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Joy, for all she was clothed in all her Knightly glory, was still learning the vagaries of the energy signatures of Mauvians. And her attention was elsewhere, in any case - dwelling on the uncomfortable feeling that to be out and about was now to possibly court some sort of negative attention that would not be so easy to recover from. Perversely, her new power, rather than investing her with more confidence, had only made her feel more paranoid, and she had resisted visiting it in Destiny City until tonight, and it felt more like an experimental excursion than anything else.

So it was that at first she noticed nothing but a cat -a kitty, as her mind joyously supplied - and did not register the tell-tale signs that it was not just a cat until she had already - oh, dignity! - knelt down and extended her fingers with an excited "pspsps" sound.

"Oh, my god," she said, immediately realizing her error. "I'm so sorry."

As far as Joy was concerned, there were only two good things about the whole Destiny City Bullshit situation: the uniform, and talking cats.

This was an especially high quality talking cat, with a juxtaposition between her somewhat formal speech and her dainty kittenish appearance that had Joy mentally reminding herself that this was a sapient being worthy of dignity and respect and that it would not be polite to erupt into a pained squeal.

Her thoughts had been frantically running ahead trying to devise some polite way to ask if she could pet, only for the cat herself to offer it up and save her the trouble. She managed to put a damper on her inward enthusiasm and a second urge to squeal, instead reaching out and obligingly offering her scratchy fingers, which had the advantage of coming with meticulously kept and somewhat pointy acrylics. She was, in fact, sort of walking catnip in uniform: all intriguingly warm furry texture and abundant soft lap and scritchy-scratchy nails and lots of little dangling stringy bits everywhere, right down to her weapon. It was a bit of a shame that she'd spent way more time running into dogs that were actually youma than she had running into cats that were actually spacefaring magical people.

"Yes. Joyeuse Garde," she said, although the French accent lapsed back out as she offered the less complicated nickname instead. "But Joy, preferably. I haven't met very many of you - not enough to remember to keep an eye out, I guess."

As far as Joy was concerned, the only creature capable of bossing her around would be a cat, given that a cat's natural role is to boss everyone around. She therefore complied, delighted.

"I hate everything about this job except for the Mauvian part," she announced, as if having just arrived at the decision. "And the hair, I like the hair. But mostly the Mauvian part."

She forgot herself enough to use her free hand to shake one of her tassels in front of Cuan's face, instinctively lapsing into interacting-with-a-kitten mode. "Cuan Oilean's a hell of a mouthful too. Do you get assigned those like we do?" It had never before occurred to her to ask, or even really to wonder about it.

Uncomfortably aware that she had come to consider Knighthood as something like means to gaining dominion - but excusing it as dominion over a single place in a single pocket dimension with no one there to bend to her will (at least that mattered), she chose not to address the idea, backtracking a bit.

She absently offered chin scratches while she considered Cuan's ideas. "I think I know someone who walked into it and I think I'd trust him. But that was a thousand years ago, and maybe things were different, then. And I don't think he feels like he really walked into it willingly, in hindsight. Like it would have been wrong not to, which I guess, to him, is the same thing as not having a choice at all. But I guess you're right. One outlier doesn't really mean anything." She paused. "And I guess - the agents on the other side - they recruit them, don't they? Hand-chosen? And god knows they're out here treating people like livestock. Yeah. You're probably right. But it still sucks."

She sighed. "As to how it works - he got a choice, a thousand years ago, even if it didn't feel like a choice to him. Me? I grabbed a ribbon on the sidewalk and next thing you know I'm a pawn on the world's stupidest chess board. No - chess is too dignified a term. It's checkers. But I get to talk to cats," she observed, "and the uniform's a real killer. And I get a little castle that's all in ruins and wreck that I feel obligated to clean up on my weekends. But that's not all bad, either. There's magic in it."

The juxtaposition between the extremely catlike behavior and the sage life-or-death advice coming out of Cuan's mouth was a little surreal, and Joy had to refrain from a sudden and inappropriate laugh, pulling her fur collar up a bit to provide a cozier position for the Mauvian to distribute head bonks from.

"Well," she said, after a moment's pause. "As far as being corrupted goes, I figure there's not much I can do about it." She did not foresee the Code, any time soon, reaching out and making her immune in the way it had for Ekstrom and Encke. Her relationship to it was too volatile, too adversarial. "I won't go willingly. All I can do is avoid getting into the situation, and if I do get into it-" she would have shrugged, if it wouldn't have dislodged the cat. "Well. I guess I'll just have to make it more convenient to kill me than corrupt me."

She hesitated again, reaching up to give her a scratch. It wasn't worth lingering on to consider what "peaceful" had meant for Gouvernail, whose affairs had largely been down among the petty squabbles of the men of Earth, which had been bloody enough, as the affairs of earthly men nearly always were. It was irrelevant, anyway: that would have been his fate whether or not he'd been given a signet ring. Becoming a Knight rather than a knight had only served to make his worldview more complicated and his guilt more stringent. "But for the rest - I'm trying. I'm not really one to get down into my feelings for longer than it takes to sleep them off. Who has the time? Everything is so short."

Well. Almost everything. She might end up spending a thousand years trapped in a dying castle alone. This was a thought not worth dwelling on.

"And the magic keeps coming, I guess. I did find some good magic recently. Can I show you?" she said, but even as she asked she was already gingerly reaching into a hidden pocket among her fox tails, moving gently so as to avoid disrupting Cuan's perch. The summons, she thought, might not inspire the same kind of delight in a kitten that it did in her. But this was a type of magic almost ideally suited to capture a cat's fancy: she pulled out a length of beautiful red ribbon, the gold threads woven through it catching on the street lights, and she held it up for inspection. "They weave themselves. I think it's actually maybe a cruel joke in a way - it's a long story - but I don't mind." The ribbon wafted a pleasant fragrance, half spice and half flower. "I think they're sort of - favors. Like a Lady in an old chivalric romance would hand out to her champions. You know?"

She paused, and then waved the ribbon vaguely.

"Do you want it?" she asked, feeling almost a little shy. "I think I'm supposed to be giving them away. Spreading the good parts around," she added drily. "I could tie it to your collars really loosely if that would help you get it home? You don't have to," she added, wrinkling her nose again. "It really is a bit renfaire."

She did not add what she was thinking, which was: and then when no one's watching you can play with it like a cat ought to and which you clearly want to do, without sacrificing your dignity.

"I feel," said Joy very seriously, as she began to tie the ribbon on, "that actually the ribbon is a poor trade for something as valuable as head bonks. I can coast for at least three solid days on the good vibes provided by an excellent head bonk."

When it was attached, the ribbon seemed to suffuse, very briefly, a feeling of encouragement and motivation.

"You are sweet and good," she said firmly, as if subconsciously reinforcing the feeling. "And I know that because I'm a blanket hog myself, so I have to defend the honor of both of us. Maybe just the good part," she added with a little laugh, giving the bow a pat to indicate that she was done. "I don't know if sweet has ever been my style. But I think I can be sweet enough to extend you an invitation - and your friend Saiph too - once I figure out better how to manage visitors. It's still sort of -" she waved a hand vaguely. "You know. But I'm getting there."

What she did not say was that the logistics were easy - that she had, in fact, already taken a Mauvian and her bonded with no problem at all. The problem lay in managing Gouvernail's feelings about it, and in truth, her own, which simultaneously craved having people on the Garde and dreaded taking them there. It was a bit like having a very beautiful secret, which gained some cachet from being shared, but also ran the risk of being in some way robbed of its value.

"I like you very much too," she added, with a sudden and beaming smile, which brought out a pair of dimples. "I will be in touch, if I ever figure that out. And maybe I'll run into you again in the meantime some time."