Not a Couple; Just Partners (Private, future MH, NSFW)

"Ah, right," Jay said, holding the griffin up and towards Xenia. The griffin cocked its head as it looked at the woman. "This is Pleasant."

"Pleasant?" She repeated, moving closer as they walked to look at him. The woman made an attempt at a chittering noise, but as she wasn't actually part bird, herself, largely failed. Laughing, she decided instead to try low frequencies of more feline noises, opting for the shared lineage instead, rather than attempting a language she didn't truly know.

Phoebe shook her head as she walked along ahead of them. Xenia was going to be adopting this one, of this, she was sure of.

Since Pleasant didn't snap at the woman, Jay thought that it was a good enough idea at the moment to hand the creature over to Xenia. "Someone I knew the little guy reminded me of," Jay explained the name.

Xenia nodded, cradling her arms and allowing the griffin to climb around and settle himself down. "He's rather well behaved for one so young. I'm impressed." She looked up as she heard the sound of rocks grinding back against each other, finding Phoebe whispering the password that caused the enchanted passageway to open up. Xenia was one of the few people that knew what the Narwhal form looked like, simply because she'd been around when the areas had been enchanted. She smirked slightly at the memory, not because the form amused her but because Phoebe's reaction to her was comical.

"Wouldn't think so when I first found him," Jay said, laughing. "He'd calmed down a lot when he realised he couldn't take my fingers off with claws or beak."

Xenia laughed a bit, "I'll have to socialize him some more, then. Take him out on the grounds sometime... he'll need a roost..." Xenia began music to herself as she absentmindedly began petting the monster in her arms. Phoebe, meanwhile, had gotten the passage open and was welcoming them inside. It actually looked like a proper interior, here, albeit you could still tell that it was part of the cave. The floors and furniture were mostly manmade, though some of the rocks made up tables and other surfaces. It was well-lit inside, though still held the familiar tints of a cave tour.

"Not too bad for being underground," Jay said, looking around once he had entered. Being a bird, being underground was not the most comfortable place for Jay, but it's not like he couldn't manage it just fine.

"I occasionally feel like a dwarf." She admitted, the words offhand but with enough amusement to make it clear that it was a joke, if only to a degree. She went over to one of the side areas, opening up another passage. "Or a hobbit, depending on where I'm at." Phoebe said as the passage opened up into something more akin to a hill burrow. She didn't trust having Pleasant outside on his own, but the nest that had been made in the space would hopefully help until they had an aboveground structure set up.

"I imagine those to be even shorter," Jay said offhandedly, looking into the space that Phoebe had just opened up. "Looks cozy, but I'd get him used to coming back to you and have him outside as soon as possible."

"I know," she said, showing him the bed space for now and leaving Xenia with him before proceeding further into the caves. She didn't care one way or the other if Jay followed or not. She had some plans and blueprints to look over.

Jay didn't have much else better to do than to follow her, since barring Pleasant she was probably the most interesting thing around to him at the moment and Pleasant couldn't really hold a conversation.

"Nosey or bored?" She asked him when she caught on that he was following and not just exploring. She was heading to another area that had the living quarters and her on-site office. There, as was normal, she immediately went for her notes, looking over a serious of potential blueprints.

"Both," Jay said, not bothering to try and hide the fact that he did want to see what was going on just for the sake of knowing.

She looked up at him before looking back down at the plans. She could change them later if there was a falling out or she felt the need to hide from him. For now, Phoebe didn't see him as any sort of threat. "Well, you're free to look around. Worse come to worse you'll run into a wall that's not magical." She peered up again before making some adjustments to the image in front of her. "Don't expect to be able to find the place again, though."

"I need to get things set up well enough that I actually have room for more monsters." She admitted, scribbling before rapidly erasing and starting over again, "I can put more in Lady's Lake, but I don't want to crowd her, so I can't put everything up front... The cave systems provide me plenty of space for cave-dwelling monsters but most of them on feral..." She kept talking, the words running into and stumbling over each other, quickly no longer making sense. Her hand was moving rapidly across the page until she nearly threw the pencil and tangled the hand in her hair, staring at the papers scattered in front of her in frustration.

"Seems like a massive pain," Jay said, without offering any advice, while she was still understandable, though with her quickly losing it he stepped back so that he wasn't in the way. "Hey, Phoebe?" he asked, though didn't go on in case she didn't want to answer any questions.

She closed her eyes, loosening her hold on her hair but backing up until she hit the wall, tilting her head back against it. "I'm doing too much at once, aren't I?" Phoebe asked him, focusing on her breathing to try to calm herself back down. Right now, she only had Xenia on permanent employ, with various trusted companies and agents on standby for when she needed pick-ups, like the truck and helicopter. Between school and both kinds of monster hunts, as well as the hideout set-ups, she was the only one really managing most of it. She'd barely given Xenia power; she was almost a glorified maid.

"You gotta delegate, then relax a bit more often," Jay said what came to mind, though he never was in control of any sort of large organisation, since it just wasn't like him to do that sort of stuff. The most stressful stuff probably came from his current job of teaching the DWMA and Institute students and he managed that just fine.

She nodded, but a sort of snort came with the gesture, as she didn't like the answer even though she knew the truth in it. "I just want it done right, and I... want to make sure I can trust who's doing it and what's being done." Phoebe let out a long, deep breath before starting to fix her hair as she kicked off of the wall. "I'm not keen on making allies. People can leave. People do leave." She refused to meet his eyes as she said the words, not so much as looking in his general direction, eyes glued to an empty space in front of her as she leaned over the desk, staring down.

"I know all about that, though it's a different sort of leaving that I have an issue with," Jay said, shrugging even though she wasn't looking at her. He walked over to the desk, crouching down and leaning on the side, careful not to mess up any of the papers. "How about you do the relaxing bit first, hmm? How about... A date?"

Her head shot up fast enough that it made her wonder if she could give herself whiplash. She had one eyebrow raised, her expression incredulous as she looked up at him, trying to read his face. Phoebe had heard him, and she was pretty sure she wasn't having auditory hallucinations or going crazy, but his words didn't register as anything that made since to her. "Pardon?"

"A date. Fun stuff, relaxing, all that," he reiterated as he stood up, smiling down at her, apparently unfazed by the question or the idea at all.

She blinked a few times in rapid succession as her brain tried to wrap itself around the idea. It hadn't been a thought that would occur to her. He and her were hunting --- collecting? --- and bed partners. Anything more personal seemed... out of character to her. "Why...?" She asked, the tone almost distrustful as she studied his face. Of course, being that it was Jay, his expression never really changed.

"I've mentioned before that I find you interesting," he said, smiling, as he walked off to look at something else in the room. "In the same way, so far, I've enjoy our time together. I thought, might as well."