#mouse world

Corner burst into giggles, and he scampered closer. “What? I- pfffffft-” His squeaks were interrupted by even more laughing, his small chest heaving. “What -huff- what do you mean humans are bugs?”

Ruby sighed, raising a paw to her forehead in exasperation. This was going to be yet another one of those sorts of conversations, wasn’t it. Snap and Corner were her best friends, but it often seemed like most of the time neither of them had a functioning mind. Thus, it once again fell to her to be the bastion of sanity while they were still out here, scavenging in the abandoned hutch. It made sense to her, in a way. Snap was the largest, Corner was the smallest, and Ruby was the sanest. “Okay, Snap. Because you are my friend, my dear friend of many seasons, I will hear you out. But you’re going to need to work to convince me.”

“Oh, rest assured, I will put in the work,” Snap responded, his ears standing straight up with completely unhidden glee. “For you see, my friends, I have a hypothesis. Nay, I have MORE than a hypothesis! I have a theory.”

“You’ve performed experiments and collected a large amount of evidence that supports your idea?” asked Corner, ever the nitpicker. “‘Cause if not, it’s still only a hypothesis.”

Snap barreled on, undeterred. “I do have evidence! So it is a theory!”

“And this theory is that humans are bugs,” Ruby responded, flatly.

“Yes!”

“Okay. So where is this evidence?”

“Why, look around you, Ruby!” Snap swung his forelimbs around again, gesturing wildly. “What is it that you see?”

“A fawn-furred theater reject making a fool of himself instead of explaining his ‘theory’.”

Ruby’s bluntness naturally made Corner crack up again, though he hurriedly muffled his laughter with his paws before she could include him in her summary. “Er, hehe… Snap, d’you mean the hutch?”

While Snap’s expression had drooped at Ruby’s harshness, when Corner spoke his ears snapped right back upwards. “Yes, exactly! The hutch! Humans build hutches! Big, huge complex structures, to provide them with shelter.”

“Yeah, we know,” Ruby said, unenthusiastically. “But they do a crap job of it and leave scraps all over the place for us to find, like we’re doing right now.”

“Exactly! Building large structures is what humans do!” Snap seemed to be appreciating Ruby’s and Corner’s indulgence of his train of thought far too much. “But when you think about it, humans aren’t the only type of creature to do this, right?”

That was actually a question worth genuine consideration, and both Ruby and Corner stopped to think for a moment. “Well,” Corner began, hesitantly. “I guess you could say we do that. Like, not all the time because usually it’s better to build houses in underground burrows, but the Hayseeds' general store is aboveground. ‘Cause it’s built into the stump. And even the burrows still have walls and stuff to give definition…”

“Yeah, but we do all that stuff on purpose,” Ruby points out. “Our ancestors had to learn and figure out how to do all that, it’s not the same thing. We do it intelligently, humans build hutches like this and their other constructions instinctively, since despite being big they don’t have good fangs and claws to defend themselves with. I think Snap’s trying to get at something else…” her brow furrowed, before she remembered Snap’s initial premise. “Well, if you’re saying humans are bugs, it must be some kind of bug, right? Like… oh, like bees?”

Corner’s eyes widened. “Oh, right, beehives! I guess they’re kinda like human hutches, aren’t they? Just way smaller, and made of different stuff. Or… like ants and termites! They make big mounds, don’t they?”

Snap nodded rapidly. “Exactly! Other animals may make stuff on occasion, but the only creatures that make stuff like human hutches are bugs!”

“I guess so…” Ruby wasn’t convinced. “But don’t humans usually live in much smaller numbers? I figured they were more like those mountain lions, with parents raising their kids along but otherwise being pretty solitary. If they were like ants, wouldn’t their hutches be way bigger to hold way more humans?”

“They do make bigger stuff sometimes,” Corner pointed out. “Didn’t you say you have a cousin who went and saw that big hutch complex?”

That was true, Ruby remembered the stories she’d heard from Bran about the massive steel hutch complexes humans had built in the distance. He’d said they were large and towering and full of many, many humans, all scuttling this way and that. Bran had said there was a huge danger of being crushed simply due to the sheer amount of humans, but it was worth it because of the amount of food and other scraps the humans had a tendency to produce.

“I guess you’re right, Bran’s stories do kinda resemble how it’d feel to be shrunken down to smaller than an ant and then placed inside an anthill,” Ruby reluctantly agreed. “But that doesn’t really explain this hutch, here. It’s just sitting here alone at the edge of the forest, by itself. Even when humans DID inhabit it there couldn’t have been more than, say, a handful of them.”

“Maybe they’re a different kind of human?” Corner theorized, though now that Ruby was paying attention she realized that Corner was probably just as disbelieving of Snap’s theory as she was, and was just playing apologist. “Like how some kinds of bees and wasps make smaller nests, with fewer bugs inside them?”

“Something like that!” Snap gleefully latched onto Corner’s suggestion, then forcibly kept talking before either of his friends could question the idea further. “But that’s not the only thing humans do! They also make traps.”

Corner’s ears flattened, confused. “Do bugs make traps?”

“Spiderwebs, Corner. Spiderwebs,” Snap explained. “Spiders and other bugs will make all sorts of traps for catching food, just like humans do! They’ll lie in wait, hoping something will fall for the trap, and then once something gets caught, they do something to their prey to make it easier to eat.”

“Humans don’t have webs, though,” Ruby pointed out. “And a lot of the stuff they do to food is only possible because the stars help them, not because the humans can do it on their own. And who knows why the stars do what they do.”

“I thought the logic was that human hutches are full of stuff that stars like living in,” Corner commented, gesturing upward to where some dark glass bulbs hung overhead, empty of the glowing stars they once presumably housed. “That was how the Hayseeds explained it to me. So the stars help care for humans like they’re pets.”

“First of all, humans don’t need help to build traps,” Snap’s voice sounded a bit harsher than normal, like it always did when people brought up the stars. “Remember that snapper trap that Mrs. Marsh has in her basement? The wooden thing with the metal wire? There aren’t any stars in it at all. And second, even if the stars DO help humans, that’s just another point in favor of my argument. People say the stars like riding on certain kinds of flies, too.”

“You’re saying… Humans and fireflies might have evolved from the same kind of bug ancestor?” Corner pondered aloud. “Both of them adapted in ways that made them more appealing to the stars as pets as a survival mechanism, but while fireflies stayed small and carry stars with them, humans got bigger and started altering their original nests into hutches that had things the stars could inhabit, meaning they became more and more reliant on the stars.”

“You’re definitely thinking way too hard about this, Corner,” Ruby refuted. “And none of that explains how humans and other bugs-”

“Other bugs?” Snap interrupted, mirthfully.

Ruby rolled her eyes and corrected herself. “None of that explains how humans and bugs look basically nothing alike. Humans are big and fleshy, bugs are small and have exoskeletons. Like turtles, but… more.”

“Worms are fleshy bugs,” Snap pointed out. “And we know bugs can get a lot bigger than we usually see them. Remember that… that centipede?”

All three of them shuddered. None of them liked remembering the centipede. But Ruby had to admit it was an excellent point. It had been a very big centipede.

“Hmm…” Ruby hummed, noncommittally. She was pretty sure all the stuff Snap was saying was nothing but badger dung, but his logic was just sound enough (and her understanding of animal biology just insufficient enough) that she couldn’t immediately reject him outright. Which was annoying.

“See? It makes sense, humans were bugs that made stuff, and they just got bigger, losing their shells in the process. Maybe that’s why they construct so much stuff aside from their hutches. The traps and constructions serve the same purpose as exoskeletons since they’re too big now to grow their own.”

“None of that sounds right,” Ruby complained.

“But you can’t find fault in it, can you?” Snap retorted, smugly. “You have to admit, it’s a viable theory!”

“I guess it’s a viable theory, but…” Corner’s ears and whiskers twitched mischievously as he spoke, and Ruby knew she was in for another headache. “Might I suggest an alternative proposal?”

Ruby groaned. Snap didn’t seem too enthused by Corner’s request either, since he had probably wanted the conversation to end with him sufficiently convincing his friends of his “humans are bugs” thesis, but he motioned for Corner to continue nonetheless.

“Humans are birds.”

“No, they’re not!” Snap immediately shouted indignantly. “That makes even less sense!”

“So you admit that humans being bugs doesn’t make sense too?” Ruby asked, seeing her chance.

“What? No! I just explained to you how it does make sense. How does humans being birds make sense???”

“Well… didn’t Mr. Gravel tell us in school that humans have warmer blood? As opposed to the colder blood that reptiles and bugs do?” Corner pointed out. “Humans can regulate their body temperature. Which means they’re either mammals like us, or they’re birds. And they don’t have fur, so they aren’t mammals, so they must be birds.”

“Now hold on! What do you mean humans don’t have fur?” Snap asked incredulously, his face reddening behind his fur in anger. “I’ve seen the pictographs they have in the library, don’t humans have fur on the tops of their heads or something?”

“Humans have hair, not fur,” Ruby pointed out, glad that she could actually remember such a small detail for once when Snap hadn’t. 

She deliberately refrained from adding that she was pretty sure fur and hair were basically the same thing. A human could have sable hair just like she had sable fur, she figured, just with differing levels of thickness and density. But she figured that Snap would be too incensed to notice, and she was proven right, especially when Corner added “Yeah, I bet if humans let their hair get long enough they’d be pretty similar to feathers, but that’d just be cumbersome and heavy and leave them open to predators,” and Snap just made a frustrated sound instead of pointing out how that statement was nonsense.

“Additionally,” Ruby continued, raising one of her paws to stroke one of her ears thoughtfully, “Humans are bipedal. Birds are too. Coincidence? I think not.” She was starting to enjoy this.

“We’re bipedal!” Snap responded angrily.

“Not all the time,” Corner pointed out. “We swap between two and four all the time depending on what would be convenient.”

“Yeah, we’re adaptable,” Ruby clarified. “It’s what makes us and similar mammals different from other creatures. We evolved to be able to adapt and grow and advance, humans didn’t, so they stay on two legs, just like birds do.” Then a thought came to her, and she couldn’t help but brux a little in joy when she realized how annoyed Snap would be by her next sentence. “Maybe our adaptability is why the stars let us handle ourselves while they care for the humans as pets. We’ve got higher intelligence, after all.”

Snap growled, but neither Ruby nor Corner reacted to it. Instead Corner just nodded his head. “Yeah, humans are pretty stupid. And I actually had a thought about that. Birds are pretty stupid too, right? And they can fly up high, close to where the stars live, right?”

“Right,” Ruby nodded, excited to see where Corner was going with this.

“Soooooo…” Corner dragged the syllable out, enjoying every second of it. “What if humans are descended from a bird that was so stupid it thought it could fly even higher than the stars, and tried to fly to the sun? But that would be dangerous, because as we all know the sun is a huge ball of fire an indescribable distance away from the earth-”

“Obviously,” Ruby confirmed. Snap looked like his whiskers were going to explode off his face.

“And because the stars are wise and merciful,” Corner continued, “they grabbed the birds that tried to fly to the sun and put them back on the ground, plucking their feathers off so they couldn’t repeat their stupid mistake!”

“And since they couldn’t fly anymore,” Ruby added, struck by even further inspiration and barely holding back giggles. “The humans started building more complex and larger nests, instead!”

“Exactly!” Corner immediately pounced on that line of thought. “And it worked out for the best, because now the stars could have a place to live down on the surface too, while they kept watch over the dumb birds to keep them from trying to grow feathers and reach the sun again!”

“That doesn’t make any SENSE!” Snap finally exploded into a storm of furious squeaks. “That’s not how feathers work! That’s not how evolution works! And the stars?? The stars can’t- The stars don’t do stuff like that? Why would it work like that? It doesn’t- Is that some kind of mythology? You can’t seriously believe-”

It was too much for Ruby and Corner. They fell to the ground, laughing uproariously and shaking back and forth, unable to contain their amusement at Snap’s anger. Snap stiffened, his eyes wide, before he sighed and relaxed a bit. “Stop teasing me.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Corner apologized, pulling himself back upright and shaking dust out of his lilac fur. “But you put on such a show with your theory! I couldn't help but take the chance to ruin it a little.”

“And it is an interesting theory,” Ruby added. “I don’t think you’re right, Snap, but I can see the logic there. Once we get back home tonight we can visit the library and look into it a bit more.”

Snap huffed and rolled his eyes, but it was clear from his body language that he wasn’t too angry at them anymore.

“Speaking of which,” Corner said, glancing outside. “I think it’s almost dusk. We should get going if we want to be back under cover before the owls start coming out.”

The other two nodded, and the three mice gathered what various odd scraps they had decided to scavenge from the empty hutch into their satchels before slipping out of the large structure through a couple small holes in the walls, scampering down the grassy hill it was situated on and entering back into the forest. They ducked under some ferns to find the well-trodden pathway they’d used to arrive at the hutch to begin with.

As the sun dipped down into the horizon behind them and the forest started to darken, Ruby spoke up again, keeping her voice low. “You know, Snap, you talking about bugs has got me thinking about something. Not something related to humans, really, but something else?”

“Really? What?”

“You know how earlier we were talking about bugs and the places they live in, and how being shrunk down and living in one would be like trying to live in a big human complex? Well, like… what if we applied that to those stories we read as kids? Like, the ones where bugs are the main characters and act like people?”

“You mean like, uh…” Snap tried to recall a specific example. “Like those Jack the Cricket books? Or something like that, but taking place in some kind of… termite city?”

Corner’s eyes widened in interest. “Ooh, that’d be weird. Would it be like how we talked about it before, where you’re still a mouse but you’re shrunk down to be smaller than the termite people? Or… would you just be turned into a termite person?”

Snap’s expression looked like he’d swallowed something nasty. “Turned into a termite? Gross.”

“Well…” Ruby thought about it. “It’d be weird, but for the termite people it’d be normal. And they wouldn’t know how to react to a tiny mouse, so it might be to your advantage to be turned into a termite person, just so that you can blend in and not get into any problems.”

“So you’d really have no choice but to just roll with it and be a termite person, then,” Snap concluded. “Because… well, how would they react if they found out you were actually a mouse, instead of a termite?”

“Honestly? I’d think it’d depend on what they think of mice in general,” Corner pointed out. “I never read Jack the Cricket, but aren’t the mice in those books kind of… non-entities? Like, Jack and his friends just kind of avoid them. Do they even know the mice are also people? Just larger, not-bug people?”

“They do,” Ruby confirmed. “Mice don’t show up a lot, but Jack and Antony have to sneak around what’s very clearly a normal burrow-village. Since they don’t want the mice to know about them they have to sneak around, but they’re clearly aware that the mice are people, just a different kind of people that eat bugs because the mice in those books don’t know bugs are sapient. Bug society is specifically being hidden from mice society for, uh. Some reason. I can’t remember why, exactly, it was just sort of how it worked.” She shrugged. “Like it’s obviously a plot device but I’m pretty sure there was an in-universe reason too.”

“Though, now that you mention it, how would it work the other way?” Snap asked. “Like, how would the bugs not be able to see the mice as sapient. We’re pretty obviously advanced, aren’t we?”

“Maybe the bugs wouldn’t be able to see that the mice are people for the same reason the mice don’t see that the bugs are people?” Corner tentatively suggested. “Like, with how sophisticated bug society is in those stories, you’d think they’d have been caught by the mice already.”

“Hmm…” Ruby thought about it some more. “You’re right, honestly. When I was little I read Jack the Cricket, and then the next time I saw an actual cricket I tried to chase it back to its little cricket house. Obviously it didn’t have one, but if I’d lived in the world of Jack the Cricket I would have found one. Maybe it’s some kind of… magic?”

“Magic, really?” Snap rolled his eyes. “What, so the mice and the bugs just… magically don’t see that there’s an entire other civilization?”

“That would probably have to be how it works, though,” Corner commented. “Like, some kind of ‘one rat’s trash is another rat’s treasure’ sort of deal, but to the extreme. Or like… that fairy story?”

“Which fairy story?” Snap asked, but Ruby answered before Corner could.

“You mean like the Tale of Lillianna? Where the flower fae were invisible to mice because they could camouflage against the flowers, so the mice would look straight at the fae and not realize they were even there!” Ruby had loved that story as a kid. “So you’re thinking it’d be something like that, but two-way?”

“I guess that could kind of make sense…” Snap assented. “But… then if you were turned into a termite, you’d find out about termite society anyway. That… hmm… that’s kind of discomforting to think about, to be honest. You’d suddenly realize that what you’d thought were just mindless creepy crawlies were actually sophisticated and civilized.”

“Yeah, there’s definitely a sort of horror aspect to it,” Corner confirmed. “I know I’ve eaten tons of bugs, so that would really freak me out. Especially now that I’d be on the other side of the divide.” He paused. “What if, now that you’re a termite person, you’re subject to the same problem the rest of the termites have, and now you can’t see the mice as people anymore? Because now you’re a termite.”

“Oh, that would be messed up,” Ruby said. “Like, I’d know I’m a mouse, and I’d know that mice are people, but since termites don’t know mice are people I’d be affected by that?”

“Yeah, like that,” Corner confirmed.

“Stars, I’d hate to end up in that situation,” Snap decided.

“Language,” Ruby chided on impulse, and Snap just stuck his tongue out at her. “But yeah, I’d hate it too. It’d make for a really interesting story, though. It raises a lot of questions about how we’d know there isn’t a weird magic that keeps us from realizing bugs are actually people. It’d be fascinating.”

“I think I’d definitely want to read a story like that,” Corner said, thinking aloud. “Give me some messed-up bug world isekai.”

Ruby went to respond, but then her mind processed what Corner said and she paused.

“Sorry, a bug world what?”

“What’s an isekai?” Snap asked.

“I, er…” Corner’s ears flattened against his head in embarrassment as he realized his mistake. “It’s uh, a word I read somewhere once, I think. You know those stories where a mouse pup falls into a hole into a tree and ends up in a magic fantasy land? That’s kind of what it means. Uh. If I recall correctly.”

“Oh. Huh.” Snap nodded slowly. “Cool.”

“Yeah, I didn’t know there was a specific term for that genre,” Ruby added. “Good to know. I wonder if other recurring kinds stories have names like that?”

“Probably,” Snap shrugged.

As the three mice continued onward, their conversation moving in the direction of lighter topics as they got closer to home, Corner briefly glanced behind him.

The sun had fully set by now, and dusk was giving way to night, but in the distance behind them Corner could just barely make out the silhouette of the house through the cracks in the trees.

The house.

The house.

…The hutch.