The words on the whiteboard seemed slightly out of focus the harder Hawk looked at them, and he had to read it very slowly to himself, getting caught on letters that first looked like other letters. He reached the name of the city, though, and pulled each letter apart one by one.

"Enodia," he breathed.

"Oh--" someone spoke up. "Jasmine, your other client's come around."

Hawk suddenly saw that to the right of him was another bed, its occupant obscured by the curtain around it. The speaker was a greying woman in scrubs, who had long, floppy ears and a short tuft of a tail, sitting on a stool beside the bed. She had leaned back around the curtain as she removed her stethoscope, side-eying Hawk. At the end of the bed was another woman--an oni with pale bluish skin and large bottom canines, dressed quite nicely, with a thick clipboard clasped to her chest.

"Seems like the stupor wore off on its own," the woman in scrubs remarked, and then added to Hawk, "I'll be right over, sir."

The oni woman, however, approached Hawk's bed. "Hello!" she said cheerily, and held out a hand, "My name is Jasmine. I'm from the Society for Mixed Species Inclusion. I'm here to help get you the resources you need here, in Enodia."

Hawk stared at her offered hand with its painted nails, and after a long moment of silence, he shook her hand wordlessly.



"Can you tell me your name?"

"H--Alexei Hawk Press."


[Hey y'all! Some folks on Patreon expressed interest in me doing something of a Q&A. If you have any questions you'd like to throw in, I encourage you to submit them to my worldbuilding blog here--you can leave them anonymously if you don't have a Tumblr account. I'll be out of town when this page is posted, but I'll begin answering what questions I get when I'm back tomorrow 5/14!]

[Update #2: I have fixed the link above! Sorry! I was out in Southern OR a day longer than I intended, so I may be a little slower answering any submitted questions than I wanted to be.]