She spent a lot of time in the woods learning from faeries, and added following weird cats to her itinerary after she found Peter's eye. It probably gave Claudia gray hairs, but Claudia knew which mushroom to eat to get pregnant. She must have been expecting it.
I don't think she saw what took place in the woods but she was aware that there were chaperones out there. Keeping Jacky out of them was a losing fight. It would be like trying to keep a ferret out of a paper basket, or grow a plant with no water.
I try to keep up with alt text on bluesky and usually focus on capturing what I was trying to convey than a dry description of the image. Will just copy paste that since it has nuggets in it.
'Eleven year old Jacky holds a lanky orange cat that completely fills her arms and thensome. She has longer hair that is tied back. Jacky experienced a kind of village raising as a kid. It was only her and her mom, but when she went into the woods she met faeries. It was a dice roll if they were going to mean her harm or not, but she got pretty good at telling the difference. The good ones taught her things that would help her survive on her own. They probably also taught her to fuck with people, but what power does an eleven year old have.
When she was seven years old she found Peter's eye in a drawer in Gale's house. I haven't settled on why she and Claudia were there. I don't think Gale and Jacky knew each other in this iteration of the story. The eye rattled for her from a wooden box upstairs. She took it home and Gale was never any the wiser- he'd never known it was there to begin with.
After finding the eye, Peter started to appear to her. He talked a little. She followed him and other cats that began to appear to secret places, although she couldn't trust the cats all the way either. Occasionally one would try to lead her somewhere bad. Jacky had to get real good at running and real good at detecting bullshit at a young age.'
I bumped some of the events in Jacky's storyline back a bit. She's had her Cat's Eye much longer than I thought. Peter has suffered her much longer than I thought, too.
I'll have to talk about how she found the eye another day, I'm zipping out the door for work.
