Chapter Eight

Ms. Winters, Alley Pa Pa Jiang’s Chinese Restaurant, New York City, Day 41

As Ms. Winters emerged from the dungeon into the darkness of the alley, pushing the grate open like a trap door, he was confronted by an odor so thick and awful he immediately recoiled back into the dungeon. Panting, he desperately tried to catch his breath. He wasn’t willing to give up on the chance to impress and aid his master though, so once he recovered he took a deep breath and bolted out the grate, heading deeper into the alley as fast as he could until he made a turn, and the noxious odor began to decline.

What surprised Ms. Winters about the decline, was the fact that it declined over feet rather than yards. He stopped, searching for the cause of the strange phenomena, and eventually found several layers of colored paper objects taped to the walls of the alley, which seemed to reduce, or more accurately, he noticed, give off scents to help mask the odor of the alley, making it tolerable. He wanted to grab some on his way back, but first he needed to wander through the dark alley, trying to find his way back to Stan’s apartment while looking for creatures to bring back.

A flash of movement caught his attention, and he saw a tail disappearing into a drain pipe, he leapt after it, but couldn’t fit his paw into the drain. He tried to get into the drain, but even as he tore into the pipe, the rat wasn’t there any longer, keeping at it was a waste of time.

Returning to his search for Stan’s apartment, Ms. Winters found a dumpster under a fire escape, and, remembering his descent, concluded that must be the way back, though several fire escapes dotted the alley. He pulled back onto his hind legs, reaching up his paws to place them onto the fire escape, and then jumped up, causing it to creak under his weight but hold. As he made his way up the stairs, he peaked in the windows, looking for Stan’s apartment, but before he spotted Stan’s apartment, he saw a cat resting on the windowsill, on the other side of the window. Overly eager to bring them back for his master, Ms. Winters quickly began to beat his paws against the window, waking the cat, which bolted off in terror before the moment it saw him. Not wanting to lose the cat, he quickly tried to push on the window, causing it to shatter under him, but, no longer supported, he fall partway through and got stuck.

As Ms. Winters tried to pull himself out of the window, an alarm began to ring from deeper in the apartment. Ms. Winters panicked and began to claw at the wall, desperate to widen the hole and escape. Soon enough, a woman peeked out of the hall, saw him, and screamed while running away. He’d been discovered! Now worried, Ms. Winters redoubled his efforts, clawing at the wall, and soon enough the wall collapsed under him, allowing him to advance into the apartment, looking for them.

Ms. Winters was drawn to the bedroom, where he heard soft crying and an oddly distorted voice, he just rammed his way into the room, trying to get to her, causing the woman to scream. He didn’t see the cat in the room, but maybe if he brought her back to the dungeon, nobody else would notice him? Deciding to follow that logic, Ms. Winters pounced on the woman, rendering her hysterical, so he batted her with his paw several times, causing her to faint. Now that she was subdued, most of Ms. Winter’s problems should have been solved, so he bit into her arm, gently holding onto her, and flipped her over his back, so he could bring her back to the dungeon, but when he got to the hole in the wall, he found they didn’t fit through together. After he managed to pull them out of the hole and back into the apartment, he had to drag her behind him to get them both through the hole.

That prevented him from reacting to the noise from an adjacent fire escape, and a gunshot rang out, followed almost instantly by a sharp, piercing pain in his back. When he turned around to see what it was, he found Stan on a fire escape across the alley, pointing a gun at him. The gun erupted again, and a pain emerged from his shoulder.

Ms. Winters cried out in distress that Stan was attacking him, trying to get Stan to calm down and notice him, yet Stan just shot him again, this time hitting his shoulder. Frustrated and sad, Ms. Winters grabbed the woman and leapt off the fire escape, falling twenty feet to the ground, bolting away as fast as he could, gunshots and footsteps ringing behind him, but they fell away as the distance between them increased.

Too upset to care, Ms. Winters ran headlong down the alley, around the corner, and shoved the woman ahead of him into the dungeon. As soon as he arrived, however, he heard “You brought back something strange, but you’re injured, what happened?” from his master, alongside the refreshing wave of mana that began to heal his wounds.

Ms. Winters tried to convey that he had found a cat, but when he went into the building to find it, the woman had seen him. When he went after her, he couldn’t find the cat, so he brought her instead, on the way back he was attacked by Stan. His master did not understand at first, so he had to try communicating it several times, but well before he finished, his master began to freak out, ordering him deeper into the tunnel that suddenly expanded at the other side of the room and closed behind him and the woman, followed by a rumbling noise as he worked to drag the woman over the spike pit at the entrance of the room, wondering what was going on.