Alex was not a morning person; no matter how early she went to bed or how many hours of sleep she got, she always felt like crap waking up. The groggy half-awake half-asleep feeling didn’t feel good and was enough to make her despise mornings. That, combined with the years of having to wake up in the morning for school when she was younger, it was a surprise that anyone was a morning person at all. As much as she loved Kesha, she never woke up in the morning feeling like P Diddy.

Another possible contributor to her disdain for mornings was the alarm on her phone that she usually woke up to. For some reason, the default alarm on the iPhone sounded like a disaster warning system. And since there was no way of bulk changing all of the alarm tones for all the different times she had set, she left it the way it was. She could not be bothered; as if waking up to piano and string instruments would make her enjoy mornings anyway.

“Gggrrhhh…” the tigress let out a groan as her phone beeped over and over again. She had hit the snooze button three times, and it looked like her phone had just about had enough. The snooze button was nowhere to be seen on the screen and it wouldn’t stop screaming. She repeatedly pressed the power button on the side of her phone until it stopped. With a quick glance at the screen, the alarm that she had just dismissed was her third backup alarm, there were no more after it, so it was the absolute latest that she could get out of bed if she wanted to get her day started on time. Phone in hand, Alex pushed herself out of bed and dragged her feet along her shag carpet toward the bathroom. She scratched the back of her head and let out a big yawn as she pushed through the door. “Hey Google, turn on the lights…” she said groggily and rubbed her eyes. It took a few seconds for the smart speaker to process her command and turn the multiple lights in the bathroom on. As they did, the tigress placed her phone down on the sink counter, put her hands on both sides of it, and leaned forward to look at her reflection in the mirror. The white bathroom was bright, and Alex had chosen to make it that way specifically to help kick her awake in the mornings. It didn’t work too well most of the time, as all it did was make her squint her eyes or even close them, which in turn made her even sleepier.

Once her eyes had adjusted to the light, she got a better look at herself; her hair was a mess, her menacingly smirking kitty shirt was wrinkled, and the fur along the edges of her strawberry-patterned panties looked as if it had been combed in different directions. She looked down at her thighs and used her hands to smooth them out. She grabbed a loose pink hair band that was next to her phone and used it to tie her hair up into a bun; a messy one, but it was an improvement over her hair dangling over her shoulders. She grabbed her toothbrush from the cup it was in along with the tube of Fang+ Specialty Saber-toothpaste, popped the lid, and squeezed out a moderate size dollop onto the bristles. She then turned on the faucet, ran her toothbrush under it for a second, and brought it to her mouth as she turned the faucet off with her other hand. The faucet squeaked as the valve shut off the water flow and the sound of the tigress running her toothbrush over her large fangs echoed throughout the bathroom.

Alex looked at herself in the mirror as she brushed her teeth, she was gentle with her pearly whites but made sure to run the bristles of her brush over every single tooth, even the molars all the way in the back. The more she brushed, the more foam she created from the friction and she let out a laugh when she saw how much she looked like she was rabid. After about a minute, the foam in her mouth was getting a little too much, so she spat into the sink.

‘Splat.’

She continued brushing.

When her silent countdown to two minutes reached a minute and a half, she heard the door to her apartment open up. Her ears flickered and turned in the direction of the sound and she stopped brushing her teeth.

“Front door unlocked by, Logan,” announced her smart speaker.