"Are you certain this is... safe?" It was one of the line cooks, whose expression said it all, really. They'd seen this creature... thing... around for a few days, and finally decided to drag up the courage to ask if anyone else was seeing it or if he'd just been hallucinating. After all he'd thought it was just a mutant fruit brought from some other dimension, but then it got up and started forraging. But this was a restaurant. And the cook was, well, let's call him "new" fresh out of C4 down south and their culinary classes. Those classes asserted that animals of any type should be discouraged where the food was being prepared.

"Oh it smells super good, though!" one of the other cooks, a raccoon kin, made wafting motions toward her nose, and sure enough there was the most delicate smell of fruit, slightly tinted with sweetness from - "is that chocolate? Oh white chocolate's my favorite!"

With that, the creature lifted its head, revealing the unusually large faceted eyes - glowing - and its long pointed ears swiveled toward her. It came hopping toward them, not-quite-bouncing, definitely not lumbering. It drooled.

The human cook looked on in abject horror as his raccoon coworker stuck her finger directly into the puddle that had formed, of this - stuff - and licked it.

"Blueberry, mmm blueberry pie. You get a gold star little guy." She patted its head, it looked pleased with itself.

"So you're just gonna-"

"I'm going to call the science hippies in the med center, I'm sure they'll have tests to run on it it's okay." She skipped away into the north tower, to do just that.

There would probably be others, this one was, apparently, a "scout"...

All text is ©Lethe of Kshau Protectorate 2024. Any other images will be credited on the pages they appear. No use of any contents is allowed.