Catgirl in Another World: Chapter 1

Since the comments on my last post were so encouraging about my isekai novel project, here's the current draft of the prologue and Chapter 1. I have a bunch of bits and pieces of later chapters in various stages of completion, but this part is more or less how I want it to be. For a while I was conceiving of it as a trilogy, but right now I'm leaning towards more of a light novel style format, with several volumes each in the 50,000 word range. We'll see how it goes!

I started on a longer post about what's going into the story, but the title of the overall series, "Memes of the Prophets" is both extremely silly and a perfect fit for the story, plus it's pretty eye-catching. In this fantasy world one of the major religions has a practice where they periodically summon a "Prophet," a person from Earth who is supposed to introduce new ideas. There have been 67 of them so far, though since the last one accidentally sparked a terrible war they'd fallen out of fashion for a bit. The conceit of summoning prophets is basically a way for the setting to encompass basically every kind of isekai protagonist and then some, and I've had a lot of fun working on the full list of them. They've thus included a veterinarian, a slime, a vending machine, a sword, a girl in powerful bear pajamas, a spider, and so on. Some had more of an impact than others, and a few are still kicking around somewhere. I don't know how many I'll get to over the course of the story, but Erica and her friends are definitely going to run into some.

Although I'm not religious myself (internet atheists make me hesitant to label myself as an "atheist," but it is factually true), I find religion as a human thing really fascinating. In planning this story I've made a habit of deciding things impulsively and then figuring out how to make them work, and starting with the idea that Valrune, the God of Crossings (who claims to appear in Earth culture in guises like Charon and Osiris) is the core of one of the major religions was definitely one of those. Being a generically Caucasian American I'm neck-deep in Christian culture, and paying attention to Jewish Twitter has really shown me just how different religion can be even within the Abrahamic faiths. Valrunism has some Christian tendencies--which in-universe are because of the influence of certain Prophets--but one area where it differs is the central place it gives to a concept of "guidance." Essentially they believe that there's a moral obligation to guide the course of events for the better, which means the Church has a long, long history of meddling in everything. Part of why the Prophets haven't had quite as much influence as they ought to is that the church elders regularly decide what is "good guidance" and tend to keep Prophets on a tight leash.

ANYWAY, hope you enjoy!