FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Prologue: 6 months earlier

To this day, it astounded Jari just how vulnerable one felt on a bicycle. The cosy, secure confines of a car made the chaotic peak of rush hour all but a simple observation, but that was certainly not the case for Jari; hunched over a pair of handlebars and supported only by a firmly uncomfortable plastic seat that dug into areas he really wished it wouldn't, a cacophony of blaring horns and screeching tyres pounded his ears from all directions, with the drivers blinded by their collective desire to push through and get to where they were going as fast as possible. Gritting his teeth, the monkey swerved around red-light jumpers and yelped at clueless pedestrians who simply wandered out into the road without a care in the world. At least today, they had a modicum of an excuse in the form of draping waterproofs and frilly-patterned umbrellas that disguised them to the world, but Jari had no such protection; sharp daggers of ice-cold rain hammered simultaneously into his beige inner muzzle and the layer of flailing, bronze fur surrounding it, seeping through the holes in his cycling helmet and eroding what little visibility his tightly scrunched eyes could offer him. What they did show him, though, was a pair of flashing yellow lights fast approaching at the periphery of the road ahead.

"Woah!" Slamming his shivering hand around the rear brake lever and promptly locking the tyre against the slicked tarmac, he skidded to a stop just seconds before the bike was about to slide out from underneath him; close enough to the batch of pedestrians crossing the road that he could make out the individual droplets of rain on their momentarily shocked faces.

"Focus; focus, goddammit!" he growled under his breath, but with what was on his mind, and had been for the past nine months, it was becoming harder than ever. Today, if the envelope that had undoubtedly arrived through the front door by now said what he was dreading, he would finally bring it out into the open. The tipping point of his decision was to be found etched onto the newspaper that sat neatly in the large, reflective-green satchel draped around the shoulder of his waterproof coat. The moment Jari had set his eyes upon a second-page article that proclaimed "Agricultural Firm embroiled in Forest-destruction Scandal!", only the presence of the weary-eyed Newsagent standing next to him had stopped him from fist-bumping the air in a manner only seen from a person after the victory of a home football team. To practically anyone else in his class, the idea of Parents who worked for six-figure salaries as Agricultural Economists would practically make them salivate with envy, but they knew barely the half of it. A non-descript black Saloon car blared its horn and swung around him before darting left into a side-road mere centimetres from his front tyre without bothering to indicate; reduced to nothing but a thick black streak in his clouded vision, but for the first time, he paid absolutely no attention to this latest event in many near-meetings with the asphalt.

"Yes, this...I'm sure of it; this's got to be the right decision..." he muttered in Finnish, suddenly gripped by a longing for his native tongue's soft flow; it'd been three years since he'd had a reason to use it. One-upping the car driver by sticking his arm out to the left and gradually slowing down, Jari cautiously guided the bicycle as fast as he dared around a 90-degree turn over a gutter, and into one of Chelsea's many homogenous, narrow residential streets; the house he shortly pulled up to comprised of the same tall, linear design and garish white-painted brickwork as practically every other on the street. Only when the adrenaline had slowed to the same crawl he was at upon dismounting the bike onto the pavement did the true extent of the cold hit Jari with the physical presence of a snap; his cycling jersey and tight-fitting lycra shorts doing very little to mask the driving rain's never-ending barrage.

"Come on, you..." he growled, wrapping his hands around the top section of the bike's triangular tubular frame and lifting it off the ground with relative ease; a set of muscles already well-defined from many hours spent shelf-stacking, bulk-food manoeuvring and newspaper tossing in the general direction of front porches over the last few summers. A quick dive of his numb fingers into a zip-lined pocket retrieved a small set of keys and, desperate to finally feel the warmth of central heating for the first time since setting off two hours earlier, he wasted no time in shoving it open and manhandling the bike over the lip.

"We must soften the blow, Anni; let him down slowly-"

"Juho, I'm not budging an inch; you're just as appalled as I am, so don't try to..."

The inaudible murmur of his Parents' voices in a quiet game of verbal-fencing with one another wafted against Jari's ears even before he'd closed the front door, promptly leaving the weather far behind. Gently resting the bike's dripping handlebar against the pristine, white hallway wall, he kicked off his trainers and kept his head low, diverting his eyes well away from the approaching kitchen as he spun on his heel and made a frantic beeline for the lushly-carpeted stairway to his right.

"Jari, have you got a minute? Actually, make that a few minutes. Come to the kitchen, please." The deliberate pause of the sharp, ice-cold female voice before that final word halted the monkey's sodden sock on the edge of the first stair; it'd been decidedly more than a request.

"Y...yes, Mother" he whispered meekly, already feeling an anvil drop in his stomach. He gingerly stepped onto the polished, marble floor of the normally airy, bright kitchen to find her leaning disinterestedly against the oak-trimmed, l-shape breakfast bar, and his Father sat perched on a chair across it, his eyes distracted from a piece of paper atop the surface to stare intently into Jari's quivering pair.

"Right" she began, "your A-Level Grades came through this morning, and...well to be frank, Jari, more than anything else, we are extremely disappointed." His blood ran cold.

"When you completed your GCSEs by the skin of your teeth, we put that down to the moving process; moving to a country with a completely different language and Schooling system is hard, I understand, and yes, we did see some improvements in your AS -Levels. But then, you go and throw that all away by doing this." As if on cue, the foreboding piece of paper was whisked across the table-top by Juho's well-aimed flick, landing right-side-up, clearly within Jari's vision. The best result on the page was a very low B-Grade on his Biology Paper, and it only went downhill from there.

"You must understand the seriousness of this, Jari; these are not good. We did warn you what might happen if you tried to simultaneously work as a Paper-Boy and study for some of the most important exams of your life" Juho snapped softly, locking his fingers together.

"The place in that Engineering College you wanted? Well, with a D in Mathematics, you might as well forget it," a defiant sweep of Anni's jewel-wrapped arms cemented her prediction, "In fact, more to the point, I'd say forget that Electric Bicycle you've been saving up for; you can use those thousands of pounds earned not_studying to pay us for the privilege of living here while you re-take your A-Levels, and actually put in the effort to _pass them." An audible gasp escaped Jari's rapidly opening jaw as a sudden flash of purple lighting snaked across the roof-window-exposed sky, but the storm inside his mind, however, had settled. With the dread of this new financial burden, Jari was now more certain of his decision than ever; enough was enough.

"Um...Mom...Dad...I, erm-" he took a pained, tear-lined sigh, "there's something I've gotta' tell you. I...I wasn't actually saving up for an electric bicycle." They leant forwards expectantly, uncannily similarly to game-show contestants just seconds from the make-or-break cash reveal.

"I, I...I want to go home; _home-_home. I don't like it here." Just stating that simple sentence had required more courage than any of the number of times he'd tried to stand up to his brother or an exploitative Supervisor, but the anchor inside his stomach had turned into a balloon at the sheer relief upon finally getting it out there, "I'm saving up to go back to Finland." The atmosphere in the kitchen was so frosty it could've been cut with a knife; seconds passed with nothing more than looks of sheer disbelief from the recipients of his outburst.

"To...to do what, exactly?" Juho whispered, his voice dripping with malice.

"I...I want to be a mechanic; full-time. I know that sounds stupid, but please, believe me, I-" he ground to a withering halt as Anni marched forwards and shoved a perfume-scented finger directly under his nose.

"Your Father and I, did not," she spat, breaking the sentence into firm chunks, "bring you here, and pay good money to put you through a private education, all for you to swoon off back to Finland and spend your days throwing bolts around!" her razor-like voice rose in a crescendo, retracting the finger from Jari's muzzle before jabbing it repeatedly into his chest, "in case you haven't noticed from the newspaper you've no doubt had a read of, we're in a dreadful situation at work, and this is the last thing we need right now!"

"Good" had been the single, defiant word Jari's brain had ordered him to snap, but try as he might, he could not bring himself to say it.

"I...I'm sorry" he whispered, "I really am; I tried to fit in, Mom, but London, it's...argh, it's so claustrophobic and, and dangerous. I miss the countryside; I miss-"

"Well then why not just move down South? Surrey and Hampshire are perfectly green, aren't they?" Anni growled, anchoring her hands to her waist.

"It's not the same!" Jari blurted out, "besides, I've already looked; no mechanic's shop within a hundred-mile radius is hiring. I admit it, alright? I messed up, but I...look," his words began to stumble over themselves, "re-taking the year won't do a goddamn thing; I want to start over, back where I'm...I'm happy. Isn't that what you want me to be?" With a deep, malice-lined sigh, Anni slowly revolved on her slipper-covered heel for a second opinion and, without a word spoken between them, communicated to Juho in the almost telepathic way that only parents knew how to. Jari could only resort to diverting his eyes anywhere but to his Parents; his hands shoved firmly in the pockets of his lime-green jersey. Seconds turned into minutes, before Juho's steady, calculated tone broke the silence.

"Right young man, I think we can come to an agreement, here. You are of an age to conscript to Finland's Compulsory service, and given that, we will pay for your flight, paperwork and first month's rent of your accommodation -because believe me, you cannot hope to afford to outright buy a house- if, and only if, you Conscript into Military Service instead of Civilian Service. They will teach you a whole variety of skills that should stand you in good stead of finding some form of machine-centred job, at least to get you started. I cannot stress this enough, however; it will be an extremely long time before you achieve what's no doubt your dream job, that is to swoon around a large log-cabin in the forest, fixing whatever comes your way and living comfortably off from it."

"After you settle in initially, you're on your own, young man; do you understand?" Anni hissed, shooting him a ferocious stare." Jari's rapidly increasing heartbeat was not something he needed to fake, but he was having to exercise extreme self-control to not leap up six feet into the air and whoop triumphantly.

"I understand" he responded with new-found confidence, "and I promise, I won't disappoint you."