Lucinda awoke to warm sun beams shining across her body and face. She licked her paw and ran it through her ears before outstretching her arms then kicking out her back legs. With a wiggle of her tale she sauntered out into the communal kitchen. Her three other roommates were already stuffing their faces with the morning’s scraps. Even though it had been nearly forty years since the discovery of Compound 853 Beast Folk were still heavily discriminated against. The bigotry of the “pious” upper class had kept most Beast Folk into low paying jobs, forcing them into small communal housing units where multiple, sometimes adversarial species had to shack up together just to get by.
“Morning everyone!” Lucinda meowed.
Everyone turned and gave their versions of the same salutation before returning to their meals. Scanning the room, it was quite the motley bunch. There was Vee, a gray she wolf with the most beautiful heterochromia which left one eye nearly black while the other was a piercing green. To her right sat her boyfriend, Maxwell. Max was a moose-folk, and he and Vee’s relationship had started adversarial, circumstance had brought them ever closer, eventually putting away the differences brought to them through nature and fell deeply in love. Finally, sitting atop the counter was Frankie, a gender-queer iguana-kin. Each of them chowing on food that Vee had scavenged in local dumpsters; Vee tried her best to make sure that everyone got enough food that fit their dietary restrictions. Lucinda grabbed a bottle of stale meow mix and poured it into her bowl with a sigh of boredom.