FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

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"So she never got to finish it," Fran's best friend had told her.

"Halfway through," the jackal had shaken her head.

"They wrote the rest based on her notes," her best friend had gone on. "I hate that."

"You do?" Fran had tilted her head.

"If I died halfway through a story, I'd hate for someone else to make it mean something else than what I wanted it to mean, you know?"

***

Light filtered down to the ground through the trees' branches in the grove around them.

"Hold still." You could see well enough to get around from it, but they still kept some more torchlight nearby.

"OW!" They did need good lighting for the kind of precision work for which they were known, after all.

"I said hold still," Glory chided her.

"I can't believe I passed out like that," Jackie grumbled to herself as Beaker started reattaching her finger. "I've finished jobs after losing an arm before." The doctor's head looked like a plague doctor's mask, but shaped like a dodo's face.

"When was the last time you slept?" Fran asked the roach.

"I don't remember." While she'd been out of commission, Ghost, Orchid, and her Earthling partner had taken her to the forest planet with the Trackers' ship to be healed.

"Most of our clients come here to get parts switched around," the bird of paradise opined, "not to get patched up, these days." Beaker never spoke. "How's the antennae?" That was Glory's job.

"Still cracklin'." The jackal had almost screamed when she'd first seen the trees. Good thing she hadn't. To be fair, a lot of Earthlings would've.

"Good, good." They were organ trees.

"It's good work." Heart trees, lung trees, liver trees, kidney trees, stomach trees, intestine trees, bladder trees, all with organs growing from their branches like so many fruit swaying in the breeze, ripe to be picked whenever the doctor would need some spare parts for one of her operations.

"They're supposed to last for a while, anyway." No brain trees, though. Brains were tricky.

"So this is where you got those," Fran gestured at Jackie's antennae.

"Why, thinking of getting some?" the nurse asked the jackal offhandedly.

"They're very good," the roach eyed Fran meaningfully while the doctor worked on her finger.

"I'm a bit low right now," the jackal explained, "but when I'll want some, I'll know where to look," she assured the bird of paradise.

"Haven't seen you in a while, come to think of it," Glory moved her attention back to Jackie.

"Is that right?" With the puffin and toucan to patch up on top of the roach's finger to reattach, the dodo had more than her fair share of work to get through for the time being, mind you. "I hadn't noticed." The nurse seemed to know when to hand Beaker which tools without a word.

"Staying out of trouble?"

The roach rolled her eyes. "Don't I always?" If it had been up to her, it would've been longer still, but she hadn't had the chance to make that call, what with being unconscious and all.

"Haven't seen you here with a partner for a while, that's for sure," the bird of paradise chirped.

"Thanks for reminding me," Jackie chuckled.

"You..." Glory looked Fran up and down. "Why you, I don't think I've ever seen here at all, have I?" The dodo picked up some more anesthetic plant matter that grew from her nurse's arm absent-mindedly. "Which doctor do you go to?" Beaker's work was known far and wide.

"I, uh..." the jackal struggled to answer.

"She just waits until they bring her back," the roach came to Fran's rescue. "I keep saying she should but, you know people," Jackie grinned.

"Ah, a lot of people are doing that these days," the bird of paradise acknowledged. "A worker's always more productive with all her limbs attached, wouldn't you say?" How long would the jackal be able to hide being an alien in a part of space where everyone had always been the same and no one looked alike, she asked herself?

"I'll remember that," Fran smiled. "You grow these here yourself?" Hanging organs glistened in the sun around them, the most natural thing in the world.

"They're coming in nice this year, aren't they?" The dodo nodded at Glory as she worked on her patient. "It's funny, isn't it?" The roach tilted her head at the nurse. "People are all so different outwardly, but when it all comes down to it, on a basic level, a lung's a lung, and a heart's a heart, wouldn't you say?" The jackal had never quite thought about it that way before.

"And an antenna's an antenna," Jackie concluded.

"That's the thing," the bird of paradise went on. "You'd think your body would be all like, 'This isn't chitin! What is this?' but, if it's done right, your body can't tell," she shook her head. "It doesn't care."

"Remember way back when there was that big showdown about whether people should have to pay again to keep extra features like that after being brought back or not?" the roach asked.

"How could I forget?" Glory winced. "We almost lost the grove." Beaker shuddered. "That would've been hard to replace, wouldn't it?" Groves didn't grow on trees.

"See, some Arbitrators didn't want the Commission to have to spend the time and resources to put these back together every time." Jackie figured she'd give Fran some context.

"Some Citizens said that, if they couldn't be brought back with them, they'd never get to do any other work, and they wouldn't be worth getting at all," the nurse added.

"Some Citizens said they gave people who could afford them an unfair advantage that they'd never be able to catch up with," the roach went on.

"And some Arbitrators said it'd motivate people to work harder overall if they could get perks they could keep in exchange for it," the bird of paradise finished.

"So what happened?" the jackal asked.

"We're more efficient with add-ons like this." A lone spark flickered off the end of one of her antennae. "That was the deciding factor, ultimately."

"Now, more people come here to get parts switched around than to get patched up to this day," Glory looped back to earlier.

"Except for that panda who used to say we're not supposed to or something," Jackie recalled dimly.

"Whatever her deal was." The dodo rolled her eyes. "So, how do you intend to pay...?" The roach gulped.

***

"We can still go get you another one, sweetie," Fran's mother had tried to comfort her.

"But I don't want another one, mom!" the jackal had cried. "No one can replace her..."

***

The dizzying heights of the Nest's paper filing cabinets towered around the mantises as they made their way through it to the paper wasp's help desk. Kledon was a paper wasp through and through. Ghost and Orchid's faceted eyes could see her joints fold and unfold like origami as she helped them navigate the elaborate paper wasp nest that served as the System's largest organic knowledge repository. Kledon created the paper and tended to her library herself, untouched by electronic tampering. It wasn't owned by the Commission, but it was available to everyone, so some Trackers turned to it for leads, when all else failed.

Somehow, Ghost had been getting the sense that, in this particular mess they were in, all else was going to be failing them a lot.

***

"Can I ask you something?" Fran had turned her head to her roommate. "Even if it's a little weird?" The jackal had nodded. "If I ever die halfway through writing a story... Would it be weird if I asked you to try to use my notes to write the rest of it?" Fran had stopped, and thought about it.

"You're not going to die anytime soon, are you?" The jackal worried about her roommate, after all.

"No, of course not, it'd just... help me not worry as much if someone indulged me?"

"I'm... touched you'd trust me to," Fran had stammered. "I'm not really a writer like you two, you know?" It wasn't really her thing.

"You don't have to if you don't want to," her roommate had reassured her. "It wouldn't have to be perfect, though," she'd smiled. "Just... anything is better than nothing, right?"

***

"I wish you'd left me to finish the job at the Revival chambers," Jackie had muttered.

"What?" Fran blinked.

"Instead of bringing me here." The roach didn't want to be rude but she had to say something. "Just for future reference, that's all," she tried to soften the blow.

"Without your finger?" Jackie nodded without a trace of irony.

"I... need to learn you might not have the same priorities I would." The jackal kept having to process just how different from Earth the System really was.

"Did I have time to finish the scarf, at least?"

Fran indicated Ghost's new scarf in the clearing near them. "You got a little carried away at the end there." It was several meters long.

"You wouldn't happen to need a few extra meters' worth of scarf, would you?" the roach asked the nurse hopefully.

"I would not." The jackal wracked her brains for a solution, for anything that could help Jackie pay for the finger she'd just had reattached.

"I've got it!" Finally it came to her. "I know how to pay you and Beaker back, Glory." It was thinking about just how different the System must have been from Earth that did it.

"I'm listening," the bird of paradise crossed her arms.

"How would you like to get something you've never seen before?" What would a world of Revival chambers where no one had kids fully entail, she'd asked herself?

"I've seen a lot," Glory raised a finger.

"I'm reasonably sure you haven't," Fran responded. "You're just the right customer for it I've been looking for, at that." If the trees around there were any indication, in any case.

"And that's worth Jackie's finger to you?" the nurse raised a leafy eyebrow.

"The finger... plus something else that's verycommon around here to replace it," the jackal bargained. "The rarer something is, the more valuable it is, isn't it?" And one person's trash could be another's treasure.

"I thought you were all out of everything?" the roach asked Fran.

"I was," the jackal replied. "This is something that's part of my body." Maybe her body really had grown something she could sell after all. "I've been meaning to get rid of it for a while, to tell you the truth."

***

"Do you feel like they did replace her, in some way?" Fran's best friend had asked her when they'd been watching her pets playing in the living room one day. The jackal had stopped, and thought about it. She'd looked at them, and she'd really thought about how she'd really felt about them.

"No, not really," Fran had realized.

"But you're glad you got them, aren't you?" her best friend had inquired.

"I love them more than anything in the world," the jackal had answered wholeheartedly. "They're just nothing like her at all," she'd clarified. "It's like the difference between loving a parent and a sibling, or between a, a..."

"... between a roommate and a best friend?" Fran had nodded. "Hey Fran, can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"If I ever die halfway through writing a story, would you be okay with trying to finish it based on my notes for me, after all...?"