The sapphire queen sat upon a stump, summoned up her pen, and began to write.

With each scratch of the tip, the krigries rose in a chirping flutter. The more she wrote of her adventures, her victories, and her crimes, the more excited her insect servants became. The more the wind itself switched eagerly about her wrist, stirring the pages.

Into these pages she poured her past, her future, and her very soul. The wind and the krigries exulted, their curiosity turned to a dance, their dance a spiral, their spiral nearly a tornado, and thunder crackled in the sky.

With a lightning crash, the book—

Treasure Detected! Check your Map for the location.

Gee, thanks, System. Popping in at another opportune moment to tell me where the nearest old book is.

I was currently standing in the kitchen of Reed’s Cabin, getting ogled by three different girls while in nekomata form. Belatedly I realized that maybe me being naked had something to do with that ogling part.

One of those girls was Reed Lastname, who still had one supportive arm around my shoulders. Another was Chora Chressen. If we hadn’t met more formally earlier, I would’ve assumed her glare right now was accusatory instead of just…her normal state of being.

And the third, the witch called Firstname Lastname, was the only one who’d never seen me as a catgirl before! She was smiling really, abnormally wide. Her eyes kept wandering back to my chest things. Level 13 and I still couldn’t get a name for those. Big thanks, System.

“Another visitor!” said the blue witch. “Can we keep this one?”

“Actually, she—uh, they, she…” Reed turned to me and whispered, “Do you mind me saying you’re the same one who—”

“They’re not just any creature,” Chora said, arms crossing. “They’re a cat.”

The witch’s face fell.

Uh, why were cats bad? Maybe she was allergic? I ducked my head and let my ears fall to try and express my apologies.

“Prove it,” she whispered. (Bad eyesight?)

“Would you mind changing forms again?” Chora said.

Guess not… I’d happily do it. It would save me some SP anyway. I poofed back into my cat form and found myself sitting on the kitchen tile, flashing back to the first night I dined here.

Weirdly, after hearing the word “cat,” Reed was seeing me with new eyes too. Now she introduced me as if reciting poetry, her voice quiet and awestruck. “I can see that now. The ears of a wolf, the tail of a lemur, and the eyes of an owl…”

The witch said, “But the colors—”

“They come in every color,” Chora insisted.

“No, I mean they changed.”

“Because they’re a soulbound spirit cat.”

Nnno, I just changed colors because I’d Evolved into a new form with different fur. Also, why were they treating me like some out-of-this-world chimera? And why had it taken Reed, and Chora for that matter, so long to start?!

Oh. It hit me. Cats didn’t exist in this world. We were just mythical creatures here, the same way chimeras would be on Earth. So it probably wouldn’t be surprising to see some house chimeras running around at some point. But housecats would be impossible…except here in this one cabin.

“That’s why I couldn’t tell you more about the cantrip,” Chora said to the witch. “Because it was for them. I couldn’t just deny their request. You know how much bad luck we’d be in for if—”

“Yeah? So? Duh, I’m a witch, I study bad luck.”

Reed stepped between them and waved her arms around. “People, people!” she said with a wobbly smile. She looked less like a referee and more like a caught criminal. I appreciated the effort, and it seemed to quell things for now.

I wished I could’ve done the same, but I didn’t even have a piece of paper saying “nice to meet you.” I had to watch as people introduced me, and introduced over me.

Well, at least things were a bit calmer after that. The witch squatted to my level and said, “I haven’t properly introduced myself, Cat-Who-Might-Be-A-Spirit. Sorry about that. I’m Bayce! Anatomagus in training.”

Did she think I knew what that was? Regardless, I meowed politely. She held her fist out to me again and I gave it a respectful sniff. Then she used it to boop my nose. I bull-snorted. That was a perversion of trust.

When Bayce backed away, Chora said, “You know me. I’ll go get the incense.” Like a ghost, she drifted out.

“Chora has some rough edges, but she doesn’t mean anything by it,” Reed reassured. Rocking on her heels, she said, “We’re all one big happy family here. You can stay as long as you like!”

Over the course of Reed’s three sentences, Bayce’s face went through some alarming changes. “Chora” made it leery. “One big happy family” made it downright angry. At the end, her cheeks reddened. I didn’t know what that part meant—I’d seen some hairless cats in my life, but never any whose skin changed red.

Reed continued, “As a matter of fact, what would you like to do next, cat friend? I’ll give you a few options and all you have to do is say ‘meow’ to show which you’d like. Is that okay?”

I nodded, knowing that the thing I should do was sleep while the thing I most wanted to do was check on my Map. It seemed rude to pull up my Map screen while people were talking to me, though. The System windows were bad enough when they popped up against my will.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“One meow: you can take a grand tour of this whole cabin. Again, just…treat it as your second home! Two: you can take a less grand tour of the available bedding and sofas and such, to see where you’d like to sleep. Three: you can just…aah…” Reed yawned dramatically, though I could tell she’d been fighting to contain it. “Or you can just faceplant on that sofa in the den. We’ll get blankets.”

Blankets? Fun! Wait, how many blankets did we even need? Yeah, it was night and the skin under my fur was on the verge of goosebumping, but it was summer, indoors!

“Sounds like you’re the one who needs to sleep,” Bayce said. She then looked straight at me with a glare I couldn’t figure out and added, “What about option four: you come with me and we have a slumber party?”

I was still wondering about the red-cheeks thing. Initial results of poring through my databanks were inconclusive, telling me that sometimes blood rushed to people’s faces when it was hot. But there was no fire in the den. It may have been warm, but it really wasn’t hot in here. Unless I was only saying that because humans, unlike me, had a need to wear warming clothes. And slept in plush mountains of bed material when a cushion the texture of dirt seemed fine.

Anyway, I didn’t like Bayce nearly as much as Reed, but nervousness made me…curious. Besides, if Bayce turned out to have some ulterior motive, like if she was some secret murderer trying to kill me, I’d better find out sooner rather than later.

I meowed four times.

Reed was a bit crestfallen. “I’m assuming you two are just gonna hang out?”

“Yeah,” Bayce said, unflapped, “but you can come too! Oh, wait, you’re falling over yourself with exhaustion.”

“Yes, but—........yeah. Yeah, you’re right…”

She looked like she needed some reassurance. I had very low confidence in my talents in this area, but I’d try. Strolling over, I noodled around her legs, walking around and through. What cats called “marking humans as territory,” humans fortunately called “affection.”

That helped her brighten up. With a small smile, she looked down at me and said, “Thank you. You have fun with Bayce! I’ll have ample time to see you tomorrow. Good night, everyone.”

“We’ll keep it consensual!” Bayce added with a hearty wave. I didn’t know what she was getting at, since, if my definition of “slumber party” was correct here, I’d already consented to spending the night fairly close to her. But whatever, she seemed silly.

Reed frowned at Bayce. “You’re making it weird. Why are you making it weird?”

“Because it’s funny?”

“To someone…”

Reed bent toward me for a hug. It was going to be awkward, considering the size and species difference, but I was ready for it…until Reed stopped, backed up a bit, and gently rubbed my head instead. Wha?

“Y-y-you made it too weird, Bayce,” she mumbled nervously as she walked away.

As she went off, her footsteps echoing through the den and up a stairway, I puzzled over why she would do that when she’d hugged me so freely before. Was it just because Bayce was watching? You overly self-conscious humans. Meanwhile, Bayce chuckled into her hand.

***

So much stuff to think about! Strange things had been happening one after the other today, and I had a hunch it’d take a good night’s rest and a few slow days to truly digest it all.

There was Treasure (apparently nearby, probably underneath the cabin’s foundations? Yeah, I could just dig that up whenever), and I wanted to believe that it wasn’t just an old used dirt book this time.

There was a suspiciously fancy golden sword in my Inventory just waiting to be—thrown out, probably. Or sold for more gold (…that I would never use).

And I was a cat in a world with no cats.

No wonder I’d never seen bobcats or mountain lions or anything in the Vencian Wood. We were mythical spirit-beasts here, and that was what I meditated on the most.

I was beyond royalty. Trophy pet of all lycanborn and devil to all wolves, I was a hybrid creature whose presence called for caution, special gems, trails of smelling-salts, and, most recently, the clouds of incense now pouring into the kitchen by way of the den and making Bayce snort. That was on top of already being a chimera-like being who could also go humanlike sometimes.

I wasn’t just some boredom-fueled project by a certain goddess of nekomata named after a geographical feature. Well, yeah, I was exactly that, but also, and maybe by accident, I was in the same haughty ranks as gryphons and centaurs.

Bayce served me some water and a plate of rabbit meat (not as bad as a mug, not as good as a bowl), then went upstairs, apparently to tell Chora off about the incense smoke. That gave me a little bit of recovery time before she came back for me. I went through the den and up the stairs behind Bayce, and then a gray cat stood in the middle of a library where every cabinet was in mid-landslide.

It was hard to believe that Bayce called this a bedroom. If a pile of rubble still has a car on it, you can’t call it a street. Underneath one pile of books there was, indeed, a sad twin mattress. Along the walls were overburdened cabinets, desks, and shelves. Sloppy bulletin boards almost obscured the one window. The floor was clean-ish, in that a human could safely weave their way from door to bed to the closed closet without outright knocking over any non-floor objects. But puddles of fallen books and stacked papers spread out from the bottom of each cabinet.

After a few seconds, I finally noticed the one section by the bed that was cleared of all ready-writey-stuff. Power-tool-like objects on the wall? Potter’s wheel and a shiny desk? That little pocket had to be some magical artisan station. Maybe that was where Bayce made her cantrips. Then again, I also noticed, clipped to wires strung up above that area, little hazy photographs. They displayed frogs, mostly, plus a couple of turtles and a cluster of grapes. Were there grapes here?

“It’s not my mess,” Bayce said as soon as we came in. The line was so fast it was automatic. “Well, it is my mess. It’s kinda not, because most of the papers and books are from Reed’s mom, and she lived here on and off for forty years. But it kinda is, because”—she laughed—“not like I’m making it any better. Half of the stuff’s all mine.”

My mind wandered to the subject of Reed’s mom. What happened to her? Had she abandoned her work, or just…

The question faded from my mind. My closed mouth and calmly waving tail gave nothing away.

I looked to the window between cramped bookshelves, seeing the dark of midnight. Then I looked to Bayce, watched her body language. She was so proud to be showing me this room, yet also…not proud. Even though the place was messy, I could respect how much knowledge and history it held—apparently, forty years of it.

“So, the cantrip,” she said, her face becoming stern and inscrutable again. “Chora said you wanted one. Is that true?”

I could not tell a lie. I nodded and meowed.

“Good,” she said. “Because I’m pumped to start making you some.”

Please don’t hurt me, we don’t have to battle over thi—

Oh! Oh? She was okay with it?!

She must’ve sensed my surprise. “Oh, yeah, I’m pumped, actually. I’d much rather be making something for a person or animal I kinda know than for some ‘mysterious benefactor,’” she said, punctuating the phrase by turning her palms in spooky circles. “So! Stop me if any of what I’m about to say sounds like something you don’t want. Reading. Speech. Hand-eye coordination. Extended…human transformation…spell…ness.”

I didn’t stop her.

Bayce threw her arms out and roared, “If you can dream it, I can make it!! (Actually wait I dunno how to do that last one because I think nobody’s made it yet!!)”

“Meow!” I cheered. Just hearing that I could read more and write more and do anything with the sausages at the ends of my fists made my whole body tingle with excitement!

Bayce snatched a folder out from a towering folder sandwich. She swiped through until she found the right spell. Or recipe? Uh, guidelines? Whatever the term was for cantrip directions. Reading it took a pair of secretarial glasses and a lot of concentration. “Hm…hm. Don’t have that. Oh, we just ran out of that. Wait, really?”

She snapped the folder closed and turned to me. “Virtuous cat spirit from the other realms, I have some requests to make. Just to confirm, you would like to try the cantrips I’ve mentioned, right?”

Definitely. I nodded and mewed.

“And you like capering around the woods, it seems like?”

Chora’d been telling her stuff about me, hadn’t she? So maybe they did get along, now and then. I nodded.

“Then do the two of us a big favor. Hunt down some ingredients.”