It didn’t feel right to Catnap in the middle of all this mess—in the physical mess of a torn wall, shattered plates and bloody trails and tracks on the floor, or the mental mess of whatever the heck the Sapphire Queen was trying to tell me.
If, that is, she even wanted to tell me anything. Maybe it was just the influence of the Bug Blade doing it, but she seemed to just be messing with me…
Messing with me in a way that might just throw my friends in the line of fire.
I had to warn them and tell them everything as soon as possible, but I also had a raging headache. Eh, they were asleep, they wouldn’t mind. I just hoped the Catnap wouldn’t overstay its welcome and nobody would accidentally step on my coiled-up body, then trip and faceplant in a blood-biohazard.
About four hours later…
HP 64% (381/598) SP 72% (410/570)
I felt surprisingly refreshed. I wasn’t fully healed, of course, but…it must’ve been such a stark contrast to my state before.
I’d fallen asleep right in the middle of the fracas. What I could see of the world outside the closest window, though, betrayed none of the havoc of the night. It was early morning now, and the sky was a dim blue. The trill of a bird told me that the enchantment on the cabin, and/or on me, had been lifted.
A furious urge to clean overtook me. In the absence of stain remover, I could only clean myself—so my rough tongue raked and raged over my blood-tinged fur.
I instantly regretted this!
Deciding to clean only my front paws thoroughly to start with, I then Morphed myself. Sandals helped me clomp through the kitchen without worrying about the shards. I grabbed a hand towel, clamped a hand around the sink spigot, and let it flow.
I wasn’t even that bloody. I’d been more ragged before, years back. Yet I felt dirtier than I ever had in my life, so scrubbing everywhere was paramount.
I did not know where to start with the kitchen and den, though. Just a glance made me want to cry.
Hence I changed back to cat form as soon as I felt acceptably clean. There! No tears.
Was anyone awake by now? My ears honed in and, as expected, didn’t pick up any humanish ambient noise. Padding up the stairs, I noticed every bedroom door was closed. Again, expected. I gave the shadowy bathtub a longing look, but that could wait.
For now, I put my ear up to Chora’s door…nothing.
Alright, then my plan was set. She was likely on the roof—and she had never minded me interrupting her roof time before. At least, she tolerated it.
I tried the doorknob with a human hand. Just attempting to wrangle it made me feel all clammy. Getting all my fingers to clasp around it was a feat of coordination I still couldn’t muster, so instead I clapped both hands around it and twisted with my whole arms. Dang, if a doorknob was this bad, I didn’t want to know how I’d look actually using the Debug Blade.
In any case, the thing popped open. Glad I wouldn’t have to clamp my cat-jaws around that knob and use the “twist and shout” method of door-opening I had once on Earth, I walked into a room I’d only seen in candlelit darkness for so long. Now it was…still in darkness, and without candles, but at least Chora had drawn the curtains back so a slowly brightening square could shine in.
Standing on the bed allowed me to reach the hatch on the door and tug the cord. The hatch opened and a ladder slid down—too fast for my liking, slamming the lower end on the ground. WHOOMPH. Well, at least it was over as quickly as it’d happened. I inwardly apologized for startling Chora…and anyone else.
As I climbed, I tasted the morning air. Hm… The breeze was fresh. It should’ve been refreshing in the wake of the savannah, snow, and swamps I’d been through in the past thirty-ish hours. But wasn’t there a change in the ambiance around here? Not like the soundless cabin, but like a second Spell, indescribably subtle, one that didn’t hit the senses as much as the…
Never mind, maybe it really did hit the senses.
My head popped over the roof to find Chora relentlessly sweeping, over and over, the same spot. It was sparkling. As if someone had not only poured on glitter, but poured it onto a glue-laden surface. And I knew Chora would never glue things to her roof.
All around her stood the typical rooftop things: workout equipment, a few chairs with a table and a closed parasol. A bluejay watched from the railing. Sometimes I’d seen sparrows hopping in a corner, the one with the least human stuff on it. There were none now, and I didn’t think I’d scared them off.
The glimmers stretched in a band, like a scale model of the Milky Way if the scale model was really bad. Where they were most concentrated, Chora swept.
In the middle of her sweeping, head ducked, her shoulders shook. She paused, looking up at me with only her eyes.
“You startled me,” she said. “And you came through my room.”
Oh yeah, I guessed the door had been pretty closed. But it was the fastest way to get to her, and I needed someone to talk to, right? I didn’t wanna be clambering up the gutters just to reach her.
“Well,” she murmured, “I guess it’s alright. It helps that you don’t speak—much.”
She went back to sweeping. I phased into cat form, walked over, and took a closer, ground-level look.
If Merianne had had bigger letters, I would have spelled out “STOP ITS NOT GONNA MOVE.” But Chora was determined, and that was her folly.
Again, the shimmers turned out to be squarish. And was it me, or did they seem to change their shapes before my eyes? Like tiny particles that assembled and disassembled and whizzed to one another faster than the brain could track… Theorizing about this any more would give me a new headache.
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Alright, watching her sweep like this was just too pathetic. I poofed into a form with hands and held up a palm to stop her. She took a step back and set the broom down.
“I know,” she said after a voiceless sigh. “It’s not just dust or anything like that. Still, um…it feels cathartic to keep trying.” She bowed slightly. “I’ll begin my exercises.”
That wasn’t my concern at all! I mean, good on her for healthy routines or whatever, but…instead I took her by the hand. Slowly—I didn’t wanna do any more startling right now—and walked with her around the rooftop rail. I wanted to survey the world around the cabin with her, especially the front door.
Yes, if I looked right at the doorway and focused, I could see a hint of a glimmering trail. Hopefully nobody would be stepping in that. They might end up ten meters away.
The other side took me above the kitchen window. There I saw fewer glimmers, but it did seem to confirm that a certain someone had tapped at the window, passing over the roof in transit. Why this glitter was localized around this cabin was just a mystery, though—had she warped in?
Whether or not Chora’s eyesight was as strong as mine, clearly she was seeing the same thing. “Who did this?” she muttered.
I pointed anxiously to the hatch, and gave her hand a slight tug for good measure.
Chora bowed harder. “Yes, spirit.”
We descended into the cave that was her room, and as she pulled out the board, I reflected that that would hopefully be the last time she ever called me “spirit.” The time of reverence was over! The time for action (and cantrips) was now!
Except I couldn’t stop her from lighting the candles. I tried, with a wilting “meow,” but maybe she wasn’t doing this to honor me so much as guard against the evil that had spread those shifty shimmers.
We sat with the spirit board in what could have been the stillness of an empty house.
Before we began, I gave the cantrip around my neck a poke. The cobalt gem was comfortable against my skin, the same temperature as myself.
“That is some nice jewelry,” Chora said.
Er, not my point. Well, seeing is believing. With my eyes peeled open to demonstrate that I hadn't entered a trancelike state, I shuffled the glass around the board, spelling words at speeds once thought impossible!
“HEY CHORA. MY NAME IS TAIPHA. I AM A CAT. NOT A SPIRIT CAT GOD WHATEVER. JUST REGULAR CAT. WITH HUMAN POWER AS BONUS? I CAN READ NOW. NOT IN TRANCE”
For the first time in a minute, I blinked at her. She went on staring at the board. Eventually she nodded, looking spellbound.
She whispered, “Right… Nice to truly meet you, Taipha the normal cat, with human power as bonus. May I apologize for the earlier indiscretions?”
“NO.”
“…Can I say ‘sorry’?”
“YES I KNOW YOURE SORRY”
She lifted a pensive fist to her mouth. “Got it…”
“OK SO EVIL SPIRIT CAME LAST NIGHT. MADE HOLE IN WALL. PRETTY BAD. STUFF BROKE. PLEASE HELP CLEAN?”
Chora squinted. Somewhere along the line, she’d begun to grit her teeth. Maybe she was just angry at the perpetrator, but maybe, just maybe…she was also annoyed because I still had to talk with the dang spirit board.
My mind was in a tumult! Not only was I trying hard to get as much information into as few letters as possible—moving from letter to letter in a way that someone else could actually, reliably follow, and with stops and starts between words, was so time-consuming—I was also just, um, not sure how to talk in general. This and my awkwardness with Reed last night gave me the sour feeling that I was just…permanently awkward. It wasn’t my fault I’d had like twenty-ish days with language skills and an hour tops in human form! Chora had to know that!
Wait…no, she didn’t know that because I hadn’t told anybody yet.
Anyway, communicating this way was way way better than nothing. I kept going.
“OK MORE INFO. LADY SHOWED UP AT POND. LOOKED EVIL. CAME BACK LAST NIGHT. EVIL. BEAT ME UP. LAUGHED AT ME. ANYTHING SEEM FAMILIAR?”
“Is it supposed to? I mean, we both read that poem about four ‘pond ladies,’ if that’s what you wanna call them.” She cleared her throat. “There are innumerable spirits passing through this world alone. If you tried to catalogue them, more would constantly be flooding in while the ones you had would be flooding out. Sand through a sieve. Maybe this ‘evil lady,’ whoever she is, she came back from a long time ago. It may also be that she came from the future. Spacetime is weird. But probably she came from the present. This is a tangent.”
“Meow?” I said interrogatively.
Chora shook her head. “You’re gonna have to spell it.”
“WHAT DO WE DO”
“About her? Or in general?”
“OK WAIT MORE INFO”
“Um?”
“WEIRD TIME ROCKS FOUND IN FOREST. MET DEGALLE. WEIRD BOOK”
And I went on to describe, in as much janky telegraph-quality detail as I could manage, the anomalies of the Vencian Wood that I’d discovered so far. The time-slowing rocks, the emptying mountains, and the book delivered unto me by a girl whose only personality trait I could peg for sure was “SHE LAUGHS.”
The visit in the night and the teleporting dust.
The golden blade and its silver counterpart, the fact that they both “MAKE STRONGER SOMETIMES OR MAKE WAY WEAKER,” and my ultra-secret, mind-blowingly brilliant plan for how to use them successfully.
“Oh, so that’s how the Drunken Dragon’s Blade works,” Chora said. Immediately she followed up with, “You might remember that I didn’t get any stronger or weaker when I grabbed the blade at all. If I held it, you grabbed it, and it gave you another terrible headache and stuff, I could just push you off. Then you could grab it again until it works. But you already considered that, right? I apologize for my impu—oh wait, yeah, no more holy reverence, sorry.”
The first human I told came up with the solution immediately. Of course.
“MIGHT STILL NOT WORK,” I said. “PUTS INT TO 0”
She leaned forward and squinted hard again. “Puts what to zero?”
“INTELLIGENCE”
“Ah, as in Attack, Intelligence, Defense, Wisdom, Speed? The Five Critical Values?”
“FIVE WHAT”
“Five Critical Values.”
“SURE BUT…” The glass hovered on the “T” as I paused to think. “I JUST CALL THEM STATS”
“Interesting. ‘Stats’ implies that they have numbers.”
Now I squinted. “THEY DO HAVE NUMBERS”
Chora seemed to be considering this as a philosophical question, not unlike after the lycanborn debacle when I first told her I was a cat, and she’d been like “wait, you’re a cat?!?!” Hm, knowing that cats were semimythical beings here shed some light on that…
Hopefully I’d get some of that light now too, since this made even less sense.
“I guess you could quantify the numerical strength of a muscle,” she said, “or the numerical intelligence of a human being, but really that could never be accurate. Brainpower and physical power are just too…diverse, too manifold, and too variable. How many numbers would we need to build an accurate simulation of a body’s worth of musculature, for instance? One for every limb? No, more likely one for every atom. Or every particle smaller than that…”
With furious force, I shook my head! “NO ITS JUST ONE NUMBER!” I said, jabbing the exclamation mark! “I HAVE 112 ATK CHORA. 2419 EXP OF 3150 EXP!!!!!”
“Why do you have two thousand exponents?”
My spelling was getting sloppy. “U MEAN U DNOT GET STRORNGR WITH SYSTMEM??”
“With…what?”
I racked my brain for a better way to explain it—before realizing that Chora’s reaction said it all. She had no System.
“NO?” I asked, just in case.
“N…no…I don’t think I get stronger with a system. Unless you mean like a daily routine…but I don’t think you mean that.”
I’d calmed down. “HOW DO U GET STRONGER?”
“By exercising. You’ve seen me exercise.”
“YEAH BUT U DONT GET STRONGER WITH NUMBERS?”
“I mean…I do know math.”
“OK BUT NUMBERS IN HEAD DONT TRAIN UR MUSCLES LITERALLY”
“No, because we don’t live in a role-playing game.”
Well, maybe you don’t…
“FINE WHAT ABOUT REED. IS SHE AN RPG PERSON?”
Chora gave me a look that I would’ve sworn was vicious if I hadn’t known her well. “No. And not Bayce either.”
“BUT I AM”
“Not to superseded a potential higher being,” Chora said, rocking forward, “but I assume that goes back to you truly, actually being some kind of soulbound spirit.” She pointed in my face. “Even if you deny it.”
“WELL I WAS REINCARNATED HERE. MAYBE RELATED”
“Wh-why didn’t you say that earlier?!”
“SHRUG! TOO MUCH TO SAY!”
Chora all but jumped upright. “What I want you to do is lay out every single atypical thing about yourself that might be even a little bit relevant. That should clear up your head, not to mention my own. We can then present our findings in an orderly fashion to the two other girls. That way, they won’t be hopelessly confused. Sound good?”
“Meow?!”