I remember the day well, even with my brain being terrible for remembering stuff a week ago. :P

I was on summer vacation between my Junior year to Senior year in high school. I just logged off of Prodigy we had since 1989 checking the PLU$ area where the forms/bulletin boards were on their service. Did my rounds on the SatAM StH ones I really liked and the Quest For Glory ones I was also big int then. Mom and dad called me upstairs from the basement saying they were heading out to KY for a couple weeks and wanted me to keep an eye on the house and pets. "Cool". "By the way, give this a try and tell us if it looks good to you or not. If it is we will use this instead of Prodigy." dad said, handing me a 3.5" floppy that had "Pipeline USA Internet". "You mean this is the real deal? Not the 'internet' that Prodigy is trying to do now that costs more money to use?" "yeah, so see if it works for what we need. If it does, we keep it and ditch Prodigy".

SO they go... I remembered to check the new at the time feature (for a fee) that Prodigy had, and that was to get internet email. I was on Commander Sonic Data's mailing list for a couple months at the time and one email I wanted to save was one someone asked "I heard on the Internet there is a place where Sonic fans can log in and play in a virtual Knothole of sorts. Where is it?" and the person who replied was Bookshire Draftwood who said "You need telnet (something Prodigy DIDN'T have then), and go to red.panda.t-byte.org 9999 (I think i got it right? been so long) to get to it." Just so I had some telnet address to try since the MUD's i was on then had closed shop (same for my telnet access I was hacking into at the time.. >.>). Once go that I installed the software on the disk, got a bag of Doritos and a 2 liter of Mountain Dew and started checking out everything had.Set up email, tested the WWW part out, ftp, all good. Oh right, Telnet... so I dig up that address, punched it in and... "Welcome to FurtooniaMUCK....? Whats "Furtoonia??"... And logged in.

36 hours later, I finally log out. Still on a high I couldn't describe I could NOT get down from or ever wanted to. I found such an awesome, magical amazing place I never thought existed. The folks on there liked cartoony stuff, had cool descriptions for their characters, I even found some cool Sonic fans and they had that Knothole area the person in email was talking about! I was in heaven. At the dead end of August I had been talking to mi1ez a good bit (one of the first I ever met on there) and learned he did some fun toony drawings he was showing me. "That's cool you can draw. Never really met anyone yet that did around me. Let alone stuff like this." "Oh there's a lot who like to draw in this fandom" he said. I am fuzzy on what got him to draw Sir Kain for me, but I remember I had like all of 2 sentences in my description for Kain who before Furtoonia was a human fighter. OK, so what to make him here? I liked out cat Flash who was a tough alley cat, that should work... Gave him that to work with. 9/4/1995, first day for my senior year of high school. I got up groggily to get dressed and check Furtoonia before i had to get on the bus. I saw Miles left me an e mail/message that had a sketch of what he was doing for me. When I opened it up I was blown away. BLOWN AWAY. I NEVER had anyone draw for me ever, let alone it come out furry and as awesome as this did. I was so high off of that I forgot pretty much all the classes i had and where they were the next day heh.

Fast forward to today, I cant tell if I have ever come down from these highs or not. So, so many awesome things have happened since I found this fandom. I'm a far better person than I was back then because of it too. I don't ever plan to leave this fandom, ever.

Thank you for the amazingly awesome adventure, Furry Fandom.