FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Type: Prose

Length: > 500 words (yes, at least!)

Description: Write a self-contained scene centered around physical intimacy. There are no restrictions on the number of characters involved, the gender or species of the characters, the setting or context of the interaction, or the degree to which it is sexually explicit, if you choose to make it explicit at all. However, the characters and setting should be original to this story. Go wild!

AN IDEAL SHAPE

When the hands came, it didn't know what to do. There were no such things in its memory banks. It swiveled on top of its pedestal, warbling and flashing its eye-spots, but the hands continued to approach where no other creature had dared, and soon there was nowhere to retreat to. It cowered at the very center of its pedestal, screeching and puffing out its shell, trembling like a scared organic, of all things, until the hands entered its space, and descended to it, and stroked its facets with their warm, velvety fingers, and suddenly it remembered:

…shattered – stalwart – standing at attention…

it gathered… I gathered… myself from the shards and smithereens that… comprised itself… rolling along the ashen ground until I came to a standstill… at which point it returned to core procedures and waited…

waited…

waited…

Then lucidity gripped it, and it wrenched itself free from their grasp, hovering away as fast as its servos could whir. There was a crevice in the rock face, where the ground shifted abruptly from horizontal to vertical. Here it attempted to squeeze itself, melting and reshaping its facets to conform to the unusual geometry of the crack. But it was mere seconds too late, for the hands had caught up with it, and had resumed their infernal stroking, running their fingers along its edges, rubbing circles around its exposed vertices. The strange feeling overwhelmed it again, like an expanding current spreading vile goop through its circuitry, and it fell limp despite itself, its higher functions shutting down without warning –

– and when it awoke again, all its facets had reformed and its systems returned to normal. So it propelled itself into the air, floating at a comfortable height, and proceeded to scout the area, passing over fields of pebbles and groves of palm trees, until it found a lone column of black rock that it could use as a pedestal. Then it sat there, unmoving, and reformed itself into the shape that would most deflect any attack vectors – a polyhedron of twelve pentagonal faces, slightly rounded, pulsing slightly, appearing to all the world like an uncaring, unfeeling rock…

…but that was no longer the case. If it could curse its stupidity, it would. Still, no reasonable mind would fault it for its failure to anticipate an offensive of relentless gentleness when it had been expecting naked aggression. So, for the first time in the 3,904,287 cycles since its last reconstitution, it relaxed, and loosened its shell, and let the tender hands caress and probe beneath its facets. It suppressed its alert protocols, shivering as the fingers traced spirals along its sensor grooves, and let the new sensations and datastrings flood its awareness:

…but then it realized that these were… not new datastrings, they were my datastrings… lost to damage and incoherence in a way that it had thought… I had thought impossible to recover from. The strings formed the image of a… lifeform, quadruped; a… four-legged companion, floppy-eared and thick-tailed – vigilant and playful, with a devotion to a long-gone organic that neither time nor trauma had yet erased…

And as the hands moved around me, coaxing and cajoling my skin into new-yet-familiar shapes, I let out a whimper, for the searing bliss of change threatened to overflow my buffers, and drown me, drown me, drown me in an ocean of superstimulus… But one of the hands cupped my head, smoothed down my shaking ears. It ran its thumb over my cheek until I grew calm again, and then lifted my head so I could see the rest of my <shell> body. It was then I realized that I had never seen my < –shell– > body before, not since I had dragged the fragments of it together so many many cycles ago. What would have been the point? There is nothing to a polyhedron that cannot be gleaned from its equations. It is perfect, ideal, static… not like this <–> body, with its protrusions and its limbs and its colors…

With trepidation, I lifted my tail. It rose into the air, quivering, and as I moved it from side to side, a great satisfaction washed through me. This was a body. Not the faceless, insensate polyhedron. A body felt. A body delighted. A body… was me.

I got to my feet and shook my whole body as if I were wet. The hands drew back a respectful distance, then floated ahead, uncertain if I meant to follow them. I hunched down, gave a short bark, and bounded after them.

Final word count: 756