[P] you should enter it in festivals, or carnivals

[Owen Winsor]

Prompt  It's early afternoon by the Cavendish Estates, and it's partly cloudy.
Your character is asked for food by a nervous feral cat.

While the worst the weather had to offer had certainly felt behind them, many afternoons were peppered and washed with overcast skies or drizzling rains, interspersed with thunderstorms that rumbled off the coastlines. That morning had not been so different, the sparse blue patches of sky slowly vanishing to the powdery white sprawl of cloud cover as Owen took part in work that had, ultimately, felt familiar to him.

A merchant was packing up his wares, his knobby knuckles worn with age and his joints not faring him favors in the damp season, and while he was skeptical of the young man who had trotted up to offer assistance, he certainly had not seemed intent to turn away intensive labor. Owen didn’t mind the physicality of it, stooping to hoist crates and sacks of goods to help load up into the little mule-drawn cart, and he thought fondly of Simo. To thank him for his good deed, the merchant parted ways with a little satchel of dried pheasant – and Owen was sure to thank him as he meandered back over towards the pebbly beaches here, found a spot beneath a sprawling oak, and sat to watch the lazy roll of gray clouds over a churning, northern sea.

A noise above him drew his attention to a pair of round, yellow eyes peering right back to him, whiskers bristled outward from the round face of a cat, who, after a momentary stare-off, moved further down its perch on the branch to meow at Owen, who slowed the chewing of his snack to watch, awestricken and dumbfounded.

OOC: a cat- a little cat-

[Nathan O'Dimm]

Everything was so much more segregated in New Orleans. Here, though, there were little travelers and clans everywhere - Nathan often felt overwhelmed by the possibility and his own poverty. What was he, with only his skins to sell? He'd seen traders eyes light up, excited at the foreign goods, knew they were worth something here -- but the North did not have any gators to skin. He had to be careful with what he sold, discerning in a way that even the Bayou never demanded. 

He'd traded very little, comparatively. A few well made cords, here and there, for the necessities that would get him through the day; sometimes, if there were a particularly beautiful piece, Nathan parted with one of his smaller skins. He'd accumulated a few treasures on his journey, and today had found a lovely little wooden cross that reminded him, somehow, of Sabi and her strange gods.  But Nathan was happier to be alone, and had meandered to the beach to sit alone with his fiddle and play a few tunes as the tide rolled out. 

But there was little Nathan could do about the biological imperitive of hunger, so his music didn't last long. Instead, he wandered down the beach, following the smell of something that might have been prey -- meatier than bird, stronger than fish, something that pulled at his basest instincts to chase, to pursue, to consume. Nathan slunk along the shrubbery lining the beach, overwhelmed by the pursuit, entirely ignorant to the other folks around him. Had he paid the least bit attention, he would have known that Owen was there -- Owen, his friend, despite the spiders. 

The meow did it for Nathan. He was close enough, but there was only so much a crouch could do in this bipedal form. He popped from the bushes and, shockingly, darted forward without tripping over his own feet. It was only then that he noticed Owen, and, in the thrall of the hunt, was grateful for the boy who currently entranced the cat. "Owen! Grab 'im!" Nathan hissed, as quietly as he could, behooving Owen to grab the cat and snap its little neck in preparation for roasting.

Oh, he wanted this snack.

[x] //

[Owen Winsor]

”Oh, hey there, Nate!” Owen had greeted in an enthusiastic boom, his tail flapping about behind him.

The noise, however, alarmed the cat on the low-slung branch, which after a precursory survey of its surroundings, promptly bolted into Owen’s ill-prepared lap with claws fully unsheathed. Dropping his pheasant jerky in surprise, his hands reached out to grab the fluffy little assailant – who had yet to truly assail him, only for the cat to dig claws into his hands and arms and face in its own alarm, letting lose a horrid yowl of a noise that made him yelp in surprise as he scrambled to try and clutch into the wriggly, squirmy mass of fur and muscle and gouging, tiny knives, before, unceremoniously, it clambered up his chest, neck, and face, and spring boarded off the utterly alarmed and blindsided Owen who pitched backwards and flung his arms out to catch himself.

The cat, meanwhile, scrambled for higher, safer ground, quickly scaling a wall of collapsed ruin and stone, only to sit, hunkered, on the very top, ears flattened out wholly and tail wider than it had any right to be, before it hissed and growled.

Owen, dazed, hissed a few soft breaths himself as he moved to sit back up, whimpering mildly with the sting the pressure of his experimental touches lit up beneath his fingertips. ”Ow – what the hell – “

Wincing, he got up, and moved to scoop his jerky up off the ground, dusting pieces off to tuck into the bag, before he looked back up to the still-hunched cat on the wall. ”What was all that about?”

OOC: owen: :c new friend hurt me

[Nathan O'Dimm]

Nathan liked Owen. He was a luminous presence in a relatively dark world; although Nathan mostly kept to himself, after the incident with the spiders he'd decided that if he had to interact with anyone at all, it'd be the more boistrous Winsor brother. 

Unfortunately, Nathan was not particularly focused on Owen -- he was focused on his racous stomach instead. But the cat would not go easy into that good night. Instead, the cat puffed and howled and jumped away. The stupid little thing jumped from its branch and onto Owen when Nathan appeared. The cat weiled the full use of its claws, Nathan assumed, and he would have laughed had he nought been so caught up with wanting to kill the stupid thing and roast it over a fire (or, if he were being honest, eat it raw and bloody -- the primal side of things was easier, simpler, and significantly more natural.) 

Nathan growled, but the cat lept away from Owen and perched on a nearby pile of collapsed rock and stone that might have one been a wall. "Gon' eat dat ting fer lunch, what'chu tink I'm doing?" Nathan growled, tail twitching, as he eyed the puffed up thing. It peered back at him with equal indignation, whichw as perhaps more alarming -- Nathan did not have any sort of appreciaton for the fact that the cat was a prdator in its own right, if shrunken. "Jus-- you closer, you grab it, we can split it," Nathan bit out, eyes still narrowed as he attempted to prowl ever and ever loser. 

He'd always been the sort to get hangry. If he could separate himself from his own body, Nathan would be able to identify that his foul mood was a mark of how long since he'd eaten a full, satisfying meal. 

[x] //

[Owen Winsor]

”What?!” Owen all but choked, ignoring all the angry pin-pricks that the cat’s claws had gouged into him as he straightened to his feet. ”Nathan – no! She’s just a little cat!”

Enlil wouldn’t have stood for that – and neither could he, fond as he was of felines, and the baleful look he gave his fellow camping companion as he was instructed to try and catch the poor little predator who was growling in a persistent, low hum, tail thicker than a raccoon’s. The cat’s pupils were thinned to slits in seas of yellow-green, and Owen promptly helped himself to the space between the flinty and dangerous exchange of gazes between her and Nathan, his lips a tight and pouty line as he pushed some of his jerky towards the southerner.

”Just have some of this, c’mon, you don’t gotta eat a cat, you wouldn’t eat my brother’s friend, would you?”

Or maybe he would. Owen visibly grimaced at the very thought. ”Wait – don’t answer that – I don’t wanna think about you eyeing Enlil like food.”

He turned around towards the wall, and attempted to reach up towards the hissing cat, cajoling with a piece of his own snack and making all manner of humiliating sorts of kissy noises.

OOC: --

[Nathan O'Dimm]

Cats, in the Bayou, were mostly food. There were so many of them -- kittens appeared seasonally and grew quickly, as fresh and ready as any flowering tree. Nathan knew a few of the weirder folks who lived further on the outskirts kept them as companions, but that wasn't so for the folks who lived along the broken paths connecting the main neighborhoods. 

Nathan wasn't cruel - at least not needlessly. His moral compass might have been readily fucked up, but when Owen stepped in front of the cat with some very potent jerky, his hungry belly turned towards that instead of the hissing, angry creature. It wouldn't be the same satisfaction but...

He reached, more of a snatch really, and stuffed the jerky in his face. "Dey taste good," he grumbled, teeth stuffed with the old meat. But the food worked quickly; Nathan felt the clarity that came with eating, even though it didn't sate his desire to sink his teeth into something alive and fighting. "Thanks."

For some reason, though, Owen was still.. kissing? at the thing, as if trying to cajole it closer. Nathan continued to chew the thick pieces of jerky, tilting his head curiously. "Figured y'all was keepin' dat ting 'round ta fatten it up or some shit. Like farmin'. Y'actually want to..." His voice trailed off, completely uncertain as to what they would actually want to be doing with the smaller, weaker animal. "Iunno what y'wan wit dat. Why don' Landon jus' eat it? He be friends wit it?"

Weird. The North was weird. 

[x] //