This post is being created in order to test Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin. If successful, everyone who subscribes to my Twitter account should be automatically notified.
I also installed a plugin that’ll email me scheduled backups of the site database, in case of nuclear strike!
The next part of Yurodivy’s story, Anomie, is still being worked on. So for this week’s update we have one new story: Shades of Cineroargenteus. It’s pretty wacky, but also contains lots of introspection.
Summary: I think most furry artists want to become the fursona they draw. But what if you became a cartoon drawing in the real world? Written as a commission for Virmir, whose character didn’t mind the situation at all!
Becomeyourfursona.com readers and RSS feed subscribers will notice that now only site updates like this one show up on the main page. And those who’ve subscribed to my LiveJournal will notice this update is being cross-posted to both at the same time, thanks to the awesome JournalPress plugin. Your comments on LJ will show up on the main site as well!
Virmir was having a great week.
That wasn’t the name he’d been born with, of course. It was the name that he’d chosen, to represent himself online. His “real” name had hardly anything to do with who he was, but Virmir was an Urocyon cinereoargenteus; a gray fox, that walked on its hind legs and talked and grinned and wore clothes (when it felt like it). A cartoon drawing, a personal brand and an identity that felt more real than the human one he’d been born with. Or at the very least, more fun.
Some days he felt kind of silly about that. Like his first few days on the job. Maybe it’d been the gray cubicles, without so much as a potted plant. Maybe it’d been his manager’s clean haircut and firm handshake, and the way he’d gone on about “fostering world-class infrastructure” and “meeting customer-centered goals.” Or maybe it’d just been the fluorescent lighting. Either way, his first few days working there had taken a lot out of him. He’d gone home and flopped on the couch, and had barely felt like a human being, let alone Kendo Virmir the fox mage.
After he’d been there awhile, though, he’d noticed something, and it hadn’t just been that the meeting room donuts were always stale. Maybe it’d been the view out the window that’d clued him into it … the row upon row of identical offices that he saw in the skyscraper across the street. Or maybe it’d been after a few minutes of hearing his boss and his boss’ boss chatting with each other, and then turning his swivel chair to look and realizing he couldn’t tell them apart.
Here’s what the-person-who-was-Virmir realized: The people he worked for talked, groomed, and dressed that way not because they were actually like that, but because the people they worked for were like that! And so on, for as far as he could see.
Somewhere at the top, Virmir imagined, was a happy, fulfilled man, who used “infrastructure” and “customer-centered” in his daily conversation. And he had a whole lot of people working for him who were trying their best to be him, even if they didn’t have a clue what those words they kept using meant.
In other words, they were all creating their own identities too. They just weren’t being very original, and they weren’t having nearly as much fun with it as Virmir was.
He felt a lot better about imagining himself as a cartoon fox after that.
Anyway, Virmir was having a great week, and it wasn’t because the PHP web app that his team had been building was almost complete. No, it was because last night he’d put the finishing touches on his latest art project, live on streaming video. On top of that, he was expecting the commission he’d ordered to come in the mail any day now.
On days like these, he wasn’t a “team member,” or a “human resource,” or a white shirt and a tie. He was Virmir, just as much as he was when he was at home in his den. And it was not just a sense of confidence, or an amused smirk at things that would have annoyed him. It was an entire way of seeing the world.
He coded faster, because server-side scripting was simple compared to runic equations and magic. He spoke up more often in meetings, because the silly humans kept digging themselves into messes and it was up to him to help them get out. And when he looked out the windows at the end of the day, at the city of concrete and windowlight, he didn’t see a vast and impersonal maze. He saw a wondrous landscape, as fantastic as any that he had imagined. And it was a bit grittier, perhaps, but it was still just as magical.
Anything can happen here, he thought, as he turned off his monitors and put on his coat.
He had no idea how right he was.
* * *
On the fourth day of this great week, something unusual happened. You see, instead of just imagining himself as the self that he drew, Virmir actually became a cartoon gray fox.
That’s not the unusual thing, though, as surprising as it seemed to Virmir. After all, anything could — and did — happen in this magical world that he lived in, including transformations. Every day, caterpillars curled up to sleep, not knowing they’d wake up as butterflies. And people became cartoons all the time, too. How else could they ever get made?
What was unusual was that he didn’t notice. He was just going about his workday as usual, a confident anthro gray fox mage, his cape and his tail tucked behind him as he typed away on the keyboard. His legs kicked the air underneath him, and his brow furrowed as he looked up at the dual monitors, trying to make sense of his coworkers’ code. It was another day in the life of Virmir, and after these last few days he’d become so used to feeling this way that he didn’t even realize he was a couple of feet shorter, until his neck finally got a cramp in it.
“Blast,” he muttered. He reached around to massage the kinks out of his neck, wincing. Then he looked up at the screens on top of his desk in dismay, and hopped down from his chair to get something to sit on.
Reaching up towards the telephone book at the edge of his desk, he saw his fox hand and thought That’s some nice shading. Then he froze.
Two hundred lines of PHP code poured right out of Virmir’s brain.
“Hey,” his coworker said, from past the partition behind Virmir’s monitor.
I love those dynamic lighting effects, said the part of Virmir’s brain that was still working right. And look at the texturing!
“Hey,” his coworker said again, and knocked on the partition. “In line 248, what did you mean by blah blah mumble subroutine blah?”
That wasn’t what he actually said, of course, but Virmir’s brain still wasn’t working. In fact, he was more in shock than he would’ve been if he’d just walked away from a train wreck. The social part of his brain said that he needed to reply, though, and so he tried. Only to find that he’d forgotten how to make words come out. “Uhhhm … “
Silence.
Slowly, Virmir ran his long tongue across his vulpine chops, and tried to talk naturally like he’d done just a minute ago. “I … don’t … know, uh … ” He blinked, shook his head, and unfroze from the position he’d been in when he was reaching up to the telephone book. “What was that, again?”
” … are you okay?”
“Oh! Uh, yes, uh … ” Virmir’s cape flared out and his tail swished as he looked about himself quickly, trying to find a hiding place and a clear escape route to the stairs. Had anyone already seen him? What about in the building across from his cubicle? He had to somehow-
“No, I’m serious.” His coworker’s freckled face came up over the edge of the partition, and looked down at him.
“AGH!” Virmir fell on his tail, and backed away several feet on his hands and legs before getting caught in his cape. He stared up at his coworker, and a drop of sweat the size of a golf ball formed on the side of his head.
His coworker gave him a bewildered look. “Dude, you look wired.”
Virmir misheard him. “Weird … in what way?”
“No, wired. You look like you stayed up all night and hit Starbuck’s before coming here.” He pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “Chill, okay? Go take a walk or something. I’ll figure it out on my own.”
He ducked back down behind the partition, and Virmir just sat there, unable to move, his heart pounding so hard it drowned out the printer down the hall. Someone walked past behind him, and while his ears automatically pivoted he could not turn his head to look. He could only sit there, and catch his breath.
What on earth just happened?
Slowly, the sweatdrop vanished and Virmir’s breathing steadied. He climbed back up to his seat, turned off the dual screens and looked into them. They weren’t glossy, so the reflection was imperfect, but even with the light from the windows in the corner of his eye he could tell. He looked just like the gray fox from his drawings. A three-dimensional, cel-shaded, hundred frames-per-second rendered gray fox, but a cartoon gray fox nonetheless. He wasn’t even wearing anything besides his cape.
Then where did … Acting on instinct, Virmir reached around behind himself and pulled out his wallet and Palm Pilot, and looked to make sure they were okay before putting them back. Then he turned around in his seat and looked. They were nowhere to be seen.
How … ?
Phones rang in the distance, and the sounds of typing and clicking and shuffling paperwork reached Virmir’s fox ears. The absurdity of his situation was not lost on him.
Now what?
After a minute’s thought, he hopped back down from his seat and walked around the side of the cubicle farm. Another sweatdrop started to form on the side of his face, as he realized he was out in public walking past people and banks of windows like this. But if he was right, then …
“Tom?” Virmir looked in at his coworker, the one who’d just talked to him. He was munching cheese puffs out of a bag while glowering at his own monitors, but he turned to look as Virmir addressed him.
“Do I, uh … ” Virmir spent a moment thinking about how to phrase himself. “Do you notice anything different about me?”
Tom squinted at him for a moment, before a look of recognition lit up his face, and he nodded. “Nice haircut,” he said. “Totally doesn’t look like you slept on it the wrong way.” He then turned back to his monitors, and wiped his hands off on a napkin before typing something in.
Virmir’s tail stopped in mid-swish, and his face turned red. “Thanks,” he said, before ducking back out, and standing there for a moment next to the Dilbert cartoons Tom had taped to the side of his wall.
Okay, he thought. So I’m myself. I mean, Virmir, I mean … blast, this is so frustrating! How did this even happen? And is it just me, or am I really …
His thoughts trailed off as he looked behind him, at a sudden, unusual sensation. His tail had been swishing with agitation, and he could feel it thump into the cubicle wall next to him.
Maybe this is a dream? Virmir pinched his arm, and it hurt. Not only that, he could feel how furry is was, past the claws on the ends of his fingertips. And if he looked closely, he could see each individual cel-shaded hair, despite the black borders at the edges of his arms. His fur rippled as he breathed out while looking at it.
Maybe splashing my face with cold water will help …
* * *
Virmir knelt on the edge of the sink in the men’s room, the one that had been up to his neck while he’d been standing next to it, and turned the cold water tap all the way to the right. Then he scooped up a good double-handful of it, and smacked it into his face.
“Aghptbb-” He fell over on his back, on the wet sink, and sputtered and slipped as he tried to get up. His cape and his back fur got soaked through, and his foot got stuck in the sink for second before he finally slipped off and landed on the floor on his arms and knees, wincing.
A couple minutes under the blow dryer helped, although they didn’t do anything about his smarting elbows and knees. He looked over at the mirror as the warm air rustled his cape, and gave his fox face a disgusted look. “If you’re a hallucination, you’re a very persistent one.”
Someone else came in just then, and Virmir quickly walked out and got his tail out of the way before the door shut behind him. He dried off his hands the rest of the way on his fur, and looked out the full-length windows, arms folded. His foxy reflection looked back at him, stern and upset on the other side of the glass.
I don’t take anything weird, he thought. So if this is my mind playing tricks on me, either I’m going crazy or somebody drugged my cereal.
Someone walked past behind him, and brushed his tail without noticing.
But my mind playing tricks on me wouldn’t account for my having a tail. Or needing a telephone book to sit on while I’m coding. Maybe I really did change, and I’m just the only one who noticed?
It seemed so obvious, and yet it was hard for Virmir to accept, just because it was so unexpected. Even if he was remarkably good-looking this way, he thought, striking a pose to see his reflection.
Hm, maybe if I downloaded Blender I could do something like this. I’d have to learn it, of course …
He stuck out his tongue, and then tried a couple of other faces.
What if I just uploaded a video, and then didn’t tell anyone how I did it? It’d have to use real-life backgrounds, of course, but still. It’d be a hit!
He struck another pose, tossing his cape out dramatically behind him.
Hmm … but would anyone be able to see me? Would whatever is keeping other people from seeing me like this work online?
Virmir furrowed his brow and put a hand to his chin, lost in thought. Maybe that can be my first experiment, then. To find out if it’s just me, or if I really did change and no one else can see it. I could do things like take pictures of myself standing under things I’d be too tall for normally, and trying to reach for things that my human self wouldn’t need a ladder for. Then I can show them to other people, and ask them to tell me what they see.
Virmir sideyed another coworker as he walked past, and it occurred to him that he was taking this pretty well. He felt a little light-headed, but on the whole he felt comfortable as his fox self, even out here in public. It helped that he’d gotten in practice, he thought … a lot of practice. Maybe that’s what caused this?
He shook his head. Nah.
Virmir’s tail swished happily as he returned to his cubicle, and stacked a couple of manuals on top of his seat before climbing back on. Then he stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles and got back to work.
* * *
That would be a convenient end for this story. Fortunately, life is rarely convenient.
What happened next started a couple of hours later. Virmir had been coding for awhile, and his throat was feeling dry. His fox ears could hear Tom munching on salty snacks in the cubicle past his, buttered popcorn and puffs with dry cheese powder on them, and the sounds and the smells were the last straw.
He hopped down and went over to the water cooler, only to find that he wasn’t tall enough to reach the disposable cups stacked on top. If Virmir had been the kind of mage who could levitate objects by casting a spell on them, he might’ve tried it; the instincts that let you do things like that are the same kind that made him become his fox self in the first place. But Virmir’s fox-self was a fire mage, and the only thing his spells could have done to the cups was make them set off the smoke alarm.
Which is why he came back a minute later, pushing his swivel chair in front of him and muttering under his breath. It got stuck on a corner, so he turned around and carefully pulled it the rest of the way …
… only to bump into a man who was standing there already, wearing a striking black suitcoat and tie and filling a huge plastic Big Gulp cup from the water cooler.
The man smiled down at him, a plastic sort of smile, his hands not leaving the controls. “Hello, Mister Robinson.”
Virmir squinted up at the man, immediately distrusting him. Maybe it was the fact that he knew Virmir’s name, when Virmir had never seen him before. Maybe it was the fact that he’d never known anyone who wore an Italian suitcoat to shop at the 7/11. Or maybe it was the black sunglasses the man was wearing … and the fact that Virmir saw in them not his cartoon self’s reflection, but the one that he’d seen in the mirror that morning.
“Having fun imagining yourself as a fox, are you?” The sound of water pouring into his cup almost drowned out the man’s words.
Virmir gave the man an amused smirk. “Yep. You should try it sometime.”
“I don’t think you understand, Mister Robinson.” That plastic smile had not left the man’s face. “You don’t understand just how dangerous it is, to imagine something that’s not wanted.”
“Oh, I totally agree.” Virmir leaned up against his chair, and winked.
The man went on like he hadn’t heard him. “Millions of people, all imagining themselves living happy, normal, productive lives … and one maladjusted person, who tries to imagine himself as a cartoon. That sort of imagination is like a disease … a cancer, in our society. And we … ” He took a long swig from his Big Gulp, and licked at his face afterwards. ” … are the cure.”
As he was talking, two more nearly identical-looking men in black suitcoats stepped into view, one behind him and one behind Virmir. Virmir was feeling quite threatened now, so he did what a fox fire mage does when he feels threatened: He fluffed out his fur, threw out his cape, and ignited a huge fireball in his hand. “I’d like to see you try!” he snarled.
The man doused him with the rest of the water from his cup. Virmir gasped and spluttered, dripping wet, and tried to ignite another fireball in his hand. A wisp of smoke came up through his fingers. ” … blast,” he said.
The three men stepped towards him.
Virmir tensed, and got ready to spring as they advanced. Then he turned and bolted, diving around the man behind him and running past banks of windows, trying to put as much distance between him and them as possible.
Without a word, the men in black suitcoats took off after him. Virmir ducked into a hallway, sprinting towards the door to the stairwell at the far end. He looked over his shoulder, past his flapping cape, and saw the three men chasing him. But when he looked back where he was heading, all he could see was a long row of doors, and a hazy mirage at the end that receded into the distance.
Virmir blinked, looked away for a second and looked back up, but he still couldn’t make his eyes focus. “What the heck?” he snarled. There was no way that this was-
Oh. Oh. Now he knew what was going on. He’d seen this a million times in cartoons, whenever they did chase scenes indoors! Only one thing to do, then. Virmir jumped at a door shoulder-first and ran through someone’s office, ignoring the startled shouts and taking the next door he saw.
He opened it and saw another hallway … or was it the same one? He could see the men in black suitcoats pausing and fanning out to check doorways. With only a moment’s thought, Virmir dashed for the next open door that he saw, ignoring the footsteps that he heard behind him. It was like an indoor obstacle course … dodge past the furniture, run through any open door and wait for an opportunity to escape.
Which came when Virmir reached the end of the hallway. Except that there was no more door to the stairwell, unless it was cleverly hidden. There was only a windowsill.
Virmir reached up and clawed at the window, trying to pry it open, as the men saw where he was and ran towards him. Then he stopped, breathing hard with exertion, and ignited a fireball in his now-dry hands and hurled it up at the window. It shattered, the air shimmering around the empty frame in a heat distortion, and Virmir hauled himself up to the sill and scrambled through just as the men caught up and lunged at him.
The sounds of traffic and of wind rushing through skyscrapers reached Virmir’s fox ears, and the breeze rustled his fur as he edged sideways along the outside of the building. One of the men stuck his head through the window and looked out at Virmir, the light glinting off of his sunglasses. “Come back, Mister Robinson,” he said. “We want to help you.”
“Interesting way … ” Virmir gasped for breath. ” … you’ve got of showing it!” His muscles were all trying to tighten up, after the way that he’d run full-tilt, and he did not need that now when he was ten stories off the ground. He tried to control his breathing, and to move steadily towards the next window.
“Mister Robinson,” the man said, “look down.”
“Why? What’s … ” Virmir’s voice trailed off, as he looked down at his feet. There was nothing below them but thin air.
The man grinned.
Virmir flailed wildly for a second, claws scraping the outside of the building, then fell like a rock. “Blaaaaast … “
He smacked into something, and the world went dark.
* * *
Smells crept into Virmir’s nose, of rotting fruit and decaying garbage. Car horns and engines, the sounds of city traffic, came at him from the side. Virmir cocked one fox ear towards them, and felt something on his face. He reached up and removed it. It was a banana peel.
The three men were standing around him.
“Gah!” Virmir scrambled to his feet and tried to back up, but slipped and fell. He was sitting on his tail on top of a heap of garbage bags piled up next to a dumpster, and the one behind him had split open where he’d landed on it. His left hand was deep in a pile of unpleasant things, and he removed it and brushed it off on his fur before looking up at the men in black suitcoats. They were still just standing there, watching him.
“What do you want?” Virmir asked.
“What do you want, Mister Robinson?” It was the one in the middle who spoke.
“Do you want to go your whole life looking and acting like this?” The one on the left.
“A cartoon fox, in a world designed for human beings?” The one on Virmir’s right.
“You can’t go on like this forever.” All three of them spoke at once, now.
“I’ve done a good job of it so far … ” Virmir tried to stand, and had to lean up against the dumpster for a second and wince. He had a headache so bad that it made him dizzy, and on top of that he felt exhausted.
“Because nobody else sees you as a fox,” the one in the middle said.
“Exactly,” Virmir said, rubbing his forehead, then looked up and squinted at him. “Are you saying that some people can?”
“It’s a rare person who sees himself for who he is,” the one in the middle went on, as a skeptical young human’s face reflected back at Virmir from his sunglasses. “It’s an even rarer person who sees others for who they are … Mister Robinson.”
“Instead they see … discrepancies,” the one on his left said. “Things that don’t add up. Things that contradict the person they ‘know’ that you are. Things that contradict the way that their world works. They won’t see you any differently, but they’ll know that you live in a different world than they do.”
“People don’t like their world to be threatened,” the one on Virmir’s right said, as though he knew right where the other would leave off. “They don’t like it when someone else doesn’t play by the same rules they have to. They’ll react. Violently, if necessary.”
Trying to look back and forth between them was making Virmir notice his neck ached as well. He clutched at his forehead and winced, closing his eyes and trying to put as much weight on the dumpster as possible. “So some people will notice me and attack, or something?”
“‘Attack’ is such a harsh word, Mister Robinson … ” The voice from in front of him. “More like ‘deny privileges to.’”
“Privileges like friendship.” The voice to his left.
“Money.” The voice on his right.
“A home.”
“A job.”
“A life.”
“A mate.”
Virmir’s ears pricked back and forth, trying to follow which one was speaking. When they were silent for a second, he looked up. The man in the middle was smiling that plastic smile again, and holding out one of his hands to Virmir. In his palm was a large blue pill.
Virmir took it with his clean(er) hand, and gave it a weird look. The man to his left handed him a full paper cup from the water cooler, and he took it without thinking about it. “So wait. You want me to just take something that’ll make me forget about all this?”
“Oh, no, Mister Robinson.”
The one to his left spoke up. “We have other ways to make people forget things they need not see, and places they need not be.”
Virmir gave them a droll look. “Then what’s this?”
“A choice, Mister Robinson.” The man grinned. “To have things return to the way they were-”
Virmir shook his head. “Not a chance.”
“-when you want them to be that way.“
Virmir gave the man a bewildered look. He went on. “You don’t even know what’s happened, do you? You just know that things are different now. And different is not safe.”
“This will allow you to be different when you want to … ” the man to his left said.
” … in the comfort of your own den,” the man to his right finished.
“And then to be the person that others expect, when it would be dangerous not to do so.” The man in front of him smiled.
“And that’s all it will do?” Virmir asked.
“Of course.”
Virmir had half a mind to just tell the man what he could do with that pill. But something made him hesitate. Maybe it was the fact that he really did not know what had happened, not on an intellectual level, and his instinct was hazy right now. Maybe it was the splitting headache he had, that was keeping him from thinking clearly. Or maybe it was the way the third man had said “den” … as though he were acknowledging that Virmir really was a gray fox.
Virmir saw, in the polished shoe of the man in front of him, a warped, fishbowl view of his cartoon self. And behind him, his human self in shirt and tie, waiting with arms folded to get back to work. The self that his coworkers saw … that’d he’d tried to be, every day, before he’d remembered to be his real self.
That’s when Virmir knew what he had to do.
First, he drank all the water, and tossed the cup away. Then, smiling, he placed the blue pill on the street in front of him. The men around him raised their eyebrows, and frowned. “What are you-”
WHAM.
From the same place that Virmir was storing his wallet and Palm Pilot, he produced an enormous mallet and brought it down on the pill, smashing it. Then he stood the mallet upright and leaned on the handle, and grinned. “Thanks for the help,” he said. “I feel a lot better now.”
The three men sideyed each other.
“Anything else you need?” Virmir asked.
The one in the middle coughed, and straightened his tie. “Mister Robinson,” he said. “If you’ll recall, we mentioned that some people might react … “
“Violently?”
The men nodded.
Virmir ignited a flame in one hand, and smiled up at them. “Bring it.”
* * *
“YAAAH!”
A fireball flew past as three men in suitcoats piled unto the back seat of an unmarked black sedan, their sunglasses crooked and smashed and their faces black with soot. The last one in hastily doffed his burning jacket and slammed the door shut, just in time for a mallet-shaped indentation to appear in it.
Tires squealed and exhaust spewed as the car took off. Virmir smashed one of the taillights with his hammer before coughing, and moving out of the way of the gray cloud left behind. “Fun times,” he said, smiling weakly and coughing again. “Fun times.”
His ears perked towards the sounds of horns honking and more tires screeching in the distance. Then they faded into the background of city traffic, and Virmir was alone in the alley.
He looked up at the side of the skyscraper he worked in, leaning on his mallet and trying to catch his breath. Then, finally, he put the mallet away and walked down the alley, heading back toward the building’s front entrance.
The guard raised an eyebrow at him, as he slid his card. Inside, people waited to take the next elevator rather than share one with someone who smelled like garbage. Alone in the elevator, Virmir examined his cape and sniffed at himself, and his nose wrinkled.
The sun was beginning to set past the buildings outside the window as Virmir walked back to his workstation, in the now-empty cubicle farm. Without sitting back down, he reached up and woke his computer from sleep mode, then saved the project he was working on and logged out. One eye fell on the books stacked up on top of his chair, as he did so, and he looked at them for a long moment. Then he walked out.
The train ride home seemed to take forever. People refused to sit next to him, which was just as well since he needed someplace for his tail to go now. But they also kept glancing in his direction. A child pointed at him and whispered to her mother, and her mother whispered something back, but she continued to stare at him afterwards.
Virmir didn’t know if the attention he was getting was because he looked beat up and smelled bad, or if it was because they could tell something was different about him. Either way, after a couple of minutes he felt awkward and uncomfortable, and wished that he could just blend into the background and wait for his aches to subside.
Virmir reached around behind himself, and spend a few seconds pawing at the folds of his cape before coming back with his Palm Pilot. He turned it on and tapped on the book reader app with his claw, but then he couldn’t make himself read anything. Instead he could only look at his hand and his claws, tapping them against each other and drumming them on his leg.
Virmir fumbled with the stylus for a moment, trying to pull it out of its slot, before finally just pressing the “Home” key and then tapping the picture viewer with his claw. A list of thumbnails came up, and he tapped on one of the drawings he’d done of his cartoon self not too long ago. He looked between it and his reflection, comparing the two with an artist’s eye and not sure which one he was checking for discrepancies.
Then it hit him. His coloring had become flat, as though he’d been colored in a vector graphics program. The drawing he’d done had better shading than he himself did.
Virmir ran one hand along his arm and could feel individual furs, but he couldn’t see them anymore. He turned off his Palm Pilot and looked between himself and his reflection, scared all of a sudden and wondering if he was just going to fade away. Then he slumped back in his seat, worn out and disgusted and not even caring that he was squishing his tail. He just wanted this day to end.
* * *
It was cold and quiet outside Virmir’s house. Dried leaves crunched under his feet, and puffs of white came from his vulpine snout. His long ears heard the songs of crickets chirping, but also that blasted dog that kept coming by and barking at Terra, his German Shepherd. His ears flattened, as he spent a whole minute listening to it louder than ever before, and fumbling with the folds of his cape and the fur on his back trying to pick out his house key.
He finally got it out and walked up the driveway to the front door. The outside light came on as the motion detector “saw” him, and in it he saw that there was a package leaning against the doorstep.
Virmir’s ears perked.
He hurried up to the front door and started using the jagged edge of his house key to cut the boxing tape. Then he looked at his hands, and just tore it open with his claws. His ears were starting to freeze by the time he pulled it out of the box: His commission, just like he’d asked for, of his gray fox character looking confident and adventurous. And it was drawn even better than he could’ve done it himself.
His tail started to swish happily as he looked at it, running his thumb over the cardstock and feeling the actual materials used. His cartoon fur fluffed out and became visible again, and his cape straightened out and became shiny. By the time he got to the note that said “Keep being awesome!” his dynamic lighting effects had returned, and he noted them with approval, looking down at himself and at his reflection in the glass on the screen door. He grinned, and his eyes and fangs shone.
An hour later he was cleaned up and wrapped up in warm, fluffy towels, his tail beside him on the couch. He set his plate with the scraps on it on the floor, and patted Terra on the head as she scarfed them. Then he stretched, and woke the notebook computer on the tray in front of him from sleep mode by tapping the external keyboard.
In a chat room attached to Virmir’s website, his online self posed dramatically, spotlights shining on him as he entered.
“Hey!” someone said. “How was your day?”
“Great,” Virmir said, and winked. 
Greetings, Become Your Fursonians. :3 I’m sure some of you have heard of me, especially if you read the recent Animal Interview. However, I also write transformation fiction of my own, and Anomie is my very first attempt. It’s a collab with Feathertail; he helped with worldbuilding and a bit of the writing. Most of the writing is mine, however, so this is a pretty good indicator of how I write.
This my first attempt at writing TF, and my first serious attempt at furry fiction. If you have any tips or recommendations for me, they would be greatly appreciated. Oh yes…and this is a multi-part story, but rest assured I can write short stories, or at least try to!
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Summary: When Corrine finds out she has a dangerous spiritual disease eating away at her soul and giving her the mind of an animal, she’s forced to leave her the safety of the cities and her former life behind to go to an internment camp and hope for an unlikely cure. Of course, there’s the matter of getting there safely first. And with all sorts of vicious half-human, half-animal monsters running around, that’s easier said than done.
The Will to Power: Part One
My parents weren’t there to see me off. There hadn’t been any time after the test had been done. I’d only had a few minutes to grab my belongings, and no one else had been in the house. Besides that, it was a military train station, not a light rail depot. My parents probably didn’t have clearance. No one else’s families seemed to be there, either.
Guards stood around us as we boarded, wearing thick ceramic plates and carrying the kind of rifles that shot your soul, not your body. Between them and the steel-armored maglev, huge and intimidating up close like a dinosaur’s flank, I nearly had a panic attack just getting on the train. It felt like stepping into a cage … or being shoved in, as the case may be.
Still, once I was inside I felt safer. It was cold with air conditioning, and echoey with the metal clanks of walking, but it reminded me of a subway car without any advertisements. Even better, it looked like the kind of train where you got your own compartment. An unarmored soldier showed me to mine, and I sat down on the thin cushion fidgeting nervously.
Now that I knew it was there, I could feel the animal inside my heart, frightened and begging for someplace to hide. I knew it was alien — it was the problem — but for now I didn’t protest. I let it be scared, and I drew my knees up to my chin and hugged them, closing my eyes and blocking the world out. And when the door shut, and left me alone in there, I let out a sigh of relief.
I looked out the bulletproof glass at the concrete side of the station, and thought of what lay beyond … what lay outside the city. But if this was a cage, it was keeping me safe inside it. And from now on, whatever happened to me was out of my hands.
Somehow, I found that prospect both relieving and frustrating. It meant that I was just a passive observer. No guilt, no reason for people to claim that this whole deal was my fault. I didn’t ask to be tainted with an animal spirit, it just happened. I didn’t ask for treatment, I just needed it. And I didn’t want to go outside, but that was the only place I could be treated.
I wouldn’t have minded actually having some power over all this. But I didn’t. That seemed to be how things went in my life — always being dragged around by something or another. I was getting used to it, just like how I was starting to get used to the constant nagging fear that came with having an animal eating away at your human soul.
Well, at least one of those things would be going away.
I tried to turn my thoughts towards more pleasant matters by looking around at the scenery. But military trains are not the most visually stimulating places around, unless you really like looking at shades of gunmetal grey. On to plan B then — a nap, or as close as I could come to getting one.
Of course, the moment I closed my eyes, the door slid open. I opened my eyes and tilted my head towards the door, fully expecting a soldier. What I saw was a young man about my age (I wasn’t sure; I was never a good judge of these things) in civilian clothing. He smiled a forced sort of smile, and waved at me.
I bit my lip and looked out the window again. “Please don’t let him sit next to me. Please don’t … ”
He sat next to me. Of course. My heart lodged itself somewhere in my throat, and I did my best to ignore him lest it fall right out of my mouth. I might not have been keen on the idea of going on living at the time, but that seemed like an awful way to die.
“Um. Hi,” he said. His voice was quiet and subdued, like it was for most people with eidolic toxicosis. Spirit poisoning. “M-my name’s Leander. Everyone just calls me Lee though.”
Cue awkward but inevitable pause between the two of us, while my animal side screamed at me that he was extremely dangerous and I needed to run and hide. Just like it did for every other person I met. It was worse than usual now, maybe because I was cornered. After all, he was between me and the door, I didn’t think the guards would take well to me fleeing through the hallways in a blind terror anyway.
“So … what’s yours?” I heard him shifting in his seat.
I sighed and looked in his general direction, more at the fabric patterns on the seat than his face. Maybe if I played along for a little while he’d leave me alone, and I could go back to pretending he wasn’t there. “It’s Corrine.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you.” He didn’t sound like he meant it. I couldn’t blame him; it’s not like these were great circumstances to be meeting anyone. “So, do you live here?”
It was a ridiculous question, and he realized it if his frantic backpedaling was any sign. “Um, I mean, it’s just I haven’t seen you around. Did you, uh, move here recently or something?”
“No. Lived here all my life.” And good riddance.
“What school do you go to?” Ugh, small talk. He sounded about as excited about it as I did, more like he was reading lines off a page than putting anything into a conversation.
“I don’t.”
He stared at me, confused. I saw his face contort and twitch for a moment.
“Long story,” I offered, in the way of explanation. It was the most anyone would ever get out of me.
“I didn’t do too well in school either. Not with grades, but … you know.” His voice dropped into the near-inaudible range. “It’s why they, ah, had me tested. And now I’m here.”
I winced. Was I really that obvious? “Yeah. They never got me tested at school, though.”
“Then how … ?”
“Work. It’s required by law now.”
“Oh.” He looked down again, his gaze flitting back and forth like he couldn’t bear to look up at me for more than a second. “Sorry.”
Huh. ‘Sorry.’ Well, what else could you say to someone who had a spiritual tumor growing in them? “We’re all in the same boat here,” I said, the terror inside me quieting as I willed myself to believe it. “Er, train, sorry. Anyway, they’ll find a cure soon.” I was being hopelessly optimistic, if not outright lying. It wasn’t going to be soon, if the military was overseeing this like they seemed to be. They tended to be busy with other things, like the skinchangers. As long as we weren’t p-shifting and ripping their throats out, we weren’t high priority. Which meant we were probably getting shoved off to the outer world where they could forget about us.
“Right.” Sincere voice, suspicious body language. He could probably see right through me, even if I could read people I never was a complicated read. “So…have they told you where we’re going?”
“Outside.”
“I know that.” He crossed his arms. “But didn’t anyone tell you where?”
“I know about as much as you do.” I shrugged. “Which isn’t much. It’s the military, what were you expecting?”
He flinched again. “Could you keep it down? They can probably hear us.”
In retrospect, implying the guys with guns were anything short of open, heroic, and competent was probably a bad idea. “Sorry.” I mumbled and did a double-take towards the door. Still closed, and they weren’t beating the door in. So far, so good. Maybe I’d even get through the ride there alive, if the train ever left the station.
It wasn’t long before I was drumming my fingers against the armrest and scowling, quite against my own will.
“Nervous?” And here I was almost willing him out of existence. Drat.
“Yeah.” My rhythmic cadence had turned into a rapid-fire solo from one of my favorite metal songs. Blast beats for the win. “I just don’t like enclosed spaces.”
He laughed nervously. “Me neither.” He stood up, reaching into a shelf above us for his luggage. “Here, I’ve got something that can help…”
Naturally at this movement, the maglev lurched into movement, and he fell to the floor along with his bag. I’ll be honest, I laughed, but more of a reflex than out of it being any kind of funny. I much more carefully got to my feet, and picked his bag up from on top of him. “You alright?”
“I’m fine.” He said far too quickly. “Sorry, I’m not that coordinated.” He braced himself against the windowsill and placed himself back into his seat.
“No need to apologize.” His bag was a bloody mess. I could see notebook papers poking out the sides of it with illegible scribblings just about everywhere, including the margins. But then again, I wasn’t one to criticize organizational skills. But I wasn’t this bad…was I?
He stared at his bag. “Could you…”
My brain took a few moments to process through what he could possibly be asking for. And then the proverbial lightbulb went off. “Oh.” I dropped the bag in front of him.
He gave me a bewildered look in exchange, and picked it up. “I always carry around at least a few of these with me.” I heard papers rustling around, and from the debris he produced a stuffed animal of some kind of dog.
“It’s cute.” I said, not really sure what else he was expecting.
“She’s a jackal. Only one I’ve ever seen.” He smiled fondly at the stuffed animal. “She can keep you company. If you want, I mean.”
“Sure.” Why not? Maybe this would get him to leave me alone. And at least it seemed to brighten his day, his face sure did light up. He did an underhand toss and the jackal landed right in my lap.
“I’ve got a lot of these. I collect them. I even have a virus plushie, want to see?”
“No.” I did have a nagging curiosity about how that was even possible (what with viruses being a microscopic entity and all) but I was sure the results couldn’t be pretty. Assuming they were visible to the naked eye.
As I tucked her under my arms, I had to admit, she was soft, and fuzzy, and strangely comforting. I leaned up against the seat and stared out the window, the pine forests obscured by a shimmering eidolic hedge. Still, it at least seemed less claustrophobic. Maybe now I could get my nap. The animal in me seemed to be somewhat satisfied, at least.
Everything turned very dark– we were heading into a tunnel. Perfect for my nap. I stretched out as far as I could without kicking Leander. And then the train lurched to a stop again.
He blinked, looking out the window along with me. “That can’t good…”
In my personal experience, a situation is never so bad that it can’t somehow get worse. And I was proven right once again when the eidolic hedge powered down. Any feeling of security I had withered away and died. What was going to protect us now from all the skinchangers and raiders and Lord-only-knows-what-else lurking outside?
Safety lights flickered on in the hallways and the intercom crackled to life. “Attention passengers. There has been a mechanical malfunction on the maglev. Please remain seated until the problem is resolved.”
This was less than reassuring, but the howls coming closer and closer were a greater concern of mine. It meant one of two things– wild animals or skinchangers. I was praying for animals.
Leander didn’t seem to be doing much better. All the color drained from his face. “Did you hear that?”
I was finding it impossible to speak or make a sound, and merely nodded in response.
Outside I could hear feet shuffling around and eidolic bullets loading into gun chambers, the soldiers otherwise eerily silent. Their movements stopped. I could hear a dull click, click, click, like metal against metal. Then, the shattering of glass and screams. Some might have been my own, I wasn’t even sure at this point. My mind had placed itself somewhere far away and safe, where there wasn’t shouting and gunfire and more screaming.
I had only the vaguest perception of someone grabbing my arm. A few moments and I realized it was Leander, and he was yelling at me too and I wasn’t sure what he was saying. Somewhere in all the haze I realized he was pulling me towards the door and trying to open it. I guess it wasn’t working, because we weren’t going much of anywhere.
But it didn’t really matter now, because there wasn’t a door to speak of. The soldiers were literally up in arms and screaming. They were also being flung across the hallways as if of their own will. Then I thought I heard one saying “Protect the civilians!” but it was hard to hear over the gunfire. And I was so far away already.
Something– I wasn’t sure what, because I couldn’t see anything except a strange shimmer in the air like heat off the pavement in summer– caused Leander to lift straight off the floor. His hand was yanked from my grip, and I stumbled onto the ground. I got off better than Leander did. He was thrown against a wall, and stopped moving.
I felt another something brush up against my collarbone. And then a flash of light, and a yowl of pain, and the something became very clear. It towered over me, and had to hunch over to fit in the compartment. Its golden fur contrasted starkly against the grey of everything else around it, and its feline face had a savage look in its eyes. It was unmistakably a lion skinchanger. And I should have been terrified of it, but I wasn’t. The animal in me was silent for once. And something about it was morbidly fascinating, like how a flame must be beautiful to a moth.
Of course this thing probably wouldn’t burn me to death. I’d just get my head knocked off. It’d at least be faster.
The thing backhanded the last soldier standing, and turned back to me. One of my aunts had a cat before they became illegal, and that animal was an unrepentant mouser before everyone went into a mass panic and started exterminating mice. The way that skinchanger looked at me was exactly the same as how her cat would look at mice before it killed them, except it had a very human grin on its face. One with more very sharp teeth than I cared to think about.
It must have had some mercy in it, or it just got bored of tormenting me. I didn’t even see him move his paw to strike me, and it only hurt for a second before I fell unconscious.
Hyenas have a bad reputation. The Lion King painted them as half-insane lackeys, while Dungeons and Dragons featured brutish “Gnolls” who worshipped a demon god. Is their reputation deserved? Or can these african predators give even wolves a run for their money, when it comes to pack organization and intelligence? Find out, as Tachyon Feathertail interviews Yurodivy — the site’s resident animal expert!