Chapter 88: Book 2 Chapter 14.1: Don't Save the Cat

Vell had his nose buried in a book, even as the others carried on a lively conversation. Just to show that he was really serious about his reading, he stopped to rub his chin thoughtfully. Harley stopped talking long enough to examine the spine of his book.

“Diffractive Analysis of Runecarving Methods by Hellson and Pallesley,” Harley said. “Seems like a real page turner.”

Vell acknowledge her with a short grunt, and then turned a page. Lee shook her head and pulled Harley away.

“You’ll have to excuse him, dear, he’s been absorbed in that book all morning,” Lee said. “I think he got a bad grade and feels he has to compensate.”

“Low by Vell standards or by normal people standards?” Harley asked.

“Why’s Vell have different standards?”

“These two are exceptional in their chosen fields,” Lee said, gesturing to Harley and Vell. “Their standards of low are very different from you or I.”

“What do you mean ‘our’ standards?” Harley said. “You’re a top student too.”

“Yes, but my father is rich,” Lee said. “People judge me differently.”

“You’re still smart,” Harley insisted. “Vell, back me up.”

Vell nodded in agreement and kept his nose in his book. Harley snapped her fingers near his eyes to try to get him to blink. It didn’t work.

“Boy, he’s really into this, huh?”

“I think his low grade was in Professor Nguyen’s class,” Lee said. “I believe he takes it personally.”

“That would explain things. Well, I know better than to stop Vell once he gets weird. Kim, Hawke, we’re going to need to be vigilant today. Vell is usually the one who stumbles into the daily apocalypses and he’s out of commission.”

“I guess I’m good at stumbling, at least,” Hawke said.

“That’s the spirit,” Harley said. “Keep your eyes open and don’t get distracted by anything.”

Hawke then looked over Harley’s shoulder and saw a cat poke it’s head out of a nearby bush.

“Oh, hey, a cat,” he said, delighted, as many are, by the sight of a cat.

“Nice test, Hawke, but I’m not falling for it!”

“That’s not a test, I actually saw a cat,” Hawke said, pointing in the cat’s direction. It retracted it’s head into the bush just as Harley turned to look.

“Alright, you did get me, but seriously, no need to test me,” Harley said.

“It’s not a test! There is a cat over there!”

Kim briefly looked in the direction Hawke was pointing, and her eyes blurred out of focus for a moment.

“Cat: a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal, and the only domesticated species in the family Felidae,” Kim said. Her eyes then focused again, and scanned the area. “No cat detected.”

“Have you been able to scan for lifeforms this whole time?”

“No, I just looked and didn’t see one,” Kim said.

“Ugh. But there really was a cat over there,” Hawke said.

“The school does have a no pets policy, Hawke,” Lee said. “Can’t have small animals wandering into particle accelerators. Probably just a drone that resembled a cat, or something of the sort.”

“It looked real to me!”

“I’m sure,” Lee said. “Regardless, we should return to Harley’s point, and be vigilant. And also get to class, it’s getting late.”

As she dismissed them, everyone stood and left the picnic table -all but Hawke, who continued to glare at the bush that the cat hid in. His patience paid off when the cat poked it’s head out again to examine a student passing by. Hawke grabbed his phone to take a picture and prove he hadn’t been lying.

Hawke was midway through opening his camera app when the cat stepped out of the bush, sank it’s teeth into the ankle of a passing student, and then dragged their entire body into the bush, the diminutive cat and fully grown man both vanishing into the greenery with a rustle of leaves. Hawke’s finger froze in place over the screen of his phone.

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Taking a few slow, deep breaths to settle his nerves, Hawke stood, backed away from the table, and then ran screaming for Harley.

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“Cat dragged a dude into a bush, huh?”

“Yeah!”

“Did you check the bush already?”

“No! I would’ve got dragged in too!”

“Fair enough,” Harley said. “Yeah, sure, I’ll check it out.”

As Harley abandoned her tools, Himiko set hers down in turn, to raise a protest. As they often were, Harley’s three best friends in the robotics department, Himiko, Kanya, and Sarah, had been helping her with a project.

“Are we just abandoning our super-important project here?”

“Yeah,” Harley said. “You want to go see if there really is a super murder cat on campus?”

A pile of unfinished work stared up at Himiko. She stared back at it for a while, and then looked up to see Kanya and Sarah were already standing with Harley. That worked for Himiko. Now she could pretend she was just following the pack, and not actually excited to see a murder cat. Hawke fearfully led the way as the gaggle of girls descended upon the bushy hiding place of the cat.

Since it was the first loop and she had nothing to lose, Harley stuck her head into the bush. There was a noticeable absence of both cat and murder.

“No dead body here.”

“It’s been a while,” Hawke said. “Maybe it moved.”

“No sign of that either,” Harley said. Dragging a human body tended to leave a fairly obvious trail. Unless this supposed cat had been able to drag a fully grown man around without snapping a single twig or matting any blades of grass, Harley didn’t think anything had been dragged anywhere.

For Hawke’s sake, Harley took another look at the scene. She supposed there could have been some teleportation involved, or perhaps a ghost cat, but that would be much harder to find evidence.

“If there is a cat, it’d have to be a weird one,” Harley said.

“It is not a cat,” Sarah said. “Cats cannot have presence within ten-thousand feet of me.”

“Like, legally, or they physically cannot get that close to you?”

Sarah, as Sarah was wont to do, did not answer the question. Hawke waited politely yet expectantly for an answer that was never coming.

“Oh, she doesn’t answer questions,” Kanya explained.

“Why not?”

“We don’t know, she doesn’t answer us when we ask,” Kanya said. Hawke sighed. He should’ve expected that.

“She may not answer questions, but what she does say is always honest,” Harley said. “If she says there’s no cats, there’s no cats.”

The absence of evidence, in this case, did seem to become evidence of absence. Hawke double-checked the bush one last time and found nothing. Dissatisfied, he turned to Harley with a shrug.

“Alright, I understand if you don’t believe me, but-”

“Hawke, of course I believe you. I was just going to say it’s probably something disguised as a cat, instead of an actual cat.”

“You’d believe that?”

“Hawke, some sort of ethereal assassin disguised as a cat wouldn’t even be the weirdest thing I’ve seen this week,” Harley said.

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah that makes sense.”

“Let’s get Freddy on the case,” Harley suggested. He’s probably got some science thing that can tell what’s going on.”

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“No spacial distortions, no sign of phased movement, no sub-atomic residue indicating disintegration,” Freddy said. He adjusted a knob on his equipment to pick up something new. “And no cat hair.”

“What about hair from alien and or extradimensional entities disguised as cats?”

Freddy turned the knob one more notch to the left.

“Nope, none of that either.”

“Alright. Well, thanks for trying, Freddy, I appreciate the effort,” Harley said.

“What? No, come on, I know what I saw! There has to be something here,” Hawke protested. “Doesn’t that thing have other settings?”

“The only setting I haven’t used is the one that scans for clowns,” Freddy said.

“Why do you even have that setting?”

“I don’t like clowns.”

“Understood. Thanks again, Freddo, I’ll let you get back to doing Freddy things,” Harley said. She affectionately tussled his mop of red hair before letting Freddy return to his own pursuits.

“Okay, so that rules out any science, now we need to try magic,” Hawke said. “We need, Vell, and Lee, and every other magic expert we can find, and we need to scour the area, and-”

“Hawke, bud,” Harley said, as she put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you should just take a load off. All this doomsday stuff has got you pretty high strung.”

“I know what I saw!”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying you’re freaking out a bit.”

Harley didn’t like to cast doubt on her friends, but Hawke had very little evidence to support his claims, and he was acting high-strung even by Hawke standards. Even as Harley watched he was glancing over his shoulder, double-checking the suspicious bush for signs of a cat.

“Maybe let me handle this one and you go take a nap, or something,” Harley suggested. “All this stress is bad for your heart.”

“Stress is kind of a normal response to this sort of thing!”

“I know, I know,” Harley said. “But you are probably dealing with an unhealthy amount of it. Me and Lee and everybody else can take this one. You need a break.”

After taking three deep breaths, Hawke nodded. It had been crisis after crisis since the day he’d started at the Einstein-Odinson, with only a few days to catch his breath. He kept his eyes closed, as Harley kept a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you sure? I could do something-”

“I appreciate it, Hawke, but me, Lee, and Vell used to handle apocalypses all the time, just the three of us. We can handle a day without you.”

“Yeah. Yeah I guess you’re right. I can-”

The sudden and conspicuous absence of Harley’s hand on his shoulder caused Hawke to stop mid-sentence. He opened one eye and peeked out at the empty space where Harley’s hand had been. Then he cracked open both eyes and stared out at the empty space where the rest of Harley had been. There was no sign of her anywhere.

There was, however, a very small gray cat sitting about twenty feet away, staring wide-eyed at Hawke. He took a few steps back. The cat never even blinked.

Taking a few slow, deep breaths to settle his nerves, Hawke backed away a little further, and then ran screaming for Lee.