Chapter 5: Home Sweet Home

Chapter Five: Home Sweet Home (Edited)

The stupidest conversation of both my lives happened because of extreme boredom colliding with drugs.

I was sixteen, and I stayed with my cousin Jerry at his mom’s for a month over the scorching summer. In theory, it was family bonding time out in the countryside, but in practice, I strongly suspected my father wanted me out of the house for a month or so given I was at the peak of my sarcastic, angsty little shit phase with any and all authority figures.

To Dad’s credit, he waited for me to reach the front door and be invited in before he bolted in his old four-wheel beater. My first view of the house was a claustrophobic living room stuffed with ancient peeling white painted furniture covered in dusty sheets while my cousin stood awkwardly holding the door open. My aunt laid snoring on the couch with a brandy bottle cuddled like a teddy bear. It was 11:00 a.m. 

This set the tone for my entire visit. We exhausted entertainment options within a day, and by day two it was already doing a fine mimicry of the climate of Hell outside, so going outside was a no go.

There were three things to do at my cousin’s. We could play games on his last generation console, of which he only had shooters (and not many of them) while I preferred platformers. We could watch mind numbing cable sitcoms and soap operas. Alternatively, we could engross ourselves with aging beige paint on the walls.

There was no internet, aside from a sketchy signal on my phone that came and went. There were endless corn fields surrounding the one-acre property, while the property itself amounted to a house , fence, and field of dead yellow grass. The most interesting landmarks were a dead pear tree and desiccated blackberry bushes.

By the seventh day, my mind started to unravel into a gray cloud. I had planted my butt in a den’s uncomfortable floral couch made sometime in the 1970’s and decided to watch a marathon of SpongeBob. There was nothing else.

My cousin joined me, at some point. I do not know when the joint came out, nor if I even took a hit or if it was all Jerry and I got a second hand high.

“What would you do if… like, you entered a new world? Portal opened up, right now, and spat you out,” Jerry asked.

“Depends,” I said. “Am I just dumped there, or do I find a portal I can use to go back and forth?”

Jerry took a solid minute to respond. Time had slowed out in the countryside miles away from any mental stimulation. What felt like days would pass in minutes while minutes ate hours.

I think it affected him; that, or the weed was really saturating his brain. Finally, he said, “Both?”

I snorted. “Probably die of cholera. In the second option, I’d try to use it for fun and profit. Gold coins from a fantasy world sold at a pawn shop would be a way to live.”

Jerry mulled that over and nodded, shaking his long, dandruff covered hair back and forth. “Harsh. What if you had powers?” Jerry blew smoke my way and I don’t recall blinking.

That had stumped me, if only for a moment. “If I have special powers, someone upstairs probably likes me? That means the whole hero gig is a thing. Hell, who knows, maybe I’d even find an obligatory waifu with big—”

“I’d fuck Sandy,” Jerry said.

“—what?”

“The squirrel girl. I’d fuck Sandy if I had powers.”

That was my first encounter with a furry. 

Looking back on it, I do not think I could have predicted my rebirth as a catgirl living out of an old sea fort with my new world's mom; it wouldn’t have been anywhere on my top twenty expectations. Or top two hundred, for that matter.

It didn’t take long to reach the bedroom. It wasn’t as if our dwelling was terribly large. The old fort’s citadel went surprisingly deep, admittedly but we didn’t use the lower tunnels as they’d long since flooded, so we stayed close to the dry surface near the highly reinforced walls. We used maybe twenty percent of the complex that used to be living quarters.

Mom kept the bedroom tidy, just short of being spartan by a few piles of books and technical manuals lying around the cots we used. The sole exception to this clutter were my drawings.

I’d tried flubbing my drawing at first to be more childlike, but that had proven exhausting, and I’d soon reverted to more detailed charcoal sketches that had perplexed Mom at first but now accepted with nary a questioning glance. Most were things I’d been able to observe on the island: the sea, a very round seagull or a roundgull, if you will, an angry crab that fought me like its life depended on it, a flower with purple petals I hadn’t been able to capture quite right. Most continued in that vein of just things, but there are a few more creative like a moonless sky above a dead forest (sketch, at least) or a ship beached beneath a full moon.

I say that like they weren’t chicken scratches. Mom seemed to like them, at least. Also I haven’t seen chicken here.

 Lighting was still sparse by the overhead light strips, but a few lanterns were set up. The lanterns might once have been nice, even pretty artisan things with leaflike designs over the metal cases, but half of them were rusted, dented, or had actual holes in them now like they had been dug out of a pile of rubble: they probably were.

However, for all they looked like archeological relics, they were one of the first things I’d seen in this world that suggested the supernatural existed and I didn’t have one Hell of an active imagination for a little girl. Rather than some lightbulb, the place with a “bulb” was more like a lens while behind each lens was a single sigil. The lanterns would produce a slow flickering, slightly blue tinted light when a switch was flipped. Weirdly enough, if left on a while and touched, I could feel the lamp cooling off rather than heating up.

I had no idea how they worked beyond “magic”. Mom had said a word I still couldn’t translate, followed by “outdated piece of junk”. Honestly, that wasn’t so weird.

In my old world I’d only loosely known the theory and physics behind how computers worked yet was still fully capable of using a computer. Furthermore, the lanterns definitely worked and were made for anyone to use.  They even had a compartment to put in a bulky silver colored battery of some type shaped like a wafer.

 Rather than a closet, dresser, or wardrobe, there were several dented and dull blue footlockers lined up across the wall with scratch marks on the floor marking where they’d been dragged in. Going through the left-most locker, I was able to pick out my wading and hiking clothes with ease and didn’t fuck up the organized way my mom had put things. I did genuinely try to put things back neatly, but I failed. In my defense, I was never that organized in my old life and in this one I was not tall enough to fold most of the oversized clothing very well with my little arms.

My foraging clothes were all old, but durable and practical clothing: tall, button up boots three sizes too big, leathery, faint blue, water resistant pants, and a shirt that may once have been white but was now permanently stained beige. Over this outfit I wore a brown jacket that somewhat reminded me of an aviator jacket if it was comically oversized. All the clothing bore rough stitching and impromptu adjustments to better fit someone my size. Putting on the boots was just a bit odd given my feet weren’t quite human anymore, but not that strange, either. It was fortunate neither Mom nor I were fashionistas, or we’d probably have a heart attack from how crude my outfit was.

Not for the first time, I looked at the shoulder of my shirt and noticed the tell-tale indications of a rectangular stitching on the shoulder: all that was left of an original name tag of some sort. I traced it briefly but stiffened when I heard Mom calling for me.

Dressing quickly, I made my way back to the entrance. I say “made” as I would never be elegant in clothing that bunched up and was too big for me even with adjustments, but it sounded better than “waddled on little legs”.

I found Mom by the entrance; a heavy, metal banded door. She was wearing her own gray fatigues with a blue jacket. The fatigues were a bit faded with a few threadbare parts but remained sturdy. The jacket was uniform in color and had a line of gold buttons going up the front, although Mom had it unbuttoned at this point.

She smiled and held out her hand. I took it. She was so warm, almost like a furnace was beneath her skin.

We stepped out into the world and into sunlit ruins.

The citadel at the heart of the fort had stood the test of time. It was a two-story building with thick, sloped slabs of sandstone making up the outer walls. Even long after its construction, it stood strong and more than ready to repel heavy cannon fire even now. If anything, it was weird how well preserved the citadel was, considering the rest of the fort was an utter disaster area. Piles and piles of rubble mixed with soil indicated the plethora of buildings which just weren’t there anymore, leaving behind only evidence of the less sturdy structures eroded by time.

Farther out was the main wall, forming thick slabs a few meters high, much of the rock eroded or shattered over time, but somewhat more intact than the secondary buildings. The soil here was hard packed, but could be dug into with enough grueling effort, as evidenced by a small garden of technically edible plants taken from the dead trees and transplanted to the side of the Citadel.

Morning light filtered over the wall and through cracks where the stone had given way.  The air itself was crisp, not enough to mist but cool enough to bite when I inhaled. Fall was already settling in.  Dust, an occasional bit of vegetation, and puddles of water were the only things present, all the wooden portions of fortifications long since taken or disintegrated under Nature’s patient assault.

It was easy to forget the outside world at times, especially when we stayed in our home for days at a time in bad storms that swept through. Staying inside, talking, living, playing with Mom, going through lessons, and more, I could think that outside the cat ears and tail, I had been reborn to a single, loving mother in a new world. Sure, it was a bit odd living in the intact ruins of an old fort in repurposed rooms meant to make something resembling a home, but we had fresh water from a deep well in the citadel and a more than solid roof over our heads. It wasn’t much, and even by my old life’s low standards it was sad, but it was still something close to home.

The eroded ruins surrounding us broke the illusion of normalcy.

My gaze lingered on the rubble strewn in great piles everywhere. I felt my ears fold, and Mom squeezed my hand.

“Mama, why is this place, so, um, sad?” I said, looking around as Mom fiddled with the door. Sad wasn’t the right word, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Unnerving, sad, melancholy, and more all seemed viable contenders, yet I wasn’t sure how to express this feeling about the ruins outside our home.

“It’s…[tréigthe], I think,” she said, shoving the door closed with a huff. “Before my time, at least. Come on.”

I pondered the word. It was a new one, and the pronunciation was odd. From context it seemed to imply not inhabited or abandoned seemed to be part of it, but she said it like there was more meaning there, something I was missing.

Or maybe there wasn’t context. On our first outing, I had asked her where we were, being curious about this new world.  Mom shrugged and only said we were on an island somewhere in the Northern Dawnlight Expanse and we were living out of an old fort called Fort Isolation. This was naturally meaningless given I didn’t know what any of that meant.

We passed the walls quickly enough and emerged into what I think used to be a collection of small buildings forming a fishing village, although it was hard to tell one pile of rubble and soil from another.

Leaving the village, the island rapidly evened out into a small wood forming the island’s core. Every single tree was barren, and little leaf litter formed on the ground. I remember one spring waiting for the leaves to return and being disappointed when I learned every tree was dead.

It was rather sad. I liked the Fall.

This isn’t to say there was no life in either the ruins or the dead woods. Mosses, vines, blades of grass, and small bushes whose names I was still learning were common enough, poking through cracks in the stone and rubble. Yet even here the seeming normal sight was broken up by the towering gray trunks of trees stretching up like tombstones.

I missed the Fall colors.

My sense of smell seemed mostly similar to my previous life, if significantly improved.   I’d been able to appreciate baked bread and wild flows and all that jazz but comparing what I could smell now to what I smelled then was roughly equivalent. Before my eyes had adjusted, I’d picked up the scent of water condensing on cold stone, undercut by a breeze bringing in a faint scent of salt and sulfur from the sea. Even this late into Fall, I could still smell a faint wildflower’s sweet scent as the breeze swept over me while the scent of damp sand and soil lingered.

Next, sounds were their own shade of impressive. It wasn’t too notable at first but what it lacked in stark difference it made up for in scaling. A bird’s fluttering wings had my ears perk up to listen, the rustling of feathers clear to me in a way I’d just missed as a human. Mom briefly paused, eyes searching nearby trees and foliage, but we saw nothing before we moved on.

Overwhelmingly, however, I could hear the sea and its endless waves upon the shore.

It only took a few minutes to leave the fort and its surrounding ruins entirely. Whether that was a testament to Mom’s pace or a testament to how tiny it was, I wasn’t sure. Yet, we’d soon left them behind for the nearby beach.

I’d never seen the ocean in my old life. My knowledge of the ocean had been fairly limited and confined to documentaries and what I’d read. I’d wanted to visit it, but I had been a landlubber all my life and never got a chance with my impromptu death by murderous Furby. Seeing it now, just like the first time, made me stop, if only for a second. Mom noticed and gave me a moment and a pat.

Sunlight reflected off blue waters that stretched to the horizon. Waves flowed across a distant rocky shore. It never ceases to make me imagine thousands of jewels floating in the water when it was like this. We stood still for a few moments in the breeze, rippling out over the ocean. We stood there for timeless eternity, simply enjoying the sight in a reprieve from the wider day.

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Chapter Five: Author’s Note

I’ve always been fascinated by stories where setting itself can tell a mystery, reveal a backstory even beyond what the main novel and its narrative may entail. This chapter probably reflects that a lot.

Obligatory author plug because I'd love to write more but society sadly says I need monies to keep living (and support my growing addiction to commissioning catgirl art)

Support me on Patreon, Ko Fi, or Subscribe Star. Check them advance chapters uploaded every weekend, too. Or check out my website for links to my other author accounts, contact, socials, etc. Anything is appreciated :3

Also I have a discord now! Check it out. I would love to chat with fans. :3

If you've paid to this anywhere outside of Patreon, subscribestar, or Ko-Fi, then you've been scammed and someone is ripping you off as it is stolen.

If you're reading this on any other site than RoyalRoad, SufficientVelocity,Spacebattles, QuestionableQuesting, or Wattpad or it's by anyone other than HiddenMaster, it's been plagiarized and stolen.