chillspacebear - Tumblr blog

chillspacebear · 29 days

Text

New Home, Old Problems

The Worlds' Stars: Chapter 1

Synopsis: Comet and his family move into their new home in the Uniguild. Comet isn’t exactly happy about it, but he’s trying not to bring down the mood.

Genre: Slice of Life/Fantasy

Words: 3,221

With a long yawn and a big stretch, I wake up from a nap. I don’t know how long I’ve been riding buses, but it’s at least been long enough to make me fall asleep in one of the most uncomfortable spots imaginable. While trying to shake off the daze, the bus stopped, and I was launched forward into the seat in front of me. I’m glad I didn’t hit my head, but my chest is going to feel sore for a bit.

Hearing everyone else on the bus talk, I can tell this is my stop. Being a polar bear, I have to stay in the back and wait for everyone who’s smaller to get off the bus first. Once it’s my turn to go, I pick up my backpack that I kept next to me in my seat and head to the front of the bus. As I depart, I tap the concrete with my toe to make sure it isn’t too hot. If it is, I’d have to pull my sandals out of my backpack so I won’t burn my feet. The ground isn’t burning to the touch, thankfully, so I hop off the bus.

Walking forward a bit so other people can get onto the bus without me getting in the way, a chilling breeze flows through, caressing my fur. I knew it would be colder here than it was back home in Tennessee, but this was a pleasant surprise. This place isn’t going to feel like home anytime soon, but if I can feel winds like this all the time, I can get used to this fast.

“Comet! Comet!” a familiar voice calls from below. I look down, hearing my name being called, and the voice belongs to my pop, a river otter named Evanthe. Pop is letting out many happy squeaks, not even trying to contain himself, before using proper words again, “Can you get my camera out of your bag? I need to capture this moment! After all this time, we’re here in our new home! And this isn’t just any other city, it’s the Uniguild! A home for anyone from anywhere, even the other worlds!”

At Pop’s request, I reach into my backpack, pull out his little camera that I’ve been keeping safe with me, and give it to him. With how excited he was, I expected to hear lots of clicks from his camera, but he was looking around with a determined look in his eyes, taking his time to try and find the best shot he could get. He is a professional, and I guess this occasion is important enough for him to get into work mode for it.

“Need a paw, Hun?” asks my dad, a red wolf.

“That’d be great, Ryan! Lift me up so I can get some better shot angles!”

Dad hoists Pop up and walks around a bit, trying to help

Pop find the perfect angle for this picture.

While they do that, my ears flip upward, hearing the bus press on with its route. Turning around, I see what might just be perfect. “Hey, Pop! Why not this?” I point upward, past where the bus once stood, and the tall buildings of the Uniguild’s city can be seen before the mountain at the center of the continent.

“The mountain with the omni-gate we used to get here…” Pop squeaked in awe.

“And the city we spend hours riding buses through to get to where we’re standing now,” Dad added. “Good eye, pup.”

I walk over to pick up Pop so he can get a good angle from a high starting spot, making sure to keep steady so I don’t throw him off his lining up of the shot. With a shutter click from Pop’s camera, I can spot a wide smile looking at him from behind, and his tail starts flicking a bit, too, like he’s back to being a pup. “That one’s going in the scrapbook later!”

Rolling my eyes, I respond, “You say that about a lot of pictures, Pop. This one’s an amazing sight, though. It could be frame-worthy.”

“‘Frame-worthy’ means good pictures of our family, Son, you know that.”

Pop’s quick reply gets a small chuckle out of me. He’s not lying, though. Of all the important memories he captures, the ones involving family are always the most important to him. I understand that much, but there are other reasons to frame something, like if it just looks nice enough, and I think this view does.

Looking past Pop at the mountain, though, I can’t help but think about how far we’ve come to get here and how much further we are from home…

“Are you ok, pup? You don’t look right.” Dad points out. I never know what expressions I’m making until someone points it out. I do need to get better with that, I don’t want everyone worrying about me all the time.

“I’m ok, just tired from all the traveling, I guess. I did fall asleep on the bus. How close is the new house from here?”

Dad narrows his eyes at me, low chance of him believing me, but he pulls out his phone and starts typing. “Map app says it’s close to one mile away from here.”

“How fast would it take me to get there if I went at top speed? You’re good with numbers. Oh, I think my top speed that I was able to record was like… seventeen and a half miles per hour?”

“If you did that, it would take just under four minutes, but unlike you, pup, Evan and I haven’t trained ourselves to run fast ‘as a good polar bear should.’ “

“Yeah. My legs are very short. I could never keep up with you like that. And even if I rode you, I don’t want to risk falling off…” Pop added.

“You also need me to lead us to the house since you don’t know where it is.”

“That is fair. Walking it is, then.”

“Should take us around twenty-five minutes.” Dad signals us to follow him by reaching his arm out towards us and flicking his paw in his direction. Pop and Dad started talking about something as we walked, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was deep in my thoughts. While I knew we were moving here, I never felt like we were getting a new home, just leaving behind what we had before. I know things weren’t the best, the rent being hard to keep up with put us in some tough spots, but some of the most important things to me were there. I don’t want to start a new life here. I wasn’t happy back home, but I wasn’t completely unhappy either. I know I could’ve stayed behind, being an adult that can make my own choices, but I wanted to stay with my dads. I feel like I owe it to them to stay with them and help them out however I can. After something I don’t like thinking about happened when I was a cub, they’ve worked hard to raise and support me. They took me in, put me in a good school, and even let me work with them in their photography business while I figure out what I want to do with my life. My want to not leave them is greater than my want to go back home.

Maybe this place could feel more like home if I looked around while we were on our way to the house. I might see things that make this place seem better outside of the money stuff and cold winds, and I might be less opposed to this new life. To our left, there’s a small shopping center with all sorts of people walking around. Most are mammals, some tigers, a tanuki, a hippo, and many more. This is the part of the Uniguild that’s in my world, the Furrealm, where land mammals are the ones that evolved to not be wild. Each of the five worlds is like that: different sets of animals evolved to become the dominant species. There’s Avius with the futuristic birds, Amphibarron with the magical amphibians, Repterra with the nature-tied and artistic reptiles, and Gillon with nomadic aquatic life. It’s cool that each of the worlds can be close together like this because of the Uniguild, unlike everywhere else.

At the end of the shopping center is what looks like a gym, which brings out a smile on my face. A pair of elephants walk out of it, which makes me happier because it shows they should have equipment that’s big enough for me. Polar bears are supposed to be strong and fierce, so becoming strong like a proper one is important to me.

Still looking at the other side of the street, I see a black bear wearing swimming trunks and carrying a towel, which gets me thinking. There must be a pool near here! Being a good swimmer is another thing a good polar bear should be, but it doubles as a fun way to spend time with Pop! We could have fun doing laps and playing together in the water for hours. If there are more things like home here, it might not be as bad a move as I first thought.

Taking a hard right, we end up in what is our new neighborhood. I’ve always lived in apartments my whole life, so I’m unsure of how I’ll adjust to a cul-de-sac. Turns out everyone here decided to go outside today because it’s hard to look in any direction now without seeing someone enjoying the outdoors. There was a trio of chimps chasing each other around, a pair of cougars were painting each other’s claws, a pack of jackals was playing with a ball, a human was taking a walk with her baby in a stroller… “Everywhere I look… everyone else…” My vision starts getting foggy, and everything in my peripheral vision darkens. I need to calm down so this doesn’t go all the way like it has before, especially while we’re walking in an unfamiliar place.

After feeling something on my stomach, everything goes back to normal. Looking down, I see Dad put a paw on my stomach to get me to stop. “We’re here,” Dad says as he points to our right. It’s not an amazing sight to behold: a red-brick house with a tan-tiled roof, and there isn’t a porch or much of a front yard. The front door at least looks big enough so I don’t have to duck every time I come inside like I did back home.

“You want to take a shot of the new house, Pop?”

“I do, but not now. This is one where I want all of us in it, but none of our clothes match, with each other or the house. I’ve got on a patterned Hawaiian shirt, Ryan has a basic blue polo, and you have a black tank top with an iceberg on it.”

“We always wear stuff like this.” I say with a smirk.

“My shot, my rules, Son.” Pop climbs down from riding on my head the entire trip. “What I do want to do is take a look inside. You have the keys, right hon?”

Dad reaches into his pocket and pulls out a set of keys, unlocking the door and letting us all in. Each of us are speechless looking inside our new house, but not in a good way. There was nothing but piles of boxes scattered everywhere. “There’s always a catch when getting something for cheap, I suppose. In this case, it was a moving service that did the bare minimum.”

“Alright,” I say as I stretch my arms, “It’s time to do some unpacking. I can handle taking everything out of the boxes and putting it where you want it to go. I don’t exercise just to look good.”

“Sounds good, Comet. We should get the bigger stuff out of the way first, like our beds. I’d prefer not to sleep on the floor tonight.” Dad replied, stretching his shoulders.

With a nod, I immediately get to work. I claw open the boxes and use my strength to put everything in place. Pop used his eye for design to tell Dad and me how to make smaller adjustments, making everything look and fit together nicer. It took a couple hours, the exact number I didn’t keep track of (Dad might’ve), but we got through half of everything already - we even took a few breaks to not push ourselves too much.

We all want to call it a day at this point, seeing it get dark outside from the window, but we’re still going through the boxes to find more personal things, like my old game console or Dad’s laptop. I pick up this one box and open it up. It was marked as fragile, so it could be anything we’re looking for now, but it turned out to be a bunch of framed photos. I’m surprised to see so many bunched up in one place like this. I didn’t realize we had so many photos, but with Pop being a professional photographer who values stuff like this more than anything, it’s weird that I’m surprised.

There are some great moments here in just the ones on the top. “Pop! I found the photos!” I called out, not caring if he heard me with the grip of nostalgia holding me tight. I started looking through the photos. One of the first ones was my graduation from high school two years back. I was so happy to be done with it. I had to get through the worst finals week of my life, but I managed to get through with half-decent grades. The next one was when I figured out how to track smells with my strong nose. Dad was howling with pride that day, and I was, too. We all had a bit of a laugh after with how weird mine sounded. Polar bears aren’t meant to do that. I still had to figure out what smells were what for a while, but I was able to follow scent trails without much trouble. I still remember the day my dads took me out for snow cones to congratulate me. The third photo I don’t remember well because I was a young cub, but it’s one of Pop and me swimming at a beach. I must’ve complained a lot that day if this wasn’t during winter. I could never stand hot days, and I still can’t. I always have to keep my fur cut short, wear clothes that won’t trap much heat, and wear cooling packs under my clothes so I don’t pass out from overheating. Then there’s, a picture of my cousin, Nieve. She was a Kermode bear, a type of black bear with white fur, and we were said to go together like ice and snow, which was a coincidence with how we were named. She was always just around the corner for me to go see, which I’d do almost every day, but now that we moved… I set the photo of us aside and pick out another photo, hoping it’s something that’ll put me in a better mood. The picture I picked out is of none other than a young me and my birth parents. I think I’m done with nostalgia.

I put the photo back in the box, pushed the box of photos to the side, then got up to look for anything else to take my mind off this. The next box I lift is smaller but much heavier than I expected it to be. Opening the box, I see Dad’s laptop and its charger. If something as small as this feels heavy now when I lifted my giant polar bear bed earlier, then I should have stopped ten minutes ago, before I opened that box of photos.

“I’m getting tired. I think I’m ready to stop for the day,” I set Dad’s laptop and charger on the living room table we reassembled earlier, “I’ll go take a bath, and after that, we can talk about dinner?” Not hearing any sort of response, I leave to my new room.

I flick the lights on and start sifting through my box of clothes to find some pajamas. I’m trying my best to keep myself together, but with reminders like those, of what I’ve lost in moving and why I feel like I do in the present, it feels impossible. I clutch a shirt in my paws, feeling tiny spots on it become damp, and I wonder… “Why me…? Why did we have to move? Why is it me that will always be alone?”

When I open my eyes, I see nothing. I look to the side, up, down, everywhere, and see nothing but black. I notice that I can’t hear anything either: not Pop, not Dad, not the wind, not the crickets that were chirping outside just a few minutes ago, or any of our neighbors. I’m back in a place I call the void, the place my brain sends me to when I feel completely isolated. I almost went there earlier but got snapped out of it, this time

I wasn’t so lucky, I’m here. I need to get myself out of this before the panic sets in. Nieve was always able to help me through this, but she’s not here, and I’m not going to see her for months. Will I ever see her again? I don’t know. How do I get out on my own? I’m on my own. I’m alone. I’ll always be alone, and nothing will ever change that.

Something touches my back, making me jump. It comes back a moment later but is less abrupt and more comforting. At first, it just sits there, but then it starts moving around. It feels good. I’m able to close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. When I open my eyes, I’m back in my room. I feel around behind me with my paw to see what’s on my back and feel an arm; turning around, I see that Dad is stroking my back.

“I think the bath can wait, Comet. Why don’t we eat dinner together first? Pop ordered baked fish.”

With a nod, Dad gets up from my bed and leads me to the living room, where Pop is already setting out food for all of us. “How long was I in the void for…?”

Dad continues leading me and gets me to sit on the couch.

“Do you want to talk? Or do you just want to wait it out?” he asks, putting a plate on my lap.

After going through the void like that, I don’t want to speak. Instead, I take a bite of food. Despite all of the seasoning I can see on it, it tastes like nothing.

Dad opens his laptop that I left on the table before leaving. “I’d say we should watch something on the TV, but we don’t have the internet set up yet for cable, so I’ll set up some movies I downloaded.”

Pop sits up on the couch next to me, but instead of eating his food right away, he first gives me a hug and then hops to give me a boop on the nose. I can’t help but give a tiny laugh. I even begin to purr a bit.

“Looks like someone’s starting to feel a little better!” Pop giggles.

It’ll take some time before I can feel happy again, just in general, not even considering us living here now. I’m sure of one thing in this very moment, though: “Dad and Pop will always be here for me, no matter where I go or how lonely I might feel.”

1 note · View note