Warrior Cat Clans 2 (WCC2 aka Classic) is a roleplay site inspired by the Warrior series by Erin Hunter. Whether you are a fan of the books or new to the Warrior cats world, WCC2 offers a diverse environment with over a decade’s worth of lore for you - and your characters - to explore. Join us today and become a part of our ongoing story!
News & Updates
11.06.2022 The site has been transformed into an archive. Thank you for all the memories here!
Here on Classic we understand that sometimes life can get difficult and we struggle. We may need to receive advice, vent, know that we are not alone in our difficult times, or even just have someone listen to what's going on in our lives. In light of these times, we have created the support threads below that are open to all of our members at any time.
Twilightpaw squinted at her prey through the haze of her own breath clouding in front of her in the cold, a feather liberated from last night's dinner and stuck upright into a drift of last night's snow standing in for the live prey she hadn't yet had a chance to sink her claws into. The camp was dimly illuminated by blue pre-dawn light that glinted off of the new snow as it experienced its first disturbance under Twilightpaw's careful steps as she stalked slowly towards her practice prey. She had been promised a real training session this morning, but her mentor hadn't showed his face yet and she figured that she might as well get a head start while he lazed around in his nest. With the image in her mind's eye of the hunting poses she had seen the older apprentices practicing in the camp before, the young apprentice paused for a second to gather her haunches under her, and then sprang - and missed her mark, the feather becoming half buried under displaced snow as her paws slammed down on either side. With a hiss of frustration, she cast another annoyed look towards the warriors' den where Devotedcrow should be emerging from. Was he really going to wait until the sun was above the horizon? That didn't seem very efficient to her, especially considering that they clearly had a lot of work to do.
If Twilightpaw expected to catch sight of her mentor by staring daggers into the warriors' den, she would be waiting a long time. Instead, when the ebony-cloaked feline emerged, he was behind her, limping out of the nursery despite the groggy protests of his young daughter. The opportunity he was presented with was far too sweet to pass up, and Crow's footfalls were silenced by the practiced precision of a rogue who was used to creeping in silence to avoid detection. He drew up close to his unsuspecting protégé and hooked his good leg around her hindpaws, sweeping them out from beneath her and she descended into a snow with a hail of flurries sprinkling down on her.
"You should be mindful of your surroundings," he advised as she regained her bearings, extending his tail to dust off the remaining particles that were rapidly starting to melt into her mottled pelt. "I noticed you've been practicing your hunting. You have good form already, so we'll work on improving that and your timing. I'll admit I'm not the best hunter, as you can imagine, but we'll make it work." To say he was surprised to be a mentor so soon after joining SummerClan would be an understatement, but to also claim he wasn't grateful for Ratstar's trust would be untrue. Crow intended to do him, and Twilightpaw, proud. "C'mon, you can show me the way to the training hollow." He gestured for her to take the lead, firebright gaze glittering wildly.
Twilightpaw heard herself let out an embarrassingly high-pitched and kit-like yelp of surprise as her focused view of the warriors' den dissolved into a whirl of white as she tumbled headfirst into the snow. The hot flush of embarrassment spreading underneath her thick pelt was enough to offset the chill of the snowy morning as she raised her head from the snowdrift she was now embedded in and realized what had happened, her eyes finding Crow and the path of pawprints pressed into the snow behind him and leading back to... the nursery. Of course. He had young kits, she should have known that he was likely to come from that direction instead. Already mentally kicking herself before Crow admonished her, the tiny apprentice climbed the small distance back to her feet with a sheepish expression. "Sorry. I thought you would have come from the warriors den," she said, regaining some of her enthusiasm in the glow of his praise of her form.
A flutter of panic seized her stomach as Crow motioned for her to take the lead. "I, uh, I don't know the way," she admitted. Was she supposed to know already? She was barely apprenticed, but maybe she should have asked somebody to show her around rather than practicing her hunting form for when she got out there.
"Well if you don't know the way and I don't know the way, how are we gonna get there?" questioned her mentor, managing to veil the humor in his voice beneath a hue of genuine, probing incredulity, mostly interested to know how his apprentice would handle the situation if it had been the truth. While Crow wasn't wholly clueless when it came to the territory, he wasn't an expert like the rest of their clanmates, most of his time since joining the clan spent in camp with his family, though he was shown around by Ratstar once or twice. He let her suffer for only a few moments before sparing her, noticing the anxiety beginning to dawn in her bright eyes. "I'm just kidding. I kind of know where we're going, c'mon."
Thankfully, Twilightpaw's smaller stature meant she wasn't out-pacing her mentor, whose greatest strength certainly did not lie in swiftfootedness. He led the way toward the hollow as they made the idle chatter of a pair still getting used to one another, every so often a comment made by the she-cat eliciting one of Crow's signature bad jokes that in turn elicited a groan from Twilightpaw. It did its job handedly, however; by time they arrived to the clearing, he noticed there was less tension in her shoulders. "Okay so like I said, I'm not gonna be the clan's best hunter in this lifetime, so my hunting style relies on stealth, patience, and ambushing prey. You have a knack for it already-- you just need some experience. Tell me what you're supposed to be mindful of when starting a hunt."
Focusing on the conversation with Crow on the way to the training hollow proved a little tough for Twilightpaw, as now that she had been admonished for not paying attention to her surroundings she had become hyper-alert of everything around them, ears constantly flicking in every direction and straining to hear every chirp, chitter, and whispering breeze that existed. The territory still being as unfamiliar to her as it was, her senses were overloaded, and it was both the rapport they had established and the freedom to focus only on what was within the clearing of the training hollow that served to ease her mind - and the warm glow of praise from Crow's acknowledgement of some natural talent didn't hurt.
"The direction of the wind," she answered immediately, the overwhelming barrage of new sounds and smells fizzling away as her brow furrowed into intense focus on the task at hand. "Where the shadows are. What's underfoot." Twilightpaw racked her brain. How many answers was he expecting? She wished he had asked for something like the top five or top ten things to know so she at least had a starting point. "The... type of prey? So you know whether they're going to run, or fly, or climb?"
"That's great! How'd I land an apprentice smarter than me?" Twilightpaw would find no shortage of positive remarks from her mentor, hoping to reinforce her belief in herself over the course of their training, which was just as important as the physical conditioning. He'd always had a soft spot for those young than him; their youthful innocence was endearing and also comforting in a way, Crow still struggling to trust others around his age. He had SunClan's prejudice to thank for that.
But that was unimportant and had no place in their regimen, the warrior freezing the thoughts before they could take root in his mind and throw him off the precipice of anxiety. The fur along his chest was flattened against him by the breeze snaking around, but the sun was creeping up behind them, presenting the apprentice with a challenge to start off with. She'd find it difficult to balance the fine line between staying downwind and keeping her shadows out of sight. "Like I said earlier, I want to work on your timing, but I've always been a paws-on learner so the best way I think to get it down is to just do it. It's still early enough that your prey will be groggy and sluggish, so I want you to take this opportunity and use it wisely. Catch a field mouse for me." She'd be out of luck here; prey mammals tended to avoid the training hollow, rife as it was with the scents of their clan cat predators, but that was all part of the lesson.
Twilightpaw beamed, basking in the glow of her mentor's praise. She nodded eagerly as she received her first assignment, squinting slightly as she solidified the image of a field mouse in her mind's eye, knowing only what they looked like after that they had been killed and brought to the camp but remembered the faint field-mouse-y scent clinging to their fur even when it had been intermingled with that of the fresh-kill pile. If I was a field mouse... she thought to herself, I would probably be as far away from this place as possible, she realized, the SummerClan scent cloaking the clearing comforting to her but undoubtedly terrifying to a prey animal.
"Well, the cat smell is probably too strong for them to hang around here," she said, keeping a careful watch on Crow's face for signs that she was on the right track. "So I should probably look for one... in the rabbit meadow? Or the wildflower meadow?" Field mice lived in the fields, right?
just gonna casually skip ahead to the action
Twilightpaw stalked slowly towards her first real prey, her heart beating so loud in her chest from the excitement of her first hunt that she would have sworn the mouse could hear it. The scattered trees on the edges of the wildflower meadow had served to save some of the meadow from being covered in snow, leaving the long grass available as convenient camouflage that both prey and hunter had sought to take advantage of. Twilightpaw's shadow intermingled with that of the grasses, hiding her from the mouse's sight as the cool breeze carried her scent safely back towards her mentor. She sprang, and her paws connected with warm fur and delicate bones that ended in a brief struggle between hunter and hunted as the mouse made a wild dash for freedom. She succeeded in landing a killing blow, but messily - her claws left several bloody scratches down the mouse's side. Nevertheless, she had caught it, and was about to bring it obediently back to Crow when the wind changed, and suddenly she had much bigger problems than a messy kill.
It was a cat scent, but it was definitely not SummerClan, and she did not recognize it as any of the clan scents she had scented on the pelts of her clanmates who returned from gatherings.
As Twilightpaw departed from the training hollow, venturing in the direction of the border that separated the lawless from the lawful, her mentor was never far from her, a silent entity trailing in the shadows. He was notably impressed by her capabilities and the way she maneuvered over the different terrains with relative ease, managing to keep the snow from crunching beneath her pads and keeping fallen leaves undisturbed where they were scattered beneath the canopy, but he did note the way her pounce was misjudged. Splatters of blood interrupted the pure white around her like a trail of bread crumbs leading back to where she was beginning to make her way back in his direction.
Crow stiffened, sensing the change in the wind around the same moment his apprentice did, and suddenly he was closing the distance between himself and her, clearly more alert now. "Bury your mouse here, Twilightpaw. We aren't alone anymore," he warned, voice hushed as his firebright gaze scanned the distant treeline for signs of the intruders he could detect on the breeze. He didn't want to alarm her, but he needed her to be prepared all the same. "We can't lead them back to camp, but we're sitting ducks out here. We need to try to gain some ground on them." As she did as instructed, Crow positioned himself between the she-cat and the scent flowing toward them, nudging her shoulder when she finished to prompt her to move.
Concealed by the shadows, a pair of rogues moved towards the glade. They felt highly confident in their ability to overtake these victims, an inexperienced youngin and a handicapped adult, and they were itching to have a win under their belt after they were chased out of SpringClan territory. A ruddy tom growled his order and surged forward, eyes blazing.
Despite the scent being clearly unfamiliar, the danger of it didn't fully dawn on Twilightpaw until she heard the tone in her mentor's voice. This was real. Her mouse was dropped into a hurriedly scraped out dip in the snow and covered messily, the excitement of it fading into nothingness as a new kind of adrenaline started flowing through her veins - and this was not a pleasant kind, promising the excitement of adventures to come, but the kind mixed with dread that felt like ice under her skin.
She couldn't help but look over her shoulder as Crow spurred her on, and came face to face with the blazing gaze of the first rogue a moment before she was knocked to the ground, the scrawny black female following in the tom's wake lunging at Crow.
Even as he was pushed to the ground, a foreign weight slamming down on him, Crow could only watch as his apprentice was attacked by a fiercer, more aggressive foe. Twilightpaw was a capable apprentice but she was woefully unprepared for an adversary of this caliber-- a cat with vengeance in his eyes and bloodlust in his heart. Dredging up every ounce of power within him, he dug his claws into the she-cat's exposed belly and propelled her off, nimbly maneuvering back to his feet and putting himself between the tom and Twilightpaw. "Pick on someone your own size," he snarled, though he was also at a size disadvantage, not to mention his weaker leg.
The she-cat prowled back over to her companion and slid up to his side, staring down the pair of clan cats. "This shouldn't be too hard," she growled, but her belly still smarted where long scratches broke the vulnerable skin there. Now she was mad.
Twilightpaw struggled against the rogue's weight as she was knocked to the ground, a futile fight as her attacker was twice her size and her only battle experience was in playfighting in the nursery. Nevertheless, she did her best, slashing out with unsheathed claws at any exposed part of her opponent. Her back paws reached out to kick at his belly, and as he released his grip on her shoulders ever so slightly to keep himself out of range of her claws she twisted out of his grip, leaping to her feet an instant before Crow put himself in between them.
As much as a small, kit-like part of her wanted to hide behind the big warrior and let him chase away the scary rogues for her, this situation didn't look good for any lone warrior and Twilightpaw was no coward. "Think again," she growled, with more confidence than she felt, stepping out from behind her mentor to position herself on the side of his injured leg.
"This doesn't have to be a fight..." He knew mediating some peace would be in vain, but Crow had to try, desperate to spare himself and Twilightpaw an unnecessary fight that he wasn't sure they could win. One of his first acts as a SummerClan warrior and of course something like this had to happen. Nevertheless, he steeled himself as he received the answer he expected: another attack.
Crow met the tom halfway and the pair collided in a flurry of claws, teeth, and passion, each one with something to gain that neither wanted to lose. The tom had his pride and reputation on the line, but the warrior had a greater reason: Someone to protect. No matter how many cuts split his skin, he barely flinched, his tolerance for pain higher than most due to the rigorous training he'd endured moons ago, and he fought with no fear of death. The intruder found himself woefully outmatched for the second time in recent memory, and when he finally submitted, he was ragged with blood matting his fur, an eye that would never heal, and vary enough energy to make his retreat.
When Crow turned to assist his apprentice, he was pleased-- and yes, definitely surprised-- to find Twilightpaw had held her own, with the she-cat making a hasty escape in the other direction. "Are you okay?" Her mentor asked, limping over to inspect her for signs of mortal injury.
