"I have excellent trunk lifting strength. That is by design! ....goddamnit, wolf, stop staring at my feet; the position and my patience's wearing thin. Rrrr, maybe later. You're very strange, dog boy."

-2Paw.

*chuckles* Granted, she doesn't have a bad temper on her, though it may look that way to others at times. She's a little too tightly controlled for that, and she knows how much damage she could do if she loses that control.

Heh! Sort of like how a tiger or tigress can often have a very, very grumpy or irritable look on their face and muzzle, seen through a human's anthropomorphised interpretative biases, but may be nothing more than their unique bone, muscle and markings producing a genera of 'permabeyotch face' and they're otherwise calm, well-comforted and emotionally content and stable.

There's always going to be a part of me that wonders what would happen if I did goad or irritate by repeated raising interest to have Huntress give up in defeat (no pun intended) and step firmly on my face. I mean, if she's strong enough to hoist and carry half a ton with her upper body, I imagine she's very well-packed with heavily enhanced muscles in her thighs and calves, with the reinforced skeletal support to handle that kind of exertion and impact.

-2Paw.

Yeah. Huntress... well, she's a weird combination of cynical and idealistic. Knows the world is a mess, has to at least try to make a difference, but also knows the chances of her having any appreciable effect are close to nil. She has a bit of a 'resting angry face' partly from the tiger sculpt, but also partly because when you get right down to it she's a combat mercenary with a bit of PTSD and she almost never completely relaxes... even without knowing her background, she tends to make people nervous because sometimes she just looks like she's trying to figure out exactly how long it would take to put you down.

I went back and looked at a Challenge magazine with a Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. adventure therein, featuring as the villain
and, oddly the hire represented by her Mr. Johnson to the PCs, an exceptionally wealthy formerly human gentlewoman, now a full-body biomodded moderately giant humanoid tigress with top of the line Exotic modding (read: insanely expensive) and bone, muscle and tensile support enhancements, along with more novel implants in a closed-loop oxygen storage battery assist to her heart-lung system, and a nanoswarm akin to Bloodshot's 'goldies' turning her into a type of Deadpool-esque super-regenerator upon injury.

She wanted to do this because she was bored, had a world of money to throw at anything or anyone she wanted, and decided to use a legal loophole regarding combat-model Exotic biomodding to allow her to legally kill and eat people, as long as she only used her 'natural' weapons, claws, teeth, muscle and strength. In effect, she temporarily ceases legally being a human being and instead becomes a strictly protected class of animal that is legally allowed to hunt, kill and eat any living thing in their territory, and that loophole overlaps her property (her 'range') as her legal stomping and hunting grounds.

In the end, if the PCs manage to slow her down, stop her from attacking them and calming her instincts down enough to talk her into telling her story to them, she'll do exactly that: while she was brought up in the lap of luxury, her father and executives on the corp board he headed routinely sexually abused and assaulted her, including penetration in pretty much every part of her that could accommodate it, and often was treated like an unpaid prostitute her biological sire hoisted around, took to 'parties' and 'hired out' for favours when he wanted to. Even though she inherited a lot of the narcissism and humanity's ennui from her father she is at her heart a terribly traumatized young woman, who was left so socially and emotionally undeveloped because of her father's treatment that while she is extremely intelligent the machinery in her head that could make the most of her inherent talents never got working properly.

She has an extreme disassociation with her original body, had had it since her very early years when her father began the horror she never really escaped, after the active abuse finally stopped. When she got her tigress body- deliberately distancing herself from what she was before, physically- she almost went as far as to have her gender physically, surgically and hormonally reassigned, or even to totally null her gender in absence by the same surgery, but chose not to in either case- she finally felt like she was living in a body that was hers and never was stolen from her, over and over again, made her feel alien inside her own skin. The tigress she became was her now, adopting the nature as well as the body of a giant, humanoid hunting cat, and could accommodate every bit of the great, carnivorous feline in instinct and sensory force-feedback loop and proprioception she now bore and sustained.

She ends up paying the PCs ten times the already king's ransom she would've paid them, and she promises that anytime they need either a place to stay or can't afford food or shelter, they can come here and Tyger Tyger will let nothing near them to harm or keep them from food or warmth.

I understand from you telling her story, Huntress' past isn't precisely what the young woman the titan tigress she would become went through, but it reminded me enough by overlap- and that Huntress also chose to become a tigress to come to terms with what she once had to bear in her past, find a purpose and usefulness to what she would know herself as from then on- that I thought her fearful symmetry with Huntress' lifepath might be worth a reckoning mention.

-2Paw.

Oh yeah, Huntress is nowhere near that level of broken. She may have had herself rebuilt into a tiger exotic biosculpt when she had the opportunity (which involved both a nasty accident and a pre-arranged looting of her trust fund to get the money) but she hasn't renounced her humanity to that extent.

The woman who would be a tigress calling herself Tyger Tyger hated her old body, or more to the point that it was hers, knowing what was done to and with it, more of a toy or a property than ever being treated as a person, that she in no small way didn't know it was her.

Looking in the mirror wasn't difficult every time she did as a human, it was what she saw there seemed alien, a foreign body that didn't eat her alive from the inside but that swallowed her and took the appearance she was told was hers, a parasite that turned commensalism of what she was into abstracted assimiliation and mockery from the face of an imagined twin who did not welcome her there.

The young woman she was told she was, she could identify as data but not identify mimetically, like that was her face smiling the rare times she could or was allowed to. She knew it was someone she was told she was but did and could never wholly, intimately connect her ego to her corpus.

Frankly, as awful as what happened to Huntress prior to her full-body biosculpting conversion was, I am more than glad she never went through what Tyger Tyger's human predecescile did at the hands of corporate villainy and loss; respectfully meant, Huntress, if you hear this as well as my beloved Jenora. If I told your tigress-Exotic this story, it would not focus on what her far-kinswoman tigress-sister went through, but the wholeness of person she eventually grasped with her massive handpaws and jaws and never let go of again, that was finally and ultimately hers.

When I read over Tyger Tyger's story and internalized it enough to understand it as a whole, her tale almost sounds like someone who was trans, finally finding peace and wholeness in a revision of their body and physical identity that matched who they were by ego and psychology.

I'm trying not to hedge too much off of the adventure in Challenge- granted, it was well-written and not a throwaway, but it was a one-night tabling and would, aside from Tyger Tyger's promise of home and sanctuary in the future, never meant for multiple sessions of Cyberpunk tabletop play, but I'm putting together the outline of a medium-length story or novella based on this adventure, at least by basic context and fleshing out the details of character background and surrounding cast and lifepaths myself.

I'm still going to get a little too close to Huntress the next time she takes her shoes off and goes barefoot, 'cos I live for the danger and the indulgent rapture of giant plantigrade cat feet, you know. (Winks with teeth at the big female tigress-Exotic.)

-2Paw.

Very nice! I love the pose, intimating that not only is she strong, she is balanced and poised. Thank you for sharing!

And, well, she is... she practices Capoeira, and is pretty good with it. Though she'll also be among the first to admit that it's a little too flashy to be a really good street fighting technique.