FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

//: City of San Iadras. 'Furry' district. The canyon was a twisted city planner's solution to problems with street space. A multi-tiered canyon had been carved almost a hundred feet into the ground under the streets of San Iadras. Up above, to a driver, it'd be little more than a parking turn off, a strip of empty space between the traffic lanes, and pedestrian access points. Below, eight levels of tiers cut into the sides of the canyon were bathed in gentle sunlight from large mirror and prism arrays, suspended just below the massive skylights of the canyon. Getting here hadn't taken too long, just a short bus ride that Jennifer seemed to know the route for better than Troy did. They'd passed down into the Canyon, making a quick stop at a Japanese electronics vendor's stall, where Troy had gotten a cheap replacement phone, having to haggle the price in Japanese and Spanish. He apologised for the delay, and fairly soon they were seated in the heat of prism reflected light, outside in the fresh air, the waving fronds of a garden pod held up near the top of the canyon for the light their only company. It was still too early on a Saturday for throngs of shoppers and cityfolk to be at their business. The menu wasn't too different to the Tyrel's outlets up north, stateside. He ordered a muffin thick with muesli, along with coffee. Jennifer picked out a complex coffee with a spanish name that wasn't on the menu back home along with eggs and bacon. Fairly soon they were sitting together, elbows on the table, waiting for one another to say something to break the silence. She did it first. "So. Japanese? Where'd you learn to speak that?" she asked, rubbing her hands together lightly, leaning a little forward on the table, perched comfortably on the backless stools that made Tyrel's a favourite coffee shop of more than one fur. "Oh, uhm," Troy gestured a little helplessly. "My late brother, Houston. He lived in Japan, I visited a lot." Especially while he was in the hospitals. He'd had to learn Japanese to get any decent information on Houston's condition. Jennifer nodded gently, averting her eyes. "I'm, sorry. I'm sure he was a nice guy." "He was." Troy glanced down at his hands. "Japan's a nice country, though. Not much contamination, still very green outside of the cities." "I think I mentioned I have some sisters out in Milan. Not so green, but they like it anyway." She rested her chin on her hand. Troy glanced at the mirrory windows of the Tyrel's. No sign of their waiter, yet. "How'd they manage to move? Western European Union's hard to get into these days." "Oh," she smiled, "work contracts. They picked up French and Italian fairly fast, so it wasn't too difficult for them to find a job. What about you and your brothers?" "Most of us have a knack for science, so universities are generally willing to help a little. Houston was in physics, uh, my brother Saigon is a pretty talented electronics engineer." Jennifer nodded. "Did he teach you?" Troy blinked, shook his head. "Uh, no. Why?" "You just seem so talented," she replied, pulling her sunglasses off and setting them on the table, not needing them in the gentler sunlight of the mirror. Jennifer looked up at him, and Troy found his heart melting in her eyes. "Electronics, with the phone and the door. And this chemistry too? And you know so many languages Where'd you pick it all up?" Troy paused, closing his eyes for a moment. "Oh, uh." He clenched his teeth together. "That's, uhm. Back in the labs they taught us a lot. Helped their intelligence testing." They were taught a lot, like how to carve up your own dead brother's flesh. Fuck. Jennifer paused only a moment, then glanced down awkwardly at the tabletop with its animated ads for Tyrel's food. Troy took a grip on his mind, breathed. Breathing was the key. "What about you and your sisters?" he asked, opening his eyes again with a fluttering blink. "They must have done something right in the dorms to get you to turn out so charming." She smiled, glancing down slightly then. Her smile deepened for a moment, ears perked as if to signal embarrassment. "Oh, ah. Nothing special I imagine. We used to play tea party a lot. To teach us conversation." "Tea party? I wish they'd let us come and visit, that sounds like fun." Jennifer laughed, shaking her head. "Oh we were awful! Just imagine about a hundred and eighty little girls putting blame on one another. We all used to use our embryonic numbers, and we learned pretty quickly that the staff couldn't remember them as easily as we could." Self consciously, Troy stuck his tongue up between his lips and his teeth, and licked at the gum on the right hand side. Sometimes the batch numbers tattooed there itched. "So if one of us spilled something on our dress, or, just felt cranky and didn't want to get along, we'd start mixing up the numbers." She chuckled, laughter in her eyes, waving a hand. "Thirty-One Thirteen, put that back, oh, sir, I'm Forty-Three Sixteen, where's Thirty-Three Ninety?" She shook her head slowly, sending her red hair swaying. "It was silly, but, you know," she said, glancing up just a little darkly, a mischievous grin on her lips. "It was fun anyway." The creak of glass caught Troy's ear. A brief glance and he spotted the human waiter, a pimply teenager who looked like he was still nursing one hell of a hangover. As usual, Troy fell silent, dry swallowing. He never knew quite how to act around waiters. While he put down their cutlery, plastic wrapped with a serviette, setting down their plates, Jennifer looked up and offered the kid a tight smile. "Thanks." "Is no problem, señorita." Watching the waiter walk back from the corner of his eye, Troy relaxed little by little. Troy watched Jennifer for a moment, as she stabbed through the plastic wrapping with the fork inside, peeling it back professionally. He followed suit. "Wow, I wish I was as comfortable with people as you are," he admitted, carefully scrunching up the cutlery wrapper. She glanced down again self consciously. "It's just practice, really." She picked up the cup of coffee, tasting it with a careful sip. She looked up with a smile. "Ooh, so, what's the scare-," she hesitated only a moment before correcting herself, "craziest thing that ever happened to you at work?" "Uh, hmm." He stalled for time by cutting open his muffin and taking up a piece to chew on. Was that conversational training? A standard icebreaking line? Troy silently thanked her for changing it. "Well. Sometimes we work with these gas centrifuges, which are kind of spinning cylinders with magnetic rotors in them." he said, demonstratively running a spoon around the edge of his coffee cup to start the fluid spinning. "They help separate out heavier and lighter isotopes, heavy at the edges, light in the middle. You can enrich nuclear fuel and stuff with these," he explained, waving his right hand with its wet spoon in the air while stalling for words. Jennifer nodded encouragingly, whilst tipping sugar into her coffee. "Sounds like you could build a bomb or something with all that." "Uh, yeah," Troy replied awkwardly with a nod. "People did that about eighty years ago. But it's pretty inefficient." He set down the spoon carefully on the side of the saucer. "These things run upwards of a hundred and twenty thousand revolutions a minute, roughly similar to old jet engines. We run a cascade farm for the university's reactors and colliders, which is maybe fifty rows of a hundred and twenty of these things. It's... loud." "How loud?" Troy dipped his head for a quick sip of his coffee. "Pretty loud. Without hearing protection the little bones in your ear just break." Concern crossed her features, the lighter fur around her eyes shifting just a little. "That sounds, uhm, dangerous?" "It's pretty safe if you take care. But you don't want to take risks." He dipped his gaze to her hands, curled around that cup of coffee, the way she gently rubbed the tips of her thumbs together over the mug's handle. "It's antique gear. So, uh. One day prospective investors for the university come down, this was back when I was working as a technician during my studies." She nodded encouragingly, reaching out lightly with her left hand, curling her fingers over his right hand. Troy found himself taking a slow breath, lightly turning his hand so he could hold Jennifer's in turn. The contact made his chest feel too big and too tight. He looked up at her, and squeezed her hand gently. She squeezed back. "Mm?" she prompted, pulling her hand back. He could still feel her warmth under his fur. "Ah," Troy smiled, taking a breath. "Now these guys want a tour of the cascade farm, because they've never seen any of this old equipment before. So we packed up the funding agents in protective headgear and suits, Greg - one of my co-workers - takes them through the safety procedures" He dry swallowed, then thought better of it and took a quick sip of his coffee. Bitter. Jennifer nodded again, cutting into her serving of bacon and eggs, dipping the fried meat before snapping it up. "At the end of all this they're set up with enough ear protection that they won't be able to hear a bomb go off next door, and Greg takes them through to show them the centrifuges. They come out, and one of the investors compliments us on our safety gear." Troy shook his head. "You're running the safest department in the university, the other labs should take a page from your book, that sort of thing." She set down her fork and lifted her cup, sipping at it slowly. "Wow." "Yeah, we were pretty pleased." Troy took a swallow of his coffee. "Mainly because we were terrified someone would realize that we'd shut down the entire cascade farm because of resonance damage and we hadn't had time to fix it yet." She snorted with laughter, reaching up to cover the tip of her muzzle with a hand. "Oh dear." She resettled herself on her seat and started at her bacon and eggs again. "They couldn't tell?" "Well, when the whole thing's running it feels like you're being shaken by a giant hand," Troy explained, making a fist. "But I guess they just never spent any time with heavy machinery before," he added, breaking off a piece of his muffin. "I always thought that sort of radioactive stuff was a little more physics, though," Jennifer said between bites. Troy nodded. "It gets kind of similar the further you go. A lot of science borrows sugar from its neighbours, so to speak." He chewed for a moment on his muffin. Light, bready. Crunchy with the muesli. Pretty much like the Tyrel's meals at home. "So how about you? What sort of crazy things have happened to you at work?" She paused for thought, glancing off to a side for a moment. The reflected sunlight made the green in them stand out. "I used to a lot of part time temping while I was in college." "Filling in when people are ill, that kind of thing?" "Mhm," she nodded. "One week I filled in for a girl working in the elementary school offices at district twelve, in the suburbs south of the city." She looked up at him, while pausing to chew on a strip of bacon. Troy nodded, pausing to brush the crumbs off the front of his shirt, never quite knowing if he should hold the eye contact. He found himself glancing away every so often, but always his eyes returned to her, and she smiled at him. "So as part of my duties I get to run the reception desks, and make the public address system announcements. Will Tommy Fisher report to the principal's office sort of thing." She paused to reach up and smooth her hair back over a shoulder. "I had to call up this one kid, Emilio Vasquez, who was ill, and after the principal dealt with him he went home." Troy had never been in a middle school, he'd only caught the last few years of high school by the time he and his brothers had been released from medical rehabilitation. But he remembered the paranoia over being sent to the principal. "Usually we got sent batches of kids at a time," Jennifer explained, holding her hands out in parallel, touching the tabletop as she went on. "Just after the school day starts, all the tardy kids start arriving. Then later in the day, all the kids who were naughty during recess, you get the idea." He nodded again. "Now these kids were usually kind of difficult to handle, but the day after Emilio went home they were all sitting there, good as gold, but looking nervous. A little more nervous than usual, given that they were going to see the principle." She cleared her throat, "now it transpires that I had to call Emilio up just before lunch period, and he hadn't come back to school the next day..." "Oh no," Troy put his hands to his face, trying to hold his grin back. "So this little kid comes up to my desk and says, like she's in a horror movie," Jennifer softened her voice a little, eyes wide, slouching in the chair to mimic a child, "Miss Wolfy Lady, is it true you ate Emilio for lunch yesterday?" Troy chuckled, shoulders shaking. "Oh man, that's. That's something." "It was so cute!" She leaned back in her chair. Troy shifted his coffee cup from hand to hand. "You're definitely not the kid-eating type." "Oh, you never know." She grinned, then, displaying her teeth, all relatively sharp. She made a show of biting at the air twice, and she added with a giggle, "Snap snap." "Oh, that is cute," Troy smiled. "It was," she agreed. He diverted his eyes down, waving a hand. "No, uh. You." He found himself self consciously scratching at the side of his neck again. "The biting thing. And I like your laugh. It's cute." Jennifer bowed her head, catching her thumb between her teeth lightly. "That's nice of you to say." An awkward silence lapsed on them. Not too awkward, though, from the way she was smiling at him. Shopping in the canyon wasn't too different to how he'd remembered it. The map of storefronts was, as always, three or four months out of date. Troy worked his way down the tiers of the canyon with Jennifer, helping her carry her things while she browsed. Thankfully, most of what she needed was right here. Things had changed since the last time he'd had a serious look at the storefronts down here. Even though this was the furry district, humans still outnumbered the furs about five to one. In the rest of the city, though, it was more like thirty to one. It was reflected in the products in the store fronts, like the clothing outlets in the middle tiers with their glass fronts, displaying custom clothing on projected display images built for a furry anatomy. He waited with Jennifer while the printing machinery in the back of one of the larger outlets cut and sew one of the dress designs to her size. She looked pretty in it while she tried it on. Troy said so. She smiled and glanced down, and Troy noticed the way the tips of her ears gently bent away from each other when she was a little embarrassed by his complements. She seemed to like it though. They stopped by a pharmacy, and Troy found products on the shelves he'd never heard of before. 'Anatomic fit' condoms, (which were ridiculous. Furs didn't carry sexually transmittable diseases - yet - and were all sterile thanks to their hit and miss genomes,) fur trimmers, a static cling device to get shed fur out of clothes. He bought himself one of those, he was sick and tired of being forced to wear black all the time just because his fur was dark. They stopped awhile to watch an Amerindian juggler's show on one of the high level tiers, and they sat down on a bench to watch for a little while. Troy put his arm around Jennifer's shoulders, she pulled herself close to him and put her hand lightly on his chest. He left a couple of new dollars as a tip, and off they went again. Troy carried her bags for her, and thankfully, before the shopping crowds got a little too dense, before any sense of worry or panic began to set in she finished her shopping and he took her to a little early lunch at a bar on one of the lower level tiers. "Can I get you two some drinks?" a harassed looking feline fur asked, setting out mats and menus as Troy and Jennifer sat down. Troy noted the waitress's nervousness for what it was, since Jennifer picked up on it fairly quickly too. Did they know each other? It was a little difficult to tell, when there were almost community sized groups of clones. "Yeah, uh, Tonic water and lime." "Just a coke, please. You're, uh, Mathilda's sister?" she ventured to the waitress. It was an inane question. The waitress, to Troy, looked to be an Andrews. A closely related run to the Edwards felines he'd met last night. If that was the case, she had upwards of two hundred sisters. She looked hardly any different from the Andrews Dallas had met last night, Nadine. Trying to identify a fur you knew could be difficult, at times. The waitress nodded, though, keying the order into her Cashier's tray. "Yeah, I'm Therese. Uh, that's Mathilda over in the residential canyon under Fifteenth avenue? Or Mathilda outside town in Greyview?" "Fifteenth Avenue," Jennifer confirmed with a nod. "Yeah, we're close." Therese seemed to relax, and the tension washed away in the both of them. "You must be Jennifer? Mathilda's foster? We met at her graduation?" Close. Meaning in a familial relationship, of sorts. Troy knew he and his brothers were rather unique because they were a 'small' run of furs, they were all 'close'. Fosters. Foster family. Troy didn't have any of those. "Yeah," Jennifer said with a relieved smile. "She mentioned she had a sister working somewhere around here, but I didn't know if it might be you. Troy, ah, Therese Andrews, the sister of one of the girls I grew up with. Therese, Troy Salcedo. He's very kindly taking me out today," she said with a perky grin. Troy offered a smile, "Hi, Therese." "Hi," Therese offered, hugging her cashier's tray to herself now, smiling and bobbing from foot to foot easily. "I, uh, don't suppose Fred Rodney's around?" Troy asked, a little hesitantly. He offered to Jennifer, "He's kind of an old friend, one of my brothers asked me to stop by." Therese paused uncomfortably, glancing back to one of the bar's back doors. "Uh, I'm not sure. Lemme go see. Troy Salcedo, right?" Troy nodded, dry swallowing, and Therese scurried off. Jennifer watched her go for a moment, and asked curiously, "Rodney? The, uh, third generation foxes?" Troy offered Jennifer a nod, waving a hand, "he helped us, me and my brothers that is, when we got out of medical rehabilitation." "Medical?..." she blinked, reaching out and pulling one of his hands across the table, holding it in both her own. His right. The fur across the back of his neck tensed a little. "Yeah, when we got out of the labs there was a lot of, uhm, damage to fix," he said, lifting up his left hand as if in explanation. Jennifer's ears tensed a little. "I kind of wanted to ask about it, actually." She squeezed his right hand gently. Troy nodded quickly, a little too quickly, nervously. "Not something I like thinking about," he offered, before the temptation to say more got the better of him, which would just make him think about it further. Therese popped back out of the door, with a little confusion across her features. "Fred, uh, Fred'd really like to see you, apparently. Just, uh, through the back there. Upstairs." "I have to go, it won't take long," Troy promised, looking up into Jennifer's eyes. Abruptly she leaned forward, kissing him on his cheek. "It's okay," she whispered. "I'll be waiting for you right here." He pulled back to stand, nodding slowly, heart pounding again. "Thank you." Jennifer just smiled warmly up at him for a moment, then turned her attention to Therese. "So how's Thomas? I really haven't had an opportunity to ask Mathilda about how they're getting along." "Oh, they're thinking about adopting a kid, actually," Therese offered. Troy swallowed down his fear, his worry about how it seemed to just leave Jennifer there. But she seemed to understand. He pushed through the employees only door. He remembered the way to Fred's little office, watching his feet as he turned from the corridor to the kitchen behind the bar and up the thin stairs. He knocked at the office door at the top, a glass frame in it still marked with the old manager's name. Ed Fontaine. Some human guy who'd run the place since before furries had been brought out of their jar, Troy remembered. Back in the old days Troy and his brothers had helped Fred fill out the tax forms, while Fred found them a communal room at a hostel. He pushed open the door carefully. The office was dark, smokey. Soothing electronic music poured from a tacky little media set in the corner. "Jesus, Troy. How'd you get with a pretty thing like her?" Fred asked, peering through a set of one way glass from his office to the bar below. Fred's fur was a rusty red colour, patched with white at the throat and running down into his shirt collar. He wore a bandana, folded so that his ears poked out the top, one shirt sleeve rolled up with a strip of IV tubes snaking down from his elbow into a piece of medical machinery on wheels with a handle on top. His fur was groomed immaculately, as always. But there was grey around his muzzle and eyes, and the smell of the smoke was more tobacco than marijuana. The way he slouched in his so called 'furgonomic' chair looked unhealthy, too. Fred was only thirty one, six years older than Troy. But he looked older, thanks to being of the third generation, from before the gene sequencing revolutions that'd given Troy's Fourth generation a health that didn't need medical support. At least, those of his generation who hadn't been through the research labs. Troy dropped his gaze uneasily. "Hey Fred." "Hey," Fred turned around in his chair, tilting his head at Troy. "Fuck. You look like a million bucks, man. How's things?" "Same old," Troy ventured with an awkward shrug. "Chances are good we're going to get new cold fusion reactions together if we manage to synthesise Unbiquadium." "What?" Fred laughed, an almost barking sound. "Element a hundred and twenty four." Troy looked up with a half hearted smile. "We think it might react violently enough while it exists to start off self sustaining fusion reactions. Maybe. How're you doing, Fred?" "Fucked up." Fred grinned, showing off his muzzleful of teeth, crooked and wickedly sharp. "Tumour the size of my ass in my lungs, but the viruses'll get it." He patted the IVs in his arm lightly. "Glad to hear it. You gonna stop smoking anytime soon?" Troy clutched at his left wrist with his right hand, staring at his feet, at the old beer can laying on the floor just a couple of feet away from a trash compactor. "Nah," Fred sighed. "I need my wits around me, man. Gotta think on my feet, nicotine helps. And it hurts enough that marijuana's the big part of my day now." "Shit. How bad?" Troy tried not to pray that Fred wasn't going to ask him to brew something up illegally again. Levorphanol, Morphine, Oxymorphone, whatever painkiller he was addicted to now. Fred helped them, now he was in pain. Troy should want to help - but he didn't. "Bad." Fred smiled grimly, pushing himself up out of his chair. Troy tried not to show his shock at how the fox was shaking. He looked more like ninety, not thirty. "Damnit, Fred. You stay sitting," Troy said, stepping closer and helping Fred back to his chair. "No, no, I want to meet her. You gotta introduce me, man, where'd you dig up a girl like that?" "No, Fred, it's okay, I mean," Troy suppressed a shudder, glancing downstairs through the glass. Jennifer was still talking to Therese. "Is there anything I can do to help?" Troy asked, swallowing back his dread. "Aw, you boys are all so shy." Fred accepted the help to sit back down, settling down with a whuff of air. The old fox's nose twitched, as he watched Troy, reading his mood. "Nah." Troy thanked the heavens, eyes squeezed shut. "But I should be helping you, man!" Fred grinned."What do you need, Troy? Nudies? A nice apartment? When are you moving back down here?" Fred had done more than enough for Troy. He and his brothers had been dumped out of medical rehabilitation without any money to their names or assistance, foster homes were already choked with the flood of furs. It'd been Fred and a few of his third gen friends, old enough to have jobs, who'd helped the Salcedos get introduced to life. Fred who'd encouraged them into academia. "I'm fine on New Dollars, and I don't need a place." Troy said, shaking his head. "I'm here for the weekend, just for that conference thing, that's all." "Shit, man. Those old humans exploited us enough, now you're helping them with their 'I'm so concerned' parties?" "Come on Fred," Troy grimaced. "The rehabilitation fund isn't like that. I mean they're funding Oslo's treatment, and if you applied they'd help you too. That Estian grant can't be covering this." "Yeah, yeah," Fred turned his head away, grimacing, ears flattened over the cloth of his bandana. He glanced back downstairs, then, grinning again quickly enough. "She as nice as she looks?" Troy dipped his gaze uncomfortably. "I like her." "You ever dated a furry before, Troy?" "No," Troy admitted with a shake of his head. "Just a few human girls here and there." "Humans, they're all interested in how exotic we are." Fred grinned wider, as if goading Troy to try and disagree. "The size and shape of our dicks, what kind of gossip they're going to get with us on their arm, y'know? Fuck, and the way human men treat our girls..." Troy wanted to disagree, but he couldn't. When he'd dated in college, his difficulty in maintaining the relationships weren't always because he was buried knee deep in his studies or that he never knew what to say. No. Sometimes it was because he felt like they just wanted to parade him around for all to see, which just somehow made it all worse. "Dating a furry, now, that's different. They just know what we've all been through." Fred reached up and slapped the side of Troy's arm with a grin. "We got it better than the humans, too. Break up and hell, how many sisters are there to try your luck with?" Fred was dirty, Troy knew. But he'd been one of the only ones who'd given enough of a damn to help. Troy smiled weakly. "Now you two go on and have some fun, huh? Everything's on me, you two have something nice." Troy bowed his head, nodding a little. "Thanks Fred." "It's no problem. And you, you lean on old Fred a little more, huh? I'm here to help!" And when he did, Troy knew, when he owed Fred, then Fred would ask for Troy to mix up some drugs. Troy waved, and headed back downstairs, head bowed. He let himself grind his teeth together until he stepped out into the bar proper. Their drinks were there, Jennifer had started on hers, was chatting on a phone. "Yeah, just like a door frame. You can? Thanks Mr. Emerson." She smiled, even while speaking to someone on the phone. Hanging up, she then turned that smile of hers on Troy. "Hey." Troy sat down, joining her, and waved for Therese. "Hey." He took a quick sip of the bitter tonic water and lime he'd ordered, fizzing lightly in its glass. "You're shaking," Jennifer frowned, leaning forward concernedly. "It's, uhm... It's nothing," Troy said, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. He forced through a smile. "You want to finish your drink? I had a better idea for lunch." He pulled out his wallet, flipping it open and keying in a payment and generous tip before slashing it across Therese's cashier tray as she arrived. "Sure," Jennifer replied worriedly, setting down her coke. "You wanna go right now?" "Uh, yeah. Come on. It'll be fun," Troy said, getting to his feet and taking Jennifer's hand, not quite running as he led her back out, leaving his drink almost untouched.