By Arcpibtn Meaas
I'm sorry, but if you were expecting a pukicutsy little story, you're going to be very disappointed. It is an ugly world, with amoral people doing amoral things. Technically, it's just PG-13 but if you are going to complain about it not being a happy story, well, why are you reading this in the first place Scene 1: Blessed Relief The time: The 2016 of an alternate reality that I pray is nothing like our future reality. The place: A burnt-out Topeka. Spires of steel and stone reached towards heaven, trailing mile-long shadows behind their majesty. The fog rolls in, carrying with it a toxin cocktail of human manufacture. Magnetobikes flit about the channels formed by billboards, while gasoline-powered automobiles crawl through the ceaseless traffic jam. The citizens prepared themselves for another day of tragedy and competition, failure and pain. It was a far cry from the relatively clean and warm city that you may know. The whole world is. Meanwhile, three hundred fifty feet below the surface, a superhero team that was this corrupt, decaying metopolis' best hope struggled to make it through breakfast, at the same time fighting to endure the greatest depression they had ever known. For, under the feet of this city of mundanes, there lived a conclave of the brightest, fastest, strongest, and formally cheeriest superheros that the world had ever known. The Five, so named for their number, eeked out an existance here, under the new captial of the American Federation. You see, about ten years ago there was a really big war--but I'll save that part of the history lesson for later. Three of The Five were already at the breakfast table: the normally hyperactive Cyber, the partially furred Derek, and the team surgeon SpotKitty. Cyber's paws were neatly folded in her lap, sighing as she watched them. Derek was fixated with staring at one point on the wall. SpotKitty had long since fallen asleep in her peas. This scene had not seen much change for the half-hour they had been there. This scene was a stark contrast to the noisy, energetic, humor-laden scene one would have seen perhaps two months earlier. They were just shades of their former selves, lacking hope and cheer. You could get disechartened, depressed, at their change. You couldn't blame them, however. Just two or three months ago, they were the hottest thing in Kansas. Previously, all superheroes were just another ploy of a failing goverment, in an attempt to inspire patriotism in a demoraled people. Then The Five, as they came to be known, came along. They didn't try to get the people to join the military, or get children interested in science and math so they might someday devolop the chemical weapon that would win the never-ending wars. And in return, the populace loved them and adored them. Many docudramas and Vert games were designed after their adventures. For this ragtag band of heros, the love and affection were as welcome as dollars to a miser. They were in heaven. Then, something happened. Their novelty wore off. And it didn't take long--no more than two months--for a suprising number of teenaged superhero teams to pop into existence. They came in every shape and size: from a fat kid who wrapped a towel around his neck and a chain around his arm and called himself "Grinder," to a fifty-strong group of psychic and semi-psychic children that defended their umpteen blocks of the city with their minds and their lives. However, exotic as these teams were, they varied the most in their quality. A few of them were good, some were decent, but the vast majority were just kids like Grinder--misguided children with no idea how romantic being a superhero wasn't. News Radio 6160 often followed up a story often followed one of these children's success stories with another's obituary. Everyone, even the battle-hardened Ethan, were severely hurt whenever another live was lost trying to live just like thier idols. Some parents even cursed The Five's name, taking potshots at them with deadly force when they saw them, convinced that they were trying to lead their children on a lemming's trip under the guise of better intentions. Wait a minute, I'm not here to give you a future history lesson, I'm supposed to be telling you a story. Sorry about that. Just after I started to drone on and on, Ethan came into the room and joined his silent teammates.. For five whole seconds, Derek and Cyber were able to divert their eyes to the hawk. Then, their previous monotony resumed. Ethan didn't notice the silence until he started on his last pound of sugar-enriched products. And it scared him. For fifteen minutes, nobody talked, and that Cyber wasn't talking for once nearly made him insane. He wasn't in the mood to go insane, so he decided to induce some conversation. "So what's up Cyber?" he asked, in his Jamerican accent. Nothing but a small, defeated moan. Scared that Cyber wasn't talking, he turned his attention to his best friend Derek. "Did you get far on that project of yours?" His reply: Grunt. Yawn. Scratch. Grunt again. "Yck." He searched for another question, to get someone else awake. "SpotKitty, how's things for you?" SpotKitty snored softly. As she did she turned her head, revealing that she had gravy all over the right side of her face. Her breath rolled the peas of her Thanksgiving-style meal around slightly, the most motion from her end for a good while. "Sleep-in dinner? Oh, well. So, Jazz..." his voice trailed off as he looked and didn't find her. "Strange, usually she's the first awake..." "Exercise room," Derek yawned. "Oh. Practicing gymnastics, I suppose?" No one had the time to answer, as there came an extremely rapid thumping from the hallway, and it was closing. As their responses to the threat, Derek looked up and SpotKitty woke grudgingly. You see, Ethan had taken a few bullets the night previous. SpotKitty, as always, came through for him. However, the surgery took from 10:35 PM to 4:15 AM this morning. While Ethan was feeling like a million bucks due to his drugged sleep, SpotKitty was feeling like--like that thing horses leave on the street. The two good fighters, Cyber and Ethan, jumped out of their seats. Cyber flicked her left wrist, and white gloves appeared. Then her right, and her grey--black armor materialized around her. She flicked her right wrist a second time, accompanied by the tell-tale whine of a charging tazer. Ethan simply fell into a martial arts stance. Together they prepared for the worst. A green-and-brown blur cartwheeled through the doorway and began whirling all around the floors and walls. And I don't mean blurred because of sheer speed; I'm talking trying to watch a staticy, out-of-focus TV while wearing someone else's fogged up glasses blurry. And it advanced on Ethan. Cyber, her vision enhanced by the suit, saw through the blur and stood down. Ethan's raptor vision was designed for distance, not hand-to-hand combat; the only thing the red-tailed hawk saw was a threat. Ethan could deal with blood-lusting kamikazes, gun-infused cyberpsychos, light tanks, oh sure! No sweat. But not this. Something he couldn't see clearly, something totally unknown, that got his psyche a little touchy. Nervously, he tried to open with a spin duck opening into a kidney blow. Who or whatever the blur was, was good. It was like all the training and skill Ethan had acquired had never existed. After watching the hawk miss miserably many times, it tsk'd and opened up with its own attacks. First flash-- his right arm was rendered limp. Second flash-- he was buckled, shoulders touching his knees. To try and keep balance, Ethan spread his wings wide. Third flash-- his wings were smashed in the fleshy part, making him yelp in pain. He crumpled, s The blur slowed down, pirouetted gracefully, and revealed itself to be their absent member, Jasmine. She sported a green leotard and a defiant smirk. "Oh, man, I'm going to have to do that again. MAN that was a rush!" Jasmine exclaimed, tossing her head for emphasis. "JAS-mine!" SpotKitty said disdainfully. The raccoon ignored the surgeon. Putting her hands on her hips, going into her unbearably cute defiant stance, she told Ethan "You're always telling us that in a one-on-one fight, no armor, no weapons, you'd 'beat the pants off us.' Guess your ego and your aptitude never quite connected." Ethan moaned, and you sorta got the idea that he never thought he'd lose to a woman, especially a fluffheaded one like Jasmine. SpotKitty tsk'd a few times. "You didn't hit any vitals. Or anywhere near where you would have caused permanent damage. But, boy, is he in a world of pain." Ethan motioned agreement. "Just like I planned... land... wha WHOA!" said Jasmine, who began to fall as she realized how dizzy she was. Cyber just barely caught her. "That was beautiful, Jasmine. To use a word," Derek said disapprovingly. "Though hot shot here did need a quick deflating." "Nice moves, Jazz." complimented Cyber. "Thanks. It was--" "--probably impossible if you hadn't taken my agility enhancement chip." Cyber chided. Jasmine's face sunk. "But... how did you find out?" Cyber pointed to a tiny access panel in her skull, flicking the access panel back and forth for emphasis. "You forgot to close the door. Now, please return my chip. Oh--and my martial arts chip, too." Jasmine sighed in defeat. She took off her locket and opened the inner chamber. Pulling back a picture of her father, there lay two, small, green-and-red crystals, each embedded in a small chip. Cyber slid a circuit board out, put the two chips in their appropiate slots, and returned the board to its rightful place. For a moment, Cyber zoned out, as the skill enhancing circutery reacquainted itself with her synapse map. Derek looked up, half awe and half jealously. "Jasmine?! How'd you get a biochip to work outside Cy's brain without a humongeous canister of tiasheba?" In a warbly tone, Jasmine boasted, "Maybe I'll show you sometime. You're not the only techie around, Patches." Derek whimpered at the put-down. This insult went back to the days when The Five were nothing more than a scattered bunch of heros. Derek had decided to become a furry, and in this version of the future, one entered a computer controlled bio-vat to make the change. However, a gang war erupted outside the walls of the street hospital, ridilling him, his bio-tube, and the computers controlling the evolution with bullets. Derek probably would have died were it not for SpotKitty. Treating him both on-the-spot and at their marginally better facilities. She prevented his death, but did not have the equiptment or the raw materials necessary to complete his metamorphasis. That left him half antropomorphic fox and half unaltered: A muzzle and slightly altered ears, two furred legs and a tail sprouting from a waist meant for a smaller torso, and a human left hand paired with a foxes' right paw. Needless to say, this was reason enough to be shunned by mundanes. Neither was he fully accepted by the the furry conclaves. The Five was all he had. Jasmine now fell down; her face was positively green. "I don't feel so good," whimpered Jasmine. "I... I need to get a bathroom." "Oh, gosh," moaned Cyber. Being the closest one, she helped Jasmine up and out of the room, stumbling plenty enough on the way out. Maybe Cy didn't realize then that the agility chip helped people keep their equilibrium; if Jazz was dizzy with the chip in effect, boy she was going to have problems without. From down the hall, the raccoon could be heard: "Oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh, oh... no!" There came a quite distinctive splashing sound. Now it was Derek's and SpotKitty's turn to look green. As if the noise were a cure, Ethan regained consciousness. Unfortunately, he also regained his temper. "Little blank, I'm going to give her a new furstyle--" He stood up fast, intent more than obvious. "No!" burst SpotKitty. "Moving so fast so soon after waking could have severe effects on your--" Ethan cut her off with a history-making burp. Duration, volume, and depth; everything you could expect in a cartoon sound effect. "Or a humongeous brapp," she continued in a obligatory tone. Then she smirked and burst out laughing. "What's so funny?" asked Ethan, momentairly oblivious. Then he figured it out. And so he fell into a loud laughter, and out of his depression. Derek started up then just because Ethan and SpotKitty were laughing. (SpotKitty especially had infectious laughter.) As their hilarity showed no sign of ceasing, Cyber came in, half cradling the queasy raccoon. Cyber stood in the doorway, Jasmine leaned on Cyber's arm, and neither had any idea in the world why their friends were now doing hyena imitations. They looked at one other, and the confusion on each other's face was enough to send them off on their own laughing fit. For maybe a good ten minutes, their laughter grew, multiplied, amplified as it rebounded off the shelter's numerous walls and doors. Instantly, everything seemed cleaner, brighter, easier, better. For the duration of this monsterous giggle-fit, and for a goodly time afterwards, their depression left their minds and hearts. Laughter truly is the best medicine. Scene 2: A Rough Falling In The park where the girl fell through was nice, as parks go. It was a 300-acre hedge labyrinth that was allowed to grow unchecked into a glorious tangle of vines and branches. The rest spots scattered throught held huge trees, themselves shading comfortable benches and picnic tables large and small. It was the perfect place to enjoy a picnic lunch or romantic interlude, a point of optimism surrounded by a city of moral decay. Let's say you had been in the center of the park while The Five was enjoying their first dose of humor in weeks. You would have noticed some unusual things. Like, the temperature. Usually, when the sun goes up, so does the mercury. However, it did the inverse, dropping about 10 degrees (4 celsius) in that time. And, the air. While there were many air purifiers in the park, they were in disrepair and wouldn't work perfectly even if they were. For some reason, however, the air was immaculate. And, it could have been your eyes, but wasn't the sun a bithigher in the sky than outside the park than it was inside? The crescendo of all this weirdness came in the canopy of the largest tree, right in the middle of the park. The air sorta swirled around and up the branches. Maybe you would have noticed; maybe you would have been curious. Spark. Flash. Chill. Boom. Oh, that's why. It was the wayward commercial teleporter. The kind that you pay five thousand credits to hop from New York City to Tokyo so you don't miss your all-important business luncheon. But, normally, teleportation is from box to box. Without a modem line reinforcing the reassembly, the molecules of the teleported were recieving the full force of the Particle Transport Juxtaposition Theory. In other words, she might come out herself, or she might come out chunky salsa. A second later, the sparks coalesced themselves into a horizontal circle, a whirring disc of light solidifing in the canopy of the tree. Through this circle a girl fell screaming. Just as soon as her head had materalized, it was slammed against a fairly thick limb. Then she fell, a rag doll, turning and twisting as she knocked, battered and bruised as she went. Finally, she landed on the soft grass beneath the tree, and lay where she fell. The circle that she was pushed from shrunk to nothingness. Three hours later, and still she slept. She dreamed, but not peaceful ones. The longest and worst was one were she was chained up against a wall with the people close to her. Also in the room with them was a beast, large and monsterous, with an enormus mouth and the teeth and slobber to match. It started on the other end of the line, taking pleasure in slowly ending the prisoner's life. When it came to her, it chewed especially slowly, giving a final bite to her skull... She woke up with a start in a cold sweat. Noticing the position of the sun, she muttered to herself. "Gah. I need to invent a new word. A daydream that's a nightmare." Picking herself up and brushing off. "Now, to figure out where I am." Then, she came to a horrible realization. She didn't know where she was, or who she was. Scene 3: Who Am I? "Oh my god. Oh my god," she muttered over and over, pacing in this overgrown garden. She was probably breaking the rules of whatever religion she belonged to; but there'd be plenty of time to repent as soon as she remembered which one. OK. Take this one part at a time. There had to be some memory of the past! Alright, her family. Uhh, there was... and there also... and him, he was... No! Not a face! Uh, ummm... Where did she work? She got an impression of an office. Then, of being a student. Then, of slave labor. All probably images from watching too much.... Aargh, the word was right on the tip of her tongue! She sat down on a nearby bench. She rubbed her face with her hands, as if that would help her remember who she was. Then, she noticed something about her hands. She looked at them. Pink and padded, like an animal's. "What in the world.." Then she noticed the fur. White near her hands, changing to black mid-forearm. Feeling her face again, she drew her hands forward along her muzzle and nose, back to her ears, all over her face. Adjusting her position, she yelped in pain as her tail was pinched horribly. Muzzle, tail, rounded ears; they all told her. She was an animal. Correction, some combination of animal and God knows what. Some part of her said that she should be freaking, screaming, running. But she had this weird feeling of being like this all her life. But how could that be? That brought yet more confusion. She sat down, to organize her thoughts. Gosh, she wasn't used to thinking this hard. She flicked her tail impatiently from side to side while she brooded. Wait! There was something about that tail! She caught it on her next twitch. Ow, not that hard! Black with a wide white stripe. Did that mean... She twisted around so as to look down the back of her shirt. Despite the awkward position and dim lighting, she saw that the same stripe snaked up along her back and neck. Yep, she was a skunk. Skunk?!? She knew what a skunk was! She remembered something! Yes!!! Now, for her name. No matter how hard she tried, she still drew a blank. Her tail twitched contemptuously. That burst of anger probably was what triggered a skunk's foremost ability. "Eeewww, gross," complained the girl, jumping out of her seat and ready to suffer even while she held her breath and scrunched her nose. A few moments passed by. Curious, she took an exploratory sniff. Yes, it was skunk's odor all right, and yes, it stank like a bog, but, somehow, she was used to it. How...? Never mind. She inhaled deeply, giving her lungs fresh air, clearing her head. Since trying to remember the past isn't worth anything, she thought, I might as well work with my present and future. Leaving the park, she went towards a certain side street, where she thought it would be a safe place to lie low. Had she had her memory, she would have walked exactly the other way. At the corner of the main road and the side, there was a video billboard. An imbedded video camera, catching sight of the girl, altered the incoming image and replayed it to screen. "See how gorgeous YOU will look in Dolphin Swimwear," suggested its sultry female voice. The effect was like a mirror, excepting she had better taste in clothes than her reflection. Now that she got a look at herself, she did look kind of beautiful. She looked at herself, her back-length green hair, the tail that was as long as she was tall, how her white underbelly contrasted with her matte black fur, her big brown eyes, the finely manicured claws of her hand. Shana. What? Who was that? The name just popped into her head. But whose name was it? A schoolmates', a friend's, an enemy? God, girl, pull yourself together! Then, two and two were put together. Long green hair? Brown eyes? Who was that? Why, that was her, stupid! Good; she had a name. And a pretty sounding one, at that. So, the skunkette in suspenders and a black T, the one in a blue one-piece, and herself, were one and the same and all of them were Shana. "God, that's a relief." Scene 4: Ice-Breakin' Bad Shana strutted down the alleyway with pride, her name in forty foot tall letters before her. She had no past, but who cares, she had a name! Not knowing who she was was one of the biggest reliefs of her life--at least, she guessed. She could do anything now. Including duck, which she did when two shadowy figures came down from both ends of the walkway. She didn't need knowledge of the world to reconize trouble when it presented itself. The two pairs met, not more than a dozen feet away from the trash bin Shana had doged behind. The group on the left was obviously professional, whereas the group on the right was obviously not. "Have you our pills?" one from the left pair asked. The man in the raincoat said "Yes. You have our cash?" The second man from the left group gave an ebony attache to the man on the right. If it was as heavy as it looked, and wasn't clinking with coins... Bills. And she would bet that suitcase of money that it wasn't from legal sources. That gave her a weird emotion; heroism? Bravado? Suicidal tendencies? Whatever its name, that was her reason for doing what she next did. Just as the man in the raincoat traded with the small guy, Shana stepped out from behind the garbage. In a voice she hoped was like an adult scolding a child, she said "I'm sorry, boys, but you need your mommy to get your prescriptions for you." Surprised, the men stepped back a pace. Their hands went for unseen holsters. One of the men taunted her, "Oooo, looks like we have a hero here." The men reeled in mock fear. "So, Fancy Furry wants to play with us." Some cruel laughs. "Maybe we'll play with her a little bit before we deal our share." Even with her amnesia Shana could tell what they meant. The two men from the right side walked away, leaving the two men to threaten her. Or be threatened by. Remembering the occurrence in the park, she mentally hit what she thought was the mechanism. Fate just made her accidentally flip a different switch. She started singing in low notes, slashing the air in front of her with her hands. A small part of her was screaming "What am I doing?!" The rest of her was laughing at her opponents' prospects and kept going. "Look, boys, it's Kung Fu Chick." Their lavascious laughs kept up. They started to say things that I will not repeat. Her hands started to whirl faster, faster. Her song lowered in pitch, picked up pace. She got the feeling of doing this out of habit, getting into a groove she had traveled many times before. Nervously, the small guy said "I don't like this, Marv, the the way she's dancing or how her eyes are glowing." The big man thumped on the little man, never one to listen to reason. "Idiot, it's just some chipped dancing skills and fashion contacts." Having so thumped his partner, he advanced on Shana, his less than scrupulous intentions blantant. While dancing, she had been unconsciously gathering psionic energy. When the brute put his hand around her and his lips all to close to hers, she burst. She siphoned her mana as an ice blast at the rude blaggard. The energy coalesced into the human visual range, displacing the heat with pure nonreal energy. The air around her beam vibrated as the supercold froze the air, with promptly shattered in the comparatively boiling 92�F air. As his heavyset friend began to resemble Frosty the Snow Man, the other man freaked. "Freak! Demon! Witch!" he blurted out, eyes driven wild by a purely human fear. He took a few hurried steps backwards before he figured out that it would be a lot easier to face the direction he was running in. The few seconds he gave the skunk in turning were all she needed. She grasped around for some more mana, repeated the last few seconds of her dance, and wham! Baddie number two was lain. She took the moneybag from the dude, figuring he wouldn't be needing it where he was going. She sneered a look at the second man, who wasn't completely frozen thanks to her underpowered blast. "Now you just chill," she mocked. "Juliet, eat your heart out," she murmured to herself as she started off. Scene 5: Burst Bubbles. It was two throps. One was hanging on to the legs of the other. The hanging one was a rabbit, black with blue and white fur and some cybernetics, almost a ninja. The gliding one was feline, with gray feathered wings, gray fur, and gray armor that looked like it was made of polygons. Oh yeah, and a miniature missile launcher. The ninja let go of the cat's legs, tumbled twenty feet, and landed in martial arts stance. Her companion flew as far behind the newcomer and alighted, effectively locking her in. Shana's eyes narrowed. In her mind, she figured they were the brokers. Play it cool, don't be a threat. Give them their money, let them have the pills, la de dah de dah, everyone have a nice day. "So, how are you two today?" "Quite fine," the rabbit responded wairly. What kind of person asked that when they were caught flaunting alien tech? she wondered. "We were just about to return that money to Topeka Credit when all of a sudden a norm comes up and blasts some bori with an ice blaster." Shana whirled and spike-kicked to a fire escape above their heads. Turning to the cat who had been sneaking up on her, she accused, "And a snapped neck, my reward?" "Nothing that drastic," assured Gray Angel (for that was the cat's name). "Exposing alien technologies to norms carries a minimum five-year reprogramming penalty, you know." Storm-- the ninja's name-- bounds twenty feet laterally, atop a Dumpster, and then forty feet up, landing right next to the mephit miss. She held out her arm, asking with body language what she says with words: "Give me the gun, and I'll try and make it three year for cooperation." "Never!" she yells defiantly. She just figured out what she meant by ice blaster. She hoped they meant a gun that fires ice. Unless they were talking about her power; and how they would take that away from her, she didn't know. Check that; she didn't want to know. Storm then became totally fed up with her. Brass, rude, daydreamy, and with an attitude the size of Wyoming; all too much like herself. She decides that she should just take the gun, knock the little miss for a loop, and turn her in to MIB Programming. Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick. If the skunk had seen where Cyber was just reaching, she probably would have taken offense. All she felt was a chill breeze. In those seconds, Storm had changed her lower right leg into liquid metal (one of her powers), snaked it behind the skunkette, and within three seconds had reached into every place where contraband could have been kept. Two the lapine's suprise, not only did she have no contraband, she was devoid of any posessions beyond her clothes: No wallet, no ID card, no credstick, no form of self-defense weaponry. Shana decided the time for talk was over. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and concentrated on the subether about her, how it flowed, the ways it interacted with the physical world. She started "pumping" her personal mana--that is to say, that she shoved as much of it out of her as hard as she could, then sucked up as much as she could while diffusion naturally filled her up to normal capacity. Soon she was cycling from zero to five times her normal mana level, taking but a fraction of a second to go from each extreme. Gray Angel jumped up to the fourth floor, and bat her wings furiously to keep up. Using her subsonic implant, she asked her accomplice worriedly, "What's with her?" "I have no idea," the hare replied, worried herself. A tinge of fear pervaded her thoughts. But not her voice: "I'm losing patience with you. Hand over the blaster, now." She pointed at Shana's face; the thrumm of a tazer blantant. Shana paid no attention. Instead, she cycled up once more, shoved her door down--and kept it down. Much like when you hold a cup upside-down underwater, the harder and deeper you push, the harder and deeper it pushes back. She kept control as long as she could, willpower versus the laws of nature. "I said, drop the--" Shana let her mental floodgates burst wide, shoved the whole of her willpower along with the rising tide of energy. That trick raised her personal mana level to nearly thirty times her resting level. Shana defiantly screamed the last word of the song and channeled the mana out as an explosion of ice. They froze. Literally. The super-cold waves froze the air's moisture, covering everything in the alleyway with a gleaming superhard layer of frost. GreyAngel tumbled a few times and landed on the ground, bouncing a few times before coming to a rest on her back. Shana's eyes opened. She was in as much shock as her would-be detainers; she finally got the grasp of just how strong her powers was. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she complained, now concerned with what could happen to them after they thaw out. Then, a worse thought: What if those two weren't alone? What if others were waiting, angry at their friend's defeature? Especially in her now mana-exhausted state, she was in no state to battle. Paranoia beginning to set in, she jumped off the fire escape and ran off, worming her way into the hard of the decaying city.
This story as a whole, Arcpibtn, Jasmine, David, and Shana are copyright 1999 & 2000 by Arcpibtn Meaas. Cyber and SpotKitty are (c) theirself. Ethan Hawke is based on a character created by Michael Keith. Resemblances to products and people made without satrical intent are fully unintentional. Coverall legal statement: This story is meant to be read, and hopefully enjoyed, by you. And that's it. Don't do anything that's mentioned in the legal text of any other story around the Internet, or I'll take action. Maybe legal, maybe just annoying, but you won't like it. Thanks to: To my writing group; Aimee, Rowdy, Sandy, Sherenna, and Tracy; for letting my ego know when it was right on and when it needed a reality check. To Muke Tever, Autolycus, Snowfur, Marikarr, Neina, and countless other attendants of FurryMUCK, for keeping me on the right track and giving me good ideas and suggestions on how to write. To Anette, for just being nice to me and helping me get a little closer to sane. Every little bit helps! To Cyber, for the picture that inspired the whole shebang, and the permission to write it period. To R. Talsorian Games and Steve Jackson Games, for books that gave me no end of inspiration.