The author stared blankly at the empty document before her. “Abstract transformation?” she mumbled to herself as she rolled the idea in her mind. “Any approach I take to this is going to be weirdly meta,” she thought. She set a pomodoro timer and tried to focus herself on the task at hand.
Although she’d chatted casually with her client before, she didn’t know very much about his OCs. Panda? Check. Red zip-up hoodie? Check. Male? Presumably, but she’d forgotten to ask for their (his?) pronouns. She had some general ideas of what the client liked beyond the commission: Size-play was the common kink that got the two of them talking in the first place. She flip-flopped between ideas. Becoming a fursona’s OC would be derivative of the client’s prior work. Becoming part of someone’s body would be too tangible. She wanted to put her own twist on it, somehow.
While the human at the keyboard hemmed and hawed, a faint image of Equilius appeared in her mind. It was a process of creation she’d undertaken before with characters she now considered headmates, though with far less intention and direction. She was used to making characters who were a facet of herself, rather than so intimately working with someone else’s OC.
Equilius was confused by his new surroundings. The world was charcoal grey, with a diffuse light coming from somewhere above. He remembered all the things he’d been through in previous stories and roleplays; he knew what his creator intended for him. Here, however, that context had collapsed into a non-specific void. He had the vague shapes of things he’d done (or were they things this story’s author assumed he liked?) but the specifics completely escaped him. He remembered there were things to remember, but the actual memories were inaccessible.
The red panda — no, panda in a red jacket, he reminded the author — flickered on the fringes of existence. The human was easily distracted, especially when a friend dropped by her table, and focusing on the story for more than ten minutes at a time was challenging. Equilius’ imagination filled with a range of thoughts, some of which he knew were not his own, but he lacked a way to distinguish his truths from her fiction and fantasy.
While the author’s mind raced the self-imposed clock, the scattered thoughts merged into a messy stream of consciousness. Maybe she could elevate Equilius into being a muse, out of respect for the fellow writer who created him, but she worried that would feel more like theft. Maybe she would recast him as someone else’s shadow, whether in a literal or figurative sense. That idea had potential. The longer she thought about it, the more Equilius’ thoughts became existential dread. He felt no more substantial than the shadow cast upon a keyboard, only existing when the author had additional words to write, then vanishing when she paused to re-read her work. He desperately reached for any coherent thoughts at all, but his mind could only grasp for single letters, chosen by someone who barely thought about him at all.
The author glanced uncomfortably at the timer, which was down to one minute. She still felt no closer to turning Equilius into something abstract. She sighed and reached out to the client to explain the situation and asked how he wanted her to proceed. The mammal ceased to be even a thought in her mind. He would no longer exist until his original creator thought of him again.
Clean Content: While this is a strangely meta narrative, there’s nothing sexual here.
This unusual work was commissioned by Equilius during BLFC 2024. Aside from the prompt “abstract transformation” and permission to use his namesake fursona, I was left to come up with something myself. Since that seemed to invite some meta commentary on the difficulty of writing something for another person, featuring a character deeply personal to them, I just took that and ran with it.
In this story, “the author” literally refers to myself, the creature typing these words that’ll later end up on the Internet. The mentions of time constraints and distractions were all genuine things that happened while I worked in the dealers’ den. So keep that in mind when reading this, perhaps in the same way I struggled to keep the panda in mind while writing it.
