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Her breathing grew heavy.

They had chased the rat into a corner. Mnemos had just fallen down a hole that RNG had opened up under her like a trapdoor. Bringing out her great big pigeon wings to slow her fall, she retracted them after having reached the ground in a crouch, alert. She took in her surroundings, looking vainly for the chaos panther who had tricked her so, and saw that she was surrounded by mirrors, all arranged in a large multi-sided polygon everywhere around her facing her. Siegfried's work, no doubt. She'd handed the authoritarian Bengal tiger his ass last time he'd come at her with Cali. It was easy for her to imagine that he would have been looking forward to retaliation. But the team he was with couldn't be dissociated from success or failure.

The rat opened a hundred eyes all over her body.

She'd be damned if she was going to let them sneak up on her. Her ears twitched, hearing a sound that she actually had to think about for a moment before realizing that it was the sound of a sprinting cheetah, at a distance from which she couldn't have been heard by any ordinary rat, and at a speed faster than that of any ordinary cheetah. Mnemos could tell who that would have to be, but she had no idea of what the speeding cat would do when she would get there. Coming out from between two of the mirrors around the rat, SpeedRun paused her faster-than-light sprint in a split-second, so abruptly that all of her black spots kept going without her, bouncing every which way on the mirrors around Mnemos like a hail of bullets.

The rat turned into six feral pigeons flying out of the way in different directions.

How much longer was she going to be able to fight them off this time, she asked herself, reforming into a single humanoid rat form while the cheetah's spots returned where they belonged as well? Before she could come up with an answer for herself, she turned around just in time to see RNG come at her from behind with her arm turned into a whip. With a fierce, take-no-shit expression on her face, Mnemos whipped the panther's arm-whip out of its trajectory with her tail before splitting and extending the end of her tail into eight more tails that targeted RNG's forehead, throat, sternum, abdomen, arms, and legs, knocking her unconscious before retracting back into a single, normal-looking rat tail.

She heard Sieg appear behind her in one of his trademark puffs of smoke and turned to knock his flaming hoop out of his hand with a thrown pigeon feather kunai before he even had the chance to take a swing at her. The Bengal tiger's jaw dropped before she knocked him out with a straight-up, old-school left hook, too 'normal' for him to see it coming but certainly effective. She turned around again, suddenly realizing that she hadn't kept track of where SpeedRun had gone after her spots had returned to her because she'd had to devote her full attention to fighting off the other two. Before Mnemos saw her coming, the cheetah slammed into the rat at top speed to send her crashing right into one of Sieg's mirrors, cracking it.

She was knocked right out.

"Looks like seven years of bad luck for you..." SpeedRun chuckled cruelly.

***

"Ah, you're awake!"

The voice sounded cheerful. At first Mnemos, not quite able to open her eyes yet, was unable to tell who it belonged to. She... had no memory of this voice. To understand how unsettling this was to her, you have to imagine what it's like to *be* Mnemos. She was called Mnemos for a reason. She remembered everything. It wasn't just that she had an eidetic memory. For her, being faced with someone who she couldn't remember was something that had literally never happened to her... Or had it? She didn't know how she could simply have forgotten something like this. It seemed kind of important. But then, she'd never put much stock in the argument that, if you forget something, it must not have been that important.

"I've been waiting for you," the voice chirped.

It didn't help that her head had still hurt too much for her to have been able to open her eyes. She struggled against the pain striving to open them again, succeeding this time at the cost of a severe full-body wince. She had to fight the desire to close her eyes again, her hope to slip back into unconsciousness. She had to figure out what the hell was going on, no matter what the cost. Her thirst for knowledge defined every part of her. It would hurt, but it would be worth it. It had to, she told herself. Unfamiliar though it may have been, the tone of the voice sounded as though it belonged to someone who definitely remembered her. The unevenness of this distribution of information was not encouraging. It was also even more difficult to explain.

"And now, you're here!"

It was a female voice. A former lover, perhaps? Mnemos scanned her mind for the handful of girlfriends that the vagaries of her harsh existence had somehow allowed her to have every blue moon or so, and recognized none. It was a strange disconnect, almost as though the rat's body remembered the voice somehow but her mind did not, couldn't place it, in spite of its best efforts. How could it be? As her eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, she saw who was facing her. While she still couldn't recognize her, Mnemos could tell from how she looked, and from remembering the situation that had led her to become trapped the way she had been, that it could only have been one person.

"Ent..." She had to spit blood to be able to talk. "Entropy..." A chill went down her spine.

"Ah, so you do remember me this time!" the cat smirked at her. "I get so hurt every time we meet and you tell me you don't," she pouted mockingly, miming a tear streaking down her cheek. "What do you want?" the rat asked her through her gritted teeth. "Just to play!" Entropy raised her arms over her head like an excited schoolchild on summer vacation. "We cats love to play, don't you know?" Her blood ran cold. "Is this some sort of ransom thing? If you people think you've ever given me a chance to form the kind of connections with people over the centuries that would be willing to do something like this for me, you *haven't* been paying attention, have you?" Mnemos would always be defiant to the last, even in captivity.

"Come now, *I'm* the one who *does* remember you every time, aren't I?" The cat titled her head at her. "And *you're* the one who's not paying attention. I already told you: we want to play! I wasn't kidding." The rat shook her head. "So this is just some big game to you? That's why you've all been after me for all this time, because you're *bored*, and you literally can't think of anything better to do with your time than to torment *me*? *That's* how you've decided to spend eternity, you bunch of lame, unimaginative *trolls*?" Entropy wagged her finger at her. "That's hardly a smart way to talk to someone who's got you where they've got you, isn't it?" Mnemos was tied up against a wall in a way her powers couldn't get her out of.

"But why me, though? The universe is *full* of other gods, or whatever the hell it is that we people really are. You could be tormenting *any* of them. Why me, *specifically*?" The cat smiled. "You're finally asking the right question." Mnemos could only think of Entropy as 'cat' because, every time her mind would put together which species of cat she was, the rat would forget it all over again. She was caught in a loop of constantly forgetting then remembering the name of Entropy's subspecies in the back of her mind as they talked, over and over again. It happened so fast that she couldn't even remember it was happening. She just experienced it as an ever-increasing sense of unease, that something was 'off' that she couldn't quite pin down.

"Why *would* someone want to go against you, vermin?"

What did she look like again? Mnemos had a lapse of attention and looked back up from her eyes having been downcast insistently. That's right, of course. *This* is what Entropy looked like. "I don't know. You tell me." The cat shook her head. "Tsk, tsk, tsk. Have you ever had something *really* bad happen to you, vermin?" The rat scoffed outright. "Hah! You really *don't* have much of an attention span, do you? You people have been making my life hell literally forever. You burned Alexandria. You burned witches. You burned books in bonfires. You burned *me* alive, over and over again. You tricked me into sleeping with *Manek*, of all people. How could you *possibly* need to ask me if anything bad ever happened to me?"

Entropy laughed. "Yeah, we had some good times, didn't we?" She had to not let her get to her, Mnemos told herself. "Admit it, vermin... Really, really look at your life. Tell me, vermin... In the end, aren't *we* the best company you've had in your life, overall? Everyone else ends up dead and gone in a heartbeat anyway, but us... We've been with you for the entire time, giving you someone to bounce off of, something to define yourself against. You're nothing without us. We're everything to you. No matter what else happens, somewhere in the back of your mind, you always know we'll always track you down eventually. It's only a matter of time. You can always rely on that. And you can rely on such few things in life, can't you, vermin?"

The cat smiled in a mockery of adoration. "You love us, vermin."

The rat laughed. "How could I love you when I can't even remember you?" Entropy growled. Mnemos forgot what they were talking about just a second before. "You'll suffer for that," the cat threatened her softly, looking at her nails in a parody of innocence. "What does it matter to you whether I suffer or not?" This time, Entropy looked her right in the eyes. "You're not the only person who's ever suffered, Mnemos. Nor the only god. Do you know what suffering *is*, vermin?" The rat looked right back at her. "So you finally called me by my name." The cat's expression hardened. "Do you know what suffering is or not?"

Mnemos raised an eyebrow at her. "I don't know. I think Buddha said it was all life, but I haven't talked to him in a while. I've been busy." Entropy slapped her. The rat laughed. "That must've been a pretty good one to get a rise out of you like that," she smirked through the blood in her mouth. "Very well, vermin. Since you leave me no choice, I'm going to have to teach you the meaning of suffering." She was in for it now. "Suffering isn't *just* having something bad happen to you, did you know that, vermin?" The cat paced back and forth in front of her scholastically. "No, suffering, you see, is *more* than that. It's having something bad happen to you... and never being able to forget. Reliving it as long as you draw breath."

What in the world kind of game *was* the Cat's Eye playing with her? Just how deep did it go? "No one ever suffers from something bad that happened to them that they can't remember... no one. No, you, my dearest, are the only reason suffering even *exists*. If people could simply forget, the way we always wanted them to... They'd be free. *We're* the angels, vermin... It's *you* who's the demon, the reason that people are suffering. There's no mourning without Memory, no trauma, no lingering restlessness. Forgetting means peace. Why do you think that most people *ever* want to forget things, vermin? They want to forget the pain *because it hurts*. And you... You won't even let them have that. You're a monster."

The rat shook her head. "But I'm not even really *doing* that, though! I don't 'do' memory the way you're implying here. I just *am* Memory. It's not my fault. It's who I am. No one asked me. You think I'd really want to live like this if anyone had asked? I just try to survive. Every living thing wants to survive. It doesn't make sense to resent me for that." There was no more play to Entropy's demeanor, twisted though it may have been. "Well, I can tell you this: anyone who's ever tried to drown their sorrows in anything would thank me for what I've been trying to do for them, anyone who ever tried to forget having lost someone, or something horrible that happened to them. And that's a lot of fucking people, vermin."

Mnemos looked at her. She'd have been lying if she'd said it wasn't getting to her.

"Anyone who's ever truly missed someone would never want to forget having known that person, if that person was truly worth knowing to them, even though it hurts them to remember having lost them. That's what caring about someone has to mean. You'd know that, if you'd ever had it in you to care about anyone, Entropy." The cat spat in her face. "Do you remember what happened to Eli, vermin?" The rat shuddered. "Of course I do." Entropy's eyes narrowed. "Tell me how she died, vermin. I have such a bad attention span I forget." Mnemos began to falter. "Eli... had a man in her life do something to her. The most horrible thing a man can do to a woman." The cat's eyes widened. "But that's not what killed her, in the end, is it?"

The rat shook her head. "No..." Entropy was finally getting to the point she'd been leading up to. "No, what killed her was *remembering* it, never being able to forget it, no matter how hard she tried, reliving it until the only way she could find to get out of having to think about it nonstop, every moment of every day..." The cat pointed at her accusingly. "YOU killed her, vermin. You killed everyone like her. And now, you're going to pay for it. How do you like that? Is it still so funny when it happens to you, bitch?" Mnemos sighed and rolled her eyes exasperatedly. "I already *told* you that's not how it *works*! I hate that it happened as much as anyone but there's nothing I could possibly have done to stop it. Why can't you get that?"

Parts of the room seemed to wane in and out of existence around them, the rat realizing that it meant that Entropy was slowly erasing the rest of the room from Mnemos' mind to leave only her memories of the cat in front of her intact for her to have to deal with. "Have you ever suffered so bad that *you* wished you could forget it, vermin?" Entropy extended her claws out of her fingers menacingly. "Who am I kidding? Of course you did. I should know. I was there." The cat flashed the rat a toothy grin. "You didn't." Mnemos' jaw dropped. "Of course I did. Why wouldn't I? I already told you, *we're* the angels, vermin... I granted you the mercy you begged me for every time. I'm the kindest person you'll ever meet. I'm nothing like *you*."

Entropy delicately caressed the rat's face with her claw. "No, I get just how lonely you get, believe me... How much you love us for having stuck by you for all this time." Every hair on Mnemos' body stood on end. "So I'll be fair!" the cat went on, going back to her cheerful, playful demeanor. "I'm going to give you exactly what you want," she added, bringing her hands around the rat's head as she spoke. Was she going to headbutt her? At first that was what Mnemos thought she was going to do. "What do you - MMMFFF!" The rat's eyes went wide and a sick feeling spread through her stomach when Entropy leaned in forward to kiss Mnemos right on the mouth, an obscenely extensive, invasive kiss that she didn't see coming.

The rat spat, and spat, and spat, and spat, feeling as though she'd just been force-fed someone's corpse. "Fucking Christ! This is why you people have been *after* me for all this time? Because you have some kind of fucked up crush on me, you lunatic?" She wished her hands had been free so she could've wiped her mouth. Even though there were obviously other reasons for which it would've been great for her to have been able to have had her hands free at that time, at that time, it was still the most prominent reason on her mind. It had been unpleasant enough. Entropy didn't look particularly bad - in a different context, Mnemos might not have spat on that - but context was exactly everything, there was no getting around that.

"Oh get over yourself," the cat chuckled. "You know as well as I do this is never about love," she went on, slowly trailing her hand from the rat's shoulder down to her chest. Mnemos began to squirm - this wasn't a place where she wanted Entropy touching her... "It's always about power, vermin," she grinned toothily, giving the rat a revolting squeeze. "But as I said, I'm the magnanimous type. All you have to do to forget this when it'll be over... is ask. If you just ask, I'll give you just what you'll ask me. It'll be as though none of this had ever happened to you. And believe me, vermin... By the time I'm through with you, you'll be *begging* me to erase your memory." Mnemos spat in her face disgustedly. "I won't let you get away with this!" Entropy laughed, suggestively going down on her knees in front of the rat as she did.

"That's what you said last time, too..."