This year was very different for two reasons: first, as covered in Part I, I had a friend coming with me who was a relative newbie to the furry world. Second, I had spent the better part of a year assembling pieces for a goat costume to wear.

In the early stages, it felt more like a flight of fancy than an actual objective. I stumbled across an Etsy store selling amazing-looking hoof leggings and I fell head over heels in love with the idea of owning hooves of my own that were semi-realistic. More than anything, I wanted to just experience walking on hooves. Feel their weight dragging at my ankle, hear them clop loudly on the floor, all that good stuff. I bought them before the last FE and they came shortly after it, and WOW, was I in heaven trying them on the first time.

After that, I knew I had to go for a full costume. But I wanted something more realistic than a fursuit. I have total respect for fursuiters, and I do not mean to imply I have anything against any type of costuming, so please don't take what I have to say as a slight. Personally, I didn't want to feel like I was concealing myself in a shell. I wanted people to see my own eyes and talk with my own mouth. I wanted to feel like I had truly transformed.

Inspired by  DizFoley and a handful of others I've seen at cons wearing prosthetics, I dug up a knock-off Avatar Navi cat nose prosthetic I bought on eBay years ago on a whim. I had never tried putting it on before. I also had some faun ears to go with it. So, with those prosthetics and my new hooves, I began building what would become a white-haired, ivory-horned, grey-hoofed goat man. I bought some awesome 3D-printed horns from another Etsy seller and some white fur arm warmers.

But then came the hardest part: finding realistic hoof gloves. I didn't have the budget for $900 silicone gloves from special effects creature shops, but I didn't want basic non-poseable hard hooves, either. I enlisted my mom's help in sewing together three-fingered gloves out of black nylon opera gloves and black vinyl fabric. For a first attempt they came out darn well, although without the arm warmers to provide fur context, they looked almost like penguin flippers. My mom thought they were rather demonic, and I reluctantly had to agree. But it was the best we could do, and I was more than happy to have anything to cover my hands and give me the three-fingered look I always love in ungulate anthros.

And then it was convention time! Thursday I drove to Toronto with my first-furcon friend in tow. I introduced him to my usual roommates,  MatthiasRat and  Fulminar . We usually have at least one more but unfortunately not all could make it this year, so it was just the four of us. With the exception of Saturday night, we had our traditional nightly games of Betrayal at House on the Hill, which Matthias won every time, whether he was the traitor or on the hero's side. I'm not bitter or anything. (I'm really not; it's a delight to know people who are as into this game as I am.)

Friday we jumped right into the festivities. No sooner had my friend and I picked up our badges than we met the usual suspects in the zoo, a group which included  Angrboda ,  Therian ,  AbeESeedy ,  Balina ,  Kraken and many more. I was eager to introduce my friend to this bunch because of how many artists there were around, and several folks were sketching as conversations went on. I was very happy to see  Fenchurch attending for the first time, so I drew her goat toy 'sona.

We scoped out the dealer's den, which has grown IMMENSELY in just the 3 years I've been attending. It was probably twice the size (floor plan and table count) as it was in 2017. I stopped and chatted with the artists I've gotten familiar with, particularly guests of honor  CatmonkShiro and  Nyomi . Shiro had had a bumpy start to the con, but things were already starting to improve, and he was handling it like the champ that he is. He was even willing to try seeing if his bear-hugging prowess could help my friend's achy back, and yes, it worked.

Then, while I was chatting with Nyomi (Moth Monarch), I spied a pair of fuzzy hoof gloves at the neighboring table. I almost did a double-take. They were made of thick, plush black fabric with shaggy white fur around the cuff that almost perfectly matched the fur on my arm warmers. They looked a bit more toonish than I had envisioned for my hoof gloves, but they looked like such a good match for the costume, and easier to put on and take off if I needed to use my phone or some other task that required real fingers. I asked the seller (Creature of Interest; https://www.facebook.com/creatureofinterest/ ) if they were for sale, and she said they were actually one-of-a-kind gloves she had made on commission, but her buyer backed out of the sale, so she brought them in the hopes that someone else might want them. I immediately produced my wallet and she sold them to me for an extremely reasonable price. My costume was finally, truly complete. (And I can NEVER tell my mom that only a handful of con attendees ended up seeing her gloves in use.)

Friday night I was invited to join  CheasyDino and a large group of TF enthusiasts to their annual dinner at Jack Astors. That was one of only two times politics came up all weekend, which was refreshing. There were also lots of crayons and brown paper tablecloths, so lots of drawing commenced before the food arrived.

On Saturday, my friend and I checked out a panel hosted by  StarWarriors about 25 common pitfalls in making a webcomic. It was very well-run and informational. I think I checked at least 20 of the boxes given all the stumbling blocks I've hit making UTC.

After that it was a quick hop to the sushi place and then I had to get my costume on. With my friend's help, the prosthetic got glued on much better than my first and only test-run of the thing two weeks beforehand. But I really had to rush to get the makeup and everything on, because at 3:45 the Fursuit Fandango photographer had scheduled a realistic-fursuit shoot. Faced with either missing the shoot, or putting on my hooves and hobbling downstairs in time for Cheasy's 4:00 TF panel I had promised to attend, I decided to go flat-footed. Everything else was on. The prosthetic looked great. I had to get over my need for perfection.

I've been to a con in a costume before, but that was at anime and comic conventions, where the characters I was playing were humans. I was trotting to the photoshoot in a long white wig, fluffy arms and large curved horns on my head...plus my face was almost totally, delightfully not human. I was TERRIFIED and THRILLED. Many of you likely know how it is, even better than I do. It felt like I was really understanding for the first time why costuming is so fun, and mentally rewarding.

The shoot went off without a hitch (save for the loud music making it hard to hear anything).  Caturnalia and  K-Libra were there. Caturnalia was in one of her many awesome costumes, the snow leopard shaman. She had shown me her menagerie last year and helped me in considering my options for costume pieces. Her photographic transformation adventures were part of what inspired me in the first place, and convinced me the costume was something worth doing. We posed for some pictures.

These are the pics taken with Caturnalia: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/31293046/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/31293082/

We all made tracks for the TF panel, where I had been invited, along with  LiimLsan , to join Cheasy on stage. We were asked to draw transformations based on prompts that the audience wrote down on slips of paper and Cheasy picked out of a hat. I thought the idea was fun and worth trying out, but unfortunately, the panel turned out to be a dud. For my part, I take responsibility for the wait time during the sketching portion. Cheasy had proposed to us a 3-to-5-minute timer and I suggested making it 7 to 10 minutes instead, because I am a slow drawer. It turned out I grossly underestimated both myself and LiimLsan's abilities. She sketched twice as many pictures as I did, and we both finished well before time ran out. But it was still a fun exercise. I just wish there was more for the audience to get out of it. From their perspective there was a lot of nothing going on and the format of the panel and the layout of the room didn't allow for enlightening audience discussion like we had in more intimate quarters last year.

After the panel, I went back upstairs to get my hooves on, and then chilled out in the zoo for a couple hours being all goaty and playing the board game Not Alone, hosted by  TFProxy . It was the only game besides Betrayal I got to play all weekend, but it was worth it, and it was a very fun strategy game to boot.

Eventually, I shed most of my costume but didn't have the time to take off the prosthetic before the TF after-dark panel that Angrboda, Therian, Abe and  Fuego were hosting, so I went there still pointy-eared and white-haired. I'd been in costume about 5 hours at that point, and was still being surprised by the circumstances it presented. It was like I was trying to reverse a self-induced TF, but couldn't complete the process, and had to decide to either mingle among society in a half-form, or lock myself in my room for the rest of the night hoping I could revert. It was a very life-imitating-art thing.

The panel itself was very good. I'm going to go in-depth about that in Part III. The rest of the night after that was spent getting my face back to normal, which took until about 2am. The costume was an incredible hassle to get in and out of, but every second of the experience was worth it. It felt fantastic, and from the many, many compliments I received, it made quite the splash. I have to admit, there is a diva inside me that I don't often like to bring out, because my ego can get out of control. But indulging in it here, among great friends and like minds, it felt good. It felt right. *I* felt right.

And I was far from the only one, as many friends had similar experiences of their own that weekend. The activities, conversations, meals, panels and everything in-between gave each of us something to do, something to consider, some way of changing how we presented ourselves to everyone else, and what amazes me but doesn't surprise me is how everyone rolls with it. You can show up as who you want to be--who you are--whatever that means to you, and you're greeted with a smile and a "Great to see you!" Now I understand that better than I ever have.

I skipped over a ton of stuff that happened during weekend, and left out many, many people who were a pleasure to hang out with. If you don't see your name mentioned above, please don't think I've forgotten you. It's a blessing to know all of you and you made the con what it was.

Sunday was a return to "the usual," if there ever is such a thing at a furcon. Final conversations, goodbyes, and a parting dinner, and before we all knew it, it was done. Another great FE.

Then on Monday I accidentally drove all the way to the Buffalo border crossing instead of Niagara Falls, drove into the truck lane even while trying NOT to drive into the truck lane, and failed to take my sunglasses off for the annoyed border agent. Back to being my nervous human self for a while!

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In Part III - a deeper look at the mature and rewarding after-dark TF panel and other specific, personal experiences that have stayed with me even weeks later.