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====== We have no fur and we must pet ======

I was trying to answer one of Visions' questions by extending the Leasemeat story, and ended up with this overlong character interaction that doesn't really fit, but I wanted to present it anyway.

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After a minute of silent travel, she spoke up. «You're a new scent around here. Are you a friend of Micah's?»

"Yeah, we met last year. It's a funny story. I'm guessing you know he's a new dad?" She nodded. "And that the dams in his childermoot insisted they incubate their womb-nest on Terra. Why I have no idea, but there it is."

«Wouldn't you like to hang out with aliens? It was OUR first contact too. You know how incubation works, yeah? The sires nearly starve themselves guarding the womb-nest and the dams just sit on their tails drumming their digits for 144 days. I'd have hatched my own litter on Terra if we knew about you guys 200 years ago. If I'm going to be stuck somewhere watching my friends waste away, it might as well have lots of new smells and sounds to soak up.»

"Well, I was delivering a pizza to the apartment next to theirs, and knocked on their door by mistake. I had no idea that the tenants were monkey foxes, that they were expecting a litter, or that expectant sires are rather... protective of their womb-nest. Well, he takes one look at me and decides this five-foot four-inch pimply-faced kid armed with nothing but a pizza box was going to devour his precious kits.

"I'll spare you the gory details, but it took three dams to pull him off me. I had to have staples in my arm." I pulled up my sleeve to reveal a long scarified claw mark running from shoulder to wrist, with a permanent bruise-colored streak where his writing claw had dug into my flesh. "I'd been begging my parents to let me get a tattoo at the time, but having yinrih ink permanently embedded in my skin wasn't what I had in mind."

«Yeah,» she geckered, «Baby brain will do that. We only get one shot at parenthood, you know, semelparity and all that.»

"Anyway, the next day those same dams show up at the pizza place to apologize and explain what happened. They offer to cover my medical bills, and they even paid for their neighbor's pizza.

"Micah calls the restaurant himself a few days later to apologize in person, or as in person as his preggo brain will permit. His English isn't that great, and my Commonthroat was nonexistent back then, but we get to talking and I find out he's a decent guy, just a bit crazy at the moment.

"So he insists that as soon as his kits hatch and he's not compelled to eviscerate me on sight they're having a pizza party and I'm invited. I wasn't sure if I was going to take him up on it, but in the end I went just to see the kits."

She adopted an accusatory tone. «You wanted to pet one, didn't you?»

"...Yes... What can I say, we have no fur and we must pet."

"Anyway, one thing leads to another, and they invite me to the presentation of their litter at the next spring feast, and that's why I'm here."

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