[Storytime: 1/9
Adventure GET: 2/21]

Hold up! Maybe I missed it because it was on the last page, but you asked me who in my family is the best cat-speaker, and I just let that slide on by, a narrative hook unbitten! If I don’t fix that right here and now, nobody’s going to know anything about my family, and at that point I might as well just say that I’m an orphan who was raised by cats, and now when witches plague the streets of Fortitude, I pull on my cat mask and take to the streets as Catmaiden, a grizzled vigilante shrine maiden who adopts orphaned rats and broods on the roofs about how both my parents were stolen by birds. But don’t worry, only Mom was stolen by a bird.

I think my dad used to be the best, but these days he’s a little... you know? He travels a lot on business and doesn’t leave the house a lot in [i]this[/i] time-space continuum. Sometimes I run into him in the kitchen. I don’t usually see the cats around.

My older siblings are both Claimed by rat gods. Kuroma is King Death, who passes by night, whose sword is naked, who reaps where he does not sow; he is the statue crumbling in the wilderness that says “—EED MY WO—“ on it and the cart full of tiny rat bodies and the lights all turned out. He eats like he’s still a teenager and sleeps in until noon and sulks around, usually, and he’s not so much good at talking to cats as he is an oversized lazy tom, you know? Wait, not lazy. Well, kinda? But in that “I have lots of energy but no pressing need to use it” way of a cat melting into the sofa cushions.

Caroline is the Dread Witch of the Far Roofs, and she’s the best cat-speaker, because she can actually have [i]conversations[/i] with the cats. Technically all the cats of Fortitude have sworn fealty to her to act as her minions, but that works maybe twelve percent of the time? Cats aren’t good at things like remembering orders or guarding prisoners or even paying attention. But she’s their Baba Yaga, their cackling broomstick hag, except don’t tell her I used the h-word okay? She gets really mad because she’s not even thirty yet. It’s her job to be the dangerous witch they visit because they need a prophecy, or to steal a treasure, or to prove that they’re brave, and she hardly ever actually kills one, and even then...

Look, it’s [i]always[/i] an accident, okay? The Witchness comes unhinged inside her, and she locks herself in her room with ice cream and Shelley the tortoiseshell for days after. She’s not evil. She’s a grounding rod for a god.

Hang on, you might say, squinting suspiciously at me, Rinley, if both your big siblings are hosts for dread and powerful rat gods, why aren’t you, like, Eater-of-candles or the Rice Fox? And you ask that because you’re not using your brain, silly! I’m [i]Rinley.[/i] I’m already walking a road, and at the end of it, I’m immortal and forever until crows forget how to say words, after somebody like Dulcy actually builds a nuclear weapon and kills everybody.

And today, if this is a Rinley story, Rinley decided to walk outside with an umbrella made of a giant lily pad because she was sitting inside, leading around the Admiral and Phoebe with the feather-on-a-string, when suddenly the urge to walk picked her up and put the feather on the cat tower and shoved her feet into her sandals and pushed her outside where she took a breath of the air which was cool and much more real than the cloyingly sweet air of her home, and that’s not to say she doesn’t like it, and contrariwise it’s always a bit of a shock, like there should be a depressurization chamber in the middle that she’s skipped, some room where she can turn a dial and raise the ambient levels of reality and objectivity until she’s ready to be in Fortitude, but it’s better this way because she keeps some of that sweet incense soaked into her shirt and coiled around her belt and kissed into her hair and it lets her bring just a little bit of her home into sleepy old Fortitude, to push things just over that line into the way they should be.

That’s my explanation for where I am right now. I was walking, and now I’m not. There is a lily pad that’s crumpling and rusting under the rain tucked into my shoulder, and the circle of runoff is getting smaller and smaller all around me, and very soon now I am going to get an object lesson in why more people don’t use lily pads as umbrellas. I really should get up and duck underneath the overhang of that tiny roadside shrine, the one with the tiny stone statues in iconic form, with the red aprons tied around their waists, as I figure out some way to not get soaked, such as digging a tunnel (no good, I’d dig into Big Lake) or knitting all the aprons into a new umbrella (but then I’d have to make new ones or suffer their curse, slowly turning into another stone statue, shrinking and becoming firmer every day until I’m found, a tiny weather-worm statue, lying in the middle of the road) or even waiting it out (but then I’d have to figure out something to do while waiting out the storm). But I don’t. I can’t get up.

My skin is prickling and pleasantly chill. I’m squatting by the side of a man-made lake, watching as the water droplets hammer down between the growing stalks of rice, and my mind’s a lake being drummed into stillness by rain, and my butt’s sitting on my haunches with my tail wrapped around me and my breath’s all slow, my chest rising, falling, rising, and I feel half a statue right now already, and the sky’s grey and the water’s grey and I’m going grey to match them in my heart, a cool slate grey like the eyes of a studly sword hero with a quiet voice, and the sound of the rain falling is a curtain of beads swaying in a summer breeze, and there are frogs croaking their lovesongs out of sight and birds croaking and I’m silent and still and the run-off from the lily pad is nearly at my knees now.

Maybe I’ll go look for someone later but I think that happens after I get wet, which happens a moment from now, five million years from now, an age of the world from now. And maybe you’ll wag your finger at me and say, Rinley, you’re supposed to be connecting with these important people, take a point of the Isolation issue, and honestly, fair, but just because this story is about me and my friends doesn’t mean moments like this don’t still happen, and this is the moment I have right here and now, and I need this moment alone with just the sound of the world around me and the chill prick prick prickling at my skin and the emotion which doesn’t have a name, which denies naming, the emotion of places and experiences which are uncontainable in a little box of understanding, the three-in-the-morning feeling, the feeling of being a Yatskaya, and right now I’m as much Yatskaya as I am Rinley, and I am quiet and I let the world fill my empty places and it’s important, it’s [i]necessary[/i] that this be alone, at least until the lily pad collapses, because being empty in the world is different when you’re holding hands with someone; it stops you from becoming a statue, an empty pitcher, a little idol wrapped in a red apron sitting soaked by the side of a rice field.

But I also think probably somebody sees the lily pad dump water on my head.