Lucky Rabbit

Pandy looked at Miss Cupcakes. Miss Cupcakes looked at Pandy, then at the door. Pointedly. Like, “Why don’t you open it?” but without words. And Pandy realized that the cat thought she could do exactly that. Change into a human, grab the doorknob, and twist. But she couldn’t, at least not for another, what, fifteen hours? So she looked down, her ears burning.

Miss Cupcakes growled. It wasn’t an, “I’m going to eat you,” growl, but a, “What did I expect,” growl. The kitten turned her back on Pandy and jumped, catching hold of the doorknob herself. But metal didn’t yield to her claws nearly as easily as wood, and with a screech, they slipped off, dropping her back onto her paws.

This failure didn’t seem to deter the feline in the slightest, however, and she jumped, slipped, jumped, slipped, jumped, slipped…until Pandy realized the door must be locked. Because of course it was locked. Who left a secret, maybe-magical door unlocked? Not Professor Beeswick or Augustus, that was for sure. They might be sneaky, and she still wasn’t certain what their end goal was, but they weren’t stupid.

Looking away from the stubborn, apparently tireless kitten, Pandy thought,

Radiant Presence successful. One use remains before level three.

Pandy had already started to move before the change registered. The System had told her what the next level was. Not just ‘the next level’, but ‘level three’. Seriously, what was going on? Should she call Keros? Or maybe Aglaea? But no, not right now. She had enough going on without further involving a couple of gods, however harmless they seemed to be.

She was glowing. That was the important part. She might not be able to help unlock the door, but maybe there was a key, or something else that would help, hidden in this enormous space. Not that her glow reached very far – about to the ends of her whiskers – but it was better than nothing. And she couldn’t just keep using Spark, even if she did have a lot of Corruption Points left. No, she’d wander around until she found something interesting, then invest in a little more light.

Thanks to the thick dust on the floor, it was easy enough to make sure she didn’t double back on herself. When she reached a wall, she moved just far enough to the side that she could barely see her own pawprints, then turned around and paralleled her previous path. Back and forth, back and forth, with Miss Cupcakes’ increasingly annoyed scratch-thump playing in the background.

Pandy had no idea how long she had paced when she found the desk. It was a very large desk, which probably explained why it was still here when everything else had been removed. It was made of some thick, dense wood, the varnish cloudy with age. The chair that had probably once accompanied it was gone, but the desk stood – or rather lurked – in the darkness, a final reminder of some long-ago person and purpose. Pandy hopped up on top of it before summoning a single Spark. The spell barely cast as much light as a dollar-store candle, but the faint illumination would at least allow Pandy to look into the depths of its drawers.

It wasn’t too difficult to open the top drawers. There was a long, flat one in the middle, then two deeper ones on each side, and Pandy could pry them open with her claws while lying on her belly. They each slid out with a shrill squeal, the right-hand one sticking halfway out, so Pandy had to fall down into it and use her glow to see the back.

She found no signs of forgotten objects or hidden drawers, no matter how she pried at the suspiciously bouncy drawer-bottom. All she managed to do was splinter a corner, which made her wince, though she was fairly certain that the original owner was no longer around to care. Then she had to get back out of the drawer, which was a bit trickier, and figure out how to open the bottom drawers on each side, which was quite a lot harder.

Eventually, she managed it by dangling her back legs over the side of the desk until she could hook her toes into the top of the drawer, then doing a sort of reverse-leg-lift, which was not something rabbits were meant to do. She couldn’t get these drawers all the way open, so she dropped down into each one, fruitlessly searching for anything that might help.

By the time she hopped out of the last drawer and landed on the ground, Miss Cupcakes had come to find out what the ruckus was all about. The cat sat, grooming her whiskers, tail wrapped neatly around her body, giving Pandy a half-lidded look that showed exactly how unimpressed she was. When Pandy’s landing created a fresh puff of dust, Miss Cupcakes sneezed and, rather than going around the desk like any normal person would, stalked under it and slid out beneath the thick piece of wood that formed the back of it.

Pandy sighed. Really, what had she expected? Help? Not that there was anything left to check. The top of the desk was empty. All five drawers were empty. Her big discovery was a bust. Feeling rather annoyed and a wee bit defiant – an uncommon emotion for Pandy – she followed in the cat’s pawprints, except that when Pandy hopped onto the board furthest under the desk, it creaked.

It was nothing. A tiny sound, no more. The desk itself had been far more talkative. But none of the other boards had creaked. So Pandy froze, then hopped in place.

Creak.

Had it moved? Surely she’d imagined that. Or, if she hadn’t, then it meant nothing more than the creak. After all, a creak had to come from somewhere, and the most obvious place was the rubbing of wood against wood – simple mechanical movement. But Pandy bounced again, harder, and the board creaked, louder, and then Miss Cupcakes was back, her eyes practically glowing in the faint illumination cast by Pandy’s Radiant Presence.

They didn’t exchange glances or nods, but Pandy went to one end of the board, while the kitten stalked to the other. Digging in their claws, they pried at it, and Miss Cupcakes’ end lifted. Pandy changed tactics, pressing down on her end of the board, which made the other side rise even more, allowing Miss Cupcakes to stick her head into the space beneath. The kitten sneezed sharply, twice, then backed up, with something clamped firmly in her teeth.

It was a bag. An old, cracked, dried-out leather bag, which all but fell apart when the rabbit and the cat began tugging at it. And there, revealed by the flakes of ancient skin…was not a key. Not what they needed. Instead, it was a book. A small, surprisingly-well-preserved book, with gilded edges on the pages, and a cover that was probably gray, but might also be blue. There was no title on the cover, but that only made it all the more intriguing.

Miss Cupcakes was underwhelmed. The kitten glared at the book, hissed at it, then batted it with her paw so hard that it spun across the dusty floor and almost fell back into the hole from which it had been removed. Pandy was scandalized, leaping forward to use her own body to cushion the book’s impact when it struck the raised floorboard. Honestly, she preferred games to books, and audiobooks to paper books – mostly so she could continue playing games while listening to the books – but books were still something to be respected.

She tried to remember what was in her inventory. Money, clothes, more money…and the stretchy black skin-suit she’d found in Ms. Wellington’s bed. It had come in handy when she had to fight the Apparition, but it was pretty wrecked by now, so she dropped it and, after a moment of thought, shoved it into the hole beneath the floorboard and stomped the board back into place.

Thanks to the disturbed dust, it was still very obvious that something was strange about the board, so she spent a few minutes dragging her fluffy bunny-duster around, disturbing the area under and around the desk. Only then did she vanish the book into her inventory, once again filling it up. She was pretty sure, anyway. She really did need to talk to Keros about inventory management.

After that, she returned to her slow sweep of the room, once again using her glow to show her what lay immediately ahead of her. But she eventually filled in the space between three walls, finding a corner and tracing tighter and tighter triangles until she was certain she’d seen everything there was to see. Which was exactly nothing. Of course.

Meanwhile, Miss Cupcakes had switched from scratch-thump to just scratch-scratch after their failure with the desk, so Pandy figured it was time to go back and see what she was up to. She had no doubt that the kitten would still be Displeased by Pandy’s failure to do anything helpful, but short of beginning a sweep of whatever remained of the space, Pandy had nothing else to offer.

Now that the floor was covered in bunny tracks, it was much more difficult to find her way around, but by putting the tiny Spark still hovering over the desk behind her, and turning her ears until the scratch-scratch was directly in front of her, Pandy found her way back to Miss Cupcakes.

The kitten was clawing at the bottom of the door. She was completely focused on her task, not even glancing around when Pandy arrived. Just one swipe of her claws after another, scratching away the darker wooden surface of the door to reveal a sort of reddish-brown within. This was the point at which Pandy realized that she was an idiot.

Coming up beside Miss Cupcakes, Pandy put a paw out. If she’d hoped to stop the kitten from clawing at the door, she succeeded, but only because the next swipe laid open her own paw instead. Blood spurted, Pandy squealed, and Miss Cupcakes backpedaled, ears flat and tail puffed up to five times its normal size.

A Minor Heal took care of the damage, and Pandy moved between the kitten and the door. Drawing back her own freshly-repaired appendage, she thought,

Scratch successful. Twenty uses remain before level twelve.

This skill had lain long-unused, and Pandy had never spent Corruption Points on it before, so she was glad to see that it took only one point to produce a swipe that tore chunks from the door. In fact, one of her claws became lodged in the wood, and it was rather painful when she yanked it free. Still, it was worth it to see the look in Miss Cupcakes’ eyes. Was that…respect?

Pandy was more careful after that, trying to make sure her claws didn’t cut too deep into the wood, but instead scraped off the surface. She did far more damage than the kitten had, but probably not as much as she could have if she’d really gone for it. Still, the skill hadn’t quite reached level twelve when light became visible through the low, wide crater she’d made.

Miss Cupcakes gave an encouraging meow, and Pandy stopped trying to be careful, and instead Scratched at the door with her full force, tearing through the last chunks. Pieces of wood scattered, and just as the hallway outside became visible, the kitten shoved her way past Pandy, while the System informed Pandy her skill had leveled up.

Scratch successful. Scratch is now level twelve.

+1 to Pain Tolerance

Took long enough. Do you like pain, or something?

Oh no. No. Pandy had played a few games and read more stories with a snarky System, and she absolutely didn’t want one in real life. She was hard enough on herself. She definitely didn’t need something living in her head, constantly taking little jabs at her. Then more words scrolled across her vision.

Oops.

Did I say that out loud?

How do I turn this off?

Is it this?

No, that’s the-

Darn it!

Um, oh…Hi.