FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter 6

So. Tell me, how bad was your day?

Timmy was an abnormally small fourteen year old, human child with soft pink skin classified as "white" for some reason that might make sense if you look to earth's history, and a large patter of pitch black skin surrounding each of his eyes and covering his eyelids. It was just a cosmetic thing, those two spots on his face just happened to be a different color from the rest of his skin, a true, pure black. Not some dark brown that simply classifies as black, actual darkness that just looked unnerving, or somehow ethereal. If he closed his eyes and let the dark black of his eyelids blend in with the surrounding skin, people around would generally jump in fear. It was just so easy to mistake him for a zombie, or some soulless demon.

Right here, right now, looking at his demolished home and seeing something swift and lithe charging at him through the shadows of the trees, Timmy considered this an advantage. He oriented towards the fast moving ... thing. Closed his eyes, and waited for the:

"Gyah!!!"

Then took off running back the way he came.

"What the fell is that thing?!"

The voice was so close Timmy didn't dare stop and look. Neither was he dumb enough to try running through the woods with his eyes closed, that trick only works once. 'I was wondering the same thing buddy' he thought to himself as he slipped past thick trees, and loose underbrush. He was making entirely too much noise, he knew. But the safety and possible aid the outer city limits offered was close enough that speed mattered more than stealth. Besides, human's aren't exactly known for being unobtrusive.

'Just what was that thing? It was moving too fast to see. Frap it, I probably could have gotten a good look if I'd actually tried instead of closing my eyes. But if I did that, identifying my attacker's species and gender would probably be my last act.' his thoughts were racing as quickly as his heartbeat. Amazing how well fear can open up one's senses even after weeks without sleep.

'I can learn from what I did see though ... whatever he is, he's fast. He called for help, asking someone else to grab me, so he can't be alone. He called them fools, so either their idiotic minions or he's not that good of a leader. And ... oh Fell, my house. He blew up my house! I can't even guess at what weapon he's using. A bomb? I would prefer it if he'd used a bomb. If it was a bomb instead of a plasma cannon that means I don't have to worry about them scorching through the woods in effort to catch me.'

Rustle! Something pushed past the crisp leaves and branches to his far left, whatever the thing was it was over 6 feet tall, almost twice Timmy's height, moving on two legs ... possibly three, unless that thing hanging back happened to be tail. Triangular, non-human face, and ... and ...

And it was gone. Rushing well ahead of Timmy, far out of sight.

'Wait a minute, if that thing was chasing me it should have caught up by now. I'm not even that fast for a human, and I sure as heck aren't a free-runner. Speed is relative I know, I know.' Timmy felt odd, being annoyed by his own thoughts 'But what is the point of outpacing me?'

He made it to the road. For now it was just a dirt path that people kept walking on but not too far down it transitioned to pavement, thus marking entry into the main city. It was a smooth, easy, strait run that didn't involve dodging trees or shoving through bushes.

'All I need to do is get to the city' Timmy mused. 'Once there it will be a piece of cake to find some hero willing to help me, people who actually know how to fight and weapons or magic from all over the Skylar system. Even if through some inexplicable stroke of bad luck I somehow managed to find the only crowd in this entire hub world that wasn't bursting at the seams with Travelers willing to jump at any chance to fix problems, I knew enough people in set locations that would help. Angel's are issued flaming swords along that halo, I'm pretty sure Harry can handle whatever this thing is'

The bushes rustled ten to fifteen yards in front of him. 'Gah! That's it, if all I need to do is get to the city then the ... the ... thing, was running ahead so it could cut me off!' realization suddenly dawned on him. In a burst of greenery it appeared, and Timmy paused his running just long enough to get a good look.

It only takes a second, a single moment, to form a first impression of someone. The attacker was a wolf, or at least looked like one. Too short and scrawny to be a werewolf, but too tall, and too fast to be a furry, so chances are Timmy was dealing with an anthro. That would explain the lack of weapons, and the hunting style. 'He was herding me' the human realized. 'He's Frapin herding me.' Other details filtered through, the wolf was clearly male, had dark grey fur that blended so well with the daylight's shadows without being a pure black. His shorts, barely covering anything but his thighs, could only be distinguished by a difference in shade and a lack of fuzziness that didn't seem to match his fur texture. The thing had a flat chest, not muscular exactly but tougher than Timmy's. Neither of them had a shirt on, but with Anthro's it was generally their preference, where's Timmy's was shredded the previous night. It's arms were lanky, the fingers much longer than it seemed they should have been, and the claws were wicked and curved. Half a second had passed.

Timmy and the wolf locked eyes, each of them working to assess the supposed capabilities or advantages. The wolf's eye's were large, green with a tiny sliver of black that might be a pupil, and contained the icy cold feral gaze of an apex predator with a lust for blood. His face was decidedly angular, his jaw protruded well past his forehead, and his lips were curled back to reveal sharp teeth, yellowed by misuse.

'I can't run back the way I came. Going to either side would be idiotic, he'd just cut me off on my way to the city. I can't stand and fight, he doesn't look the type I can talk my way out of ... darn it, if I had training as a free-runner this situation would be easy to resolve.' The two had assessed each other, the wolf with the conclusion that this human child was easy prey, and Timmy with that simplistic conclusion that human fighters generally come to on occasion. "I can't take this guy."

And with that the second was up, the wolf was charging towards Timmy and growling in a clear effort to scare the boy away. It would have been foolhardy to waste that precious second moment thinking instead of taking action, there wasn't any time left for evaluating an escape plan. So Timmy went with the quickest response he could think of, and charged the wolf head on. His oversized, human lungs sucked in air at a faster pace to supercharge his muscles, his heart was pounding faster and faster, the pain in his legs from and arms from being pushed to their relatively pitiful limits were all he could focus on as he tried to build up speed.

Once that was accomplished, and still roughly ten yards from his anthro attacker, he noticed the wind brushing lightly on his exposed skin. His somewhat flat, shoeless toes stomped the ground noisily and shoved off with tremendous force to propel his body violently forward in a series of rough, jerky movements that all flowed seamlessly. The wolf ran with a much more efficient system, by expending energy for that first burst of speed and then simply fallowing the momentum with light, springy legs acting as fluidly as wheels. The silence of it's footsteps shouldn't have surprised anyone, but compared to the noisy clomping of it's human prey the difference was noticeable.

As they neared for impact Timmy curled his hands around his head, balled his fingers into tight, awkward fists, and curled his stomach slightly so that he leaned forward as he ran. He looked perfectly set up for a head but, and at his height that would have reached the wolf's stomach. The wolf prepared for impact by lowering it's center of mass, extending each of it's arms to the side so that between his teeth and each of his claws the wolf could take up a much wider area. He looked prepared to curl around and gouge into anything foolish enough to be caught within arm's length.

Timmy stared into the eyes of his attacker, waiting until they were three feet apart at a full run. There wasn't a moment's time to waste in contemplation, impact was imminent ... the wolf only had time to widen his eyes in surprise as the human dropped to one knee, curled up on the ground at knee height without bothering to stop. The wolf's claws instinctively clutched at where the human's head had just been, but only made contact with empty air and he had to forcibly correct for their wasted momentum.

SNAP! The wolf felt something hard and solid crashing into the very fragile joint between his foot and his leg, but the next thing he saw was dirt.

The young child had curled into a tight ball and threw himself into the ground mid-run, letting his crisscrossing arms slam into the Anthro's three toed paw. He waited for the feeling of light pressure on his back as the wolf tripped over him, then the tell-tale thud of something large and heavy slamming hard into the dirt road, and then he was up, uncurled, and running as fast as his short legs could carry him.

'I've got to make it to the city!' was all he could think of. He had no idea what this Anthro's capabilities were, only that he had been easy to slip past. 'Come on man, keep running, don't get tired now.' the boy urged his already aching lungs and heavy eyelids. Walking around with no sleep was one thing, running was something else.

'You won't even hear him it if that guy gets back up, don't waste time looking back' his thoughts raced, his heart was pounding. 'Three frapping fights in the course of three days. Three! I haven't been this unlucky in years, why the fell is everything suddenly conspiring against me now? What is this an age thing? I've never been cute, not with these eyes, so it's not like I've recently lost a childish layer of protection. Oh man, this day cannot possibly get any worse. Demons at a pizza place, random snake people hunting mice, and now someone blew up my house?' he paused ... in thought at least, he was still running at full speed. 'I didn't even think to ask this jerk why.'

NAB! Timmy stuttered to a stop as a large fuzzy paw wrapped around his foot from behind, his legs spread to keep from falling flat on his face. His head turned to see ...

"You impudent little twerp" the wolf, standing on three legs with a thin glob of blood trailing from his snout, and the leg Timmy smashed into held high off the ground.

"Limping much?" the boy retorted before kicking free and leaping back to dodge a second grabbing attempt. "Now tell me what the Fell your after!"

"Oh that's simple" the wolf answered while slowly standing up to two legs, resting most of his weight on his right one. "We need a human to take home, and you seem to fit the bill."

"And my poor house did what exactly, refuse to give you my location? Murder isn't very nice." Timmy took another careful step back, making sure to stay completely out of reach of those claws. Far enough away that he had room to start running again if this guy jumped.

"MURDER?" the wolf snarled. "That's just like you humans, such a violent race. All my organization requires of you is cooperation and you immediately assume I'll murder you to get it"

Timmy blinked. "I didn't assume anything, you already did kill! It's perfectly reasonable to assume you'd kill again." he twitched at a rustling, squishing sound from somewhere behind him. Sort of like moldy jello in a plastic bag ... but he was too focused on the wolf to turn and look.

"What are you babbling about, your still alive twerp."

"But my tree isn't."

The wolf blinked. "What?"

"You murdered my house, the poor girl had seedlings she kept in contact with, neighbors she chatted with, and after all that time I spent making sure the walls I added wouldn't mess up her leaves ... you just killed her."

The wolf's muzzle twitched in total confusion. "What the hell are you babbling about. Your 'house' was a cardboard box sitting in a tree!"

"Organically synthesized memory foam, more commonly known as wax-maker spider thread. That wasn't cardboard."

"All I did was ..."

"Murder my house" Timmy interrupted.

"It was a TREE! Murder doesn't count if it's a plant!" the wolf shouted, stomping his foot in anger. Only to reel in pain, his face twisting in awkward ways to hold back the screams of utter torment. In hindsight, he probably shouldn't have stomped with the broken leg.

"And you call me violent? Of course it counts as murder, she was alive wasn't she? Last I checked she wasn't the least bit suicidal, and the way you killed her didn't even leave enough wood behind to donate to a lumber yard or termite mound. Through what twisted bit of logic was that not murder?" if he hadn't been so tired, in pain from his exertion, upset about the loss of his home, and confused by the upsurge in monster attacks, the boy would have laughed at the Anthro's attempts to dull the pain in his foot-paw.

"You're a human ... what the Hell are you ... oh! Hehe, sneaky little bastard. I keep expecting physical attacks, but no. Your just trying to mess with my head, make me lower my guard with your unexplained bouts of insane non-sense." the wolf deduced. Badly.

"Insane ... non-sense? Now your just being redundant." the boy took another step back and listed for the sloping jello sound. It wasn't hard to pinpoint, but it was hard as heck to identify without looking at it. Just thinking that something was sneaking up behind him made the tiny, clear white hairs on the back his neck stand up.

"I killed that, er ... I destroyed that 'house' of yours as part of a brilliant tactical plan to get you when you were most vulnerable, and most likely to listen without killing my partner. But Noooo, humans never fallow a predictable pattern" the wolf devolved into sarcasm. "Why on Plebis would they actually be where their supposed to be?"

"I have no idea what your talking about."

"School!" the wolf shouted. "You were supposed to be in school an hour ago! Then, after a long day of strenuous mental and physical activity in a well respected learning institute you come home tired and with no place to rest. That would have been the perfect time to talk to you, that was the plan. But Noooo, you had to ruin it all, you had to come home early"

"I'm late for school? Really? I thought I still had an hour or two left before it started."

The wolf stared, completely dumbstruck. "You ... you ..." but a polite, accented voice from behind chimed in.

"As I once said to my students, never ascribe to malice what might more simply be incompetence." Timmy ducked and hurled his body to the side, cringing as his soft, unprotected skin was scraped raw on the dull rocks, but smiling as what looked like a cloud of semi-transparent yellow bubbles slammed into the wolf's chest. The boy turned his eyes away from the brilliant lightshow, ignoring the sight of a limping wolf getting thrown head over heals by a kinetic projectile weapon of unknown design, and focusing instead on whatever had made those jelly sounds behind him.

"Hello" the boy smiled while looking up to the second attacker.

"Oh dear ..." it mused, as Timmy looked it over. The thing was blue. Lots and lots of blue. It had a total of sixteen, thick, semi-transparent tentacles by a rough estimate, four on each side of the top half of it's body and a similar pattern near it's 'feet' if one uses the term loosely. It's body was split into two obvious segments, the upper body with a large, bulbous structure containing numerous beady black eyespots. The lower body being two lumps of oddly colored jelly mushed together at the base and hinging in the middle so that it could lift one lump at a time to walk. Overall it looked like clear jello that was shaped into a dildo, given an hourglass figure and two giant toes where feet should be, then someone stuck fuzzy wires into it's sides and covered the fuzz with more jello. One of the tentacles sported a small, angular device with a flat, glowing screen pointed away from the handle.

As it oriented the device away from the wolf that had just been blasted, Timmy no longer felt like voicing his entertaining comparisons between this hostile life form and an exotic, oversized sex toy.

"Don't just stand there! Shoot it!" the wolf called while staggering to it's feet. The jelly thing looked over in shock.

"Your ali?- ... OW!"

Timmy was up in a flash, used one last burst of adrenaline to cross a relatively short distance to overtake the dildo monster; then shoved past, not taking the time to actually fight it and settling for just running away. The city was so close! He could see the tops of buildings just over the trees, all he had to do was keep running.

"Get him! Shoot the human you fool!" the wolf yelled as Timmy turned around to see him stand up. His chest was raw and bleeding, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny little cuts bleed out, most of the fur was gone leaving only little patches, the skin that wasn't covered in blood looked bruised and battered. It was only a small area on his chest, about a foot in diameter. Painful as it may of looked, the effects were only skin deep and clearly not lethal.

"How are you still alive!?" the tentacle thing demanded, waving it's weapon around franticly and thus offering Timmy even more valuable seconds to run. "A direct hit should have ..."

"SHOOT!" the wolf demanded with a fierce sense of urgency.

Something made a 'Blop' noise from behind his back. Timmy turned to see a cascading beam of bright, yellow, semi-transparent bubbles flowing and stretching towards him at high speed. He tried to turn, to dodge whatever the thing was supposed to be, but even slow bullets aren't known for being easy to avoid.

POP! It landed hard into the human's back, he could feel his skin evaporating away, he could feel his warm blood and chunks of his skin spray out to either side. He cringed, he arched his back in pain, his face twisted in an expression of agony. Then the kinetic forces came into play, a loud, bright explosion shoved him violently forward. He felt his face and bare chest slam awkwardly into the dirt road, momentum scraping him raw as friction was left to slow him down.

The boy was alive. The boy could still run or fight if he needed to. And he was certain he could recover so long as his blood could clot uninterrupted. But Frap it, that thing hurt!

"Thank you, took you long enough loose brain" the wolf retorted as he limped over to Timmy's battered and bleeding body.

"But ... but how are you ... you shouldn't be alive! Nothing on my world survives a ..."

"What does that little toy gun do, by the way? Hmm?" the wolf asked accusingly.

"Make parents ... sue the toy company?" Timmy offered while struggling to sit up.

"It ... it electrochemically disintegrates a cell membrane leaving the individual parts of a cell to fall apart on their own. It's the worst kind of death imaginable, it's a dreaded terror, illegal in seven systems! It ..."

The wolf slapped a paw to his face. "Seriously? Your trying to capture an EarthSpawn life form. EarthSpawn! Why the hell would you take a chemical weapon? What sort of braindead partner doesn't even do his homework?"

"I ... this was the most dangerous weapon I could ..."

"Think! Think for a second you twit. What does a chemical weapon, one that works on a cellular level no doubt, do against a multi-celled organism?"

"It's ... it's supposed to destroy your cell membrane. Nothing can live long without the ..."

"And what do you think it does to a creature with untold billions of cells each with their own individual membranes. Hmmm?!" the wolf pointed to the battered and bleeding area of his chest. Timmy took all this sweet time while they were arguing to get back on his feet. It hurt like heck, but he wasn't going to just lie there when he still had the opportunity to move.

"It would ... oh. Oh dear. I suppose it wouldn't be terribly effect then."

"Thank you captain obvious. Now grab the twerp before he can get away."

"I thought you were supposed to do the ..."

"I can't hold him very well on a broken leg now can I?"

"Oh dear. I suppose not." the jelly filled tentacle monster squished and slumped over, easily overtaking the human child. The walking motion looked decidedly awkward, he'd lean his body to one side, carefully lift up a bloated foot, wobble forward, then stomp the jelly filled appendage onto the road. It wasn't efficient, and it wasn't fast, but he wasn't too injured to move. Once near the upright child, the eight tentacles near ground level snaked out to wrap around Timmy's feet. The seven free tentacles up at head height wormed and slithered they way around Timmy's neck, his shoulders, up underneath his armpits.

"Careful you moron! Don't get any of his blood on you, and keep that bastard's face pointed away from your eyespots." the wolf instructed.

'Eyespots?' Timmy thought to himself in sheer amazement. 'Actual eyespots? Wow this guy odd. He has true eyespots instead of the much more advanced eyes ... where is he from exactly?' silently the boy took note that his blood was somehow dangerous. That piece of information could prove useful.

"I think that should cover it, unless you have any other objections" the jelly thing commented sarcastically. "Why take such precaution with a young one? Wasn't the whole point of coming here so that we could capture a human weak enough to study?"

"Just because he doesn't have any augments doesn't mean his white blood cells won't eat your brain. Now shut up and start teleporting."

That got Timmy's attention. "Teleporting?" he called out nervously. He went from hanging limply in the air to struggling weakly in a desperate effort to see behind him. He could hear his own blood dripping to the dirt road bellow.

"Ignore the twerp."

"Very well sir. Ten seconds to porting." something made a whirring noise. That got Timmy scrambling even harder.

"What do you think your doing!? You can't teleport here!"

"Oh shut up, human! Just because you don't possess our society's more convenient devices doesn't mean such things don't exist." the wolf snapped.

"That's not what I'm talking about! I mean you can't telep- ..."

"Shake him please" the wolf asked of the jelly thing, and thus Timmy was cut off by a rapid up and down motion.

'What are these idiots thinking!' Timmy mused, this was even more terrifying than if they were deliberately trying to kill him. The boy didn't pay much attention in school, but knew enough to know there plenty of good reasons people walked rather than ported throughout the Skylar system. The megelostructure wasn't set up in a way to allow conversion type transport. Unable to move effectively, unable to fight effectively, and facing what would most certainly be a painful experience comparable only to being shoved through a meat grinder, the boy did the only thing he could think of.

"HELP!" he screamed bloody murder. The city was so close, just so close. Someone had to hear him, right? No matter how much of a long-shot that was there was bound to be someone with super-hearing and a desire to play the hero. Calls for distress in a city full of Travelers always got attention. The only variable was how long it would take ...

"Someone shut the twerp up"

"I don't think I can, he's bleeding too much. What do I do if some splashes on me again?"

"Oh never mind, three seconds to port" the wolf answered. And then it flashed ... a bright, horrible light spreading out from somewhere out of sight that spread from the jelly thing to Timmy, and then to the wolf. How a light could feel sticky was something few people want to answer from first hand experience, it soaked into the skin and clothing as it spread, if forced it's way deep into the muscle and sinew, the light didn't seem content until it could concentrate itself into Timmy's bones with a vice-like grip. He could no longer see clearly, his lungs and heart couldn't seem to expand or contract as they should, his hearing was shot, and he couldn't smell anything past the tickling of a strange goop soaking into his nose-hairs.

Next came the sudden vertigo, a lurching feeling as he and his captors went from a standstill to near the speed of light. His body parts twisted and folded under the force, he could feel his arms circling around behind his back, the fingers stretching out like putty and pushing through his spine towards his chest. His lungs would flatten out at times only to reform in awkward, unwieldy shapes that didn't match with the rib cage they were supposed to fit into. His feet twisted into tight little knots, his spleen and liver felt like they were drifting off at random ... the human hoped to all the gods in heaven that he could forget where his anus ended up.

Teleportation was by nature unpleasant. One method involved vaporizing the original, transmitting the remains through either normal space or a singularity to their designated destination, then reforming a new individual as close to the original as possible before the plasma has time to cool. The pain is brief, and you aren't aware of anything during transit, but that's only because your dead. This was the other form of teleportation, which involved breaking a hole in the universe and shoving the occupants through it. It's disorienting sure, but actually a pretty effective means of travel from one planet to another within the same system without the complete temporal distortion that's required for moving a vast spaceship across galaxies.

SMASH! The 'ride' came to an abrupt halt, Timmy felt all of his organs, bones, and muscle snap back into proper alignment as he returned to normal space, only to have every miniscule amount of elation vanish with the feeling of vertigo.

The tentacle's lost their hold, Timmy saw a bright blue sky, the shadow of the nearest planet in the distance, and the bright yellow light from Central spinning around his line of view. His arms and legs flailed uselessly at empty air, he tried to spin to at least land on his feet, but failing at that the next best thing to do is curl up and brace for impact.

Oomph! He landed hard, but at least this time it was on dirt. Sweet, huggable, dirt. Never mind that it mixed into his wounds and stung on his raw skin, at least this stuff was real. He heard a soft 'splat' as the jelly thing landed, then a 'wump' similar to Timmy's own crash as the wolf scrambled to his feet. Everyone stood up to look around, but Timmy already knew they were at the border. Only question was: which one? There were trees, the lining of a thin, deciduous forest with very little underbrush several yards away. The dusty, dirt covered area everyone was struggling to get up in looked like a vast clearing. No paths, no markers, nothing noticeably close in three directions to get one's bearings from ... but that forth direction, Timmy turned around to stare, was unforgettable.

Fear. That's what people are most likely to feel when the world just seems to end. The ground looked nice and solid, perfectly normal and stable, but three yards away from where the boy landed the ground just stopped. A massive, unending cliff face that went on and on in each direction, no clear way down, nothing jagged or sharp ... it was just a sheer drop strait down, too far down to see. Looking across, past the dizzying heights of an impossibly steep cliff, he could see the grey, blurry images of the next band down. A clear line in the vast distance cut through part of the grey, but nothing was really distinguishable.

'This is the next band over' Timmy's body trembled. He knew right where he was, he knew exactly what he was looking at, and he hated every moment of it. 'This is the drop-off ... I can see the next PD over, I can even see the drop-off of that PD and the one beyond that. Oh Fell ... if I fell down there I'd be falling the entire length of a planet! I'd burn up in reentry.'

The boy tried to take a few steps back, only to fall over and scramble on his hands and knees. There was supposed to be some sort of force field holding everything in place, the filter that marks the edge of a Cat-box's control. Complete with every startling implication that held.

"What the hell happened, this isn't Galma? I thought you said you knew how to dial in the coordinates." the wolf shouted in a mix of fear and anger. Mostly anger

"I don't ... what did happen?"

Timmy scrambled to get up, winced visibly at the small pool of blood he was leaving and how his arms kept threatening to collapse on him. "What the Fell are you two morons trying to do?!" but even as he spoke, he was forced to cough out blood. 'Oh frap, what if my organs were messed up during travel?'

"I'm not the moron here, now shut up and lets try this again" the wolf growled before taking a few shaky steps toward the blood soaked child. All of Timmy's cuts were minor, thinner and finer than paper-cuts ... but if you have enough of them enough paper-cuts can bleed you out. Timmy wasn't going to move fast enough to resist.

The child felt rough, fuzzy hands tightening around his shoulder, and then his neck. He felt the panic involved when someone twice your size, standing next to a cliff face, decides to lift you off the security of solid ground under your feet. The boy stared into the wolf's eyes, shivered at the sight of it's long, ridiculously long fangs. But then he turned, brought Timmy's back to the wolf's chest with one arm abound the boy's neck. His other arm was now free to manipulate something unseen in the palm of his fuzz covered paws.

'I'm not going to teleport again, these guys are just going to bounce off the filter like crazy balls before they realize the only way out of here is to walk. Oh Frap ... oh Fell this guy's teeth are so close to my neck. Those long, sharp teeth ...' then it dawned on him 'Long, ridiculously long teeth. This guy's an anthro, not a human, so his body is designed more like a wolf. Wolfs don't fight head to head, or toe to toe like the great apes, they either rush in for a weak area and wait for the prey to bleed out or they form a pack, latch onto the prey, and try to snap the neck before it can really fight back.'

The wolf started to drag Timmy closer and closer to the jelly thing, they needed to be together before they ported. It was interesting just how much slower the wolf moved on a broken leg ... foot really.

'Humans and tigers don't have long fangs for a reason, we fight through impact, sheer muscle and force. The longer a tooth is, the more fragile it becomes and the more likely it will shatter' the boy reminded himself as he gathered up strength.

"Now that I'm setting the coordinates we won't mess up again. Get your slimy tentacles off me! We need to be close, not touching"

"I assure you good sir, I do not exude nearly as much ... slime ... as you two are. To think that there could be so much red goop contained within your shell. What possible purpose could such a fluid serve?"

"I'll tell you about it later dipstick, for now let's ... mrmaaph!" the wolf was cut off as the back of Timmy's skull leaned forward, then slammed hard into his elongated jaw mid-sentence. A flat face would have handled the impact well, but the wolf's jaw extended farther than his forehead and was already weakened by falling on it when he tripped. The wolf's front teeth crumpled and shattered under the impact, teeth a few rows back were knocked out of the gum line, and most of the rest of his fangs were knocked out of alignment.

Cringing at the pain in the back of his head, Timmy made sure not to waste this moment. He slammed his sharp elbow into the wolf's ribs, he swung his dangling feet around to stomp on the wolf's knee, he punched, he bit, he ... fell. The wolf staggered back leaving Timmy to fall face-first into the dirt, ever so close to that drop-off!

"Fragile. That's what you call things that didn't evolve naturally" Timmy taunted while scrambling to put some distance between himself and sudden death. He was well aware that what he said wasn't necessarily true, Warmachines were incredibly powerful and were as far away from natural evolution as one could get. But that still didn't make up for the wolf's anatomical shortcomings, whoever made his race could not have been Earth-force military.

"As if your evolution on that death-trap of a planet you call Earth could be considered natural" the jelly monster reached two of it's tentacles out to wrap around Timmy's feet while a third aimed the bubble-gun at the boy's face.

Timmy twisted onto his back, reached up to grab the gun, then pulled it free of the tentacle just the flat portion on the end started to glow. Once there was nothing holding down the trigger the glow died back down. He was surprised at how easy it was to snatch the gun away, but then none of those tentacles had fingers so it must have been hard to grip.

"Wha! No!" the thing screamed, redoubling it's efforts to restrain the small human child. More of it's tentacles wrapped around his legs, the rest shot around to entangle him wherever he wasn't bleeding. Timmy blinked as he felt a soft hissing sound, and the creature retracted two of it's tentacles while screeching in pain.

"Heh ... guess blood drips" the boy muttered while swinging the gun around to bear. It stung a lot on multi-celled organisms, but against this guy it should be lethal. 'That was what he said, right?'

The jelly filled dildo monster lifted Timmy off the ground and tried to hold his arms to the side, but they seemed to be struggling against even his feeble strength. Slowly, he was winning. A bit at a time, Timmy's struggles caused more and more blood to flow from thousands of tiny cuts across his chest, arms and back that made more and more tentacles retreat. He started to aim, he could see part of the gun glow as his finger pressed into the trigger mechanism on the back.

Then the world suddenly shot forward! Just before the bubbles could shoot out the alien slammed him into the ground. Timmy screamed, lost hold of the gun, and watched as it fired uselessly into a nearby tree. The same bright light flashed as each bubble popped in a dazzling display of vaporizing bark, and as soon as it was over the tree had a plate sized circle that looked as if it were scrapped raw.

The wolf started to recover from the blows Timmy had dealt him, he was barely standing, limping over to the jelly monster, while two of his hands pressed tightly into his battered muzzle. He looked like he was either trying to stop the bleeding, trying to keep the rest of his teeth from falling out, trying to keep his jaw from falling off, or some combination of the above. Needless to say the wolf was going to have trouble talking for a while.

But he was still getting closer, and Timmy knew he was unarmed, pinned down, and in direct contact with mister jelly. As soon as they were close enough he'd have no way to avoid being taken with them, and he was dead certain these two off-worlders didn't even know the danger they were getting into.

'I've got to think fast' he struggled against his constraints, the wolf was so close now! 'What can I ... aha!' the boy opened his mouth, placed one tentacle between his teeth, and bit down. The results were immediate.

"WAAaaaa!" the jelly alien retracted all of it's appendages but the one Timmy had his spit covered teeth around. That one just didn't seem to come loose no matter how much the alien pulled. Timmy felt himself lifted off the ground, then swung around in midair as the jelly monster flung it's tentacle around madly, all the while it's screaming never died down. "Getitofme!Getitoffme! Ahhhh!"

Timmy bit down harder and brought his arms around to hold on tighter as the rapid spinning, twirling motions started to make him feel sick.

"I'm being eaten by a human! Help! Help! Someone help!" the alien screamed ... up until it's tentacle ripped out of it's proper socket, with both the appendage and Timmy sent sailing into the air.

At first Timmy felt this was a good thing, the fall to the ground would hurt but at least it would put some distance between him and those other two. Heck, if he caused enough damage they might even leave him alone. Right? But relief moved rapidly to panic as he saw the ground switch from a few yards down, to several miles down.

His eyes went wide with shock, his arms flailed in panic, he spit out the tentacle in his mouth so he could scream properly. He'd just been thrown off the cliff, and left to fall down the entire length of a planet.

THUD!

'That was a short fall' Timmy thought to himself after splating into something hard, but solid. He heard a faint buzzing noise at his hands, knees and feet, which in tern made him curious enough to look.

"It ate my arm! That human ate my arm! Ahhhh!" the jelly thing screeched in a mixture of pain and terror as it looked across to Timmy, floating in midair.

'What the Fell' Timmy wondered, there was a small, glowing platform that matched the shape of his hands and feet, supporting him completely level to the ground he could no longer reach. He could still see the impossible drop so, so very far down, but what was holding him up felt solid enough. 'A safeguard or something?' the boy mused. 'I wonder how far out it goes.'

The wolf mumbled something past it's broken jaw, held up something small, silver and shiny in the center of it's palm, then pointing out to Timmy.

"Wh-wh ... you still want to catch that thing? No. No ... I say we leave right now, humans are dangerous. Too dangerous. Even a weak, civilized one that's never seen space travel in it's life is too much. Ju-just forget about exterminating the fighters. It's not worth it!" the jelly monster seemed to be in panic. When the wolf objected, it snatched the teleporter forcibly, wrapped one tentacle around the wolf's abdomen, and pressed into the silvery device with another tentacle.

'Why didn't I see that thing before?' Timmy wondered as a glowing light surrounded and soaked into his attackers, the seconds counting down until a big enough hole in existence for them to fit through could form. Timmy took this time to examine what was under his bare feet. Some sort of force field for sure, the pale, glowing light that was roughly the shape of a foot wasn't attached to anything and felt too smooth to be plastic, or some metal. He lifted one foot up and watched as the platform vanished, leaving him to float in midair on just one leg. 'Uh-oh'

The boy looked worried as he brought his foot closer to the empty air before him. Cautiously, slowly. But as soon as his foot was level with the distant ground another yellow platform appeared out of nowhere to support him. The boy smiled and lifted up his other foot to take a step. 'This should be easy.'

POP! The two alien attackers vanished from where they were, an explosion of light appeared some distance from far above and behind Timmy, much like those same bubbles from the gun they'd left behind, only after they popped one could see the battered and bleeding form of the wolf and jelly monster falling. They landed with a 'plop' level with the ground, level with Timmy, and everyone blinked as more and more yellow, glowing platforms appeared to hold up not only the people, but the bodily fluids that kept dripping around them.

"Smacked into the filter again, didn't you" Timmy taunted while slowly taking a step towards the ground and the gun. If he could get to that, then he'd be in a serious position of power. But he didn't trust this glowing, invisible-until-you-step-on-it ground enough to run.

"Wha ... but how did ... gah! Keep away from that!" the confused, now panicked jelly monster screamed as it scrambled forward through empty air to intercept Timmy. Worse, the wolf was recovering and not willing to stand defeat this time. He used one paw to cover his muzzle and rushed (or rather limped) forward on three legs, all the while moaning as he forced himself through the nerve-racking pain of using his broken leg for speed.

Timmy blinked as he saw this turning into a race, he sidestepped to avoid one of the jelly thing's outstretched tentacles, only to glare and stomp on it after the thing missed.

Nab! The wolf slid across the floating platforms that formed where he landed and stayed to hold up a sickening trail of blood. Just how much more could everyone loose? Timmy felt it was starting to get ridiculous, one of the two should have long sense passed out by now. But then again, Timmy's wounds were all minor. Very minor. And the wolf's major wound, his face, was only recent. So while there was plenty of blood spread out over a wide area, neither had actually lost a great deal throughout the fighting.

But now the wolf had the gun in paw, and Timmy was too far away to do anything. If it hit, it might not kill him outright, but it would still send him flying and open up even more little paper-cuts all across his skin. Unless ... if it hit where the skin was already half vaporized, it might go through more layers of cells to tear out parts of his muscle, or rip through blood vessels. Timmy was now more scared of that wolf than he was about that bottomless drop to an unseen, grey colored ground bellow.

The wolf smiled as he was sure of his victory, an awful, disgusting smile male all the more morbid by the fact his face was gushing red ooze and looked like it was falling apart at the seams. He raised his shaking hands to aim at Timmy, he glared to the tentacle monster while making blurbing, pained noises through his shattered jaw ... all three were distracted by a beeping, and turned to look.

The yellow platform holding up the jelly monster's detached tentacle switched from yellow to blue, and the light dimmed. All three watched closely as their minds worked feverishly to solve the little puzzle, but the beeping happened again and the platform went from a dull blue, to a transparent red. They could see through the platform now, like a painted glass or a ghost who got tired of the usual white. The platform beeped one final time, and then the tentacle dropped, vanishing from view.

Timmy looked to the jelly monster, who in tern looked to the wolf, who in tern looked back to Timmy. All of them processing what just happened and filing it away for future use. Then the yellow platform holding up all of the human and the alien, but part of the wolf, started beeping and turned a dull shade of blue. All thoughts of combat were forgotten, all three of them suddenly felt getting back onto solid ground was a higher priority. Timmy and the jelly monster raced each other, the wolf spun around to his belly and started to crawl his much shorter distance.

The floating platforms beeped again, then turned red and semi-transparent. Timmy was in panic, but the jelly monster just reached for his teleporter and started to dial something in. the alien was too far away to reach the ground, but his survival chance was much better. The wolf seemed pretty cocky about his position as he started to drag his feet across. A yellow light flowed around, and sunk into the jelly dildo monster's body as teleportation began. The platforms beeped.

Just like that the race was over, Timmy saw all of the nearby pools of blood slip down and vanish. He saw the wolf scramble to hold onto the cliff face as nothing was supporting the lower half of his body, only to fail miserably and slide down. Then it all started moving fast ... fast was the only word for it.

'Oh Fell, oh Fell ... wait, Frap! I'm using Fell's name in vein, but this is exactly what happened to him!' Timmy screamed inwardly, he was much too tired to do it outwardly. He felt overwhelmed by vertigo, he was having trouble seeing past the violently turbulent wind rushing up from under his feet. The air was moving so fast it stung on his chest and back where the skin was scraped raw. Timmy could see both his and the wolf's blood falling around him in a decidedly pretty display, whole puddles formed into individual drops and just hovered relative to Timmy's position. The scariest part, aside from knowing he'd die long before he could reach the southern band he was going to land on, was the cliff face. The wall that he'd thought of as the "drop-off" from his band was the cliff for this band. As he fell towards the next band of dirt, the wall of it he'd been standing on his entire life rushed past at dizzying speeds.

As it turns out, the wolf was in a much worse position than Timmy was. The wolf was right next to the wall when he fell, literally clutching dirt in his paws to try and pull his way up. His paws were the first to go, scrapped warm, then scraped off entirely in a horrendously bloody display that painted gory little lines on the dirt wall and sent finger bones and bits of fur into the air surrounding him. But his body was slowly sliding closer to the wall ... the wolf panicked, or rather he panicked even more-so than he would have thought possible.

The wolf's end was not swift, nor was it painless, as he felt himself rammed into the solid cliff face and pulled down by gravity at terrifying speeds. The fur, and the rest of the skin on his chest scrapped off and fell through the air like shrapnel. Bits of bone from his rib cage were either ground into powder, or snapped off in large chunks and sent spinning to either side. Parts of the wolf's lungs were ripped out, the outer layer of his heart was scraped off so that any blood it pumped was just sent strait into the air, only to mix with the pretty, sparkling globs that had already cooled and settled like rain.

He bounced off ... as horrifying as all of that was, the wolf was still alive when he bounced off. It's like the wall was teasing him! Timmy thought as he was forced to watch a scene more terrible than anything they might put on Roda's dinner pizza. The limp, gushing body spun around and twisted through the air. Wind ruffled the creature's fur, his tail trailed around like a tiny streamer.

'Why the Fell wasn't he screaming!' Timmy wondered, looking up. Looking away. Looking at anything but the fountain of blood rushing forwarth from a mangled body. Timmy could see the jelly monster far above him vanish in a flash of light. Timmy could see that the ground he'd fallen from was now too far away to see clearly. Timmy could see nightfall creep it's way across the next band down as an overhead planet cast it's shadow. He could see the light from central glinting off of ...

"Oh Fell ..." Timmy cursed. The light was glinting off of globs of blood. Who's exactly was hard to tell, but most of it was the wolf's. Timmy forced his head to turn and look at the battered, fuzz covered body now soaked in red. 'He isn't screaming because he can't. I broke his mouth, and now the guy's lungs are gone. A healer could probably fix that. A necromancer could work wonders ... there are a few medical techs that could save this guy so long as the tell which parts are his. But gah! There isn't anything anyone can do until we Frappin land!' Timmy cringed as the body flipped head over heals.

He saw into the wolf's eyes, he saw the complete and utter horror it was feeling, mixed with rage as if this was all somehow Timmy's fault. The wolf was upside down when the wall seemed to shift closer and closer. It really did look as if it were toying with it's helpless prey, but the wall couldn't possibly be alive.

Crunch! The wolf's tail scraped into the cliff face, fallowed shortly by his spine and an audible crunching noise as the spine snapped. The body twisted in half so that it's face was near it's feet and bits of the spinal column were floating out, only to have all of it scrapped clean, splattered out in all directions, and ultimately liquefied. Individual body parts broke off from the main body and tumbled around through a sea of floating (falling) blood, organs, and entrails. The heart was ripped open into multiple flaps of twitching muscle, the skull was cracked, shattered into several pointy little shards. The legs, the arms, those were tossed into the mix to soak with what now closely resembled a wall of blood.

As the whole thing fell the glob separated, the mass started to dilute, and what was once a single sheet of bodily fluids spread out into dazzlingly brilliant drops of the prettiest dark red one could ever see.

If Timmy hadn't eaten so little, been so dizzy, or been so tired from this whole ordeal, he would have puked. Not that adding puke to the mix would make any of this better.

"FELL!" Timmy screamed out his curse, having just witnessed a death so excruciatingly painful demons and soulless humans would have applauded. The wind was whipping as his ears too swiftly for him to hear his own voice, but just the act of cursing was helping him get through some of his panic. He tried not to look at a swirling eyeball as it fell through the air with him.

The ground was still too far down to see clearly. That wasn't a surprise, but the fact he could no longer see the ground level of his own band was. That certainly didn't take long. Throughout his entire view all Timmy could see was the flat, brown colored dirt wall to his left or right, or the vast grey expanse that would surely separate into individual colors as Timmy got closer to it. The boy braved looking behind him into the cloud of sparkling drops of blood, only to shriek and clutch for his own heart.

"No, no! NO!" the wall was closer to him now than when he last checked, it was even pushing into some of the blood and body parts that had fallen off. Timmy's eyes started to water, but the tears just floated above his head and mixed with the shiny beads of blood rather than running down his cheeks.

'No, it couldn't be getting closer, I can fall down in a strait line and be completely uninterrupted. Right?' the human tried to delude his own thinking. This was one situation where understanding all of the physics involved with your demise wasn't going to make you fell any better about it. 'Oh Frap, oh Frap ... this isn't what happened to Fell, legend has it that Fell drifted off into space. No ground bellow him yet, no gravity or centrifugal force in place, he just kept on falling until he was out of atmosphere and into the icy cold, soul sucking void.'

The wall crept closer and closer, lumping Timmy in with thicker and thicker pools of the wolf's blood. He felt something soft and spongy bump into his bare foot and immediately kicked it away. 'Come to think of it, rapid decompression sounds a lot more appealing than what happened to this guy'

Timmy shuddered as the cliff face kept coming closer and closer.

"No! I'm n-not goi- ... *cough* no I'm ... *spit*" his yelling became internal dialog as he started to choke on the wolf's blood. But then, drowning sounds a lot nicer than being scrapped apart by gravity too. 'No! I'm not going out like this, I've got to fight it. Got to get away'

The boy was determined, panicked, and crying like the small child he really was. His arms and legs kicked and flailed madly, he tried to swim away by pumping his arms and flapping like a bird. Even splashing through the sparkling globs of blood if they could give him any traction at all, just something to push against without scraping his hands off trying to grab the cliff. Nothing worked.

'Oh no, oh please no.' the boy whimpered as the wall kept pushing closer. He closed his eyes and waited for the worst, waited to feel pain and torment on a completely new level. 'This has got to be the worst day of my life!'

The dirt from the cliff face closed in. Timmy found time to scream.

__________

Roda smiled to herself at the pleasant, crisp air the forest gave off. So much different from the city, and not quite as stuffy as in her safe little burrow, but still offering plenty of unnecessary cover. Roda knew that the open sky wasn't anything to fear. Logically she knew not to be afraid of wide open spaces or lack of cover. But deep inside, even if there wasn't any bird around here big enough to carry her off, she was glad to have something she could rush to and hide under should the time come.

Her long, skinny tail twitched as it trailed behind her, her short, cut off jeans rubbed lightly as she walked. She had a blue, frilly jacket to match the jeans and a thin, revealing tank top to cover her chest, boobs and belly. Her thighs were somewhat exposed, which she felt was natural given that she grew up where clothing was either armor, or not used at all. The pockets in her jacket were bulging, clearly full of something.

Her padded, brown furred feet could feel the smooth crunching of dust and dirt as she walked through the beaten path towards Timmy's school. At least she thought it was the right path. And oh what a noticeable difference this was from the cement and blacktop of the city! This was the sort of path that reminded her of home, a place where the sword and arrow ruled, while mages and spells were the force of change. Prey was plentiful there ... if only she weren't too scared to eat it.

"I think this is far enough away from anyone it might offend" Timmy spoke aloud while reaching into her pocket to pull out a chunk of meat wrapped in tinfoil. She glanced to her left and right to make sure no one else was around, she sniffed the air herself and twitched her whiskers to make sure there wasn't any wind that might blow the smells toward the city streets. Her large, oversized ears turned and twitched to try and listen for anyone nearby breathing. Nothing.

She could eat in peace.

The almost four foot tall mouse girl unwrapped the tin foil of her meal and smiled in delight at the green and brown slop of decaying muscle that shone through. The bones were more black than white with mold, what had once been blood was long ago converted into an awful sludge that soaked in with the rest of the flesh. As she grabbed it with one paw to pull out chunks, she marveled at her luck in gathering such a delicious meal for breakfast. The bits of old flesh weren't just falling off the bone, the bone itself was sagging and squishing.

She poked the tidbit into her mouth, bit down with her grossly oversized front teeth while keeping the whole mess hidden away by flexible lips, and giggled like a child with a brand new toy when a warm, seeping puss spread out from the marrow and coated her taste buds.

Most people couldn't appreciate a fine meal such as this, only scavengers seemed to tolerate it while her kind evolved specifically to seek to it out. That's part of what comes with being a Maggot-mouse, even if the name needs work.

'I think maggots are the only toping that could possibly make this taste better' she thought to herself while swallowing the sloppy mush. She wondered how long this meal would last her, then how long it would take her to make it to Timmy's school.

'I don't want to show up smelling so bad everyone else pukes. Hmm, and I certainly don't want to save this and risk scaring everyone shitless ... ew ... puking would be better, emptied stomach is better than emptied bowels.' she contemplated. 'So, as delicious and well aged as this is, it's my civic duty to make sure no human is offended by it's mere presence.'

The mouse girl smiled widely as she shoved the whole meal, all of it, into her mouth and swallowed it down. Bones would be easy to digest and the putrid, liquefying flesh was perfect for washing it all down, but the tin foil still smelled as sweet and appetizing as ever. If she liked the way it smelled, then any humans she came across would most likely hate it, so Roda took it upon herself to lick it until it smelled more like rodent slobber than human remains.

Next she needed to wash her hands. The girl lathered up a nice ball of fresh spit in her mouth, slowly licked across her forearm, then up to her palm, ending with sticking the whole thing into her rather wide mouth. She lathered and rubbed, working in between the fingers and getting anything tasty out of her fur, then moved onto her other hand while the first one started rubbing her cheeks. Why waste the spit?

As soon as she was all clean she needed to wait until her hands dried ... which took longer than she wanted. But once she felt they were dry enough she crumpled up the tin foil, placed it back into her pocket, then pulled out a slip of paper advertising the school Timmy goes to most every day. It didn't look bad in the pictures, all happy kids and bright colorful playgrounds. All it would talk about is how they make the world a better place for the next generation and the many ways they educate human children about the skylar system and the history of human interaction throughout the Mergers galaxy.

'That is a long history' Roda whistled as she read on about how this school classifies 'human' as anything not overtly anthropomorphic. Individual body parts from other creatures on a mostly human body was acceptable, slight deformities or physical and mental abnormalities were expected on a hub world, but anything that was clearly distinguishable from a human or belonging to another race was no allowed. That meant Roda, as an anthro mouse, who's distant ancestors retained their mouse-like internal biology and behavioral patterns even after they were modified into large bipeds, would not have been allowed to take class here.

'I'm too old for anyway, I'm ten! I'm not a little child that needs schooling.' but as she thought that, something ahead smelled ... well, awful. She tried to put it out of her mind. 'I have to wonder why they went with general appearance. Was it so that the children wouldn't form into neat little prejudices with easy to distinguish characteristics? No, that's silly ... even if they were all clones who looked and thought the same way, so long as their human they'd try to place everyone into categories based on easy to decide factors. They'd set up social structures based on what foot a person first uses to walk with if anyone gave them the chance.'

The smell was getting worse, but Roda did her best to ignore it. 'Timmy doesn't like this place. Based on the information pamphlet that seems odd. True, Timmy's pretty odd as well, but in a good way.' she sighed. 'It would help if I had a frame of reference for what school was, I grew up in a tribal community that traveled and taught it's children on the go. My only schooling was which part of the monster to bite first, and which end of the sword is the pointy one. True, those are important lessons, but no one ever forcibly crammed the insane amounts of Intel human children are forced to process. Well, humans and furs ... their supposed to be the same thing'

The smell was suddenly unbearable, Roda tore through the pamphlet by accident as the awful stench made her tighten her grip. She slipped it back into her pocket and tried to identify a putrid, lingering trail of molecules that made her want to puke up her favorite meal. A horrible feeling really, considering Roda wasn't physically capable of regurgitating anything she swallowed.

"What is that?" she asked aloud before looking down to a bright, glistening glob of red in the middle of the walkway. "Fresh ... fresh blood?" she put a hand over her mouth.

"Ugh! That's disgusting, I don't know how predators handle that kind of stench" she felt it needed to wait a little. Put some black mold around it, mix in it with week old puss, keep it locked up tight within a shriveled up bag of skin and let it marinate in itself, sure then it would be appetizing. But fresh and wet? Roda rushed forward to get away from it. Vampires may love the stuff, carnivores might live for it, but Maggot-mice knew that when the undead you bite into starts bleeding fresh, red blood you've got the wrong undead.

She kept running until the dirt path thinned out and she could see the top of some building over the trees in the distance. 'Not too long now' she mused. Taking out the paper once more to read things over, never giving a second thought to the blood stains in the road. That was just something messy for a janitor or a scavenger to clean up.

"When I see Timmy, I think I'll ask him how his day went. Mine is going pretty good."