A Ferret who has only just found a new home completes her tail of tragedy which led to her small family becoming refugees.

This is a submission to the Thursday Prompt writing group. This week's prompt started out from the prompt “We Are All Writers Together.” I started finishing up my Planet Dirt prequel, as the whole series spun out from a concept by another write,  yelleena But as this got pretty dark pretty quickly, I let it slip away. Until the prompt ‘Suppression’ brought it pounding again on my skull. The prompt ‘heavy’ brought me to it’s ending.

Check out the group's user page by following this link. And the other stories generated from these prompts here,  here, and here.

This story has headed my FurAffinity page as a Featured Story

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Before Planet Dirt: Part 4: Last Days On Brydun VI
By: DankeDonuts
https://www.furaffinity.net/user/dankedonuts/


I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry while recording these stories. But I expect I’ll be breaking that promise, again, today. I had a good sob and sniff before I came here. Just for knowing what I’m going to be talking about. My name, again, is Tovi Kaidis. A Ferret, former citizen of Brydun Vi. The Planet Dirt Heritage Foundation has asked me to tell the tale of how my family and I came to be here.

This is how my husband died.

The world I had grown up on was becoming more hostile to me and mine. After my husband publicly defended a co-worker Fur from false accusations of contaminating a diner guest’s meal, more complaints than ever started piling in Sanctum Comfort Hotel. Calling him out personally for one petty offense or another, all of them lies. Even for slights he somehow committed on the main hotel grounds when he was verifiably on duty cooking in the Whisperwind kitchen. Ultimately, the management started trying to make Shollo quit the restaurant in order to save face.

I’m proud to say he didn’t back down. He hung on through the nights of too little sleep and mornings of crawling out of bed just in time to kiss our kits good morning before departing our apartment, red-eyed, for his next shift. Of knowing he was being blocked for promotion, and that he was training the newest batch of cooks to be promoted over him. Humans, all of them.

All the while, more and more of the Furs on the staff got their notices. And not just at the hotels.

Regardless of his professionalism, he was staring down the start of a two-week suspension within a few months. I don’t even remember the excuse they used. We were somewhat prepared for him to be outright fired by then, in that I had updated my resume and arranged for some recommendation letters. Mostly from people I’d done odd techie jobs for back in our former neighborhood, but hopefully my prospective employers wouldn’t look too closely at who had written them. I went out looking for regular work while he stayed home with the kits. Sore for why he was there, but plenty happy to have the extra time with Eskoo and Keesha

They sure were overjoyed to see more of their father, but of course they weren’t so happy to see me off so much. “Why can’t we be a big family together all of the time?” Keesha asked me once while I hugged her and Eskoo goodbye. They were seven, then.

The first time I heard the term ‘Truhu’ was on the hovertram to one of my interviews. Some Fennecs were arguing about whether or not to pull their son out of his primary school. He was being bullied in by a pack of kids who’d used the word like it was some kind of shield. The tip of the mother’s tail was twitching up a storm. She wanted her pup to stay in, and take self-defense lessons so he could fight back.

Sitting there listening to them, my mind wandered back to that holo-article about the Dalmatian I’ve spoken of before. The homeless veteran with the decaying cybernetics, laying naked and hopeless in an alley. What had fighting ever gotten her?

Before long, the word had come into my home. While the kits were I school, Shollo had more free time than he knew what to do with, even after housekeeping. He started spending time on the holoboards. They were segregating themselves into their own forums so they could share their grievances with each other free from harassment by trolls or other forms of anonymous ugliness. To my eyes, Shollo’s new friends seemed to be doing more complaining that finding solutions. But he was enjoying his newfound outlet for his frustrations. Browsing became subscribing. Subscribing became posting. Posting became him repeating favorite reads over dinner.

And he was reading quite a lot on the TruHus. Where they’d started. How they were insinuating themselves into so many worlds. Why so many otherwise reasonable Humans seemed to be rolling over for them. My take was that he was absorbing too much opinion and not enough hard data. But he kept on plugging in with his new friends. By the time he was back to work, he’d joined up with Furs United. A local-action group founded to mount protests wherever there was Human favoritism to be found and to gathering funds to bury the TruHus in civil action lawsuits.

Shellyanne Hauser was the local chapter head of Furs United. I’d never met to confident and charismatic a Kangaroo Rat. Which, of course, her detractors used against her; claiming she was inciting public unrest so she could whip up a base of fanatics and launch herself a political career. Truth be told, she’d been an art museum tour guide in Fort Luhn for years over in Dolenton. That’s where she’d lived until Human-centric gentrification rolled over her neighborhood. She was just very good at giving speeches and directing people’s attention where she wanted it to be.

Mrs. Hauser was convinced the TruHus were a few more allied or compliant politicians away from outright declaring non-Humans to be illegal l on Brydun VI. “A slow-motion coup is happening on this world, and so many others. The people enacting it cry false tears of persecution and pretend to be the victims of a system rigged against them. And, having convinced themselves that they are the victims, they then tell themselves that they are entitled to push back against us. But I promise you, once they are they system, they’ll just keep right on telling themselves that lie. And push even harder. We have to push back now before they have all the leverage!” She said that at one or another meeting Shollo had taken me too. I found myself agreeing with some of it. I signed up not long after. Started volunteering my time to get their communications systems up and running,

We Furs weren’t the only ones openly mobilizing. The TruHus were powerful enough, politically and financially, to act openly. The various neighborhood watches the Humans had set up in their own little corners of this neighborhood or that, formally allied into The Watch. The signing ceremony was broadcast live. Their newly minted leader, Walth Vallard, declared the organization the moral victors in “whatever phony conflict someone else wants to start.” He was a short man, but a wide one. With thick hands that he liked to swing around and slam into tables when he talked.

The tipping point towards open conflict, like so many other things, started with money.

Brydun VI had been riding the beryllium rush for years, but the news holos I was devouring came with more and more warnings the bust was on the horizon. Investors oozed away. Stocks fell. Banks got worried. The economy soured. The TruHus lured in more fresh blood; people who wanted to use anyone else as an excuse for their own diminishing lots in life, or their own shortcomings. Furs were as good a scapegoat as any for more than a few of them, I suppose. Once these disaffected souls joined up, then they got feed the party line.

Rumors started swirling of the Sanctum Comfort started talking serious cutbacks. Shollo had been very careful not to talk Furs United or even plug into their pages on his own commbox while on company time. But now it seemed his employers were looking for an excuse not to need an excuse to tear up his contract.

I’d kept up the job hunt while the kits were at school. No anti-Fur bullying where they were going, thank goodness. But nothing had come of it but a few ‘we’ll call yous’ that never called back.

There was tension at work, and tension at home. We’d never really fought before that. Oh, when we were getting serious about seeing each other, we played at it. Made a game of finding things we disagreed about. Or rows around this time were less about coming to mutual understanding, more about letting off steam in the direction of someone who’d take it. The kits by then were old enough to notice the difference. So even more tension. We funneled our frustrations into Furs United in our own ways. Him working recruitment, me the back-end tech.

Did I mention that this moment of economic downturn and social strife was occurring during an election year? The kits were on the verge of turning eight when certain holosites -- I hesitate to put the words ‘news’ in front of that word in this case -- started running with the story that Colonial Governor Tasniam and his wife had both had some cosmetic gene-editing done. He, to keep from going bald. She, to keep from ever having to shave her legs or armpits again. His numbers plummeted with the TruHu’s, who began mounting a write-in campaign for Michael Jaladar. One of the Humans who’s first government position was in the Land Management office. He’d been appointed to one of the seats left empty after the eminent domain seizures that bulldozed our old house and so many others. Vacated by the Furs  who’d resigned in protest.

Jaladar immediately began campaigning on restoring order and prosperity. He denigrated Tasniam in the press for his “weakness in the face of societal disintegration! Self-destruction posing as plurality!”

In a move meant to placate a base that had already turned on him, Tasniam rammed through a second set of austerity measures. These ones centered around heavy tariffs on luxury goods. With what qualified as a ‘luxury’ defined narrowly enough to hit mainly Furs in their pocketbooks. Items such as specialized fertilizers for the Koalas’ eucalyptus groves. Catnip teas for the Felines.  Lightweight gear of all sorts for the Avians. We didn’t have a Panda population at the time, but at triple the price for bamboo imports, we weren’t ever going to ever attract one.

Mrs. Hauser put the call out to organize a march on the city halls of the five largest cities on the planet to protest the bill, which she called “a knife in the belly of our collective community.” An action that large couldn’t ever hope to go unnoticed. The request for demonstration permits was leaked, and come the big day The Watch had every city hall enclosed with counter protestors. Having acquired access to government grounds with little or none of the bureaucratic hurdles our side had had to jump through to set paw on the streets.

Many amid this Human chain, most of them wearing the blue and white of the True Human party, were armed with energy weapons. Supposedly set on stun. “Those animals are bringing weapons to this shindig!” Vallard bellowed at a reporter. “Hell, they bring weapons everywhere! Claws! Fangs! Quills! Venom! We’re only evening the odds!”

It was true that there was a sizable Dart Frog community further south in San Buena, one of the cities to be marched upon. But the notion that they are naturally venomous was of course a complete fabrication, or an example of that man’s ignorance. The insects the Frogs would have had to consume in order to produce any toxin went extinct ages ago with Earth’s rainforests. Not that the reporter tried to present that fact before that awful man yanked her commwand away, claiming it for his own uses.

“We will not be intimidated!” he shouted, and his words were screamed back by the hundreds-long throng. “We will not be intimidated!”

“We will not be bullied!” “We will not be bullied!”

“We will not be suppressed!” “We will not be suppressed!”

That was what hundreds of our kind were walking into. Peacefully but undeterred. Shollo did exactly what I thought he would. He kissed us all one by one, and headed out the door to catch the ride-pool that would hover him over to the nearest staging area. If the kits had been just a little older, we’d have all gone.

What unfolded next I saw from the holoscreen and the warmth of my own couch. The news coverage started cycling through the various protests. I saw my mate standing in a row next to Mrs. Hauser, and Windell Cless from the old neighborhood in Neo Nebra, and a few new faces from the Furs United meetings I’d attended. They were slightly elevated, holding court before a countless crowd of Furs and Scalies, many of whom had signs in the hands. Shollo had the audhorn, and was telling the crowd “This is where we stop running! This where we have to take a stand! Because someone has to!”

Those were the last words I ever heard him say. That was the last time I ever saw him.

His words received two cheers, and the third was upended by something crashing off-screen. Or being smashed up, I’m not sure. There was a sudden rush of bodies. Someone put their hand over the holocam. Voices started shouting at each other. In what little space the camera could show, a line of tear gas plumed, blotting everything out. Everyone was screaming, their words soon drowned out by the bellowing siren of a police siren.

They cut to a different correspondent, who detailed a similar incident in a different part of Spectros City. Then another in San Buena. Followed by Fort Luhn, Dolenton and Riverwide. From the big five, the riots spread out into smaller towns. The kits were watching by then. Asking where their father had gone. Starting to cry from worry. And he wasn’t answering any of my calls. No reply while buildings burned and vehicles were destroyed. Not while the fistfights were scanned from the safety of skyspeeders or reporters chased one line of crowd control officers or the other. I was clutching the blanket were were laying under hard enough to leave holes in it. My eyes filled with silent tears.

I managed to get Eskoo and Keesha to bed around midnight, after they’d worn themselves out from worry. “He’s alright. He probably just forgot to have me check the power settings on his commbox before he left. You know how glitchy that thing has gotten. We’ll hear from him soon, and I’ll wake you up the instant I do.” I left their room with tears running down my cheeks. Praying to a god I’d never had much use for that that I wasn't lying to my children.

I didn’t sleep at all. I called absolutely everyone I could think of, and then through up more numbers to find and call, looking for any news of my husband. Fear eating further into me with each busy signal, every time I heard ‘no.’  

When I called Verga Gulden, one of the ladies who had given me a recommendation letter, her voice was frantic. “Oh, Tavi! I was just about to call you!… Do you know where my Lissie is?”

Word came a 4:47AM. Someone matching Shollo’s description was mentioned by a reporter as having been dragged into the back of a police hovervan. And that his body was seen being pulled out of it on a stretcher when it reached the precinct. Dead before he reached the station.

“Resisting arrest,” they said! “Did what we had to do,” they said! “Hard times call for hard decisions!” “It was his own fault!” “The Furs started this, not us!” “They had it coming!”

Those bas- brigands caused the very riot they used as an excuse to rip us to pieces in the press! Call us murders! Thugs! Animals! I’m sure they did it! I know they did!

Excuse me.

No, I’ll be alright to go on in a moment.

With my husband’s name tarred in the press as one of the instigators of a night of violence that cost twenty-three lives – nineteen of them Furs or Scalies, and one Parrot --  mine was no good for finding work. The money started running out, and he rent suddenly doubled. The apartment complex had been bought out by some conglomerate, and they wanted us out. All of us. No incentive checks this time. They weren’t necessary. Not with the new zoning laws that had been put into effect on day one of Governor Jaladar’s term.

Three months to the day after Shollo’s cremation, I had sold everything that wouldn’t fit into two bags for myself and two smaller one for each of the kits. We squatted in the apartment for three days after our lease expired. No heat, no water. Only setting foot outside to find food or a restroom. I had to bathe my offspring in a library sink. We were sneaking our way back in through the rear of the complex when we were found out by Big Gus from the floor below us. He got the name for being the biggest Bulldog you’re ever likely to meet, and was using that bulk block the path up to our floor. “Cor, I’m glad I found you lot first. Word is the new landlord’s laying in wait for you in the room opposite yours. The one he cleaned the Parkers out of yesterday. With members of The Watch in there too.” I thanked him hurriedly and ducked the kits back downstairs and out the building. We never looked back. Thank goodness we’d gotten into the habit of taking our bags everywhere, or Mr. Abernathy would have gotten them too.

Halfway down, I think I heard Big Gus making some excuses for himself while he blocked the door, but I don't suppose I’ll ever know for sure. Unless his family comes by these parts someday. I hope he’s alright. I hope they all are.

It was another two nights in a dingy back alley before the ship arrived that would take us off-planet. But I never let myself sink to Formerly Sergeant Bisset’s despairs because I had two kits with me who were not going to live their lives in squalor. It took two years to get a real home. Across more planets than I care to remember, more camp towns and shanties than I could ever forget. All to get here to Planet Dirt. But we made it. Another ship is on the way, so I’ve been told.

Shellyanne Hauser disappeared the night of the riot. To my knowledge, she was never found.

I still don’t know what my husband’s last words were.

Is that enough?... Are we done?... I’d really like to go hug my children.


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