing hard by the time they reached their doors. Charlie and Alex on one side of the hall, Lillian and Angela in the opposite room. And now Fang.

They faced off in the hallway, Lillian scritching Fang’s back and the others carrying their own familiars. Charlie’s snake Ori coiled around his neck like a heavy, scaly scarf; Flit perched on Angela’s shoulder, the dove tucking her head under a snow-white wing; and Fara clung to Alex’s backpack, colorful butterfly wings slowly opening and closing, displaying subtly different patterns each time.

Lillian looked at the others, opened her mouth, then closed it. Alex went to say something, then seemingly thought better of it and cut himself off as well. After a long moment of silence, Angela shrugged and simply said, “I’m tired. I’m taking an early night. See you guys in the morning.”

She ducked back into the girls room, and Charlie gave a wave. “Good idea, too tired to celebrate right now. See you two at breakfast. We’ll go somewhere good, on me.”

Lillian and Alex just gave similarly tired waves and silently entered their rooms, Lillian shouldering off her backpack and going directly to her bed, flopping down on her back while still holding Fang to her chest.

Fang promptly squirmed out of her loose grip, stepping on her face a couple times in the process, then set out to explore the room, slipping under the bed like a shadow. Lillian said something curious, and he flicked his tail out from under the bed to give away his position to the human’s dull senses. Then he resumed his silent prowl, sniffing at crumpled notebook pages and dust bunnies in this new environment. The humans exchanged a couple more words, their beds on opposite sides of the relatively small room close enough that they didn’t need to speak very loudly to wish each other a pleasant sleep.

That concept actually confused Fang enough for him to peek his whiskers out from underneath the bed. His familiar wishing his other minion a good night’s sleep meant that there could be bad nights of sleep. How does someone not sleep well? Was his human truly so deficient that he would have to teach her how to nap properly? Did Alice need his instruction too? She hadn’t even been able to communicate with Fang, what if she simply never knew the wonders of proper sleep that she’d been missing?

As the humans’ breathing slowed, Fang continued his survey of the room as he pondered this new idea of ‘sleeping well’. Lillian’s bed had little other than dust bunnies and a couple of stray papers and pencils. Just a single slim book tucked into a back corner, behind one of the bed’s feet. Angela’s side was a bit more interesting, with a variety of clothes stuffed under the bed that Fang shoved into a couple of nice piles suitable for napping.

Aside from the beds, there was a large wooden trunk at the foot of each girl’s bed that he thought might make for good scratching posts. A few drags of his claws down Lillian’s proved that they were made of wood that was far too soft to properly hone his formidable claws, as each drag carved grooves from the material with ease.

The bird that accompanied Angela was perched on a little shelf high on the wall, seemingly asleep judging by its soft coos. Fang decided to spare it for now. Not because the shelf was in a high corner that he didn’t have a good way to reach without spending sunshine. Fang just didn’t feel hungry, and had had enough exercise for the evening.

The room also had a pair of desks, simple tables littered with books. Sadly, none were open for Fang to sit on, nor were there any stray pencils to bat around, though he did enjoy rattling around the pencils stuck in a mug on Lillian’s side, and chewing on the end of a feather stuck in an inkpot on Angela’s side.

Between the desks was a wide window, with a beige curtain currently drawn over it. When Fang wormed his way beneath the drape, he found that the actual glass was recessed into the apparently very thick wall, providing a large, wide sill for Fang to perch on and look out at the setting sun, catching its final few rays of the day.

The room was small enough that by the time he finished his exploration and settled down there, his prodigal feline mind still hadn’t managed to unravel the strangeness of the concept. Sleep well. Maybe it was just stating the obvious? But Lillian had meant it, she wanted Angela to get good sleep as opposed to something else. Was bad sleep a thing for humans? If he kept evolving, would Fang encounter this bad sleep? These thoughts deeply troubled the cat for all of 1.27 seconds. Then they were washed away by the warm light of the sun through the window, and the blissful, inherently good embrace of sleep.

Fang emerged from his sleep relieved. There had been no signs of the dreaded ‘not sleeping well’ and he was becoming more and more confident that it was just some strange human thing.

The world outside his window had faded from the golden light of evening to the silver light of the moon, and the grounds below were picked out in sharp relief to Fang’s sharp eyes, shadows stretching from the buildings and casting portions of the ground into inky shadow.

The grassy field outside had emptied out quite a bit compared to his earlier trips across it. None of those enormous creatures stomping about, no humans tramping along, and few creatures out in the darkness. A few bats circled and swooped in the sky, making loud screeching sounds and swatting bugs towards their mouths in a clumsy imitation of how a cat would swat their prey around. Far below, a tiny little shape scurried across the grass, causing Fang to shake off the last remnants of sleep and stand up, stepping forward until his whiskers grazed the glass.

A rat was running across the field. Fang pawed at the window, rattling it a touch in its frame as he meowed at the distant creature, demanding that the glass step aside and let him hunt the long-tailed vermin.

Sadly, no matter how much the glass wished to bow to feline superiority, it was inanimate, and so could not move out of the way.

Fang decided to recruit his much more animate and slightly more intelligent human to clear his path instead, turning around and dashing towards the door, meowing with increasing volume as he waited for his human to stir herself and cater to his whims. Before his meowing could get to his true ice-pick-in-the-ear volume, Fang started scratching at the door, which was made of wood even softer than the chests.

His human merely rolled over in her bed and shifted her pillow around, cruelly ignoring his plight, while the other human just mumbled something in her sleep.

Fang could not let this stand, and so approached his human’s bed, continuing to meow as he put his paws on her pillow, bringing his face closer to the exhausted girl’s ear as he gave his most persuasive mewl yet.

Nothing.

Was she dead? How could she so cold-heartedly refuse his pleas otherwise? Fang rasped his tongue across her cheek, whiskers tickling at her face. Then he hopped up onto the bed proper, clambering onto her chest and positioning himself to look right at her face, checking if she was still breathing. Yep, breath on his whiskers, and a slow rise and fall of her chest beneath him. He meowed again, displaying the full weight of his displeasure at being ignored in the volume this time, and her eyes finally screwed up before drifting open, blinking a couple times before blearily focusing on Fang’s face.

Inches from her own, black fur against a dark room, with his eyes and teeth almost glowing in the faint specks of moonlight that filtered in around the curtain.

Lillian sat bolt upright with a shriek, sending Fang tumbling off of her, yowling in indignation at the audacity of his seat abandoning its horizontality before he was done with it. Angela stirred on the other bed, mumbling something about the time, while Fang gave his human a death glare as she calmed herself. When her gaze finally landed on him, Fang his back on her and began to groom himself, settling the silky coat from where it had been ruffled by her uncouth outburst.

By the time he finished putting himself in order, his human had calmed down, and he returned to the door, scratching at it once more.

His human stopped being calm when she heard the scratching, and struggled out from beneath the blankets, at long last coming over to the door. But rather than opening the door as he was clearly and persistently demanding both over their link and vocally, she scooped him up instead, muttering something about not scratching things. Well it was hardly his fault that there was no satisfying scratching post in the room, nor a cat-flap like his second human had in his door. Fang gave a few half-hearted squirms, but allowed the human to carry him back over to the bed. His displeasure would be known, but escaping just now would only lead to a chase around the room trying to corral him, and he wasn’t in the mood for that sort of game at the moment. There was prey to hunt.

Then his human took the small, glowing marble from earlier out of her pocket, and waggled it in front of his face. Fang ignored it, his eyes still fixed to hers. She placed it down on the side of her bed, then placed Fang on top of it, between herself and the wall, and tucked herself beneath the covers, muttering something about needing to ‘sleep right‘ for tomorrow. That strange idea again. Fang couldn’t really make sense of it. Was there a way to sleep wrong? That thought kept Fang in place for a while, sitting on the marble and enjoying its slow trickle of sunshine, along with Lillian’s sleepy hand on his side, fingers digging under his fur in a way that rumpled it all over again, but made for some wonderfully purr-inducing scritches.

Then for some reason the human stopped petting him as her breathing slowed once again. Fang planted a paw on her wrist. Gave it a couple little taps. Her fingers twitched, but no more scritches were forthcoming.

So Fang turned to other diversions instead. The diversion of shiny, clickety-clackety prey that never slept. He shifted backwards, allowing the glow from the glorious marble tribute from his human to filter out into the room, casting warm light and sharp shadows around the room. He gave it a little tap, and reveled in the little burst of sunshine it released in fear of his hunting prowess. Sunshine that did a wonderful job of refilling the miniature sun within him. He gave it a few more light baps, guiding the sunshine through his body along the way, spreading the trickle out into a glow of warmth that hovered beneath his fur and settled into his muscles. A faint scent of smoke filled the air, and little sparks of light danced across his fur, singing the blanket. An expression of the warmth of the cozy sunlight inside him, surely.

Then he tapped the marble a little too hard, underestimating his feline might, and rather than rolling to a stop on the rumpled blanket, it hopped over the edge, tumbling off the edge, falling between Lillian’s bed and the wall. Fang pounced after it, but his whiskers told him he was a touch too large to squeeze through the same gap. But he certainly couldn’t let his prey escape so easily. He reached his paw down and flailed around, swatting aside a crumpled piece of paper and grazing the walls and floor a few times before he felt that familiar jolt of sunshine that meant he’d struck marble!

However, the little thing had the audacity to flee from his attack rather than being caught as it should! The marble skittered and bounced across the floorboards, rattling out from underneath the bed and sending shadows dancing and jittering around the room.

Fang promptly turned to face it, bounding forward, using Lillian’s chest as a springboard to launch himself after the marble. He arced gracefully through the air as his human mumbled something about sleep. He landed on top of the marble just as it rolled to a stop, one paw impacting a hair before the other and sending it bouncing off to one side again, towards the desks, with Fang hot on its non-existent heels. He swatted it to the side, where it rolled under Angela’s bed, and he followed at top speed, another vicious attack sending it bouncing off of the wall and back between his legs, rolling beneath the desks. Fang took the high road,leaping up onto the desk, his next bound sending a book shooting back behind him and knocking over the mug of pens that had dared to stand in his way, reaching the other end of the desks before the marble had even rolled all the way through.

His familiar sat up, bleary eyed once more, while Angela started fighting with her blanket when the mug rolled off the desk and clattered to the floor.

Fang pounced down at the marble once again before his humans could fully rise, swiping at it and chasing it across the room with a couple more expert strikes, herding it against the door… where it rolled through the gap beneath it, out into the hall.

Fang was once more stymied by the shut door, and turned to his familiar. She was already standing this time, glaring at him. “What is it this time? You can’t go run around, it’s the middle of the night, and I’m responsible for you.”

Fang meowed, placing his paw on the door, trying to convey his urgent need.

“Oh no, don’t tell me you need to go to the bathroom. It’s five stories down.”

“Lils…” Angela mumbled, having finally won her fight with her blanket and settled back down beneath them. “I’m tryna sleep. Just… take him down the hall. The bathrooms’ve got a… familiar section. Self cleaning or somethin.”

Lillian grumbled and stood up, double checking she was still dressed. Hadn’t even taken off her adventuring clothes before flopping into bed. And like a good little minion, she came over to the door, and at long last, opened it for Fang. The cat purred with pride, rubbing against her leg as his favorite nearby human displayed her capacity for learning.

He poked his head out of the doorframe, looking around for the marble. But it was missing. There was a faint glow coming from under the doors at either end of the hallway and directly across the hall, but no glowy, glorious, click-clacky marble running for its life. Fang pulled his head back into the room and looked at Lillian. He meowed at her to vaguely fix the situation, though he didn’t really expect his human to be able to track down the marble.

“Go on then, down the hall.” Lillian stepped outside, waving generally down the hall at one of the doors.

Fang peeked his head out and looked around the corner. Just a door. He cocked his head at his pet human. Did she need to go to the bathroom? She didn’t need Fang’s help with that. Alice always shooed him away when he followed her in. Humans were more than capable of that on their own.

Lillian motioned for a few more seconds, trying to coax him out with waving hands and even by walking a few steps down the hall. Fang just looked at her in bewilderment. Was his human broken? Was this what that ‘bad sleep’ did to people? Fang shied away from the door, afraid it might be contagious, and went to hide under Angela’s bed instead.

Lillian eventually sighed and slapped a hand over her eyes. “Fine. Don’t go. I’m done. Good night. Again.” She closed the door and tottered back to her bed, slipping under her blankets.

Once Fang was sure the girl wasn’t going to infect him with her bad sleep, he searched around for something else to do. It was the middle of the night after all, prime hunting hours. And that’s about when Fang’s incredible mind dredged up the long-forgotten reason he had originally gone to the door all those minutes ago. A rat outside! Fang rushed over to the door and pawed at it, yeowling at the top of his lungs at Lillian to let him out and allow him to go on his glorious hunt!

A pillow and a barrage of cursing hurtled from where Lillian was trying to sleep, and Fang instinctively blinked out of the way of the improvised missile.

Outside in the hall, Fang looked around. Oh right, he could do that.

Having brilliantly executed his scheme to escape the confines of the room, Fang trotted down to the end of the corridor, and blinked past the door onto the stairs.

No rat was safe from him now, no matter how many doors it hid behind.