FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

~ The war was essentially won; the avian home world was a scorched ruin and the heavy battle fleet was on its way to port for resupply, repairs, and relaxation. Everyone aboard the ships of the mustered fleet, though victorious, were exhausted. Staff Sergeant Flenir sat at a table in a galley, grimmacing down at the impossibility of his studies. His technical exam was only a few months away, and he couldn't for the life of him get the math to work for the top level balances between the ship's systems. The most basic relationship, the wobbling of the vacuum chamber's positive and negative pressure should be magnified and seen in both the fold couplings' charges and the power conditioners for the ship's secondary systems.

~ And yet, the fox couldn't find even a hint of such variations on the readout of his diagnostic pad. The systems were all scattered amongst their green zones; nothing was awry. Nothing was quite wrong. But each system seemed to be ignoring the delicate dances performed by the others. It was as if each system had been pulled from the ship, and was being subjected to some sort of cosmic bench test.

~ The puff of his tail lashed about amongst the empty chairs around him; this particular galley was otherwise empty. The Frozo-Drink machine hadn't worked since it was powered back up when they broke orbit. And no one who'd pulled the line as far as they had stretched could find sufficient relaxation anywhere but at the bottom of a Cherrie Blam Frozo-Slam. Flenir liked it this way; it was as if he could hide his shame as he riffled through the stack of notes and papers. He must be missing something, or doing some math wrong, or using the wrong diagnostic script, something. He didn't even notice when the barely awake Airman entered and stumbled over to the Frozo-Drink machine.

~ The Airman First Class looked like his shift had just ended, and it had been somewhat rough. Her work uniform was covered in patches of dielectric grease. Sergeant Flenir looked up to correct the Airman just after she had removed a cup and was trying to coax some Orango-Bond Low Caloric Drink Substitute Not For Infants Or the Elderly from the machine when he noticed something very odd on his pad. Each time she shoved the drink forward, in sync with the whirring of the empty pump mechanism, the grav coupling pressure started to flutter. Still within spec, but as though synchronized. When she went for Cherrie Blam Frozo-Slam, the intertial dampening coils started to react in the same manner.

~ Sergeant Flenir, realizing his error, tapped his way through the pad menus to verify he'd patched into the correct system interface. To his amazement, he had. This was not his error; he tabbed around the menus and stripped off the processing scripts and normalization and verification routines on the data. And there he found it. Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl. The Airman was determined to at least get some Grape Drink. Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrl. The fold couplings were reporting that they were low on synth-syrup, and the intertial dampeners were steady with a magnetic field strength of seven ounces.

~ For the brief moment of panic and action, the foxes fingers were as nimble as they had ever been, a blur across the pad in his anger at the anonymous prankster. Screenshots and datalogs forwarded to the printer in the Chief's quarters. It was only moments later that he whizzed by the rather disappointed Airman filling her glass with water on his way to the Chief's quarters. By the time he arrived, the badger was standing in his own doorway furiously juggling a messaging pad and a diagnostic pad.

~ "Good. Take this one. Pull up inter-ship com, and get me an appointment with the Admiral in twenty-three minutes." The badger strode away from his quarters, shoving a pad into the hands of Staff Sergeant Flenir, turning all of his attention to the diagnostic pad. "And call up my entire engineering crew. Have them all on deck in four minutes; I don't care what they're wearing." Chief Master Sergeant Cressig was, himself, wearing only boxer shorts and what looked like a grooming tool in the fur of his tail. If abandoned grooming supplies counted towards clothing.

~ Sergeant Flenir nodded and somewhat jogged to keep up with the Chief as they made it down the corridors, "Erm, Sir.. I know I was angry at the prank, but is this all justified?" The fox's anger was a pale din against the thought of how many evenings were being ruined in their wake.

~ The chief didn't even look up from his pad as they continued to travel towards the main engineering deck with a sense of urgency. "There's no prank. We're all going to die." It wasn't until arrival on deck to the sight of variously disrobed technicians that Chief Master Sergeant Cressig finished his sentence. "Probably."