Metaworld HopeCore

Thursday night, Eppie finally had the spare time to visit the Stray Cat Society.

In a low, warm, concrete room that smelled of kibble and litter and the musk of many cats hanging out, she reunited with her gentle giant. Now that the weather was warmer, the adult strays preferred the outside campus over the basement, a stark difference from the basement-raised kittens awaiting adoption.

Here, surrounded by the faint ammonia of cat piss, lay her and Lim’s private sanctum. As the president of the Stray Cat Society and its future vice president, they were CSULA’s Munkustrap and Mr Mistoffelees.

Alone, they didn’t use their coded text-speak. In the basement, with a tabby kitten climbing his forearm and the door shut against the campus, Lim could say the quiet parts aloud.

“The Mengs are in,” he nodded to her, easing the kitten off his sleeve and setting it among its siblings. “All the way in. Aunty Meng talked her husband around without him taking a tyre iron to William. Kitty vouched for the aftermath plan. They're solid.” He picked off another kitten trying to climb his shirt. "That's two. Us and the Mengs."

“And the other three?” Eppie stroked Mr Chin, looking rather like a character from a Bond film.

A muscle worked Lim’s jaw. “They’re far more timid than I thought. Poorer families, I guess. They feel… safe with the Chens. They listen to Chen-ye, they take the lai-see at New Year, and they pay their rent. They have their circumstances. There’s nothing wrong with that…”

“Well, there’s something wrong since last April,” Eppie’s lips went sideways. A new marmalade tom investigated her fingers, then got slapped in the face by Mr Chin. It fled. “Look, there’s one more thing, and you’re probably not going to protest…”

Lim sat back on his heels and waited.

Eppie waited until he had a cat.

“I’ve forgiven Valorie Sanders,” she said flatly. “I settled with her. She’s on our… my side.”

The basement went quiet but for the industrious purring. Mr Chin made bedroom eyes at Lim while Eppie watched with a guilty heart.

“San-jei,” Lim repeated the name. “The culprit.”

“A victim,” Eppie reminded him. “Yes, she kick-started William’s… appetite, but the things he had been doing to her in the dark…” Eppie made a face. “There were bruises.”

“She was a Senator’s daughter,” Lim was picking his words carefully, his eyes growing redder by the syllable. “They had the power to do something. To say something. Instead, she was jealous of Luciana, and that jealousy led William to a locker room. How can I tell the other families that the girl responsible—the accomplice—is now one of us?”

“Don’t tell them anything.” Eppie very carefully put Mr Chin aside. The situation, she knew, required a delicate touch—a feminine touch. Lim had convinced himself that he loved Luciana, and that his failure to protect her was why she was in the situation she was in—but none of that was really true.

He and Luciana had a good thing, but they never dated.

And Luciana was never someone he could have protected; that is, unless William dragged him over beforehand and told him to hold the girl down.

Having touched Valorie’s pain, she was now equipped to help Lim as well. That was the wisdom she had gained at the Met. The human experience, after all, was interior decoration arranged and rearranged in a room called life. The room itself… rarely changed.

“Lim,” her [Vocality] grew hypnotic, her baby blue eyes were depthless pools of persuasive pity. “I am not asking you to forgive her. I’ve hated her longer, and with far more intensity than you did. That said… Val has her own circumstances, like the families, when you walked out of that locker room, leaving William intact, when you scrubbed the video. When you reported my whereabouts to William, was that not a circumstance?”

Lim’s giant body froze. The devastation of her words was like incisors poking and stirring a welt. His face was undisguisedly hurt, enough to make a girl’s heart sore.

“Don’t move,” Eppie needed to close the distance before her tiger-sized Munkustrap fled the shelter in a fit of self-loathing. “Give me your hand.”

“Meow?” The kitten hanging from his sleeve demanded to know what was up.

Eppie gingerly removed the cat, then held Lim’s giant flesh mitts. She took a deep breath, so that her striking irises captured Lim in their pale-blue crystalline lens, and said the magic words—in Cantonese.

“Lim… it’s not your fault.”

“What?” Lim looked taken aback. As an Asian kid, sympathy from a parental figure was rarer than six-toed cats.

“It’s not your fault that William happened to Mio,” Eppie said softly. “You saved me. And you would have saved Mio, too. But as for what happened to Mio… It’s not your fault.”

“It’s Valorie’s fault.”

“But it's not your fault…” She walked forward, closing the distance.

Lim looked like he was about to be attacked. He tried withdrawing his hands, but—

Eppie’s [Strength] was [21]. Lim’s eyes widened. His breath grew laboured.

Unable to escape, Lim looked at her in disbelief, then confusion, then desperation.

“It’s not your fault.” She inched closer still, pulling him forward this time, her tiny arms tensing with near-superhuman strength. Her voice was like a siren’s; her mouth, small and pink and guileless, demanding his forgiveness.

Lim fought back, his fingers cracking her entwined digits, his biceps bulging, the veins of his neck rising, until...he lifted her bodily at about thirty degrees, so that, to the kitties, they looked like a Chinese acrobatic troupe performing a trick.