Steak

## Overview

Is a former power cat and a member of the Celestial Council.

### Power

Steak's power is what she dubbed 'the voices', or 'insight of the mind'. To activate it, she must make eye contact with a cat and wink. What happens afterwards is a symphony of voices which speak of the cat's actions, thoughts, and intentions, and due to the massive amount, Steak cannot hear and understand all of them, only the few she manages to pick out. It is very loud when in use, and makes her head hurt badly if used too often. There have been cases where it has cased a nosebleed. After losing one of her eyes, Steak's power is constantly activated, so she avoids eye contact as much as possible.

### Personality

Steak can appear simpler at a glance, her most basic personality traits being her love for food, desire to hide, and love of gossip, but she's a bit more complex. She's obnoxious and nosy, and nearly friendly, when she isn't trying to hide away from the world, and remembers very specific things about cats.

Her most basic traits are rooted in trauma. Her love of food and desire to stockpile comes from never knowing when she could possibly eat next. Being in the open always leaves her vulnerable to attacks, or unwanted attention. The gossip thing, it's the only way she's capable of fighting back.

She doesn't know how to love properly, having no examples to learn from as she grew up, and having seen so many cats torn apart by it, she has found herself unable to say the words, even to the first cat she truly loved, truly wanted to spend her life with, leading to their eventual separation, she doesn't know how to cope with it. She loves her family dearly, even if she doesn't say it, and is oddly loyal, despite having never been taught to be. Steak shows her love through her actions and concerns. Towards most cats, Steak is not willing to share her food, and won't bother to worry about them, but if she cares about someone, she will check in on them often, and actively offer to feed them if they're hungry.

Steak isn't a good cat, but she isn't truly evil either. She's rude and obnoxious, and is not afraid to use the information she has against you, but she has limits. She refuses to fight, mostly because she's bad at it and hates pain, and she is extremely maternal towards younger cats for some reason. Snide mom energy.

Rivers and large spans of water are something that Steak really enjoys, she loves to swim at any opportunity, and will make a mad dash towards any body of water she comes across. Despite this, she is absolutely terrified of storms, having one be the cause of her biggest injuries, she is working to get over it.

Overall, Steak is a cat that is memorable, if not deplorable for her strange actions.

### Appearance

Steak is a rather stocky cat, with thick bones and large paws. Her fur is a thick, primarily black calico color, and her body is littered in various scars, from scratches to bite wounds, though the most prominent is the one covering the right half of her face. She once had a long tail, but lost most of it to a boat propeller when arriving on the island. She has tired grey eyes, the right one missing after a confrontation with Breathless, and she wears a tattered red handkerchief around her neck. Her front left leg is damaged, sore to walk on, and her paw spasms at random intervals.

## Detailed History

### Pre-Bloodclan Life

Pre-Bloodclan life

Born to a couple of street cats, Steak grew up fighting every day for just the chance to eat properly, until she learned how to manipulate, and fight back, using the stories she collected through hiding from the older cats. At 16 moons, she was eating well, well enough to allow her littermate to follow her around, that littermate being her sister Marrowe, they were often called ‘the calico sisters’. She’d also managed to find a companion, a Bengal named Kaize, but she was never able to reciprocate their love quite right.

Steak, Marrowe, and Kaize ended up on a boat which brought them to the island, and during a storm, the sisters were thrown into the sea and injured, while Kaize dove after them to help. After waking up the next day, having slept on the shore, the three cats ventured further inland, meeting an herb-savvy cat named Juno. Juno and Kaize grew close, Steak quickly realized that her companion was falling out of love with her… and she let it happen. She was too tired to kick up a fuss, too insecure to fight, too scared to say she loved them. After the calico sisters recovered, Juno and Kaize left, and Steak didn’t try to stop them.

The storm she’d experienced, the storm which caused her sister permanent brain damage, the storm which took her tail and her face, it never left her mind, and every storm she faced after would trigger severe phantom pains and flashbacks, though as the years have gone by, she’s grown better at coping.

Eventually, Steak trespassed into Bloodclan territory, having a brief spat with a large apprentice. Having heard the rumors of Bloodclan, she decided she might enjoy clan life, so long as it’s the interesting one.

### Time in Bloodclan

In Bloodclan, Steak was known to stash pieces of prey in difficult places to reach, and would often settle herself in the cracks and crevices in camp as the perfect vantage points for watching, and overhearing drama. She joined not long after Lunarstar was defeated, and while she accepted Emperor as leader, she found herself uninterested in his life. She knows a good deal of information about the younger cats in Bloodclan, and has some good material to use against the older warriors, but aside from that, she spent her time just eating and listening.

During her time in Bloodclan, Steak found herself caring for her youngest sister, Eggs, and for some reason, she couldn’t see her as a sister, instead, she saw the kit as a daughter. But she never admitted that, because she’d make a terrible mother. So she continued raising Eggs as a sister, maybe coddling her too much, maybe losing her temper too often. But she wanted the kid to live a better life than she could. She tried her best.

Steak had also become aware of a younger sibling being in Thunderclan, having recognized her as one of the last litters Steak had been around to meet. Celandineblossom, an apprentice at the time, was friendly enough to let Steak visit.

### Celestial Council

Steak believes in Starclan. Doesn’t mean she likes ‘em. She just wanted to be left out of their sight, but apparently they thought it would be funny to give her a power. Having a habit of winking at cats during conversations, she quickly discovered how it worked after throwing one or two fits about the cats around her talking too loud. She confided in Harmony, the Bloodclan Healer at the time, and was soon invited to the Celestial Council. She jumped on the opportunity immediately, considering the amount of information she could learn. Steak found herself making friends, she didn’t really understand why they put up with her, but she appreciated it. That didn’t stop her from making an enemy in the current leader, Hawkshade, but that happened much later.

### The Bystander

Steak didn’t care much for Alistair, and aside from taking whatever information she could from his conversations with other cats, she avoided speaking to him like the plague. On the bright side, he was more active than the previous leader, so she respected him.

Then Lightstorm was imprisoned, and Steak took a look into Alistair’s mind.

Steak didn’t know what to do about her leader’s paranoid mindset, all she knew was that she didn’t like it. So, she decided to try being a stable point, at least until he could find someone more reliable. At least until Lightstorm was out. With her observant nature, she noticed when Alistair wasn’t eating enough, or getting enough sleep, so she chided him with snarky comments and idle conversations. Some cats think that she’d piped in to steer him towards the ‘right path’, but she was just getting involved to keep the one leader she respected in power, and to keep everyone’s eyes off of her.

Soon, daily routine of checking on Alistair, after sneaking food to Lightstorm, became something she looked forward to, and before she’d had the chance to stop herself, the leader she affectionately called “Boss” become someone important in her life. She was bitter about it at first, but decided it was alright, since her actions could never be that important in anyone’s life. For the first time, she wished they could be. And she wished she wasn’t betraying him every day.

Lightstorm nearly escaped Bloodclan, and it was quickly obvious that she had help. Steak was responsible for that, and she hated it. Lightstorm’s recapture and subsequent death, as upsetting as it was, was almost a relief for Steak, because then she could stop getting involved. Alistair had reliable cats around him, she retreated from his side. But guilt kept eating at her. She had to confess her betrayal before someone else found out.

Unfortunately, someone did.

In the midst of her confession, Breathless took Steak down and announced her crimes, and she couldn’t bare to say a thing. She was sure that she would die. She didn’t expect the expression on Alistair’s face. The Bloodclan Leader, though hurt by her actions, spared Steak by exiling her. She just couldn’t understand why he would spare someone so traitorous and insignificant.

She never should have gotten involved.

### Life as a Rogue

Steak hated feeling guilty. So she stopped thinking about it.

She technically lived with Marrowe, but she travelled all the time, almost never sleeping in the same place, having no routine was frustrating. At least she still had the Celestial Council. Steak continued to orbit Bloodclan, getting involved even when it was unnecessary. This proved to be a mistake.

Moments after Bloodclan’s victory against Skyclan, Steak took notice of a very familiar cat tormenting a young apprentice. She stepped in. Things got violent.

Breathless was a powerful fighter, and Steak? She’d only managed to win her battles through blackmail. She scratched at his eyes, he injured her left front leg and took her right eye. Lack of proper treatment left her with a limp. Steak was imprisoned in Skyclan camp for a while, though she was released when Skyclan was liberated. She shortly learned of Alistair’s coma, and, feeling guilty again, reached out to Dionysus, urging him to make sure the leader didn’t die of dehydration. Whether or not he followed up on that, she didn’t know, but she was grateful the cat listened to her demands.

When Alistair left Bloodclan and began his path of redemption, Steak found it… difficult, to seek him out. Not because he was hard to find, but rather, she didn’t want to be found. She wanted to blame him for her guilt, but she knew it was caused by her own actions. When she finally caught the courage to approach him, she nearly turned around, but he found her first.

After reconciling with Alistair, Steak was finding it easier to breathe, easier to accept herself every day. She’d been living with Marrowe, having Eggs stay with them for a short time before returning to Bloodclan, and she was keeping up with the Celestial Council, preparing for the clans to move.

Things were looking up for her. And then they weren’t.

### Death of Marrowe

Marrowe had begun… forgetting things. She kept referring to Steak and Celandineblossom by their old names, barely recognized Eggs, only thought about the one thing she’d always hyper fixated on; bones. Steak took her eyes off of Marrowe for too long, and her sister disappeared from the area. Steak tracked her scent to Riverclan’s territory, which had begun to be consumed by the twoleg construction.

Marrowe had entered the construction site, almost blind to the world around her, blind to the excavator steadily rolling her way. Steak ran as fast as she could, screeched as loud as her body would allow, but her sister remained oblivious, the back half of her body still in the path of the treads. Marrowe didn’t die immediately, she barely comprehended the situation, even as Steak closed her jaws around her throat. The last thing Marrowe knew was that for the first, and last time, she heard Steak whisper ‘I love you.’

This event traumatized Steak. Though she was comforted by the cats around her, even though she wasn’t alone, everything went by in a haze, she couldn’t return to the empty den, and she couldn’t close her eyes.

When she broke from this trance, the territories were growing smaller, and the clans were getting ready to leave. She told Celandineblossom that she loved her, though the word still felt gross in her mouth, her siblings needed to hear it. But she couldn’t find Eggs, or rather, wouldn’t find her, because she was scared, and ashamed. Ashamed to have failed Bloodclan, but more importantly, ashamed to have abandoned Eggs, to have failed her so miserably. The only other cat she managed to utter the words to was Alistair, and even then, she didn’t know what they truly meant for her.

### The Coward

Steak couldn’t bare to look at the bridge. She couldn’t bare to go near that construction site. And while she so desperately wanted to stay with the cats she loved, to follow them to a better place, she just… couldn’t. So she did as she always did, she took the easy way out, and left everything she’d ever loved behind. She wanted to tell Celandineblossom, she wanted to tell Eggs, but after telling Alistair of her choice, after realizing how desperately she loved those cats, she couldn’t take it. Wouldn’t take it. Because she was scared. She was a coward at birth, she knew she’d be a coward at death. She boarded a boat and disappeared from the lives of all cats who knew her.

Maybe someday she’ll learn, and maybe someday, she’ll return.