Catgirl System

“What’s wrong?” Reed said, setting down her carving project.

Nothing was wrong, but she’d probably be shocked when she saw what I was about to do.

“Are you showing me something?”

I looked straight at her. Meaning, of course, that I couldn’t see her past the enormous text box still obscuring my vision. It wouldn’t go until I Evolved, and I decided to show her the process.

After all, if we were already in the same campsite and everything, and as long as I was going to change cat-types at all, she might as well see this weird thing I do now. Better for her to know than to be scared. Or try to stab me.

I chose my Evolution.

At the same time, I chose to Morph into a nekomata.

I exploded into not just smoke, but beams of light. I couldn’t feel my body as I changed, as if I was nothing but the ethereal glow.

When the light was gone, when my feet were firmly back on earth, when I was done Evolving…I had become more like myself.

My long, wavy hair had become plush gray. I stared at it, cupped it in my hands like it was water. For the first time I noticed how delicately my hair waved and curled. It caught the light of the fire, but it didn’t shine, exactly. It just had an aura of soft, collected light. It was like, like…

Like the nice heather glow of a gray cat’s fur.

Only seconds later did I raise my head and look at Reed. She’d been staring at me. Which part of me, I couldn’t say, because as soon as I looked up, she looked down at the dirt between us.

“Uh,” she said with a serious blush, “am I supposed to…did you want me to…keep looking? Even if I start to stare?”

She made this so complicated! It was fine whether she stared or not! I just wanted to show myself and have her look at whatever she wanted, for as long as she wanted. Fine, maybe I didn’t want her to keep looking for an hour, but that was getting extreme.

This humanoid body didn’t feel much like it belonged to me anyway. It felt half-body, half-costume. And even though I all too keenly noticed the breeze whenever I Morphed, I sure hadn’t manifested the clothing-based embarrassment that humans had.

…Oh, right. That was why Reed was blushing so hard, wasn’t it?

I walked back to the quilt, gave it a good shake, and wrapped it around myself. Though it had easily swallowed up my cat body, it wasn’t so big on a nekomata. When I secured it around my shoulders, it barely came down past my waist.

“Mah?” I said, tilting my head.

Reed chuckled nervously and raised her head again. “Better,” she said, “in some ways…”

I tilted my head the other way. “Mah?”

“I meant that…your body looks good. N-not that you should be trying to please me with your body!” she cried, waving her hands in denial. “You’re perfect as you are! Perfect as a cat, perfect as a human! You’d even be perfect if you were ugly!!”

Unsure how to respond to this, I settled on a little smile. This calmed Reed down…slightly. She was currently a mess of forced giggles, and I didn’t know how to interpret it.

Did my smile even look right? It was gonna be tough to adapt to human norms, including making facial expressions. Since I’d lived alone for all my past life, I hadn’t even fully gotten used to communicating with my own kind. Yet it was a challenge I was willing to take. But only because Reed was so nice.

Right after I’d finished Evolving about two minutes back, a text box had appeared to tell me all my Stat gains. I’d willed it away, but now it came back—as if it knew just when I could spare a moment.

Evolution Complete!
Orange Tabby → Ash Heather

New and Upgraded Traits!

Morph (Stage 2/5): Can become a nekomata at will. Somewhat limited time.

Human Language (Stage 2/2): Can thoroughly comprehend, and think in, the human languages used around you.
Now you have everything you need to communicate on Vencia!

Inventory (Stage 2/5): Can carry up to 5 item types in a personal magical vacuum. Max quantity of each item: 9.

Stealth: SPD increases when alone and unseen.

***

Level Up!

Lv. 8 → Lv. 10
EXP: 34% (510/1500)

HP: 100% (230/230)
SP: 100% (185/185)

ATK: 37
INT: 24
DEF: 26
WIS: 17
SPD: 33

New Skills!

Guard: Magically increase DEF.

Meditate: Magically increase WIS.

Th-this was…exactly as mouth-watering as I’d imagined it would be!

I had new strength, new powers (okay, they were shields instead of fun new attacks, but still), and if my cat math and cat memory were correct, my Attack had shot through the roof. Hadn’t it been in the 20s earlier? Well, now it was close to doubling that. Even my lower Stats had gotten a significant boost.

All of it disappeared the moment I was done reading it. Good box.

I turned my attention back to Reed, who was scratching her head and still struggling to get a grip on herself.

“So this is you,” she said warmly.

“Meow meow,” I replied.

“‘Meow meow’ back!” she said…again warmly, but kind of unintentionally insultingly. It wasn’t my fault I could only say a handful of variations on the same cat word.

Wait a minute. My Stage 1 Human Language Trait had gone up to Stage 2, meaning I could…

I could say so much now!

Unless the universe was about to pull some major schadenfreude on me—like making the only words I could say “meow,” “bark” and “moo.”

Well, I had to try.

The first word I attempted—the first official spelling-bee dictionary word—was “name.” After the name-related mishap earlier, I so badly wanted to share my name, and I sensed that Reed badly wanted to hear it.

It wasn’t the name itself that mattered so much to me. It was what sharing names represented. “Taipha” could be my way of staking a claim on my new home.

And…yeah, it could also help me forge human alliances. Get to know them better.

I wondered about Reed. I didn’t want her to turn me away.

What I wanted to say was “name.” What I actually said was “meh.”

This puzzled Reed. “Huh?” she said.

Augh! “Meh” was hardly different from “mah!”

“Neh!” I cried, this time with feeling.

This confused Reed even more. She raised a worried hand to her face. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Neh!” I cried again, shaking my head furiously.

I was actually tearing up at this! If I couldn’t get this dinky little word right, then what was the point of even trying? Why was it that I could meet this girl time after time and still not give her something as simple as a name?

“Neh,” I said, my head down. I sounded like a baby. I hated it.

At that moment, Reed understood. She stood up and came closer, beginning to wrap her arms around me and the quilt. “Hey,” she said gently. “Is it alright if I hug you?”

I sniffled and nodded my head the slightest bit.

She held me close. Even when I was a nekomata, she was slightly taller than me. I rested my chin on her shoulder, felt how neatly it slid into place. My ear twitched against her magenta hair.

“You don’t have to move too fast,” she said. “If talking is hard, then please, don’t feel you have to talk.”

But that only made tears roll down my cheeks.

“I-I’m sorry for asking about your name,” Reed continued. Oh no…now she was crying too. I could hear it in her shaking voice. “I didn’t know it would…”

We stood like that for a minute, the fire crackling nearby, the rain hitting the near-transparent tarp above. Our tears rolled down, and then they dried.

When I’d started crying, I thought there was no way I’d be able to distract myself from the idea that I might never share this part of myself with anyone, no way that I’d be able to get to know anyone in Vencia. But now time had passed, and now she was holding me. I found my thoughts drifting to the warmth of her embrace, then to the stars passing somewhere above the clouds.

Weirdly, I’d never paid attention to Vencia’s night sky…I’d always been too focused on surviving in the trees below. There were stars here, right? Would the stars look much different in Vencia? Up here?

With someone else?

I was the one who pulled away. Reed dropped her arms and nodded in acceptance.

She whispered, “Should I talk less too?”

…That was a good question. I understood what she was trying to do—if talking made me uncomfortable, let’s neither of us talk at all—but I did like hearing her speak, and I didn’t want to stifle that no matter the intention. The pressure for me to speak seemed to come from my heart, not really from her.

In the end, I shook my head “no.”

Then I bowed a little bit and tried to speak again. This time I went more slowly. I formed each word deliberately. I had to be an artisan, shaping my mouth around words the way a potter formed a bowl. And then I had to try again, with patience.

“Theh…theh…thank…you. Thank you.”

Reed sniffled.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

Crying and struggling to speak had done something strange to me: it had closed my dry throat up. It would be hard to speak again, for a while.

…Especially with my SP dropping as fast as it was.

HP: 100% (230/230)
SP: 19% (36/185)

How was it that the first time I’d Morphed, I only lost a sliver of SP despite walking for several slow minutes? Maybe it’d happened that way because Sierra had been giving me an easy-mode, tutorial-style push. Maybe it had to do with the type of activity I was doing, the amount of stress. Or maybe the reason was simpler: my System was just as capricious as the goddess was.

In any case, I wasn’t going to let the System boot me out of nekomata form this time. I could do it myself.

Poof.

And then I was a cat again. Same cat size, same cat body, with maybe a bit more muscle and bulk. The only major difference was my fur. That quilt I’d been wearing collapsed on the dirt around me.

“Was that intentional?” Reed asked.

Um…it was an edge case. I shook my head, since my transformation was still limited-time-only.

Reed put a finger to her chin. “So that form is limited in some way…”

I nodded. Then I flopped on the ground the way I would before a nap, but kept looking steadily in her eyes.

“Are you saying that you would need a nap to…to do it again?”

I nodded vigorously.

“Then I won’t stop you!” she chirped. It seemed like the more nervous she got, the louder.

But I didn’t want to nap—not yet, anyway. To show her I still had energy, I dashed around in circles, chasing my own tail.

She got it instantly. “Then we’ll stay up together,” she said. “I can’t sleep either. It’s not often I have guests…”

Maybe our conversations were still games of charades, but tonight I decided I could deal with that. When I was in the mood, it was fun—and after the rollercoaster I’d just been on, I was definitely yearning for fun.