I have very vivid memories of looking down from the 14th floor (really the 13th, but they skipped that one because superstition) of the building I worked in during my brief time in New York and getting terrible vertigo. Apparently, my new kitty bits came with some brain upgrades because twenty feet off the ground felt as right and normal as six.

Scaling the tower was easy with claws to dig into the mortar between the bricks. The more I climbed, the easier it seemed to get. My arms were getting tired but my legs were completely fine, and they were doing most of the work. It was easy to dig in with my toe claws when I needed to take a short break. Right now, I was letting my nose adjust to the shifting smells occurring at this height. I was about halfway up the wall and the pungent odor of the vats was being replaced with sun, grass, trees, animals, and about fifty other things I didn’t have a chance of identifying. Once my brain finished sorting itself out, I started climbing again, slow and steady. It took another half hour for me to reach the top.

“What the fucking fuck.”

I was right about the explosion. Probably. I couldn’t think of anything else that could snap off the top half of a magic tower and toss it around. The stone stretched about a third of the way across a clearing and seemed to point towards the massive forest that stretched as far as my eyes could see. I climbed up onto the top of the wall to get a 360 view. The clearing was a near perfect circle of bare earth, torn up here and there by what must have been one hell of a fight.

I could make out some twisting spikes of a shiny black substance erupting in clusters from the ground. There was another thing that looked like a cascade of frozen blue fire lighting up one side of the busted down tower. The dirt in between the weird, and probably magical residue, looked dry from up here, but I didn’t know anything about local weather patterns. I guessed that whatever shit had gone down had happened somewhere between a few days and a couple weeks before I woke up.

“Glad I missed that party.”

The forest surrounding the clearing was huge and obviously old. Old as balls. Even from this distance I could see that the trees would have dwarfed the tower had there not been so much space between. I sat down on the crumbly top of the tower and contemplated the sky.

Blue? Check.

Sun looks yellow? Check.

Three moons barely visible in the morning light? Gee, Toto, guess we’re not in Kansas anymore…

One of the moons was small and reminded me of the everyday lipstick my sister favored. One of the moons was a sea green with what I could have sworn was a yellow ring around it. The last moon was whitish and cratered, like Earth’s moon.

Immediately, I dubbed them Mauve Moon, Impossible Moon, and Moon Moon.

There were no clouds as far as my eye could see. Way over to my left was something big and a little darker than the sky. My best guess was distant mountains. Aside from that, I could see trees. The massive sea of green was more than a little daunting. I’ve never so much as camped. I like my creature comforts.

I glanced down at my reformed feet. I glanced over my shoulder and curled my tail into a spiral.

I’m a little more creature than I’m comfortable with now.

There was a weird sort of cognitive dissonance playing merry hell with my ability to plan and give a damn. From my perspective, I’d been home and eating dinner like…three hours ago. Now I was no longer human, no longer on Earth, and the very building blocks of the universe had changed. The utter lack of information to go on was one part terrifying and one part freeing, in a way.

I had no fucking clue. I was completely unprepared. It was like college all over again.

“No way out but through, J-”

Wait.

New life, new name? My old name didn’t really fit the fantasy aesthetic, or the whole cat girl thing.

Fuck, why was I thinking about this? Not the time! Go go gadget, Maslow’s hierarchy!

The climb down the tower was significantly more fraught than the ascent. The outside of the building had not been left unscathed from the fight. There were sections that were pitted and melted, making them impassable, other sections that sparked with purple electricity, and one whole triangle that was covered in runes that pulsated with eerie orange light. I studiously avoided the weird looking bits, which added more time to the climb.

About fifteen feet off the ground, I must have hit some sort of trap. There was a click, a grind, and suddenly the stone in front of me was lighting up. I shoved away instinctively with hands and feet and started falling. My spine did a thing. I have no other way to describe the instinctive contortion that occurred. My spine moved in a way human spines cannot, but it let me make the drop and land…like a cat.

It occurred to me that one of the things I knew nothing about was, well, me.

Time to experiment!