FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

--- Mass Transit

Public transport had always been a nightmare for the rabbit. The claustrophobic closeness of pressing bodies, the random jostling of the transport, and of course the smells. Combined with the waves of nausea from his recent transition, from artificial to planetary gravity, it was sensory overload. Reg wasn't sure if they would reach his destination, before his stomach involuntarily added to the smells inside the cabin.

His chief engineer was fond of saying, "Gravity doesn't pull, it sucks." But gravity wasn't really the issue. The trouble was inconsistent gravity. He often thought that long transits in zero gravity would be preferable to what he experienced with artificial systems.

With zero gravity, he would only have to deal with the loss of muscle mass, and bone degradation. A generalized weakening of his body as a whole sounded better than the balance, coordination, and motion induced nausea he was going through now. His fellow passengers probably thought that he was detoxing from some potent off-world drug, which would have been a valid analogy, except no part of being a freighter captain had ever given him a high worthy of this crash.

He hated down time, and had no idea how he was going to spend the next two weeks while the ship was being refit and refueled. By the time the ship was ready for departure, he would be acclimated to planetary gravity and have to make the switch all over again. He cringed at the thought.

Pressing himself against the cabin wall and holding tight to a structural support rib, he did his best to become one with the shuttle bus. Allowing himself to be randomly shaken and bounced around during the journey was better than the mixed signals his brain would send trying to compensate for the motion.

Mercifully, the shuttle arrived at his stop in time for him to stumble out of the exit, and collapse at the curb onto his overstuffed duffel, before his stomach ordered 'abandon ship' on its contents. He lay there, blissfully still for a few moments, while the cool rain on his face soothed his nausea, and washed away its evidence.

--- The Lift

He knew this was only a brief respite though, and the building containing his apartment was only a few hundred meters away. He briefly entertained the idea of simply crawling the rest of the way, but decided against it. He had to get moving before someone tried to rob him, or worse, arrested him for vagrancy.

Two more shuttle transports had made their regularly scheduled stops by the time he made it to the front door of the complex. The passkey in his jacket pocket was recognized and opened the door before he reached it. Using the wall for support, he passed the residential elevators and made his way to the end of the hall. There, his passkey allowed him to open another door marked 'Maintenance Only'. Or at least he had always assumed that was what the sign said, as he had never learned to read Maramosian script.

The door led to a large freight elevator. Stepping into it, he braced himself into the corner next to the control panel, much as he had on the shuttle. After taking a deep calming breath, he did his best impression of the local dialect and phonetically pronounced the word "Maintenance" into the control panel. The cage-work safety doors closed and the elevator car began to slowly rise. Very slowly, and very smoothly, with no sudden lurching or vibration. Reg smiled to himself, as he relaxed against the wall with his eyes closed.

He was startled awake when the control panel repeated the word 'Maintenance' back to him in a synthetic voice. The safety doors had already retracted and the lift had ceased moving. His instinct was to simply step off with his bag, but he knew that he would likely end up on his face again if he moved too quickly. Instead he exited by a very deliberate shuffling of his feet and rocking his weight side to side, never lifting his feet off the ground, dragging his duffel behind him like a rudder.

Almost the entirety of this floor was a single large open room. It was the central hub for all of the environmental, plumbing, and electrical systems in the building. The walls and ceiling were a tangled mass of conduit and ducts leading in all directions. The room was filled with a constant drone from a myriad of fans and pumps, punctuated by the periodic cycling of pressure valves and pneumatic vent shutters.

He hurried his shuffling to a simple nondescript door not far from the elevator. This door was not automated like the others, so he retrieved his pass key from his jacket pocket and used its edge to slip the lock. Once inside, he quickly shut the door and leaned against it.

The landlord thought him mad for requesting this detached set of undersized, windowless rooms. Originally intended to house the building's maintenance crew, they were so small, inconveniently located, and noisy that they chose to live elsewhere. The space had languished unused for years because of this, so the owner felt he was still coming out ahead by charging Reg half-rent.

With eyes closed he held his breath and listened. The drone of the building's systems was still there, but now only as a soft, muffled rumble. It was almost identical to his cabin aboard ship. It sounded like home.

--- The Bath

Opening his duffel, he withdrew a small metallic box not much larger than his hand, and socketed it into a matching niche on the wall. A pair of indicator lights along one edge lit up red, then alternately blinked a few times before each turned green.

The lights in the room rose to full brightness, and he heard the security locks engage on the door he had just forced open.

"Lance, I need a bath", he said to the room.

"Yes, sir. I am sure you do", came the reply from his navigator, as a hazy greenish hologram of a Rakshasan took form a few feet away. "The water is already started."

"Thank you, Lance", he sighed as he shuffled to the bathroom, stripping his clothes off, one piece at a time, as he went.

By the time he reached the bathroom, the tub was full, and he was naked. Kneeling next to the tub, he grasped its side and stretched himself out along its smooth edge so his body straddled its length, then rolled his body into the water all at once.

He could feel the warm water seeping into his fur, slowly making him less and less buoyant and gradually sinking to the bottom of the tub with only his face remaining above the waterline. Circulating jets activated, and massaged his body, head to toe, with a lightly perfumed degreasing agent. Tilting his head, he could see that the once clear water was now nearly opaque with a week's worth of sweat, oil, dirt, and the occasional tuft of loose fur.

Just as quickly, the water began to clear again as the circulation filters did their job, returning fresh water to the jets until the system ran clean. When the jets started their third circuit across his body, his bladder decided to remind him of its existence. By that time, he was too relaxed to care about such things and decided to let the filters deal with that as well.

After nearly an hour in the tub, he reluctantly decided to climb out. He would have happily continued to remain in that gravity free state, but feared that Lance would change the water temperature to full cold to prevent him from falling asleep and drowning. The water drained away as he stood, and warm jets of forced air began to pass over his body. The air fluffing and drying his fur until he looked like a grade school static electricity demonstration.

He was too tired to bother with brushing himself down, so he shuffled to the bedroom. When he approached the foot of the bed and made a half-hearted attempt to lift his leg to climb onto it, the planet made its move. Gravity reached out, took a firm grip, and slammed him face first onto the bed before he could put his arms out to stop it. He didn't care. He was already asleep.