Cat's Chimerical Creations Lore: Chance
This is Chance the Rescued Bear:
I was casually scrolling some local FB groups late one January evening when I came across this post:
I showed my partner the post.
"...do you want to go out and see if he's still there?" my partner asked.
So, gone ten o'clock on a Wednesday night, when I have work the next day and should have been headed to bed, we put on our warm clothes and headed out into the wind and the rain to look for this little lost teddy bear.
Based on the above photo, we thought he'd be in the Sunken Gardens along the seafront, but after walking the length of it a couple of times, couldn't find him.
Maybe his owners saw the post and rescued him?
Since we were out already anyway, we figured we might as well check the rest of the prom, just in case.
As we got towards the end, under the hazy sodium glow of a streetlight in the salt spray, we saw something on one of the far benches.
"It's a McDonalds bag," said my partner.
"Let me just check real quick," I said.
Readers, it was not a McDonalds bag:
He was in bad shape; covered in sand and grit from the beach, soaked from the rain and the sea, back seam torn open and ketchup smeared across the wound.
When we got him home, the first order of business was to pull out all the soggy, gritty stuffing, and then give him a bath:
After that, he spent two weeks hanging in the window, drying out in the weak sunshine.
Once he was nice and dry, I filled him with fresh stuffing and added a few scoops of beans to give him weight:
I could have tried to make the repair job on his back seam a little more subtle, but I thought that a bear this tiny and this brave deserved to have a visible record of what he'd survived. I used triple threads of blue, red and green to match his collar:
When the time came to pick a name for him, we went with Chance after my partner repeatedly exclaimed "what are the chances?" following his rescue.
Chance originally had a flocked nose, but during his misadventure by the sea he got a big scratch on it and over time it's peeled off to leave shiny black plastic.
Based on the collar, we think Chance was originally a Paddington plush with a dressing down, and based on the torn back seam we think he may have been scavenged specifically for that dressing gown:
Chance doesn't remember much about his life before; he says he remembers hurting, and being very scared and alone in the dark.
These days he loves warmth and sunshine, spending time with all of his siblings, and, if the weather isn't obliging, keeping cozy.
He's even been known to turn to the occult in order to bring back the sun:
