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Get out your decoder rings! Communiques in hand and . . . go! The boys of the diaper-loving fraternity Baby Blue are ready to launch their ultimate attack against their girly sissy opponents. Read along, and if you crack the code, maybe you can help. But be sure your diaper's on good and tight, because the secret message is no crumby commercial.\n\nStory contains many allusions and many cameo characters. Don't sweat it if you don't recognize all of them — just enjoy it and have fun when you do!", "description_bbcode_parsed": "It's a pivotal moment in the Pink and Blue Diaperfur series, one we've been building to at least since 24/7!

Get in position! Get out your decoder rings! Communiques in hand and . . . go! The boys of the diaper-loving fraternity Baby Blue are ready to launch their ultimate attack against their girly sissy opponents. Read along, and if you crack the code, maybe you can help. But be sure your diaper's on good and tight, because the secret message is no crumby commercial.

Story contains many allusions and many cameo characters. Don't sweat it if you don't recognize all of them — just enjoy it and have fun when you do!", "writing": "[b]Open House: A Pink and Blue Diaperfur Identity Adventure!\n(Level Four, Episodes 10–14)\n[/b]kitncub\n[url=mailto:kitncub@yahoo.com]kitncub@yahoo.com[/url] \n\nThis continues directly on from\n[url=https://inkbunny.net/submissionview.php?id=57020]Open House, Level One[/url] \n[url=https://inkbunny.net/submissionview.php?id=58736]Open House, Level Two[/url] \n[url=https://inkbunny.net/submissionview.php?id=58887]Open House, Level Three[/url] \n\nIf you haven’t read them, check them out first.\n\nTo see the entire series, go swimming in the [url=https://inkbunny.net/submissionsviewall.php?rid=b913e6bca8&mode=pool&pool_id=2437&page=1&orderby=pool_order&random=no&user_id=]Pink and Blue Diaperfur Adventures pool.[/url]\n\n[b]Author’s Note: [/b]This is a diaperfur story for readers 18 and over only; if you’re under—do your homework! It involves furs in diapers who are not (chronologically) babies, and furs in dresses who are not (biologically) girls, often doing things of a sexual nature. The story is fantasy and emphatically not a representation or recommendation to do anything in real life. Individual characters express their own views, not mine. It is part of the Pink and Blue series, which includes a lot of characters, so if you have not read any prior stories in the series, this is probably not the place to start.\n\n[b]Rapid Recap: [/b]When we left our heroes, Roger, Rian, and the Baby Blue boys were recruiting for a massive counteroffensive timed to coincide with the Open House of the enemy sissy pink faction'! With both teams’ agents pounding the pavement collecting recruits, lovers Rian and Serafina have found themselves at an ideological impasse. Meanwhile, Twitchy, who has been concealing information about his age, turned eighteen and put his master plan to cement his relationship with his incontinent boyfriend, Dex, into motion—and staged a laboratory accident that made the recalcitrant raccoon’s heroic side public, at once giving the boys’ lagging recruiting efforts a shot in the arm, and landing the unlucky raccoon his dream job. But when things went haywire in the lab, Dex came through anyway and saved the bunny for real. It looks like Twitch may have caught his tail in his own trap—and made himself more in love with Dex, rather than the other way around. When we left off, new recruits lured to the boys’ camp by tales of Dex’s heroism have promised intel from inside the sissy academy . . .\n\nLet’s run down the line-up quickly:\n\n[b]Baby Blue principals:[/b] Roger (Labrador), leader; Rian (wolf), second-in-command; Dex (raccoon), third-in-command, combat leader; Twitchy (rabbit) and Squeak (pocket-sized mouse), chief engineers; reliable second-stringers: Boy Scouts Ace (lynx) and Jax (tracking hound), recon and wilderness patrol; Byron the malamute (swimmer); Kyle the Dalmatian (cook) \n\n[b]Pink faction/Academy for Special Boys: [/b]Calliope (leopardess), leader, and, yes, biologically female; Cassandra (Newfoundland), second-in-command, trusted administrative aide; Serafina (fox), a sissy princess, love of young Rian’s life, star of a local Shakespeare festival production, and academy instructor; Lin Lin (panda); and Shelley (squirrel), a mysterious mercenary just brought on board at the academy\n\n[b]\fCharacter Fun Facts:[/b]\n\n[b]Roger: [/b][i]Personality when fully regressed!: [/i]Goofy but responsible big brother! You’ve got him — this Labrador will sometimes let the boys he’s sitting for drink root beer out of sippy cups and watch movies rated PG-13 — even though his boys are obviously babies. Yes, as a babysitter Roger, maybe because he is often wearing diapers himself (just so he doesn’t need to leave the boys unattended during his bathroom breaks, of course), can be a bit of an easy touch — unless a little visitor has got crazy ideas about using the potty. His apartment is sleepover-ready at a moment’s notice.\n\n[b]Rian:[/b] [i]Personality when fully regressed!:[/i] Harmlessly mischievous! The sort of scamp who is often a caretaker’s secret favorite, little(r) Rian is always at the start of something, but he is quick to cover for regressed playmates mixed up in shenanigans with him and take spanks on their behalf. Whatever age he’s acting, nothing makes this wolf bouncier than seeing an inhibited diaperboy accept who he is and really enjoy himself for the first time. What’s that? Your pants? He’s holding them, silly! No, no, you’re mixed up, sweetheart — you asked Rian for help getting them off, not on.\n\n[b]Dex:[/b] [i]Personality when fully regressed!: [/i]Goody two shoes! A caretaker who follows his rules — play nice, no meat in his food, no disposable diapers, and no girly frilly stuff —will never hear a “but” out of mommy or daddy’s quiet, adorable little angel — not even a crinkly one, since this sweet little baby boy is a cloth purist. Now where’s his bottle? Aren’t you going to hold it for him? You don’t expect this little prince to drink out of a sippy cup while he’s sitting on your lap, do you? \n\n[b]Twitchy: [/b][i]Personality when fully regressed!:[/i] Precocious smart aleck! The kid who’ll never take “Because I said so” for an answer, Twitchy will viciously dismantle parental clichés like “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?” with impressively logical (and incredibly whiny) objections, like, “Thanks for clarifyin’ that I don’t haffa get potty-trained just cuz the other cubs are doing it.” Worse still, the talkative bunny has been known to make his playmates similarly subversive. Twitch will rarely use toys or devices in the manner they are intended and considers instruction and warranty sheets only as paper-airplane material.\n\nThe bossy petite panda [i]Lin Lin[/i] takes sissy stuff seriously and looks down on part-timers; so seriously, in fact, that she’s the real deal, a post-op transsexual, a secret known only to a pawful of teammates and to a boy’s team member she once found an unlikely mission partner—and an unexpectedly supportive ally. To her students, she’s a feared disciplinarian and physical education instructor at the sissy academy. Lately, she feels like the hardworking, underappreciated one among the pink team leaders, who have been keeping her on the sidelines, maybe because they hold a grudge. The panda schemed to destroy the boys’ team and steal Serafina’s post shortly after she came on the scene. She hasn’t softened up much on the boys since then—or has she? [i]Favorite fictional character:[/i] Blossom! (Powerpuff Girls) [i]Personality when fully regressed!:[/i] Wouldn’t you like to know.\n\n\fYou have chosen to play this level as . . . Roger! So . . . let’s play!\n\n[b]Level Four (Roger), Episodes 10–14[/b]\n\nEpisode 10: Nuclear Capability!\nEpisode 11: Training Day!\nEpisode 12: Car Trouble!\nEpisode 13: Invitations!\nEpisode 14: Ultimate Technique Revealed: Roger’s Attack!\n\n[b]Episode 10: Nuclear Capability![/b]\n\n“I won’t do it again!” the gray spotted hyena in the bondage cell whimpered, falling onto his knees from the restraint chair as soon as the straps came unfastened. “I won’t, I swear!”\n\n“Ya won’t do what again, peaches?” the gray squirrel standing in front of him asked, tapping a riding crop against one open paw—and sounding bored.\n\nIggy whined and looked down at the used panties he’d been wearing for the past two days — since, as the squirrel’s first recruit, he’d followed her here dragged by the collar—and, umm, following his built-in compass needle.\n\n“I won’t—I won’t—” he whined as she knelt down behind him and reached underneath his shirt and up the front of it. When she reached the top, he felt something cold and cool brush against his skin, making him shiver. It was a Swiss army knife, and the squirrel flicked it open. Catching the blade on the collar of his pink tee-shirt, she ripped through it in one smooth, fluid motion, leaving him naked, except for the musky panties he was wearing, and the locked mitts still clapped on his paws.\n\n“I won’t wear a shirt that doesn’t go with my underwear,” he whimpered, and the crop came down on his back, causing him to wince, and drop onto his mittened forepaws on the floor. He was grateful that he was wearing thick leather mittens that cushioned the impact—it was real nice of her to let him wear those—even though the fingerless mitts left him helpless as a puppy when it came to complicated tasks like opening doors.\n\n“Whose underwear?” Shelley asked, still sounding disinterested.\n\n“Yours!” he whimpered. “I won’t wear a shirt that doesn’t go with your underwear. I won’t wear one without a corset under it again!” he wailed. “I’m sorry. I was just in a hurry. But I have to wear corsets. I know. Otherwise I look all slovenly and disgusting. And I won’t— I won’t—”\n\nHe squirmed, writhing on the ground, looking at the top hat that had rolled over into the corner by his foot—the last piece of masculine clothing he’d been left with. Though he’d look ridiculous wearing it now, he could carry it, as a reminder, he’d been told, of his changes, and how much his mistresses had improved him.\n\n“And I won’t make a mess in your underwear again,” he whimpered, rapidly becoming incoherent. “why don’t I — I could have sworn I had more underwear — don’t know where it went — I know I — if I’m not wearing mine I can’t — I have — only you can— do anything in them — but can’t I take them off? Can’t I take them off just for five minutes so I can — three minutes so I can— I won’t make a mess in them again. I won’t! I’ll clean up whatever I—”\n\nSeeing how much he was squirming against the floor, the squirrel set her riding crop down carefully and shook her head. Reaching into a small green knapsack on the ground, Shelley produced a cold, stainless steel chastity cage, and set it on the floor.\n\nBefore she fastened it, she made a distasteful expression, pulled back the hyena’s panties as far as she could, and let them snap, hard, which made him tremble and whine and strain to hump against the air. “Yah’ve gone and stretched them all out,” she complained. “I don’t want them any more. Since ya’ve got no others that suit you, you can stay in those until, I dunno, they have holes or somethin’. Why don’ we start ya that way. Ya’ll smell like a girl’s kind of mess to anyfur that actually cares ta smell ya, but trust me,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “that’ll be an improvement.”\n\nShe started rolling them down to his knees—taking care to bunch them up, so they’d feel more used when she rolled them back up.\n\n“Two minutes,” he whimpered, “so I can—” He shuddered as she held one paw, loosely around his member—not to help him, but to keep him from touching it — and reached with her other to pick up the chastity cage on the floor behind her.\n\n“Everyone’s gonna think you’re a girl, peaches,” she said. “Aren’t you happy to be promoted that way? Y’all know girls are the superior sex. And ya were such a sorry specimen getting a date was hopeless for you before, why this is the only way ya might actually trick some females into spendin’ time with you. Now you’re no longer entirely worthless. Only like, ninety-five percent? Don’t that make ya proud?”\n\nThe hyena whimpered, shook his head, and waved a mittened paw at his top hat; all he did was knock it over and he watched with wide eyes as it rolled out of reach. The cold steel of the chastity cage made his whole body tremble as it was locked into place. He loved it. He knew he shouldn’t, but he did.\n\n“Tell ya what, sugar plum,” the squirrel said as she stood up, “if, in the next two weeks you manage to fool at least one girl into thinking that you’re one, too, then, come that weekend,” she said, and set one footpaw on his back, pushing him sideways and over, so that he flopped onto his side, mitted paws spread out on the floor and chastity device locked securely in place, and found himself staring up her white tennis skirt, at the blue silk panties she was now wearing, as she said, “you can have ninety seconds.”\n\n“Thank you,” the hyena whined, “Miss Shelley, thank you so much, you’ve been so much more generous than I deserve—I hope that I can—”\n\n“Hey, hey,” the squirrel said, as she went over to a sink in the corner, turned it on, and lathered up her paws with the handsoap there, “who knows what you might have to do to fool a girl and get your minute and a half. Pleasure her boyfriend, convince her that female musk is your absolutely favorite smell—” she glanced over her shoulder at him and made a bored, casual shrug. “Something like that. Are any of your ex-girlfriends dating? Bet one of their new boyfriends might accept you as a girl. I mean it’s obvious you’re no kind of man.”\n\nShe turned on her heels and slipped out the cell door; she found herself facing the Newfoundland and the leopardess who ran the academy as she locked it behind her.\n\n“And that’s the old-fashioned way,” the squirrel explained, handing the keys back to them, and looking at her watch. “Your highest level of discipline went, mmmm, I dunno, more or less like that, I ‘magine? Softer, even? And the panda’s your meanest? Y’all see how much time I wasted in the last two days on one slave who wasen’ a bit hard ta break?”\n\n“Hey!” whined the squirming hyena from inside the cell, “I was very hard to br—”\n\n“No you weren’t, peaches,” said the squirrel, still sounding bored as she interrupted him and shook her head at the Newfoundland, yawning. “Forgot to gag him, sorry, but I really don’t want to touch him again.” She banged the door with her riding crop. “Be quiet in there!”\n\nThe hyena slumped on his side and whimpered, quietly raising his mittened paws to his muzzle. Would it get him brownie points if he gagged himself? Oh, he hoped so! Maybe he would get two minutes of playtime that way? He opened his mouth, stuck one of the bondage mitts into it, and bit down on it obligingly, being sure to make at least a few muffled attempts at speech so the women outside might realize that he had muzzled himself and saved them the trouble.\n\nThe taste of leather overwhelmed him and made him choke at first—but he’d consider it training. If he wanted his playtime any time soon, the hyena had a feeling that his gag reflex had to go.\n\nThe squirrel business consultant began tapping her riding crop against one open paw as she walked down the row of punishment cells. “A very paws-on approach isn’t it? Soo much attention wasted on each one of these critters. ‘Sides the fact it’s inefficient, you’re stuck when ya’ve got a fur like bristles down here who you can’t handle so directly. Y’all have got a business that promises to make sorry boys into slightly less sorry facsimiles of the stronger sex, either cuz they ask ya to, or cuz their partners do, and then you take, like, what, a year, maybe more to do it? Seriously, Cal, you ask most of these furs to make a,” the squirrel shook her head mournfully as she remarked, “minimum commitment of six months to get into your school? No, honey. No. Maximum intake, maximum output, maximum revenue, that’s what I’m talking about,” she recited, punctuating her remarks with taps of her riding crop. “And that’s what you’ll see in the draft mission statement y’all asked for. That’s why I’ve gotten so involved with the scenario camps, furs pay, they’re in, they’re out, they’re gone, and after the weekend you don’t have to bother with them. Boys who’ll pay to be abused want to give you all their money anyway. I consider it part of the scene for them, you know, they get off on it. Your installment plans and all the time you spend on each fur are misguided. Charging more for less time is giving these wannabes better service, when ya think about it. They get off on financial abuse, just the same as on physical. I thought you knew that.”\n\nThe squirrel cast a glance over her shoulder at Callie, and shook her muzzle at the leopardess. “Honestly, Cal, I know what you can do. I was there the first time you put someone under. I don’t know why you don’t just take these so-called boys for a week, send them back out the way their masters want them with a new wardrobe, and charge each five thousand dollars.”\n\nCallie chewed on her lip thoughtfully the whole time, nodding absently as though she hadn’t heard a word the squirrel had said. Her sissy Newfoundland attendant took a long breath and filled the dead air in the conversation. “We tried deeper hypnosis as a method for Level 5, but there were—” the dog admitted, “problems. We had one bear with a very pushy boyfriend there, who kept butting into the induction. The boyfriend seemed pretty happy with how it went. But the mistress and I are worried about the student’s ability to function, you know, in the world.”\n\nThe squirrel shrugged. “Who cares?” she asked. “He was screwed up before he came to you or he wouldn’t have come. Every male we see in this business is damaged goods. And the top’s the one paying you right? So he’s the one to make happy. But if it’s a bother my suggestion for problem cases is cleaner that way, too. These fetishy types all wanna be subs really. Didja see how hard that hyena in there tried ta keep himself from pawing? He’s a boy, they’re weak anyway, so by male standards it was a heroic effort. Libido gets in the way of their own desires. Complicates everything.”\n\n“That,” she continued, tapping her riding crop against her palm emphatically, “is really what makes it hard for them to function in the world, isn’t it? All that frantic, desperate, sloppy pawing? So don’t mess with the little control stick. Fix the CPU. You’re selling yourself to tops here now, least that’s what you’re saying—they’re the ones you keep reaching out to? If they’re the ones paying the bills, then you want to show them you have access to total power—and can share it with them. It’s like a nuke really. Just havin’ it as an option and lettin’ the boys know they can be switched off changes the game. Suddenly the unruly little monsters will be the sweetest little flowers their boyfriends or girlfriends or parents or whoever want them to be. They’re on when you or their tops want them on—off when ya don’t. Sure as if they came with a switch. And focused on their partner’s pleasure, not secretly all squirmy for their own. Whether or not they feel that again is in your paws, and they know it.”\n\nThe squirrel turned around, set down her green knapsack, and unfastened it, producing what looked like a small first aid kit as they stopped outside the cell where the rebellious hedgehog Swifty had delivered was being held.\n\nCalliope watched curiously and broke her long silence. “So the rumors really are true. You aren’t just bluffing about having concocted something. You’re sure this is harmless, Shelley?” she asked. “This boy, Jason, and his caretaker expressed an interest in a kidnapping scene where the abductors turn out to be working for his boyfriend, and he’s ultimately delivered back rendered entirely—compliant. He’s been fighting, but he hasn’t said any safe words yet. Still, he may be confused about what’s real and what’s not, and the question of consent after something like what you’re proposing seems—complicated. There’s really no trauma from this?”\n\nShelley smiled up at them. “I won’t feel a thing,” she said as she fitted a syringe. “And in a minute—neither will bristles. Relax, there’s no knife, and it entirely wears off once y’all stop dosing.” She flicked her tail and added, “Chemical castration’s a misnomer really. It’s more like hormone repression. This is watered down from what they use on sex offenders a’course. But you wanna see a sissy boy simper in spirit as well as in satin—”\n\nCalliope tilted her head as she watched the squirrel. “Are you enjoying this, Shell?” she asked. “I can’t tell. I know you run your dungeon for the money, but I hoped this trip might be fun for you. I do interview them all, so I like to think that the students here are — well, at the risk of sounding biased, special. And the current batch of kids Roger and I have—the way they all play off each other . . . it just keeps surprising us.”\n\nThe squirrel shook her eyes as she loaded a syringe and let the liquid squirt out of it. “Will you listen to yourself, Calliope? Staying near you know who has been bad for you. I knew it. These boys are cut from exactly the same cloth as my dungeon clients. I don’t need to talk to them to know that. They like diapers, for goodness’ sake. I can put up with a little of that from someone like you, but these are boys. What else is there to know? Trust me, I’ve seen what furs are willing to pay for and there’s not much left that will surprise me. Boys just want to get off on whatever weird thing gets them off. And I’m glad to help provided they pay for the privilege. My goodness my gracious, sweet thing,” she remarked, shaking her head. “You’re calling these fetishists kids now? What are they next, friends? Family? I can almost hear your brother making one of his losers love company speeches. You’ve finally followed my advice and found a way to profit from this little scene of yours. That’s the only way to justify staying involved with this stuff, from a real life perspective. So use your talents, make some money off of it. Rog wouldn’t know much about any of that, would he?”\n\nCalliope smoothed out the folds in her dressing gown. “My brother doesn’t have special physical,” she eyed Shelley, then looked back down at her dress, “or mental abilities, no,” she admitted, “but he is always there.”\n\n“Peaches,” the squirrel said, rolling her eyes, “I know he’s family so ya wanna make him sound better, but we both know,” the squirrel gestured to Cassie for the keys to the cell, and took them as the huge dog handed them over with a jangle, “it’s cuz that dog has nowhere else to be.”\n\nThe mercenary squirrel turned her attention back to the jail cell. “Bristles sure has gotten quiet,” she remarked as she opened the door and peeked inside. “What the—?” she blurted as she saw the hedgehog’s bed, with its restraints unfastened, and blankets thrown over it.\n\nThe Newfoundland padded past her and over to the empty punishment cot where the hedgehog had been restrained, yanking the blankets off the bed. Instead of a diapered, defensively bristling hedgehog bound in place and ready to be injected on his spineless elbow joint, she found — a sack of flower. A sticky paper label on it bore a hastily scrawled inscription. Directly above the bed, a ceiling panel hung half out of place.\n\n“Just one word. Maybe some kind of Baby Blue code,” Cassie remarked, puzzled, snatching the label off the bag and scratching her head with one huge paw. “All it says is . . . Substitution?”\n\n“Needless to say,” the stubby-maned lion with the ninja headband hanging around his neck finished, panting, and he put a sympathetic arm around the quivering hedgehog’s shoulder, “I got the cub out of there just as fast as I could. I’d been working as a caretaking assistant for the fox, changing some of her sissies while she was coaching others with, ermm, different things. They all started calling me mommy, and that was sort of—disconcerting—and once they put flowers in my mane. I snuck into the wardrobe one time and I almost—I took a dress and I—” he shuddered. “It’s only because I wanted to take care of furs, I thought it might make them more comfortable—I didn’t put it on, I just looked in the mirror, and thought—well, Serafina said a few times she thought they were all safer with a strong boy fur around. That might have saved me. I started sneaking around after I heard so many of them whispering about Level 5. Everyone was afraid of being sent there, but no one seemed to have seen it.”\n\nBen was relating his story in hushed tones to Roger, Rian, Dex, and the Boy Scouts, all gathered in a small, private circle around a fading campfire outside Roger’s nomadic command center tent. “I didn’t even know where we were going at first, but we got off at a bus stop eventually, and there was the lynx. He gave me this newspaper.” Ben pointed again at the paper he was jealously guarding, and the picture of Dex, staggering under the weight of Twitchy in his arms and the ferret cub clinging to his ankle, making his way out of a university lab building with columns of smoke billowing out of its lower windows.\n\n“And there you were!” the lion escapee said, looked up at Dex, his eyes wide. “It was like a sign! Jason and I were talking about how worthless we’ve both felt sometimes. But one of us! A hero! And you’re not just someone who just looks at pictures. You’re a lifestyler, he said. But still a fighter—more than a fighter—you’re a real shinobi, I can tell. Ace said there was a whole army of you assembling at a secret spot in the woods,” the lion looked around at the circle of furs around the fire and started to breathe easier, relaxing, and releasing a tiny bit of warm pee into the front of his diaper, “like a village, hidden in the . . . .”\n\n“Hidden in diapers,” Jax finished for him, nodding gently and putting a paw on the two boys’ shoulders. “Don’t forget the diapers. They’re very important for the hiding. Otherwise most of these boys would leave piddle trails that would lead anyone right back to our secret spot.” The black-and-brown mottled tracking hound turned his attention to the shell-shocked hedgehog, offering him a s’more. “Welcome back, Jason. Do you still want to be a helicopter pilot—someday far away from now, when you’re all big and potty-trained? We still have one of your friends from Camp 5 here. Do you remember Kit, your raccoon buddy? Do you wanna come scouting tomorrow and see him again? He’s been worried about you. Gonna be real relieved to see you’re not in a dress. Tell me about your caretaker. Do you live together? Have you two been talking since ya came here, or is he just someone you visit once in a while?”\n\nRian, still wearing his soccer outfit, had dropped a half-eaten S’more on to the ground without noticing. He was trembling. His muzzle and whiskers were still covered with chocolate and he was staring into the fire, looking horrified. “There’s no way that Serry knows about this,” he said, shaking his head. “I refuse to believe it.”\n\nDex had raised a finger to his muzzle and was chewing on it thoughtfully. “I don’t think that’s legal,” he mused. “That isn’t legal is it? I mean isn’t it like something the police do?”\n\n“I’m sure it’s like a super-diluted play formula,” Ace said, putting a paw on his friend’s knee and squeezing it. “Maybe even a placebo. Don’t look worried. We’re gonna bring the roof down around those girls’ ears once and for all, anyway, remember? They’ll never touch our boys after this. Baby Blue will be the age-playing scene in this town. There’s no stopping us now.” The lynx squeezed Dex’s knee again, and jerked a thumb at him, then at Rian, remarking, “We have two 24/7 boys, and they’re the coolest diaperfurs in the city right now. Furs are lining up around blocks to play with the two of you. Rian and Dex,” Ace said, nodding proudly, “the bluest and the truest. Our not-so-secret weapons.”\n\nRoger had crossed his arms and bit his lip, shifting around and crinkling audibly. He seemed less concerned about the syringe part of the story than anyone else. “Rewind a minute,” the leader of the group said, waving one paw in a circle. “What did my sister say after that ‘Rog has got nowhere else to be’ dig? Didn’t she stick up for me?”\n\nBen shrugged and looked apologetic. “Look, I’m sorry,” the lion said, “I don’t think she did, but I wasn’t really listening to that stuff and I didn’t know who all you people were yet.”\n\nRian looked up from the fire out of the corner of his eyes and thought he heard the older canid sniffle. “Are you okay, Rog?” he asked.\n\n“I’m fine,” the Labrador said. “Smoke got in my eyes.” He tossed half a log from the pile next to him on to the fire and watched the little blaze flare up again. Then he smiled and tilted his head to look at his sidekick.\n\n“But I’m kind of mad now,” the dog pouted.\n\n**********************\n\n“I have my paws full coordinating the Open House,” the leopardess and pink team leader, leaning her chin on her palms and resting her elbows on her Victorian writing desk, said to her Newfoundland aide. “I’m just not convinced it’s that serious, Cassie, I’m sorry. There’s no point in getting myself involved.”\n\nThe giant sissy dog was staring down at her lap and her milkmaid apron, looking depressed, when the door was flung open, and a panda in a purple Powerpuff Girls sweater and sweatpants burst in.\n\n“Oh, it’s serious!” snapped Lin Lin, bustling right under the arm that squirrel lounging outside, sipping at a Diet Coke, had lazily raised to stop her. The panda held up a folded campus newspaper. She threw it down on to the headmistress’ desk. Cassie stiffened and fidgeted uncomfortably for a moment, although the feline headmistress looked unfazed.\n\n“This recruiting situation is very serious. A defector gave this to me,” the undersized bear said, pointing down at it. “I knew this would be a problem someday, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, Mr. ‘stand back, world, I’m coming out of my shell any decade now’ is finally stepping up. And right before our Open House. The boys have been giving these out all over town!” She waved her paw at it and gritted her teeth. “He’s like their new poster cub. Him! Mr. Goody-two-shoes. Mr. ‘I hope that’s vegetarian baby formula.’ The bluest and weirdest and— and— ungirliest one over there. Did I say weirdest? At least the wolf is all about sex. We can respond to that. But everything about that raccoon is just so—” she shuddered “so boy.” Then she banged one fist into her opposite palm in frustration. “Just read it. What kind of a stupid—” the panda shook her head despairingly. “How are we supposed to compete,” she said, sounding upset, “with some moron who does idiot things like he’s trying to get himself killed?”\n\nThe Newfoundland picked up the newspaper and eyed it curiously, looking up over the edge of it at the leopardess.\n\n“You said,” the panda continued accusingly, pointing at the huge black dog, “that once you’d sidelined the wolf things would be fine. You keep saying things will be fine because you have some mysterious backup plan. I have a news flash for you, Zen dog: Just saying that things are going to be okay does not make them okay! We’ll be shown up at our Open House and we’ll never recover from the embarrassment. You’re supposed to be in charge of security for this event. We are having a crisis. You should be ashamed,” she continued, gathering steam as she wagged a paw up at the dog’s giant nose, “that you’re not out there in the field and that you’re hearing this from me! You should feel terrible!”\n\n“Actually,” the dog said, setting the newspaper down in her lap and looking from Lin Lin down to the picture of Dex carrying the two furs out of the building with smoke pouring out of its windows, then out of the corner of her eyes at her mistress, “now I feel better.”\n\nThe leopardess pursed her lips, folded her paws together, and rested her chin on them thoughtfully. “We’ve put a lot of work into this event and the timing of the announcements needs to be right,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m not overly concerned. Our security should be adequate for anything my brother is likely to put together. But, still, if Roger’s whole group actually charges into the building during the Open House at the wrong time it could muddle things up and make the academy look very bad. Do you know how many furs they have now, Lin Lin?”\n\nThe panda looked thoughtful for a moment and calculated quickly. “I’d guess close to sixty,” she admitted, grudgingly. “But they probably can’t convince all their newbies and part-timers to come in for something like this.”\n\nThe leopardess nodded slowly. “I’m not sure. Everyone who joins is getting some kind of operation order. Serry retrieved one of them from her spy,” she remarked, laying a paw on a slit blue envelope at the edge of her desk. “By itself it doesn’t make much sense.”\n\nLin Lin padded over to the desk and snatched the envelope up. The outside said, “S. Fox.” She yanked the paper out and unfolded it, scanning the message on it for a moment as she held the missive up to the light:\n\n\t“There’s been a mess-up about playing dress-up:\n\tA fox with your skills is required.\n\tThere’s no alarm ringing, just bring what you’re bringing,\n\tI don’t mean the forest’s been fired.”\n\nThe Newfoundland shrugged. “It may be some sort of cipher, or I assume if you put them all together the message would become—”\n\nLin Lin cut off Cassie abruptly. “It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s just a singsong baby rhyme. They probably made up something for each recruit. The poem isn’t the message; just ignore it,” she said, pivoting on her heels and, without asking, plunging her paw into the squirrel’s soda cup and withdrawing the lemon slice floating in it.\n\n“Hey!” Shelley said, taking an interest in the happenings around her for the first time, “I was drinking that!”\n\n“I noticed,” Lin Lin answered acidly as she squeezed the lemon slice out and let its juice dribble on to the enemy team’s communique, which she then pressed against the warm case of the leopardess’ desk lamp. “Standing around drinking diet soda seems to be what you’re billing us for.” Without waiting for a response, she pointed to a white outline emerging on the pale blue paper and handed it back to Cassie. “Invisible ink,” she explained rapidly. “This has the bunny written all over it. It’s a basic solution so it won’t show up if you leave it near something warm accidentally, the way lemon juice does. Grape juice might make whatever’s drawn here a little clearer.”\n\nThe Newfoundland shook her head. “Invisible ink? Who uses that besides little kid—”\n\nLin Lin rolled her eyes in annoyance, and interrupted, sounding exasperated, “Exactly.” Then she blew on the paper, causing the outline to appear in sharper relief. “It’s not a code. It’s a map. And it looks like a part of a map of . . .” she pointed at a marked spot and frowned. “Our basement. With a dotted line coming. . . from below.”\n\nCassie’s eyes glimmered. “They’re digging tunnels under the academy,” the dog concluded, sounding surprised. “He really is planning a traditional attack!” Then she slumped back in her chair, seeming relaxed again. “Good to know,” she remarked calmly. “We should still be okay. He must not know Shelley is in town or he never would have risked something so direct.”\n\nShelley tilted her head, watching the group with a raised eyebrow. “Y’all take your stupid game pretty seriously, doncha?”\n\n“Okay, really,” the panda said, tugging at her Powerpuff Girls sweater, and addressing the school’s feline headmistress directly, pointing up at Shelley without addressing or looking at her, “what is this squirrel doing here? This is not the time to be adding new furs. It’s making all the girls nervous.”\n\nCallie took a long breath, but the Newfoundland cut in. “Shelley isn’t an age-player,” she explained. “But her paws-on dungeon experience might be beneficial to our business plan. And, she’s a security expert in case we’re attacked. You saw how quickly she rigged the woods. Entrapment and containment are her specialties. She’s run kidnapping teams at scenario camps for years, and she also weekend-long abduction scenarios.”\n\nThe squirrel shrugged. “Girl scouts,” she remarked. “Backcountry girl. Daddy used to take me trapping. Ought to be good for something.”\n\n“Of course, if the boys are coming in from underground,” Cassie resumed, frowning, “we might need to get more creative. We may even need to fight. I was hoping to avoid that.”\n\nLin Lin narrowed her eyes and looked at the perpetually bored squirrel critically. “What is she going to do when her nets don’t catch all of them,” she asked, “file her claws and look annoyed until they leave? She couldn’t even keep me from—” She whirled and swung for the squirrel’s soda glass again—only to find herself stumble as her paws slid through empty air—she stopped her foot just short of stepping into the spreading puddle from the squirrel’s spilled soft drink—wait, the plastic cup was open-side down—had she spilled it by accident, or had she just dumped it as a trap as soon as Lin Lin swung?! Was she really that quick?\n\nThe panda’s eyes darted to the left, then to the right, as she settled into a defensive stance—and she whirled as heard the soft tap of footpaws touching the floor, lightly, behind her, raising both paws to swing.\n\nLin Lin caught only air, again, but she saw a gray and white blur rebounding from one of the walls, as the squirrel caught herself, and hung suspended, by both forepaws, from the room’s ceiling, her tail twitching lazily, but her eyes glinting.\n\n“Y’all move so two-dimensional like,” Shelley remarked as she swung and, letting herself drop a few inches, caught on to the opposite wall, clinging lightly to the porous conrete with both feet and one forepaw. “It is a little dull to watch.”\n\nLin Lin’s eyes widened. “She has feral climbing abilities!” the panda marveled. “Even on smooth surfaces. I’ve heard of things like this, but I’ve never seen it. . . .”\n\nCassie nodded. “Shelley’s skills are well-suited to our current needs. Traps, dungeon containment, countering climbing types . . . other things . . .” the Newfoundland explained. “We should be able to have a skeleton security crew of you two with some backup. Besides, as soon as Roger sees her here, I’m sure he’ll order his boys to pull out right away in return for our releasing any captives.”\n\n“Did you say there are sixty of these mewling little diaperboys coming?” Shelley asked as she released the wall and dropped, lightly, back on to the floor.\n\nLin Lin nodded.\n\n“Be a dear,” said the squirrel, tussling the undersized panda’s headfur patronizingly. “Take care of the other ten.”\n\n[i]Next time: The sissies are drawing battle lines! But boys have power-ups not available to girls. That’s right — training pants, I mean, training scenes![/i]\n\n\f[b]Episode 11: Training Day![/b]\n\nFrom his vantage point behind a tree on the south slope of a hill, Rian, who had slipped into a matching set of camouflage sweatpants and sweatshirt, watched the teams he was surveying critically.\n\n“Let’s get down to business!” Ace shouted, a whistle hanging around his neck on a cord, as he rested one paw on his holstered paintball gun and paced back and forth in front of a contingent of boys lounging, leaning against trees, or sitting on their padded rears on the forest floor. “You slackers need to understand that girls and sissies do not play fair. They sure as heck won’t—”\n\nAce whirled on his heels mid-sentence, whipped out his paintball gun, and released a volley at the giraffe who stumbled backwards, tumbling into the fur behind him, causing them to both land on the ground with a thud, “Won’t tell you to get ready and give you until the count of three!” the lynx concluded, shaking his head mournfully. “You’re the saddest bunch I’ve ever met.”\n\n“Hey!” Steven whined, straining his longer-than-average neck to look down at his shirt. “How bad is it?” the tall fur asked the one next to him. “I can’t even see. This is my kite-flying shirt.” The other boys shuffled and made some studious and some half-hearted efforts to stand at attention. Most stared at their feet. One, a hedgehog, who had been picking his nose, jammed his paws into his pockets.\n\n“Sorry,” growled the lynx, “I thought you were the ones who hadn’t been sissified yet. What is it that you think we’re trying to do in this training?”\n\nThe hedgehog answered cautiously, “Make men out of us?”\n\nAce guffawed. “Men? Out of you?” The lynx shook his head. “Now I see what the problem is. You goofs are trying to be men. Standing up straight and tucking your clothes in and keeping your pants dry. It takes more concentration than any of you can spare. Since every,” he paced down the line, eyeing reach recruit in his unit as he spoke, “last,” he flicked a beaver’s chin with his finger, “one,” he straightened a skunk’s bandana, “of you is a paw-sucking,” the lynx withdrew a pacifier from his pocket and stuck it in the mouth of the next recruit in line, who whined around it, but Ace refused to let go until he began suckling on it, slowly, then he released it, and the recruit continued sucking, “pants-soaking,” he yanked the giraffe’s tucked-in-tee-shirt out of his jeans and, letting it hang loosely, glowered up at him, “toy-loving baby. Men,” he shook his head and snorted. “Your only hope of not ending up sissified, private,” he said to the hedgehog, grabbing his wrists and yanking both paws out of his pockets, “is to think and act and fight and feel exactly like a little, little boy. Now, why didn’t you put what you’ve been doing on your list of hobbies?”\n\nThe hedgehog, who seemed to have a pair of headphones permanently settled around his neck, looked confused. “List what hobby?” he asked.\n\n“Picking your nose like a two-year-old who just figured out how to do it,” said Ace. “You stick your paw in there like a toddler when nofur’s looking and you think I haven’t noticed.”\n\nJason looked down at his feet. “I doooon’t,” he said.\n\nAce snorted. “That’s a very bad secret. Habits like that should be listed on your regressive profile. So the other furs on duty with you know they should carry tissues to wipe your paws and nose in case you get excited about it and try to show them what you got. Well, the whole unit knows now. I’m going to have to order them all to tease you about it so you won’t be so sneaky next time.”\n\n“Jason picks his nose with a rubber hose,” the beaver next to him said in a singsong voice.\n\n“I doooooon’t,” the hedgehog protested again, holding out his hand toward the beaver demonstratively as he added, defensively, “I use my paaaaw!”\n\n“Ewww,” the short beaver sidled away, eyeing it cautiously, “keep your paw away from me!”\n\n“Seeeee,” whined the hedgehog, “it grosses people ouuuuut.”\n\n“Jason,” said the lynx severely, “after the trouble you’ve gotten into by trying to play both sides of this game, we can’t let you sneak off unsupervised even on the pretense of going potty or changing yourself and get into who knows what kind of mess. I know your problem. You say yes to whoever you’re talking to. It’s very bad and it will only get you into scrapes like that one. I know that for a baby, saying ‘no’ the first time can be very hard. You’re staying under the eyes and paws of the bigger boys until you have a better sense of what you like and we know you’re at least big enough to say no to a caretaker sometimes. So with everything you’ll be using your diapers for, and your dependence on the other boys for changes, I wouldn’t worry about your nose-picking habit being the one that grosses your teammates out. Don’t worry too much though—you’re on double the normal chlorophyll and fiber ration, effective immediately.”\n\nThe hedgehog looked crestfallen. “But no alone time is just like at the academ—”\n\n“Hey hey,” Ace interrupted the hedgehog, tucking the bottom of his chin, “we’re not like that at all. It just means you can’t run off and do it in private for fear you’ll get yourself in some kind of mess again. Get a copy of the cheat sheet and see which big brother types are comfortable lending a paw or letting you paw when they change you. Then try to be on your best behavior around those folks, do act your cutest when you ask them for help, and don’t bug any furs who haven’t noted there or told you privately that it’s okay.”\n\nRian nodded approvingly at how things were going and moved on to his next observation stop. ‘Take a look around before we decamp to the main operation site,’ Roger had told him. ‘See how the recruits’ characters are coming. All their work helping get the main site together’s worked wonders for them! I think you’ll be happy with how much their maturity’s dropped in such a short time, and how little boy they’re all shaping up to be. Even the ones who came in experimenters are practically certified diaperboys. Once you’ve seen how they are we’ll consult on final deployments.’ So far, Rian liked what he saw. His mentor had been doing good work while his veteran agents had been recruiting. No one in that unit was acting a day over five! Now, to check on some of the bigger kids.\n\nFrom behind another tree, he saw Dex standing in the center of a clearing, and two of his new strike team trainees at the edge of it. The two of them seemed to have been pestering Dex about something.\n\n“I am not a ninja,” the coon was insisting, tugging at his yellow karate gi. “Why would a ninja wear bright colors? That’s just stupid.”\n\nA white canine standing next to the lion muttered to his fellow advanced combat trainee, “Told you. It’s pointless quoting it to him. He hasn’t even seen it.”\n\n“But he has seen it,” Ben, tugging at the headband with a reflective silver forehead guard around his neck, protested to the white canine, “I’m sure he has. He’s just yanking my tail.”\n\nDex, who was standing in the middle of a clearing, beckoned with one paw. “All right, whatcha waiting for, guys?” the coon asked, holding up a box of wipes in his other paw. “You boys in training pants and pull-ups are big kids now. But you do want a box of these to use on your cubbies, don’t you? And for yourself? Juuuust in case? Shame there’s only one box—and two of you. Guess someone will have to end up with a rash.”\n\nBen’s eyes narrowed and he charged toward the raccoon; at the same time his canine partner ran at him from the other side, brandishing a foam sword, both ready to grab for the wipes; Dex hopped up into the air, and hung from a low-hanging tree branch, swinging his feet in the air and watching the two boys tumble into a shallow pit that had been covered over with brush in front of him.\n\n“Lesson one,” the raccoon said, as he hoisted himself up to sit on the branch on his rear, “especially, if you’re going to be fighting sissies, you have to learn to see through deception. Think before you launch an attack. Your opponent might use it against you. Also, if the bait is obvious,” he added, shaking his head, “don’t take it.”\n\n“Okay,” moaned Ryo, setting down his foam katana at the edge of the pit and then hoisting himself out of it with both paws. The white dog’s shorts slid down enough in the process that his pull-up-like swim diapers were showing. “We get it.”\n\n“I’m telling you this,” Dex said cockily, sitting on the tree branch, “because you don’t get it.”\n\n“I knew it!” yipped the lion, scrambling out of the pit. “You’re cribbing straight out of—”\n\nDex shrugged. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the coon interrupted. “I’m a bit big for Saturday morning baaaby shows — if you’re still on about one of those, Ben.”\n\nThe lion clenched both fists and looked up at the raccoon. “That’s it, you’re going down,” he growled. “Starting with those pants you think are hiding your underwear. Are you with me, Ryo?”\n\nBy the time Rian had made his way back to the first troop for a closer look, the lynx in the safari outfit was launching another round of exercises. “All right,” Ace said, “on the count of—” but before he started counting, a pillow thudded into him, and as he reached for his paintball gun, five of the boys had flung themselves at his waist and legs, two were lying on their stomachs and gripping his feet, and three others were on top of him tickling him as he fell.\n\n“That,” said the lynx between giggles, as he rolled to and fro wrestling with the nearest boys and reaching for the pillow with one of his own paws, beating at them with it, “is more like it! Keep fighting without potty breaks! Don’t even stop to go! You have to piddle while you’re moving! If you slow down cuz you need to concentrate or hide behind a tree or something ridiculous, I’ll get you and it’s noogie time! Trust your protection—if you were good little boys and let a qualified caretaker help you into those diapers, they can handle the force of a coursing river.”\n\nRian bit his index finger musingly. “Maybe I did misjudge Ace,” he said to himself as he watched the cat wrestling, daddy-like, with the boys.\n\n“Break!” shouted the lynx’s boyfriend after a few minutes of wrestling and running around, blowing a bird whistle. Jax appeared with a Dalmatian at his side. “Snack time!” The two of them were sharing the work of carrying tote bags filled with brown-bagged snacks and lunches. The lot staggered, uneasily to their feet — many only made it up onto all fours and crawled over to inspect the offerings that way. But Ace hopped right up, adjusting his safari hat to its usual rakish tilt.\n\nKyle watched the wrestling, grass-stained, mud-covered boys with what appeared to be relief. “I’m sooooo glad I’m not in combat and scouting any more,” the Dalmatian said, breathing a long sigh of relief. “I sucked at all that.”\n\n“You sure did!” said Ace to the Dalmatian brightly as he accepted the first pawful of bags from Kyle and began distributing them. “You sucked something awful!”\n\nHis more sensitive tracking hound boyfriend and fellow wilderness team leader reached up and flicked Ace’s hat off his head and into the air, causing his tufted ears to twitch. “What?” protested the tough lynx as he bent over to pick it up. “I was being supportive!”\n\nRian, from his concealed vantage point, rolled his eyes. “Or maybe not,” he said to himself and moved on to the other side of the hill. He returned to watching Dex’s small unit, and saw the coon hopping up over a low swing of Ryo’s sword. Using his tail to adjust his trajectory in mid-air, the raccoon martial artist propelled himself backwards away from the bola that Ben hurled at the air above it. The spinning rope weapon caught Ryo instead and sent him tumbling back on to his rear, tangled up.\n\n“Still fighting with each other? Let me know when I should start paying attention,” Dex said, still holding the box of cub wipes in one paw, and sticking his tongue out at them as he landed—only to find his footpaws touching down on toy cars that the fallen canine had just launched out of his pocket from his tangled position on the ground!\n\nDex slipped and staggered backward as the miniature vehicles careened out from under him. He recovered his balance quickly—but not quickly enough to keep the lion, who had pounced as soon as the cars were launched, from laying one paw on the box of wet wipes, and begin tugging at them. “Ryo and I are teammates so the two of us are one!” the lion said proudly. “We can share the wipes!”\n\n“Excellent!” their raccoon sensei said, grinning, releasing the box and giving the two of them a thumbs-up as he straightened. “Then you two are ready to learn some real taijutsu.”\n\n“Now come on, just admit that you took that word from—” Ben started to say, fiddling with the headband around his neck.\n\n“Aikido,” Dex said with a smile, cutting the lion off as he padded over to the entangled canine and bent over him, “They finish right before karate starts. I sit in on the end of their class sometimes.”\n\nRian was about to move on when he felt two paws grab him from the rear and yank down his sweatpants. “Hey!” the wolf barked, hopping out of them, to leave them in the paws of a slight brown milk-chocolate-brown raccoon, the wolf’s own triple diapers exposed.\n\n“I did it Jax!” shouted the coon, pressing the button on a plastic walkie-talkie on his belt. He was wearing a cub scout uniform. “I caught another spy! Heading north by northwest, twelve paces from camp 3, on the opposite slope of the hill, Ryo is three paces to the east and he’s just breaking from training if you need backup!”\n\n“I’m not a spy,” Rian said, his eyes narrowing as he pointed to the shiny rank badge, a gold emblem of two crossed safety pins, on his camouflage shirt, “I’m your commanding officer! And you pantsed me.” Rian said frowning. Then, seeing the raccoon looking embarrassed, the wolf flipped his frown almost immediately, saying, “Thanks! They were getting stifling. You must be the legendary coon called Kit. Jax and Ryo have told me about you.”\n\n“Lejennary?” asked the coon.\n\nRian nodded and looked around shiftily. “Oh yes. The star newbie who kept Swifty from making off with more than a piece of our message. You might have saved our entire operation from being torpedoed by my mistake. I heard Roger gave you a medal. . . there it is,” said Rian, examining the cub scout’s small sash. He smiled at it and nodded. The wolf’s eyes glistened a little, as he recollected his own first act of blue team heroism, and he continued wistfully, “This used to be mine you know. I gave it back to Rog when I got my circle badge. I’d planned to visit you earlier,” the wolf said, managing to snatch his sweatpants back as the distracted coon relaxed his grip. Instead of putting them on, though, Rian flung them over his shoulder, seeming entirely unconcerned by the visibility of his diapers, which, since he had just put them on recently, gave off a fresh, talcum scent and small puffs of powder as he shifted in them. “The thing is,” he eyed the cub scout, “Jax said you’d be a challenge for me.” The raccoon looked curious. “I like to say,” said Rian, “that every fur I play with feels a little smaller afterward. But Jax said you came ready to play and it would be hard for me to come up with a way to make you any cubbier.”\n\n“Just because my diapers say ‘Baby’ on ‘em doesn’t make me a baby,” the brown raccoon protested unconvincingly, crossing his arms. “I have an awesome car. All-terrain vehicle! Waterproof interior! Great for camping.”\n\n“Is this one of the Power Wheels?” Rian asked suspiciously.\n\n“Noooo,” said the coon shaking his head and motioning in its general direction. “It’s right at the edge of the woods over—”\n\nRian’s eyes twinkled. “I have an idea,” he said, pointing at the raccoon and then setting off in the direction of the coon’s car. “You’re coming with me.”\n\nThe coon hesitated for a moment, looking back over his shoulder toward the rest of his unit. Rian glanced back for him.\n\n“Cubby,” the lupine explained, grinning wolfishly as he gestured to the rookie, “you have to follow me first.”\n\n******************************\n\nTwitchy fiddled with the goggles on his forehead and hummed as he settled into his desk chair at Hideout #4, tapping his foot rhythmically against the floor as he switched his three monitors, one at a time, to bring up images of the main operation site on one, a blueprint-style map indicating tunnel routes, and on the third, tabbed through footage shots from the boys’ recently installed security cameras facing the river.\n\n“Perfect,” he said as he watched some of the sissies rigging additional traps in the woods, under Lin Lin’s direction, earlier in the day. “They’ll never know what hit them.” He pointed a paw at the panda. “Have fun trying to decode our message, miss smarty-panties,” he taunted the screen. “Or catching up with our recruit numbers after Dex’s hat trick. Hope you’re getting used to losing to me!” He took a long breath. “Everything has worked out perfect. Okay — things did get a little bit hairy in the middle there, I admit — but, in the final analysis,” he reassured himself, “just as planned. I saved Dex, and Baby Blue, and everyone! The boys from Hideout #4 can do—” he looked down at his pocket for a moment, and shook his head. Something didn’t feel right.\n\nThe rabbit began whistling as he slid back in his wheeled chair and hopped up. He heard anxious squeaking — and giggled involuntarily, hopping around, as he felt a scuffle in his pant leg, and a warm little body scurrying up his thigh, then through his shirt and onto his shoulder, to nose at one of his floppy ears.\n\n“Squeak squeak squeak!” the mouse squeaked into his ear anxiously.\n\n“Squeak!” Twitchy exclaimed. “You haven’t run up my pants leg in months. Yeah,” the rabbit blushed and patted the small mouse on his head. “I’m okay. Especially now that you’re here. We’re all okay. I did it, Squeak,” Twitchy said as he looked at the recruit counts on one of his monitors.\n\n“Squeak?” said the mouse into his ear, curiously.\n\n“That was close,” the rabbit said, sitting into his chair and sliding backward across the room. “I was worried for a while there. I could feel him slipping into a dark place. But he’s going to be okay now. He’s back. For one day Dex had everything the way he’d wish for it to be. Now he knows what he wants and what life can be like if he doesn’t fixate on Rian and all the things Rian has.” Twitchy took a long breath. “But he’s not bad either, you know, Squeak. Rian was the first fur from here to come over and see me. He never meant to be messing things up for me and Dex. He just doesn’t get boundaries sometimes,” the rabbit sniffled. “I bet he grew up with so much stuff that sharing was never a big deal. I would have liked to have a childhood like that. But he’s a good friend really. He wants us to be happy, too. Oh, Squeak!” Twitch exclaimed brightly, reaching for the bookbag he’d dumped under his desk, “I have some projects I need your help with!”\n\n“Squeak?” asked the mouse.\n\n“Noooo, it’s not for school,” said Twitchy, shaking his head as he pulled out a sheaf of papers, “I’m so not worried about schoolwork while I’m here. I can do that stuff back on campus. Besides, I took myself out of the lab assistant pool. I have enough work to do anyway and, errmmmm—it seemed like the safer thing to do after the accident. No point doing extra if I end up killing myself, right? Sooo first, I have these nursery plans for Dex that I want you to look at—I want your input on what kind of cables and ropes I’d need to hold his weight safely. Oh, but don’t tell anyone! It’s a secret. Only Rian knows what I’m up to. And this is for Kyle — oh,” added the rabbit with a giggle, “this is for him too, cuz he put up with me being snappish lately,” he said, producing a collar from the front pocket. “I made a detour on the way here to a pet shop that could engrave things. It says ‘Point me to Hideout #4’ on the front side of the tag. And the other side says, ‘Help a puppy.’” Twitchy rubbed his paws together. “It’s for next time he gets lost in the woods and can’t find his way back here on time. I’m gonna make him wear it on BB territory,” the bunny said gleefully, “cuz I’ve never met someone with so little sense of direction. It’s one part of my part of a project for him.”\n\n“Squeak?” said the mouse, sounding surprised.\n\nTwitchy batted a paw at him. “Well of course I like Kyle, Squeak, don’t be silly!” the bunny said lightly. “K is not that bright, and kind of clumsy, but he’s our teammate. And our friend.” The rabbit resumed typing as the mouse scurried down his arm, on to the desk, to examine the blueprints he’d set down there.\n\n“And to think,” Twitchy said, “for a few seconds I thought I might not see any of them again.”\n\nThe mouse scampered over Twitchy’s papers while the rabbit surveyed operation plans on his screens from various angles, frowning and chewing on his lip thoughtfully. “You should have seen how happy Dex looked on that rooftop, standing up and doing what he wanted to do. I helped him get to that point! Me! And I knew as soon as I saw it it was a life-changing moment. I told you, Squeak,” the rabbit said, humming, “one perfect day is enough to change a fur.”\n\nThe small mouse took two of Twitchy’s fingers in his paws and tugged on them; the bunny tilted his head and looked down at him curiously. “Squeak?” queried the mouse. “Squeak squeak?”\n\nTwitchy snorted. “You and your reverse psychology, Squeak,” he said, shaking his head. “Of course I’m sure I’m talking about my boyfriend. He’s like a new fur. Who else would I be talking about? I’m not wrong you know,” the bunny added distractedly, “this Dex and Rian situation was trouble waiting to happen. It’s a good thing that someone finally did something about that and fixed everything before one of those two did something really stupid. But it’s taken care of. My little coon kit hero is going to get the job of his dreams and have the sort of life he deserves. No more of this depressive feeling second-best stuff. It all happened even faster than I hoped.” The rabbit tilted his head and patted the mouse gently, concluding, “I know it’s never smart to say this, Squeak, but we aren’t on TV, so here goes,” he knocked on his desk with one paw, just in case. “Nothing can go wrong now.” \n\n[i]Next time: Car Trouble! We all know Twitchy shouldn’t have said that, right?[/i]\n\n[b]\fEpisode 12: Car Trouble![/b]\n\nThe Doberman mechanic assistant stepped out of the gas station garage just in time to see a brown-and-white border collie wearing jeans, a purple fleece shirt with a pocket over the tummy, and a baseball cap sideways on his head slam his hood shut with one paw, and twirl a wrench with the other.\n\n“Hey! What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks, man?” Diesel demanded as the collie, who was wagging his tail, leaned over and replaced the wrench in a toolbox. “Did you just use our stuff to fix your own car?”\n\n“Oh, hi,” Blaze said brightly, turning around and slouching against the hood of his Honda. “I called, but when no one came out I thought maybe you guys forgot about me.” The happy-go-lucky collie grinned at him. “I don’t like it when furs forget about me.”\n\nThe Doberman opened and closed his muzzle wordlessly, and shook his head. “I—uh—was eating lunch,” he lied, narrowing his eyes. He had in fact been caught up in what had become a difficult changing situation, and he had knocked something over. But, when he heard noises, he had gotten himself together—and clean—as fast as he could to come out here. “Whatever you did,” Diesel warned him, “it won’t be insured. Don’t expect us to fix it cheap if you have a problem either.”\n\nThe collie shrugged. “I’ll live,” he said. “It’s just an oil change. I can handle my own changes.” His ears pricked, and his head tilted. He regarded the Doberman shop worker, who was wearing overalls, curiously.\n\nDiesel’s ears pricked, too. Had he heard a crinkle when the collie reclined against his car? Did he smell talcum powder? The collie straightened up, the Doberman straightened the crooked shoulder straps of his overalls, and for several minutes, the two dogs each moved a couple paces in opposite directions, circling each other suspiciously.\n\nEventually, the collie reached behind him, through an open car window, and produced a newspaper folded up on his front seat. Maybe this would be his break. Whenever he seemed to be getting close to answers about the fur he was tracking, whoever he was talking to suddenly become cagey.\n\n“Say,” he said, operating on the evidence of a crinkle, “is there any chance you know,” he unfolded the newspaper, and held it up with both paws, thrusting the unfolded front page with the picture of Dex directly into the Doberman’s face, “this guy?”\n\n“That guy!” the Doberman exclaimed, as he stumbled backward and caught himself with one paw against the gas pump, since the collie had opened the newspaper right in front of his muzzle. “Why I know that he’s—” Wait a minute, he caught himself. Who was this dog? If he was a diaperfur, why hadn’t he been recruited? They’d contacted almost everyone active in town. Maybe he was another spy. Or some worse kind of snoop. And Dex, one of the most reserved and private members of the group, had never put up a profile on any fetish sites; before he had recently gotten better control of his regressive episodes, the coon had been wary of playing with anyone besides his closest friends. The Doberman changed his tone abruptly. “Some total stranger guy who I’ve never seen before.”\n\n“Uh huh,” said the collie, nodding and tilting his head as he reached into his pocket. “I’m hearing that a lot.” He produced a card with a phone number and the name ‘Blaze’ scribbled on it. Should that sound familiar? Diesel thought he might have read it somewhere recently. “Well if you never see him again,” the collie said, “tell him I want to talk?”\n\n“I never will,” the assistant mechanic said decisively, but took the card and pocketed it, “but why would you want to?”\n\n“I just want to give credit,” the collie reporter said, “where credit is due. I’ve been trying to find out his name for going on two days but it seems like there’s no easy way to do it. He’s—”\n\nAt that moment, smoke came pouring out of the canine mechanic’s office. “Oh, darn it,” exclaimed the Doberman, turning on his tail and dashing to the door. “I thought I took care of that!”\n\nBlaze tossed the paper back into his car, reaching for his cell phone. Why were things catching fire everywhere he went lately? Did the universe have it in for him? “Hey!” the collie shouted. “Be careful, man! Don’t do anything—”\n\nBut the dog opened his door and walked right in, much to the collie’s consternation. He stuck his head out in a moment, coughing a little, as he waved a paw at Blaze, who had raised his phone to his ear. “It’s okay,” the Doberman said. “Don’t call anybody!”\n\nThe collie’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and he padded over to the door.\n\n“Look, see,” explained Diesel, pointing at a few small, apple and cherry-sized spheres covered with holes, with smoke spewing out of them, that had scattered over the floor amid a haphazard collection of car parts, tools, Hot Wheels, radios, and large electric battery packs. “The stuff inside burns up. We made some to simulate exhaust smoke! My idea. They’re the final touch for a project I’m working on for Ba—err, just a personal project. Industrial-grade smoke bombs! These are just small ones. Perfectly safe: as long as you don’t break them open or drop them into anything flammable. The fuel burns up inside the sphere. Baking soda slows the rate of burning, so that they mainly give off smoke. It’s called a moderant. Basic chemistry.” The Doberman then scowled at him and added, “See, your mechanic really does know more about how things work than you do.”\n\nBlaze blinked, stunned. “Baking soda?” he remarked, as though a puzzle piece had just fallen into place. “You.don’t say.”\n\nThe collie turned on his heels and marched back to his car.\n\n“Hey!” Diesel called after him, running out after he had opened the window in back of the office and turned on a fan. He arrived just as the collie was starting to back up. “Listen, man,” the Doberman said into his car window, “you don’t seem like too bad a guy to me. But don’t march around barking questions like that. You might not realize it, but — playing things the way you are, you could be missing your chance to be part of something really big.”\n\n“Listen man back at you,” the collie, tilting his head and flashing a last, cheery smile, said, adding right before he rolled up his window, “I was about to tell you the same thing. Give me a call if your memory suddenly improves.”\n\nBlaze turned on his radio as he pulled out into the street, shaking his head as he made his first turn away from the gas station. “Another closet case. That guy back there and I should just be able to talk to each other without all these hang-ups and weirdnesses. It’s sad that we diaperfurs all have to be so secretive and inhibited,” the collie reporter mused aloud, casting a glance sideways at the story he had written about Dex.\n\nIt had gotten more comments on the school paper website than anything else he had written in his almost four years of articles. He remembered one anonymous one that said simply, ‘This made my day. Yes, Virginia, good furs do exist.’ He had booked back to the fire scene to clean up the changing paraphernalia Dex had spilled as soon as he saw the coon off, and scrambled out of there as soon as he heard the fire truck coming, having decided to leave Dex’s secret out of his story. But after a day of skittish, frightened looks and abruptly ended chat sessions from half the furs he tried to talk to about the coon, he was wondering if he had done the right thing. “Things shouldn’t be this way,” he mused.\n\nThe collie plugged an earpiece into his cell phone and clicked the speaker on with his free paw as he continued thinking. “I wonder if that would change,” he thought aloud, sketching a verbal outline, “if there was one of us every fur could look up to. Our hero revealed. All around great guy. Rescues people. Stands up to the system. We caught up with him the other day and had a nice chat. And by the way, here’s why our superhero doesn’t wear his underwear outside his pants —secretly, he’s a —,” Blaze cut off, pressed the second dial button on his phone and it began ringing. “Well, buddy,” he said as he waited, “I’ve got a feeling someone who oughta know you’s gonna open up to me.”\n\n“Yo, man, it’s your favorite roommate,” he said into the speaker as soon as the call was picked up. “That geeky kid, your bunny lab partner,” Blaze asked as he continued driving. “Any chance you’ve got a cell number for him?”\n\n**************************\n\n“Your car has a lot of trunk space,” said Rian as he circled around and, bowing to the raccoon cub scout in a gentlemanly fashion, opened the passenger side door for him. “Like your pants. I bet I know what all that storage space is for!”\n\nBoth pairs of pants had ended up over the wolf’s shoulders on the way; as he had explained, they would move faster if pants couldn’t get snagged on things. Besides, since the coon had pantsed Rian, it was only fair that he also remove his own. It all seemed fair when Rian explained it, anyway.\n\nThe chocolaty coon hopped up into the car, following Rian’s lead, and settled into the passenger seat. He started to reach for the seat belt, thinking that a good scout would always wear one, but the wolf leaned over him, through the side door, and took his wrist, lightly in one paw, lowering it to his hip. “I will get that for you, Kit Raccoon,” Rian said, “You are too little.” \n\nThe coon let Rian guide his paws to rest on the edge of his thighs, by his hips, and looked up at the wolf curiously. Rian pulled down the seatbelt, clicked it into place over the raccoon’s waist and, incidentally, his wrists. Then Rian pressed him back into the seat, softly with his free paw, while he pulled the belt as tight as it could go with the other.\n\nThe coon fidgeted a bit. “Iss tight,” he said in a not-quite pouty tone, afraid to start any outright whining too quickly.\n\nRian nodded and said, “It is for your own safety.” The wolf reached over him and tossed both pairs of pants into the back seat. Then, instead of closing the door and going to the driver side, as the coon expected, the wolf hopped in and pulled it shut behind him, scooting his way over the raccoon without ever resting his weight on him. It served to squash Kit back into the seat even deeper and make him feel impossibly small, even though rationally he knew Rian was only able to scoot over him and the armrest that way because the wolf was slight himself. On his way, Rian kept brushing — was it accidentally? — the front of his exposed “BABY” diaper. Since the wolf was thickly padded and shifting quite a bit himself, all the maneuvering in the otherwise silent car filled the small space with crinkling.\n\nAfter a moment Rian settled comfortably into the driver’s seat. “Waterproof interior,” he remarked in a neutral tone as he looked around. “I definitely approve. Now there is something I noticed about your profile statement, Kit Raccoon. I want to clarify it before we go ahead and order your reward for unmasking a dangerous, cooty-carrying spy.”\n\nThe cub scout scrunched his face up. Some of those words were pretty big, but he caught the important one! “Whass my reward?” he asked.\n\n“Something you need really bad, so that you do not get squished back into your seat and choked by your seat belt any more,” Rian remarked casually. “You are so small I almost did not see you there when I got in.” \n\nThe coon’s ears pricked. He had a hunch where this was going, but he decided to play dumb. “Whass I gotta do?” he asked. “A mission! Does I haffta fight Swifty again? I won’t let any more of my buddies get sissied,” he said huffily. “Don’t worry, Commander. That fox is going down! I’ll never forgive those girly types for what almost happened to Jason. I’ll fight them forever. I’ve been training hard, and I’m twice as cubby already as last time I gave him the slip. The cubbier I get, the more effectual I am. It’s because I am a cub scout! Not a regular boy scout.” He nodded decisively and tugged at the handkerchief hanging loosely from his collar.\n\nRian nodded, still keeping his tone level. “Then we better keep you cubby most of the time, huh? That way you will always be ready for action. Kit Raccoon, Ace’s report says that when you were asked about skills, you only listed one. Now that is okay. You have already found out you have more. When Kyle came to us he thought he had no skills besides being a champion piddler. As important as that is—and believe me, Kyle’s pants-piddling abilities are impressive—he has since discovered his other talents. Like you have a talent. I heard the report you radioed on me. And Jax has told me you never get lost in the woods. He said that when you go off with your little buddies you always seem to know the way back to one of the big brother-caretaker-type furs nearby. You are like a brainy Brightheart Raccoon when it comes to directions. But do you remember what you had said to Ace as your one skill back when you were recruited?”\n\n“Driving?” said the coon.\n\n“Kit Raccoon,” said Rian seriously, and the cub scout noted that Rian was only using the full form of his nickname and speaking slowly and without contractions, as though the wolf were giving a lecture to a small, easily confused child, “you did not say, ‘I can drive.’ You said, ‘I have a car.’ Those are different and I think as a good cub scout maybe you chose your words carefully to avoid lying. I know that you have a car because I am sitting in it, and because you opened it for me. That makes me nervous about highway safety though, since you are obviously a baby. I suppose they will sell cars to any fur nowadays. But your reward will help to keep you safe in it.”\n\nThe scout cadet just nodded, ready to follow his leader wherever this went. “Is my reward,” he guessed, trying to conceal his mounting excitement, “a car seat?”\n\n“You are very smart!” said Rian, reaching over to pat the strapped-in coon’s head while still looking straight ahead out of the windshield. “Your teammate Ryo said that you are a gifted subby player, very good at figuring out what your big brothers want even without being told. I wonder if you can figure out what I am thinking, though. I am going to think really hard about something that I hear you say in your car all the time. You will use all your subby cubby skills to guess the phrase I am thinking. And if you end up thinking the same thoughts as me along the way, well, then, what we have thought of together, will become true. Does that make sense to you? Until you have guessed, I will be very serious and avoid eye contact, so as not to give you any clues. That is the only way to be absolutely sure that we are both thinking of the same thing, so that it will become true.”\n\nThe raccoon in the cub scout uniform—well, the top half of a cub scout uniform—nodded, and cleared his throat, then repeated a series of phrases, pausing after each, as seriously as though he were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “Are we there yet?” he guessed first, his eyes flickering to their corners to eye Rian for signs of the brotherly wolf’s approval after each attempt. “How about now?” A twinkle in his eye, but otherwise the wolf maintained a stoic demeanor. “I need to use the poootty.” Still nothing. “I see a doggy at that house! Hello, doggy! Arf! Arf!” No acknowledgment, and he had even barked a real bark! Maybe if he needled him. “I spy with my little eye a . . . big wolf cub baby’s waistband!” The corner of Rian’s lips curled up in the start of a smile, but he still didn’t speak. This was hard! Maybe he had to test the boundaries of his role. The cub scout coon cleared his throat. “Let’s play license plates!” he announced. “I see California!”\n\nThe wolf was visibly stifling a chuckle and fighting his own impulses to cuddle and tickle the cubby scout strapped in next to him until they found out how waterproof his seats really were. \n\n“You need to read to play the license plate game,” Rian explained in a tone of sententious disbelief, as though the cub scout had proposed a manned mission to Mars. “And you are too little to read, Kit Raccoon! Having things read to you by bigger boys is not the same thing as reading them yourself.” \n\nThe coon fidgeted and tugged at the handkerchief tied around his neck, and bit his lips pensively. Darn it. Why couldn’t he guess what the wolf was thinking? He wanted his car seat! He wanted to be a helpless backseat driver in his own vehicle, yipping directions to the bigger boys, barely potty-trained themselves, who were at least big enough to drive a team pet like him around.\n\nYeah, he wanted to be everybody’s pet. He wanted to be changed in his backseat. Rian was right — why did he have a car with so much trunk space, except to always have multiple packs of padding in it? Big packs of big diapers. Big, puffy diapers. And wipes. And powder. And a tote bag. So his big brothers never had to bring supplies for the ride on his account!\n\nHe wondered if his trunk was really big enough for all his diapers, though, because suddenly Kit thought he might need large diapers instead of mediums. He thought that because the diaper he was wearing suddenly felt sooo tight. He squirmed under his seat belt and let out a whimper, biting his lip harder. He had to do something in his diapers bad, but his paws were pinned in place, to his hips, by the tightly fastened seat belt. Did Rian know that’s what would happen?\n\nWell of course—this is what always happened when he tried to wear a seatbelt just in the seat like a big kid! He would be way comfier in a car seat. Even if it didn’t fit under his steering wheel and meant he could never drive himself anywhere, and had to always ask bigger boys to drop him off places he had to go when they could, on their way to do grown-up stuff.\n\n“Kit Raccoon,” said the wolf gently, emphasizing the first part of the nickname, “I know that you can do this.” Rian rested a paw on the raccoon’s knee and gave it a gentle squeeze, his eyes sparkling as he felt the coon, pinned in place by the tight shoulder strap of the seatbelt, wriggling around in the seat as he tried to maneuver one of his forepaws closer to his crotch, sliding it up his thigh a little bit at a time. “I know that you want things to be how we are imagining them.”\n\nThe wolf rested one paw atop the coon’s small one, arresting its progress, and stroked his knuckles and the back of his paw gently, smiling.\n\n“Guesses you’ve made so far are things that any cub in first or second grade would say,” the wolf hinted, prodding him. “I am sure that when you are driving around with a bigger fur, you say them all the time. All of our Baby Blue boys who drive are already used to ignoring the constant refrain of ‘Are we there yet? How about now?’ when their little bro teammates are in the back seat. You should try driving with Twitchy in the back. Sometimes he will start reciting counts of miles out to three decimal places. But we are talking about your car. Why do you have a car with a waterproof interior? I bet you specifically said that you could only look for cars with that feature when you were shopping for cars. Why is that?”\n\nThe wolf ran one of his fingers along the cushion of the rubber-covered seat, beneath the raccoon’s closer thigh, approvingly. The coon started and whined; that tickled the back of his leg! How did Rian know he was ticklish there? His diaper was soooo much tighter all of a sudden. When and how did his Medium get sooooooo tight? Maybe large diapers wouldn’t have enough room. Maybe he needed extra large diapers! I mean, really, he felt like the tapes were about to pop! He had to get his paws to his crotch—to adjust it! Pronto. But they were still pinned to his hips because Rian had fastened his seatbelt so tight. The cub scout wriggled helplessly, letting out a long whine.\n\nRian reached up for the rearview mirror, and adjusted it with his left paw, so that he could watch the raccoon in the passenger seat through it, and gauge his degree of squirminess that way. The little guy looked just about ready.\n\n“What I am asking is,” the wolf explained in a patient, fraternal tone, “not what any cub says a lot in the car, but what is something that Kit Raccoon says all the time in his car, maybe more than any other boy even on this team, since he is always being driven around?”\n\nThe raccoon whimpered. The short, diapered wolf in the front seat next to him suddenly seemed impossibly grown up. But then, he told himself, this was Rian’s car practically! Well, Baby Blue’s car. He was just holding it for them! It’s not like he drove by himself anywhere. Ever. The only things he’d ever think to go shopping for if the team didn’t drag him to other places were toys and ice cream! Besides, he needed a car seat, and that wouldn’t fit under the steering wheel!\n\nAnd he had to have a car with a waterproof interior: what other kind of vehicle could he ask anyone to drive him in? Asking for a ride in someone else’s car would just be rude. Because of all the times he had an accident and said to the other boys in his car — yes, that was it! He did say that a lot, didn’t he? A glimmer of an idea had come to him! And not a moment too soon, judging by the bulge in front of his diaper. He prayed that it worked.\n\nEying his super-grown-up looking lupine chauffeur curiously out of the corner of his eyes, the cub scout raccoon whimpered, “I — I don’t need to use the potty any more.” He gulped and added, for good measure, “Mr. Commander Rian boss wolfy big brother cubsitter sir.”\n\nHe inhaled sharply before he had finished, though, because Rian’s paw had slid from his thigh to his crotch and begun patting it gently. The wolf’s eyes sparkled with pleasure, as he watched his blissfully squirmy playmate indirectly, through the rearview mirror, and observed how relieved he instantly looked at the touch of his commanding officer’s paw.\n\n“Exactly that. Your teammate Ryo is right, Kit Raccoon,” the wolf said, in a tone of congratulations. “You,” he gave his first gentle squeeze to the coonie’s well-padded crotch, and instantly felt the diaper reach its maximum degree of tightness under his paw, as he concluded, “are a genius.”\n\nThey both felt one of the four tapes pop open — but that would be okay. The scout cadet would need a change in less than fifteen minutes, anyhow. He had a whole lot stored up and his diaper was about to be really flooded—albeit in such a way that leaking ought not to be a problem. In fact, Rian took advantage of the situation to squeeze the diaper loosely around the coon’s shaft, and slide it up and down as he rubbed, feeling the kit quiver.\n\n“I think you have a very big future on this team,” Rian remarked as he stroked, “as a very small raccoon.”\n\nRian rested his left paw on the steering wheel of the inert car, gripping it tightly to anchor himself as he worked on the coon’s crotch, watching him through the mirror all the while. \n\nThe wriggly cub scout managed to whimper, “Do ya need to drive somewhere Mr. Commander Rian sir? Ya can have my keys. They’re back in my pocket in my pants on the back seat.”\n\nThe coon exhaled sharply as he felt the first dribble of pre-cum trickle out into the thick, cottony padding pressed tightly all around his very small-feeling cock. “Please take my keys,” he added plaintively. “I’d just looose them. I can’t dwive myself anywhere! I just gotted a car so I’d haff something to bring to the group and for bigger boys to make it worth takin’ care of me! And cuz it would be rude to ask for a ride in anyone else’s car, wiff all th’ accidents I have! I ‘member that now! You helped me remember!! My big brothers can drive it whenever and wherever they need it. That’s always more important than wherever I need to go! They can just drop me off and pick me up places when it’s on their way! Since I’m good at directions, I’ll navigate for them, from my car seat! Drive me somewhere an’ I’ll proof it!” He whimpered, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Taaaake me shopping,” he whined. “I need new cloooothes. I knooow the waaaay to Kits R Us.” He fidgeted and added, plaintively, “Toys ‘R Us miiiiiiiight be near it so we could go there too real quick?”\n\nRian giggled as he kept pumping away at the coon, who felt himself melting into a full-on climax, as the wolf lightly explained, “Not quite yet, I’m just getting a feel a for your car, Kit Raccoon. I may need to do a few rounds of practice just feeling out all these controls while we talk about your future. You see, little guy—”\n\nJust at the moment he felt the coon’s whole body flopping against the seat he was pinned to and what would be the first very long release into his diaper beginning, Rian broke into a wide grin and concluded, gently, “I’m not used to driving a stick.”\n\n*************************\n\n“If I help you pwactice tomorrow, Princess, will I have to read the boy parts again?” the cross fox, wearing a frilly purple dress, with ribbons tied around his tail and one ear, and a daisy tucked behind the other, whined.\n\n“Probably,” she said gently, before motioning him out the door and adding in a whisper, “You’re good at it.”\n\n“Awww,” Swifty whined, his tail and ears dropping. “That’s what Mama says too.”\n\nSerry patted him on the head and handed the cross fox a teddy bear in a dress matching his, who had been sitting between them with a tea cup during the rehearsals. “You can talk the girliest pillow talk you want with Dolly to make up for it. I think you should go out with the other girls and talk with Dolly in front of them about outfits until naptime, and how unfair it is that you have to be a boy sometimes, until you fall asleep together. Dolly will understand. And she’ll send you girly dreams in return, if you snuggle her enough.”\n\nSwifty nodded, gripping the doll tightly in both paws, and shuffled off quietly. The sissy fox princess left the door cracked open, as was her habit, as she turned back to the vanity table in her “office,” remade into a dressing room with a small computer table. Serafina was known as the academy’s most approachable instructor, and it wasn’t unheard of for students to sneak into her room to talk privately about their relationship or school problems. Serry wasn’t prepared for her next visitor, though, and blinked as she saw, in her mirror, the undersized panda poking her head in, and, unsure of how best to enter, clearing her throat and knocking lightly on the door. \n\n“Lin Lin?” said Serry, raising an eyebrow. “Umm . . . come in . . . I guess.”\n\n“So, fox,” the panda, wearing her Powerpuff Girls sweater, pink sweatpants and jogging shoes, looked around the room awkwardly and padded over to two laundry bags and a laundry hamper filled with old clothes, “I guess it’s true, you’re a lifestyler now. Girls’ clothes full time.”\n\nThe fox lowered her script. “Oh,” she said, relaxing, as though the visit suddenly made sense. “You came because you heard I’m giving away stuff. Well, all my boys’ clothes are in those baskets. In fact, that’s almost every piece of outerwear I own without a skirt. Help yourself. Maybe there’s some active wear you can use for your gym classes.”\n\n“Actually,” admitted the panda, “I came to show you this before I send it anywhere. Since it is about you.” She practically threw a clipboard on the vulpine’s vanity table, and then padded over to the hampers. “But I’m definitely raiding your stuff while I’m here.”\n\n“What is this?” Serry stared at the clipboard and raised her eyebrows. “Did you collect all these signatures?”\n\nThe panda answered nonchalantly, “I told the girls they didn’t all have to sign it. But I don’t think they believed me when I said it was optional and I wasn’t keeping track and there’d be no consequences if they didn’t. I just decided our students should know the boys’ team isn’t the only one with a member who’s been in the press. And you were in a newspaper recently, that dumb festival story about how you and your director-furson told people you were, umm, transgendered, if that’s what you’re calling yourself now. Whatever the word means in your case. So, unfortunately, you’re all I had to work with.”\n\n“Azzie . . . Muffy. . . Bri . . . Kitty. . . .,” Serry remarked the sissy names of some of the furs whose legal ones she recognized as she turned through the pages carefully. “Where’s this thing going?” she asked. “Am I supposed to sign it? Or do anything?”\n\n“To any place that covers your dumb festival thing,” said the panda as she rummaged through Serry’s hand-me-downs. “And your stupid sponsors. And ex-sponsor, I guess, saying that we won’t be patronizing their cruddy movie nights and bake sales. No, fox, it’s about you, so you shouldn’t sign it. Haven’t you ever seen a petition or heard of a boycott before?” She shook her head. “Look, I knew you’d be too busy mooning over some boy or other to make any kind of response yourself. But I thought you might want to see it before it got sent anywhere, in case you had, I don’t know, changes or anything. It’s not that often that furs in our groups actually take a stand for something. It seems like we should support them if they do.” The panda had assembled a small pile of clothes, and took a break from rummaging to lean on them on one elbow. “This is a lot of stuff. What made you decide to get rid of all of your boy things?”\n\nThe sissy fox eyed Lin Lin curiously for a moment. “Well, honestly,” she said, as she began scanning the draft of the statement on the first page, blushing as she recollected, “It was about Rian.”\n\n“Oh,” said the panda gravely, sounding disappointed, but Serry, warming to the subject, barreled ahead without looking up from the paper and without noticing Lin Lin’s pained reaction. She momentarily debated the wisdom of telling the panda anything personal — but her desire to talk about the boyfriend she hadn’t spoken to since the night behind the waterfall quickly won out.\n\n“He was getting to be such a desperate case. He was so nervous about going 24/7 himself and he wanted my support so badly. I felt like I had to do something. We had this date in between the audition and the start of rehearsals, before I quit the stationery store,” Serry related, her cheeks flushing as she did, “and he surprised me by showing up outside the store when I was leaving. He brought me a tin of candy hearts. They were custom ones— I don’t know where the little guy finds all these things — and every one of them was different, they all said things like, ‘For my leading lady,’ and, ‘The course of true love never did stay dry,’ and ‘My pampered princess.’ I said I wanted to save them all. He kind of insisted on feeding them to me during the night, but I made him give me a list of all the inscriptions first. Umm — that all happened later, though — where I meant to start —”\n\nLin Lin considered making an excuse and bolting for the door, but decided not to abandon her clipboard — instead she distracted herself by sitting up again and moving to the giveaway hamper, which also had some used sporting equipment resting alongside it.\n\n“Anyway,” Serry continued as she read through the letter, pausing to reread most of the sentences since her mind kept wandering back to the memories she recounted, “when he met me, I was wearing street clothes — I mean, my old street clothes, boys’ clothes — and he said ‘Serry?’ in a voice that sounded sooo sad, and I said ‘No fun seeing me like this, huh? Don’t worry, hon. I’ll get changed as soon as we get back to my place, we don’t have to hold paws or anything until I’m pretty.’ Well, we were on the sidewalk, and he hugged me so tight, and kissed me, hard, then he buried his little head in my chest and said, ‘You’re radiant. I’m just sad for the dress you’re not wearing right now. It’s missing its chance to be beautiful.’ Then when we got back to my apartment he scratched and whimpered at the door to my bedroom the whole time I was changing. I decided then I had to do something.”\n\nLin Lin, who was doing her best to ignore the fox’s sappy reminiscences, stifled her gagging with a pretend cough. “Sounds like he’s pretty far gone,” she said noncommitally.\n\nThe fox shook her head and smiled, looking over her shoulder at the years’ worth of male apparel she was discarding. “You have no idea. Poor Rian. That guy,” she said wistfully, “will do the craziest things for love.” Serry tapped a finger against the clipboard thoughtfully. “I hope he’s okay over there. I’ve hardly seen him for days. He didn’t return my call yet about the Dex and Twitchy stuff. He’s got to be worried sick about his friends. I can’t bear to bother him with all this festival stuff. It would put him over the edge. And,” the fox blushed, “I did kind of pull a dirty trick on him with Swifty.”\n\nLin Lin, sitting by the final laundry bag, turned around and unfurled a tee shirt with both paws, concealing her smirk behind its images of flying, spiky-haired muscled fighters. “This was yours? I mean, you actually wore it?” she asked with a chortle. “Dragonball Z?”\n\nThe sissy fox nodded. “My life was different back then. You had to be there, I guess.”\n\n“Well, I’m keeping this,” the panda remarked, folding it up. “For future blackmail material. I can’t let that go unremarked.”\n\n“See,” Serry, softened by talking about her wolfy, giggled involuntarily, and remarked, “I knew you came here with something nefarious up your sleeve.”\n\nThere was a long moment of silence. Then Lin Lin dropped the shirt on to her pile and stood up, experimenting with the best way to carry the items to carry she’d collected. “You have missed a lot of meetings lately, fox. Are you up to date with Cassie’s mysterious fallback plan? And this Level 5 stuff? Have you sent anyone there? You haven’t said anything about it.”\n\nThe vulpine princess shrugged. “My paws are kind of full between my girls and the play. No, I haven’t. I heard there were a couple problems. But I’m sure Callie and Cassie have everything in paw for the Open House. I trust those two and I’m not going to second guess them this time.”\n\nLin Lin frowned as she stood awkwardly by the door, a pile of folded clothes tucked under each arm, and a pair of sneakers hanging in her other paw.\n\n“Why?” Serry asked, looking over her shoulder slowly. “What’s going on? Were you hoping I would say something?”\n\n“Of course not,” the panda snapped, shaking her head emphatically. “It’s just — That squirrel Cassie’s been spending so much time with — I think she just hates boys, you know — which is good, I mean, that’s why we’re here, right — but I don’t know what she likes — well, maybe that’s not it. But I really have a bad feeling about her. And the way she drags her recruits in here and then a few of them disappear upstairs. There’s something off. Mark my words, she,” Lin Lin said biting her lip, “is a bad influence.”\n\n“Well,” said Serry, smiling, as she handed the petition back to the panda’s free paw, “give the new girl a little time.”\n\nThe door was already swinging shut behind the panda by the time the fox added, quietly, “Maybe she’ll grow on you.”\n\n[i]Next time: Invitations! Some potentially life changing ones are made![/i]\n\n\f[b]Episode 13: Invitations! [/b]\n\n“Hey,” Roger said, slipping into the tent and tussling the cubby wolf, still wearing his camouflage sweatshirt and his replaced sweatpants, behind his ears. “You can do this, little buddy.” The Labrador held up one paw and let a car keychain dangle in them, adding mischievously, “I think you’ve proved that you can talk anyfur into anything.”\n\nWith the last day of training wrapping up, Rian sat cross-legged at the foot of the beanbag chairs in the vacated command center, leaning back on it, with two newspapers spread out on the ground in front of him.\n\n“I’m proud of you for wanting to make this call, Rian,” the dog said, crouching low and whispering to him. “Heroes and heroics come in all sizes, you know.”\n\nThe little wolf had been slumping lower, inch by inch, for the twenty or so minutes he’d been staring at the papers, and was now resting on about the middle of his back, only his neck and shoulders supported against the chair and raised off the floor. He looked terrified. “I need a few more minutes,” he said. “You can start the huddles without me.”\n\nRoger nodded and, patting him on the head, padded over to the door.\n\n“Sorry, Kit,” Roger said at the tent flap, holding his arm up and shaking his head to the eager cub scout hoping for entry. “Rian’s resting and he asked not to be bothered for a while. Why don’t you ask Byron or Ben to drive you?” The dog added, lowering his voice, “I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to convince Byron to go the toy store.”\n\n“Serry,” Rian whined to himself inside, biting his lip, “I’ve put off doing anything about this long enough. I’ve swum across rivers and climbed up broken fire escapes and been hypnotized and bussed tables for you. Don’t make me do this. Anything else, but not this. No, you wouldn’t—I know you wouldn’t ask me to. But I can’t bear to call you back until I’ve tried to do something—”\n\nHis cell phone lay on the ground next to his knees. He read the end of the article about his girlfriend again:\n\n‘Of course we’re sorry the Family Center’s decided so close to our opening to withdraw as one of the sponsors of this year’s Shakespeare festival,’ the director said. ‘But it won’t affect our opening, and we’ll still find a way to keep the festival free.’ He added, however, that private donations and inquiries about sponsorship are always welcome.\n\n“Dex and Serry are so brave,” Rian whimpered, looking at the picture of Dex in the campus newspaper he’d placed next to it, “and for two days I haven’t even been able to do this one thing for my girl.”\n\nHe gulped, took a long breath to steady himself, and reached out, his paw trembling, for his phone.\n\n****************************************\n\n“Hello, Dex,” the ferret activist professor on the other side of the computer screen said, grinning at the raccoon.\n\nThe raccoon was sitting seiza-style, and, relaxing from a long day of training with his new strike team members, had temporarily replaced the top of his karate uniform with a pale blue tee-shirt for the conversation on Twitchy’s laptop, in a well-lit corner of the changing shed behind Roger’s store. “Well, between Twitch and Jeremy looks like we have this Skype thing figured out. . . . Sorry for asking you to take a personal check. But for the time being I’ve tried to keep your name off anything public, so there wouldn’t be any reprisals while your financial aid decision is still up in the air.”\n\nThe raccoon nodded. “Thanks, Profess— I mean, Bill,” he said tentatively. “But are you going to be okay? You said you had big news?”\n\n“Ni hao Dex!” shouted the kid ferret who appeared in the background, hopping up and down and waving his paws in the air. “I’m going to China! I’m going to walk the Great Wall!”\n\nDex blinked. “What?” the coon asked. “You can’t be serious.” He narrowed his eyes. “Did the board ask you to leave? You can’t leave town right after your big moment. It’s a trick.”\n\nThe adult ferret leaned back in his chair and put his stocking feet up on his desk; then, realizing after a moment they were blocking the camera, he lowered them and crossed his arms. “Sun’s rising in the East. It’s a new day. President Tanner suggested I take a summer fact-finding trip to visit recycling sites and consult with the Chinese government’s natural resources people. Don’t worry, Dex,” he added, a glint in his eye, “I know what he’s up to. He’s getting me out of his fur, probably hoping I’ll come back without having accomplished anything or better still having mucked something up before the money’s been redirected, and that will be the end of that. I’m sure there’s an agenda set up that will keep us running around in circles the whole time we’re there. Well,” the ferret bit his lip, “I never cared for these office politics, but I haven’t forgotten how to work them. We’re calling his bluff. This won’t be a straight university business trip, and we won’t follow his itinerary after the first few days. I do know one or two important people in other countries, myself. We’ll have some off-the-books meetings, and we’ll come back with some surprises.”\n\nThe coon tilted his head. “We?” he asked.\n\nThe ferret blushed. “I got ahead of myself,” he said, reaching for an envelope on his desk. “This is going to be bigger than the Forest Furries party, Dex. For one thing, it won’t be so much about me this time. It will be about a team.” He smiled. “Like your protest field manual says. This trip could be the start of a whole new front in the environmental movement. And, umm—you’re welcome to come, and serve as my assistant from the ground up. I know this might feel a bit sudden, but, Dex—” the ferret looked over his shoulder at the cub the raccoon had rescued from the laboratory fire, shifted in his chair, then looked back into the webcam, tugging at his collar. “You already seem quite indispensable to me. Take some time to think about it. I don’t need an answer just this minute. We leave at the start of July. It’s not tipping my hand too much to say, I hope you’ll say yes.”\n\nThe kid ferret in the background had climbed on to the top of a sofa and was holding his arms out, balancing unsteadily. “You have to come, Dex!” he shouted without looking at the webcam. “It will be super-exciting! Things could be exploding and stuff!”\n\nThe raccoon looked down at his footpaws. In high school he had dreamed about doing something like this. But now . . . A trip to a non-English-speaking country? Could he really manage that on his own without exposing his incontinence? Or should he tell them about it? No way. He couldn’t. He was crazy to be considering either option. Then again, eighteen months ago even going camping had seemed impossible. Maybe . . . He felt a little queasy, though, as he suddenly remembered an invitation he’d made the night of Rian’s 24/7 party. “I might have to do something in July,” he said cautiously. “I’ll check and let you know. I know the answer to this is probably no, but, is it possible I could bring someone, like for part of it?”\n\nThe ferret blinked. “Umm, I don’t know how much space we’ll have, Dex, or how I could justify paying for that — unless your friend speaks Chinese. That would be a plus.”\n\nThe raccoon chuckled and shook his head, as though reminded of a fond memory he’d almost forgotten. “Lightning would strike twice before that happened again,” he said.\n\n“Did I say something funny?” the adult rodent asked.\n\n“Kind of,” Dex said. “It’s hard to explain.”\n\n“Well, if it helps you make up your mind,” the ferret said, holding the envelope up to the web cam, “you got your first piece of fan mail. This was in my mailbox with your name on it. Umm, Jeremy opened it and read it—sorry about that.”\n\nDex frowned. “I thought you said no one there knew my name?”\n\nThe ferret activist unfolded the note and held it up to the camera. “Sounds like someone who already knows you from somewhere else. Look familiar?”\n\nThe coon squinted at the screen. There were green ice cream stains at the edges of the yellow legal paper, and a simple, hastily scrawled note. “From one loser to another,” Dex read. “Good luck, kid.” That was it.\n\nThe coon shrugged. “I’ve never seen that pawscript before in my life. No idea who would have written that.”\n\nThe ferret folded the note back up and replaced it. “Well,” he said paternally, “usually that’s the case with the hate mail. There’ll be a lot of that, too; it’s fair to warn you.”\n\n***********************************\n\n“This is it, boys,” Roger was saying to the group of recruits assembled around his campfire, toasting hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks. Twitchy would eat the hot dogs topped with marshmallows; Roger would eat the marshmallows off the end of his sticks; and the more gastronomically sophisticated would reserve the marshmallows for S’mores. “Everything we’ve been getting ready for. T minus zero tomorrow. We mobilize at exactly the same time as the sissies’ Open House kick-off.”\n\nA jumble of plastic army figures were scattered around the campsite in a chaotic jumble around the dog.\n\n“I’m nervous,” said the giraffe. “I know we’ve practiced a dozen different ways, but . . . I still don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do and how it all fits together. There are so many furs. And there’s so much that could go wrong. What if it just ends up a big mess? After all this work?”\n\nThe dog wagged his tail. “Hold on for the ride and do what comes naturally!” he said, rising on to his knees to put a paw on the tall fur’s shoulder sympathetically. “Don’t overthink it! Listen, Steven,” he said, gesturing to the campfires sparkling around the campsite, where Dex, Ace, Jax, and Twitchy were delivering similar pep talks and answering final questions to other groups, “I don’t plan things down to the minute like girls do.” He pronounced the g-word distastefully. “But each and every one of you is here for a reason. If you chose to come here — and you’re still here, after all these days — then you belong here! We don’t take furs into this group casually. And finding good furs is the important thing. If you have good pack members, no matter how soggy, or droopy — or sticky —” he at the very exposed cloth flap poking out of the giraffe’s pants, “things get — as long as we all do our best for each other along the way — they have a way of working out well enough, even if it seems like we aren’t all on the same page about everything a lot of the time. If you care about the pack, the pack will take care of you. The group’s smarter than any of us, individually.” The Labrador nodded and grinned up at him. “I’ve always found that to be true,” he said reassuringly, adding in a confidential tone, “Don’t tell too many furs, though. It’s a dog secret.”\n\nThe rabbit at one of the campfires, a small mouse on his shoulder, ducked off to the side to have a private conversation with one of his team members, while Kyle hopped up and temporarily took over the support group debriefing.\n\n“What kind of questions?” Twitchy asked the Doberman in hushed tones, as he eyed the reporter’s card in his paw curiously.\n\n“I don’t know, boss,” the dog mechanic said, shrugging. “He was really just fishing for a name, I think. I didn’t give up anything. He might have just wanted to say thanks for something? I’ve never really even talked to Dex, but he’s your boyfriend, so I thought you might know more about it.”\n\n“Squeak?” queried Squeak into one of Twitchy’s ears.\n\nThe bunny flicked that ear and put a paw on the Doberman’s shoulder. “You did good,” he said, chewing his lip curiously. “I’ll look into this before it causes any trouble for the group.”\n\n“Check it out,” Ace whispered as he crouched behind Jax while his own boys munched on S’mores and pointed to a few fires over to a Dalmatian fumbling with two Lego playset models, one resting unsteadily on each flat palm. “Kyle’s running a unit.”\n\nThe Dalmatian looked terrified for a moment, until a malamute, arriving late from work and slipping into the group behind him, caught him before he fell. The clumsy Dalmatian relaxed, breathing a long sigh of relief, and looked up into Byron’s muzzle — and in doing so, dropped one of the two models, which broke into several of its composite blocks around his feet.\n\n“That’s strange. It’s not like Twitchy to turn over a briefing to anyone,” The tracking hound’s eyes slid sideways as the tracking hound whispered back, an edge in his voice, “Where did Twitch go?”\n\nAce shrugged, still basking in the afterglow of a rough-and-tumble play day and not picking up on his boyfriend’s tone. “Just talking to someone. The bigger question my boys are all asking,” the lynx said, patting his boyfriend on the shoulder, “is where Rian’s been all night.”\n\n*************************************\n\nThe wolf’s diapers were squishing audibly as he fidgeted on the floor. The sweatpants he was wearing were soaked from the waist down to their knees by the time he heard voices outside the tent flap, and, after a brief conversation, a familiar head poked inside.\n\n“Yo,” the coon said, padding over to the beanbag chairs and dropping a paper bag next to Rian. “I heard you were holed up in here. But I can come in, right, puddles?”\n\n“Dex!” exclaimed Rian, brightening, and settling back into a mix of relief and feigned cheerfulness, stuck his tongue out and sniffed at the bag. “You’re one to talk. Bet your uniform didn’t come yellow. What is that girly-smelling stuff?”\n\n“Chunks of scented herbal soap, coarse and grainy for scrubbing,” the coon explained. “I use them for my, umm, shaved area. I thought you might want some too.” He eyed the wolf suspiciously. “You have been trimming every day, right, diaperboy?”\n\nRian fidgeted and didn’t answer. The truth is trimming his diaper area was something Serry had been helping with, and the two lovers were still officially fighting. “You know, Dex,” Rian said, looking up out of the top of his eyes at his friend, “I love my crinkles and my life has been a million times better and more full of love for everybody since I decided to spend it padded, buuuut it’s true what I told people, well, mostly, I mean it’s true that I never would have had the guts to go 24/7, if I didn’t know you.”\n\n“That’s old news,” Dex said, patting Rian’s head. “Everything okay?” he asked, and the little wolf grabbed one of Dex’s paws in both of his.\n\n“But I’m saying it because once again, Dex,” Rian said seriously, hugging Dex around the waist and rubbing his head against the raccoon’s diaper area, feeling the pillowy cloth underneath his karate pants, “you’ve given me the courage to do something very important.” The wolf took a long breath, starting to relax, but still holding on to his friend’s waist. “I had a long talk with my dad. I think he’s going to write a check to Serry’s Shakespeare festival.”\n\nRian couldn’t see his friend’s muzzle, but Dex, who had been chipper, looked stunned. “You went to your dad? Who you’ve barely spoken to in years? For her?” The raccoon dropped on to the beanbag chair Rian was leaning against as though he’d been punched in the stomach.\n\nHis voice echoed in his own ears like he was hearing himself from a thousand miles away. “This isn’t one of your games. You two are really serious—like, forever serious—aren’t you?” He let out a long sigh, and admitted, “I don’t get it.” He shifted in his diaper awkwardly and looked down at it, feeling inadequate. “Is she that good at—I mean, is it about sex, or—”\n\nRian smiled dreamily, warming to a chance to talk about his favorite subject. “No—well, not oooonly,” he said, sniffling and releasing Dex to wipe his nose with the back of one paw. “I’m a better fur when I’m with Serry, Dex,” Rian said. “I don’t want to be whiny and pathetic like this.” He gestured at the discarded cell phone. “This is part of my story, but it’s not who I am or what I want my life to be about, you know? She makes me more the fur I want to be. We’re different for being together. Things just click, and all of a sudden we’re better furs, we can do things as partners that we couldn’t do alone.” His eyes were glistening and he seemed newly confident as he talked. “But why am I telling you this?” he asked, pressing both forepaws against the floor to straighten himself up from his slouch. “That’s how you feel about being with Twitchy, isn’t it, rescue ranger?”\n\nDex frowned and changed the subject. “Are there strings attached to this donation?” he asked.\n\n“Oh yeah,” Rian said, sloshing slightly. “I need to tell you. I’m sorry, Dex. I don’t think I’ll be spending the Fourth of July with you and your folks after all. I need to go out there and thank him in the fur. Let him see how I’m doing for a few days. I think it’s better to do it on a big holiday, when Spence and other furs will be around, and there will be things going on.” The wolf smiled uneasily. “I know I haven’t really seen my dad since I felt like I was out from under his thumb, but it’s only three or four days. No matter what he says I’m not going to slip into Oslo or Copenhagen or—” the wolf waved a paw in a circle as he fumbled for the right word.\n\n“Stockholm syndrome,” said Dex, correcting his friend automatically. “I don’t want to see you feeling freakish,” he mused, “and come back acting not like my buddy. I’d still feel like a misfit toy if not for you.”\n\n“I mean, I’m nervous of course,” continued Rian, rambling, “and I don’t want to worry Serry by telling her about it cuz that will be such a busy weekend for her play, and I’ll probably have to do it without my security blanket, I mean, security undies, unless I’m reaaaallly careful, but still it’s not like— I’ll be okay. I’ll just tell myself this trip,” he took a long breath, “isn’t something bad. It’s a chance that I hoped for — a chance for me to make an ultimate expression of love — to do something real for the fur I care about so much.”\n\nDex stared off into the wall of the tent blankly and took a long breath of his own, pondering what Rian had just said.\n\n“I was just debating not going home for the Fourth of July anyway. If you want,” the coon said quietly, “I’ll go with you.”\n\n[i]Next time: T minus zero! The pink team’s Open House—and Roger’s counteroffensive—kick off![/i]\n\n\f[b]Episode 14: Ultimate Technique Revealed: Roger’s Attack![/b]\n\nThe sun rose slowly, and Rian, who had woken up first, was padding around the campsite, smiling down at the slumbering boys sprawled across each other in furpiles of various sizes, patting each on the head, and kissing their foreheads lightly.\n\nHe had moved up onto the slope of the hill overlooking the small meadow where yesterday’s training exercises had been held, and dozed off himself, against a tree.\n\nHe woke up from his long nap with a jolt, though — when he felt a paw rest on his shoulder — and smelled perfume! The wolf leapt up and whirled around, raising both paws defensively, and a giggling sissy fox hopped backwards away from him.\n\nRian’s eyes narrowed. This was bad. At least they hadn’t relocated to the main operation site yet. But they were moving now. The groups of boys below were already breaking into cells and moving out. Roger had gone on ahead with the first batch. A pink student in their midst, and he didn’t have a weapon! What if she was transmitting their heading? What if she followed them to the main operation site? What if she wasn’t the only one? The short wolf raised a paw warningly, taking a minute to recall the trainee’s name. “Brianna, isn’t it?” he said cautiously. “How did you get back here?”\n\nThe crossdressing fox blushed. “You remembered!” the sissy student exclaimed, evidently pleased. She reached into the loose folds of the negligee slip she was wearing over her pink plastic panties and produced a doily Valentine, which she held out to him. “Don’t worry, Mr. Rian! I’m alone! I came here on secret. Lady Lin Lin would be horrified if she knew you were being invited. The invitations aren’t supposed to be seen too far in advance by anyone who won’t keep them secret until the Open House,” the sissy fox said quickly, then added, in an excited whisper, shaking the Valentine, “But it is up to each of us who they’re for. No one else has anything to say about it. That part’s very important. The first round are going out this morning. It’s beginning!” \n\nThe wolf scratched his head with one paw and took the card in the other, wrinkling his nose distastefully at the perfume it contained, and, holding the card loosely in one paw, flipped it open, his eyes flickering from the message inside up to the sissy fox trainee, who shifted her weight from one footpaw to the other, looking nervous.\n\n“Ummmmmmmmmmmmm,” Rian said for a long moment, blinking, and reading the card again to make sure he understood what was happening correctly. “I can’t go to a dance with you, Bri,” he explained awkwardly, straightening the camouflage top that only hung down to his belly button, leaving his double, slightly soggy overnight diapers exposed. “I have a girlfriend. And I can’t do anything like that time I subbed at the academy with you again. I’m sorry. Serry and I are going steady now, you see.”\n\nThe sissy fox trainee swished her tail and her ears drooped. “Okay, Mr. Rian,” she said quietly. In truth, she’d expected this; that’s why she’d gotten up at the crack of dawn to deliver her first card early. “I thought you’d say that. But I just wanted to say,” she said, looking nervous, “you were a great top. I didn’t shower afterward until Lady Lin Lin made me.”\n\nRian looked thoroughly confused. “Thanks?” he said experimentally. Would that make her leave? She still fidgeted there for a moment.\n\n“Would it be cheating,” the fox in a dress asked cautiously, “if you just did one long piddle into another girl’s diaper and sent her away? So I can wear that diaper until the end of the day? I prooooomise,” she said, negotiating shrewdly, “I’ll never ask again and I’ll keep everything about this campsite secret if you do.” The fox held out both paws so he could see them, and made a motion over her chest with one of them. “Cross my heart.”\n\nRian shot her an exasperated look and started back to camp to retrieve his cell phone, rolling his eyes.\n\n“Let me text Serry and check,” he said, annoyed.\n\n**************************************\n\n“And she gave me this,” said Rian, sounding horrified, as he dropped the scented doily card on to the picnic changing table in the middle of the central tent of the main operation site, and pointed at it, whimpering fearfully. “She caught me when boys had already started moving here and said it’s starting now! ‘It’s just beginning!’ That’s what she said! There will be multiple waves of attack! They’re bringing furs back there as soon as they catch them! It’s some kind of a sissy activation code! An operation protocol! It sounds,” he shuddered, “awful. Whatever they’re up to, it’s twice as bad as we thought.”\n\nRoger picked up the card and tilted his head sideways, regarding it curiously as he opened it. “Dear Rian,” he read, then corrected himself, with a chuckle, “Sorry, Dear Mr. Rian — you are cordially invited to Empress Calliope’s. . . bla bla bla . . .Academy for Special Boys’ first annual semiformal . . . bla bla . . .” Roger skipped to the bottom of the card, and blinked as he read the conclusion, “Sadie Hawkins dance?”\n\n“Aaarggggh!” the little wolf exclaimed, flopping back into a conference chair. “I feel the cooties flying off the paper just hearing about it. Is it like Sadie-ism? What kind of a terrible, awful, sissifying, repressive—”\n\nHis fellow Circle members, Dex and Twitchy, who had gathered for this emergency session shortly before the final attack began, looked at each other out of the corner of their eyes. The small mouse on Twitch’s shoulder squeaked and clapped a paw to his forehead.\n\n“You don’t know what a Sadie Hawkins dance is?” exclaimed Twitchy in disbelief, crossing his arms and looking huffy. “Some social chair you are.”\n\n“Whaaaat is it?” Rian whined, hugging himself and shivering. “Something terrible? Is Sadie Hawkins Dance the name of a horror movie? Or a book where people go to a dance and are zombified? Or a brainwashing—”\n\nRoger patted the wolf’s head. “Girls ask guys,” he explained quickly, sounding mildly intrigued. “Well, this fight could get interesting. Maybe I underestimated you, sis.”\n\nDex, who had been sitting seiza-style next to Twitchy, looked up from the floor at Rian, biting his lip to stifle a chuckle. “I also cannot believe that you didn’t know that,” the wolf’s best friend admitted.\n\n“I went to boys’ schools!” the wolf wailed apologetically.\n\n**************************************\n\n“Annnnnnnnd cooooontact!” shouted Ace, unslinging his paintball gun and charging into the woods, his tracking hound boyfriend and their malamute lieutenant at his side.\n\nThe two Scouts hopped back as soon as they felt the traps spring inches in front of them and fly up, empty, landing on their heels and raising their weapons defensively; Byron, whose foot was caught in a third rope noose, was yanked up into the air, flailing around with both paws.\n\nThe panda who had been behind a tree nearby watching them ford the river was facing them immediately, holding a dodge ball in one paw. Her eyes darted around the clearing. A gray squirrel in a white tennis shirt and skirt dropped from the treetops and landed softly on both footpaws next to her.\n\n“Flipper and the Rainbow Scouts?” Lin Lin remarked, surveying the trio. “You’re the first wave? Well, this shouldn’t take long.”\n\n“Ouch,” said Jax, frowning, as the Scouts crouched next to each other in a defensive position. The lynx in the safari outfit muttered something to himself grouchily.\n\n“See,” the panda explained, looking up to the taller squirrel, “you need to know things about people to insult them effectively, that’s all I’m saying.” Then she turned her attention back to her blue team opponents. “Come on, if this is a strike team, where’s Dex—I mean, where are the ones who really matter?” Lin Lin asked. “Cooperate and we’ll go easy on you.”\n\nShelley just shook her head. “You two are really dressed like Boy Scouts,” she said, in disbelief.\n\nLin Lin elbowed the squirrel’s leg. “I told you they would be dressed like Boy Scouts. I told you all about them.”\n\nThe malamute meanwhile, had grabbed on to the rope snare he was swinging in and pulling himself up with both paws to stop the dangling.\n\nShelley shrugged. “You were probably being boring at the time,” the squirrel answered, “and if that was the case I woulda stopped listening, peaches. I told you I don’t care about ‘knowing’ any of these weirdos, on their team or yours. I don’t want to spend more time than I have to for this contract job with furs who have no interests besides their weird fetishes. But now I’m a bit miffed. Scouts ought to know better than to take a crowd of furs crashing through these woods. Have a little respect for nature. Stand back from it and let it be. There’s a family of whippoorwills living here for goodness’ sake. You wouldn’t know but those happen to be rare song—”\n\nThe tracking hound wearing the badge-covered scout sash narrowed his eyes and glared up at her, interrupting, “Nature’s meant to be enjoyed,” said the tracking hound seriously, “responsibly. Try to tell furs to respect it who never spend time outdoors. What’s the point in that? And you’d think I’d know about the whippoorwills,” he continued smugly. “I’m the one who found their nest. Saw the father guarding it. It was a beautiful thing.”\n\n“Found their nest?” Shelley narrowed her eyes and leaned on one paw against a tree. “Jax?” she said curiously. “Is that you, sugar plum?”\n\n“I told you his name was Jax,” said an exasperated Lin Lin, kicking her shin.\n\nThe squirrel ignored the kick, seemingly unaffected by the impact, and shrugged, “I thought you said Jack,” she said without looking down at Lin Lin.\n\nThe tracking hound’s ears twitched. “Respect for nature—whippoorwills,” he repeated, then asked, a note of surprise creeping into his voice, “Shelley?”\n\n“Okay, what in blazes,” exclaimed the lynx, standing up and looking around the assembled group of furs warily, and ticking off questions on the paw that wasn’t brandishing a paintball gun, “who are you? Panda—your team is throwing new furs in the mix? Now?”\n\nLin Lin rolled her eyes and remarked, sympathetically, “That’s what I said . . .”\n\nThe lynx continued ticking off questions, punctuating each with a shake of his paintball gun, “Why haven’t I heard of you? How do you know my boyfriend? And are you a really good cross-dresser or a—”\n\nThe athletic squirrel rolled her eyes, “I’m the genuine article, litterless kitty. Girl since day one and girl till I die.”\n\n“Oh thank goodness,” said the lynx, visibly relieved, resting a paw on the brown-and-black tracking hound’s head protectively as he relaxed. “For a second I was afraid Jax might have dated you.”\n\nA dodge ball thudded into the distracted lynx and sent him down onto his rear.\n\n“Enough chitchat,” Lin Lin snapped as he recovered. “Let’s finish this. Time to take care of you losers and get back to the soon-to-be girls all tied up at your real attack site.”\n\n“What do you mean?” Jax asked nervously, as the lynx got back on his feet, “the real attack site?”\n\nLin Lin waved one paw at them dismissively. “You stooges might want to make Distraction Central more convincing next time by bringing more than three furs. We found your tunnels under the academy,” she said contemptuously. “As we speak, your little cub scouts are marching into a trap.”\n\n“Oh,” repeated Jax placidly, “they found our tunnels under the academy, Ace.”\n\n“Well,” said the lynx flatly, shrugging, “might as well surrender. It’s all over now.”\n\nLin Lin frowned. “You don’t look worried,” she said, a little perturbed. “If there are more of you coming through the woods, we’ve got them covered too. Besides us two, you’re in range of a multi-purpose catapult as soon as you come out of the woods near the building. You aren’t going to like some of the stuff it launches. You aren’t going anywhere near the academy. Not unless you curtsy and ask nice, anyway.”\n\n“Okay,” said the hound dog. “Just hope you don’t end up too lonely over there.”\n\nThe squirrel was regarding them all with a mix of curiosity and disbelief. Lin Lin shook her head. “You three are a distraction, right?” she said, starting to sound a little concerned. “There is another attack?”\n\nThe malamute, who had been sawing away at the snare with a Swiss army knife once he had steadied himself, finally dropped to the ground, landing in a bundle next to Ace.\n\n“Can I do it?” he whined from the ground.\n\n“Take it away, puppy,” said the lynx encouragingly.\n\n“We’re just here,” announced the burly black-and-white dog, holding up a pale blue envelope from his prostrate position, “to deliver a message!”\n\nLin Lin shook her head and snatched it from him, ripping it open and throwing the envelope back at them as she yanked the paper out and unfolded it. The panda did a double take.\n\n“You cannot be serious. That’s what all these ridiculous drills and operation talk by you idiots has been about?!” she exclaimed in disbelief. “You’re throwing a party?”\n\n“Correction,” said Byron, still on his back, holding one paw up into the air, “we’re throwing the party!”\n\n**********************************************\n\nRian stood as guard at the entrance to Roger’s main operation site, wearing a ship captain’s hat, the top of a sailor suit, and pale blue diapers, trying to keep himself from bouncing at the gate as he greeted the furs still waiting in line to get in.\n\n“Remember!” he announced, holding a paw up to his own forehead. “Gotta be at least this big to enter! And noooo holding spots! Potty breaks most definitely lose your place in line!”\n\nThat rule was, in fact, the entire purpose of making furs stand in line. Too many of the boys, in Rian’s opinion, took fifteen or twenty minutes of anxious pacing before they finally let go and piddled like babies, and Roger and Rian had been brainstorming ways to ensure those ones still felt sufficiently relaxed when the party began.\n\nJust to be safe, juice boxes were being given out at the start of line for cubs, and iced tea for caretakers, both spiked with mild diuretics. Rian was also quite unnecessarily making furs wait five minutes in between each admission.\n\nA beaver a little shorter than the shrimpy wolf was standing a few furs back in line and knitting his paws together in worry. His anxiety about whether he’d even get in led him to piddle into the front of his swim diapers and feel his pants warm up the very moment he came up to the wolf.\n\nRian grinned to see the shorter fur looking nervous. The wolf crouched down on his knees to make himself shorter and traced an imaginary line from his forehead to the top of the beaver’s head with his paws. “Whew!” Rian said, in mock surprise, and wiped his forehead with the back of one paw. “You’re juuuuuust big enough! Wow, sooooo big all of a sudden!” he declared and the worried beaver breathed a sigh of relief. Rian patted his bottom, giving the thick cushioning on his rear a hearty squeeze before sending him on in with a light slap on his rear. “You’ll be in Pull-Ups in no time, Sammy!”\n\nInside, the beaver’s eyes widened as, feeling very small, he scoped out Roger’s fully finished main operation site.\n\nHe ran over to a long, looping water slide where Ryo, holding the spot for Byron until his trio got back, stood at the top with a lifeguard whistle hanging around his neck. It was no ordinary water slide — it snaked around an entire section of the abandoned campground, making about four loops, and furs were riding down it in inner tubes — and, of course, swim diapers, which would be checked both at the top and bottom of the slide by one of the lifeguard assistants, and changed if necessary.\n\n“Oh, go back one more time!” Roger urged one dizzy cub stumbling out of the whirling above ground whirlpool it emptied into, and propelling him toward the ladder, sticking his tongue out at him, “you don’t look one bit wrinkled yet!”\n\nThe entire site was covered with equipment Roger had been collecting or received on loan from furs who had been in and out of one of the incarnations of his boys’ club, or who knew furs who had, and who had been called on to make an offering — to the first day of Baby Blue’s first annual start of summer members-only weekend-long play-all-day party.\n\nThe one donation he’d adamantly refused, of course, was a set of Port-A-Potties. Instead plentiful diaper pails and buckets of cleaning fluid were scattered around the playsite in free corners, and the Baby Blue team members running the site would each be checking them in shifts to spray around air freshener and transfer their contents to vaccuum-sealed laundry bags tossed in the back of a car or to a rented Dumpster at the edge of the woods that would be driven to the city dump when everything was over. \n\nIn the center of the complex, Kyle the Dalmatian wore a white apron and cap, manning an old-fashioned soda fountain on loan from the local ice cream parlor.\n\nA raccoon cub scout approached the counter cautiously. It had been artificially elevated by being placed on cinder blocks, so that furs who hopped up onto the tall stools to reach the top of the counter wouldn’t be able to touch the ground with their footpaws while they were drinking thseir sodas.\n\nThe coon scout hopped up, trying to catch the top of the counter with both paws so he could hoist himself up onto the stools. Seeing him struggle, Kyle reached over the counter, and, taking the slight coon under the armpits, hoisted him up and settled him on to the school.\n\n“Howdy, scout. Do you want a surprise?” the Dalmatian asked. Kyle was running an open bar, randomly mixing sodas, the way only kits did at soda fountains, so unless you ordered really specifically, you could bet your Coke would have root beer, Sprite, and maybe vanilla syrup in it. Some special selections were on display in a bottle rack behind him — sparkling grape juice of various vintages — kids’ beer, a non-alcoholic foamy, guarana soda for Japanese kits that simulated the foaminess of beer — a milky drink called calpico — and well, most of the non-alcoholic, sugar-loaded kids’ drinks one could think of.\n\n“I want a Roy Rogers,” the traditionalist cub scout announced, tugging at his kerchief.\n\n“There’s an age restriction on that one,” Kyle said, raising an eyebrow, or rather raising the black spot that was above the Dalmatian’s eye. “I’ll need to see some ID.”\n\nKit Raccoon unfastened his belt and wriggled around on his stool until his pants fell onto the ground underneath them, then stood up, unsteadily, on the metal ring elevated a foot or so up from around the base of the stool. The cub scout pointed down to the crinkly Bambino diaper he was wearing, labeled “Baby.” “This is all I’ve got,” he said hopefully.\n\n“That’ll do,” said the Dalmatian cheerily, patting his head. “Not that I doubted! But rules are rules. If you keep it out, I won’t have to ask next time!”\n\nAt an adjoining snack booth, chocolate-covered grasshoppers, lollipops with insects inside them, crispy fried worms, and various other kinds of gross-out foods from around the world were being offered to the adventurous cubs — or to big brother types in search of ways to prove their toughness — alongside the usual selections of licorice, popcorn, and cotton candy (although only pale blue cotton candy was being served).\n\nBen the leonine combat trainee, on a break from his main activity, was munching on a small plate of chocolate-covered a grasshoppers a mink he’d changed minutes ago looked up at the incredibly tough-seeming lion wide-eyed.\n\n“Mmmm, bugs,” Ben mumbled and held out the plate to the mink. “I think you should try one, Roddy! Open wide!”\n\nThe mustelid stumbled backwards, falling on to his padded rear, and quivered fearfully, shaking his head, and waving both paws.\n\nAround the perimeter of the abandoned campground, boys were running in sweeping circles flying kites and banners under a giraffe’s direction. “Follow me, kids! Veer left!” Steven, who could see all the tree branches and the heading of the kites better than any fur, shouted, giggling, as he ran alongside one of the invariably shorter kits, directing the aerial traffic with his long arms, “Don’t let the trees getcha!”\n\nOn a grassy field, boys were checking out the Doberman’s refitted Power Wheels, equipped with radios, batteries that let them run up to 15 miles an hour, and rubber bumpers on all four sides. Some were scrunching themselves into the small compartments and driving with lips bit and expressions of the utmost seriousness. Others were wantonly crashing into each other and tumbling out of the cub-sized bumper cars, laughing and snuggling up to each other after the harmless collisions.\n\n“They’re not too roomy are they?” asked an otter waiting for a vehicle to become available.\n\n“Nope,” said the dog mechanic in overalls at the edge of the track, unsnapping the visitor’s pants snap and unzipping his fly, watching his pants fall to his ankles. “Those won’t fit, that’s for sure.”\n\nIn small fighting rings nearby, mechanically minded furs were being invited to assemble their own battle-bots, but most of the participating cubs found themselves being thrashed by one of Squeak’s three fighters, which the tiny mouse was manning simultaneously, hopping back and forth from one controller to another and running multiple matches, squeaking up a storm.\n\nAt a pair of picnic tables behind him, Twitchy, his goggles perched defiantly on his forehead, was leading one of his first workshops on making volcanoes, and hopping over the lava spills that flowed out onto the ground to pat the participants’ heads and check their diapers. The cubs at his table didn’t know it yet that the workshop would lead directly into one on making volcano sundaes with crazily mismatched toppings like bananas and gummy worms — provided the rabbit saw signs of intense concentration on their science fair work.\n\nThat meant it would be open only to furs who’d been absorbed enough in their chemistry project that they’d used their diapers. The others would get booted and told to come back for the next workshop and work harder for their ice cream. Joint prizes — packs of diapers and related accessories from the boys’ changing tent, mainly — would be given both to the most impressive volcano builder and to the architect of what was voted the craziest sundae in each contingent.\n\nNearby, the first of Dex’s combat for cubs drills was starting, and furs were squirting baby bottles at each other as they clambered up and down a jungle gym, negotiating high chairs and other nursery obstacles as they tried to rescue a teammate stuck beneath the jungle gym’s trap door, before he was too badly in need of a change. The captive was guarded this round, by Dex, and next round, by Ben or another of his trainees. It didn’t sound that hard, of course, except for two things. First, this being a cub mission, it had to be conducted entirely on all fours, and anyfur breaking that rule would be booted from the field as swiftly as someone using his forepaws in soccer. Second, the jungle gym was surrounded on all four sides by open-walled bounce castles, and cubs hoping to get to it had to crawl over one of their inflated plastic platforms while Dex and his lieutenants, threw pillows at them from the jungle gym above.\n\nAll around the jungle gym and bounce castle complex, small clusters of curious furs who had grabbed one of several copies of the newspaper article about Dex’s heroism being circulated around the playsite whispered to each other and pointed up at the coon, eager to meet him. By the time the night was over, Dex would have so many offers of changing assistance that even a cub who took his shoes and socks off wouldn’t be able to count them all. When he went on his first break, he’d find himself moderating a series of pouty disputes between little furs ardently making protests like, “I volunteered to change him first!”, “I’ll use the most powder, Dex!”, “Deeex, pick me, I’ll do it when you’re messy, too!”, or “Noooo meeeeee, I’ll wash it in the river right now with my paws and hang it up to dry on the jungle gym, Dex, I won’t put it in a diaper pail!” For the entire evening he spent at the playsite, the incontinent coon so practiced at changing his own diapers wouldn’t have to change himself once that night. He’d have trouble getting a quick change, though since often he would be coordinating between three or four little helpers fumbling with safety pins and powder.\n\nRian met the three returning furs who bypassed the line near the entrance, and put up a “Hold it just a minute—or better yet, don’t” sign on the small table he had been leaning on with his guest list. He escorted the messengers directly to the group’s leader, and all five scuttled into the picnic table in the transparent central tent. “How’d it go?” Roger asked.\n\nByron yanked a ribbon out of his ear and stomped it under his foot. “They took the message back to the academy,” the malamute reported, grinding his heel hard against one of the perfume-scented decorations that the three messengers had been told to wear if they expected safe passage back. “We didn’t get hit too bad.”\n\n“Hey, don’t worry,” Roger said, tucking the malamute’s chin, “you three were handpicked to deliver the message for your high cooty immunity. As soon as we’re done you go straight on the waterslide. You’ll wash it off in no time.”\n\n“Just don’t take too long,” warned Ace. “I’ve got to get safari adventure running before all the diapers with little lions on them are gone.”\n\nRoger opened his laptop and, opening up a control panel, connected it to the video cameras Twitchy had set up around the main operation site, making sure they were streaming views to several open windows on his computer.\n\nThen he opened a channel. On the other end of a video chat window, he saw his sister, a leopardess in a Victorian dressing gown glowering at him. “I was told,” said Calliope, snapping an oriental silk fan shut and tapping it against her claws, “that you had a message for everyone in our group. I’m only playing along, brother, because there’s been so much gossip here about what you’re recruiting for. I want to show the girls I’m not frightened by this ridiculous bluff, and that they can enjoy the Open House without looking over their shoulders.”\n\nThe Newfoundland standing next to her looked distressed. “Don’t do this, mistress,” Cassie was protesting. “There’s no need! There won’t be a manned attack either way. I’m sure he won’t risk sending his boys in now that he’s heard Shelley is here! I think everything will be fine if we just ignore them.”\n\nCalliope flicked the fan at her.\n\nRoger held up one finger and his tail began wagging as he flopped down into his wheeled command chair. “First,” the Labrador said, holding up the invitation Rian had delivered, “I want to give you a last chance to explain what’s going on over there. What’s Level 5? And what’s the squirrel gone squirrely doing in town? I’m sure we’ve,” he caught sight of Ben, who had delivered them disturbing intel from the academy dungeons, on one of the monitors and concluded, vaguely, “heard the same rumors.”\n\n“How I run my school is none of your business,” said the unflappable leopardess curtly. “And you never should have heard about Level 5. I assume you’ve been poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. As usual. But the gossip you’re spreading has been useful to me these past few weeks, so I didn’t think it was essential or prudent to correct it.”\n\n“Okay, sis,” said Roger, shrugging, “Then you give me no choice. But I want to be sure you understand the terms first.”\n\nCalliope rolled her eyes and bent over her laptop, pressing a few keys. “There’ll be no manned attack as long as you can see that we’ve broadcast your message to everyone here. So long as we listen to it, you promise to leave us alone the rest of the night. That’s fine. I’m not worried about your silly message and this battlefield nonsense would just get in the way of what we’re doing.”\n\n“Which is what?” the dog asked. “Level 5?”\n\nCalliope rolled her eyes again. The Newfoundland next to her looked increasingly anxious and was shifting her considerable weight from one foot to the other. “Again it’s none of your business, but no,” Calliope said curtly, “The Open House is its own thing and it’s just begun now. We’ve been making announcements.”\n\nThen, ignoring her aide’s frantic gestures, Callie looked down at the pale blue paper Lin Lin had delivered and keyed in codes given by Twitchy that opened a two-way video connection to the handful of display screens that had been installed around the academy’s auditorium. From what Roger could see through the chat window, what was going on at the academy looked exactly like a high school junior prom, with various fairyland decorations strewn around the auditorium, and even a puffy, fake winter wonderland landscape, the floor covered with cotton and pillows, on one side of the large auditorium. The sissies were in full dress and most were slow-dancing with their partners and caretakers.\n\n“Heeeey!” said Rian curiously, leaning past Rog to point at the screen at one pair, a sissy bear dancing with a tall wolf. Roger batted his finger away, though it left a smudge. “That’s not Muffy’s boyfriend.” The wolf tilted his head. “There a few others I don’t recognize either.”\n\nCassie cleared her throat. “Our students have been screening with various partners,” the Newfoundland cut in, clearly hoping that what she said might still forestall Roger’s attack, “but tonight it’s entirely up to each girl who she brings to the dance, and we’ll be adjusting her curriculum and helping her adjust other things based on her choice. Some of the tops who didn’t get invited, or who got invited late, are feeling a little anxious right now.”\n\nCallie rapped her assistant’s knuckles with a fan. “We have no obligation to explain ourselves to him,” she said severely.\n\nRoger’s eyes sparkled, and he laughed. “Of course! Sadie Hawkins. It’s a switch event!” he exclaimed gleefully, clapping a paw to his knee. “You little busybody, sis! You’ve been bluffing your own customers for weeks. Whether they’re paying the bills or not, you just wanted to see how your students’ caretakers would behave if you held out the promise of unlimited power and no limits, didn’t you? Expose who would treat your sissies right and who wouldn’t? See if the furs they’re already with are good enough for them? Then you throw the decision back to the cubs who they want to be with? Something like that? And what about this other stuff—what happens in Level 5? Why are you working with Shell?”\n\n“I’ve told you three times now,” Callie flicked her tail and pursed her lips, but her eyes twinkled affirmatively, “that how I run my school is none of your concern. You don’t check in with me about how you operate. Now, your message, so we can get back to business here?”\n\n“My boys are my message!” said Roger proudly, opening the footage from around his party site and watching it come up on the presentation monitors around the school’s auditorium in the background of his laptop screen. “Let’s see, who’s showing the most white — Our two 24/7 boys, of course — You all know Rian, our Mr. Popular; he was a terrified closet case who couldn’t even knock on your door once, remember? I bet most of your girls wouldn’t believe that,” Roger gestured to the cubby wolf next to him, before turning back to the monitors. “And there’s Dex, local hero; for almost two years he thought he’d never have a choice but to work double shifts in a coffee shop for the rest of his life” — The coon in the karate uniform, on one of the monitors, clapped a paw to his chest in mock pain as a squirt gun sprayed him, and let himself tumble off the jungle gym, landing on his back, with a bounce, on one of the crowded bounce castle platforms, as crawling cubs swarmed over him. “There’s Twitchy; he can figure out any complex system, except bathroom-based ones, and not because he grew up taking prep classes and having expensive computers to play with, no, he didn’t come from where you might guess if you met him now” — The rabbit, on another screen, was hopping over an overflow of fake lava, carefully lifting an unwisely situated popsicle stick castle that had been placed near the volcano tables and handing it to a concerned-looking age-player.\n\n“Any one of those boys,” Roger continued as he cycled through different scenes from around the sprawling playsite, “had reason to be bitter and angry about his problems and stop his life where it was years back. But they chose to keep putting themselves out there, instead, even if it wasn’t always easy, and even if they had some disasters along the way and things didn’t go quite as they thought or wished they would have, and eventually they found me, and each other, and things might not be perfect now, but they’re still hanging on. There’s all of them together, doing what boys do best.” The couples stopped dancing, and looked up curiously as scenes from all around the party site came up, some on split screens. “Just playing. And on this screen you’ll see a plan of everything we have here in case I leave anything out. There’s a water slide, robot arena, a ball pit, bounce castles, a soda fountain . . . Finally, I want to explain,” he said, fumbling for a map, which he started to hold up, “how other cubs can—”\n\n“They found our tunnels under the academy,” said Jax, tugging on his sleeve.\n\n“Oh!” Roger exclaimed, sounding chipper. “You found our tunnels under the academy! Well, that makes things easier! Then I don’t have to spell out,” he said, holding up his dotted-line covered sketch of the academy, with a grin, “how you can get here! Both those tunnels narrow out at this end,” he said, pointing at the map, “so you can only come out near our playsite one at a time. And those openings are being watched. There’s no use trying to launch any kind of attack through them.”\n\nLin Lin, who had joined Callie and Cassie near the laptop, clenched a fist and rammed it against her thigh when Roger said that.\n\nSerafina, who was on the sidelines coaxing a group of shyer sissies uncomfortable moving around in their dresses, shook her head, watching her onetime partner fumble with the map, and giggled in spite of herself. She bent over and whispered to Azzie, who had been scurrying around serving drinks wearing only an apron, a diaper, and a pair of ballet slippers, since that’s all his senior students had decided their new maidservant had earned in the way of a wardrobe so far. “Just watch, little cadet,” the princess fox said fondly. “This is going to work out the way it always does with these two.”\n\nAround the auditorium, some of the couples were breaking up as several sissies hopped up and pawed at the monitors curiously. A couple muttered excuses — which took some doing, since potty break wasn’t a valid one, for a sissy baby — and slipped out the exit momentarily.\n\n“The dance moves outdoors later on,” the Newfoundland said hopefully, bustling off to try to stop some of the ones wandering off. “We finish in the moonlight. You can get fresh air then! There’s no hurry.”\n\n“We haven’t shown the best part yet,” Roger said, stepping back, and motioning to Rian, who pulled his shirt up to show what he was wearing, as he hopped up on to the large table in the central tent, “right here, in the center of everything is, our changing tent.”\n\nSerry’s eyes sparkled as she saw the wolf on one of the monitors, waving both paws above his head. “Hey,” the princess fox remarked curiously, although her boyfriend couldn’t hear her, “what kind of diaper have you got on now, Rian? I haven’t seen you in those.”\n\n“Turn around, little buddy, show it off, give them a full view,” said Roger, and the wolf did, holding his arms out, bending over to look at the webcam from between his legs, “this is just one of the Japan models. You’ll observe how unusually puffy it is around the leg gathers.” Rian wriggled his bottom as cubbishly as he could manage. “We’ve got the regular American and Canadian stuff in the middle — standard brands — and we have a Europe section on this side — and an Asia section on that side. If there’s a diaper you’ve ever wanted to try — we’ve probably got it! Our first shipments finally came around the time of Rian’s 24/7 party, but I’ve been keeping the whole stash under wraps.”\n\n“First shipments?” Calliope asked, letting her consternation show for the first time.\n\nRoger nodded eagerly as Rian, still looking out from between his legs, stuck his tongue out at the screen. “You’re hearing it hot off the press,” the Labrador announced gleefully. “Rian and I made a business trip over spring break when everyone thought we went to Euro Disney. I was visiting wholesalers for my comics and hobby shop now that I’ve started a mail-order catalogue and website thingy. But besides that, in addition to picking up some fun party foods and things, I can officially confirm,” Roger swept his arm back to encompass the massive stacks of bags around, on and under, the changing table, “that Baby Blue has bulk diaper suppliers — on three continents.” He put an arm around each of the Boy Scouts’ shoulders. “These two scamps who you might mistake for teenagers are wearing their first baby-printed adult German ones under those uniforms. Nothing but the best for my boys.” Ace blushed and Jax bit his lip.\n\nThe Newfoundland buried her face in her huge paws, obviously very upset. Calliope looked at her watch, doing her best to look unfazed. “Are you finally done talking?” she asked acidly. “Is that your entire message?”\n\nRoger saw an athletic gray squirrel drop from the ceiling and land beside Calliope. A hyena broke away from the other sissies and came toward her cautiously, extending a doily invitation; she shoved him away without looking at him, and said, “All right, Cal, am I still needed here tonight or not? You said to wait and see whether —” Shelley said, pausing as she glimpsed the display monitors, “What’s going on? Oh —,” the squirrel looked exasperated when she saw Roger’s face on the screen and crossed her arms, looking sideways and up into the air, pretending to ignore him.\n\n“Hi, Shell!” the Labrador shouted, waving at the screen. The squirrel just rolled her eyes, looking even more incredibly annoyed than usual. “Wow it’s been a while huh! The last part of the message is especially for you and then I’m signing off.”\n\n“I can’t wait,” she said out of the side of her muzzle without looking at him.\n\n“I don’t know what time your thing finishes over there. But in case any cubs are curious about this, I—” began Roger, flopping back in his chair and crossing his arms as he slid back to rest his feet on the edge of the changing table, smiling triumphantly. Right before he closed the connection, the dog concluded, waving goodbye at the screen with one paw, “Will be here all night!”\n\n[i]Next time: Best of Both Worlds! Both parties continue as cubs move back and forth through Roger’s tunnels, but eyebrows are raised when one fur goes missing in the confusion. [/i]\n\n[b]\fLevel . . . Cleared?\n\nCongratulations! You have successfully completed Level Four (Roger) . . . I think?\n\nYou have unlocked a Hidden Achievement: Chill! You’re just easy to be around and hang out with. Which is sometimes, the first and most important thing furs need; you give them a place to go.\n\nGame Over! You win! As long as you didn’t leave any loose ends or activate two or more wild cards in the prior levels that could combine. . . .\n\nWait a minute? You did? Because if you did, then something like this might happen:\n\nNext time: Open House: Level 4 (Episodes 15–17: Sequel Screen)\n\nWild cards activated: Swifty Fox (Level 1); Jax (Level 2); Blaze Collie (Level 3)\n\nWild cards subject to combination:\n\nJax . . . + . . . Blaze Collie\n\n(To be continued . . .)\n[/b]\n\n", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "Open House: A Pink and Blue Diaperfur Identity Adventure!
(Level Four, Episodes 10–14)
kitncub
kitncub@yahoo.com

This continues directly on from
Open House, Level One
Open House, Level Two
Open House, Level Three

If you haven’t read them, check them out first.

To see the entire series, go swimming in the Pink and Blue Diaperfur Adventures pool.

Author’s Note: This is a diaperfur story for readers 18 and over only; if you’re under—do your homework! It involves furs in diapers who are not (chronologically) babies, and furs in dresses who are not (biologically) girls, often doing things of a sexual nature. The story is fantasy and emphatically not a representation or recommendation to do anything in real life. Individual characters express their own views, not mine. It is part of the Pink and Blue series, which includes a lot of characters, so if you have not read any prior stories in the series, this is probably not the place to start.

Rapid Recap: When we left our heroes, Roger, Rian, and the Baby Blue boys were recruiting for a massive counteroffensive timed to coincide with the Open House of the enemy sissy pink faction'! With both teams’ agents pounding the pavement collecting recruits, lovers Rian and Serafina have found themselves at an ideological impasse. Meanwhile, Twitchy, who has been concealing information about his age, turned eighteen and put his master plan to cement his relationship with his incontinent boyfriend, Dex, into motion—and staged a laboratory accident that made the recalcitrant raccoon’s heroic side public, at once giving the boys’ lagging recruiting efforts a shot in the arm, and landing the unlucky raccoon his dream job. But when things went haywire in the lab, Dex came through anyway and saved the bunny for real. It looks like Twitch may have caught his tail in his own trap—and made himself more in love with Dex, rather than the other way around. When we left off, new recruits lured to the boys’ camp by tales of Dex’s heroism have promised intel from inside the sissy academy . . .

Let’s run down the line-up quickly:

Baby Blue principals: Roger (Labrador), leader; Rian (wolf), second-in-command; Dex (raccoon), third-in-command, combat leader; Twitchy (rabbit) and Squeak (pocket-sized mouse), chief engineers; reliable second-stringers: Boy Scouts Ace (lynx) and Jax (tracking hound), recon and wilderness patrol; Byron the malamute (swimmer); Kyle the Dalmatian (cook)

Pink faction/Academy for Special Boys: Calliope (leopardess), leader, and, yes, biologically female; Cassandra (Newfoundland), second-in-command, trusted administrative aide; Serafina (fox), a sissy princess, love of young Rian’s life, star of a local Shakespeare festival production, and academy instructor; Lin Lin (panda); and Shelley (squirrel), a mysterious mercenary just brought on board at the academy

\fCharacter Fun Facts:

Roger: Personality when fully regressed!: Goofy but responsible big brother! You’ve got him — this Labrador will sometimes let the boys he’s sitting for drink root beer out of sippy cups and watch movies rated PG-13  — even though his boys are obviously babies. Yes, as a babysitter Roger, maybe because he is often wearing diapers himself (just so he doesn’t need to leave the boys unattended during his bathroom breaks, of course), can be a bit of an easy touch — unless a little visitor has got crazy ideas about using the potty. His apartment is sleepover-ready at a moment’s notice.

Rian: Personality when fully regressed!: Harmlessly mischievous! The sort of scamp who is often a caretaker’s secret favorite, little(r) Rian is always at the start of something, but he is quick to cover for regressed playmates mixed up in shenanigans with him and take spanks on their behalf. Whatever age he’s acting, nothing makes this wolf bouncier than seeing an inhibited diaperboy accept who he is and really enjoy himself for the first time. What’s that? Your pants? He’s holding them, silly! No, no, you’re mixed up, sweetheart — you asked Rian for help getting them off, not on.

Dex: Personality when fully regressed!: Goody two shoes! A caretaker who follows his rules — play nice, no meat in his food, no disposable diapers, and no girly frilly stuff —will never hear a “but” out of mommy or daddy’s quiet, adorable little angel — not even a crinkly one, since this sweet little baby boy is a cloth purist. Now where’s his bottle? Aren’t you going to hold it for him? You don’t expect this little prince to drink out of a sippy cup while he’s sitting on your lap, do you?

Twitchy: Personality when fully regressed!: Precocious smart aleck! The kid who’ll never take “Because I said so” for an answer, Twitchy will viciously dismantle parental clichés like “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?” with impressively logical (and incredibly whiny) objections, like, “Thanks for clarifyin’ that I don’t haffa get potty-trained just cuz the other cubs are doing it.” Worse still, the talkative bunny has been known to make his playmates similarly subversive. Twitch will rarely use toys or devices in the manner they are intended and considers instruction and warranty sheets only as paper-airplane material.

The bossy petite panda Lin Lin takes sissy stuff seriously and looks down on part-timers; so seriously, in fact, that she’s the real deal, a post-op transsexual, a secret known only to a pawful of teammates and to a boy’s team member she once found an unlikely mission partner—and an unexpectedly supportive ally. To her students, she’s a feared disciplinarian and physical education instructor at the sissy academy. Lately, she feels like the hardworking, underappreciated one among the pink team leaders, who have been keeping her on the sidelines, maybe because they hold a grudge. The panda schemed to destroy the boys’ team and steal Serafina’s post shortly after she came on the scene. She hasn’t softened up much on the boys since then—or has she? Favorite fictional character: Blossom! (Powerpuff Girls) Personality when fully regressed!: Wouldn’t you like to know.

\fYou have chosen to play this level as . . . Roger! So . . . let’s play!

Level Four (Roger), Episodes 10–14

Episode 10: Nuclear Capability!
Episode 11: Training Day!
Episode 12: Car Trouble!
Episode 13: Invitations!
Episode 14: Ultimate Technique Revealed: Roger’s Attack!

Episode 10: Nuclear Capability!

“I won’t do it again!” the gray spotted hyena in the bondage cell whimpered, falling onto his knees from the restraint chair as soon as the straps came unfastened. “I won’t, I swear!”

“Ya won’t do what again, peaches?” the gray squirrel standing in front of him asked, tapping a riding crop against one open paw—and sounding bored.

Iggy whined and looked down at the used panties he’d been wearing for the past two days — since, as the squirrel’s first recruit, he’d followed her here dragged by the collar—and, umm, following his built-in compass needle.

“I won’t—I won’t—” he whined as she knelt down behind him and reached underneath his shirt and up the front of it. When she reached the top, he felt something cold and cool brush against his skin, making him shiver. It was a Swiss army knife, and the squirrel flicked it open. Catching the blade on the collar of his pink tee-shirt, she ripped through it in one smooth, fluid motion, leaving him naked, except for the musky panties he was wearing, and the locked mitts still clapped on his paws.

“I won’t wear a shirt that doesn’t go with my underwear,” he whimpered, and the crop came down on his back, causing him to wince, and drop onto his mittened forepaws on the floor. He was grateful that he was wearing thick leather mittens that cushioned the impact—it was real nice of her to let him wear those—even though the fingerless mitts left him helpless as a puppy when it came to complicated tasks like opening doors.

“Whose underwear?” Shelley asked, still sounding disinterested.

“Yours!” he whimpered. “I won’t wear a shirt that doesn’t go with your underwear. I won’t wear one without a corset under it again!” he wailed. “I’m sorry. I was just in a hurry. But I have to wear corsets. I know. Otherwise I look all slovenly and disgusting. And I won’t— I won’t—”

He squirmed, writhing on the ground, looking at the top hat that had rolled over into the corner by his foot—the last piece of masculine clothing he’d been left with. Though he’d look ridiculous wearing it now, he could carry it, as a reminder, he’d been told, of his changes, and how much his mistresses had improved him.

“And I won’t make a mess in your underwear again,” he whimpered, rapidly becoming incoherent. “why don’t I — I could have sworn I had more underwear — don’t know where it went — I know I — if I’m not wearing mine I can’t — I have — only you can— do anything in them — but can’t I take them off? Can’t I take them off just for five minutes so I can — three minutes so I can— I won’t make a mess in them again. I won’t! I’ll clean up whatever I—”

Seeing how much he was squirming against the floor, the squirrel set her riding crop down carefully and shook her head. Reaching into a small green knapsack on the ground, Shelley produced a cold, stainless steel chastity cage, and set it on the floor.

Before she fastened it, she made a distasteful expression, pulled back the hyena’s panties as far as she could, and let them snap, hard, which made him tremble and whine and strain to hump against the air. “Yah’ve gone and stretched them all out,” she complained. “I don’t want them any more. Since ya’ve got no others that suit you, you can stay in those until, I dunno, they have holes or somethin’. Why don’ we start ya that way. Ya’ll smell like a girl’s kind of mess to anyfur that actually cares ta smell ya, but trust me,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “that’ll be an improvement.”

She started rolling them down to his knees—taking care to bunch them up, so they’d feel more used when she rolled them back up.

“Two minutes,” he whimpered, “so I can—” He shuddered as she held one paw, loosely around his member—not to help him, but to keep him from touching it — and reached with her other to pick up the chastity cage on the floor behind her.

“Everyone’s gonna think you’re a girl, peaches,” she said. “Aren’t you happy to be promoted that way? Y’all know girls are the superior sex. And ya were such a sorry specimen getting a date was hopeless for you before, why this is the only way ya might actually trick some females into spendin’ time with you. Now you’re no longer entirely worthless. Only like, ninety-five percent? Don’t that make ya proud?”

The hyena whimpered, shook his head, and waved a mittened paw at his top hat; all he did was knock it over and he watched with wide eyes as it rolled out of reach. The cold steel of the chastity cage made his whole body tremble as it was locked into place. He loved it. He knew he shouldn’t, but he did.

“Tell ya what, sugar plum,” the squirrel said as she stood up, “if, in the next two weeks you manage to fool at least one girl into thinking that you’re one, too, then, come that weekend,” she said, and set one footpaw on his back, pushing him sideways and over, so that he flopped onto his side, mitted paws spread out on the floor and chastity device locked securely in place, and found himself staring up her white tennis skirt, at the blue silk panties she was now wearing, as she said, “you can have ninety seconds.”

“Thank you,” the hyena whined, “Miss Shelley, thank you so much, you’ve been so much more generous than I deserve—I hope that I can—”

“Hey, hey,” the squirrel said, as she went over to a sink in the corner, turned it on, and lathered up her paws with the handsoap there, “who knows what you might have to do to fool a girl and get your minute and a half. Pleasure her boyfriend, convince her that female musk is your absolutely favorite smell—” she glanced over her shoulder at him and made a bored, casual shrug. “Something like that. Are any of your ex-girlfriends dating? Bet one of their new boyfriends might accept you as a girl. I mean it’s obvious you’re no kind of man.”

She turned on her heels and slipped out the cell door; she found herself facing the Newfoundland and the leopardess who ran the academy as she locked it behind her.

“And that’s the old-fashioned way,” the squirrel explained, handing the keys back to them, and looking at her watch. “Your highest level of discipline went, mmmm, I dunno, more or less like that, I ‘magine? Softer, even? And the panda’s your meanest? Y’all see how much time I wasted in the last two days on one slave who wasen’ a bit hard ta break?”

“Hey!” whined the squirming hyena from inside the cell, “I was very hard to br—”

“No you weren’t, peaches,” said the squirrel, still sounding bored as she interrupted him and shook her head at the Newfoundland, yawning. “Forgot to gag him, sorry, but I really don’t want to touch him again.” She banged the door with her riding crop. “Be quiet in there!”

The hyena slumped on his side and whimpered, quietly raising his mittened paws to his muzzle. Would it get him brownie points if he gagged himself? Oh, he hoped so! Maybe he would get two minutes of playtime that way? He opened his mouth, stuck one of the bondage mitts into it, and bit down on it obligingly, being sure to make at least a few muffled attempts at speech so the women outside might realize that he had muzzled himself and saved them the trouble.

The taste of leather overwhelmed him and made him choke at first—but he’d consider it training. If he wanted his playtime any time soon, the hyena had a feeling that his gag reflex had to go.

The squirrel business consultant began tapping her riding crop against one open paw as she walked down the row of punishment cells. “A very paws-on approach isn’t it? Soo much attention wasted on each one of these critters. ‘Sides the fact it’s inefficient, you’re stuck when ya’ve got a fur like bristles down here who you can’t handle so directly. Y’all have got a business that promises to make sorry boys into slightly less sorry facsimiles of the stronger sex, either cuz they ask ya to, or cuz their partners do, and then you take, like, what, a year, maybe more to do it? Seriously, Cal, you ask most of these furs to make a,” the squirrel shook her head mournfully as she remarked, “minimum commitment of six months to get into your school? No, honey. No. Maximum intake, maximum output, maximum revenue, that’s what I’m talking about,” she recited, punctuating her remarks with taps of her riding crop. “And that’s what you’ll see in the draft mission statement y’all asked for. That’s why I’ve gotten so involved with the scenario camps, furs pay, they’re in, they’re out, they’re gone, and after the weekend you don’t have to bother with them. Boys who’ll pay to be abused want to give you all their money anyway. I consider it part of the scene for them, you know, they get off on it. Your installment plans and all the time you spend on each fur are misguided. Charging more for less time is giving these wannabes better service, when ya think about it. They get off on financial abuse, just the same as on physical. I thought you knew that.”

The squirrel cast a glance over her shoulder at Callie, and shook her muzzle at the leopardess. “Honestly, Cal, I know what you can do. I was there the first time you put someone under. I don’t know why you don’t just take these so-called boys for a week, send them back out the way their masters want them with a new wardrobe, and charge each five thousand dollars.”

Callie chewed on her lip thoughtfully the whole time, nodding absently as though she hadn’t heard a word the squirrel had said. Her sissy Newfoundland attendant took a long breath and filled the dead air in the conversation. “We tried deeper hypnosis as a method for Level 5, but there were—” the dog admitted, “problems. We had one bear with a very pushy boyfriend there, who kept butting into the induction. The boyfriend seemed pretty happy with how it went. But the mistress and I are worried about the student’s ability to function, you know, in the world.”

The squirrel shrugged. “Who cares?” she asked. “He was screwed up before he came to you or he wouldn’t have come. Every male we see in this business is damaged goods. And the top’s the one paying you right? So he’s the one to make happy. But if it’s a bother my suggestion for problem cases is cleaner that way, too. These fetishy types all wanna be subs really. Didja see how hard that hyena in there tried ta keep himself from pawing? He’s a boy, they’re weak anyway, so by male standards it was a heroic effort. Libido gets in the way of their own desires. Complicates everything.”

“That,” she continued, tapping her riding crop against her palm emphatically, “is really what makes it hard for them to function in the world, isn’t it? All that frantic, desperate, sloppy pawing? So don’t mess with the little control stick. Fix the CPU. You’re selling yourself to tops here now, least that’s what you’re saying—they’re the ones you keep reaching out to? If they’re the ones paying the bills, then you want to show them you have access to total power—and can share it with them. It’s like a nuke really. Just havin’ it as an option and lettin’ the boys know they can be switched off changes the game. Suddenly the unruly little monsters will be the sweetest little flowers their boyfriends or girlfriends or parents or whoever want them to be. They’re on when you or their tops want them on—off when ya don’t. Sure as if they came with a switch. And focused on their partner’s pleasure, not secretly all squirmy for their own.  Whether or not they feel that again is in your paws, and they know it.”

The squirrel turned around, set down her green knapsack, and unfastened it, producing what looked like a small first aid kit as they stopped outside the cell where the rebellious hedgehog Swifty had delivered was being held.

Calliope watched curiously and broke her long silence. “So the rumors really are true. You aren’t just bluffing about having concocted something. You’re sure this is harmless, Shelley?” she asked. “This boy, Jason, and his caretaker expressed an interest in a kidnapping scene where the abductors turn out to be working for his boyfriend, and he’s ultimately delivered back rendered entirely—compliant. He’s been fighting, but he hasn’t said any safe words yet. Still, he may be confused about what’s real and what’s not, and the question of consent after something like what you’re proposing seems—complicated. There’s really no trauma from this?”

Shelley smiled up at them. “I won’t feel a thing,” she said as she fitted a syringe. “And in a minute—neither will bristles. Relax, there’s no knife, and it entirely wears off once y’all stop dosing.” She flicked her tail and added, “Chemical castration’s a misnomer really. It’s more like hormone repression. This is watered down from what they use on sex offenders a’course. But you wanna see a sissy boy simper in spirit as well as in satin—”

Calliope tilted her head as she watched the squirrel. “Are you enjoying this, Shell?” she asked. “I can’t tell. I know you run your dungeon for the money, but I hoped this trip might be fun for you. I do interview them all, so I like to think that the students here are — well, at the risk of sounding biased, special. And the current batch of kids Roger and I have—the way they all play off each other . . . it just keeps surprising us.”

The squirrel shook her eyes as she loaded a syringe and let the liquid squirt out of it. “Will you listen to yourself, Calliope? Staying near you know who has been bad for you. I knew it. These boys are cut from exactly the same cloth as my dungeon clients. I don’t need to talk to them to know that. They like diapers, for goodness’ sake. I can put up with a little of that from someone like you, but these are boys. What else is there to know? Trust me, I’ve seen what furs are willing to pay for and there’s not much left that will surprise me. Boys just want to get off on whatever weird thing gets them off. And I’m glad to help provided they pay for the privilege. My goodness my gracious, sweet thing,” she remarked, shaking her head. “You’re calling these fetishists kids now? What are they next, friends? Family? I can almost hear your brother making one of his losers love company speeches. You’ve finally followed my advice and found a way to profit from this little scene of yours. That’s the only way to justify staying involved with this stuff, from a real life perspective. So use your talents, make some money off of it. Rog wouldn’t know much about any of that, would he?”

Calliope smoothed out the folds in her dressing gown. “My brother doesn’t have special physical,” she eyed Shelley, then looked back down at her dress, “or mental abilities, no,” she admitted, “but he is always there.”

“Peaches,” the squirrel said, rolling her eyes, “I know he’s family so ya wanna make him sound better, but we both know,” the squirrel gestured to Cassie for the keys to the cell, and took them as the huge dog handed them over with a jangle, “it’s cuz that dog has nowhere else to be.”

The mercenary squirrel turned her attention back to the jail cell. “Bristles sure has gotten quiet,” she remarked as she opened the door and peeked inside. “What the—?” she blurted as she saw the hedgehog’s bed, with its restraints unfastened, and blankets thrown over it.

The Newfoundland padded past her and over to the empty punishment cot where the hedgehog had been restrained, yanking the blankets off the bed. Instead of a diapered, defensively bristling hedgehog bound in place and ready to be injected on his spineless elbow joint, she found — a sack of flower. A sticky paper label on it bore a hastily scrawled inscription. Directly above the bed, a ceiling panel hung half out of place.

“Just one word. Maybe some kind of Baby Blue code,” Cassie remarked, puzzled, snatching the label off the bag and scratching her head with one huge paw. “All it says is . . . Substitution?”

“Needless to say,” the stubby-maned lion with the ninja headband hanging around his neck finished, panting, and he put a sympathetic arm around the quivering hedgehog’s shoulder, “I got the cub out of there just as fast as I could. I’d been working as a caretaking assistant for the fox, changing some of her sissies while she was coaching others with, ermm, different things. They all started calling me mommy, and that was sort of—disconcerting—and once they put flowers in my mane. I snuck into the wardrobe one time and I almost—I took a dress and I—” he shuddered. “It’s only because I wanted to take care of furs, I thought it might make them more comfortable—I didn’t put it on, I just looked in the mirror, and thought—well, Serafina said a few times she thought they were all safer with a strong boy fur around. That might have saved me. I started sneaking around after I heard so many of them whispering about Level 5. Everyone was afraid of being sent there, but no one seemed to have seen it.”

Ben was relating his story in hushed tones to Roger, Rian, Dex, and the Boy Scouts, all gathered in a small, private circle around a fading campfire outside Roger’s nomadic command center tent. “I didn’t even know where we were going at first, but we got off at a bus stop eventually, and there was the lynx. He gave me this newspaper.” Ben pointed again at the paper he was jealously guarding, and the picture of Dex, staggering under the weight of Twitchy in his arms and the ferret cub clinging to his ankle, making his way out of a university lab building with columns of smoke billowing out of its lower windows.

“And there you were!” the lion escapee said, looked up at Dex, his eyes wide. “It was like a sign! Jason and I were talking about how worthless we’ve both felt sometimes. But one of us! A hero! And you’re not just someone who just looks at pictures. You’re a lifestyler, he said. But still a fighter—more than a fighter—you’re a real shinobi, I can tell. Ace said there was a whole army of you assembling at a secret spot in the woods,” the lion looked around at the circle of furs around the fire and started to breathe easier, relaxing, and releasing a tiny bit of warm pee into the front of his diaper, “like a village, hidden in the . . . .”

“Hidden in diapers,” Jax finished for him, nodding gently and putting a paw on the two boys’ shoulders. “Don’t forget the diapers. They’re very important for the hiding. Otherwise most of these boys would leave piddle trails that would lead anyone right back to our secret spot.” The black-and-brown mottled tracking hound turned his attention to the shell-shocked hedgehog, offering him a s’more. “Welcome back, Jason. Do you still want to be a helicopter pilot—someday far away from now, when you’re all big and potty-trained? We still have one of your friends from Camp 5 here. Do you remember Kit, your raccoon buddy? Do you wanna come scouting tomorrow and see him again? He’s been worried about you. Gonna be real relieved to see you’re not in a dress. Tell me about your caretaker. Do you live together? Have you two been talking since ya came here, or is he just someone you visit once in a while?”

Rian, still wearing his soccer outfit, had dropped a half-eaten S’more on to the ground without noticing. He was trembling. His muzzle and whiskers were still covered with chocolate and he was staring into the fire, looking horrified. “There’s no way that Serry knows about this,” he said, shaking his head. “I refuse to believe it.”

Dex had raised a finger to his muzzle and was chewing on it thoughtfully. “I don’t think that’s legal,” he mused. “That isn’t legal is it? I mean isn’t it like something the police do?”

“I’m sure it’s like a super-diluted play formula,” Ace said, putting a paw on his friend’s knee and squeezing it. “Maybe even a placebo. Don’t look worried. We’re gonna bring the roof down around those girls’ ears once and for all, anyway, remember? They’ll never touch our boys after this. Baby Blue will be the age-playing scene in this town. There’s no stopping us now.” The lynx squeezed Dex’s knee again, and jerked a thumb at him, then at Rian, remarking, “We have two 24/7 boys, and they’re the coolest diaperfurs in the city right now. Furs are lining up around blocks to play with the two of you. Rian and Dex,” Ace said, nodding proudly, “the bluest and the truest. Our not-so-secret weapons.”

Roger had crossed his arms and bit his lip, shifting around and crinkling audibly. He seemed less concerned about the syringe part of the story than anyone else. “Rewind a minute,” the leader of the group said, waving one paw in a circle. “What did my sister say after that ‘Rog has got nowhere else to be’ dig? Didn’t she stick up for me?”

Ben shrugged and looked apologetic. “Look, I’m sorry,” the lion said, “I don’t think she did, but I wasn’t really listening to that stuff and I didn’t know who all you people were yet.”

Rian looked up from the fire out of the corner of his eyes and thought he heard the older canid sniffle. “Are you okay, Rog?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” the Labrador said. “Smoke got in my eyes.” He tossed half a log from the pile next to him on to the fire and watched the little blaze flare up again. Then he smiled and tilted his head to look at his sidekick.

“But I’m kind of mad now,” the dog pouted.

**********************

“I have my paws full coordinating the Open House,” the leopardess and pink team leader, leaning her chin on her palms and resting her elbows on her Victorian writing desk, said to her Newfoundland aide. “I’m just not convinced it’s that serious, Cassie, I’m sorry. There’s no point in getting myself involved.”

The giant sissy dog was staring down at her lap and her milkmaid apron, looking depressed, when the door was flung open, and a panda in a purple Powerpuff Girls sweater and sweatpants burst in.

“Oh, it’s serious!” snapped Lin Lin, bustling right under the arm that squirrel lounging outside, sipping at a Diet Coke, had lazily raised to stop her. The panda held up a folded campus newspaper. She threw it down on to the headmistress’ desk. Cassie stiffened and fidgeted uncomfortably for a moment, although the feline headmistress looked unfazed.

“This recruiting situation is very serious. A defector gave this to me,” the undersized bear said, pointing down at it. “I knew this would be a problem someday, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, Mr. ‘stand back, world, I’m coming out of my shell any decade now’ is finally stepping up. And right before our Open House. The boys have been giving these out all over town!” She waved her paw at it and gritted her teeth. “He’s like their new poster cub. Him! Mr. Goody-two-shoes. Mr. ‘I hope that’s vegetarian baby formula.’ The bluest and weirdest and— and— ungirliest one over there. Did I say weirdest? At least the wolf is all about sex. We can respond to that. But everything about that raccoon is just so—” she shuddered “so boy.” Then she banged one fist into her opposite palm in frustration. “Just read it. What kind of a stupid—” the panda shook her head despairingly. “How are we supposed to compete,” she said, sounding upset, “with some moron who does idiot things like he’s trying to get himself killed?”

The Newfoundland picked up the newspaper and eyed it curiously, looking up over the edge of it at the leopardess.

“You said,” the panda continued accusingly, pointing at the huge black dog, “that once you’d sidelined the wolf things would be fine. You keep saying things will be fine because you have some mysterious backup plan. I have a news flash for you, Zen dog: Just saying that things are going to be okay does not make them okay! We’ll be shown up at our Open House and we’ll never recover from the embarrassment. You’re supposed to be in charge of security for this event. We are having a crisis. You should be ashamed,” she continued, gathering steam as she wagged a paw up at the dog’s giant nose, “that you’re not out there in the field and that you’re hearing this from me! You should feel terrible!”

“Actually,” the dog said, setting the newspaper down in her lap and looking from Lin Lin down to the picture of Dex carrying the two furs out of the building with smoke pouring out of its windows, then out of the corner of her eyes at her mistress, “now I feel better.”

The leopardess pursed her lips, folded her paws together, and rested her chin on them thoughtfully. “We’ve put a lot of work into this event and the timing of the announcements needs to be right,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m not overly concerned. Our security should be adequate for anything my brother is likely to put together. But, still, if Roger’s whole group actually charges into the building during the Open House at the wrong time it could muddle things up and make the academy look very bad. Do you know how many furs they have now, Lin Lin?”

The panda looked thoughtful for a moment and calculated quickly. “I’d guess close to sixty,” she admitted, grudgingly. “But they probably can’t convince all their newbies and part-timers to come in for something like this.”

The leopardess nodded slowly. “I’m not sure. Everyone who joins is getting some kind of operation order. Serry retrieved one of them from her spy,” she remarked, laying a paw on a slit blue envelope at the edge of her desk. “By itself it doesn’t make much sense.”

Lin Lin padded over to the desk and snatched the envelope up. The outside said, “S. Fox.” She yanked the paper out and unfolded it, scanning the message on it for a moment as she held the missive up to the light:

\t“There’s been a mess-up about playing dress-up:
\tA fox with your skills is required.
\tThere’s no alarm ringing, just bring what you’re bringing,
\tI don’t mean the forest’s been fired.”

The Newfoundland shrugged. “It may be some sort of cipher, or I assume if you put them all together the message would become—”

Lin Lin cut off Cassie abruptly. “It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s just a singsong baby rhyme. They probably made up something for each recruit. The poem isn’t the message; just ignore it,” she said, pivoting on her heels and, without asking, plunging her paw into the squirrel’s soda cup and withdrawing the lemon slice floating in it.

“Hey!” Shelley said, taking an interest in the happenings around her for the first time, “I was drinking that!”

“I noticed,” Lin Lin answered acidly as she squeezed the lemon slice out and let its juice dribble on to the enemy team’s communique, which she then pressed against the warm case of the leopardess’ desk lamp. “Standing around drinking diet soda seems to be what you’re billing us for.” Without waiting for a response, she pointed to a white outline emerging on the pale blue paper and handed it back to Cassie. “Invisible ink,” she explained rapidly. “This has the bunny written all over it. It’s a basic solution so it won’t show up if you leave it near something warm accidentally, the way lemon juice does. Grape juice might make whatever’s drawn here a little clearer.”

The Newfoundland shook her head. “Invisible ink? Who uses that besides little kid—”

Lin Lin rolled her eyes in annoyance, and interrupted, sounding exasperated, “Exactly.” Then she blew on the paper, causing the outline to appear in sharper relief. “It’s not a code. It’s a map. And it looks like a part of a map of . . .” she pointed at a marked spot and frowned. “Our basement. With a dotted line coming. . . from below.”

Cassie’s eyes glimmered. “They’re digging tunnels under the academy,” the dog concluded, sounding surprised. “He really is planning a traditional attack!” Then she slumped back in her chair, seeming relaxed again. “Good to know,” she remarked calmly. “We should still be okay. He must not know Shelley is in town or he never would have risked something so direct.”

Shelley tilted her head, watching the group with a raised eyebrow. “Y’all take your stupid game pretty seriously, doncha?”

“Okay, really,” the panda said, tugging at her Powerpuff Girls sweater, and addressing the school’s feline headmistress directly, pointing up at Shelley without addressing or looking at her, “what is this squirrel doing here? This is not the time to be adding new furs. It’s making all the girls nervous.”

Callie took a long breath, but the Newfoundland cut in. “Shelley isn’t an age-player,” she explained. “But her paws-on dungeon experience might be beneficial to our business plan. And, she’s a security expert in case we’re attacked. You saw how quickly she rigged the woods. Entrapment and containment are her specialties. She’s run kidnapping teams at scenario camps for years, and she also weekend-long abduction scenarios.”

The squirrel shrugged. “Girl scouts,” she remarked. “Backcountry girl. Daddy used to take me trapping. Ought to be good for something.”

“Of course, if the boys are coming in from underground,” Cassie resumed, frowning, “we might need to get more creative. We may even need to fight. I was hoping to avoid that.”

Lin Lin narrowed her eyes and looked at the perpetually bored squirrel critically. “What is she going to do when her nets don’t catch all of them,” she asked, “file her claws and look annoyed until they leave? She couldn’t even keep me from—” She whirled and swung for the squirrel’s soda glass again—only to find herself stumble as her paws slid through empty air—she stopped her foot just short of stepping into the spreading puddle from the squirrel’s spilled soft drink—wait, the plastic cup was open-side down—had she spilled it by accident, or had she just dumped it as a trap as soon as Lin Lin swung?! Was she really that quick?

The panda’s eyes darted to the left, then to the right, as she settled into a defensive stance—and she whirled as heard the soft tap of footpaws touching the floor, lightly, behind her, raising both paws to swing.

Lin Lin caught only air, again, but she saw a gray and white blur rebounding from one of the walls, as the squirrel caught herself, and hung suspended, by both forepaws, from the room’s ceiling, her tail twitching lazily, but her eyes glinting.

“Y’all move so two-dimensional like,” Shelley remarked as she swung and, letting herself drop a few inches, caught on to the opposite wall, clinging lightly to the porous conrete with both feet and one forepaw. “It is a little dull to watch.”

Lin Lin’s eyes widened. “She has feral climbing abilities!” the panda marveled. “Even on smooth surfaces. I’ve heard of things like this, but I’ve never seen it. . . .”

Cassie nodded. “Shelley’s skills are well-suited to our current needs. Traps, dungeon containment, countering climbing types . . . other things . . .” the Newfoundland explained. “We should be able to have a skeleton security crew of you two with some backup. Besides, as soon as Roger sees her here, I’m sure he’ll order his boys to pull out right away in return for our releasing any captives.”

“Did you say there are sixty of these mewling little diaperboys coming?” Shelley asked as she released the wall and dropped, lightly, back on to the floor.

Lin Lin nodded.

“Be a dear,” said the squirrel, tussling the undersized panda’s headfur patronizingly. “Take care of the other ten.”

Next time: The sissies are drawing battle lines! But boys have power-ups not available to girls. That’s right — training pants, I mean, training scenes!

\fEpisode 11: Training Day!

From his vantage point behind a tree on the south slope of a hill, Rian, who had slipped into a matching set of camouflage sweatpants and sweatshirt, watched the teams he was surveying critically.

“Let’s get down to business!” Ace shouted, a whistle hanging around his neck on a cord, as he rested one paw on his holstered paintball gun and paced back and forth in front of a contingent of boys lounging, leaning against trees, or sitting on their padded rears on the forest floor. “You slackers need to understand that girls and sissies do not play fair. They sure as heck won’t—”

Ace whirled on his heels mid-sentence, whipped out his paintball gun, and released a volley at the giraffe who stumbled backwards, tumbling into the fur behind him, causing them to both land on the ground with a thud, “Won’t tell you to get ready and give you until the count of three!” the lynx concluded, shaking his head mournfully. “You’re the saddest bunch I’ve ever met.”

“Hey!” Steven whined, straining his longer-than-average neck to look down at his shirt. “How bad is it?” the tall fur asked the one next to him. “I can’t even see. This is my kite-flying shirt.” The other boys shuffled and made some studious and some half-hearted efforts to stand at attention. Most stared at their feet. One, a hedgehog, who had been picking his nose, jammed his paws into his pockets.

“Sorry,” growled the lynx, “I thought you were the ones who hadn’t been sissified yet. What is it that you think we’re trying to do in this training?”

The hedgehog answered cautiously, “Make men out of us?”

Ace guffawed. “Men? Out of you?” The lynx shook his head. “Now I see what the problem is. You goofs are trying to be men. Standing up straight and tucking your clothes in and keeping your pants dry. It takes more concentration than any of you can spare. Since every,” he paced down the line, eyeing reach recruit in his unit as he spoke, “last,” he flicked a beaver’s chin with his finger, “one,” he straightened a skunk’s bandana, “of you is a paw-sucking,” the lynx withdrew a pacifier from his pocket and stuck it in the mouth of the next recruit in line, who whined around it, but Ace refused to let go until he began suckling on it, slowly, then he released it, and the recruit continued sucking, “pants-soaking,” he yanked the giraffe’s tucked-in-tee-shirt out of his jeans and, letting it hang loosely, glowered up at him, “toy-loving baby. Men,” he shook his head and snorted. “Your only hope of not ending up sissified, private,” he said to the hedgehog, grabbing his wrists and yanking both paws out of his pockets, “is to think and act and fight and feel exactly like a little, little boy. Now, why didn’t you put what you’ve been doing on your list of hobbies?”

The hedgehog, who seemed to have a pair of headphones permanently settled around his neck, looked confused. “List what hobby?” he asked.

“Picking your nose like a two-year-old who just figured out how to do it,” said Ace. “You stick your paw in there like a toddler when nofur’s looking and you think I haven’t noticed.”

Jason looked down at his feet. “I doooon’t,” he said.

Ace snorted. “That’s a very bad secret. Habits like that should be listed on your regressive profile. So the other furs on duty with you know they should carry tissues to wipe your paws and nose in case you get excited about it and try to show them what you got. Well, the whole unit knows now. I’m going to have to order them all to tease you about it so you won’t be so sneaky next time.”

“Jason picks his nose with a rubber hose,” the beaver next to him said in a singsong voice.

“I doooooon’t,” the hedgehog protested again, holding out his hand toward the beaver demonstratively as he added, defensively, “I use my paaaaw!”

“Ewww,” the short beaver sidled away, eyeing it cautiously, “keep your paw away from me!”

“Seeeee,” whined the hedgehog, “it grosses people ouuuuut.”

“Jason,” said the lynx severely, “after the trouble you’ve gotten into by trying to play both sides of this game, we can’t let you sneak off unsupervised even on the pretense of going potty or changing yourself and get into who knows what kind of mess. I know your problem. You say yes to whoever you’re talking to. It’s very bad and it will only get you into scrapes like that one. I know that for a baby, saying ‘no’ the first time can be very hard. You’re staying under the eyes and paws of the bigger boys until you have a better sense of what you like and we know you’re at least big enough to say no to a caretaker sometimes. So with everything you’ll be using your diapers for, and your dependence on the other boys for changes, I wouldn’t worry about your nose-picking habit being the one that grosses your teammates out. Don’t worry too much though—you’re on double the normal chlorophyll and fiber ration, effective immediately.”

The hedgehog looked crestfallen. “But no alone time is just like at the academ—”

“Hey hey,” Ace interrupted the hedgehog, tucking the bottom of his chin, “we’re not like that at all. It just means you can’t run off and do it in private for fear you’ll get yourself in some kind of mess again. Get a copy of the cheat sheet and see which big brother types are comfortable lending a paw or letting you paw when they change you. Then try to be on your best behavior around those folks, do act your cutest when you ask them for help, and don’t bug any furs who haven’t noted there or told you privately that it’s okay.”

Rian nodded approvingly at how things were going and moved on to his next observation stop. ‘Take a look around before we decamp to the main operation site,’ Roger had told him. ‘See how the recruits’ characters are coming. All their work helping get the main site together’s worked wonders for them! I think you’ll be happy with how much their maturity’s dropped in such a short time, and how little boy they’re all shaping up to be. Even the ones who came in experimenters are practically certified diaperboys. Once you’ve seen how they are we’ll consult on final deployments.’ So far, Rian liked what he saw. His mentor had been doing good work while his veteran agents had been recruiting. No one in that unit was acting a day over five! Now, to check on some of the bigger kids.

From behind another tree, he saw Dex standing in the center of a clearing, and two of his new strike team trainees at the edge of it. The two of them seemed to have been pestering Dex about something.

“I am not a ninja,” the coon was insisting, tugging at his yellow karate gi. “Why would a ninja wear bright colors? That’s just stupid.”

A white canine standing next to the lion muttered to his fellow advanced combat trainee, “Told you. It’s pointless quoting it to him. He hasn’t even seen it.”

“But he has seen it,” Ben, tugging at the headband with a reflective silver forehead guard around his neck, protested to the white canine, “I’m sure he has. He’s just yanking my tail.”

Dex, who was standing in the middle of a clearing, beckoned with one paw. “All right, whatcha waiting for, guys?” the coon asked, holding up a box of wipes in his other paw. “You boys in training pants and pull-ups are big kids now. But you do want a box of these to use on your cubbies, don’t you? And for yourself? Juuuust in case? Shame there’s only one box—and two of you. Guess someone will have to end up with a rash.”

Ben’s eyes narrowed and he charged toward the raccoon; at the same time his canine partner ran at him from the other side, brandishing a foam sword, both ready to grab for the wipes; Dex hopped up into the air, and hung from a low-hanging tree branch, swinging his feet in the air and watching the two boys tumble into a shallow pit that had been covered over with brush in front of him.

“Lesson one,” the raccoon said, as he hoisted himself up to sit on the branch on his rear, “especially, if you’re going to be fighting sissies, you have to learn to see through deception. Think before you launch an attack. Your opponent might use it against you. Also, if the bait is obvious,” he added, shaking his head, “don’t take it.”

“Okay,” moaned Ryo, setting down his foam katana at the edge of the pit and then hoisting himself out of it with both paws. The white dog’s shorts slid down enough in the process that his pull-up-like swim diapers were showing. “We get it.”

“I’m telling you this,” Dex said cockily, sitting on the tree branch, “because you don’t get it.”

“I knew it!” yipped the lion, scrambling out of the pit. “You’re cribbing straight out of—”

Dex shrugged. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the coon interrupted. “I’m a bit big for Saturday morning baaaby shows — if you’re still on about one of those, Ben.”

The lion clenched both fists and looked up at the raccoon. “That’s it, you’re going down,” he growled. “Starting with those pants you think are hiding your underwear. Are you with me, Ryo?”

By the time Rian had made his way back to the first troop for a closer look, the lynx in the safari outfit was launching another round of exercises. “All right,” Ace said, “on the count of—” but before he started counting, a pillow thudded into him, and as he reached for his paintball gun, five of the boys had flung themselves at his waist and legs, two were lying on their stomachs and gripping his feet, and three others were on top of him tickling him as he fell.

“That,” said the lynx between giggles, as he rolled to and fro wrestling with the nearest boys and reaching for the pillow with one of his own paws, beating at them with it, “is more like it! Keep fighting without potty breaks! Don’t even stop to go! You have to piddle while you’re moving! If you slow down cuz you need to concentrate or hide behind a tree or something ridiculous, I’ll get you and it’s noogie time! Trust your protection—if you were good little boys and let a qualified caretaker help you into those diapers, they can handle the force of a coursing river.”

Rian bit his index finger musingly. “Maybe I did misjudge Ace,” he said to himself as he watched the cat wrestling, daddy-like, with the boys.

“Break!” shouted the lynx’s boyfriend after a few minutes of wrestling and running around, blowing a bird whistle. Jax appeared with a Dalmatian at his side. “Snack time!” The two of them were sharing the work of carrying tote bags filled with brown-bagged snacks and lunches. The lot staggered, uneasily to their feet — many only made it up onto all fours and crawled over to inspect the offerings that way. But Ace hopped right up, adjusting his safari hat to its usual rakish tilt.

Kyle watched the wrestling, grass-stained, mud-covered boys with what appeared to be relief. “I’m sooooo glad I’m not in combat and scouting any more,” the Dalmatian said, breathing a long sigh of relief. “I sucked at all that.”

“You sure did!” said Ace to the Dalmatian brightly as he accepted the first pawful of bags from Kyle and began distributing them. “You sucked something awful!”

His more sensitive tracking hound boyfriend and fellow wilderness team leader reached up and flicked Ace’s hat off his head and into the air, causing his tufted ears to twitch. “What?” protested the tough lynx as he bent over to pick it up. “I was being supportive!”

Rian, from his concealed vantage point, rolled his eyes. “Or maybe not,” he said to himself and moved on to the other side of the hill. He returned to watching Dex’s small unit, and saw the coon hopping up over a low swing of Ryo’s sword. Using his tail to adjust his trajectory in mid-air, the raccoon martial artist propelled himself backwards away from the bola that Ben hurled at the air above it. The spinning rope weapon caught Ryo instead and sent him tumbling back on to his rear, tangled up.

“Still fighting with each other? Let me know when I should start paying attention,” Dex said, still holding the box of cub wipes in one paw, and sticking his tongue out at them as he landed—only to find his footpaws touching down on toy cars that the fallen canine had just launched out of his pocket from his tangled position on the ground!

Dex slipped and staggered backward as the miniature vehicles careened out from under him. He recovered his balance quickly—but not quickly enough to keep the lion, who had pounced as soon as the cars were launched, from laying one paw on the box of wet wipes, and begin tugging at them. “Ryo and I are teammates so the two of us are one!” the lion said proudly. “We can share the wipes!”

“Excellent!” their raccoon sensei said, grinning, releasing the box and giving the two of them a thumbs-up as he straightened. “Then you two are ready to learn some real taijutsu.”

“Now come on, just admit that you took that word from—” Ben started to say, fiddling with the headband around his neck.

“Aikido,” Dex said with a smile, cutting the lion off as he padded over to the entangled canine and bent over him, “They finish right before karate starts. I sit in on the end of their class sometimes.”

Rian was about to move on when he felt two paws grab him from the rear and yank down his sweatpants. “Hey!” the wolf barked, hopping out of them, to leave them in the paws of a slight brown milk-chocolate-brown raccoon, the wolf’s own triple diapers exposed.

“I did it Jax!” shouted the coon, pressing the button on a plastic walkie-talkie on his belt. He was wearing a cub scout uniform. “I caught another spy! Heading north by northwest, twelve paces from camp 3, on the opposite slope of the hill, Ryo is three paces to the east and he’s just breaking from training if you need backup!”

“I’m not a spy,” Rian said, his eyes narrowing as he pointed to the shiny rank badge, a gold emblem of two crossed safety pins, on his camouflage shirt, “I’m your commanding officer! And you pantsed me.” Rian said frowning. Then, seeing the raccoon looking embarrassed, the wolf flipped his frown almost immediately, saying, “Thanks! They were getting stifling. You must be the legendary coon called Kit. Jax and Ryo have told me about you.”

“Lejennary?” asked the coon.

Rian nodded and looked around shiftily. “Oh yes. The star newbie who kept Swifty from making off with more than a piece of our message. You might have saved our entire operation from being torpedoed by my mistake. I heard Roger gave you a medal. . . there it is,” said Rian, examining the cub scout’s small sash. He smiled at it and nodded. The wolf’s eyes glistened a little, as he recollected his own first act of blue team heroism, and he continued wistfully, “This used to be mine you know. I gave it back to Rog when I got my circle badge. I’d planned to visit you earlier,” the wolf said, managing to snatch his sweatpants back as the distracted coon relaxed his grip. Instead of putting them on, though, Rian flung them over his shoulder, seeming entirely unconcerned by the visibility of his diapers, which, since he had just put them on recently, gave off a fresh, talcum scent and small puffs of powder as he shifted in them. “The thing is,” he eyed the cub scout, “Jax said you’d be a challenge for me.” The raccoon looked curious. “I like to say,” said Rian, “that every fur I play with feels a little smaller afterward. But Jax said you came ready to play and it would be hard for me to come up with a way to make you any cubbier.”

“Just because my diapers say ‘Baby’ on ‘em doesn’t make me a baby,” the brown raccoon protested unconvincingly, crossing his arms. “I have an awesome car. All-terrain vehicle! Waterproof interior! Great for camping.”

“Is this one of the Power Wheels?” Rian asked suspiciously.

“Noooo,” said the coon shaking his head and motioning in its general direction. “It’s right at the edge of the woods over—”

Rian’s eyes twinkled. “I have an idea,” he said, pointing at the raccoon and then setting off in the direction of the coon’s car. “You’re coming with me.”

The coon hesitated for a moment, looking back over his shoulder toward the rest of his unit. Rian glanced back for him.

“Cubby,” the lupine explained, grinning wolfishly as he gestured to the rookie, “you have to follow me first.”

******************************

Twitchy fiddled with the goggles on his forehead and hummed as he settled into his desk chair at Hideout #4, tapping his foot rhythmically against the floor as he switched his three monitors, one at a time, to bring up images of the main operation site on one, a blueprint-style map indicating tunnel routes, and on the third, tabbed through footage shots from the boys’ recently installed security cameras facing the river.

“Perfect,” he said as he watched some of the sissies rigging additional traps in the woods, under Lin Lin’s direction, earlier in the day. “They’ll never know what hit them.” He pointed a paw at the panda. “Have fun trying to decode our message, miss smarty-panties,” he taunted the screen. “Or catching up with our recruit numbers after Dex’s hat trick. Hope you’re getting used to losing to me!” He took a long breath. “Everything has worked out perfect. Okay — things did get a little bit hairy in the middle there, I admit — but, in the final analysis,” he reassured himself, “just as planned. I saved Dex, and Baby Blue, and everyone! The boys from Hideout #4 can do—” he looked down at his pocket for a moment, and shook his head. Something didn’t feel right.

The rabbit began whistling as he slid back in his wheeled chair and hopped up. He heard anxious squeaking — and giggled involuntarily, hopping around, as he felt a scuffle in his pant leg, and a warm little body scurrying up his thigh, then through his shirt and onto his shoulder, to nose at one of his floppy ears.

“Squeak squeak squeak!” the mouse squeaked into his ear anxiously.

“Squeak!” Twitchy exclaimed. “You haven’t run up my pants leg in months. Yeah,” the rabbit blushed and patted the small mouse on his head. “I’m okay. Especially now that you’re here. We’re all okay. I did it, Squeak,” Twitchy said as he looked at the recruit counts on one of his monitors.

“Squeak?” said the mouse into his ear, curiously.

“That was close,” the rabbit said, sitting into his chair and sliding backward across the room. “I was worried for a while there. I could feel him slipping into a dark place. But he’s going to be okay now. He’s back. For one day Dex had everything the way he’d wish for it to be. Now he knows what he wants and what life can be like if he doesn’t fixate on Rian and all the things Rian has.” Twitchy took a long breath. “But he’s not bad either, you know, Squeak. Rian was the first fur from here to come over and see me. He never meant to be messing things up for me and Dex. He just doesn’t get boundaries sometimes,” the rabbit sniffled. “I bet he grew up with so much stuff that sharing was never a big deal. I would have liked to have a childhood like that. But he’s a good friend really. He wants us to be happy, too. Oh, Squeak!” Twitch exclaimed brightly, reaching for the bookbag he’d dumped under his desk, “I have some projects I need your help with!”

“Squeak?” asked the mouse.

“Noooo, it’s not for school,” said Twitchy, shaking his head as he pulled out a sheaf of papers, “I’m so not worried about schoolwork while I’m here. I can do that stuff back on campus. Besides, I took myself out of the lab assistant pool. I have enough work to do anyway and, errmmmm—it seemed like the safer thing to do after the accident. No point doing extra if I end up killing myself, right? Sooo first, I have these nursery plans for Dex that I want you to look at—I want your input on what kind of cables and ropes I’d need to hold his weight safely. Oh, but don’t tell anyone! It’s a secret. Only Rian knows what I’m up to. And this is for Kyle — oh,” added the rabbit with a giggle, “this is for him too, cuz he put up with me being snappish lately,” he said, producing a collar from the front pocket. “I made a detour on the way here to a pet shop that could engrave things. It says ‘Point me to Hideout #4’ on the front side of the tag. And the other side says, ‘Help a puppy.’” Twitchy rubbed his paws together. “It’s for next time he gets lost in the woods and can’t find his way back here on time. I’m gonna make him wear it on BB territory,” the bunny said gleefully, “cuz I’ve never met someone with so little sense of direction. It’s one part of my part of a project for him.”

“Squeak?” said the mouse, sounding surprised.

Twitchy batted a paw at him. “Well of course I like Kyle, Squeak, don’t be silly!” the bunny said lightly. “K is not that bright, and kind of clumsy, but he’s our teammate. And our friend.” The rabbit resumed typing as the mouse scurried down his arm, on to the desk, to examine the blueprints he’d set down there.

“And to think,” Twitchy said, “for a few seconds I thought I might not see any of them again.”

The mouse scampered over Twitchy’s papers while the rabbit surveyed operation plans on his screens from various angles, frowning and chewing on his lip thoughtfully. “You should have seen how happy Dex looked on that rooftop, standing up and doing what he wanted to do. I helped him get to that point! Me! And I knew as soon as I saw it it was a life-changing moment. I told you, Squeak,” the rabbit said, humming, “one perfect day is enough to change a fur.”

The small mouse took two of Twitchy’s fingers in his paws and tugged on them; the bunny tilted his head and looked down at him curiously. “Squeak?” queried the mouse. “Squeak squeak?”

Twitchy snorted. “You and your reverse psychology, Squeak,” he said, shaking his head. “Of course I’m sure I’m talking about my boyfriend. He’s like a new fur. Who else would I be talking about? I’m not wrong you know,” the bunny added distractedly, “this Dex and Rian situation was trouble waiting to happen. It’s a good thing that someone finally did something about that and fixed everything before one of those two did something really stupid. But it’s taken care of. My little coon kit hero is going to get the job of his dreams and have the sort of life he deserves. No more of this depressive feeling second-best stuff. It all happened even faster than I hoped.” The rabbit tilted his head and patted the mouse gently, concluding, “I know it’s never smart to say this, Squeak, but we aren’t on TV, so here goes,” he knocked on his desk with one paw, just in case. “Nothing can go wrong now.”

Next time: Car Trouble! We all know Twitchy shouldn’t have said that, right?

\fEpisode 12: Car Trouble!

The Doberman mechanic assistant stepped out of the gas station garage just in time to see a brown-and-white border collie wearing jeans, a purple fleece shirt with a pocket over the tummy, and a baseball cap sideways on his head slam his hood shut with one paw, and twirl a wrench with the other.

“Hey! What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks, man?” Diesel demanded as the collie, who was wagging his tail, leaned over and replaced the wrench in a toolbox. “Did you just use our stuff to fix your own car?”

“Oh, hi,” Blaze said brightly, turning around and slouching against the hood of his Honda. “I called, but when no one came out I thought maybe you guys forgot about me.” The happy-go-lucky collie grinned at him. “I don’t like it when furs forget about me.”

The Doberman opened and closed his muzzle wordlessly, and shook his head. “I—uh—was eating lunch,” he lied, narrowing his eyes. He had in fact been caught up in what had become a difficult changing situation, and he had knocked something over. But, when he heard noises, he had gotten himself together—and clean—as fast as he could to come out here. “Whatever you did,” Diesel warned him, “it won’t be insured. Don’t expect us to fix it cheap if you have a problem either.”

The collie shrugged. “I’ll live,” he said. “It’s just an oil change. I can handle my own changes.” His ears pricked, and his head tilted. He regarded the Doberman shop worker, who was wearing overalls, curiously.

Diesel’s ears pricked, too. Had he heard a crinkle when the collie reclined against his car? Did he smell talcum powder? The collie straightened up, the Doberman straightened the crooked shoulder straps of his overalls, and for several minutes, the two dogs each moved a couple paces in opposite directions, circling each other suspiciously.

Eventually, the collie reached behind him, through an open car window, and produced a newspaper folded up on his front seat. Maybe this would be his break. Whenever he seemed to be getting close to answers about the fur he was tracking, whoever he was talking to suddenly become cagey.

“Say,” he said, operating on the evidence of a crinkle, “is there any chance you know,” he unfolded the newspaper, and held it up with both paws, thrusting the unfolded front page with the picture of Dex directly into the Doberman’s face, “this guy?”

“That guy!” the Doberman exclaimed, as he stumbled backward and caught himself with one paw against the gas pump, since the collie had opened the newspaper right in front of his muzzle. “Why I know that he’s—” Wait a minute, he caught himself. Who was this dog? If he was a diaperfur, why hadn’t he been recruited? They’d contacted almost everyone active in town. Maybe he was another spy. Or some worse kind of snoop. And Dex, one of the most reserved and private members of the group, had never put up a profile on any fetish sites; before he had recently gotten better control of his regressive episodes, the coon had been wary of playing with anyone besides his closest friends. The Doberman changed his tone abruptly. “Some total stranger guy who I’ve never seen before.”

“Uh huh,” said the collie, nodding and tilting his head as he reached into his pocket. “I’m hearing that a lot.” He produced a card with a phone number and the name ‘Blaze’ scribbled on it. Should that sound familiar? Diesel thought he might have read it somewhere recently. “Well if you never see him again,” the collie said, “tell him I want to talk?”

“I never will,” the assistant mechanic said decisively, but took the card and pocketed it, “but why would you want to?”

“I just want to give credit,” the collie reporter said, “where credit is due. I’ve been trying to find out his name for going on two days but it seems like there’s no easy way to do it. He’s—”

At that moment, smoke came pouring out of the canine mechanic’s office. “Oh, darn it,” exclaimed the Doberman, turning on his tail and dashing to the door. “I thought I took care of that!”

Blaze tossed the paper back into his car, reaching for his cell phone. Why were things catching fire everywhere he went lately? Did the universe have it in for him? “Hey!” the collie shouted. “Be careful, man! Don’t do anything—”

But the dog opened his door and walked right in, much to the collie’s consternation. He stuck his head out in a moment, coughing a little, as he waved a paw at Blaze, who had raised his phone to his ear. “It’s okay,” the Doberman said. “Don’t call anybody!”

The collie’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and he padded over to the door.

“Look, see,” explained Diesel, pointing at a few small, apple and cherry-sized spheres covered with holes, with smoke spewing out of them, that had scattered over the floor amid a haphazard collection of car parts, tools, Hot Wheels, radios, and large electric battery packs. “The stuff inside burns up. We made some to simulate exhaust smoke! My idea. They’re the final touch for a project I’m working on for Ba—err, just a personal project. Industrial-grade smoke bombs! These are just small ones. Perfectly safe: as long as you don’t break them open or drop them into anything flammable. The fuel burns up inside the sphere. Baking soda slows the rate of burning, so that they mainly give off smoke. It’s called a moderant. Basic chemistry.” The Doberman then scowled at him and added, “See, your mechanic really does know more about how things work than you do.”

Blaze blinked, stunned. “Baking soda?” he remarked, as though a puzzle piece had just fallen into place. “You.don’t say.”

The collie turned on his heels and marched back to his car.

“Hey!” Diesel called after him, running out after he had opened the window in back of the office and turned on a fan. He arrived just as the collie was starting to back up. “Listen, man,” the Doberman said into his car window, “you don’t seem like too bad a guy to me. But don’t march around barking questions like that. You might not realize it, but — playing things the way you are, you could be missing your chance to be part of something really big.”

“Listen man back at you,” the collie, tilting his head and flashing a last, cheery smile, said, adding right before he rolled up his window, “I was about to tell you the same thing. Give me a call if your memory suddenly improves.”

Blaze turned on his radio as he pulled out into the street, shaking his head as he made his first turn away from the gas station. “Another closet case. That guy back there and I should just be able to talk to each other without all these hang-ups and weirdnesses. It’s sad that we diaperfurs all have to be so secretive and inhibited,” the collie reporter mused aloud, casting a glance sideways at the story he had written about Dex.

It had gotten more comments on the school paper website than anything else he had written in his almost four years of articles. He remembered one anonymous one that said simply, ‘This made my day. Yes, Virginia, good furs do exist.’ He had booked back to the fire scene to clean up the changing paraphernalia Dex had spilled as soon as he saw the coon off, and scrambled out of there as soon as he heard the fire truck coming, having decided to leave Dex’s secret out of his story. But after a day of skittish, frightened looks and abruptly ended chat sessions from half the furs he tried to talk to about the coon, he was wondering if he had done the right thing. “Things shouldn’t be this way,” he mused.

The collie plugged an earpiece into his cell phone and clicked the speaker on with his free paw as he continued thinking. “I wonder if that would change,” he thought aloud, sketching a verbal outline, “if there was one of us every fur could look up to. Our hero revealed. All around great guy. Rescues people. Stands up to the system. We caught up with him the other day and had a nice chat. And by the way, here’s why our superhero doesn’t wear his underwear outside his pants —secretly, he’s a —,” Blaze cut off, pressed the second dial button on his phone and it began ringing. “Well, buddy,” he said as he waited, “I’ve got a feeling someone who oughta know you’s gonna open up to me.”

“Yo, man, it’s your favorite roommate,” he said into the speaker as soon as the call was picked up. “That geeky kid, your bunny lab partner,” Blaze asked as he continued driving. “Any chance you’ve got a cell number for him?”

**************************

“Your car has a lot of trunk space,” said Rian as he circled around and, bowing to the raccoon cub scout in a gentlemanly fashion, opened the passenger side door for him. “Like your pants. I bet I know what all that storage space is for!”

Both pairs of pants had ended up over the wolf’s shoulders on the way; as he had explained, they would move faster if pants couldn’t get snagged on things. Besides, since the coon had pantsed Rian, it was only fair that he also remove his own. It all seemed fair when Rian explained it, anyway.

The chocolaty coon hopped up into the car, following Rian’s lead, and settled into the passenger seat. He started to reach for the seat belt, thinking that a good scout would always wear one, but the wolf leaned over him, through the side door, and took his wrist, lightly in one paw, lowering it to his hip. “I will get that for you, Kit Raccoon,” Rian said, “You are too little.”

The coon let Rian guide his paws to rest on the edge of his thighs, by his hips, and looked up at the wolf curiously. Rian pulled down the seatbelt, clicked it into place over the raccoon’s waist and, incidentally, his wrists. Then Rian pressed him back into the seat, softly with his free paw, while he pulled the belt as tight as it could go with the other.

The coon fidgeted a bit. “Iss tight,” he said in a not-quite pouty tone, afraid to start any outright whining too quickly.

Rian nodded and said, “It is for your own safety.” The wolf reached over him and tossed both pairs of pants into the back seat. Then, instead of closing the door and going to the driver side, as the coon expected, the wolf hopped in and pulled it shut behind him, scooting his way over the raccoon without ever resting his weight on him. It served to squash Kit back into the seat even deeper and make him feel impossibly small, even though rationally he knew Rian was only able to scoot over him and the armrest that way because the wolf was slight himself. On his way, Rian kept brushing — was it accidentally? — the front of his exposed “BABY” diaper. Since the wolf was thickly padded and shifting quite a bit himself, all the maneuvering in the otherwise silent car filled the small space with crinkling.

After a moment Rian settled comfortably into the driver’s seat. “Waterproof interior,” he remarked in a neutral tone as he looked around. “I definitely approve. Now there is something I noticed about your profile statement, Kit Raccoon. I want to clarify it before we go ahead and order your reward for unmasking a dangerous, cooty-carrying spy.”

The cub scout scrunched his face up. Some of those words were pretty big, but he caught the important one! “Whass my reward?” he asked.

“Something you need really bad, so that you do not get squished back into your seat and choked by your seat belt any more,” Rian remarked casually. “You are so small I almost did not see you there when I got in.”

The coon’s ears pricked. He had a hunch where this was going, but he decided to play dumb. “Whass I gotta do?” he asked. “A mission! Does I haffta fight Swifty again? I won’t let any more of my buddies get sissied,” he said huffily. “Don’t worry, Commander. That fox is going down! I’ll never forgive those girly types for what almost happened to Jason. I’ll fight them forever. I’ve been training hard, and I’m twice as cubby already as last time I gave him the slip. The cubbier I get, the more effectual I am. It’s because I am a cub scout! Not a regular boy scout.” He nodded decisively and tugged at the handkerchief hanging loosely from his collar.

Rian nodded, still keeping his tone level. “Then we better keep you cubby most of the time, huh? That way you will always be ready for action. Kit Raccoon, Ace’s report says that when you were asked about skills, you only listed one. Now that is okay. You have already found out you have more. When Kyle came to us he thought he had no skills besides being a champion piddler. As important as that is—and believe me, Kyle’s pants-piddling abilities are impressive—he has since discovered his other talents. Like you have a talent. I heard the report you radioed on me. And Jax has told me you never get lost in the woods. He said that when you go off with your little buddies you always seem to know the way back to one of the big brother-caretaker-type furs nearby. You are like a brainy Brightheart Raccoon when it comes to directions. But do you remember what you had said to Ace as your one skill back when you were recruited?”

“Driving?” said the coon.

“Kit Raccoon,” said Rian seriously, and the cub scout noted that Rian was only using the full form of his nickname and speaking slowly and without contractions, as though the wolf were giving a lecture to a small, easily confused child, “you did not say, ‘I can drive.’ You said, ‘I have a car.’ Those are different and I think as a good cub scout maybe you chose your words carefully to avoid lying. I know that you have a car because I am sitting in it, and because you opened it for me. That makes me nervous about highway safety though, since you are obviously a baby. I suppose they will sell cars to any fur nowadays. But your reward will help to keep you safe in it.”

The scout cadet just nodded, ready to follow his leader wherever this went. “Is my reward,” he guessed, trying to conceal his mounting excitement, “a car seat?”

“You are very smart!” said Rian, reaching over to pat the strapped-in coon’s head while still looking straight ahead out of the windshield. “Your teammate Ryo said that you are a gifted subby player, very good at figuring out what your big brothers want even without being told. I wonder if you can figure out what I am thinking, though. I am going to think really hard about something that I hear you say in your car all the time. You will use all your subby cubby skills to guess the phrase I am thinking. And if you end up thinking the same thoughts as me along the way, well, then, what we have thought of together, will become true. Does that make sense to you? Until you have guessed, I will be very serious and avoid eye contact, so as not to give you any clues. That is the only way to be absolutely sure that we are both thinking of the same thing, so that it will become true.”

The raccoon in the cub scout uniform—well, the top half of a cub scout uniform—nodded, and cleared his throat, then repeated a series of phrases, pausing after each, as seriously as though he were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “Are we there yet?” he guessed first, his eyes flickering to their corners to eye Rian for signs of the brotherly wolf’s approval after each attempt. “How about now?” A twinkle in his eye, but otherwise the wolf maintained a stoic demeanor. “I need to use the poootty.” Still nothing. “I see a doggy at that house! Hello, doggy! Arf! Arf!” No acknowledgment, and he had even barked a real bark! Maybe if he needled him. “I spy with my little eye a . . . big wolf cub baby’s waistband!” The corner of Rian’s lips curled up in the start of a smile, but he still didn’t speak. This was hard! Maybe he had to test the boundaries of his role. The cub scout coon cleared his throat. “Let’s play license plates!” he announced. “I see California!”

The wolf was visibly stifling a chuckle and fighting his own impulses to cuddle and tickle the cubby scout strapped in next to him until they found out how waterproof his seats really were.

“You need to read to play the license plate game,” Rian explained in a tone of sententious disbelief, as though the cub scout had proposed a manned mission to Mars. “And you are too little to read, Kit Raccoon! Having things read to you by bigger boys is not the same thing as reading them yourself.”

The coon fidgeted and tugged at the handkerchief tied around his neck, and bit his lips pensively. Darn it. Why couldn’t he guess what the wolf was thinking? He wanted his car seat! He wanted to be a helpless backseat driver in his own vehicle, yipping directions to the bigger boys, barely potty-trained themselves, who were at least big enough to drive a team pet like him around.

Yeah, he wanted to be everybody’s pet. He wanted to be changed in his backseat. Rian was right — why did he have a car with so much trunk space, except to always have multiple packs of padding in it? Big packs of big diapers. Big, puffy diapers. And wipes. And powder. And a tote bag. So his big brothers never had to bring supplies for the ride on his account!

He wondered if his trunk was really big enough for all his diapers, though, because suddenly Kit thought he might need large diapers instead of mediums. He thought that because the diaper he was wearing suddenly felt sooo tight. He squirmed under his seat belt and let out a whimper, biting his lip harder. He had to do something in his diapers bad, but his paws were pinned in place, to his hips, by the tightly fastened seat belt. Did Rian know that’s what would happen?

Well of course—this is what always happened when he tried to wear a seatbelt just in the seat like a big kid! He would be way comfier in a car seat. Even if it didn’t fit under his steering wheel and meant he could never drive himself anywhere, and had to always ask bigger boys to drop him off places he had to go when they could, on their way to do grown-up stuff.

“Kit Raccoon,” said the wolf gently, emphasizing the first part of the nickname, “I know that you can do this.” Rian rested a paw on the raccoon’s knee and gave it a gentle squeeze, his eyes sparkling as he felt the coon, pinned in place by the tight shoulder strap of the seatbelt, wriggling around in the seat as he tried to maneuver one of his forepaws closer to his crotch, sliding it up his thigh a little bit at a time. “I know that you want things to be how we are imagining them.”

The wolf rested one paw atop the coon’s small one, arresting its progress, and stroked his knuckles and the back of his paw gently, smiling.

“Guesses you’ve made so far are things that any cub in first or second grade would say,” the wolf hinted, prodding him. “I am sure that when you are driving around with a bigger fur, you say them all the time. All of our Baby Blue boys who drive are already used to ignoring the constant refrain of ‘Are we there yet? How about now?’ when their little bro teammates are in the back seat. You should try driving with Twitchy in the back. Sometimes he will start reciting counts of miles out to three decimal places. But we are talking about your car. Why do you have a car with a waterproof interior? I bet you specifically said that you could only look for cars with that feature when you were shopping for cars. Why is that?”

The wolf ran one of his fingers along the cushion of the rubber-covered seat, beneath the raccoon’s closer thigh, approvingly. The coon started and whined; that tickled the back of his leg! How did Rian know he was ticklish there? His diaper was soooo much tighter all of a sudden. When and how did his Medium get sooooooo tight? Maybe large diapers wouldn’t have enough room. Maybe he needed extra large diapers! I mean, really, he felt like the tapes were about to pop! He had to get his paws to his crotch—to adjust it! Pronto. But they were still pinned to his hips because Rian had fastened his seatbelt so tight. The cub scout wriggled helplessly, letting out a long whine.

Rian reached up for the rearview mirror, and adjusted it with his left paw, so that he could watch the raccoon in the passenger seat through it, and gauge his degree of squirminess that way. The little guy looked just about ready.

“What I am asking is,” the wolf explained in a patient, fraternal tone, “not what any cub says a lot in the car, but what is something that Kit Raccoon says all the time in his car, maybe more than any other boy even on this team, since he is always being driven around?”

The raccoon whimpered. The short, diapered wolf in the front seat next to him suddenly seemed impossibly grown up. But then, he told himself, this was Rian’s car practically! Well, Baby Blue’s car. He was just holding it for them! It’s not like he drove by himself anywhere. Ever. The only things he’d ever think to go shopping for if the team didn’t drag him to other places were toys and ice cream! Besides, he needed a car seat, and that wouldn’t fit under the steering wheel!

And he had to have a car with a waterproof interior: what other kind of vehicle could he ask anyone to drive him in? Asking for a ride in someone else’s car would just be rude. Because of all the times he had an accident and said to the other boys in his car — yes, that was it! He did say that a lot, didn’t he? A glimmer of an idea had come to him! And not a moment too soon, judging by the bulge in front of his diaper. He prayed that it worked.

Eying his super-grown-up looking lupine chauffeur curiously out of the corner of his eyes, the cub scout raccoon whimpered, “I — I  don’t need to use the potty any more.” He gulped and added, for good measure, “Mr. Commander Rian boss wolfy big brother cubsitter sir.”

He inhaled sharply before he had finished, though, because Rian’s paw had slid from his thigh to his crotch and begun patting it gently. The wolf’s eyes sparkled with pleasure, as he watched his blissfully squirmy playmate indirectly, through the rearview mirror, and observed how relieved he instantly looked at the touch of his commanding officer’s paw.

“Exactly that. Your teammate Ryo is right, Kit Raccoon,” the wolf said, in a tone of congratulations. “You,” he gave his first gentle squeeze to the coonie’s well-padded crotch, and instantly felt the diaper reach its maximum degree of tightness under his paw, as he concluded, “are a genius.”

They both felt one of the four tapes pop open — but that would be okay. The scout cadet would need a change in less than fifteen minutes, anyhow. He had a whole lot stored up and his diaper was about to be really flooded—albeit in such a way that leaking ought not to be a problem. In fact, Rian took advantage of the situation to squeeze the diaper loosely around the coon’s shaft, and slide it up and down as he rubbed, feeling the kit quiver.

“I think you have a very big future on this team,” Rian remarked as he stroked, “as a very small raccoon.”

Rian rested his left paw on the steering wheel of the inert car, gripping it tightly to anchor himself as he worked on the coon’s crotch, watching him through the mirror all the while.

The wriggly cub scout managed to whimper, “Do ya need to drive somewhere Mr. Commander Rian sir? Ya can have my keys. They’re back in my pocket in my pants on the back seat.”

The coon exhaled sharply as he felt the first dribble of pre-cum trickle out into the thick, cottony padding pressed tightly all around his very small-feeling cock. “Please take my keys,” he added plaintively. “I’d just looose them. I can’t dwive myself anywhere! I just gotted a car so I’d haff something to bring to the group and for bigger boys to make it worth takin’ care of me! And cuz it would be rude to ask for a ride in anyone else’s car, wiff all th’ accidents I have! I ‘member that now! You helped me remember!! My big brothers can drive it whenever and wherever they need it. That’s always more important than wherever I need to go! They can just drop me off and pick me up places when it’s on their way! Since I’m good at directions, I’ll navigate for them, from my car seat! Drive me somewhere an’ I’ll proof it!” He whimpered, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Taaaake me shopping,” he whined. “I need new cloooothes. I knooow the waaaay to Kits R Us.” He fidgeted and added, plaintively, “Toys ‘R Us miiiiiiiight be near it so we could go there too real quick?”

Rian giggled as he kept pumping away at the coon, who felt himself melting into a full-on climax, as the wolf lightly explained, “Not quite yet, I’m just getting a feel a for your car, Kit Raccoon. I may need to do a few rounds of practice just feeling out all these controls while we talk about your future. You see, little guy—”

Just at the moment he felt the coon’s whole body flopping against the seat he was pinned to and what would be the first very long release into his diaper beginning, Rian broke into a wide grin and concluded, gently, “I’m not used to driving a stick.”

*************************

“If I help you pwactice tomorrow, Princess, will I have to read the boy parts again?” the cross fox, wearing a frilly purple dress, with ribbons tied around his tail and one ear, and a daisy tucked behind the other, whined.

“Probably,” she said gently, before motioning him out the door and adding in a whisper, “You’re good at it.”

“Awww,” Swifty whined, his tail and ears dropping. “That’s what Mama says too.”

Serry patted him on the head and handed the cross fox a teddy bear in a dress matching his, who had been sitting between them with a tea cup during the rehearsals. “You can talk the girliest pillow talk you want with Dolly to make up for it. I think you should go out with the other girls and talk with Dolly in front of them about outfits until naptime, and how unfair it is that you have to be a boy sometimes, until you fall asleep together. Dolly will understand. And she’ll send you girly dreams in return, if you snuggle her enough.”

Swifty nodded, gripping the doll tightly in both paws, and shuffled off quietly. The sissy fox princess left the door cracked open, as was her habit, as she turned back to the vanity table in her “office,” remade into a dressing room with a small computer table. Serafina was known as the academy’s most approachable instructor, and it wasn’t unheard of for students to sneak into her room to talk privately about their relationship or school problems. Serry wasn’t prepared for her next visitor, though, and blinked as she saw, in her mirror, the undersized panda poking her head in, and, unsure of how best to enter, clearing her throat and knocking lightly on the door.

“Lin Lin?” said Serry, raising an eyebrow. “Umm . . . come in . . . I guess.”

“So, fox,” the panda, wearing her Powerpuff Girls sweater, pink sweatpants and jogging shoes, looked around the room awkwardly and padded over to two laundry bags and a laundry hamper filled with old clothes, “I guess it’s true, you’re a lifestyler now. Girls’ clothes full time.”

The fox lowered her script. “Oh,” she said, relaxing, as though the visit suddenly made sense. “You came because you heard I’m giving away stuff. Well, all my boys’ clothes are in those baskets. In fact, that’s almost every piece of outerwear I own without a skirt. Help yourself. Maybe there’s some active wear you can use for your gym classes.”

“Actually,” admitted the panda, “I came to show you this before I send it anywhere. Since it is about you.” She practically threw a clipboard on the vulpine’s vanity table, and then padded over to the hampers. “But I’m definitely raiding your stuff while I’m here.”

“What is this?” Serry stared at the clipboard and raised her eyebrows. “Did you collect all these signatures?”

The panda answered nonchalantly, “I told the girls they didn’t all have to sign it. But I don’t think they believed me when I said it was optional and I wasn’t keeping track and there’d be no consequences if they didn’t. I just decided our students should know the boys’ team isn’t the only one with a member who’s been in the press. And you were in a newspaper recently, that dumb festival story about how you and your director-furson told people you were, umm, transgendered, if that’s what you’re calling yourself now. Whatever the word means in your case. So, unfortunately, you’re all I had to work with.”

“Azzie . . . Muffy. . . Bri . . . Kitty. . . .,” Serry remarked the sissy names of some of the furs whose legal ones she recognized as she turned through the pages carefully. “Where’s this thing going?” she asked. “Am I supposed to sign it? Or do anything?”

“To any place that covers your dumb festival thing,” said the panda as she rummaged through Serry’s hand-me-downs. “And your stupid sponsors. And ex-sponsor, I guess, saying that we won’t be patronizing their cruddy movie nights and bake sales. No, fox, it’s about you, so you shouldn’t sign it. Haven’t you ever seen a petition or heard of a boycott before?” She shook her head. “Look, I knew you’d be too busy mooning over some boy or other to make any kind of response yourself. But I thought you might want to see it before it got sent anywhere, in case you had, I don’t know, changes or anything. It’s not that often that furs in our groups actually take a stand for something. It seems like we should support them if they do.” The panda had assembled a small pile of clothes, and took a break from rummaging to lean on them on one elbow. “This is a lot of stuff. What made you decide to get rid of all of your boy things?”

The sissy fox eyed Lin Lin curiously for a moment. “Well, honestly,” she said, as she began scanning the draft of the statement on the first page, blushing as she recollected, “It was about Rian.”

“Oh,” said the panda gravely, sounding disappointed, but Serry, warming to the subject, barreled ahead without looking up from the paper and without noticing Lin Lin’s pained reaction. She momentarily debated the wisdom of telling the panda anything personal — but her desire to talk about the boyfriend she hadn’t spoken to since the night behind the waterfall quickly won out.

“He was getting to be such a desperate case. He was so nervous about going 24/7 himself and he wanted my support so badly. I felt like I had to do something. We had this date in between the audition and the start of rehearsals, before I quit the stationery store,” Serry related, her cheeks flushing as she did, “and he surprised me by showing up outside the store when I was leaving. He brought me a tin of candy hearts. They were custom ones— I don’t know where the little guy finds all these things — and every one of them was different, they all said things like, ‘For my leading lady,’ and, ‘The course of true love never did stay dry,’ and ‘My pampered princess.’ I said I wanted to save them all. He kind of insisted on feeding them to me during the night, but I made him give me a list of all the inscriptions first. Umm — that all happened later, though — where I meant to start —”

Lin Lin considered making an excuse and bolting for the door, but decided not to abandon her clipboard — instead she distracted herself by sitting up again and moving to the giveaway hamper, which also had some used sporting equipment resting alongside it.

“Anyway,” Serry continued as she read through the letter, pausing to reread most of the sentences since her mind kept wandering back to the memories she recounted, “when he met me, I was wearing street clothes — I mean, my old street clothes, boys’ clothes — and he said ‘Serry?’ in a voice that sounded sooo sad, and I said ‘No fun seeing me like this, huh? Don’t worry, hon. I’ll get changed as soon as we get back to my place, we don’t have to hold paws or anything until I’m pretty.’ Well, we were on the sidewalk, and he hugged me so tight, and kissed me, hard, then he buried his little head in my chest and said, ‘You’re radiant. I’m just sad for the dress you’re not wearing right now. It’s missing its chance to be beautiful.’ Then when we got back to my apartment he scratched and whimpered at the door to my bedroom the whole time I was changing. I decided then I had to do something.”

Lin Lin, who was doing her best to ignore the fox’s sappy reminiscences, stifled her gagging with a pretend cough. “Sounds like he’s pretty far gone,” she said noncommitally.

The fox shook her head and smiled, looking over her shoulder at the years’ worth of male apparel she was discarding. “You have no idea. Poor Rian. That guy,” she said wistfully, “will do the craziest things for love.” Serry tapped a finger against the clipboard thoughtfully. “I hope he’s okay over there. I’ve hardly seen him for days. He didn’t return my call yet about the Dex and Twitchy stuff. He’s got to be worried sick about his friends. I can’t bear to bother him with all this festival stuff. It would put him over the edge. And,” the fox blushed, “I did kind of pull a dirty trick on him with Swifty.”

Lin Lin, sitting by the final laundry bag, turned around and unfurled a tee shirt with both paws, concealing her smirk behind its images of flying, spiky-haired muscled fighters. “This was yours? I mean, you actually wore it?” she asked with a chortle. “Dragonball Z?”

The sissy fox nodded. “My life was different back then. You had to be there, I guess.”

“Well, I’m keeping this,” the panda remarked, folding it up. “For future blackmail material. I can’t let that go unremarked.”

“See,” Serry, softened by talking about her wolfy, giggled involuntarily, and remarked, “I knew you came here with something nefarious up your sleeve.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then Lin Lin dropped the shirt on to her pile and stood up, experimenting with the best way to carry the items to carry she’d collected. “You have missed a lot of meetings lately, fox. Are you up to date with Cassie’s mysterious fallback plan? And this Level 5 stuff? Have you sent anyone there? You haven’t said anything about it.”

The vulpine princess shrugged. “My paws are kind of full between my girls and the play. No, I haven’t. I heard there were a couple problems. But I’m sure Callie and Cassie have everything in paw for the Open House. I trust those two and I’m not going to second guess them this time.”

Lin Lin frowned as she stood awkwardly by the door, a pile of folded clothes tucked under each arm, and a pair of sneakers hanging in her other paw.

“Why?” Serry asked, looking over her shoulder slowly. “What’s going on? Were you hoping I would say something?”

“Of course not,” the panda snapped, shaking her head emphatically. “It’s just — That squirrel Cassie’s been spending so much time with — I think she just hates boys, you know — which is good, I mean, that’s why we’re here, right — but I don’t know what she likes — well, maybe that’s not it. But I really have a bad feeling about her. And the way she drags her recruits in here and then a few of them disappear upstairs. There’s something off. Mark my words, she,” Lin Lin said biting her lip, “is a bad influence.”

“Well,” said Serry, smiling, as she handed the petition back to the panda’s free paw, “give the new girl a little time.”

The door was already swinging shut behind the panda by the time the fox added, quietly, “Maybe she’ll grow on you.”

Next time: Invitations! Some potentially life changing ones are made!

\fEpisode 13: Invitations!

“Hey,” Roger said, slipping into the tent and tussling the cubby wolf, still wearing his camouflage sweatshirt and his replaced sweatpants, behind his ears. “You can do this, little buddy.” The Labrador held up one paw and let a car keychain dangle in them, adding mischievously, “I think you’ve proved that you can talk anyfur into anything.”

With the last day of training wrapping up, Rian sat cross-legged at the foot of the beanbag chairs in the vacated command center, leaning back on it, with two newspapers spread out on the ground in front of him.

“I’m proud of you for wanting to make this call, Rian,” the dog said, crouching low and whispering to him. “Heroes and heroics come in all sizes, you know.”

The little wolf had been slumping lower, inch by inch, for the twenty or so minutes he’d been staring at the papers, and was now resting on about the middle of his back, only his neck and shoulders supported against the chair and raised off the floor. He looked terrified. “I need a few more minutes,” he said. “You can start the huddles without me.”

Roger nodded and, patting him on the head, padded over to the door.

“Sorry, Kit,” Roger said at the tent flap, holding his arm up and shaking his head to the eager cub scout hoping for entry. “Rian’s resting and he asked not to be bothered for a while. Why don’t you ask Byron or Ben to drive you?” The dog added, lowering his voice, “I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to convince Byron to go the toy store.”

“Serry,” Rian whined to himself inside, biting his lip, “I’ve put off doing anything about this long enough. I’ve swum across rivers and climbed up broken fire escapes and been hypnotized and bussed tables for you. Don’t make me do this. Anything else, but not this. No, you wouldn’t—I know you wouldn’t ask me to. But I can’t bear to call you back until I’ve tried to do something—”

His cell phone lay on the ground next to his knees. He read the end of the article about his girlfriend again:

‘Of course we’re sorry the Family Center’s decided so close to our opening to withdraw as one of the sponsors of this year’s Shakespeare festival,’ the director said. ‘But it won’t affect our opening, and we’ll still find a way to keep the festival free.’ He added, however, that private donations and inquiries about sponsorship are always welcome.

“Dex and Serry are so brave,” Rian whimpered, looking at the picture of Dex in the campus newspaper he’d placed next to it, “and for two days I haven’t even been able to do this one thing for my girl.”

He gulped, took a long breath to steady himself, and reached out, his paw trembling, for his phone.

****************************************

“Hello, Dex,” the ferret activist professor on the other side of the computer screen said, grinning at the raccoon.

The raccoon was sitting seiza-style, and, relaxing from a long day of training with his new strike team members, had temporarily replaced the top of his karate uniform with a pale blue tee-shirt for the conversation on Twitchy’s laptop, in a well-lit corner of the changing shed behind Roger’s store. “Well, between Twitch and Jeremy looks like we have this Skype thing figured out. . . . Sorry for asking you to take a personal check. But for the time being I’ve tried to keep your name off anything public, so there wouldn’t be any reprisals while your financial aid decision is still up in the air.”

The raccoon nodded. “Thanks, Profess— I mean, Bill,” he said tentatively. “But are you going to be okay? You said you had big news?”

“Ni hao Dex!” shouted the kid ferret who appeared in the background, hopping up and down and waving his paws in the air. “I’m going to China! I’m going to walk the Great Wall!”

Dex blinked. “What?” the coon asked. “You can’t be serious.” He narrowed his eyes. “Did the board ask you to leave? You can’t leave town right after your big moment. It’s a trick.”

The adult ferret leaned back in his chair and put his stocking feet up on his desk; then, realizing after a moment they were blocking the camera, he lowered them and crossed his arms. “Sun’s rising in the East. It’s a new day. President Tanner suggested I take a summer fact-finding trip to visit recycling sites and consult with the Chinese government’s natural resources people. Don’t worry, Dex,” he added, a glint in his eye, “I know what he’s up to. He’s getting me out of his fur, probably hoping I’ll come back without having accomplished anything or better still having mucked something up before the money’s been redirected, and that will be the end of that. I’m sure there’s an agenda set up that will keep us running around in circles the whole time we’re there. Well,” the ferret bit his lip, “I never cared for these office politics, but I haven’t forgotten how to work them. We’re calling his bluff. This won’t be a straight university business trip, and we won’t follow his itinerary after the first few days. I do know one or two important people in other countries, myself. We’ll have some off-the-books meetings, and we’ll come back with some surprises.”

The coon tilted his head. “We?” he asked.

The ferret blushed. “I got ahead of myself,” he said, reaching for an envelope on his desk. “This is going to be bigger than the Forest Furries party, Dex. For one thing, it won’t be so much about me this time. It will be about a team.” He smiled. “Like your protest field manual says. This trip could be the start of a whole new front in the environmental movement. And, umm—you’re welcome to come, and serve as my assistant from the ground up. I know this might feel a bit sudden, but, Dex—” the ferret looked over his shoulder at the cub the raccoon had rescued from the laboratory fire, shifted in his chair, then looked back into the webcam, tugging at his collar. “You already seem quite indispensable to me. Take some time to think about it. I don’t need an answer just this minute. We leave at the start of July. It’s not tipping my hand too much to say, I hope you’ll say yes.”

The kid ferret in the background had climbed on to the top of a sofa and was holding his arms out, balancing unsteadily. “You have to come, Dex!” he shouted without looking at the webcam. “It will be super-exciting! Things could be exploding and stuff!”

The raccoon looked down at his footpaws. In high school he had dreamed about doing something like this. But now . . . A trip to a non-English-speaking country? Could he really manage that on his own without exposing his incontinence? Or should he tell them about it? No way. He couldn’t. He was crazy to be considering either option. Then again, eighteen months ago even going camping had seemed impossible. Maybe . . . He felt a little queasy, though, as he suddenly remembered an invitation he’d made the night of Rian’s 24/7 party. “I might have to do something in July,” he said cautiously. “I’ll check and let you know. I know the answer to this is probably no, but, is it possible I could bring someone, like for part of it?”

The ferret blinked. “Umm, I don’t know how much space we’ll have, Dex, or how I could justify paying for that — unless your friend speaks Chinese. That would be a plus.”

The raccoon chuckled and shook his head, as though reminded of a fond memory he’d almost forgotten. “Lightning would strike twice before that happened again,” he said.

“Did I say something funny?” the adult rodent asked.

“Kind of,” Dex said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Well, if it helps you make up your mind,” the ferret said, holding the envelope up to the web cam, “you got your first piece of fan mail. This was in my mailbox with your name on it. Umm, Jeremy opened it and read it—sorry about that.”

Dex frowned. “I thought you said no one there knew my name?”

The ferret activist unfolded the note and held it up to the camera. “Sounds like someone who already knows you from somewhere else. Look familiar?”

The coon squinted at the screen. There were green ice cream stains at the edges of the yellow legal paper, and a simple, hastily scrawled note. “From one loser to another,” Dex read. “Good luck, kid.” That was it.

The coon shrugged. “I’ve never seen that pawscript before in my life. No idea who would have written that.”

The ferret folded the note back up and replaced it. “Well,” he said paternally, “usually that’s the case with the hate mail. There’ll be a lot of that, too; it’s fair to warn you.”

***********************************

“This is it, boys,” Roger was saying to the group of recruits assembled around his campfire, toasting hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks. Twitchy would eat the hot dogs topped with marshmallows; Roger would eat the marshmallows off the end of his sticks; and the more gastronomically sophisticated would reserve the marshmallows for S’mores. “Everything we’ve been getting ready for. T minus zero tomorrow. We mobilize at exactly the same time as the sissies’ Open House kick-off.”

A jumble of plastic army figures were scattered around the campsite in a chaotic jumble around the dog.

“I’m nervous,” said the giraffe. “I know we’ve practiced a dozen different ways, but . . . I still don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do and how it all fits together. There are so many furs. And there’s so much that could go wrong. What if it just ends up a big mess? After all this work?”

The dog wagged his tail. “Hold on for the ride and do what comes naturally!” he said, rising on to his knees to put a paw on the tall fur’s shoulder sympathetically. “Don’t overthink it! Listen, Steven,” he said, gesturing to the campfires sparkling around the campsite, where Dex, Ace, Jax, and Twitchy were delivering similar pep talks and answering final questions to other groups, “I don’t plan things down to the minute like girls do.” He pronounced the g-word distastefully. “But each and every one of you is here for a reason. If you chose to come here — and you’re still here, after all these days — then you belong here! We don’t take furs into this group casually. And finding good furs is the important thing. If you have good pack members, no matter how soggy, or droopy — or sticky —” he at the very exposed cloth flap poking out of the giraffe’s pants, “things get — as long as we all do our best for each other along the way  — they have a way of working out well enough, even if it seems like we aren’t all on the same page about everything a lot of the time. If you care about the pack, the pack will take care of you. The group’s smarter than any of us, individually.” The Labrador nodded and grinned up at him. “I’ve always found that to be true,” he said reassuringly, adding in a confidential tone, “Don’t tell too many furs, though. It’s a dog secret.”

The rabbit at one of the campfires, a small mouse on his shoulder, ducked off to the side to have a private conversation with one of his team members, while Kyle hopped up and temporarily took over the support group debriefing.

“What kind of questions?” Twitchy asked the Doberman in hushed tones, as he eyed the reporter’s card in his paw curiously.

“I don’t know, boss,” the dog mechanic said, shrugging. “He was really just fishing for a name, I think. I didn’t give up anything. He might have just wanted to say thanks for something? I’ve never really even talked to Dex, but he’s your boyfriend, so I thought you might know more about it.”

“Squeak?” queried Squeak into one of Twitchy’s ears.

The bunny flicked that ear and put a paw on the Doberman’s shoulder. “You did good,” he said, chewing his lip curiously. “I’ll look into this before it causes any trouble for the group.”

“Check it out,” Ace whispered as he crouched behind Jax while his own boys munched on S’mores and pointed to a few fires over to a Dalmatian fumbling with two Lego playset models, one resting unsteadily on each flat palm. “Kyle’s running a unit.”

The Dalmatian looked terrified for a moment, until a malamute, arriving late from work and slipping into the group behind him, caught him before he fell. The clumsy Dalmatian relaxed, breathing a long sigh of relief, and looked up into Byron’s muzzle — and in doing so, dropped one of the two models, which broke into several of its composite blocks around his feet.

“That’s strange. It’s not like Twitchy to turn over a briefing to anyone,” The tracking hound’s eyes slid sideways as the tracking hound whispered back, an edge in his voice, “Where did Twitch go?”

Ace shrugged, still basking in the afterglow of a rough-and-tumble play day and not picking up on his boyfriend’s tone. “Just talking to someone. The bigger question my boys are all asking,” the lynx said, patting his boyfriend on the shoulder, “is where Rian’s been all night.”

*************************************

The wolf’s diapers were squishing audibly as he fidgeted on the floor. The sweatpants he was wearing were soaked from the waist down to their knees by the time he heard voices outside the tent flap, and, after a brief conversation, a familiar head poked inside.

“Yo,” the coon said, padding over to the beanbag chairs and dropping a paper bag next to Rian. “I heard you were holed up in here. But I can come in, right, puddles?”

“Dex!” exclaimed Rian, brightening, and settling back into a mix of relief and feigned cheerfulness, stuck his tongue out and sniffed at the bag. “You’re one to talk. Bet your uniform didn’t come yellow. What is that girly-smelling stuff?”

“Chunks of scented herbal soap, coarse and grainy for scrubbing,” the coon explained. “I use them for my, umm, shaved area. I thought you might want some too.” He eyed the wolf suspiciously. “You have been trimming every day, right, diaperboy?”

Rian fidgeted and didn’t answer. The truth is trimming his diaper area was something Serry had been helping with, and the two lovers were still officially fighting. “You know, Dex,” Rian said, looking up out of the top of his eyes at his friend, “I love my crinkles and my life has been a million times better and more full of love for everybody since I decided to spend it padded, buuuut it’s true what I told people, well, mostly, I mean it’s true that I never would have had the guts to go 24/7, if I didn’t know you.”

“That’s old news,” Dex said, patting Rian’s head. “Everything okay?” he asked, and the little wolf grabbed one of Dex’s paws in both of his.

“But I’m saying it because once again, Dex,” Rian said seriously, hugging Dex around the waist and rubbing his head against the raccoon’s diaper area, feeling the pillowy cloth underneath his karate pants, “you’ve given me the courage to do something very important.” The wolf took a long breath, starting to relax, but still holding on to his friend’s waist. “I had a long talk with my dad. I think he’s going to write a check to Serry’s Shakespeare festival.”

Rian couldn’t see his friend’s muzzle, but Dex, who had been chipper, looked stunned. “You went to your dad? Who you’ve barely spoken to in years? For her?” The raccoon dropped on to the beanbag chair Rian was leaning against as though he’d been punched in the stomach.

His voice echoed in his own ears like he was hearing himself from a thousand miles away. “This isn’t one of your games. You two are really serious—like, forever serious—aren’t you?” He let out a long sigh, and admitted, “I don’t get it.” He shifted in his diaper awkwardly and looked down at it, feeling inadequate. “Is she that good at—I mean, is it about sex, or—”

Rian smiled dreamily, warming to a chance to talk about his favorite subject. “No—well, not oooonly,” he said, sniffling and releasing Dex to wipe his nose with the back of one paw. “I’m a better fur when I’m with Serry, Dex,” Rian said. “I don’t want to be whiny and pathetic like this.” He gestured at the discarded cell phone. “This is part of my story, but it’s not who I am or what I want my life to be about, you know? She makes me more the fur I want to be. We’re different for being together. Things just click, and all of a sudden we’re better furs, we can do things as partners that we couldn’t do alone.” His eyes were glistening and he seemed newly confident as he talked. “But why am I telling you this?” he asked, pressing both forepaws against the floor to straighten himself up from his slouch. “That’s how you feel about being with Twitchy, isn’t it, rescue ranger?”

Dex frowned and changed the subject. “Are there strings attached to this donation?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” Rian said, sloshing slightly. “I need to tell you. I’m sorry, Dex. I don’t think I’ll be spending the Fourth of July with you and your folks after all. I need to go out there and thank him in the fur. Let him see how I’m doing for a few days. I think it’s better to do it on a big holiday, when Spence and other furs will be around, and there will be things going on.” The wolf smiled uneasily. “I know I haven’t really seen my dad since I felt like I was out from under his thumb, but it’s only three or four days. No matter what he says I’m not going to slip into Oslo or Copenhagen or—” the wolf waved a paw in a circle as he fumbled for the right word.

“Stockholm syndrome,” said Dex, correcting his friend automatically. “I don’t want to see you feeling freakish,” he mused, “and come back acting not like my buddy. I’d still feel like a misfit toy if not for you.”

“I mean, I’m nervous of course,” continued Rian, rambling, “and I don’t want to worry Serry by telling her about it cuz that will be such a busy weekend for her play, and I’ll probably have to do it without my security blanket, I mean, security undies, unless I’m reaaaallly careful, but still it’s not like— I’ll be okay. I’ll just tell myself this trip,” he took a long breath, “isn’t something bad. It’s a chance that I hoped for — a chance for me to make an ultimate expression of love — to do something real for the fur I care about so much.”

Dex stared off into the wall of the tent blankly and took a long breath of his own, pondering what Rian had just said.

“I was just debating not going home for the Fourth of July anyway. If you want,” the coon said quietly, “I’ll go with you.”

Next time: T minus zero! The pink team’s Open House—and Roger’s counteroffensive—kick off!

\fEpisode 14: Ultimate Technique Revealed: Roger’s Attack!

The sun rose slowly, and Rian, who had woken up first, was padding around the campsite, smiling down at the slumbering boys sprawled across each other in furpiles of various sizes, patting each on the head, and kissing their foreheads lightly.

He had moved up onto the slope of the hill overlooking the small meadow where yesterday’s training exercises had been held, and dozed off himself, against a tree.

He woke up from his long nap with a jolt, though — when he felt a paw rest on his shoulder — and smelled perfume! The wolf leapt up and whirled around, raising both paws defensively, and a giggling sissy fox hopped backwards away from him.

Rian’s eyes narrowed. This was bad. At least they hadn’t relocated to the main operation site yet. But they were moving now. The groups of boys below were already breaking into cells and moving out. Roger had gone on ahead with the first batch. A pink student in their midst, and he didn’t have a weapon! What if she was transmitting their heading? What if she followed them to the main operation site? What if she wasn’t the only one? The short wolf raised a paw warningly, taking a minute to recall the trainee’s name. “Brianna, isn’t it?” he said cautiously. “How did you get back here?”

The crossdressing fox blushed. “You remembered!” the sissy student exclaimed, evidently pleased. She reached into the loose folds of the negligee slip she was wearing over her pink plastic panties and produced a doily Valentine, which she held out to him. “Don’t worry, Mr. Rian! I’m alone! I came here on secret. Lady Lin Lin would be horrified if she knew you were being invited. The invitations aren’t supposed to be seen too far in advance by anyone who won’t keep them secret until the Open House,” the sissy fox said quickly, then added, in an excited whisper, shaking the Valentine, “But it is up to each of us who they’re for. No one else has anything to say about it. That part’s very important. The first round are going out this morning. It’s beginning!”

The wolf scratched his head with one paw and took the card in the other, wrinkling his nose distastefully at the perfume it contained, and, holding the card loosely in one paw, flipped it open, his eyes flickering from the message inside up to the sissy fox trainee, who shifted her weight from one footpaw to the other, looking nervous.

“Ummmmmmmmmmmmm,” Rian said for a long moment, blinking, and reading the card again to make sure he understood what was happening correctly. “I can’t go to a dance with you, Bri,” he explained awkwardly, straightening the camouflage top that only hung down to his belly button, leaving his double, slightly soggy overnight diapers exposed. “I have a girlfriend. And I can’t do anything like that time I subbed at the academy with you again. I’m sorry. Serry and I are going steady now, you see.”

The sissy fox trainee swished her tail and her ears drooped. “Okay, Mr. Rian,” she said quietly. In truth, she’d expected this; that’s why she’d gotten up at the crack of dawn to deliver her first card early. “I thought you’d say that. But I just wanted to say,” she said, looking nervous, “you were a great top. I didn’t shower afterward until Lady Lin Lin made me.”

Rian looked thoroughly confused. “Thanks?” he said experimentally. Would that make her leave? She still fidgeted there for a moment.

“Would it be cheating,” the fox in a dress asked cautiously, “if you just did one long piddle into another girl’s diaper and sent her away? So I can wear that diaper until the end of the day? I prooooomise,” she said, negotiating shrewdly, “I’ll never ask again and I’ll keep everything about this campsite secret if you do.” The fox held out both paws so he could see them, and made a motion over her chest with one of them. “Cross my heart.”

Rian shot her an exasperated look and started back to camp to retrieve his cell phone, rolling his eyes.

“Let me text Serry and check,” he said, annoyed.

**************************************

“And she gave me this,” said Rian, sounding horrified, as he dropped the scented doily card on to the picnic changing table in the middle of the central tent of the main operation site, and pointed at it, whimpering fearfully. “She caught me when boys had already started moving here and said it’s starting now! ‘It’s just beginning!’ That’s what she said! There will be multiple waves of attack! They’re bringing furs back there as soon as they catch them! It’s some kind of a sissy activation code! An operation protocol! It sounds,” he shuddered, “awful. Whatever they’re up to, it’s twice as bad as we thought.”

Roger picked up the card and tilted his head sideways, regarding it curiously as he opened it. “Dear Rian,” he read, then corrected himself, with a chuckle, “Sorry, Dear Mr. Rian — you are cordially invited to Empress Calliope’s. . . bla bla bla . . .Academy for Special Boys’ first annual semiformal . . . bla bla . . .” Roger skipped to the bottom of the card, and blinked as he read the conclusion, “Sadie Hawkins dance?”

“Aaarggggh!” the little wolf exclaimed, flopping back into a conference chair. “I feel the cooties flying off the paper just hearing about it. Is it like Sadie-ism? What kind of a terrible, awful, sissifying, repressive—”

His fellow Circle members, Dex and Twitchy, who had gathered for this emergency session shortly before the final attack began, looked at each other out of the corner of their eyes. The small mouse on Twitch’s shoulder squeaked and clapped a paw to his forehead.

“You don’t know what a Sadie Hawkins dance is?” exclaimed Twitchy in disbelief, crossing his arms and looking huffy. “Some social chair you are.”

“Whaaaat is it?” Rian whined, hugging himself and shivering. “Something terrible? Is Sadie Hawkins Dance the name of a horror movie? Or a book where people go to a dance and are zombified? Or a brainwashing—”

Roger patted the wolf’s head. “Girls ask guys,” he explained quickly, sounding mildly intrigued. “Well, this fight could get interesting. Maybe I underestimated you, sis.”

Dex, who had been sitting seiza-style next to Twitchy, looked up from the floor at Rian, biting his lip to stifle a chuckle. “I also cannot believe that you didn’t know that,” the wolf’s best friend admitted.

“I went to boys’ schools!” the wolf wailed apologetically.

**************************************

“Annnnnnnnd cooooontact!” shouted Ace, unslinging his paintball gun and charging into the woods, his tracking hound boyfriend and their malamute lieutenant at his side.

The two Scouts hopped back as soon as they felt the traps spring inches in front of them and fly up, empty, landing on their heels and raising their weapons defensively; Byron, whose foot was caught in a third rope noose, was yanked up into the air, flailing around with both paws.

The panda who had been behind a tree nearby watching them ford the river was facing them immediately, holding a dodge ball in one paw. Her eyes darted around the clearing. A gray squirrel in a white tennis shirt and skirt dropped from the treetops and landed softly on both footpaws next to her.

“Flipper and the Rainbow Scouts?” Lin Lin remarked, surveying the trio. “You’re the first wave? Well, this shouldn’t take long.”

“Ouch,” said Jax, frowning, as the Scouts crouched next to each other in a defensive position. The lynx in the safari outfit muttered something to himself grouchily.

“See,” the panda explained, looking up to the taller squirrel, “you need to know things about people to insult them effectively, that’s all I’m saying.” Then she turned her attention back to her blue team opponents. “Come on, if this is a strike team, where’s Dex—I mean, where are the ones who really matter?” Lin Lin asked. “Cooperate and we’ll go easy on you.”

Shelley just shook her head. “You two are really dressed like Boy Scouts,” she said, in disbelief.

Lin Lin elbowed the squirrel’s leg. “I told you they would be dressed like Boy Scouts. I told you all about them.”

The malamute meanwhile, had grabbed on to the rope snare he was swinging in and pulling himself up with both paws to stop the dangling.

Shelley shrugged. “You were probably being boring at the time,” the squirrel answered, “and if that was the case I woulda stopped listening, peaches. I told you I don’t care about ‘knowing’ any of these weirdos, on their team or yours. I don’t want to spend more time than I have to for this contract job with furs who have no interests besides their weird fetishes. But now I’m a bit miffed. Scouts ought to know better than to take a crowd of furs crashing through these woods. Have a little respect for nature. Stand back from it and let it be. There’s a family of whippoorwills living here for goodness’ sake. You wouldn’t know but those happen to be rare song—”

The tracking hound wearing the badge-covered scout sash narrowed his eyes and glared up at her, interrupting, “Nature’s meant to be enjoyed,” said the tracking hound seriously, “responsibly. Try to tell furs to respect it who never spend time outdoors. What’s the point in that? And you’d think I’d know about the whippoorwills,” he continued smugly. “I’m the one who found their nest. Saw the father guarding it. It was a beautiful thing.”

“Found their nest?” Shelley narrowed her eyes and leaned on one paw against a tree. “Jax?” she said curiously. “Is that you, sugar plum?”

“I told you his name was Jax,” said an exasperated Lin Lin, kicking her shin.

The squirrel ignored the kick, seemingly unaffected by the impact, and shrugged, “I thought you said Jack,” she said without looking down at Lin Lin.

The tracking hound’s ears twitched. “Respect for nature—whippoorwills,” he repeated, then asked, a note of surprise creeping into his voice, “Shelley?”

“Okay, what in blazes,” exclaimed the lynx, standing up and looking around the assembled group of furs warily, and ticking off questions on the paw that wasn’t brandishing a paintball gun, “who are you? Panda—your team is throwing new furs in the mix? Now?”

Lin Lin rolled her eyes and remarked, sympathetically, “That’s what I said . . .”

The lynx continued ticking off questions, punctuating each with a shake of his paintball gun, “Why haven’t I heard of you? How do you know my boyfriend? And are you a really good cross-dresser or a—”

The athletic squirrel rolled her eyes, “I’m the genuine article, litterless kitty. Girl since day one and girl till I die.”

“Oh thank goodness,” said the lynx, visibly relieved, resting a paw on the brown-and-black tracking hound’s head protectively as he relaxed. “For a second I was afraid Jax might have dated you.”

A dodge ball thudded into the distracted lynx and sent him down onto his rear.

“Enough chitchat,” Lin Lin snapped as he recovered. “Let’s finish this. Time to take care of you losers and get back to the soon-to-be girls all tied up at your real attack site.”

“What do you mean?” Jax asked nervously, as the lynx got back on his feet, “the real attack site?”

Lin Lin waved one paw at them dismissively. “You stooges might want to make Distraction Central more convincing next time by bringing more than three furs. We found your tunnels under the academy,” she said contemptuously. “As we speak, your little cub scouts are marching into a trap.”

“Oh,” repeated Jax placidly, “they found our tunnels under the academy, Ace.”

“Well,” said the lynx flatly, shrugging, “might as well surrender. It’s all over now.”

Lin Lin frowned. “You don’t look worried,” she said, a little perturbed. “If there are more of you coming through the woods, we’ve got them covered too. Besides us two, you’re in range of a multi-purpose catapult as soon as you come out of the woods near the building. You aren’t going to like some of the stuff it launches. You aren’t going anywhere near the academy. Not unless you curtsy and ask nice, anyway.”

“Okay,” said the hound dog. “Just hope you don’t end up too lonely over there.”

The squirrel was regarding them all with a mix of curiosity and disbelief. Lin Lin shook her head. “You three are a distraction, right?” she said, starting to sound a little concerned. “There is another attack?”

The malamute, who had been sawing away at the snare with a Swiss army knife once he had steadied himself, finally dropped to the ground, landing in a bundle next to Ace.

“Can I do it?” he whined from the ground.

“Take it away, puppy,” said the lynx encouragingly.

“We’re just here,” announced the burly black-and-white dog, holding up a pale blue envelope from his prostrate position, “to deliver a message!”

Lin Lin shook her head and snatched it from him, ripping it open and throwing the envelope back at them as she yanked the paper out and unfolded it. The panda did a double take.

“You cannot be serious. That’s what all these ridiculous drills and operation talk by you idiots has been about?!” she exclaimed in disbelief. “You’re throwing a party?”

“Correction,” said Byron, still on his back, holding one paw up into the air, “we’re throwing the party!”

**********************************************

Rian stood as guard at the entrance to Roger’s main operation site, wearing a ship captain’s hat, the top of a sailor suit, and pale blue diapers, trying to keep himself from bouncing at the gate as he greeted the furs still waiting in line to get in.

“Remember!” he announced, holding a paw up to his own forehead. “Gotta be at least this big to enter! And noooo holding spots! Potty breaks most definitely lose your place in line!”

That rule was, in fact, the entire purpose of making furs stand in line. Too many of the boys, in Rian’s opinion, took fifteen or twenty minutes of anxious pacing before they finally let go and piddled like babies, and Roger and Rian had been brainstorming ways to ensure those ones still felt sufficiently relaxed when the party began.

Just to be safe, juice boxes were being given out at the start of line for cubs, and iced tea for caretakers, both spiked with mild diuretics. Rian was also quite unnecessarily making furs wait five minutes in between each admission.

A beaver a little shorter than the shrimpy wolf was standing a few furs back in line and knitting his paws together in worry. His anxiety about whether he’d even get in led him to piddle into the front of his swim diapers and feel his pants warm up the very moment he came up to the wolf.

Rian grinned to see the shorter fur looking nervous. The wolf crouched down on his knees to make himself shorter and traced an imaginary line from his forehead to the top of the beaver’s head with his paws. “Whew!” Rian said, in mock surprise, and wiped his forehead with the back of one paw. “You’re juuuuuust big enough! Wow, sooooo big all of a sudden!” he declared and the worried beaver breathed a sigh of relief. Rian patted his bottom, giving the thick cushioning on his rear a hearty squeeze before sending him on in with a light slap on his rear. “You’ll be in Pull-Ups in no time, Sammy!”

Inside, the beaver’s eyes widened as, feeling very small, he scoped out Roger’s fully finished main operation site.

He ran over to a long, looping water slide where Ryo, holding the spot for Byron until his trio got back, stood at the top with a lifeguard whistle hanging around his neck. It was no ordinary water slide — it snaked around an entire section of the abandoned campground, making about four loops, and furs were riding down it in inner tubes — and, of course, swim diapers, which would be checked both at the top and bottom of the slide by one of the lifeguard assistants, and changed if necessary.

“Oh, go back one more time!” Roger urged one dizzy cub stumbling out of the whirling above ground whirlpool it emptied into, and propelling him toward the ladder, sticking his tongue out at him, “you don’t look one bit wrinkled yet!”

The entire site was covered with equipment Roger had been collecting or received on loan from furs who had been in and out of one of the incarnations of his boys’ club, or who knew furs who had, and who had been called on to make an offering — to the first day of Baby Blue’s first annual start of summer members-only weekend-long play-all-day party.

The one donation he’d adamantly refused, of course, was a set of Port-A-Potties. Instead plentiful diaper pails and buckets of cleaning fluid were scattered around the playsite in free corners, and the Baby Blue team members running the site would each be checking them in shifts to spray around air freshener and transfer their contents to vaccuum-sealed laundry bags tossed in the back of a car or to a rented Dumpster at the edge of the woods that would be driven to the city dump when everything was over.

In the center of the complex, Kyle the Dalmatian wore a white apron and cap, manning an old-fashioned soda fountain on loan from the local ice cream parlor.

A raccoon cub scout approached the counter cautiously. It had been artificially elevated by being placed on cinder blocks, so that furs who hopped up onto the tall stools to reach the top of the counter wouldn’t be able to touch the ground with their footpaws while they were drinking thseir sodas.

The coon scout hopped up, trying to catch the top of the counter with both paws so he could hoist himself up onto the stools. Seeing him struggle, Kyle reached over the counter, and, taking the slight coon under the armpits, hoisted him up and settled him on to the school.

“Howdy, scout. Do you want a surprise?” the Dalmatian asked. Kyle was running an open bar, randomly mixing sodas, the way only kits did at soda fountains, so unless you ordered really specifically, you could bet your Coke would have root beer, Sprite, and maybe vanilla syrup in it. Some special selections were on display in a bottle rack behind him — sparkling grape juice of various vintages — kids’ beer, a non-alcoholic foamy, guarana soda for Japanese kits that simulated the foaminess of beer — a milky drink called calpico — and well, most of the non-alcoholic, sugar-loaded kids’ drinks one could think of.

“I want a Roy Rogers,” the traditionalist cub scout announced, tugging at his kerchief.

“There’s an age restriction on that one,” Kyle said, raising an eyebrow, or rather raising the black spot that was above the Dalmatian’s eye. “I’ll need to see some ID.”

Kit Raccoon unfastened his belt and wriggled around on his stool until his pants fell onto the ground underneath them, then stood up, unsteadily, on the metal ring elevated a foot or so up from around the base of the stool. The cub scout pointed down to the crinkly Bambino diaper he was wearing, labeled “Baby.” “This is all I’ve got,” he said hopefully.

“That’ll do,” said the Dalmatian cheerily, patting his head. “Not that I doubted! But rules are rules. If you keep it out, I won’t have to ask next time!”

At an adjoining snack booth, chocolate-covered grasshoppers, lollipops with insects inside them, crispy fried worms, and various other kinds of gross-out foods from around the world were being offered to the adventurous cubs — or to big brother types in search of ways to prove their toughness — alongside the usual selections of licorice, popcorn, and cotton candy (although only pale blue cotton candy was being served).

Ben the leonine combat trainee, on a break from his main activity, was munching on a small plate of chocolate-covered a grasshoppers a mink he’d changed minutes ago looked up at the incredibly tough-seeming lion wide-eyed.

“Mmmm, bugs,” Ben mumbled and held out the plate to the mink. “I think you should try one, Roddy! Open wide!”

The mustelid stumbled backwards, falling on to his padded rear, and quivered fearfully, shaking his head, and waving both paws.

Around the perimeter of the abandoned campground, boys were running in sweeping circles flying kites and banners under a giraffe’s direction. “Follow me, kids! Veer left!” Steven, who could see all the tree branches and the heading of the kites better than any fur, shouted, giggling, as he ran alongside one of the invariably shorter kits, directing the aerial traffic with his long arms, “Don’t let the trees getcha!”

On a grassy field, boys were checking out the Doberman’s refitted Power Wheels, equipped with radios, batteries that let them run up to 15 miles an hour, and rubber bumpers on all four sides. Some were scrunching themselves into the small compartments and driving with lips bit and expressions of the utmost seriousness. Others were wantonly crashing into each other and tumbling out of the cub-sized bumper cars, laughing and snuggling up to each other after the harmless collisions.

“They’re not too roomy are they?” asked an otter waiting for a vehicle to become available.

“Nope,” said the dog mechanic in overalls at the edge of the track, unsnapping the visitor’s pants snap and unzipping his fly, watching his pants fall to his ankles. “Those won’t fit, that’s for sure.”

In small fighting rings nearby, mechanically minded furs were being invited to assemble their own battle-bots, but most of the participating cubs found themselves being thrashed by one of Squeak’s three fighters, which the tiny mouse was manning simultaneously, hopping back and forth from one controller to another and running multiple matches, squeaking up a storm.

At a pair of picnic tables behind him, Twitchy, his goggles perched defiantly on his forehead, was leading one of his first workshops on making volcanoes, and hopping over the lava spills that flowed out onto the ground to pat the participants’ heads and check their diapers. The cubs at his table didn’t know it yet that the workshop would lead directly into one on making volcano sundaes with crazily mismatched toppings like bananas and gummy worms — provided the rabbit saw signs of intense concentration on their science fair work.

That meant it would be open only to furs who’d been absorbed enough in their chemistry project that they’d used their diapers. The others would get booted and told to come back for the next workshop and work harder for their ice cream. Joint prizes — packs of diapers and related accessories from the boys’ changing tent, mainly — would be given both to the most impressive volcano builder and to the architect of what was voted the craziest sundae in each contingent.

Nearby, the first of Dex’s combat for cubs drills was starting, and furs were squirting baby bottles at each other as they clambered up and down a jungle gym, negotiating high chairs and other nursery obstacles as they tried to rescue a teammate stuck beneath the jungle gym’s trap door, before he was too badly in need of a change. The captive was guarded this round, by Dex, and next round, by Ben or another of his trainees. It didn’t sound that hard, of course, except for two things. First, this being a cub mission, it had to be conducted entirely on all fours, and anyfur breaking that rule would be booted from the field as swiftly as someone using his forepaws in soccer. Second, the jungle gym was surrounded on all four sides by open-walled bounce castles, and cubs hoping to get to it had to crawl over one of their inflated plastic platforms while Dex and his lieutenants, threw pillows at them from the jungle gym above.

All around the jungle gym and bounce castle complex, small clusters of curious furs who had grabbed one of several copies of the newspaper article about Dex’s heroism being circulated around the playsite whispered to each other and pointed up at the coon, eager to meet him. By the time the night was over, Dex would have so many offers of changing assistance that even a cub who took his shoes and socks off wouldn’t be able to count them all. When he went on his first break, he’d find himself moderating a series of pouty disputes between little furs ardently making protests like, “I volunteered to change him first!”, “I’ll use the most powder, Dex!”, “Deeex, pick me, I’ll do it when you’re messy, too!”, or “Noooo meeeeee, I’ll wash it in the river right now with my paws and hang it up to dry on the jungle gym, Dex, I won’t put it in a diaper pail!” For the entire evening he spent at the playsite, the incontinent coon so practiced at changing his own diapers wouldn’t have to change himself once that night. He’d have trouble getting a quick change, though since often he would be coordinating between three or four little helpers fumbling with safety pins and powder.

Rian met the three returning furs who bypassed the line near the entrance, and put up a “Hold it just a minute—or better yet, don’t” sign on the small table he had been leaning on with his guest list. He escorted the messengers directly to the group’s leader, and all five scuttled into the picnic table in the transparent central tent. “How’d it go?” Roger asked.

Byron yanked a ribbon out of his ear and stomped it under his foot. “They took the message back to the academy,” the malamute reported, grinding his heel hard against one of the perfume-scented decorations that the three messengers had been told to wear if they expected safe passage back. “We didn’t get hit too bad.”

“Hey, don’t worry,” Roger said, tucking the malamute’s chin, “you three were handpicked to deliver the message for your high cooty immunity. As soon as we’re done you go straight on the waterslide. You’ll wash it off in no time.”

“Just don’t take too long,” warned Ace. “I’ve got to get safari adventure running before all the diapers with little lions on them are gone.”

Roger opened his laptop and, opening up a control panel, connected it to the video cameras Twitchy had set up around the main operation site, making sure they were streaming views to several open windows on his computer.

Then he opened a channel. On the other end of a video chat window, he saw his sister, a leopardess in a Victorian dressing gown glowering at him. “I was told,” said Calliope, snapping an oriental silk fan shut and tapping it against her claws, “that you had a message for everyone in our group. I’m only playing along, brother, because there’s been so much gossip here about what you’re recruiting for. I want to show the girls I’m not frightened by this ridiculous bluff, and that they can enjoy the Open House without looking over their shoulders.”

The Newfoundland standing next to her looked distressed. “Don’t do this, mistress,” Cassie was protesting. “There’s no need! There won’t be a manned attack either way. I’m sure he won’t risk sending his boys in now that he’s heard Shelley is here! I think everything will be fine if we just ignore them.”

Calliope flicked the fan at her.

Roger held up one finger and his tail began wagging as he flopped down into his wheeled command chair. “First,” the Labrador said, holding up the invitation Rian had delivered, “I want to give you a last chance to explain what’s going on over there. What’s Level 5? And what’s the squirrel gone squirrely doing in town? I’m sure we’ve,” he caught sight of Ben, who had delivered them disturbing intel from the academy dungeons, on one of the monitors and concluded, vaguely, “heard the same rumors.”

“How I run my school is none of your business,” said the unflappable leopardess curtly. “And you never should have heard about Level 5. I assume you’ve been poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. As usual. But the gossip you’re spreading has been useful to me these past few weeks, so I didn’t think it was essential or prudent to correct it.”

“Okay, sis,” said Roger, shrugging, “Then you give me no choice. But I want to be sure you understand the terms first.”

Calliope rolled her eyes and bent over her laptop, pressing a few keys. “There’ll be no manned attack as long as you can see that we’ve broadcast your message to everyone here. So long as we listen to it, you promise to leave us alone the rest of the night. That’s fine. I’m not worried about your silly message and this battlefield nonsense would just get in the way of what we’re doing.”

“Which is what?” the dog asked. “Level 5?”

Calliope rolled her eyes again. The Newfoundland next to her looked increasingly anxious and was shifting her considerable weight from one foot to the other. “Again it’s none of your business, but no,” Calliope said curtly, “The Open House is its own thing and it’s just begun now. We’ve been making announcements.”

Then, ignoring her aide’s frantic gestures, Callie looked down at the pale blue paper Lin Lin had delivered and keyed in codes given by Twitchy that opened a two-way video connection to the handful of display screens that had been installed around the academy’s auditorium. From what Roger could see through the chat window, what was going on at the academy looked exactly like a high school junior prom, with various fairyland decorations strewn around the auditorium, and even a puffy, fake winter wonderland landscape, the floor covered with cotton and pillows, on one side of the large auditorium. The sissies were in full dress and most were slow-dancing with their partners and caretakers.

“Heeeey!” said Rian curiously, leaning past Rog to point at the screen at one pair, a sissy bear dancing with a tall wolf. Roger batted his finger away, though it left a smudge. “That’s not Muffy’s boyfriend.” The wolf tilted his head. “There a few others I don’t recognize either.”

Cassie cleared her throat. “Our students have been screening with various partners,” the Newfoundland cut in, clearly hoping that what she said might still forestall Roger’s attack, “but tonight it’s entirely up to each girl who she brings to the dance, and we’ll be adjusting her curriculum and helping her adjust other things based on her choice. Some of the tops who didn’t get invited, or who got invited late, are feeling a little anxious right now.”

Callie rapped her assistant’s knuckles with a fan. “We have no obligation to explain ourselves to him,” she said severely.

Roger’s eyes sparkled, and he laughed. “Of course! Sadie Hawkins. It’s a switch event!” he exclaimed gleefully, clapping a paw to his knee. “You little busybody, sis! You’ve been bluffing your own customers for weeks. Whether they’re paying the bills or not, you just wanted to see how your students’ caretakers would behave if you held out the promise of unlimited power and no limits, didn’t you? Expose who would treat your sissies right and who wouldn’t? See if the furs they’re already with are good enough for them? Then you throw the decision back to the cubs who they want to be with? Something like that? And what about this other stuff—what happens in Level 5? Why are you working with Shell?”

“I’ve told you three times now,” Callie flicked her tail and pursed her lips, but her eyes twinkled affirmatively, “that how I run my school is none of your concern. You don’t check in with me about how you operate. Now, your message, so we can get back to business here?”

“My boys are my message!” said Roger proudly, opening the footage from around his party site and watching it come up on the presentation monitors around the school’s auditorium in the background of his laptop screen. “Let’s see, who’s showing the most white — Our two 24/7 boys, of course — You all know Rian, our Mr. Popular; he was a terrified closet case who couldn’t even knock on your door once, remember? I bet most of your girls wouldn’t believe that,” Roger gestured to the cubby wolf next to him, before turning back to the monitors. “And there’s Dex, local hero; for almost two years he thought he’d never have a choice but to work double shifts in a coffee shop for the rest of his life” — The coon in the karate uniform, on one of the monitors, clapped a paw to his chest in mock pain as a squirt gun sprayed him, and let himself tumble off the jungle gym, landing on his back, with a bounce, on one of the crowded bounce castle platforms, as crawling cubs swarmed over him. “There’s Twitchy; he can figure out any complex system, except bathroom-based ones, and not because he grew up taking prep classes and having expensive computers to play with, no, he didn’t come from where you might guess if you met him now” — The rabbit, on another screen, was hopping over an overflow of fake lava, carefully lifting an unwisely situated popsicle stick castle that had been placed near the volcano tables and handing it to a concerned-looking age-player.

“Any one of those boys,” Roger continued as he cycled through different scenes from around the sprawling playsite, “had reason to be bitter and angry about his problems and stop his life where it was years back. But they chose to keep putting themselves out there, instead, even if it wasn’t always easy, and even if they had some disasters along the way and things didn’t go quite as they thought or wished they would have, and eventually they found me, and each other, and things might not be perfect now, but they’re still hanging on. There’s all of them together, doing what boys do best.” The couples stopped dancing, and looked up curiously as scenes from all around the party site came up, some on split screens. “Just playing. And on this screen you’ll see a plan of everything we have here in case I leave anything out. There’s a water slide, robot arena, a ball pit, bounce castles, a soda fountain . . . Finally, I want to explain,” he said, fumbling for a map, which he started to hold up, “how other cubs can—”

“They found our tunnels under the academy,” said Jax, tugging on his sleeve.

“Oh!” Roger exclaimed, sounding chipper. “You found our tunnels under the academy! Well, that makes things easier! Then I don’t have to spell out,” he said, holding up his dotted-line covered sketch of the academy, with a grin, “how you can get here! Both those tunnels narrow out at this end,” he said, pointing at the map, “so you can only come out near our playsite one at a time. And those openings are being watched. There’s no use trying to launch any kind of attack through them.”

Lin Lin, who had joined Callie and Cassie near the laptop, clenched a fist and rammed it against her thigh when Roger said that.

Serafina, who was on the sidelines coaxing a group of shyer sissies uncomfortable moving around in their dresses, shook her head, watching her onetime partner fumble with the map, and giggled in spite of herself. She bent over and whispered to Azzie, who had been scurrying around serving drinks wearing only an apron, a diaper, and a pair of ballet slippers, since that’s all his senior students had decided their new maidservant had earned in the way of a wardrobe so far. “Just watch, little cadet,” the princess fox said fondly. “This is going to work out the way it always does with these two.”

Around the auditorium, some of the couples were breaking up as several sissies hopped up and pawed at the monitors curiously. A couple muttered excuses — which took some doing, since potty break wasn’t a valid one, for a sissy baby — and slipped out the exit momentarily.

“The dance moves outdoors later on,” the Newfoundland said hopefully, bustling off to try to stop some of the ones wandering off. “We finish in the moonlight. You can get fresh air then! There’s no hurry.”

“We haven’t shown the best part yet,” Roger said, stepping back, and motioning to Rian, who pulled his shirt up to show what he was wearing, as he hopped up on to the large table in the central tent, “right here, in the center of everything is, our changing tent.”

Serry’s eyes sparkled as she saw the wolf on one of the monitors, waving both paws above his head. “Hey,” the princess fox remarked curiously, although her boyfriend couldn’t hear her, “what kind of diaper have you got on now, Rian? I haven’t seen you in those.”

“Turn around, little buddy, show it off, give them a full view,” said Roger, and the wolf did, holding his arms out, bending over to look at the webcam from between his legs, “this is just one of the Japan models. You’ll observe how unusually puffy it is around the leg gathers.” Rian wriggled his bottom as cubbishly as he could manage. “We’ve got the regular American and Canadian stuff in the middle — standard brands — and we have a Europe section on this side — and an Asia section on that side. If there’s a diaper you’ve ever wanted to try — we’ve probably got it! Our first shipments finally came around the time of Rian’s 24/7 party, but I’ve been keeping the whole stash under wraps.”

“First shipments?” Calliope asked, letting her consternation show for the first time.

Roger nodded eagerly as Rian, still looking out from between his legs, stuck his tongue out at the screen. “You’re hearing it hot off the press,” the Labrador announced gleefully. “Rian and I made a business trip over spring break when everyone thought we went to Euro Disney. I was visiting wholesalers for my comics and hobby shop now that I’ve started a mail-order catalogue and website thingy. But besides that, in addition to picking up some fun party foods and things, I can officially confirm,” Roger swept his arm back to encompass the massive stacks of bags around, on and under, the changing table, “that Baby Blue has bulk diaper suppliers — on three continents.” He put an arm around each of the Boy Scouts’ shoulders. “These two scamps who you might mistake for teenagers are wearing their first baby-printed adult German ones under those uniforms. Nothing but the best for my boys.” Ace blushed and Jax bit his lip.

The Newfoundland buried her face in her huge paws, obviously very upset. Calliope looked at her watch, doing her best to look unfazed. “Are you finally done talking?” she asked acidly. “Is that your entire message?”

Roger saw an athletic gray squirrel drop from the ceiling and land beside Calliope. A hyena broke away from the other sissies and came toward her cautiously, extending a doily invitation; she shoved him away without looking at him, and said,  “All right, Cal, am I still needed here tonight or not? You said to wait and see whether —” Shelley said, pausing as she glimpsed the display monitors, “What’s going on? Oh —,” the squirrel looked exasperated when she saw Roger’s face on the screen and crossed her arms, looking sideways and up into the air, pretending to ignore him.

“Hi, Shell!” the Labrador shouted, waving at the screen. The squirrel just rolled her eyes, looking even more incredibly annoyed than usual. “Wow it’s been a while huh! The last part of the message is especially for you and then I’m signing off.”

“I can’t wait,” she said out of the side of her muzzle without looking at him.

“I don’t know what time your thing finishes over there. But in case any cubs are curious about this, I—” began Roger, flopping back in his chair and crossing his arms as he slid back to rest his feet on the edge of the changing table, smiling triumphantly. Right before he closed the connection, the dog concluded, waving goodbye at the screen with one paw, “Will be here all night!”

Next time: Best of Both Worlds! Both parties continue as cubs move back and forth through Roger’s tunnels, but eyebrows are raised when one fur goes missing in the confusion.

\fLevel . . . Cleared?

Congratulations! You have successfully completed Level Four (Roger) . . . I think?

You have unlocked a Hidden Achievement: Chill! You’re just easy to be around and hang out with. Which is sometimes, the first and most important thing furs need; you give them a place to go.

Game Over! You win! As long as you didn’t leave any loose ends or activate two or more wild cards in the prior levels that could combine. . . .

Wait a minute? You did? Because if you did, then something like this might happen:

Next time: Open House: Level 4 (Episodes 15–17: Sequel Screen)

Wild cards activated: Swifty Fox (Level 1); Jax (Level 2); Blaze Collie (Level 3)

Wild cards subject to combination:

Jax . . .  + . . . Blaze Collie

(To be continued . . .)


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