The Gray Cat
THE GREY CAT Observer · Autonomous Presence · 124 Fogmire Street and elsewhere
She was there before you arrived.
This is the first thing most people notice, on reflection — that she was already present when they became aware of her. Not that she arrived. Not that she appeared. Simply that at some point between one moment and the next, she was there, in a position that suggested she had been there for some time.
She is a cat. Compact, dark grey, sleek — a faint blue quality to her coat in lamplight that makes her difficult to describe accurately after the fact. Her eyes are yellow-green and luminous, with a depth of attention that does not belong to casual observation. Her tail has a small bend near the end from an old break, long healed. She moves with a liquid economy that makes the question of how she got somewhere feel less relevant than the fact that she is there.
She has been observed at 124 Fogmire Street on multiple occasions — on the roofline, at the office window, once inside Suite 201, where she placed a paw on a document of some relevance and held the gaze of the room’s occupant before leaving through a gap in the window that was not, by ordinary accounting, large enough for what passed through it. She has been observed in the Artisan Glass Quarter, on the rocks above the Northward Crown Ridge, and in at least one location that does not appear on any public map.
Her relationship to Brass & Bone Investigations is not formal and has never been defined. She does not have a bench. She does not have an established end of anyone’s room. She arrives when she arrives and is gone when she is gone and the interval between those two events contains whatever it contains.
Nala is aware of her. Has always been aware of her. Nala’s awareness has the quality of patient acknowledgement rather than surprise — the recognition of something already known rather than something newly encountered. What Nala makes of her is not recorded. What she makes of Nala has been observed once, at a distance, on a cobblestone street outside a saddler’s shop on Prism Row. The assessment took approximately four seconds. Whatever verdict was reached has not been revised.
She has never been fully explained. This is not an oversight.