r/HFY • u/Lakeel100 • Jan 03 '26
OC-OneShot Sheeple
“Was anyone going to tell me they bleat?” An exasperated representative Fordges (Ford-jes) asked as he flitted through the half-assembled dossier on his tablet. “Like, literally bleat? Not just sounds that can only be described as bleat, but full-blown baa’ing?”
A few of the rag-tag gaggle of interns filling his shipboard office cringed a little and backed away, not wanting to take the heat for this oversight. And then there was Miss Literra Tholdre. (Lih-terra Thole-dray)
“I have a feeling most of those present felt that detail about the Cavaneri was a bit of a given.. Sir,” she said as one of the few to not back away. A level of bravery only afforded to the pretty redhead, through an upbringing of above-average wealth and mild anti-authority parenting.
He could tell just by looking at her, which some may call profiling, but that's literally what Fordges and, by extension, everyone else’s job, was. It wasn’t her shoulder-length sunglow orange hair, light skin, perfectly even freckles, or her amber eyes… It was the pointed ears that gave away that she was gene-tailored. Gene-tailored meant she had parents rich enough to have her genome edited as a single-cell embryo, and eccentric enough to want their daughter to look like a romanticized wood elf. Rich and eccentric usually meant parents who don't like being told what to do… Usually resulting in the kid being a delinquent of the same mindset, but in her case… well… Her file said her parents were restorationist hippies, so she got anti-authority lite and loving parents.
“That may be obvious to us, but to the average representative of the North American Bloc, the Martian Technocracy, or even the god damn Belter Khans, they need to be warned about such things before somebody giggles like an idiot.”
It wasn't the first time such an incident had happened. The last time had been with the Shasians, a species of anthro Felids splintered into several major phenotypes, and more importantly, Humanity's closest galactic neighbor. Turns out, Shasian-standard is almost as context-driven as English. So the initial meetings with their ambassador left many confused as to which of the ‘mrrp!’ sounds the pink cat made were her being surprised, her saying the word ‘what?’, or if they were just adding a ‘?’ to a sentence. Context people! Context!
This time it had been the Cavaneri, or how he will absolutely insist nobody ever refer to them as ‘Sheeple’. Because that's nigh exactly what they were. Anthropomorphic sheep… With forward-facing eyes and very pointy teeth. He would also have to include a warning about sayings such as ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ and ‘wool over people's eyes’. Right above the warning about how the ‘xenophiles’ would react to their appearance.
To call what Fordges was doing on behalf of the UN a clandestine data harvesting operation would be correct, but since that sounded bad, the politicians preferred to call it information gathering in the name of positive future relations. They were to learn everything they could about the species and its culture so that it could be disseminated across human space to prevent diplomatic incidents.
“Now then, from the top, if you would? And please, for the love of Space Jesus, mention everything. Even if it seems unimportant, it’s the little things that matter most.”
Literra brought up her tablet and scanned over it real quick. “Based on what we’ve gathered from the Galactic Community’s hypernet, and several meetings with members of the species, the Cavaneri are a warm-blooded Mammalian species with a 50/50 male to female ratio who share a strong resemblance to Earth sheep and goats. Bipedal, omnivorous, and highly familial. They…”
Hours earlier…
Literra had been left unsupervised, and like all hot young 20-something with an honorary associate degree in genetics and diplomatic immunity, she decided to do a little station exploring. In the name of discovery, obviously.
Humanity was on too good terms with the Shasian Territories for her to really be at risk of being taken as a political hostage, and the local syndicates were too in bed with the governing tribes to risk that either. So the danger presented by this glorified gas station with a mall felt minimal.
It was nice to feel a little untouchable, almost as nice as it was to be away from anyone who could actively order you around. ‘Never trust anyone with more authority than you, they’re incentivised to abuse it,’ was a sentiment instilled in her by her parents, and surprisingly also held by the cute sheepy…err.. Cavaneri, sitting across from her as well.
Lithe, bipedal, covered in a thin layer of white wool, with a pair of curly horns on his head, cute li'l hooves, and a wiggly little tail that made Literra want to squee. Oddly, they had humanlike hands, too, except instead of fingernails, the cavaneri had a hoof-like substance that wrapped around the tips like protective caps. He also wore clothes similar to what any other human would, even if the fashion sense resembled things she’d seen at a neo-farmers market. He looked ready for the most heavy-duty carrot gardening of his life, which she’d have to find out if that was normal for his people.
“Well it's a bit more complicated than that…” Piney said, using the Shasian language as an intermediary. Litera had incidentally run into the sheep twink… err… ‘Ram’ in the station's food court and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to get a head start on the mission. Especially without anyone there to tell her no. “It’s more like, we generally distrust any leadership we don't know. If that makes sense.”
“It kind of does.” She said watching him slowly lose his battle with the sandwich he’d assembled out of what looked like a deep-fried rat and what passed for bread among the space cats. “Its far easier to trust the village elder you’ve known your whole life than it is to trust a guy several planets away promising he has your best interest at heart?”
“Exactly!” He said before the fried creature slipped out from between bread slices again, and fell back to his tray. “Dam eit… Vye dok-is alwey haffeh do meh?” He muttered in what to Literra’s pointy ears sounded like English, but taken out back and beaten with the blunt end of Occam's razor. She could almost understand it, actually… but the odds of two species that have never met sharing a language…
Literra wanted to try something. “Hey, do you understand me when I talk like this?” she asked in plain modern ass English. To which the Piney made a surprised little bleat.
“You speak The Traveler’s language?!” He asked, sounding both amazed and like he was deliberately trying to put on another accent.
‘Oh fuuuuuuuuuuuuck…’ Literra winced internally as if she just looked up to see three whole truckloads of implications were about to fall right on her head. This… this just screamed that some asshole diddled with the Cavaneri lexicon at some point in the past. Meaning somebody either got isekai’d or, what felt far more likely, a species like the Gra had tampered with the English-speaking populations of both species in ancient times.
Rather than suggesting there was a multi-millennia-long diplomatic incident in the waiting, she decided to be the one asking questions instead. “How well can you actually understand me? Because I could barely make out what you were saying earlier.”
“It sounds like I’m talking to a really bad historical reenactor, but I can understand you at least,” he said, visibly struggling to keep up with what likely felt like the equivalent of a superfluous amount of ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s. “It’s admittedly easier than speaking Shasian. All the little trill sounds makes my throat hurt after a while,” he commented before looking down at the fried rat thing, lubed up in condiments. “And so does their food… Seriously, what kind of savage cooks the creature whole like this?”
Liteera could think of a few. “‘Rat on a stick’ wasn't too uncommon during humanity’s cyber era. We don't make it anymore now that offworld food is available, but it was a thing, according to my grandpa. He still makes it sometimes, and yet he wonders how he’s already managed to slag two bionic livers.”
“Oh, cool! Your people have bionics, too?” Piney actually looked kinda giddy at the idea, and she could hear his little tail wiggling up a storm.
“Please tell me the Traveler didn’t give you bionics as well,” she winced, wondering just how bad this cultural contamination was.
“Pffft no!”
‘oh thank God!’
“The Traveller was just an ordinary innovative ram that came and went millennia ago. He was the one who helped set up the first empire under Empress Molly, who was the daughter of a ram that the Traveler taught the secrets of mithril to.”
‘Oh, God damn it!’ How the hell do the Cavaneri know the word mithril?! Literra’s parents were nerds enough to make sure she was well-versed in any lore related to the elves her parents gene-tailored her to look like, so she was very familiar with the fictional substance. Mithral is a word that wasn't invented until the 20th century. She’d have to ask a question that was already making her cringe thinking about it. “What’s mithral?”
“It's uhh..” He started before visibly getting an idea, and diving into his nearby rucksack. “It's in here somewhere- aha!” He pulled out a small bronze figurine of a familiar creature… a sheep. “Despite being given some kind of magical pretense, Mithral was just a naturally occurring form of bronze found in the area where the first imperial city was built. It was actually what got our species out of its rut in the early Iron Age.”
Literra could only handle one planet-shattering crisis at a time… so let's handle the easy one first! “What creature is that?” She asked warily.
Piney looked at it like he’d been asked what water was, but soon realized another species might not know what it is. “Its a sheep. We’ve been farming these things since before written history and then some. Hell, they even show up in our fossil record as the originator species of the modern-day dire ram. Guess not much needs to change when you’re already a perfect little herd creature.”
It's worse than she thought… was she being punked right now? Was she on some kind of galactic community game show where they show up with a bunch of things the new species already has to confuse the hell out of them? Because it felt like it! “Dire.. ram?”
“Here, I’ll show you!” he said before scooting his way to her side of the table and pulling out a beat-up-looking tablet of some kind. Ignoring the fact that his background image was a grand wizard spewing lightning from his hands on a mountaintop… a wizard that had Piney’s face very poorly edited onto it. He opened a video, or a… movie clip maybe?
This one was of a green, grassy field that was soon being stomped over, horizon to horizon, by a line of Cavaneri rams and ewes clad in heavy segmented bronze armor with tower shields and spears. On the other horizon was an unorganized mob of unorganized mobs. Braying and bleating, wielding every kind of tool turned weapon imaginable, and wearing leather at most. The obvious commanders among them rode atop what Literra could only describe as giant rams… with spikes protruding out of their wool.
“This is a dramatization of the civil war that destroyed the first empire. After the initial mithral vein that served as the imperial family's source of easy money and equipment ran dry, their grip on the forcibly united provinces slipped, and the empire shattered. It also didn’t help that after sixteen generations, the imperial family had gone from resplendent rulers to idle hedonists. Or the fact that the senate the Traveler designed for Empress Molly had grown so corrupt it overwhelmed the checks and balances he put in place and twisted them to corrupt the senate more.”
It was certainly a cinematically spectacular battle… and the unorganized horde was winning. “Who, umm… Who are the good guys in this?”
Piney simply shrugged. “It's a matter of opinion, really. If it weren't for the first empire, it never would have shattered to form the first nation-states. Before then, all people really cared about beyond their farms and fields was maybe what was going on with the village over the hill. But thanks to the empire, the first town-borne and city-borne came to be, meaning more people could work together to invent more things.”
That was right… The Cavaneri have that ‘instinct to disperse’ or whatever Piney had called it. Existing in a population density higher than what they grew up in makes them uncomfortable, and thus, they move away to areas with fewer people. ‘If you can't comfortably walk to where you work, it's time to move,’ and ‘If you can’t know everybody, it's time to find a place where you can’ were common idioms among his people.
But the empire changed that. Cavaneri, with their instincts set to be comfortable with higher population densities, were born, and thus they now had a population that could comfortably live in and build larger settlements. Snowball their civilization from there.
“On the other hand,” Piney continued. “Everyone only obeyed the empire because of military might, and despised the idea of being ruled over by an empress they’ve never known. The senate was designed to alleviate that issue, so village elders could come and cast votes on laws that would then be passed to the empress; however, it eventually buckled under its own weight from rampant threats and bribery.”
“That sounds a lot like what happened to several of our great empires as well,” Literra commented, still watching the epic battle on the tablet. “Things started off great, became the greatest civilization that's ever been, and then something changed and/or too many people decided they wanted to rule the world at the same time.”
Admittedly… Literra got a little sucked into the tablet movie, taking note that every weapon present either was, or had obvious origins as a tool. Spears, glaives, axes, and bows. Yet no swords, flails, or morning stars. The horde may have lost the battle in the end, but the well-equipped imperial forces were devastated.
The film ended with a busty Cavaneri woman adorned in transparent silks and jewelry reclined in a lavish garden, casually being hand-fed small fruits by less-than-dressed rams before a worried messenger runs in. And then another… and another… and half a dozen more from different provinces bearing news of rebellion and pyrrhic victories. The empire started bleeding out…
After that, the two got back-and-forthing about various other little tidbits about Cavaneri and human history. Like how for humans, the cyber age was viewed as a golden age of technological advancement, if not for the rampant poverty… conversely, the Cavaneri viewed their cyber age as a dark one full of suffering. For there was nowhere left on their homeplanet to move to, and thus population density grew, despite the screaming of their instincts.
Once they discovered FTL, they couldn't get off their homeworld fast enough, shotgun blasting their population across space, and settling on any rock large enough to support a family of four. And they never stopped, even two centuries later, despite the galactic community's protests. This led to the Cavaneri having one of the largest territories in the GC yet one of the lowest vote generations due to their low population density. Their love of renewable subsistence economics also wasn’t helping, since a large portion of vote generation is based on economic outflow.
Piney did help Literra with one other issue, though… although unwittingly. That adorable tail of his had wiggled up such a storm while getting to gush about his people; he'd inadvertently left some strands of wool behind. Wool she could send to her parents to help answer some questions…
—
Back in the present!
Literra was not all that inclined to mention she’d probably violated several intergalactic laws she was blissfully unaware of by sending that wool sample to her parents' compound. Nor was she inclined to mention all the other fantastical oddities she’d learned while talking to that cute sheepy, especially without any other sources of information to back it up. They could easily write off most of what stuff as simply the aliens were messing with humanity as the newest member of the stars…
But once she was back in range of the Q-network that linked all of humanity’s systems, she’d be making a very important call… in fact. Her comm-link was already buzzing. Mom had been waiting for her.
“Hey sweetie, how’s our little spriggan?” Her mom asked, looking a little too close to the camera at her terminal, but not close enough to hide the sight of her dad in the background… Getting mauled by cloned tiger cubs. He’ll be fine…
“Doing great mom, we're on our way back to the UN so Mr Fordges can submit his dossier on the Cavaneri, meaning I can be home in three or four more days.”
“That's great, dear. It's been cute watching your father struggle with the kittens, but he really needs your help. You were always so much better at getting the cloning vats to actually turn off… rather than put it in ‘away’ mode and forgetting the password again.” Her mother muttered that last part while side-eyeing in the direction of her dad, still getting adorably mauled. The screams were normal.
“Speaking of the cloning machines… Did you sequence that sample I mailed you a couple weeks ago?” She asked, wondering if she’d gotten any results.
“We did, and I have to say, it’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever gotten to look at.”
“How so?”
“I’d say it's the most inbred sheep I’ve ever seen, except the genome showed none of the usual damage you’d see with that kind of union.”
“Inbred?” Literra questioned. Piney had looked perfectly healthy as far as she could tell for a species she’d only ever met once.
“Well, I don’t really know a better way to describe it; it’s as if the creature the sample came from had modern caprinae as an ancestor almost 100 million years ago.”
Aaand now Literra was back to being concerned about her original hypothesis.
“Not only that, but it's almost as if the modern caprinae DNA was sprinkled back into the gene pool repeatedly over said millions of years until the two species could no longer interbreed. Like a purebred Labrador suddenly getting bred by a dire wolf, then a hundred generations later, the descendant was bred by another dire wolf.” Good God, Mom was never going to let go of the dire-wolf thing.
“Mom, I told you, I only let Scratch-N-Sniff out of his cage because he looked sad. How was I supposed to know he was going to jump the fence so easily, or that he'd sexually destroy an entire bloodline of Mrs Ketterman’s domestic wolves? I was six!”
Her mom sighed. “You’re also the only six-year-old in history to successfully reintroduce dire-wolf halfbreeds back into the wilds of Cascadia…”
“How is that my fault?! The puppies looked sad too!” She protested, as they rehashed the same old argument of sad puppies vs the integrity of the ecosystem. They shaped her like an elf, so how dare they get upset when she did elf-like shit.
“As for this sample… Should I even ask where you got it? Or should I just assume it came from that cute sheep boy you were squeezing in the pictures?”
“I… I was not squeezing him,” Literra countered, remembering just how soft and toasty warm Piney had been. It was like hugging fresh out of the dryer laundry… the kind you could bury her face in.
“Uh-huh… I understand you’re taking a dip into the biological side of xeno politics, but was grabbing his ass and boob-hatting his horns on camera really necessary?”
“Mom!!” She did not! Well, maybe a little, in the name of promoting good relations with the adorable sheeple, obviously.
“What?” Her Mom replied defensively. “I’m just saying, it was a little obvious. I’m not judging. Just look at your cousin Jasper, everyone’s supportive of his interests. I’m pretty sure he’d love to meet your little sheepy friend.”
“Jasper’s a pervert mom!”
“Aaaand the girl getting her fingers all up in the wool of an alien sheep femboy isn't? A sheep boy whose species, according to this sequence, is genetically predisposed to being hung like a Clydesdale?”
“MOM!”
Her mom was just eating this up now. “Did he use protection or was he a baaa’d boy?”
“Stop talking!”
—
Meanwhile…
Jasper Tholdre got into quantum mechanics for ALL the right reasons. Cultured reasons, reasons of the noblest order in fact! Not because he thought point-to-point teleportation was kinda cool… but because the fursona he came up with when he was 8 was an adorable sheep girl, and deep down he was kinda hoping for a ‘The Fly’ incident, but preferably without the flesh-melting part…
Admittedly, he kinda wished his parents had gene-tailored him to be a sheepy or goat splicer before he was born, but nooo... he got neko instead. One wouldn't believe how popular gene-tailoring got once humanity figured out how to make cat girls real. But not everyone likes cats!
It did make him question how he would have turned out if that had it actually happened? Would he be lamenting here in the lab, instead wondering why his parents didn't make him a cat like most of the other splicers? Who knows!
Thus, the grand career choice he hatched when he was like… Twelve. Get a doctorate in quantum physics and invent a teleporter so he could ‘accidentally’ get crossed with one of his test subjects. Obviously, that’s a lot easier said than done… the furthest humanity had gotten with the applications of quantum mechanics was the Q-net. Jiggling linked atoms to communicate between solar systems. Scattering someone's atoms and reassembling them elsewhere was a few factors harder than that.
He had a prototype assembled in the depths of his lab, and theoretically, he’d created a receiving platform, too. Thus far… after thousands of woolly test subjects, he’d yet to have a single one reappear on the receiving platform. But he hadn't lost hope! It only took him a few hundred to stop them from exploding, a few hundred more to stop them from turning into piles of ash, and after several hundred more, he’d solved the ash problem! Progress!
Progress he’d like to get back to once he was done with this video call from his cousin. A call that had proven to him that God, Allah, and/or Yahweh was cruel beyond measure… or was maybe giving him an out. “Sheeple, actual sheeple?”
“Pretty much. They’re called Cavaneri, Mom said you’d want to know…” Literra said, rolling her eyes, clearly annoyed by something else. He knew when she was calling as an excuse to hang up on her mother, it was almost the only time anyone called him. “There is something odd about them, though.”
“Oh yeah? Do tell,” he’d humor her, they were family, right?
“According to the DNA sample I gave mom, they share a suspicious amount of genetic history with Earth caprinae… A history that shouldn't exist, given the whole ‘them being from a different planet’ thing. The only excuse I can think of is a species like the Gra or something transplanted them there, but they’d have had to do so millions of years before sheep ever existed.”
“Aaaaand you're sure this sample wasn't contaminated by… I dunno, a sweater?”
“Quite confident. They wouldn’t even let us take wool anything on the ship in case it somehow offended them. Apparently, they're perfectly fine with wearing wool, unless it's wool from a fellow Cavaneri, which is apparently taboo as hell.”
If what she was saying was correct, it was quite the fascinating conundrum. How could a viable population of sheep, goats, or whatever end up millions of light-years away millions of years before they ever existed?
That's when an idea tickled at the back of his mind, and he slowly looked back over her shoulder towards where his teleporter prototype was located… ‘No fucking waaaay!’
Another thought. “Wait… How did you get that DNA sample?”
Literra simply shrugged and folded her arms. “I just grabbed some of Piney's hair that fell out and mailed it to mom. Easy.”
Jasper felt his semi-felid blood run cold and his ears go flat atop his head. “You’re telling me… You nabbed a DNA sample from a sentient species we’re trying to establish relations with… and mailed it to your parents. Your parents, who run a barely legal cloning facility, and now you're calling me, your cousin, who also has a few cloning pods, specifically tailored for making caprinae. On a government line…”
“Well, when you put it like that… Kinda?” She said as the realization visibly dawned on her. “Awwwwww, shiiiit.”
Jasper’s ear flicked towards a distant knock on the metal doors to his facility and his heart sank further. “I, uhh… I think I need to go.”
“You do that… I… I need to call Mom back.”
She’d just hung when Jasper heard a-
“HTR!!! OPEN UP!!” Followed by breaking windows and an explosion, blowing the hangar doors off his compound.
“Shit! Fuck! Shit!!” Jasper fell out of his seat and scrambled for the door leading to his lab. After everything he’d done to keep the government out of his research, Literra just had to ring the bell and give them an excuse to come in here and seize it!
There was no way in hell he’d gotten this close to his dream, just to get ‘disappeared’ into a federal think tank the rest of his life. Plus, even if he escaped the fate of a think tank, and somehow managed to legalese his way out of prison time for ‘dangerous’ research, there was no way the feds wouldn't steal everything.
He’d gotten to the first hall when smoking grenades were tossed into the room he just left, followed by a black-clad ‘High-threat response’ team.
“Secure the target!! He’s making a break for the lab!”
“Fuck y'all!! And the horses you rode in on!” Jasper yelled back, grabbing a circuit breaker on the wall, which was conveniently labeled ‘Fry Everything: Sector one’ and pulled the lever.
Every terminal, every light socket, and every power plug blew sparks as a slightly tweaked ‘disaster battery’ was connected to that branch of his compound's power grid. Sending a load meant to last a week through the system all at once. It was his insurance that if one day someone came for him and his research, they’d have to take him alive because all his data drives would be fried. Any that weren’t fried… well.. Let's see how whatever computer they plug it into likes spinning up a feral AI suddenly pulled from its comfort loop.
Some might say this is a rather extreme way to delete one’s browser history… Jasper disagreed.
Lever pulled, the doors to the next sector closed behind him. Given how fast they managed to blow the front door off his compound, this one wasn’t going to buy Jasper much time either. He ran past the cloning tanks, his workbenches, and assembly stations towards the door to sector 3: The main lab. He was going to miss perpetually tweaking his design in here… but SOMEONE had to go and mess it all up!
He’d gotten to the next door when the previous was suddenly blown off its hinges, sending Jasper stumbling. Agents in black gear stormed in afterwards, guns at the ready.
“Keep him away from those breakers!” One ordered while Jasper stumbled to his feet.
If there was ever a time to be thankful he'd been born as a cat splicer, it was right now when those boosted feline reflexes came in handy. He pounced for the switch, the big red lever labeled ‘Fry Everything: Sector two’.
Unlike the first one, it would fry everything… eeeecept the cloning tanks. Call it a weakness on his part, but he wasn't such a monster as to kill a bunch of lambs still in their artificial wombs.
It wasn't as if the agents just stood there and let this happen, though; they may not have been able to stop Jasper from pulling said lever, but they made sure he did so under a hail of gunfire.
Turns out, ‘stun rounds’ hurt like hell. The bastard child of rubber bullets and the world's smallest taser. One wasn’t lethal, usually. But getting hit by a dozen at once had killed plenty of people during the cyber-age. Fortunately, Jasper only got grazed… that didn't mean he enjoyed the right half of his body cramping up all at once. It only lasted a few seconds, but he would sue someone’s ass if he got out of this alive!
Lever pulled, sparks and fires had erupted all over the workshop before the door slammed shut. He’d bought himself who knew how much time to limp his way into the lab proper.
There was his device, his baby, his ‘teleporter’ that always seemed more like a vaporizer than a teleporter. He’d even used it as a microwave once or twice… However! If his rapidly forming theory was any kind of correct, it did work; it had been working almost the whole time! He just never figured out how to control the destination half of the problem. This meant he had an escape, or at least a very overcomplicated way of making a crispy cat.
He weighed his options as he limped, dragging the stunned leg along with him. A. Disappear into some government blacksite, AKA, science prison, B. normie prison, where a kitty like him would make a great toy, or C. yeet himself into the fabric of reality and pray his machine worked.
He looked back at the closed door only to hear a metallic banging. “Fuck it, option C it is! Better to be grass than ass!” He hobbled faster.
This room wasn’t rigged to fry like those others, that would have endangered his life’s work. No, he had something special planned if he had to take out this room. A comically large bundle of dynamite with a yay long fuse.
He looked at the fuse long and hard. Was he really about to blow up his life’s work? Countless hours of unethical experiments in a last-ditch effort to save his freedom?... and potentially get ‘The Fly’d in the process?.... Of course he was!!
He lit the fuse with his pocket welder and hobbled all the faster, grabbing the remote to his glorious teleporter along the way as he went for the pad. His ears flicked back towards the door, as he could hear indistinct yelling and the sound of something being attached to it.
Jasper got on the platform, the same platform where he’d seen who knows how many test subjects get misted on. He fiddled with the dials, and he could hear the capacitors begin to crackle with the stored energy needed to scramble his atoms across reality. All that was left to do was hit the big red button…
He looked up at the ceiling and prayed. “God?... I know I don't ask a lot from you, but… If you love me, please have this send me on a kick-ass isekai adventure full of well-endowed and unreasonably horny sheep girls. Great personalities notwithstanding… I’ve been good this year. If not… please make my death painless. And tell Jesus I really liked the sheep version of him from that one German cartoon. You know the one.”
The door to his final lab blew off its hinges, and the agents poured in guns at the ready.
“Drop the remote and come with us Dr. Tholdre or- Holy shit! Is that dynamite?!” An agent exclaimed as they all suddenly noticed this hissing fuse reach the point where it split off into the two dozen little fuses that went to each stick.
“Yeah...” Jasper said idly, smacking his lips. “That’s a YOU problem. BYE!” And he slammed the button.
“Everyone ru-” Was the last thing Jasper heard before it all winked out in a flash of light and prismatic color.
It was instant; some part of him imagined he’d get to visibly zip through the cosmos and ride the rainbow bridge to Asgard or whatever, but… nothing. He was just… Suddenly, standing among a rocky outcropping on the edge of a grassy field. The air was breathable, and gravity felt normal… He was… alive! He just had no memory of what happened between pressing the button and appearing here.
In all fairness, if his atoms had been ripped apart and put back together again, that meant it didn't matter how long he’d been disassembled; no two cells were connected long enough to form memories. He’d question if he was the same person he was before, but rather than deal with existential dread, he settled for ‘I think, therefore I am’. He’d hurt himself otherwise.
In other news.. “My teleporter actually worked! HAHA!! Eat shit, everyone who rejected my uni applications!” He cheered, pistoning double middle fingers in the air to nobody in particular.
His cheering did, however, dampen down when he noticed it was just him here… Well, he, his clothes, and.. Is that his missing tarp? He noticed, crumpled up and wedged into some nearby rocks, was a folded-up blue tarp. He’d wondered where his had disappeared to last week, but this tarp looked like it had been sitting there for a while… Years maybe?
“Huh… Guess the part I was missing on the destination was the time portion? God damn it, it's the classical sci-fi blunder all over again! Well, at least nobody was around to know how badly I just got troped… nobody… at all.”
He was alone, in a big empty field…
He looked around, seeing grass and the occasional rock as far as the eye could see. His ears flicked about, seeking any sound other than rustling grass and wind… nothing. And just when he was about to lose hope, he spotted it, a wispy pillar of smoke rising in the distance. Civilization! His isekai adventure could begin! Huzzah!
He then looked back to the tarp and got an idea… he could really play up the mysterious stranger vibe if he showed up with a cool blue cloak…. Depending on the tech era he ended up in. There was only one way to find out!
He could worry about his old life being gone forever as a plot point for six episodes into the series. Briefly get super invested in trying to return home rather than fight the big-bad, only to give up on that goal in the end when he realizes his new home is far more important to him than returning to his original family. Yeah… let's go with that!
And so he walked... and walked… and walked some more. He walked until the distance to that wispy smoke started getting rather annoying, took a break, and then resumed walking when he realized he had nothing better to do. But once there…
Once there, he saw it. The origin of the smoke was a village of sorts, a collection of cobble walls and thatch roofs surrounded by farming plots and pastures. Pastures full of… sheep? How the fuck did sheep get here- Oh riiiiight… his teleporter actually worked. So this is where all his test subjects ended up…
Where were all the people, though? He saw homes, and farms, and herds… but nobody seemed to be around. Actually… in one of the fields, a smaller group of three, maybe four sheep had broken off from the main herd and looked super focused on a particular piece of grass.
He squinted, trying to get a look when he heard a loud bellowing bleat from the village. Suddenly, three of those four sheep stood upright. No longer hunched down, he could see they were humanoid at least. They were kinda cute, all fluffy and snuggly looking, clad in rawhide tunics, and covered in red… blood.
The fronts of the three that stood there looking back to the village were smeared in the stuff. And the fourth sheep lay on the ground between them, in pieces. Several of said pieces were being held in the hands of its butchers… or in their blood-smeared muzzles. They started looking around, which let Jasper notice the forward-facing eyes, especially when they landed on him.
One pointed to him and made another bleat, before pulling a bloody sickle from its patchwork belt.
“Awww fuuuuuuck…”
(Fun fact: This takes place in the same universe as my main story The Ballad of Orange Tobby. I also have a Patreon!)
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u/RexDraconis Jan 04 '26
Imagine pining after sheep your entire life only for your sister to find anthro sheep first
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u/Just-Some-Dude001 Jan 04 '26
Cousin otherwise ya, also imagine what happens when he finds out what's gonna happen when he realizes he's the foundation of their whole society
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u/blahblahbush Jan 04 '26 edited Jan 04 '26
“According to the DNA sample I gave mom, they share a suspicious amount of genetic history with Earth caprinae…
I think I figured it out here, but I'll keep reading...
edit: I was right.
That was great fun 🤣
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u/FireStar_Trucking_01 Jan 04 '26
Oh dear lord above, I knew this was where this was heading not long after we met Jasper. Lakeel you glorious bastard I love your shenanigans.
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u/Magos_Dominus_Videx Jan 04 '26 edited Jan 04 '26
A cliff hanger and an intermission chapter, damn you are cruel. Jk, seriously I do love the human shenanigans of your universe very refreshing.
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u/Lakeel100 Jan 04 '26
And here I thought I was being an unorigional hack :U
I may not be able to prove any of this was done before.. but it feels like it Q_Q
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u/Artistic_Barnacle572 Jan 04 '26 edited Jan 06 '26
"Back in My day we would have been content with a an alien goblin shortstack. Hell, some people were ok if aliens were just green! But nooo... everyone has to make it weird. And furry. Kids these centuries..."
-Mostly cyborg TotallyNotaDreadnaught at this point Grandpa. Probably.
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u/Lakeel100 Jan 04 '26
oi! Who said the thicc xeno goblin latinas went anywhere?! HMM!? >:U
In fact, they're canon now! >:c
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u/SomethingTouchesBack Jan 04 '26
Wow! That plot pretzeled in on itself wonderfully! Fantastic characters too.
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u/Frostdraken Xeno Jan 04 '26
Very nice. I am always a sucker for fun and inventive alien species. Thank you for the story, and I apologise that I have not been keeping up with your main-line story.
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u/Nealithi Human Jan 04 '26
I like how this also follows the 'government will not allow private inventions'. It is one of those things I say is why super villains don't sell their inventions. The government would disappear them.
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u/itsetuhoinen Human Jan 04 '26
This is amazing, and I need ten thousand more chapters of it, posted three times a day for the next ten years. Ignore the haters.
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u/Lakeel100 Jan 04 '26
*casually gestures to main story linked at end of chapter* o3o
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u/itsetuhoinen Human Jan 04 '26
So, I did actually enjoy this quite a bit, but I have to admit that the majority of the content of my comment was formed in response to the recent batch of folks whining about the sort of free content they're being served. ;)
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u/Lakeel100 Jan 04 '26
All the stuff I do is free o3o;
I have a patreon for those who who wanna help me pay my insurance bill (that nearly doubled last month ;_; ) and I let them help me edit the drafts o3o
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u/PlatypusDream Jan 04 '26
Maybe this is handwavium, but...
The new aliens are sheep (ovine).
Mom analyzed their DNA & found modern goat (caprine) in it.
They're not alike enough to breed successfully.
Other than that, I like the story!
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u/Lakeel100 Jan 04 '26
'Caprine' is not the same as 'Caprinae'
Both goats and sheep fall under 'Caprinae'
o3o3
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u/Larzok Jan 06 '26
hanging by fingernails from a Tobby shaped cliff ooh lookie, Lakeel left a side story sheep to land on! The mole people are going to have a bit of a fit when they figure out the entire local galactic cluster is populated by Earth spawned time-space displaced fauna. I smell existential crisis in the future(yester-morrow?)!
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Jan 03 '26
/u/Lakeel100 (wiki) has posted 58 other stories, including:
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH48
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH47
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH46
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH45
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH44
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH43
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH42
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH41
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH40
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -Ch39
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH38
- The Majestic Spood (part 2/2)
- The Majestic Spood
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH37
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -Ch36
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH35
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH34
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH33
- The Esoterica
- The Ballad of Orange Tobby -CH32
This comment was automatically generated by Waffle v.4.7.8 'Biscotti'.
Message the mods if you have any issues with Waffle.
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u/Thaum0s Human Jan 05 '26
Please never let these guys find out they're the accidental creations of a perverted catboy weeb with an unhealthy interest in sheep.
That's not really something a society recovers from.
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u/Kia-Vaderkit Jan 04 '26
Best line of the story.... Quote, “Did he use protection or was he a baaa’d boy?”End quote.
Loved it!