ANIMAL CONTROL - PART I

We slip into a solid routine at Animal Control.

Meganie takes over a corner desk within the week and we take turns guarding it so no one can try to claim her space or equipment.

It’s technically cheating the hot desk system, but she does all the prep and admin, so she doesn’t have to leave the office, and I do all the fieldwork. No one is ever away from the desk, we both do what we're better at, and keep hitting cases out the park.

It’s not much different to Lost Property either.

Get report of creature that should not be where it is, whether that’s messing with the new or old timeline, then search it out and bring it home. That’s about the only consistent difference really. We always bring the animal back to their original world.

Unlike ragged socks that won’t be missed ending up in our archive, or items simply too dangerous to be left out in the universe. Most cases we deal with are, as noted previously, cats. Pets that need to be taken home.

Though we do get the occasional pet that’s like a T-Rex or a giant slime or a colony of acid producing mold... there’s no accounting for taste, but they all have people waiting for them in other dimensions, so we do our best. With only a little judgement on why the hell you’d keep a hydra as a pet in the first place.

Some creatures just don’t serve much of an ecological niche, or were abandoned already, so as long as they aren’t missed and don’t disturb things in their new home, they tend to live normal animal lives out in the big wide universe.

Even if they’ve suddenly become one of a kind.

More often than not, they simply end up in a dimension so close to their original, there is no functional difference other than them finding a slightly different tree they’ve never peed on before, or something equally as trivial.

Anyway, other than returning wayward pets to grateful owners, or plucking alley cats out of heaven – a world of sentient hedge sparrows and no natural predators – before they can commit a genocide, I’ve had a little feline problem of my own.

“Again?” at first, it started with the back of my neck tingling under predatory gaze.

A crinkled smile, a deep stretch leading into an arched back, tail coiling around my neck, and pheromone musk whipping at my senses, “N’yesss~”

Meganie glances over one of her monitors, keyboard clattering away aggressively, and grumbles to herself

 “I’m too tired... tomorrow maybe?” but now it has escalated to, well, daily demands in full view of the office.

A death-stare ten thousand strong. Some from disgust, some from jealousy, all from being disrupted by such unprofessionalism, “Mrrrrr... N’yo! N’yow~”

I mouth my desperate plea to my partner, but she ignores me. Her attention locked on typing up our last case about some hallucinogenic toad giving a race of proto-humans the ability to unlock psychic powers, that would have eventually led to their ascending to godhood and taking over at least a dozen timelines, had we not scooped up the petrified little guy and placed him back in a swamp where he belonged.

Some tribals got a legend about peering through the veil, searching out every high their mostly safe home-world has to offer, and one minorly poisonous amphibian gets a rightful fear of being licked.

The inter-dimensional version of these people would have enslaved the toad’s entire species for milking, that is until they figured out how to reconstruct atoms into any form their minds could conceive, so they’d just make the active molecule in its purest form and get even stronger.

“Ffffffffffffffine...”

I sigh and relent and stroke the catgirl’s back as she’s sprawled across my lap and the seats either side of me – taking up nearly three desks of space and pissing off our neighbours – while her ass bobs up and down each time I near the base of her tail, like a normal domesticated feline.

She purrs deeply.

I’m used to the volume you can get out of cats back home, working in an animal cafe and always stopping to pet neighbourhood strays, you get used to their behaviours and quirks. Even if I wasn’t allowed my own pets growing up.

However, the bass and intensity of this particular specimens rumbling... it’s just lewd.

“Nya’lah, can you sit still at least?”

I make a show of how her inability to settle is rocking me too violently. Made all the worse by her basically only ever wearing a skin-tight leotard, headband, and leg warmers like she’s really trying to be an 80’s VHS aerobics instructor.

I just want her to quiet down so everyone will stop plotting my death. I wouldn’t even complain if she left me alone completely, but the whole thing backfires.

She circles off the seating, paddying onto the floor on all fours, the side and back of her thigh bumping into my face as she goes. Then, she nuzzles her own into my lap, placing my hand on her cheek, and proceeds to purr even deeper.

The vibrations radiating right into my crotch with a smirk of knowing, “Mrrrrrr... how very daring. Preferring to pet me like this in front of everyone!”

I hate – HATE – to admit how exhilarating this situation is.

Even with the life or death situations I’ve faced over the last six months, this kind of teasing and exhibitionism just hits different.

Your blood runs so cold, terror dancing about your senses at how debauched you look to everyone, and the fear of repercussions to come.

Your guts burns with desire, your brain on fire with thoughts these overtly flirtatious behaviours elicit from your carnal animal instincts. Breath hot and ragged from restrained temptation.

Your every neuron activated, electric shocks intensify your touch, smell, vision... a perpetual feedback loop of ever heightening experience at such raunchy input.

“Pervert.”

One word.

One kill.

I look to my colleague.

Something between the bittersweet, pure disgust, sparks of her own desire, and the void itself glares out at me from beyond the parapet of tech beside me.

I asked for your help and you ignored me. You don’t get to be judgy now.

Or, you could come over here and stake your own claim-

WHAT THE HELL AM I THINKING?!.

I stand up and head back to my room to have a shower as close to zero Kelvin as I can biologically handle without it causing instant or lasting physiological damage.

With my self-control restored, I find a notification from Meganie.

A new case all prepped and a route for avoiding Nya’lah to get to the portal room.

How considerate.

Some designer robo-dog, full on brain and organs in jars throughout a mechanised casing, has ended up in a renaissance era civilisation that will end up having an undead panic and go complete inquisition witch trials, wiping out two thirds of their population, if they see what a less advanced mind might interpret as a zombie or hell hound.

Christ alive... this job sometimes.

In Lost Property I just had to shadow Meganie and be her gofer on missions, it was a quiet team that got on with things, but Animal Control has already gotten way more complicated. Cases and office politics alike.

I shoot my co-worker a confirmation and sneak to the designated room with these magic crystal powered warp-way gates operated by mysterious hooded figures.

Science based and magical transporters are weirdly not dissimilar.

They’re both fuelled by a power source, both can cause nausea or other side effects, and both can be improved by refining the underlying processes behind them. The only difference is whether you’re making better runes and spells or components and materials.

I’d say I do tend to get a bit more dry-mouth from how sterile a technological isekai-ing goes. Too much climate control and not enough wiggle room.

The portal has no smell, just a green glow and the sound of water going down a drain. A whirlpool through time and space.

The world I seamlessly transition into – coming out of a wood shed and looking like a minstrel so I should be able to weasel my way in just about anywhere – is one without magic.

Hence the use of it to get here, as when they eventually advance technologically, if there is any remnant of my existence to detect, it will be unexplainable to them. An anomaly to be ignored, rather than evidence of a scientific phenomena, could they only unravel it through observation and experimentation.

I stroll through the streets with what appears to be a type of lute on my back.

I can’t even play guitar. Well, I've never trieed, but hopefully I can figure out some basic chords to strum, from what I remember of childhood piano lessons. I'll just sing the few songs I know, or random nonsense like in musical comedy routines whatever it takes to get by.

“A giant?” 

“What a stern faced brute!” 

“Wonder when he’ll play?” 

“So tall!” 

The people I pass along the street are considerably shorter and leaner than I’d expected. I remember learning in history that medieval, or earlier eras of human in general, were noticeably smaller than in the modern day. I’m not quite 6ft, but I’d say the average here is 5ft and below.

I’m standing out too much.

I duck down an alley, into another, and call up Meganie on the crystal ball she procured as part of my peripherals.

A tiny mousy face swirls into focus through the mineral mists within the stone. Spooky stuff, but she looks so cute all rounded out by the refracting surface of the sphere.

“I think there might be a problem...” I grin sheepishly, knowing exactly what her response is going to be, “...I’m too tall to blend in with the population, I feel like I’m drawing too much attention, what’s with that? They all malnourished or something?”

Seems like reasonable speculation that there could have been draught and poor harvest for a couple of generations, so everyone has ended up stunted even for this period of history, but my coordinator sighs and drops the inevitable, “Did you even read my briefing?” 

“Of course I did!”

The issue is that Meganie has a tendency of writing an entire natural history of the target dimension, not just a cheat sheet for the specific locality.

I get a disapproving hum from my colleague while I think over her encyclopedia entry. “Wait... is this the bit about monkeys?”

There was a whole chapter on taxonomy – I kid you not – and it finally clicks into place why the locals all look so lanky yet tiny compared to the humans I’m used to.

They evolved from monkeys instead of chimps.

Meganie chirps with self-satisfaction at my remembering her research. “Well, I gotta make sure no one falls in love with me, don’t want to mess with the gene-pool and leave any evidence behind.” She takes the bait instantly and I disconnect the call.

Worth it.

Her blushing irritated face fading back into fractal fog as I pocket the orb and set about looking for a robot-dog in a world of monkey-men.