L'Orfeo

A long time ago I was on Facebook, before I found out enough about it to make me twitchy. I was mostly there for the games; and the game I enjoyed most was called Fluff Friends.

Fluff Friends was great for a number of reasons. First of all, though there were competitive elements if you wanted them (you could, for instance, take part in Fluff races), it was primarily co-operative. You had a cute animal called a Fluff, which could be one of quite a number of types; mine was a penguin mathematician called Euclid. Your Fluff needed a lot of petting to keep it happy, and there was a limit on how much you could pet it (it may even have been only once a day), so you would go round and pet other people's Fluffs in the hope that they would reciprocate by petting yours, which they generally did. Fluffs also needed feeding, and they all had their own favourite foods; if I recall correctly, any food would give them energy, but if you gave them something they liked it would also make them happier. So you would get to know, not only what your Fluff liked, but also what your friends' Fluffs liked, because you could feed them too.

But the thing I enjoyed about it even more than the social element was the opportunity it gave for creativity. You see, you didn't just have a Fluff. You could have an entire collection of "minis", which were smaller creatures, some of the same types as the Fluffs themselves, others uniquely minis and not available as full-sized Fluffs. You could also earn game currency and buy backgrounds and items in the Fluff shop, and with these you could create all kinds of scenes. Since not every specific item you wanted was available, this often took some ingenuity; you could not, for instance, get a bicycle, but you could get wheels and... something rod-shaped, possibly pencils... and you could put things together to look like a bicycle. Quite a lot of people made static scenes, kept them up for a while, and then changed them for another static scene; but a few people, me included, seized the opportunity to tell a long-running story. A kind of Fluff opera, if you will.

My Three Musketeers all got into this story in different ways. Porthos was the first. A new mini came out called a Ya-Wobbly, which was originally intended as an April Fool's joke, but proved so popular they kept it in the game. The Ya-Wobbly was a kind of gonk; it was spherical, dark charcoal grey in colour, and had a permanently rather worried expression. So Porthos appeared as the enormously talented Russian countertenor Pavel Petrovich Ya-Wobblski, who had got lost and strayed into Euclid's little polar paradise. Later, I managed to win the rarest mini in the game, the Arctic fox, and that had such a self-possessed air about it in the way that it was drawn that it just had to be Athos. It got Athos' real name and went about saying some very Athos things. But as for d'Artagnan...

I could not make d'Artagnan work as a mini, so I did the next best thing. Another rare mini (though not as rare as the Arctic fox) was the golden unicorn, and I ended up with quite a few of them. They looked like this:

The way it worked was that Orpheus the golden unicorn was Euclid's best friend, and while Euclid applied himself to the delights of mathematics, Orpheus got a choir going among the minis (and was, naturally, very happy when Pavel Petrovich showed up). Orpheus himself was an outstanding tenor, and of course an outstanding tenor in the early stages of his career needs a voice coach... so, every so often, Orpheus would disappear from the story for a while, and the understanding was that he was off having intensive singing tuition from d'Artagnan. All of them, I should say, were in on this; Athos and Porthos were both on Facebook themselves and followed along with amused interest, and d'Artagnan has never done social media in any form but I would often send him screencaps of the story panels.

So when I found a pattern for a cuddly unicorn, that was it. Orpheus just had to be made. And once he was made, a photo of him had to be taken with his voice coach... who, I might add, stood there in the full evening dress you see above and cheerfully galloped him around in mid-air following a concert somewhere on the east coast. (To be fair, it may partly have been stress relief. The tenor part was horrible. He did it full justice even so, but he explained earnestly at some length that the score had demanded one or two things that were physically impossible, so he'd had to fudge.) I have no idea what the rest of the audience thought, but I was certainly well amused.

But, of course, in 2016, poor little Orpheus vanished along with almost everything else, so now Orpheus is in the Underworld. Except... his mythical namesake did, after all, come back.

The original unicorn pattern has been discontinued, but very recently I found another one. And some very nice gold velour. And a much better yarn for the mane and tail (the original one was Twilley's Goldfingering, which is most satisfactorily glittery, but a bit too thin for the purpose, so it is inclined to straggle). And some decent safety eyes, because keeping them very small like those in the drawing doesn't work so very well on a cuddly animal.

Orpheus will return. Bigger, better, and even cuter. After all, I have promised d'Artagnan he will!