Episode VII:

Sunless Sights

The City of Irest wasn’t what people typically thought of when they heard the phrase “port city.” Such a phrase brings images of massive, powerful ships sailing into complex dock systems carefully arranged to allow for constant aquatic traffic. The sprawling, reaching cities, grow alongside the coast as though the ocean was their lifeblood - which, of course, it usually is. This is how port cities across the world lived and thrived.

This was not an option for the city of Irest.

Irest was situated atop a cliff a full mile above the surface of the ocean. Many who saw this wondered if there was a better place for the city to be built, but the entire triangular shape of the Bell Peninsula was unfortunately lined with similar cliffs. In the past, the natural monolith had proven an insurmountable obstacle for those attempting the journey into uncharted waters, preventing landfall of any sort by traditional methods.

Thus, Irest was born to fulfill a need. It started as a simple farming village taking advantage of the way the cliff face split up the river, allowing water to be easily irrigated to more fields. Civilization advanced, and as leisure gave way to thrill-seeking, ropes began to trail down the cliffs. The city invested in ports, but not in the traditional sense of the word. Tiny ropes gave way to massive docks, jutting off of the cliff like great steel teeth. They were large enough to service airships, but of course, a different kind of customer took the most interest.

This area of the world was important to trade, a naval nexus between two highly disparate sections of the world. However, the cliffs offered no sustenance - a barren underbelly hundreds of miles long.

Given time and opportunity, though, innovation always takes the reins. The ropes grew longer, and the ships grew taller, and eventually even a simpleton could put it together.

By the present day, elevators lined the coast, lifted up and down by refined steel cable hung from the docks, shifting along industrial pulley systems to carry people, goods, and much more. It wasn’t the most efficient of ports, but the existence of a port here at all was a miracle - or perhaps a testament to ingenuity.

With the docks guiding growth, the city itself took an interesting path. Rather than spreading out, Irest spread down. Carving out the cliff like some creeping vines, the lowest levels paradoxically became the newest ones, a new take on the usual sedimentary growth of cities. As the waterfall cascaded down the cliff, people walked behind it like it was the most normal thing in the world. Which, to them, it was. Were the sky not obscured by a sheen of watery torrent, it would have been cause for alarm.

Within these cliff-dwellings of this great bastion of civilization, there were many fantastical sights. Goods brought back from the largely unknown lands to the East, performers of every shape and species, and every modern convenience few cities this far from the developed nations had.

There were several malls. In one of these malls was a large clothing store. And in this clothing store, there was a cashier who was really annoyed that there was enough modern infrastructure in Irest to not only allow, but mandate credit card use.

“My card can’t be declined!” She shouted, slamming her fist on the countertop. “I work here! I can buy a dress if I want!” It was fortunate it was early enough in the morning that there was currently no one in the store since anyone would have thought the outburst had come from a spoiled brat. However, the cashier couldn’t be as young as she looked, since she was at least of the legal working age, despite having the physical appearance of someone who thought being a “teenager” was a recently received badge of honor.

She angrily held up the teal dress at the cash register. It was a color she found most beautiful—pale teal, matching her hair exactly. It was such a rare color to see on decent clothing her size, and, as such, she had to have it. It even had pointed shoulders! She loved pointed shoulders! But no, her card was declined…

Her left eye twitched. She picked up the card in her hand, planning to smash it on the ground into a million tiny pieces for daring to make her life irksome.

Then she realized it wasn’t a credit card in her hand. It was that dumb card she’d been sent in the mail by a spam company that wanted to be her credit card company. The dumb thing wasn’t even activated yet, and never would be if she had anything to say about it. Why she had kept it, she had no idea.

With a sigh, she dug out her wallet and removed her actual credit card, running it through the register and completing her purchase. She slung the teal dress over her shoulder and slumped forward, dragging her side ponytail over the counter and letting out a deep groan. “What am I doing with my life…?”

She examined the sleek, red gloves on her hands. Smooth, featureless, and comfortable in a way only a garment designed for a specific person could be. These gloves had meant something, once.

It almost felt like a dream, standing here now, having just completed a shouting match with a cash register.

There was a soft bing noise that let the cashier know a customer had just walked in. She didn’t even try to put up an enthusiastic smile. “Hello and welcome to Bangle Jangle, world of wondrous woolen fabrics and many others. How may I help you today?”

The soft brown eyes of a girl locked with her own. “…Aren’t you a little young to be a cashier?”

The cashier grunted. “Aren’t you a little young to be carrying around an entire house?” She gestured at the massive backpack adorned with various survival supplies, a bow, and what she was pretty sure was a collapsible tent.

“No, I mean, are you the actual cashier? I need to buy a new outfit.”

The cashier examined the girl’s clothes, finding that her sleeveless shirt was far too small for her and filled with more than a few holes at that. “Geez, how long have you been wearing that thing?”

“I don’t really know,” the girl admitted.

The cashier nodded in understanding. She knew what that felt like. “Well, yes, I am the cashier.” She pointed at the name on her bland, white uniform. “See? Jenny.”

The girl nodded. “Amaris.”

“Now it’s my turn to ask a question…” Jenny leaned in, pressing her forearm into the counter. “How are you going to pay?”

Amaris gave Jenny a smug smirk, flipping a solid gold coin onto the counter. “Will this work?”

Jenny snorted. “Kid, I would love it if that worked, but we’ve got this card requirement policy now, something about counterfeit protection.”

“It’s going to be worth more than the clothes, obviously. You could just pay for the clothes with your card and I’d give you the coin for the service.”

Jenny was fairly certain she wasn’t supposed to do that and the manager would throw a fit if he found out.

Screw that guy.

“Make it two coins and you got yourself a deal,” Jenny said, pointing expectantly at the coin already on the counter. With a shrug, Amaris flipped a coin over her back, kicking her leg back at just the right angle to land it next to her first payment.

Jenny whistled. “Coordinated.”

“Thanks. It helps a lot out there.” Without another word, she shuffled off to the children’s section to find some suitable clothing. She must have known exactly what she wanted for she came back to the register not fifteen minutes later, wearing a long sleeveless periwinkle shirt without a design, some rugged black pants, and a pair of industrial hiking boots. Her old shirt was still on her outfit, though, hanging from her hip, displaying the mathematical function proudly.

Amaris also threw two identical shirts and pants onto the counter, along with some loose underwear and some socks. “Three shirts, three pants, three pairs of underwear, six socks, and these boots.” She flicked a third coin to Jenny. “Good enough?”

“Good enough,” Jenny said, twirling her card and ringing her up. “That’ll be… oh who cares, you sure don’t.”

Amaris was already folding up the extra clothes neatly into a bundle that she tied up with rope and what might have been a pillowcase, hanging it off the side of her backpack.

“Don’t you ever get tired of carrying that thing?”

“Used to,” Amaris admitted. “Not anymore.”

Jenny whistled. “You put grown men to shame.”

Amaris gave her a coy smile. “I know. I have experience.” She turned, waving as she went. “Bye, thanks for the help!”

“Bye,” Jenny said, scooping up the gold coins. The three dots of color reflected in her eyes. Silence returned to the store. A moment of fleeting interest, over. With a sigh, Jenny lazily leaned forward on the counter once more. That was probably the most interesting thing that was going to happen to her today.

That thought was put to rest when Amaris ran back into the store at full speed, scrambling as though her life depended on it. “Get down!” she shouted to Jenny as she jumped into a coat rack to hide.

Jenny did not get down. She turned to look directly at what Amaris was running away from.

The first thing that struck Jenny were the eyes. Hundreds of them seemed to pour through the sliding glass door, until with a creaking groan the mechanics failed and it was shoved aside to shatter on the ground. Each one seemed to fix onto Jenny almost instantly, colored a horrible, maddening red. They came from a mess of what looked like the butcher’s scraps - until Jenny realized they were actually razor-thin, glistening tendons.

The entire creature swayed like a liquid, crooking back and forth with a sound like a mop being sashayed across a dirty, wet floor. Sinking into the room, its seemingly fleshy appearance was betrayed as the tendons scraped past a clothing rack, burning it away and leaving behind a torn, scattered mess of metal.

Jenny inhaled to take a breath - a mistake, as she coughed out the scent of death. Like some mad summer dream, it left behind an aftertaste of overwhelming butterscotch.

Jenny raised a finger. “You are one of the ugliest things I have ever seen, and that’s saying something.”

The creature rolled past her, largely uncaring. One of its razor-wire tendons slicing into her wrist, lobbing off her hand in one effortless swing.

Jenny leaned over the counter to look at her severed hand, lying lifeless on the ground.

“Been a while since that’s happened,” Jenny commented. Flexing her wrist, she inspected the hand that’d been attacked—already almost good as new, though the glove hadn’t come back yet. Maybe the regenerations were getting slower… or she was getting more impatient. She looked up; noting that the creature was on a march toward the coat rack Amaris was hiding in.

“You chose the wrong place to do this, stalky,” Jenny announced. She jumped onto the counter and pulled back her fist. For the first time in… wow, had it been that long?—she felt a buildup of heat within her grip. Searing flame erupted around her fist, an explosion of energy she quickly slammed into the roiling flesh of the beast. Its many limbs reacted, cutting up her arm into a million pieces, but that didn’t matter. She grew a new one—though the sleeve of her uniform didn’t regenerate. Her discarded hand was still aflame, searing the creature with more force than a simple punch should have had behind it. Revealed by the crushing force, the creature’s center looked like a rolling mass of crushed brain matter—now folded in on itself, turning into a charred chip as it fell down, lifeless.

“Huh, easier than expected…” Jenny shrugged before clapping her hands. “Once again, Jenny has saved the day!”

“We need to run!” Amaris shouted, jumping out of the coat rack and grabbing Jenny’s arm.

“Wh-what? Why?” In her confusion—and shock at the sheer amount of strength in Amaris’ grip—she let herself be dragged along.

“The brain is just a cohesion matrix, the eyes are the actual creatures!”

Jenny glanced back. Those eyes that she hadn’t crushed had suddenly grown eight spindly legs and were skittering after them with a mad determination.

Jenny blinked. “…I have to admit, that’s a neat trick.”

“Stop admiring the enemy and run!”

A snake poked its head out of the backpack and hissed at Jenny.

“There’s a snake in your backpack,” Jenny observed.

“Oh for the… don’t you understand the danger we’re in!?”

Jenny paused. “Right, danger. That thing I’m never in.” For Amaris’ sake, she picked up the pace. She may have been invincible, but the people around her weren’t.

Sometimes she forgot that most people couldn’t just regrow limbs at the drop of a hat.

“So… how come the spider eyes are after you, kid?”

“I killed their mother.”

“…Excuse me?”

“She was trying to eat me!”

At this comment, Jenny broke out into a huge, glittering grin. “Amaris, I think you and I are going to get along just fine.”

“Less talking, more running!”

The snake hissed, as if to punctuate the thought. Good snake.

~~~

Amaris stopped running when she heard Jenny’s breathing start to become ragged. Need to remember, not everyone has my endurance. She steered them into a side street deep within Irest’s cliff face. Even though the sun was high in the sky, it was impossible to tell this deep in the city, so everything was lit with artificial lampposts. Given how there were a large number of people walking around as though nothing were wrong, it was probably safe to assume none of the eye spiders were close by.

She allowed herself to stop, breathing hard, but not gasping for lungfuls of air like Jenny was. Cautiously, Amaris turned around to examine Jenny. The girl was short, shorter than her, and yet looked slightly older. However, she didn’t act like a kid and was apparently legally allowed to work as a cashier. Then there was the whole thing with magic punches and being able to regrow limbs without breaking a sweat. Honestly, that last part should probably have been the most concerning.

She had so many questions to ask, but she waited for Jenny to gather her breath. To her credit, Jenny tried—but the moment she got enough breath to try speaking again, she broke out into laughter, removing what little progress she had gained.

Amaris put a hand to her mouth, trying to stifle a giggle. But it was too late—Jenny heard the giggle and only laughed harder, falling to the ground with an immense wheeze that only prompted Amaris to laugh harder.

The people of Irest largely ignored them. It was just two girls laughing. Not the strangest thing in the world.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that no laughter can last forever, and theirs was no exception. The moment of reveling in the absurdity ended eventually, and the two wordlessly decided to start walking in a random direction through Irest.

“Soooo…” Jenny said, putting her hands behind her back. “You have adventures like this often?”

Amaris snorted. “All the time. I’m cursed to have my life be interesting.”

Jenny crossed her arms and tossed her hair back. “Sounds like a fun curse to me.”

“It isn’t. I’ve been brainwashed, enslaved, murdered—don’t ask—and tormented in a large myriad of unpleasantness.”

Jenny waved a dismissive hand. “Psh, pain’s nothing.”

“You wouldn’t know.”

“A-hem, you appear to have misunderstood my nature.” Jenny put her hand on her chest and spoke as though she were some kind of legendary hero of old. “I feel pain just like anyone else. It’s just lost all meaning with time.”

Amaris rolled her eyes. “Pain’s not something you can ignore after a few months of suffering.”

“Think… more on the scale of centuries.”

Amaris raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You, more than a hundred years old?”

“At least. I know I was around since before Irest was founded but…” Jenny reached for her chin, scratching while she dug through the dredges of her oldest memories. “Yeah, uh, the human brain wasn’t meant to store this many memories, anything before that is pretty fuzzy.”

Amaris stared at her in disbelief. She’s serious. “You’re… some kind of ancient… I don’t know! What were you doing running a cash register!?”

Jenny opened up her mouth to respond but was unable to find the words. She awkwardly closed her mouth and blinked a few times. “I… don’t really remember what I was thinking.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “But hey, that store’s trashed and there’s crushed brain all over it. And… eh, I quit.” Without missing a beat, she ripped off her uniform, standing in only her underwear.

Amaris facepalmed. “Don’t you have any modesty?”

“Not really,” Jenny said, putting on the teal dress she’d had hanging on her shoulder the whole time, satisfactorily tapping the angles on the shoulders with her gloved fingertips.

Amaris tilted her head. “…I think the red clashes with the teal.”

“You take that back. Red and teal go great together.”

“You’re just saying that because of your gloves and your hair.”

“Absolutely,” Jenny said, breaking out into a grin. “I am the epitome of color coordination.”

Amaris facepalmed again and shook her head. “No… no you are not.”

“And your outfit consists of basic clothing implements and a ragged shirt haphazardly hung off your hip like a political statement.”

“Touche.”

Jenny shot her a finger-guns gesture and winked. “Check and mate! I win!”

“Win what?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Jenny put her hands on her hips and struck a heroic pose. “So, my dear Amaris, what adventures will we have today?”

“Look, I’m serious, this is a curse. It’s not going to be happy-go-lucky fairy-tale adventure time. Horrible things could happen at a moment’s notice a—“ Amaris realized they weren’t walking down a street in Irest anymore. Instead, the two of them were walking on a sidewalk made out of purple concrete next to an abandoned, equally purple road lit only by tall, haunting lampposts. The street was utterly abandoned, and the buildings lining it were featureless, without windows or doors.

Amaris hung her head back and let out an annoyed groan. “Oh, for the love of hating lovely things…”

Jenny whooped. “Aw yeah! That ‘curse’ of yours works fast, Amaris! I wonder what kinds of ancient secrets we shall find in this… violet city.”

“Whatever it is, it probably won’t be pleasant…” Amaris took stock of her surroundings, more than a little annoyed that further examining didn’t reveal anything. The buildings were featureless, the sidewalk had no cracks, and every lamp was perfectly identical so far as she could tell. There wasn’t even variation in the sky, which stood as a flat, empty black. Not even any stars.

Jenny cupped her hands to her mouth. “Helloooo? Is anyone there!?”

Amaris slapped Jenny’s hands. “Are you insane? That’s how monsters find us!”

“That was the idea.”

Amaris took in a long, sharp breath, instinctually rocking back and forth on her heels in a stress-relieving motion. “Do you want to die?”

“Of course not!” Jenny said with a dismissive hand. “I want… the thrills!” She jumped on one of the lampposts and started spinning around out, a gleeful grin on her face. “From this day forward, it’s not Jenny, cashier; it’s Jenny, monster hunter!”

Amaris wanted to point out how idiotic Jenny was being, but even she had to admit, if Jenny really was as invincible as she thought she was, there might not have been any real danger. To her.

Amaris, on the other hand…

Jenny must have seen her look. “Oh, don’t worry, I can protect you.” She flexed her arm, showing off a distinct lack of muscles. If it wasn’t for the spark of ice forming on her fist, she would have looked rather absurd.

In response, Amaris flexed her own arm, displaying an actual muscle with a corked brow.

“Or you could take care of yourself,” Jenny said with a shrug.

“Wh—that wasn’t the point I was trying to make!”

“Then what was your point?” Jenny put her hands on her hips in an exaggerated pose.

“I-kitty.”

Jenny stared at Amaris dumbfounded. “…Kitty?”

“Kitty,” Amaris said, pointing behind Jenny with a big grin. Sure enough, there was a calico kitten walking down the sidewalk toward them. Amaris moved to pet the adorable animal, but she stopped before she got close enough to get a detailed look. Cats were cute. But cute…

She nervously backed away.

Jenny rolled her eyes and turned around. “That ‘curse’ has made you paranoid…” She kneeled down, motioning for the cat to come closer.

The cat continued walking toward them, moving no faster or slower than it had been before. In fact, it didn’t even make eye contact with either of them. Amaris hung back behind Jenny a few meters, but she didn’t run. Despite all that happened to her, she had a soft spot for cats—thinking of them as sort of a kindred spirit in curiosity.

The cat approached methodically, almost robotically. Still, Jenny gestured for it to come to them. Her first words once the cat was close enough were “wow, you have strange eyes.”

Amaris tensed. “What… what kind of eyes?”

“Look for yourself,” Jenny said, gesturing at the approaching feline. Instead of whites, iris, and a slitted pupil, the entire eyeball was uniform static, akin to what an old television showed when set to a channel that didn’t exist. Pixels of gray, white, and black flitted randomly around the cat’s eyes like angry bees.

The cat did not seem to mind. For that matter, it didn’t seem to feel anything or even register their presence. It simply walked forward. When its head awkwardly bumped into Jenny’s knee, it kept trying to walk as though there were nothing in the way.

Amaris let her guard down a little. “Does it feel… strange?”

Jenny stroked it behind the ears. “No… it’s just a cat. With freaky eyes and no brain, apparently.” She got up. The cat kept walking down the sidewalk as though nothing had ever impeded it, passing by Amaris without a glance.

“Weird…” Amaris put her hand to her chin and pondered what this all meant, understandably not getting very far. Pitch joined in the act, licking her chin in places she wasn’t scratching.

“Your snake is trying to eat you.”

“He does that,” Amaris deadpanned.

“So… now what?”

“The cat has proven itself to be harmless or mostly harmless,” Amaris said. “So… we follow it.” Clutching the straps on her backpack tightly, she marched after the cat, Jenny trailing behind in a much less orderly walking pace. At one point the ‘immortal girl’ started skipping along the sidewalk.

Be patient with her… Amaris told herself. Of course she’s not afraid, she has very little reason to. I shouldn’t resent her for feeling fine.

As they followed the cat, they found that every building was identical, surrounded by four streets that formed a perfect grid that went off for as far as the eye could see. Had Amaris not been counting the number of street corners they passed, there would have been no way to tell how far they had moved from where they started.

The further they moved along, the more cats they saw. While they all had different fur colorations, they all shared the same empty, static eyes. None of them took any notice of the girls walking among them—in fact, it looked as though it might have been impossible for them to notice anything at all. Despite their oblivious appearance, they managed to time their walks perfectly with respect to each other; with no visible change in their speed, no cat ever ran into any other for any reason.

Jenny apparently decided she had to mess with this perfect system. She knelt down and stopped a cat for a second.

“What are you doing?” Amaris hissed.

“Science.” Jenny released the cat, letting it loose on a collision course with another cat. As they approached, one cat arched its back while the other ducked low. Somehow, neither of them lost speed, yet one was able to walk right over the other.

“Okay, so they can adapt,” Jenny said, nodding slowly. “…This tells us nothing.”

Emboldened by Jenny’s actions, Amaris knelt down to pet the cats as they passed by. Not to feel their warm fur in her fingers—although she didn’t complain about that—but rather to make sure they weren’t actually robots. Her cursory inspection told her it was real fur on real flesh on probably real bones, but that last one she wasn’t sure about. “Not robots.”

“Robots can be made out of meat,” Jenny said matter-of-factly.

Amaris decided not to question that, standing up. “Okay. We’re in the middle of a seemingly endless city populated only by brain-dead cats with eyes that can’t load properly. Uh… yeah dunno.”

Pitch slithered down her leg and poked his head at a cat that was eye level with him, hissing. Predictably, it paid him no mind.

“So far this gives us no indication on how we could go back to Irest,” Amaris noted.

“I know!” Jenny waved a hand excitedly. “We could collect the cats and make a giant cat-ball!”

“How would that help?”

“It’d be fun.”

“That… aren’t there other things that are fun?”

“Yes, but cats a—demon bird.”

Amaris caught on immediately, whirling around and pulling her bow. A few street corners behind her, there was a floating creature of shadow. It had no legs, but rather a bottom resembling shadows of torn ligaments and bone. Its two arms were thin and angular, almost flat, and clutched within all eight of its talon-like fingers was some kind of silver staff tipped with a hovering yellow flame that was disconnected slightly from the staff’s physical bulk.

But the worst part of all was the beak-shaped mask. It was made of silver and pointed downward, coming to a sharp tip. Six eye slits were cut into the mask, three on each side, and through them there was nothing but darkness.

Amaris didn’t shoot, she just stood there, staring at it.

“Freaky…” Jenny said, poking her head around Amaris. “So, you gonna shoot it, or what?”

Amaris didn’t move, she simply kept the demon-bird-masked thing in her sights.

“Amaris…”

The thing lifted its staff slowly, angling it right at Amaris. The flame began to spark aggressively.

Now. Amaris let the arrow fly. It swung through the air, aim true: its tip impacted the beast directly in its dark chest. The impact made the creature lurch, but that was the extent of the damage—the arrow was consumed by the creature’s darkness the next moment.

“Nice shot,” Jenny called, taking a few steps in front of Jenny. “My turn.” As the creature angled its staff at them once more, Jenny ran at it, fist brimming with icy energy. With a shout of delight, she plowed her fist right into the creature, triggering an explosion of ice shards on contact. The darkness dissolved her hand and glove away, but she had another set the next second. “There’s more where that came from, buddy.”

The creature appeared unharmed, overall, brushing through the ice like it was nothing. Slowly, methodically, it brought the staff’s burning tip to Jenny, lightly bopping her with it.

Jenny snorted. “Hey, Amaris, this guy’s attack is usele—“ it was at this point Jenny felt the fur starting to grow on her skin. “Oh come on! That’s cheap and you know i—“ She dropped to the ground, shrinking within the folds of her dress. Her complaining words became yowls and meows until even those stopped. A bluish cat remained, eyes of static, mind of nothing, with a teal dress draped all over her.

“Jenny!” Amaris shouted. “Not again, not again…” She absent-mindedly wiped her eyes and pulled out another arrow, this time aiming for the light of the staff itself. Her arrow flew true, impacting the glittering flame, to no effect; this time her arrow wasn’t consumed, but just bounced away.

She readied another arrow, not exactly sure what her plan was, but she knew she couldn’t just leave Jenny like that, meowing in confusion.

…Wait. Meowing? She’d stopped meowing already, wasn’t her mind supposed to be like the other cats?

To Amaris’ shock, Jenny the cat started growing again. Her fur shed right off, forming a light blue pile on the ground as a human took form once again, rising within the dress—though this time she had it on backward. With an expression of untold rage, Jenny violently grabbed the bird-demon’s staff and rammed its glowing end into the ground. “Looks like being turned into a cat qualifies as an attack… How would you like a taste of your own medicine?” She pulled on the staff, attempting to yank it out of the creature’s hands.

Having the strength of an underdeveloped teenager, she wasn’t able to come even close to prying it out of the creature’s death grip, though she tried yanking on it a good three times. “Oh come on, let the epicness happen!”

The creature easily wrenched the staff out of her hands and smacked her upside the head with the physical part of it.

“Ow,” Jenny deadpanned. “Guess we do this the old-fashioned way…” She pulled her fist back, this time surrounding it in an aura of pure light. Unlike the ice, which had done nothing, this burned the very substance of the creature away like fire consuming paper, leaving behind only the mask and the scepter; the flame of which went out in an instant.

“Hey! I wanted that!” Jenny gestured angrily at the now-defunct staff on the ground. “I was gonna turn all my enemies into cats…”

“You might still get a chance…” Jenny said, pointing behind her.

Jenny turned, finding that several dozen of the bird-demon creatures had appeared, slowly marching toward them.

Jenny snapped her fingers—how she did this through her gloves, Amaris would never know. “That might be a problem”

“You think!? Do you know anything that can hit them all?”

“Uh… no.”

“Do you know any spell besides fist?”

Jenny shrugged. “Not so much as I remember. But I know a lot of varieties of fist!”

Amaris noticed the things were starting to point their staves at Jenny. “Then let’s run!”

“Oooh, a chase! Like in those zombie movies!” The idea seemed to thrill Jenny, so she took off in a run after Amaris. Amaris, while having to carry a backpack, was still slightly faster than the rather flimsy Jenny, but she slowed down her pace so she wouldn’t leave the immortal girl behind.

A bolt of yellow energy struck just to Amaris’ left.

“Ah, the cat-inator is long-range!” Jenny observed.

“We’re not calling it the cat-inator!”

“Yes we are, you just did.”

“I… ugh! Just… turn a lot of corners, break line of sight!” Amaris took a hard left and Jenny followed. This kept the bird-beasts from shooting at them, but, somehow, five turns later Jenny and Amaris were behind the creatures. What? I was meandering away from them, that doesn’t make any…

Jenny grabbed Amaris, yanking her out of the way of a beam. “Told you I’d watch you,” Jenny said with a wink.

“Thanks,” Amaris said with a nod.

“Doooon’t mention it!”

Despite all her bravado and smiles, Amaris could tell Jenny was already getting strained from all of the running. Poor girl was not used to bursts of strenuous activity. They needed a plan, a way out of this, and they didn’t seem to have anything at their disposal to take on that many of the creatures…

“Hey! You two! In here!”

That wasn’t Jenny’s voice and it didn’t sound anything like what Amaris expected the bird-demons to sound like, so Amaris listened to it. She turned to the voice and jumped.

All things considered not the smartest thing she’d ever done. She had jumped right toward one of the windowless, doorless buildings, and was on course to flatten herself against the wall like a pancake. As it was, only half of this occurred—she smacked her head and upper body against the wall, while the rest of her passed through it like it wasn’t there. The impact upended her like a pinwheel, but, despite the pounding headache she had from jumping headfirst into a wall, she managed to stick the landing. Shaky, in pain, but upright and alert.

Jenny walked in after her, ducking as she did so, clapping slowly. “Nice.”

“Shut up…” Amaris grumbled, rubbing her head. “I’ll be lucky if I don’t have a concussion…” Despite the pounding in her skull, she forced herself to open her eyes and look around.

They were standing on top of a circular, purple platform about the size of a living room. On this platform was a couch upon which sat six cats with real, living eyes. However, these cats meant little to Amaris—what struck her the most was what she could see outside the disc.

Colors. An endless wall that rippled with a gradual rainbow gradient upon which polygons of various sizes appeared and disappeared like bubbles. Squares would appear, grow, and dissipate while overlaid with pentagons, triangles, and other loosely flowing shapes. Already, Amaris found herself trying to piece together any possible patterns in the rate of appearance and disappearance of the shapes, and if it correlated to their size or number of sides.

“I think you broke Amaris,” Jenny said, waving her hand in front of Amaris’ face.

“The Wall has that effect on people,” the lead cat, a brown male, said as he hopped onto the back of the couch.

“The… Wall?” Amaris turned to the cat, tilting her head. “What is it?”

“We have no idea,” he admitted. “But we know that, here, we’re safe. The Scourge can’t come here.”

“Why not?”

“Again, no idea.” The cat shook his head forlornly. “And we don’t know why that particular building you entered has a connection to this place, why there’s a circular platform here, nor any number of other questions everyone who comes here asks. We free cats found it one day and it was exactly the same then.”

Amaris nodded slowly, turning away from the Wall. Aside from it and the platform, there wasn’t much—the rest of the platform was surrounded by purple walls, one section of which had red arrows painted on it, pointing directly at the invisible exit. “So… here’s a question you can answer. Who are you?”

“I am Urvest,” the cat said, bowing his head. “And these are the free cats, those who have broken free from the static’s control.”

“How did you break free?”

“It just seems to… happen,” Urvest admitted. “Perhaps a glitch in whatever system connects the minds of all those in the static.”

“…You don’t know why there are bird demons wandering around turning people into cats, do you?”

“I am afraid not. I myself was once a citizen of a city known as Irest—a gari, if that means anything to you—and then one day I found myself here, turned into a cat.”

“Wait, wait, wait… you were a gari?”

“Yes?”

Amaris tilted her head. “But… your name. That’s not a gari name…”

“What kind of strange names do the gari take where you’re from?”

“Uh, names like Sarah, Richard…”

“Those are human names.”

Amaris facepalmed. “Nope, nope, not having this conversation again, uh… you were talking about being transformed into a cat?”

“Yes. I was in the static for… some time, I don’t know how long. Then I was free, and I found this place while running from the tamers—they are attracted to disorder in the static, and I was definitely causing disorder.”

Amaris glared at Jenny, who put her hands up in surrender. “I was trying to figure out what was going on!”

“And summoned them upon you, no doubt,” Urvest said. “I am curious, how did you manage to get away without becoming cats?”

“We’re just that good,” Jenny grinned.

“She’s immune to whatever it is they do,” Amaris corrected.

“…Because we’re just that good.”

“Immunity… curious…” Urvest scratched his chin. “Well, I suppose that gives you an advantage over us, we’re just cats.”

Amaris leaned forward. “Do you know anything about these… tamers? Anything at all?”

Urvest looked to an old, female cat. “Mrra, would you like to tell your story to them?”

The elderly cat nodded, shakily climbing up onto the back of the couch next to Urvest. “I… am the only cat here who remembers what our great city was like before. Wondrous parks, kittens playing in the streets, and… so much more. I won’t bore you with the details; suffice it to say, it was nice, at least compared to this. But then, one day, the sun vanished—the tamers must have stolen it, or something. After that, they started marching through the dark streets, taking every cat they could find—and converting everything that wasn’t a cat to their purpose. They somehow warped the city, closed everything off, and drained all the life from it. I don’t know why and I don’t care. I just want them gone.”

“Have you tried to do anything to them?” Amaris asked.

“Oh, yes, many things,” Urvest explained, his tail flicking from side to side. “We have killed two, and only two, and we lost many cats to other tamers during the operations. Resistance is simply not feasible in our state, since it does not take much to re-wire a cat to the static.”

Amaris nodded slowly. “And… does the fact that they have six eyes mean anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Hmm…” Amaris took a step back to start pacing while thinking.

“I’ve got a question,” Jenny said, stepping forward. “How do you guys survive?”

“There is only one food source out there, and it ain’t pretty,” Mrra hissed.

“…Oh…”

Amaris almost threw up at the implications.

Jenny held up her arm. “If, uh, you have a sharp object, I can cut off several duplicate arms for you guys, it mi—“

“Don’t bother,” Amaris said, putting a hand on Jenny’s arm. “We’re not going to stoop that low.”

Jenny blinked a few times. “I think a willing meal would be better tha—“

“We’re going to help end this. I can’t stand to see this continue.”

“…Do you have a plan?”

“As a matter of fact…” Amaris reached into her backpack and pulled out a long rope. “I do.”

Pitch slithered along the coils of the rope as if trying to make it look cooler.

“Snake!” Mrra shouted. “Snake!”

“Mrra, calm down,” Urvest cautioned.

“Snakes ate my last garden the day before the sun was stolen! I’m not going to calm down! I’m gonna rip that thing’s skull out of its sorry little head and pulverize it to make grout! Grout, I tell you!”

Pitch sensed the threat and retreated back into the backpack, where Amaris took up a defensive stance just in case Mrra tried to rush her. In her younger years, the cat may have tried it. But she was old, and such a rush would probably pop a few joints she didn’t want strained. So, instead, she angrily turned her back to Amaris, refusing any further conversation.

“Sooo…” Jenny said, awkwardly leaning in. “You had a plan?”

Amaris nodded. “Tell me what you think of this…”

~~~

“Your plan is outrageously simple and it isn’t going to work,” Jenny told Amaris as they poked their heads around the corner of one of the buildings.

“Wait until it fails to gloat, thank you.”

“You might be dead at that point.”

“You forget, you’re the bait here.”

“Right.” Jenny grinned. “At least I’m really good at my job!”

“Just…” Amaris handed Jenny the arrow with a rope tied around it. “Just do the thing.”

“With pleasure.” Jenny gave Amaris a cocky salute before running out into the street, rope trailing behind her. Once she arrived in the middle of the road she reached down, picked up a cat, and threw it at another cat. “Oh no, look at me, I’m causing disorder and chaos in this perfect system! Somebody better try to stop me!” She picked up another cat and used it like a stick to nudge other cats off course. Luckily for her, these cats were mindless and didn’t descend into clawing balls of fury upon being used to poke each other.

The effect was exactly as intended. Less than a minute after she started poking cats, one of the tamers appeared, its beaked mask glinting off the light of a nearby lamppost.

Jenny unceremoniously dropped the cat she was holding. “Hey there! I was wondering, could you point me in the direction of the nearest restroom? See, I can’t seem to find any.”

The tamer slowly raised its staff, at which point Jenny ran at the tamer, knocking the staff’s tip to the side before it could fire at her. The next thing she did was ram the arrowhead into one of the mask’s eyeholes, finding it hollow inside. With a single twist, the arrow lodged itself in there, the glue adhering to the inside of the mask.

“Bingo,” Jenny said, at which point she was shot by the staff she called the cat-inator. This had been part of the plan—let the beast think it had got her—but even so, it wasn’t pleasant. Sure, there was pain, but pain was an old friend at this point. Specifically, the friend who lived in Jenny’s mental basement and made so much noise that Jenny forgot there was noise. The unpleasantness actually came from the feeling of her body reshaping itself and of her mind being ripped from her bit by bit. She was a woman who liked being in control of herself, and having awareness stolen from her and replaced with an incessant, buzzing static was not on her list of acceptable activities. She was only doing it because it might help them get out of this place, or at least figure out what was going on.

All of her thoughts that were telling her to stick with it, to endure the suffering… all of those vanished, replaced with a desire to eat fish and meow at dogs. Then even this passed, until there was only the buzzing… buzzing… buzzing…

No matter how many times Amaris told her she’d only been in that state for a few seconds, Jenny still felt as though she spent hours listening to the offending noise without the ability to think back. To one of her advanced age, a few hours wasn’t all that much, but the jarring buzz still engraved itself into her memory.

Eventually, though, she returned. First as a mewling kitten, but then as her usual, angry self, rubbing the cat hair off of her like it was made of spiders. Standing up to her full height, she noticed the tamer was gone, and that the rope was sliding slowly along the ground.

“Yes!” Jenny made a fist-pump, quickly running back to Amaris. “Mission success, we have a lead.”

Amaris nodded. “I noticed. I’ve tied all the rope together I can. Hopefully, it will give us enough of a trail to follow without being seen.”

“Amaris, it either doesn’t notice or can’t remove an arrow stuck in its eye. I think it’s not going to notice us following it.”

“Unless we disrupt the cats.” Amaris grasped her backpack straps tightly.

“Got it, don’t kick any cats.” Jenny took an extravagant bow. “I will attempt to restrain myself, m’lady.”

Amaris rolled her eyes, turning to her snake—Jenny still had no idea what its name was. “I think she lost her mind eons ago.”

“Took you that long to figure me out?” Jenny snorted. “You’re slow, anyone could have seen that I w—“ The last of the rope uncoiled, wrapping around Jenny’s foot, dragging her stumbling into the street.

Amaris gasped. “Get it off! We don’t want to slow it down!”

“All right, all right!” Jenny lit her fist on fire and punched at her own foot, disintegrating the part of the rope wrapped around it along with half of her foot. It was back in a second, though her shoe didn’t come back.

Amaris frowned. “Why the gloves and not the shoes?”

“I have asked myself that question many, many times,” Jenny muttered. “Let’s just follow the rope before it gets away.”

With that, they walked after the end of the rope. It moved slowly—the tamers weren’t fast by any means—but it moved reliably. Their only obstacle was the cats, and they were sparse enough that it was a simple matter not to interfere with their mysterious duty of walking around like robots.

“Hey,” Amaris said. “I just noticed, your dress is on the right way.”

Jenny blinked. “Huh?”

“When you reformed the first time you grew into it backward.”

Jenny shot Amaris a glare. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“There were deadly demon birds trying to turn me into a cat, and then there was the Wall, and then the other cats.”

“They don’t matter,” Jenny huffed.

“Jenny!” Amaris folded her arms. “They’re stuck here just like us.”

“Yeah. Do you see any of them out here helping us?”

Amaris frowned. “They’re scared.”

“So are you, and that’s not stopping you, is it?”

“No…” Amaris shook her head. “But that’s beside the point. I wouldn’t have been able to handle this myself just a few weeks ago. I’ve been trained by what I’ve experienced, and I’ve experienced a lot of different things. They just… have this.”

“They could still grow a backbone…”

Amaris tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Jenny, let’s try not to resent them and just help them. We might be able to d—“ She paused. “Hold on, that was our fifth right turn in a row.”

“Huh?”

Amaris looked around at the city. “We should be on a perfect grid, but if that were the case, we would have seen the rope pass over itself. It didn’t. We just turned four corners and didn’t arrive at where we started.”

“I don’t follow.”

As they continued to follow the rope, Amaris reached into her backpack and pulled out her notebook, drawing a grid of lines to represent the city. “Geometrically speaking, every intersection of roads is an intersection on this page.” She placed her pencil on a dot. “Here’s where we start. If we turn right, right, right rig—“

“Okay, I get the idea, math whiz.” Jenny looked down at the rope with mistrust. “What does that mean?”

“It means the realm we’re in doesn’t follow the rules of standardized geometry. Now, our realm doesn’t either, given relativity, but four corners still add to a perfect square in almost every situation.” She tapped the back of her pencil to her lips. “Here, for all we know we aren’t even walking in a straight line.”

“Is this a problem?”

“It might be if we try to get back to the safe zone. But one thing we do know…” she pointed at the rope. “That has an unbroken connection to the tamer. It will lead us wherever that monster is going.”

“Then that’s all I need to know.” Jenny rolled her wrist around, stretching it. “Can’t wait until I can unleash judgment on the flock.”

“Gung-ho sure seems to be your style…”

They continued on, walking after the rope for at least an hour. Jenny was already starting to get tired, but they knew breaks weren’t really an option since they had to keep up with the end of the rope while also not getting too far ahead of it, so there was no chance they’d be detected.

At about the end of the hour, they saw it. In the distance was a building not like any of the others: rather than a flat prism, this was a massive sphere at least four times as tall as any of the other structures. Jenny moved toward it.

“No, straight lines may not be straight,” Amaris reminded her. “We follow the rope.” The snake hissed in agreement. Jenny suppressed the urge to slap the snake’s smug grin off its face. Or, at least, what Jenny was interpreting as a smug grin.

It was a good thing Amaris stopped her because the rope never went directly for the spherical building—and yet, they always seemed to be getting closer and closer to it. They’d turn a corner four times and suddenly be twice as close, or even go directly away but see it in front of them one turn later.

Almost certainly, the tamer was leading them right to it. Jenny readied her fists. The moment they arrived, she was taking the place down, no questions asked.

Arrive they did. The rope eventually stopped moving, leading straight into the building’s wide-open doorway. There were no doors, just a gaping hole the rope went into.

“Here goes!” Jenny called.

“Wait!” Amaris hissed. “Maybe we could sneak in? Or… something?”

“Enough sneaking, time for fist.” Jenny gave Amaris a silly salute and ran down the length of the rope at full speed. Instead of going through the hole, she jumped to the side, surrounding her fist in a soft blue vibrating cone. Its tip rammed into the purple material at high speed, disintegrating the lower part of the spherical structure like an egg.

Through the dust and rubble, Jenny could tell that it was bright. Holding a hand up to her eyes, she was able to make out a massive glowing ball of soft, yellow light mounted on a metallic pole with a spiral ramp leading up to it. The glorious orb took up a tenth of the entire sphere’s volume, illuminating the singular room within.

“Huh, you really stole the sun.” Jenny put her hands up, ready for action, sizing up her opponents. There were about a hundred tamers all gathered around the sun in a circle, all of their masks pointed directly at Jenny, including the one with an arrow stuck to it.

“Well, now I know why you had that rope stuck to you,” an annoying, high-pitched voice declared. The next thing Jenny knew, the tamer with the arrow stuck in it exploded, mask and staff falling to the ground with a loud clatter.

Jenny looked around for the source of the voice, finding it with some difficulty at the base of the sun’s pillar. At first, Jenny thought it was a hulking brute of a creature with a tiny head, but that wasn’t true. It was actually two creatures. The first was a muscular, stout being with gray limbs and no head to speak of, wearing a circular mask overtop his torso. Like the tamers, this mask had six eyes, but these holes were cut as circles, and unlike the tamers, Jenny could see the glint of two eyes behind the central eyeholes.

Riding the beast was a much smaller individual of humanoid stature, but of a size smaller even than Jenny. The figure wore blue, metallic armor with many aggressive spikes on it, and a helmet that had, as expected at this point, six eye-holes cut into it.

Jenny pointed a finger at the beast and its rider. “You’re responsible for all this?”

“Depends on what you mean, though I suspect the answer is yes,” the rider said—Jenny was sure it was a woman at this point, though the high pitch of her voice grated against Jenny’s ears.

“Then you’re about to get a knuckle sandwich.”

“Enstatic her,” the rider ordered with a dismissive wave.

The tamers were still slow, and Jenny was fast. She rushed the rider, pulling back her fist with a prepared light spell.

A lance appeared out of thin air in the rider’s hand and she threw it right into Jenny’s heart. She didn’t cry out, but she did get thrown to the ground from the force. Jenny ripped the lance out of her chest, only for the mount to punch her everywhere, for its fist was only slightly smaller than her entire body.

Jenny went flying, landing ungracefully on her head and cracking several bones in the process. Naturally, she stood up unharmed a second later, smirking. “This is fun.”

“I agree,” the rider said.

At this point, one of the tamers got a lock on Jenny and fired, turning her into a cat again. It took a few moments, but she was back up again, dusting fur off of herself. “Gah… that just feels wrong.”

“Immunity…” The rider tilted her head, raising a hand toward Jenny. Nothing visible happened. “Curious. Not cursed… what exactly are you?”

“Excellent question,” Jenny said, charging her once more. Another tamer hit her, making her stumble and roll as she turned into a cat. When she reformed, she was stuck in the hands of the gray behemoth. Her response to this was to light both of her fists on fire, which prompted the beast to throw her into the ground like a basketball.

“Being bouncy would be nice,” Jenny muttered as she stood up and popped her arm back into place. “But you can’t keep me down.”

“I disagree,” the rider said, summoning a staff identical to the ones the tamers used, pointing it at Jenny again, quickly reducing her to cat form. Once again, Jenny popped out.

“That trick won’t keep me down forever!”

“It keeps you down.” Jenny dodged the first zap, but the behemoth slapped her to the side so the second one could work its unholy feline magic. “And then you come back, only to go back again.” Jenny was barely able to move under her own will when the rider shot her again. “And so you will remain. Unable to obey our Master’s grand design, but unable to hinder it with annoyance.”

“Your voice sounds like a squeaky toy fromeow meow meow…”

“Your defiance is impressive.” She stood on top of her mount, leaning over top of Jenny like a vulture in a towering tree. “And quite entertaining. Ru, what do you think?”

The behemoth she was riding spoke with an echoing voice, not unlike two boulders atop a distant mountain crashing into each other. “She will make an excellent test subject, Bella.”

“I’m glad we agree…” Bella let out a shrill cackle that, unfortunately, Jenny was aware enough to hear fully just before getting zapped again. “Though the infinite shedding might be a problem.”

~~~

Meanwhile, Amaris was being significantly smarter than the immortal child and sneaking into the spherical building as opposed to charging in blindly with the fury of a brain-dead hippopotamus. This observation was one of many equally unflattering ones Amaris was coming up with to describe exactly what she thought of Jenny right now.

There was a silver lining to all of it, though—Bella, Ru, and every one of the tamers were busy tormenting Jenny with eternal cat-ing, Amaris could walk right into the building without being noticed. As Bella and Ru berated the growing mass of fur, Amaris took stock of the situation and the sun just sitting there in the center of everything.

Obviously, if she was going to do anything, it was going to be with that.

She took off her backpack and set it just outside, keeping only one object on hand—a single arrow. Lifting up her shirt, she hooked it onto the pants she’d bought earlier that day. Had she been careful, she probably could have looped the arrow without damaging the fabric, but she was in a hurry so she tore a hole right into it, running the apparel.

Good thing I bought extras…

She also slipped off her boots, leaving the socks. She pressed her hands together and took a deep breath. All right… you can do this, Amaris. Just like the shows. Except a bunch of demon birds will turn you into a cat if you fail. …All things considered, that's a lot less gruesome than usual.

“MEOW!” Jenny shouted, loudly enough to make Bella burst into laughter. Amaris took this as her cue to move, bolting at top speed. While none of the tamers were looking at her, they still surrounded the central pillar, and she was going to have to get over them to have any hope of reaching it.

The pitter-patter of her small, muffled feet was nothing compared to the laughing monologue Bella was in the middle of. “You know, practically speaking, we’re going to have to find another way to hold her, eventually.” She threw a lance into Jenny’s neck before turning her into a cat again. “It’ll probably fill up our chamber soon. I wonder how long…?”

Given the square-cube law and a rough estimate of the rate at which cat fur is being produced… Amaris forced herself to stop solving the alluring math problem and focus on her plan. She had circled around the edge of the chamber, arriving at the area where the tamers were thinnest and closest to the solar pillar. It was going to take an absurd series of jumps, but she was pretty sure she had it in her.

“Ow!” Bella shouted. “She scratched me!”

Don’t you have armor? Amaris thought as she jumped into the air. She planted her foot directly on the head of a tamer, startling and dazing it considerably. Its slight give provided a push, increasing her momentum on the second jump.

“I wonder, if we pluck out her fingernails will the claws not form?”

Amaris slammed into the side of the solar tower, fingertips barely looping around the edge of the spiral path. The impact would have knocked the wind out of most grown adults, but Amaris still had enough force to fling herself up and onto the path. Good thing too, since the tamer she’d stepped on had decided it was faster than all the others and had shot at the place she was hanging. So far, though, only it had noticed her—but it would likely raise the alarm, meaning she had to move fast.

“Actually, Ru, I have a question. Why cats? Of all things… why would our Master give us a cat transformation spell? It’s not a particularly tomentous thing to turn people into.”

Amaris decided she had no time to run up the spiral path, so she jumped again, grabbing hold of the next level of the spiral and swinging herself up; though the tamer shot at her again. The tamers next to it were catching on, she knew it, but she didn’t want to risk running to the opposite side, wasting time.

“If I were designing the spell, I’d say… snails. No, wait, not painful enough. What about…”

“Something’s wrong,” Ru said.

Fiddlesticks. Amaris jumped up another level, her speed, distance, and constant motion being the only thing stopping her from being unceremoniously transformed into a cat. Considering how she was hanging in precarious positions during most of the climb, if she turned into a cat at any moment the fall likely wasn’t going to be a pleasant one. She kept climbing anyway, it was her only hope. Looking up, she could feel the warmth of the sun on her. Which, to be honest, felt more like a heat lamp than a celestial object. It might even have been made out of glass.

“Ru, we caught here, what could b—“ Amaris pulled herself up to the last level just as she was seen. “Stop!” Bella shouted at the top of her lungs, the shrill force of her voice not only stopping all the tamers but also Amaris in her tracks.

“Are you all idiots?” Bella shrieked at the tamers. “What if you hit the sun!?”

Amaris pushed through the headache she’d just developed and launched herself up to the top level.

“And you, get down from there!”

Amaris didn’t bother with a sarcastic quip, she didn’t know the capabilities of Bella and didn’t want to find out. She took out the arrow, ready to use it to wreck whatever was holding the sun here.

As it turned out the sun was held in place by a lightbulb socket barely the size of Amaris’ fist. She could probably undo it with a few twists using her bare hands. It wasn’t like the sun was all that hot.

I brought this arrow up here for no reason.

With a shrug, she stabbed the arrow into the socket anyway. The socket began to burst with yellow sparks. Amaris took a step back, satisfied; that is until a lance from Bella flew past her eyes, inches from her face. I am very lucky.

The socket she’d stabbed exploded, throwing her off the spiral tower. She let out a panicked yell, letting instinct take over—she judged the distance to the ground to be a little under four stories. However, she had a lot of forward momentum from the explosion and repeated controlled falls from ridiculous heights had instilled in her an instinct for this sort of thing. The trick was to roll with it, literally.

She made it so she hit the ground with a significant rotation, allowing her to convert most of the fall’s energy into a roll, rolling head over heels and spreading out the stress of a direct impact with the ground into a long tumble.

Her primary goal—not to break any bones—was accomplished. That said all four of her limbs were already bruising, there was a nasty cut on her forehead that was getting in her eyes, and she was fairly sure she’d pulled her hamstring. Without a suit to force her to move, she wouldn’t be doing any more acrobatics anytime soon.

The best she could do was sit up and wipe her eyes. She was blessed with a beautiful sight: that of all the tamers dissipating. Without the power of the sun, they faded into nothing, their masks and staves clattering to the ground. The sun itself was completely unharmed by the explosion and was lazily floating upwards like a balloon.

It unceremoniously hit the top of the spherical chamber, making a clink sound and coming to a rest. …It’s really made out of glass. What kind of backward realm is this?

A lance dropped out of the sky and punctured the ground an inch from Amaris’ hand. She tried to jump to her feet but her right leg couldn’t support her weight—she dropped to the ground with an agonized grunt.

“Ru, how did she survive that fall?” Bella asked.

“Wh—why aren’t you vanishing?” Amaris stammered.

“…Did… did you really think we were lesser shadows?” Bella brought her hand to her helmet’s forehead, leaned back, and laughed the shrillest laugh Amaris had ever heard. She briefly wondered if it could shatter glass.

“Listen here, little girl…” Bella jumped off Ru, running across the ground with such speed that Amaris didn’t have time to respond before she arrived and grabbed Amaris’ collar in her fist. “You don’t have any idea what you’re messing with!”

“But… we stopped you…” Amaris couldn’t help but smile. “Th-that counts for something.”

“We’ll just start the operation up again! It won’t be l—“

There was a large explosion behind Bella. Both Amaris and the armored midget stared at the billowing smoke that quickly dissipated to reveal… a short woman standing triumphant, with a smoking boot planted firmly on the back of a decidedly charred Ru.

“Ru!” Bella gasped in shock, dropping Amaris. “What did you do to him?”

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “Explosion fist? I don’t exactly give them names, you know.” She tapped her boot on Ru. “Huh. Still alive. Durable.”

Bella summoned one of the staves. “Back to being a cat with you…”

Jenny simply stepped out of the way. The beam hit the nearest entity: Ru. Bella let out a sharp gasp. “N-no!”

Within a few moments, Ru was transformed into a gray cat, his mask so large that when it fell to the ground, it trapped him under it like a bowl. “Bella,” he asked, calmly. “Why am I a cat?”

“Oh thank the static your mind is fine…” Bella let out a sigh of relief. “I did not want to have to explai—“

Amaris, while without her legs, could still use her arms. She jumped Bella from behind, grabbing hold of her neck. “Jenny! Now!”

“No!” Bella shouted. Before Jenny could get there, Bella released her helmet, leaving it in Amaris’ hands. The being that emerged from the helmet shocked Amaris.

A perfectly normal human girl with chestnut brown hair and blue eyes. No older than eight, possibly younger.

“What…?” Amaris managed, gawking.

Bella said nothing, she simply shot Amaris a glare of fury. Her eyes burst with yellow energy and she ran around Jenny and to Ru. Amaris wasn’t sure what happened next, but there was a sound like cracking crystal… and the two of them were gone.

Jenny lowered her fist, dissipating the arcane pink aura surrounding it. “Oh come on, I wanted to try out a new one on her…”

“Jenny… that was just a kid.”

“Yeah, like I’m just a kid.”

“No… I think she was really just a kid.” Amaris picked up the helmet, looking deep into its six-slitted eyeholes. “…There was more going on here…”

“That we’re not going to be able to figure out,” Jenny said, patting Amaris on the back. “Instead, we celebrate, because… we won!” She threw her fists into the air and cheered.

“…Can you help me up? My leg can’t support me right now.”

“Oh, sure. And…” Jenny’s smile softened slightly. “Thanks. For…”

“For saving you after you were an idiot?”

“Yeah.” Jenny laughed nervously. “That…”

The two of them stumbled out of the chamber to the place Amaris left her backpack. Just past the backpack was a sea of hundreds of cats, all of whom had no static in their eyes.

“…I think they want their sun back,” Amaris said, glancing at Jenny’s gloves.

“Fine.” Jenny set Amaris down. Then she set to work demolishing the entire spherical building.

“…I think we should move further away,” Amaris told the cats.

~~~

Jenny’s controlled demolition was a success, which was to say it didn’t kill anyone and it only flattened two other city blocks. With the sphere reduced to rubble, the sun floated up until it took its place in the sky, baking the world below in a beautiful glow. Immediately, all the blank, purple buildings transformed into what they were supposed to be—bustling city blocks with parks, residential areas, and a ridiculous number of cat-themed vending machines.

It apparently had nothing to do with the Cat-Ival. Amaris asked.

Unfortunately, the restoration of the sun did not completely reverse the curse. Everyone who was a cat remained a cat, though no longer tied into whatever the static was.

None of them, not even the ones who lived in the cat city before the sun was stolen, had any idea who Bella and Ru were—or what their plan had been. To be fair, most of them didn’t care, and just wanted to celebrate Jenny and Amaris as heroes.

They never saw Urvest. They couldn’t even find the hole in reality again, since the city had re-shuffled its non-standard geometry when the sun rose back into the sky. Since it would have been easy for Urvest and his cats to find the new “heroes of the city,” Amaris was forced to conclude they didn’t want to see them.

Honestly, she didn’t blame them for keeping a low profile, considering all that had happened to them.

“So…” Jenny said, licking an ice cream cone a cat had just offered them. “How do we get back to Irest?”

Amaris shook her head as they walked down the street. “None of them know. The people who were here originally don’t know of any other realms, and everyone else was dragged here by accident, just like we were.”

“Hmm…” Jenny stretched her back and flexed her wrists. “You know what would be funny?”

“What?”

“If w—“ Jenny stopped in the middle of her word.

The two of them were standing on one of Irest’s docks, overlooking the ocean a mile below them.

“…The what?” Amaris shook her head. “Seriously, what?”

“Your curse couldn’t stand the idea of you being heralded as a hero by cats for any longer.” Jenny crossed her arms and pouted. “Lame. I could have gotten used to being queen of cats.”

Amaris looked down the ropes at the boats below. “I’m charting a boat to the East.”

“Then to the East we shall go!” Jenny pointed dramatically—to the West, but that wasn’t what Amaris took issue with.

“No, Jenny, you can’t come with me.” Amaris clutched the straps on her backpack. “My curse affects the people around me. You were dragged along with me to that crazy static cat place. You’ll be dragged along with everything else, too.”

Jenny snorted, pointing cockily at herself. “You assume I don’t want to be pulverized by ancient creatures of unimaginable evil.”

“Jenny...” Amaris frowned. “What if… what if you really had been captured, and been forced to change into and out of cat form for eternity? What i—“

Jenny poked her in the nose, shutting Amaris up. “You listen here, Amaris. You can’t do this alone. You need someone who can travel with you and not die from the sneeze of the monster of the week. That someone is me.”

“There’s going to be things that hurt you in ways that aren’t pain.”

“And I can take that! I’ve survived everything else that life’s thrown at me, including dozens of things that I can’t remember! And… and… and…” Jenny furrowed her brow as she tried to come up with another logical reason. “And you can’t stop me from following you.”

Amaris narrowed her eyes. “No…” She put a hand to her forehead, but couldn’t help but smile. “No, I can’t stop you. This is cheating, you know?”

Jenny gave her some finger guns and a wink. “You love me, you know it.”

“You’re headstrong, impulsive, proud, inconsistent…”

“And you’re paranoid, jaded, twitchy…”

“Eye-spider!” Amaris shouted. Sure enough, one of the eyeball spiders was skittering across the dock toward them, followed by dozens of its brothers. “Run!”

“Run where!?”

Amaris jumped off the dock and onto one of the many cables going down to the ocean. “Here!”

“I’m not good at climbing!”

“You can just jump without a problem.”

“But water will get in my lungs and drowning is annoying and…” Jenny noticed Amaris was already a dozen meters below her, jumping from cable to cable like a monkey. With a resigned sigh, Jenny stepped off the dock and fell to the ocean below.

Some time later, she hit an ocean liner, punching through the deck and making a rather unpleasant stain on the floor below.

“I am not cleaning that up,” Jenny said as she pulled herself out of the crash to the horror of the ship’s crew. “Geh, I’m going to need to get this dress cleaned…” She looked at the crew with bored eyes. “Hey, you guys going East?” She produced three gold coins and grinned. “Do you take gold?”