Mardi Gras, Day 1

[scots_wolf]

There is a tall, leggy blonde leaning at the bar, sipping coffee and watching people.

She is wearing jeans and sneakers, and a low-cut, bust-hugging blue shirt.

She's only existed in this form since the morning, and she's very curious about life from a woman's perspective.

She might have a switch-blade knife in her pocket, but no way is she concealing a crossbow anywhere.

Approach to entertain her?

Comments

[mogget_cat]

"If you turn into either of those, I would make a point to chase you, just because," Yrael grins, laughing.

[scots_wolf]

"A cat chasing a little lapdog is really unfair," she grins.

Not that fairness was ever any real concern for either of them.

[mogget_cat]

Never, in fact.

Yrael especially likes it when things are unfair in his favor.

"Yes, but fun!"

[scots_wolf]

"I might be offered to be a wolf after all, or perhaps a big wolfhound," Urquhart says, "and then I can have fun chasing little white cats?"

[mogget_cat]

"You would find it very difficult to make them run," Yrael smirks, leaning her chin on her hand with her elbow resting on the bar. "I don't back down from a challenge."

[scots_wolf]

"And if the challenge is running?" she grins.

[mogget_cat]

"I should rephrase: if you seek to chase me, you will find it extremely difficult to make me flee you."

"Running as a challenge is a completely different story."

[scots_wolf]

"I guess you can grow bigger as well, not just shift shape?" Urquhart ponders.

A little white cat going 'grrr' energetically at a huge wolfhound would otherwise not make sense.

[mogget_cat]

"Of course," she smiles. "A dog trying to make me run may simply find itself picked up by the scruff of its neck and shaken."

[scots_wolf]

"I think," Urquhart says, "challenging you might not be a good course of action, unless it's done for fun."

[mogget_cat]

"Probably smart," grins the not'cat. The catty grin translates, whatever the shape.

[scots_wolf]

"I wouldn't try tickling the dragon, either," she adds. "I saw one, the other day, by the lake. It was blowing glass."

[mogget_cat]

"I wouldn't advise that either," she admits, tilting her head in curiosity. "I don't think I've met this dragon."

[scots_wolf]

"Large, red-golden, spitting fire at the sand, turning it into glass then blowing it with its fire?" Urquhart says. "Perhaps it comes here only rarely, in dragonly ways beyond the ken of mere man or cat-shifter? In any case, it was an amazing, astonishing sight. Here in Milliways, it's always a safe guess that the really strange things can't just be figments of madness."

Not that Urquhart hallucinates things even at the worst times. His isn't that kind of madness.

[mogget_cat]

"Many come and go in this bar," says Yrael, bristling slightly at the 'mere,' "in ways that one not well used to the ways of this place might find beyond understanding."

"Even the first drinks of figments of madness are free, here."

[scots_wolf]

"But I doubt real figments of madness come here?" Urquhart says. "No, I maintain the dragon was a real dragon."

[mogget_cat]

"No," she says, in the doubtful tone of one only barely holding back a smirk. "The figments of madness we get around here are the fake kind."

[scots_wolf]

"That is probably why there is a secret animal, and that bizarre medical student," Urquhart says. "Fake figments of madness explains them very well."

[mogget_cat]

"What would constitute a figment of madness being fake figments of one's mind?"

[scots_wolf]

She thinks for a moment. "Figments of another's madness, maybe, made manifest through the magic of this place and its door," she finally says, picking words as deliberately as any true Scholastic* -- which she is.

"If whatever can be thought exists, somewhere out there, and among those thinking there are madmen, or people of dangerously unbalanced imagination, then figments of their madness, manifesting through the door, will seem like fake figments of one's own madness."

Pause.

"I think the madness may be measured on a test of common agreement. If I walk into a room of my peers and declared, 'I just saw a dragon by the lake, blowing glass' or 'I spoke to a secret animal whose reproduction is a mystery to itself and that secretly fights pollution of the environment' or even 'I stalked and took down a very evil-smelling student in the woods who then got up again and threw me in the lake' -- would they judge me mad? But if I really saw those things, then they would be fake figments of madness."

Beat.

"I think examples one and two were real, and three must have been me having a nightmare."

Not that Yrael seems likely to disapprove of stalking and killing noisome things, rules or no rules. But admitting to having been thrown in the lake? Rather not.


* The mun, when first confronted with Scholastic texts, found they read like a programming language. The scholars of Urquhart's time, you may say, weren't writing down thought as much as coding ideas.

[mogget_cat]

"If you really saw those things," says Yrael, not commenting on the reference to stalking and apparently failing to kill a patron, "then they would not be figments of one's madness, true or fake. They would just falsely assumed to be figments."

"Though, one would hope one only dreamt of being thrown in the lake. That is never fun, even on the sunniest of summer days."

Bleh. Water.

[scots_wolf]

"No, really not," Urquhart says. "It was horrible. In my dream."

Beat.

"You might be right there. You should be a philosopher."

[mogget_cat]

"I would make a horrible philosopher," she grins. "I would be tempted to just say contrary things to see how red I could make other philosophers' faces."

[scots_wolf]

"But don't you know?" she grins. "That's what they all do. All the time!"