Interesting piece so far, and good characterization. The Siamese in particular exudes a really nice coldly amused menace.

I noticed a little inconsistency with the tense; it's mostly past but occasionally slips into present. Otherwise, the writing is quite good.

The ending works for me; we still don't know the exact nature of the rescuer, and there have been enough hints that something about them isn't quite as it seems to work as a hook and make me want to continue reading.

I do wonder how feral critters would be much use growing tea, though. ;3

I'm not surprised there is an inconsistency with the tense, this was written over the course of about five months and I may have forgotten what I was writing over that span. More to edit!
Before I even began, I wrote the ending lines. They always make me feel like crying... Glad to hear my ending isn't too final. I was worried that it seemed like Mandy died.

When I was trying to write the original versions of this, I opened with Mandy's bloody mouth from holding a sickle all day. After some two or three scraps, I had to get rid of the sickle. It didn't fit, but that's pretty much how it works for the first while of harvesting tea (I don't know if they actually used sickles, but it seemed logical to me).

Scratch the five months bit, I started early October and wrote like a paragraph every day (sometimes less) before stopping entirely in December.

This story was made more intense by the fact that I was listening to Rachmaninoff while reading it. There are a few occasional errors in the writing, and I was a bit annoyed by you using the phrase "not uncommon". You should have just said it was common. But great story! I will have to write a story to counter it. I had an idea for a story with the exact opposite message. x3

The phrase "not uncommon" was used because, otherwise, the sentence doesn't have enough syllables in it and sounds weird to me.
To me, the phrase "not uncommon" also implies a different level of commonality just below common. I don't know if I'm just crazy or what.

I'll have to sift through this again when I finish the second part. Maybe get you or Tonin (or both of you) to point out any errors.

It's mainly just to eliminate wordiness. It was a guideline used by 1984/Animal Farm author, George Orwell, a.k.a. Eric Arthur Blair. I guess it doesn't have to be strictly followed. :P