willy, loner.

Willy is a cheerful tom, with a timid heart. He has survived alone primarily by fleeing from confrontation, making as few enemies in his travels as he can manage and moving on before the ones he does make can get a hold of him. In spite of this, Willy cannot avoid making friends. He is far from shy and irrepressibly curious, filled with questions and stories for sharing, but more importantly he is terribly lonely. He will never be suited for travelling alone.

Willy stumbles into most of his misadventures by pure absentmindedness. He has been known to collide with trees because he was watching a bug, not his feet. Were he not so adept at running away he might have had his tail chewed off by a fox moons ago.

Eternally optimistic, Willy is willing to believe just about anything he is told. He has seen gleaming beasts the size of mountains take to the skies, and gray water that never ends, so how could anything be impossible? As such, many of the stories he learned from other cats are lies. Every story Willy tells about his own life is true. He abhors lying, no matter how good the reason. If it ever occurred to him that anybody might be lying, he would be quite put out.

His name was Willy. A wide-eyed tomkit with ears too big and legs too long. He and two others-- Dumpling and Skeeter-- were born beneath a dumpster that stank of rotten fish. The three of them grew up where salt filled the air, and the first sound Willy ever heard, apart from his mother's thunderous purr, was the crash of waves on the sand. The Grey Water, her mother called it. The kits were not permitted near it.They made a game of seeing how close they could get, before Mother chased them all, tumbling foot over tail, back to the sanctuary of the wharf.

Willy was in danger most often. While his siblings willfully challenged Mother's guard, Willy did so out of sheer absentmindedness. Driven by curiosity he would tumble down a slope of sand, then pounce on a particularly attractive snail shell, then chase the bit of colorful string dangling off a Twoleg kit and never realize how close he came to the shore. Were his mother ever any less watchful, Willy could have simply vanished in the surf.

As the three kits got older, clever Skeeter became Willy's keeper. They ventured further and further from the dumpster, returning to Mother every couple of days, but increasingly content as an independent set. Willy made his first grand foray away from the shore in their company, at eighteen moons old. They walked straight into trouble.

The three young cats came to a broad strip of black earth for which they had no name. Willy, not prone to caution, wandered out into the middle of it. He turned to call to Dumpling, excited by the sticky feeling of the black stuff under his paws, when a massive blur of red and black came screaming around the corner. Dumpling and Skeeter scrambled to safety. Willy had nowhere to go. His siblings lingered at the edge of the black path, too afraid too approach and too afraid to leave him. When the Twolegs came and stuffed his limp body in a box, they caught his siblings too.

Willy does not remember much from the strange white world the Twolegs brought him to. They poked him with sharp, shiny things, and he slept many times before they took him away again. The three siblings rode together in the belly of a great, roaring beast. They were released together, terrified, in a strange Twoleg nest.

Skeeter spent the next moon plotting their escape. Dumpling was gone before they had a chance, swept up in the arms of a babbling Twoleg kit, abducted. Willy and Skeeter never saw him again. They lived like shadows, after that, hoping that the Twolegs would not separate them if they avoided attracting attention.

New Twolegs came for Willy anyway, nearly two moons after they took Dumpling. They moved strangely. Hobbled when they walked, and smelled of dust and something that burned in his throat. Willy did not even get to say goodbye to Skeeter before they stuffed him into another beast.

Willy did not stay with them very long. The Twolegs left the window open only once, and Willy was gone. The jump hurt his paws, but he limped away in the direction the wind was blowing, and never looked back.

So began Willy the Wanderer. At first he intended only to find his family, but Willy had no idea even which direction to go. He gave up hoping after a full cycle of seasons. Then he wandered simply because he had no home to return to. Now, he drifts from one community to the next, ignoring territories and bringing strange stories with him wherever he goes.

Willy has no warrior name-- yet? He may someday join a Clan, but there will be much roleplay and chemistry testing first.

Willy was neutered in the "white world." He doesn't know it, but he is incapable of having kits. He does know he never much wanted any.