I woke up in a kaleidoscope.

Brilliant blue air and milky clouds swept across the sky. The tall grass was fresh spring green, but when sunlight hit it, it sparkled peach pink. Flowers peeked out from between the blades, their petals fuzzy and ruby red. Strange flowers…strange colors…

Wait. I could see colors?

I was a tabby cat in a rainbow world. For those who don’t know, cats are basically colorblind.

We can kind of see blue, green, and yellow…but pink and red were things I wasn’t even supposed to recognize.

And wasn’t I supposed to be an old cat? Wasn’t my vision supposed to be blurry? Why could I tell apart every single blade of grass?

And—why was I still alive?

I raised my head, yawned, and began to feel an odd, dizzy sensation. It was like my mind itself was cloudy! And my nose—

‘Choo.

Oh, I guessed that one was just a sneeze.

The petals of a ruby flower drifted out of my nose and into the clean air, that sea of blue. I rolled onto my feet. Still too cautious to stand, I crouched.

And I took it all in.

Then a weird box popped into my vision. Not like a cardboard box, but a gray box that seemed as thin as paper. It scared me so bad that I leaped in the air and landed on my back. Lucky the grass and dirt was so springy…

Welcome to Vencia!

You’ve acquired Traits. Traits are special abilities that are usually unconnected to your SP (Skill Points). Many are automatic or always active. Some have unlimited uses while others have a cooldown period.

Morph (Stage 1/5): Can become a nekomata (also known as a “catgirl”) at will. Very limited activation period.

Human Language (Stage 1/2): Can begin to comprehend, and think in, the human languages used around you.

Perfect Human Vision: Can see a spectrum of color equivalent to the visual range of most humans.

A-ah…this was a bit much…

If this, uh, floating box that followed my eyes everywhere was telling the truth, then was I seeing human colors?

And had I been thinking human words this entire time?

Huh…in hindsight, I’d never known the phrase “in hindsight” before…

Message from Sierra, the Goddess of Nekomata

You’ve lived a long and successful life on Earth, Taipha.

“Goddess”? This box? Well, she did know my name…the name I’d never told anyone because I was a cat…

Admittedly, you had a pretty bad ending. This time, don’t eat the bright-blue butterflies. They’re the poisonous ones.

Urgh…okay, I remembered now. A fuzzy memory of my life in the city. (My first life?) I’d seen this strange, almost luminous bug flying through the alley, and I just had to pounce on it. And then I ate it. Was that so silly of me, Sierra?

To help you get used to your new life as a cat-human hybrid, I haven’t given you all your Skills and Traits at once. Don’t want to give you too many heart attacks, ha ha!

I, uh…I guessed that made sense.

Tip: Access your Stat Screen at any time by thinking, “Stats.”

Huh…

Look, I was not at all used to being told what to do. Not even by a goddess. Especially not by a goddess! If it weren’t for the fact that I was in a bizarro world and this box would literally not leave my face, I wouldn’t even have been reading it right now!

I hadn’t been just some housecat in my past life. I was feral. I grew up fending for myself, saving myself from storms. Other cats were nothing to me. Worse than nothing: they were rivals, all of us fighting over the scraps that humans dropped. And humans were…

Let’s not get into that.

So when the magical box in my vision told me to think “Stats,” I told myself, Don’t think “Stats.”

You stubborn cat. I know how you work.

Darnit.

Stats:

Taipha
Gray Tabby
Lv. 1
EXP: 0% (0/150)

HP: 100% (10/10)
SP: 100% (10/10)

ATK: 1
INT: 1
DEF: 1
WIS: 1
SPD: 1

Traits:
Morph (Stage 1/5)
Human Language (Stage 1/2)
Perfect Human Vision

Skills:
Swipe

Woah, so much information. So many abbreviations! This would definitely come in handy, considering I had no context for these numbers and whether they were good or bad!

Ha-ha. Next time you see something in this System that confuses you, keep things simple and just think, “Huh?”

Huh?

…No, I didn’t mean…

Stats are percentages and numbers representing your aptitudes (but I bet even you already knew that). As a Level 1 Gray Tabby, you are the weakest possible cat at the lowest possible Level.

You’re still stronger than a Level 1 squirrel, though.

The mention of food made my hyperactive brain change tracks, and I stood up in the plush grass and stretched, imagining the squirrely kill already.

I was currently in a little clearing surrounded by a forest whose oak trees shone green and plum purple. Everything was tranquil but alive. I could keenly feel the life playing on my whiskers—that was one talent I knew I hadn’t lost.

Nice that Sierra had the good sense to put me in a place where I could eat no problem.

Of course, most adult squirrels are at least Level 8…

I swatted the box and it knew to get out of my face.

What’d Sierra say this place was? A forest called Vencia?

Frankly, it looked heavenly.

Now that I had a moment of boxless peace, and now that I knew I was relatively safe, I could just stand and enjoy the fact that I was alive.

The trees stretched sky-high, leaves rustling in the gentle breeze. I heard the chittering of strange insects in the bark, in the dirt, and it sounded like music to me.

A bird called. A meal. I hadn’t had anything besides pigeons and sparrows in ages.

Everything I’d just read that’d been weird and abstract and alien left my mind. The stuff about being half-human and having a Level and Talents and Skills, and being dead-ish.

Speaking of mortality, now that my stomach was rumbling, it was definitely time to go hunt…right?

I looked down at my legs. I’d been a yellow-orange tabby in my past life, but now I was striped white and light gray. So if the color of my fur had changed along with my power, did that mean orange was supposed to be a stronger color than gray? What sense did that make?

In any case, if I was the weakest possible cat at the lowest possible Level, how was I supposed to survive?

…

........

…How was I supposed to survive “huh.”

Oh, hey, Taipha! It’s you again!

Now it was my turn to laugh sarcastically. Or I would’ve, if cats could laugh.

Well, you survive by gaining Experience Points, which will bring you to higher Levels and unlock Evolutions into stronger cats. You can get some easy Experience Points by killing insects. The more Experience, the more Levels.

But don’t eat any insects that are brightly colored. That’s how they tell others, “Hey, I’m poisonous.” It’s a basic fact of life that pretty much everyone knows, innately, but I guess not you.

I ATE IT BECAUSE I WAS CURIOUS!

Which is what babies do.