FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Koris was always a beautiful city in the springtime. Situated a few miles inland from the coast behind imposing seaside cliffs, its denizens would know that winter was truly over when the ocean currents shifted to start blowing tender sea spray kisses to them even despite the cliffs that tried to keep them apart. For centuries, poets waxed lyrical about this forbidden romance between Koris and the sea. People who grew up in that city swear that they never shed their thick winter undercoats before they've smelled that sea breeze. Koris University's mascot was--and still is--a crashing tidal wave with horns, sunglasses, and a handsome, devilish smile.

Springtime meant children tumbling recklessly down verdant hills, young sweethearts frolicking through meadows with eyes locked upon one another, and farmers planting whatever damn crop they wanted because anything can grow in the lush hinterlands.

Hrvalye considered this history as he walked to work one late spring morning. He waved hello to a well-bundled lady going the other direction as they passed an empty playground. He couldn't tell from looking at it when it last got any real use, but he knew it had been a while. The topiary gardens on his right were bare of topiaries or vegetation of any kind. The fruit trees in the courtyard of the local parochial school were all dead. For years, the community held out hope for those noble trees, struggling against the inevitable, but now they were symbols of mourning in a place with no shortage of them.

The sun was smiling benevolently on the fair city, but its feeble effort did little to abate the cold wind, biting savagely at any exposed skin that dared face it. Hrvalye was warm enough, with his many layers of armor, stalwartly backstopped by the thick winter undercoat that he had been wearing for years.

He never got used to it, and he never wanted to, though this morning it was getting to him a little more than usual. Soon enough I will have a little respite, though. I will escape this world, live somewhere temperate, and discover a path to a warmer future for everyone. How wonderfully romantic and not-desperate it sounds when I put it that way.

He stepped into the airlock of the Earth Labs, where he worked towards this bright, shiny, warm future. The windscreen lowered behind him until it satisfyingly hissed to form a seal against the elements. After a brief pause, the heavy door in front of him whooshed open, and with practiced timing he immediately hopped through it. The door shut rapidly behind him, finishing off with a sharper and more urgent seal.

Cracking open his helmet and unzipping his wind-breaking jacket, he made his way into the locker room to hang up his outerwear: the helmet, the jacket, the insulating surcoat, the snow pants. He knocked some snow off his boots and slipped them off along with the outer layer of socks. He was about to put on some more sensible shoes when he noticed a wet splotch of blood on his right sock.

He sighed with guttural frustration. He was running late and had skipped the foot brace today. It would be fine, he thought. It had healed, he thought. He was wrong, and stupid, stupid shit. Shit. Shit. Shit!

Fuck.

"Hey," he called out to the room as he dejectedly plopped himself on the bench behind him, hoping someone else was as late as he was.

"Hey yourself," came a reply. Hrvalye exhaled with relief, apparently having held his breath for the last ten or fifteen seconds in his mixed irritation and apprehension. He was pretty sure he knew that voice, though it was hard to tell with the poor acoustics.

After another ten or fifteen seconds, Hrvalye was proven right; it was Cecina, who was considerate enough to approach slowly, averting her eyes. Once she was pretty confident of where Hrvalye's face would be, she glanced in that direction. Then, satisfied that he was adequately clothed, she walked over.

Hrvalye was glad to see her. Probably anyone could help him just fine, but it was nice to have it be his best friend first thing in the morning--bonus for her being an English-speaker, to strengthen the immersion. Unlike him, Cecina was probably very much on time today, likely just retrieving something from her locker like a reasonable person. "What's up, Hervie?" she asked, switching to English, evidently oblivious to the source of Hrvalye's troubles.

" Please do not call me that," he responded with half-gritted teeth, also switching to English. It was a new affectionate nickname Cecina picked out for him, but he hated it. Well, he didn't hate it exactly, but he wanted to. And she knew that. "It's stupid. It's cringeworthy. Anyway," he motioned with his head to the foot he was holding with his hands, where the bloody sock was clearly visible.

Her eyes widened a bit as she stepped closer. Evidently she missed the foot--maybe it wasn't as bad as it seemed. "Oh, that's nasty." Well, never mind. "What happened?" She sat down next to him, slowly reaching her hands over, but stopping with a small wince when she was a few inches away. She turned her expressive green eyes to Hrvalye's, seemingly asking what he wanted her to do.

He gave her the slightest of nods, and she reached to the sock, slowly working it down from the calf. "Slowly, slowly," he muttered while somehow inhaling, biting his lower lip as it started to curl back. He kept shallowly stress-breathing until she finally got the sock all the way off. Thankfully, she'd been gentle, though the annoyed look she shot him when she finished was not.

"That was way, way too dramatic for the situation, Hervie. It doesn't even look that bad with the sock gone."

He craned his head forward a bit even though he could see his foot just fine from his original vantage point. "Yeah, no, you're right," he sighed. "I think I'm just mad at myself and letting that bleed over--"

"Nice pun."

"I hate you. Anyway, I'm mad at myself for not taking care of my stupid foot. It was almost completely healed and now we're back to square... two, I guess? Square one looked worse than this."

Cecina carefully turned the foot a bit to give herself a 360-degree view, holding it by the heel and arch. "As I said, it doesn't look that bad, though I guess I wouldn't see much. It looks like the injury is along and under the in-hoof?"

"Yeah, I smashed an anvil on it Wile E Coyote style."

"Look at you with your pop culture references," she said with half-admiration.

"Hey, you know I take my research seriously. But yeah, not an anvil. Bottle of wine, actually. I instinctively tried to catch it... with my foot... as it fell. It worked!"

"Was the wine worth it?"

"No idea, haven't opened it yet. But probably not. It was on sale--like, clearance-type sale."

"I think they just call that 'clearance'."

"Lay off, man. I was modifying a mildly incorrect statement and trying to use those words as a point of emphasis. Like when we say butter, but saltier than butter," he slipped into Arvanyan at the end to try to illustrate the idiomatic similarity.

It wasn't really the same thing. "I don't think that's the same thing," she said, squinting slightly.

"Okay, but it's fine."

"Yeah, of course, it's fine. You just speak English all funny."

"That's just how I talk! Like, I talk like that when we speak Arvanyan, no? I mean, who says_'butter, but saltier than butter'_anyway?"

"Old people. And you. Fair point."

"Anyway, I am actually late and getting later, but I need to bandage this up and ideally get a new sock somehow."

"I'll see what I can do. Sit tight," she stood up, "Do you want me to let Piran know that you're here but otherwise indisposed?"

"Yes." The corners of his mouth turned up to a tiny smile, "You are a delight. Thank you."

"I know. BRB." She turned and walked away, smirking, her short tail swishing in stride almost invisibly in front of her black pants and half-under her black sweater. It was an avant-garde look, especially given her white wedges and unvarying near-black fur. He spent more time watching her leave than he meant to, like a leering scuzzball, but he very deftly convinced himself it was because of his confusion over fashion.

Focusing once more on his foot, Hrvalye dabbed lightly at the wound with the bloody sock. "This is probably a bad, unsanitary idea," he muttered, "But too bad. Getting what you deserve, Hrvalye, you poop. Poop poop poop." He softly blew out his lips with the trail of p's strung together. Relaxing, if childish.

"Um..." came an indistinct voice. Hrvalye groaned inwardly--that was unnecessarily dumb of him, and he was pretty sure he knew who this would be too.

Bingo! Dravori appeared around the corner, wearing only his boxer-briefs. No one really liked him, and he always seemed to show up when he was least welcome. "My English isn't very good, but were you just muttering 'shit shit shit' in a singsong voice?"

Hrvalye was focused on his foot, so he only saw Dravori from the corner of his eye. Surely he wasn't strolling up naked to strike up a conversation? To be safe, Hrvalye kept his attention on his ill-treated wound as he sighed and rolled his eyes. "It wasn't shit shit shit. It was poop poop poop. The plosive consonants run together in a satisfying way that also allows me to be self-deprecating. It helps me get into the human spirit. Hard to explain to someone who isn't going in." Wow, that almost sounded like a reasonable excuse! Nicely done!

"Yeesh, all right. How's your foot, by the way? I heard you and Cecina a little bit but didn't want to interrupt."

"It's fine, thank you. Well, as fine as can be expected. Hopefully she'll be back soon with something to help."

"Yeah, she's pretty great, isn't she?" Oh dear. Sounds like Dravori has a crush. Judging by how sharply he just swerved, he was experiencing it with the maturity of a middle schooler. Cecina would not be pleased if she knew.

Hrvalye quickly changed the subject, "Indeed. So, how are things going with your prep? I heard you guys handled the last disaster simulation with aplomb." He instinctively turned his face to look at Dravori as he finished, and immediately regretted not changing the subject to how much he loved pants. Even if it weren't weird for Dravori to invite himself to a locker room conversation in his underwear, he just was not the kind of guy you wanted to have that level of intimacy with. Hrvalye returned his gaze to the relative safety of his foot wound.

"Yeah!" Dravori smiled, "We were a very well-oiled machine. It's amazing how well the drills and training have sunk in. We were practically the paragons of individual creative forces synthesizing team solutions."

That sounded kind of weird--bad weird, not good weird. Like buzz-phrases being misremembered and forced into a loveless polyamorous marriage. Moving right along... "I'm glad to hear it. We are all going to be in your hands, and it means a great deal that we can truly trust you. I never want to be in a situation like last year's fiasco. We almost lost everything. With a lot of luck, we'd reduced that to losing 'only' three years of existence." Hrvalye actually choked up a bit as he spoke,"I would be horrified to suffer that. To cause others to suffer that," he tried to laugh a little to regain his equanimity, "And it is good that that we're minimizing those risks. We can't let that happen again--anything like it. One second of existence is too much to lose."

Dravori nodded, but didn't seem to fully grasp the extent of Hrvalye's angst on the matter; probably for the best. "Don't worry. We've got this, and you've got this. It'll be a good cycle. How far do you think we'll get--in there, that is? Three years? Five?"

"No idea. I try not to think about it too much. I know this is urgent, that we are our world's last best hope, but we have to keep the focus on quality here. If we get three, great. If we don't, we don't. But we'll do our best. It's all we can ask, right?" Hrvalye shrugged his shoulders slightly as he asked the question.

Dravori nodded in response, "Right. Anyway, I have to get dressed and get back to the lab." He patted both hands on his belly a couple of times, apparently to emphasize his lack of dress, "Is there anything I can help with before I go?"

"Nah, I'm sure Cecina's got it under control, and will probably be back any second. Thanks, though."

"Sure thing." Dravori nodded once more and walked off. Thank the heavens.

Hrvalye rested his chin in the crook of one of his fists, absently brushing his goatee with the thumb. The conversation with Dravori unsettled him. Not because of anything Dravori said, exactly, but because it felt like everyone was too confident about this entire endeavor. Last year really was a disaster of incomprehensible scale. Over 7 billion people lost three years of life experiences. Hundreds of millions of children were completely erased from existence with no one to remember them. Everyone thought that all possible safeguards were in place last year, but the catastrophe still happened anyway. How much smarter could everyone have gotten in the past year, really?

The hubris was insufferable, and Hrvalye felt a slowly building rage whenever his mind turned to these ideas. But these are desperate times. It's almost summer, and a person would die of exposure within hours if they were outside without enough clothing.

A single tear fell from Hrvalye's eye as he sat in silence. He blinked with surprise and sniffled as he sat up straight. _Oh god, why do I have to feel this way? Why do I have to feel this way now? _

"We have a duty, we have a duty..." he muttered, switching back to English. He took a deep breath. Better. Most of the people in the Interfacer unit felt some degree of ambivalence about what they were doing, and this reassured him. He, Cecina, all of them, they were good. They had a sacred code to protect others that they would never abandon. And someday soon they would gather the information they needed to save their own forsaken people. Very romantic; not desperate.