Geeks In Dark
Geeks In Dark
Okay, this is my second yiffy furry story. Related to the first story, "Every Geek's Dream", in that Noere and Fouwrey are here again, this time happily married. I tried to make this story slightly less romantic but twice as light-hearted. Look at me, I'm actually trying to be funny this time. Oh well, it isn't going to end well... or maybe it is.
Being an environmentally conscious person, the story contains more than a few 100% recycled jokes. I would like to thank the originators of the running jokes (about the stingy people and the cell phones, in this case). No matter if you approve of this story, no matter wherever you are - you save everyone's day. And final warning: If you think this thing has a direct Matrix reference, you are badly mistaken. (Nor is it exactly a direct biblical reference either...) I do, however, admit reading through an unhealthy dose of Pratchett's books recently.
As of writing, I have not received much feedback from the earlier story, except from the individuals who reviewed it. The story seemed to be well received. I would appreciate more comments.
Keywords: M/F; Species: Wolf, Fox, Cat
Author E-mail: [[email protected]](%5C)
Author home page: http://www.iki.fi/wwwwolf/
Copyright © 2003-2004 Urpo Lankinen. Distributed under Creative Commons [Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial license](%5C). (In plain terms: Distribute how you wish in unmodified form, but not for profit. And attributions are required.)
"Now, in this wall of the cave...", Noere said, "we see reddish stone. It's called... granite."
For some reason, the picture didn't show Noere at all, nor anything else.
Fouwrey was sitting in a small computer lab in the university building C - the humanities and natural sciences building.
The lab was mostly empty. Single incandescent light lit the center of the room, and leaving the back with a server rack and bookshelves in shadow. The contrast between the bright center of the room and shadowy desks on the sides was somewhat unexpected, even a bit unreal - one started to wonder if this light was not meant to light things.
Various computers from more or less recent years filled the tables. A miniature television was sitting on top of the computer Fouw was using. Bookshelves along the walls were mostly empty, with a couple of mathematics and computer science books, all of which had been frequently perused. The server rack was mostly filled with inexpensive, near-obsolete servers the researchers had bought and used for all kinds of things - not all of them very scientific, and others scientific in ways the rest of the staff of the faculties just didn't want to know about.
He was watching his dear mate's most recent television appearance. The local television station, HowlTV, had envisioned a bright plan of producing several new series of science programs. This particular six-episode series was titled "Wonders Below Surface", and was about gems, minerals and precious metals. Naturally, the university was among the best places to find experts. Noere's research group was delighted to help.
This particular episode was the first episode of the series. Fouw found the show interesting and well-researched, even when he wasn't particularly versed in geosciences. The producers obviously had some starting problems, but it was not fair to blame them for those. The HowlTV station had opened over two months ago - May 15th, which Fouw could remember so easily only because it was exactly a month after he and Noere had wed - and everyone at the station were young and inexperienced, but also very enthusiastic and determined.
In this case, it showed slightly. It seemed that both the persons on screen and the cameramen had rather bad footing.
"Now, if you look here..." The cameraman struggled to focus on the small object on Noere's paw. "This is a zircon, from the university collections, found three years ago from a location that is a few kilometers south from here. Like this place, and most of this country, the bedrock there consists of granite. Zircons as large as these are quite rare. Zircon can be easily found in granite stones themselves, but usually the only in form of grains that are microscopic in size."
Lots of waving image every minute. The camera wasn't focused on one target for more than twenty seconds, which was enough. If only the editor had used his metaphorical scissors a bit more liberally when moving to another shot...
Fifteen minutes later, the program was over. Fortunately, the shaking was only a problem in the first half of the program. The only problem left on the second half was the excessive darkness. But at least the narration worked!
It was getting late, but Fouwrey focused on the task that was interrupted by the program. The program was shot two days ago and post-produced the previous day. Fouw admired the nerves of the HowlTV people - only nerves of steel and several cups of coffee could have produced a show as good as the one just shown. Working with the footage they had must have been tricky. Fouw could not notice any stock footage being used in the program.
The slightly unkempt but nevertheless likable grayish wolf typed more equations to the math package, running his program once more. The 3-dimensional graph formed on the screen in the form he had thought it would appear in. Just squished.
"See you later, Fouwrey", Solomon said as he left the computer lab. The cat, by the coloring of the fur, largely resembled a faded tiger. He munched a microwaved slice of pizza as he walked out of the door, the keyring jingling on his belt. He had a look on his face that didn't suggest a gastronomic delight. Sol was Fouwrey's best friend, and was master at writing really complex computer programs in most obscure languages in short time, and he even had the knack of making them small and beautiful.
Solomon left, Fouwrey stayed. His analysis was verbose and anything but small and beautiful. He had hopes of making it better.
He took his smudged hand-written notes, quietly vowing to buy a laptop computer one day, and typed lots of commands to produce a slightly more readable version using the mathematics typesetting system. Reprocessing. Recalculation. Verification.
A hour later he was sitting in the lab with a tidy printout of his analysis. He thought he was finally finished with the text and figures, but the color printout was all wrong. The printer had run out of purple ink, which made the graph almost unreadable. He wanted to growl for wasting a hour on something he knew was not necessarily possible. The final revision would be black and white, as soon as he'd learn the tricks to do that in the plotting program.
He had been thinking of Noere. That didn't stop him from spending time with the analysis. Tiny changes to the codes. Invisible on preview and printout, but makes it process twice as fast. Practically useless, but he was slowly starting to become a perfectionist.
Noere had called earlier and said she would come directly to the university at 7 PM.
Fouwrey yawned and looked at the clock on the corner of the screen. 19:15.
Had there been problems?
The door opened. The worries that had come to his mind were gone as fast as they had appeared. The familiar vixen with a flame-red head fur bound to ponytail and slightly tufty orange-white fur stepped in, the bushy white-tipped tail wagging about happily behind her. She was smiling widely, happy to find Fouw so fast. "Hi!"
Fouw smiled widely. "Hello, love. I was worried for a second."
"Sorry, I'm a bit late", Noere said. "Soufod was supposed to drive, but before we could leave he was on the phone for more than 20 minutes while we waited in the car, and he didn't realize it was his turn to take us all home." She dropped her bag on the desk and kissed the wolf on the cheek.
She looked at the portable TV, still tuned to the local channel. No sound was heard - Fouw's earphones hanged on the side of the computer, still plugged on the TV. Two old dogs argued about the present economical situation in live broadcast, mysterious acronyms, numbers and fractions scrolling by on the bottom of the screen. Fouw wasn't particularly into chaos theory - or numerology.
"So, you watched the program? Did you like it?" Noere asked and smiled.
"Yup, with the other eye - I was busy with the analysis. I hope I have the whole show on disc at home. It was a pretty good documentary, very interesting. Well, truth to tell," Fouw said with a smile, "I wasn't sure if you even were there. I think I saw a trace of a vixen once. I did hear a voice that sounded a lot like you."
Noere laughed. "We should have brought more lights. The television people were very nice, they just don't know how to make it all work perfectly yet. But every one of them wanted to make a good show and we did all we could to help them. Everyone was being clumsy when the floor had a lot of loose rocks."
"And stalagmites?"
"It was not a limestone cave. If there had been any of those, someone might have been hurt seriously. I only got a small scratch when I stumbled. Anyway, I'm so glad to be home finally."
"And I'm happy that this workweek is over. Definitely."
"I can't wait to get home with my stressed wolf", Noere said, smiling mischievously. Fouw stood up as she came to hug him. Noere kissed him. "Stressed or not, tired or not, you look just as lusty as I feel." Noere giggled happily, pressing her head on Fouw's chest, resting her black-socked paw on his crotch, noting she had been quite right.
"You're reading my thoughts, love", Fouw said. He was lost in thought for a while. Then, smiling, he opened his mouth, as if to say something that seemed like a good idea two seconds ago, but not quite so at the present. Drawing breath and smiling, he whispered, "ever done it behind a server rack?"
Noere grinned, but her expression turned right after that to that of worries. "You think I have? Nope..."
"Come on!" Fouw said, noting Noere's worries and with honest playfulness gleaming in his eyes."Everyone's gone home, and I've sat here every Friday evening and no one is going to come here..."
"Not very romantic though, or comfortable", she said, frowning. "And home isn't that far away. Can't we wait that long?"
Fouw grinned. "Maybe, but imagine the thrill!"
She thought for a while. She came to the conclusion that she had nothing technical against the idea, knowing Fouw was mostly right, but there were some practical concerns. And besides, both of them could just as well wait patiently for ten more minutes to walk down to the main exit, out of the door, to the other side of the building, and up the stairs to their home on the attic. Muttering, she noted, "How about Murr Phido's Law. And aren't there surveillance cameras here?"
"I think I have seen everyone else leaving, though. And no, there's no cameras here. There's one on the corridor that lead to this room and another on the other side", Fouw explained. "And last I heard, nobody's in the surveillance room after the work day, and the non-essential video recorders there are mostly borrowed away for more acute use. Who would want to guard a couple of antique ser--"
Noere grinned as she grabbed Fouw's muzzle, silencing him. "You talk too much sometimes. Okay, let's do it, but let's not waste time. And besides, everyone else probably does this", she said with a smile. "Quick, then!" She unbuttoned her jeans and kicked them aside, then got on all fours, to the shadows behind the rack, throwing her bushy tail over her left side.
Quickly lowering his pants, Fouw went on his knees behind Noere, blinking. He was feeling worried, but also thrilled. This had been a very good idea a moment ago, but already it seemed like an odd one. He wasn't sure if he could handle this right away - he, like Noere, was far more used to slower pace and more romantic setting - but then, he just figured out that this insane bit of lust had brought them here and maybe, just maybe, it was going to get them through this without further embarrassment.
But only way this could work would be that he acted. He was surprised that in this excitement and hurry he had time to think. He took a gentle grip on her loins, pulling her hips to him, slipping his hard member inside her quite effortlessly. He was trying to say something, he felt there was a need to say something, but he couldn't find words that wouldn't sound hopelessly inadequate or cliched. He felt there was a need to say some sort of compliment to her beautiful mate. But he fought it; This wasn't the time for romance. There was plenty of time after the thing.
Noere moaned a little bit louder than she should have, with worries forming in her mind, as Fouw slid in her the second and third time. She could feel his member growing a bit in her.
Fouwrey let the suddenly appeared lust take care of the rest, his grip on the loins of his dear mate caring and nice as his hips thumped on her rear again and again. Everything seemed to happen too quickly for his romantic mind, but his lupine instincts drowned every complaint as he pushed on and on.
"You have a very cute tail..." Fouw managed to say in middle of gasps for air. "Thank you", came the reply from Noere. Both were thinking of the same thing - all right, it was a compliment, just a bit useless in this situation. Fouw, however, was feeling a bit better after this clumsy note.
Fouw went on, whimpering very quietly, focusing his attention on Noere's cute shoulders and head fur. But he also thought of her narrow loins, how slim and small she seemed compared to him. And yet, they certainly were made for each other. Noere was swept away by passion, rocking back and forth in rhythm with Fouwrey. Usually, she didn't think of Fouw's size, usually she just enjoyed the fact that they were close by, touching, but now it looked like his size was the only thing she was thinking; it felt odd, to be about to be explode with joy and that was mostly only because she was filled by him over and over again. Fouw's clumsy compliment had helped more than he thought.
Their senses were heightened, both were thrilled, and they were really hoping Mr. Murr had been wrong this time. Fouwrey's whimpers and Noere's quiet moans were drowned by the noise of the server fans, the flow of mildly warm air next to them almost pleasant. Lamp light poured on the side of Fouw, and one beam of light came through the sparsely filled second rack and illuminated a part of Noere's tail - an arc of reddish-brown.
Minutes later, Fouw was being absent-minded again, but that was nothing related to his usual absent-mindedness. His throbbing member was still sliding in and out of Noere gently as he floated back to the real world, and both were worried if his yap of joy a moment ago had been heard. Neither could, however, hear anything but their own heavy breath and the hum of the fans.
Noere was feeling good as Fouw pulled out of her. Heavily breathing, she just said, "what a ride, my wolf, my wolf..." she closed her eyes, Fouw's warm gift of happiness inside her, and flowing down by her legs under the fur. "My, you're such a warm wolf", she said exhaustedly.
They got up, both rather shaken by the experience. They gave each other a quick kiss before stealing a notable amount of paper towels from the sink in the adjacent room to clean themselves up, and to make sure the floor was tidy enough not to cause any suspicion.
"So what do you think? Was it as good as you thought?", Noere asked as they got dressed.
Fouwrey was quiet. They didn't talk much about sex, except when they were in bed and only briefly even then. It was one of those things that worked perfectly without any discussion and just didn't need much of it, and besides, awkwardness of communication wasn't a problem if there was no direct communication. Both wanted to talk about sex openly, but it wasn't that easy yet. They were getting at it better every night, though.
"It wasn't all what it was supposed to be," Fouw admitted. "I'm more scared now than I was supposed to be during that."
"Me too, to tell the truth", Noere said. "and you said we weren't going to be caught and we weren't. But it was fun to try, and, well, I think I needed it." She tried to smile. "Once."
"Well", Fouw said, "just what I thought, I don't think this is our kind thing, you know? But at least we can say we've tried." He took Noere in an engulfing embrace, kissed her nose and gave her a lick on the cheek.
"Yeah, this place needs more signs like 'in this boring place people made love once, believe it or not'", Noere giggled.
"And under it, the system administrator would scrawl 'beware of static electricity'", Fouw said with a grin, making Noere laugh. "Right. Let's get home," he said as he let Noere off the embrace .
Suddenly, the lights went off.
Things like that often end up being rather surprising, but everyone expects that things like that tend to happen every now and then. Immediately after lights go out, people always keep hoping they come right back. This is what Fouw and Noere both expected, and they both started to feel rather desperate when the lightlessness continued a little bit too long. They were both rational beings - one thing they could not do right now was to panic. Fouw was the first to say anything after the darkness fell: "Well well, of course this sort of thing, hmm." He muttered something to himself. "Let's hope they fix this soon."
The computers on the desk began to automatically shut down one by one as their power sources were draining. The servers still kept humming, being powered by longer reserves of backup power.
A beam of light pointed at the door. Noere noted the light came from Fouw's flashlight.
"Never leave the home without one, huh?" Noere laughed and rummaged her bag. "But watch this!" she said as exaggeratedly dramatically as possible as she flipped the switch.
It was a bit wider, but a lot dimmer, beam of light.
It was Fouw's turn to chuckle. "That's one of the flashlights you had on the documentary filming day?"
"I was hurrying to meet you! I didn't have time to get new batteries! And this is just as good as the spotlights of the camera crew - all of the dim light, none of the noise of the power generators!"
Fouw chuckled. "All right", he said, "Let's get going."
Moments later, they were walking down the corridor. The outer door loomed before them, darkening sky over the dark street outside of it.
"Uh, a small problem", Fouwrey said, as he futilely tried to open the outer door. He had tried his key card and PIN many times; the lock refused to obey, sealing the large door closed. Noere tried the same thing, likewise with no success. "Wonder why they never bothered to think of things like this? This is an university, not a bank vault!"
"Well, maybe we could just wait until the power comes back on", Noere suggested.
Fouwrey had his cell phone. He had phoned the janitor. The janitor, who somehow happened to be on the campus at such a late hour, was likewise locked in, just in a different building. He phoned the power company, and they were just as puzzled about the blackout as everyone else. After that phone call, the cell network started to become hard to reach as the nearest base stations lost power.
It was, however, somewhat comforting to know that they weren't alone with their problems - two districts of the city had fallen into the depths of darkness, no one knew why, and apparently no one had any idea when the power was coming back. They decided to help themselves.
They had quickly talked through a lot of things that had happened through the week and that they had forgotten to talk about on the telephone. Noere had called him twice and Fouw had called her once during the week, and they had mostly only talked about urgent practical matters and not that much about social things.
They had not sat down as Noere had suggested. Instead, they tried every possible door; it was completely useless, as all of the doors were locked. There were five doors leading to other corridors and one leading out, all locked. One classroom door had been left open, but the windows, just like doors, were shut tight - and since they were made of clear, bulletproof, unscratchable plastic, they couldn't be broken, either.
In fact, they found that for some reason, the laboratory where the physics folks worked on high-energy lasers was unlocked. They tried to fry the laboratory window with one of the prototype laser guns, but the window remained as it was. Maybe that was because the researchers had not made the laser gun futuristic-looking enough - the gun was just a long aluminum box with a lens on the other end. Nobody is expected to cut the window open with an ugly widget like that! On the other paw, maybe it would have worked better with power to run it - the batteries seemed dead.
Two hours later the power had not come back, nor they had found anything that would help them get out.
They were starting to feel a little bit helpless, but they remained hopeful. A first-year physics student whom they had met a hour earlier in 5th floor had said it best: "What goes in, must come out! Er, wait..." The student, a wolfhound, had left looking for an exit for himself. Apart of him, on the humanities faculty side of the building, they had only seen a fox, lion and a she-wolf from the folklore special research group - they had been debating about different ingredients of fairy tales through the evening. All three were sitting by a big desk, heads resting on the story books they clutched, sleeping heavily. Noere wondered if that was the result of them reading each other a bedtime story.
Fouw was thinking of the building. He had been here for a long time, yet now that he thought of it, there was actually very little he could remember about how it had been laid out. He had not been actually exploring the building over years, and had usually only been to the parts where he had some immediate business in. Of course, they had checked first the exits he could remember first - and the ones Noere could remember.
"I wonder..." Fouw thought aloud. An idea formed in his mind, and he was thinking of the few times he had actually tried to go to some places he had no business in being, just to find a shortcut to another place. Every time he had tried to do that, he ended up finding a longer route. The university area in general was full of long, twisting passages, all alike, and if you tried to find a shorter path, you ended up where you wanted to be, only about two hours later than if you had gone there normally using a route you already knew.
They went back to the room next to the computer lab. He looked behind one bookshelves and noticed that he had remembered right - there it was, the passage he had found more than five years earlier, regrettably one that that time made the trip considerably longer. But then, he was on the wrong side.
It was a door. A steel-frame door with a wire mesh reinforced stained class window. A stairway door.
Quickly, he and Noere moved the shelf and attempted to open the door. Much to their surprise, the door wasn't locked. Fouw had been in the staircase behind the door several times, and the floor they were in was the only one that could not be accessed because a bookshelf was blocking the door, yet the door opened to the stairway. A few times he had opened the door and almost walked through the mostly full shelf. He had asked the janitor to get the door locked or the shelf moved, but now he was glad the staff had forgotten to do anything about it. Locking the door might have been inconvenient. He still wished they had moved the shelf, though.
They went down to ground floor. Through the window in the stairway, they saw the street and park across the street, dark scary trees, freedom so close and yet so far. With city lights gone in the radius of several kilometers and the university located on the highest hill of the city, they could see the stars very clearly, unbelievably enough, it was even more beautiful than usual.
But the ground floor door was locked. There was no card lock, just a normal keyhole - but the lock was apparently the kind that was locked by timer. There was no key and the door had already been locked as the power went out.
The next thing to do was to go up. But that didn't work - only floor could be accessed and on that floor's corridor, the doors leading to other staircases were unhelpfully locked. Someone had decided to temporarily store a very large tank of liquid nitrogen in front of the fire exit - not that it helped, because the fire exits naturally only worked in case of a fire. Nobody seemed to have matches, and the natural sciences faculty had long ago declared flint and steel obsolete.
Then Fouw remembered the door that lead to the subterranean parking area. Only two weeks ago, in the coffee table, he heard a few passing remarks about it from other staff members. The parking area was locked with a rusty padlock, and the keeper, a crocodile called Leonard McRawl, was notorious for his insistence to use everything until it fell apart. His manners had actually impressed the university management, and during the last economical recession, he had provided some valuable hints on how to cut costs. There were several plans they had rejected though: The university hospital did not implement his plan of cutting heating expenses by making fevered patients walk from room to room, and the head chef of the restaurant was not impressed by his plan to introduce "rabbit tracks and flown-away duck as the main course, check as the dessert".
Fouwrey and Noere descended to the basement floor. Fouw wasn't quite sure where the parking area was, because he had visited it last time a decade ago.
The long concrete-walled hallway, with pipes and wire-enforced lamps on the ceiling, extended to two directions. Both ends had heavy metal doors, indicating these were bomb shelters. Fouw knew there was a way to basement through one of the bomb shelters - he had been there once before - but he couldn't remember exactly where. In the light of his flashlight, he noted the door to left was closed. He looked the other way: in dying light of Noere's flashlight, lucky that he could see pretty well in dark, he could see the other door was ajar.
"Try that closed door, I'll try this one," he said to Noere, as he went in the other direction.
As Fouwrey disappeared through the open door, Noere pulled the heavy metal handle, and the door opened effortlessly. As she did that, the battery of her flashlight finally died, but she could see.
The room was a bomb shelter that also hid four racks of servers. As a geologist and top of the class in geography in school, Noere knew there were no major earthquakes in this part of the world, and her grand-grand-granddaddy had told to her granddaddy of the last horrible hurricane that for some reason once swept through the land, and aside of that the family history knew of no major natural disasters. And with the competent politicians running the country, no bomb shelter was ever going to actually be a bomb shelter. So, this bomb shelter was a server room, at the moment lit by a flashlight hanging from the ceiling.
"Oh, hello, Sol, Elena. I'm very sorry to disturb you."
Elena, a tabby cat, Solomon's wife and a historian, lay on her side without her clothes on a scratched foam mattress between two server racks. She was lightly asleep, curled up in a throughoutly cute feline fashion, but woke up seconds after Noere came to the room, with an expression of slight alarm on her face, almost hissing.
Beside her, wearing shirt but lacking pants, and quickly trying to make this situation not to be so, lay Solomon. He also had been asleep, but had woken up seconds earlier as he had heard Noere opening the door.
"Uh..." Sol began. "Er, you shouldn't sneak around like that, we thought we were alone..." They both looked more than slightly embarrassed, quickly trying to get more properly dressed. "Damn, it's cold in here."
Fouw came back from the other room. "Noere? Who's there?", he said, with hope in his voice. "Sol? Elena?"
"Hello again, Fouw," Sol said.
"Romantic lovemaking in faux nuclear war-time setting", Noere said with a grin. "There must be something about these things." She patted the side of the server rack with her paw. "Looks to me like Sol and Elena were also inspired by the same thing as you was", she told Fouwrey, grinning mischievously.
"You mean that you also...?" Sol looked at Noere, who nodded smiling amusedly and winking eye, then Fouwrey. Elena giggled, and Sol's muzzle split in a grin. "Are we the local pioneers of, uh, genetic algorithm research in, er, multi-tiered server environments?" He was the local champion of using extremely thinly veiled technical expressions, and hardly a day passed without such things happening. On the bad side, it must be noted the trait wasn't particularly unique among the people they knew.
"We, being but mortals, / are chain'd to do / what e'er we do, / to be ever happy and chortle / our days for it so few," Fouw quoted with a dramatic pose, his eyes fixed to the darkened lamp and his paw on his chest. "I guess you aren't going to stay here over night?"
"Not really," Elena replied, yawning, not wishing to wake up after such blissful sleep she had had for a few moments. "The babysitter is probably getting worried. Sol left his cellphone home, and I was going to call home, but I forgot to recharge the thing."
"You can use mine," Fouw said. "Not sure if calls can go through. I've tried calling everything else already, everyone seems to be pretty confused."
Elena took Fouw's phone, her pawns shaking. She had some problems remembering the number, but remembered it right before trying to call for the first time.
"That was one horrible poem, by the way," Sol commented.
"Agreed. It was obvious and not very insightful." Fouw titled his head.
"You wrote it?" Sol asked.
"Yep. I wasn't drunk or anything though," Fouw said. "I'm afraid it just wasn't meant to be a serious poem."
"I didn't even know 'chortle' rhymed with anything," Sol said. "Does 'wolf' rhyme with anything?"
"Please," Fouw said, "I am not a poet. Don't ask. But I know 'cat' rhymes with way too many words, not all of them nice."
Surprisingly, Elena's call went through on first try, but she got busy signal. The second time luck favored her - the babysitter picked up the phone. Fouw wondered for a while, but then remembered that while the cell phones never worked perfectly on normal conditions, in X-Tails, the phones always worked where drama required it, be it in middle of the Fishyhare desert or in salt mines two hundred meters below ground.
"Hi, Elena here," Elena said, her voice trembling with hope - or maybe she was just getting very tired and words no longer wanted to form properly at this dark and worrisome hour. "Look, you probably noted, the power is out and we're trapped in the university..." there was a long pause. "Ah, interesting..." some more explanations obviously followed. "Wow, that's nice to hear. Look, we're trying to get out of here... what?" she was interrupted by Fouw.
"I think I found a way out. Shouldn't take long, but promise nothing," Fouw said.
"Fouwrey has found a way out and he thinks we might get out soon, but isn't sure. ...What? That's very nice. Hello sweety!" Elena started to prattle. "How is mom's cute little fuzzy wuzzy? Mom is coming soon! Would the wuzzy fuzzy go to sleep now, would you, little honey? ...Uh? Mommy will see you in the morning! Sleep well and remember to brush your teeth... oh you brushed them yourself? Very good! Mommy must go now! Sleep well! Bye bye!"
She smiled widely as the call ended. "She said there was something in the TV about the blackout. Someone had pushed a couple of wrong buttons in the power monitoring station. The whole physics department staff is there throwing some wild theories in the air, the mathematicians gave up only moments ago trying to calculate the probability of this event occurring."
"My highly qualified opinion would be that this thing is not very likely. But I don't know how that would help fixing the problem", Fouw said.
"Probably something to do with quantum physics, or something. I don't know, just a hunch", Sol said.
Elena continued, "Electrical engineering folks are there as well and work feverishly with the power company staff - there seems to be some serious damage in the control electronics - and just for good measure, they alerted the local Chess and Go champions as well, as well as the last year's crossword puzzle competition winner. The chess guy played some interesting games to pass time and the Go master soothed everyone's nerves with pearls of Eastern wisdom. Anyway, the reporters had been told that the power should be back in a hour earliest, and definitely before noon tomorrow."
"By noon," Fouw said, disappointed. "Going to be a cold night then, I think it's better if we try to get out by ourselves." He turned to Sol. "Have you tried all exits?"
"I think so," Sol said. "At least in the upper floors."
"Do you think this it's possible to get out through the basement?"
"Maybe, there are some doors. I haven't tried them all. I was first thinking of the basement windows, actually. All of them seem to have been closed permanently, some window holes have even filled with concrete or brick and mortar."
"What about the parking area? Can we get there?"
"I thought you said you had all of the keys for the campus area", Fouwrey said as they hurriedly walked along the corridors.
"That was well before the key cards came, and even then, I was mostly collecting keys very few people had. Nowadays, I just have tons of useless keys with me, always..."
Almost everyone Fouw knew collected something. Aside of the dust, Fouw himself collected books. He had a famous collection of books very few people, himself included, had read through, much less understood. Though, it was not that all of them would be particularly difficult to digest. As things were, his comic book and magazine collection was a little bit more popular among people who wanted to borrow something to read.
Noere had her model planes. When he moved to Noere's home, Fouw had been worried about his book collection, knowing that model plane building requires proper ventilation and humid air is not good for books, but he found out that there was a nice little room that was perfect for his collection.
Elena was a big movie fan, and had quite a collection of videos. One day, she was complaining that organizing the movie collection was difficult, so Sol sat down on front of his computer and programmed a database system. Next week, it had become the database used by collectors of any kind.
Sol's own collection was a bit unusual. He collected keys. He put many of them on albums like numismatists store coins, all with tags that tell what door it supposedly opened - or opens. He carried a keyring that had several dozens of keys.
"But can you open this one?"
"I think I had this one. Hold on." Sol looked through his keyring, with Fouw showing him some light. His batteries were dying as well, but fortunately that mattered very little to all of them. In less than a minute, Sol had picked the correct key from his keyring.
The basement, the usual collection of ghastly concrete-floored, pipe-roofed corridors with wood and wire mesh walls loomed before them. Odd black shapes of long lost dusty objects were behind the mesh, making the shadows of the flashlight creepy enough.
Ordinarily the basement seemed quite boring. Fouw found the basement seemed almost depressing. It was a part of the building that almost nobody had cared about, a part no one visited. The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were all left unadorned - there was no reason to make it pleasant-looking since no one was visiting here often. Every brick and every bit of paint and finish was left there without care and compassion, barely well enough not to let the building collapse, barely enough to satisfy the letter of the law.
The university basement, at least in the scary fiction they had heard, were a place for mad scientists to keep their monsters in. Now, to Fouw, it seemed the basement itself was a monster, an ugly place with no one living there, that was kept out of sight of whoever was visiting the house. The very walls seemed to beg for attention, with the mesh and wood compartments in the room - hiding things left there by the occupants above - shying away from the walls, begging forgiveness for intrusion. The builders and the occupants abandoned the basement, and the basement was angry.
The doors leading to individual compartments had curious labels, such as "Engineering - Essential PR Gear" (white coats, yellow helmets, clipboards and pens), "Economics - the horror, the horror" (with lots of pretty books with a lot of key terms prefixed with either "e" or "i"), and "Natural Sciences - the only fast, reliable and cheap computers left, preserved for posterity, yes, you can have all three" (with lots of slide rulers in neat stacks, boxed with their instruction booklets).
Sol and Elena had better idea where they were heading - They had kept their car in the underground parking area until, like many others in the city, they decided the car was too much of a burden and they sold it profitably to the foreigners whose attraction to cheap cars was not explainable easily. Even if the mysterious ways of neighboring nations was an enigma, at least they knew where the parking area was.
Everyone else looked at Sol as they came to the other end of the basement.
"This is a dead end," Fouw said.
"Wrong, wrong," Sol said, smiling. "Look to the left."
Low on the left wall was a hatch that was locked with a padlock. Again, Sol looked for a key, and after some worrisome guesswork, he managed to pick the right key. With some problems, they went through the hatch to the underground parking area.
"Are you kidding? The old crocodile definitely is the only one who has a key." Sol grinned. "Believe me, I have asked a lot about it, no other answers. Besides, I heard the company that made the lock went bankrupt when they waited years for him to send an order for a new lock, or even as much as a set of new keys for it."
The parking area had three levels, and they had come to the uppermost one, usually reserved for the management - and almost no one used the parking area, because the high-ranked academicians lived in two kilometer radius around the university, and the ones who didn't had delusions - or worse yet, feasible plans - about hovering electric scooters in near future.
The lower two levels were not that full either. The increasing gas prices hit the students hardest, and during the last few years, bicycles had gained a lot of popularity. McRawl had planned that over the next summer vacation the upper level of the parking area would be re-sectioned for bicycles.
As they walked through the hall toward the ramp leading outside, they looked around. The parking area was empty, aside of something they noted too late.
It was something very big and very loud.
All of them ran in horror. There weren't that many places to run, so logically, each of them tried to hide behind the nearest column.
Feelings of horror and utter confusion crossed their minds. Then, things like "It was not that big" and "Not very loud, either" crossed their minds. Rational senses won. Almost simultaneously, they looked around their columns at the thing that had scared them.
"Hey, it's just the keeper's van", Elena said. McRawl had a minibus of his own, painted green, and - obviously - the horn let out a crocodile roar. McRawl's son was electrical engineering student, and Fouw suspected a few of his "systems" could have been triggered when they walked past the car. Whether or not the things that just happened was by design was not known, but McRawl senior probably wouldn't like the fact that if someone just walked past the van, lights turned on, all doors unlocked and flew open, and the engine started running.
Fouw examined the door that lead out to the ramp. The outer door was an old, heavy wood door, but it was almost never locked. The inner doors were not much more than two metal frames with heavy bars. It was closed from inside with a rusty chain and just the kind of rusty padlock he suspected it would have. It looked even more rusty than they guessed.
After they had found the van's towing rope, breaking the lock was trivial. As the van, driven by Elena, sped up with the rope firmly attached to the door handle, the door crashed open.
As they hurried to open the heavy outer door, McRawl himself opened it - from outside.
"What in the name of the heavens is happening here?" he said. After seeing the rope setup, he guessed the rest. "I was just coming to open this door, when I heard there were people inside! Now you have to get me a new lock, damn it! And it'd better be a good one!"
"Just a moment," Sol said, and took a brand new Apeloy padlock from his pocket. "I'll give you this new lock if you give me the old lock - and the key."
Still being rather cranky, McRawl took the lock and handed the key to the cat with a shrug. "All right, have it your way, at least you'll quit asking me about it, right? I can't see what that is good for, anyway, if it's broken."
"You know, it is a piece of history", Sol said absentmindedly as he examined the key. It was probably the oldest keys that was still in use in the university area, or at least it was until this night. Sol picked up the lock from the ground, and noted that while the lock was open, it was actually still intact and usable - the yank had opened it, but not broken it. He quickly realized what that meant, and put the lock to his pocket before McRawl could take another look at it. Otherwise, he might ask it back so it could serve another decade.
Noere rode.
The journey home had been slightly longer than expected. It was just past midnight when they got home.
Fouwrey was very surprised when Noere showed un-vulpine feats of strength as she picked him up on their doorstep, threw him on the bed and began undressing. Fouw didn't ask anything, everything went wordlessly from there onward. He had seen that look on her face so many times - smile almost wider than her face, eyes narrow. After both had undressed, she had began kissing him so intensely nothing had prepared him for that. He was almost helpless with her fast, utterly passionate caressing. He could do nothing but lie down, he was stunned by her show of love. It was not unlike her, but it still amazed him every time she really put her mind into the caressing.
Fouw was almost falling asleep due to sheer physical tiredness, and many parts of his body were aching, but Noere definitely kept him wide awake. His tiredness only showed in that he himself could do very little, he had to hope she could find her satisfaction herself.
Her paws on his chest, she went on and on for minutes and minutes and minutes, yapping and moaning like the crazed fox she was when they made love, the whole bed shaking to her rhythm. She was obviously beyond passion - he came, but she didn't let him just stay there and enjoy it, she was bouncing forth with such passion that Fouw doubted if she hadn't even noticed his climax. But he knew she had, for her yaps seemed far more cheerful.
Noere slowed down only a little, her movements matching that of Fouw's throb. Se yapped louder and louder, her tail rhythmically thwapping his legs and his own tail that lay between them. Then she tensed and yapped loudly, her body arcing above him, being nothing but a collection of beautiful curves to Fouw's orgasm-hazed mind. Slowly, her pace slowed down, she lay on top of him, then moved beside him. Fouw was still aching, perhaps even more so than before Noere took him to the bed, but he had to admit that she had given him at least equal amount of bliss to balance that. The morning might be sweet after all.
"Good night, love," she said, breathing heavily and licking his cheek.
"Good night, Noere," Fouw said, kissing her nose and smiling widely as he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Fouw's last thought as he fell asleep was that he needed coffee. Hopefully the power was back by morning. But unlike all other mornings that week, Noere would be there - he felt he could wake up without going to get anything at all, as long as she was by her side.