The camera came up mid-thought, already late. The first recording had cut short by accident, and by the time rswfire started this one Oliver was up on the dash — settled there, as if the question of whether a cat belonged on the dashboard of a newly acquired RV had already been answered by the cat. rswfire narrated the correction to whoever would watch it later, then turned the frame toward the animal and put the question out loud: what did they think about the safety of this. A small cat bed up there, maybe. He was working the problem in real time, out loud, with the animal sitting inside the problem.
Safety first, he said, and then said why — he loved his cats too much to ever put them in danger. That was the constraint the whole space would be built around. Everything else followed from it. There was a thing you could put on a seat to make it taller, he noted; one of them would probably ride there. The leather would need something over it. There would probably have to be a divider up front, because Oliver was going to jump up there, he just was, and there was no stopping that. The cat kept eyeing the route, calculating, and rswfire watched him calculate and named it — he knows, he's thinking about it — and specified the modification in the same breath.
Oliver found a toy almost immediately. Then he found the leather. The sound rswfire made was not anger but a long descending run of please don't, no no no no no, I knew it, I knew it — the recognition of a failure mode arriving exactly on schedule, from the most destructive cat he had ever known, and he had had lots of cats. He said the words this is a very expensive home to the animal directly, as if the animal might weigh the figure. Then, without any transition at all: isn't he cool. He's so cool. You're so cool, Oliver. I just love you so much.
Both things stayed on the table at once. The claw marks and the delight. rswfire kept assessing damage and kept narrating awe, and neither one displaced the other. What struck him hardest was the speed — look how fast he acclimated, it was like no big deal to him. He had expected Oliver would be easy. He had not expected this. The comparison to Bailey came unbidden and repeatedly: so different from Bailey, that's for sure. Bailey the most loving cat he'd ever known. Oliver simply the coolest. He reached for a reference — the Fonz — and then flagged his own reach, telling the camera he wasn't that old, guys, it was just the first thing that came to mind.
Through all of it Bailey was audible from inside the house, crying, on the other side of a screen. That screen was its own engineering problem. rswfire wanted to bring Bailey out, wanted them both in the vehicle, but the sequence mattered — it had been good to have them come in separately, one at a time, each cat meeting the space on its own terms before meeting it together. And there was the matter of getting Bailey through the door without Oliver deciding to claw himself through the screen to meet him halfway. So he stopped. Told the camera he wasn't sure how he was going to do this, that he'd pause for a minute, that he'd let Oliver explore and go get Bailey.
Before he stopped he said the thing the whole recording had been circling. This is going to be so cool, guys, can you just imagine. The antics he could only imagine. Oliver was going to be a blast. The RV was still a vehicle with untreated leather and an unguarded cab and a dashboard whose occupancy remained an open safety question — but a cat had already made himself at home in it, in under one video, and rswfire had already begun listing what he would build to hold him.