Cutelings

_{I want to adopt a cute pet in your world. What is it and how do I look after one?}

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Owl Key...!! We have been petsh this days haven't we? So, it is time for that conversation.
Let me welcome you to this chapter by stating the obvious: I am not your average informant kind of guy. Altair started his archives to his nasty little secret project, and he got in time his friends to supply new material about Sharitarn. Flamboyant or accounting practical, blood thirsty or sweet, the friends and acquaintances of this man know as Infamous Archmage where adventurers, almost inevitably.
I am the sort of person that stays home when rain is falling. Was already like that on Earth, and not much changed.
Of course, now I have more reason to avoid travels and bold gestures of challenge the world. And instead keep civilized domestic manners. Few iis arrive from Earth and build a live on Sharitarn as free women, as you must have noticed by now. Slavery is a real possibility here, and it is the normal fate of women females who are caught unprotected by their citizen rights.
That chapter isn't about me, nor is it about slavery. Our subject here is animals of company, pets, affective substitutes for lovers or children in some cases. Companions and helpers of meditation for others. Or simply a welcomed element of a family home for those who are like myself.
I could not resist the idea of start this by mentioning how cheap a cliché is to ask a woman to right about pets. One topic so entangled with children, family homes, and so on. Having indulged myself enough, is time for me to begin the actual text:

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NECESSARY CONTEXT

This is Sharitarn, the planet "Blessed and Cursed" by a inter-dimensional phenomenon that moves people, animals and plants, from different Universes to this one. The proportion of each item I just listed in the total of Vortex occurrences is higher that it should be by blind luck. There it more "talking animals" than "non-talking animals" being brought to Sharitarn every day than what you would expect if the phenomenon was random. More non-talking animals than lifeless rocks and bicycles.
Still, Sharitarn do gets a daily supply of people, non-talking animals, and random stuff, from other Universes. Keep that in mind, if you will. Up to very recently (and since 1700, give or take decades) the large majority of those "blesses" where originated from Planet Earth. Not all of them.
There is more Parallel Universes than anyone will ever be able to count. They all have in common the number, size, and position of planets and stars but very little else beyond that. Things we easily take for granted both on Earth and here in Sharitarn are absent in some Universes, death for instance. There was at least one Universe "touched by the Vortex" where no living thing can die, they keep going for ever.
There is iis from Earth, like you and me, who find in Sharitarn a Universe where the laws of physics work about the same way they work in their home Universe. Most days. And there is other iis, from different parallel Universes, who find a extremely strange universe whit natural phenomenons they never imagined possible.
They have a legend, that could be a real story, about a village transported by the Vortex from a Universe where the stars and planets don't move. Their Universe was identical to this one only for one instant and in this instant their entire village was transported by the Vortex. They all went mad and suicidal just for realizing the sun was moving in the sky. However, their pets and domestic animals_ according to the tale_ survived.
Second thing I wish to call your attention to is something I already mentioned: slavery.
Everywhere on Sharitarn, or in caves deep bellow surface, people buy and sell people. In human cities they consider that we are natural slaves and the human males natural masters. In obuju cities the obuju females are the masters and their males the natural slaves. I don't know how they do things in Dradinu, that's a human city where the citizens are true hermaphrodites: but I do know they have slavery up there too.
There is countless "talking beings" here on Sharitarn, some of which are talking animals, others talking plants, and some are too weird for me to define. None of those species is beyond the possibility of end up slaved.
On Earth we used the expressions "animal" and "human" in a way that causes confusion here. Up there we often oppose one thing to the other, but here human is just a species of the gender animal. Humanity is the most powerful talking specie on Sharitarn, nevertheless we are a animal specie like all the rest.
They have "humanists" here, and not wanting to unnecessarily offend anyone I will say this: I do consider their great cause disturbing. A bit disgusting, even.
Any way, pets. Pets are slaves that don't talk, would you say? Slaves are talking pets, same way humans are talking animals? I'm not inviting your to play with words here just for the fun. Are not words what I am inviting you to play with here, but concepts. And that isn't play but more properly exercise, and an exercise that is useful for our object of interest here and now.
You go to a Main Market thinking like an Earthling and the most likely result is you end up lost. Possibly dead. So "help me help you", and try to answer the questions in the previous paragraph.
And don't came to me with parrots!!
Third and last thing I wish to point to you, before we enter the actual subject, is afterlife.
I don't know how much have you heard about Necromancy, Mind Magic and Divination spells, nor have I any idea about if you have a religious background or not. Magic and religion are only of incidental relevance here, but their must be addressed for one moment before we can advance.
Sharitarnes have a few more facts about what happens with a person after death. However, not half as much as what your average Sharitarne would think.
There is a part of the living person that stays around, and perhaps brakes in pieces that can be collected after centuries by Necromancy. This part is named "ghost", if you please. Memories and feelings, or perhaps the copies of those things, are in this things. Not the person, the person, its individual and inimitable essence of being, is different. Let's call it the "spirit". The spirit stays around for as long as two years, usually less, and it can be contacted by necromancy and by some mind whisper spells during this period.
Once the spirit is gone, it is gone for good. No magical mean can bring it back or find out what direction it went. The native Sharitarnes have stories to answer that, neither better nor worse than those told by Earthling religions.
Up to this point you could accuse me of digression. The twist that makes this relevant for our subject comes now: what I just explained about afterlife only applies to talking beings.
Non talking beings do have ghosts, and spirits, and their spirits separates from their ghosts as well after life. However, their spirits never disappear. Is actually possible to follow them, and there was (or is, depending on your source) a entire magical Way that focus in follow those non-talking essences in their walks in the afterlife.
And in their reincarnation.
I like to explain that twice when I can, because that was a fact of life in Sharitarn that costed me more than a little effort to absorb and digest. Humans, and any other intelligent beings, live only once in this Universe. We are born, we grow, learn to speak, age, die, and then we are eaten by e big spiritual hawk named "Tarn". This is it. To all talking beings.
Your domestic cat on the other hand will NOT follow this paradigm, if she felt through the Vortex with you. When she die she will walk around for some time, invisible and ethereal, and after some more or less complicated natural processes she will find living pussy cat who is in heat and ling around until the lady has a carnal intercourse. When your dead cat will be "sucked in" the action and end up as a baby cat fetus, to live a new cat's life.
The process is the same for all non-talking beings in this Universe, and it keeps repeating again and again, Age after Age.
Reincarnation is literal true here, nothing religious about. However, it only exists for non-talking animals.
That means you could have your cat back to you, time and again, during all your life. Same spirit in different bodies. Memories from past lives are a bit blurry, but they have means to help the animals to remember. If you are in this sort of thing.
Closing this topic. If your cat cannot find a living animal of her specie, because cats are extinct or never existed (well cats do exist here, but parrots don't) on Sharitarn, then she will look for the closest alternative possible. A small wild feline of some kind, or a large one, or a hyena, or a bear, and that goes on and on. Until the spirit can incarnate again if continues looking and lowing its standards.
They say (and that is in the very border between fact and myth, so you make your choice to believe it or not) that sometimes the non-talking animal cannot find a compatible non-talking animal and end up born in a talking specie. Your cat could end up in your uterus, as a human baby, your baby.
That of course means that is her last life, unless she is lucky enough to be born dead or with some brain damage that makes impossible for her to develop intelligence. If things go normally, she will be a normal human child with a cat's personality. And will be eaten by the big hawk after this death, like any other human person.

MARKET OR CHURCH

If you wanted to buy yourself an animal, whether it is a beast of burden, a mount or a company, I would suggest to you two possibilities: Main Market or Peasant Settlements.
In most cities there is Merchant Houses specialized in living animals, that deal both with slaves and with pets. Or more with one and less with the other. The logistic does not changes too much, or so I understand.
For the most exotic products may be hard to know if you are buying a slave or a pet. Some species are just in the border. And if you buy a baby of some very intelligent specie which has a different spectrum of sounds for his hearing, and/or a throat that cannot speak the phonemes used in human language, then your baby slave will never learn human communication and will end up behaving like a smart dog would. Without contact with his own specie, his brain isn't likely to develop linguistic intelligence.
Human babies that end up slaved in some non-human nations have similar fate.
In terms of laws and rights, non-talking animals and slaves are identical. They have no legal existence, except as private property. No more rights than a much or a firewood log.
However, you didn't asked exactly that in your letter. You didn't used the word "buy", ratter "adopt". For that you don't go to a market.
Under ideal circumstances you go to a friend. Or, more likely, a friend goes to you.
When a woman is pregnant, or when she moves to a new home, domestic animals are common gifts. Children gain pets as well, and they give pets to each other as gifts sometimes. Not fancy expensive numus, or parrots, not even Earthling cats (that are not as common here on Sharitarn as they are on Earth) but gelatinous beings that move through walls and jump from the ceiling on small preys, and "rat-monkeys", six-legged lizards that grow as large as dogs sometimes, and a lot of snakes and snakelike species. Cheap things, most of them have cousins that can be found walking on public parks or hiding in the sewers.
As an Earthling who became a mother here in this alien Universe I feel less comfortable about most of those gifts than the average Sharitarne mother feels. Some of those pets are actually deadly poisonous, and not all of them are really tamable. Cute as they may be.
Sharitarnes protect their children, in their own way. But that is not the way we usually expect.
By experience I can tell you that: you will not raise a child in an human state city without pets. Don't even try.
Pesky things will appear in your home, hidden in the most unsuspected places. Your only chance to keep those occurrences rare is to give your children pets yourself. And make clear that you don't want those pets exchanged for others.
Now. If you don't fancy the idea of buy pets, and have no native "mother in law" with a newborn winged wolf she wishes to push in your hands, rests one alternative.
As Earthling you will probably not like it, at first. But don't close the door before look what is inside. Give it a chance. I am talking about church.

THE PRIMAL SHAMANIC TEMPLES

Yep, well, I am as resistant to the notion of religious superstition as any Earthling. Still, those people do a decent job.
It is an very old religion, from the days when they organized the first human cities on Sharitarn. Not from iis but from native Sharitarnes, I mean. Human cities are older than that, but this priests have a distinct native perspective in their practices.
They are not terribly political, or I would not be able to stand the implicit humanism in their ways. Their main interest if reincarnation, of non-talking animals (the only ones that actually reincarnate, as we previously discussed).
You must go to a few reunions, and you don't usually get to choose the exact animal you will adopt. Still, they talk a lot, and listen twice that much.
If they consider you trustworthy (what was not a problem to me but I have heard that can be for some) you leave the temple with an animal that is what you where looking for. They will not only give you the puppy, but also visit you from time to time, help your family to learn how to interact with that particular animal. Even provide veterinary assistance, for very small prices.
As they see the deal, you are not just assuming an obligation for life. Worth to mention that. You are making a bond between your lineage and this pet. A bond that is supposed to last for all generation to come, and all reincarnation of your pet.
My family got a doglike puppy with six legs and a line of turtle shells covering his head back, all the way to a tail that ends in a sort of heavy hammer. Thor grew to became a head bigger than the biggest dog I remember to have seemed on or home planet. It has no eyes or ears but sees and hears just fine. And it is immensely loyal, and affectionate.
His specie can live for 20, sometimes 25 years. However, they start declining in vigor and strength after 15. Thor has 17 now, and the shaman-priests have suggested euthanasia.
That's a thing you have to consider as well. They will not force the issue, but they will bring it up. And mention the subject again from time to time, waiting for your reaction. If you accept the idea they will go own.
Their rituals for that are pretty, but a bit sad in my opinion. And they will not tell you when your pet will reincarnate, nor give and promises about return it to you. That is the idea, of course, they will try to return your pet to you in his next incarnation, or to your family if you are already dead. You assume the responsibility of accept the animal again, and that obligation is passed to your descendants, but the shamans don't promise the animal will go back to you.
They could loose track of Thor, and my "god-ish" companion could end up born in the other side of the planet. Forgetting me and my family completely.
Still, whit all the parties you are supposed to go, and the visits they make from time to time, I do think this church is a good idea. Worth the price.


MY PERSPECTIVE
As much as anyone else's, is subjective.
Tell you more about myself could have been one way to begin this article. We got Thor when my oldest was three years old, but took me one year and the better part of the second to reach this point. I had four children after that, five total. Only three survived, one girl and two boys.
My free companion is an Earthling like myself, high-caste. A Mage Caste sigrax.
Nowadays Thor lives with my older son, who was the reason why I decided to enter religion despite not being found of the idea.
When my second son died short after his first birthday I decided that the idea of that huge bird of prey eating people's spirits was too horrible to be allowed in my home and stopped any contact with the shamans. Because of that Thor was the only pet I got from them, until much later.
However, as I said before, you have to give your children pets if you don't want them to bring dangerous poisonous things from the streets to home. And even if you do give them something more sensible than poisonous monkeys of sewer there is no guarantee that they will not bring the sewer creatures back from school with them any way.
High caste children in my city do go to schools. State Cities are separated in sectors, and most children in the school where mine studied where from Mage Caste families like ours.
By the time our daughter was born Tom had a profitable position, of some status, teaching at the Magic University of our city. That allowed us to buy the young lady a squirrel from Stone Maze, Madrigal has eyes like gold and red fur.
It looks like an Earthling flying squirrel in most aspects. However, he is considerable smarter. Larger as well: larger than Thor, after both became adults. Madrigal was more intelligent than Thor, I think, and more ferocious as well. Now she is very old, and according to her owner she does little more than sleep on her favorite window.
My next son was born little more than one year after my daughter. I was with the impression that our house was too small at the time. We already had two pets, both considerable large, and because of that I decided not to get us a third.
However, my oldest son was twelve years old when my youngest reached three. And he was very much in love with that church I had abandoned years before.
He was also studding to the test to became a Scholar Caste (to be a Mage Caste one has to be born whit magic potential, and he didn't has it. Is not exactly hereditary) and starting his sexual live with slave-girls. I knew that time would come, eventually, sexual slavery is a inevitable part of life in this planet and one have to choose what battles are worth. So I accepted the fact that sexual slaves would be part of the life of my family, long time before that.
Still, in the context the prevalent feeling was that I was loosing contact with my oldest boy.
Religion provided us a bridge, I think. And from that reconnection came the second pet my family would adopt.
Sand is not the sort of animal I would have considered bring to my home during my first years here on Sharitarn. Took some convincing for my older son to sell me the idea. She was a "snake-cat" (is how I call them), and there was a possibility that she could develop poison. There was also the issue that her specie is one of those that have capacities "similar to magic", and those are never very trustworthy beings.
They assured me that the animal was an very ancient spirit, that had been human families for many Ages, and just recently the lineage that had adopted her had been extinct. So, she needed a home, and she liked us.
Was one of this "great honor" arguments priests use for fool their flocks. However, I already explained the situation. Long story short, I said yes.
Not all poison felines look reptilian, by the way. Sand does.
Imagine a cat, a slim siamese. Now change the head for the head of a copper viper, and imagine the entire body is covert in snake scales. Dark read scales. The tail is little less than twice longer than a cat's tail has right to be, but sometimes disappear entirely. The entire animal seems transparent most the time, and became totally invisible in half-shadows. That's basically Sand.
When she grew up she learned to walk through doors and walls inside the house. Solid objects. Their kind can "dig holes" in solid things without actually affect the solid structures. They walk through the etherial counter part of things, sliding in the world where ghosts interact with the dream bodies of mages. That's not magic, technically, because is all instinctual and cannot be shaped at will by the animal. Works the way it works.
Is still a lot like magic. And comes with the capacity of sense a lot of things that even Divination spells can't reveal. Only Necromancy.
Sand was murdered two years after we adopt her. She attacked a raider who invaded our house looking for free women to kidnap and carry away for slavery. The snake-cat's alarm and fight gave us time to react. I locked myself with the children, Tom activates a couple of spells and reached his sword.
Two invaders escaped, the third had been poisoned by Sand and passed out in the streets. A boy four years older than my eldest, from another nation. Ended his first adventure as a raider impaled in the Justice Square at the end of the street.
Kidnap free women for slavement is an universal sport on this planet. Success if very celebrated.
Who fail and is caught end up facing death by impalement, more often than not.
Sand came back to us less than two years later. She was light grey this time, silver metallic scales, with eyes that looked like black pearls and a small third eye in her forehead. A different race, but the same animal specie, snake-cat like before.
My forth son loves his feline companion. He is 11 years old now, and is the only one of the children who was born with potential for magic and survived long enough to begin preparation for the First Test. His father thinks he is ready, but the boy wants to prepare for a little longer.
That is a big moment. Can mean the chance to enter Mage Caste and possibly go as far as became an archmage. But the potential can be burned in the test, and in that case the student will never be able to make spells.
I had another son after that, my last. He died before I had got him a pet.
I could tell you that life is cruel on Sharitarn, but what good would that do? And besides, where life isn't cruel? There was ever a time when children didn't died from diseases or accidents ?
I am a person of religious habits, by this point in my life. However, I'm not a religious person. Far from me to advise anyone to become one. Believe what ever you what, or what you can convince yourself, or believe nothing. All I say is that there is this particular option if you want to adopt a pet, it demands some participation in rituals and provides some social interaction that can not be the worse thing in the world for a Earthling iis trying to build a civilized life on Sharitarn.
On the other hand, you can always just buy yourself a pet instead.

BUT BEYOND THAT

Did not escaped you that I begun this chapter presenting myself as someone who is not an adventurer.
The I associated our theme here with domestic life, children and community.
Before I must ask you to not let me convince you that adventurers don't have pets on this planet. Earthling parrots will not be on shoulders of pirates in this world because flying birds are immensely rare. But you will see flying snakes playing the same role.
Wild men have their iapis and trained bats, warlords in their castles train flying wolves and land octopuses covert by long fur. Six legged lizards and giant rats with twelve eyes serve as mount in some places, and smaller races of those same animals can be found playing the roles we used to associate with dogs on Earth History.
Variety of life on Sharitarn is a strong element, always. There is far more biodiversity here than what any single planet could dream about. It is "The End of the Sewer" really, in the end of day. Blessed and cursed by the Multiverse, for good and for worse.