The Cup
Around 2,000 years ago, the founder of a major religion staggered down the Via Dolorosa, sorely oppressed by the ponderous weight of the wooden cross that he had been made to bear. Being scourged by a leaded whip and then led away to crucifixion could really ruin your entire day; where was a good lawyer when you needed one?!
Falling to his knees in pain and exhaustion, the carpenter turned itinerant preacher gasped for breath, his throat parched and swollen. It was then that a cowled figure scurried to his side, producing a cup of water from within the folds of his garment and offering it to the beaten and physically failing man. The carpenter grasped the unexpected gift with trembling hands and drank gratefully of the warm water, raising his eyes then to behold his benefactor.
The face hidden within the hood of the simple robe had bright, alert eyes, a snout, and gray fur; it was a wolf furry, a creature known and despised in ancient Israel and forced with others of his kind to live among the lepers. The eyes of the wolf and the deity in the flesh met briefly, and something passed between them in that instant.
"I has cookies!," offered the wolf in a whisper, not knowing quite what else to say to the atypical human. The bearer of the cross didn't have a chance to answer, however, as a Roman soldier dashed the cup from his hands at that instant, other soldiers giving the wolf a sound cuffing about the ears and knocking his hood back to expose his visage.
"Look!," gasped a middle-eastern woman who beheld the commotion. "It's a furry!," she cried. "Unclean!"
"Well, excuse me for living!," huffed the wolf, backpedaling from the soldiers. "And your hygiene ain't the greatest either, Sister!," he countered, pointing a clawed finger in the woman's direction. "No cookies for you!"
"Alright then, off you go!," shouted a Roman Centurion to the wolf while his underlings dragged the carpenter to his feet and back on the road to his own execution. It crossed the carpenter's mind to say _"If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can imagine,"_but he chose to leave those words for others to say in the movie business of the distant future. The wolf paused only to retrieve his cup, such commodities hardly being considered disposables in those days.
And so the wolf returned to the Leper Colony, maintaining possession of the cup which seemed to have acquired the property of bestowing healing upon anyone who drank from it. The cup passed from his children to his grandchildren and so on down the line until the city and surrounding areas were eventually sacked by the barbarians when the Roman Empire fell. Buried under rubble, the cup rested forgotten in the earth for centuries while the world moved on. It was eventually unearthed accidentally by a foraging anthropomorphic cat named Brice, who took the cup home to use, his own water dish having grown rather shabby.
After drinking from the cup of the carpenter for several days, the poor cat was beseiged one day by an especially nasty junkyard dog, who seized Brice by the neck and whipped the feline viciously from side to side, breaking his spine. As Brice lay crumpled on the ground, however, something extraordinary happened, his spine spontaneously knitting together. Brice stood up, seriously pissed, and regarded the dog with baleful eyes.
"That wasn't very nice!," he said, opening slashes on the dog's face with his claws to emphasize his point.
Taken back, the dog regrouped and clamped his jaws on the cat's rear leg, snapping it. Brice collapsed momentarily to the ground, the damaged bone and muscle reconstituting itself almost immediately.
"Screw you!," hissed Brice, launching himself on the dog's back and inflicting painful damage with all four paws.
And so the battle raged on for some time afterwards, the dog tearing into and inflicting apparently mortal wounds upon Brice from which the cat almost immediately recovered to administer further slicing and dicing to his foe.
"I do believe," said Brice to himself,"that I am wearing the bastard down!"
And so it was that when the dog was bleeding from dozens of wounds and Brice delivered an especially effective strike to his nose that the hound yelped and ran away from his much smaller foe with his tail between his legs.
"Oh yeah, who's bad?!," exulted Brice, indulging himself in a brief victory dance.
In the days which followed, Brice's veterinarian would marvel at the strange and unknown kind of powerful "cellular glue" as he termed it that seemed to allow the small cat to recover from seemingly devastating injuries. Brice only purred as he was stroked, realizing as do all furries the importance of living in the present moment...