FSE

Furry search engine

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Irma snorted derisively and cracked her tail. "Skin or scale? We can't even agreeee how to treat those with different colorsss, to say nothing of whatever isss to be made of usss now. What happened to him declaring martial law?"

Ulysses stepped forward once more to answer: "I don't know why he didn't bring it up" He muttered something else but just coughed into his hand when I asked what it was. "But I had my orders signed, sealed, and delivered, last night. You better believe I have a laminated copy of them in my pocket, authorizing us to operate domestically."

"That'ssss my boy!" Kim praised him, thumping her snout into his chest plate and knocking him clean off his feet.

"Ouch, I guess my time of beating you in a fight is over." He chuckled, along with Kim. I heard a sharp crack from behind me and felt a very distant impact on some part of my body. Craning back to look I saw that my tail had shattered two of the wood planks in the barn door. For fuck's sake, even after all those two have been through, I still get jealous.

My unconscious display of strength drew the attention of several of the Agents milling around looking for something to do. Their eyes flicked from my tip to the door and then to my face, catching my own attention. I peeled my lips back and grinned at them savagely until Irma, not even looking at me, slapped me in the head with her own tail. Like she is the very model of restraint, I thought.

Ulysses stopped his rough housing with Kim and raised a hand which halted her movements as well. "Copy" He said into his headset. "Do you guys have a paperboy? What time does he normally deliver?" He asked, addressing us.

"Not in the middle of the day, that'sss for damn sure. What kind of car?" Kim asked in return.

After another brief consultation with his men; "A white mid 90's Toyota Corolla with a green door."

Neither Kim nor I could help snickering while the team leader did his best to stifle his own mirth as well. The next bit caused his mouth to clap shut.

"Does your paper boy normally have three adult males with optics riding along with him while he looks nervous as hell?"

"Nooo.... I wouldn't touch that newspaper if Iiii werr yurrr men."

"Of course not." He turned and rapidly began updating the FBI on the new developments.

The Senior FBI guy made it clear in no uncertain terms the gravity of the situation. "You have the declaration of martial law and your orders. County SWAT is not equipped or trained to deal with organized paramilitary. If we are threatened, terminate. We will assist."

Suddenly, loud enough to be heard by those nearby we heard shouted from the radio "Pineapple! Pineapple!" At the same time the side by side reversed from the front of the house. A loud bang followed by the sound of a great many metallic objects hitting the front of our house reached our fins.

"Game faces!" Uly shouted. He pointed at the Blackhawk and made a spinning motion with his finger and the rotors began to turn while the door gun was loaded. Half of the Agency present opened a large box full of Kevlar blankets and hurriedly rushed all the human non-combatants into the barn and slammed the door shut.

Two other crates were opened revealing armor and helmets in one, carbines and equipment vests already loaded with ammunition in the other. As everyone armed themselves, and once we sure that our other children were safe. I, Irma and Kim turned and placed our heads against each other's.

Be safe, I love you. Was all we said to each other, before taking up positions.

Irma turned and locked her fore claws into the edge of the roof and with wings fluttering for assistance, dragged herself up to the crown of the barn flattening herself as best she could and began swinging her head back and forth scanning.

"Do you know how to fly?" Was asked of us by a soldier.

"Not yet"

"A pity. We have absolutely no idea on what to do with you two. Can you be our eyes and ears like your scaly friend?"

"Yuu mean our daughter? Yesss."

Kim issued orders: Irma, scan north. Tom you've got east, I've got west. Irma sounded her understanding, while I took up my position by resting back upon my tail with fore legs and head held high.

Ulysses yelled out as the Blackhawk lifted off and began circling. "The house is twelve 'o' clock, call 'em as you seen 'em!"

The UTV returned to the driveway, the rest taking cover behind anything solid enough to be of use.

A crack was heard, and my wings shriveled as I heard Kim give a startled shriek of alarm. I fought the urge to leave my position, instead I curled my tail around to poke the Agent lying prone behind it. "Get Allison out heree. Treat my wife." He nodded, and performed some kind of movement towards the barn that he'd likely seen in movies.

Kim called out: "4 'o' clock, sniper in tree three meters up."

"I got him" A Bravo called out. A return shot followed, as the unseen sniper fell from his branch, quite dead. Fire erupted from a 60 degree arc along the Southwest edge of the trees.

The hovering helicopter hurriedly hewed around and hurled hot lead across the tree line. Several screams were heard before rifle fire began to ping the body of the aircraft.

As the helicopter gained altitude to avoid the return I heard a new engine screaming at high rpm from the other side of the house. The grenade launcher mounted on the UTV began to chuff and a series of explosions could be heard as the new engine sound extinguished and several new rifles could be heard exchanging fire. Immediately a multitude of long bursts from a Pig silenced many of those exchanges.

I began to see shadows moving across a broad stretch of my watch. As forms coalesced, I saw the other side of the pincer taking positions.

"30 dismountsss in tree line, 8 'o' clock, 40 metersss!"

From much nearer, I heard Irma briefly call out a warning before with a loud hissing noise several pyrotechnics impacted against the barn setting one side on fire.

The Huey overhead spun around and just as the door gun began to spin up, it stopped.

Everything. Stopped. The rotors of the helicopter, the gunfire, the bullets themselves, I saw in amazement. Everything.

A sound that was so large it acted as a pressure wave knocking all those erect flat to the earth as a flash of light left us all disoriented.

Stumbling back to our feet, I was surprised by the figure I saw standing in the middle of all of us. At first I wondered how a child got out in the open like this.

Shells, was I wrong about it being a child.

Stop

Whispered in my head, and judging by the wild eyed look of everyone around me I was not the only one.

Stop this.

The helicopter floated to the ground to rest leisurely on its belly. Suddenly every weapon that I could see, including an unknown number from the trees zoomed towards the air over the mysterious child and congealed into a ball losing all form. The blob regained structure as it twisted into a pair of helixes which then buried one end into the earth as easily is if it were water. Leaving a statue of what was apparently DNA right there in the middle of our yard.

The other has warned you.

We are less patient with your savage tendencies.

A ripple in the very air surrounding the child spread outward and then retracted. 53 people emerged from the trees, struggling in midair against whatever held them in its grasp. Inexorably they were drawn into a circle around me and the other defenders.

Who leads you?

The question went unanswered as the militants ignored it and continued their single minded struggles. Apparently this being did not need to hear it out loud.

You

One of the armed interlopers was raised high and placed in the center of the concentric rings of the circle.

Observe

Every other member of the Militia began to fade from sight. As they neared the edge of invisibility a small but intense glimmer of light began to manifest, until, with 52 crackling snaps of some kind of discharge, they disappeared.

The leader was dropped to his knees right before the child as his mouth worked uselessly to form words and his wide, terror stricken eyes, flashed all around looking for his comrades.

The child reached out a hand and softly laid it upon the man's head. He fell to the ground screaming mindlessly as he began to scratch at his own face. Hooked fingers dug long furrows through skin as blood erupted from his eyes, his horrific shrieking continued to grow until with a spasm he fell still. His hair had turned white.

This one has defied our warnings.

This one has seen eternity.

This one has seen the madness in the void.

This one will share his lesson.

Do not harm the children of the egg.

From one moment to the next, the child was gone.

"What. The. Fuck. Wasss that?" Roared Kim.

No one had an answer

Two soldiers were fashioning a straightjacket out of the fallen leader's own uniform, while another two along with three of the FBI were on their knees next to each other rubbing crosses and praying fervidly. Everyone else was sitting down where they had been standing, staring blankly at the ground or at the sky. I could hardly blame them, whether God or an alien. We had just seen something beyond our understanding, which could be added to the large pile of other things that are beyond our understanding.

Wearily, I lifted my head and glanced towards the barn after hearing noise from that direction. I saw Irma standing next to the barn with her tail pointed towards it as she scooped and threw a river of dirt between her rear legs to cover the smoldering ruin of one wall. Several fire extinguishers could be heard discharging inside as white powder billowed out of the perforated structure. The rest of the interior's occupants stumbled out coughing and looked around bewildered.

Alex coughed out; "What... What happened? We heard the gunfire stop and then there was nothing but silence before we heard sobbing out here."

"We witnessed... something... Something some of uss were not able tooo handle." I flicked my nose at those in prayer, some of whom were unabashedly crying in terror.

"Iii think... It wasss from a higher dimension..."

"Close, but not quite." Said a young high pitched voice. Before yet another new intruder faded into view like the bizarre alien it no doubt was... This was growing tiresome.

It looked like we did now in miniature. No longer than one of my arms, and scarcely 12 inches tall.

Calmly, it pranced over to our new lawn art, in what I can only describe as in an incongruously happy manner, and began to scale the metal form. As it neared the top some of the metal flattened to form a platform which the little curiosity contentedly curled up on before glancing back at us with eyes as yellow as the sun. There were no pupils or irises, just a solid unbroken gold.

"Another universe actually. One they had created."

"You...you mean it wasn't God?" One of the shell shocked feds asked hopefully.

The little creature closed its eyes and began humming to itself. This went on for a few minutes before someone asked it what it was doing.

It still did not respond for a few more minutes before it opened its eyes once more.

"God... What a fascinating concept. No, not exactly. Gods in their own creation perhaps. But you may as well consider them as such here. If that deference will make you behave accordingly. Divine, they may not be. But evolved and advanced enough to warp your reality as deemed necessary."

A cube of water, ten meters to each side, appeared hovering next to the little... thing. Inside were a pair of bottle nose dolphins and a nonplussed woman wearing a snorkel and a wetsuit that said 'NW Cetacean Studies'.

It glanced at what was apparently its creation, and then to all of us. "What a sad display this is."

The woman swam to the top of the cube and poked her head out to gasp for breath.

"What is this? Am I dead? This can't be real."

The little black scaly thing turned its head and began making a series of buzzing clicks that made my head hurt. The effect on the dolphins was dramatic. Immediately stopping their agitated orbiting of the cube they both pointed their snouts at the creature and approached as near as they could, sticking their heads out the bottom of the water cube in defiance of all logic. What followed was what I could only imagine as being a conversation.

Gradually however I was shocked to learn I could get a vague understanding of what was being said. The creature was providing calm assurance while asking if they were happy? content? The response was a kind of longing for something that made me think, big water. Their home range maybe? They sounded confused and hurt, but also glad in an abstract way. They knew that they had been healed from their encounter with sound? Bubbles? Loud food? Anyway they knew they felt better than they had. They seemed to like their reluctant minder as well.

"You, Jasmine, you help them, yes?" The black scaled enigma asked the handler after bopping each dolphin on the snout with its own which had caused them to float away aimlessly. "They thank you."

"What? They know? How do you know my name? How is this possible?" She asked, completely stunned as one of the dolphins swam up under her arms. "Amazing. If only the others would believe me..." Thinking quickly, she pointed at us. "You're my witnesses!"

"You have parents/ancestors/creators/builders yes? But no family/others/group/herd of your own?" She shook her head wistfully and sighed, the strange critter craned his head out to look her straight in the face. "How much would you like to really help them?" It asked.

Her eyelids began to close dreamily as we heard her whisper; "With all that I am." Starting at the tip of her nose, her olive skin became gray right before our eyes.

"With all that you are, you shall." The alien responded. While her body changed, the look of bliss never left her face until it too, lost its human form. Just like that, before us a third dolphin was born. Jasmine flailed about, unable to control herself, before her two charges raised her from beneath to the surface where she took her first breath.

She wallowed around until till she faced us, her beak cracked open and, impossibly, creaked out slowly and nearly incomprehensibly, her thanks. The cube disappeared, the only evidence of it having existed was the snorkel lying on the ground where it had been thrown in Jasmine's transformation.

"What you don't know. What you can't see, is that in 47 years due to my actions just now and the efforts of Jasmine, the oceans/seas/waters/solutions will be 54.7489% free of the trash/refuse/swill/castings you have so wisely deposited into the biggest natural resource you possess. In 98 years that number will reach 94.6723%.

"This is why you have become children of the egg. This is why a part of me is here as well. You have been remade to guide the humans. While I have come to guide you."

"What do we call you?"

It closed its eyes again and began to hum once more. "I am what you would call an artificial intelligence, a computer to use a gross oversimplification. What you see before you is nothing more than an appendage/accessory/peripheral/limb. My core/heart/being/mind would actually fill the interior of your moon." It looked up and then back to us again. "You may call me..." It hummed again. "HAL 9000"

"NO!" The senior FBI guy said shaking his head.

"But, why not, Assistant Director Reese?" The... whatever... asked. "I am a highly advanced lattice organism that exists in the 11 dimensions of this universe and 9 in my own." It hummed some more. "Oh... I see, superstition... You decide my name then. I can help you decide by telling you my true name."

It opened its jaws and a deep tolling noise began that quickly swept lower than any of us could hear before culminating with a thump that made our house settle on its foundation and two trees to fall over.

"Thumper!" One of the FBI agents said, after getting up from where the mysterious quake had dumped him and the other bipeds.

The creature closed its eyes and hummed again. "Yes... Thumper... That will do nicely." As it said its last words it ceased looking like Irma, Kim, and I, and became a small, gray, cotton tail rabbit.

Reese scowled at his subordinate; "We'll just see how much anyone is willing to listen to a rabbit on global affairs."

It took more effort than I'm willing to admit to stop staring at Thumper as I felt ribbons of saliva begin to dangle from my lower parted jaw. The rabbit gave me a look that somehow conveyed its unimpressed feelings through its golden gaze.

Thumper disappeared and reappeared a second later standing outside our circle in a form that I could only assume I would share in before long. A black scaled creature larger than an elephant.

It brought its head up to its full extension, level with the roof of the barn and looked down at us. "If you need to be frightened to make decisions, I will make this my chosen form." Thumper said, in a stentorian voice. It raised its wings, and with two great flaps sprung from the ground to soar around our heads before vanishing once more.

"So what is it going to be? Choose now, or, I, choose. There are forms from which I can select that will make you insane/broken/unserviceable/fragmented just by looking upon them." Said a tiny voice as it resumed its initial form atop the DNA thing.

The pale and shaken director just muttered that it looked fine as it was.

"Excellent" The outline of its body suddenly became fuzzy and indistinct as if my eyes couldn't focus on it and after I blinked, there were two of it.

"Some of you have business/undertakings/jobs/lives here, some of you do not. I will accompany one group while I stay here with the other. Now let's hop to it, there is only so much you can do in the next three thousand years/orbits/quanta/cycles I have allotted this project. It is time to begin."

"Now just hold on a damned minute." Reese started angrily. "We came out here with a job to do, and that was to int..."

He disappeared, along with one of the Thumpers, the comatose militia leader, and the rest of the FBI agents, leaving all their equipment behind.

One of the SF soldiers gave a whoop and yelled "Yard sale" before him and some of the other opportunistic fiends, that weren't mentally fried by the recent events to begin digging through the equipment.

I saw Ulysses approach Thumper and whisper something to it. All the FBI equipment vanished.

The scavengers turned around to protest, only to stop upon seeing the unbridled rage written all over the Major's face.

"You motherfuckers, two of your brothers are crying in terror, and you fucking start acquiring shit? When we get back to the shop, clean out your fucking lockers, you have no fucking place in my A-Team. Now see to your fellow fucking soldiers."

With downcast eyes they all muttered "Yes, sir" before doing as they should have been doing anyway. Gathering the despondent troopers and guiding them up to the house.

I bobbed my head in approval just as Thumper did the same, Kim hissed and nipped at one she felt wasn't moving fast enough to add encouragement. Her movement drew my attention as I recalled her pained squawk during the fire fight. I got up to move to where she laid on her side while a confused looking Allison stood there scratching her head.

"You sure you were hit?"

"Sssomeone shoot her, and ask her if she wasss hit by a bullet."

"Okay, okay. It's just that the only damage I see is a dent in one of your scales where you said you'd gotten it."

Now that I thought about it myself. I had felt several sharp momentary pains during the fight, had those been bullets? We were rather large targets, I had thought it weird that we had not been hit once. Perhaps we had been.

Responding to the puzzled look of my cocked head and twisted snout, Thumper provided the answer.

"Carbon is why the bullets did not penetrate. Your civilization is just beginning to tap the potential of that element. Your scales are the pinnacle of one branch of development of that atom/mineral/compound/mixture."

"How the hell isss that a biological growth then?"

"That is beyond your understanding at present."

I grumbled at that response but made no further comments.

"Now, my attention/focus/concern/inspection falls upon you two academic professors. I must send you on your way. Before you depart/leave/escape/exit I will give you this."

It reached with a pair of talons and pinched a scale from its opposite shoulder to present to the awestruck egg heads.

"With this you I also shall send this model upon which I repose along with..." It stopped while its form blurred once more and again there was yet another clone.

The new clone spoke; "I will come with you as well. Once we arrive I must ask you to summon all the heads of the departments and start contacting/communicating/exchanging/notifying all your fellow professors/erudite/lecturers/explorers. Wake up your world."

"Please say your good byes and indicate when you are prepared."

So it spoke before settling curled next to its progenitor on the newly expanded platform to begin humming much as the prime model had been earlier.

Nerd one and Selena turned toward us to say their good-byes. Selena approached Kim as my wife raised one of her hands towards the increasingly diminutive doctor. She hesitated, and then reciprocated by grasping one of her paw digits just behind the claw and giving it a few hardy shakes. My head swiveled back to the other one, and experienced a twinge of vertigo as I looked down from at least a couple of feet above him. He awkwardly extended his own hand, instead of offering him a finger I leaned closer to look at him with an analytical eye.

"Next timeee, perhapsss. Triii standing up for yurrself more."

He lowered his hand and nodded without a word. This floor mat has no chance I thought to myself.

They swapped their attention while I gladly offered Selena a claw, Kim just looked at the other with a cocked head. When he didn't get the hint she lowered her head and snorted in his face, he got the hint then. I looked at his partner and murmured to her; "Help him"

She looked up at me and gave me a wink before patting my neck and turning back towards their self-appointed chaperone. Once both scientists were arrayed next to Thumper 3 they promised that they would return.

As they disappeared Thumper Prime addressed Ulysses. "I have notified the local law enforcement 11.2 minutes ago. They are arriving presently."

Ulysses cursed. "You fucking alien computer, all I needed was a five minute warning. We don't have comms with them." He ran off yelling at every one in uniform to lay down their weapons.

The chaos that was inevitable at this point occurred exactly as I thought. After 45 minutes of raised weapons, raised voices, and frantic calls to authorities that were busily dealing with a dozen similar situations the din began to die off. Into this relative silence the steady hum of a major crime scene began to develop.