Fate would see it that I've been able to sleep better than I have in years. While I thought I'd been sleeping alright, I had no idea it could be better. After spending time with Serafina, I'd found myself sleeping heavier than I had ever slept to recent memory. This provided me with a handful of issues, though, because I was reluctant to get out of bed and attend my responsibilities. Mental Health Days had become only minutely more common for me â€" they're totally a thing, I promise. Instead of heading to the office, I'd been far more frequent in Arsenaal, happy to work on my projects and tinker between the artifacts I'd been collecting. As it were, I had more company than I was used to there â€" but with Serafina's help, I was moderately more social than I had been prior to her arrival and permanence in my life. I'd found a slew of individuals I didn't want to baste and fry on a regular basis and they'd become fairly good employees. No one better than my pseudo-... I don't know what you call him, a guard cat? Guard Leopard? Tobias was, by far, my favorite of the individuals who'd become part of the Arsenaal cast.

I guess it's important to say that Tobias was less of a guard-leopard and more of a Chief Operating Officer as it was on an extremely regular basis that I found him sitting at my kitchen table in my apartment, surrounded like a King and his Knights by my domesticated herd of felines. Church, as always, was his right hand man (cat?), helping Tobias exact executive orders. I have no idea what their meetings truly were about, perhaps who got to sleep on the sunny corner of my bed most frequently, but it seems to be dire business most of the time. And most of the time, this dire business pissed off the lady cat, Temple. Temple was a pretty ginger feline who I'd liberated from the local shelter, alongside of several others. The menagerie amused me, especially during these little business pow-wows. Monk, a fat tortoishell cat seemed to only care about the nap he took while seated in a chair next to Temple. And Mosque, a pretty gray and white lady-cat sat with dignity on Tobias' other side, as if she was the right hand instead of Church. Church, the member of Tobias' round table of kitties with tenure, sat regally beside Tobias, wearing a bow-tie collar that surely my sister had purchased (...it totally wasn't me) like a badge of honor. The last time I'd witnessed their pow-wow had been a few nights past, and I was smothered by tiny feline bodies afterwards which rendered me entirely suspicious of what they'd been ... pow-wowing over.

Felines, jobs, and business aside â€" I was content to sleep heavily with my face buried in pillows and a burrito of a sheet pulled up to my shoulders. Snug like a beef-burrito that my brother had forced me to eat from Taco Bell, I might have even snored some until I was launched into a dream that there was a leopard in my bedroom, wreaking havoc upon the expanse of the room and exacting revenge on all sedentary objects. It was only when a hiss resounded and I could feel the shiver of supernatural existence crawl over my skin that I realized it wasn't a dream, and I was, rather unfortunately, awake. In an attempt to pretend that this wasn't true and that whatever one of my cats had hissed at me was going to go away, I burrowed further into my pillows. With a hiss of my own did I recoil though when there was something furry inching its way up my bed.

"For the love of God!"

The body under my sheet was much larger than any of the domesticated felines who shared my apartment and were generally docile tenants until their King arrived. I sat up, grabbing a pillow instinctively and smashing it down on the very, very large blob beneath my bedsheet.

"Tobias, get the fuck out of my bed. Bad kitty."

Groaning with discontent, I pulled the sheet back to reveal the cat-man who looked entirely too pleased with himself.

"Don't make me get a super-soaker to shoot you with water."