Kaori bought a cat from the catalog in her book and wasn’t surprised when it showed up in the same room with all of her other denizens. She was a tad surprised that the cat turned out to be a sphinx cat and not any of the normal domestic breeds. It wasn’t really a problem though. She bought the little animal for her experiments, so having it show up in suspended animation was rather convienient.

She tried to will it to move and the dimly glowing cylinder of white light moved where she wanted it. The cat in the cylinder of light was standing on the floor but as the light moved along the floor, the cats feet didn’t move. It was odd to watch, almost like a 3D animatic of a scene where the cat will eventually walk across the room.

When the cat was next to the first test subject, a human male who reminded her vaguely of her economics professor, she began trying to will the two of them together. She tried to imagine the two of them merging. She tried to imagine the two of them blending. She tried to imagine the two phasing into one another. Kaori tried every form of total and partial merger she could think of but the guy and cat just stood next to each other without ever moving in the slightest.

A bit dejected that the idea was a bust, she glanced around and decided to try the same thing with the other races. She started with the cat and an elf. Then a dwarf, a demon, an angel, and so on. The forced merger experiment was at an end. There had to be a way. She had chosen the cat because she had already met a cat-man hybrid. Anthromorphs was the proper word for it, wasn’t it. That’s what Descartes had called himself.

Next, was trying the few methods she could remember from anime, games, and manga. There was one where blood from the animal was infused into the host and dark magics caused the fusion. Kaori tried this by fueling the cat’s production of blood while sending the freshly made blood into the first guy. She then tried every frequency of magic she could think of but they did nothing.

Next was the merger of parts directly and for this, Kaori used cloning via forced parthenogenesis budding. The parts of both the man and the cat were fused with magic like some very twisted Frankenstein’s monster and then a large quantity of magically reactive potion that Foglat helped her produce was infused into it’s veins. When the whole abomination was presented with a soul and bombarded with light magic, still, nothing happened.

Tozenna forced a bunch of her growth into the veins of a new set of body doubles at Kaori’s request. The result was the same as the other experiment. It seemed that plant and animal were no more compatible than cat and man. Kaori was beginning to grow frustrated. This was not how that was supposed to go.

She tried the creation of a virus that would fuse the two creatures but the methodology was well beyond her means. When she considered it, she decided that a virus would likely be even more far fetched than straight magic would be.

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Next up was the mating but she was unwilling to do things the usual way. That was far too disgusting for her sensibilities. She knew that there were a lot of people in her country that would have jumped at the opportunity. Indeed, her homeland was known as a nation of repressed perverts on the internet. However, She wasn’t one of them.

The first step was to draw out the egg and semen of the two contributing specimens. The next step was to observe the interaction of the egg and sperm. Under magical magnification, the two refused to interact. The outcome was not unexpected. She then used a modified version of charm and illusion to present the sperm with the notion that the egg was the right kind and that did the trick. However, the penetration of the egg was as far as it went.

This series of experiments was at an end. For all her knowledge and effort, she was still unable to come up with a way to make the two merge. There was still the merger of essence but Kaori wasn’t sure exactly how that would work. She decided to think on it a bit while finalizing a few of the other problems and policies she had in place. Perhaps the answer would come to her if she didn’t dwell on it.

Looking over the work that has been done thus far on the terrain she was most impressed but still felt it was missing some element. She began to look more critically at the arrangement and shape of the islands and then it hit her. She was seeing something in her mind and since she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it, the exact nature of the problem or feeling of something lacking just wouldn’t fully manifest. Now that she knew what it was, she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her sooner.

The islands all had a sort of ring shape around the central island continents and there was a big spot missing from the center of the whole arrangement. The look of the whole reminded her of an impact crater and now that she knew what it made her think of, she wanted it to match up to that a bit better. When she spoke about it to the design team in charge of terrain, A lot of them stared at her blankly without comprehension but those that did understand all lit up at the idea and they began working furiously towards that end.

The new idea had all of the islands conforming to a more scoured out look but with erosion from weather over many eons. There would be a lot of cliffs that terminated on the side of the islands that was farthest from the center. Some islands would see a ridge of rock running through the middle of the whole thing but always the prevailing theme was a blast crater. This also gave them the chance to implement a major discovery at the very center of the island continents.

Kaori had already come up with the idea of having dungeons distribute new technologies to the residents. That meant that she would have to make the dungeons at least semi-sentient. Then she could have a deity in charge of dungeons and when one was being challenged by inhabitants, it could drop new weapons or domestic goods or even new recipe items in the loot in various rooms. This would encourage a steady progression of technology and would give the residents more reasons to enter dungeons than just coin.

The big surprise at the center of the world would be a still working advanced spacecraft that was so tough that it had caused the cratering effect over the entire surface of the world. There would also be evidence left in the craft of the proto-species that were the supposed forefathers of all the races that she wanted to place on the world. That brought her back to the problem of new species. She still had no ideas on that though.