I did my first-ever straight-upward Leap, then struck at the magpie-spider’s underbelly like a lycanborn kid slicing through a pi?ata. I screwed my eyes shut and fell back to earth as the candy-rain of entrails and acid followed.

  Luckily, all the damage I took from the impact of landing and the acid rain dissolved like…um, like anything caught in acid rain.

  The spider fell too, and with it a bunch of drifting hologrammy feathers. I ejected the butterfly corpse—though I would kinda miss bringing that shiny trophy home—and picked up as many feathers as I could.

  There had to be six times that many still scattered around. Nine times six… Was that or was that not seven grams’ worth?

  …Hold on…if all these feathers were collectively considered “black and white,” did that mean that none of the things I’d collected were, strictly speaking, black? Had this all been…for nothing?

  I chose to believe not.

  Another thought occurred to me: this spider-hybrid corpse might be some kind of rare specimen. Something that someone might appreciate me Inventorizing. I mean, people on Vencia didn’t seem like fervent taxidermists or anything, so maybe they would actually be offended…but hey, they also went fishing and stuff. Hopefully I hadn’t just murdered some forest guardian just to pocket their body as a trophy. I swapped out the magpie corpse for the bizarre combinatory animal.

  Wow! I’d been expecting unethical magical experiments or disturbing crossbreeding.

  Anyway, now that all that frenzied action was over, I looked again at the mosaic that’d captured my attention earlier.

  I could see now that the whips and collars had been somewhat more vibrant than the rest of the mural because they had been new additions. They sure weren’t present when the mural was first made.

  In fact, a bunch of other details had been changed over time. The most obvious ones had been painted in—like the whips—but others must’ve required chiseling old stones out and replacing them with new ones. How else could they have edited out the vast green field below the rows of cats? In the modern day, these rows were being ordered to jump through flaming hoops. I saw now that this was just an amazingly cartoonish replacement for all the cats running across the wild plains in peace.

  Chat with Teague Terminal?

  What is lycanborns’ relationship with cats?

  Uhh…what if I told you I’m the creation of Sierra, the goddess of nekomata?

  Checking credentials? Huh?

  I already have a migraine, I thought-grumbled. And that snarky comment was nearly true, thanks to the information and sensory frenzy I’d had over the past several hours finally hitting me about…say…five minutes ago. I had a nagging, pounding headache. But that was okay! I was powering through it, at least for now.

  …Alright, go ahead and check me.

  To my surprise, nothing uncomfortable in the slightest happened to my body or mind.

  They sure are, Teague Terminal! They sure are.

  Yeah, yeah, whatever. You’re basically a robot, so I don’t think anything I say right now matters.

  Case in point: no response.

  But…show me what kind of weird nonsense the time-traveling Log is!

  Reams and reams of names spread before me. They must’ve been ordered by date of arrival or something, because there was no alphabetical order here.

  Skipping to the end of the pages I could actually access brought me this curious little list. Curious, but in the end, useless. Right?

  What would happen if I thought…select Sephene Cane?

  Uh…didn’t keeping this kind of information in a pretty public log bring back the possibility of time paradoxes? What if that kid looked at these records himself and arbitrarily decided not to show up on a date when he shows up?

  But what if…what if I told him that…never mind. (And I wouldn’t anyway. I didn’t want the whole universe to combust.)

  ***

  The lycanborn mansion was the very picture of opulence, just like the Teague Terminal said it was.

  Of course, there was no hole in the ceiling back when the cellar was first made. I ended up passing through an open doorway, creeping through stairs I felt I had no business walking across. The passage was narrow and totally dark, leading upwards and curling around until…

  An open door in the wooden floor of a busy kitchen. The hustle and bustle of chefs and servants crowded my vision, their legs kicking through and around me. It was hard not to flinch. Aside from the stray shout for a new order, though, it wasn’t a strain on the ears. And the light streaming through open windows was welcoming, brought to mind the smell of a fresh roast. Not that I could smell anything in this timewarp.

  I ran to the nearest door and found myself in a stunning dining room, watching servants prepare a ludicrously long table in a gallant room for some kind of party. Gold-and-cobalt wallpaper glittered, and a parade of stoic portraits frowned down on cushioned seats.

  Dashing off, I passed through room after room until a sense of familiarity stopped me in my tracks. My gut was alarmed. How could this possibly be the same room where Chora and I had just fought magpies?

  Not only were the walls intact and the floors well-broomed, and the vines totally absent, but the ruined picture was back in full. This was the first realistic depiction of a werewolf I’d seen. Despite his ripped clothes and messy fur, he stood with staid dignity in the harsh lighting of exaggerated moonlight.

  At one end of the room were two things that made me jump—I mean, two living things. A couple of jaguars were sitting right there on velvet cushions.

  Jaguars!

  And one was staring right at me!

  Everything the Teague Terminal had said about certain cats having mystical powers came back to me in a panic. But as the jaguar rose, lumbered toward me, and passed harmlessly through my frozen form, I realized that was not the case this time. If it had been, we’d no doubt have a paradox on our hands.

  Discussion from the next room over whispered in my ear. It sounded like a tearful family reunion, and by “tearful” I mean the kinds of tears I’d expect from a Victorian novel. I heard someone mention “your too-long stay in the tropics,” a loud embrace and a wail. I…cringingly decided that maybe I wasn’t meant to hear about that.

  Moreover, my headache was seriously getting to me. And so was the fact that I didn’t know how Chora was doing!

  Not to mention how it was beginning to bother me that this whole place was maybe, possibly, a secret that I shouldn’t even reveal to her. I hated that idea. Keeping a secret like this seemed pointless. I mean, this whole place was already magic—we wouldn’t be saving anyone’s sanity here!

  But if it came up—if it had something to do with those other, more nefarious time stones—then of course I couldn’t hide it. I figured I’d just have to wait and see.

  Wait until I had more effective vocal cords, that is.

  ***

  It didn’t feel right for it to still be afternoon.

  I emerged from the cellar hole and found myself positively blasted by sunlight from cracks overhead.

  But what felt worse was returning to an empty ruin.

  …But it did feel better when I saw all the feathers lying everywhere, and smelled the distinct lack of blood.

  I still had to find Chora. For the important reason of finding out whether she was alright, and for the less important reason of getting help collecting all of these feathers.

  Wait…

  Something gleamed in the corner of my eye. Really, it anti-gleamed, seeing as it was a dingy dirty sack. And yet it seemed to wink with the promise of a good idea.

  I looked around, my ears alert for any magpie sounds. There were certainly several in other rooms, just none here. Scared off.

  Methodically, I dragged the bag free from the slop heaps, opened it up, and then grabbed the feathers clump by clump and emptied them into the bag. After I figured I had enough, I dumped out the nine from my own Inventory too. Then I closed up the top as well as I could (meaning I closed my mouth around it a couple of times, only for it to open easily again) and Inventorized it.

  And it worked.

  For some reason, this was the most accomplished I’d felt all day. And I’d pummeled birds and a mutant spider after suffering through acid and beaks to the gut!

  …Did Sierra really just give me 50 Experience? Wow! Cruel! Not everyone could be good at lateral thinking!

  At that moment of, um, simultaneous victory and crushing defeat, I heard some familiar footsteps outside the shattered room. And I realized they’d been casually roaming there all along—they were just closer now, and now that my feather-collecting task was done, I was paying fuller attention.

  I crept through an open doorway and spotted Chora in a hallway, hands on hips, scanning an enormous mound of trash straight out of a landfill.

  She glanced my way, then glanced back. “Welcome back,” she said. “I hope you’re alright.”

  I could ask the same. I mean, she looked okay, but she had to be so tired she’d flop over by evening. “Mrah?”

  “Oh, me? I’m fine. And you were away long enough for me to recover. I haven’t found much of real value. Enough change to buy some okay shoes, though.” She shook one hand in the air, as if handling a baggie. “Like this much. Enough to fit a coin purse.” The hand went in her pocket. “I’m looking for that fancy wagon the villagers mentioned, but…see for yourself. If there was a wagon here, it’s long since disassembled.” She reached over and grabbed a twisty scrap of brass from the top of the mound. “And stuff like this is all I can find that hasn’t just decomposed and filled up with worms.”

  I examined the umbrella I’d found just before ejecting it.

  Chora reached down and picked it up. “Small, black…looks like what the flier said.” She turned to me again with a bit of a smile. “Thank you, spirit. Hopefully you got a lot of training and sightseeing out of this journey, but…this is certainly the biggest win I can see.” She shrugged. “It’s something.”

  Not to be corny, but…yeah! It turned out this mansion really was something.