The city of Chicago offered a future of prosperous times in the same way London offered good living in the Victorian Century.  It was a good life, but if only if you had the money, the luck, the perseverance, and also the right connections.

Everyone else was filtered out into the sewers and slums like rainwater to a river, where there would be an overflowing multitude of the destitute.  Many would die from either advanced diseases regardless, or from the general poverty that killed their souls.

But that was all in the slums of the Windy City.  Chicago was not an evil place, not entirely corrupt.  It was simply pessimistic about the poor and the slow.  If you couldn't keep up, you should drop out of the race.  This was not a cruel philosophy to them.  This was the philosophy that kept the city alive, like the gazelles that had to outrun their friends when the cheeetah hunted them.

The city, like the rest of its Earth, was in a supposedly advanced time, perhaps 1300 years after the greatest cataclysm in human history as of yet.  A time when humanity reached its nadir of war, and only after after the most horrific of wars that decimated the world into an empty chaos, they had a new race of creatures to contend with.

"Anthros."

Anthropomorphic animals were not a new concept.  They had spanned far back in the echelons of human history, to the days of pagan rituals, to the time of ancient gods of the desert tribes of Africa.  It had been the idolism of many humans in either spiritual, moral, existential, fantastical and even sexual terms.

Yet even within the apocalyptic wasteland that became the 22nd century, there still remained what some would call madness, and what others would call a miracle.  The Circe project, beginning in 2102 AD/CE, was both.  Very few records remain of how, what or even why such an event transpired within the laboratories in Iceland.  Records were lost, factions remember different parts from others but there was one thing they all agreed on.  The scientists, beyond all reason and after many failures that each made them learn one mistake from another, managed to finally create the first anthropomorphic animal.

A dog, a mutt of an unknown breed that crawled out of a chamber with hands and feet perfectly developed.  The feet were like paws with stronger leg muscles, stretched past human limits in both appearance and musculature.  Yet the hands were exactly human, despite the fur and black hardened claws, fingers ending in stubby lumps of black like freshly roasted bread.  But they had created an anthropomorphic animal, the perfect blend between human and animal.

What followed afterwards was centuries of suffering and confusion.

Humanity has always been afraid of that which it does not know of.  The American horror writer HP Lovecraft wrote "Fear is the most strongest and ancient human emotion.  And fear of the unknown is the most powerful and ancient of fears."  In this world at least, this was very true for every form of unknown encountered, humanity has either fought in fearful attack or cowered until they could.

Almost every downfall of humanity, or at least many of them, had centred on fear of the unknown.  The fear that more powerful humans had when they encountered unknown parts.  When fear was gone, this was replaced with avarice.

Every part of humanity experienced this.  Between tribes, countries, races and genders, and now they had to face their own science.  They were afraid of their creations, and now they had to overcome fear in order to fight it the only way they knew how.  But the problem was that there was nothing to fear.  In the same way that they had little to fear from their own species on a general consensus, they had just as little to fear with the anthros.  But of course, there are always the skeptics.  And so the laws were written up.

At first it was hard for them to face the fact that meat seemed to be something barbaric due to more sentient creatures.  So the quick solution came from soya and tofu-based foods which many at first were resistant to.  This did not work, and few of the people were fooled until science gave them a better solution in the form of what used to be called "quorn".  Mass-produced fungus that had the perfect texture and thickness of meat, despite being a plant, that was perfectly safe for everyone to eat.  Now came the acceptance.

The first human encounters with anthros ranged from those who worshipped the very ground they walked on, to the ones who would kill and eat them because they were but simply animals that talked.  So more laws were written for terms of conduct and applications of having equal rights to humans, which to many was unbelieveable for the sudden granting of laws to a completely new group of sentient beings.  Laws and rights that took years for other humans to receive, but for a race that humanity itself created, and some considered were were gods for the anthros to create them, to receive them in the space of several months?  It was madness surely.  And so there came conflict.

Wars broke out, and anthros became their own society outcast from the others with the odd Romeo and Juliet situations here and there between anthros and humans.  Many of them ended either for the better, the same as Shakespeare wrote it, or far worse than the bard could ever have imagined.

But eventually, the anthros became stronger than the humans, thanks to the many experiments that made them develop better immunities and musculature.  Plus they had retained their natural weaponry and now that they had human intelligence, they soon developed weaponry to the level of humans.  The only thing that could harm them, apart from the most determined of human warriors, was their own diseases that still affected their inherent natures from swine flu to myxomatosis.

Humanity was frightened because of the fourth World War, or as some more dramatically call it, the Human Holocaust.  A war that truly nearly wiped out all of humanity.  The human population of Earth was approximately 9 billion beforehand.  By the end of the fourth World War, it was down to 2 billion.  Society itself was ravaged to the point that most of the Earth became a wasteland.  Some areas however, such as Iceland, were well-protected and it was in that very sheltered land that anthros first came from.  And not just creatures that had been alive alongside humans, but even more ancient creatures such as most famously, the saurians through a daring process of rebuilding DNA from fossils and crystallised amber remnants.  There was a book about this but the best thing about living in the post-apocalypse was that you didn't have to pay royalties anymore, or be accused of plagiarism.

Even with humanity struggling to work together in the centuries of rebuilding both their society and their history, they clashed with anthros and their various growing tribes who equalled them in combat.  Of course they also lost many as well, perhaps half of all the anthros that existed at that point.

Eventually, after decades of struggle there came an alliance of peace within a bloody handshake of both hand and paw.  Communities grew together, society restored itself overtime, bonds of both friendship and love developed between them.  And so, by the time of 3513 AD/CE, humans and anthros had become close enough to let 1300 years of animosity slide past them, ridiculed in comedy clubs throughout rebuilt cities, provided they were kept in good taste.

But that's only the backdrop, the bloody-brick road to lead to where this story starts which is set at first in Chicago.  In this year of 3513 AD/CE, is one character who is the entire reason for this story to be written.  He does not have a destiny to become the saviour of his world, but this story is about him nonetheless.  A velociraptor, trying to live life in the slums like any other anthro or human.  He wasn't homeless, but he was paid far below the minimum wage and could smell the slightly-stained blankets already beckoning for him.  He had his job as a bartender's assistant, after drifting from place to place with the barest knowledge of wellbeing and nothing from literature.

The raptor was almost alone in the world other than the few friends he made in Chicago, an immigrant orphan from London who learned the ways of the streets thanks to a close and dear friend that he had almost completely forgotten, after being adopted by a human male and a female horse, a mare.  He ran away at the age of 14, hopping on a ship over the Atlantic to try and find a new life which he could not even say was better than the life he had back home.  Now at the age of 22, he was currently on the run from the police.  Or at least what he assumed was the police, it was definitely some form of authority who tried to corner him in an alleyway as they shouted:

        "STOP RUNNING!"

        "FUCK OFF YOU PRICKS!"

Through the various byways, the raptor outran the ones behind him, but some were trying to leap from the shadows or in front of him forcing him to wallkick past them with the odd lucky strike to their faces, trying to look for something better to get away with than on foot.  Leading them back the way he came through scrapyards and crummy apartment blocks, he saw his motorcycle, his knight in shining armour parked nearby which he hopped and pumped, charging into the roads distant whilst screaming victoriously.

        "SEE YA ROUND FUCKERS, HAHAHAHAHAA!"

The chasers picked up their radio to transmit:

        "Sierra Papa Victor, suspect's escaped on a black Triumph motorcycle, make is Speed Triple 900cc, repeat, black Triumph motorcycle 900cc, registration Whiskey Eight Niner, India Golf Four."

The raptor knew despite his cocky exit, that they'd have backup onto him.  He had been in trouble with the law because of his activities with this very motorcycle, the illegal street races and such.  He held his grip steady on the handlebars and awaited any sign of his assailants upon the roads through the various widened paths between the slums.

Two minutes passed, he heard a car behind him, a strange one he hadn't seen before which worried him moreso as he was sure it was the police after him.  But seeing he had to escape, he made a daring turn through an alleyway where the car could not chase him, nearly getting clipped by the bumper as he sped through the narrow corridor to reach the other end before anyone else showed up.  The motorcycle exited the alley and roared off the other way, the car soon following him a minute later on the main road.

        "Oh you wanna play fucker, well fuck THIS!"

Giving the assailants the clawed finger, he swerved past dustbins clanging relentlessly in the night amongst the droning sirens hounding after him.  The raptor's legs shook with the engine, and his growing irritation at the cops when he only wanted to finish his delivery of Carlsberg to the bar and go to bed.  But ohhhhh no, they decide to pick tonight.  The car gained up to him with the blaring orders:

        "PULL OVER YOUR VEHICLE AND SURRENDER, CITIZEN!"

This annoyed him greatly, being told what to do, and he decided to spin round on the road attempting to slide past the car in a half circle, bringing out one three-clawed hand to scrape against the windows and paint in a screeching fashion and head back the way he came with defiant vandalistic glee.  The car had to stop in its sharp turn and the fugitive felt like he was home free with a good humiliation earned upon his opponents whilst cackling to the wind.  Then he saw a few more cars come up in front, surprising him to a screeching halt as they stopped colliding slowly for the raptor to end up on their hoods right into the sturdy unbroken windscreen.  They immediately came out to restrain him on the hood, holding his arms as he struggled.

        "Le-LET GO OF ME!"

        "Sorry kid, but you're our lucky contestant."

There came a syringe from one of them, firmly injected into the unwilling captive's neck as he tried to fight back.  The fight soon turned internal against the sudden unconsciousness that came upon him.  His eyes tried to stay open, but the lids became heavy like the weight of the world upon his face as murmured vague insults and desperately tried to flip them off one last time before he was put into one of the cars.  They drove to leave his motorcycle on its side, cold, alone and abandoned in the middle of the road.