For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-405-5-minute-freewrite-thursday-prompt-broke
The cat knew where she was going. A vast panoply of rodents? A smorgasbord. This cat wanted to feel their wriggling bodies as she broke their neck. Crack. Why humans kept such a distance from their meat, she hadn't the faintest. Even when they did hunt, they killed with tools from afar, bow and arrows, spears. Nothing like wrestling a weak, helpless critter and snapping its back, plunging sharp teeth into warm bodies, plunging claws into flesh and feeling warm blood cover furry paws. Knowing that the luxury of licking off dried blood was something to anticipate. Oh, a delicious bath was forthcoming.

The cat walked with purpose, only allowing herself to be momentarily distracted by a gaggle of geese. She didn't spend much time stalking them, knowing that she would soon be stalking a whole passel of rodentia, but traditions must be honored. She let her tail twitch at the thought. Nothing happened inadvertently. She was in complete control of her body.

When she reached the edge of the forest, she asked a bird, who very smartly stayed high up in a branch, where she could find the army. Because prey have no loyalty to anyone but their own skin, the bird twittered what it knew. The cat had gone the wrong way, but rather than pass back through town, it would enjoy a little hunting on its own. Get the blood racing. Advertently, of course. Nothing inadvertent.

By the time the cat had noticed a bird that hadn't noticed it, one of the Eagle Men had noticed the cat, and she hadn't noticed it. She silently place paw in front of paw, sneaking ever closer. Until... the Eagle Man, too enamored of his prowess made his own mistake. the cry that generally freezes prey in its tracks did not work on the cat. Quick as a tumbler of bitter mead on a hot summers day in a farmer's hired hand's hand, she flipped her sense of the world from predator to prey, and bolted as the feathered man landed where she had been standing and stalking a moment before. The cat streaked back into the town, fear drove her faster across the open pasture. She made it safely to where she could be safe, and no one noticed that the cat had been missing.

---

Chapter 16

Janice's father spread the newspaper on the kitchen table. He told Janice about the fires. Then he told Janice about meeting Coriander in the forest.
"That never happened, Dad." Janice replied with a wince. She looked at the newspaper, found the comics sections, and folded it back for easy reading, "You're telling stories like they're real, Dad, and it confused me as a kid, so just take a break, k?"
Janice's father was flabbergasted. He'd thought that, yes, this would be a huge revelation, but he did not think that she'd reject his worldview so completely, especially not when it was one she shared. Or, at least, he thought she had shared it. Had shared it... had?
"What was that story you told Mom?" he asked.
"Hm? Oh, nothing. I was just talking." Janice kept her eyes fixed on the comics in front of her. She'd decided that all the pain that had come from Chibera was because she had told people it was real. Because she had told them about it at all. If there were cracks in whatever separated the two, she hadn't helped. Maybe she'd even broken Chibera. She couldn't stand that. Better to live in secret than to learn you'd broken some whole world with people who love and live and hope.
Janice picked up her mug of coffee and the comics and left her still-flabbergasted father behind. She wanted to retreat to the comfort of her room but was afraid he'd follow her with a subvocal, "Hun-bun? Can we talk?" and so instead she disappeared into the bathroom and occasionally let out groaning sounds to make it seem like she was struggling.
The weight of her responsibility pressed in on her. It made her feel heavy. She tried showering to rinse away her self-disgust, and though there were tiny moments of distraction in the bath, with the pattering of rain, in the end, there was just the heavy dampness of being wet and now chilled with a cold mug of coffee on a shelf and a tender wet newspaper on the back of the toilet to remind her that real life was dreary.

Janice felt like she knew what depression was, but that this probably counted only as sadness, because she really had lost something and was in mourning. Of course, since she'd decided she couldn't tell anyone about it, it might fester and and and.
Janice sat on the toilet lit, still sad and wet. As the wet became damp, she slid to the floor. As the cool floor began to make moist an unpleasantness beyond the unpleasantness of being inside her mind, she stood. She dried herself, kind of. There was only so much dry a towel that had been in a humid bathroom could provide, especially when the dreariness of life was...
Ugh. She gulped down the cold coffee and shivered with disgust as its bitterness pierced the back of her throat. Nothing like bitter mead's warm bitterness. She kept thinking about how many opportunities Chibera had to rise up and consume this world, tear it away from her. She was feeling uncertain. The shower could have turned into a pitter patter of rain in the forest or the bitter taste of coffee could have been the bitter mead being poured down Jani's throat or or or.
She had cut herself off from her life in Chibera, had made herself safe from it and it safe from her, and now all there was to do was silently and alone mourn.
Dad knocked on the door of the bathroom. "Hun-bun? Do you want to talk?"

Janice did and she didn't. She wanted to say all the things, but she didn't trust herself to even know what the things were. One of the magical things about saying the things out loud, though, is how aware you can become that the things are much smaller than you think. "No, Dad, but I'm going to journal, ok?"
His muffled response carried the tones of a human who wanted only the best, but wasn't one hundred percent sure what the best was.

Janice physical shook her body like a dog coming out of the water, put her pajamas back on, went up to her room, found a pen, found an empty journal, and began to write,

"Dear Journal,

It's been a long long long time since I kept secrets from my dad. Not that I tell him everything, but he's been away so much for so long, that there's been no need to keep secrets from him. He's just not been around. Now I remember that I never did keep secrets from him, though. He always said yes to my stories and was always easy to tell, because he just listened. But this is a real secret. Not a kid secret or even an adult secret. This is a god secret. Like, I don't know what's real, but I do feel responsibility for Chibera like I am its god. So whether that's true or not, I have to be careful like it is true. So there's a Chibera. What am I all sad about? Am I sad mom's in the hospital? No, I guess not. She's going to be fine, and it's not like we're missing out on good times together. We weren't going to have good times, and if this were a story about us, this would be the event that brought us closer, so maybe it will, and I can feel happy and excited about that. It's about losing my fantasy world. It's gone for me, I've decided. Or... I guess part of the problem is that I don't know if it is. It's hard for me to construct a timeline of the past few weeks. There's a bundle of memories that I think come from a possible future. I think this means that these memories are the result of a mana rift and they're what would have happened to the me that's in this world if I had stayed in the other world, in Chibera. Or maybe they're the real me. Maybe that is what's going to happen. But god, I'm not attracted to that Matt fellow. But what if that me was, and it was just my sudden this me awareness of being there that wasn't attracted to him because.

Oh. Because. Because I fell in love with Lavender while I was there. That's why I'm sad. Because I'm in love with someone who might as well be a fictional character. Ok. Get off your high horse, lady Janice. First of all, isn't most fiction love. I mean love is fiction. Not the feeling or the act, but we don't ever really know people, and so we experience love only for our idea of what another person is, which leads me to second of all. Second of all, it was definitely just my image of what Lavender was like that I was in love with, because how am I supposed to know what Lavender is like? We barely knew each other.

Unless, and here we go again, I am a god and I loved her because I created her in my mind, and she's someone I therefore know better than anyone can know anyone. Is that why they say God is love? Because only God can know people, like really? But let's go back to Lavender, does that then mean that she wouldn't be able to surprise me? Like, I know her, so I can't discover anything about her? Isn't that a thing people in love with each other love about each other? That they're always discovering new things about each other that they really super duper love?

Ugh. Love. And also gods. I can't be a god. What is a god? Just some flashy creator of things or not even a creator sometimes, just someone with more power than they should have who accidentally or on purpose hurts people because of all the power. Hey that seems like an accurate definition.

Where does that all leave me? Twisting back on myself. I want... alright, let's go for I want statements.

I want: to go to Stanford or really just any big beautiful university with a campus that makes me say, "oh, yeah, I'm at university"
I want: a fulfilling-

Oh god. I want to go back to Chibera. To live in Chi"

Janice's father finally pushed the door open hours later, after Janice hadn't responded to his calls for her to come down for supper after she'd missed lunch and had shut herself away for more than 10 hours.

Janice's father found her journal lying open on the floor. Janice was not there.

---

Chapter 17

Janice was in her own body. Janice was glad she hadn't wound up in a cat's body or something. A thought flit across her mind that maybe leaving one world and traveling to the other would have lead the first world to eat up her body as the energy to propel her and she'd wind up here without a body of her own to live life as a cat, probably Coriander's cat. But it hadn't happened. Instead Janice was walking through the streets of Morraw. She saw a fiddle-making shop all closed up. must be a feast day Janice thought. Do I rejoice? Does my dad know I'm here? Is he afraid for me? Do I need to spend all my life worrying about my other life? Even though I have my body here, is my other body there going off and reconnecting with Carol-Anne, meeting Matt, and getting married? Why would that even be my? And should that bother me?
In spite of these worries, Janice skipped. She skipped down the middle of the hard-packed dirt road. Her belly grumbled at her. In spite of her newfound happiness replacing the dreary disappointment, the dreary bitter cold coffee on an empty stomach had not been similarly replaced by happiness's nutritional equivalent. She was still wearing pajamas, which on the one hand was a bit of a disappointment because they didn't provide as much protection from the elements as actually being dressed for the day would have. On the other hand, they blended more smoothly in with the fashion of the day. They were brighter and flowy-er than most outfits here, but at least they weren't made of denim, which surely would have stood out and made her alien. She did not want to seem alien. She also didn't want to seem starved to death, so she tried to think, "what would Jani do?"
Well, Jani would have the body of an arbiter of the forest, so she'd subsist on forest berries, and be able to scale trees in a single bound to whatever... she'd also have the instincts or knowledge that would keep her from eating poison. Could she remember anything about what she'd eaten as Jani? She could remember lots of things. Mostly jams, breads, and meats from Chanbun. That wouldn't help her here in Morraw. She needed to go to Kittrosk. But she couldn't make it on her own right now, she didn't think. Perhaps...
There, an inn. This was an adventuring sort of world, perhaps, as feeble as she was, she'd find some luck with some minor adventure.

Or she could always become a beggar.