Something about the composition of the world has changed. That's the first thing apparent to [[character:Laure Joubert|Laure]]'s senses - like a transition from a dream into lucidity, something not quite tangible sharpens.
The second thing apparent to Laure's sense is that there's a cat in the library.
Sitting near the end of one aisle, glancing up along one shelf, is a cat with a distinctly dusty silver coat. She's not sure how she managed to miss it - it doesn't **look** like it's only just walked in and it was something she ought to pay attention to. Pets aren't allowed in here; any cat whose personality she can't vouch for personally might claw at something important, after all. She wouldn't let hers in here, for that matter, she **knew** hers was oblivious to etiquette.
Laure blinks at the cat. Her memories of the last few minutes feel fuzzy so she must have been daydreaming and shelving books on autopilot. That would be why a cat had managed to elude her notice for... however long the cat had been there. A sleek white cat, so it couldn't be one of the many feral cats that littered the city. Someone's pet that had escaped? It didn't have a collar but some cats refused them or were gifted at removing unwanted clothing, so that meant little. Or maybe one recently dumped and seeking humans and shelter from the summer sun?
She'd have to look up the number of the local shelter so they could check for a microchip. And if the cat didn't have one, a beautiful feline like that would find a home without difficulty. Perhaps she could take it home during her lunch break and leave it in her bathroom, in case her imperious Napoleon objected to another cat in his territory. Certainly Laure couldn't let a strange cat continue to roam the floor; who knew whether it would decide to watch the world from the peak of a shelf and claw the books on the way up! Or tumble some of them on top of it in the attempt.
"Hello, sir cat. Did you follow someone through the doors?" she asked soothingly as she crouched near the feline and extended one hand. Hopefully it would be sociable and allow itself to be picked up. "Will you come with me? This is a place for books, not cats."
As Laure approaches, the cat's attention swerves across to her, left forepaw rising - then as she crouched nearby, it turns to run two metres further away, then casts its gaze back at her, curious and cautious, both. For a few moments, it looks like it's interested in playing the role of the White Rabbit in her lucid dream - then it glances up just as a shadow falls across her, cutting across the light from the skylight. Perched on the top of one of the shelves is [[character:Theta|an inverse image of the stray cat that led her into this aisle, though it's the size of a large dog]]. For a moment, it looks like it's just a strong silhouette - then she realises it has no shading at all, and the glowing pinpricks for eyes are **its actual eyes**, not some effect of distorted lighting. As if it wasn't content with the impossibilities already witnessed, its mouth opens into a grin, revealing a set of sharp, white teeth, their shape strictly speaking having more in common with short needles than cat teeth.
She should be terrified. Objectively she knows she should be terrified, but her brain is stalling at there being a panther in her library. Except it's not a panther, it's a cardboard cutout of a panther, because it was flatly black. Except it's not cardboard, because it is FLAT black and cardboard has ripples and edges and does not come in 'blacker than black'. Except it's not a cutout because it has glowing eyes that don't illuminate the rest of it, and any moment this is going to be revealed as an optical illusion or a trick of the light or something that actually makes sense.
Then it opens its mouth (and how did something that was black on black have a mouth that could be opened and seen?) and bares gleaming white fangs that looked like they belonged to some deep sea nightmare. Abruptly her brain remembers what terror is and decides now is the time to feel all of it. Shrieking Laure throws herself backwards towards the end of the shelves and the free space beyond.
Two steps into her flight, something heavy knocks against her shoulders and sweeps at the front of her right leg's shin, tipping her controlled motion into a crashing fall that rattles through her from her left shoulder. Some instinct not under her conscious control begins to twist her around, trying to wield her elbow as a weapon, but the motion is aborted as black fingers wrap around her lower arm in a split-second motion and pull her arm down. No more than a moment later, she's pinned to the ground by the weight against her shoulders and dark talons locked around her arms, leaving her with her legs able to kick and thrash, albeit to little effect.
The silver-furred cat has pressed its flank against the end of one of the aisles nearby, staring at her with wide, alert eyes, its tail swerving slowly in subdued anxiety, evidently uncertain about the situation.
From here, she can see a patron at a table, his back mostly to her, evidently not alerted by her scream, paging through a book. It's a surreal sight - she can't remember if she's welcomed any deaf person into the library today, but that seems like it might be the only reasonable explanation.
"Help!" she screamed, hoping that the man was just hard of hearing and not completely deaf. Instincts dormant for millions of years were howling about predatory big cats and at any moment she expected to feel lionesk fangs sinking into the back of her neck. Except it didn't have the fangs of a big cat, it had the fangs of a fishmonster so it was some sort of experimental genetic aberation. Laure kicked and struggled and noticed the claws sunk into her arms were more like fingers and updated her imminent death to be from hungry panther-fish-man. NATO creating some sort of animal supersoldiers and letting them escape to eat honest french women trying to make a living and this was either the fault of the British or the Americans and whoever it was needed to charge into her library and shoot their monster before it ATE HER.
That seems to do the trick. The person at the table turns in his seat, abandoning his reading task, and with a look only superficially resembling curiosity glances toward her, then at the beast pinning her... very quietly rises to a stand, and then quietly moves away, tense, apparently having much of a similar reaction as she did, if significantly less vocal.
Like a scorpion's tail, something lashes toward him in a split-second motion - either by some miracle or by deliberate design seizing his decorative jacket rather than his person. That does the trick of wrenching a scream from him. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't inspire him to change his stance and stay and fight; he lets the creature keep the garment and legs it.
The scorpion-panther-fishman smacks the fabric against the wall, revealing a tortured, curt jingle of keys or something much like them, then brings it close and drops it infront of Laure's head. With an inhuman strength, it rearranges her arms, bringing her wrists together and holding it in one of its hands, then threads one arm of the jacket around her arms and into a punishingly tight knot, tangibly cutting off part of the blood circulation to her hands - an awkward but entirely effective binding.
"I think that was helpful, don't you?"
//It can speak.// The voice sounds only barely human, as if someone had synthesised it and deliberately kept a touch of an artificial undercurrent to it - not like a computer, instead more as if this monster ought to be making more feral sounds instead, as if animal vocal chords were being abused to emulate the nuances of speech, as if the words were threaded into a feline purr.
The cat she saw earlier is still where she last saw it, now hunkered down and slightly tense in its posture, evidently trying to shrink its way out of existence, though its concern evidently was not fully winning out over its curiosity.
Help was fleeing. Help wasn't even trying to help, and that felt like the keenest betrayal even if she might do the same, but the only vaguely coherent fragment thought she may call for the police while running. Or the army. Or tell the police to call the army and tell them Things were invading, and that there must be more than one of them because no creature could have a tail that long. But no creature could match the rest of it, so impossibly long scorpion tails on pantherfishmonsters only showed it refused to obey the laws of nature. Of course it refused. Nature would lock it in a deep dark hole with a volcano on top.
Laure shrieks some more as the monster wrenched her arms back painfully and knots the stolen jacket around her wrists so tightly that her fingers begin tingling painfully from the lack of blood. It could tie knots. It could THINK of knots and then tie them, so it was not a natural creature at all. Desperately she kicked at the weapon, for what else could such a creation be?
Then someone talked. The shock of that nearly made her freeze (but the panic seizing her body was happy to continue without active input). Her first thought was that someone was WITH the monster, was directing it, was concealing themselves with a voice synthesiser. Because that thought was more paletable than the creature being capable of speech, being capable of THOUGHT, of hunting her deliberately instead of by order or instinct. And because, perhaps, the thought of a handler meant someone that could make this all stop.
The creature on top of her grabs at her left shoulder with one of its hands, almost applying enough pressure to crush it - for a moment, the pain directly disables her panicked thrashing, whiting out her perception. It's mercifully temporary; as the fingers ease up, only a very dull and distant ache reminds of the punishing grip of before. The creature's other hand has slipped in under her right arm near the bound wrist, and a dangerously sharp claw rests near the top of the narrow inner edge of her wrist, a few millimetres next to a visibly major blood vessel, just shy of piercing her skin. Beyond that grip, her fingers are still protesting the binding of her arms with pins and needles - shrinking to a new insignificance as the claw against her skin sinks in and connects with the bone, then drags up along her arm in an abrupt motion, leaving a ten centimetre gash in its wake, prevented from significant depth by having traced its path along the bone, but not anywhere near shallow enough to pass as a mere scratch.
As the claws dug into her shoulder she thought she was going to faint. Colour that was both white and black and neither swarmed across her vision and clenched it to nothing and her breath caught and everything seemed to shut down in ways Laure distantly recalled from that one time she'd collapsed with heatstroke. Fainting sounded very nice. She'd faint and then wake up when this was all over.
When she'd fainted there hadn't been the pain, of course, and maybe that was why her breath restarted with a rush and her eyes cleared and everything still ached and she was flat on her belly in the grip of a monster. Still trapped. Laure sucked in a deep gasp of air and tensed to begin desperately thrashing again. Before she could fire bloomed against her wrist and darted blazingly along her arm and the stored breath was spent in screaming.
An instant later, the creature above her lurches, tearing her body with it slightly, aborting a sound that might have morphed into a syllable of speech. At the edge of her vision, the corporeal silhouette seems to have bunched itself together a bit - it takes a bit over an instant to identify that its arm has risen and its hand and fingers cross the line of sight to those seaserpent teeth, the tips extending the featureless of its head, and a hiss begins to gather itself. Then something swings for the creature and it half jerks back, half is struck near its head with a dull >**thud**<, and-- it disintegrates, as if into geometric shapes. The visual effect is too abrupt to identify with certainty - but the weight keeping her down disappears. The silver-furred cat has taken the hint and bolted, it seems - it's certainly not where it last crouched. Instead, the black, unreal monster reappears as if through teleportation, sitting on the table the patron abandoned earlier. Its invisible lips peel back from the exaggerated white of its teeth, pin-prick eyes glowing. [[character:Margreet Wauters|A woman]] in boots steps past Laure's right shoulder and inserts herself between her and the monster like a shield, wielding a plastic bag full of ice cubes like a weapon, posture tense, her attention entirely on the creature she seemed intent on banishing. With ice cubes.
It was... gone? Everything still hurt but there wasn't anything pushing on her and she could esc- a single jerk at her wrists showed she was still trapped like a landed fish, so escaping was not happening. Her fingers burned and her arm blazed and getting upright or even to her knees without her hands helping was not happening.
Laure gave a terrified whimper as she caught sight of the monster appears on the table. Teleported, her brain claimed, but should not be possible. Nothing about the creature should be possible, so yes teleportation may be true, but if it weren't for the blood she could feel soaking into her skirt (she was bleeding? That much?!) her brain would be uncertain the events of the last few minutes had happened.
There was a third person now. Had that man gotten help after all? She wielded a clear bag of... it looked like ice cubes, but that could not be. What monster would be frightened of cold? Some bag of miracle science to banish a living shadow beast.
The Cheshire-cat-fishmonster's tail swerves, splitting as if snapshots of its motions were turning corporeal and adopting a life of their own. A moment later, each element in that surreal bouquet thickens and curves, coming to spill across the table like the writhing tentacles of an octopus, as if someone had deposited a pitch-black kraken behind that otherwise vaguely feline silhouette. As if slick with moisture they roll off the edge of the table as they grow, tips curling upwards and outwards as the creature's shoulders shift and it looks as if ready to pounce, maw open.
The stranger's bringing up her gloved hands, raising her bag like a small boulder wielded to crush someone's skull in the most primitive possible way. "Fuck off!" she says, her voice shrill and unflattering, carrying a foreign accent. German, maybe. Dutch? Either way. Another few steps forward, clearly not intimidated by the creature, her posture threatening. The monster hisses sharply - then flickers out of existence, evidently not in the mood to struggle with prey that actually resisted.
For a moment, the stranger remains exaggeratedly alert, holding the bag as if adequately armed, her gaze flitting around the room and up toward the ceiling in nervous gestures - then she swirls, hurries the handful of steps back to Laure, and drops the bag near her head before swooping into a kneel beside her and frantically tugging Laure's wrists free, making noises that sound like more instinctual variants of 'I got this! I swear, I got this!'. "You need medical attention," she says, a nervous concern in her voice, moving to try to tie her earlier makeshift bindings into some kind of tourniquet. From the amount of blood it doesn't seem like a major blood vessel was breached - just many, many small ones.
Laure mentally adds 'octopus' to the list of creatures that the monster was built from. Squid? Weren't squid crueller than octopii? Wouldn't the feline make up for that? She felt like a trapped mouse being fought over. Was the women the monster's handler, come to scold it for slipping its leash?
She seemed more interested in driving the being away than bringing it to heel. That seemed positive, Laure's battered mind felt. If the monster was under her command then she had seen things she should not, and the simplest solution was to let it finish eating her (did it want to eat her?) and clean up the mess. And there was a mess. She was bleeding, which meant this was real. There was a shadowmonster being driven away by some superscience and she wasn't sure whether to scream or cry or laugh hysterically.
Her body settles for gasping sobs of mingled pain and stress and relief as the stranger frees one wrist and talks of medical attention as if whatever has happened is OVER.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," the woman tying off the bloodflow mutters, almost too soft for Laure to make out; at least one of those expletives belongs to her fingers slipping in their frantic motions. "If I'd been here just a little sooner," she scolds herself aloud, wincing. "Is this your first encounter?"
Vicious pins and needles are running through her uninjured hand but Laure pushes it against the ground anyway to twist her torso enough that she can look at her rescuer as she tries to stem the bleeding. And then feels ill at her first proper look at how bad the slash is. "First encounter?" Laure parrots stupidly. The woman had an accent. Her french was very good, but she must have misphrased that. Such an unnatural creature could not be expected to be encountered. Or perhaps it was her own brain that was confused, as the world felt fuzzy and nonsensical at present, threaded through with bright wires of panic that called for her to find some place safe to hide in and heal and protect herself from the not-yet-dead monster.
"Is this the first time you've seen a Cheshire?" the stranger is asking, her gaze nervously flitting between the necessary binding and Laure's face. Something about her manner suggests that the question is borderline rhetorical - as if the answer could only be 'yes, of course', but for stray cases that she was hoping to exclude. One successful yank later and she's stopped fiddling with Laure's arm, and a second question joins the first: "Can you walk?"
"That monster is called a Cheshire?" she asks, brain latching itself onto something that might help her avoid the thing. Although unless it was a daemon that could be banished by it's True Name the word means little. It answers the stranger's question at least, and with some help from a bookshelf Laure manages to shakily get her feet under her without (belatedly) fainting. "Who is responsible for making such a thing?" And now her voice was growing high and squeaky with distress.
"Making?" the stranger asks, a non-verbal noise threading through the syllables as if the notion were so absurdly offensive in some cultural context Laure was oblivious to that it was immediately identified as a wholly innocent faux pas and forgiven, despite harrowing allusions. "They're not from here," she says. "They're pests, that's what they are. Cosmic pests." There's a fearful vehemence to those words, as if she were superstitiously using the word 'pests' in the hope that if she said it often enough, they'd become easier to deal with and little more than an annoyance.
She pushes herself to her feet. "If this was your first encounter it's unlikely Theta will be back, unless he wants to prove a point." She's speaking rapidly, clearly pumped full of adrenalin herself. "So, you need to learn: They hate water. It fucks them up good. They can't pass through it like through everything else." Said, she's leant down to pick up the ice pack, dithering for a moment - then hesitantly trying to press it against the bleeding arm, perhaps hoping to take the edge of the pain. "You need a doctor or a hospital, we need to get that stitched."
Hissing at the chill of the ice against the wound Laure finds herself pliantly going along with the women, content to let someone else who knew what was happening take the reins. Her own mind was too busy scrambling to make sense of the world. "That was an alien?" the librarian asks at last. Alien did not seem possible, but the monster - the Cheshire, she corrects herself - was not possible, so two impossibilities should combine into one terrifying encounter.
Perhaps it really did intend to eat her. But why would it hunt a human, when the countryside was full of many fat cows?
Her wrist throbbed. Water. Water repelled them, and the stranger suggested it could harm. Earth was a poor planet to attack then, given how much of it was simply lying about, but she should not attempt to psychoanalyse a nonsensical being whilst bleeding over her nice clean floor. "I... yes, my colleague will take over when she sees I am hurt, that will not be a problem," Laure stammers before a thought occurs to her. "But what if it comes back! If that... Theta Cheshire? If it comes back, it will hurt others! We must close. And inform..." Her words faded off. What sort of authorities did one call when an alien invaded your building?
"'Theta'. Just 'Theta'. Not his actual name, obviously, don't know or care if he has one," the stranger says. "If Theta comes back, we have a serious problem - emphasis on 'we', I'm certainly not letting you out of my sight until you're properly patched up. As for others, it's no use trying to warn anyone." As she speaks, she slips out a mobile phone out of a pocket with one hand, flicking through the applications with practised motions until a map glows up out of the screen. "Okay, so the nearest hospital is, uh," she comments, visibly tense, flicking the map screen around a bit, before holding it so Laure can see. "Only two blocks away." She taps the screen with the edge of her thumb's nail to indicate their destination. "Can you walk that far?"
"I can." She hoped. Two blocks did not seem far, but she felt giddy and ill and shaky and was not sure how much was bloodloss and how much raw shock and fear. But adrenaline was supposed to help you, and surely she could use that to continue putting one foot before the other until it was safe to collapse into a little ball and cry for hours.
The stranger seemed confident that this 'Theta' was gone. "Does that mean there are another eight of those Cheshires? More?" Laure found herself wondering as they moved towards the door. She was not sure how one told one impossibly matt black monster from another, but she could not tell sheep apart and sheppards managed, so it was not surprising that an expert could. That must be why she did not inform anyone; she was part of those that needed to know, and thus they already did.
"More, unfortunately," the stranger grimaces. The pace of her stride seems undecided whether it should be one of haste or one of caution, if she should hurry Laure along or if she should make sure she stayed firmly attached to her by proxy of the bag of ice and by - after the phone disappears back into her pocket - a hand gently held against her shoulder, ready to steady her. "How long have you been lucid?"
Lucid? "I am not sure what you mean," Laure said in confusion. "I don't think I fainted during the attack."
"When," the stranger rephrases. "Did you feel like you were startled out of a particularly deep daydream, or comparable?"
It was a very odd question and she wanted to dismiss it, but it was framed as if it was important. "...there was a cat in the library," Laure responded slowly. "A beautiful silver cat. I noticed it while shelving books. I went to catch it, and suddenly there was a grinning shadow behind me."
Had that been only a few minutes ago? It seemed so distant. There were too many strong emotions to fit into such a limited timespan. And why was she being asked if she had been startled from a daydream? Could these Cheshires secrete some sophoric musk that dazed those around them?
They're outside by now, on the streets. If anyone is paying attention to Laure and her wound, it's invisible to Laure. Everything looks roughly normal, but she feels a touch invisible - not enough to be bumped into, but sufficiently as that her own searching gaze and her state are provoking no return glances. "Everyone you see," the stranger says almost sternly, addressing the topic of conversation rather than the evidence around them. "Everyone is still stuck in that state. They cannot help you and you cannot currently help them, unless the kind of help you need is a script they've been taught to follow. I am telling you this so it does not surprise you when you cannot afford to be surprised."
That does not make sense. It does not compute. It is even less comprehensible than the idea of alien felines invading a Parisian library. "Are you claiming that all of Paris is trapped in some mind-controlled daze?" This woman has saved her and proven she knows how to drive the monsters away, so she will be given trust, but Laure felt that surely she must be misunderstanding her.
"...a sizeable chunk of Europe, actually, possibly more. That said, I wouldn't call it mind control, it's fairly subtle - near as we can tell it's mostly just curiosity that's disappeared. That's been shockingly effective in rendering people pliable." There's anger in the stranger's voice, as if she considered the status quo deeply insulting and unfair. People push past them on the street, matching the narrative with a single-minded focus that promises no interest in anythinng outside of practised motions, outside of daily routine. There's still a chance it's just a coincidence - people are in a rush or absent-minded even without losing their curiosity - but given the narrative, the world around Laure threatens to adopt a creepy air. If she believes what the stranger is telling her - a stranger! who thinks it's reasonable to attack impossibly strong silhouette-aliens with a bag of ice! - it also implicitly casts another question into the ring: What is different about this stranger and Laure that they are 'lucid' and everyone else is not?
It was inconceivable. Laure found herself seeking justifications and alternate explanations that sounded less like a poor sci-fi movie. How could a loss of curiosity cause such a thing? There were entire industries that would shut down! "How could that be?" she protests. "Surely it would be noticed! A... - a telescope spotting a spaceship, or scientists not sciencing, or..."
But if everyone continued on autopilot with part of their brains stalled, would it be noticed? "Or the inventors not inventing and being chased by the tax office! A sudden increase in dulled humans not noticing danger and being eaten by crocodiles! Something!"
"Assume those symptoms are given - do you think anyone's going to guess people have lost their curiosity without being curious about the cause, much less find out the cause of that, in turn?" the stranger frowns sternly. "Wildlife deaths are undoubtably up, but people who take note of that go precisely as far as to take note of it."
And then she pauses, holding Laure back for a moment, long enough to prompt her to stop, then rearranges her undamaged hand to hold the ice-pack against her arm on her own. A moment later, she's stepping into the path of a young man with a slightly neglected looking mohawk dyed a bright lime, prompting him to swerve to the side - she repeats the process, stopping him from actually gaining any distance.
After half a minute of the awkward dance, she steps aside and lets him continue on his walk unobstructed. "That didn't even register as implausible behaviour to him," she says, coming back to Laure and resuming her duty with the ice. "He could have questioned my motives - instead, I was just an obstacle." There's a fearful exasperation in her tone, transparently directed at the world. Then she shakes her head as if to physically dislodge her train of thought. "Come, the hospital's over there."
Clutching the ice to her arm she watched her rescuer accost a young man and expected her to say something, to challenge him verbally in a way that would trigger whichever response would prove her statement. Instead she merely blocked him. And again. And continued, until Laure's heart was in her throat anticipating at least a string of curses and likely a punch.
That never came. The man reacted with less autonomy than a robotic vacuum. There was no protest, no bewildered expression, no frustration or attempt to reroute in any but the simplest of fashions. Even a roomba would have made a plaintive beep. Nothing.
The note of fear in her voice is entirely justified. Laure could feel the prickles of panic begining to creep up her spine once more as she managed only an animal sound of distress.
Whether mercifully or not, the stranger's quiet for the rest of the trip. In the hospital, she sits Laure down in emergency admission, but rather than wait for her to be noticed waltzes up to the nearest member of staff and directly addresses them in a slightly louder voice than might have been necessary in another situation, narrating that 'her friend' has gotten her arm slashed and needs stitches and disinfectants. It takes a little longer than it should, but eventually, Laure - both physically and mentally exhausted - is being tended to, a numbing agent taking the worst out of the sting of a needle being threaded through her skin. The stranger is sitting beside her, holding her free hand, squeezing it reassuringly.
"He would not notice if we were to discuss Cheshire's right now, would he?" Laure asks with a nod towards the doctor currently sewing her back together. She watched the doctor out of the corner of her eye, anticipating a glance towards her or a chuckle or the 'how did you hurt yourself like this?' questions that had not come. Everything in her gut said that he would react, but... well. She was no longer sure how long she had been sleepwalking in the same way. Were her own memories of active humans suspect?
Nor did it explain how she had woken up. "If the Cheshires are causing this fog to dull resistance, what are they doing here? Why create something that breaks if one of them gets too close?" A thought struck her; if proximity was a cure, perhaps that deaf man was likewise wandering about confused at being ignored.
At the initial question, the stranger shakes her head quietly, although her facial expression suggests that it's more complex than a yes/no question - it's clearly 'no' enough for her to prompt Laure to continue, at least. Once she does, though, the stranger gives her a confused glance for a moment, evidently struggling with the interpretation of her words. Then she shakes her head lightly. "I haven't witnessed how close they are making a difference. I don't know what does, but we have the grim suspicion they have conscious control over the mechanism." A pause. "In other words, they choose if they want you lucid."
Her grip tightens noticably. "But, why would they want that?" It's less a question and more seeking reassurance that her conclusions aren't correct, but the horrified expression creeping across Laure's face suggests she has an idea. 'Feline' was the first and most persistent adjustive she had applied to Theta, and she's witnessed how her Napoleon has toyed with a captured mouse.
The stranger stares at Laure in response to the question, a stubborn flavour of silent concern in her expression. Then her gaze slips down to the wound as it's being treated, giving Laure's hand another reassuring squeeze. "I don't think now is the right time to discuss that," she says, her tone struggling for 'soft and soothing' but coming across as a bit more abrasive than that, product of obvious tension. Her gaze creeps back up to Laure's face. "I haven't even introduced myself," she sighs, briefly pulling a face in clear distaste at her own lack of ticking all necessary social checkboxes. "Sorry. I'm Margreet Wauters - or just Greet, if you prefer."
Laure crumples slightly but drops the subject. There must be good reasons for not talking about it. And look, now she has a name to go with her rescuer. "Laure Joubert," she offers in response, before wondering softly: "What happens now?"
"What happens now is that I protect you until it's clear Theta isn't interested in you personally for some reason," Greet says, matter-of-factly. "And try to get you up to speed on details, maybe make you a Cheshire survival kit. Maybe the more important question is: How do you hope I can help you?"
A hysterical giggle was startled out of her. "I really do not know. A monster attacked me and society has been crippled so I don't know if anyone is fighting them and people aren't able to notice and I want all of this to be a bad dream. But I cannot hope for you to fix that, so I do not know what I can do."
"We're fighting them," Greet says, softly. "Not... yet very successfully, perhaps," she adds in awkward, self-conscious afterthought. "But we're trying." For a moment it looks as if she wants to say something more, then she decides against whatever it was with halting body language. Instead, almost a non-sequitur: "Do you live alone?"
"I... no, I have a housemate. And a cat." Did a cat count? Did cats suffer the same curiosity-killing as humans? "Is that a problem?"
"...not a... problem, directly, but you might find your housemate perhaps harder to tolerate now that you'd lucid," Greet comments, haltingly. "Just... something to keep in mind," she adds, sounding like she was trying to downplay something witnessed personally.