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KFP 3: Stripes of the Past Chapter 4

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“What happened?”
     Tigress was inwardly asking herself the same thing. What had happened? The most she knew was that she had just witnessed a bizarre, inexplicable sequence of bewildering visions upon seeing the curious symbol on the croc Commander’s armor, but why did she see them? What did they mean? There was one vision, however, that she found rather easy to interpret—the one in which an unknown tigress supposedly deserts the cub reaching up and mewing pleadingly to her. She was willing to explain the most she knew of what she had seen, but not until she was alone with her comrades.
     “Let’s get these bandits bounded up,” Tigress sighed. “I’ll explain everything later.”
     Without any disagreement, Po and the rest of the Five set about finding whatever they use to bind the unconscious bandits that remained. Tigress was about to do so herself, when the sheep nurse she had rescued from the croc Commander hurried to stand in the tiger’s way. She stopped to look down at the sheep standing there before her—she looked awfully familiar, and sounded awfully familiar as well as she spoke.
     “Tigress, I must thank you for saving me and everyone else here.”
     Tigress was almost certain that this sheep was one of the caretakers who raised her when she was but a cub. When she heard that sheep’s voice, the memory of that hated remark banged into her memory.
     “No one would adopt a child because they’re afraid of her—she’s a monster! A monster!
     She was that very one.
     The awful memory combined with that familiar voice made Tigress wince at every word the nurse spoke. She shook her elaborately striped head lightly, as though trying to shake that memory out of her mind, as she held out a paw and replied modestly, “You have no need. We were merely doing our duties.”
     The sheep nurse latched both hooves onto Tigress’ paw, which was huge compared to the sheep’s small hooves. “No, I truly must thank you, you especially, after how we had treated you all those years ago. You’ve certainly come a very long way from the cub we feared so greatly and dubbed so cruelly. We just hope that you don’t still hold it against us.”
     Tigress gazed sympathetically at the sheep for a moment, before replying, “My honor does not permit past grievances to restrain me from answering the call of duty, but I also do not find it honorable of me to hold wrongs that have been resolved long ago against those who had committed them. What had happened here in my days as a cub was years ago, and has been resolved long then. One should leave troubles of the past to that time, for they no longer matter—it’s what one chooses to do with oneself in the present that matter.” She glanced over at Po, the sage who shared with her the lesson he had learned from Lord Shen’s Soothsayer when he had sought to learn the truth about his past and his parents.
    Tigress then returned her attention to the sheep nurse. “Of course you are forgiven.”
    The sheep nurse smiled gratefully up at the big feline, her head feebly bobbing in light nods. “Thank you, Tigress. My, how you have come a long way, from that troublesome handful of an orphan cub to this successful, revered, handsome Master.”
    “And the center of countless fans!” a young but gruff voice exclaimed.
    Tigress looked the crowd of orphans, from whom a small quintet somewhat older than the rest shoved their way through to meet with the tiger Master. These kids were very distinct from all the others, for they were of species one would expect to find in the Valley of Peace (rabbits, sheep, goats, ducks and geese), these were a wallaby, a gharial, a barn owl, a pangolin, and a rhinoceros beetle perched on the pangolin’s shoulder, much akin to Mantis perched on Monkey’s shoulder.
    “I told you one day we’d meet the Furious Five,” said the wallaby to his friends.
    “I was always certain you’d prove right,” replied the pangolin. “I just never thought we’d meet them in person this soon.” His beady eyes were shining with astonishment, but not more so than the wallaby’s.
    Tigress couldn’t hold back an amused grin as she kneeled down to level her gold-and-scarlet eyes with the young marsupial’s. “Well, it seems we have some fans here.”
    The stunned little wallaby was speechless for a moment, but then gave some light nods. When he had found the confidence, he made a Kung Fu salute and said, “You bet, Master Tigress. Especially of you and…”—he drew in his breath sharply as he saw Po striding up to Tigress’ side upon hearing a mentioning of fans—“…the Dragon Warrior!”
    The panda beamed an impressed smile down upon the young quintet. “Fans of the Five, huh? Say, you guys look kinda like a mini Five yourselves.”
    Tigress couldn’t help but agree—apart from the difference in species and gender (in the case of the wallaby, gharial, barn owl and rhinoceros beetle), these five orphans were practically a young mirror image of the Furious Five.
    Mouths agape, the five orphans were utterly stunned and speechless. The gharial was rapidly fanning his hands to his narrow-snouted face and on the brink of hyperventilating. “The Dragon Warrior…talking…to us…” He suddenly began toppling over, as though he were about to faint, only to be caught by the barn owl, who gave him a gentle shove forward to help him regain footing.
    A black-and-white male goose waddled up to Po’s side (having overheard the conversation between Tigress and Po and the five orphans), smiling in amusement as he nodded to the young quintet. “They are quite the little warriors, aren’t they? I saw them in action during that bandit raid. When those bandits tried to interrogate them, these youngsters certainly gave them a few assaults to think about.” He chuckled with mirth.
    A large smile curved on the young wallaby’s features. “We’ve always dreamt of learning Kung Fu and becoming our own Furious Five one day.” He and his cronies then whipped into fighting stances, very much akin to the posses the Furious Five would often strike.
    Po pulled back slightly in pretense surprise. “Whoa-hoh! If I had met you guys just a second before you struck those posses, I’d have thought you were a Furious Five! Heck, I’d be shocked outta my mind you didn’t turn out to be one.”
    Still grinning, Tigress’ whiskers twitched mirthfully as she nodded to Po’s words. “Agreed. Who knows, maybe we might consider taking them under our wings and teach them ourselves?”
    The orphan quintet went stock still. This time it was the Wallaby’s turn to faint, only to be caught by the gharial, who fell backward in a faint himself, only to be caught by the pangolin, who did likewise and was caught by the rhinoceros beetle. The barn owl rolled her large, dark eyes, as she shook her round, flat-faced head.
    Tigress’ ears suddenly twitched and cocked as she heard others conversing behind her, mentioning something of a Yang Stone.
    “I do wonder what a Yang Stone could be?”
    “It must be something valuable, if those bandits were desperate to get their claws on it.”
    “They must think it’s somewhere in here.”
    “Why would they think that? I don’t know anything about a Yang Stone. Do any of you?”
    “It must be here, or at least, I think it must—I mean, if those bandits were looking for this Yang Stone, why else would they look for it here? They must’ve known it’s here, or at least, had an assumption that it is.”
    “They’re bandits, roving scavengers – they’d search a scorching, barren desert for goods. Besides, how could a stone that we knew nothing of until just now end up here without our knowledge, and when?”
    “I just wish I knew what on earth a Yang Stone is, what it looked like.”
    “I’ve heard of a Yin-Yang: it’s a circle with one half black with a white dot, the other white with a black dot. The white half is the Yang, of course. If this stone is named after that, it must look like a Yang. But why is that important?”
    The vision of the curious Yang-like object hanging by a thread suddenly beamed into Tigress’ mind as she listened to the debate over this Yang Stone. She turned to face the people conversing—there was a white goose, a pig and the sheep nurse Tigress had spoken to earlier.
    “Yang Stone,” Tigress said abruptly, interrupting the conversation between the three caretakers. “Is that what these bandits came here for?”
    The sheep nurse she had spoken with nodded. “That crocodile you were handling was interrogating on it. I just wish I knew what it was.”
    The young wallaby’s voice sounded out timidly from behind Tigress. “Uh…a bandit asked me something about a Yang Stone. I don’t know if it’s the Yang Stone they’ve been looking for, but I’ve got something that looks like a Yang.”
    He reached a paw down the neck of his vest and produced a medallion of some sort. It appeared to be made out of alabaster and it bore the shape of a curving teardrop, giving it a strong likeness to a Yang. However, in the place of the black dot one would expect to see in a Yang was a hole through which a thread was strung to hang it around the wallaby’s neck.
    Tigress’ eyes became transfixed on the Yang-like medallion—it bore the exact resemblance of the object she had seen in the bizarre vision she had experience. The very segment of the vision that featured this object flashed in her mind again.
    Slowly approaching the young marsupial, the athletic feline pointed a claw to the medallion. “W-Where did you get this?”
    The crocodile Commander, whose arms and legs were bound together with curtains by Monkey and Crane, was suddenly coming to. His eyes began to flicker open, and the first thing to greet his eyes was the sight of a small marsupial presenting a white Yang-like medallion to the tiger he had been dueling with. He automatically sprung to his tethered feet and tried to pounce as he bellowed out, “YANG STONE!!!” only to flop down on his scaly stomach in an undignified fall.
    Working his bounded limbs as best he could, the crocodile tried to scramble his way towards the wallaby, only to be stopped dead in his tracks as Po quickly dealt him a stunning kick to the left temple, knocking the lights out of the assaulting reptile.
    All eyes then turned to the young wallaby and the object that the croc Commander had proclaimed as the Yang Stone. An epiphany dawned upon them all.
    The sheep nurse Tigress had saved from the menacing croc walked up to Tigress’ side, curiously eyeing the white medallion the young joey was wearing. “So, that must be this Yang Stone that those bandits were fussing about. But do tell us, Qiáng Jiǎo, where did you get this?”
    “Remember that you told me that the bedroom I live in once belonged to Master Tigress?” asked the wallaby, Qiáng Jiǎo. “Well, some time ago, I found a little tiger doll. When I was playing with it, this thing fell out. There was a slit on the doll’s back, so this Yang Stone must’ve been hidden in there.”
    “A tiger doll?” Tigress parroted in an enquiring manner, her gruff voice heavy with pensiveness. “I remember having that back when I lived here.”
    “Ah, yes, I remember that as well,” replied the sheep nurse. “It was laid right beside you in the little basket we found you in as a cub. It must have been given to you by your parents before you were separated from them.”
    The vision of the fleeing tiger mother replayed in Tigress’ mind. She strained to banish it from her thoughts as she focused on Qiáng Jiǎo. “Do you still have the doll? Could you show me to it?”
    Qiáng Jiǎo nodded and led the big feline to the room she resided in as a cub.

The second Tigress stepped into the room, memories came flooding in, many of them relating the cruel past she had lived and sending an icy chill down her spine. She remembered all those claw marks marring the walls all too well – how they suffered when she needed to vent out her anger. All the other orphans shared a bedroom, with their beds filed side-by-side; Tigress, on the other hand, had her bed placed in a separate room, where she was confined, isolated from all the other children. It wasn’t a room to Tigress, it was a cell, as though she were a deranged, mentally unstable murderer who would slaughter anyone or anything in sight, or some animal completely incapable of coherent thought, or—as the caretakers had so often addressed her as—a monster.
    “How did you end up in this room?” Tigress asked Qiáng Jiǎo. “This is the room they kept me locked in so that I wouldn’t terrorize the orphanage…back when they considered me as…” There was an uncomfortably long pause – she strained hard to finish her sentence, but the word was trapped in her throat.
    Qiáng Jiǎo, having heard the story of Tigress’s days in the Bao Gu Orphanage, now felt that he had to finish the tiger’s sentence for her, since she was clearly struggling to do so herself.
    “A m-monster?” he asked timidly, heavily worried that reminding the big feline of what she had been called in those days would result in upsetting her. Somewhat to his meagre relief, Tigress simply nodded, her expression unchanged.
    “You’ve heard the story?” she asked.
    Qiáng Jiǎo nodded hesitantly, awkwardly tracing patterns on the scrapped floor with a long foot. “I also heard that this is the room you stayed in back when you used to live here. I know you told me that, but I heard it long beforehand. And because you’re one of my biggest heroes, I decided to move in here.”
    He looked to the small fractured-framed cot—its red cover was emblazoned with a golden flower very akin to the ones on the vest Tigress usually wore. Seated upon it was a small doll made into the likeness of a tiger. Picking up the doll, and flipping it over to show the back of it to Tigress, Qiáng Jiǎo pointed to a line of stitches running vertically down the doll’s back. “These stitches are new, but there was another set here when I first found this doll. They didn’t look like they were sewn in too well, so they must’ve come undone when I was playing with it the day that medallion-thing fell out. When it did, I took a look at the doll and found a slit in its back – that must’ve been what the stitches were for, to keep it closed and the medallion inside.”
    The young joey placed the doll into Tigress’ callous-hardened palm as she kneeled down and extended a large, strong paw. Tigress then seated herself upon the small cot, studying the stitched-up slit on the back of the doll. “If this medallion, or Yang Stone, has been in the doll that’s been with me since the day I ended up in Bao Gu Orphanage, it must have something to do with my past. Can I see that thing, Qiáng Jiǎo?”
    Qiáng Jiǎo lifted the Yang-like medallion from his neck and handed it to Tigress. “You can keep it, too—after all, it was in your doll, so this probably belongs to you as well.”
    Tigress thoroughly scrutinized the curious medallion as she held it up to her face. She was almost instantly mesmerized by the Yang-like object that rotated left and right before her gold-and-red eyes on the thread that looped through where the black dot on a Yang should be. She could feel some atrophied memory emanating from beneath deep subconscious layers in her brain, but in spite of her strains she could not manage to dig it out and examine it coherently.
    “M-M-Master Tigress?”
    Tigress snapped back into reality and directed her attention back to the young wallaby. “I may have to hold on to it for the time being, but this Yang Stone—if that truly is what it is—must have belonged to someone else before it was placed into this doll. And if those bandits value it so greatly and know what it’s called, it must be of significant importance.”
    “Maybe it belonged to a province ruler,” suggested Qiáng Jiǎo, his voice heavily laden with wonder at the thought of it, “or maybe even the Emperor himself. You could’ve come from royalty, and that Yang Stone could an heirloom, your heirloom.”
    “It certainly is something to wrap one’s head around,” Tigress replied, her striped head swaying lightly. “But for all we know, it could’ve been stolen from a great ruler by some bandit and hidden in this doll, which may not have originally been intended for me but somehow found its way to me. It could’ve ended up with me by accident, but then again, one of Oogway’s sayings is that there are no accidents – the bandit may not have intended for the Yang Stone to end up with me, but destiny may have. Why, I don’t know. But whichever way it ended up with me, I’ll have to find out where this thing came from, what it is, who it belonged to, and what it’s for; especially who it belonged to, for as far as we are aware, we could be looking at stolen property. Besides, why would anyone leave something so valuable with an unwanted child?”
    Qiáng Jiǎo noted that the burly tiger was slipping into depression. Seating himself beside her, he placed a comforting paw on the feline’s lap. “Don’t think like that, Master Tigress. Who wouldn’t want you?”
    As though to mentally answer the young marsupial’s question, Tigress reminisced on the fleeing tiger mother in her vision, the caretakers who so cruelly branded her as a monster, and her adoptive father (Master Shifu) who only saw her potential of becoming a Tai Lung redo.
    “Maybe it was just that something had happened to your parents, and that doll and Yang Stone were for you to remember them by,” Qiáng Jiǎo continued, trying to raise Tigress’ spirits. “Or if that Yang Stone really is something important, maybe both you and it were under threat of something, and your parents left you somewhere where the threat couldn’t find you.”
    Tigress sincerely believed that a more likely reason that her parents had left her was the same reason that everyone in the orphanage feared her, but she smiled thinly and nodded in agreement to the young wallaby’s words, not wanting to crush his attempts to cheer her up. “Perhaps your right,” she said, placing the tiger doll on her lap and ruffling Qiáng Jiǎo’s ears with a hefty paw. “So, do you know anything about your parents? I mean, I’ve never seen a kangaroo in China before – I’ve heard that they live in Australia, and I heard that it’s pretty far south. How did you end up here?”
    “I’m a wallaby, actually,” Qiáng Jiǎo replied. “It’s like a kangaroo, but smaller, or at least that’s what I’m told—I’ve never seen a kangaroo or another wallaby like me. I have heard that they live in Australia, but I don’t know how I got here in China, nor do I know what it’s like where my kind lives—China’s the only home I know, or at least the only home I can remember.”
    Tigress felt sympathy for the little joey; alone in a strange land, never having known another one of his own kind, she could imagine how he must’ve felt, and how Po must’ve felt, being the only panda in the whole village and perhaps even the only panda left in all of China – she too felt the same way.
    She felt the joey leaning against her side, his face pressed against it and small wet tears seeping into her vest as he wept silently. Curling her orange-black-and-white striped tail comfortingly around Qiáng Jiǎo, Tigress stroked his back with a large, strong, but gentle paw. She paused as she noted the joey’s body tensing at the sensation of her heavily calloused palm running down his back – it felt like a rough stone against his fur.
    As she tried to stroke the little wallaby gentler, Tigress couldn’t help but feel guilty for having brought up that question that caused him to go through this state of despair. “I’m sorry, Qiáng Jiǎo. I didn’t mean for you to—”
    “It’s fine,” said Qiáng Jiǎo in a voice that was scarcely more than a whisper. As overcome with sadness as he was, he was bemused that such a tough, hardcore, platinum-souled warrior like Master Tigress would show such compassion. Being in a state where comfort was needed, however, he didn’t question it.
    Pulling the young joey onto her lap, Tigress wrapped a thick, strong arm around him, pressing him close to her body, like a mother with her child. Still stroking him, she made soothingly gentle shushing sounds, which eventually became replaced with a velvety lullaby that she had remembered since cub-hood. She could not remember where she had learned it – she doubted that the caretakers of Bao Gu sang it to her, for not once did she recall them ever singing to her, let alone saying anything directly to her; they were far too fearful of her at the time to even look directly at her. She often sang it to herself on lonely nights when she turned in for bed in her cell-like room—those were the only times she could remember hearing it.
    Lulled by the hummed song from the athletic pantherine, and the warmth emanating from her large arm muscles, the young wallaby’s weeping slowly ebbed as the spell of slumber palled over him. No sooner had this occurred, than Tigress found herself slowly nodding.
    Darkness covered Tigress’ vision as she was fully engulfed by slumber. All was black, save for a faint blue phosphorescence shining somewhere below. It rose until it became apparent as a cluster of blue embers, which began to lick their way up until they grew into fully fledged flames. The same white tigress from Tigress’ vision slowly rose from the sapphire flames, showing no reaction as they licked against her snow-white fur, which bore no signs of singeing whatsoever. The white tigress stood gazing grimly as she held up the Yang-like medallion with the paw whose muscle-swollen forearm bore the serpentine tattoo. The tattoo came to life and coiled itself around the white tigress’ sinewy limb and, with all the sinuous grace a snake could possess, glided through the loop of the thread strung through the medallion’s hole. It turned its reptillian head to face Tigress, his fearsome eyes glowing with a fiery rage that Tigress knew was directed at her, spawned from motives she knew nothing of.
    The serpent’s hood flared out, and its jaws parted wide open, revealing its two gleaming, silver fangs. Suddenly, a white glowing orb materialized from the cobra’s mouth, enlarging and expanding as it shot forward, engulfing everything within Tigress’ view with a blinding white radiance.
Looks like we've been given a little pre-introduction on a would-be new Furious Five

Synopsis:
Tigress has always thought that she had her awful past behind her back in Bao Gu Orphanage, but this is only the past she remembers, when everyone feared and despised her and cruelly branded her as a monster. The lesson Po had learned from Shen's soothsayer had taught Tigress to keep the past behind her, but when a new threat looms over the Valley of Peace, will she be forced to forsake that lesson and find herself questing for the lost parts of her early story, of how she had come to be in Bao Gu, who her parents were, and where she had come from? And although Po has come to accept the goose who adopted him as his father, will finding the one that is his by blood be the Valley's only hope? Along the way, our dynamic duo will encounter old friends and new friends, and old foes and new foes, new foes who are not as new as our heroes had first come to suspect.

Edit: Changed Qiáng Tī's name to Qiáng Jiǎo.
Qiáng means strong/powerful; and Jiǎo means leg. Thus Qiáng Jiǎo means Strong Leg.

KFP © Dreamworks Animation
This story © ~platypus12
© 2012 - 2024 platypus12
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TC-96's avatar
:la: can't wait for more ^^