FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The Portal Games

Arena 2, Episode 1

Black Chaos

The first team to the core would have an advantage over the other, and if there was anything that Black Chaos had learned, it was that they needed to seize the advantage while they could. The stingray threw her hand forward as soon as the dragon disappeared, and the four others following her charged after. While Isabella was still sorting out the issues of her team, they could seize an advantage.

The only problem was Kotone.

Even as Black Chaos surged forward, pushing for the corridor leading straight through to the other side of the station, the mare lunged to intercept them. Tarin broke from the group, and the two tangled.

Ailsa didn't bother to acknowledge the battle. Instead, she waved for the others to keep moving. Sanmer went first, cuddling his plant to his chest, while Jaden followed behind him. Lykus turned, reaching for his cards -

"Later," Ailsa said. "Don't waste 'em now."

The striped wolf nodded and kept running. She turned just in time to see Kotone stumble backwards, and Tarin pulled back, joining her as they ran down the corridor.

"Looks like you kept your promise," the stingray said.

"I said it wouldn't happen again, and I meant it."

"Clearly."

Ailsa looked over her shoulder. The other team hadn't stepped out of the starting point yet, which was all for the best. They had the bigger, bulkier, more dangerous team members, and for all that the dragon had said that the corridors leading further towards the center of the Circe were safe, she wasn't going to put good odds on it supporting the thudding footsteps of more than one team at a time. She could just make out Isabella huddling around their T-Rex, see their ice dragon helping the mare back to her feet, and then turned her head back to the path ahead.

The corridor was long, and considering it was transparent, it had the disorienting effect of making everything appear too close and too far away at the same time. The emptiness of space opened up beneath her, feeling like one could fall forever if the ground were to disappear.

For that matter, she probably could. There were no clear planets out there, and if there was enough of a push -

No point thinking about that too much. Not now.

The other three members of the team had already beat feet, with Sanmer struggling to keep hold of his potted friend. Lykus ran alongside him, offering a hand, but the fox shook his head.

"It'll be okay. I just need to find something to jury-rig a warming field."

"You think we'll find one of those here?"

"No, but I can hope. Worst comes to worst, maybe I can wear it."

"It'd be an improvement over the lab coat," Lykus joked.

"You say that, but it might just be. All the leaves on the sides seem almost prehensile in their own right."

"What, seriously?!"

"Yep."

"I want one!"

Jaden, however, had run fastest, and reached the far end of the corridor first. He leaped through to the other side, landing with a thump on the half-frozen metal panels. He groaned as he stood up, looking left, right, left, taking in the whole place.

It was different to the station that they'd left behind. Instead of the single room that seemed to open up to different corridors, this one was a single room with different spots on the floor and ceiling, holes that seemed to match one another. At the far end of the room was a semi-closed chute that led up to the other levels of this piece of the station, but no signs of a new way out. He looked back the way they'd come, and saw two buttons on the wall. One was green, the other was red.

"This place...it's so..."

It was almost quiet, and it was the 'almost' that bothered him. He had been in the rare, blasted lands that were devoid of spirits, and while the silence was deafening in such places, there was a rightness to it, a reminder that even the world eventually moved on, and spirits were no more permanent than anything else that the living could touch.

This...this was different. It was almost silent, almost empty, as if only a shadow of a shadow of a thing remained, either too weak or too canny to let something be aware that it was there.

He didn't have time to think about it for long. Sanmer and Lykus arrived in tandem with one another, with the latter going from grinning to shivering as soon as he no longer had a distraction, and Tarin followed them. Ailsa stepped through afterward, then turned around. She glanced down, saw the same panel that Jaden had, and nodded.

"Let's start this off right, for a change."

She pulled out her gun, took aim, and pulled the trigger.

Whoopsie Daisies

"SHUT THE DOOR! SHUT THE DOOR!"

Glyn's warning came just in time. Sergino punched the panel at the entrance of the corridor just as the glass on the other side shattered. The door panels slammed shut, and the six-person team watched as the corridor that had led to the center shattered into a million little pieces. The frame remained, but the transparent barrier between the pathway and open space was gone.

The timber wolf cursed, kicking up a pile of snow. Sergino shook his head.

"Well...that is unfortunate."

"Fucking right..."

"We have two other paths, at least."

"For now. How long before Ms. Trigger-Happy blows out the other paths?"

"She can only take one route at a time; even if she blows out every path on one side of the station, that still leaves us time to move along the other."

"Guys? I - I think that we might have another problem," Isabella said.

As soon as the dragon disappeared, Sarah had stumbled forward, but now, the T-Rex was shivering, her eyes half-closed as she sagged forward. Her vibrant green scales were going slightly gray in the cold, and she struggled to stay on her knees.

The pangolin had already wrapped herself, fluffy side down, against the bigger woman, but there was only so much that could do. Sergino shook his head, grabbing hold of his belt.

"Furs will help," he said.

"What -"

"I am from an ice place. I can handle this."

He pulled off his belt, and then his pants, and in that moment, all eyes turned to him. Even Sarah, bleary-eyed as she had become, stared at the naked ice dragon.

To give him credit, Sergino didn't pause, nor did he blush as he pressed the furs where they would have the greatest effect, holding them to the places where the blood vessels came closest to the surface of the skin, making sure that there was something to hold in the warmth. He used his belt as a tie to keep it in place, and soon enough, it was done.

Perhaps not done well, but it was done. And Sarah was able to speak.

"Nnngh...Didn't...didn't expect...a freezing...freezing place..."

"Are you going to be okay?" Isabella asked.

"Not for long...but for now...yeah..."

"Okays. Then we need to find clothes."

"...For more than her," Glyn said, nodding at Kotone. "She's not doing well, either."

"I can function," the naked mare said through clenched teeth.

"Bullshit. You're naked, and freezing."

"..."

"Um, everyones?" Isabella pushed herself up over the T-Rex's shoulder. "We better decide where to go. I mean...it's not safe, either way, but we need to move."

"She is correct," Sergino said. "We don't have much time in this cold. Left or right?"

A quick vote passed, with four to the left, two to the right. Kotone and Sarah were told to wait where they were, but to the surprise of everyone, Jason took point.

"I've been in space for months now," the dragon said, shaking his head as he looked down the tunnel. "This feels almost like home."

"Well, it is home for me," Glyn said. "You start walking. I've got something I want to check out."

The dragon nodded, making his way down the corridor. Normally, he would have taken his time, reminisced about his past, enjoyed the feeling of being somewhere familiar again rather than being lost in a weird tropical environment that he had no business being in, but this was more important. He had to make sure that they could get to the other side, that there were places that could support the weight of their bigger competitors. The artificial gravity was the real problem, though.

Jason could feel it with every step. Something had gone off with the Circe's gravitational pull, with some spots pulling harder, some dragging lighter. He was used to the feeling of fluctuation from his time in space before, but this was different. This was quite a bit more varied.

And he would just imagine that it would throw Black Chaos off, eventually. He was already adjusting, pushing off lighter in some places and heavier in others, using the gravity to his advantage to keep from tiring himself out. More to the point, it kept the weaker parts of the glass floor and walls from caving in from his footsteps.

Unfortunately, halfway down the 600 meter corridor, he had to stop and turn around. The rest of the team waited for him, Sergino raising one eyebrow and the others waiting for news. Jason shook his head.

"The glass is all but shattered halfway down. Only way over that is a long jump or walking on the walls."

"Dammit," Sarah hissed.

"Don't count us out just yet," Glyn said, looking up from a wall panel he'd dragged out of the way. "Looks like we might be lucky."

The timber wolf hissed and winced from a couple of shocks, only to twist something just out of sight. No sooner had he done so than Jason blinked, the green dragon waving his arm toward one wall, then the other in the tube. A slow grin covered his face.

"Oh, that is clever."

"Thank you, thank you," Glyn said, getting to his feet. "Divided gravity. Should be pretty much equal between the four sides of the corridor."

"Translation?" Sergino asked.

"You walk up to the wall and it becomes the floor," Jason said. "Just...do it carefully. Walk like I do."

It took a few minutes, but the green dragon was able to convey how they could make it across the glass without shattering it, though it would take some time. They agreed to cross the corridor one person at a time, with Isabella and Sarah bringing up the rear. Jason went first, and so began the exodus of team Whoopsie Daisies from one end of the station to the other.

Black Chaos

"Have I said lately that I'm not a ferret?" Lykus asked from the head of the group. "I feel like I have."

"And yet, you're saying it again," Tarin said from just behind. "Can you climb faster?"

"I'm not built for this."

"Nobody is. Keep climbing."

The team had realized almost too late that the bottom floor of this part of the station had served as dorms, with the different holes in the floors and ceiling serving as energy projectors. Jaden had almost gotten bisected by an energy wall before Lykus had pulled him out of the danger zone, and they'd all decided that climbing was the better option.

The next floor up had been a bust, as well. Storage, yes, but all of the storage bins were frozen shut, and while they had people that could have lockpicked them, there was no real hope of breaking them open while they were frozen shut, and Ailsa wasn't about to fire her gun in closed quarters like that.

So, up they went again. There was no power in the tube, so there was no lift, meaning they had to use raw muscle power and the weird fluctuation of weak-strong gravity to wiggle their way up the tube. It was an exhausting affair, something that nobody enjoyed, and the regular risk of the climber in front of someone losing their grip and sliding back, accidentally sitting on someone else's face in the process, was all too real. It had happened to all of them already, save Lykus.

The wolf poked his head through the next gap, looking back and forth. He called down.

"Looks like we have passages out!"

"Do they go to the core?" Ailsa called up from the bottom.

"Nope."

"Keep going up."

"Come on. Let me stretch my legs a bit!"

"Up!"

"Uuuuuugh!"

The wolf was more than slightly tempted to use his cards, but in all reality, none of them would do much to push them faster. The water control card that he'd used to buy them a lead in the tropics might have done them some good here, but the rest were a little too dangerous for that.

He looked around at the third floor, considering hopping out anyway. The third floor had corridors that led to the two stations adjacent to them, part of the middle ring of the Circe, but in addition to that, it looked like something of a science lab. Most of it didn't look that useful to him, but -

Well, if anything was useful, he imagined that Sanmer would hop out and get it. Even if it did look a little too 'glowy' for his tastes.

Lykus shrugged, pulling himself further up the tube. Tarin followed, pausing only to glance into the room for a moment himself, then shrugged and pulled himself further along. Jaden stumbled, almost falling down, only to yelp as Sanmer's plant tweaked him from below. The orca moved much faster after that.

Then came the scientist...and he couldn't help himself.

"Ooooooh!"

The white-furred fox leaped out of the tube before Ailsa could grab him, darting past the ice-covered panels beside the lift tube as he made full speed for the experiment tables. He leaned over them, only to yelp and yank his hands back as two hard-light emitters nearly trapped his wrists against them.

"Now that's some active security. I like that." Sanmer grinned, darting almost like a cartoon from table to table, bending down to get a better look at the vials that were frozen over and those that had maintained their liquid integrity. "Now, just what were you working on? Something involving some sort of transmutation, I'm sure, judging by the name, but what else? And can I -"

"Sanmer!"

Ailsa shouted as only a Marine could shout, and the fox jumped again. He looked over his shoulder to see the team captain half-in, half-out of the tube, narrowing her eyes at him.

"Are you going to come along, or are you going to make me drag you along?"

"You know, this is ruining the fun. Do you know how many people would kill to be here, to have some time to look at all this?"

"I'm not convinced someone didn't already kill everyone here."

"There's no bodies."

"They could have been taken away. Let's keep moving. We don't want to lose another teammate, do we?"

The fox opened his mouth, then closed it. It was a compelling argument.

"Come on."

They hustled up the tube. Unfortunately, trouble was already waiting at the top of it.

They reached the top to find the rest of the team in combat with no less than six hovering drones, each one projecting hard-light arms and chains and grippers and clankers. Lykus was hopping from drone to drone, managing to adapt his cards to catch some of the hard-light emitters, but Tarin and Jaden were struggling. Particularly Jaden, as the orca had been caught, lifted up, and stripped. He was held pinned to the wall, a third drone making its way to him, a screen opening with a swirling spiral built in.

As Tarin fenced with his opposing drone, Ailsa nudged the scientist.

"Tell me you can hack those."

"I think I might."

"Try. Now."

She pulled out her gun. Not many bullets left. Not a good idea to waste one, but she had already made her choice. No man left behind.

She lifted the gun and pulled the trigger, blowing out the hypno-screen that had been about to take Jaden's will away. The drone wielding it sagged down, while more lifted up to make their approach.

"This is getting ridiculous," the stingray muttered.

Whoopsie Daisies

They were lucky with the first station. Its power was barely sufficient to keep life support running, let alone gravity, so they were able to move through it without any real difficulty. The outer ring was not in good shape, not at all, but it meant that some of the security measures that would have impeded them worked out in their favor so far.

They were also lucky enough to scavenge a few things. This station turned out to be the laundry hub, and while the clothes weren't the cleanest - some utterly reeked of sweat - they were, at least, wearable. Sarah got dressed, and so did Kotone, and everyone else - save for Sergino - decided to go for the new latex, climate-controlled clothes.

Of course, Isabella ripped right through hers, what with her scales, but she still kept the rest. The team admired their new, rubbery attire, and congratulated one another on surviving thus far.

"Anyone think we have a chance of finding the other idol this time through?" Glyn asked.

"Probably not," Sarah said. "I mean, there's twenty-two stations in total, right? And even if we take an indirect route, we're only going to see a maximum of, what, nine? Maybe? Not great odds, that."

"Still..."

The timber wolf's thoughts didn't have to be said. They were all too aware of the potential problems if the other side managed to get the missing match to their current idol. They'd lucked out in not being forced to use their own idol last time, but if the other team got both, then they would have to lose someone no matter how well they did. It wasn't a good thought; as a matter of fact, it was downright terrifying.

They floated together on the second floor of the ministation, none of them saying anything. There was a sense of urgency, a need to move, but it was hard to really decide where they should move to.

Eventually, Sarah pushed them to keep going. They took the tube - barely big enough for the T-Rex to slide through - and went up a level. There was a corridor leaving the station there, but though it led to the middle ring and thus closer to the core, it was frozen over. Ice, ice, everywhere, and no chance of breaking through it without actually shattering the glass in the corridor itself.

So, further up they went. On the fourth floor, they found a battery of computer monitors built into the wall, as well as the corridor leading further around the outer ring. Jason went to explore, while Glyn settled in at the computers, tapping the screens.

"Surprised that they've still got power," he muttered.

As the timber wolf explored the 'lore' left behind, Sergino looked down the corridor himself. He rested his hand against the glass, cocking his head to the side, and then slowly pulled his fingers back. A chilled pattern remained behind, and he shook his head. Perhaps something of a last-ditch thing, but there was a different possibility. He stored that idea away for later.

Kotone, Sarah, and Isabella waited quietly, and Isabella looked around as they did. The mare didn't miss the look in her eyes.

"What is it?"

"There's something..." The pangolin shook her head. "It's weird. Kinda like something alive and dead at the same time."

"Does that happen often?" Kotone asked.

"No. That's why it's weird."

The pangolin shook her head, looking pensive. Sarah patted her back, the T-Rex getting up and pacing around. The soft beep-beep, beep-beep of the computer on dying batteries and the clang-clang of footsteps was the only sound to be heard.

Eventually, Jason returned, and the green dragon reported that there was a clear route from the next station to the middle ring. Everyone got ready to go, only for Glyn to whistle.

"So that's what happened out here..."

"Is it important for getting to the end?" Sergino asked.

"Might be."

"Tell us while we walk."

Black Chaos

The final tally: twelve drones destroyed, five exhausted team members, five bullets left in her gun. Ailsa holstered it, shaking her head as she did her best to ignore the fact that she'd been stripped to nothing more than her combat boots.

At least that was better than some of the rest of the team. They were completely naked, and only Tarin still had much to his modesty left. She looked back at Sanmer. The fox's omni-tool was blinking, clearly nearly dead, but it had been the main thing that turned the tide. Once they got the drones to stop immediately attacking them, they were able to scrap them one by one, and without that...

Well, she didn't like to think of the possibilities of what might have happened in this rather lewd game.

"Hope that dragon's enjoying the view," she muttered, adjusting her belt as her last bit of clothing outside of her boots. "Fucking..."

"Well, I can say that he probably is," Lykus said, chuckling. "Though he probably likes the rest of us a bit more."

"Why's that?"

"Foot fetish."

"..."

"Hey, I did say I knew him," the wolf said, shrugging.

"This place..."

Everyone turned to Jaden. The orca knelt down, pressing his hands to the deck. His eyes were wide, and he was muttering something, something too quiet for the others to hear, but it clearly affected him. He looked up at them.

"This place...it isn't powered by...by the lightning."

"You mean electricity? Now that you mention it..." Sanmer looked around. "Actually, you're right. There aren't any usual power lines, are there?"

And indeed, as they looked around, there were none. No power lines, no hard-lines to protect the wires, nothing. But despite that, they could still feel the hum of something rippling through the station. There was some sort of power here, and it was...potent. More potent than it had a right to be.

Where had the dragon dropped them?

"Jaden? What are you sensing right now?" Ailsa asked.

"It...it's new, but...it isn't the same as anything that I've felt before."

"What's it closest to?"

"...The things below."

"Demons?" Lykus asked, blinking. "It doesn't feel like hell in here."

"How - we'll talk about that later," Ailsa said, shaking her head. "What do you mean, it feels like that?"

"New. Like...like it was born here. Like it hasn't had...enough."

"Enough what?"

"Food."

Lykus whistled, and the rest of them winced. The wolf blinked.

"Uh...oh, fuck..."

"What?" Ailsa asked. "What else? What now?"

"Um, uh, if this is meant to be a demon thing...like, let's say that the whole station is a ritual circle or something -"

"Oh. Oh!" Sanmer winced. "Oh, damn."

"And we just blew off one part of it -"

"Did we blow it, though?" Ailsa asked. "Far as I can tell, the framework is still there."

"..."

"That'll hold, for now. We have time. So, is it a demon, or isn't it?"

"...I don't know," Jaden admitted. "But it's not...nice. And it is hungry, and it's twisted up with everything else here."

"Magi-tech. Ugh." Sanmer shook his head. "Not what I wanted, after all."

"Well, while it's still holding, we're moving to the core. Move out, everyone," Ailsa said.

Whoopsie Daisies

On the one hand, they were able to make it to the western edge of the middle ring, and the gravity cooperated for the most part. The corridor was more stable than the pair that they had already passed through, though they had a rather serious issue at the first station. A series of red-lined mechanical limbs lunged for them, roaring about 'Decontamination.'

Then again, 'serious' was a matter of perspective. For Glyn, it was serious. For Isabella, it was serious. For Jason, it was somewhat serious.

For Kotone, Sergino, and Sarah? It wasn't serious at all.

The various arms were yanked right from their base plates, thrown to the floor and stomped on by the T-Rex until the various pieces were nothing more than chunks of wire and metal, with some bleeding red energy spread through. Glyn knelt down by it, shaking his head.

"So, that's what they called Argent..."

"What's Argent, Glyn?" Isabella asked.

"Short story version? Hell energy. Channeled through the station to accompany transformation, transmutation, and transmogrification through mechanical and surgical means, far as I can tell," he said, brushing it away with one of the uncontaminated bits of metal. "And as long as the station stays intact, completely controlled...for the most part."

"...And if the station breaks?"

"Well, it could open a full-fledged portal to allow the energy out, oooooor it might suck us all in with it."

"...That's gloomy," Jason said.

"Yep. So, here's hoping nothing else gets busted while we're running around."

Crack.

They slowly turned toward the corridor they'd just left behind, a large white crack spreading along one of the glass walls. The entire team lunged for the button to close the door at once, and they shut it just in time. The second 'crack' was more felt than heard, and they felt the station...shift, for lack of a better word. There was more of a hum in the air, more of a feeling that something wasn't quite right.

"Well...the frame's still there...for now," Sergino said as he looked through the glass. "Guess it didn't like so many big people going through it."

"How far to the core?" Isabella asked. "I don't...I don't know if I like the feeling here."

"Should be just one corridor in," Glyn said.

"Then let's go for that. Quick."

Both Teams

Black Chaos would arrive nearly twenty minutes before the Whoopsie Daisies, and they would have time to act first. What they'd see, of course, was likely not what they expected to see.

The Core was a giant circular chamber, arranged with panels that activated and deactivated by timed patterns around a glowing red core. Each time a panel deactivated, there was a safe place, allowing someone to stand on the panel without being blasted by the energy flowing from the core itself. Each panel had no more than six inches of space between it and the ones beside it, meaning that any passage had to either be on the panels, or be done by someone extraordinarily skinny.

The rounded room and walls surrounded the power core of the station, which consisted of a giant red cloud contained within a glass bubble. The sparks and bolts of red that shot out from the storm cloud powered the station, blasting through the panels to the associated places elsewhere in the station. Yet, every time that a bolt struck a panel, it left a smell of something in the air. Not a scent of ozone and burnt things, like with a regular storm, but something else. Something more sulfurous.

At first, the prize would be difficult to see, but if one looked at the storm within the center of the room, one could see a secondary tube within the central ball. The storm clouds and their red lightning circled it, and within were three things.

A tablet with an updated map.

A heat laser.

And a translator.

None of which were entirely needed, but all of which would open many doors to the people that were able to seize them.

And Black Chaos had a twenty-minute head-start to figure out how to get to them first.