Connie’s apartment was much different than Rachael’s, even more stark than night and day. There was a new couch and love seat set in the living room in front of a huge large screen TV, the kitchen had all new, chrome appliances, and the bathroom was immaculately clean with a luxurious bathtub big enough for at least two people. It was not the most luxurious home I had ever been in, but it was in at least the top five. I wondered why the girls wouldn’t have had their first club meeting here, it would have made a better impression.

“So I guess just don’t poop on the floor and we’ll be cool,” Connie joked as she set me down on the leather love seat. “Though I don’t think that will be a problem since you’re a human and not a cat… I guess it’s probably silly to even have a litter box here, I’ll just always keep the lid up.”

I meowed in response and she nodded her head. “We need to do something about that too.” She put down the board and planchette onto the dining table half-way between the kitchen and the living room. “This is just too slow for me. I think we can get a better solution.”

I meowed in the best questioning tone I could manage. I would certainly be on board for any ideas she had to make it better. There was so much I wanted to say and respond to that would just take too long right now and be too impractical.

“Give me an hour or so and I’ll go get the things we need, I don’t want to get your hopes up in case I can’t find what I want today. You’ll be okay on your own for a bit?”

I pushed the plancette over to “YES” to respond.

“Perfect,” Connie said, gathering up her purse again, “be back soon.”

As soon as the door closed, I jumped down from the table and stretched out my body, loosening the muscles that had tensed up due to the uncomfortable situation. Feeling a bit better, I hoped up on the couch, ignoring the potent smell of all sorts of herbs and spices I could smell around the apartment. The place reeked of magic related items that I badly wanted to investigate, but I was not a fan of making the same mistake twice. I realized now that it was a pretty creepy thing I did when I went through Rachael’s things. I had, stupidly, been looking at it from the perspective that I was a cat and wouldn’t ever be found out, but even if I hadn’t be found out, that still wouldn’t have made it okay. Either way, I was still some strange man combing through the belongings of a college-aged girl. Curling up into a ball, the call of a nap cemented that I would be sleeping instead of snooping. It would also speed up time for me that I wouldn’t anxiously be waiting for whatever need communication device Connie was setting up, it was like going to sleep early the night before a holiday to make it come sooner.

I was woken up by the sound of the apartment door opening and closing. Groggily, I peeked through my paws to see Connie returning with a large, relatively thin box with another, slightly smaller box on top of it. My ears perked up with interest and I stretched my long body deeply as I rose to my feet.

“This should do it,” Connie said with a smile. She carefully set the boxes down on the dining room table and began to fight with the packaging tape that held the box openings shut. “I’m glad they had it, they only had a few in stock and only one of the biggest kind.”

Turning my head to the side in curiosity, I tried to think of what she could be talking about. I had wracked my brain for twenty years trying to come up with a solution to my communication problem, I couldn’t fathom what she had figured out in less than a few hours of discovering my plight. I was dumbfounded as she pulled the first, larger item from it’s box. Underneath the layer of protective bubble wrap was a computer keyboard larger than I had ever seen before. It was missing many of the more specialized buttons to accommodate for paw-sized keys, but it would certainly work for me as a typing device. I felt incredibly stupid for not realizing that such a thing could exist, though I supposed I wouldn’t have been able to find one just laying around on my own anyway. The second, smaller box was a new laptop so that I could have it on all the time and hooked up for easy use.

“I figured we can probably find a text-to-voice app or something so you can talk to me without having to have me also hovering over the screen.” She pulled the protective film from the screen and plugged it into the wall. “I’ll get it all set up for you, then it’ll be all yours.”

I meowed my thank you as best as I could, fighting the extreme urge to run up and scent mark her with the glands behind my ears. She smiled and gave a nod of her head like she understood, then got to work going through the process of getting the computer set up. I sat behind her, tail twitching as she worked her way through the initial start-up screens. With every click to the next page, my heard thumped louder with hope that it would be the last page. Unfortunately I had limited experience with the machine, I had owned one, but it hadn’t been the same social platform that it was now, so I hadn’t used it much for anything but research while I still had thumbs.

“Alright, think it’s ready to go,” Connie said, plugging in the keyboard to the laptop. “Just type what you want and it will speak it for you.”

Exhilarated to the point that my paws were visibly shaking, I hopped up onto the table and sat before the magnificent device. I didn’t waste any time thinking of what I was going to say first.

“Thank you so much for this,” my new, eerily human-like robotic voice said, “I can’t believe I can effectively communicate now.”

Connie’s face broke into a big grin. “You’re welcome, but now you own me a huge explanation of what happened.”

For the next half-hour, I slowly typed out my story of the ritual gone wrong, learning to adapt to life as a cat, and my frustrated attempts to undo the transformation. It was good practice and by the time I had arrived at the end of the story, I was able to type much faster than I had at the start.

Connie had been enraptured the whole time, nodding or shaking her head a long with the story. She had a look on her face that led me to believe that it was just now sinking in that I actually was an actual person trapped inside a cat’s body.

“Okay, so, I guess you’d like some help to get back to your true form?” She asked, with a tint of humor in her voice.

“That would be nice, unless you want to take care of a perpetual house cat for who knows how long,” I replied.

“Well what do we need to do?”

I thought for a moment on what she could specifically help with, then began typing. “We have about a month if my calculations are correct, so when it comes time, I will need a ritual knife, a couple herbs and something to burn them in, wine, and three pieces of clear quartz. The better the ritual implements are, the higher chance I have of getting it right, at least that’s the assumption I’ve been working on all this time.”

“Assumption?” Connie raised her right eyebrow questioningly. “You mean you don’t even know for sure?”

“Well, I’m not exactly a master at magic or anything like that,” I admitted, “but I do know enough to be fairly sure I’m correct. Though I guess I didn’t even know that turning into an animal was even a possible outcome from messing up my initial ritual.”

“I’ll take your word for it, I guess. Before today I didn’t even know any of this stuff was actually real.”

“What do you mean?” Both the girls had all the instruments necessary for at least low level magical work.

Connie’s cheeks flushed and she began to talk with her hands. “Well, like, yeah I practice Wicca and all that, but like…” She trailed off for a moment, seemingly struggling for words. “It’s like being any kind of religion, you believe the things work, but you never get to directly see it… you know?”

“Ah, so it is purely religion.” That was an interesting thought. I of course had known about people who only practiced for religious purposes, but I had always kind of assumed that those people just weren’t rigorous pursuers of magic.

“I guess so?” She sounded unsure and a bit embarrassed, though I couldn’t quite understand why. “I just didn’t know that these things actually… like worked like on TV or in books.”

I furrowed my brow in concentration, trying to imagine if I thought it were reasonable that someone could stumble into witchcraft on their own and not be exposed to the raw magical power potential. It was something that was passed down by one witch to another, sure there were books and manuals that people could buy, but how would someone even know how to look for them without someone already practicing pointing them towards it? More importantly, if people were following the rituals outlined, how was magic not occurring anyway, despite their naivety?

“You seem really surprised by that,” Connie said, “what am I missing?”

“How did you come to find witchcraft?” I asked, hoping that her answer would provide some kind of an explanation.

“Well I knew that I didn’t really like my parents religions,” she explained. “My mother is Jewish and my father is some sort of Christian. I just never really clicked with either of them and was looking for something different. One day in high school, I just started searching the internet for alternative religions and came across Wicca. Something just felt right about it, so I started learning more and practicing. I’ve been involved in the religion for about six years now.”

“These websites, they just claimed it was a religion?”

“No, not exactly. They tend to give information like all of it really works, but it’s not like anyone really believes it actually works.” She went quiet for a moment, before letting out a soft laugh. “Though it looks like it is, which is pretty funny when you think about how many random Wiccans there are running around.”

It was such a strange thing to try to digest, so much of my life had been centered around magic that it was hard for me to imagine that people in general didn’t believe in it. All the way back my mother’s bloodline as far as we knew had all been witches and practiced witchcraft. It was more than just a family past time or a religion, it was a sacred part of who we are. The idea that people just casually stumbled across it and thought it was something frivolous enough to not only not take seriously, but believe it was all false under the surface hurt a part of me that I couldn’t quite identify. The feeling was like I would imagine I would feel if someone spit on my mother’s fresh grave, deeply disrespectful in a way that threatened to suspend my usually non-violent nature to enact revenge.

“I don’t understand,” I managed to type. It was the most true thing I could manage that wasn’t just angry stream of consciousness random half-sentences strung together.

She shrugged sheepishly and gave me a sympathetic half-smile. Despite cats not being great at displaying emotion, apparently I was managing to convey how I felt anyway. It wasn’t her fault of course, no one had been around to properly train her, but I still couldn’t help but feel that she was a fake witch.

“I can still get those things for you, I mean, I already have all that, I think,” she was stuttering slightly, which made me feel bad since I wasn’t trying to blame her.

“Of course,” I replied, “I would like the help. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think badly of you. It’s just a shame that you did not receive a proper education in regards to witchcraft.”

“You could help me with that,” she said. “I would like to know more and be able to actually do magic,”

I looked her face over and found that she looked sincere about her desire to learn. I wasn’t one to turn down a willing student, so I would agree to help her. I didn’t know exactly where to start, but I knew that it would have to wait until I was a human once more to begin. There is so much about magic that requires certain body movements and feelings that I just hadn’t been able to get the same effect as a cat. As soon as I could return to my true form, I could start teaching her in earnest.