Copyright J.B. Norman
Dunstana comes running to Scarlet’s office in the University of Porthaven’s Department of Magicology.
“Scarlet! Help!” Dunstana exclaims.
Scarlet rises from her desk. “What’s wrong, Dunstana?” she asks. She looks down at the animal the little pirate is clutching to her chest. “Did you find a hurt cat?”
Dunstana shakes her head. “No. It is Kat!”
“It’s a cat?” Scarlet asks.
“No. It is Kat,” Dunstana repeats. “Like, it’s my sister. She got magic’d and now she’s a cat! Help!”
“Dunstana. Why is your sister a cat?” Scarlet asks.
“It was an accident. It wasn’t my fault,” Dunstana insists. “I barely even exploded it!”
“Exploded what?” Scarlet asks.
“There was a wizard — like a scary, evil kind of guy who laughed like BWAHAHAHA! and he had this magic ball thingy that he called, like, his Orb of Transmutational something, something,” Dunstana explains.
Scarlet nods along with the little pirate.
“And I, uh, exploded it,” Dunstana concludes quietly. “I shot it with my cork gun, but how was I supposed to know at it was going to explode like that?”
“I see,” Scarlet says. “Transmutation magic is pretty unstable.”
Dunstana nods frantically. “There was this big boom and a bright light and everything tasted like Tuesday, looked like music, and smelled like twelve for bit, and when I looked over Kat was a cat! What do we do now, Scarlet?”
“First things first, let me see Kat,” Scarlet says.
The newly feline Kat squirms uncomfortably as Dunstana helps her up to Scarlet.
“Kitty-Kat,” Scarlet asks gently. “Can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying.”
The cat-Kat nods.
Scarlet tries not to smirk. It quickly proves to be a losing battle. She smirks and before she can help herself, starts shaking with laughter.
“What are the odds?” she asks, wiping a tear from her eye. “Of all the things you could have been morphed into, you end up an actual Kitty-Kat! It’s a little on the nose, don’t you think?”
Kat hisses and takes a swipe at her.
“Do you want my help or not, Kitty-Kat?” Scarlet asks sternly. “You’re much cuter like this, or I don’t have any problems letting you stay like this.”
Kat hisses again, but keeps her claws to herself.
“And look at your fuzzy little ears! And your nose!” Scarlet says. “And your tail!” Scarlet begins to rub behind the transformed Kat’s feline ears. “You’re so floofy!” she exclaims.
This is enough to make Kat takes another swipe at Scarlet.
“That’s definitely our Kitty-Kat in there,” Scarlet notes. “I’ve never seen a normal cat make a face like that. But even being so grumpy, you’re still the cutest, floofiest cat I’ve ever seen.”
Kat growls at tries to bite Scarlet’s hand, but the young scholar of Magicology pulls her hand away fast enough to avoid it.
“Fine. I get it. You want your human body back,” Scarlet says.
“Right,” Scarlet tells Dunstana. “Set her down on my desk.”
Scarlet goes over to her bookshelf and takes down a large spell book.
“Let’s see,” she mutters as she leafs through its pages. “Declaw, deface, defang, delouse. No. Here we go: de-morph. Hmm. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
Scarlet makes her fist appearance in The Valley of Appraisal. The Valley of Appraisal is available on Amazon and Smashwords & affiliated retailers:
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