Daniel woke up before his alarm went off, which was rare for him. He lay on his bed for a while, wondering what was different, before he heard a scuttling noise at his bedroom door. Still a little sleepy, Daniel slowly got up off the bed, yawning as he went to open the door. As he did, he was met by a pair of beady black compound eyes staring at him from ankle height.

  Daniel stared at it blearily for a moment, wondering what it could want. Oh right, it was breakfast time. Sighing lightly, the young man took a tentative step over the creature towards the kitchen. The creature followed behind him as he walked, and he scratched his side while he thought about what he needed to do at work today.

  Opening the fridge, Daniel inspected the contents. He reached out to a pouch of energy gel, but stopped before he touched it. While energy gel was nutritious, it would be better to have a varied diet.

  He decided to take 2 eggs, 1 for him and 1 for the creature. He cracked one open into a small bowl and leaned down to put it on the floor. The creature eyed it warily, inspecting the bowl for a few moments before tentatively poking its proboscis into the yolk. Daniel took a pan out and some cooking oil, before lighting the stove. As he waited for it to heat up, he watched the creature as it slowly drained the egg from the bowl. Maybe it was just him, but it seemed less energetic than usual.

  After breakfast, it was back to the usual routine, though thanks to the creature waking him up a little earlier, he could afford to take it a little easier today. Daniel took a long shower, shaved his stubble, and carefully combed his hair. Soon enough, he was by the door putting his shoes on. What remained of the door, anyway. Where there once was a solid wooden barrier, Daniel had taped a flattened cardboard box in its place, and slid Samanth’s blue Esky in front of it to shore up the gap on the bottom. It did the job, for the most part, it was just a little awkward to use.

  Daniel slid the Esky out of the way and bent the cardboard open, creating a gap for him to go through. Before he left, he turned to look at the creature. He had to scan the room a few times to find it – it had hidden itself well in the shadows of the kitchen counter, silently staring at him at the doorway.

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  “I might be back late. Don’t mess up my house too much, ok?” He told it.

  He knew that people usually left their pets outside for that very reason. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t exactly do anything to stop it from entering his house, given the state his door was in. And besides, what was there to mess up? Daniel’s eyes tracked over the carpet of his living room over to the pieces of his shattered TV. He’d cleaned up the smaller pieces with the vacuum, and he’d bagged them up by the ‘door’. He would need to deal with the larger chunks differently, however. He’d have to do that when he got back, after he called the landlord about the door.

  The young man sighed, reaching up and over the cardboard to stick the tape back to the doorframe on the other side. And then he made the slow journey to work.

  ----------------------------------

  It was business as usual at the business, which was to say that it was busy. The start of the month was less stressful than the end of it, but there was still a fair amount of work to do, as well as outstanding tasks that hadn’t been finished yet.

  “Where are those reports, Daniel?”

  “Daniel, can you give me 20 photocopies of these?”

  “Hey, we got a team meeting in 15 minutes.”

  The work piled on and Daniel worked diligently to complete it, but try as he might, he couldn’t focus completely on his work like usual. His thoughts kept wandering back home. He wondered how the creature was settling in to his apartment. He wondered how much of a mess it had made.

  Maybe this was the experience of having a pet, Daniel reflected, as the meeting went on and on. That didn’t really feel right, but wasn’t exactly wrong. He didn’t want to keep it as one, and it was smarter than most any animal he’d seen. But he was feeding and housing it, after all.

  The day wore on and Daniel saved a draft proposal which he hadn’t made much progress on, he sighed and massaged his forehead. He had quite the backlog to get through, but he found it hard to concentrate when he knew what would be waiting for him at home. To be perfectly fair to the creature, its destructive power seemed to be well below the intruders they’d had last night. He would probably come home to an intact apartment. Probably.

  Daniel frowned and started typing faster.