FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

In the years I operated as a private eye in Crossroads City, crazy shit had become a normal sight in my line of work. Crazy cases, crazy events, and even crazy clients. On the plus side, it often led to steady revenue coming in whenever Mrs. Smith covertly believed Mr. Smith was cheating on her, and 'for real this time', only for the jealous spouse to have her suspicions lead to nothing. It certainly eased the burden of rent and the Internet bill. On the minus side though, it could easily become tedious and the claims unfounded in reality. Literally.

One of my more...eccentric clients started hiring me only a year into moving in with Daniel above his café. It had been a very productive year for the both of us, primarily because a significant amount of cheating spouse cases allowed me to pay my half of the rent, and because a judge tossed my roommate's ridiculous alimony agreement (after I helped prove the Saint Bernard's ex-wife had been breaking said agreement). We even scrounged up enough money to purchase a classic frosted glass door with 'Leander Investigations, LLC' tinted on the front. I wanted to put my motto underneath, but the door already cost quite a bit.

Anyway, back to my story; almost a whole year since I moved in, my mornings were spent either doing errands or assisting Daniel's workers at the café. Sometimes, if business got too overwhelming, I'd go the extra mile to grocery shop for supplies or food ingredients when the cook ran out. He technically wasn't my employer nor was I his employee, but I owed Daniel more than he could ever owe me. Going out to buy milk or lettuce was nothing.

One day, after visiting the marketplace, I walked into the café bag in paw only to be bombarded with questions after questions. The source of it came from an exasperated, awkward tabby cat the same age as me, only his clothes were blatantly mismatched, and he smelled of something fierce. Like he forgot to shower or wear anti-musk deodorant that morning. He certainly didn't look like a marathon runner.

"Mr. LeanderIneedyourhelpdoyouknowwe'reinasimulation?Ofcourseyoumustknow--"

After Daniel stepped in to help me calm him down, I invited the bear into my office, unaware I'd opened up Pandora's Fucking Conspiracy Theory Box. His name was Christopher Campbell, a (suspended at the time) college student living with overprotective, closeminded parents in their mid-seventies.

Christopher Campbell firmly believed with a doubt there existed another realm beyond our own. Not Heaven or Hell though, but the True Reality, and what everybody else considered reality was nothing more than a digital matrix world built to keep furkind imprisoned. The disheveled tabby insisted these weird...alien, smooth-skinned, furless beings called 'The Sapient Masters' maintained the simulated reality, viewing themselves as a superior species that relied on our unaware bodies for either an energy source or their pleasure blah blah blah blah.

The best part? He claimed his neighbors were 'Sapient Agents' sent to monitor his suspicious activities within the simulated reality we all unfortunately had to enjoy. Midway through a panicked recollection of all his memories and doubts, the poor tabby suddenly found my private detective services ad in his father's abandoned newspaper. He thought it was fate.

"The Resistance wants me to join them, and you are the key!" he explained as I struggled not to snicker behind my professional demeanor. "Help me expose the Sapient Agents, Mr. Leander, and together, we can expose the truth to the whole populace!"

Finally, I said to the eccentric feline, "...I will need a deposit beforehand, if that's fine with you first? Can't exactly expose this Matrix without security, can I?"

As he rambled on and on about the settings and lore of an honest-to-God decent idea for a new science fiction film to me, I remembered what my mentors taught me during my internship. If they had the cash and weren't a threat to themselves or others, there wouldn't be any harm or foul to sating whatever suspicions were troubling prospective clients. So, I accepted Campbell's case the moment he produced the deposit for me.

Surprise, surprise, nothing came out of it. His neighbors were not, in fact, interdimensional alien agents targeting him for his silence. Christopher Campbell was just a sad, strange cat who apparently got himself suspended from college for repeated harassment and threatening a professor during class. He'd also apparently ran a vlog channel online dedicated to spreading his theories of technology-based madness across the Internet. Half an hour of watching one of his videos only led to me getting a nasty headache resembling an aneurysm.

Two hours of stakeout surveillance and an hour of researching on databases later, and I called Campbell over to my office to foot his bill. He refused, saying I either didn't do enough surveillance on his neighbors or that I wasn't seeing the 'bigger picture' of what was at stake for the entirety of furkind. He absolutely refused to pay a cent all while shouting at loud enough of a volume to likely scare off some of Daniel's customers in the nearby café.

"Death is no longer the end for us unless you drag out my demonic neighbors from their confines and help me expose them to the world, Leander! We're all trapped in this matrix--"

As he continued rambling hysterically, I reached under my desk for the panic button and tried calming him down, even offering to return half of his deposit for the trouble while deducting my rate. I somehow even managed to yield a conversation about the descriptions of these villains until a police officer finally knocked on my office door.

To make a long story short: Christopher Campbell was given a stern warning by the officer (and his parents, from what I later gathered) never to approach me again. A part of me regretted not going to civil court over the fact that neurotic tabby still stiffed me.

Nevertheless, the best I could do was blacklist him, warning every other private investigation agency throughout Utah to turn him away. I also had to apologize to Daniel over the course of the next month.