If you've known us for a while, you've have heard this for sure. It's a favorite icebreaker of ours.
If you haven't, buckle in. This is a fun one.
So, rewind... many years ago, now. It's the tail end of high school. Our system is smaller, we've only just started to crack our socially awkward shell, and we actually have a consistent handful of friends for the first time in our lives.
Fast forward a bit to college. We're studying computer science (unwillingly) and daydreaming of throwing our long-term focus at the study of myth and fable. We looked at the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index with awe and wonder.
Somehow, in spite of living on the internet for years now, we'd never heard of furries. The first time went like this.
SCENE: Outside the dining hall, immediately after lunch
[our shitty clamshell phone rings]
Us: Hello?
Nyk, our then-best-friend from high school: Hey deadname, how's it going?
Us: It's... going?
Nyk: I got a weird question for you.
Us: Shoot.
Nyk: You seen anyone on campus there wearing collars?
Us: Collars?
Nyk: Yeah, collars. Like around their necks.
Us: Like, spiky collars? Like punk collars? No, I haven't.
Nyk: No, not punky collars. Dog collars.
Us: ...why the hell would someone wear a dog collar?
Cue us getting a half-hour bad explanation of what furries were. Nyk, of course, was one.
We left the call confused. We followed this up by immediately looking up what furries were on a library computer, getting the Typical Internet Horror rundown of the time.
"Oh gods," we said, taking it at face value, "my best friend is a dogfucker."
THANKFULLY we got that conception cleared really quickly. A lot of awkward parking lot conversations later, and Nyk had us interested in the idea. We flirted with something classical from our fable-leanings (which NEARLY got us out of the gates with a fox), but ultimately we couldn't resist the call of pilfering a gold-and-blue angel-wolf straight out of our one D&D monster manual.
We'll skip along the surface of the next year or two from here. Most of what happened was typical young goofy furry stuff from there. We wound up with four people total in our local crew, including us. They were the gateway to our first queer community, a big part of the slow avalanche of identity that'd find us many, many years after the fact.
At some point, Nyk wanted to call our local crew "a pack." Y'know, cute, silly, whatever.
Then, he wanted to call the pack Harmonic Ascension.
"That sounds like a name for a cult," we said. "Haha."
Nyk shot us a death glare, and that was that.
A bit later, Nyk declared that he and his partner were the pack alphas.
By now, it was becoming increasingly clear in a number of ways that Nyk was a power-tripping asshole. Sadly for us, we believed the best in people and overlooked far, far too many red flags.
This culminates in a day where Nyk finally reveals himself to be a direct descendant of Merlin. Like, Arthurian Merlin.
And that he's been hiding some sophisticated druidic practice from us the whole time.
Like, okay. We're cool with the occult. We did a lot of practice then, we still practice now. However.
Nyk was an asshole. And Nyk constantly fucked up.
He'd more or less call everyone to hang out and watch him "perform a ceremony," which never came out like he wanted.
Somehow, we got the blame. He more or less called us some kind of bad vibes spell teflon, and he used this as further cause to push us around.
Here's where it comes to a head:
It's a night in the dead of winter. It's really fucking cold and really late. We just finished a day of hanging out with Nyk's partner at their place.
Said partner's parents were extremely scary and physically abusive fundies. They knew we were queer, and we could feel the tension when we were around them.
As we're leaving, Nyk throws us his keys and tells us to start the car so that we can wait with the heater while he wishes his partner good night.
At this point, we get the idea for the most low-balled prank ever: We'd swap our house keys with the keys on his lanyard, throw it inside on the driver's seat, and "lock them inside."
We do this. Nyk comes out.
We play up being dumbasses. He immediately shoulders us aside and crawls under the car, looking for something he can twiddle to pop the door. We IMMEDIATELY fess up to keep him from damaging something.
He pushes us down, gets in the car, and slams the door. He starts swearing up a storm and threatening to leave us behind.
Our phone is dead, and we can't call our parents. The fundies for sure wouldn't let us back in. Our house is too far to reasonably walk, especially in the cold. We can't let him leave us here.
For some reason, the solution comes to us as "defuse the situation with humor." For some reason, "defuse the situation with humor" comes to "cling on the back windshield and say that if he's driving off you're going to hold on."
Being a completely normal person, he takes this as cause to floor it and gun his car down the nearby straightaway.
He responds to a few minutes of screaming by slamming his breaks and whipping his car to send us flying into the asphalt. It was a miracle we didn't break anything or hit or neck, but our back was on fire.
Nyk comes over, stares down over us.
Nyk: You're staying here unless you apologize for overstepping my bounds as pack alpha.
We aren't. And we don't want to. But Nyk is our access to warmth and medical aid. So we lie through his teeth, and we do. He also says we'll need to pay to get our blood out of his upholstery. We do this too, anything to get to safety.
And so, he peels us off the pavement, gets us into the passenger seat, and we leave.
Nyk's house is only a few minutes away from here. His mom is a nurse. They have a HUGE collection of first-aid gear.
So when we drive past, we ask about it in confusion, mentioning just that.
"Eh," he says, "I want a burger right now, though."
And this is how we wound up patching ourselves up with the employee first aid kit in a McDonald's bathroom, lying at the cashier that we'd "gotten knocked aside by someone leaving the drive through" as this druid asshole sucked down a big mac in the other room.
Needless to say, this was the last time we had anything to do with him.
...and that's how we became furries :'D
