Cherry's Story Chapter 4 - Purring (Patreon)

Celeste Academy, for all its love of modern technology, remains entrenched in classic tradition.

This is most true when students and faculty discuss the history department. Professors and students come from all over the world to explore the annals of Attunement history and lore. There, they pore their eyes over texts and scrolls from eons ago and come out of these halls accomplished and changed.

“To engage with history,” one famous alumni of the academy once said, “allows us to change how we live in the present.”

But a love for tradition may mean the ignorance of accessibility.

Cherry is lost.

The history department building is filled with small halls that lead to other halls. Rooms that lead to other rooms. Elevators that lead to other elevators. Her first ever seminar is on the furthest end of the building and this requires her to trek across this convoluted maze. The rooms are often empty, forcing Cherry to look to the sleepy students reading massive tomes in the corners for some guidance. Most are too tired to help, but a few are able to point her in the general direction of where she needs to go. She has to walk up and down ramps, climb up and down stairs, and even figure out what signs mean when the arrows point downwards.

After twenty minutes of going around in circles, the pastel brown walls have become a blur to her. Cherry sees the rays of sunlight from the top hall windows illuminating more and more of the ceramic floor, but she finds that the areas which do not meet the rays have become darker and thus even more unknown. She can hear footsteps, laughter, and loud coughs echoing in her ears. More and more people are flooding into the halls. Cherry clutches her sleeves and recognizes that her anxiety is building up and gagging her throat. If she knew where the lecture room was, she’d be hiding in it right now.

Cherry finds the room at last. She pushes the heavy door into the room, letting the bustle of the university halls penetrate the silence. It is an oval room with a steep incline from the entrance and down to the lecturer’s table. All of the furniture in the room have a nice oak-like color and texture. It’s like Cherry stumbled into the past. She closes the heavy door behind her, restoring the chamber to its serene state. Cherry feels like she can breathe again, her heart pumping to remind her that she shouldn’t go back out again.

She walks down the stairs and takes a seat in the center, one with a vantage point to see the lecturer clearly. Cherry takes out her writing utensils and textbooks from her backpack. She looks around. Of course, nobody is around yet. She’s in the lecture room twenty minutes before the seminar is supposed to start.

So she stretches her arms. Despite these tumultuous beginnings, she is ready to take some notes. The first seminar will be on the historic beginnings of magic. The big question is: How did the ancestors of humanity discover and later learn to use Attunements? Cherry goes through her notebook and recalls how Attunements have helped create a boon for agricultural economies.

People were able to find fertile soil by analyzing the components through Attunements. Without this skill, it may not have been possible for humanity to consider farming viable. This is something Cherry’s familiar with and why she feels that Attunements may be beneficial to her home village. Reading about how wagons and cartwheels were developed with the help of Attunements giving accurate and precise measurements makes her dream about improving the quality of life back home. Today’s subject should be somewhat okay for Cherry.

But even then, she worries about whether or not she will be able to learn everything. The lecturer had assigned some preliminary readings, but Cherry ended up looking for a Yayue language translation. The version she found was machine-translated and Cherry knew there were some mistranslations. It took her a couple of hours to decipher a paragraph — and there were many, many more paragraphs after that. In the end, Cherry, drowsy and tired, barely got through the readings.

Is this how it is going to be for the next year?

The thought paralyzes her. Cherry shakes her head and tries to get her focus back. She realizes that the room is stuffy, as if it has not been ventilated for weeks. Cherry coughs, reminded by her dust allergy lighting up her throat. But she stays on, breathing in the musty air.

Today begins her first week of classes.

Mima closes the oven, her mind miles away from the kitchen. She thinks about Cherry and how she’s faring in school. Is she alright? Mima’s regular customers have not arrived yet. The temptation to take out her phone and message Cherry with a “hey” is overwhelming her, but it may be too early.

And anyway, it’s not like we’re actually dating! We only just messaged each other yesterday…

Last night, the two of them had a short conversation about how peculiar it was to meet each other there. They didn’t talk much, but Mima feels relaxed just chatting with her. She thought it’d be more tense because it’s weird to meet someone like an international student she barely talked to in a dating service.

But there’s something really soothing about Cherry and the way she types her messages.

Her name is cute, but it’s probably not her real Yayue name. If possible, Mima wants to call her by her actual name. Mima notes to herself that she’ll need to ask Cherry about it. It must be a lovely name, just like her.

Cherry…

Mima realizes that she’s daydreaming about her again. She pouts in embarrassment. This constant thinking about Cherry will become part of her schedule if this continues. It’s hard for Mima to think of herself as a professional at this rate.

Well, Mima thinks, time to go back to researching Mom’s unique brew again.

She goes to the kitchen and takes the different bags of cooking chocolate out from the fridge. Mima’s research has led her into baking several chocolate cakes in order to taste-test the various textures possible with each kind of chocolate. She figures it’ll kill two birds with one stone if she can figure out what chocolate Mom used  and she potentially sell some chocolate cakes, too. For now, she’s trying out a cake made from 85% dark chocolate grown and produced in the Rococo Islands. The surroundings of Baroque City have rich, fertile soil that makes planting tougher plants like cacao possible.

The oven rings a ding-ding. Mima opens the oven and, with her oversized mittens, takes out a cake that looks like a rich, chocolate pound cake. She places it onto the kitchen counter to cool down. Meanwhile, she opens up the fridge and gets out a homemade chocolate cream stored in a plastic piping bag. Once the cake is cool, Mima squeezes the chocolate cream onto the cake. It’s over-the-top for chocolate latte research, but the cake looks nice at least.

I wonder if Cherry will come by, she thinks. We can share the cake together and talk about stuff. She knows Cherry will be attending her first day of classes in Celeste Academy today, so she may be busy. But Mima’s hopeful that she might come and enjoy a lovely evening with her. Mima slices the cake into neat portions, placing each one on a decorative plate. She sets one aside for herself to try.

Bitter. Not too sweet. The way she likes it.

But does Cherry like bitter desserts?

If Cherry prefers a bit more sweetness, then the chocolate cake could use more cream. There’s some sweet strawberries dipped in a bit of chocolate that she could put on top of the cake. Mima can also make a strawberry banana smoothie for her. Or perhaps...

She gets out a paper and starts designing several menu items for Cherry.

When the seminar ends, Cherry feels so exhausted that she lets herself lie on top of her desk. The pen rolls away from her fingers and touches the spine of her ringed notebook. Her notebook is inundated with blue ink and no amount of margin space is left unscathed.

To say the seminar was exhausting is an understatement. It was so packed with information that Cherry ended up writing a synopsis of what the professor said. Cherry tried to keep everything compact and made a mind map connecting the terms and concepts, but in the end there was just too much.

She eyes a page of the notebook. Celestian words are everywhere and the circled terms lead to Yayue definitions. Many concepts have question marks, indicating a need to do some further reading. The five pages she’s written over the hour-long lecture are all like this.

If this is what my entire semester will be like, I don’t know if I can make it.

By the time she packs her belongings and gets up, everyone from the seminar has left and new students are rushing in for the next class. Cherry goes back to the bustle of Celeste Academy and overhears the laughing and giggling of her schoolmates having a good time.

Is my Celestian that bad?

She realizes she’s on the verge of tears. Cherry starts running from the crowd congregating in the cross-sections of the halls. There’s so many people who are chatting and look like they belong here and that, for some reason, distresses her. She keeps colliding into people and her “excuse me” in Celestian isn’t intelligible to anyone. Her voice starts to quiver. What’s happening?

Maybe it’s because she is becoming aware of how lonely she is.

“Cherry? What’s wrong?”

A familiar voice. Lexa. Cherry turns around to the familiar voice standing a few feet behind her. Lexa is standing there, surprised. A couple of girls are standing with her, exchanging glances between Lexa and Cherry and Cherry can't help but feel ashamed on top of everything else.

“You’re crying!” Lexa steps forward, her face wrinkled with worry, before looking around and making a scowl. “Who’s bullying you? I’ll show them what a tough librarian can do!”

“No. No one…” Cherry takes a step back. “I am sorry to bother you and your friends!”

Lexa tries to reach out to stop her, but Cherry's already made a quick escape. She keeps running, running, running … until her legs are worn out. When she is finally too tired and leaning on a wall to catch her breath, she’s found herself at the gates to the school.

She exits the academy and tries to shake off the anxiety. She decides to walk down an alley in the opposite direction of the Cottage Bookstore. Shopkeepers are preparing to close up their trinket shops while students cycle back to their houses.

The aroma of pies coming from closed up shops reminds Cherry of her village. She feels a tug at her heart. Cherry misses the peppery aroma of Auntie’s cooking, the way the leaves rustle in the wind, the high-pitched voices of children laughing in classes, and the humble abode her family has where she reads her books under the shade.

The loneliness is too much.

The path she's walking leads to a dead end, where only some overturned trash cans lay. Old coffee cups litter the ground.

Mima…

For some reason, she thinks of her. Cherry grabs her smartphone and wonders if she should message her.

Then, she hears a soft cry. A sad mewling comes from one of the trash bins. Cherry walks over and stoops down to investigate.

A white cat with brown spots looks up to her, most of its body obscured by trash and the bin itself. It is with a sudden, cold realization that Cherry realizes the it must be stuck.

She also realizes the cat is not moving very much.

Cherry frantically pushes aside the garbage, and carefully lifts the trash can as fast as she can. he picks up the cat and briskly walks down the hill, careful not to trip on the cobblestones. The cat’s wounds could get worse if she moves too fast. She doesn’t know where she should go, but she keeps going downhill.

Then, a realization. Mima is close by.

Cherry knows it's a hassle for Mima, especially since they have only met once. But Mima is the only person she can think of. Not even Lexa has popped up in her mind. Mima, only Mima.

Cherry hurries to the cafe.

Mima watches the sun fall into the sea while sipping a cup of chocolate latte. The way the sun reflects on the undulating waves of the ocean is mesmerizing. She sips her warm beverage, filled with appreciation and awe at how one part of nature can meld into another.

She hears the front door open and the bells jingle. Mima turns around and sees Cherry huffing and panting, a cat cradled in her arms.

Cherry shouts, “This cat hurt! Help!”

###

A few hours have passed. The vet left a few moments ago.

Mima walks toward Cherry and asks, “Do you want something? I can make a hot chocolate latte.”

Cherry doesn’t respond. She’s on her knees watching the cat resting on the couch meant for customers. The cat is visibly breathing in and out and their rear legs are wrapped in bandages.

According to the vet, the cat apparently had minor dislocations. It must have happened when the cat was searching for food in the bins but found itself slammed underneath one. The vet will check up on the cat again in a few days but because they were given quick treatment, they should be able to recover swiftly.

Still, Cherry remains worried about them.

Mima remembers the various items she designed for Cherry. Maybe mentioning them could cheer her up. She says, “Well, I made a cake —”

“I am scared,” Cherry says, “I am alone. I do not know how to speak. Even I need help to save cat.”

Cherry looks up at Mima, her face expressionless. Not even a tinge of sadness can be seen.

“Words are hard,” she continues but in a more monotone voice, “I want to say I am scared and lonely. But what words to say that… I need someone to help me say it.”

The words end with gasps. Mima feels the breeze take away those words and she looks into Cherry’s eyes.

“I want not be alone,” Cherry says, gazing back at the sleeping cat, “but words — they are so hard to say that.”

Cherry pats the back of the cat. She has not cried yet, but Mima can imagine that those tears are welling up somewhere. All it takes is one poke and all those emotions will burst out into the world.

That’s how I felt when Mom passed away.

“You aren’t alone. I’m here. Um, do you want to try out a cake I made?” Mima sits beside her, trying to catch Cherry's eyes. “I made a cake that’s sweet and nice.”

Her eyes are beginning to look watery. Mima takes out a napkin from her pocket.

Language failed to describe the emotions I went through. All I could do was hold it together till the funeral ended. No words could ever placate me.

Cherry accepts the tissue and starts wiping her tears away. She lets out whimpers as she tries to hide her face from Mima. The cat, slightly perturbed, opens their eyes.

“There, there,” Mima says, “it’s alright.”

“Only two days in school and I am already so sad.” Cherry’s voice quakes as her eyes meet the cat’s. “Why? I should not be this sad so fast!”

We are guided by words and yet, their guidance always fails. I didn’t want to speak to anyone and nobody could speak to me. I was alone. All alone in this cafe.

“That’s okay,” Mima says, “sadness just happens.”

“But that does not make sense!”

Cherry is covering her face with her hands and her crying has gotten louder. The cat purrs as if trying to console her.

“Words and emotions are like that. They don’t always make sense.”

That must be why … I decided to work on Mom’s recipe.

Cherry turns her face into Mima’s shoulders and starts crying.

“I can take care of the cat,” Mima crouches down to pet the cat. “I’ve always liked them… and it’d be a good distraction from work. Maybe my customers will like them too.”

“Thank you,” Cherry says, “the cat will be happy.”

Her eyes are red from all the crying and she is barely able to make a smile. It is embarrassing to show that personal side to Mima.

Cherry then says, “I also glad I can see you. I am happy you make me happy.”

“I-I am glad too!” Mima has difficulty looking into Cherry’s eyes now. She is trying to focus on the cat instead. It’s weird since she was able to console Cherry and not look away even once. What is so different about this situation? Cherry finds it strange.

The cat rolls over and purrs to make Cherry rub their belly. When Cherry’s hands brush their fur, she feels like there is a connection between her and the cat. They want to be loved and taken care of, but all they can do is meow. If they’re hungry, they meow. If they’re sad, they meow. If they’re happy, they meow. The only difference is the pitch of their voice. This reminds her of her grasp of the Celestian language; she can only say a few words she has learned from reading and can only create nuances in her speech through pitch and tone. Few people are able to understand what she is trying to say. She thinks she is just like a cat, barely understood by many.

But there are people who understand cats and can take care of them well. If a cat can get that, then I should be able to, too...

“This cat is cute,” Cherry says, interrupting her own train of thoughts. “I want to make them happy.”

Mima brushes their tail. “They’re adorable. I can’t stop playing with them.”

“I want to visit cat tomorrow.”

“Y-You can visit the cafe anytime, you know.”

“Hm?”

“Yeah, you can take care of the cat with me!” Mima says, her voice cracking a bit. “And it’d be nice to have you around!”

“Is it like date?”

Mima starts coughing.

Cherry believes that dates happen when you want to get close to someone. She doesn’t really understand it much outside of the movies she’s seen, but it looks really cute and she wants to do it with Mima.

“Like girlfriends?” she says.

“Yes!” Mima suddenly gasps. “I mean, we would just be starting out. We’d learn about each other. It would be fun.”

“Yes, I want date at cafe. And with cat.” Cherry says before rubbing the belly of the cat again. “And you are pretty.”

“Y-you are pretty too! And I want to know more about you.” Mima has an awkward smile and then looks over at the clock. “But it’s getting late, isn’t it?”

“Yes… Lexa must be worried.”

“Lexa?” Mima, for some reason, changes her tone to something similar to concern. “W-Who is she?”

“My first and ever roommate! She is dating someone later.”

Mima sighs with great relief, which makes Cherry tilt her head in confusion.

“Okay,” Cherry says while getting up, “I will go now.”

Mima looks at Cherry and pauses for a few seconds before smiling and saying, “Take care. I’m looking forward to our date.”

“Yes,” Cherry says as she approaches the door, “and … thank you, Mima. I do not feel lonely anymore when I am with you.”

“It is the same with me,” Mima says. “Please come back soon.”

“I will!”

The cat happily purrs and the bells on the door jingle.

Dear Diary,

I was sad today. Lonely and scared. Words frightened me. Class was not good and made me anxious.

Then, I see cat abandoned. They remind me of me. The cat hurt. I was scared.

I went to Mima the chocolate coffee person and she was very kind to the cat and me. She is so adult and different. I admire her. She calls vet and cat is now happy roaming in cafe.

I want to visit cafe. I want to visit Mima too.

I want to know her and be with her. I am happy and not lonely when I am close to her. I like her drinks. She is pretty. She is mature but also very cute. I think if I say something nice about her, her cheeks go very red. It makes me happy. I cannot stop thinking about her. Writing about her is too fun.

We have a date soon. I am ready for the date. I want to talk to her on Wondr before date.

When I am back at dorm, Lexa hugs me. Asks “Where have you been? It is so late. I was so worried and scared for you!” She is crying so much that she hug me so tightly I breathe hard.  I wish I tell her not to worry, but also I am happy she cares about me this much.

School makes me sad. But I have friends. Friends will make me strong.

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter