Catgirl System

“I think this is where we need to go.”

Chora was pointing to a mansion, one stark in the evening’s fading light. Well, only parts of a mansion, but so much remained. Wooden walls had been weathered and streaked, and underneath the arched and broken windows, the planks now looked dark and sagging, perpetually waterlogged. Roof tiles had skated off the parapets. What must have been weathervane on the central roof was nothing but a stubby iron pole.

I could still see that this place had once been joyful and alive, from the eclectic way its architecture slammed together: from an elegant base jutted towers, and from those towers jutted compartments. But whatever had been lost to time left gaping holes filled with dust rubble.

It goes without saying that everything was also rife with ivy, creepers, and nests nestled in windows, seemingly in mid-collapse.

In front of us now was a small pavilion, the cobblestones overgrown. The decorative pillars to either side of the short road were cracked and crumbling but still tough enough to stand. At the far end of it, just in front of a porch split down the middle and toothy with splinters, was a little stone statue. A gnome? A cherub? Hard to make out, from this distance and with this weathering…

It had a cheeky little smile. One that suggested a wink even if it didn’t literally do it.

Like it wanted me to dart in.

I was ready to set off exploring, but I had to remember that Chora likely didn’t have the same comfort with nighttime and darkness that I had. Also…

HP: 84% (297/353)
SP: 54% (158/293)

I could use a recharge, it was true. Though Air Cutter used less SP than any of my other offensive Skills, using it at all—and then following it up with the Slash that chewed through energy—had not been ideal, as it turned out. But since I had no more of those horrifying plimpberry pancakes to increase my SP, and nothing but the power of naps to bring up my HP, clearly the best thing I could do was take a good night’s sleep.

Aw…

Chora could see my disappointment. Or, rather, she could hear it, since I went “mah…” to express it. “It’s okay,” she said. “Come on. I’ll tell you about the mansion and we’ll find a good place to sleep.”

She turned and led us out, and we went leisurely off, closer and closer to the western edge of my Map.

New Sub-Location Added!

“That’s the lycanborn mansion,” Chora said. “Now it might as well be the magpie mansion. You’d think there would’ve been a movement to preserve the place or rebuild it… Maybe the lycanborn really have been petitioning for that, but they have incredibly bad luck. They don’t deserve that.” She shrugged. “Then again, maybe if it was rebuilt, it’d devolve into a tourist attraction.” She squinted. “No, it’d be worse.”

I curved around a boulder. “Meow?”

“Yeah, there’s places in the mansion that people from the village would use all the time for secret hangouts. Go into the old cellar, clear out the old potatoes or whatever, and have a rave. Or do money laundering.”

What village?

“And I used to think this place was the coolest too,” Chora continued. “The summer I turned thirteen. Bayce, Reed and I were all ready to do our first adult things.” She snorted. It was the first thing like a laugh I’d ever seen from her. “Really they were all dinky kiddie teenage things. We snuck out and we had plans to do about a million things. We’d be doing scooter tricks, we’d be detectives exploring, we’d find some old treasures the magpies were hoarding, we’d all do shrooms.” She paused. “Do you…have the cultural context to know what any of those are?”

Surprisingly, yes. I meowed.

“That’s a relief. Well, when we got there, we got cold feet. We’d never seen the mansion in the dead of night before. I’m sure it was just that we were scared, but we swore it was glowing like the moon.” She shrugged. “Must be why everyone knows it’s a lycanborn mansion. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the ones that got you were curious about it. Writing up a petition or something…”

Her words, and thoughts, drifted off. I tried to imagine the three cabinmates as teenagers, as friends, as tight-knit.

And I wondered about “the village.” And I wondered why in the world we were going west instead of east.

Then I put those two lines of thought together.

Ah, I thought, looking up at Chora again. So we’re going on more of a journey than I thought. Gotcha. I only hoped that Reed wouldn’t be worried. (Bayce could wait, she had homework.)

I also noticed that the chirps weren’t chirping, and didn’t seem to be lurking here at all. If they had, surely I’d have tripped over a den of them hidden among dirt and leaves. Had they all migrated to the south—all of them, like a single unit?

Wait! I was being a dingus again. They had gone south, once upon a time, but then they changed tack and went north to Mirror Pond, with the pond fairy—uh, pond woman—that scary person.

Ugh…why did I let that mystery linger for so long?

Probably because so many mysteries had been floating around me lately when I all I really wanted was to eat well and kill better.

Hnnnrgh! I felt like there was another mystery just on the brink of being solved, right there at the probably-lycanborn mansion of centuries past. If I could only talk to Chora and pick her brain more about it.

But we had more pressing problems to get to. More pressing and potentially more fun.

It was officially night. Cresting a band of rough, high rock, I stood excitedly on the rim. Chora followed after scuffing her knee. I hadn’t realized how heavy her breath had become, but it was true: just walking on uneven terrain was a chore. Hopefully she’d see it as exercise and a means of discipline.

Quest: Explore the Vencian Wood
Progress: 23% (7/30)

Our travels were about to get lighter, though. Before us was the open plain where I’d suffered my second death. It looked just as striking as it had when I’d first arrived: an open savannah whose quivering ponds might have been the droplets spread from a flicked paintbrush. With my night vision, everything was gray and ghostly.

I turned to Chora. She reached down, pulled out a compass she’d been checking now and then, held it very close to her eyes so she could see anything at all.

“We’re only about halfway there,” she said in between long breaths. “Will that be alright with you?”

…I was starting to get concerned about her. She hadn’t eaten, she hadn’t slept, and in the thrill of the moments before now, I hadn’t even paid attention to that!

Apparently she sensed the concern in my silence.

“Occasional fasting, occasional struggle—it’s good for you. Or, well, that’s not advice for you specifically, cat spirit. I meant the general ‘you.’ Humans, we cease to struggle and we stop growing.”

That didn’t make me feel better at all. In fact, it made me more guilty! She hadn’t swigged her waterbottle in quite a while, and I was beginning to realize she must’ve been out of human-safe drinking water. Surely if I’d paid more attention to the sound around me, I’d have heard her stomach tossing and turning like a ship in a storm.

Fine. If Chora liked suffering so much, we could suffer hardcore. But we would suffer fast.

One moment I was there and the next moment I wasn’t.

“Wait,” she said, too surprised even to scream it. But I wasn’t slowing down, and now that I was out of Chora’s sight, racing downhill and into the scoop of the valley, I was only getting faster.

I began to hear footsteps far behind and above me. First shuffling and tentative, then energetic. Then a whipping of wind.

Good. She accepted the challenge.

Whatever village lay to the west, she’d have to race me there.