Any time Olympus Tyrrhena walked through the wide double-door of the shelter, his olfactory sense was hit with a chemical-like agent that – while often unsuccessful – was designed to mask odors. Still, for him it was a familiar and welcoming aroma, and one that accompanied a genuine feeling of excitement.
The smell meant there were cages, and cages meant there were animals in them, and those animals were always ready for adoption.
“My friend!” shouted the greeter, Tharsis Cimmeria. “So glad to see you again. We have some new arrivals I’m sure you’ll be interested in.”
“You always do, Tharsis,” Tyrrhena said. “Truthfully, I’m not even sure what I’m looking for today. Hopefully I’ll know it when I see it.”
The Noachis Shelter was the largest in what was once the West Coast of the United States. An old naval barracks that had been converted into an adoption center, it could house as many as 3,000 animals at one time. And it was almost always filled to capacity. It seemed that for every one that was taken away to its forever home, another five were corralled while running wild outside the facility. In a perfect world, all the adoptees would be carefully matched with the adopters, but in recent times officials at Noachis Shelter simply wanted to make sure business ran smoothly – and quickly.
If you had the resources to get an animal, the animal was yours with no questions asked.
“Now, the last time you were here you got Eddie, the male, right?” Cimmeria asked. “I remember him well … always banging against the cage and howling. Not a lot of our customers would take a chance on an animal like that. I hope he’s working out for you.”
Tyrrhena sighed.
“Unfortunately, I had to have him put down,” he said. “I gave him as much time as I could to adjust to his new surroundings, but he could never do it. He was extremely violent and very disruptive. I had to have him destroyed because I was afraid he was going to hurt the other animals, as well as himself. It’s a shame, but when you go through as many as I have in the last couple of years, you get used to it. Well … you never get used to it, but you learn to live with it. Anyway, that’s why I’m here today, to see if I can find one to replace the one I lost.”
With Cimmeria providing a loose follow, Tyrrhena walked down the aisles of the shelter and carefully eyed each individual cage. It was rare when one of the animals made eye contact with him, and when they did it was always fleeting. What he enjoyed most was seeing the ones who were curled up sleeping. Whether true or not, he believed those who were slumbering in the cages would be easier to tame.
Finally, Tyrrhena found what he was looking for. An animal with bushy red hair, and so new to the shelter he still had on his uniform.
“We call him Captain,” Cimmeria said. “We think he was in that group of resistance fighters we captured just last week, but we couldn’t find any identification on him. Now that we’ve all assumed humanoid form and characteristics, they don’t even know who to fight anymore. Soon we’ll have complete control of this hemisphere, so we’re going to need even more shelters.”
Two staffers quickly joined Cimmeria, who prepared to open the cage and quickly tie up Captain.
“So … are you going to keep him at your Earth dwelling or take him back to Mars?”
“By the looks of him, he’ll be more of a labor animal, so I’ll probably leave him here to work the fields,” Tyrrhena said. “Besides, Promethai would kill me if I brought another pet home.”