I'm still thinking of titles for this, and I'm open to suggestions.

The first part of a short story I wanted to have done by Halloween night. Barely made it in my time zone.

More of this story will come, my friends. Wish little Third some luck. He'll need it.

And I didn't realize until recently that this story fits all the tick boxes of a monomyth. Campbell would be proud.

Inspired in part by a tumblr post by Prokopetz about the relationships between humans and urban critters, and partly from my own dreams of my raccoon mom and siblings of another life. We didn't think or talk like this - this is an attempt at making it comprehensible to a human. It's so hard for me to understand it even in my own memories. And the stories weren't like this - raccoons have no subjunctive, and every possibility is the future. Stories are deeds and warnings, and not like human fairy tales, and often "sung" by raccoon standards, ideas strung together, just playing with tones like a human child with a xylophone. And yet... this was so fun to write, imagining what kinds of human fairy tales a raccoon with human intelligence would write and pass down the stories of. It would feel to the reader the way a real raccoon story would feel to Third.

I'm not yet skilled enough at xenofiction to truly show the thought process of someone who isn't human, especially limited first person. But this is me reaching as high as I can. Wish me luck keeping this up over the next installments.