Galea sat at her desk, scribbling down notes and reviewing her logs, the sun was setting. As she scratched down the last bit of text and finished her administrative work, her mind began to wander. Breeding humans was a pretty hands-off occupation, but she just had too many of the damn things! She had a little over forty thousand humans at her farm, small by the standards of industrial human farming, but it was too much to keep track of for just her and her assistant, Maya.

In fact, Galea had been thinking about hiring another assistant, so she could scale her operation up; the constant need to transfer humans to and from her farm made Maya rarely able to actually assist her in the shop itself. She didn’t want to borrow from the banks to hire… that was always a dangerous move, so that left her with securing enough reliable income to hire someone else on her own…

Galea leaned back and stretched in her chair in frustration. That was the problem! Her store was only able to barely survive in the human selling and trading market because she offered clean organic humans that the factory farms wouldn’t bother providing. Her humans were all bred and raised with no adulterants and absolutely no drugs; whereas the factory farms jacked their humans up with everything under the sun to increase fertility and accelerate growth. Galea thought factory farmed raised humans looked… uglier, she thought they tasted worse too, and that they were somehow even stupider than regular humans, but when most of the demand for humans in Elsira was for cheap, mass-produced humans the lack of demand really ate into her bottom line. She understood it, in a way, when humans are barely an inch tall and used primarily as food or screaming pieces of jewelry, why does it matter if the thing is smarter? So… her humans became just another batch in an empire with a glut of supply. Organic, sure, but otherwise nothing to differentiate her product from the masses.

At least until now, her eyes settled on her notes, the newest entry concerned the most recent addition to her store, the little blue haired male that she picked up from the frontlines. After checking up on him earlier as he happily bred with one of the new females, she decided to leave him be for the rest of the day. Galea had been breeding humans for about seventy years, and during that time she learned that wild caughts really don’t like mating out in the open, hence why she got the little pet house for him, no need to incite a reaction from a wild caught before it acclimates to life in a cage. Blue would get used to being seen like all the other humans, but until then she would accommodate its idiosyncrasies.

She was excited at the potential of Blue, when she checked in later and asked the females for a count they told her that he had mated with four of them in total. Not stellar numbers by any means, but for a first day? Galea couldn’t complain. She was pretty sure she could push him up to six or eight copulations a day, so around two hundred copulations in a month, with about a one in twenty chance of conception each time… Galea could get conservatively get a hundred offspring out of Blue every year. Over the course of a full breeding career, that would mean thousands of offspring. Even if it’s a recessive gene she could still interbreed the offspring and get hundreds more studs with that distinctive blue hair. If she really pushed, she could get the gene into all her breeding age humans in just a few of their short generations. Finally, she thought, a visual indicator of the quality of her product! She grinned at the thought.

Maya chose to return at that exact moment, stepping through the door to the back of the store to see Galea grinning like a maniac.

“Something happen?” Maya inquired.

“Oh, no, nothing, just thinking about how our little blue friend is just the thing we need.”

“What, like money?” Maya raised her eyebrow.

“Yeah, like money.” Galea thought for a moment before continuing. “Well, at least in the long term, I still don’t know what we can do to raise funds short term…”

Maya set her bag down amidst the rest of her things in a cubby along the wall. She turned back to Galea, her face scrunched together in confusion.

“Why not take him up to the human markets? You could sell him there.”

Now it was Galea’s turn to be confused. “I don’t want to sell him! He’s our ticket to a brand!”

Maya rolled her eyes, “I mean take him up to the studding section.”

“What studding section?” Galea cocked her head, “I thought the pet shops had a monopoly on studding. No studding outside our premises, no selection of a particular mate, that sort of thing.”

“They did until some noble came by each of them a few months ago, throwing cash around like she had the key to the Empress’s own vault. You know that minor noble Belvia? The one who always had a distaste for the rest of the pet store owners and their merchant backgrounds? Well, she caved and took the offer. With no more benefit to their little studding cabal, now they’ve all got small selections of breeders available for pet owners.” Maya shook her head for a moment, remembering something. “Didn’t I tell you this already? I got back one day to find you sleeping at your desk and left a note!”

Galea grinned sheepishly. “I probably didn’t notice it… with how much paperwork is lying around…” she trailed off.

Maya sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. You’re overworked here. If we stud him out, we can get some income flowing in quickly. Maybe even hire some more help?” Her tone sounded like she was dangling a treat in front of Galea and hoping she would take it.

Galea scowled at her playfully, “you just want a raise!”

“A raise would be nice too!” Maya laughed back.

They chuckled for a bit before Maya spoke again.

“So? What’s the call, boss?”