The road was bumpy, full of potholes and rocks. The fact that they were in a clumsy-looking little jeep didn't help either. A lithe woman sat in the passenger's seat, while her father, just a little over-the-hill, drove.
"You sure you know the way, dad? This road doesn't look like it leads to anything important."
He laughed, patting her knee, "Of course it seems that way, Kia. But things are not always as they seem."
As if on que, the small forrest they'd driven through opened into a large plain, in which stood a rather imposing building, surrounded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire to keep out intruders. This is where Kia's father worked. Some kind of bio-engineering firm she'd never bothered to look into too deeply. The laboratory looked typical, beakers, test-tubes, computers, and strange chemicals were in ample supply. But Kia noticed some strange noises comming from further on.
"Dad.... are you keeping cat's here?"
"How could you tell?"
"The yowling's pretty loud."
"Oh, that would be the little cubs, come meet them, they're the most adorable little things." he kept talking as he led his daughter to a doorway on the far end of the room, "They're orphans, not quite sure how, but it could be poaching likely as not. We're trying to see if we can return them to the wild soon." the doorway opened to a covered porch and then a large yard, some cheetah kits were playing near the porch door.
"Oh my goodness. Why are you keeping them here?"
"Well, they're not test subjects, if that's what you're thinking. That just wouldn't be right, especially with all of these cubs being perfectly healthy. What we've been working on here, is a kind of vaccine to help the sick cats get well and stay strong. If it works, we can probably keep them from going extinct."
".... do you enjoy avoiding my questions?"
"What?... Oh, well, as for why they ARE here, we have a specialist observing their behavior to help us understand them. And we had to take some blood samples to see how it would react to the medicine."
So, they went on with the rest of the tour. Her father was looking for some things in his office when the alarm sounded. They ran into the hall to see what was the matter. One of the other scientists ran toward them, stopping to catch his breath before speaking. "One of Sector 5's containment chambers failed. We have to evacuate right away!"
The building began to tremble as they headed for the exit, but Kia gasped as they passed the lab, she could hear the cats. "The kittens!"
"Don't worry about them, we have to get ourselves out!" explosions started going off in other parts of the building and Kia ran through the lab to find the young cheetahs still in the yard. She gathered them up as quickly as she could, garnering more than a few scratches and bites from the frieghtened cats. There was a large box in the porch, probably had been used to keep them in when they were younger. She put them in there and ran back through the laboratory, down the hall, she could see the front door, then an explosion from behind blew wood and stone debri at her back, she fell forward, dropping the box on it's side, spilling the kits out. When she tried to get up, a pain siezed through her legs. The explosions became more frequent, the lab had caught fire.
"There's the door! Run!" she pushed and shooed the cats away, the hall only led to the one door, and it wasn't too long before they found their way out. She tried to crawl out after them, but there was a loud noise, she could feel her body being thrown threw the air, felt the heat, but she could barely see anything, and after her head hit the ground, she saw nothing, felt nothing.
***
She awoke in a hospital bed, drowsy and achey, but happy, because her father was standing beside the bed. "Dad?... what-?"
"You still need your rest, sweetheart. That was very brave, what you did, but you could have been killed. I don't want you to put your life in danger like that. Do you understand?"
She nodded, then got an oddly puzzled look on her face. "My head..... why do I feel an itch......" she reached up to her head, feeling around to erase the annoying tingly sensation, but she felt fur, like cat-ears... on top of her head. Puzzling some more, she felt the tips, it tickled, and they twitched. She looked about ready to scream. "What happened?"
"Calm down, dear. We're not entirely sure, but we think some of the prototype medicines got into your bloodstream durring the explosion. We never had any idea what might happen if we used it on a healthy human. They were only meant to make weak cheetahs strong again. I suppose it must have made you stronger, and permeated the cheetah dna through your body."
Kia was rather dumbfounded by this news, and had time to think of it durring the few days she had left in the hospital. When she left the hospital, she had no intention of becomming a superhero of any sort. After all, her father had said she shouldn't put herself into danger. More and more, though, she felt that her small apartment was too small, her college campus was to confining, and her waitress job too confining. And then she got tired of wearing hats all the time.
"I hear they got good hero-training in Paragon." her father brought it up one day when she'd visited for dinner, "fancy teleporters to get you out of trouble and everything."
"You don't think I should go, do you?"
"I think you gained some cheetah instincts from that accident too. Big cats need big territory. This little town is hardly enough room for you to run."
"Just drop out of college, quit work, leave you? I don't know if I can give up on so much to look for fame and fortune in the city."
"I think you'd do really well there. And you'd be doing more good than you are here, just chasing rabbits and climbing trees."
So she left for the city, just for a little while at first, but she found she liked having room to roam and people to vent her stress on. Now a full-time hero of Paragon City, she calls herself Fierce, because that is how she wants the evil-doers to think of her.