A gentle soul (o)

Jasminekit hummed, padding out of the nursery, shouting a 'I'll be back soon!' over her shoulder to her mother. The little she-kit looked around, trying to spot a cat to talk with. Finding no cat, she huffed, pouting, as she sat down, tracing her paw in the dirt in boredom. there's never anything to do! She thought, wondering just how long it would be until she was made an apprentice.

Having gotten a handle on everything a warrior needed to know—running, sparring with her long-suffering mother, extending and retracting her claws in wonderment for minutes on end—Jaykit had decided a trip outside the nursery was long overdue. She’d already pounced on every non-living thing around her nest at least twenty times today. It was getting boring in there. Camp was always so noisy; she assumed that meant it would be more exciting.

As she crawled into the sunlight, her gaze landed on one of the older kits, the brown-and-white one. Being a whole three moons old, she probably had to start learning their names soon. The other kit looked restless, too (though Jaykit might have been projecting), so Jaykit marched over, pulling in a deep breath to puff up her fluffy chest. As she opened her mouth to fire out an introduction, her sharp yellow eyes caught on the marks in the dirt below, and she planted herself beside the kit to squint at them. “That looks boring,” she said, not intending to be unkind despite her tone. “What’re you doing? Are you making something? Oh—what’s your name, anyway?”

The small thud of a cat sitting beside her made Jasminekit look up. A smile crossed her maw and her tail raised happily. "Oh. Uh, hi." Jasmine replied softly, a bit awkward. The gray she-kit had snuck up on her, although her presence was not unwelcome! "Jasminekit, I am Jasminekit. And you?"

Her eyes flicked back down to the scribbles she did in the sand, her kitten claws having done well to mimic the shape of the leaf beside her. "Oh this? I, erm, was just bored. So I decided to make a leaf in the sand. It's not too hard, I could show you. That is, if you would like! You don't have to!" Her whiskers twitched from embarrassment, and she didn't meet the other cats eyes.

The thought that an interruption might be less than welcome hadn’t crossed Jaykit’s mind. Still, she settled further down when the other kit smiled at her, however uncertain that smile may have been, and her posture relaxed into something more natural. Jasmine…Jay… Jaykit’s eyes lit up. “We match,” she informed Jasminekit, expression brilliant with pride as if she were the first cat to discover the hunting crouch. “My name’s Jaykit.”

Another glance at the marks below confirmed they did look an awful lot like a leaf. Peering at them with genuine interest, Jaykit reassessed her opinion. The games she usually played were a good deal more active than this, but anything beat sitting around and staring at nothing until naptime. Besides, maybe she could drag Jasminekit into a playfight or a game of mossball after this. “It looks less boring than the nursery—I want to learn!” She pressed a paw into the sand, careful not to smudge the leaf’s outline…then paused. “Does it have to be a leaf?”

Jasminekit was a bit surprised by Jaykit's enthusiasm. Her father, Nightmare, eyes her oddly whenever he caught her tracing in the sand, and while her mother, Silverflower, only smiled, Jasmine wasn't as blind as they would've hoped. "Oh, we do!" She chirped in reply, eyes wide. Jasminekit...Jaykit... They were quite similar.

In reply to Jaykit's question, Jasminekit shook her head. "Oh, no! It can be anything. A feather, a rock, a tree, a cloud.. Whatever you want! If it's a feather or somethin' you can have it beside you to trace, like I did with the leaf, or you could make your own personal interpretation. Our claws are small, so you use them to draw in the sand. It sounds a bit silly, but, one day, I want to be able to trace scribbles of cats I'm friends with or like. I-it's really dumb, I know! It's just... A personal goal, ya know? Every cat dreams of being a warrior or medicine cat; of course I do too! But I want to be more than just a warrior, something to make me stand out."

Realizing she'd ranted quite a bit, she flattened her ears. "Um, I'm sorry, I really didn't meant to rant. It's just nobody's ever been interested before.."