Book 5. Chapter 53: Sweet dreams
Cathida wasn’t going to be done brooding for a while.
Journey confirmed the updates, gave an estimate of a half hour or so to process through, so I had some time to kill while we relaxed. Which gave me some well deserved retrospective thoughts.
These were some of the strangest days of my life so far, and that was a high bar to pass these days given Wrath, machines, gods, and other such shenanigans already. Literally doing both debugging and therapy to a digital engram was already up there on things I’d never thought I’d be doing. Watching what was supposed to be a living demi-god chatting along with a pack of giant intelligent dogs all circled around him using a mythical bird on the branch above to help translate was right up there as well. Not to mention being stuck on a strata underground that was so far beyond what most Deathless fireteams even explored that an entire civilization had sprung up down here unknown to everyone.
But I get ahead of myself. I’ll start with dogs.
Dogs were expensive pets to have on the surface. I hear it’s more wild-wastes and hands off in the Othersider side of the world, where if one’s important enough, they can afford to have a few dogs.
Othersiders dip around under the surface at their own leisure, since there are no laws prohibiting them from going further underground. And no laws protecting them from basically anything either. But there’s plenty of open space for them to run around in.
Pipe weasels, minks and ferrets are more the guard pet of choice among surface clans. They’ll kill any rats running around and are exceedingly good at it, even hunting them down through ventilation pipes with hardly any effort.
But dogs appeared so many times among the golden era media a lot of idioms stuck around and are actively used even by the clans, despite most of us never having seen a dog more than a few times in our lives.
Undersiders break all rules like usual, I’ve seen more dogs running around in Capra’Nor than I ever had in my entire life - but Undersiders and pilgrims are where most surface dwellers or Othersiders get their dogs from in the first place. So not a surprise that to Drakonis, dogs were normal pets.