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Description
Skip to below the line for her story, er, stories... I have so many different potential stories for how an anthro-Graphite could have happened.
To me, the "real" or original version is feral, but I want to dress up! And I don't have the skill or coordination for a quadsuit. Haha.

Just a quick, and by quick I mean very quick and sketched, concept of what I'd like to do for a costume of my Graphite character. It will be so much fun. I have always wanted the creative experience of making a mask. The mask blank has already been ordered and I already have the material and pattern for the linen cloak. I haven't decided what color I actually want the robe underneath to be. I just made it a generic pale cream color here as a placeholder. I also already have the leaf belt, ordered from Etsy www.etsy.com/listing/168906727… with money I made doing a miserable $4-5 per hour window lettering gig. At least I got something cool out of it, because I wasn't going to spend my hard-earned day job money on something like that. :3 I have bills to pay! (That's why I'm making almost the entire thing myself. Gotta save money!)

Challenges include making ear slots in the hood, a tail slit in the back (that shouldn't be too hard) and the paws/sleeves for the partial, the feet, and the tail... okay, all of the actual character! But I really do want to make the clothing in a way that will allow me to wear it without the fur part of the costume, say, to a renaissance faire or something. So the ear slits will have to be sort of discreet. Or maybe I shouldn't have ear slits, but I do want the hood to stay on the head and not crush the ears, so I will probably have them.

It's a slow thing I have been working on assembling bit by bit for months already and it will be many more months before it's done. I go at my own pace.

Anyway, I put this together to help me visualize what I am going for. It will be a long time before I finish all of it, but it will be fun. This is almost a scrap, but I thought it might be interesting enough to toss up here.
Another thought... if the robe is very simple, and I do intend it to be (like, think a wizard robe, not form fitting and without embellishments or details), I could make two or three different ones out of easily-laundered cloth so if I wear the costume at a con I can have a fresh garment every day.

________________________________________________________________________________

I kind of have... three alternate stories for how she came to be... Oops. Second one is definitely my cover story if I decide to wear the full costume to a Ren faire someday.
________________________________________________________________________________

Prehistoric survivor:

How long has she wandered the earth? Was she granted some sort of immortality, either as a gift or a curse, eons ago, before her kind perished from the earth? Her kin have been resting in the earth so long that their bones have turned to stone. The fertile, wet woodlands where she grew up have turned into dry badlands, the layers of the years eroding away into steep gorges and precipitous slopes. It is unrecognizable. The earth has gone through several drastic changes since her kind vanished. The world has become cold and warm in turn; ice ages are hardly remarkable to her anymore. Still she wanders. She has changed a little, but much less than life on earth has changed since she was born. Sometimes she sleeps for years. The children of the earth have changed. These upstarts. They are changing the face of the earth. Still she travels, sometimes upright and almost always disguised. She has ways of hiding herself.

________________________________________________________________________________

Medieval fantasy alchemy accident:

It was never meant to happen like this! She thought she had the perfect combination, the rare ingredients from the far-flung corners of the world, tested and found to be genuine. At last, she would be able to shapeshift at will into a monstrous creature: a glorious sphinx with the body of a lioness and the head of a human! She would terrify her enemies! She had thought long and hard about how to craft her intentions when she consumed the concoction. A sphinx was a cat, but not quite a cat. She had been assured that the sphinx was a real creature, or at least that it had lived at one point in time; she knew it would not work with a creature who lived in legend only. She would consume the potion and specify that she wanted to take the form of a cat that was not a cat. The closest thing to a cat without being a cat, either rare or vanished from the face of the earth. She even had a few bones from said creature; they were so old they had turned to stone. They looked close to feline. Or... she was told they were from a sphinx. She trusted her source enough to focus all her energy on those fossilized pieces of history. Perhaps that was her mistake. Just when she thought she had it all figured out, when she took the potion, she turned into something else entirely. She was no were-sphinx. She was not even sure what this was... it seemed like a cat, but its nose was wrong, and its fur was colored unlike any living cat she had heard of. Long canine teeth jutted out of her mouth. A thick, striped tail lashed behind her. Was she disappointed? Slightly... but whatever this was, it would certainly do for her purposes. She donned some simple, lightweight garb and set out to surprise a few old... acquaintances.

________________________________________________________________________________

Futuristic sci-fi DNA laboratory accident:

In the early days of genome sequencing, no one had thought it was possible to salvage DNA so old. It was supposed to have decayed to nothing. Well, that's what they would have said in the 21st century, anyway. Their dreams of dinosaurs coming back to life were never to be realized. My great-whatever grandparents probably watched Jurassic Park and worried before being reassured there was nothing to worry about. Well, not for that generation, anyway. However, science kept advancing. Soon, passenger pigeons again blackened the skies of Eastern North America. The mammoths had been easy enough to resurrect. Smilodons and dire wolves rose again and roamed nature preserves set aside for them where the public could view them from elevated railways and slow-moving aircraft. It was exciting and humanity craved more. We kept working backward through time. It took more than a century, but soon we were working on truly fossilized creatures, not creatures found frozen on the tundra. I was part of Project Oligocene, and my job was to prepare ready-made genomes to grow as life forms; not the final phase, though. We had to force ready-made embryos, modified already to be compatible, to accept and express the DNA of a very different life form, which could be done chemically these days, fortunately. We would use that generation to create the next generation of naturally-born creatures, at last back from extinction. I was disappointed at first that I was not on one of the many dinosaur units, but that soon passed. As an aside, I never found out how any of the original DNA was actually obtained. The processes for retrieving it were so complex that they may have involved time travel on a microscopic scale. I have no idea. There were hundreds of individual samples per species. My specialty was to do what I was doing, which was all well and good until the laboratory explosion... I had been working with DNA of a false sabertooth cat, mixing it with the reagent that let it bind to already-living cells. Well, it bound to my cells, was not reversible, and over the next few days, weeks, months and years, even (in the case of my bone structure), I slowly changed into a hybrid of human and sabertooth cat! Everyone said I was lucky to have survived, and I was medically monitored (and studied nearly to death) along the way. They say they are close to figuring out how it was possible for my body to assimilate these genes, express them and survive. Life is certainly different being a nimravidish human hybrid. I've given up on finding a mate, and bearing children is out of the question. You won't believe how much my dietary needs have changed! My entire income now comes from being studied. On the bright side, when I'm not hooked up in a lab somewhere, I can go basically anywhere unencumbered. Nobody messes with me. Sure, people take pictures from afar, but nobody wants to get too close save for a few brave souls. Is it the teeth? Sometimes I wear oversized clothing with a large hood just to do my shopping without having too many people gawk. Mostly, though, I order things from home!

Description
Skip to below the line for her story, er, stories... I have so many different potential stories for how an anthro-Graphite could have happened.
To me, the "real" or original version is feral, but I want to dress up! And I don't have the skill or coordination for a quadsuit. Haha.

Just a quick, and by quick I mean very quick and sketched, concept of what I'd like to do for a costume of my Graphite character. It will be so much fun. I have always wanted the creative experience of making a mask. The mask blank has already been ordered and I already have the material and pattern for the linen cloak. I haven't decided what color I actually want the robe underneath to be. I just made it a generic pale cream color here as a placeholder. I also already have the leaf belt, ordered from Etsy www.etsy.com/listing/168906727… with money I made doing a miserable $4-5 per hour window lettering gig. At least I got something cool out of it, because I wasn't going to spend my hard-earned day job money on something like that. :3 I have bills to pay! (That's why I'm making almost the entire thing myself. Gotta save money!)

Challenges include making ear slots in the hood, a tail slit in the back (that shouldn't be too hard) and the paws/sleeves for the partial, the feet, and the tail... okay, all of the actual character! But I really do want to make the clothing in a way that will allow me to wear it without the fur part of the costume, say, to a renaissance faire or something. So the ear slits will have to be sort of discreet. Or maybe I shouldn't have ear slits, but I do want the hood to stay on the head and not crush the ears, so I will probably have them.

It's a slow thing I have been working on assembling bit by bit for months already and it will be many more months before it's done. I go at my own pace.

Anyway, I put this together to help me visualize what I am going for. It will be a long time before I finish all of it, but it will be fun. This is almost a scrap, but I thought it might be interesting enough to toss up here.
Another thought... if the robe is very simple, and I do intend it to be (like, think a wizard robe, not form fitting and without embellishments or details), I could make two or three different ones out of easily-laundered cloth so if I wear the costume at a con I can have a fresh garment every day.

________________________________________________________________________________

I kind of have... three alternate stories for how she came to be... Oops. Second one is definitely my cover story if I decide to wear the full costume to a Ren faire someday.
________________________________________________________________________________

Prehistoric survivor:

How long has she wandered the earth? Was she granted some sort of immortality, either as a gift or a curse, eons ago, before her kind perished from the earth? Her kin have been resting in the earth so long that their bones have turned to stone. The fertile, wet woodlands where she grew up have turned into dry badlands, the layers of the years eroding away into steep gorges and precipitous slopes. It is unrecognizable. The earth has gone through several drastic changes since her kind vanished. The world has become cold and warm in turn; ice ages are hardly remarkable to her anymore. Still she wanders. She has changed a little, but much less than life on earth has changed since she was born. Sometimes she sleeps for years. The children of the earth have changed. These upstarts. They are changing the face of the earth. Still she travels, sometimes upright and almost always disguised. She has ways of hiding herself.

________________________________________________________________________________

Medieval fantasy alchemy accident:

It was never meant to happen like this! She thought she had the perfect combination, the rare ingredients from the far-flung corners of the world, tested and found to be genuine. At last, she would be able to shapeshift at will into a monstrous creature: a glorious sphinx with the body of a lioness and the head of a human! She would terrify her enemies! She had thought long and hard about how to craft her intentions when she consumed the concoction. A sphinx was a cat, but not quite a cat. She had been assured that the sphinx was a real creature, or at least that it had lived at one point in time; she knew it would not work with a creature who lived in legend only. She would consume the potion and specify that she wanted to take the form of a cat that was not a cat. The closest thing to a cat without being a cat, either rare or vanished from the face of the earth. She even had a few bones from said creature; they were so old they had turned to stone. They looked close to feline. Or... she was told they were from a sphinx. She trusted her source enough to focus all her energy on those fossilized pieces of history. Perhaps that was her mistake. Just when she thought she had it all figured out, when she took the potion, she turned into something else entirely. She was no were-sphinx. She was not even sure what this was... it seemed like a cat, but its nose was wrong, and its fur was colored unlike any living cat she had heard of. Long canine teeth jutted out of her mouth. A thick, striped tail lashed behind her. Was she disappointed? Slightly... but whatever this was, it would certainly do for her purposes. She donned some simple, lightweight garb and set out to surprise a few old... acquaintances.

________________________________________________________________________________

Futuristic sci-fi DNA laboratory accident:

In the early days of genome sequencing, no one had thought it was possible to salvage DNA so old. It was supposed to have decayed to nothing. Well, that's what they would have said in the 21st century, anyway. Their dreams of dinosaurs coming back to life were never to be realized. My great-whatever grandparents probably watched Jurassic Park and worried before being reassured there was nothing to worry about. Well, not for that generation, anyway. However, science kept advancing. Soon, passenger pigeons again blackened the skies of Eastern North America. The mammoths had been easy enough to resurrect. Smilodons and dire wolves rose again and roamed nature preserves set aside for them where the public could view them from elevated railways and slow-moving aircraft. It was exciting and humanity craved more. We kept working backward through time. It took more than a century, but soon we were working on truly fossilized creatures, not creatures found frozen on the tundra. I was part of Project Oligocene, and my job was to prepare ready-made genomes to grow as life forms; not the final phase, though. We had to force ready-made embryos, modified already to be compatible, to accept and express the DNA of a very different life form, which could be done chemically these days, fortunately. We would use that generation to create the next generation of naturally-born creatures, at last back from extinction. I was disappointed at first that I was not on one of the many dinosaur units, but that soon passed. As an aside, I never found out how any of the original DNA was actually obtained. The processes for retrieving it were so complex that they may have involved time travel on a microscopic scale. I have no idea. There were hundreds of individual samples per species. My specialty was to do what I was doing, which was all well and good until the laboratory explosion... I had been working with DNA of a false sabertooth cat, mixing it with the reagent that let it bind to already-living cells. Well, it bound to my cells, was not reversible, and over the next few days, weeks, months and years, even (in the case of my bone structure), I slowly changed into a hybrid of human and sabertooth cat! Everyone said I was lucky to have survived, and I was medically monitored (and studied nearly to death) along the way. They say they are close to figuring out how it was possible for my body to assimilate these genes, express them and survive. Life is certainly different being a nimravidish human hybrid. I've given up on finding a mate, and bearing children is out of the question. You won't believe how much my dietary needs have changed! My entire income now comes from being studied. On the bright side, when I'm not hooked up in a lab somewhere, I can go basically anywhere unencumbered. Nobody messes with me. Sure, people take pictures from afar, but nobody wants to get too close save for a few brave souls. Is it the teeth? Sometimes I wear oversized clothing with a large hood just to do my shopping without having too many people gawk. Mostly, though, I order things from home!