FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Tell me, Mr Wolf. Do you hear voices right now?"

I nodded. "They are hiding in the traffic noise."

"Can you describe them to me?"

"Man and woman, both sound young and old at the same time."

The psychiatrist and I were in a small office at the downtown Oakenford police station. Exactly where they had managed to pick up a shrink with such short notice was a mystery to me, but he certainly looked the part. He was in his mid forties, wore horn-rimmed glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard, and he smoked a pipe. He was the perfect stereotype, and I disliked him from the moment we shook hands.

"What are the voices saying to you?"

"They are telling me, that you are one of them."

"ME?" Dr. Burris looked slightly bemused. He lit his pipe, and a scent of sweet tobacco filled the room. I was tempted to tell him not to smoke, get up, stand right behind him and shout

Smoking kills, motherfucker!

That would give him an impression of just how real the voices are.

"I never thought my life was interesting enough to make me one of them." He smiled and made a halfhearted attempt at a laugh, but I noticed the flame on his burning match tremble slightly.

"Do you understand why we are having this discussion, Mr Wolf?"

Sometimes, when you catch a shrink off guard, he will slip into the authoritative _ I am the doctor and you are my patient_, mode. This one was no exception.

"I've seen shrinks for the past seven years," I said. "I've grown used to these little talks. You've got my journal; you know I'm unreliable."

Burris leaned forward. He spoke to me as if he believed I was hard of hearing. "You were witness to a murder -the only witness," he said. "Your eyes have seen the killer, but your brain has superimposed another face on top of the real one. If we can strip away that layer of hallucination together, your input could be vital to the investigation.

I sighed. "I saw zombies. The murderer was a zombie and so was the third person."

Concentrating was difficult. Sometimes the voices are clear and outspoken, other times they hide in some background noise. Today they stayed put, and leapt out with any passing noise.

"Don't answer him", a car drove through a puddle and made a splash.

"He's one of them!" someone closed the sliding door of a van.

Dr. Burris kept talking to me, while I found comfort in looking at a begonia in the window. I'd like to crawl into the plant and hide there while the police solved the case without my help. I was so tired.

"The magic wand?" Burris had changed the subject. Had I answered any of his questions? I wasn't sure.

"What about it?"

"Was there anything inside of it?"

"Inside?"

"Did it contain anything?"

The question struck me as odd. Why would a magic wand contain anything. "I was being chased and shot at. I did not stop to look at the wand. I'm not even sure that it was real."

He nodded and smiled, but his hand clutched the pipe hard. So hard, that the tip of his index and middle fingers turned slightly white. I only wanted to know who had shot at me, but I got the impression that Burris had another priority: he wanted to find the wand.

---

I decided to return to the convention centre. It was the last day of the Oakenford Games Con, and I hoped that retracing my steps would uncover some of the events that my mind had coated with a layer of hallucination. Before I entered the centre, I took an additional 50mg of kisantex on top of the 50 I'd taken only two hours earlier that morning. I'd rather feel lethargic than go through another episode. I entered through the same door as before and swore to take it easy. I headed straight for the newsstand and bought another copy of White Dwarf. The barbarian, the red dragon and the Valkyrie on the front page cover did not move or change in size or looks. The big-breasted Valkyrie had a mouth that was halfway open. Her eyes were sultry and asked me to tear off her brass bikini and grind up to my ankles while the barbarian watched. The artist had drawn her that way to make the reader get horny and buy the magazine, but I observed the metrics of her tits from a purely technical angle; when I'm on meds, nothing happens down below. Zilch. My dick is reduced to a urethrae and my mind clouds over, like when you have a head cold. Still, I was happy and confident that the double dose of meds would keep an episode at bay.

I passed the food court and remembered that I still had some unfinished business with a kebab. I double checked that the hand-painted sign read Kebab and Coke, five Euros, like it was supposed to. Two customers waited in line ahead of me, and both ordered the one dish available from the stand, both with a side of fries. When it was my turn, I got the impression that the sales assistant looked at me for a very long time - too long for the casual glance over. He looked out of place too among the convention goers. He was muscular, almost professionally so, and his way of handling the food items was not natural to him. He took my order and began preparing it with his back turned. He was very slow in preparing my food and drink. I handed him a fiver and left with my tray, then walked around the stand to a round cafe table at the far end of the food court. When I took a sip of my coke, there was an unpleasant metallic taste to it.

"Don't drink it!" it was the male voice.

"I thought I had Kisantex'ed you fuckers into oblivion."

"He's poisoned it," added the female.

Screw the coke, I thought and took a bite of my kebab. That too, was tainted with the same metallic taste. Either the sales guy was one shitty cook, or my voices were right: someone was trying to poison me. I pushed the tray away and browsed the convention programme. What exactly I was doing here was anybody's guess. The only clue I had to work from was a single name, Kendall Duran - some games designer who had come to promote a board game. The convention programme had him booked at stand I-26 under the name of EnDurance Games. It was in the cheap indie section, next to Pelligellus Games at I-28.

The table at I-26 was vacant of course, so I browsed through a number of games on display at the neighbouring Pelligellus. They carried mostly fantasy inspired games, with a few war-games in between.

"Ever played Moonzone?" asked the guy behind the counter. I estimated him to be in his mid-twenties, like me, but he wore a long beard in braids that made him look older.

"I was really looking to get a copy of Future Battalion", I said and looked around, but didn't see the title on any of the boxes.

"Aww man!" Said the vendor. "That was Kendall's last game. Did you know him?"

"I've bumped into him on occasion", I said in agreement with the truth.

"Did you hear that he got mugged and shot, right outside the convention centre?"

"No, that one was new to me."

"Mike Ayers." he reached out to shake my hand. His shake was surprisingly timid for a guy his size, and his palm was soft. "I did the illustrations for Moonzone."

"Carter Wolf." The guy was visibly proud of his Moonzone game, and I figured that buying a copy would put me on his good side.

Mike put my copy of the game in a League of Legends plastic bag. "We knew that something was not right with Kendall, when he tried to sell Future Battalion at one hundred fifty bucks a pop."

"Sounds pricey"

"Board games like that retail at forty; fifty at the max. But a hundred and fifty is insane."

I guess that makes two of us , I thought. Kendall Duran was not a novice to the games industry. Over the past ten years he had grown from an unknown games developer with Droid Disaster as his first title -a checkers-like game with a sci-fi theme. A series of experimental titles finally put him on the track that would ultimately prove his strongest. During his last six years in the business he produced a whole series of extremely accurate tactical war games, So accurate in fact, that they were used by the military for training purposes.

"Like this one," said Mike and showed me a heavy box illustrated with a tank on the box-top. "Bombs over Baghdad. You could play either as the Iraqi army or the US. This game had a winning tactic of teaming the 173rd Airborne Brigade with the Kurdish rebels outside Kirkuk, and you know what? It worked in real life. Secured the whole northern Iraq. Man, Kendall sure knew his tactics."

My heart skipped a beat, Mike had games by Kendall Duran in his shop. Maybe he had a copy of Future Battalion.

Mike only rolled his eyes. "This dude came in and bought every single copy. Military guy, that was fifteen hundred bucks right there."

"He must have thought the game was really good, then."

"It wasn't," said Mike. "It was unbalanced."

"How'd you know? Does it say on the box: Warning, this game is unbalanced as fuck?"

Mike laughed, then pointed to an area of the centre packed with tables and chairs. A number of people sat bent over various games, most of which featured a large number of cards and counters.

"That's the demonstration area," said Mike. "All new games are out there for trying out."

"So, you didn't sell the remaining copy to that military guy?"

Mike looked a little hurt by my suggestion. "Somebody was still playing it. I'd never sell a promo while it was in use." He pointed at a table in the playing area. There was some kind of tabletop game spread out on the surface, but the two chairs were vacant. "Wanna have a go?" I nodded and Mike began to set up the pieces. Future Battalion was a combination of hex based strategy game, with a R&D phase on top. You could hire engineers to develop new weapons, with a line of futuristic sonic weapons being the most exciting.

Mike shrugged. "Once you get the sonic weapons, you pretty much win the game," he said. "No game lasts for more than twenty minutes."

"So, it's a race against time?"

"Duran really messed up the balance in this one," said Mike. "All the weapon descriptions are accurate, from the AK-47 to the M1 and Berettas. The sonics are of course made up, but boy, are they overpowered."

Mike picked out a handful of cards that showed the specifics of the weapons in the game. The cards stated a bunch of numbers that I didn't understand, but I guessed that they represented calibres and rounds contained in the magazines. I was anxious to see the specs for the sonic weapons, but when Mike put down a few cards, they all showed the same picture: a snake. Sonic rifle - a snake, Sonic grenade - a snake, sonic bazooka... I felt queasy, then the snake on the cards began to move and squirm. Schizophrenic break on the rise; great! just what I needed.

I looked up from the map. The lighting in the hall dimmed, and Mike began to change in front of me. He was talking about rules and tactics, but the words no longer made sense to me. His looks had changed from that of a grown man to something childlike. I was playing a war-game with an obese child, and I laughed. It was hilarious; his words sounded like baby chatter to my ears, while he held up a handful of cards, all of which bore the same image.

When I looked down again, the map had changed. It was still a hex-map with playing pieces scattered across it, but I couldn't identify what pieces were mine. I knew that I was looking for something that I had lost, but couldn't remember what; something important. At least the hallucination of Mike was benevolent. He had not changed into anything ominous or horrible, only a large, comical infant. Then it struck me: he was innocent. My brain had interpreted that he had no part in the murder and projected him onto my mind as a babbling toddler.

"Here's here," said the female voice.

"What is he doing here?" said the male.

"He shouldn't be here", replied the woman. She sounded concerned.

"It's too dangerous."

"Guys, you're playing yesterday's tape!" I shouted at the voices. "I know I'm here. I was here the day before yesterday and yes, I'm here today also."

"Not you," said the male. "The tall man."

"He has come for you."

---

I was wide awake in a blink, and saw the tall man moving around among the stands and the tables. Zig-zagging among the cos-players, he made a path towards our table. He wore a different suit, but I recognised him instantly. My hallucinations came flowing fast now and his face was wrinkled and deflated, like a leaky beach ball.

"Why won't you show me his face?", I asked the voices.

"You see what we see,"said both voices.

"Shit!"

Mike was of no use. He moved the playing pieces to random positions across the map and giggled like a baby, or maybe he had already left and went back to his shop. At this point I couldn't tell anymore. I got up and made for the nearest exit. It led me to a short alley that connected to the main street. Any sane person would have taken to the street and either hid themselves in one of the shops along the way, or just kept running. But I am not a sane person, and my leg was all stitched up, so running was out of the question. In a few moments, the tall guy with the beach ball face would exit the convention centre and start to look for me, so I was pressed for time.

_ Going up_, I thought when I saw a ladder extend from the first floor fire exit. He won't expect me to go up. It was going to kill my leg, but I leapt up the first two stairs. To my surprise, I was still on the ground. I jumped again, and once again I was on the ground. I had no sense of distance or dimension and my legs were leaden. I could neither run nor jump.

"Help!", I cried silently.

"You must become," said the male voice.

"Of course," I agreed. "I must become."

I became, and my legs grew strong and my arms long and powerful. I felt myself changing, my vision grew secondary and I navigated through knowledge alone. I climbed the staircase with ease, past the first floor and I kept going until I reached the rooftop. Here I squatted down and watched the tall man as he searched for me outside the centre. He looked around, confused, then he looked up and down the main street. Finally he gave up looking for me and walked towards the parking lot.

I sat on the rooftop for almost an hour, just waiting for things to return to normal. The double dose of Kisantex did not put a stop to my schizophrenic breaks, but they were easier to control than usual.

---

The vendors were closing their shops when I went back into the centre. Mike was busy rolling up the Pelligellus banners and didn't notice my return. I didn't wish to bother him anymore, so I headed straight for the playing area, where the last remaining copy of Future Battalion was left on the table and still in mid-game. I quickly gathered the pieces into the box and made for the exit. I had listened to the voices. I had become

• and it had saved my life.