Push, push.
"Little girl, could you stop pushing my cup?" The police officer helplessly pulled the cup away from the edge again.
"Mm."
Yimi stood to one side unhappily.
Humans in big cities were the most troublesome. The kitty had only wanted to ask for directions, and somehow she had ended up being taken to a police station.
That woman had asked where she lived, and Yimi had answered everything honestly. When the woman expressed doubts, Yimi had even taken her upstairs to see the bedding she had spread on the floor.
That only made the woman even more determined to carry her to the police station.
"How is it?"
Kisaki Eri was the well-meaning busybody who had brought Yimi here. She was already thirty-seven years old, yet still looked remarkably young.
She was the wife of the currently somewhat famous "Sleeping Kogoro." Because of a disagreement, she was presently separated from her husband. She worked as an attorney and, thanks to an undefeated record, was known as the "Queen of the Court."
"We haven't received any missing-child report, but rope that looks like it was used to tie something up was found at the scene. It could have been a kidnapping. Little girl, do you remember where your home is?" a female officer asked gently.
In this era—or at least in this world during this month—population registration wasn't convenient enough for the computer to be much help.
"Don't remember."
If she remembered, she would have gone back long ago.
"Then your dad—"
"I have Mom and Grandma. They're in another world." Yimi had learned to answer before people finished asking.
Someone in every world asked her about this. She didn't really understand why everyone was so interested, but once she went through the usual answer, she generally got somewhere to stay for a while.
Could this be because of Mom and Grandma's influence!
"Uh... then do you remember what your house looks like?" The policewoman looked at her like a pitiful little thing.
"Mom's place has... one bedroom, one living room. Grandma doesn't live with her. Hers has one bedroom, one living room too. I share a room with Mom."
Yimi honestly described the one-bedroom apartments where Mom and Grandma lived.
Even though she had tried her best to understand the concept of a living room after turning human, when she was only a cat at home, she naturally had no way of understanding that Grandma was actually the landlord of the entire building.
...
There was nothing wrong with the procedure. They couldn't find her home, and there was no way to contact any relatives. It was as though a person had appeared out of thin air. Other than sending her to a children's home to wait for someone to claim her, there didn't seem to be any other option, but it was already late.
Since it was late, the kindhearted Kisaki Eri took her home, hoping someone would come for the child tomorrow.
Judging from Yimi's words, it wasn't hard to conclude that she was a child who couldn't understand the concept of death and had been told a well-intentioned lie that her family had only gone somewhere else, causing her to go out looking for them.
A one-bedroom apartment could only be a rental. The child was already seven or eight and still had to share a bedroom with her mother, which showed the family had been struggling financially.
If someone had been willing to comfort the child with that kind of lie, then after discovering she had gone missing, they should at least have looked for her or reported her missing.
The biggest inconsistency was how clean the child was. Even her clothes carried the fresh scent of laundry detergent. This outfit had clearly been washed very recently.
Kisaki Eri lowered her head and looked at Yimi hiding behind her, unwilling to enter the apartment. In truth, she had already noticed at the station that this little girl was exceptionally pretty and easy to like.
As a prominent attorney, Eri had seen plenty of families. If something happened to the family of such an adorable child, relatives would normally be willing to take her in, though of course there were plenty of people in this world who disliked trouble.
If the child believed the lie about "another world," then her family had most likely died in an accident. There should normally be insurance money to make relatives more willing to take responsibility. If the girl wasn't lying, there was only one possibility left.
Kisaki Eri crouched down and looked closely at Yimi's little face—or more precisely, her hair.
White, with black streaks. Would a poor family really dye a child's hair? And make the color look this natural?
That halting, slightly unclear way of speaking meant she was either a genius foreign child or...
Kisaki Eri reached out and removed her hat, making the unprepared Yimi cry out.
"!"
Eri had thought there might only be something unusual about the hair color. Never in her wildest imagination had she expected to see a pair of cat ears, much less watch them twitch on their own.
A genetic mutation? No. Biologically, that still shouldn't be possible... yet the facts were right in front of her. No matter how attractive they looked, that did not change the fact that they were different from an ordinary human's.
"Give it back." Yimi angrily snatched the baseball cap away and put it on again.
"So that's what happened."
Kisaki Eri seemed to connect the dots, then looked at Yimi with pity.
This child must have suffered a great deal. From the moment she was born, she had been destined to grow up in an unfortunate environment.
She was reluctant to go inside because she had been driven out before, wasn't she? Eri didn't understand it, but in many places, a physical abnormality like this could easily make a child get treated as some kind of monster.
Kisaki Eri's voice became much gentler. "Remember to change your shoes when you come inside."
But Yimi's reluctance to enter obviously had nothing to do with that. Even in human form, she could smell that another cat had lived in Kisaki Eri's home!
This was another cat's territory.
"You have... a cat." Yimi pointed at the cat food in the corner.
"Mm. I used to have a little cat named Goro, but he passed away." Kisaki Eri gently tugged Yimi's hand and successfully led her inside.
"Passed away?"
"Yes. He was very old, after all."
"Mm."
Yimi spent one second feeling sad for the kitty, changed her shoes, walked inside, and crouched in front of the cat food. Another brand she didn't recognize.
"Can I... taste one bite?"
Kisaki Eri, who had just put down her shoulder bag, froze and pushed up her glasses. "Have you eaten this kind of thing before?"
"I eat it often. Just not... this flavor."
"..." Kisaki Eri crouched down and gently hugged Yimi's head.
This might actually be a child-abuse case. She had originally planned to make time tomorrow to take Yimi to a hospital for an examination, certain that it would help locate the child's family.
Maybe tomorrow... no, even if she waited another week, perhaps nobody would come to take this child home. What would she do then? Leaving such a pitiful child alone was obviously not something Eri could bring herself to do. Maybe tomorrow she should go discuss it with that man.
Yimi had no idea what Kisaki Eri was thinking. Remembering how the man in white had been frightened earlier, Yimi first pretended to rummage in her pocket, then took out colored pencils and paper. She copied the two characters for "detective" from the System panel and showed them to Kisaki Eri.
"What does Beishen mean?"
"Chinese characters? This word should be read as 'detective,' shouldn't it? You can write Chinese characters?" Come to think of it, the child's name didn't sound Japanese either. Maybe her halting speech wasn't an intelligence problem.
"I can write... all kinds of writing." Though only some of it.
"Then I'll test you. How do you write 'breakfast' in Russian?"
Yimi wrote it down for her.
That actually seemed to be correct...
"How do you write 'English' in English?"
Yimi wrote it down.
Kisaki Eri sensed something unusual and pulled out a basic multilingual dictionary. "What about in Italian...? In German...?"
Yimi wrote all of them. She could even form sentences and speak in those languages without a problem, aside from the same halting delivery. This was obviously a prodigy!
"Has Yimi-chan gone to school before?"
"A little over... a month." Yimi had a bad feeling.