The Entanglement of Cat and Rin Schrodinger

Chapter four
Cat

I’m lying down. I think. My cheek is up against some moss that’s making an indent in my cheek, creasing it into little folds. The brightness that blinded is still here, but softer now. It was sunlight. It’s all around me.
The membrane between my eyes and the air isn’t very substantial, so I turn into the moss burying my face in it. Then I fully gain back consciousness. I sit up gasping. My head is pounding, with the words rift, rift, rift, rift like the tide of the Hudson river against the ocean, swirling in my head. I can’t seem to remember much of how I got here, except that I have a horrible headache. It takes my eyes awhile to adjust to my surroundings. There’s a lot of trees around me, for one thing. And there’s sunlight. A lot of it. I know one thing—it’s not New York, or the memorial. It’s like a whole different world.
Then I get it. I know, I should have figured this out right away, but please excuse me, I have an earsplitting migraine. The cat, Schrodinger’s Cat. It’s me. My name was inescapable. Okay, maybe this is purely coincidental, but how many girls named Cat Schrödinger with mothers who have Physic degrees wind up in an actual alternate universe. It might make my mom want to do a more in depth look at chaos theory.
At least, I think it’s a parallel universe. There’s no other explanation, and it was the first think that I could think of. Maybe I’ve just been growing up listening to this stuff my whole life, or I’ve been thinking about Old Erwin a lot lately, so the first explaination I would think of would be that. But it just feels right. That, or I’m having a really authentic hallucination, complete with mosquitoes. I have absolutely no idea how this happened, it must have had something to do with the weird light by the memorial. I don’t know, and honestly, I don’t care. The first step in an emergency is to access the area. Or something.
My head is still spinning, but I get up anyway. I’m in a large hollowed out tree, possibly from a fire, whose trunk is half open. It’s the kind of woods you think there’d be in fairy tales, idyllic and peaceful golden with afternoon light. A group of alder trees surround me. There’s a gentle breeze blowing to add to the cliché of it all. Cliché, cliché cliché. I hate it. The Cat slipping into a another world, fairy tale setting, next they’ll be a friendly village girl asking me if I’m lost and—
“HI!!!!”
Ah, well. I never did stand a chance against the gods with a sense of humor.
I turn around and face her. She’s a few inches shorter than me coming up to my shoulder, possibly about nine, but I’m pretty tall for my age, so that doen’t really mean anything. Her shiny black hair is cropped at her collarbone and she has an Asian look about her face. Her huge brown eyes stare up at me like I’m a new toy, which is always promising. She must’ve been behind the tree when I was…transported.
“Um,” I say
“God, that took a while! I was thinking of going back to Shomei’s house because it had been so long. But you’re here!”The girl is practically jumping up and down. “Finally! There hasn’t been anything through this rift in forever. Now I get something actually alive!” Say what? “Evada didn’t believe me when I had that dream, but oh my god! You’re actually here! Okay, right. I’m Meina. You’re Katherine right? I knew it! I—”
“No, my name’s Cat, unfortunately. It’s not short for anything. Just Cat.” Another wave of throbbing waves past my forehead and I lean against the tree.
Meina’s face falls for a fraction of a second. “Oh, okay. Hey, Shomei’s probably got your room ready by now. We should go.” Shomei and Evada, I think, keeping tabs on names, an old habit. She grabs my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and starts dragging me toward a path I hadn’t noticed before, keeping up an incessant stream of babble. Leaves scatter away from our feet. She leads me out of the woods and the path takes us into a little village with a high fence around it, which is a little unexpected. I can’t imagine what they’d need to keep out with their perfect world, and everything.
Inside the village is quiet, its houses a greek style terra cotta and whitewashed in classic Mediterranean fashion. The only person I see is a little girl with blonde hair who waves at me like she knows me while picking bluebells in a garden.
This whole world seems like it’s pieced together from a lot of familiar civilizations from Earth in a disjointed, clumsy way. The North American climate, the German fairy tale woods, Meina’s Asian features, the little girl’s Caucasian features, and the terra cotta houses. I suppose it feel natural to them and my world would be the awkward, pieced together one. As if to prove my point, at the far corner of the village on an incline, there’s a large Japanese style house with stone steps leading up to it.
Meina takes out a key when we reach the front door to the Japanese house, finally letting go of my hand, which is completely numb. She shoulders the front door and leans hesitantly inside.
“Evada?”
No answer. Meina turns and pulls me inside, flicking on a light switch. The inside is simplistic, but modern, which is how I’d imagine most Japanese houses to be, but truthfully I’m just going on how they’re drawn in the manga I read, which isn’t very reliable. The one strange feature of the house are beautiful designs on all the available wall space of the house. Vines, waterfalls, houses, animals and gardens, anything you could think of. They look like kind monks used to work on in the middle ages, the ones you see in museums behind glass, only done in an odd style I hadn’t seen before. I step up to look closer at one, but Meina gestures to me to follow her down the hall.
“Shomei will probably want to see you.”
Shomei, I think again.
The door she leads me to is the largest I’ve seen in the house, carved wood, oak maybe. Meina knocks twice on the door and waits for an answer. A voice comes from inside, muffled, but Meina pushes open the doors, leaving me standing awkwardly the door way. Until I notice the room. Like the walls of the house, its walls are painted, but with even more brilliant designs. Celtic knots interweave Japanese style cliffs and waterfalls, while a language that looks almost like Sanskrit runs along the outer edge. The main focus of the painting is in the middle, behind the desk. It’s a woman in armor with dark hair flowing out around her, reminding me of Joan of Arc.
The sound of a cough calls me back to my senses. A little breathlessly, I turn my head to where the sound came from. An old man sits at a desk watching me closely. I can only describe him as a complete Gandalf lookalike. Despite having the same Asian features as Meina, he has these brilliant blue eyes, piercing me. Meina still stands beside me, shuffling her feet, but looking very proud of herself.
When the old man finishes inspecting me, he leans back in his chair. I nervously clear my throat.
“So, you must be Shomei…?”
“Yes,” he says “Yes, and Katherine, you kept us waiting a very long time.”