They're not easy to keep alive. At least, they weren't on my home planet. We were at war for a really long time. And it was still a bad idea later when a bunch of my people worked for the Lord Commander's empire.

["Lord Commander" is quite a name. Very supervillain. A little too on the nose, for an interplanetary dictator.]

It was easier on Tera Con Prime but still not a good idea.

[It was a cold, rough place, outside the warm bubble with his father, a place where people could even be executed in the street if they forgot their identification at home. It was so easy for someone to want to kill something you loved there. ]

[It was so easy for the Lord Commander himself to kill the things people loved, or demand someone kill what they loved most. And it wasn't always a pet. It was people far too often.]

[But despite the slight ominousness, Little Cato doesn't look sad or angry or anything more than a little reflective. He has the soft and unperturbed look of someone simply inured to death and ugly life in an ugly city.]

[It's not all dark, really. He even smiles as he piles more kittens on himself as he lays there on the floor. One nuzzles into the crook of his neck.]

I wonder if I can keep these guys. Or, if I can't, if I can find my own weird mutant freak to chill with me.

[They are a deeply intense ugly-cute and what edgy teenage boy doesn't want their own pet mutant?]