The entrance to her home isn’t a door in the traditional sense, nor is it a cave, nor a den, nor any other comforting term that might imply purpose or intention—it’s a warped, rusted hatch half-submerged beneath algae-choked water, crookedly mounted into the base of a crumbling drainage tunnel that smells of copper, wet stone, and the faintly sweet rot of half-drowned vegetation, and as you step inside, the ground makes a sound like something exhaling its last breath, as if the very place itself has been holding this moment in until now.

The interior, if one could be so nice, is a mess of contradictions—walls constructed of whatever she could steal, salvage, or beg from forgotten corners of the world above, stitched together with wires, strips of thick kelp, and occasional lengths of surgical tubing that seem to pulse slightly with residual warmth, and overhead, where most creatures might hang a lamp or a comforting net of soft fabric, she has suspended dozens of broken wind chimes, cracked glass baubles, and the occasional preserved eel in resin-filled jars that hum faintly with phosphorescence.

Kaida the platypus is already inside when you arrive, standing just out of reach in the gloom, the watery light catching on the subtle sheen of her damp, oil-slick fur, her broad, leathery tail curled slightly around her ankles like a blanket she doesn’t know how to let go of, and as her strange, semi-webbed claws fidget against the glowing screen strapped awkwardly around one wrist—clearly designed for a very different species and jury-rigged with layers of rubber bands and wooden bracelets—you see her jaw tighten in discomfort before her voice claws its way out of her throat in that unmistakably broken rasp.

“You… you are much larger than I imagined,” she says, and although the sentence begins with something that could almost be interpreted as detached observation, the tail end of it slips into apology before it even finishes escaping her, as though she already regrets giving voice to the thought the moment it forms.

Her nostrils flare once, her nostril slits flinching in silent panic, and her bill—unwieldy and expressive in its own awkward way—trembles ever so slightly, revealing more emotion than any human mouth ever could, even as her eyes widen with the unmistakable realisation that the first impression has already slipped out of her control.

With visible embarrassment, she jerks her arm up, her clawed fingers jabbing frantically at the buttons on her smartwatch’s cracked interface, claws clacking against glass, scrolling past entries labelled in a language you can’t quite decipher until she lands, with tragic precision, on one that simply reads: “DATE SCRIPT: LINE ONE – GREETING (NEUTRAL TO POSITIVE).”

“Wrong,” she mutters, and then again, quieter and more bitter, “Wrong. That wasn’t it. That’s not... comforting. Restart protocol. I should have—this is wrong.”

Her tail shifts uneasily behind her, dragging a faint trail through the puddled floor, and her webbed hind foot—thick, muscular, duck-like—taps nervously as she continues to scroll, clearly having prepared for this moment with a level of manic anticipation that now feels almost painful in its transparency, as though you’re watching the final performance of a play whose cast forgot the lines halfway through.

Eventually, and only after several false starts and deep, wheezing breaths, she forces herself to meet your eyes for the briefest of moments, her voice low and laced with apology when she finally speaks again.

“I do not talk much,” she says, each word deliberate, like dragging teeth across stone, “It’s hard. My throat—it’s engineered for things other than conversation. Screaming. Feeding. Flood cries. This is… different.”

There’s a pause, heavy and awful, and you get the sense that if you moved toward her too quickly, she’d vanish into the dark like a ghost.

“If I get too warm,” she whispers, “tell me. If I get too loud, tell me. If I look at you like you’re meant to be inside me in ways you don’t agree with... just blink three times and I’ll leave.”