As noon approached, Elise wasnt looking forward to her excursion to this human planet with Trixie. She understood that all animals needed to eat and carnivores needed meat but… couldn’t she just buy normal feed for the animals? Why bother breeding some mites she found on some uncharted world beyond even the backwater frontier? Surely the inconvenience and hassle couldn’t be worth a twenty percent reduction in feed cost… but then again, Elise wasn’t a business owner, maybe the pet industry is cut throat?

She sighed, it didn’t matter, she just had to get it over with and then she would be back to tending to actually impressive animals, animals worthy of being pets, and all would be well.

Trixie emerged from the backroom, a container in each hand, and called to Elise.

“I’m gonna feed the animals before we head out, Elise, come help me out.” Trixie stated, as Elise approached Trixie handed over a bucket of… humans. Suspended in an anti-grav field.

“Why the anti-grav field?” Elise inquired.

“Oh, they’re really soft, I think it’s part of why the animals like them so much, but they’ll get squished without a field, so anti-grav cups and containers are what I use to transport them outside of the trays.” Trixie started walking through the herbivores’ enclosures with her planet feed and shouted over her shoulder, "one cup per enclosure, okay?"

Elise shrugged, “understood.”

She glanced into the bucket, inside was, a preposterous amount of humans, at least tens of thousands, maybe over a hundred thousand.

“Say,” Elise started, “how’d you get so many of these things from fifty thousand anyway?”

Trixie shouted back without so much as glancing in Elise’s direction, “They reproduce like crazy, of the initial fifty thousand only about ten thousand were breeding age females, but I got them each outputting at least one offspring a year, by around fifteen years in or so the first generation of offspring started being viable, so I bred them, by the third generation I had nearly a million breeding age females, we’re starting to reach the fourth generation now, so I’m expecting tens of millions soon. I started it as a curiosity, but honestly? I’ve got too many of the things now.”

Elise nodded and started her rounds. She dumped cups of the humans into all the carnivore’s bowls and… well, they didn’t last too long. The walls of the bowls were far too steep, and it didn’t seem humans could climb walls. She zoomed in a few times, but stopped after a while. Watching them get ripped apart with tooth and talon was less gross than watching them mating, but it still wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do with all of them? I mean, the animals are already eating their fill…”

Trixie had finished her rounds and returned to Elise. “Actually, I have,” she answered immediately, “May actually likes the taste of them, if I can get a license to sell them I could turn a profit that way, do you want to try some?”

Elise thought back to watching the demise of the humans in her bucket, leaking and squirting as the animals set upon them when she put them into their feeding bowls, and then further back to the breeding tower, mucus oozing out of their reproductive… orifices, she felt a bit queasy.

“No, thanks.”

Trixie shrugged, “Suit yourself, we’re headed to the world I found them on in a minute, you need to go to the bathroom or anything?”

“No, no I’ll be fine let’s go ahead and go.” Elise just wanted to get this all over with.

Trixie nodded before heading to the backroom to grab some equipment and the teleporter. She was tampering with the controls as she came back into the front room and after a few seconds a tear in space materialized between the two of them.

“Well, let’s get going then.” Trixie walked right through, and Elise followed. The familiar smell of ozone and a brief sense of vertigo engulfed her and then she was through the rift, somewhere millions of light years beyond Imperial space; a routine commute for many, but not something she often had the chance to experience as someone born on an agricultural world.

Before her was a green, verdant world. A decent sized pond and… what looked like a hive next to it. She approached the mass of gray, first crunching through the outskirts of the hive until the wide and flat gray area transitioned into hive structures that came up to her ankles, the tallest approached her knees.

“I set the teleporter to take us to the highest concentration of humans on the planet, so, here we are.” Trixie extended her arms before her and smiled.

“Is this a human hive?” Elise inquired.

“Yeah… it is but…” her eyes darted to the edges of her vision, reading her virtual assistant, no doubt, “something is… off.” Trixie began scratching her head.

Elise cocked her head toward Trixie, having already noticed a distinct lack of activity in the hive, “You mean there aren’t any humans?”

“My assistant’s scan is telling me there aren’t any humans even left in this hive! When I expanded it to the planet there were only a few thousand! There were billions before! What the hell happened?” Trixie was fuming.

Elise walked around the hive and to the outskirts on the other side she saw something moving below her and reached down for it, squatting down she plucked it from the ground.

“Hey, Trix, what did you eat with that boyfriend you had when you were camping here?”

“How would I remember that?” She was still a bit agitated; she wasn’t going to like this one bit…

“Was it live Calyxans?”

Trixie fell silent and strode over from nearby, squatting down next to Elise as she lifted what was in her hand for her boss to see. An isopod a few inches long with a hard shell, frequently eaten live during social outings, especially picnics or camping trips, a Calyxan, wiggling in her grasp.

“Whoops.” Trixie said bluntly.

Elise's vision flicked to her own virtual assistant. “My VA is saying there are about thirty million Calyxan on the planet. I think I know what happened to your ‘billions of humans.’” she stated.

“Fuck!” Trixie shouted, rising quickly and sauntering over to the tallest hive structures. Elise watched with some bemusement as she flattened them with one kick, then kicked some smaller ones for good measure, shortly before stumbling over her own flailing feet in a rage and falling flat on her ass.

Elise sighed, rising herself, she walked over to Trixie.

“You said that the teleporter took us to the highest concentration of humans on the planet right?” She asked as she helped Trixie back onto her feet. “We might as well grab them, they’re dead here anyway and you need the breeding stock.” Elise was almost happy, she didn’t have to wade through billions of the things, but she couldn’t let Trixie see.

“Yeah… yeah you’re right, let’s just get what we can and go.” Trixie muttered dejectedly.

The duo walked over to a seemingly barren patch of dirt. Trixie looked down and gestured with her hands.

“Here’s our few thousand humans.”

Elise saw nothing, she started to speak but stopped herself as she saw Trixie fidgeting with one of the tools she brought. Content to simply observe, Elise took a few steps back.

Trixie held out what looked like a small pencil, she drew an outline along the ground and with a few murmured commands and a flicked switch, the ground began to rise from the surface. Piles of dirt floated up to the height of Trixie’s midriff and she began to pat the dirt off of what had been below the surface.

After a few pats, a structure emerged from the dirt. Small and cylindrical, an underground bunker of sorts, it was deep down, Elise could step into the hole it came out of and the surface would come up to her thighs, far below what a Calyxan could dig to.

“Well,” Trixie sighed before opening a rift back home. “Let’s get outta here.”

Elise didn’t need to be told twice. She stepped through the rift back home and, after a blast of ozone and vertigo, was back in the shop’s front room.

Trixie recovered quickly and got straight to work, “I’ll go crack this open and split what is left of them into the breeding trays. I told May to come back this afternoon, her package is on the front desk, once you give it to her that should be everything for today.” Trixie smiled, “so how was your first day?”

Elise was… okay with how it went, the animals up front were great, the humans were really gross, but… well the carnivores need to eat something, she figured she’d get used to them.

“It went well. I really like it here!” Elise lied, no point in being a downer on her first day.

“That’s the spirit! I’ll see you tomorrow then!” Trixie declared with a smile before stepping into the backroom with what humans she was able to recover from the uncharted world.

Meanwhile, Elise went to the front desk to wait for May, she wouldn’t have to wait long, within ten minutes May was confidently strolling through the front door.

“Hi miss Elizze!” Her words slurred as her voiced boomed out with the level volume that only children could get away with in public.

“Hiya sweetie! Are you here for you package?” Elise held it out with outstretched arms and a smile.

“Yes! I’m hungry!” May declared while she began to rip the lid off of… an anti-grav full of humans.

“Oh.” Elise muttered.

May paid her no mind. With one fell swoop she grabbed a handful of the humans, her hands turning crimson from where they smashed against her skin, and threw them, en masse, straight into her mouth. Her lips and mouth pockmarked with crimson, May grasped another handful and held it out for Elise.

“Wan’zom?” May’s voice was muffled, her mouth full.

“Oh, no, no thank you sweetie.” Elise said with a delicate smile, though she felt a little queasy.

“’Kay!”

Elise watched as May’s outstretched hand, dropped the offered humans back into the container, well most of them anyway, some just… fell to the floor, with no anti-grav to keep them up. They splattered like water balloons the size of pin pricks on the cold hard tile.

“Here, sweetie, let me walk you out.”

May smiled and nodded, she grabbed her package of humans as Elise took her by the shoulders and led her to the door. Her hand turned the handle for the young girl and May ran off. Elise took a deep breath, and with a sigh of relief for having finished her first day of work. Stepped out onto the boulevard to head home.