An overground tramway is quietly gliding while driving along the tall concrete skyscrapers of the university, of a dusty grey badly imitating dressed stone in the past but now blacken by greasy pollution, whom the wrongly slender and totally lumbering silhouettes are made even more gloomy by the immobility of the sunless overcast sky.

My mind is very similar at this moment to the weather outside the wagon, sullen and hazy, but one fact : I am late, against all my habits. I am sure the tuition already begun, without even having to take a look at my watch. But it is not the only unusual think today : the tactile feelings from my legs and fingers, my limited field of vision, the sticky warm air I am breathing from my nose... all these signs mean that I am wearing my fursuit to go to school ! It seems to not trouble a lot of people in the train, everybody reading his journal or making last minute revisions for the exam. The only person who pay attention to me got on at my station and sat besides me. She is a school comrade, who I often meet in the campus corridors and I always say hello to when passing by, and she is helping me now... In fact, I do not use this usually and so do not know the route to follow, that would tend me to fret in others circumstances.

The tramway go on gliding in silence, still driving along these broken-down skyscrapers which give of our university the image of a disused industrial brains farm. And all I can do is to wait...

It was a very banal underground station, included in its morose but not shabby ambiance : the white ceramic tiles on the wall were not very clean, the ground was dotted with fossilized chewing-gums and neon lights humming was acting as background noise...

There was nobody at the top of the escalator, except a man and his dog. If the master had the plain look of this kind of people we never remember the face, his she-dog caught my eye on the contrary, with her long chocolate brown fur which give the need to munch it and her graceful stature of healthy German shepherd. I could not stop myself from kneeling nearby and salute her as a friend. She answered by putting her forepaws on my lap and looking deep into my eyes, her little wet snout against my nose. We stayed like this a little while, each one of us waiting for the other to make the first move, tilting slightly his head and moving his lips closer for a long tender kiss. Finally, I plunged my hand into the soft and warm silky fur of her back and hold her thigh against me in a more appropriate friendly hug, breathing this particularly soothing scent from her fur before standing up.

The escalator was positioned at the near end of the station and facing the other end of the platform, but fixed barriers just at the exit of the stairs compelled us to make a U-turn once arrived on the platform. It was at this moment that I saw them in real for the first time. From a distance, one could mistake them for tribal men with beast pelts, but their thin yellowish fur striped with brown and their pug muzzle tell without doubt their bot pre and post-human nature. I am still wondering how they managed not to freeze on the spot, given they had nothing but a small loincloth and some glass beads necklaces. The warriors, whom vigilante immobility did not give off any feeling of aggressiveness despite the long spear they were holding in their right hand, surrounded the rest of the group composed of females with theirs children who were talking just as we were in the African savannah. I must admit I ogled a little given the circumstances, but these chubby young... girls were not really my type and the language barrier was a great problem, so I was reduced to listen their very singing but incomprehensible intonations.

“Ip-Chee” : this name came to my mind almost instantly, perhaps because I saw it in a “National Geographic Magazine” issue or in an old wildlife documentary. The man who came down on the platform with me started to mumble very unpleasant xenophobic and pro-human remarks. Applying the approximative maxim from Pierre Desproges “The more I know humans, the more I like my dog”, I turned towards my four-legs female friend and we resumed our silent conversation. I do not remember well what themes did we talk about, but her large emerald green eyes staring at me, her so intense but so cute look which said so much, all of that remind me how I felt happy and serene during this floating moment when I was beyond friendship and near to reach something more deep, more blossoming... Perhaps would we meet again, one day, who know ?

My mother joined me after a while. She made me notice that the platform was lined by two quite normal tracks but also by a third one suspended at two meters over the more distant track from us. Following with my finger the overground rails sank into penumbra by lack of proper lighting – almost all neons were flickering – I stated the presence of rectangular recesses regularly spaced and wondered myself about their function. As to give us the solution, a miniature fret train went on this peculiar track before stopping in front of us, the kind of small containers it was transporting were then in line with the recesses and sank into them without a sound until being perfectly embedded into the wall and almost invisible. The unloaded wagons then began to hurtle down the sloping end of the upper track, arrived on a toppling switching system and set off again in the opposite direction passing by the lower track.

However, I did not see the last wagon made the switch topple after he stopped in it. Capturing a movement on my right, I saw Mom go down the tracks to solve the problem. You cannot help yourself to worry  in such a risky situation, even if none train passed through the station since you arrived...