I stumbled across the multiple-universe of on-line comics in August 2000, quite by accident. I attended DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia to visit my brother, Dan Jolley, who was one of the exhibitors (he writes comic books and other fiction). While standing in the registration line, I was leafing through a sample booklet of comic strips that I’d picked up. It was put out by Plan Nine Publishing, a truly marvelous source for that kind of thing. When I got back home, I started surfing the web and hit all the sites listed, one of which was ES Productions, the home of Sabrina On-Line. This web-comic occupied the number One spot in the Global 100 for a very long time, and rightly so. I got thoroughly hooked on the adventures of the comely young skunkette.
Eventually, having read all the comics, I began following the links Mr. Schwartz had so kindly provided, and found the Foxx Den. Mr. Yost’s story of Sabrina is somewhat non-canonical, in that it varies from the story line in the comic to rather a large degree. His tale is fanciful, challenging, engrossing, well-told, and fun. His other story, Tabitha, is challenging, engrossing, and very well-told, but let me just warn you in advance to have a supply of tissues handy. The Yost/Bruner writing team has a finely tuned ability to wring one’s emotions. The Foxx Den, as of my first attempt at getting this site going, had occupied the Number One spot in the Global 100 for several weeks.
There was one small mention of Wendy in Chapter 2 of Tabitha that just seemed to flip a switch in my head. The basic outline for my story came to me pretty much full-blown. It demanded a response.
I did have a few hazy goals in mind when I began this story.
Foremost was that I had a yarn stuck down in there somewhere that was just itching to get out. I got the burn to write, so to speak.
Second, I wanted to add to the (strangely small) selection of furry fiction that does not devote itself entirely to explicit, kinky sex. There is no yiff or spooge in this story. There isn’t supposed to be. So if that is what you came here looking for, please look elsewhere, because you won’t find it on this site. However, there is occasional strong language, spots of violence of one type or another, and adult situations of varying intensity. That’s life. One does not expect evil creatures to say “Aw, heck.” in a crisis situation. At least, I don’t.
Third, I had rarely run across a furry story that dealt with issues of faith in any detail. This one does. I am a Christian myself. I know lots and lots of other Christians of every hue and degree, and I have observed that one’s faith (or lack thereof) is usually a determining factor in one’s worldview. It affects every major decision that person makes. This is true of devout followers of most religions. Now, having said that, you may ask, “Is this a Christian story?” No. It is just a story. That much will be obvious once you start reading. But the aspect of faith is not ignored, and where appropriate it will be discussed.
Probably not the same as yours.
A good question to ask first
is, “Where are we, anyway?” The pan-universal furry experience covers an awful
lot of ground, and just about every alternate-reality scenario ever dreamt up.
In this world, I am making the following assumptions:
This is a parallel alternate reality.
The major points of historical record mirror the events in our own reality.
There are no humans in this reality, nor were there ever.
There being a wider variety of furry subspecies than there are human subspecies, certain aspects of the development and expansion of human cultures will have less-than-accurate analogs. This is unavoidable.
Okay, having said that, here’s the deal: all anthropomorphic furs in this story are derived from mammals (or occasionally marsupials), specifically those with paws. There are no anthro-ungulates, anthro-reptiles, anthro-amphibians, anthro-avians. Just fur-bearing critters with paws, and not all of those. I don’t include any higher primates, or bats, or anteaters, or sloths, or echidnas, or other weirdness. Sorry.
Eutheric Orders:
Carnivora (land-bound types only, ie: cats, dogs, mongooses,
skunks, otters, bears, etc.)
Hyracoidea (hyraxes)
Insectivora (hedgehogs, moles, shrews, etc.)
Lagomorpha (rabbits & hares)
Rodentia (rats, mice, capybaras, etc.)
Primate Families:
Lemuridae (lemurs)
Loridae (lorises)
Tarsii (tarsiers)
Metatheric Orders:
Diprotodontia (wallabies, koalas, wombats, kangaroos, etc.)
Also, small, feral versions of any of the anthropomorphs may be found roaming free. I could see no logical (to use a laughable term, given the context) reason for there not to be. If one accepts the (admittedly very shaky) premise that humans developed from apes, even though there are still apes around, it seemed ‘rational’ (again, ha-ha) to me that anthropomorphs could be descended from their less-advanced counterparts which still cavort in the wild.
Also also, the furs in this world do not use footwear except in certain specific (read: extreme) circumstances, such as clean-room environments, arctic exploration (and even then the locals would not normally use any), and so on.
Also also also, most furs walk digitigrade (on the toes the way cats and dogs do here) as opposed to plantigrade (the way humans walk). This fact is not immediately obvious to the casual observer, however. Due to anthropomorphism, the length of the foot is greatly shortened as compared with their feral counterparts, to allow the knee and hip to work the way they do in humans. There are a few plantigrade exceptions (bears and wolverines to name two) because not all normal animals are digitigrade.
Depends. A lot of it is the luck of the draw, which would explain why Zig Zag* looks the way she does. On the other paw, Doug and Kelly Granitz (a brown bear and a puma)** had a world of trouble even getting pregnant in the first place. However, if species mixing is really as common as some of the story lines make it out to be, why are we not neck-deep in hybrids? My take on the situation is this:
First, most species tend to stick to their own because of cultural norms and the environments in which they were raised. So (just because it’s what they’re used to) foxes tend to prefer foxes, rabbits prefer rabbits, and so on. And in many of the instances where affections stray out of species, they don’t go too far. A fox and a wolf, for example, or a badger and a ferret.
Second, there is the problem with hybridization. Sure, as a first-generation mix you might be able to cross a coyote with a rabbit. But the offspring of that coupling would have a high probability of some degree of sterility, as with mules. Some cross-breedings just won’t work at all (a kangaroo and any non-marsupial, for example). If you go so far as to mate two different mixed-breed individuals, the chances of that union bearing fruit are very low. I’d be truly surprised if Zig Zag (a skunk/tiger mix) and James Sheppard** (a coyote/German Shepherd mix) were able to have children. What they would look like, I can’t even guess.
*Copyright Max BlackRabbit
**Copyright James Bruner in ‘Zig Zag, the Story’
Well ... you might want to keep one handy. The written word has been a part of my life from earliest memory. I am a reader, I spring from a tribe of readers. Word games were the diversion of choice in our house when I was young. And my appreciation for English, with its willingness to borrow terms from other languages with reckless abandon, its elegant turns of phrase, its colloquialisms, its flexibility, and its knack for expressing exactly what the writer wants to convey, has only grown with time.
Please understand, I am by no means any sort of literary force. My own abilities are admittedly meager, and in the final analysis I am doing this simply to have fun.
Heck, I’ve had a blast with it. My hope is that you will, too.
(The following textual format was copied shamelessly from James Bruner’s ZZ Studios website . . . with his permission, of course!)
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