The beginning of a bizarro binary

The Prompt: Craft a story or scene about two people—or other nonhuman characters, if you prefer—from very different backgrounds sharing a meal together. What do they learn about each other that they weren't expecting?
Source

Owh, yeah, tell me about that, must be strange living in small places no, any cockroach or insect must be so large, what a hassle it must be to keep your house safe from other critters?

Actually no, not as difficult as you might think. I've got a door in front of the hole, and a nice trap system -- haha I know, a mouse has a trap system for critters, but it's true I gotta protect my belongings from those pests also yo -- so most of the tiny insects flies and spiders are deterred. Cockroaches don't approach my abode at all because there's an invisible layer of soap in front of the doors, which is a serious poison for them if you didn't know that, so they're not a major threat. Actually to go off of that, the major deterrence I have against bugs and insects is strong smelling incense, the ones you guys or the humans cant smell but the small beings find it absolutely repulsive, so much that I've seen them leap to death rather than smelling it. So yeah, it's not bad at all, haha the same as it is for you.

What about the furniture, is it all small-sized furniture like they have in Tom and Jerry, or do you improvise?

I wish it was like that! A tiny little fridge designed just for me, couches custom-made for bodies of mice! Ahh what a heaven that'd be! So there are places that make those, off that bat, but they're far far too expensive. You'd think since they're small they'd be much cheaper as they don't require as much material but apparently the increase in cost due to the labor more than makes up for it. Apparently you need very detailed craftsmanship and expensive equipments to make anything good for us, the tooling made for human furnitures is all useful in our case, they say. So if you're a really well-off mouse, you'd have your own custom-made furniture, but for a majority for us, and that's a vast vast majority, you could say the totality of us actually, we just improvise. Which means, you know, using those plastic containers of nuts as water tanks, the flat cans of sardines for bed, you know the drill. I don't mind really, the smells are actually quite good, and the shape is perfect. You just need to put in enough hay and other padding, and everything becomes comfortable, you know? That's how all our ancestors did it back in the day also, didn't they, they had none of this modern technology, so it was just piles of hay and old clothes and twigs and what not, and that's what made them happy. With our modern everything, we've become more demanidng, but are unable to provide the bare minimum for survival for most of our population, which is a great travesty, for a soceity this wealthy and technologically advanced...In any case, yeah we'd go back in our old ways if our environments were the same, which they're not, so our ways are different as well.

I'm so glad you bring that up, I wanted to talk about that a little bit as well! I mean yeah I agree, our cultures are important and all, but it's also important to adapt you know, we're not living in the jungle, afraid of the lion and the fox anymore. Our threats are different, the enemies wiser and wilier. Our techniques must be adapted for them, to gain a superiority not just later but in the long-term interactions between the species. I don't want to make you feel too weird, but I feel like a large interspecies is coming up soon, due to all the genetic engineering work these people are doing upon themselves. So everyone's asking for a naked yoga, without realizing what it is or why they want it, it's the most ridiculous thing ever, I know the theory, and people have tried explaining to me, but I guess that's why I order things around huh?

Interesting, I didn't realize you felt so strongly about naked yoga and genetic engineering? Is there a fundamental distrust of the technology and the inputs and the outputs of the very powerful systen,or is there more willingness to go to 'on site installed software', but commoditified, so you can run your own software stack, whatever.