>>5905059>>5905033You decide to investigate the Pet of the Deep Arbiter. Of all the big names you've heard of, he's the only one you haven't met in person, and he sounds pretty reasonable from what you've heard of Sawyer.
The issue is how to find the damn thing, black cats aren't uncommon, and you've even seen a few animals with some (probably unawakened) magical potential before, so just because you see a magical cat doesn't mean it is <span class="mu-i">the</span> magical cat.
The only lead you have is an orphanage that is located suspiciously close to most of the reports. The reason why the orphanage stands out more than the other buildings in that area is due to the high number of cats that get fed by the kids here, so it looks like a good place to start.
Going to the orphanage doesn't take long, and you're let inside under the pretense of being interested in adoption. There's usually more paperwork to this before you can straight up waltz inside the orphanage, but they have so many kids that they're willing to speed the process up.
The orphanage isn't that big, but big enough to accommodate the fifteen or so children that live here. The kids here look at you with both interest and fear, you're not sure if they actually want to be adopted or not.
You have to pretend to be interested in the kids, but really, you're just looking at the cats. There's a lot of them, a few cats are bringing back rats from who knows where, while a few others are napping on beds and other bits of furniture.
There are a few black cats, two of them even have some low magical potential, so you decide to examine those first. You're not sure how to analyze their pattern, it's raw and undefined. If you didn't know any better, you'd suspect they weren't awakened, but that can't be right.
As you ponder how to talk to a cat without looking like a crazy person, a kid bumps into you as they carry some boxes to the kitchen. It almost makes you stumble, but you catch yourself using a nightstand as support.
Then, the nightstand leans a little bit more than you thought it would.
You hear a hiss, and a gruesome SPLAT sound. You look down in horror as you see a cat bleeding, crushed under the nightstand. You pull the nightstand back up in a panic. The cat is still breathing, it's black, but it doesn't look magical like the two others.
One kid starts crying, another screams. This is bad, at least if it died you would've known for sure it was the right one, but now you have to make a choice.
>Pretend to bring the cat somewhere to save it, but let it die. It might be what you're searching for.>Bring the cat to a veterinarian, maybe you can still save it if you're fast enough?>Try to disrupt the wound, a cat is small enough for unreliable habit to work, but it's still a long shot.>Write in. 