Just as I was puzzling over how to set up Reed’s campsite when Reed herself was fast asleep (having just passed out both from sincere exhaustion and from sincere enthusiasm for helping me wrestle a bull), she woke up again.

“Sorry,” she said, clearly dazed. But I was sorrier that I hadn’t thought to nudge her head onto something, anything, softer than the flat dirt it’d fallen on.

In response to her apology—an apology for what I considered a sudden, involuntary and blameless fall—I just shook my head. Then I transformed for a couple of minutes, helping her first to her knees and then to her feet. The impressive carcass of the bull we’d slain had gone into my Meat Locker.

Which I checked out:

Meat Locker: 2/3

Gackern (Whole)

Nova Bull (Whole)

Texture: Stringy

Flavor Profile: Earthy

Tip: Break out the tenderizer!

What was with this highly specific item vault? Was there some kind of deeper purpose to it? Was I supposed to feed someone specific with it? Like a dragon? A village? Some large animal family?

Message from Sierra, the Goddess of Nekomata Hey there! Just dropping by to say I’ve been proud of you lately.

Sierra, the Goddess of Nekomata has disconnected.

Whuh?! O-oh…well, that’s nice o—hey, wait, you didn’t answer my question!

Ugh. Enough of that, I guessed.

Anyway, while Reed had been lying on the ground for like three minutes, I’d also been meditating more on hunting. Yes, that’s right, even more. It would be wiser after all to switch gears, at least for a little. Kill when I needed to, spare my enemies when the duel was done. I’d already been shying away from killing insects for a while now—besides a chase now and then, they weren’t fun to go after anymore.

Now, though, I was making an official hunting policy, and not just for fun’s sake. And despite it meaning fewer wild, no-holds-barred beatdowns, I felt alright about that.

As we hurried down the dark road, with Reed pulling ahead of me, I studied her. Watching her fight had raised more questions in my mind—or, rather, recalled them. I mean…did she even have SP? The only Skill-like things she appeared to have were the Advance Spells that she’d physically taken along. Based on my experience casting some myself, those consumed none of the user’s SP. They really were totally made in advance, everything needed bundled up together.

Therefore, humans had no natural Skills?

Except Chora, who…okay, maybe those weren’t natural. Not to say they were unnatural, but clearly she had to train. So maybe she was maintaining them, with magical martial arts. But that would mean they weren’t innate, right?

And humans seemingly didn’t Level Up. Whatever HP and SP thresholds Reed had now, they were probably hers for life. Unless bodybuilding raised them higher, or things like that. Probably? That sounded correctish, didn’t it?

I felt bad for her, then realized I was kinda also feeling bad for everyone back on Earth where Levels, Stats, and compensatory magic didn’t exist at all.

We stopped at a boulder that leaned so dramatically that it almost made an overhang. It was also five times Reed’s height.

“When I’m out, I want to feel like there’s something secure at my back,” she said as she fiddled with a tarp-heap of items pulled from her Inventory. “Rocks, mountains. Or, failing that, I want some uneven terrain. Anything but…flat flatness. That would just eerie to me. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

Reed’s words had the side effect of making the world around us feel ghostly.

Mist was passing, coming in tides and patches, and yet that haunted feeling had settled in to stay. As Reed took an interesting pouch out of the pile, she set her back against the boulder. The boulder seemed set against the far-off Kaugs. And the Kaugs were raging with clouds.

I scratched idly at the boulder. Was there any amount of poledust in it? Probably not, since if there was, Reed would’ve started picking at it by now. But it was pretty all the same. Even in darkness, I could make out strips of silver and dead-coral blue, under a veil of mineral sparkles.

The sound of a big tarp flopping out shocked me to my bones.

I craned my neck. I saw nothing. Then my night vision kicked in. I saw something! A big colorless tarp, the same one that Reed had used during her campout at Beacon Mountain, had flopped up and out of the pile of its own accord. Or Reed’s magic-inflected accord, more likely. I wondered if it still had any rain on the top, from last time.

Even without water vapor, it was gonna get a bit chilly tonight. That’s what Reed’s insta-campfire was for, of course! A wooden cylinder, set carefully on a flattened patch of grass and inside a simple ring of stones, transformed with an odd creak. It expanded, then multiplied into full kindling.

“Fire,” Reed murmured. The coal chip in her upturned palm crackled into an egg of fire. She lowballed it at the kindling.

For several seconds, it rumbled around at the base of the sticks, like an impish child hiding, running around under table legs. Then, all at once, the pile was ablaze.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Fire is a terrifying thing. If animals told stories the way humans do, they’d mythologize it. It’s a thing without substance, only heat and a ghost. Nothing uses it except humans and lightning bolts—the fingers of gods.

I was feeling unusually contemplative, and mellow, and wiped out. All these things fed into each other.

Groggily, I released the bull’s carcass from my Meat Locker and watched Reed go about dressing it.

“Sorry! It’ll take a while for me to get it right,” she said over her shoulder. “You might want to eat some meat of your own instead. Or…first?”

I meowed in the affirmative, as vigorously as I could. Since I wanted to get a taste of Vencian steak, and really savor it, I decided not to try picking at the gackern. (Naturally, that was not the only reason I didn’t start on it.)

I really, truly wanted to keep my eyes open. I was curious to find out what the process of dressing looked like, or even…was.

After watching, catnapping, watching, drifting off, and watching again, I can tell you this: she used three knives, and there was a lot of butchering.

It must’ve been two in the morning when she tapped me on the back to tell me she was done.

“Psst… Hey,” she whispered in my ear. Either it was my imagination, or her nose had brushed the very tip of my ear.

I woke up with a stretch. I felt very refreshed, and not just in terms of Stats. My mind was clear, startlingly so, and the whole campsite Reed had set up was clearer too, clear and bright. Somehow the mist was rolling in yet passing around us. Somehow I knew it was the strength of the fire that did it.

Best of all, she’d prepared platters of food for us both to share—multiple cuts in multiple ways, seasoned and unseasoned, a few still raw, mashed potatoes optional.

“I hope you like some of it,” she said with a modest bow. The bones of the bull were spread behind her, shining dull-orange in the flickering firelight.

I wanted to tell her, I will like all of it.

Because when you made it, you took your time. And you poured yourself into it.

And even though you may not love to fight, you loved making exquisite use of the victory you got.

“Meow!”

The buffet began.

I sampled everything I could. Which surprised Reed, because I had a habit of being picky or standoffish about food.

Tonight, definitively, once and for all, I felt that raw meat was not the most delicious of meats.

And for the first time, I faced the startling fact that having vegetables in combination with meat could actually make them both more flavorful.

I had a hard time admitting that part to myself. One pivotal step closer to these humans, and to having to cook my own food and make my own fires—another step away from my old home.

Don’t think like that, I chided myself as I shut my eyes for a moment, savoring the flavor of some well-salted flank steak. Haven’t you already settled this? You don’t live out there anymore! And you have a new home!

There was Reed, sitting on a rock across from me, forking a purplish mushroom into her mouth.

Between bites, there were moments when her mouth hung open, about to speak. If I had to guess why, it was because she had so much to ask me, just like I had so much to ask her, and the silences between us were beginning to ache.

But yeah. I liked the seasoned flank steak the most…

I put some leftovers in my Meat Locker, and Reed put others in her allegedly smell-absorbing Inventory. As for the bones, Reed took a few of them and encouraged me to claim what I liked. Of course she’d taken the horns, but she also sat with the rest for a while, for an intriguingly long time. For long moments she would close her eyes. Why, though? Sure, she’d handled the spiritual conflict at the Beacon pretty confidently, but it wasn’t like she channeled spirits or chatted with them…I assumed.

She turned and caught me staring. I flinched.

“Oh, I just like to do this. I just feel it’s right.” She was so bashful that it was obvious she didn’t have a coherent, logical explanation. I didn’t mind that.

She went on, “I don’t even feel right about bringing home trophies. If I use these bones, it’ll be for art and art only.”

But then she thought better of it.

“Art and broth,” she decided. “Bone broth’s supposed to be good for you.”

Soon we’d both eaten all the meat we were going to eat, and secured all the bones we could ever ask for.

With a contented sigh, Reed rolled herself onto the grass. Thud.

I blinked.

Oh yeah, my wish that we could spend tonight under the stars!

It was kinda thwarted by the fact that the tarp above us was a flat white. Yeah, I must’ve been really zonked out when I described that tarp the first time, because it wasn’t clear at all. We couldn’t see anything without also feeling a gentle patter of rain.

And yet, Reed’s eyes seemed to be tracing slow paths across that ceiling. She was paying this white roof her full, relaxed attention.

When I looked up a second time, the roof was gone. Translucent. The stars shone nearly as brightly through it as through air alone.

I walked closer to her. Carefully, as if she were sleeping or I were trespassing. Her arms were bent into triangles, hands behind her head. Between an arm and her side, I flopped down.

Then I looked in her face, wondering, Is this okay?

The hint of a smile told me it was not only okay, but good.

I turned my head up to the constellations. The comet-streaked, glimmering constellations.

The untraceable, intractable constellations that Bayce loved so much yet would never dissect the importance of for me—okay, why was it that all my plans for “relaxation” and “being comfortable around each other” just resulted in more questions bubbling up to the surface? It was getting annoying.

Would I have to transform for another thirty seconds just to ask what the heck the starsigns were, and whether their prophecies were fake, and how I could find them?

No… I was so cozy here.

For several minutes, Reed didn’t disturb the relative silence. Beyond the crackling of the fire, we could hear wingbeats, a single howl. At some moments we seemed to be floating on our own solitary island.

Eventually, she took one arm out from behind her head and traced lines in the air. I followed these lines studiously, but I couldn’t retain them at all. She might as well have been a conductor leading a silent symphony.

“My favorite constellation swings around in the fall,” she said, “but over there are two I’ve always liked. Cheelic, the gold-antlered stag, is supposed to watch over the harvests as they’re blooming. Really, he watches over everything that grows: berries and fruits, edible plants, possibly fungi too… And he has a wife, Cheyoran. They don’t make as many stories about her, but you’d think she should be considered even more important, since she watches over all the animals, when they’re in the prime of their lives.”

She traced them both in the sky again, slowly this time.

image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map73-1.png]

Above us hung two deer: Cheelic striding above, Cheyoran looking up below. The stars that apparently showed their eyes shone brightest in that slice of the sky.

I can’t promise I understand constellations. They just…look hardly anything like what they’re supposed to represent. What looks like a pair of antlers to one community looks, to my uncultured eyes, like four stars that kinda make a trapezoid.

Even I knew, though, that it’s the stories behind the stars that make their shapes come to life.

“Cheelic and Cheyoran are also part of the band of guardians standing between this world and the spirit world,” Reed continued. “They welcome spirits in at the height of summer. Sometimes they even lead them into their home, their den. Cheelic is supposed to be really gregarious, and he makes the spirits feel at home. And Cheyoran gets everything ready.”

She turned to me. I could tell only by the changed direction of her voice—my eyes stayed glued to the depths of the sky.

“Have we helped you feel at home here?”

Without hesitation, I meowed.

She did not need to know about the growing pains. Not until we could communicate the way we most wanted to.

But this wasn’t bad.

Without meaning to, I fell asleep leaning against her.