Loki and Jester - Backdated
Feb. 25th, 2019 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ax_mainJester meets a cat who is secretly her second trickster god! She can't wait to find that out!!!
Jester slid a Traveler pamphlet inside the copy of Animal Farm (between pages 68 and 69), and stretched on the small ladder she was perched on, so she could put the book back on the wrong shelf. She nearly lost her balance and only just managed to catch herself, the heavy bookshelf shifting with a creaky noise as she held on to it for dear life.
"Got it, it's not going up there," she stated out loud, figuring that she was alone in the library this late at night. She hopped off the ladder and found a better place for that book on one of the lower shelves. There! In the History section! In between The American Spirit and 1776, that was a perfect spot for it!
"I hope you appreciate this, Traveler," Jester added with a smile, and wandered down the aisle, pulling the ladder along, to find another book to slide a pamphlet in.
As Jester reached for a book near the corner two glowing green eyes faded forward from the shadow between shelves.
“So you’re the culprit rearranging books.” A whiskered face followed as a cat leaned out from the open space.
Jester's jaw hung open in amazement for a second - a talking cat! - but then she closed her mouth and peered closely at it. He sounded like a judgmental cat. "You make it sound like a bad thing. I'm liberating them from the constraints of overly strict order."
“Hmm. Would you perhaps take children from their parents and misplace them?” Loki asked curiously. “Make them difficult to find?”
"You're a very silly cat," Jester told him with raised eyebrows. "Children play hide and seek on their own. Can I pet you?"
He twitched his nose and purred a rumble of amusement. “As long as you don’t care that you’re petting another student.”
Jester was already reaching out to stroke him from head to tail. "Can you imagine?" she asked, sounding delighted. "If you were an actual talking cat? Just a regular cat, but you talked? That would be amazing!"
Loki stretched out under her touch. He turned to rub his head back against her hand after the first pass. “Agreed. Lots of animal companions around here. Don’t pet all of the cats you meet. Some are partial to particular people.”
Jester obliged him by scratching and rubbing the top of his head. "Are we still talking about people cats, or actual cat cats?"
Loki leaned into the head scratching. He appreciated people who didn’t find the whole thing odd. “Both. And magical cats. We have a plethora of cats, bears, and winged things. Only 50% of them are me.”
That made Jester laugh appreciatively as she kept petting and scratching him. "Who are you, anyway? Or I can just call you Cat."
“I like that. Call me Cat for now. We can share names later.” He climbed closer to her. “What you say to giving up your vandalism for a while and finding a place to sit? If we exit the library you can tell me all about this awesome person from your pamphlets.”
Jester had been about to protest that she hadn't vandalized anything yet, but then he kept talking, and she enthusiastically shifted gears. "You want to know about the Traveler? I will tell you everything. He's the best. Come on!" She slid the last of her pamphlets back into her pink backpack and picked up the cat without thinking twice about it. He was a cat, what else was she going to do?
Loki leaned his paws up on her shoulders and subjected himself to being snatched, as long as it got her out of the library. He wasn’t sure which of his friends would cringe the hardest at the misplacement of tomes.
"Where do you want to go, Cat?" she asked as she headed out, but she slowed her walk immediately, fingers stroking his nape. "There are some really comfy-looking armchairs right here."
“Moonlight,” Loki commanded. “It’s beautiful tonight. Let’s go watch the stars.” He nuzzled Jester’s shoulder agreeably.
"I love watching the stars!" Jester agreed enthusiastically. "It will be worth the cold." She went quiet as they reached the hallway, and stole silently towards the nearest exit.
He approved of her stealth. Behind the colorful comic sans there was clearly a clever mind at work. Loki waited until they were outside. He climbed up her shoulder and snuggled warmly against her neck.
"Oh, thank you," Jester murmured happily, as the cold night air was tempered by the sudden cat scarf. She moved a little way from the building, so they were less likely to be overheard, and looked up at the sky. "The moon is so pretty tonight!" It was very nearly full - or coming back from being full, maybe.
Loki purred softly, then agreed, “It’s beautiful. Hopefully all of the werewolves are getting a good night’s sleep.”
"They really should be," Jester agreed seriously, reaching up to her shoulder to pet Cat's nape. "All that shifting and howling and running must be pretty exhausting!"
“Howling and running can be refreshing on the right day, but if you have to crunch your bones to shift that must suck,” Loki said sagely. He snuggled and accepted the petting. “Do not recommend.”
"Do your bones crunch?" Jester asked curiously, heading for the nearest bench. So she could sit, and he could curl up in her lap, and she could pet him as she told him everything about the Traveler!
“No, transforming is a very quiet process. There’s no reason to make it audible.”
"Or painful," Jester supplied, petting him a little more at that thought. Bones crunching sounded really painful! She hoped it wasn't painful for him.
“No, it’s nothing like that,” he assured.
"Good," she stated decisively as they reached the bench. "I don't want you to be in pain every time you change. Can you change into other things?"
Loki slipped down into her lap. “I can. Anything really.”
"Anything at all?" Jester cried out in excitement, instinctively resuming petting him. "Could you be a pink unicorn? But not in my lap, don't crush my lap," she hurried to add.
His tail twitched. “Pink isn’t really my aesthetic.” He leaned back to look up at Jester before shifting into a miniature, lapsized unicorn. He had a glossy black coat and mane, and the usual white crest surrounded his horn. For Jester, there was a single braid in his mane with a pink bow at the end of it. “If you were looking for something bigger to ride we need to get to know each other better.”
Jester squealed, hands coming to either side of her face. "Oh noooo, you're so cuuuuute!" And the shift hadn't seemed painful at all! Just like that, the cat had been a unicorn! With that super cute little pink bow!
If unicorns could smirk, this one was smirking. Loki illusioned an array of stars and sparkles to twinkle around them. “It’s a gift.”
And another squeal at the light show, this one even higher-pitched. "Cat, you have the best superpower! How much better do I need to know you? Could you have wings and go flying, too?" He would look so much better with a little more pink on him, too. Oh, Jester needed to draw that tonight before sleep!
“I can do all of those things. With or without wings.” Loki stood up, hooves digging awkwardly against Jester’s legs before he jumped away from her. Levitating in a new shape was always a challenge, but he managed to float as gracefully as possible. After a moments pause he adjusted his shape, sprouting long grey wings tinged with hues of pink. Loki flapped the wings downward and kicked upward to soar higher above Jester’s head. He spiraled a circle above her.
"Oh my god!" Jester's shouts of excitement were not getting any lower-pitched, but her next words, by contrast, were. "That is so cooool!" She swung her backpack beside her on the bench and was pulling her notebook out, so that she could draw Cat in this new and wonderful form, grabbing a pencil to sketch the first few lines of him.
Loki fluttered and looped above her. He wasn’t opposed to showing off. Having never transformed into a Pegasus of this size before, it was good practice flying in this shape. Wings were not intended to lift a horse. Some levitation helped the process.
He watched her sketch as he swirled. “You have a quick eye.”
"So do you," Jester replied, pencil moving over the page. He didn't use it for drawing, but for shifting, but he'd taken her requests in stride! She finished the sketch (she would turn it into a proper drawing for the Traveler later) and looked back up at him. "Do you want to see what else I've drawn?"
He swooped down to sit on her shoulder, shape melting back into a cat. “Show me,” he requested.
Jester giggled at his renewed perch, glad that he wasn't using his claws to stay there. She flipped back to the beginning of this sketchbook, which she had started on the way over to the school. "That was some people in the airport," she said, of a few portraits of people (mostly very obviously staring at her). "That was the very nice stewardess on the flight. She kept checking I had everything I needed. She gave me so many peanuts. This is Molly, obviously. He's so pretty! And Gilmore." Next to Gilmore, Jester had drawn the head of a bright pink unicorn with a glimmer in her eyes. (It was a female unicorn, yes.) "Ms. Frost. Kurt and TJ. I can't believe they go here! Did you see them ice skate? It was all over YouTube in December. They're so cool! And that is just a page of dicks." And indeed, it was a page full of dicks, of all shapes, sizes, and colours.
The colors was what really stood out to Loki. “Wow.” Up until that point he admired her skill, but it was her boldness that impressed him. Also, he hoped, her imagination. Unless that purple dick indicated that she knew Molly better than he did. “Remind me to sit closer to you in art class,” he said thoughtfully.
"Hmm, I don't know, Cat," she told him, all the while she went over the people in art class to draw a list of suspects. She had a strong suspicion. "Then you might get distracted because my drawings are so amazing." She flashed a fanged grin at him, then turned the page. It was filled with different renderings of the Traveler; she had had to try different drawings before settling on what she had used for the pamphlets! "So this is the Traveler. He's amazing, you know. He's always there to listen to me, and to encourage me and support me."
Mmm, time for the religious propaganda. With such colorful scripture how could Loki dismiss it? “Is this someone you met in your travels?” Loki asked. Fiction or real person?
At the question, Jester grew quiet for a beat. "Technically," she started, a little softly, but then her speech grew back to its usual cadence as she went on speaking, "coming here was my first travel. Technically. Mama was too frightened people could not deal with my good looks. So the Traveler came to me! He visits me when he can. One day, I'll travel the world for him! Make him really proud."
Loki turned in her lap and leaned up to press a paw to Jester’s cheek. “You are very pretty,” he told her seriously. “And it would be a shame to hide you.”
"It was a shame," Jester confirmed lightly, not letting his seriousness get to her. She scratched his head, and his nape. "But she did it because she loves me. People can be stupid. I'm glad I'm here, though."
Loki settled down in her lap and curled up in a ball. He leaned into her hand. "People are moderately less stupid here," he said with a yawn.
"Is that your expert opinion, Cat?" Jester asked with an amused grin, and stroked him from head to tail a couple of times. "Anyway, the Traveler is really cool. You should pray to him! I'm sure he'd come and visit you, too, if you believed in him. I mean, I'm his favorite, but you could be his next favorite!"
Loki’s eyes drifted shut. “I will keep this in mind. Your pamphlets were very riveting.”
"I'm glad you think so!" Jester exclaimed happily, and kept on petting him, even as she shivered from the cold.
Jester slid a Traveler pamphlet inside the copy of Animal Farm (between pages 68 and 69), and stretched on the small ladder she was perched on, so she could put the book back on the wrong shelf. She nearly lost her balance and only just managed to catch herself, the heavy bookshelf shifting with a creaky noise as she held on to it for dear life.
"Got it, it's not going up there," she stated out loud, figuring that she was alone in the library this late at night. She hopped off the ladder and found a better place for that book on one of the lower shelves. There! In the History section! In between The American Spirit and 1776, that was a perfect spot for it!
"I hope you appreciate this, Traveler," Jester added with a smile, and wandered down the aisle, pulling the ladder along, to find another book to slide a pamphlet in.
As Jester reached for a book near the corner two glowing green eyes faded forward from the shadow between shelves.
“So you’re the culprit rearranging books.” A whiskered face followed as a cat leaned out from the open space.
Jester's jaw hung open in amazement for a second - a talking cat! - but then she closed her mouth and peered closely at it. He sounded like a judgmental cat. "You make it sound like a bad thing. I'm liberating them from the constraints of overly strict order."
“Hmm. Would you perhaps take children from their parents and misplace them?” Loki asked curiously. “Make them difficult to find?”
"You're a very silly cat," Jester told him with raised eyebrows. "Children play hide and seek on their own. Can I pet you?"
He twitched his nose and purred a rumble of amusement. “As long as you don’t care that you’re petting another student.”
Jester was already reaching out to stroke him from head to tail. "Can you imagine?" she asked, sounding delighted. "If you were an actual talking cat? Just a regular cat, but you talked? That would be amazing!"
Loki stretched out under her touch. He turned to rub his head back against her hand after the first pass. “Agreed. Lots of animal companions around here. Don’t pet all of the cats you meet. Some are partial to particular people.”
Jester obliged him by scratching and rubbing the top of his head. "Are we still talking about people cats, or actual cat cats?"
Loki leaned into the head scratching. He appreciated people who didn’t find the whole thing odd. “Both. And magical cats. We have a plethora of cats, bears, and winged things. Only 50% of them are me.”
That made Jester laugh appreciatively as she kept petting and scratching him. "Who are you, anyway? Or I can just call you Cat."
“I like that. Call me Cat for now. We can share names later.” He climbed closer to her. “What you say to giving up your vandalism for a while and finding a place to sit? If we exit the library you can tell me all about this awesome person from your pamphlets.”
Jester had been about to protest that she hadn't vandalized anything yet, but then he kept talking, and she enthusiastically shifted gears. "You want to know about the Traveler? I will tell you everything. He's the best. Come on!" She slid the last of her pamphlets back into her pink backpack and picked up the cat without thinking twice about it. He was a cat, what else was she going to do?
Loki leaned his paws up on her shoulders and subjected himself to being snatched, as long as it got her out of the library. He wasn’t sure which of his friends would cringe the hardest at the misplacement of tomes.
"Where do you want to go, Cat?" she asked as she headed out, but she slowed her walk immediately, fingers stroking his nape. "There are some really comfy-looking armchairs right here."
“Moonlight,” Loki commanded. “It’s beautiful tonight. Let’s go watch the stars.” He nuzzled Jester’s shoulder agreeably.
"I love watching the stars!" Jester agreed enthusiastically. "It will be worth the cold." She went quiet as they reached the hallway, and stole silently towards the nearest exit.
He approved of her stealth. Behind the colorful comic sans there was clearly a clever mind at work. Loki waited until they were outside. He climbed up her shoulder and snuggled warmly against her neck.
"Oh, thank you," Jester murmured happily, as the cold night air was tempered by the sudden cat scarf. She moved a little way from the building, so they were less likely to be overheard, and looked up at the sky. "The moon is so pretty tonight!" It was very nearly full - or coming back from being full, maybe.
Loki purred softly, then agreed, “It’s beautiful. Hopefully all of the werewolves are getting a good night’s sleep.”
"They really should be," Jester agreed seriously, reaching up to her shoulder to pet Cat's nape. "All that shifting and howling and running must be pretty exhausting!"
“Howling and running can be refreshing on the right day, but if you have to crunch your bones to shift that must suck,” Loki said sagely. He snuggled and accepted the petting. “Do not recommend.”
"Do your bones crunch?" Jester asked curiously, heading for the nearest bench. So she could sit, and he could curl up in her lap, and she could pet him as she told him everything about the Traveler!
“No, transforming is a very quiet process. There’s no reason to make it audible.”
"Or painful," Jester supplied, petting him a little more at that thought. Bones crunching sounded really painful! She hoped it wasn't painful for him.
“No, it’s nothing like that,” he assured.
"Good," she stated decisively as they reached the bench. "I don't want you to be in pain every time you change. Can you change into other things?"
Loki slipped down into her lap. “I can. Anything really.”
"Anything at all?" Jester cried out in excitement, instinctively resuming petting him. "Could you be a pink unicorn? But not in my lap, don't crush my lap," she hurried to add.
His tail twitched. “Pink isn’t really my aesthetic.” He leaned back to look up at Jester before shifting into a miniature, lapsized unicorn. He had a glossy black coat and mane, and the usual white crest surrounded his horn. For Jester, there was a single braid in his mane with a pink bow at the end of it. “If you were looking for something bigger to ride we need to get to know each other better.”
Jester squealed, hands coming to either side of her face. "Oh noooo, you're so cuuuuute!" And the shift hadn't seemed painful at all! Just like that, the cat had been a unicorn! With that super cute little pink bow!
If unicorns could smirk, this one was smirking. Loki illusioned an array of stars and sparkles to twinkle around them. “It’s a gift.”
And another squeal at the light show, this one even higher-pitched. "Cat, you have the best superpower! How much better do I need to know you? Could you have wings and go flying, too?" He would look so much better with a little more pink on him, too. Oh, Jester needed to draw that tonight before sleep!
“I can do all of those things. With or without wings.” Loki stood up, hooves digging awkwardly against Jester’s legs before he jumped away from her. Levitating in a new shape was always a challenge, but he managed to float as gracefully as possible. After a moments pause he adjusted his shape, sprouting long grey wings tinged with hues of pink. Loki flapped the wings downward and kicked upward to soar higher above Jester’s head. He spiraled a circle above her.
"Oh my god!" Jester's shouts of excitement were not getting any lower-pitched, but her next words, by contrast, were. "That is so cooool!" She swung her backpack beside her on the bench and was pulling her notebook out, so that she could draw Cat in this new and wonderful form, grabbing a pencil to sketch the first few lines of him.
Loki fluttered and looped above her. He wasn’t opposed to showing off. Having never transformed into a Pegasus of this size before, it was good practice flying in this shape. Wings were not intended to lift a horse. Some levitation helped the process.
He watched her sketch as he swirled. “You have a quick eye.”
"So do you," Jester replied, pencil moving over the page. He didn't use it for drawing, but for shifting, but he'd taken her requests in stride! She finished the sketch (she would turn it into a proper drawing for the Traveler later) and looked back up at him. "Do you want to see what else I've drawn?"
He swooped down to sit on her shoulder, shape melting back into a cat. “Show me,” he requested.
Jester giggled at his renewed perch, glad that he wasn't using his claws to stay there. She flipped back to the beginning of this sketchbook, which she had started on the way over to the school. "That was some people in the airport," she said, of a few portraits of people (mostly very obviously staring at her). "That was the very nice stewardess on the flight. She kept checking I had everything I needed. She gave me so many peanuts. This is Molly, obviously. He's so pretty! And Gilmore." Next to Gilmore, Jester had drawn the head of a bright pink unicorn with a glimmer in her eyes. (It was a female unicorn, yes.) "Ms. Frost. Kurt and TJ. I can't believe they go here! Did you see them ice skate? It was all over YouTube in December. They're so cool! And that is just a page of dicks." And indeed, it was a page full of dicks, of all shapes, sizes, and colours.
The colors was what really stood out to Loki. “Wow.” Up until that point he admired her skill, but it was her boldness that impressed him. Also, he hoped, her imagination. Unless that purple dick indicated that she knew Molly better than he did. “Remind me to sit closer to you in art class,” he said thoughtfully.
"Hmm, I don't know, Cat," she told him, all the while she went over the people in art class to draw a list of suspects. She had a strong suspicion. "Then you might get distracted because my drawings are so amazing." She flashed a fanged grin at him, then turned the page. It was filled with different renderings of the Traveler; she had had to try different drawings before settling on what she had used for the pamphlets! "So this is the Traveler. He's amazing, you know. He's always there to listen to me, and to encourage me and support me."
Mmm, time for the religious propaganda. With such colorful scripture how could Loki dismiss it? “Is this someone you met in your travels?” Loki asked. Fiction or real person?
At the question, Jester grew quiet for a beat. "Technically," she started, a little softly, but then her speech grew back to its usual cadence as she went on speaking, "coming here was my first travel. Technically. Mama was too frightened people could not deal with my good looks. So the Traveler came to me! He visits me when he can. One day, I'll travel the world for him! Make him really proud."
Loki turned in her lap and leaned up to press a paw to Jester’s cheek. “You are very pretty,” he told her seriously. “And it would be a shame to hide you.”
"It was a shame," Jester confirmed lightly, not letting his seriousness get to her. She scratched his head, and his nape. "But she did it because she loves me. People can be stupid. I'm glad I'm here, though."
Loki settled down in her lap and curled up in a ball. He leaned into her hand. "People are moderately less stupid here," he said with a yawn.
"Is that your expert opinion, Cat?" Jester asked with an amused grin, and stroked him from head to tail a couple of times. "Anyway, the Traveler is really cool. You should pray to him! I'm sure he'd come and visit you, too, if you believed in him. I mean, I'm his favorite, but you could be his next favorite!"
Loki’s eyes drifted shut. “I will keep this in mind. Your pamphlets were very riveting.”
"I'm glad you think so!" Jester exclaimed happily, and kept on petting him, even as she shivered from the cold.
