FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"After everything, it's still you." (Undertale, Genocide Run)

"It was you, wasn't it?" The humanoid ant queen had stared Fran down severely from her earthen throne. "You killed the ants, didn't you?" The queen had brandished a bloodied ant skull in one of her six hands as evidence. "As a child, you played with us in sand and fished us out of pools." She took a bite out of the skull and threw it behind her like a bad apple. "Now you've grown!" The ant started dissolving before the jackal's very eyes. "Now you murder us!"

Fran had woken up gasping, startled awake by her own nightmare. She had sat there in bed just panting, gathering her bearings as cold sweat had trickled down her back...

***

"Guess what?"

Ghost sighed. "I'm not gonna like this, am I?"

"Corsair never showed up for her job on the desert planet," Orchid shook her head.

"We need to question Solder and Glew again, knowing what we know now," Ghost opined. "Did you talk to Speaker or did I?" Ghost forgot.

"Corsair told me she didn't know whether Speaker had even been revived or not," Orchid remembered.

"Hold on a sec," Ghost pulled out her communicator. "Hey Collider, do you know if they revived Speaker yet or not?"

The hadrosaur shrugged. "I was just about to call you!"

Ghost tilted her head. "What about?" Please be good news, the mantis thought.

"You wanted me to get back to you about Sawtooth, right?"

***

The Jamboree proved unlike anything Fran had ever seen in her life.

Jamborees took place on all five planets but at different times for each planet. This one was taking place on the water planet. Wave pools had been set up for Citizens to go in to let the waves wash over them. Bubbling pools warmed by jets peppered the area for those who just wanted to sit down and relax for a while. Spectacular fountain arrangements took the jackal's breath away.

There seemed to be just about as many installations with saltwater as with fresh water to accommodate different Citizens' physiologies. By day, the sand on the beach was every color of the rainbow under the sun. By night, it lit up glowing with bioluminescent plankton under the silvery moonlight as far as the eye could see.

Waterslides of every shape and size led from the highest peaks down to the lowest pools. The System's builders could seem a little bolder than Earth builders in some ways. Their rides weren't designed to kill you as such, but they clearly weren't quite as afraid of the possibility you might die on their rides - and neither were a surprising amount of Citizens at that.

Fran startled, slightly splashed by an otter who'd just performed an elaborate tumbling dive off a nearby springboard into the deep end of a cold swimming pool. It occurred to the jackal as she shook off the water that she'd never seen this many people in one place not work ever since she'd reached the System, she didn't think. She found something tremendously refreshing about it.

More than that, she'd never seen this many structures in the System that hadn't been built to generate power, not for efficiency, but simply for people's enjoyment. While it may have seemed to run counter to the System's logic superficially, Fran had a very good understanding of why it was in fact absolutely essential to the System for it to have been able to continue functioning the way it did. It was supposed to be a time and place for people to get a chance to do everything they may have wanted to do but couldn't the rest of the time, a pressure release valve, a place to put those things that couldn't seem to fit anywhere else.

People worked, to be sure, it just wasn't quite the same. People served drinks, they set things up, they maintained things, took things down when it was over, organized things and, moreover, made sure everyone signed in on their way in. As a matter of fact, a lot of people ended up paying for a good part of what it'd cost them to get in by doing work on location for some of their time there themselves. The event was typically arranged around the expectation that a certain amount of Citizens would pitch in like that.

"Hey, Jackie!" Practical considerations did play their own role giving people a reason to stay, mind you. "How have you been?" Jamborees also worked as swap meets of sorts, as a time and place where a lot of skills and valuables that would normally span a wide range of distribution were all gathered in one place at the same time. "Haven't seen you in a while." Considering the way their barter system worked, how people usually had to fly from planet to planet and how quickly interest on debt could accrue, it could be especially useful to have access to such varied goods and services in such a short time - and access to such a wider market than usual for your own goods and services, as the case may be. "Who's your new partner?" They were getting better at not really answering that.

"Wow!" They'd just run into what it'd just taken Fran a moment to realize could only be a floating sea slug. "Glitchhop!" A floating sea slug Jackie seemed to recognize at that. "Where's Gizmo?" The jackal didn't know what species Gizmo was, but she did recognize the name from when it'd been used alongside Byte's during their interrogation earlier. "You canfly now?" Good, so I'm not seeing things, Fran thought to herself.

"You like it?" Glitchhop did a quick spin in the air, like someone trying on a new dress. "It's new!" The jackal wasn't quite sure where the sea slug's voice came from either but one step at a time. "Gizmo made it for me so she doesn't have to drag me around anymore." You could still hear a smile in Glitchhop's voice, wherever it came from.

"You must be excited about that!" Being able to get around on her own had opened up a whole new world to her. "You and Gizmo are still partners though, right?" The sea slug 'nodded' in the air with her whole body.

"That's right!" The roach wasn't the first person that Glitchhop had run into since her modding who'd only been used to ever seeing them together. "We just get to cover more ground this way," she'd chuckled.

"I bet you would!" Fran wondered just how long the sea slug's partner had been carrying her around until then, but didn't ask. "She been workin' on it long?" Jackie's antennae tilted along with her head.

"You have no idea," Glitchhop emphasized. "We got a hair's width from having the rug cut right out from under us at that, too." The roach furrowed her brow.

"What do you mean?" The jackal wasn't quite sure either.

"Well, last time Gizmo died Byte almost managed to take it from us," the sea slug explained. "I was stuck in the salt mines on the desert planet for a while," Glitchhop winced. "I wasn't much help." The salt desert was no place for sea slugs. "Good thing you Cleaned Gizmo and got it away from Byte!" So this was who the partner of the coyote they'd Cleaned on the rock planet canyon had been! "What were you going to ask from us for giving it back, by the way?" It looked like the neurally activated anti-gravity technology that Gizmo had practiced on those floating rocks had borne fruit after all.

"Haven't decided yet," Jackie shrugged.

"What exactly do you do?" Fran asked.

"I'm a programmer!" Glitchhop turned to her as she spoke. "I do a lot of coding for electronic body parts people have some of their flesh body parts replaced with," she elaborated. "Some energy stuff, some ship stuff, some hacking, mainly cyborg coding, though, yeah." The sea slug seemed like the kind of person who liked talking shop when you got her started. "I mean, I'm useless in a fight, but get me in a computer system, and it's a different story." No one could do everything, but everyone could do something, after all. "Ooh, you know those video games they have at Jamborees now?" Had the jackal heard that right? "I make those." Her heart leapt in her chest.

"You have video games?" After everything Earth had the System didn't have, of all things, Fran had never expected the System to have those. "You can't be serious! What kind?" Glitchhop actually gestured for Fran to follow.

"C'mon!" How could the roach not have mentioned they had video games? "I'll show you." What an incredible oversight. "We'll play!" If the jackal had introduced an alien to Earth and had wanted her to feel at home, video games would've been the first thing she'd have mentioned. "It'll be fun." How dearly she'd missed them, and the people she used to play them with...

***

"I think it's this idea that I'll invest all my emotions in this one person," Fran had tried to explain, "then they'll be taken away from me later, you know?" At least she'd had someone to talk to. "Then they'll just take all my emotions with them." Someone who'd cared.

"It's partly because of what happened with your mom, isn't it?" That wasn't a given.

"There's some of that, yeah," the jackal had nodded. "Not all, but some," she'd acknowledged. "I feel like I'm putting too many eggs in one basket." It was so hard for her to really let herself care about someone.

"So all you have to do to lose all your eggs is lose one basket," she'd summed up. "Big gamble."

"Kinda yeah!" Fran had agreed. "But like... You don't want to have to live your whole life without caring about someone because that's like... It's too sad, you know?" More emotion had crept into the jackal's voice than she meant to. "So you either hold back, without really living, or like... You give someone your heart, and they take it to the grave," she'd lamented.

"Hey Fran?"

Fran had looked up. "What?"

"Listen to me, and listen good," she'd told the jackal. "You can care about me, it's safe," she'd promised somehow. "I will never die."

***

"Can I count on you, Ghost?" Ghost hadn't expected the question.

"What do you mean?" She and Siren didn't talk a lot.

"Well, you know," the blue jay tried to sound casual, "if something happened where Trackers had to have each other's back to take care of a lot of Renegades at once, for example." Ghost and Siren had handled the task of Enforcing Jackie very differently.

"You think anything like that's gonna happen soon?" They'd walked away from it with very different takes on it.

"I don't know," Siren shrugged. "Something's in the air, it feels like." The blue jay was trying to have her cake and eat it too. "They've been coming at the Chambers more, for one thing." She was trying to give herself a layer of plausible deniability.

"Yeah, that didn't used to be a thing as much," the mantis acknowledged. "I think Orchid told me Sticks and Stones have been looking into that." They were still both among the Commission's top people, at the end of the day, weren't they?

"So you'd have my back, right?" Ghost had learned over time that, when people let on they didn't fully trust you, it was often best not to fully trust them either.

"It's my job, isn't it?"

***

"Oh my God."

Of all things that had seemed impossible to Fran when she'd first come into the System, it was something that would've seemed possible to most people back on Earth that had seemed the most impossible.

"Did I just...?"

It only served to compound the irony that it would have been something that had actually happened just then, at that.

"I think I did."

The jackal looked to her left. A rainbowfish was lying in bed next to her on his right side with his left hand on her right shoulder. She looked to her right. A zebrafish was lying in bed on his left side with his right hand on her left shoulder. Both were sleeping peacefully with smiles on their faces. It was clear enough that they'd enjoyed a visit to Beaker's grove and sampled the fruit from her new trees.

"Well shit."

Fran had always thought of herself as ace on some level, even before she'd known what it meant. Did this mean she'd been wrong after all? That was a complicated question. She'd known people who'd been ace way into their mid-thirties, until they weren't. It didn't mean they hadn't been, but it did mean people sometimes changed how they identified over time. She'd known people who'd been ace, but who had made exceptions in certain situations, if the situations had been exceptional enough. Some who'd regretted it, some who hadn't. Did she?

She'd have to find out what kind of memory it turned into with time, she supposed.

The jackal had spent some of the evening at the Jamboree bar drinking and dancing with the rainbowfish and the zebrafish on the dance floor. Partners were common in the System, but the fish had seemed to share a distinctive connection somehow, she couldn't quite put her finger on it. There were no nudity taboos in the System, she'd learned at the hot springs. In every way, Jackie and every other Citizen that Fran had talked to until then had reacted to her as though sex didn't exist and they had no idea what it was.

She'd been so relieved to learn that! She'd felt a lot more at ease living in a society where she hadn't been expected to have sex than in a society in which she felt that pressure on her all the time. Had it paradoxically been finally having had that pressure removed that had made it possible for the jackal to stop resisting the idea for the first time? There probably had to be an element of that in there somewhere. She didn't have to have their kids or get married, but she didn't have to disappear from their lives. She could engage with them however she wished.

Would this be a one-time thing, or something she'd see herself doing again? Time would have to tell. She wasn't sure how much trouble she'd go to for another shot at it, truth be told, in the grand scheme of things. There was a good chance Fran would have more urgent priorities to deal with, likely having to do with Jackie, who'd still be her partner first, after all. But, if the opportunity did present itself again, would she take it? Before her visit to Beaker's grove, she'd never existed in the kind of body that felt right to her. That may have played a role in why she'd been less into it back on Earth too, come to think of it. What a thing for the jackal to have introduced to the System, she almost scolded herself. There was no need to decide right away.

She carefully removed the rainbowfish's arm, then the zebrafish's arm, criss-crossed across her chest like a makeshift harness. She tried to slip out from under and between them without waking them up, with only partial success. They seemed half-awake and half-asleep when they turned to each other to start making out with each other in the bed while Fran looked back at them over her shoulder as she left the room. "Have fun guys!" she smiled and waved at them on her way back out.

***

Fran had tried to pet-proof their apartment completely, but there was no such thing in practice, you had to understand. She'd bought and installed fences and wire panels to try to keep her pets out of places that might be dangerous for them, out of places where they might cause damage without meaning to, but they always found a way. Her pets had been inveterate explorers, like a force of nature that pushed ever outward and couldn't be contained. If they hadn't wanted to be there with the jackal, she couldn't have kept them long, not really. Somehow she'd end up finding them on top of the shelves, behind the couch, in the trash can, under the bed, on the table, on the counter, on the fridge. Rules were made to be broken.

They went everywhere they could go.

***

"She came right out of nowhere," Sawtooth coughed. "I didn't see her until she was right on top of me," the antlion shook her head weakly.

"Are you warm enough?" There was no reason to be insensitive, Orchid figured. "Are you feeling better?"

"I've been killed a lot of times, Officer," Sawtooth rasped. "More than my fair share, some might say," the antlion threw in, tongue-in-cheek. "I never found anything as unsettling as that."

"What was she like?" Ghost asked.

"She was all covered in white fur, from head to toe." So it hadn't been a jackal. "All claws and fangs. She meant business."

"What were you doing in the ice caves?" Orchid went on.

"I was looking for Tilly, if you must know," Sawtooth replied.

"Why do you think the white creature attacked you?" Ghost wondered.

"Because I found her," the antlion answered.

***

"And they never found out," she chuckled.

"Wow!" Fran gasped. "How about that!" The jackal chuckled along. She'd joined Jackie and Dex in the room the three of them shared for the Jamboree.

"I know, right?" Dex could spread out on a couch, on a bed or on a floor like nobody's business, it turned out.

"That's really saying something, lemme tell you." The roach seemed more comfortable around the two of them than Fran had seen her in a long time, if ever.

"I would think so!" The jackal was starting to feel more at ease around them than she'd felt around anyone in a long time herself, truth be told.

"I'm impressed you were able to keep what you did from them for as long as you did," Dex gestured with a crinoid tendril for emphasis.

"We kinda had to," she'd shrugged.

"So did we, though, didn't we?" Dex addressed Jackie.

"They can never find out to this day," the roach confirmed.

"That's some dark shit right there," Fran shook her head.

"I don't know what that means," Dex admitted, "but I'm here for it." Her flamingo legs were draped across furniture like discarded clothes thrown haphazardly onto it.

"You did so much for me back in the day, Dex," Jackie reflected. "I don't know if I ever told you how much." It tugged at the jackal's heartstrings to hear it.

"It sounds like you two have really been through hell and high water together." They didn't know what that meant either, but it didn't matter.

"It wasn't fair, you know."

The roach winced. "I know, Dex, I know," she tried to reassure her friend. "It wasn't your fault, though," she insisted.

"It wasn't more your fault than my fault, I can tell you that," Dex added cynically.

"It was no one's fault," Jackie almost snapped. "It was their fault." The scent of incense permeated the room to appease them after a long day.

"You mean the Trackers." The roach nodded. "The ones that were after you for the food smuggling." Jackie and Dex had run food back in the day. The roach got caught. Dex didn't.

"The very same," Dex replied.

"The thing is," Jackie explained, "even if Dex did turn herself in at this point, or if I sold her out or something, we'd both get in trouble for it," she went on, "I knew for all this time, and I didn't tell 'em." The System didn't have drugs the way they existed on Earth, but they made do.

"So they'd stick you with another Enforcer regardless," Fran understood.

"And we're not letting that happen again," Dex emphasized, like only someone who'd heard what Enforcers have put the roach through more than once would. "The point is, I know it might not seem that way to you because you just walked in, but people hide stuff from people in the System all the time." They were passing something back and forth between the three of them that was helping them calm down, mind you.

"There are secrets in the System," Jackie had to agree. "You wouldn't think so, but there are." They were sharing synthesized versions of oxytocin, dopamine, adrenalin, endorphins, and so on and so forth - not drugs that released those chemicals like on Earth, but the chemicals themselves, directly.

"I mean, there are 'secrets' everyone kinda knows but acts like they don't," Dex clarified, "but there are secret secrets though." The jackal felt privileged that the roach and Dex would have shared their secret with her.

"That's so weird." Of course, Dex felt privileged that Jackie and Fran would've shared their secret with her as well. "On Earth, a whole bunch of our sci-fi shit is all about how in a sci-fi setting there'd be surveillance everywhere and the authorities would always know your every move." It wouldn't have been the first thing that had turned out different in space from what she'd been taught to believe that space would be like, mind you.

"I think on some level," the roach started, "they want people to have something to lose when they're assigned an Enforcer. They can only take your privacy away if you have it, right?"

"That's interesting, I hadn't thought of that," Dex observed.

"Earth didn't know shit, I can tell you that," the jackal giggled. She was using words she knew she wasn't supposed to use to hide her identity freely, her guard was so far down around these people.

"Oh! You were going to show us some of your animals, I think," Jackie remembered.

"Oh yeah, that's right!" Fran had been adding names to her list of communicator contacts over time: Beaker, Glory, Kiwi, Chime, Cuckoon, Ghost, Glitchhop, Tandem, Dex... She'd almost forgotten that Ghost had given her back her Earth phone altogether when she pulled it out to, in true Earth tradition, show them cute animal videos. "These were my pets when I lived back on Earth."

They all watched, mesmerized, the jackal's pets run and dance around her, excited she'd be bringing them something to eat, jumping at their plate of food to start eating like there's no tomorrow the second she'd set it down. You could hear them munching wholeheartedly, Fran telling them soothing, encouraging words, petting them as they ate with a smile in her voice. When the jackal and roach caught each other's eyes, they couldn't help noticing they were both crying their hearts out, hoping Dex wouldn't see. Fran, because they'd been her pets, she'd loved them, and missed them so much to this day - Jackie, because they'd been eating food, it'd made them so happy, and it made her think about all the people she'd brought food to before...

***

"We didn't even do anything, though!" Glew protested.

"Not this time," Solder clarified.

"Well yeah, not since last time, I mean," the glowworm grumbled.

"We're not here because you did anything," Orchid assured them.

"What do you want from us?" the toucan demanded.

"We're headed for an ice cave," Ghost explained.

"That means it's dark, so we'll need some light to see," Orchid started.

"And it means there'll be ice, we'll need fire to melt it," Ghost finished.

"You're not Enforcers," Glew furrowed her brow.

"And if we say no, you increase our sentence?" Solder asked.

"No, we just decrease it if you say yes," Orchid specified the distinction.

"We're asking for your help," Ghost concluded.

***

Fran's best friend and roommate would usually get along. They'd existed together sharing the same space for a long time, and they'd all believed, on some level, that they'd continue to share it for the rest of their lives. Realistically, she'd have had to say that both of them were roughly equally important to her emotionally. She wouldn't have known what to do without either of them. They'd all saved each other's lives so many times that they'd lost track of it by this point. Even though they'd each had their own respective approaches to solving problems their own way, they'd all agreed about what the problems were, and about how badly they'd needed fixing. It'd gone a long way, there'd been no question about that.

It'd been the small things that'd get in the way of the big things sometimes, as they often do.

It'd taken well over a decade for it to become an issue but, when the jackal's roommate and best friend had gotten into a fight over chores, it had hit her really hard. It'd been important to her for them to get along, for her to feel that all three of them had been a cohesive unit that had worked together to achieve their goals. It'd seemed like a stupid thing to care about, superficially, but Fran's best friend and roommate had both been writers. They'd worried about the encroaching approach of death as they'd grown older, and their anxiety that they might die before they'd get a chance to finish their respective stories had grown with the passage of time. Every hour spent doing chores had become an hour they hadn't been able to spend writing.

That was when Fran had started surreptitiously taking on more and more of the chores on herself without asking. She'd hoped to give both her roommate and best friend enough leeway to be able to spend the time they'd needed to get their writing done, get their other work done and, more importantly, so they'd all have time to hang out together bonding in their living room when all would be said and done, which she'd always looked forward to at the end of the day. "Always help people who need your help if you can, Fran," her mom had always told her back when she'd been alive. "It's the most important thing there is."