Inaaya, meanwhile, is completely unaware of Jing Yi's feelings about her pocketknife. "For my part I'm mostly curious how it relates to Aldebaran and I'm curious about the city the two of you were talking about? I'm not looking to pretend to have read it."

"Carcosa is a city of key importance to the play. It holds the palace of the King, Hali. As most things are in the text - or, the play - it's highly allegorical and is implied to be hidden from knowledge or from conventional reality. It comes and goes as a memory. But to see the city is to learn about it, as well. It's, it's quite beautiful."

Jing Yi glances out of the corner of his eye and turns to look at something. It's the Yellow Sign.

WHY THE FUCK IS THAT HERE

"...William?"

Oh no, he looks visibly startled. Goddamnit. He laughs nervously. "Sorry, I think I just saw a cat run across the window."

Oscar usually makes a point of not looking at William Jing beyond the amount necessary but the guy seems kinda out of it and nervous today. To be fair there a lot of things William Jing should worry might catch up to him.

Terrence glances at the window. Dude is on edge today, though.

"Maybe Inaaya can go talk to it," says Oscar. What, he can't help it.

"I don't think that will be necessary?" He is trying not to sound choked off, especially around Oscar, but it is not working.

Terrence snorts and chuckles.

Betrayed, betrayed by his own roommate. Et tu, Terrence?

"It's a joke, William," says Oscar. It's an unusually direct, and emphatic, response.

It takes her a second and a half to realize Oscar was referencing what Nessa Clapper said yesterday and doesn't know about her actual real life ability to talk to cats, and another half-second to remember to have some sort of reaction to this that isn't freezing up, and then she makes a face at him like it's a joke that wasn't very funny.

She's sitting next to Jing Yi, mostly because it's vaguely uncomfortable to have adult white men on both sides, and didn't see anything, but then she wasn't really looking at the window. There's something in one of her pockets, it might be a pencil but could just as easily be the knife.

Inaaya didn't like his joke very much.

On the other hand, William doesn't have much to say about it.

Jing Yi would usually consider disliking Oscar's jokes to be a reasonable preference! But now he is in stabbing range of a probable knife. And Inaaya has no reason to use it, but she could. 

"...anyway," she says after it's been quiet long enough to get awkward. "Terrence, you were talking about Carcosa being beautiful?"

Does he talk about anything else?

"Yes. Aldebaran. Carcosa. Allegories. Continue."

Terrence swallows a piece of toast, which he has, for some reason, cut up and is eating with a fork and knife. "Oh! Yes! It's not just a metaphor, within the narrative of the play, we get several vivid descriptions of the architectural styles, the building materials, etcetera - even the geography of its setting, which is highly fantastical. Or - not straightforwardly metaphorical, at least. Like I said, um. A complicated text."

Gosh, somehow he's found an affected way to eat toast.

Finally they're getting somewhere. "What's the architecture like?"

Terrence talking at length about the King in Yellow is irritating, but it is a familiar irritation, and he definitely neither has knives nor a desire to stab Jing Yi with them, and so it is better than a lot of the alternatives.

Huh! He glances around as a sort of habit whenever he's preparing to launch into passionate-description mode, but it's an autopilot habit at this point, because this train is leaving the station. "Oh! Uh -" he ... describes the described architecture from the text, at some points near-quoting directly. The pale marble towers, the high arches... "One gets the sense of a sort of brutal classicism, at impossible scales, stylistically adrift in time... but perhaps that last part is only my embellishment," he admits.

There's something classical about this guy for sure.

....hm. Maybe it is far from Ulthar -- which would also explain the alley cat yesterday never having heard the name -- and it does sound more like the Dreamlands than like anything on Earth, and she can't put a reason to why it sounds vaguely off...... but it does sound vaguely off. She mentally marks it down as weak evidence against.

It's bad to be in the habit of fitting evidence to your theories so she doesn't want to press in Dreamlands-ward directions here but she does say "Huh. It does sound beautiful."