Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 943

Chapter 943: Does It Bite

"Asset classification," he said. "Species."

"You’re in the wrong section of your books, Inspector." Kaiden said it without any edge. "Pebble isn’t an asset, and there’s no species line for him either. Under the partnership agreement, every non-human sentient under my authority is a legal person in this country. Pebble’s a resident, same as anyone else on the roster."

Vespera produced the relevant clause from her folio and held it out to Hobbes until he took it.

Hobbes read it. Then he looked up at the resident, and the resident lowered his head through the air toward him and read him back, one long pull of breath from tie to shoes. The pull rearranged his pages and untucked the entire left side of his shirt.

Pebble sneezed, politely, and returned his head to its post.

Hobbes re-clipped his pages and tucked his shirt back in. His pen resumed as if the weather had been procedural.

"Incident record."

"None," Kaiden said. "He’s never hurt anyone here, and he’s had hundreds of strangers walking past him since sunrise."

"He shares grounds with non-awakened personnel daily. Construction crews, recruits, vendors." Hobbes turned a page forward, then back, hunting through his own forms with the first friction the day had put in him. "A person still needs a legal footprint, Mister Grey. Weight class, hazard category, containment protocols. I have no form where a citizen of this scale can live."

"If your Bureau ever writes one, I’ll fill it out the same day," Kaiden said.

There was no form. Hobbes went through the clipboard twice, front to back, and somewhere in the second pass the man visibly ran out of government.

No species code, no hazard class, no box whose ticking would make a building-sized citizen fit the code. Entire careers in his building had been spent making sure a box existed for everything the apocalypse could send through a gate, and every one of those careers had failed to imagine a hillside that loved people.

He clicked his pen twice, which from Hobbes was visible distress. Then he wrote slowly, in the margin where no box was, the only honest sentence available to him.

No applicable regulation.

"Off the record." He capped the pen, his gaze moving between the six eyes that tracked him back. "Does he bite?"

"..."

Everyone in earshot paused for a moment, visibly running the question back to make sure it had really been asked.

Does he bite?

This hulking monster created from the congregation of twenty dungeons’ worth of monsters.

Does he bite?

"He’s a guardian hound, not a purse dog," Kaiden finally replied. "He bites whatever attacks his family. Nothing else has ever managed to interest him."

Hobbes took in the scaffolding, four stories of load-rated steel with a dent in the second story shaped like affection, and wrote nothing further.

...

At one o’clock, Alexandra ambushed the federal government with lunch.

She had set a folding table apart from the recruits’ mess. A pressed tablecloth, real cutlery, one place. Hobbes stopped in front of it and did not sit.

"I’m not permitted to accept gratuities from an inspected entity."

"It isn’t a gratuity," Alexandra said, apologetic about correcting a federal officer and not remotely willing to stop. "Lunch is served to everyone on site at one o’clock, and you are on site." She indicated the recruit tables across the lot with her ladle, where every table was eating the identical stew. "You’re free to decline."

Hobbes verified the identical stew at four separate tables, and the recruits nearest him developed a sudden deep interest in their own bowls. Then he sat and ate methodically, and somewhere in the middle of the bowl his shoulders came down for the first time all day.

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