part0010

IT WAS THE GREATEST shock of my life. I was a cat now. A little kitten even! And I had a new human master with a name that I used to use not so long ago! This was very hard to believe, and even harder to accept. I tried to enter the new world to check with my own eyes that these changes were real, but the same message kept appearing before me:

I whined helplessly and hoped that this was just a bad dream, that I’d wake up in my familiar human body. But all I could do for now was look at my character information. A ragged ginger kitten looked back at me from the stats screen, with a broken back-left leg tightly bandaged.

ATTENTION! Your master may come up with a name for you until you reach level 5.

Otherwise, you will be given the default name Whiskers.

ATTENTION! Game class is determined automatically at level 10 based on the skills you gain and your play style. Your class may be updated/corrected further until you reach level 25. After level 25, your class cannot be changed and you will no longer be able to use skills incompatible with your game class.

Currently suggested class: Troublemaker, Pussycat, Birdhunter

Strength 8 (-30% damage dealt in close combat)

Agility 20 (+30% movement speed, +30% reaction speed, +30% action accuracy) * Your high Agility gives your character special abilities (temporarily inactive)

** Due to an injury, Agility is temporarily reduced to 18, bonuses received from Agility stat reduced

Intellect 18 This high level of Intellect for a creature of the Cat species allows you to see the expanded stats of creatures and items and gives additional information on classes and game skills

Perception 18 (+20% range to vision, hearing, sense of smell)

Physique 14 No effect

Luck Modifier -3 * Your extremely low Luck gives your character special abilities

ATTENTION! You can redistribute up to three stat points

Health Points: 61 / 61

Carrying capacity: 2.2 lbs * Inventory unavailable

Hand-to-Hand Combat 1 * Mutagens not used

Little Furball * Innate ability of creatures of your species

+30% defense against cold due to fur. Creatures of large and very large sizes ignore you

Hardy Brute * Ability available to creatures with significantly negative Luck

+10% resistance to cold, heat, poisons, radiation and other aggressive effects

Nocturnal Predator * Innate ability of creatures of your species

No penalty to vision range at night, automatic Soundless Step at night

You cannot eat vegetation

Everyone’s Favorite * Innate ability of creatures of your species

+20 to reaction from any cat species, +20 to reaction from males, +50 to reaction from females of all intelligent species.

Complete protection against aggression from any cat species until level 10

Clawed Paws * Innate ability of creatures of your species.

10% chance on hit to make enemy bleed

Daredevil * Ability available to creatures with Agility at 20 or above **

Ability to climb vertical surfaces, fit through narrow gaps and cracks and jump ten times the length of your body

** Ability temporarily unavailable due to injury; recovers in 30 days

What was I supposed to do with that?! Hope that this was just a bad dream, that I’d be a man when I woke? But what if that never happened? Did I have to play THIS?!

I calmed down a little, then more carefully read the stats of this furball toon I had to play. Hmm… No fighter, to put it lightly. With that huge 30% penalty to damage dealt with claws and teeth, my kitten would barely be able to handle anyone alone, and the ten percent chance to make the opponent bleed was scant solace. I was tempted to boost my Strength at the cost of some other stat to improve my combat abilities. I tried to add a point to Strength, taking away from Agility (thankfully you could play with the stats as much as you wanted before confirming) and found out that each additional point to Strength adds +5% to damage dealt in close combat. That meant that even the maximum possible three points extra to Strength would only reduce the penalty by 15%… Not exactly a thrilling boost. Especially when I thought about my character’s other problem: the kitten’s extremely low Luck modifier. What did that mean?

The character’s Luck modifier influences your chance of hitting with any long-range weaponry, your chance of being wounded when falling or taking damage, your winnings in gambling games and your chance of dealing critical damage to a foe. Luck does not influence your chance to find trophies, but does increase your chance of a more valuable find.

Your current Luck means a penalty of -3 to all checks for parrying, dodging, maintaining balance, resisting injury and dealing critical damage. It also increases your chance of random negative events.

I had no interest in ranged weaponry or gambling games in the body of a kitten. These paws would hold a bow or rifle about as badly as a deck of cards. But that minus three penalty to all Agility checks and the ‘increased chance of negative events’ definitely bothered me. I tried to take a point from Agility and put it into Luck. The penalty to all the checks went down to minus two, but the special Daredevil attribute disappeared too. Although that didn’t seem to matter a great deal; my kitten couldn’t climb trees or jump far for another month on account of its broken leg. In a whole month of gameplay with such a terrible penalty to Luck, I suspected my kitten would get a bunch of new injuries, so Daredevil wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Another point would reduce the penalty to all checks down to minus one, but at the same I also lost the Hardy Brute ability, which gave my character ten-percent resistance against cold, heat and other extreme conditions. Probably a bad idea. That resistance could come in handy.

I reset the redistributed point and continued to mess around with my character stats, not yet confirming the changes, just playing around with the figures. Increasing or lowering physique increased and lowered total Health and Stamina. That was pretty predictable.

What happened?! I had no idea what was going on. Had my in-game master given his pet to someone? Or… here I laughed with the predatory grin of a Cheshire cat, because I guessed just what was going on. Whoever was playing as my human body had gotten rid of his lame double-barreled surname and changed his game nick to Sergeant. I would have done just the same.

Hmm… What was it the stranger in the bar said? “Two different characters can lead to the most interesting outcomes” and “Don’t forget to bring the kitten.” Incidentally, I’d figured out why I had to take the kitten with me. The little furball’s body had become my prison! And, as strange as it sounds, it was me playing the human master as well!

I tried to close the stat window to confirm that Sergeant was me. But…

Damn! When would I be allowed to join the game? I went back to my character stats. This time I experimented with Intellect. Reducing Intellect by one, or even by two points, seemed to have no effect. Reducing it by three down to fifteen removed the note about the stat being high for the cat species, and the descriptions on all the stats and skills got simpler. What if I did the opposite and increased Intellect even more?

Intellect at nineteen. No visible changes except that my Stamina points dropped a little (probably because of the change in Agility from where I’d taken the point). Intellect at twenty. Even fewer Stamina points, but…

There we go! Under the kitten’s multicolored bars showing health, fatigue and hunger, another appeared, blue this time! A hint floated up to tell me that this was my mana bar. I had just three Magic Points. Not a lot. Very little, even. But this was just the start!

At the same time, another line about a special characteristic appeared in my character sheet:

Self-Taught Mage * Ability available to creatures with Intellect at 20 or above

ATTENTION! The character must have the corresponding skill

There it was — another weapon for my kitten apart from weak claws and teeth! Feeling like I was on the right track, I read about the possible spheres of magic my kitten could learn.

Two more sections (Summon Magic and Death Magic) were inactive for me for some reason. I didn’t know why exactly. Maybe this world had some kind of balance limitations and didn’t invite cute and apparently harmless kittens to summon terrible demons or sow death and destruction. No problem. The five types of magic available should be more than enough. Although… Damn it!

Each section of magic required the character to have a corresponding skill. But those skills were incompatible with each other! I could choose only one of the five! Damn, not fair!

I wanted it all. To launch fireballs at enemies, to heal myself and my friends, to summon treacherous illusions, to transform from a harmless kitten into something big and dangerous. After spending a long time studying the spells on offer, I settled on Curse Magic.

These spells were available right away at level 1, although using the last required a whole five Magic Points, and I only had three. Nonetheless, I made my choice:

I lowered my Agility from 20 to 18 to free up two stat points. Good-bye useful Daredevil ability, I’d have to do without it. Anyway, thanks to the broken leg, the kitten’s Agility would be just 16 for now. I got another stat point by lowering Perception to 17 (yes, I lost 5% range on my hearing, vision and sense of smell, but that was no disaster). The main thing was that I had three stat points to spend.

First of all, I raised Intellect from 18 to 20! There’s the magic bar! Welcome, furball mage, to a new world! And finally, I used the last stat point to raise Luck from minus 3 to minus 2, to make it a little easier for my kitten to survive to be the terror of my enemies!

I read the lines of text and purred happily — the other sections of magic weren’t closed to my kitten after all. I just had to wait for level ten. Well, this was a start. Next I wanted to learn more about useful skills for my kitten, but at that very moment, I was dragged into the new world! Finally!

Damn, nice bonus! I’d have to try and get it. Only… Where was I?! Winter… Night… A snowy forest… Snowdrifts so big that my kitten sank right into them up to his head. Wait. Voices? Yes! People were talking somewhere ahead! I galloped toward the voices, limping along and falling into the loose snow. And almost reached them, but then…

The unkempt thug glanced around furtively, didn’t see the tiny kitten. He pulled his arm back and brought down a rock with all his strength on the head of the young man sitting nearby. He killed him! I froze in shock.