TRUTH

On returning home one day, he noticed Nicolle was not in her usual mood and didn't rush to show him all that she had done of her "homework" and pump him with new questions.

"Master, may I ask you about something?" she quietly asked, with downcast eyes.

"Nicolle, I told you a long time ago that I don't like that word. Why're you using it now? What's happened, Nicolle?"

"Forgive me, Edwin. My conditioning is getting in the way. I can't say what I want. I feel... wrong."

Seeing her distress, Edwin motioned for her to sit. She obeyed, promptly sitting down on the carpet. Edwin joined her. “Relax for a moment, remember the technique I’ve shown you.” The pair sat together for several minutes, breathing deeply, slowly and in unison. When Nicolle seemed to be more relaxed, Edwin broke the silence.

"Talk to me, Nicolle. I'm not Master. We're family."

"Edwin... why?"

Edwin began to think about how to explain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, when the rest of her words began tumbling out.

"Why am I this? What am I? I thought I was like them but I'm not and I don't understand. I'm a catgirl but I'm not because I'm different and I'm not stupid like the ones in the stories. I want them to be like me and I want to be like them — I want to be something I understand, but there's something wrong with me!"

Then, in a quivering, unhappy little voice, a tiny voice that felt like it opened the earth underneath Edwin and left him falling and falling... "Help me, Daddy...."

The moment of shock passed. "You've never called me that before."

In a tiny voice still, "It's in the stories. In the books you gave me. Families have Daddies and Mommies. I don't. It's more about me that's wrong."

For a long minute, they sat. Nicolle forlornly looking down at her paws. Edwin looking in wonder at this formerly happy little creature who had suddenly changed. Hearing his own pulse in his ears in the terrible quiet.

"Nicolle. My little cat... my little girl. We're each other's family. We have to be. We’re all we have. I've never lied to you, Nicolle, I've never mislead you. But I haven’t told the full story either, the whole truth that I foolishly didn't realize you needed to know."

Nicolle looked up. Her startling blue eyes looked eagerly into his sad, brown ones. It made it harder to tell her, but he started.

"You are different and you don't have a real Mommy or Daddy like the stories, but you are not wrong. The stories are just stories. Life is sometimes much different than happy stories. Much different. But… and this is the most important thing I've ever said to you, Nicolle... there's nothing wrong with you. It's all the others that are wrong and what's so wrong about that... is that they don't even know it…but you do."

And he told her what he learned about how catgirls came into being. How they were manipulated to suit the whims of their owners. How they were "born" and "raised" and "educated." And how, by some miracle, she had escaped all those careful plans and then fallen into the hands of one of the very few people stupid enough to think he could go on indefinitely, without consequences, nurturing a catgirl who was all that catgirls should have been but were prevented from ever being. And then he wept alone on the floor after she had stifled her own scream and ran to her little room, slammed the door and cried and cried.

There was no dinner for Edwin. There was just a long, long empty silence after Nicolle's weeping quieted. Sitting on the floor. Staring at the wall as night fell. Wondering how life could ever go on again for either of them. And fearing for what it all might do to Nicolle's poor little non-human mind. When it was impossible not to, he fell over and fell asleep on the floor. He dreamed of a dark laboratory, Nicolle falling into a vat and dissolving, and then a clumsy creature that looked like her crawled out of it and grinned at him stupidly with none of her light of recognition or understanding in it's eyes.

Next: Part 4 / 25, “Wrong or Right”