They found Ursula asleep in the hallway, folded across a chair with her sword in hand. Unwilling to wake her up, Emil convinced Kitty to carry her along as they went up to their rooms, leaving her in her own room, atop her bed. The final touch on Emil’s end was to write a little note, thanking her for sitting up and ensuring her that they returned no earlier than one in the morning.
And then, they went to bed. As per Emil’s request, a mattress had now been introduced to his room, laid square across the floor at the foot of his own bed, fully made with covers and everything. Now that he was looking at it, it looked less like a bed for sleeping on and more like a dog bed. Perfectly placed for Kitty to keep watch on both the lone window beside the desk and the door. Wonderful.
They changed in relative silence, Emil slipping back into his pajamas and nightcap while Kitty fought to get out of his clothes. During the minute Kitty spent actually dressing himself in his pink pajamas, Emil sat at the edge of his bed, thinking. Afterwards, if you’d asked him, he wouldn’t have been able to put words to a single thought he’d had. But while he sat there, his feet absently playing with his slippers, he felt like his head was filled with far too much. Cottonwad sheep bumping against each other, marbles in orbit.
Kitty, once changed, stood awkwardly in the room, his eyes moving from Emil’s bed to his own prepared doggy-bed. Cleverly, Emil made no show of which he’d prefer for him to tuck into. With palpable reluctance, Kitty stepped over to his shiny new mattress. There, he paced around in a circle and made a show of laying down and curling up like a dog, eliciting a chuckle from his tired friend.
“Come on, let’s just sleep normally,” Emil said, dragging his legs onto his bed, though still sitting up to see his friend.
“Yeah, yeah, fine,” Kitty responded, tossing off the covers to properly lie down. He seemed briefly annoyed by his pillow, though he was able to avoid discomfort by throwing it away and resting his head on the plain mattress. As another little joke, he crossed his arms and opened his mouth wide, fake-snoring loudly. “Hooooonk, mimimi… Hooooooooonk, mimimi…”
The sight of his friend’s wide-open mouth made Emil chuckle nervously. “Dude, come on,” he said. Thankfully, Kitty relented, turning over to lie on his side, facing Emil half-grinning. Emil nodded at him gratefully over the foot of his bed. “I’m turning out the light. Is that okay?”
“Sure, sure,” Kitty said. “You need the rest. Go sleep.”
Waving his hand, Emil undid the light spell, the little disc of light fading into the aether. Darkness, unbanished, now took hold of the room once more. The only light to be seen was the pale gray stream flooding in from the window, the various moons outside peeking in, their visit freckled by stars. Gently, Emil laid himself down, trying to get comfortable in the way-too-soft bed. The pillow was also too soft, and the covers likewise. Like lying on top of mangled geese. He shifted uncomfortably. He had to sleep. He was exhausted. Wasn’t that funny? No matter how high he got his exhaustion resistance, he never stopped feeling exhausted. It was just that he wouldn’t die from it—at least, that’s how the God of Knowledge had explained it.
“Goodnight Moleman,” Kitty said from beyond the foot of his bed.
“Goodnight, Kitty,” Emil responded. “Thank you for today.” He wanted to say more, but something had lodged itself sideways in his throat.
“No problem. I’m just happy to get to help you for once,” Kitty sighed happily.
Emil smiled, but it felt performative. “Yeah.”
A warm, comfortable silence fell over the room. Time to sleep. Bedtime. It was time to shake off the thoughts and worries of the day, draw a clean slate, and get prepared for the joys and hardships that would come morning. Emil closed his eyes.
A pair of pleading eyes met him.
His eyes flared open again and he took a few trembling, subdued breaths. His eyes slowly trailed towards the foot of his bed. He couldn’t hear anything. It was like he wasn’t even there. Sometimes, his friend really could meld with the shadows. Or… No, it was more that the shadows seemed to meld with him. Like that impressive fur coat he wore. He cloaks himself that easily with the darkness—like he skinned it himself.
The thought was absurd enough to bring a smile to Emil’s face, though it wilted just as quickly.
He took another breath. Everything was alright. He had Kitty, didn’t he?
He let his eyes flutter closed again.
The gaze. It was there. Watching him. Pleading. Begging. Desperate as the dead. Emil squeezed his eyes hard, clenching them to the point where the darkness in his vision was replaced by blinking, dotting stars and light-filled nebulas crashing together.
But the second he loosened up again, the eyes returned. Please help me. Please. Please.
Jaw clenched hard enough to hear ringing, Emil opened his eyes again, defeated.
The dark room was hardly better. It smelled clean. Few pests. Nothing to fear, no one to beg him for anything—save for maybe a princess cake. Emil blinked at the dark ceiling. ‘Princess cake?’ A memory struck him, and in a mere instant, his body relaxed. Smiling slightly, he asked the darkness, “Hey, Kitty? Are you awake?”
A whisper met him after a second. “Dude, it’s been like five seconds…” He could hear the smile in Kitty’s voice. “I’m fast asleep. You’ll have to shake me awake.”
“That’s a shame,” Emil sighed theatrically, turning over where he lay. “I was planning on doing good on that promise I made to get you a cake for your nineteenth birthday. Since we missed your twentieth birthday too, I was thinking of letting you pick out another gift, but maybe you’d rather save that for the morning. Celebrating your twentieth birthday should be a bit more than just eating cake in the middle of the night, so if you don’t want to, then—”
A pair of glimmering eyes had teleported to the foot of his bed. Funny—in the darkness, when he looked straight at him, Emil could only see his bright yellow eyes. Like a cat. “Cake,” the shadow breathed. “I really want—” But then it stumbled back a little, into the light of the moons outside where it became Kitty, and he swiped at his mouth. “No, wait, it’s… It’s way too late for cake. You have to rest! That’s what we decided, so…”
Emil sat up in bed. “So, no cake?”
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Deaf, Kitty continued. “Besides, when I celebrated with the pirates, we celebrated my twentieth plenty, so two cakes might be a bit…”
“Only one, then?”
Kitty’s hands clenched and unclenched. Briefly, Emil considered whether or not he’d ever seen Kitty so conflicted about something. “But you… You need… And I… But…”
“Princess cake,” Emil enunciated. Kitty didn’t bite. ‘Time to bring out the big guns,’ Emil thought and patted the covers next to him. “We can eat it on the bed?”
Kitty teleported again, now sitting on top of the bed, legs crossed, drool running down the side of his mouth. “Really?” he asked. “On top of the bed? You’re sure?”
“I am,” Emil replied and pulled up the shop window. “Now, what color do you want?”
“Hmmm…” His eyes slid down to Emil’s blue pajamas, and then to his own pink ones. “Is there a blue-and-pink one?”
“Any reason in particular?” Emil teased as he found the desired cake.
“Not really. I just… Whoa.”
‘Whoa indeed,’ Emil thought, smiling down at the cake now in his hand. It was massive. Not a lot of people knew about it, but if you fiddled with the shop options, you could increase the size of certain items bought, at a small price increase. This was how the largest princess cake ever seen by human eyes had been spawned—weighing in at what Emil estimated to be at least two kilos, he sat it down gingerly—right atop his covers. Hygiene? What was that—a car brand? “Well?” Emil said, looking up at Kitty. “Go on, birthday pig.”
“How did you—what is…” Primal instinct took over. His hand whipped out with speed that would impress a competitive slapper, gouging out a piece and bringing it to his face in a fraction of a millisecond. “Whoa!”
Emil was beyond relieved to find that though his friend had changed in many ways, his reaction to cake was the same. Silently, in a certain sort of exhausted stupor, Emil began replicating his friend’s movements, tearing into the cake with his bare hands. It was a fulfilling experience. As they began eating, barely more than a few mouthfuls into it, Kitty handed Emil the marzipan rose. He wanted to refuse it, but Kitty refused his refusal by expertly retelling the rules of birthdays: what the birthday pig wants, the birthday pig gets. And that includes the satisfaction of watching their friend eat the rose. Emil, defeated, obliged.
Without Kitty’s infinite stomach, Emil doubted that he could have consumed the thing, even with his whole party in attendance. Now, though, it went well. By the end of it, the bed was covered in sticky cream and vanilla sauce, the both of them resting their backs against the head of the bed, side-by-side, equally comatose.
“How do they do it…?” Kitty mumbled thickly. “It’s just points. Points into food. What is even points…?”
“Points are divinity,” Emil answered, unwillingly groaning at his pained stomach while he was at it. “The God of Knowledge told me so… We just can’t absorb it properly, so we can instead use it to trade with the gods… Because they can turn divinity into anything… Meaning that divinity is kind of like raw energy… Can’t be destroyed, only remade…”
“That makes no fucking sense,” Kitty muttered. “Nothing makes sense.”
“Untrue,” Emil said, smiling at Kitty as he turned his head to look at him. “I think this makes a lot of sense.”
Kitty smiled back at him, turning back to stare straight ahead. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it does.” They fell back into a comfortable silence. Neither of them spoke. But, after a while, unprompted, Emil got the feeling that his friend had something to say, though he couldn’t find the words for it. Patient, Emil said nothing. And after a few minutes, hesitant, Kitty said, “Moleman, about Linne…”
“Yeah. I did.”
Kitty fell silent again. “He smelled like… He didn’t die normally, but…”
“I killed him.”
Silence. Thick, suffocating silence. Kitty’s voice was so small. “...Why?”
Saying ‘you know why’ would have come off as almost accusatory, so Emil restrained himself. Hand folded atop his midsection, he instead said, “He was in pain. He would’ve died anyway. There were so many reasons, I just…”
“No, not that,” Kitty said. Suddenly, in the darkness, Emil could see his friend’s eyes again—shining dully. “Why didn’t you let me do it?”
Emil’s mouth opened before slowly closing. Around him, the darkness closed in, inch by inch. “Because,” his mouth said of its own accord, “I had to. It was my duty. I can’t be so cowardly as to call for a man’s death, only to chicken out of being the one to behead him. What kind of—can you imagine the lack of principles you’d need to do that? To—to decide someone’s life and death, only to put the dirty deed in someone else’s hands? I can’t be that. I wouldn’t be able to stand with my back straight.”
Beside him, Kitty had fallen silent again. Without asking for any hurry, Emil let him think.
“Next time,” came Kitty’s tiny voice, “let me do it.”
Emil sat up straighter, turning towards his friend. “I just told you—”
But Kitty’s eyes were pleading. Begging. It made Emil’s heart stop beating entirely. “Please.” A million rebuttals reared in Emil’s chest, only to die, stillborn, at the earnest look on his friend’s face. “The way you’ve been today… I can’t bear to see it again. You heal people. You help people. I can’t do that. Not the way you do it. But what I can do… What you can’t do… Let me do it.” Unable to read the expression on Kitty’s face, Emil turned away. But Kitty kept speaking. “You’ll blame yourself anyways. So… don’t see it as you ordering someone to take out the trash. See it more like… like using a hammer to hit a nail.”
Emil’s face snapped back to Kitty. “You want me to see you as a tool?”
“If it’ll let you use me in a way that helps people, then… yeah.” Kitty smiled sheepishly. “Not always, of course. I’m your friend, not your employee. But, sometimes, you need to view the people you love objectively. Look at who I am, what I can do, judge it…” His smile persisted through the terrible words he spoke. “In the end, I trust that you will be able to decide how to best use my abilities. Better than I could, at least. I mean… You’ve seen what I do without proper guidance. What I’m asking is just what we’ve been doing so far, but in a more practical sense.”
“What you’re asking is for me to treat you like a dog,” Emil said, appalled. “To see you as some kind of item to be twisted and formed into a good little tool. You can’t possibly want that.”
“All I want,” Kitty said, his face as earnest as the sky, “is to help you. If I can’t do that…” He chuckled, his upper lip twisting in strange desperation. “I don’t know what I’d do.”
Stunned to silence, Emil had to turn away from his friend. The weight in his stomach suddenly felt all the more palpable, as though someone had left a lump of lead inside it. He felt disgusted. How had this happened? When? Of course, he had always tried to guide Kitty towards a more moral, less bloody path, but for it to turn out like this… Hoarsely, Emil asked, “What would you do if I died?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if I defeated the tutorial before you did?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’d try to beat it and join you.”
“And what if…” The thick lump in his stomach lurched up into his throat, heavy and choking, downright nauseating. Eyes wide and trembling, he locked eyes with his friend. “What if I didn’t want you to?”
Kitty smiled lightly. “If that’s what you want, then I won’t beat it.”
Never before has Emil felt so infuriated by sincerity. He wanted to throw off the covers, to scream at his friend that he needed to have his own life, that you couldn’t possibly call a life done at someone else’s whims anything but slavery, that what he was asking of him was inhuman and horrible and immoral, but… But he didn’t do that. He sunk down a little further, moved his face to look back at the foot of his bed, and sighed. Finally, after close to a full minute of silence, Emil said, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Next time, I’ll let you do it.” Emil watched with detached caution as Kitty reared up slightly in joy. “But,” he said, cutting Kitty’s excitement short, “I can’t treat you like a tool. I’ll try to figure out how to best use your abilities, but it’s up to you to use them. If you don’t want to, then that’s your choice. I’m not your master, and I’m not your party leader. I’m your friend, and I don’t want to be anything else. If I tell you to do something that you don’t want to do, I expect you to refuse.”
“Right, of course,” Kitty said, but it was clear in his voice that he’d already found his triumph.
“Just to clarify, this is only for this floor, okay? Lives are on the line. After this is over, you’ll go on with your life, and I’ll go on with mine. We’ll still be friends, but you don’t take orders from me. Understood?”
The mention of the floor’s finite nature drew all hints of joy from Kitty’s face. In the darkness, he was suddenly nothing but eyes again. A pair of bright-yellow cat’s eyes that trailed down, down, to look at steepled hands. “Yes, yes… Of course. I understand. I just…” He sighed in the darkness, much in the same way a tired dog huffs. “I hope this floor will last a bit longer. Hanging out with you… It’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time.” He chuckled, and now Emil could see him again. His eyes were strangely moist, but his smile had returned. “I wish we could hang out like this forever.”
“Maybe we can,” Emil said, mellowly humoring his friend. “Maybe when we’ve both beaten the tutorial, and we’re back on Earth, we could play another round. Have dinner at my place. My mother’s a great cook, as I’ve told you. And my brother… Heh, I think you’ll like him. He’s really cool. He taught me to play the banjo when I was smaller, but I never got any good at it. Not like him. But you’ve got the fingers for that sorta stuff. If you ask nicely…” Emil chuckled. “I’m sure he’d love to teach you.”
Kitty leaned back further where he lay. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that.” But even with the wistfulness in his voice, there was something missing—some human emotion that had been there only a minute earlier.
It would take six months until Emil learned exactly what had shifted in his friend.
But by that point, it was already too late.