image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map76-1.png]

One sliver of the Kaugs had practically been terraformed into a research base.

Just beyond this section’s borders, everything was twinkling and rabbits, the rocks touched by few tools deeper than the scoring claws of a high-Leveled weasel. But inside, things were busy and just a little festive. Somewhere between one and two hundred people were there, all in separate cliques doing their separate activities. Some ate, some chattered, some photographed. And several were boring into the rock—in one case, about to blow up what looked like a stick of dynamite to destroy it.

Reed and I surveyed the scene from behind a snow-buried rock. I heard snippets of conversation not more than twenty Reed-bootprints away from us, yet the part that stuck out to my ear was what seemed to be a faint chorus of tiny electric-powered drills, with voices all along the mountain edges.

This valley belonged to DeGalle dmAge!

Ah, and there were guards on the perimeter. Just noticed that. You could tell they were guards by the padded vests over their coats, and the odd weapons they had on them: crossbows at the hip, maces and javelins in their hands.

“Camera or…no camera?” Reed whispered. Her fingers were fiddling with the wonderful box. In the end, she caved. “Ah, the shutter’s not that loud. They won’t hear it. And if they don’t see us, they won’t catch this either.”

Cautiously she poked her hands out, and…click.

Then, like her hands were vipers, she yanked her arms back behind the rock. The photo soon slid out. The sunlight playing off the mist looked beautiful in real life, but on a cheap sepia-toned camera, it washed everything out. But still! I could see Bayce appreciating it.

“Meow,” I whispered. Wow, I had not been aware that cats could meow-whisper until that moment.

With a stifled giggle, she pocketed it. “Alright, enough of that. Time for the part I don’t like…”

We both took another look at the guards. Now I noticed another new detail: a sign was standing near them. Near their shins—it was a tiny little sign. And when Reed squinted, she could see that it read…

“DeGalle work zone, unauthorized parties keep out.” She went “pfft.” “I’m honestly getting angry just looking at it. If I left now, I’d be kicking myself for not doing something about it.”

But doing what about it? I thought, looking imploringly up at Reed, wondering what would actually work. Giving them a stern talking-to?

Sadly, that was exactly what she did.

She went up to the guards with her voice in a shout. With an anger I had never heard from her before, she cried, “What is this sign, huh?! Who’s supposed to read that?!”

At first, the guards just gave her a look. A pointed, possibly dangerous look. She may have been strong, but whether she could take them all on—even with my help—was beyond questionable.

But then I saw the guards’ eyes doing something peculiar. They glazed over.

A few seconds after their eyes unfocused, Reed noticed. “Even a fence would’ve—oh, I see, it must be ‘just DeGalle’s orders’ and ‘nothing us guards can do about it.’”

“Ma’am, honestly we’d let most visitors in if they asked.”

“That’s not the point! It’s not just about today, or getting in or whatever, it’s about the random havoc you wreak and keep wreaking! When’s it gonna stop—just never, until DeGalle dies?!”

I was worried for her. Also, I was…a little baffled by her indignance here. Whatever big-picture social issues were weighing on her, they just weren’t familiar to me, outside of what little I’d been told about Rare Hunters like DeGalle and their unsuccessful heroics. But more than that, I didn’t want any of these guards to be able to get a hit in. Or even think that they could.

“And you took over this place—it’s overrun—without telling anybody? You think that’s okay too?!”

“Ma’am, unless you own this land—”

“I told you, it’s not about ‘owning’ any—”

She stopped herself. Not only had the crowd in the valley lost half its volume…there was also a new character among the guards.

This had to be DeGalle dmAge. Her hair and outfit, while not well suited to chilly weather, was bizarre and complicated. In fact, I’m not sure Earth has any equivalents, so this will either be hard for readers to interpret or weird enough that you won’t believe it’s real on any planet. I’ll just try my best here.

So starting from the top, she had a sky-high swooping ponytail, brown until the tips ended in distinct trails of green, blue, red, and hot pink. Two tendrils of this hair snaked around her ears and back behind her, extending into…wings? A cape? Two tails of a scarf? Two non-functioning hands? Well, they swooped down into something, and moved more like fabric than hair when a breeze came by. These cape-tendrils were also neon at the tips. A bit of a sneer seemed frozen on her face, but pointy shades hid her eyes.

Instead of a shirt, she wore a flame-patterned chest-bob holder with a gigantic zipper in the middle. That zipper had to be securing about three zipper-teeth. Low-rise jeans were stacked with five chunky belts, and the cuffs of them were edged with more metal teeth. Around either fist was a gauntlet made of some kind of color-changing steel. The hues went from deepest black to indigo, and they seemed to hold stars. Watching them was like gazing into a video feed of a distant planet with a very dim sun. Each gauntlet cuff likewise had a huge zipper on it. Did they zip directly to her skin?

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

I wish I hadn’t just asked that!

Upon reaching us, she lifted the shades and revealed stern eyes topped by gorgeous eyelash-clumps.

I’d expected her face to either be totally lackadaisical or eternally furious, but she didn’t hit either extreme. She hit a different one: cool yet world-weary, eyebrows not furrowed but heavy.

“You remind me of me as a youngster,” she said, “same spirit.”

Reed blinked up at her. “…’Youngster’?”

“You understand the harsh welcome. My investors ask for a certain level of security. That’s business,” DeGalle huffed.

Then she held a gauntlet out, for Reed to shake. I knew Reed was fighting down a wince as she accepted it. And they shook on it.

Hm? This was getting strange, too strange for me to keep hanging back. I slowly made my way out of hiding, unnoticed at first except by watchful, quiet guards.

“You’re DeGalle,” Reed said, so caught-off-guard she seemed dazed.

DeGalle didn’t respond directly. She only said, “You’ve got attitude. Good.”

Reed squinted.

“What’d you come here for? Autograph?” She kneeled and scooped up a photograph that’d fallen to the snow. It had to be the one Reed had just taken of the campsite. Reed blushed instantly—an insulted blush. DeGalle raised her voice and said, “Guards, get my pen.”

“No! Not at all!” Reed cried, panicky. Before she could say more, she stopped herself. I figured she was realizing she could ask for something from a celebrity…and that meant she could practically ask for anything. “I-I’m…here to observe your research facility…under my authority as a resident and guardian of the forest.”

“How about that,” snapped DeGalle, making Reed tense up. Now that I was practically at Reed’s shin, I noticed she was gnawing on a toothpick. No wonder she kept gritting her teeth. “I suppose you’d just love a tour of the whole darn camp, now, wouldn’t you? You’d like that?”

Reed stomped her foot. “I would!”

DeGalle leaned forward into her face. “You would, now?”

“I said I would!”

Just when I thought DeGalle was going to reach over and slap her, and I was going to have to Leap in and bite someone, she laughed, in her face, with a huge booming hyena-cackle loud enough to shake an avalanche free. The guards didn’t seem so surprised. Reed did. She nearly fell backward from the force of it.

“C’mon,” DeGalle said at normal volume, striding around and past her. Evidently, she was indeed going to take her on a tour of the camp.

Reed just stared into the middle distance.

I nuzzled her shin, and it startled her upright. “Agh! Uh. Hello! What was that?”

“Mraow,” I said ambiguously. Truth be told, I didn’t know either—I definitely didn’t have a good read on DeGalle yet, other than, yeah, she was very cocky. In my mind, you didn’t taunt and test someone like that unless you were supremely sure you could beat them in a fight.

I looked around, then thrust a paw forward. May as well follow.

Reed followed her, and I followed Reed. And people’s eyes started to fall on my back. It seemed everyone had slowed down or frozen once the commotion started, but now they were tentatively moving and chatting again. Still, they gave me weird looks and talked openly about me, what kind of spirit or monster I could be. Reed’s body language seemed just as nervous about it—and about, um…everything—as I was. And yet I didn’t think it’d help any to Morph, only to have to Morph back about a minute later.

We began to weave through picnic tables and a big communal stew, its steam merging with a thin mist above.

DeGalle, still leading us, hadn’t looked back at me yet. Did she know I existed yet? Nah, she just moved on to a topic closer to her own heart. “This is shaping up to be ground zero of my biggest mission to date.”

“…You want me to ask what kind of mission, don’t you?” Reed said.

“You must think you’re sharp, kid.”

Then DeGalle was silent.

“…Okay, what kind of mission.”

“It’s a secret.”

Reed sighed aloud.

“Just kidding. Hardly any of it’s classified, take a look.”

DeGalle stopped walking and turned on her heel. Here, at the end of the lunch zone, was a long table saddled with all sorts of equipment that, in my mind, fit the description of mad scientist lab stuff. Interspersed with all the tubes were what appeared to be jewels in little jewelry cases, except instead of resting on pillows, they were sitting on the grainy mulch they probably came from. Like Earth diamonds, but honest.

I jumped onto a chair to get a closer look, nearly pressing my nose up to the glass of one jewel. This time DeGalle had to see me, but again she had no comment. Which bothered me! She really was a jerk, just a different style of jerk than the one I’d assumed!

“Check it out,” DeGalle said. “Magic stones. Cool, huh?”

Reed leaned in for a closer look. Seven stones, sitting around. As I gazed into the jewels with her, I realized that…I could take one of these!

It didn’t even have to be a useless petty crime—with my Inventory, I could actually get useful info about what DeGalle had called nothing but “magic stones.” Plus, if I forced them into the Meat Locker somehow, I could maybe learn some other cool facts! Like at what temperature they tasted best. Okay, maybe this had diminishing returns.

Ugh, if only I knew how to share this idea with Reed. Plus, while it was alright for me, a random wild animal, to be a criminal, what if I made Reed a criminal by proxy? That’d be awful!

But a second later, I was surprised by Reed’s reaction to the jewels. Leering up at the tall DeGalle, she said, “They don’t look like magic. Nor do they feel like it.”

“That’s because they’re in cages, smartie. Trust me, if I opened any of them, you’d be scared half to death.”

Then, summoning up big gestures and a movie trailer voice, she coughed, took a step back, and regaled us:

“Relative peace has reigned over this wood for thousands of years. Its local spirits have slumbered, and the few who appear or awaken have been friendly to mortals. Even war was not enough to destroy it for good or change its fundamental character.

“But that all changed, and it happened”—her tone made it an accusation—“right under our noses.

“See, up north in these same woods, not far from the great Clantisere Pond and its glittering waters, there’s a place where time begins to slow. A pocket of stifled air. A place where this summer never came.

“And it’s because…” She picked up a case. “Of these rocks.”

Oh. Yeah. Duh. Of course the suspicious deadly time-dilating thing that I’d been unable to tell anyone about (and too distracted by everything else to) was a prime candidate for DeGalle’s hunt. But…then again, when I’d first encountered the rocks, I’d assumed they were a normal feature of Vencia.

Weren’t they only in one spot, though? One tiny singular plot of land, and one little hole, and terrorizing a couple of squirrels at most?

Well, if it was such a big deal that DeGalle had to investigate, I guessed it had to be far bigger than that.

And even if it was going to turn out small, any blight on the forest would be, well, a blight. It made sense that it’d be best removed.

Quest: Solve a Mystery—The Rust-Colored Stones Progress: 50%

I looked up to get a glimpse of Reed’s face. Mostly I saw her chin, but a perplexed chin. She was intrigued, and so was I.

DeGalle’s speech took a sharp left. A sharp one, but a logical one.

“How easily could this be weaponized? Very. How many people are dying to exploit this kind of power—the ability to guide and stifle time itself? How many humans, and—tell me this—how many spirits?”

Her final words crawled through my bloodstream.

So DeGalle was trying to stop an insidious crisis of potentially global proportions.

And now that she’d put it that way, I had no clue why the rest of this planet didn’t agree with her.