Catgirl System

As Bayce bounced halfway into the hatch toward the momentous cantrip, I poked Reed’s ankle and, when I got her attention, pointed my nose curiously toward the second floor and made my best attempt at a questioning “meow.”

“You want something?”

I shook my head.

“You’re wondering about…”

Hm. I didn’t wanna transform just to play hand-charades and transform back. I didn’t enjoy that in pretty much any situation, but least of all in front of Bayce, who might make weird jokes about it—or not, but it was a crapshoot. I was just gonna hope that Reed would get my meaning and, if she didn’t, move on.

“About Chora?” she tried.

Yeah! I nodded.

As Bayce disappeared, Reed elaborated. “You know, she tries to keep to a routine. Sometimes she has no problem staying up late for a special occasion, but most of the time she would rather sleep in.”

“I can’t believe she’d wanna miss this,” Bayce said with a hint of a sneer.

Reed awkwardly scratched the back of her neck and grinned. “Would I be right in assuming that Chora warned you to keep it down or do it in the morning?”

Bayce sighed. “You would be. But—ugh! If she loves our friend like she says she does, why can’t she turn up for her—her surprise cantrip party?” Bayce turned to me. “Right, cat?”

I blinked noncommittally. Truth be told, I was…a cat, so I didn’t put too much stock in human social engagements myself, and I didn’t know there were so many laws governing them. And if even Reed the human agreed, then all the better. Chora could sleep in if she wanted, right?

Then again, Chora kinda-sorta asked Bayce to do it. Or compelled…or forced. Now she wasn’t seeing it through, even though it was her own idea. So on second thought, I could see where Bayce was coming from.

“Well, I can’t leave this door open forever,” Bayce said with a relaxed smile. She seemed to have moved on, so I would too.

Reed and I descended a flight of eerie stone stairs before rounding the corner into…

Wow. This was a weird science lab. You know how you’ve got cartoon witch’s cauldrons, surrounded by cabinets of herbs and hanging limbs and things like that, and on the other side you’ve got science labs with tubes and pipes and squiggly lines and huge dynamos, right? This was the horrific child of both rooms.

The passage already had the ambiance of a tomb, with craggly walls that hadn’t been touched up with polish, to say nothing of paint, since the dawn of time. The lighting was already a threatening red, coming from flaming-hot braziers that threw jagged shadows on the walls. It was already scary! It didn’t need all these terrifying contraptions blocking your way at every step!

I yearned to touch things. A bumpy science-spire the height of the whole chamber—five or six meters—came up on my left. To my right, a rocking horse with patchy fur and a fully exposed skull beckoned. At my feet was a heap of applesauce-like mush. Oops…did I crush that without meaning to? They’d better keep me away from the walls, where rows of wooden trinkets, windchimes, wires, strings, and hammers did their hanging. And all around us was that purring, exuded by no single thing in this room but by everything, a resonance. As soon as I’d entered, I got the sense that many mechanisms had to be running, pumping their engines or racing their minds or whatever they had to do.

“Whoops. That’s just some escaped slime. I’ll put it back later, don’t worry about it,” Bayce said.

Huh? O-oh, my applesauce foot thing. I scraped it off as well as I could on a burlap sack full of, apparently, thorns (ouch), then followed wherever Bayce and Reed went, paying strict attention so as not to trip up again. Reed was half as wary as me—Bayce was a natural.

She began to explain what was going on. “In the middle of all this is the crucible. That’s where we’ll dump the ingredients.”

“…’Dump’?”

“No, Reed, not literally. I can be careful! Don’t look so scared. This place isn’t even scary!” She laughed giddily, nervously. “Nothing’s gone wrong here in, like, years.”

“Actually,” Reed said with a mild smile at me, “nothing bad ever happened in here, until last month.”

“And I took the fall,” Bayce said, laying a noble hand on her chest. “Don’t make the cat think I’m a bad person,” she said with a smirk my way. I didn’t know how to interpret that…was it just an in-joke?

Reed took a deep breath. “Anyway!” she said loudly—or as loudly as possible, given the intensifying rumbling of the room. “Bayce, why don’t you show us the crucible?”

“Right right right!” Bayce scooted between what looked to my muddled mind like two mini nuclear reactors, and Reed and I followed suit.

We stopped at a single small pedestal. And when we got there, it occurred to me in a flash: this was the ultimate source of the rumbling. Not the only thing rumbling, but the ur-thing producing the rumble. Let me be clear, though: the rumbling was ten percent physical and ninety percent metaphysical. Resonancey stuff. It rattled my skull but mainly it rattled my soul. You get it.

As I stood so close to the pedestal that the top of it shaded me, Bayce stepped up to the other side. I heard her picking something up, could only barely see it.

“And this is—” Bayce stopped herself. She paused for a good long while.

I blinked. Reed blinked.

“O-o-oh,” Reed said at last. “I guess you want the cat spirit friend to come up and see it.”

“Ths energy’s not gonna self-generate forever,” Bayce said, tapping her foot with as much amusement as impatience.

Reed turned to me. “Would you like for me to pick you up?”

“Meo—”

“Weak!” Bayce interrupted. “We-e-eak! We wanna see the catgirl!”

I would’ve agreed with her, but I hesitated because…dang, did she have to make me self-conscious all of a sudden? I didn’t even know if Catgirl Taipha’s face and T-shirt were still wet or not! Bayce wouldn’t wanna see me all damp and catching colds.

“Okay, alright, you can transform on your own timetable,” Bayce relented. “But your other form is really frickin’ cute. Just wanted to share that.”

“Hey!” Reed cried. Then, weakly, she added, “Cats are cute too.”

U-uh…I decided to make zero attempt to accurately parse that conversation.

Bayce kneeled beside me. It turned out she was holding a tiny porcelain bowl containing the first two ingredients: some scales and some feathers. These had already been pounded and mixed together as if by a mortar and pestle. It looked like paste with sticks coming out—not attractive and not even shiny anymore.

“You can tell what this is, right?”

“Meow.”

“Cool! So I don’t have to explain it. I just ground it up. Next, I’ll add the few ingredients that I found on my own. Along with the poledust, if Reed will be so kind.”

Bayce stretched a hand out behind her. Reed set the pouch in her hand. Then the pouch was untied, the powder emptied out. Bayce hopped back into a standing position, set the bowl on the table, and with a frightening whoosh and puff of Spell, she made a pestle fly from who-knows-where in the room to her palm. Miraculously, nothing was broken and there were no pratfalls.

Then her other hand pointed to the brazier lighting her face, commanding it to burn brighter—how that worked I dunno—moments before grabbing the bowl’s edge like the steering wheel in an off-road racer. Her smile was…off-kilter.

“Alright, everyone! Now the excitement begins!!”

A long, long pause.

When Bayce churned the mixture, she did it slowly while adding her own hum to the mix of mystic vibrations. Her sound amplified things by the slightest degree. I could feel it as surely as a pin in my wrist. She worked with a steady, methodical arm, her mouth half-open as it would be in sleep, her eyes flickering.

Eventually she crossed the threshold from humming into words, or sounds like words. Even so, they flowed into each other in the same monotonous tone. I thought of holy chants.

Then it went beyond sound. As I was watching Bayce’s mouth, all the sound suddenly stopped—in the entire room. No sounds of shuffling from anxious feet. No sounds of breathing. Only pure resonance remained. And yet Bayce’s arm was still working. Her lips were still moving.

This lasted for only an instant.

Then everything exploded.

A brief, sparkling interlude of dazzling psychoactive particles stabbing suddenly into my eyes, ears, and core—my head and fur flying backward as if thrown back by a gale-force wind—a capstone incantation that I made out crystal-clear, but it disappeared from memory in the aftermath, a dream…

Things faded to normal. Even the resonance of the room was nearly gone, down to a trickle of a murmur. The loudest noise was the crack of the fire.

Reed had her eyes shut and her thumbs securely bolted over her ears. My own ears had a faint ache, yet I had no regrets—I’d just witnessed something miraculous.

Bayce looked like she’d hopped into a bomb blast. Clumps of hair had been blown back. Her bowler hat, having gone clear across the room, was hanging on a dynamo. And yet she was happy, and her hands remained clasped around the bowl and pestle. Below her chin, the steam of the bowl wafted up and out. A faint, pleasant, implacable smell was coming from it. The smell of magic?

“Now for the cantrip itself,” she whispered. She leaned over to another table, lifted up a plank of wood from the clutter, and passed it to Reed, who kneeled and passed it to me. I looked down and saw a suite of gemstones—nearly fifty. Next to them were a few strands of metal and twine.

Every miniscule gem had a perfect hole punched into it. One of these would go around my…neck? Or paw, or wrist?

“Choose your favorite,” Bayce murmured, and seemingly on command, the light of the fire changed, became near-white.

I studied the rainbow of stones in this brightness for a few minutes. It was so hard to choose—these were all so pretty, and this kind of question was something I hadn’t even considered considering earlier! Why couldn’t Bayce choose for me? Or Reed? Either one would be super-meaningful! What would I…

Once I calmed myself down, the idea hit me quick as thunder. I pawed a rough chunk of deep-blue sapphire and a loop of tan twine. Not to represent Bayce—although if she felt flattered by it, I wasn’t gonna change her mind—but to represent the Queen of the Night and the Big Weird Book, and the first thing besides my System alerts that I could actually read.

Reed rose and handed the stone to Bayce. Then Bayce dropped it into the bowl, and the concoction answered with a deep sizzle. Altogether, it sounded like any old tablet dissolving in water. The room dimmed back to the color of fire.

“Now we just let the stuff seep in,” Bayce said.

Oh, so it was the other way around—liquid dissolving…resolving? …into an object. That made more sense, in a magic kind of way.

Reed picked me up so I could see the materials at work. I got the feeling that the gray sludge I was watching bubble in the bowl was neither liquid nor slime, but a substance that could only have been perfected in a bizarre lab like this. Somehow the animal parts and stuff of mountain rocks—organic earth stuff—had been diluted into a form that was both purer and totally outlandish. Into the element of magic—no, the element of reading.

With each passing minute, the sludge “shrank” more and more into the sapphire. And then the last drop was sipped up. The bowl was left spotless. So was the cantrip.

She’d done it.

She’d done it!

“There it is!” cried Bayce, making jazz hands over the bowl. “Your first cantri—”

I transformed and glommed onto her.

“O-oh!” Bayce’s arms hovered in midair, stunned. “Oh, well…thank you, it was nothing, really…”

Reed—who’d had to lurch back to avoid getting suddenly crushed—burst out laughing. Wondering if there was something funny about Bayce’s face, I drew my head back. Sure enough, it was frozen in a dippy smile.

As I held her, Bayce patted me on the back the way a robot might.

I withdrew. Was it just me, or did she not appreciate that hug nearly as much as she led me to believe she would? I looked at Reed with a questioning pout.

“Huh? Oh, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Reed said. “I’m fine. And she’s just hilariously surprised. I think you gave her what she’s been wanting…”

Ah. I backed away from Bayce, shrugged it off, and decided that if Bayce ever asked for scritches or anything like them again, I couldn’t give them to her without being prepared for a terrifying reaction like this. Then again, maybe she was also surprised by my wet, hypothermic shirt. Darnit, I should’ve thought to take it off way earlier…

She handed me the cantrip, placing it gingerly in the palm of my hand. For my human form, it was small—too small to fit around my huge head and land on my neck where it was intended to be. But for the neck of my cat form, of course, it was perfect.

Hm…did Bayce think this part through?

Come to think of it, since my clothes seemed to be attached to my humanoid form but not to my cat form, would…would the cantrip be like that too?

Wh-wh-what if I just kept it in my Inventory? Would it still be active?

I took two ends of the twine in my fingers, wiggled them back and forth. Then I crinkled my eyebrows at Bayce.

“The twine changes size with you,” Bayce said. “I’m an anatomagus, dude, who do you take me for?”

I didn’t take her for anything, in fact, because I still didn’t know what that meant…but hey, that meant I could try it on. Lowering my head, I pressed the necklace against my scalp. Slowly, almost hesitantly, it lengthened. When I pulled it down around my neck, it made a perfect u across my collarbone.

…I now had a much more solid idea of what a u was.

Poof!

And now I was a cat again, feeling the way the pendant instantly adapted to my change in form, almost like a part of me.

And now I could feel the resonance, if only dimly, echoing from the sapphire.

It entered me, suffusing me. That “pure reading energy” was within me now. It felt like steely gray. It felt like the glass of Sierra’s lens. It felt like comfort in knowledge.

Bayce guided us all outside, then into the cabin and upstairs in search of books. Moving quietly past Chora’s closed door, we came to a big bookshelf at the end of the upstairs hallways. With the three of us moving together, I seemed to be in a mangrove forest of legs. The hall felt darker than ever.

But with my eyes, I could push my head forward and see everything. There were so many books to choose from…a terrifying amount, actually! Would I even have time to read as many as I wanted?

Because suddenly I wanted to read them all.

I remembered Sierra’s bookshelf. The thing she’d taunted me with! All the knowledge she had about Vencia and other worlds (and the dirt she no doubt had on me). All the freedom she had to explore that in words.

Well, Sierra, are you happy now?

I’d gotten the power to read, just like she wanted. Made in my goddess’s own image.

The names on the spines were coming to life. No longer as intimidating as the ink-black bars of an iron gate, they were familiar. Most, I realized, were storybooks, and some were textbooks, and field guides and world maps and family albums and nature magazines. There was a little bit of everything.

“…um, hello?”

Whoops. Reed’s voice came to me like one struggling through deep water and molasses. I’d totally zoned out.

“I think she’s having a hard time picking,” Bayce said.

Reed nudged one book off the shelf. My eyes eagerly followed it. “What about this one?”

“Why that one?”

Reed squinted. “Is…it…bad?”

Bayce squinted harder, defensively. “Uh, no? I’m just asking.”

“I just think it seems like a good first book. There’s no special reason.”

Bayce looked away. “Oh, um…okay! I’ll just leave you two to this intimate momen—I mean, regular moment.” She waltzed downstairs into the kitchen.

I hardly paid that any attention. I was reveling in the power to make words unspool in sound and meaning before my very eyes. Reed led me to the couches, and as she walked, she began to open Merianne in Otherland.

Although this wouldn’t be my first book—that honor went to that huge lightning diary—it would be the first one that clearly harbored no evil intentions. And it had pretty nice pictures, I noticed as Reed flipped through the first few pages.

But I had been wondering about this reading cantrip quite a lot in idle moments. The biggest reason I wanted to get to a book ASAP was no longer to read it.

As the first paragraph sat open on Reed’s lap, next to the watercolor of a girl at a riverside, I pored through it, examining every letter. Reed waited patiently, grinning. She must’ve thought I was merely excited to wrap my mind around individual letters, but really I was fact-checking against the new yardstick in my brain. I knew how many letters were in the alphabet, and I knew which ones I needed in order to say what I most wanted to say.

I pointed with the tip of my paw to form a message, letter by letter.

“THANK YOU”

It took a few moments for her to understand, but the answer came.

“…You’re welcome,” she said, awe in her voice.

“HELLO FOR REAL

“I AM A GIRL CAT NOT A SPIRIT

“MY NAME IS TAIPHA”

Reed turned to me, at first with no clear reaction. Then I found tears budding in her eyes. Why was she so emotional, so sensitive? Not crying because something was lost or sad, but crying out of pure emotion-ness?

Wait. I could ask her now.

“WHY CRYING”

“I’m not sad,” she said, though her throat was getting congested as the tears threatened to leak. “I feel overcome, sometimes. It’s just…we just…”

Bayce’s voice came bounding over the kitchen counter. “You two’ve been through a lot these past few days.”

Reed rubbed one eye. “Yes. And I hope we can go through more.”

“ME TOO”

With a few more rubs and a final snivel, Reed tried to get herself together. “Okay,” she whispered to herself.

Then, clasping her hands together, she bowed to me. Just a bit. It was a repeat of the bow she’d given me the first time we met, when I was a stranger at the door and Bayce was all but smothering me. It was our introductions all over again, but a touch more proper and a touch more right.

“My name is Reed Gnaeomi,” she said. “It’s an honor to be with you.”

End of Book 2

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