part0039

I STARTED AWAKE as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over my head. My tiny kitten heart was trying to beat its way out of my chest as if from fear. A strange and intolerably piercing feeling of impending doom gripped me. Something was wrong. But what was it? I climbed onto the big oaf’s shoulder, looked around carefully, listened. My furry ears twitched. All seemed calm. Early morning, practically still night. No wind. A thick mist had descended on the meadow. Sergeant was wrapped up warm and sat blearily numb on the armored reptile’s back as it ran in circles. The human was tired, but not asleep. He was singing Stairway to Heaven to himself under his breath, his voice cracking, occasionally forgetting words and replacing them with yawns. Sergeant didn’t seem to be the reason for my concern.

All the same, I activated my Soothe skill to support my master, helping to restore his Stamina Points and banish fatigue. I turned in the other direction. From the river, I heard a big fish splashing around, the occasional ribbit, some strange howls. But those noises had been going on all night. I couldn’t hear anything new. Katy and Tick-Tock had crossed to the opposite side of the river, settling down together in the shallows amid the reeds. They were very busy. Pan’s Landing would surely be seeing a bunch of baby creeping crocodiles in the near future.

Wait! What was that? A weak sound coming from the woods. Someone was wandering unhurriedly, rustling in the wet grass, carelessly breaking twigs. A sherkh? The sound was moving away, and there was only one source. Not the sherkhs. They moved too quietly for me to hear them at this distance. Anyway, I could hear a quiet sobbing. It was a woman. Then I realized what I was hearing — it was Varya, walking with a heavy weight, upset and crying.

She was the reason I woke up so worried! I must have heard the girl in my sleep and realized that I needed to go help right away. I jumped straight off the human’s shoulder onto the giga-komodo’s back, then fearlessly leaped from the great height right into the thick mist. Damn it! I hoped to land on soft springy grass, but I hit something hard instead. I hurt my paw again! The injury on my back left leg didn’t heal when I leveled up, unlike all the other bumps and scrapes I got in the new world. It seemed the only way to heal it was to wait a month. The leg hurt and I couldn’t stand on it again now. But that didn’t matter. The important thing was catch up to the departing Scout before she was lost completely.

It wasn’t easy to limp through the thick grass on three legs, but I went as fast as I could, listening for distant footsteps. I was quickly soaked through from the dew and even started shivering. I was losing Stamina Points fast. But a few minutes later, I finally caught up to Varya!

The girl was walking fast along the edge of the forest, her eyes wet with tears, headed toward the waterfall that I could hear easily from where we were. The heavy overstuffed backpack she wore confirmed my suspicions that Varya planned to leave and not come back. It looked like she’d packed supplies for her fellow soldiers, as her commander had ordered.

The mist was so thick. I’d never seen it this heavy. Max Dubovitsky claimed that in this weather, his daughter could find a way home, move between the worlds. The Engineer believed it so strongly that I did too. I had no doubt that Varya was capable of leaving.

Silly, the way I saw it. Where would she end up? If she landed in the urbanized and computerized twenty-first century, it would be a hell of a world for her to adapt to. She was brought up with completely different ideals and principles. If she got back to distant 1941 and the war, then her commander would be none too happy at her leaving her rifle behind in Pan’s Landing, and they’d think her insane if she told them about creeping crocodiles, furry people and invisible walkers. And that was the best-case scenario. It seemed more likely to me that the girl would wind up in a trap, surrounded again by the fascists combing the woods.

Varya sat down on her bag. We couldn’t have much of a conversation; I could only meow. The girl was mostly quiet rather than sharing her woes. I couldn’t help her like this.

I had thought a lot about Varya Tolmachyova’s role in her squad. She didn’t seem like a nurse, let alone a cook. In the new world, the girl had become a Scout. I wondered if that was somehow connected to her past life. Maybe her job was observing the enemy and relaying intel. And that meant Varya would have been trained to use radio, she would have completed those courses. That meant I knew a way to get through to her. I’d messed around with radio back in my teens, even learned Morse code. True, I gave it up after a while — the romance of it was dead, nobody sent distress signals out on the airwaves anymore, and conversations with other radio geeks got boring fast. It was all a long time ago. I wasn’t sure I could remember all the letters and symbols. But it was worth a try.

Alright. Little taps with my right hand on the girl’s skin, followed by longer presses with my claws. The letter D was dash, dot, dot. O was dash, dash, dash. N, dash dot. T, dash. Then a pause. It was all coming back to me. Now for another word.

I couldn’t answer back with Varya holding me in the air by the scruff of my neck. Fortunately, she realized that herself after a moment and placed me on her forearm. I quickly drummed on her skin with my paw:

The girl screamed in fear and dropped me. She covered her mouth with her hand to avoid waking the whole forest. I didn’t understand her reaction. So what if I was a talking cat? Sure, it’s a little unusual, but nothing to be afraid of.

Over the next twenty minutes, I managed to get my main point across to the girl — that I used to be human, but now I was in the body of a cat. She’d seen my human body too, which Sergeant was currently inhabiting. Sergeant was something like a second me, part of the mind we shared that was split in two when we came to the new world. Yes, we were once one, and I remembered everything he remembered. And even more, since I had higher Intellect, which gave me a better memory. I didn’t forget any words from our favorite songs, unlike certain lumbering oafs who shall remain nameless. I doubted he could remember Morse code.

“So you can’t talk to anyone but me? You poor thing! Want to talk to people through me? You can tap on me and I can translate. Heck, let’s just leave together! Where I want to go, lots of people know Morse code, and you’ll always have someone to talk to! The Commander said that we’ll break through the front line to our people soon, and I’ll show you to them! The Soviet scientists will really want to see a talking cat!”

The girl sincerely wanted to help me, but I didn’t like the way her thoughts were going. In fact, it scared the hell out of me. I started to tell Varya that she shouldn’t tell anyone about me. It was better for other people to dismiss the little kitten. That meant I could stay unnoticed and do much more good!

It took a while, but I managed to convince the girl not to keep it a secret. Life in a cat’s body was far from sweet, and if people learned of my peculiar nature, it would only get worse. They’d start to fear me, avoid me, chase me away.

For her, the autumn of ‘41 was the present. Bloody and dangerous, full of joy and sadness, victory and defeat. And no doubt very vividly remembered. The new world must seem boring and fake when set against the life she left behind. But to me, all that was deep in the past, before my father’s time, let alone mine. A difficult time, when my country was on the brink of peril. The fascists were just seven miles from Moscow. Leningrad was under siege. The front was moving eastward, and millions of Red Army soldiers had been taken prisoner. In Europe and beyond the ocean, nobody believed that the USSR could withstand. But withstand it did! At the cost of great losses and much self-sacrifice and heroism, through a titanic effort, the enemy was stopped, and then thrown back and crushed.

If Varya and I went to the past… Then we could change the future by just showing up, even if we kept quiet about everything we knew. We would unwillingly affect the course of history, which could be very dangerous. Events might go otherwise. Varya alone wouldn’t be too bad. She only knew fragments. But I’d studied history, and studied it well. I knew all the main battles of the war, the routes of all the assaults, the distribution of forces. I knew all the greatest defeats and most outstanding victories. I could remember airplanes and tanks that the front hadn’t yet seen. Would I be able to resist sharing that information with others? Changing the course of history could be extremely dangerous…

It was a meandering journey, but eventually I managed to get my thought across. Varya sat in silence a while, then finally agreed. She looked at her backpack of provisions, sighed heavily and decided to change the subject.

“Tell me, Whiskers… I mean, Andrei… Is it true that Sergeant and Shelly… well…” Varya fell silent, unable to find the right words. But I got the picture.

“Wow…” Varya smiled and blushed heavily. “I’ve never had a kitten admit to falling in love with me. It’s nice. Alright, you’ve convinced me. I’ll stay in this world. And I’ll help you find a way to turn back into a human.”

Yes! I’d done what I’d set out to do: convinced Varya to stay with me in this world! Somehow I knew that there would be no more attempts to leave. The unstable passageway between the worlds had just closed.

ATTENTION! Your play style has suddenly changed. If your character makes further progress in this direction, your game class will change from Hexxer to Cat Sith! This means that you will lose some skills that are incompatible with that class: Curse Magic, Transformation Magic and Dodge will be deleted!

I read the game messages and they scared the hell out of me. No! Dodge didn’t matter; I hadn’t used that skill once. I tried to avoid things coming to blows anyway. But without Curse Magic and Transformation Magic, my Whiskers would lose his main strength and would be far less dangerous to enemies. And although I suspected that I wouldn’t have to use Soothe so actively again, and that I’d probably never be able to level up the skill five times in twenty minutes again, all the same I switched off the skill. And, to calm down the game algorithms, I even put ten of my fifteen free skill points into Curse Magic, leveling it up to sixty-five. I put the remaining five points into Radar Ear, which had proved itself to be a very useful skill. It was now at level twenty-one.

There was a lot I wanted to talk about with the first human that understood me, but a mighty roar from somewhere in the forest interrupted our conversation. We froze. The roar repeated, this time far louder and closer. Something very big and very dangerous was approaching. Wordlessly, Varya and I both went into Stealth in synchrony, then activated translucency too.

“Look at you! Just like me!” the Scout laughed, stretching out a barely visible hand to search for the invisible kitten on her backpack. If it weren’t for the movement, I wouldn’t have seen her outstretched hand.

Varya obeyed. She picked up her backpack, which turned almost invisible on the girl’s back, then moved toward the river bank. We came out on the mist-wreathed meadow and I called a halt. I didn’t like what I was hearing at all; the nearby trampling of something very heavy. But Sergeant came first, careering past us twenty paces away. It looked like the approaching beast had interrupted the taming process and chased the human away from the giga-komodo. Varya was about to call out to the boy, but I sank my claws into her shoulder in warning. And a good thing, too! Just twenty seconds later, the earth shook and a giant reptilian face full of teeth appeared out of the swirling mist, followed by its long black body.

The giant crashed on by without spotting us. Woah! It was so big! At least fifty feet long from its nose to the tip of its tail. And swift. I used the Slow spell on it a whole seven (!) times, but it barely helped. The target’s size must have affected the spell’s effectiveness. Nonetheless, Varya decided to follow the massive beast. I don’t know what she was hoping for exactly, since the monster was moving too fast. But the Scout was right! After four hundred yards or so, we saw the massive dinosaur again. Its speed had dropped and it staggered along now. Another Slow! Weaken! Weaken! Weaken!

Then, finally, the river monster began to sway… and crashed to the ground! The earth shook from the landing. The reptile tried to raise itself on shaky legs, but fell again, and this time didn’t get back up. My invisible companion started to creep closer. Foolishly, in my view, but I didn’t stop her. I felt nothing but fear at the sight of the huge predator, although I knew deep down that such a large creature would ignore my tiny kitten body.

“I’m gonna keep this one! What a cutie-pie! Still little, just level seventeen. And skinny. But never mind, I’ll feed her up and we’ll turn her into a real terror of the forest. Check out her magic mist fur, Whiskers!”

I ignored the Scout’s proprietorial statements. I could already hear Sergeant heading our way, fast. Let the humans decide for themselves who got the big lizard.