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“AWAKEN, TRAVELER.”
The city had just begun its nightly agenda. People went to and fro on the sidewalks to their various destinations, and traffic crawled in the wide streets as yellow taxis honked in a collective Morse code, all under the watchful downtown gaze of scores of skyscrapers. There was not a giant wolf standing in the middle of it all.
Then there was.
This surprised the wolf as much as it surprised the people she suddenly found herself among. She took a step forward to keep herself from falling, her arms spreading out to maintain her balance. A brown-furred foot as big as a truck slammed down into the pavement, announcing her presence to those not already aware of it with a colossal thud. One hand found purchase on the side of an office building, causing the attendees of an eighth-floor office meeting to forget all about next year’s revenue forecasts as they stared at a hand that could easily hold any of them. Their agenda forgotten, the city’s went on, albeit at a much more frantic pace than before.
The wolf slowly righted herself, stood up to her full height, and looked around. She was a gigantic wolf in a sprawling city, a state she did not remember existing in a few moments previously. Turning her gaze downward, she saw the people now fleeing her vicinity. They were not like her. Aside from the obvious size difference, she saw no anthropomorphized animals; all were human. Glancing over to one of the buildings beside her, she found a cluster of darkened windows and checked her reflection. She was indeed a wolf, her true form.
That recognition sparked others as she started to walk down the street, her feet adding their own bold signature to the cracks and potholes already scrawled into the history of the pavement. The screaming, the honking, the palpable air of panic: these were all familiar to her, and they helped her find her identity. She was Mataki, She Who Grows, Face Among The Stars. Other names revealed themselves to her with each massive step, and with each step her confident, mischievous smile grew.
She had been summoned.
By whom she didn’t yet know. That was unusual. The summoning itself was unusual. Her normal method of ascension was to be born into a world naturally, then to manipulate events that would ensure its eventuality. Being whisked into a universe in which she didn’t originate was much more rare, but not unheard of. Word travels between realities. Being summoned at this size, this far along in the process, however, was unprecedented. Her curiosity grew along with her smile, and she stopped to look around once more for information about her situation.
She saw another tall woman in the distance, this one clad in robes and holding a torch aloft. I’m in New York City, she thought, but not a version she remembered visiting before. She would have remembered humans. She glanced down at her own clothing, wondering how whatever power had brought her here had decided to dress her. She saw a blue tank top stenciled with the letters ZQI in yellow, and further down, a pair of denim shorts.
A confused frown crossed her features momentarily. Her clothing didn’t seem to match this world; ZQI was in another place, she remembered. Having little else to go on, she scanned the ground for signs of her beckoner. There’s always one that doesn’t run, she thought, and she searched the still-fleeing citizens below, her yellow eyes darting from group to group.
But this time they were all running.
She had more luck turning her gaze upward. A tall building adorned with Babylonian architecture caught her eye, but not completely for its height or composition. A vast amount of power was concentrated there, ominous clouds forming at the apex of its brightly-lit upper spire. She could begin to feel its aura as she walked closer to it, and her fur stood on end briefly. Surely this was the cause for her being here, she thought, and she eagerly walked to the building’s base.
Such was its height that she couldn’t see what was going on above as she reached the building’s foundation. Being who she was, this was a problem easily solved, however, and one she would enjoy solving. Calling her powers into service, her eyes glowed a vivid amber, bright enough to illuminate the side of the building in front of her as if a car’s headlights were focused there. Like a searchlight, the beam began to rise up along the edifice, a deep creaking sound providing accompaniment as the wolf grew taller and taller. As she neared the top, her ears perked to full attention to hear two voices in a shouted conversation above.
“I couldn’t help it. It just popped in there!”
“What?? What just popped in there??”
“I—I tried to think…”
“What did you do, Ray?”
The wolf reached her goal, her face rising up into full view of the inhabitants of the topmost level of the tower. There were four men dressed in uniform, each carrying some sort of weapon. Their conversation stopped briefly as all four stared at the new arrival. Three had faces of surprise and fear, but one showed…recognition. It was this man who spoke next.
“It’s the wolf from Blue Sky Green.”
“Well, there’s something you don’t see every day. You’ve been reading furry fanfiction again, haven’t you, Ray?” one of his companions added.
“I tried to think of the most harmless thing…something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never, ever possibly destroy us…but I found that story last night and…and she popped into my head!” said Ray.
Silence met this for a long moment. The air still crackled with magic and electricity from the recent summoning, and the wolf felt it, so close now. She drew in a breath of it, closing her eyes and savoring its power, feeling it flow through her and begin to feed her growthlust. When her eyes opened again, their yellow glow illuminated the platform before her. Her muzzle opened in a tooth-filled smile. She had found her Not-Runner, and she finally understood it all. With a deep chuckle, she spoke for the first and last time, her face already rising higher above the quartet she addressed with her deep, booming voice.
“Furries ruin everything.”
They hit her with the full force of their weapons, but their energy only added to her own, making her fill her role all the faster. She soon dwarfed the building that fed her its luscious, ancient power, raising her arms to the sky and beginning the dance of destruction. The giantess added larger and larger pawprints to the urban landscape, laying waste to streets, blocks, and neighborhoods as her form became known to more and more of the world’s denizens. Many knew what it was like to be pressed into the depths of the earth that day, I can tell you! They came to know the she-wolf as Ray did, but undoubtedly the vast majority found it much less fun being in the damn story.
Mataki, of course, would have disagreed.
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Some characters and lines of dialogue taken and adapted from the motion picture “Ghostbusters”, © 1984 Columbia Pictures Corporation
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