What the...

[donotmail]

| characters | Arj and anyone!

| date/time | Wednesday afternoon, just after the crystals shatter

| location | 1st floor of the tree

| rating | PGish?

| summary | Arj gets a sudden welcome when the new floors open up!



Arj is outside when he hears the commotion. He'd slunk off into the outdoors some time earlier, in search of a quiet place to hide. Outside, he'd been overwhelmed by the vast forest in front of him. Did greenmount trees really get this big?

Of course none of it matters, because this is a hallucination, and he is going to be calm about it and not get into trouble. So he's found himself a nice hollow in one of the great tree's roots, and is how hiding behind a curtain of illusionary moss. He's curled up in a tight little ball, ears turning this way and that. He can hear things outside, people talking, but he is going to be sensible about this. There is no point whatsoever in talking to anyone who doesn't exist.

Until the crystalline sound of shattering pierces the air, and he startles, the 'moss' vanishing into nothing. Against his better judgement, he half runs, half slinks over the massive roots to the hollowed out trunk.

"What on Ryll was THAT?"

Comments

[hairsay]

"Fuck you and your figments, you're the talking cat," Jo spits. She wishes her rifle worked; since it's proven so completely useless she's taken to stashing it under her bed, but that makes her feel vulnerable and terribly weak... usually it's not so much in evidence, but at the moment she's feeling particularly hapless, which makes her posture all the more defensive. Her wings, which she wears almost all the time these days, are spread to make her look much larger. The only thing that's keeping her from freaking a hypothetical leak is her proximity to the lifestream. It's hard not to be soothed in the presence of the golden light, though she is eyeballing the sword between her and Arj like she could even possibly use it.

She glares at the cat. "Some kind of fucked up blue fucking rabbit-cat," she amends, feeling spiteful for being put on edge.

[donotmail]

"Of course I'm a talking cat. I'm perfectly normal. It's you, being a... a... whatever it is that you are."

He stops when it hits him that perhaps this was not a sensible thing to say. The creature is standing there, wings spread, and it occurs to Arj that not only is she a lot bigger than him, she's clearly also a lot better in a fight.

Maybe "rabbit" means kiarr. But it probably doesn't.

"But on the other side of things," he says. kicking aside a few stray crystal shards and sitting down, "perhaps we could talk this over instead?" He licks a paw, and looks up.

[hairsay]

"It's 'human'," Jo replied, only slightly mollified. As her wings thumped back down over her back, the weight of them reminded her, "mostly, anyways."

She gave him what amounted to the evil eye with her own blue peepers for a few moments, waiting for him to spring. He could talk, right? That meant 'good guy', right? Or at least the kind of good guy whose worst danger was a mauling of her sense of esteem rather than her soft parts.

After he seemed to hold still for a while, she carefully approached him--and the lifestream, which helped to settle her even more, even if artificially. She was still wary, but the unbridled urge to skitter up into a corner disappeared. Jo took her chances and glanced up through the hole in the trunk, but from here all she could see was the beam of light traveling straight up, as well as the offset levels of the floor.

She turned her gaze back on the extremely strange cat, deciding she was going to have to take things in an orderly fashion. He looked a little like the bobcats her country supported, but lankier. The blue wasn't helping things, either. All that she knew about cats that weren't of the barn variety came from her knowledge of cougars... and those, it was said, were extremely dangerous. You couldn't run or play dead. Shouting them down was a chancy proposition. They could stalk for days.

They also didn't talk, and more specifically, they didn't ask to talk things over. She was still ready to kick up into the air if need be, but she jutted her chin about as amicably as she was able under the circumstances. "I haven't seen you before around here. You're not from Ferelden like the Grey Warden and her war dog, are you?"

[donotmail]

"Human," Arj says, bobbing his head in an attempt at looking respectful. "Understand. Human."

What's surprising him now is that she looks wary of him, as she approaches, enough that he stays where he is rather than turning to flee. He doesn't know what these humans do to show how they feel - she doesn't have, say, ears that can lie flat like his are now - but the way she moves says it all.

"I haven't a clue where Ferelden might be," he says. "I happen to be from the Aauron Clan of the Heshroun Basin, in fact."

He pauses, and then... "So... am I to believe that you are not imaginary?"

[hairsay]

Jo considers the cat thing. Either it's going to rip her arm off or it's going to puff in smoke if she goes near it, but its question leaves her unable to reply by words.

Instead, she carefully approaches him head on, then raises a hand. She's impetuous enough and stubborn enough that this for some fucked up reason seems like a good idea, even as she reaches out. She bops him on the nose lightly and then leaps back like a frog on a skillet, waiting for him to come at her and ready to spring directly up through the hole in the trunk.

[donotmail]

He tries to back off as she approaches him, her unfamiliar scent causing the hair on the back of his neck to rise, but she's too fast. He rubs his nose with his paw, looking over it to where she now stands, having leapt backwards again.

"Maybe you could have put that another way?"

[hairsay]

"I could have pinched you," Jo growls, but she doesn't move when he doesn't seem to lunge. Maybe he's not as wild as she first feared... though she's going to have to be certain before she lets her guard down. "What are you? I've never seen a blue cat before. You're not planning on eating me, are you?"

[donotmail]

"Eat you?"Is that why she's so skittish? But she doesn't look like prey, doesn't smell like it either. Prey doesn't talk, and prey certainly doesn't tap you on the nose to make a point. "Why on Ryll would I want to eat you?" (He keeps quiet about the fact that she could probably overpower him, no trouble at all, if she wanted. Nobody needs to know that.)

"And I'm a desert kiarrcat, isn't it obvious?"

[hairsay]

"This isn't Ryll," Jo retorted, shifting her stance just a little. Her wings had settled to a low half-open flare, though her arms were still half-raised as well. "And it's not obvious... I mean, fuck, I'm from Earth, and where I'm from cats don't talk unless you mean in squeaky meowing noises." And hisses, lots of those.

"Anyways, you don't want to eat me, that's the smart answer. I don't want to eat you, either. Fish, now, that's a different story. If we weren't the size of a thumb I'd say some red meat would be welcome, but most of that comes from animals that are about a hundred times bigger than us right now. Welcome to hell in a berry and nut shell."

[donotmail]

He flicks his ears forward again in confidence, now that she's not going to try any more nose tapping. "That's ridiculous," he says. "This can't not be Ryll. Where else is it if it's real? Ryll is... Ryll. And what do you mean, size of a..."

He stops, and raises a paw, looking over the long skinny digits. (His paws do indeed have thumbs, lower than where the dewclaws would be on a normal cat, and much longer and more dextrous. If Jo has ever seen a polydactyl, she might have seen something like this.)

"You will... excuse me..." he says, giving her a respectful but swift and half hearted bob of the head. He turns his back to the human, and gazes out toward the wide open door. He's barely aware of his footsteps as he walks away, out into the open, and looks around.

He's been out here before, of course, but this time, he's really seeing it. His haunches sink once again to the ground, and he sits there, in the moss and the bark, staring into the mists ahead.

[hairsay]

"Welcome to ass-land nowhere," Jo called after him, "population, a poor kidnapping of shit lords who don't know what to do with themselves!"

Of course, being who she was, she allowed the strange cat creature to wander off. So long as he didn't barrel face-first into the mist like she had on her first day here, he'd probably be alright.