Chương 65: Chapter 64: Face to face

Exotic animal partners occupy an unusual place in our records. In rarity, they sit close to Legendary skills - not one-of-a-kind, but close enough that most people will never encounter one in their lifetime. A planet might have a handful at any given time. What is unusual about the current moment is the number. Earth's registered count has nearly doubled in the last two years. We do not yet have an explanation for this. We are watching.

- Internal research note, PfP Animal Affairs Division, current year The briefing the next morning was thorough and left no room for ambiguity about what was expected. Aldric walked him through the settlement's daily operation with the precision of someone who had designed the system himself and took it personally. Residents were attended to. Requests were fulfilled promptly, as long as they were reasonable. Problems were resolved efficiently. This was not a settlement that fed and sheltered its community.

Comfort and hospitality here was the baseline.

"The residents notice attentiveness," Aldric noted.

"They notice its absence more." Kara's first two days were a rotation through most of the settlement's functions. Meals - the preparation, the service, the close attention to preference that set this kitchen apart from any other he had encountered. Maintenance of the common areas, which in a castle this size meant something closer to curatorship than cleaning. Resident requests, which ranged from the straightforward to the elaborate. He was good at it.

He had not expected to be quite as good at it as he was, and then he thought about three years learning to read a room from a man whose idea of instruction was to say something once and wait, about two semesters of SDC logistics and event management under real pressure, about four weeks of parsing Isamu's corrections from the angle of a shoulder or the placement of a foot. He revised his surprise downward. He also listened while he worked. The community was not subtle about its allegiances.

The Progenitor faction ran through the settlement as an undercurrent in almost everything. The faction symbol appeared on personal items, on documents left open on tables, on a pendant worn by the woman in the east wing who requested the same tea at the same time every morning and said nothing beyond thank you.

The conversations Kara moved through had a theme of their own - references to faction policy, to recent decisions, to figures within the movement discussed with the ease of people who considered themselves insiders. And then there was Tomas. He heard the name within his first hour and did not stop hearing it. It came up in every other conversation. Mr. Tomas prefers. Mr. Tomas has said. Have you heard what Mr.

Tomas thinks about - Kara moved through these conversations with the attentiveness his role required, though he was already getting tired of it. On his second afternoon, crossing the main courtyard with Waggy padding alongside him, he passed two residents in conversation near the east wall. One of them said something about faction direction that Kara did not fully catch, and the other responded with a nod of complete conviction and said, "Hail Tomas." The other returned it. Just like that. Casual. Like a greeting.

Kara kept walking. Waggy stopped. He looked at the two residents, tilting his head, opinions clearly forming at a rapid pace. They did not notice him.

"Come on," Kara said, very quietly. Waggy looked at him a moment longer, plainly considering the matter unresolved, then walked on. Kara kept his face forward and had to activate Safe Haven to stop himself from laughing. The exotic animals notifications had been consistent since his arrival - multiple presences closeby, pretty much from the same approximate locations, suggesting they were housed rather than ranging.

By his second morning he had a rough sense of where the signal was strongest, which was the east wing, which was also where Tomas and his family were housed. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. He mentioned it to Brenn during a quieter moment, framed as curiosity.

"Oh, the family keeps partners," Brenn said, offering it up as common knowledge.

"A few of them."

"Rare animals?"

"Exotic partners." Brenn said, almost like he was proud of it.

"Three of them. Mr. Tomas has one, his wife has one, Miss Lucianne has one." Kara had started operating on the quiet assumption, built up over the last several weeks, that exotic partners were perhaps less rare than advertised. Waggy. Kohaku. Vitaly. And now three more. He was beginning to wonder whether the registered numbers were simply out of date.

"How many are there?" he asked.

"On the planet." Brenn looked at him with mild surprise, as though the answer were common knowledge.

"A dozen if I'm remembering right." A pause for effect that Brenn seemed to feel the moment deserved.

"The family alone accounts for a quarter of the number." Kara absorbed this. A dozen on the planet. And he had personally been in the company of six. More than half of every exotic partner on Earth, and he had been within arm's reach of them in just a few months. He thought about Shanks arranging this placement and the strings he would have had to pull. He thought about PfP's reach - eyes and ears in every room on every planet - and what it meant to have that network turned, however briefly, toward him.

He felt something that was close to vertigo and also close to gratitude, probably in equal measure. He filed it for later and went back to work. He approached Aldric on the third morning. He had thought about this conversation and framed it carefully. He had an exotic partner himself - registered, community-tagged. He had hands-on experience with what exotic partners actually demanded, which most people never had occasion to develop.

If the family's partners had care needs that the current staff were managing around - walking, grooming, the more hands-on requirements - he could be useful in a way his other duties did not cover. Aldric listened attentively.

"Hmmm. You've been doing well," he stated.

"Better than expected from an intern to be fair." He considered for a moment.

"The family's partners do have care requirements. The staff here have handled rare animals before and have been doing their best to extrapolate from that, but exotic partners are - it's a different thing entirely, as I'm sure you know." A pause.

"I'll arrange an introduction." The introduction happened the following afternoon. Aldric walked him to the east wing at a brisk pace. They passed through a corridor Kara had not been in before - wider than the others, the stone better maintained, small details in the furnishings that quietly announced this was not for public consumption. He heard the animal before he saw it. A sound - high, bright, slightly frustrated - coming from behind a door that Aldric knocked on with two precise raps. A pause.

Then, with the particular drawl of someone deciding whether an interruption was worth acknowledging, a young feminine voice answered - "Come iiin." The room was large and well-lit, arranged to someone's exact preference. In the middle of it, on an elaborate padded structure that had clearly been commissioned rather than purchased, was a small gibbon? No, not quite. Kara had experience with gibbons. He took a moment. Its fur was bright, unapologetically pink.

Long-armed in the gibbon way, with fingers that moved with quick dexterous intelligence, and a face that was entirely and implausibly that of a small dog - soft-muzzled, dark-eyed, floppy-eared. It looked at Kara the moment he entered with intense interest, clearly deprived of entertainment. Lucianne was standing near the window. She was taller than he had pictured, and she stood like someone who had been told since childhood that rooms arranged themselves around her. Blonde hair, precise in its arrangement.

She looked at Aldric first, then at Kara with the brief assessment of someone looking at new furniture, evaluating whether it fit her tastes.

"This is Kara," Aldric introduced.

"He has an exotic partner of his own - registered with the community. I thought he might be useful with Pip's care needs." Something shifted in Lucianne's expression, suddenly looking at him with a little more interest.

"An exotic partner," she said. Her eyes moved over Kara once, reassessing.

"I saw the ping. I was wondering whether it was genuine or a mistake with 3 of them nearby." A small pause, and then, like someone wholly accustomed to the world organising itself around her - "So PfP has arranged this as an additional service. How thoughtful of them." She smiled.

"We'll keep this in mind." That we - absorbing PfP, Kara, the community registration, and the entire arrangement into a single gesture of ownership - moved through Kara like a splinter finding a nerve. Fluid State and Safe Haven were doing precious work now.

"Happy to help," he said. Pip, meanwhile, had crossed the padded structure in four quick movements and was now at its edge, at the closest point to Kara, watching him with focused curiosity. One small pink hand reached out tentatively and retracted, then reached out again. Lucianne glanced at this fondly and then turned back to the window. Kara looked at Pip. Pip looked at Kara.

The small dark eyes were bright and restless and wanted something that the padded structure and the well-appointed room and the girl at the window had not been providing.