Reed and I didn’t get much of a chance to observe the full majesty of the mountain landscape. Over the course of our journey into the Kaugs, the grasslands changed so dramatically at our feet. It almost didn’t register in our minds that the boulders had gotten not only more numerous, but more immense, at once darker and more glittery, and, more than anything, more…pointy.

Nonessentials don’t really register when you’re running for your life, for fifteen unchecked minutes, away from a pack of raccoons that act more like swarming, starving piranhas.

“That was awful,” Reed said between pants, wiping her forehead. She was drenched. I would’ve felt superior for my lack of clothes-soaking sweat glands, only I was positively overheated.

Well, at least we could look forward to a refreshing dose of mystery mist once we stepped forward into the clouds.

That sounded more ominous than intended.

image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map75-1.png]

Quest: Explore the Vencian Wood Progress: 33% (10/30)

Suddenly when we looked back, all we saw were those foggy boulders stabbing up from the ground, growing progressively taller and…more like pencils. Technically we could see the path, too, and the grass, and if Reed craned her neck I was sure she could see the blood-specked place where that clamping raccoon cracked its back—b-but you know what I mean.

Majesty. And all this majesty had seemingly snuck up on us.

We were between those rocks and even bigger rocks, with clouds attached, and now that we were this close, we could feel the air getting a notch cooler, a notch wetter. We could also see that angry, hurricane-like churning. No longer could this stuff be described at all like cotton candy. These were bullet-speed spiderwebs of mist scraping and screaming across a canvas, ever-changing, of innumerable colors. Aurora in a form like molten fabric.

Didn’t look like the best thing to step into, but Reed traipsed on in without a single word of caution.

Her eagerness was a good sign in my book. I hopped in after her.

The atmospheric change was instant and total.

We went from a hot day on the savannah to a cool steam bath made bitterly chill by the strong winds. The clouds weren’t just mist once you got inside, they were spray, straight out of the end of a waterfall, splashing sideways into your face.

It was all incredibly refreshing. After the first minute, that is, which I spent hissing in strangeness and discomfort.

Visually, the mist was impenetrable…at first. It wasn’t just a billowy curtain—it was cloud cover, and it really did cover everything once you were inside. It swathed the bases of rocks in its multicolored soup, making the air thick, humid, and windy as heck.

The strangest part, though, was the micro-climate it fostered. In here there were different types of grasses, low, sparse, and mystifyingly gray-green. There was snow. It coated the ground in a thin layer that was just substantial enough to feel chunky.

I also spent that first minute tiptoeing around so frantically in search of un-snowy ground that I looked like I was dancing. Angrily dancing.

“I was wondering how you’d feel about this part,” Reed said, slowing down and watching me with deep curiosity. She’d put on an aviator jacket. “Feeling not good? Good?”

I was undecided. “Mreaow…”

“Not all the Kaugs are this windy and snowy, though. Would you like to lead the way?”

I looked up at her with surprise. She didn’t know where to go from here? And she wasn’t just eager to stop at the nearest big mountain?

But it was also a look of relief. Now I could go after the Quest Item without hesitation.

image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map75-2.png]

Current Location: ??? (S.A5)

I pulled up a close-up of this Map square. Just in case it would show me some cool streams or specific mountains. Or something. But zooming was no help.

Well, maybe things’d be different when I got closer to the Treasure? It was still a ways off, near the western edge. And it didn’t help matters that I still couldn’t pin down whether it was in a cave or on a peak, or buried under a random hunk of ground. Or in the hands of a camera crew.

Speaking of DeGalle dmAge, there were some clear footprints in the snow. But there were also places where other animals had come through and added their own, which layered on top of human heelprints. Plus, there were kicked-up snow piles and patches scraped away.

The road we’d been taking was practically over. Even if it remained underneath the snow, it was no longer useful to us.

So, after I calmed down and adjusted to the cooler temperature, I let myself meander. Reed followed all too patiently…or maybe she herself had never explored this place in too much detail.

There were so many crannies between rocks and steep mountains where the snow settled in dense valleys, veining up along the sides of the rocks.

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I gazed down a particularly deep one. Then I took a few steps back and, about to jump, preparatorily wriggled.

“If I may,” Reed said, “I-I like playing as much as the next person, but it might be dangerous to expend too much energy.”

Yeah, I saw her point. I wasn’t gonna Leap into this valley, though. I was only going to jump.

“Ah, here’s a better warning—there’s typically a bunch of worms threaded through the snow valleys, when they get that deep.”

…Noted…

But it looked so beautiful. The sunbeams, pouring down one moment and covered by shade or too-dense cloud the next, stood out magnificently against the dark backgrounds of both the white snow and the mini-mountains. It moved as mesmerizingly as a lava lamp.

Soon I found my first body of water. It was a tiny pool, a very very micro version of the kind of watering hole I’d have found further northwest. It was being slurped by a bluebird who’d apparently decided to exploit it to the fullest.

Once the bluebird flew off, Reed and I inspected the water together. She squatted while I nearly dunked my head in.

I looked up at Reed, saying with my eyes, Is it okay to really dunk my head in, or would you hold back a chuckle and then tell Bayce and then Bayce would laugh at me?

“Do you have any clue how deep this hole goes?” She put a finger to her cheek. “I’m a bit confused about it…”

It was profoundly dark water, greenish-black. Immediately around it, there were sprigs of grass and slathered snow. But no big, sudden explosion of vegetation. If the wind would stop blowing, we would’ve been able to judge whether there were fish way down inside, camouflaged but making the slightest ripples in the water.

Exploiting my deduction skills the way a bluebird exploited a tiny freshwater spring, I determined that this…was a tiny freshwater spring. Meaning the water had sprung up fairly recently from a source deep underground! Therefore, it was highly improbable that it contained fish—at least, not normal Earth-y fish, because maybe a sea gnome or whatever could’ve magically appeared there!!

My eyes glimmered with pride.

I told Reed, “Meow.”

She smiled! Then she frowned, because she’d asked a yes-no question when what she’d truly wanted was a what-how.

She began awkwardly playing Twenty Questions. “Do you think it came from a river?”

I shook my head.

“Do you think it’s…a spring?”

Nod nod.

“So it probably doesn’t have fish in it, huh.”

I shrugged my shoulders, which might’ve just looked like a random stretch.

“Let’s try to drink it!”

My eyes widened.

Reaching in with cupped hands, she took a mouth’s worth of water. The color was almost clear. She sipped it up as I lapped it out of the spring.

Delicious! Even better than the well and pump water.

I looked over to watch Reed relish the taste. Then immediately convulse in a shiver, swat her hands across her pants like matches on a matchbox, rub them together, and jam them in her pockets.

Served her right for not getting me a matching cat-coat.

“As you’ve noticed, there’s no snow on the mountaintops,” Reed said, “aside from those lines stretching up onto them from the ground. That’s because the Kaugs don’t get most of their snow from the sky. Rain only turns into snow when it hits the ground, and then it…just doesn’t melt all the way, especially not in those hollows.”

“Meow?”

“I mean the bowl-looking, valley-looking places with the worms.”

“Mweow.”

I decided it was best to get a move on. We were approaching lunchtime, but we hadn’t quite hit it yet, and Reed looked as game for more adventuring as I was.

We headed for a cluster of mini-mountains packed so closely together that climbing through was like maneuvering through a maze. Bushes and young pine trees clung to the sides, waving in sudden blasts of frosty wind.

I hadn’t chosen this route for any real reason, besides that it seemed fun.

I did have to stand and wait for Reed to wriggle through a tight space now and then, though. Once I even transformed to help pull her through and, falling together, we almost crashed into a bush.

At the end of that shadowy maze, we came across our first river.

The twisting band of black water rose and fell in the gentle hills and dips between mini-mountains. Even from a distance, we could see the backs of red and lime-green fish glinting through the calm surface. Rabbits were grazing along the green bank, their coats as snow-white as the land just behind them.

I wasn’t in a mood to fight nearly as much as a mood to journey. But I did hop after the closest rabbit, streaking across a shallow bend in the pond. The rabbit took off, and I barely nicked their foot…but if I’d been really trying, I was certain I could’ve done better.

“Good job!” Reed said with a bit of applause.

U-uh… I felt weird about having an outside party compliment me on random hunting stuff. Strutting and performing, that was one thing, but I’d just bounded toward that rabbit for bounding’s own sake. Were Reed and I both modest now? Though I wouldn’t call it “modesty” so much as “not being used to the constant eyes of other people-ness”…

Nonetheless, I strode back across the river, shook off some of the water on my legs, and rubbed Reed’s shin in brief thanks.

image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map75-3.png]

According to the Map, we were getting closer and closer to the mountains’ heart.

Handier than the Map, though, were my senses. Smell: the fact that I could barely, just barely, smell some hints of recent human activity in the paths less covered by snow. Sight: my wandering gaze in search of footprints and dropped debris. Most of all, hearing: the hints of shouts I kept hearing over the bends.

A particularly loud cry and a bit of a rumble reached us now.

“Woah,” Reed said, wobbling a little. “That’s got to be humans…”

For a few moments, I looked with her toward the source—invisible behind a curtain of small, frosty mountains.

But then I looked back at the pond, figuring, Whatever. Y’know what, I wouldn’t mind catching a couple of fish before we even consider approaching that curtain. I am carnivorous, after all. And these fish look really beautiful.

I moseyed on up to the water’s edge again and watched the surface.

“Cat friend, I…like the way you stay focused on life’s pleasures,” Reed said, giving the jankiest compliment I had yet received.

Seeing fish was one of life’s pleasures. But so was nabbing them. Swipe.

My claws thrashed the waters apart, catching a sparkling tuna with precision. It’d been caught in the central point of my vision, just as it’d been passing in front of my chest, my nose. Perfect alignment. Harmonic convergence.

That tuna shone like young turquoise.

I bit its head off right then and there.

Victory! EXP: 11% (327/2850)

Reed marveled at the catch I was eating from across the pond, but, tactfully, she didn’t say anything. When it became clear that I wouldn’t stop eating until the bones were licked clean, she got out her own baggie of snacking granola.

In a way, maybe we were trying to build strength before our confrontation with dmAge’s crew soon…

…but for now, it was just me allowing myself to revel in my powers. I caught four more fish at that brook—two more tuna, a snapper, and a long, slippery crimson fish—but none of these had been a challenge. And the last four fish, I wrestled and then let go.

EXP: 46% (1320/2850)

Level-Up or no Level-Up, and thankful for the chance to see how far I’d come, I decided to go out and see new things! And/or people!