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Who: Jay Merrick and You
What: Jay fell unconscious in Rosswood Park and woke up on a magic island. He's not yet sure if this is a good thing.
When: January 29th, morning
Where: The Storyteller's Temple
Warnings: Language, Jay being an anxious wreck; will update as things come up!

This is wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. He's either still dreaming, or he's still hallucinating, or he's dead, because the only remaining option doesn't just happen.

Sure, maybe the supernatural exists, but it doesn't talk to you in your dreams, and it doesn't spare you from getting your memories scraped out of your head by ~~that thing,~~ and it doesn't drop you off in...okay, maybe it does drop you off in an overgrown, abandoned building, but not one that looks like this.

He leans up against something that definitely isn't a mana pool, because mana pools don't exist. His phone is gone. His camera--shit, his camera's dripping, and the viewfinder screen won't light up, and it won't even turn on, it just keeps making this thin, whining noise before fizzling out again, and come on come on COME ON this can't happen

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Oh, okay. The giant flower tiger is Butternut. That's fine, then.

God.

Seriously, though, based on how affectionate they were with Tim, they might actually be less deadly than they look.

And now they're looking at him. Great.

Jay weighs his options. On the one hand, there's keeping a safe distance from the, uh, Butternut, and keeping his skin intact. On the other hand, big kitty.

Fuck it.

Jay tentatively holds out a hand for Butternut to sniff. He's still poised to bolt if this turns out to be a terrible idea, but if he's gonna pull the kind of stunt he knows in the back of his mind would net him hundreds of angry comments on Twitter, at least he's doing it for cat scritches.

The tigerlily purrs, immediately bumping their head up against Jay's hand.

"I'm, uh...looking after them," says Tim, maybe a hair unconvincingly. He's been looking after them since basically he found them and brought them back to a couple kids who wanted to name the cat two different things. The poor thing was called two different names for a long while until eventually Tim more or less picked something in between.

"Don't worry, they're harmless. They, uh, photosynthesize. If you can believe it."

Butternut bumps their head up against Jay's hand, and--

--Jay's brain shorts out for a second. Big kitty. Big ol' kitty who eats by photosynthesis. Jay wandered into Rosswood like an idiot, got lost, panicked, got ripped into another dimension with another Tim who's got three years on him, ate some eggs, teleported across the islands by choice, somehow, and now the biggest goddamn kitty he's ever seen is pushing their head into his hand like they want attention. Like ██████ used to do.

Like--

Jay grits his teeth.

"For...for who? Whose are they?"

Hard to imagine an animal this big being somebody's housecat. Tentatively, Jay inches his hand down, trying to keep his distance from the petals that ring their face. If they'll let him, Jay Merrick is going to try to scritch Butternut under their chin.

"Belong to a couple friends of mine," he says, because that's infinitely easier than disclosing everything that the kids were and are to him. "When they disappeared, I kept taking care of them."

Just because Chara's back doesn't mean he needs to get into that now. Especially when the subject itself is so goddamned complicated as it is.

Watching that reaction to the tigerlily play out, again Tim feels the need to ask:

"...you good?"

Tim's gotten awfully perceptive, hasn't he? ~~Like he hasn't always been perceptive, like Jay didn't either ignore it or snap at him every time he pointed something out.~~

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm...good." Jay continues his tentative quest to give Butternut the scritches they so clearly deserve for being such a massive, good kitty. "Just haven't...'S been a while since I actually got to, y'know."

He gestures weakly at Butternut.

"I mean, like, even normal-sized ones. I'm..." He stumbles over it the way he stumbles over anything about what he is, what he used to be. There's always an element of guesswork, piecing it together out of the scraps he manages to find. "I'm a cat person. Or, was. I dunno."

His brain still sticks on what Tim said, though. Friends. Maybe Tim had friends back home, but the only one Jay's ever known about was Brian. Maybe that's the fault of the investigation, maybe Jay set his focus too narrow, but he doesn't think he did. Nothing about Tim struck Jay as a social butterfly. The guy seemed fine enough with dropping his whole life, basically, to help Jay with the investigation. It's enough to make Jay hazard a question:

"And, uh...friends?"

That somehow does not surprise Tim in the slightest. He remembers Alex only vaguely as a dog person based purely on the fact that he used to have one, but there's no personal memories in his history of Jay ever keeping a pet. But he never asked. Never had the inclination to get to know very many people involved in the filming of an amateur student film, and years later, they were both too preoccupied with running for their lives than anything else.

"Sure," says Tim, shrugging. Butternut is having a ball, rubbing up against Jay's legs with a low, rumbling sound like an idling motor. "I've been stuck here for three years."

He wasn't just sitting in his house doing nothing, much as he used to do exactly that back home before Jay found him. Especially since he was maintaining Denny for a good chunk of that time.

Makes sense. Sort of. Jay's not so sure, honestly, but he'll take it.

"Guess it's easier to meet people when there's not..." He looks up at the sky, gestures vaguely in the same direction. "Stuff."

Jay nearly jumps at the pressure on his leg, at the low sound that accompanies it, but then it all slides into place.

That's a purr. They're purring. They're purring, at him, because he pet them.

Jay bends down to scratch the top of their head, behind the ears, around the flowery ruff like it's a collar, trying to get the tough-to-reach spots. Almost inaudibly, and at a lilting pitch higher than Tim's probably ever heard him use, he mumbles, "Hey, there, Butternut."

When there's not stuff, sure, or maybe because of all the stuff that happened. Nothing like meeting people while under intense emotional duress. That's a real fucking icebreaker.

"Anyway, they're a real people person. People...cat. Whatever. They're a tigerlily."

'Cause, you know. Kinda obvious.

"Anyway, all the houses look kinda like this. This is one of the smaller ones." He gestures at the shack in question. It actually looks kinda nice. There's a garden outside that Tim's kept going in the absence of the people who...ordinarily would.

It does indeed look kinda nice.

"Guessing the--" He scratches at Butternut, People Cat, in lieu of the camera strap. "--landscaping didn't come with the rest of the property."

Tim doesn't strike him as a gardener, but Tim doesn't strike him as a lot of things he apparently is now.

"Nope," he says shortly.

And he leaves it at that.

"Like I said. It's been a few years. Some people picked up interior decorating. Some people keep pets. There's a guy who grows his own pot." And Tim, apparently, has a garden. It's more like he inherited it than anything else.

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