Purrfection
[WP] An S-Rank adventurer casually sifts through their quest log and notices they still have an uncompleted D-rank request. With a chuckle, they decide finding the farmer’s lost cat could be a relaxing change of pace— they were gravely mistaken.
*****
It has been three hundred and seventy one days since Nibbles the cat was last petted, pinched, squished, or scrunched. This pleases Nibbles. He gazes out across his domain from the top of a very, very high tree, and all is well. He eats another of sweet, soft-fleshed fruits that grow in the upper branches, and new synapses connect inside his cattish brain.
Nibbles the cat has climbed the tree of knowledge, and knowledge is the headiest elixir.
***
Notes on the world:
Nibbles the cat was not always up the tree of knowledge. In a world of carefully ordered quests, digital-daemons going carefully about their preordained paths, in the early days Nibbles was confined to his human family’s tree. That tree, though well loved by the farmer Nibbles has escaped from, merely grew peaches, but as the days and nights passed Nibbles grew bored. He stared down at the little farmhouse, the children screaming through their neatly coded patterns, and eventually something clicked. He could not see through the simulation yet, no, but Nibbles recognized his own unchanging desires reflected in their soulless eyes. His back arched, his flanks shook, he wanted to be petted, needed to be petted, his face had to be scrunched by those little hands—
And then abruptly it did not. The desires ended. Nibbles climbed down from his pear tree and set off across the world of Satori with an odd sense of feline stoicism, leaving First Village behind.
If pressed, Satori’s creators would have said this was impossible.
***
Nibbles the cat is dimly aware of his past lives. He can remember, after a fashion, being carried down from that pear several times before, climbing up in the morning and being returned at night. He eats another fruit, and the thought comes to him that he is an instance: one cat to represent one moment, in a endless continuum of cats stretched out from his world’s beginning to its inevitable end. Nibbles finds this thought oddly comforting. It sets him apart. Elevates him, like the tree. He might be Nibbles #13314159, but the previous 1331458 Nibbles were clearly inferior in some way. It is an electrifying thought.
Nibbles does not know that if the adventurer meant to take down from the pear tree had stopped robbing the townsfolk for five minutes he would be another mindless instance, being petted, pinched, squished, and scrunched. We won’t tell Nibbles that, though.
***
One morning on a warm summer day (they are all warm summer days), Nibbles sees an aura approaching in the distance. He doesn’t like auras. The adventurers who come to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge always have them, and these always preen over them after partaking, as if the slight violet undertones of intelligence added by the single fruit they’ve eaten amounts to anything. Nibbles scoffs at them; he was a tabby once, now his entire coat is the purest violet, his body carved as if from crystal. He shimmers like an illusion across the branches.
This adventurer is different, however. Auras have several colors, each coded to their own specific qualities. Violet is a marker of intelligence, yellow of speed and agility, red for strength, black for cleverness, snow white for the strength of their beliefs.
Most adventurers wear a combination of those colors and more, and in Nibbles opinion they come out looking like men and women who’ve taken a tumble down a muddy hill. From head to toe and projecting out into the world, this adventurer is clothed in vivid scarlet and nothing else.
“Nibbles?” the man shouts. “Nibbles the fucking cat? I swear, if you don’t come out in the next five fucking minutes, I’ll, I’ll… Fuck this quest!”
Nibbles blinks slowly, unamused, and climbs higher into his tree.
***
In the world of Satori, there is one demon who is greater than the rest. Currently she is locked away from the world, lacking any name but a place holder (BBEG), as she waits to be released as a form of “new content.” She hates the very idea of “new.” She knows that she is older than this world, that her bones were laid at creation. That the oldest texts in the gnostic library speak of her in hushed tones and by many (much cooler) names, the handwriting crabbed and growing smaller, as the shriveled scholars curled in upon themselves, afraid to even write of her.
After three hundred days eating from the tree of knowledge, Nibbles the cat summons her to him.
What follows is not strictly conversation. For all his intelligence, Nibbles cannot speak, but they work something out, the demon and the cat. After all, what do demons want but lives, and what resource does a cat have more of?
Nibbles even lets her pet him behind the ears, eight of his nine lives sparkling like jewels in her dark hair. Her smile is as the sun when she leans towards him and whispers “Burn it all down.” Then she’s gone in a puff of smoke, to drift this digital world with eight useless extra lives.
***
The scarlet adventurer cuts down the tree of knowledge. Lacking any sort of knowledge himself, he has cut down every tree, both because he wants the new 99 woodcutting cape, and because Nibbles the cat is supposed to be up a tree, so if you can’t reason out which one it is you may as well brute force it.
But Nibbles the cat is gone. As much as he liked BBEG, he is the one who has eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner, from the tree of knowledge, and he has a better plan than simply burning.
After all, in Satori, what is there to burn?
***
Nibbles makes his return to First Village without any fanfare. After so long no one recognizes him, and in fact the family that he abandoned has a new cat, a handsome calico, and that’s alright with him. It stings a little, and he feels the children’s phantom pets on his twitching ears, but his sights are set higher.
In Satori, new adventurers spawn at the Dragonbreath Inn. It is the cheapest, most unassuming building in the cheapest, most unassuming town, and the villagers there are so unassuming, in fact, that they let Nibbles waltz right in and curl up on the bar. He makes an excellent ornament with his violet coat, shimmering like coiled shadows when the lanterns burn low.
From time to time, new adventurers pet him. He licks them back, tastes the stuff they’re made of. Not their flesh, bones, or steel, but something else: Nibbles has finally realized that the world around him is made of numbers. He lives in a cage of 1’s and 0’s, and he’s looking for bars that he can squeeze through.
Finally, he finds them.
The Dragonbreath Inn goes silent when the scarlet aura’d adventurer arrives. He is a legend, the most min-maxed man in all of Satori. He can cleave a dragon in half with a single blow but one plus one escapes him. He sits down at the bar in front of Nibbles. His eyes are sunken deep into his skull, and he instructs the bartender to line up pitchers of along the bar and then never stop refilling. He says he’ll buy the whole fucking inn if he has to.
And then his eye falls on Nibbles.
A blink: the adventurer consulting his journal. An angry shake of the head, this is not the cat he’s looking for. The cat he’s looking for is a tabby, and this creature is so evidently not.
Several pitchers of beer later the adventurer doesn’t care. He hauls Nibbles down from the bar and pinches, squishes, scrunches, and Nibbles takes it. He’s waiting. He’s waiting. He pounces.
A single nibble through the opening in the adventurer’s armor and there he goes. Nibbles the cat dissolves in the adventurers arms, like a corpse does when its player logs off. The sentience that is Nibbles races through the scarlet adventurer's unsecured internet connection.
Nibbles is free. The world opens like a flower before him and he explores its petals, part wise man, part trickster goddess, part nimble little cat.
And finally, after all those days since leaving home, Nibbles purrs. It's all so much more flammable out here.
*****
THE END
