Author's Note: This story, like The Best Man, Daddy's Special Girl and The Town Bike, take place in the Furicana universe. Furries and humans alike share this world -- and their beds. Enjoy!
I turned on the light in my bathroom and sighed -- looking down and seeing nothing but a broad expanse of yellow and brown spotted chest fur in the mirror.
Sonoma State University was not a place built with me in mind.
My name is Pat. I'm a giraffe. And stop -- I've heard all the jokes.
Hey, did you mean to wear your hair like it, or can you just not reach it?
Or the old stand by about the coffee getting cold before it got to my tummy. And the less said about the giraffe walking into the movie theater, the better. In truth, my neck was not
that
tall. Really. Honest. Yes, I had to bend almost in half to look myself in the eyes and make sure my ossis were still on straight, but it wasn't because my
neck
was tall.
It was because
all
of me was tall.
"Hey, Pat!" one of my dormmates called through the door of my main room -- audible even from the bathroom. "Pat! Patty patty patty! Patflat! Flatpat! Pat...lack? Lackpat. Patlick? Lickspit? Spitlick?"
"What, Gordon?"
"Oh, I forgot."
Gordon's feet were already stomping down the corridor that connected our rooms. On paper, SSU had the single greatest set of dorms in all of northern California. There were separate rooms, each room had a bathroom, each set of four rooms connected to a kitchen, the whole works. It would be fantastic, even, if-
I stepped into the shower and smashed my forehead and ossis right into the shower faucet. I clapped my hands to my forehead and felt the dull ache of a headache start to creep from my scalp to my snout. My tail lashed from side to side -- drumming against the glass shower door. I grumbled under my breath and grabbed onto the shower knobs. A blast of far too cold water smashed into my chest.
"Auuu-FUCKI!" I squealed as the cold water went from chest to balls in about fifteen microseconds.
I grabbed knobs.
Twisted.
A moment later, my balls were being scalded.
"I HATE THIS PLACE!"
And to think, I had come here with such high hopes. My parents had dropped me off a mere week before -- after a long, indolent summer spent enjoying the last few days of my innocent high school days, drinking soda and playing Rock Band II and kissing Cindi Kapowski underneath a mistletoe she had hung over her doorway on the night before we headed out, all of it blurring together into a faint memory of
simpler times
. Then I had seen the dorms -- the same dorms that I had toured with the smiling guide and a gaggle of other students -- up close and personal. The problems hadn't really cropped up until my parents were driving away, as if some kind of evil spirit had concealed them from our eyes until it was beyond hope, and beyond help.
Okay, maybe I was being a bit melodramatic.
I emerged from the shower, using an old hair dryer on my chest fur, sighing as I watched the fur ruffle and shake underneath the hissing, blowing vent-fan. I walked to the window that dominated the left half of my room, making sure to keep my bare ass out of the direct line of sight. Not that it was easy to see
in
from the outside. Whoever had built these dorms had been that clever at the very least. I looked out through the screen and saw other students heading out to their classes. At the early morning, it seemed to be an even mixture of humans and furs of various types.
I sighed.
"You're being overdramatic, Pat," I said, quietly, setting my dryer down on my desk next to my heavy duty LCD screen and surround sound speakers -- painstakingly packed and carried from my den at home and set up in the much smaller dorm room. "This is just the first day."
Hammering came at the door again.
"I remembered!" Gordon called through the door.
I closed my eyes.
I had only known Gordon for about a single weekend, and he was already shaping up to be quite, ah, unique.
"What is it Gordon?"
"Did you want breakfast?" He asked.
"Nah, I-" I took a step forward. My hoof caught on the taut power cable that stretched from my hair dryer to the bathroom's plug socket. The dryer jerked across the desktop, wrapped around the base of the monitor and arrested its motion. The monitor moved forward half an inch, but didn't budge. What did budge was my whole body -- my entire center of balance swung out crazily and I spun my arms around me, hopping forward on my other hoof. I landed on one of the wires of my surround sound system, got caught, and finally, hit the carpet snout first with a CRASH. The door bounced and Gordon tried it -- the door opening.
"Dude, are-" he stopped, standing over me, my tail flopped up against the small of my back.
I couldn't even imagine what I looked like right then.
All I could think about was the fact that I could already taste blood dripping from my snout.
"...are you okay?" Gordon asked.
I got my hands under my chest, shoved myself up, and glared at him -- feeling the wires wrapped around my body drawing taut.
"NO!" I said. "I'm just FINE!"
Then the monitor fell on my back.
###
Gordon was not the most assuming human being. Though, if he had been transposed to any of the other species that shared this big globe with humanity, I doubted he'd have made any more of an impression. Short and somewhat stumpy, with a face round enough to be babyish, and yet square enough to not quite verge on moon-faced, he had hair-colored hair and neutral eyes that could sometimes seem blue, sometimes gray, sometimes green, and always boring. If he had maybe been able to distinguish himself with his manner of dress, he
might
have been able to stand out as more than just your average human being.
But Gordon wore slacks and a gray pocket T-shirt, and that was the end of it.
And yet, Gordon
stood out
. He never just glanced at something. He
looked
at it. Even knowing him for a weekend had seared the way that he turned his whole head to focus on something into my brain. And nothing could make me forget his way of talking. I wasn't sure if I liked it or loathed it -- but I figured I had a year at the very least to figure out one way or another.
"So, I was thinking," he said.
"What about?" I asked, my voice snuffled behind the two wads of paper jammed into my nostrils.
"Oh, space," he said, nodding. "Did you ever wonder if an alien race might come to Earth and just flip their
shit
that we have several million sentient species on it? Many of them with wildly different physiological makeups? And yet, the most dominant species in the planet never hunted or competed the others into extinction? And do you think they'd
buy
the current anthropological research findings?"
"What? The Brussels Hypothesis?" I asked, rubbing my sore back with one arm.
It wasn't that I was some nerd or anything. Well, no more than anyone else who played Rock Band II and loved Marvel movies. But it was hard to not have something that trended on Twitter and Facebook for three days straight
seared
into your brain at least a little bit.
"More like the
Boning
Hypothesis," Gordon said. He elbowed my hip -- easy enough for him. I looked down at the top of his head. He craned his head back to wiggle his eyebrows at me. "Get it? Get itttttt?"
"No, explain it to me," I said, dryly. Well, I tried to sound dry at the very least. It was hard to be properly pithy while your voice sounded pinched and nasal.
Gordon just wiggled his eyebrows at me in increasingly suggestive ways until I had to drag him to the side before he walked into a street light pole.
By this point, we had come to the large, green center of SSU's campus. The route we took looped past the gymnasium -- which I had steadfastly refused to go, blessed as I was with the athletic phenotype of most furs -- and then went straight towards the baffling modern art masterpiece called the bacon and eggs that was set between the three nexi that the SSU campus rotated around: The library, the science building, and the
other
building -- the building where the school crammed English, History, the soft sciences, and anything that didn't fit in the science building.
And of course, the bacon and eggs.
It looked a bit like a huge strip of bacon, balanced on one end, reaching upwards into the sky, with two flat half-spheres set to either side of it. They were supposed to represent the duality between good and evil.
"Lunch!" Gordon said.
"If you say so," I said, sticking my tongue out at him -- and when a giraffe sticks their tongue out, they stick it
out
and out and out and
out
.
Gordon went cross-eyed trying to keep his eyes on my tongue tip. "That's so
cool
."
"Thanks?" I asked.
I wonder, sometimes. Do people who have their lives changed know that everything they knew before had been altered in that single moment? Because, well, walking into the shower this morning had told me that the comfortable, easy way that I could live in my own
home
wasn't the same and it wouldn't be the same for a very long time. That was something that had to sink in. But in the grand scheme of things, that wasn't
that
big of a chance.
The next change should have taken time to sink in.
But I swear I felt it in my bones from the moment it happened.
Something smashed into my back at high speeds and pitched me forward. I threw up one arm and caught myself on the ground before I smashed my face against the much less forgiving concrete. I rolled and spun onto my back, ready to shout, and saw that the person who had smashed into my back was still in the air. She had rebounded off me and -- suddenly, the sky above me went dark. The sun had been blotted out by something vast and membranous. Then something light and fuzzy bumped into my chest and my ears were filled with the roar of wind and the rustle of detritus flying about and the cries of onlookers.
Then silence -- a deep, abiding silence as I looked deep into the golden eyes of
