Aquila Felis - Part 1

Aquila slowed down and landed on a branch. She liked being in that form, able to fly away if there was danger and at the same time having good enough eyes to check every time of the clearing properly. Even though she once had been kidnapped from it, she had kept it as her place for training. She couldn't afford a huge house with rooms for training in the basement or something of that kind - in fact she still lived with her non-magic family. The clearing was her best option. It was in the forest close to her town and she could easily reach it in a five minute flight. It had enough space and it was well off all paths through the forest.

After a while she considered the clearing safe and flew down to the ground. After changing into a fox she went down a fox hole and came up again with a bag. She shapeshifted again, and now a human girl with brown hair and brown-green eyes, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor small, she opened the bag and looked in. "Hm." she thought, before choosing some flour to start with. She liked flour. It was not suspicious at all, and yet suited her abilities well. She took some of it in her mouth, blew it out creating a small cloud, made sure to step away from it and clicked her fingers. She couldn't do much more than create a spark, but that was enough to set part of the flour on fire leading to a dust explosion. Flour explosions were powerful. During mediaval times, millers and bakers never worked at night. The only source of light apart from the sun they could have used was fire - and all the flour in the air of their workplace would have done to blow the whole building up. The bit of flour she usually used couldn't do that, of course - but it'd do well enough as a surprise.
She also had taken a liking to magnesium. It burned bright enough to blind any enemy she might encounter. And freshly made magnesium powder had a tendency to heat itself enough to randomly start burning. Put some flour in the enemy's buildings air, add some magnesium powder... both flour and magnesium were easy to get and unsuspicious. She could probably be checked by the police and they wouldn't bother to even ask what she had them for. The pure alcohol was a little harder to explain, but it burned with a really dark flame that hardly created any light and therefore was difficult to see - and hopefully easy to step in accidentally. She hadn't really tried that, yet...
If she put enough thought into it, most every day things could be dangerous. And if there was no obvious way for them to be, you could still hit someone over the head with most of them. So Aquila didn't bother to wear a weapon, usually. She loved her bow, though. She wasn't really good with it, maybe good enough to hit someone 20m away, but it was fun to do archery. She didn't really have any enemies, so she didn't worry about defending herself too much. In case of doubt she could just become an eagle and fly away, right?
The animal she liked to be most was usually a cat, though. They liked it warm and comfy, just like her human self. Her cat form was brown with darker brown stripes - easy to recognise if you knew her, but to strangers it was just another cat.

She hadn't found out why she had been kidnapped yet, though. And so Dragona had asked her to be careful. She had started to check the clearing before arriving there, and going there as an eagle instead of a human - assuming it safer that way. Just after she had put the bag back into the fox hole and changed into a cat to climb the next tree, she heard something. She hurried up an old oak with lots of leaves and waited, not moving. Maybe it was some deer or wild boars or something. She liked watching them, she never got as close to them as a human.
What entered the clearing wasn't a boar or a deer, though. It was a human, though they were wearing thick clothes and a hat so she had no idea whether they were male or female. In any case they took out some spray paint and worte 'Darkness rising' on her clearing. They had horrible handwriting. Aquila was quite annoyed by that act of vandalism, but she decided to stay on her branch and didn't move. Once they had left she changed into a human and called Dragona, though. She definitely needed someone to complain about that to.