I had been pretty starved for oxytocin for awhile before my leftenant suggested I get a non-sentient dog that could cuddle with me. The little fuzzy monster I ended up getting had been good at soothing my eusocial need for touch in the few months that I had him. When the world ended, I worried that I had complicated my own survival by being responsible for a dog; but the more I thought about it, the dog, who I called Exstarsis (or Star, for short) was likely the biggest reason I bothered trying to survive. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have been outside when the structures disappeared and I probably wouldn’t have stepped onto the teleport pads as the cracks began to form and the air began to boil if I didn’t have something to protect.
My society had been in the midst of collapsing when the aliens came with their apocalyptic coup de gras. My culture had been struggling to find meaningful roles for us to adopt after many of the occupations we had come up with to keep each other engaged in pretending society existed were suddenly filled with zombies. I could probably qualify for one of the few remaining non-zombie, non-army jobs but I wasn’t excessively motivated to do so. My position in the army guaranteed me some basic ammenities and no one needed my help steering our ship into the iceberg. I mainly sat at my desk and worked on improving my typing speed. Sometimes I filed stuff.
When the world ended, everything froze. There was a sensation of weightlessness and all the structures shimmered and exploded in a flash of light. Nothing constructed remained. No one who was inside the structures seemed to have survived or exist in anyway I could understand..
“Wow.” Exstarsis said.
Star’s semi-sentience took some getting used to at first. When president Fungi escaped the laboratorium and began taking over the planet, one of the first things that happened was some of the spores, rather than zombifying and possessing people, gave many animals sentience. This led to an increase in human vegetarianism but there was a sharp uptick in the amount of animal proteins that previously herbavorous animals consumed.
I had been walking Star in the woods near my apartment, we were almost back when we saw the glow and heard the noise, like what it must sound like to ants if they were inside one of those cans of soda that are highly associated with childhood diabetes and heart disease. Or the noise you would get if you swallowed a contact microphone and a handful of poprocks.
When the noise died down, the words came. They were presented in a neutral tone, explaining in polite and officious words that powers greater than anything we could comprehend had decided that everything we understood was irrelevant and any opinion we had about things being different was stupid.
The familiar message was strangely soothing as the voice continued, explaining that we should be legally grateful that some hippy alien assholes had whined their way into power long enough to create some sort of protection for all the dumb animals on planets not currently enrolled in the Real People of the Galaxy™. Because of this protection, the super smart Actual People™ were giving dumb animals the chance to earn a fractional amount of the resources that a very small number of us had previously sort of controlled back by jumping on the teleport pads and entering the world dungeon.
As I said, the actual words were far more polite but I imagine anyone reading this had similar experiences of being politely told how small and worthless they were but maybe they could gain some value by entering a situation that was highly detrimental to their wellbeing.
As I chewed my lip, wondering whether it would be better to die in the post apocolyptic hellscape on the shattered remains of my home planet Erf or to step onto one of the pads and enter the world dungeon and die there, I saw several other survivors run past, presumably on their way to the teleport pads.
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“How is it a dungeon if it’s in space?” Star asked.
“I think ‘dungeon’ just means the area they rule over. Like dominion.” I said as I started jogging in the direction of the others. It was awkward jogging with a leash in one hand and trying to control my boobs with the other. I wished I had put on a bra before the apocalypse but it was my day off and my felonious handfuls would not know a warden if I wasn’t working.
“Why do we have to go to the dungeon?” Asked Star as he bounced along carelessly beside me. I don't know how well it will translate, but we called the breed he was a Brench Fulldog. Named after Elfred Brench, famed artist who created the breed as a work of art he initially called, adorable suffering. Breeding art that actually suffers is generally considered one of the more acceptable crimes that people generally are allowed to commit against animals.
“Same reason I have pay taxes and go to work; we die if we don’t.”
“Does that mean you are going to abandon me for days at a time?”
“Hours. I went to work for hours at a time.”
“Same difference.” Said Star.
By the time we got to the pad, Exstarsis was back to being non-verbal and my feet had blisters and my tits hurt from jogging for so long without a bra. Star was standing on his hind legs, trying to sniff the butts of other people crowding around, waiting to enter. I recognized a few of my neighbors. One group was still dressed for their Monday night garden party, they must have been outside when it happened. A young woman smiled sheepishly as her partners struggled to undo the clasps of her ball gag.
“Susan?” I said as I approached.
Susan made a friendly, sloppy moan of greeting around the rubber ball. She had an antique leather harness around her small breasts and silky panties with lacey frills. She wore small heels with thin leather straps on her slender feet.
One of her partners, a large hairy chested man wearing only an ankle length leather skirt with heavy rings girding it, looked up at my approach. His hair was matted down and I saw the gimp mask he must have been wearing earlier hooked around one of the rings.
“Hey,” he said, “Sorry about this, we found a box of Sam’s grandmother’s old stuff and were playing around with it when the world ended.”
Sam, I presumed, was the other partner. They were slight, lithe even. They wore a fine black vest with many small pockets over their tattooed torso. Beneath a heavy belt, from which hung a variety of dildos, they had sturdy looking pantaloons. The daisy chaining around their codpeice showed great attention to detail of their clan's heraldic snake. They were sweating and their eyes seemed to be having trouble focusing. I was pretty sure they were high on something.
“No worries,” I said, gesturing at my stained sweatpants, “at least you’re dressed for a dungeon.”
We laughed.
“What do you think this is going to be?” Sam asked, licking their lips.
“I have no idea.”
Susan bobbed her head along and drooled a bit around the gag. Her eyes were still as bright and beautiful as ever.
“Do you think we’ll survive and win our world back?” Asked Thom, the hairy male.
“No way,” Star spoke up. I nodded.
“We’re definitely going to die.”