The Colorbear Saga

The Grand Tail of Scruffy

(not referring to Scruffy's physical tail, which like that of all colorbears is small and fuzzy, but that's how the few colorbears who can read usually spell.)
So anyway, Scruffy was fairly intelligent for a colorbear but he was very strange. He always asked questions like "What if mushrooms grew in colorbear fur?" (A colorbear sport is jumping on mushrooms and squashing them.) "Then we'd jump on each other and the ones being jumped on would scream and that wouldn't be much fun but it would still be fun to squash the mushrooms."
These deep (if you're a colorbear) questions were too much for all the other colorbears and they learned to ignore Scruffy and carry on with jumping on the mushrooms that grew, perfectly normally, out of the ground. Scruffy, of course, would wander off into the woods, searching for unsquashed mushrooms, and get lost.
It wasn't a major problem for Scruffy to get lost, because there was always a handy log to sleep in in the forest, and since colorbears don't actually need to eat to survive, the scarcity of honeytrees was only an inconvenience, not a major problem.
One day Scruffy got lost because he was looking at flowers and wondering whether they could talk. He had tried talking to them and they hadn't answered but he thought maybe they were asleep. Or maybe they spoke the language of the noncolorbears which no colorbear could understand (because it had more than two words.)
Scruffy wandered around whenever he found any flowers, not knowing (but he wouldn't have cared if he had known) that he was getting farther and farther away from home. Gradually the blue flowers became more purple (not just from it getting dark, but a different breed) and Scruffy started wondering if he shouldn't try to find a log to sleep in (preferably one with a lot of flowers nearby so he could hear if they woke up in the night and started talking.)
Looking around for a log, Scruffy didn't look where he was going and ran smack into what looked like a wall in the semi-dark, but when he backed up and squinted seemed to be the BIGGEST tree he had ever seen in his life or ever had anyone tell him about. It was about fifteen times the size of any other tree he had ever seen (not that Scruffy could ever come up with the concept of "fifteen", but he thought it was very, very big.)
After being momentarily impressed, Scruffy noticed that there was a log near it, so he crawled inside and went to sleep.
In the morning he crawled back out and went to look at the big honeytree. He fell down on his knees and said, "Oh, Great Father Honeytree, tell me the reason I have been chosen to find you. I have followed your children the flowers, hoping to hear their wisdom, and it is you who I have found. Please, I beg of you, speak to me!" (very liberal translation)
"Oh, little Scruffy colorbear, you are the first of your kind to find me. The most adventurous, the most intelligent maybe. Lie against my trunk and I will tell you my wisdom."
So Scruffy lay flat against the great trunk of the tree and stayed all day in the sun that filtered through the forest, listening. When it started to get dark the tree said, "That's all." Scruffy got up, stretched and did a somersault for joy. "I am the messenger!" he shouted. And he jumped up into a tree and bumped into it. And a redfruit, that if he had seen it, he would have called the biggest one he had ever seen, fell on his head. Scruffy was literally stunned. And when he recovered, he had completely forgotten that he had even met the Father Honeytree, much less the things it had told him. But he found his way home eventually, without further adventure, and forever retained the conviction that plants would talk to those who were willing to listen.

Luffy was an exceptionally beautiful female colorbear. Several artists tried to paint her and the best of their creations looked like this. Note the long eyelashes, a turn-on for male colorbears.
This is a noncolorbear painting of Luffy. (Note that several of the colorbear artists looked at Luffy's stomach instead of her head and painted the portrait of her face the wrong color.)
Luffy, like Scruffy, had an experience with the great Father Honeytree, but she was much younger at the time. When she was born, her mother accidentally left her in the woods overnight. (Colorbears, because of their (lack of) intelligence, don't make the best parents, because they tend to forget where they left their children.) The Father Honeytree knew, because he know everything, about the poor little colorbearbaby left in the woods. He spread his branches far, so they covered Luffy. When she woke, he sang to her, and she went back to sleep. The Father Honeytree was not without feelings, and he became quite fond of the little colorbear. Before her mother returned for her, he gave Luffy a gift: a beautiful colorbear body that could look like anything she wanted, a nice personality, and great intelligence (relatively speaking).
Luffy soon became the most popular colorbear on notearth. Even the noncolorbears liked her (that's why they painted her portrait, wanting her to be represented better than the colorbears could do it). As previously mentioned, male colorbears love long eyelashes. For the local talent show (none of the colorbears had much talent, so talent shows consisted of colorbears making their fur neat, getting up on stage, and being applauded by the audience) Luffy grew her eyelashes very, very long and won the hearts of all the male bears. Then she astounded the audience by dancing -- purposeful, graceful movements that had never before been seen by the colorbears. Every colorbear loved Luffy's talent and tried to take dance lessons from her. Unfortunately, most of the colorbears weren't intelligent enough to learn very much.
The talent show occurred shortly after Scruffy's encounter with the Father Honeytree, and Scruffy still had the feeling that something important had happened to him. This feeling gave him the self-confidence to ask Luffy for a date. Besides, he liked the way their names rhymed (he didn't realize that every colorbear's name rhymed with every other colorbear's name). For reasons neither one of them could explain, they both liked to take long walks together in the forest, where the great Father Honeytree would, unseen, smile approvingly at his two favorite children. (Yes, I know it's an inane, drippy story, but it's the kind of story the colorbears love to tell. Unfortunately, they'll never be able to tell this one, because none of them, not even Scruffy and Luffy know about the F.H.T.)
Van Beargo's discovery of the art of collage, "The Honeytree." Colorbears not having invented scissors, the real masterpiece is his neat tearing of the electric company's poster into the right shape.

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