#Mantis always brings it… cherished member of the Chilaios Council

[wormlette]

We are not a pet play expert but we ARE someone who spends entirely too much time working with kink psychology. The good pet play on AO3 is sadly very thin on the ground and we tend to make it harder for ourself by going exclusively for fandoms who have like five authors maximum so we can't offer recommendations but to be quite honest Laios feels like the kind of guy who'd really enjoy a day collar or something similar in that it would give him, like, a physical reminder of being, in some way, wanted, and a tactile sense of connection. Any sort of distinct accessory that serves as a subtle "mark of ownership" during day-to-day works here, but "day collar" is easier to say.

He would probably want to have something that can be tugged on and used as a handle or similar, honestly. He might find use in anything that Chilchuck can use to more easily catch his attention or, like, offer a physical "guide" to move him around by - Chilchuck may not be physically strong enough to actually move him on his own, but a bit of extra leverage can probably get a setup where it's a Noticeable Physical Sensation and Laios can follow through on his own. It would be INSANELY impractical in the dungeon, though, which would definitely put a stopper to it - the handle that you have put in so that your halfling pick-lock can have a shot at moving you around at will can also be utilized by enemies who were capable of moving you around previously and probably don't need the extra handle.

We feel like Chilchuck might not 100% Get the full "belonging" aspect of a day collar, at least initially but he could definitely get some mileage out of adding a built-in handle to get Laios's attention. The issue would, of course, be in getting them to this point - we feel like it wouldn't come up super easily? Most likely, we think it'd be the sort of thing where Chilchuck makes an offhand comment without it meant to be taken Seriously and Laios jumps on it as "hey we could actually do that".

Chilchuck feels like the sort of guy where it simply wouldn't have passed his mind that a day collar could be a Thing and the idea of someone Wanting that would be a bit out of his sphere of... interest? Knowledge? He wouldn't think of it until the idea of it'd be brought up, and he honestly might take a bit of convincing to come around to it. Laios feels like the kind of guy where he thinks about "what if I wore a harness like an actual beast of burden" and then he thinks about that continually for the next five years.

We can probably give advice on tracking down resources on IRL pet play, but we can't help very much with fiction? Our #1 thing that we feel we Need to have in any fic regardless of content is good characterization, and this tends to significantly narrow the margin of Things We Can Recommend because something can be a stunningly beautiful depiction of how to write pet play but we still won't like it if it's OOC and we are unfortunately prone to having the disease where we exclusively get into stuff that has maybe three other people in the same area.

Hopefully this coheres for you we're sort of rambling with hopes that this'll vaguely get at what we're aiming for - we are heavily impacted by our own personal desires to add MORE spec. bio to everything we're into, ever, so we're unclear if our halfling agriculture & domestication thoughts would fully apply?

We definitely agree that dogs would be uncommon or rare - a poorly-trained dog can probably be a very real danger to even an adult halfling, and the larger breeds of dog can get to be bigger than them, which'll be a HUGE risk especially for an environment when they can't be 100% sure of the breed content of any given dog. You can easily run into Issues training dogs as a normal-sized human - it's going to be a whole lot harder and more risky to get something that's BIGGER than you and can seriously injure or kill you to LISTEN, especially when your stakes are "either you do this right or you are at significant risk of injury from a dog that hasn't quite been trained to be considerate around halflings".

If the dog doesn't know precisely how gentle to go with its pack, then even with good intentions, it can hurt someone very badly - you've definitely got to know EXACTLY what you're doing, or otherwise have a very good trainer. Of course, that might be able to add to fun metaphors later, so... depends on how you handle it. Or handle them, as it may be.

We think that the most familiar form of animal agriculture to them would probably involve raising things like silkworms, mealworms, crickets, and other bugs, both for general materials and because they're small enough that "raising bugs for meat" almost definitely gives more bang for their buck than it would for larger races. We feel like larger domestic animals would be significantly rarer, just because trying to tame just about anything long enough to domesticate when you're only 100cm tall is going to be DIFFICULT. Easier to just make domestic lineages of things like "animal where you can put it somewhere dark and damp with some corn meal and potato slices and get ten times the yield after leaving it for a few weeks". Of course, they'd probably have other domestic animals beyond bugs, but we can't really think of what exactly - ferrets, maybe? Humans domesticated them for hunting, but halflings might be able to make more use of them.

Hopefully some of this at least sparks a bit of inspiration for you - we're simply having fun typing Words. Good luck with your writing!

Ok this is so fucking good I need to stop hoarding it. Everytime I go to publish I start rereading and get distracted 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 Laios seems like the kind of guy where he thinks about “what if I wear a harness like an actual beast of burden” and then is thinking about it for the next 5 years… HELP… YEAG…..

I FEEL YOU I’m becoming a pet play enjoyer but so far nothing scratches the itch like it does with these two. I must do more research and yet…… I just keep coming back to Them. Laios spontaneously inventing the most avant-garde kinks in the dunmesh world… Chilchuck being like what the fuck. Well. What the fuck. I can’t not get him that. And it has to be made out of good materials. He’d fuck it up if he tried doing this himself. TWIST MY ARM. Sigh.

And god yeah the actual animals that half-foots would have … Chil’s upbringing vs Laios’ (with all his animals) would be so different. Brewing many scenes from this.

DREAMY SIGH. THANK U.

#Mantis always brings it… cherished member of the Chilaios Council