TW: Neglect, hunger, and mentions of death. Mildly descriptive violence and death scene later on. Note that this is a backstory chapter and that all of the members will be getting backstory chapters, so if these things are triggering to you, please don't feel like you have to read this. There will be other backstory chapters for you to read. Your mental health is far more important than some fanfiction you found online.
The kitten hybrid didn't know much about the world, but what he did know was that it was important to make it to the other side.
He didn't know why, nor did he know how. All he knew was that he needed to go there, because his mother had told him and his littermates so. She had told them that if they stayed in this crowded room for too long, then they wouldn't be able to get out. He didn't know what that meant, nor did he understand what was so bad about the only room he'd ever known, but his mother had seemed so upset about it that he decided that it was important that he make it out somehow.
However, he had more trouble escaping than his littermates did. According to his mother, and some of the other cat hybrids in the room, the requirement to escape the room was to catch the attention of a human. On the other side of the invisible wall, many humans walked by each day, and some even picked one or two cat hybrids from the room to come out with them. The kitten hybrid had thought for sure that a human would pick him quickly, because, in his eyes, he was the prettiest of his littermates. After all, he was the only one with the same chocolate brown hair and fur as his mother. And he was the only one with long fur instead of short fur, just like his mother's long fur. His mother was the prettiest cat hybrid he'd ever seen, so the kitten thought that if he looked like her, he must be pretty too.
However, almost all of his littermates were chosen before him, with the exception of one of his sisters. His mother left him soon after, tearfully telling them goodbye and begging the remaining two to get chosen by a human, unlike her. He didn't understand why she was crying. Wasn't she leaving? Wasn't that a good thing? He didn't want her to leave them, but it was alright if a human had chosen her, wasn't it? She had said that the only way to escape was to be chosen by a human, so why was she saying that she hadn't been chosen when she was leaving?
Some cat hybrids seemed more happy to leave than others. He had never seen anyone stay in the room for too long, so he wasn't sure why his mother had insisted that they would get trapped. The room was crowded, though, so maybe it really was better to leave anyways.
Now that his mother had left him and his sister alone, he knew that he needed to get them both out of the room as quickly as possible. His sister was pretty too, he thought, with short grey fur and long brown hair, so he was sure that he could get them out. Whenever he saw a human looking through the invisible wall, he would drag his sister up to the front of the room with him and try to get the humans to look at them. Most of them did, but none of them ever chose him, until one day a family of five came looking at the two of them curiously. The kitten was happy to learn that he and his sister would be going together with the same humans - it almost seemed too good to be true. All of his siblings had been taken separately, so he was glad to know that he would know someone where he was going. His sister, too, seemed relieved to be with him and not alone.
However, their happiness was short lived.
When the kitten and his sister met the humans later on that same day that they had been chosen, they both were disappointed to find out that the humans who had chosen them were smelly. The other human in the room, the one whom they got to see everyday when he showed the outside humans around, seemed not to smell too bad, so the kitten assumed that not all humans smelled bad. Why did theirs have to be the smelly ones?
