The new light in the human-den was a silent hum and a wet, rhythmic pop. Bagheera, a sliver of night, uncurled and flowed towards it. A box of water glowed, and within it, a flake of captured sunset—orange, alive, waving tiny fins—pulsed. Prey.
Her body flattened, muscles coiling. Whiskers twitched, tasting the still air. The orange thing drifted, oblivious. One heartbeat, then two, and her forepaw, a black flash tipped with hidden needles, struck. Thump. Not the give of flesh, but a hard, cold flatness her paw bounced off, sending a strange shiver up her leg. The orange prey darted, then resettled, still swimming, still tauntingly visible.
Confusion, a low growl in her chest. She tapped again, claws extended. Scritch-tap. The invisible wall remained. She pressed her nose to it, sniffing. Water-smell, plant-smell, no way through. She paced, a tight knot of predatory energy, her tail lashing. The prey moved freely, a jewel in an impossible cage. This was wrong. What she saw, she should touch. What she touched, she should grasp.
Her gaze tracked upwards. The box was open at the top, a dark, shimmering skin on the water. A new path. She gathered herself, a compact spring, and launched onto the nearby table. Now she loomed above. The orange prey flickered closer to the surface. Excitement tightened her chest. This time.
She reached down, a swift, sure hook. Her paw sliced through the skin of the water and plunged into cold, clinging wrongness. A shocked hiss ripped from her as she recoiled, shaking the heavy, dripping wet from her fur. It was an offense, this cold drag where there should have been warmth and struggle. She leaped from the table, landing hard, and furiously licked her paw, trying to erase the feel of the alien wet.
When her fur was merely damp, she stopped. The burning frustration cooled, replaced by a new stillness. She looked at the glowing box. The orange prey still swam, untroubled. Her instincts had screamed pounce, grab, bite. But the box had answered with hardness and a cold shock.
Bagheera sat, straight and tall, before the transparent wall. Her emerald eyes, no longer wide with baffled instinct, narrowed into focused slits. The lashing tail stilled, only its very tip twitching, measuring a new rhythm. The prey was there. The path was not simple. This was not the easy food in the bowl, nor the frantic chase of the moth. This was a puzzle. A new kind of hunt. And the first move, she now understood, was to watch. To learn.