kitty at my foot and i wanna touch it.

[headandhand]

WHO: Open to all residents
WHAT: Your regularly scheduled NAPs event for the month
WHERE: The RoCocoa Cat Cafe
WHEN: Aug. 10-14
WARNINGS: Please use these if applicable!


Look at all of these bright, shining new faces! There’s even a few less bright, less shining faces, but hey, this city welcomes all types. Chances are, if you’ve just arrived, you're seeing some pretty crazy things, unless you're used to an eye-blinding amount of neon, robots, weird-ass technology, magic, and an omnipresent police force...and hey, if you are, congrats, you're gonna settle in juuuuust fine. But for the rest of you, the Head knows this has gotta be pretty overwhelming, right?

Well, since your quaint individual processing units are probably having a hard time, why not link up with another one? By which the Head means...

Hello, new citizens of Dualis,
and welcome to your monthly Network Adjacency Protocol~!

NAPs are a monthly community networking event similar to the Earth concept of speed dating! Two citizens (new arrivals and old hands alike) are placed at a table together with a handy cue card of queries to help break the proverbial ice. Ask queries and receive results, or ignore the card and yeet yourself straight into a brand new friendship! But don't be too shy, you've only got ten minutes together, and if you just sit in silence for the whole ten, the Network Admins are likely to come supervise and try to repair the uplink through a mild shock to the ol' central nervous system. You might find yourself saying all sorts of unintended facts about yourself if that happens...probably better to just make friends, right? Who doesn’t like friends?!

This month’s event is held at the brand new RoCocoa Cat Cafe, a sparkly new establishment that caters to children and the young at heart with iced and hot cocoa drinks of all kinds, delicious pastries, age-appropriate live music, and of course many friendly kitties who love to lounge in laps. The cats are of all shapes, sizes, and colors, including some who may look a little different from what you expect, or may look like an ordinary cat but are actually anything but ordinary underneath that adorable fur coat. All cats in the cafe are adoptable, too, if you meet a new furry friend and just can’t bear to go home without them!

So pull up a chair, get to know your new neighbors, and enjoy a sugary treat or two with the resident furbabies. You might just meet your new two- or four-legged best friend!

Comments

[notalive]

"Peacock?" he asks, genuinely confused. He's guessing that's a bird - and he'd look it up if he could look up anything without getting nothing but cosmetic videos and cat pictures - but he can't even begin to picture anything more than that. Are they green? Who knows. What does this have to do with cats? No idea.

The cat finally decides to pay Steph some attention and turns to get in her face, sniffing at her nose. He's amazingly sure of himself for a cat that must be totally blind.

[ichoosefight]

"It's a kind of bird," she explains. It's hard to describe what exactly they look like to somebody who's never seen one before, so instead she turns to look around the room for one of the hybrids.

She points at a male across the room that looks immensely smug as a pair of paying customers admire him.

"That one, with the feathers? I used to have a cat like that, but a girl, so from the bottom of the neck down she was sort of brown and white. Shorter tail-feathers, too."

[notalive]

He follows her gaze, and his eyebrows go up as he sees the sleek creature showing off for customers. Even as he's watching, the cat stands and stretches its tails, much like the one they have at their own table, only this one's tails spread into a fan like shape, feathery tufts rippling under the lights of the cafe.

"You had one?" he asks, looking back. "So you had them at home?

He's pretty sure there's nothing like that where he's from - cats just don't look like that. Bird and cat hybrids definitely don't exist.

[ichoosefight]

"No, just normal cats and peacocks." She watches the cat a moment longer before turning back to her companion. They're certainly pretty animals, even the plainer females.

"But this kind of thing has happened to me before. The 'kidnapped to another world' thing. A bunch of us ended up here, apparently."

[notalive]

"Somebody else mentioned this wasn't his first time..." Connor looks around, but he can't see the man in question from where he's sitting. "Nida, his name was. You know him?"

Maybe once you've been kidnapped from a world once, you're easier to kidnap again? Or maybe this is far more common than he could have expected, but everybody who vanishes is just a missing person, languishing in cold case files the world - or many worlds - over.

[ichoosefight]

"Oh yeah, he's a friend. Of course, you spend 6 months trapped in a tiny village with only a few handfuls of other people you get to know pretty much everyone."

She scratches the blind cat idly behind the ears, and it finally sits and gets its twin tails out of her face.

[notalive]

"Right - Iteration, wasn't it?" Until hearing that name, Connor had just assumed this was completely unprecedented - he's never heard of it, it seems impossible, how could it have possibly happened before? Now everything is unknown. Everything he knew totally upside down.

"Did you ever find out who took you there, or how?" Connor asks, leaning forwards - and idly petting the cat on the table, who's already purring under all the attention from them both.

[ichoosefight]

"Not really." She frowns into the distance while the cat takes over, rubbing her hand with its head this way and that so she couldn't keep scratching if she tried.

"I don't really remember how we got out, either. I mean, I'm pretty sure I was there for that part? But that whole two months is pretty fuzzy in general."

[notalive]

He makes a soft, thoughtful sound.

"I wonder if that was deliberate or not… I mean, if whoever took you there or brought you here doesn't want you to remember what they did."

Or maybe it's a side effect of the whole...being kidnapped across time and space thing.

"Which is better - there or here? From what you remember?"

[ichoosefight]

"Here," is the immediate, certain answer. "There was no coffee in the village. Or like, regular electricity, consistent food sources, soap... This is way better."

She gives the cat an extra good two-handed scratching as a show of appreciation to the universe in general.

"Dr. Thompkins said I might've been bit by something venomous. She found me wandering the savannah in Nigeria, and I definitely got bit by several somethings in the process." She shrugs. She's not too worried about it being intentional, but maybe that's because she doesn't like to think about that time of her life in general. She was in a dark place mentally as well as physically.

"You probably don't have to worry about it. At least, not any more than you did before."

[notalive]

If there's one thing he's learned - humans? Pretty attached to the caffeine. But being an android, he can barely conceive of what she's describing - or rather, he can, but it might as well be like picturing before the Big Bang. A world before it was even possible that he could exist.

"I definitely don't have to worry about being bitten," he says dryly. "But I get the point."

The cat's definitely showing its appreciation, arching hard and purring so loudly Connor can feel it through his hand on the table.

"What did you do in a place like that?" he suddenly asks, genuinely a little confused. "I mean... I'm from 2038, you might as well be describing a different planet."

...Well, she sort of is. Kind of. Maybe? He's not sure how this works.

[ichoosefight]

She doesn't get what he's talking about with critter bites, but she lets it slide.

"I think it was a different planet," she demurs. "Mostly we hunted. I caught up on a lot of sleep."