Thick clouds of exhaust chugged from the car’s engine. I expected the familiar stink of gasoline, but instead, the smoke was all charcoal, wood, and magic…which still stunk.
A calico cat sat upright in the front passenger seat, which, ten seconds from now, wouldn’t be such a great idea. For now, it was picturesque.
I enjoyed the forest view through a scuffed, slightly foggy window. Then the view was lost—something had been plopped on my head.
“Mrah!” I complained. But then I reached up with a paw and felt it, and… “Mrah?”
I readjusted what turned out to be a leather cap, complete with aviator goggles. My ears twitched their way through two holes. Even if the cap was premade for some random mass-market doll, there was no chance Reed hadn’t punched those holes through herself.
And I knew the whole thing was Reed’s—she was stifling a laugh now. I turned to face her just as she got both her hands back on the steering wheel and locked her eyes on the dashboard.
Pfft. Yeah, pretend you didn’t do that.
Reed was on my left, Chora to my right. With only two rows, we had to maximize that space. Behind us were Heidschi and Bayce, the resident magi.
Then we were rolling. Slowly at first, accelerating like a steam train. At the first big lurch, I gave up on cat form and Morphed—making the fit snug but the sitting steady. The aviator cap stretched, and not uncomfortably. A seatbelt was buckled.
Then our car turned on the mulch, heading northeast, and approached running speed, and passed it. We were more than rolling. Wind curved around the front window, snuck through the cracks, dove in from overtop, and whipped the dangling dangles of my aviator cap.
Never had I ever had the pleasure of a car ride. Now I was intoxicated.
Before, I’d felt pity and a little superiority whenever I watched a pet carrier going in or out of a car, the withdrawn faces of the cats inside. I’d inwardly laughed at the dogs hanging their desperate heads out of car windows. (Maybe they felt twice the thrill that they’d get from ordinary running, but they also looked twice the foolish.)
Now, though, I wished I’d been in a pet carrier. Even sitting in the nucleus of a car and feeling the movement, like a boat on an earthen sea, was…an implacable good feeling. Both serenity and excitement. Or was that serenity just the fact that friends were with me?
And the view was something else. It actually caused some cognitive disconnect to only be able to see the world through windows far from my face, yet still be moving. Heck, being moved at all was odd in what my brain told me should be a stationary room.
The more I looked up, the more dizzying it became, and yet the more I wanted to go from the middle cushion to Chora's spot so I could get an unadulterated view of the side. And maybe roll down the window so my tongue could hang out.
But I had too much sophistication to do that, or to stomp all over Chora’s legs just to crane my head in front of her chin! And I figured it was best just to stay calm and listen to the chatter going on in the car anyway. That would keep me from getting lulled to sleep.
The sudden car-wide jerks when we rolled over boulders or thick roots would help too.
Hold on, what was I doing? My job wasn't to sit idle until a battle, or even really to brainstorm! It was...
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map133-1.png]
...to keep my full attention on the outside world so I could explore the whole Vencian Wood!
Oh yeah, and to keep tabs on Logy also. Her icon was in some random place I hadn’t gone yet, and it definitely wasn’t on the way. Where the heck was she? As usual, I didn’t fancy her being with me in any group conversations, but I also didn’t fancy her silently dropping out. Whatever, she’d get there when she’d get there. Much like us.
Anyway, we’d be entering new territory soon. Past the meadows, the world would start changing, and every bit of my senses absorbed would count, I hoped, towards my Quest.
I tapped Chora’s knee. She’d been talking to the seats behind.
“Gold-alloy foci sound—sorry, put a pin in that. Taipha wants to tell me something.” She turned my way, unfolding her piece of what we were calling “spirit paper.”
I pointed to letters on this great innovation. I’d written them myself! “CAN I SIT BY WINDOW? ITS OK IF NOT”
“Of course you can sit there. Even in this form, you wouldn’t take up enough space to even begin bothering me.”
True enough… Compared to my nekomata form, Chora was shorter by a good thirty centimeters. It was a little off-putting, even now after spending an entire evening lying next to her this way.
Still, I blinked at her. “U RLY RLY SURE? I HAV A TAIL”
Bayce called out, “We have tape.”
Uh…well, it turned out that there was more room on the sides of this jalopy than even in a high-end Earth car. (Change the shape of the cup holder and it could’ve held a whole beer boot!) That suited me just fine. It was easy enough to smoosh my side against the secure door, crank the lever, and take that window down.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Ahh, the breeze against my skin…
***
Looking out a car window, hearing the stuttering sounds of conversation behind me, suddenly the world seemed endless—not because it was no longer small, but because we would roll across it forever.
Rabbitfoot Plains whizzed by, and more and more my view filled with flowers, now blurs. The streaks of color—bronze, purple, yellow—glowed like haze, and the heady smell of nectar slapped us in the noses, setting off more than a few sneezes. As the car made a wide turn, I got a revolving view of a handful of sparrows bathing in a patch of dirt. We were noticed, and that was all. The creatures of the forest went about their day, and we about ours.
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map133-2.png]
I realized with a start that we were getting closer to the site of that tree with the fascinating winey fruit…but just as quickly, I de-hunched my shoulders. Of all the scents that drowned our nostrils, none were as potent as that one, as the scent, the odor that practically dripped with fuchsia.
Then…
“We should be close now,” Reed announced. She’d said less than twenty-five words altogether since we pulled out. She said everything calmly, with discipline.
This car was a dangerous vehicle even without coming close to the top speeds an Earth SUV is expected to hit. We were faster than a run, but that was it. It was startling for me to realize that even though this was fast, it was probably under fifty kilometers an hour. In fact, me sprinting would be at least as fast. But it’d be way more sweaty, and therein lay the difference.
Yet even at this speed, as the car and its sparking engine heaved us all over an unexpected stone, while turning a little too sharply, my chin nearly hit the windowsill.
The world was getting bumpier. A little bit rockier and a little bit…sandier. Hmm. I wondered what sort of biome could possibly be causing this. A beach, perhaps?
Well, to approach this more seriously, it seemed like a weird place for vines to exist, let alone go of their own viney free will. I was no biologist, and neither was my storehouse of human information, but shouldn’t we have been raring to fight sentient beach grasses?
Now and then, the jeep would come to an abrupt halt, its wheels simply spinning in the dust. Bayce and Heidschi would jimmy something in the back—I guessed they were opening a hatch in the back seats that let them access the magical engine—and that would get it moving. Then we would jerk onward for a few minutes until the next weird pitfall, all as the grass of the world trickled away.
Of course, that slowed us down, and to attempt to avoid hitting more pitfalls while simultaneously worsening the problem, Reed decelerated. Soon we were barely going above running speed.
All the while, our scenery was going through a second transition. Grass was patchy and the flowers nonexistent, btut the oversized dandelions were getting more frequent. Animals changed—I caught sight of reptiles flickering into their burrows.
The air changed too, tinged with a salty lake’s breeze.
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map133-3.png]
We were close, but not there yet.
“I want to suggest getting out now,” Chora said, breaking a silence. “We could move just as fast as the car is going now. Maybe faster. Plus, we might want to shift into observation mode, to spot enemies.”
“That's not a bad idea,” Heidschi echoed.
Bayce said, “Well...we have more than enough fuel in the engine for a full drive. And the car gives us an extra layer of defense in case we do get attacked on the way.”
“Plus, we won’t be exhausted,” Reed noted.
I had an idea. Half of one. “Meow,” I said, summoning attention. “JUST LET ME OUT NEXT TO CAR.”
Bayce clicked her tongue. “You’re not that heavy.”
“UGH NOT BC OF THAT. ITS EASIER TO HEAR FOES WITHOUT ENGINE RUMBLE AROUND ME. PLUS IM FAST”
Reed glanced at me, biting her lip. “…That makes some sense. You are the strongest one here.”
I sure was, and I was ready to tear out my stultifying gold blade if that was what it’d take to defend us all. I hopped over the windowsill, made a landing worth only a seven-point-seven out of then due to sandy soil, and got a little distance from the car. Then I was trotting alongside it, humbled by the vehicle in a whole different way—feeling about like I would next to a rhino in a marathon.
Still, it was easy to keep up. Not only was I sprinting faster and faster with each level, I was also building up my endurance. Add to that how much more natural it is to walk on millions of tiny granules than to roll on them.
—Ah, a really obvious idea just came to me.
Map, let me see underground!
Error: Request too broad. Information could overwhelm the user.
Um, okay. I’m not ready to faint yet… At least tell me what info you’re withholding?
Soil composition, erosion, average particle size, prairie dog paths.
Map, just show me prairie dog paths.
Error: Request too broad.
Ugh. One more try… Map, show me all the magical plants underneath this Map square?
Processing…
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map133-4.png]
Oh, wow. The village of Outlast could’ve used this information way earlier.
There was an amorphous “cloud” of magical plants in this area, one that brought o mind a foggy octopus. Bits of cloud were had spread around the northeast, but they were darkest and most concentrated in that farthest corner.
Right now, for our troupe, this data wasn’t useful so much as a confirmation that we should be headed the way we were already headed. But also, it was terrifying.
It was suggesting that these vines were a network we’d been moving across all along. While I wasn’t seeing crisscrossing, spiderwebbing lines—the Map was too vague for that—I suspected that was exactly what was hidden below our feet. That could truly “overwhelm the user.”
So if we drilled straight down, we’d hit something. Kind of like what Logy was saying, except that was about time magic, not, uh…plant magic. And yet if we drilled down here and now, we clearly wouldn’t be defeating the evil at its source. We’d be hitting random vines. Our struggle would be far from over.
And as long as we were already heading toward the source, we’d better stay on track.