350 words | 2 minutes https://familiar.moonlitfiction.com/beginnings/
"Your kind really will just pack bond with anything." The alien man sitting across from your mistress laughed, eyeing your clothes and collar.
"My kind? Watch your words, ambassador, for I am nothing like the rest of my kind. Those like us are outcasts among my kind. I might as well be as inhuman as my companion here. Back on Earth, we were curiosities at best. Out here, we're as free as anyone else." She laid a hand on your knee, hitting you with waves of involuntary shivers.
Earth was decades and lightyears away, and yet the memories remained.