It had been several hours since Regan had last seen Sara out in the forest. She had told Sara that she would meet her back in the mansion garage to get the stag all cut up and processed for the freezer. In those hours Regan had made two new friends and had gotten registered at the mansion with a room and a job as the new gardener and grounds keeper since she was pretty handy with plants.

It took Regan a little while to find her way to the garage but she did eventually find her way to it. She opened the door to the garage and was glad she had grabbed her green wool sweater from her back pack before coming out. The air had turned quite chilly in the past few hours and even with her thick fur she still felt the cold, the years she spent locked up indoors had made her a little more sensitive then she should have been.

Peeking around inside the garage, Regan looked to see if Sara had already arrived and started to work on the stag.

Sara hadn't been in the mansion it's self for a long time but the place still was a comfort to her. She'd come here at first just to visit good friends. After one of the times that she had nearly lost her life, Sara had lived in the mansion for a couple of months before she'd moved out but she still knew some of the older students and teachers here. In a house full of mutants, she barely raised any eye brows from her looks and she'd often made herself forget the feeling that brought her. Where out on the street, even some of the people she liked still stared, here she was.... normal. If there was such a word anymore.

Her fur was thick enough that she didn't need a lot of extra clothing. The wild cougar side of herself was well suited to the cold and often preferred it over the heat. She'd been satisfied with just a light vest, never liking the way that sleeves felt when the rubbed her fur on her arms the wrong way.

It didn't take Sara too long to set up. The stag was hung from one of the rafters in the garage, and Sara opened the garage doors so that the cold air would keep the meat at a cooler temp. Once She had that, she found a table that she quickly scrubbed clean. A bucket was left under the deer, and from there she raided the mansion's kitchen for a set of knives, freezer bags, bowls, and cutting boards.

Sara's ear twitched in Regan's direction when she heard the other feline join her in the garage. Sara had to admit that she was a little surprised to see her. She wasn't sure if she was really going to show up. Sara wouldn't have showed up when she had first arrived in New York. But that was her. "Hey." Sara said turning her head so that she could look over her shoulder. "I assume that you found everything that you needed to."

Finally spotting Sara in the large garage, Regan padded over to her slowly. She held her clawed hands folded in front of her as she came up to her and stopped a few feet away. The stag didn’t look quite as grizzly now hanging in the garage as it did when it was laying in the bloodied snow. It was still torn up from her massive saber fangs, but it was a little more tolerable like this. “Hey Sara.” she said softly and gave the larger feline a soft smile. She nodded at the other part of her statement and smiled some more. “I found a lot more then I needed to, but that’s alright.”

Looking at all the things that Sara had set up, Regan glanced around and wondered if she should be doing something instead of just standing around like a lump on a log. Piping up to her thoughts, she finally said, “Is there anything I can be doing to help you?” She wasn’t quite sure what to do as she had never done this before, but given that Sara was kind enough to be doing this for her, it was the least she could do to lend a hand in some way, shape, or form.

Sara glanced at the buck for a moment as Regan and herself greeted each other. It was an odd feeling standing here and Sara wasn't sure really why. Maybe because she'd never really met someone who was so much like herself without that other person being a shape shifter of some kind. She did her best to hide the fact that she was sort of curious.

Mean while Roxy, Sara's dog, had found a couple of the Mansions other inhabitants. A young girl with a tail, pointed ears and light purple skin tossed a stick for her. It was clear to Sara that the dog enjoyed her visits back to her old home.

When Regan asked if she could help, Sara just shrugged. "If you want, you can wash up. There's a sink around the corner." Sara indicated with a nod of her head. "There are some rubber gloves on the table, and you can slice the meat into pieces the size that you want, then put them in the bags."

Regan heard Roxy’s playful barks outside and looked out. She smiled and looked back at Sara. “Roxy is sure having a good time.”

She nodded to Sara saying to wash up and then she could cut the meat up. Rolling up the sleeves on her green sweater, she headed back to the sink and started to scrub her furry hands and hummed a soft little Celtic tune. She felt rather comfortable around Sara, it was so nice to meet someone who had a similar mutation to her. She couldn’t help but wonder why she was so much smaller then Sara though. Contrary to popular beliefs, Tigers are actually the largest of the big cats, and here Regan looked like a munchkin next to her lion like friend.

Padding back over to the table, Regan put on the rubber gloves as best she could with her long claws. The gloves felt weird against her fur, but she supposed that was the best way to keep the blood off her white fur, and her white fur off of the meat. Standing at the ready for the first cut, Regan couldn’t help but wonder how many times Sara had done this, she sure seemed like an expert, so she asked to break the silence. “So Sara, how many deer have you processed so far and when did you learn how to?”

Sara looked over her shoulder at Roxy and the girl playing when Regan said something. "I lived here at the mansion for a couple of months. Roxy was given to me by one of the other residents. Sam, also known as Cold steel had rescued her as a puppy. She still knows a lot of the other students here witch comes in handy if I need a dog sitter ever." Sara said with a shrug.

Sara took one sharp knife. The rubber gloves stretched oddly over her paw like digits, but She'd gotten used to the odd feeling at one time. A long time ago. Regan scrubbed up, and got her gloves and Sara removed one section of meet keeping the muscle groupings the same because different parts of the deer's muscle would cook at different rates. Sara had done the yucky stuff first by removing the inner organs that had been left in a bucket. That stuff could probably be discarded so the deer looked sort of hollow hanging there, if one looked at it from the right angle.

Regan asked Sara how many deer she'd processed and Sara shrugged. She didn't really know the exact answer to that. "I'm not really sure." Sara said. "I used to hunt for my meals, but when I moved to the city I started relying more on Chinese take out. I learned this from a good friend when I first started living on my own. When I did hunt, I normally went after smaller things. Rabbit, squirl, turkeys."

"What about you? How long have you been supporting yourself? Out on your own?" Sara left off like this but she chose her words carefully.

Regan smiled as she spoke about Roxy and her time at the mansion. “Oh that was nice of him, I am sad to say I have yet to meet Sam.” She smiled and kept watching Roxy for a few more minutes before getting to the deer. She liked to watch animals play and figured that if Sara ever did need a sitter, she’d offer to watch Roxy, they could have quite a good run together she figured.

Regan stood waiting for the first section of meat to come off the stag, she was glad that Sara had finished cleaning out the innards of the stag before Regan had gotten there, she would not have been able to stomach that in her normal form. She was still at least partly human under all of that fur and that human was a dainty soul.

Nodding as Sara spoke about her hunting days, Regan half giggled as she offered her reply to the smaller game. “Yeah I’m sure I’d be alright with smaller game myself, but the saber tooth has one heck of an apatite. She needs to be satisfied or I have a hard time keeping her at bay.” She shrugged her shoulders and tried to smile and play off the embarrassment she was feeling.

Not quite sure how to answer Sara’s questions, Regan gave her shoulders a shrug. “I’ve been on my own for a month or so now. Have only had to hunt a few times, but I used to hunt a lot when I was on my own as a child.” Regan made sure not to go into when she had been picked up by Shamus, she didn’t want to get into that right now, it was after all the most embarrassing part of her life to date.

Sara shrugged to what Regan said about the sabertooth side of her demanding more to eat. Sara had her own appetite to worry about, but smaller game was more practical for keeping on the move. "I've gotten used to Chinese takeout."

Sara worked around the joint of the deer's back leg. It only took her a moment to go through it, then bend it and get it out of her way for the rest of the meat of the leg. It didn't take long for her to give Regan something to do and lay some meat on the table in front of her.

Sara listened to the rest of Regan had to say. She was only out on her own for a month. Sara chose not to ask, but normally a mutant goes out on their own because of something negative that had happened. So with the feline power of deduction, something had happened a month ago to cause Regan to be on her own... Again... Sara's ears flicked back against the back of her head for a moment. Her right ear doing more of a twitch than the left. "Sometimes being out on your own makes things..." Sara trailed off for a moment as her knife turned a little wrong in the meat and she went to correct the small mistake. Thinking of what she really wanted to say. Easier felt like it would be wrong to say. "Simpler."

Regan watched Sara closely as she worked her way around the stag’s leg joint and cut free some of the meat and placed it on the table. Regan grabbed it and started to slice it up with her knife into more manageable portions and then placed them into the freezer bags. She giggled over her shoulder as Sara mentioned that she had gotten used to Chinese take-out. “I don’t think I have ever had Chinese take-out to be honest, I might have to try it someday.” Regan was sure it sounded odd, but other than hunting for herself, given scraps of meat when she was in the cage, and eating what the cooks prepared for her once she was living with her “Father”, she had never really eaten anything else.

Still cutting and packing the meat that Sara kept putting on the table, Regan’s own ears flicked back to listen to Sara. Her earrings clanked together as she swiveled them back and forth. She listened to Sara speak and then trail off for a moment before finishing her thought. She pondered it for a few moments and gave a slight nod in agreement, thought she was sure Sara didn’t see it since they were back to back at the moment. “That’s true, sometimes that is simpler.” Regan knew full well that being alone was simpler for everyone because of her mutation, but the human part of her craved company and human interaction and that made her being alone more complicated since her loneliness would make her give in to her saber tooth and put everyone in danger. “It can also make things more complicated in certain situations. I think everyone needs someone to look to in the world, someone they can trust and lean on when times are tough. No one should be entirely alone.”