Welcome to Gaia! ::

Where was this? His sense of cardinal directions was usually limited to east in the morning and west in the evening anyway, but today was overcast. And what good were cardinal directions when you had little concept of the city layout anyway? Could one person have the whole map of a city in their brain? Someone must somewhere. There were a lot of smart people out there. But he was neither a bright person, nor even a dumb one now. He was an addled cat, which was probably a worse state than boy-oaf. Cats usually seemed so graceful and refined. Not lugging around messenger bags by the strap in their mouth, drooling with the effort of hours, fur-ruffled and lost.

Alley cats went all sorts of places, right? They must never get lost.

And there was his phone again. It didn’t normally have much to say, but it was ringing a few times today. Had the school noticed he was missing? Had Colin? Had ANYONE?? But what could anyone do about it? He was a CAT. It wasn’t a dream, because he’d been obliged by ….catness… to have a nap earlier, and he woke to his own purring and furry self.

Björn let the bag strap out of his mouth, and circled the body of it once before pawing at the flap rapidly like a red laser-dot to get it open. His ears were pinned at the merrily blipping ringer, which was still on from exercise. He wished again for opposable thumbs to be able to manipulate enough buttons to get the thing to silent mode. It was just heartbreak to look at the little screen, so he didn’t, half in his bag, tail and lower half out of it, and pawing it until it kicked in the ‘ignore, send on to voicemail’.

Then he hunkered down with his legs neatly beneath himself in what he thought of as 'loaf' posture, still half in his bag, and sulked.

He was used to people walking by him by now, usually with odd expressions as to why a cat was dragging a messenger bag, so he hadn’t moved from his half-inside the bag when he heard the muffled approach of voice and footsteps, or the sound of someone setting down. He hadn’t expected a hand on his outside-of-bag butt, though, and ‘brrted’ in undignified surprise, crawling a little further into the bag.

His ‘retreat’ displaced a magazine, a matchbook, and bee-product chap-stick to roll out onto the ground. He gave another 'brrrrt', more inquisitive, and poked his pink nose out to sniff. There really wasn't enough room in this bag for all his things and his cat-self.

They smelled a little familiar? He'd never paid a lot of attention to smell before. Now that he was paying attention, the voice had had a pleasant sound. Maybe that was familiar too.

He perked in the bag, the plug and outlet of memory and realty finally joining to create a flow of current. It was Talia! He circled around a little more so that his front half was out of the bag now instead of his bottom half, and almost beamed happiness. Until she spoke again.

“That’s sort of rude, to call someone stupid.” It was bitter, or correcting, just a resigned tone. It wasn’t that she was lying. But the use of it wasn’t a statement of truth, how she’d used it, it was an insult. And he’d thought he’d at least proven he was useful for some things.

Maybe she was having a bad day. It wasn’t like he’d expected she’d have to pick up his things. Well, gratitude always smoothed things over, right? “But thank you, it’s really kind of you to pick those things up. I get them all spitty if I do.”

He made dancey shiftings, trying to move himself aside while she jammed the last couple items past his fluffy bulk into his satchel. It was inevitable that his haunches still be a bit in the way, meaning that her passing hand and the objects had made his fur go every which way except the direction it was meant to go.

Her outburst was just a surprise, and he blinked owlishly. Intelligent questions aside, he blurted out in quiet uncertainty, “What’s a negaverse?”

What was his name? Could he Tell her? She was talking about such odd things, plainly in a bad mood, and not in a helpful one if she was asking for rainchecks about things. Maybe she was very stressed at home or at school? It was a very surprising side to see of the little baroness, whatever the trouble was. He'd never thought of her as a very fluster-able person.

But creativity wasn't forthcoming. What name could he give, if it wasn't Björn, and not be lying to her? He didn't want to lie to Talia.

"Bear. My name is Bear." He flattened his ears sheepishly. That is what Björn meant, anyway. "What's a guardian cat? Is that a breed? It still doesn't answer what a Negaverse is, I really don't know."