Here's a new OC of MANY I've made. I've done a first grade aged boy who always (yes, ALWAYS) wears a caramel-brown furred dog suit. His name is Max, but he called himself "Barkley". He LOVES his dog suit and tends to act as a dog at times. To the neighbors, he looked like a little golden retriever waddling through the world on two legs. Max's parents had tried, both gently and not-so-gently, to get him to go without the suit on, but Max quietly and calmly refused without any tantrums whatsoever, only with the same four words almost, if not every single time: "Barkley isn’t ready yet." At first in school, some kids laughed. A few were cruel. But Max didn’t bark back. He simply sat at his desk, paw-gloves gently gripping his pencil, answering questions with wagging enthusiasm and surprising wisdom, ignoring the teasing. Overtime, even the meanest kids got used to him. Some even started to like him as Barkley more than they liked him as Max. No one really knew the reason why Max wore the costume. Some guessed he just really loved dogs. Others speculated he was pretending to be someone else. Someone braver... someone stronger, even. But the truth — a truth Max didn’t say out loud — was this: Max used to have a dog of his own. A real one. It was a she, and her name was Penny. She had floppy ears and caramel-colored fur, just like the suit. She used to sleep at the foot of his bed, snuggle him when he cried, and always seemed to understand the words he didn’t know how to say. But Penny got very ill. And one night when he was just starting first grade, Max woke up to an empty spot on the bed, and the quiet kind of silence that felt like a hole in his chest. He didn’t cry. Not at first. The next morning, Max pulled out a costume Penny had worn for Halloween once — a dog outfit made for a human. He put it on, zipped it up, and didn’t take it off. Because when he wore it, **he could still feel her.** In the rhythm of his steps. In the stillness of his heart. In the warmth that had not faded. And slowly, the world adjusted to him. One day, a girl named Junie asked if she could sit with Barkley at lunch. Barkley allowed her to, and then noticed that she was wearing a costume of her own. It was a cat costume with fuchsia-colored fur. Plus Within the next week, he noticed another kid was wearing a dragon costume. Before long, Barkley wasn’t alone. The playground became a safari of imagination — dogs, cats, bears, birds, wolves, lions, elephants, ferrets, otters, skunks, mice, pigs, tigers, rabbits, and even a unicorn or two laughing together. It wasn’t about costumes anymore. It was about being who you wanted (or even needed) to be. Now, the thing about these costumes is that they have some things that make them differ from normal costumes. You'd think Barkley would ever outgrow his dog suit, but these costumes can grow alongside the owners of them, so outgrowing them will be VERY unlikely. On top of that, these costumes can also automatically clean themselves from the outside AND the inside, so they would never need to be put in a washer or anything like that. I know neither of these are physically possible in real life, but I have 4 words: MY CHARACTER, MY IDEAS.
EGTTRO
