Grassy plains were the natural habitat of the cheetah. Vast savannahs filled with predator and prey, where the cheetah's supreme speed ruled over the open ground. They were majestic on the move; a blur of motion, fluid and graceful as the ground disappeared beneath their powerful legs and they closed in, inevitably, on their terrified dinner.
Unfortunately, they weren't quite so impressive in woods. Particularly dense ones. Really dense ones. Rei pondered this as her tail accidentally hit a tree trunk for the eightieth time, her upper lip curling to reveal long, sharp fangs. She let out a rasping grunt, beginning to get really irritated, before her paws thumped down loudly over the bracken, tail still trying to swipe from side to side to signal how pissed off she was. Her clubbed ears were splaying out to either side of her head, her fur raising slightly. She'd passed through forests before, but this was taking the ultimate biscuit.
Rei was now a day's walk, as the cheetah runs - or, well, stumbles - from the fringe of the forest by La'marri. She was intending to head to the coastline and perhaps visit an island or two, but if everything around Western Le'raana had trees like this, she was heading in entirely the wrong direction. She'd barely managed to catch a runty little boar in the past day and a half, and manouvreing was wrong. No matter what she tried, she seemed to be in the wrong shape. Of course, she could change that shape, but it always ended with her being terribly confused about something. Things were never confusing for cheetahs.
But they could be irritating.
With another little grunt, the cheetah sniffed at the air and let her ears swivel, trying to pick up the scent or sound of a nearby dinner. Aside from the birds in the trees - which had so far proven impossible to reach thanks to the evergreen branches of DOOM - there didn't seem to be another living thing around. Frustration boiled over, and the big cat shook her head violently from side to side. If she didn't get out of this stupid overgrown vegetable patch soon, she was going to start eating trees.
Ha. She'd see how they liked THAT.
