Chapter One - Assess Adapt Ove-My-God I’m a Cat?!

First, assess. Second, adapt. Third, execute.

It was a nice and simple three-step method I had memorised for getting out of a pickle. Sometimes that pickle was a target leaving their location early. Sometimes it was a client deciding to betray me at the last minute before paying up. In any case, it was always a good time to think things through before acting, and best of all, it prevented unneeded panic.

Assess.

The first thing to assess, contrary to the body's own instincts, is the environment. What is going on, who is around, what the location is like. Assessing your body will be done by your body. You'll hurt where you're hurt, so don't bother checking yourself until you're safe.

I was in an alleyway. Probably in a mega city? The building nearby was... six floors tall? The other five and a bit? I couldn't see out of the alley in one direction because of a dumpster, and the other was a T-junction at another tall building.

The space was dirty. Trash piled in the corners, but old trash, so old it had turned into unidentifiable mush. It stank, but not the stink of an alley behind an eatery. So there was that, at least. The buildings looked residential too. Not factories but either offices or apartments. There were lots of air-con units sticking out of the sides of the walls and dripping water down into the alley in a slow trickle.

Looking closer, I had... a few dumpsters. Two of them were moved close enough together to effectively block the alley on one side except for a narrow passage between. There were several boxes around, and a pair of shopping carts on their backs, the handles broken and the sides cut apart to make a sort of makeshift lean-to with several tarps acting as walls.

This was a hobo-home. And a decently built one, as far as that kind of thing went. There were a few cans in a small plastic bin, the sort I might have gotten from a dollar-or-less store, and a few heaped blankets deep in the little home acting as a nest.

And so close it was literally touching me was... the girl.

I eyed her more carefully, ignoring the babble of babytalk.

She was in her late teens, maybe? It was hard to tell with how thin she was. Blonde hair, lots of pimples and scars from acne across her cheeks and chin. She was relatively tall, but gangly. Her clothing helped. A thick coat of the sort that I hated--it made noise whenever she moved--and joggings covered in a few stains.

She was somehow not too dirty, despite the raggedy clothes. It looked like she might have showered, or at least washed her face, recently enough.

Adapt.

I was now a cat. A kitten.

I... none of my training prepared me for adapting to this, but the first step would be to not panic. How would I do my job? Raising up a paw, I extended my new, natural weapons. Five itty-bitty claws.

Now, I'd played with kittens before. I'd had a few use me as a tree. I knew that these things could hurt like hell, but... there was no way that these could kill, not unless some idiot left their wound untreated for weeks.

My teeth were little better, and being a kitten, I could forget about any sort of acrobatics. Sneaking around would be both easier and harder, I supposed.

How would I even get a new contract? How would I pay my rent?! Taxes... actually, fuck taxes, that was the one upside at the moment. Cats didn't pay taxes. Though my cats did have health insurance, but I'd been the one paying into it.

Ah... crap, my cats!

No, no, I couldn't panic. Assuming that now wasn't too far away from the time where I died, then they'd be fine. I had a trusted friend looking into them every day, and my cleaning lady would change their water and clean out the litter. I paid extra for the service and she was paid straight from my account. For that matter, so was my rent.

My home would be safe for a long while. At least long enough to figure out how to get back into a more human body.

Third was Execute, but... well, I didn't fancy killing this child and I didn't really know where to begin just yet.

"Kitty kitty kitty," the girl hummed. She shifted over to sit on the ground, then I was unceremoniously pulled up and towards her lap.

"Let go of me!" I snarled.

"Oh, sorry," she said as she put me back down.

The girl and I blinked at one another.

"You heard that?" I asked. What came out was the most pitiful mewling I'd ever heard.

The girl leaned forwards again and blinked at me. "Can you speak again?" she asked. "Come on, try really hard. Like this!" She closed her mouth and hummed, her face going entirely red from cheek to ears. It looked like she was constipated.

"You'll pop a blood vessel," I snapped.

"I heard that!" she gasped.

Interestingly enough, I hadn't. It took me a moment to realise what was happening. "Test, test," I meowed, clearly not saying anything. I shut my mouth and focused. "Test, test," I said, this time without the mewling.

Telepathy? It wasn't entirely unheard of. Some warlocks could do it, of course, and a few magical adepts as well, but it remained firmly in the realm of magic-users and their ilk. There were technologies to replicate it, but I'd never invested that deeply into cybernetics. I kept what I needed for a job and tried to stay plain and organic otherwise.

"Okay," I said. "I can speak. And you can hear me, yes? I see you nodding, good. Now, if you would be so kind as to explain."

"Sure!" she said with a guileless smile. "My Anima skill hit level five, which is a capstone level, I think? I'm not sure. But I got a perk! One of the perks on the list was Spirit Companion, and I got to pick from a loooong list of them. One was Kitty Cat Mentor, and that sounded a lot like the kind of magical companions you see in mahou shoujo shows, so I picked that, and now you're here. I dub thee... Prince Kittybottom."

"No," I said, denying the name. "I'm a woman, first of all."

I paused as a realisation hit me... was I? Wait, no, I was definitely still a woman, regardless of the biology of this cat body. Though I did desperately hope that it matched. I wasn't about to check, not in the middle of a conversation. Naked I might be, that didn't mean I was without manners.

"That.. leaves a lot more questions. But I appreciate you answering the question I asked. That was kind of you."

She smiled warmly. "You're welcome... Princess Snufflebutt?"

"Still no. Do you mind if I ask more questions?" I'd long, long ago learned that one can be impolite and get what they need--sometimes more effectively than if they're polite--but once you've burned the politeness card, it's impossible to unburn. Always start as gentle and nice. The meanness can come out later.

"Sure! What do you want to know?" she asked. "I have all day."

"A few things come to mind," I said. "Foremost of these... what happened to me? But also, where are we, what's your name, and what's this perk thing you're talking about?"

"Oh boy, that's a lot. Uh, I have no idea what you mean by what happened to you? I used a perk, and poof! You! As for my name." She made finger guns 'firing' them with each syllable. "I'm Fee-Fi-Fo-Fasmine!"

"Fasmine," I repeated.

"Ah, yeah, just Fasmine. Fasmine Sharp. Everyone just calls me Sharp, and they often remind me that I'm not." She shrugged. "Oh, and we're in Boston Two. Like the old Boston, but worse."

"Ah," I said.

So I wasn't too far from home, actually. A single mag-lev ride away, in fact. My apartment was in one of the smaller cities. It was quieter there, and I didn't mind travelling for work if it meant that home was peaceful.

"I see. Well, Miss Sharp, it was nice meeting you, but I'd like to go home now."

Sharp blinked. "But... we are home?" She gestured to the cardboard kingdom around us.

"You live here?" I asked.

Another shrug. "Ever since I left the orphanage, yeah. It's not so bad? I know where to get a shower for cheap, and I'm still getting UBI payments! So I can afford food. In six months I'll have enough to afford the rent downpayment for a place of my own. But in the meantime, this is our place!"

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"I see..."

"And the perks thing, that's my system! Maybe you have it too? I just need to think real hard and it... uh... you know." She made squiggly gestures ahead of her. "Wa-wa-wa! And then there's all the skills I have, the levels they have, and I guess if I get one to level five, poof, a perk! So far I only managed that with Anima, though."

Oh.

Oh no.

***

There were plenty of weirdos out there, and I didn't mean permanently-online people who echo-chambered themselves into bizarreness.

I meant people that were simply abnormal. Sometimes they were the results of corporate black projects. Melding tech and humanity in ways that were fundamentally wrong. Cyborgs and machines that had some tiny speck of humanity left.

Sometimes it was more esoteric. Warlocks, people who worshipped the Eidolons, were a thing. Magic-users came in a dozen flavours as well. They were uncommon and not always impressive, but they had their tricks.

Then there were the truly wildly strange. Beings from beyond the cosmos inhabiting some poor fool's body. Wild scientific experiments that went wrong. Living magical things that defied explanation.

I'd been hired to get rid of a few of those over the years. It was always interesting work, because half the time the normal approach wouldn't work, and the other half died just as easily as anyone else, though they were often very overconfident the whole time.

What Fasmine here was describing...

I reached out to touch my chin, only to discover that it was harder to adopt a thinking pose when you had four legs and no arms.

"You have a gifted system," I said.

"Uh, I don't know if I'd call myself any sort of gifted," she said with a shrug.

That's not what I meant, but it wasn't wrong. That kind of system, that kind of magic, was rare beyond measure. It might even make sense that it could... basically kill me and turn me into a cat. Dammit.

The kinds of people who had access to this, the one in a billion, tended to either keep their heads low for a long time and then pop out and become too huge to fail, or they'd burn gloriously for a few short moments, changing the world with them.

And this little street rat had that at her disposal.

Actually, that kinda matched. The sort of person who gained this gift was never the sort of person who had a happy life. "What are your... skills? Stats? How does this system of yours work?"

"Oh, I have no idea," she said.

"Mrow?" I said. Then I hissed a little and tried again. "You don't?"

I started to pace, which led me to discovering the unfortunate truth that I was now exceptionally clumsy. Maybe that would get better once I figured out how to coordinate moving four limbs at once, but for now, if I wanted to pace, I had to stomp one paw down, then raise the other, then stomp it down too.

I probably looked like a cat wearing booties for the first time. At least it was amusing Fasmine who giggled at my pacing.

No matter, she did answer my question, and I would be improving.

"Well, let's see, I have a buncha stats."

I nodded. She wasn't going to tell me. She'd probably figured that keeping it to herself was the wiser course of action, which it very much was. I couldn't be trusted just yet and she'd already given away too mu--

"My stats are Anima, which I have at level five! Body, Combat, Cool, Magic, Protagonist, Reflex, and Tech! Uh, most of those are at level zero or one." She scratched the end of her nose, almost as if she was ashamed.

I ran through the list while making a mental note to insist that she not just tell people this in the future.

Anima was definitely a spiritual thing. Druidic magic? Warlock magic? I wasn't sure, but it was definitely a broader stat.

Body was likely something that encompassed her physical skill and health. That was simple enough. Combat was combat. Did it encompass gun use? Martial arts? Did it factor in combat senses and tactics?

Cool... what even was Cool? This child definitely wasn't, she looked like a dork.

Magic was another big mystery. What would that kind of thing entail, exactly? I only knew enough about magic to take out a few high-profile targets, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

And then Protagonist?

I eyed Fasmine again, and on noticing me staring she tried a smile. She was missing a tooth, I noticed, and the rest she had were slightly crooked. Did that stat imply that this was a protagonist? A protagonist of what? A Dickens novel?

Reflex and Tech, at least, were a little simpler to understand, they were far less esoteric. "Have you tried improving your stats here?" I asked.

"No? I'm not sure how I even got Anima to get stronger. It just did. I gained a point every couple of days, and then poof, level five and that first perk! Do you have a thing like this too?" she asked the last while making a vague gesture in the air. "All you gotta do is think about it real hard."

"No, of course I--"

Name: Caroline Daniels

Aliases:

Sarah Black

Mia Quinn

Sam Knight

Switch

Lucas King

Echo Four

Christie

Jacline Carter

Ghostwire

Princess Snufflebutt

Stats

Anima - 0

Body - 0

Cat - 0

Combat - 0

Cool - 0

Magic - 0

Reflex - 0

Tech - 0

Oh.

Wait, why the hell did I not have Protagonist? What was the meaning of that? And what kind of stat is Cat?

I shook my head and refocused. This could be big. More than that, it could be a path towards regaining a proper body. Yes, this had potential, but I felt like all that potential was unfortunately locked with the child before me.

A child clearly living on the street. "This won't do," I said.

"It won't?" she asked.

"No, Sharp, it won't. Is this where you live?"

"Yeah? I mean, for now. Like I said, I plan on saving up for the next half year until I can get an apartment! It can't be that hard, right? Winter will be tricky, I guess, but there's shelters for that. Oh... did you mean the lack of litter box? I, uh, can hold you on top of the toilet? There's a corner store in one of the buildings nearby that has a washroom. You need a key to enter, but the lock on the second stall has been broken forever."

I felt myself twitch. No, there was no way... no. I wasn't going to think about bodily functions, not for as long as I could avoid the topic.

This wasn't the worst situation... actually, no, this was about as bad as it could be. No home to speak of, no money, no job, probably a heap of illnesses just hiding around the corner. "You don't happen to have enemies, do you?" I asked.

"No?"

Well, at least there was that.

I sat down, which felt very strange. What was I supposed to do with my tail? For now I let to fall down, but the ground was dirty and it was going to get into my fur.

"So... what's your goal here?" I asked. She looked more confused than anything, so I decided to elaborate a little. "I mean, you summoned me here with a perk, right? I imagine that you have a goal beyond that?"

"Like I said, I'll wait and get an apartment! But, uh, if you mean my long-term goals? I'd like... a nice place to stay. With a bathtub. And a fridge. I'd like to learn stuff. Not go to school though, that sounds lame. And I want to be the world's greatest edgerunner. I want to be someone that people remember centuries from now. Like... like a legend!"

"Oh, is that it?"

"Yup!"

I waved my head left and right and tried to throw my arms up, only to forget that I didn't have any. "That's not something easy to achieve!"

Fasmine giggled. "Oh, you're so cute!"

"I'm not cute. Take me seriously, please! If... if you want to achieve your dream, we're going to have to work very, very hard."

And if I wanted to get a body back, then I'd have to convince this bumbling child to get her act together. She needed to be a lot more powerful, get much better connections, and I needed to convince her that she needed me through all of that.

This wasn't going to be easy.

***