…PRELUDE…December 5, 2015. INFANTRY BRIGADIER GENERAL JOHANNES MANFRED MUNCHEN VON ACKERMAN stands alone in the middle of the Black Forest with some things of his in his hands, most notably a bundle of beautiful red roses and an old Walther WA2000 sniper rifle. He is standing over the grave of a man called Marcus Karl Miller. I am standing too far off to hear what he is saying, but I can tell that he is holding back tears. He stands there talking to the grave for a solid ten minutes before he sets the rifle down in front of the headstone, steps back and salutes the grave. Von Ackerman drops his arm and signals me to come in. I open the wrought iron gate and step into the cemetery. It is early December and the first snow has fallen, all seventeen inches of it, and both I and the general are bundled up tightly against the cold. It is just below freezing. Von Ackerman, a grey wolf anthropomorphic being, greets me as soon as I am within range of his huge arms. He smiles and welcomes me to Germany. The man, who I had come into contact with only the week before, has betrayed my imagination. I had imagined a human being, not more than five and a half feet tall, not younger than sixty, and nothing short of fat. He is instead over seven feet tall, not older than fifty, and everything short of fat. His hand, which he has produced from his pocket in greeting, engulfs much of my wrist let alone my hand. Soon as he let’s go I shake my own after its mild crushing. This man was born in Germany in the seventies to a woman named Rosie “Riveteer” Sinclair. According to what he has told me in our discussions by letter, she is a very beautiful red fox who was a WASP pilot for the United States Army Air Force. She came to Germany in the fifties when her official kill record was confiscated and doctored to give the impression that her exceptional kill record and flight skills were anything but. Disgusted, Sinclair moved out of the country and came to the place that was gaining a massive reputation as a sanctuary for anthropomorphic beings, or “Furs.” This place was the new Germany, which was quickly binding all of Europe together in brotherly peace. Here, in a quiet town outside of Munich, Sinclair settled herself in a tiny two room house and quietly lived out most of the sixties and seventies as the assistant manager of a small grocery store. That was, until she discovered a growing lump on her abdomen, and nine months later at 05:15 in the morning of January 3, 1970 and small child she called Johan was born. Like a mother naturally does Sinclair loved the boy and took care of him until he was ready to leave the perpetual “nest” of her care, however; Sinclair could not explain his birth. Having no mate, and desiring no relationships with a male, period, she had ruled out all possibility of herself sleeping around, and thus the child became some sort of an anomaly. The child was well aware of his inexplicable existence and would never hint that he had ever even had a father. He keeps the bundle of roses in one hand and shoves the other back in his pocket. I make a note of how tenderly he carries them. He begins to talk to me, in German. “I’m glad you came,” he says to me, as I franticly try to pull out my electronic translator,” not many humans care of what we Furs do by our own free will, and even fewer are willing to accept an entire region dominated by them.” He looks across at me, craning his neck down to meet my eyes, nearly two feet below him. “That is what happened you know,” he says regarding me,” to us Furs, I mean. Being persecuted in their own lands… just like Israel became the new home for the Jews, the broken and fractured remains of Germany became the new home for Furs. Then the uniting of Europe started to happen, slowly gaining support until all of Europe was one big country, more or less. That’s why other countries here have a prefix now; The German-French Republic, The German-Dutch Republic, The German-United Kingdom, just to name a few examples. Every country in Europe has become a bastion for exiled Furs, and Germany accepted us all, and we still do today. That’s why we became the German Federated Democratic-Republic of Europe or GFDRE. That’s also when the Russian Civil War of 1965 began.” He stopped talking for a moment, thinking back over all of that conflict. “I was born the year the GFDRE started to help the reformist side in that war, back on January 3, 1970; the year that the war really escalated and there was no turning our aid away from those we supported. The reformists wanted to convert the government of Russia to capitalism and a whole war started because of it, kind of like the Cold War but in one country and the war got hot. I joined the Bundeswher in January of 1988 as a second Luftennant. I was on an op in 1990 a few weeks before the war ended, with the 425th Sniper Gruppen of Steinherring, Germany” He looks back at the grave, well behind us. I see a tear start to form in his eye. He faces back toward the way we are heading. He stays silent for a good long time. “What do you want to know about it?” he asks. I tell him that I wish to know what happened during his 1990 op with a man named Miller and a woman named Tupikov. He shivers when I say the female’s name, and I can see red flesh under some of his facial fur for a moment. He stays silent for a long time. A very, very long time, and when he speaks again it is when we have stopped in front of a grave marked ‘Rosie Sinclair January 3, 1914-November 5, 2015.’ He turns towards the grave and lays the bundle of roses down in the snow. “She died of cancer,” says von Ackerman, fighting a ball in his throat,” but even that didn’t keep her from one of her lifelong goals, to live for one hundred consecutive years. The doctor told her she wouldn’t do it. ‘Not in your state of health,’ he said. She was sixty two by that time. Her reply was simple, ‘I’ll do it… whether or not you say I can.’” He shakes his head. “And you did, didn’t you?” He says this more or less to himself,” at the ripe old age of one hundred and one years of age she went to that doctor, got out of her wheel chair for just a second… and she kicked that doctor right in the testicles.” I wait patiently as he stares at the grave, his warm blue eyes suddenly becoming cold and hard. He grabs the whiskers protruding from the left side of his muzzle and pulls on them. Grab. Pull. Grab. Pull. Grab. Pull. Grab. “Then,” he says finally,” I do believe I need to start at the beginning.” He holds his hand up to his face and regards the single white rose clutched in his fingers.