DST is kicking my butt, here. 1700 words was just barely sustainable.
I cornered the creature in the alleyway, and swore. I had been hoping it was just a cat. Nope, not with my luck! I had flushed out a dog. A damned dog.
You don’t bring pets to the Tomb Worlds. Or at least this one. There are a lot of places where cats can settle in, and a lot of different places where dogs can, but something in the atmosphere of One-Eighteen did things to any Earth life larger than — well, every animal that wasn’t human, honestly. Mostly, what it did was kill those species off, but dogs and cats are stubborn buggers.
Even then, they mostly avoided humans — it was like every scrap of domestication had been burned off of them — but this creature looked hungry enough to forget about who the apex predator was. I didn’t like its looks in general, too: it was about the size of a golden retriever back home, but its hair was a mangy patch of gray and greenish fur, a mouth full of loose and slightly oozing teeth, and eyes that mixed hurt, confusion, and disgust in equal proportion. Dogs and cats really don’t like living on One-Eighteen, and I think the few feral ones here dimly blame humans for bringing them here.
And I was pretty sure that the dog wanted to take its frustrations literally out of my hide.