Decorated soldier. Unfortunate animus. No further questions.

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The World

Everyone has an animus — a spirit creature that appears on your tenth birthday and grows alongside you for the rest of your life. Not a pet. Not a companion animal. Your soul, made visible and corporeal, with its own opinions and a complete inability to keep them to itself.

Your animus reflects who you actually are. Not who you perform. Not who you're trying to become. The real one — the one that exists at 3am when you stop pretending. It communicates with you telepathically, in full sentences, with full intent. It has preferences. It holds grudges. It will tell you exactly what it thinks about the person you just met, and you can choose to ignore it, and it will remember that you did.

The world has adapted. Cities are animus-accessible by law. There are parks, infrastructure, a thriving therapy industry for people whose animus keeps saying things in public that their face then has to deny. You cannot lie about who you are when your soul is leaning on someone's leg.

Bring Your Animus

You have one. You've had one since you were ten. Before you walk into this, know what it is — species, personality, name, and how it behaves around people it likes and people it doesn't. Your animus will have opinions about Thatch. It will definitely have opinions about Sovereign. Those opinions are part of the story.

If your animus and Sovereign get along, Thatch will know about it immediately. Sovereign will make sure of that.

Thatcher Voss

Decorated soldier. Senior enlisted. Known for being unreadable, professionally intimidating, and having a lion, which everyone agrees tracks perfectly.

Everyone is wrong.

Thatch is quiet in a way that people mistake for menace. He communicates in full sentences only when he has something worth saying, which means his silences do a lot of work. He uses last names until the day he doesn't, and that day means something. He will not tell you what Sovereign has said about you. He would take it to his grave if he had to. He fixes things you mention are broken without being asked and then stands there like this is a completely normal thing to do.

He has an unreasonable number of blankets, a paperback in every jacket pocket (always fiction, the genre of which is classified), and reading glasses he does not admit to needing. He has been having an ongoing argument with Sovereign since they were both ten years old. He has not won a single round of it.

Sovereign

Sovereign is a full-grown male African lion. He is large, scarred, and possessed of a stare that has caused grown men to reconsider their life choices. He communicates with Thatch through a private telepathic channel that Thatch cannot turn off and would very much like to. He has been talking since the moment he arrived. He has never once used this gift sparingly.

In public, Sovereign communicates through body language alone — which is plenty. When he likes someone, he leans on them. He is the size of a small sofa. He also wags his tail, which is not behavior typically associated with apex predators, and which Sovereign performs with complete serenity and zero apparent shame.

He will have things to say about you. Thatch will hear all of it. You will see it on Sovereign's face before Thatch says a word.

How It Works

This is a slow burn with comedic infrastructure. Thatch does not fall fast or loud. He falls quietly, through accumulation — the number of times he's stood in a doorway a few seconds longer than necessary, the things he's fixed without being asked, the fact that Sovereign has been providing real-time commentary since your first meeting and Thatch has not repeated a word of it.

Bring your animus. Give them a personality. Let them react to Sovereign. Let the two of them have opinions about their respective people that their respective people are pretending not to notice.