Ooh...I like the "coming into heat" bit - I always really like when people include the more animalistic behaviors/characteristics in their furry universe. :)

heee, i'm going to have fun with that...not so much in this story, as in the one I'm going to start writing soon. See the comment below yours.

Heh. But beware: messing with sex and reproductive elements is one of the hardest things to reconcile with a world resembling the real one, becaue they’re so fundamental to human thought processes and society-building. This is particularly true when it comes to heat versus monthly cycles: we talk about “breeding like bunnies”, but nothing else among the higher mammals can match humans for insane populations curves, precisely because humans can breed monthly, at any time of the year, instead of yearly or semiannually in well-defined seasons.

Yeah, I am still working the details out on how their society works, biologically and socially. That they live in a multispecies world the total sapient population of which is roughly equivilant to ours (in the 1800s) means that each species must breed a *lot* less often. Most species go into heat 1-2 times/year (3 for cats and rabbits) and do not reliably produce kids. The rest of the time, they have more or less the same sex drive as we do, but it almost never results in a child. (The rare times it does are always significant, in different ways depending on culture and class).

Breeding and being in heat is a big deal socially in this world. A young female will start cycling long before she is expected to marry. During this time, it's expected that she'll find a close friend of the same gender or, slightly more rarely, a male of an unrelated species to help her out. She's entirely sequestered during this time, and it isn't discussed, but friendships of this kind are socially encouraged within certain bounds of decorum. All interactions between opposite sex, same species (and any species which might create a hybrid, like lions and tigers), however, are governed by the draconian social rules of the Victorians. And boy, are they ever legion.

And that's how I've managed to tweak Victoriana to furries in order to tell the story I want to tell. ;) Most of this is only obliquely relevant to this story, but it will become more so in the next.

Hmm. I’d have thought species that are fertile less often would have to be more reliable about conceiving, given the smaller windows of opportunity. If a canid like Danielle misses, she doesn’t get another chance for six months; by contrast, a human has five chances in the same time period.

This may become more important when one considers that, unlike a single-species world, a multispecies world has “partial populations”—so many of this species, so many of that species. If the total world population is, say, a billion and a half, as it was in the real world of 1900, how many of them are, for example, black-backed jackals? Each species would have to be considered as if in isolation: if there are only a few thousand pandas, they could have real problems maintaining a breeding population.

That said, the social fallout you’ve postulated makes sense. It would be interesting to see how other parts of the world deal with the same factors. . . .

Minor, minor nitpick.

Story = awesome.
Art = delight
Blurring together two speech bubbles for two different characters (at least that is how I am reading the lower panel after looking at it a few times) creates possible confusion. It looks pretty, sure, but I believe a hard line or some visible background separating them would make the exchange of dialog more immediately clear.

oooh, very good point. I can't believe I didn't catch that. /facepalm/

When you're inking over pencils from some other day, and getting into 'a groove' it's easy to just follow faint lines, or make unconscious choices about which lines to follow without really thinking about it. Happens to everybody. Your word balloons are simply so 'flourishy' that I wasn't sure if you were doing it as a deliberate style-thing or if it were an error...So I addressed it as if it were intentional, mea culpa.

yah, that's what was happening...I was looking at the shape of the balloon without the content, and I did it wrong. Ah well. I possibly fix later.