She isn't built for running. With rain slashing it's way through the night, visible only in the fleeting halos of streetlights and neon signs, she ran anyway. The droplets pelted cold against her, though the fur helped keep most of the chill out. Someone wrote a song once about cold November rain, but Fall's soundtrack for tonight was an entirely different sort of genre. Industrial guitars and mechanical drums played in her ears courtesy of the big headphones tucked under the dark grey of her hoodie. The rapid beat helped spur her footfalls on, padded feet slapping over the sidewalk as she sprinted.

The light ahead of her took on the unmistakeable red and green clash of a traffic intersection, the brightness enhanced by the headlights of a single car idling at the stop. The running figure approached the road quickly, coming up to a handrail and leaping toward it without hesitation. Both hands came forward, meeting the top of the metal rail at the same time as her feet hit it and pushing off in that same instant. Her tail, trailing behind her out of a gash cut in the rear of her jeans, whipped through the air, a banner recolored to black and faint red by the stoplight's one-eyed witness. Four more precise paces before she leaped into the air one more time. This time, she slid across the front of the boxy champaign colored Oldsmobile waiting for the lights to change. Fall went feet first this time, sliding on her wide hip across the rain-slicked metal of the car.

Startled by the furry figure suddenly shooting across the front of his vehicle, the driver had no recourse but to slam on his horn and yell a few obscenities out a window hastily opened. Fall didn't look back. Music continued to pound in her ears and her feet continued to pound the pavement. From asphalt back up onto the paler concrete of the sidewalk, she ran. Her breath was coming heavy at this point, her chest causing far too much secondary motion to be comfortable, but she ran. A few strands of bright green hair had worked their way out of the ponytail and hung down against her muzzle, but she couldn't spare the moment to shove them back beneath the cotton of her hood. She had to run.

A turn around a corner found one of her padded feet slipping in a puddle, traction momentarily lost. The huge length of her fluffy-furred tail swayed wide, working like a rudder to try to keep her on balance. She scrambled, nearly falling over and touching the fingertips of one hand down momentarily, before she found her footing again and rekindled her sprint. She ran toward darkness this time, an alleyway illuminated only by the dim light cast by the facades of the buildings that made up it's walls.

There was no slowing as she went barreling into the alley, stirring up fast food wrappers and forgotten reciepts in her passing. Ahead, there waited a fence that barred the way, but the runner was not going to be deterred. Another leap planted one foot into the mesh of the fence, the familiar sound of flexing chainlink rang out through the rainy night, echoing off of the pair of buildings that seemed to lean in to watch the climb. Another foot hit the dingy bricks of the wall, higher up than the first, and then both hands grabbed onto the cold bar that made up the top support of the fence. With a soft grunt of effort, Fall's furry form found it's way over. She dropped to the blacktop on the other side and paused for a few heartbeats.

The hood had flipped back in her leap over the six foot high fence. With it down, the runner's face was exposed. White and black fur covered everything, her bottom lip pierced by a pair of silver rings, and her rounded ears stood up through the searing green of her hair, each run through with a trio of hoops. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and most of it shoved down the back of her hoodie, but it was fighting for it's freedom now. Flyaways stood up in every direction, though the rainfall worked to smother them back down to her scalp. Bright eyes the color of smoldering embers looked out of dark markings, unmistakeable panda circles around her eyes, though with tearstreaks that ran down to her jawline leaking from them like wet mascara. Every breath sucked past her dark lips made her heavy chest heave beneath her hoodie. A hand came up, fingers tipped with blind claws tugged the silvery zipper down to expose herself to more airflow, as well as to sacrifice her black t-shirt to the wetness that soaked this particular evening. The top of the outline of a golden dragonfly on the shirt was visible, where the rapidly dampening cotton clung to the shape of her body.

Drawing in a deep breath, a quick hop heralded her breaking into a run once again. This time, her path drove her to the entrance to one of the many buildings in the area. From the state of disrepair that the three steps she hopped up to get to the doors, it looked like it had been abandoned for some time. Graffiti danced merrily along the bricks, conjuring colors out of the otherwise drab building. The doors were made of old, rusted metal and chained together with a heavy padlock, so entrance had to be made a different way. Fall hopped onto the wide cement wall that made up the edge of the building's entry porch, then jumped a second time. One hand hit a mounting bar that had once supported a security gate over the window she had chosen, but now served only to join the uncountable scars on the old place. In one deft swing, the chubby figure tucked her knees toward her chest and fell through the frame that had long since lost it's glass.

Inside, the wooden floor was in disarray. Planks had warped and stood up at angles, swept off to one side like some petrified wave. It made traversing the space in the dark trecherous, but Fall was surefooted. She skirted around weak spots that she had previously discovered, she adjusted when the creaking of the wood became a little ominous, but soon she found her destination. An electrical box mounted on one wall, the cover broken and hanging to one side. Quick fingers flipped breakers, each one thunking loudly and then followed by a labored buzzing as power began to run through circuits that should have been shut off a decade before. With a mechanical cha-chunk, several floodlights came on, bringing an eerie life to the abandonned tenement.

Chips of plaster and pieces of ceiling tiles decorated the warped wooden floor here and there. Graffiti here was even thicker than it was outside, the street artists more bold indoors where they didn't fear a passing patrolman quite so badly. A mural of interwoven works of illicit art stood out in the light. Names in intensely stylized letters were all tangled up with a sugarskull, which seemed to be unintentionally vomitting a stenciled image of a man with a bullhorn. Fall stood for a moment, looking over new additions to the wall. Someone else had been in the building since the last time she visited. Her eyes narrowed in the dark and her ears perked up, listening for signs that she might not be alone. All there was to hear was the steady background drone of the rain against the roof and the ocassionally hissing woosh of a car driving by on the nearest road. A slow sigh escaped before the panda began her ascent.

Entering the tenement was one thing, but getting to her goal was quite another challenge. The stairway ahead of her was collapsed, a pile of rubble with a bannister still standing as testament to the fact that it had once been a way to reach the upper floors of the building. Making an approach was awkward, a curving, loping sort of a run around the ruined floor before leaping at the wall of the former stairwell. Several holes were already punched into the plastic of the wall by this maneuver, but this time, the wall held. With a soft yell, Fall pushed off and turned around, extending her hands to catch onto the edge of the floor at the second story level. Her legs kicked and her tail lashed as she strained to haul herself up. Her fairly plush figure made the pullup a challenge, but she had done it before and would do it again. This time, the only damage she did was snagging her sleeve on a stray nail. After a quick tug left a small hole in the dark gray cotton of her hoodie, she stood up to walk down the dimly lighted hallway of the second floor.

Climbing to the third floor was easier, since the stairway was still intact. The grafffiti was much thinner up there, thanks to the leap one had to make in order to get that high. The only notable piece of decoration was the long Chinese dragon someone had lovingly rendered on the third floor stairwell's wall. One of Fall's dark furred hands reached out, dragging the black pads along her fingertips over the wall, as if seeking out the smooth scales of the spraypainted serpentine shape. Her claws made hollow dragging sounds along the wallboard as she reached the third floor. The doors were closed on most of the abandoned apartments, safe from squatters up this way. The long-tailed panda came to a stop in front of door 307.

Above, beneath, and around those numerals, 307, someone had taken the time to draw much larger letters. Big blocks using purple, green, black, and white to convey the letters FALL. The someone who had labeled the door was the girl that stood in front of it. After rummaging in a pocket for a moment, a keychain came out. Numerous keys glittered in the low light before she found the right one and unlocked the suspiciously new looking doorknob and deadbolt. Swinging the door open, she stepped inside and closed it before locking it up again and sliding a chain lock into place as well. Then, and only then, did she step forward and shed her hoodie. As she peeled the soaked sweatshirt off of herself, she called into the darkness of the apartment.

"Honey! I'm home!"

No reply came, of course. Fall walked along the creaky floor until she came to a cheap floor lamp and clicked it on. This particular apartment, unlike the rest of the building, was not nearly in such an advanced stage of decay. It's tenant had taken pains to replace the kitchen cabinets and repaint the walls. She had replaced the light fixtures and brought up some spartan furnishings. A television sat upon a huge old dresser that had been in the building for decades. A stereo rested on a set of plastic shelves. A bed had been set up in one corner of the living room, mattress and box spring piled with blankets that rested upon the floor. After tossing her hoodie on the couch in the center of the room, Fall ran her hands back over the ponytail that had mostly come loose. The tips of her hair danced around the base of her tail and that tail itself stretched several feet behind her hips. The hybrid panda was not entirely a subtle figure.

With music still playing through her headphones, she walked across the living room of her appropriated apartment. The sliding glass door waiting for her was spotlessly clean and opened smoothly on it's track, granting her the way out onto the small balcony that was her favorite retreat from the world. A comfortably cushioned chair and a plastic table greeted her, welcoming her into a position seated on the chair and with her aching feet propped up on the table. The awning above the balcony was keeping the rain off, though the drops hitting it made a thunder all it's own. One hand reached off to the side, plucking a package of cloves and a lighter out of their stash. A few flicks of her thumb later, Fall was inhaling the sweet, spicy smoke and looking out over the city. Lights glimmered in the distance, made less distinct by the falling rain.

A slow exhalation sent a cloud billowing past her pierced lips and Fall gently sang, picking up the words of the song playing in her ears. "Couldn't have seen it come from an inch away, but it's here, right on time. Wait for the flash of grey and we will feel the same, if we can just drift for a while. When I'm back on the ground, I feel safe again. I feel warmer..."

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