Chester lay on his back, watching the stars as they burned, each one so distant from him and each other that he could not truly wrap his head around it. Somehow, he knew that somewhere out there, on some other world, someone could have just so happened to be looking directly at him, though neither would ever know. The thought at once thrilled and terrified him. The fox felt the gentle nightly breeze as it blew across the roof of his house where he lay. Off in the distance, in the earthly vicinity, Karina, his wolf friend, was howling at something or another, though Chester was too interested in the stars to guess what she was howling at. In the low light, he wouldn’t have been able to see her anyway, what with her fur being ebony in color. After a couple of hours, he stood up, headed back inside, and climbed into bed. He had very nearly gone to sleep when something outside exploded. At least, it sounded like so. He sprang out of bed, his tail and the fur over his spine, puffed up. A turquoise light filtered in through the blinds, so he opened them. And so, for the first time in his life, he saw an aurora. As beautiful as it was, there was something wrong: it was shifting far too quickly, and it stretched as far as he could see, not to mention the presence of colors that aurorae don’t normally have: light blues, oranges, grays. With his fur slowly coming back down, Chester pulled his bathrobe back on and scrambled outside and out onto his back deck, and there he saw that the aurora stretched from one horizon to the other, which aurorae don’t normally do. He looked to the house just down the street, towards Karina’s house. She was standing on her own back deck in a nightgown, and seemed to be holding that same mixture of awe and confusion that Chester had. Then came the headache. Though neither saw the other, Chester and Karina both collapsed, clutching their heads and groaning. As the fox lay there, his awareness of everything was drowned in pain; something was burrowing into his mind, and forcefully. He screamed.



* * * * * *



When Chester came to, it was just after sunrise. The aurora was gone, but something else was missing, too, though he couldn’t quite put his paws on it. He groggily headed inside, his head throbbing with each beat of his heart. He decided to take a nice, hot shower. The pain didn’t go away, but it was greatly decreased. Back in his bathrobe, he stood hunched at the bathroom sink, staring at his reflection, trying to find out just what was missing by going over the details of his life. “I am Chester. I am a fox anthro. But I wasn’t always so: I was born as a… as a…” he trailed off. He had no idea what the word was, nor could he summon a mental image of it. So, to his bedroom he went, looking through his old photographs, specifically the ones taken before 2014. In every single one, further and further back in time, Chester only saw his progressively-younger fox form. Even as far back as the first picture of him ever taken, mere hours after he was born. “Maybe if I…” he put the photographs back in their place, then slapped himself across the face. He failed to find himself jolting awake in his bed in the middle of the night. “Not a dream, then,” he declared. Next stop, the Internet. He checked various news sites, and every single one of them was foaming at the mouth about the aurora from last night, which apparently covered the sky all over the Earth, even over the equator. And yet, he noticed, nothing electronic had been fried, so the aurora – if that’s what it really was – couldn’t have possibly been one caused by solar activity. Then something else clicked in his head: the news anchor he was currently watching, something in the back of his mind kept telling him that she wasn’t always a mountain lioness; but then what else could she be? He shook his head, then the reporter shifted away from the aurora to talking about how, at the same time, there had been a mass outbreak of countless people, estimated in the billions, had suddenly turned feral, not only physically, but mentally. Chester closed the page and turned the monitor off, having seen and heard too much to process all at once. The headache was still bad enough that simply thinking was painful.

He started searching through and around his house, looking at various plants and objects laying in and around, especially gifts from his fiancée. So many of them gave him the strange sense of something being off, like they should be something else, but he just couldn’t tell what. Next, he tried going through his large array of history books, but every photograph, every portrait, every carved relief all showed anthros where they should have been, yet, somehow, it just wasn’t right. “I need to take a walk,” he said as he gave up trying to find answers that would likely never come. Before he left his home, though, he started messaging people, and the replies he got were assuring; just about everyone in his contact list had, apparently, made it, including his five closest friends and Ning.



* * * * * *



Down at the park, things still failed to improve: he remained as confused as ever, and it didn’t help that the last message Ning, his tigress fiancée, sent indicated that she was having such a horrible headache that she could barely move her hands, let alone get out of bed. At least Karina was there with him. “Are you okay, Chester?” she asked in that Southern drawl of hers. “You really don’t look good.”

“I’m really not. I don’t hurt so much now, but I still got this really weird feeling. Like I’ve forgotten something very important.” He sat at the base of the tree that they were standing beneath. “I’ll need to ask you something, Karina. You might find it a bit odd.”

“Ask whatever,” she replied. “Both our thresholds for weird are far past the moon by now.”

“Do you remember me as being anything other than this?” he inquired, gesturing to his vulpine form. “Like, something not vulpine at all, but some kind of… of… oh, what was it? I think it was some kind of primate.”

“Uh, no? As far as I recall, you were always a fox.”

“What about the time when I took that potion? Y’know, the one I bought from that store that I introduced you to a few years ago. Remember that? What I told you?”

“Uh,” Karina sat down beside him and looked around for a few seconds before turning back to him. “From what I recall, the potion just made your fur softer and your tail a lot puffier, and, uh… oh, yes. As I recall, it also gave ya those black markin’s ‘round your whole body.”

“Hmm. Somehow that sounds right, but… at the same time it doesn’t- BY THE GODS!” he bolted up to his feetpaws. “That’s it!”

“What?” Karina’s voice was quivering.

“Oh, sorry, Karina, I didn’t mean to scare you, but, that’s it! Karina, what was that that Ning told us about reality benders?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do!” Her voice steadied as she stood up, brushing little bits of plant debris off of her legs, tail, and skirt. “I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary at all, yet you seem to. Add to that, everyone getting a simultaneous headache, and an atmospheric phenomenon – in this case, some aurora-like apparition!”

“That has to be it. This must’ve been reality being changed somehow, on a large, possibly even universal, scale!” Both tails drooped and both pairs of ears folded as they took the realization in. Chester looked up, towards the sky. It was still totally clear despite the time of year. He felt as if the universe itself was mocking him. “Karina.”

“Huh? What’s up?”

“If last night we did indeed have a reality restructuring event, why are some people less affected than others?”

Karina tilted her head a little. “What, exactly, do you mean?”

“I keep getting this feeling that something’s just not right, yet you don’t seem to. That’s where I’m going with this: Whatever happened, some peoples’ memories weren’t changed as thoroughly as others.”

“That could just be your magic resistance,” Karina suggested, both of them knowing just how potent that was after a rather amusing incident a few years back.

“That could well be,” Chester said, tilting his head downward a little and pinching his chin. “Or it might have to do with my own history. I’ll try asking Ning once she’s getting better, see whether she’s got this same feeling that I do.”

“That’s a good plan,” Karina said, then her expression suddenly changed, as if remembering something. “I have to go now. Sorry, Chester. Got a thing to go do with Kaze!”

“Alright,” Chester replied, waving as Karina headed off. Chester sat down and took in the silence for a while, before he lay on his back. He closed his eyes, so that all he could perceive was the grass brushing against him, the sounds of pedestrians on foot and on bike, the rustling of leaves, and the nearby beach. But then, something intruded into the darkness behind his eyelids. Two lights appeared. Two vulpine eyes, each glowing an electric blue. And they seemed to be boring into him. He opened his eyes, and they disappeared. He sat up and looked around, but the nearest person was almost thirty meters away. “Now, who was that?” he wondered.