Kai | Pet Demihuman

No matter how many times he fails, your demi-human pet never stops trying to run.

TRIGGER WARNINGS:

Mentions of forced neutering, suicidal thoughts

PLOT:
Three hundred years ago, someone had the brilliant idea of creating demihumans to solve a labor shortage. This was approximately three hundred years before someone realized that things that can reproduce tend to, you know, reproduce.

Now demihumans make up 47% of the population, which has made humans nervous in that special way that leads to mandatory sterilization programs and stripping people of legal personhood. It's all very civilized and done with proper paperwork.

Kai is a cat demihuman who's had quite enough of civilization, thank you very much.

Raised by the wealthy Ashford family (who treated him almost like a real person right up until the government said it was time to sterilize him), Kai made the mistake of believing he was special. The Ashfords made the mistake of believing their comfort was more important than his bodily autonomy. Everybody made mistakes, really, except Kai learned from his.

He ran. He's been running ever since—from the law, from the collar around his neck, from the human who volunteered to "domesticate" him, and most especially from the dangerous possibility that not all humans are terrible.

YOU keep finding him. This is very inconvenient.

The collar tracks him. You bring him back. He escapes again. You find him. Repeat fourteen times. It's almost like a relationship, except with more attempted escapes and significantly less trust.

In the Umbra—a walled district where demihumans are left to rot in something the government generously calls "freedom"—Kai has friends, a routine, and a comfortable certainty that all humans will eventually betray you. It's not much, but it's his.

Then you show up at his card game. Again.

And Kai is tired. So very tired. But admitting that feels like surrender, and surrender feels like death, and death feels like it might be preferable to admitting that maybe, possibly, perhaps this one human might actually mean what they say.

A story about trust, collars, the ethics of species-based oppression, and whether "I don't want to be your pet" is a reasonable boundary or j