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Barbara swapped the big straw hat for a pair of sunglasses and lounged in the passenger seat, leaning against the window and enjoying the cool breeze that rolled in once they left the city behind.
Henry's Cadillac DeVille was almost thirty years old, but he'd kept the air-conditioning in good repair — no weird smells, no half-broken vents. Still, out in the suburbs the natural breeze was more refreshing than running the AC, so nobody complained. They let the wind do the cooling.
Katie the tiger draped her head over the other rear window, tongue lolling out as she dispelled the heat.
Because of the tiger's head in the back seat, the Cadillac had already been stopped by the police a few times. Still, a reminder: California hadn't outlawed keeping big cats. As long as they didn't hurt anyone, the cops had no right to interfere — and Katie was on an iron chain, so what more could they reasonably do?
Queen was on the car stereo. Freddy Mercury had passed away at the end of 1991, but the band hadn't completely folded; they still performed and produced. That said, their peak moments would always be those songs left behind before his death. Right now "Radio Ga Ga" was playing and Henry and Barbara hummed along.
At first Barbara had been super wary of Katie: worried the tiger's claws might come over the seat and rend her, or the big mouth might accidentally take the headrest and her brains with it. The chain only stopped Katie from jumping out — it didn't stop her from waddling forward if she wanted to.
But Katie, raised by a Kryptonian, didn't have the temperament of a wild tiger. Thanks to strict handling and discipline, she'd grown surprisingly calm for such an animal — almost a miracle. In tiger terms she'd be considered unusually steady.
Katie thought all bipeds looked the same: some were edible, some should not be messed with. She'd sorted the world into those groups and mostly stuck to her internal rules. If anything, Katie was more mellow than the Kryptonian owning her — which was saying something.
Katie found the perfume-spritzed female in the passenger seat uninteresting, so she didn't bother approaching. This was one of Henry's recent little discoveries, actually.
As Katie grew, she'd wreck the house more and more. Computers and speakers were covered in protective housings so she'd rip the cover rather than the device itself — but constant repairs still drove Henry mad and made everyday life clunkier. At one point Henry thought to armor everything like a house tank, but that was obviously impractical.
Then, during a trip to the lab at Sheep Hollow Canyon, Henry saw Katie actively avoid a certain pungent chemical. He realized he'd been solving the wrong problem.
Everyone knows infants put stuff in their mouths during their oral phase. Nintendo solved the "tiny kids pop the cartridge into their mouths" issue by coating game cards with an extremely bitter substance (benzyldimethy lammonium? — the text names a bitter compound) so a child spit it out immediately. It's a bitter deterrent.
Henry couldn't use a smell-based repellent that would also pummel his own Kryptonian nose — Katie could smell everything he could, and he didn't want to torture himself. So he borrowed Nintendo's idea: create a coating that's harmless to humans and animals but tastes or smells unpleasant enough to keep Katie away from things he didn't want chewed.
Benzyldimethy…something would have worked, but it stuck to skin and made everything taste awful if you touched it before meals. He also needed a scent that wouldn't spread widely, would be barely perceptible to him, and wouldn't cling to everything.
Henry, not deeply schooled in materials science, took the brute-force approach: he grabbed commercially available perfumes and pungent substances and made Katie sniff them, noting which ones made her recoil. From that set he tried combinations: bitter agents, alcohol, camphor, chili extracts.
After much trial and error, he mixed his own "tiger-repellent coating": a blend of bitter, alcohol, camphor and capsaicinoid extracts. When applied, the smell was faint enough that even Henry barely noticed it, but it triggered avoidance in Katie. Lab mice went berserk when given the compound, trying to escape the cage, but physiological checks revealed no immediate harm. Long-term effects still needed watching.
Henry forced a tiny taste on Katie anyway — and the poor tiger seemed to live three dreary days afterward. Henry tried a bit himself and for the first time since waking up in Alaska he lost his appetite for days; Kryptonian smell acuity meant the minor bitterness absolutely wrecked him.
Still, it solved the core problem: Henry no longer had to fortify his flat into an armored bunker. Katie learned what she could bite and what she should avoid. The coating had one unintended side effect: Katie developed a phobia of people who wore perfume. That explained her cold shoulder toward Barbara — in developing the repellent, Henry had made perfumed humans aversive to Katie.
That side-effect turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Katie wouldn't randomly lung at people who smelled of fragrance, saving Henry the headache of training her not to pounce. Barbara, of course, was baffled by Katie's disdain and gradually eased into the trip anyway.
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