Wolf took a deep breath and walked in.

Neptune padded lightly through the field of alpacas—who all bleated angrily at him—and then across the empty sports field until he came to the Tusitala School back entrance. This was it. He was going to leave the school grounds for the first time ever. What was beyond these wrought iron gates? He had no idea. Surely nothing he hadn’t seen already inside the school grounds? Neptune, like all creatures bound to one universe, one planet or one locality, simply could not visualize the unknown. The unknown is, of course, by definition, not known.

So he was surprised first of all by the metal boxes on wheels that whizzed past him. Sure, he’d seen these things from the gates. But up close they were smelly and dangerous looking. They had humans in them, some of them clinging to a round thing. Neptune cut down an alleyway as soon as he could to get away from them.

A deep species memory told him that this alleyway would normally be a dangerous place, full of cats waiting to attack him. Indeed, he knew from Mirabelle’s pet noir stories that bad things happened in alleyways. Occasionally the cat detectives in her stories had to confront gangsters in alleyways while fighting off the feral, scrawny, local cats. Neptune quite fancied a fight. It would warm him up. Despite his thick coat he was freezing. But there were no cats here. There was no one at all. Just slush and rubbish.

Neptune felt dirty. This world beyond wasn’t as clean as the school grounds. He jumped up onto a wall and began to wash himself. Neptune decided to have a little think while he was washing. It was all very well setting off on an adventure, but didn’t most adventurers have some sort of objective? Neptune reminded himself that he was looking for the missing cats. Well, they weren’t here. They were probably all dead. How much did he really care? He let out a small sigh. Could he go home now?

Just then, he smelled something unmistakable.

Guinea pig.

It was coming from the garden on the other side of the wall. It smelled delicious.

Surely just one wouldn’t hurt? For the road, as they say.

Everybody who visits a library does so for some reason. People go there to pick up another thin paperback featuring doctors falling in love with nurses or beautiful secretaries who feel compelled to marry their sulky bosses. There were many Matchstick Press editions of these sorts of books still out there, mainly in provincial libraries and dusty corner shops, that were enchanted, and therefore incredibly addictive, and so people who’d read one had to read more.