FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

** ** Just outside the gates of an abandoned Ghost of Halloween holiday store nestled in an even more abandoned department store mall anchor like a Russian Doll, stood a rail thin elderly Canadian man wearing a patchy third-hand business suit with gray hair. With him in the green space of the overrun mall atrium was a coquettish young Mexican woman. Brown-eyed, brown-haired, and wearing a nondescript but professionally tasteful shirt, jacket, and skirt. Together, they exchanged doubtful glances as they surveyed the crew assigned to them by their new employer. After escaping the sinking ship of the scandal plagued Biggston-Raine corporation just a few months before, they now found themselves under the employment of the mysterious Eat Mint Be Cool Corporation. Jobs they had found surprisingly easy after a few choice words spread by Brianna and I Spy. Children of the Egg who had been rather fond of the two, despite some spiteful disagreements with their former employer.

Two dragonesses of Brianna's acquaintance had escorted the pair had into Ontario, Canada from the United States just a few weeks before. They were the escorts who had brought Kevin to his home country with the land border closed and possibly saved the life of them both. Known dragon collaborators that they are. The state they had worked in had turned sharply against dragons in only a few days. A popular governor had released a campaign video of him standing with one foot on a severed dragon's head. A youngling, no less. The next day the national press announced that a local hunter had found him and a group of his colleagues on a trapping expedition dead of blunt force trauma. Among the dead with him, were two US senators. The day after that, ten thousand heavily armed paramilitary marched from The Republic of Texas into Oklahoma. In support of their claim that it was their God-given human right to hunt the most dangerous prey on Earth. The alien invaders who claimed to be due the same rights as the humans they no longer were.

Kevin and Camila had gotten out, but Amya had not. Betrayed by Drew, she'd been deported under charges of betrayal of humanity. Not to her home country, of course. Like millions of others, they had dumped her on the other side of the Mexican Security Zone and left to fend for herself. Kevin sent her half a million dollars a month. Just enough to afford the rent for her family in a compound on the gulf coast until I Spy could make her way down there to speak to the local matriarch. A journey of two thousand kilometers into the heart of an open war between cartels and the dragons and government forces trying to end them.

Whoever, or whatever, her parents were, he could not imagine how they reacted to that. Literally, he could not. A human child of fourteen months did not cross a continent under her own power and have a reasonable expectation to arrive safely at her destination. I Spy had spoken of it as a matter of fact.

"Each of you has a very special idea in your hands today." Camila started off brightly, introducing the reason for the assembly of creators. "And that is how best to amuse baby dragons! No simple task, as I'm sure you know by now!"

"It took us weeks to earn enough of theirs and their clan's trust to entice them here." Kevin added gruffly. Somewhat embittered by his experiences of the last few months. "So, you better not waste it."

"Me estás aguando la fiesta..." Camila muttered, put out that the old grump wasn't as enthusiastic as she was about the promise of the session.

"Should we be afraid?" one woman from the group asked tremulously. "One of the... one of their giant parents is sleeping against that door over there." She pointed at the nearest roll-up doors. Seen through the gutted remains of a store, the cargo bay was large enough to admit a semi-truck. Behind it, the group could hear the rasping snores of a Child. The dragon outside shifted, and Kevin winced as a long tapering spike pierced the flimsy delivery door with the tortured shriek of tearing metal.

"Oh dear," the unseen dragon said, waking up just enough to wiggle their spike back through the hole in the door. Kevin stared blankly at the damage. It was little wonder why property insurance was unbelievably out of reach for most anymore. The dragons didn't even mean to be destructive, they just...were. Humanity had not built a world with multi-tonne sentients in mind. Perhaps if the dinosaurs had survived to evolve further, the world would have been more hospitable to dragons.

"Yeah!" a pig-tailed girl said, only to be shushed by the glowering man who yanked on her coveralls to draw her back to him. "Dragons are dangerous. Uncle Romulus said so! Right?" she said, looking up at her relation imploringly. In her hands she clutched a fluorescent orange ball with an array of holes perforating it. The sphere suddenly shot a jet of compressed air and jumped up out of her grasp when she jostled it. When it hit the ground, it launched in a new direction with a feverish hum coming from within it as the girl and the man chased after the toy.

"Of course they aren't honey!" Camila said when the little girl returned with her arms wrapped protectively around the project. "The Children of the Egg you will meet today are even younger than you. They've come to play with the toys you made. Won't that make you happy to see them have fun?"

"Uh huh," she said, shuffling back and forth. "Can I play with them too?"

"You invited us, inventors," the sour-faced man next to the girl said, looking around. "To come here because you ran out of ideas, didn't you? So, what's our cut if they like our inventions?"

"As per the agreement you signed. The teams responsible for the top three designs in each session will each receive two hundred thousand dollars. In addition, after three rounds of testing, the team with the highest likeability score will receive a contract of five percent of sales of their item. As well as a contract employment in finalizing and economizing a manufacturable design using reclaimed material," Kevin explained. The damn resource control board was throttling everything outside of food and medical supply production. "And we have not run out of ideas, we have run out of engineers and technicians that Ottawa hasn't drafted away into national projects.

"Two hundred thousand?" Uncle Romulus scoffed. "That's barely six months of groceries."

"As long as we get paid," A heavy-set woman with her hair tied in a bun and wearing a military-style jacket said. Next to her was her daughter, looking to be well on her way to being a clone of her mother's shape, where she shyly hid behind her leg. The mother poked a cube in her hand, prompting it to produce flickering holographic shapes such as stars, planets, and other celestial objects. She waved it around demonstratively. "I made this for human babies, not animals. I expect to be compensated if the feral things just chew or piss on my creation and destroy it."

Kevin was glad, watching the woman, that you needed a special license to have a firearm in Canada now. Not that it stopped the flood of weapons from the United States from crossing the border where the wars continued. But he and Camila didn't have to have handguns strapped to their legs like they did before. The authorities had encouraged them to always keep arms in the United States. Where they had held the last disastrous product test when a dragoness had masturbated with a massaging cradle in protest over its origins. Not that a protest wasn't warranted, given the resultant investigation. It still showed that there was no predicting the actions of an intelligence that no longer felt any compunction about acting like the humans they once were.

"Where are they?" another man asked.

"I will call to them," Kevin said, feeling Camila's surprise at the violent reaction this simple statement brought, even though he wasn't. The two of them weren't alone, either. A presence was approaching with its attention focused on the meeting. It felt like a searchlight that only some could sense was bathing him and the others. Intrusive thoughts wormed into him. The first was one of greeting and the next asked if he was in danger. Quickly, he signaled his safety to the approaching mind, and that it was okay for the children to participate.

"You're one of...them. Aren't you?" the broad woman asked acerbically. "A scalie. A traitor. The fuck toy for a..." she looked down at her daughter and her mouth snapped closed, ending her tirade.

Camila's friendly exuberance failed as her expression became one of intense irritation. Directed straight at the woman taking shots at her after she tried to correct the misconceptions of what a relationship with a dragon entailed. When Kevin saw this, he hurried on, trying to get things rolling.

"As you can see, to minimize the distraction of the Children that I can fe... that I know are waiting for us. We have constructed a sterile room for the dragons to play in." Kevin motioned to the large square structure in the middle of the atrium, open to the sky, with one side paneled in a one-way mirror.

"If everyone is ready, I ask that you please enter the controlled environment to deposit your inventions. Then I will signal that it's safe for the Children to approach. Are there any objections?" Kevin nodded and opened the reinforced door to the test area when there were none. "We have briefed you on what the dos and do nots are for the dragons. Remember that you already signed a document that said as much if any desire to interact with you."

Each of the inventors deposited their toys inside on the central table. The devices were a broad array of colors, shapes, functions, and refinement. Inside the white walled chamber, the only other furniture was a chair with a clipboard full of surveys and a pen in one corner.

"Who's going to be crazy enough to go in there and meet these dragons?" Uncle Romulus demanded.

"I am, to take their surveys and to show them they can trust us," Camila said.

"It's them you should be worried about not trusting!" one woman said. "I don't trust anything to do with those aliens. They smell terrible and they act like demons. The way they look at you like they want to take you apart to see what's inside is enough to make you realize what heathen things they are."

For someone that feels so suspicious of the dragons, Kevin thought to himself, she certainly has no problems designing toys to be used by them. All the same, he was glad that firearms were so much harder to get to Canada after the start of the Alberta Border War.

"What if the dragons get scared?" another little girl asked. "I don't want them to be. They are fun to play with!"

"I told you to stay away from them," the man with her said severely. "They will eat you."

"That's not true," the girl said, looking petulantly stubborn. "You said Santa wouldn't give me anything for Christmas because he was broke. So, funny Patrick flew to my window wearing a beard and a hat to give me Mrs. Crumpet. They are nice!" she showed a boy three groups over from her the doll when he asked. The other child looked suitably impressed by the ancient, yet still functioning, Teddy Ruxpin. Kevin was equally astounded to see one for the first time in over forty years. The two children raced to set the animatronic doll on a chair and pull it up to the window to watch the proceedings.

For capitalism's sake, he could only hope that they could convince the dragons to express an interest in buying goods newer than the animatronic doll. The antique sat rhythmically working its mouth through a lullaby from the cassette tape playing in its back. It was bad enough that no one had been able to buy new clothes in the two years after the shipping industry collapsed. The shabby attire of all there were a testament to that.

"Then they fly away, back up through the hole in the roof." Kevin answered the little girl's question, calling up an audio file on his phone and turning the sound all the way up. "As long as they don't feel trapped, this will go just fine." He held his phone up above his head and pushed the play button. A piercing whistle came from his phone that oscillated up and down with barely audible quavers interspersed through it. The dragon asleep outside awoke with another bang on the door and responded with a similar cry. Kevin felt the Child's acknowledgement in his head that they had received the invitation.

"It took us weeks to get their trust," Camila told the group as Kevin awaited their customers. "One hundred kilograms of carbon black, five slinkies, and twenty calculator motherboards."

"Five slinkies," a man whispered in reverential awe. "God in heaven, who has the resources to make and transport those?"

Kevin and Camila had braced themselves for the chaos of the young Children, but instead of them the brazing light of a single mind nearly pinned them to the ground. This time, even the other humans who weren't attuned felt it. The gaze of a sun.

When a shadow fell over the mall's roof entrance, a sliding panel Kevin had had opened. It wasn't the children they expected, but a father. A Father, who was less than impressed.

Five knocks rattled the garage door and one of Camila's assistants used the chain to open it, revealing two dragons. One demonstrably larger than the other standing behind it. For those local to the area, it was easy to see just who the newcomer was. Three rings through the first spinal fin intercostal, and one through the left ear crest. The jewelry, along with a great number of tattoos stretching across his flank, made him distinctive. On both arms and against his chest were large satchels with dangling metal rings threaded through loops to make them easy to open for a creature whose fingers were capped by talons over fifty centimeters long.

"Oh god," the bitter man exclaimed. "I quit. I won't have me or my daughter here one second longer. That's Bruce, Aretha's husband!"

"That's Bruce, Aretha's husband!" The eponymous dragon said mockingly as he mimicked the man's voice. "Is the mere sight of me enough to cause such terror now? You must have a very distressing life to be so quickly scared, little rabbit." Bruce's grim smile revealed interlocking rows of serrated fangs and hardened molar plates.

"We're leaving before he rapes our minds!"

Kevin watched, nonplussed, as the man pulled a folded sheet of aluminum foil out of his pocket and smoothed it over his head. Doing the same to his daughter with another sheet. Startled by her father, the girl was crying when he swept her into his arms and fled. Leaving his invention behind.

"We'll contact you if the Children like your design," Kevin shouted to the man as he pedaled furiously away on his bicycle. His daughter in the pull-behind trailer. "Remember that Eat Mint Be Cool is a fair dealer ready to supply all your youthful desires!"

"Fool," Bruce said in his own voice with a muffled thump of his tail on the worn carpeted floor. "The light of a Constellation is a gift, not a weapon."

The other dragon that had been behind him suddenly thrust their head down through the opened roof, swinging it back and forth on their lithe neck. They spoke no words, but Bruce relaxed the bristling spike near the end of his tail after the unnamed dragon turned one blue and yellow eye towards him. It always unnerved Kevin, along with many other humans, how little the dragons needed to vocalize amongst themselves. Especially when a Patriarch or Matriarch was around. At least for simple conversations.

The dragon on the roof retracted their head and vanished. Kevin and the others hurriedly stepped back to make room for the crouched Patriarch to slink forward and examine the sterile test chamber. He nudged the walls with his wing to ensure their bracing and paid particular concern to the toys on the table. Bruce stared so hard at each that Kevin was half afraid they'd melt before he gave a sharp truncated roar to signal his satisfaction.

"I know and trust Camila, mother of none and daughter of Selena, and Kevin, father of Tim, Becky, and Jack and son of Monica. But the rest of you are no lights I have seen before. I warn you now so that we are all understanding each other. Today, I am the fledglings' father and will not suffer any harm to come to them. Is this clear?" He moved his tail to point at one woman in the group before him. "You, especially. I feel the anger churning in you."

The short blonde woman frowned with the fingers of one hand tapping her crossed arms. "If I feel your filthy mind anywhere near my thoughts, I will report you to the Dragon Taskforce."

Bruce made an unimpressed snort at the hostility. The task force the woman named had a long and controversial history with Canadian dragons. Their recommendations that the Children all be surgically implanted with tracking devices or have their wings amputated did not inspire feelings of civility. The task force had made little effort to conceal what they considered a "safe" dragon. Their authority to manage dragons lay in their creation by parliament and the task force was answerable only to them. Rarely at that, given the present neo-con government. However, despite these extreme voices, Canada was near the top of the world in giving the dragons individual rights. They were entitled to live, for one. There were some countries where dragon hunting was an unregulated sport.

Much to the detriment of the hunters.

"I don't need to be looking very hard to see emotions flashed across the building. And you should take a shower. You smell funny." Bruce said, sniffing deeply at the air above the woman in her thick jacket. He turned his head away from her to look at Kevin.

"The children are ready for you," he said and used his tail tip to fish a large electronic tablet from the pouch strapped to his side. He focused one eye on the screen as he carefully tapped commands with the same dexterous appendage, a small stylus slipped over the end like a sheathe. Even with his attention diverted, that watchful sense of a presence hovering over the shoulders remained. For some, comforting, and for others, terrifying. The woman's eyes narrowed, and she glanced from the large dragon to the room with a calculating look that set Kevin on edge. A reassuring nudge came from Bruce, and a sense of watchfulness.

Camila pulled the chair to the center of the room and sat calmly, still with a cheerful smile. A whirlwind of emotions and wind descended through the roof down around her. There were eleven babies ranging in size from a dog to a pony and several times their lengths. Their expansive wings rustled shut one by one as they entered the test chamber. Too large for all of them to have them extended in the limited confines built just for this occasion. None of them were speaking in a human language at first, chirping, whistling, and trilling at each other instead, along with growls and hisses.

Their huffing laughter was endearing as they bounced around, scrutinizing the room's features. A chaotic swarm of motion. One by one, they slowed enough to acknowledge Camila. Each bobbing their head to her and then rearing up with their hands outstretched for the woman to briefly clasp in greeting. The smallest of the fledglings, his eyes' sclera yellow and his irises red, gave an enthusiastic greeting by leaping on the woman. His tail circling her legs, he nuzzled her face with the side of his.

"Camila friend! Pleasant skies for you!"

"Pleasant skies for you, friend Gregory Acorn!"

Camila and Kevin were familiar with the six-month-old drake after his mother invited them to witness his hatching. A remarkable honor. Earned by getting their adoptive Constellation the building materials and skilled labor needed to expand the communal lair in exchange for five minutes of airtime at peak hours. The lair was a place of shelter where the dragons could rest in their masses along with any human brave enough to bed down with the massive beings. Gregory had even gifted Camila a piece of his own shell. He'd eaten the rest. She wore the shard on a chain beneath her shirt, marking her as the child's first friend. It was an honor that meant a great deal for the tiny fledgling to bestow.

"What new thing you have to show Acorn this sun? Is fun toys?" he asked, bounding away to the table where the other dragons were seated, staring raptly at the toys.

"You got it, Acorn. It'll just be you and your friends playing with each of these while me and friend Kevin watch from there." She pointed to the one-way mirror, and the dragons squeaked as they abandoned the toys to look through the window at the crowd outside. Disappointment spread among them at only seeing their own reflections. At least until some of them flapped their ear fins in the mirror, laughing madly as they watched themselves dance up and down with bobs of their heads.

"You watch Acorn play? Is it? We do! Fun. Fun. Fun!"

What followed surprised every human but Kevin and Camila. In great carefulness, the eleven rambunctious toddlers inspected each toy in exacting detail. With careful nudges of their hardened claws, they turned each device over again and again. Whether it was meant to be or not. To peer at all angles. Their sharply pointed talon tips probed at each seam found, dismantling many of them as thoroughly as possible without the use of tools. And just as thoroughly being reassembled.

Then, and only then, did the baby dragons act as Kevin expected, drawing a sigh of relief from the elderly man that the preternatural children could indeed have fun. They abused each one, according to its function, until it stopped working. Test-to-fail, the engineers called it. Normal in normal times, but these were anything but.

"Do you know how much fucking time I spent on that, eh?". The woman with the overstuffed coat yelled, advancing on Kevin after seeing her creation meet its end. Destroyed systematically between the tail swipes of two children. Bruce, in the background, pushed his tablet to the side and rumbled a gruff warning.

"And fuck you too, dragon. We are the ones that decide when and how you speak."

Bruce did not meow, or bark, as the woman seemed to expect. Instead, a feeling of peace and calm descended on Kevin that also slowed the juvenile dragons, dashing back and forth in reaction to the anger they felt. The woman was unaffected, and so was Camilla as she stormed out, incensed by someone goading the young with their wild emotion.

"Who is..." she stopped as the woman reached into her coat and leapt behind Camilla with her arms fixed around her neck. In one hand, showing that she had a finger curled into a ring attached to a small green egg with yellow stenciling. Kevin froze, only his eyes blinking in disbelief, as it dawned on him that he was looking at a hand grenade. With the way that her thick coat hung heavily against her, Kevin suspected it was not the only one either.

Bruce, who had been halfway to his hands and feet slowly crouched until his chest rested on the floor once again, not taking his eyes off the flushed woman.

"This does not have to end with bloodshed, stranger. Talk to us as one reasonable being to another."

"You and the rest of your abominations have taken everything from me. Everything! My home, my earnings, my wife, and even my planet! All I had left, my only hope was making a commission off the invention that your spawn just destroyed, eh!"

Kevin and the other humans were steadily backing away as the two talked. The fear and the pleading in Camila's eyes as she stared at him with her copper-toned skin faded in terror. Behind her and her captor, the sales executive saw all but three of the baby children flee through the skylight. The children that stayed were nosing through the remains of the toys, looking for things that they then set aside. Oblivious to the danger they were in, Kevin's anguish grew blindingly in his mind. One dragon raised its head to look directly at him and send an assurance.

"You came here hoping to support yourself, yet also ready to commit violence. Those men that have been talking to you," Bruce tilted his head like a dog hearing a silent whistle. The eye staring down at the woman lidded and became unfocused, his scales and wings shifting. "They gave you the grenades and told you to get as many of us together as possible. What did they give you we cannot, small one? Let us help you..."

She appeared to think it over. With sweat pouring down her face and her labored breathing from her emotions, her glazed eyes focused slowly on the finger through the grenade pin. Far beyond the walls of the silent store, a siren wailed among a chorus of shrieking Children. All of which were getting swiftly louder. The woman's expression twisted with renewed fury and her finger tensed to pull. Kevin threw himself down as three things happened at once.

The first movement were the twin tails. One at each corner of the window, swinging forcibly at the one-way mirror with metallic objects held within their curls. The appendages weakened the safety glass by shattering it within its frame. The third child then leapt through the compromised pane in a ball propelled by their powerful hind legs, caroming into the back of the attacking woman. Bruce's tail was already moving, darting forward to slide beneath Camila after she took the partial impact of the leaping child.

The other humans screamed and fled, leaving Kevin alone to helplessly watch the tumbling grenade flung from the limp woman's hand. The safety pin missing.

Kevin threw his hands over his head and curled, facing away from the metallic clinking as the bomb bounced across the floor. Sure that his life was over and full of regret for the awful words he and his sole granddaughter had shared at their last meeting.

But after a lifetime of waiting with only terrified human whimpers and the excited dragon breath rasping in the empty store, he picked his head up to look. The grenade sat nestled against a wall, harmless and intact.

Bruce brought his panting head down and nosed the attacking woman's arm off Camila, allowing her to run to Kevin and cling to him as she sobbed her terror out. The other two children gingerly came through the frame of broken, laminated glass, their scales protecting them from the chunks. They tore the coat off the woman to reveal two more grenades and a handgun. The pair sniffed thoroughly at the grenades, making wordless noises of curiosity to themselves and drawing Bruce's own nose to have a sniff of his own. Understanding flashed in his eyes and Kevin felt a message shoot above his head through the Constellation. The dragoness from before returned, corralling the other fledglings before her. She sniffed each of the humans systematically where they cowered behind walls and planters in the mall, looking for other would-be bombers.

The woman moaned unintelligibly as Bruce's hand came down to pin her within a cage of talons, dazed after slamming her head into the ground. Bruce's mind wrapped around Kevin and Camila, whispering the reassurances of all the Children that they were safe, and that they always had been. The aura of their home Constellation embraced them. Two fledglings went to help Acorn, dizzily stumbling into the temporary wall next to him and keening the distress cry of all young Children. With their flanks against his, they steadied his drunken wobbling.

"It didn't explode..." Kevin said in a daze. Whatever made that awful siren pounding against his developing migraine, arrived at the door of the mall. A racket rising even above the loud thuds shaking the roof alongside bugling cries of other Children. "Why didn't it explode?"

Bruce looked down at him while nuzzling the distressed children, giving them a lick before answering. "She was holding it wrong. There are two safety pins. She only pulled one. I saw it in a movie once years ago. We had to act before she could figure that out."

Kevin found he could reach new levels of terror. A plan hatched from a Hollywood movie. He joined Camila in weeping silently as they held each other, welcoming Acorn when he came seeking the comfort of his first friend. All around, an aethereal web of peace and comfort cradled them, soothing them.