Sly Rabbit

2006-10-14T15:52:14Z

75.2.29.124:

[[Image:GR_MFF2005_buster_the_plushie.jpg|thumb|right]]

'''Sly Rabbit''', previously '''Sly Squirrel''', real name Austin C., (born November 11, 1984) is a writer of [[furry]] fiction and poetry. He has been active in the fandom since 2000, when he joined the [[TSA-Talk]] mailing list. He created ''[[Velveteen]]'', which he performed at [[Midwest FurFest]] 2005.

Sly Rabbit lives in Indiana. He has attended Wabash College from 2003, pursuing a degree in English and secondary school education.

== External links ==

* [http://xepher.net/~slysquirrel/ The Beat Goes On...] - Sly Rabbit's website
* ''[http://slysquirrel.livejournal.com/ Titles are for Sissies]'' - Sly Rabbit's [[LiveJournal]]

== Selections from Sly Rabbit ==

Crossing lines

My thoughts are fish:

Bluegill that bite my hook time and time again.

Bass, big and meaty, the keepers,

Catfish that snap my line in two during

Late nighttime hours

Fishing uncle's lake with chicken liver.

My thoughts swim every day

Knowing that the secret to fishing isn't the catch

But casting the line.

----

Jones

Another day on another empty street. Pay no attention to the android charging up on the balcony.

The coffee’s percolating on my grill as I step outside my house. The smell’s a bit better out here; less mold, but there’s still that rainsoaked wood smell that just won’t quite go away. (This happens when your street becomes a creek.) I pour myself a cup, hold it close to my nose, and for just a moment I can close my eyes and forget that my home is a disaster area.

I never forget, of course. It’s just a human idiom.

The coffee doesn’t taste when it enters my mouth. It never has. I just put it past my lips, swish a bit, and spit it over the ledge to two feet of water below. Old social habit – a holdover from when I was working as an office assistant. Risk manager. I told insurance companies the relative chances of, say, a monsoon sweeping its way through a town and turning it into a wasteland. We used to drink coffee at the meetings and I played right along; I had a nice little “stomach” that kept the fluid in until I could dispose of it in private. But here, and now... who cares? I’m all alone.

The generator’s out of juice, now. I pull the plug out of my thigh and throw it back into my house. That’s it. No more. No recharge for my solid state brain. All that’s left is me, the coffee, and the floodwater below.

One week to go.

Evacuate. The call came over the radio waves today. All-frequency bulletin. “Removal by force if necessary.” It’s gonna take force. I know it. They can try and try but this little balcony is all I have.

I’m not going back.

Good ol’ T-72 models like me, we’re a rare breed. Vintage. Fuzzy state chips capable of 2.7 Trillion calculations per millisecond, back when that actually meant something. Synthetic skin and flesh cover titanium shell. Ten times lighter than any robot on the market, four generations ago.

People now, they’re clamoring for the ZX-6. Positronic. Biologically engineered, chemically fueled. Eats at the table like a regular Emily Post. Capable of human emotion. The perfect robot, just like I used to be.

Now, I’m reconstitutable. The world can always use a good fuzzy chip brain in a factory’s manufacturing robot, or in someone’s art project. Something meaningless to throw aside. Something nostalgic to gawk at. Old tech. Walking dead.

I had a friend who ended up in St. Louis. He’s a birdbath, now, with just enough autonomy to wipe the bird shit off his eyes.

Androids don’t cry. At least, that’s what they advertised.

One week.

It’s amazing I lasted this long, really. You can blame that on Harry, the old deli keeper down the lane. Vainglorious old fart, he was. “I don’t need another damn bot!” he kept telling the salesmen with their ZX-6 bots. “Jones here works just fine.”

(Maybe they’ll make me into a car wash when they pick me up.)

I wonder if he survived. Breathing’s hard for humans when they’re under a few feet of water.

Another sip-swish-spit of coffee washes the thought away, and numbers enter my head. Six days, twenty-three hours, forty-five minutes, and no place to go. Wait it out. Go get it over with. Either way I’m a brain waiting to be harvested.

There’s a pair of tickets to Arizona pegged on the overhang’s supports. Old Harry’s retirement present, once he finally closed up shop. One way. One last gasp. One big bang of a vacation, looking over the canyon. Now Harry was floating somewhere in the store. If I played the bus schedule I could be there in a two days.

Nothing left to do.

All androids pass the torch sometime.

One week, eh? What the hell. I always wanted to see the Canyon anyway.

----

Child's Play

Kyle hated graveyard shift. Discovery Zone didn't seem nearly as magical without all the kids screaming and plowing through its play tube mazes and ball pens. On those wonderful day shifts he could watch the kids play around here and there and almost imagine his childhood playland days, when everything was big and explorable and fun. Sometimes management would even let him get in the ball pen with some of the less outgoing kids, just to make sure they had a good time.

But cleaning up after kids' messes was no picnic, especially when you had to scrub the tubes on Sunday night. His body was about two sizes to large to be really comfortable in those things, anyway.

Hours worked were hours paid, though. And when he needed those extra dollars' rent for the month he could always rely on picking up late night cleaning duties from an all-too-willing volunteer.

Sighing, he unlocked the front door and disabled the alarm system. The main breaker switch snapped and the lights overhead came to life. Laid out before him was a multicolor wonderland laid in shambles, waiting for him to do his magic. And to the kids it _was_ a sort of magic; they left the place in shambles and when they returned it was like new, ready to be romped through all over again.

He smiled. At least there was something positive he could pull from these boring hours.

The cleaning supplies waited for him just behind the counter: sponges, cleaner, disinfectant, Lysol foggers, kneepads. He pulled them all out to the playland's foam-covered entrance arch, took a deep breath, and went to work straightening up the activity tables lining the outside of the tangle of tubes and air-bounce playplaces.
The main ball pen shifted.

It made a horrible racket in the dead silence, all those plastic balls moving. It always seemed to move to and fro on its own, it seemed; there really wasn't a good explanation for it. Maybe it was heat from the lights or the ventilation system changing pressure within the pen that made some of the balls shift. Kyle had learned to ignore it on graveyard shift.

He caught balls flying through the air in the other pen.

That wasn't terribly uncommon, either. The pen had a little machine that zinged balls up to the ceiling so they could rain down on the kids. They loved it. Sometimes a ball would stay up there for days at a time only to come down when the air conditioning blasted it in just the right way. The sound was a little shocking when you were alone in there, but it wasn't terribly uncommon.

It happened again.

Now _that_ was terribly uncommon. With a sigh he dropped the Legos he had been arranging and walked over to investigate. Some kid probably buried himself in the balls hoping to be the system and get some extra playtime; the staff tried to keep it from happening but some kids still manage to slip through the cracks.

He had to duck down to get under the mess of tubes and cargo nets, and ended up crawling into the ball pen's main entrance. He sifted around for a while, called out for anyone in the pen, but found nothing. For a moment he thought about what he could have been doing -- should have been doing, for that matter. He considered going back for the Lysol fogger and taking care of disinfection while he was hunting.

But when he heard a voice in the tunnel above the cleaning items were quickly forgotten. Out of the ball pen he climbed, and with a little shiver of glee he started climbing a cargo net into the nearest tube maze entrance.

Inside the tubes he could hear the voice echoing from every corner; it sounded like laughter. He grunted and started to move about in a sort of army crawl, for there was no other way to really get his body through the tubes.

It took a few minutes of searching before he realized he was enjoying the tube crawl. He was going really fast, too. It felt good to shoot through the tubes like a kid again. After a few turns he was even convinced that the tubes were getting bigger as he gave chase. And it was paying off, too; as the chase went from tube ladder to cargo net bridge he started to see the flicker of a shadow at the next turn. He could have sworn it was a tail.

His clothes felt really baggy. As the chase went on he was having trouble keeping his shirt on his shoulders. His pants came off in one quick turn, but he didn't pay much notice. The shadow was getting closer with each passing turn!

It seemed like the cargo nets were getting easier, too. His fingers and toes gripped the things better than they used to. His shoes had fallen off at about the same time as the pants but he didn't really feel any different; there was something protecting his feet without the need for those icky things.

There was something he was supposed to be doing. He couldn't remember exactly what that was, and he didn't care. There was a really important game of chase going on!

The shadow disappeared around one final corner, and Kyle heard the zipline zing on its way to the bottom. A small body hit the padding below with a soft whuff. That was how it was going to be, then! Kyle laughed and redoubled his speed -- he was able to crawl around with plenty of room to spare, by then -- until he came out of the tubes and onto the zipline's starting platform.

"Whee!" he cried out as the platform fell out from under him. The line whirred and Kyle imagined he was flying for the few seconds it took to get to the bottom. Then the line caught and he was sent flying to the crash pads below, which he hit rolling. Laughing, he stood up and pounded through a line of weighted pendulums hanging from above. And out into the playland.

Laying in wait for him was a small pile of clothes just his size. He knew he couldn't be out there naked, of course; mommy had taught him better than that. From the pile he picked a pair of raccoon undies and a pair of overalls. The undies went on, then he took off his shirt...

Only to find fur!

His big kid mind tried scream out a protest, but the words died in his mouth. The fur was cool -- it made him look nice. And, almost as if on cue, he felt his tail swishing under the overalls. Chuckling, Kyle guided the striped tail through it's respective hole on the overalls before he snapped the clasps at the top.

Dressed, Kyle dove back into the playland to hunt down his mystery person. He didn't have to look farther than the waterbed moonwalk, though. "Hi!" The kid called to him. "My name is Sandfur. Who are you?"

"I'm Kyle." The smallish boy bouncing to and fro on that waterbed wasn't much of a boy at all; he looked more like a cartoon character off one of those old 80s cartoons. All his features waxed raccoon -- masked fur on the muzzle, black paws, long, swishing tail... the works. And Kyle's subconscious was completely comfortable with it. He knew this wasn't right. He shouldn't be seeing _any_ kid as an equal, especially in a kid's playland that suddenly seemed all-too-large. This boy shouldn't be here after hours. This boy shouldn't be a raccoon. _He_ shouldn't be a raccoon.

He didn't care what he should be doing.

The raccoon kid looked around the playland and back to Kyle. With a wide-eyed, pleading face he asked, "Want to play with me?"

Kyle looked down at his new, overall-clothed, furred body. The tail attached to his rear swished this way and that and brought sensations new and unknown. He crossed his eyes on the black button of a nose on the front of his raccoon muzzle and giggled at how his new friend split into two. Everything around looked new and exciting and just his size. This was a _cool_ playland!

"Sure!" with that Kyle dove into the waterbed moonwalk to play astronaut with his bestest buddy in the whole wide world and thought of nothing more. This was heaven.

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Artists]]
[[Category:Writers]]
[[Category:Poets]]
[[Category:Indiana]]
[[Category:1984 births]]

Xanni The Blue

2006-10-14T15:40:49Z

75.2.29.124:

'''Xander The Blue''' (born May 11, 1980) is a [[dragon]] furry from [[Wikipedia:Palatine, Illinois|Palatine, Illinois]], U.S.A.

Xander is currently maintaining his hair gel collection (he likes the fruity ones!) while animating surprisingly realistic monsters that are gonna come and eat'cha. Stomp right out of the screen, he's that good.

Xander actually hires shoe gnomes to do his animation work. He sleeps and the gnomes come out to do his work. (Gnomes sure do have it rough nowadays -- gotta keep up with the times.)

* [http://www.furnation.com/Xander_The_Blue/ Xander The Blue's Lair]
* [http://xandertheblue.livejournal.com/ Xander The Blue] on [[LiveJournal]]
* [http://us.vclart.net/vcl/Artists/Xander-The-Blue/ Xander The Blue] on [[VCL]]

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Artists]]
[[Category:Dragon characters]]
[[Category:Illinois]]
[[Category:1980 births]]

WikiFur - User contributions [en]

Sly Rabbit

Xanni The Blue