It was a bright and sunny day along the shopping boulevard of a typical Imperial agricultural world. Automated transports whirled by on anti-grav thrusters, longer distance teleporters flickered into existence to expel or accept occupants, and random passerbys strolled the streets.

A young woman, barely a century in age, flaxen hair tied up in a ponytail with a pale complexion walked through the commotion with a pip in her step. She had just come of working age and it was her first day on the job; plus, it was just the job she had always wanted to try: working in a pet shop!

She deftly weaved through the busy foot traffic and glanced at the visual assistant that flickered in and out of her peripheral vision, guiding her to her destination, and as she rounded a corner her sapphire eyes locked onto the storefront of Trixie’s Exotic Animals, she had arrived.

Her gait slowed as she passed the display items facing the street, tiny lizards of various species and sizes, more moderate sized fuzzy creatures, and a single viciously predatory looking bird of some kind, or maybe a dragon? She wasn’t quite sure. Regardless, as she arrived at the door her heart began to race, ever since she was a little girl she’d always loved animals and here she’d get paid to work with them! She was the luckiest girl alive! With that thought, and a deep breath, she turned the handle.

The inside of the store was… plain, not in a bad way, but in a sterile kind of way. Of course it would have to be, she thought, it’s a pet store. The walls were lined with cages and enclosures, the pets she had seen on the storefront were merely a fraction of what the store had to offer. Birds and lizards, aquatic life and flora for the animals. The shop had it all.

In the back corner, tucked away almost as an afterthought, stood the matron of the establishment. Trixie herself, her brunette hair flowing down to the small of her back, her hands flickered across some machines as she worked; her focus dedicated entirely to whatever she was doing.

“Umm… excuse me, miss Trixie?”

Trixie twitched in surprise, jumping up a little and turning to her guest.

“Yes? Hello? What can I help you with, the store is closed for another hour you know, right?”

“Yes ma’am I know, I’m Elise, I applied about a week ago on-”

Elise’s statement was cut short as Trixie’s somewhat surprised facial express faded, she strode over, smiling, and placed her hands on Elise’s shoulders.

“Elise! Right!” she said as she patted her shoulders and sized her up, “you’re just in time you know! I need another pair of hands today and my previous part-timer went off to the capital world to try to ‘make it big’ like some superstar,” she huffed in visible annoyance. “Here, let me show you the front of the shop.”

Trixie’s hands unclasped Elise and she motioned her to come with her. The following hour was a haze for Elise, so many kinds of creatures, so much information to process, but her virtual assistant recorded it all for her later use. Which animals were carnivorous, which were herbivores, how best to care for certain creatures, it was all so much! And her giddiness grew with each passing fact, this is exactly what she wanted from a job! Eventually, though, the fun had to end.

“Aaand that’s it! Every animal in the front of the store! Which is basically everything we sell to customers live other than food. You ready for service? The store is going to open soon.”

Elise relaxed, knowing the tirade of new information had passed.

“Of course! What do you want me doing today?”

Trixie smiled, “That’s the spirit! Could you work the counter for the first half of the day? I was dreading going on a supply run in the afternoon, but with you along it’ll be easy as cake!”

Elise nodded and smiled, “Sure thing!” She set up shop behind the corner counter and synced her virtual assistant to it, before long customers began filing in and she helped them the best she could. Elise was a quick study, supplying every tidbit of information she had absorbed to customers while filing out there orders. A few hours in a young girl came in and marched straight up to the counter.

“Hello! Who are you? I’m May! Is auntie Trixie here?”

Elise looked at the girl with a bit more scrutiny, same blue eyes as Trixie, the same brown hair, she saw the resemblance.

“Oh, hello May!” Elise began with a smile that she always gave children, “I’m Elise, Trixie is in the back, would you like me to go get her?”

“Yeah! I wanna pick up my package!”

“Okay sweetie, I’ll be right back.” Elise headed into the backroom of the pet shop to ask Trixie about whatever May’s package was and was greeted by a strange sight. Half the backroom was what she expected, pallets filled with dry foods, cleaning supplies to keep the front area sterile, but the other half was filled with incredibly thin transparent trays stacked into towers. Trixie stood at the towers scanning them and doing, well, Elise wasn’t quite sure, but doing something with intense concentration.

“Hey miss Trixie-”

“Please, Elise, call me Trix” Trixie interjected quickly.

Elise relaxed and spoke, “There’s a girl named May up front asking for a package? Also, what are you doing back here? What are these?” she asked motioning toward the towers.

“Oh, these? These are my supply of live food for the carnivores, or at least the ones that prefer live food. They’re called humans.”

“Humans?” Elise’s eyes darted to the edge of her vision, where her virtual assistant would tell her about the unknown species only to see it display… nothing, that piqued her interest immediately.

“What are humans?”

“Here,” Trixie motioned to one of the towers, “take a look.”

Elise took a few steps forward and bent over to take a look inside. It looked like… a seething mass of pale movement. There wasn’t really much to see at this scale so she squinted, her virtual assistant automatically magnifying her vision. She saw some pale bipedal creatures, teeming swarms of the things, there must have been tens of thousands of them, all in various states of action or inaction. Most lazed around, but some of the creatures were paired off, connected to each other in various positions and wiggling.

“Umm, Trixie, what exactly are they doing?”

“Huh, what do you mean?” Trixie zoomed in with her own assistant, “Oh! Sorry this is one of the breeding towers” she blushed a tad, “the ones that are kind of attached to each other are mating, kinda gross, right?”

Gross indeed, Elise thought, shrugging and casting her glance away from the activity in the enclosure, “they’re just animals right? Animals do these sorts of things.”

Trixie let out a tiny laugh and smiled at Elise. “Now see,” Trixie began in a more jovial voice, “you might think that, but I’ve noticed that they have some rudimentary intelligence, see look back in the tower, some of them have started noticing that you’re new here.”

Elise wordlessly raised an eyebrow at Trix before doing as requested. She squinted back into the enclosure and, sure enough, more than a minority had begun to notice the new titaness, some of the ones that were mating even took notice, stopping in the middle of coitus, their reproductive parts separating, flopping apart…. gross… to gawk up at her.

Elise grimaced, unsuccessfully, trying to mask her disgust at having watched the creatures copulate. She understood why Trixie kept them in the back…

“Why are you breeding them back here?” If Trixie noticed her squeamish tone of voice she took no notice, continuing on chipper as before.

“Oh that’s simple,” Trixie began, “see I mainly use them as live food for the carnivores right? And I make sure they all see which trays I take for feed. My virtual assistant monitors each tray, the tray with the fewest successful copulations per month from each tower I use as feed for the month.” Trixie grinned from ear to ear as Elise stood perplexed.

“How does that help?” Elise was dumbfounded.

“Oh Elise! It’s because they compete! They really go at it the closer we get to the end of the month too. More mating means more young that can be used as feed or reproduce themselves in the long haul. Ever since I discovered them about half a century ago I’ve saved about twenty percent on live feed! They can double their population in as little as a year, though...” Trixie frowned a little before continuing, “they can’t actually reproduce themselves until their mid-teens, but once they hit that age I can anti-grav sort them into a new breeding tower and bam! Now that new tower is doubling every year.” Trixie was all smiles.

“Huh, do you really not have any problems with the setup? Like how can you crowd them so much?” The creatures were absolutely packed in the trays, most animals wouldn’t put up with it.

“Oh, uhh yeah,” Trixie shuffled nervously, “I kinda did at the start, but I found that a ratio one male to about seven or eight breeding capable females curbs fighting in the containers to acceptable levels. The males are really the fighters, they’ll fight over access to females, but when I balanced the ratios most fights over mates simmered down. They’ll still bicker over… whatever it is they bicker about, but most fights aren’t deadly or permanently debilitating, so it’s fine."

Trixie shifted her gaze from the tower onto Elise, “Actually there is one thing that I need to fix with them, there’s too much inbreeding, the initial stock I brought back was only around fifty thousand individuals, so I need some fresh stock to put some variety back into the gene pool. That’s what I was planning to do in the afternoon,” Trixie paused for a moment, “you’re okay taking a teleporter off world right? It’s a planet I found out beyond the frontier when I went camping with my boyfriend at the time. He wasn’t too pleased that I found some ‘stupid mites’ more interesting than him, but he was a bit of an ass anyway.” Trixie glanced up toward Elise expectedly.

Elise was… hesitant, but she probably couldn’t squirm her way out of this one. She loved animals! Big fluffy animals, smaller reptiles, giant birds! Not… some mites being raised and bred as cheap protein. But what choice did she have?

“Of course I’l go!,” Elise said graciously, “it’s my job, after all.”