Catgirl System

The Mapmaker Trait came with an ability I had yet to explore—not that I yet had a chance to. I could track anything on my Map for up to three days! And follow it around, chasing some kind of a little line or dot! I’d be like a submarine, except above water, not metal, and otherwise totally different…except for the radar, that was the main part!

All this time, Reed—after recovering from her weird laughter—had been noshing on food out of her Inventory, and from time to time she had picked up a whittling project and held it at different angles in the sun. While I appreciated the alone time she had afforded me the moment I, um, probably started staring off into nothingness with a glazed look in my eyes, I also knew that part of the reason she had drifted off to do her own thing was because we could only handle so much awkward silence. And only so much of her speaking to, essentially, a wall. A wall that meowed.

But I wouldn’t, I couldn’t abandon her for long. After changing some location names around, I figured I’d test the real heart of my new changes the next time I was in a state to hunt.

For now, though, we hadn’t really finished out breakfast, and I had only eaten a third of my beef-bacon slab. But really I felt too excited to go on eating.

I joined Reed on top of her rock—there was room enough for us both. She looked me over thoughtfully, her eyes lingering on every spot and speckle that now covered me from head to foot. When those eyes lingered a bit longer, I stretched and turned to show more.

Then she set her bowl down, swallowed down a bite, and made a hesitant gesture at my front paws.

U-uh, well, I guessed I could show those off…

Finally, a body part it made sense to be flustered about. My paws are among the most sensitive, important, fragile parts of my body. They’re attached to my flimsy legs—literally twigs. And they’re extremely soft and pliant. Sometimes I’d think back to a certain night in the cabin and think, I really am walking on sticks with marshmallows at the ends.

I knew from experience that humans loved, loved to handle cat and dog paws. They loved shaking hands with them. They loved squeezing them to death. I was confident Reed wouldn’t squeeze mine to death. I mean, Bayce might. But Reed wouldn’t.

So I made sure my claws were retracted and carefully lifted a paw to her. I showed her the back, then the pad of it.

Reed gasped a little. Staring intently, she murmured, “The pattern even goes onto your paw pad. It’s beautiful.” Then she looked in my face. “It’s all beautiful.”

I didn’t give her any sounds of affirmation, hoping just my patient face and my calm, slowly waving tail would be enough.

Seconds passed in charmed silence, a scene that couldn’t last forever.

I broke the soap-bubble moment with a new gesture. With my other paw, I pointed back and forth to my mouth. Then I wiggled that paw back and forth. Like a worm, but I was hoping it conveyed the surface of water.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I made too many assumptions about the food and drinks you would bring for yourself.”

Y-y…yeah, she was right. Like Sierra was saying, if I’d been a human reincarnated here, I would’ve spectacularly engineered a way to always have water on hand by now.

But, thinking about it now, how would I even do that? Cups and bowls didn’t just grow in the wild. I’d have to, what, borrow them from the cabin? Or make a simple bowl myself by Slashing a big-enough rock?!

Um…actually, those were both totally reasonable solutions. Me not bringing drinking water instead of, like, an unused relic sword everywhere was a huge oversight. But if I was interpreting Sierra’s words from earlier correctly, it was an oversight I was totally meant to make!

That’s a joke. But only halfway.

“And,” Reed went on, “I should have made it totally clear that you’re free to borrow anything you like from the pantry and closet. We have shallow bowls, spare canteens…”

I had to shake my head at myself. You have no excuse, Taipha.

Well, since we were kind of far out from the water pump and all, Reed took pity on me and let me drink from her canteen. A clumsy process, because she didn’t want cat-mouth or nekomata-mouth on her canteen. She “waterfalled it” above me (her words, not mine) and I, to get the maximum amount of mouth surface area possible, Morphed.

Most of the water missed. That’s all I’ll say about that.

As Reed produced an amazing string of apologies, I held up my hands and helpfully assured her, “Meow! Meow!”

At any rate, once I’d Morphed back (hoping my shirt would dry in the void where un-Morphed clothes go), and once Reed dusted herself off, we discovered that all this food and water had reactivated our brains at last. We could start the day!

“Hm…” Reed said, her mouth warming up for coherent speech. “You’d like to go straight back to the cabin, right?”

“Meow.”

“So would I, so that works out perfectly!”

She tapped a finger against the rock in thought. “Since we’re heading back on the road again, it would be prudent to do that thing I talked about…to have some way of communicating so we know how to approach battles.”

“Meow…”

I didn’t feel too sure about this because our ways of communicating were, in so many ways, fundamentally different. Body movements, quieter sounds, and certain scents were all out of her range, and while a cat’s meow is capable of more variation than you’d think, human ears aren’t trained to listen for everything it can do. Besides, I wasn’t a linguist—I couldn’t get that creative or efficient with it. Maybe “mrow” would mean there’s a bird ahead and “mrow-w” would mean there’s two birds, but…what if there were like…ten?

“We can make one sound when we want the other person to follow, and another sound when we want them to stay put,” Reed said.

Oh! Oh, okay, that worked too.

“Does that sound good?”

Of course it did! I nodded.

“And we can have another set of sounds, too, basic things like ‘danger,’ ‘weak opponent,’ or ‘rough terrain,’ so we’ll know what to expect.”

“…Meow!” Simple but brilliant! In fact, almost too obvious in hindsight!!

“And since obviously we don’t have the same kinds of vocal cords—well, most of the time,” Reed continued, “we’ll probably have to use different sounds, but agree that they mean the same thing.”

“Meow! Meow!!”

We spent a surprisingly long time deciding on which terms to use, and not just because Reed was also chewing and swigging canteen water. At first Reed insisted she’d be doing whistles—“those strong, crisp whistles where you stick your fingers in your mouth first”—but after many attempts, all she could attempt was a pathetic, withering high note. I didn’t laugh, but only because I didn’t have the ability to laugh at the time. Anyway, she abandoned this plan and went for short whoops and cries instead, sounds that could be loud or low, sounds that traveled far and fast.

On my end, I gave several permutations of “meow,” “mraow,” “maow,” and “mrrrow,” but somehow Reed mixed a lot of them up. To make sure she’d be able to tell them apart in the heat of the moment, I had to focus on speed, tone, and repetition. So in the end, yeah, it was surprisingly close to my original idea, in that it relied on repetition. “Meow” meant one thing and “meow meow” meant more of that thing, to oversimplify it.

First we settled on sounds for “follow me” and “stay put.” Those were clearly the most important, since I was always dashing off at a moment’s notice and I wouldn’t have been in favor of a leash. Next we pinned down “high danger,” “low danger,” “lots of enemies,” and “one or a few enemies.” The third set of sounds was for terrain—we didn’t go into many specific types, but we made sure to add “tight squeeze” (for stuff like pits and boulders) and “horrible patches of bog water” to that collection.

Lastly, we made a sound for “all clear,” the assurance that whatever the situation was, it was over and we could get back to adventuring.

Studiously, Reed wrote it all down. And although Reed confirmed with me that I couldn’t read the page, I still insisted on staring at it for minutes and minutes on end. She must’ve been confused, but there was no explaining it: I was copying the vocabulary down on the side of my Map.

While copying it was agonizing now—because I wasn’t copying words, I was copying several series of illegible symbols broken up with the letters that spelled “cat”—I’d have no trouble reading it once I had that reading cantrip.

Or…maybe I would. Because when I looked over the full results after ten whole minutes of staring, it looked like…a car crash.

Not even three-year-olds wrote this poorly. Except for the c’s, a’s, and t’s. Those were killer.

Oh, wait! Cats could experiment too! Mapmaker, move my latest notes to a new piece of mental scrap paper!

Latest notes have been moved to a new untitled document.

Would you like to rename Untitled?

What? Wait, am I renaming the new page? Uh, yeah, sure.

“Untitled” renamed to “Reed’s Tag Team Hunting Calls.”

Decent! And obviously, if my mindwriting truly was irredeemably bad, I’d make a new document at home.

I could dedicate some slices of time back home to memorizing all of them. Reed, too, because no way she’d been able to internalize them all. But I did retain what we agreed were the most vital ones: “follow me,” “stay put,” “high danger,” and “all clear.”

Then Reed sighed with the satisfaction of a job worth doing and took a long drink from her canteen. “Well, are you ready to head out?” she asked.

I sighed myself, and yearned for the water pump, because I refused to “waterfall” more resources from Reed. Because it was just nowhere near as cool as it sounded.

With that, we went back on the trail, our sights set on a mellower kind of adventure.