i-i Thick, honeyed bubbles pulsed ambitiously against my throat, irresistable sweetness shrinking my cheeks. It was like grape juice. Welch's, I guessed. Candy bees with sticky wings hummed along the inner walls of my lazy mind and veins, buzzing their drunken melodies. My drowsy eyes were gently glazed, exhausted baggies below pulling them down. I felt like a kid -- a kid too curious for his own good, heh. 'Name's Chiro, I think. I'm a good ol' Hekshanian, or Hellcat, whichever you prefer. Most all of our kind are alcoholic; we have our reasons. My reasons? I just have one: I can't help it. My poor fur is a mess of larken, baby blue and bruised cobalt, tassled and uncombed. I dunno why. Mostly, Hekshanians have some white in their pelts, but me? Nah. It's just different shades a' bloo bleeding continuously into one another, making a huge blur of patterns. Kinda handsome, doncha think, ladies? Yah... I smacked my chops deliciously, vision diving into a splash of bad focus, then surfacing up again to resume composure. Mmm, yummy. I loved that dizzy feeling. Serpents of suffocating cigarette smoke curled up into the peaceful atmosphere around me, fading away like old memories into time. Time never waited on anybody. Or anything, for that matter. I was a regular at The Final Heaven, a well-known, laid-back bar, where new brandy and wine were the main attractions. For me, that is. I was a sucker for expensive wines, and I suppose that's why I always earned my welcoming wave from the townies around here. They saw me 'round the clock. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I had to have my dessert after every meal, people. It was a tradition, an errand I had to run in order to complete my days, which I were shortening at the same time. I couldn't live without wine, and I couldn't live with it. What a nightmare, huh? My single dream was to be the owner of a vineyard, a taster, a tester, an infamous tender. Paris sounded like a lovely spot. City of Lamour... The place hadn't changed since the Rulerists first found out about us so-called 'aliens.' I wasn't born on Hekshano, but on Earth. I grew up in a nice little orphanage, where porridge and mushroom omelettes were cooked for us little ones. There were pastries for the good kids and bread for the bad ones. I was a goody-two-shoes back then, so creamy pastries made me a chubby little boy. What an embarassment. It was when I first tasted wine, mmm, that I couldn't stop myself. That is, couldn't stop myself from going to the greatest lengths to get more. I was addicted young, a mixed blessing, really. Sweets turned to bread, which made me return to my healthy, skinny weight, and relations turned bad, which caused me to run away. I granted myself freedom and turned to the knock-down-drag-out-spit-on-ya' streets, searching for wine all the time. Beer didn't click any switches in my head. Most of the time, I was broke, and still am, from shelling out my cash for alcoholic beverages. But everything took a turn for the better when I met Beex, one slick 'Cat who knows how to treat Chiro right. (That's me, I almost forgot myself, haha.) Beex is the tender at The Final Heaven, and he sells me wine cheap, which I'm grateful for. He arranged for a rendevous a couple of weeks ago at the alley behind his place, so, being the nice guy that I am, I decided to give in and meet him there. He told me to wait in The Final Heaven for him. I yawned groggily, flipping another swig of the best drink there is (champagne) into my greedy maw, smacking dimly. -- Hiccup. My royal plum irises shivered with comic shock. I was hiccupping? I nearly laughed aloud. That was something that happened in cartoons. I never thought that I'd be hiccupping for real, but I guessed that it was bound to happen to a gulper like me sooner or later. Hic. Everyone was giving me chuckles and odd glances. "Uh huh," I said between gargling my drink and grinning at the shifty-lookers. A sparse trickle of caramel liquid seeped from my glass flask and into my coat as I giggled stupidly. Too much champagne. I was getting a little trippy-happy. An intense game of pool was in full flush to my left, while a group of teenage Conturians were busy mastering an arcade game, a rare thing these days. I managed a grin, which I'm sure must have looked goofy, but I didn't care. More importantly, I was becoming impatient. Beex was supposed to be here. I stopped drinking and took a slurry look around. Chairs and benches flickered every-so-often in my drugged sight, jerking periodically up and down with seizure-like spasms. Ah, the dance of a hanged man. Piteously groping elbows and joints cracking as they jerk instinctively up with one another in leaps of pain and concern, to the neck, the fingers scrape a half-conscious kiss, and it continues. Repeating until milky eggs of iris flop uncontrollably into the furthermost rear of the skull, and it is complete. It stops. And the dance is done. I suppose that's how I see the world around me when I'm drunk, but I'm immortal, and I get to perform my little waltz every time the curtain ripples open. Poorly-manicured, ebon-dripping talons skidded shrilly across a dimly-lit sea of unpolished tile, my thunking paws gliding on wings of light friction. My feliney tail whipped out promptly, tightly entwining itself around the metallic, steely limb of a nearby bar stool, providing me with a straightening savior of balance. I slumped over in a recooperative slouch, fairly exhausted. My drink had been irregularly strong, nearly a KO, in fact. I felt as if I was sedated, like someone had given me an impractical does of morphine to deaden some kind-of psychotic injury bleeding inside me. I had a bunch of those, but this medicine wasn't working, like all meds. It just made me feel worse, and I felt like I was drowning in the deep end of a pool, montstrous waves of chlorine flooding up my nostrils and into the finite area of my lungs. I didn't feel any discomfort, though. The so-called pain was just a rush of water, and I was enjoying it. The only thing I didn't like was that I had no idea how I'd ended up in this pool or why I was suffocating in such an artificial ocean. I coolly closed my sickly eyes, blocking out the distorted relfections of unsavory, bobbling images, huffing softly at the worsening effect opening my dewy opticals had upon me. Translucent, silken ribbons and tattered bows of violeteen damask (That's the color damask, not the dang material. -_-) hovered about and around me, upturning their triangular, sparsely discernable tails like flirtatious angelfish, then coming back again with a barage of technicolor bubbles for another round of 'Let's Make Chiro Hurl.' I felt over-heated, like... hypoglycemia, but worse. 'Hey, Chiro, you awright?' A relatively well-groomed cyborg sat sloppily a good distance away from me, mechanical lips murmuring rythymically as he meticulously counted out exactly timed, numeric fragments... 'Eight. Seven...' I hadn't noticed him before, and, just now, it seemed as if he'd just magically materialized out of some insane nightmare, staring frostily at me, iron fingers tapping with deranged precision, all actions perfectly performed. Orderly. Bitter. Far too serious. The 'pik-pak, pik-pak' of this silvren creature's horrendous clicking echoed painfully through my tender ear drums, producing a ghastly shriek from my saucy throat, my head abounding with intense agony. I cried out like a little child, blinking rapidly. What was wrong with me? 'Oh, God, Chiro! What the hell is happening to ya?' 'Six...' I tried to scream again, because he wouldn't stop it... But nothing came out. 'Chiro! Shit! Get someone out here!' What were you saying? Tap. Tap. Quit that. I tightly locked my twitching set of eyeballs with his rigid, emotionless scopers. He was all chilled auto parts, freshly lubed, by that sweet aroma of oil... Snappy for a place like this, aren't ya, buddy? Tap. It hurts. I wish you'd stop. I cringed involuntarily, unravelling my cramped tail, tumbling awkwardly to a noodly set of legs and onto my more solidly supportive knees. I felt like a melting ice-cream cone, my life dripping out of me in boiling, summer-time heat. 'Five...' Something pricked at my passively thunking neck, and a humble thread of satin, sleek and anneorexically slender, touched crimson rose in the shadowy eclipse of The Final Heaven. 'How the holy hell?!' -- No. Hell's not holy... I don't know how. Tap. Tap. Shhh, let me think. I was warped, and I didn't know what was happening, but there was sound, too much sound. Or maybe it was just because I couldn't speak. Petals of burgundy wine slipped from me and freely swept like slothful torrents of white-water through the quenched canyons of my chest. Back then, I had thought that maybe I had drunk so much wine, I'd become it inside. But. I was losing my mind. 'Four. Three...' Then everything went black, and I just couldn't see anymore. I was blind and stunned to the point of absolute stupor that everything around me was an absolute prison of charcoalen torture. I was quite gradually being cruelly deprived of all my senses, and it all had something to do with that drink of damnation.