Chapter Text
A meeting was taking place inside Themyscira's official embassy to the United States of America (briefly shuttered in the wake of the Amazon Safety Act's passing) between five women.
"I can't believe this is happening twice..." Sighed Cassandra "Cassie" Sandsmark.
"First, it was when you attacked the White House, now... Diana, is there something you're trying to tell us?" Pressed Donna Troy.
"We're your actual sidekicks, she's just a pet project..." Huffed Yara Flor.
The trio of Wonder Girls was gathered before Diana of Themyscira, and someone who had come to think of herself as, for lack of a more concise term, "a superpowered woman of varying moral states," Barbara Ann Minerva, AKA Cheetah.
"Hands up, everyone in this room who has kissed Etta Candy on the lips." Barbara's response arrived with all of her traditional speed and ruthlessness, just lacking any physical violence.
Roughly ten seconds later, there could be no doubt that Barbara's was indeed the only hand currently extended upwards.
"There were more circumspect methods of making that point." Diana sighed while rolling her eyes, though her face bore just the faintest twinge of a smile.
"Hasn't it been years since the two of you were... together?" Cassie probed.
"Agape, philia, storge, philautia, xenia, and eros. There are many different kinds of love. Given everything I put her through, and how relatively well she reacted to it, I still very much love Etta Candy." Barbara clarified, for a given definition of the term.
"I've already lost Steve, I won't allow myself to suffer the same heartbreak when it comes to Etta. Especially since ultimately it was her desire to aid me by tracking down a missing Amazon that has placed her in such a perilous situation. I wish she had warned me before going to such extremes, but..." Diana briefly trailed off as she contemplated how best to conclude that particular sentence.
"Being friends with Wonder Woman has never been for the faint of heart." Cheetah helpfully stepped in.
If there was one thing that she, Steve Trevor, and Etta Candy all had in common, it was that, for better or worse, none of them had been the type to back down from a challenge. Indeed, Barbara's own refusal to "back down from a challenge" had unquestionably played a part in her spending a decade of her life as a supervillainess.
"Thank you, Barbara. I won't allow the distress call Etta sent me to remain unanswered; even if every member of the Justice League condemns me for it, even if they vote to expel me, I am going to Moray Island." Diana insisted.
Moray Island was a small nation unto itself, founded with the financial backing of multi-billionaire Ernest Pye, whose wife had died during one of the first events of a type that would come to be known in the superpowered community as a (capital "C"), "Crisis". They were best defined as "threats to the Earth (if not a great deal more than just Earth) big enough that they required the contributions of nearly every superhero (and every so often, certain supervillains as well) to stop".
That experience had driven Ernest to create the world's only nation with a strict "no superhero" policy, in the hopes that if there were no heroes around, such grand dramatic events would simply ignore his new homeland and leave its occupants unharmed.
That worldview struck Barbara as being roughly equivalent to pinning signs that said "no rain allowed" on every wall of a house without a roof. Honestly, Cheetah was a little surprised Lex Luthor had never gotten around to having the Legion of Doom conquer the place as what amounted to a team-building exercise. Still, Mr. Pye had somehow managed to acquire a respectably sized following. Eventually, all the necessary paperwork had been filed, all the political agreements had been made, and Moray Island had become the sole place on Earth that even Superman would always leave to its own devices. Which meant one thing…
"You're breaking the laaaaawwww…." Donna giggled, drawing out her final word for extra emphasis.
"Sovereign clearly had no clue what manner of monster he was unleashing upon the world when he decided to make Wonder Woman a criminal." Yara tittered, a playful light in her amber eyes.
"Hey, don't go giving one old geezer all the credit, I worked long and hard for years to be a bad influence on her!" Barbara protested, her tail lashing back and forth in faux fury.
"I don't plan on violating any legal statutes; Themyscira has simply decided that the time has come to establish diplomatic ties with Moray Island and in my official capacity as..." Diana kept her voice studious and neutral as she began to explain.
"You're breaking the laaaaawwww…." This time, all three Wonder Girls chorused the words in perfect unison.
This was not how Barbara Ann Minerva had imagined a gathering of Amazons would go; it was considerably more fun.
"Regardless of the exact legality of such actions, while I am visiting Moray Island, I'll also need to be certain that no harm befalls my daughter. That is why the most logical option is that I take Barbara with me to keep an eye on her, while you three act as Lizzie's babysitters once again. If you wish to second-guess my judgment, tell me; should I instead be leaving my daughter in the care of a semi-reformed supervillainess, or bringing Lizzie along with me on a possibly life-threatening mission?" The wisdom of Athena left the trio of Wonder Girls pouting, sighing, and silently fuming in turn for a good solid ten seconds.
"Why not have Cheetah stay back with us though? If you're going to be doing something 'totally not illegal' on Moray Island, you'll probably want to keep a low profile, and no offense, but the entire 'half human half cat' thing sorta makes your prospective partner stand out in a crowd." Yara eventually protested.
"Even if she's currently dressed more like a librarian than a supervillainess," Donna added.
"Would it be weird if I said that I've seen some of my mom's work friends wearing that kind of getup?" Cassie idly wondered aloud.
There had been a time when Barbara Ann Minerva wouldn't have bothered with clothing, not caring how people chose to react to the sight of her naked (fur-covered) body. There had been a time when she wore a black workout top and black long pants with stylized white spots on them.
Today, however, she was wearing a simple salmon jacket over a greyish-white shirt, pants that were a slightly darker shade of grey, with unremarkable black boots; hardly the kind of outfit one would expect to find adorning a woman who had once been one of the foremost members of the Legion of Doom.
"Believe me, you're more on point than you realize..." Barbara freely admitted to the blond-haired Wonder Girl, her face bearing the easy, relaxed smile of an apex predator.
"Donna, Cassie, Yara, I'd appreciate it if you kept what you're about to see secret. It'll inevitably get out sooner or later, but I'd prefer it be 'later' all the same." Diana warned them.
Then Barbara allowed herself to transform.
Her skin's outer layer of fur vanished, her tail retracted, first into her outfit and then her body, her teeth went from wickedly sharp to all but completely blunt, before finally her pupils expanded from vertical slits into spheres. All that was "Cheetah" about her fell away, leaving only Barbara Ann Minerva behind.
Well, almost all, her eyes still retained the same orangeish coloration that was so prevalent among fast-running savannah cats and so rare among humans.
"You didn't use to be able to do that, right?" Cassie gasped in surprise.
"I'm pretty sure the entire point of her curse was that she couldn't do that." Donna eagerly agreed.
"So would you care to explain how you can 'do that' now?" Yara Floor inquired.
"I killed Aphrodite; she came back to life. I killed Poseidon; he came back to life. That kind of experience can make a supervillainess ask herself, 'What's even the point of deicide?' Luckily, Wonder Woman helped me find the courage to realize that sometimes a girl just has to kill gods for the love of the game. So I decided to introduce Urzkartaga to a famous human saying: 'till death do us part'." Despite having only human vocal cords at the moment, Barbara still managed to practically purr her final words.
"Since evil deities can prove... depressingly resilient, I also took the time to pay a visit to The Keeper Of The Grounds, and convinced him to ensure that Urzkartaga will be given a chance to grow properly accustomed to his new domicile." The Amazon Princess added with a surprisingly predatory grin of her own.
"Well, objection, withdrawn, I guess..." Yara reluctantly sulked.
"Does that mean you also managed to finally deal with your hunger problem?" Donna added in far warmer tones.
"You know, if more fairy tales ended with: 'so then one princess helped the other princess stomp the evil god's corpse into mulch to make sure he never ever came back' I wouldn't have kept ignoring them growing up." Cassie giggled.
"While I am feeling significantly less hungry than I have in years, I'm very much not a 'princess'." Barbara insisted, unintentionally crossing her arms in the same defensive manner that Yara currently was.
"You kind of are..." The blond-haired Wonder Girl protested.
"Cassie, you and Barbara can have that argument after we've saved Etta. Right now, Cheetah and I have an Invisible Jet to catch." Declared Wonder Woman.
No sooner were the words out of Diana's mouth than the tail, fur, and fangs returned to Barbara Ann Minerva's form every bit as swiftly as they'd departed.
XXX XXX XXX
Some people wondered (if not outright made jokes) about why a superheroine who could fly needed an Invisible Jet. Barbara, having dedicated a decade of her life to the cause of (primarily) anti-Wonder Woman-focused supervillainy, had done more than enough research to know the answer. The first big reason was that the jet allowed her to transport people who couldn't fly from place to place far more comfortably than carrying them. The second big reason was that the Invisible Jet was invisible in much the same way that Cheetah was fast.
The statement was factually correct, but it didn't come close to capturing the whole truth of the matter. The Invisible Jet was the ultimate stealth aircraft, proof against mundane senses, technological tools, and magical scrying. So if, say, you needed to take a trip to a small island nation that wasn't especially friendly to outsiders (and doubly so if they had superpowers), you couldn't ask for a better mode of transportation.
Also, its "telepathic control" system was (according to Diana) easy enough to manage that she didn't even have to be looking where the jet was flying to use it.
Barbara knew that, but knowledge alone was not enough to make her stop wishing that Diana would focus on the sky in front of her instead of the passenger sitting behind her while the two talked mid-flight.
"It was… nice that of all the outfits you could wear, you chose that one." The Amazon Princess admitted as she once again took in the sight of Cheetah's clothing.
Barbara (currently in her human form with no fur to obscure the action) couldn't help but blush slightly.
The two of them had known each other (be it as friends or as foes) for too long to be able to hide much from one another.
"What do you think is 'nice' about it exactly?" The woman who was surely still a wanted criminal in enough countries and by enough international organizations to justify calling herself a supervillainess answered.
"It's not just the outfit you wore when we first met; it's the outfit you wore when I needed you the most. You're wearing it to signify how much you want to help." Diana's answer came back all but instantly, as if she'd been expecting her passenger's recalcitrance on the matter.
The Amazon Princess was, of course, completely correct.
Becoming Cheetah had removed Barbara's need for glasses or a cane, dyed her hair red, and caused her ears to regrow to the point that she'd have to pierce them all over again to wear non-clip-on earrings, but the supervillainess had still done her best to recapture how she'd looked when the two of them had first crossed paths.
It had been slightly disturbing to finally discover how her human self looked these days. Not because of how much it had changed, but because of how much it hadn't. Even though over a decade had passed since being cursed by Urzkartaga, her face was completely devoid of wrinkles or gray hairs.
It'd be easy to assume that somehow the proverbial "clock" had been frozen on Barbara Ann Minerva while she'd been stuck as Cheetah, but the supervillainess couldn't help but suspect there was something grander at play.
Barbara felt it was far more likely that her current capacity to "age gracefully" could best be explained by the very legends that had drawn her to the African nation of Bwunda in the first place: "the bride or Urzkartaga would be blessed with long life and power". The power had been evident from the start; the "long life" had just been a bit more subtle.
Though exactly how "long" her life might be had never been especially clear in the texts. The other cheetahs who had come before Barbara must have eventually died from one cause or another, or else Urzkartaga wouldn't have had an opening for a new "bride" when she'd arrived. Still, had any of them been lucky enough to be claimed by old age, or had they all come to violent ends? Knowing Urzkartaga, some of them had probably perished at the hands of their very own divine patron, possibly any of them who had grown too powerful or wise for his liking. Perhaps in some perverse way, the misfortunes he'd heaped upon her had been a small blessing; thanks to them, she'd known how foolish it would be to trust Urzkartaga.
So, if nobody gets around to killing me, exactly how long am I going to live for?
That was the kind of question whose answer could have some very worrying implications… if she wasn't currently looking smack dab into the warm blue eyes of an Amazon Princess whose own lifespan could also doubtlessly only be described as "long".
If Barbara Ann Minerva ended up outliving not just Etta Candy… but also the theoretical children that Etta ended up adopting after she met another nice woman who didn't run around naked trying to murder people, so long as Barbara had Diana, she wouldn't have to worry about being alone.
So long as she had Diana, she'd never be truly alone…
If Barbara had realized that particular fact a decade ago, the world would be a much happier place for a great many people.
XXX XXX XXX
Sure enough, having already recently snuck past what amounted to every detection system in the United States' arsenal, the Invisible Jet had no trouble going unnoticed as it approached Moray Island. Diana set it down at the top of an otherwise barren rocky outcropping where it was unlikely to be disturbed, then its two occupants disembarked.
The one downside to this approach was that they also had to descend the mountain on foot (Wonder Woman flying around would be an unwelcome sight on an island that was supposed to be free of superheroes) in the rain, though neither of them was perturbed by the prospect. Once again, as much as Barbara might hate herself for being the cause of that particular event, compared to a multiple-day-long brawl between Wonder Woman and Cheetah, this was nothing.
Then they had to trek through a small forest before eventually making it to Moray Island's biggest city (at which point Barbara finally abandoned her Cheetah form to blend in better) and started looking for any sign of Etta Candy. What the two ended up finding though was something far stranger.
The city's walls were covered in graffiti, which wouldn't have been quite so remarkable if it hadn't been the same two phrases over and over and over again.
"Mice have ears."
"Mouse Man knows."
"Didn't you fight a supervillain named 'Mouse Man' once?" Barbara eventually asked after they'd seen the dozenth repetition of such writing.
"It was roughly a month after I first defeated Ares. He attacked Washington, D.C. with an army of gigantic brainwashed mice." The Amazon Princess' tone was almost disturbingly deadpan as she answered.
"You should tell that story to all the people you're encouraging to seek redemption. Few things have made me happier about leaving your rogues' gallery than discovering how impossibly pathetic some of its other members are." Barbara muttered while shaking her head.
"The hardest part was convincing people not to shoot them, the mice I mean." Diana mused idly.
The supervillainess buried her face in her hands as the realization suddenly struck home.
"Of course you care about that kind of thing..." Because right up until Diana had mentioned it, Barbara very much hadn't.
Just because they were mice rather than people didn't mean that brainwashing them wasn't wrong though. What had first struck her as too absurd to be worthy of deeper consideration was, now that she did actually give it a second thought, the superpowered equivalent of owning a dog-fighting ring.
So if you took someone like that and put them in charge of an entire nation…
"Let's hope we can find Etta soon, something tells me this is going to be bad… Che-Terra bad." Barbara desperately tried to warn the Amazon Princess.
"Che-Terra?" Diana was confused.
She wasn't the only one, either, until, with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, Barbara realized the only possible explanation.
Wonder Woman never actually heard about that particular scheme! Guess I can give the shorter, less horrifying version...
"I once made myself the ruler of a fake world full of anthropomorphic cats. They did everything they could to make me happy… and I still end up acting like a cruel tyrant." Barbara practically whimpered the words.
Cheetah didn't understand what mystical principles had underlain the Queen of Fables' powers, or exactly how "alive" the other residents of Che-Terra had truly been. Barbara desperately hoped they'd been nothing but the magical equivalent of chatbots, because the alternative meant…
"Hurt people, hurt people." Diana insisted before pulling her companion into a tight hug.
It was exactly what the supervillainess wanted, even if she couldn't have possibly deserved it.
"Mice have ears!" Someone nearby shouted.
It wasn't the words themselves that were worrying so much as their tone. The voice in question spoke with the fierceness of one more interested in obtaining obedience than genuine communication from whoever they were addressing.
"Not..." Began Wonder Woman.
"Good." Finished Barbara, who had already transformed back into Cheetah.
XXX XXX XXX
Today had been one of the worst days of Mae Milton's (rank Seven) life. A boy in class had teased her, so she'd teased him back. Except she'd done it a little too loudly and for a little too long, so the teacher had hit her. Then she'd been sent to the principal's office, who had called in her father to discuss the incident. After learning about what she'd done, her father had hit her.
That on its own would have been bad enough, but it was only the start of her troubles.
Because while her father had been driving her back home, their vehicle had been stopped by a pair of mouse guards. They'd insisted that Lenny, the giant mouse who pulled their car, had developed a case of mange behind his left ear, even though Mae's family had always taken excellent care of him.
The mouse guards hadn't cared; they'd pulled her father out of the car and started hitting him, one of them even had a bunch of metal spikes sticking out of his bat! Eventually, when they grew tired of hitting her father, the mouse guards had told Mae not to make a fuss and get herself straight home as they dragged her father off to face more thorough "justice" for his "crimes".
Which had left Mae sitting alone in a car she couldn't drive (were the mouse guards waiting for her to try so that they could have an excuse to hit her also?) an hour's walk from her home.
With no other choices, she'd struck out on foot. She'd honestly tried to walk all the way back home… but she'd never really paid attention to the route all that well (why would anyone expect her to? She wouldn't be driving for over a decade) and she must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. She'd gotten lost, wound up in the wrong part of town, and now… now not only was today the worst day in Mae's life, but it might very well be the last one.
Because at some point it had started to rain and she'd just felt so small, weak, and pathetic that she couldn't bring herself to keep going. Instead, she'd spotted a nearby bus station with an overhanging roof of sorts and collapsed onto its bench. Using her backpack for a pillow, she'd tried to get some sleep, as if when she woke up, she wouldn't still be every bit as lost and far from home with no clue if she'd ever see her father again.
But even that small mercy was denied her, because Mae felt certain she couldn't have gotten more than five minutes of sleep before…
"Mice have ears! <You'd better have a good excuse for yourself, whelp!>" Shouted a mouse guard who was pointing his rifle straight at Mae's head.
"Mouse Man knows! <The last bus left this station over an hour ago!> Mouse Man knows! <That means you're loitering and abusing this bus station!>" He further ranted as the barrel of his weapon hovered only an inch away from Mae's forehead.
"Mouse Man knows! <Brats like you make me sick to my stomach!> Mice have ears! <Acting like you haven't even heard of the concept of basic public decency!>"
He was going to kill her. She could beg, plead for her life, but really, what was the point? Hopefully, with such a big gun and her being so small, it would all be over quickly…
"Mouse Man knows! <Fat Cats like you with no respect for the little people make everything worse for everyone!> Mouse Man... <Well, let's just hope I don't have to waste nine separate bull...>"
He'd already started pulling the trigger before he'd even finished speaking.
He ultimately never got a chance to finish either action though, because a golden tiara slammed into the side of his head, the small object somehow striking with enough force to send a fully grown man sprawling!
The other mouse guard turned and fired his shotgun in the direction the tiara had come from. Make that, he tried to fire his shotgun, because suddenly his weapon had been cut in half, and Mae had no idea how.
"Rawr." Snarled something, or maybe it was someone?
Mae couldn't quite be sure; the noise sounded almost playful in a way, like a person pretending to be an animal rather than the genuine article. Mae also struggled to comprehend exactly what happened next; it was as if something moving incredibly fast hit the mouse guard half a dozen times from just as many different directions before he joined his partner on the ground.
Just like that, Mae Milton's remaining lifespan was no longer measured in seconds. She wished she could have been unreservedly happy about that twist of fate... It was hard though, when the idea that there were things much worse than death was a lesson that her parents had drilled into Mae's head repeatedly, and her school had seen no reason to refrain from reinforcing it.
From out of the damp darkness emerged a woman clad in red, blue, and gold. She was tall, one of the tallest people that Mae had ever seen. Not only was she tall, but Mae had never met another woman with muscles that big before!
"Are you all right?" The woman asked while crouching down so that she didn't tower over Mae quite so much.
Mae's eyes were currently busy going wide with shock as her hands flew to cover her mouth in horror. The tall woman wasn't wearing an armband, which meant that she had to be another Seven! But what kind of Seven would dare to say not just one but four words in blatant violation of the "Mouse Laws" which oversaw the speech patterns of Moray Island's occupants?
Only the kind of Seven who would be willing to attack a mouse guard, obviously… and if they were willing to do that to a mouse guard, what might someone with such a total disregard for the law do to Mae? Doubtlessly something even worse than a quick and painless death!
"Why is she looking at you like that? Normally, people only look at me like that." Another voice, deeper than the tall woman's but still undeniably feminine, joined the conversation.
A second woman emerged from the dark and into the weak light of the bus station's lamp. Unlike the black-haired woman, this red-haired one wasn't wearing fancy clothing, to the point that Mae could even imagine her own mother wearing the same sort of outfit. Her clothing was the only thing ordinary about the red-haired woman, though.
Indeed, the longer Mae looked at the newest arrival, the more what she'd just seen take place was suddenly starting to make a twisted sort of sense...
Because ultimately, there was only one person who would be willing to attack mouse guards while they were in the middle of enforcing the island's laws. Other students had told stories about her in school while whispering so softly that even a mouse's ear couldn't hear their words.
Frightening stories about a woman who didn't exist; who couldn't be allowed to exist. She was like a linguistic black hole of sorts, something that could only be described around the very edges, or circumspectly considered via all the things she was not. Because she wasn't exactly a person, more like a living inverse. Mouse Man, MM. The woman who couldn't exist was supposed to be what you got when you flipped everything Mouse Man was upside down...
WW.
This red-haired woman with her golden fur, feline features, and sad orange eyes, this was Wonder Woman!
End of Chapter One
AN: "Agape, philia, storge, philautia, xenia, and eros" are all various Greek words for different kinds of "love," be it romantic or not.
If you detected a certain degree of derision towards Diana's canonical choice to bring Lizzie with her when she went to Moray Island rather than leave her in the care of her sidekicks/her amazon sisters/any of her fellow Justice League members, all I can say is that when Tom King learns to write better I'll stop feeling the need to make fanfiction based on his stories where the characters don't make incredibly stupid choices.
Cassie Sandsmark's mother, Helena Sandsmark, is an archeologist just like Barbara was before she became Cheetah. Helena works as the curator of a museum with a huge collection of Greek artifacts, so I'm going to assume she's at least mildly interested in Greek mythology. Despite this obvious shared connection, I'm not aware of DC ever having Helena and Barbara interact with one another, which strikes me as a missed opportunity (I'll probably get around to writing fanfiction where they cross paths next year if I can stay motivated).
Barbara's outfit is basically the same thing she wore back in Wonder Woman Volume 5 Issue 6 when Barbara and Diana met for the first time in the Rebirth continuity.
https://i.imgur.com/XzdVX4f.png
https://i.imgur.com/RDdj7cp.png
If you have any questions as to why/how Urzkartaga got killed "off-screen," I sort of covered this in my notes to the first story in this series, but for convenience sake I'll do a quick recap. Because in this continuity Barbara's fur was used as part of the ritual to create Elizabeth/Lizzie, Barbara feels she now has a duty to be available to be a part of her Lizzie's life. Barbara's own mother died when Barbara was a young girl, and so she doesn't want to end up inflicting the same trauma on her own offspring.
This desire to be there for Lizzie curbs some of Barbara's self-destructive tendencies, so rather than engage in convoluted heist plots, she just directly tells Diana, "I need this plant the Justice League currently have to kill Urzkartaga so I can stop being cursed with cannibalism..." and of course, Diana is willing to pull the strings to get it for her. Which means that in this story, Barbara is power and ability-wise at the same place she was at the end of "Cheetah and Cheshire Rob the Justice League", thus she's capable of shifting between human and Cheetah forms.
The Keeper Of The Grounds is a being whom Diana meets with in Wonder Woman Volume 5 issue 775, who oversees the Graveyard of the Gods. Diana defeated him in a riddle competition to bring the Greek gods back to life, and I figure she would totally be willing to engage him in another one for the sake of winning at least one "anti-resurrection" for Urzkartaga. While Diana believes "We have a saying, my people. Don't kill if you can wound, don't wound if you can subdue, don't subdue if you can pacify, and don't raise your hand at all until you've first extended it" Urzkartaga was a problem that couldn't be solved by an extended hand, pacification, subduing, or wounding… so she's going to make damn sure that killing him genuinely solved the problem and it stays solved.
The line "the bride or Urzkartaga would be blessed with long life and power" is paraphrasing part of a speech that Barbara gives in Wonder Woman volume 5 issue 7.
The multi-day-long fight that Barbara talks about is from Wonder Woman Volume 6, issue 10. It serves as a major plot point in my fic "Conquered by a Legend" that you can find over here... https://archiveofourown.org/works/84973911
Che-Terra is from Deathstroke Inc Issue 3 (there's also like a single panel of it in issue 2).
There are no shortage of John Steinbeck references (well, references to one particular book he wrote and its film adaptations) in this chapter, but given that the story arc this fic is based on is called "The Island of Mice and Men," can you really blame me?
There's no exact time frame set up for how long had passed between Moray Island being established and Diana visiting it in Wonder Woman Volume 6, Issue 23. Honestly, I like the idea that it was established very early on in her career, and roughly a decade has passed since then, it helps make the island being the way it is feel more believable.
Given the horrifically repressive state that Mouse Man has set up, and how nobody but him is even allowed to say the word "Wonder Woman," I think it's not unreasonable to assume that he also bans any visual depictions of her. This means that someone like Mae, who was either born on the island or at the very least raised on it, has absolutely no freaking clue what Wonder Woman is actually supposed to look like. So hopefully that makes her conclusion at the end of the chapter seem more reasonable…
Granted, this does mean that I'm deliberately retconning the panels in Issue 26, which suggest that Mae (well, "the girl with the pink hair" since she's never named in the comic) was old enough to already be verbally communicating when Mouse Man took over (and had to be retrained to only say "mice have ears" and "Mouse Man knows") but I think that's a small price to pay for telling a stronger story...