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_Been an interesting few weeks. Rainfurrest 0 was a big success; much love to the staff and to all the furs who came out. Finally got a moment from my work backlog to polish and post this.

No real yiff in it, but lots of love, cuddling, and of course, strangeness. At this point the story is in control of me and not the other way around, so I just have to let it go where it wants :)

-Lemnwezel_

Eva lay sleeping on her side in the warm carpet of the dark room, her arm now draped around her fox Jeff, who in turn had his arm around Tabatha. On another carpet nearby, the little tabby cat Dani was snoozing in contented bliss beside Pete.

Eva shivered slightly in her dream, where the impact of water cascading down a rocky, mossy waterfall a short distance away cast a fine mist upon her silvery white fur. She was watching Jeff treading water in the pond below the waterfall, taking in the beauty of the area. She darted through the tall, dense strands of fern growing between ancient oak trees surrounding the pond to dive in after him. She then chased him around playfully, splashing water on him, and tugging gently on his wet but still remarkably floofy tail. After they got a little tired, she snuggled him tightly as they floated along the surface of the deep, clear water. She could feel her heart beat strongly in contentment and love for her fox, as their muzzles met in a long, passionate kiss. The mist came down around them like a very gentle rain, perturbing the glassy, rippling surface of the pond.

A large drop of water hitting her muzzle roused the large dog from her dream, and the first thing she noticed was that there really was water raining down on them. She shook her head carefully to get rid of the excess water without waking the others, and when she opened her eyes she saw the room bathed in an dim, wavering green glow. It appeared to be cast by many swarms of fireflies quite close to the wall.

After she focused a little harder, she noticed the swarms were actually outside the wall. Their light was shining through the clear walls of the room, distorted by the water droplets clinging to the wall.

No trace of the recent cake explosion remained, and from what she could see by the fireflies' glow, her fur was spotless.

Periodically the swarms would tighten their formations, spinning inwards like a collapsing spiral galaxy, until for one brief instant they were joined together in a web of electrical sparks that sent them spiraling apart again.

"This, " she thought to herself, "is something Jeff would probably want to see."

She rubbed Jeff's side and nibbled his ear, whispering his name softly. Jeff opened his eyes briefly, muttered something incomprehensible, shook the warm mist from his ears, and then snuggled back up against Eva and gave Tabatha a quick hug before going back to sleep.

Eva sighed and kissed the back of his head, watching the strange light swarms for a bit more before going back to sleep herself. Whatever it was, she decided, didn't seem to be harmful, and Jeff didn't seem to be bothered by it, so she decided to ask about it later when everyone was awake.

Jeff's dreams carried him back into his machine world he'd invented as a young child, where he would carry on long conversations with microwave ovens and toasters, and play games with a sentient ironing board, in a house all to himself that no one could get to but him. It had been a long time since he'd visited this place in his mind, but it was all still as clear and vivid to him now as it was as so long ago.

He sat on a couch and stared out the window at the stark desert landscape, amidst myriad clockwork creatures engaged in a great number of different activities. Despite all their movement and action, Jeff now felt a loneliness in his machine world he'd never felt before. He pondered what it was about the feel of another individual's close presence he could no longer live without. Being a social creature by design perhaps made it inevitable that he'd eventually been forced to choose between getting along with people and giving up some of his concentration to their chaos, or becoming completely dysfunctional in society and utterly lost within his own mind.

Suddenly Opie came charging through the front door, nearly knocking the door off the hinges of his dream house, clicking loudly and trembling. All the busy automatons fell still and silent, and a primal terror began creeping into Jeff as he watched the ostrich collapse in a heap and hide his head under the couch. Through the silence, Jeff began to hear a distant, rhythmic sound, as of someone or something beating heavily on hard earth. He rose slowly to his feet, walked very quietly over to the window, and looked down the road. Nothing out of the ordinary was visible, just the standard Joshua trees and dry, dense underbrush. Jeff noticed something very large and dark moving in his peripheral vision to his left, and he froze. Something was right in front of the house just to the left of the window, and as it moved silently into view adrenaline began to fill Jeff's veins. Whatever it was had many limbs and moved with some of them like an insect. But the other limbs had horrific looking devices on their ends; some were covered with thousands of razor blade-like projections, while others had blunt clubs or spears.

Where it would seem its head would be there was only a dark circular maw, surrounded by a dense mass of tendrils resembling barbed wire tipped with heavy, metallic balls. It rose slowly now, turning to face Jeff, it's maw-tendrils rubbing and scraping sharply against the window in the process.

Jeff noticed he was trying to scream, but couldn't. He was staring at an immense machine whose only conceivable purpose was to violently destroy. It was unimaginably black, like the darkness of a deep cave somehow polished to a mirror finish. It silently reared back, then in a smooth motion rammed its maw and tendrils through the window...

Suddenly he was wide awake, trembling slightly, and gasping for air. This woke the ever-alert Eva, who held her fox tight as he tried to actually crawl underneath her. Tabatha was unperturbed by this, snoring a bit very softly, and still seemed to have an appreciable smile on her short snout from the night's activities.

"Bad dream," Jeff finally whispered to Eva, who nodded and pet his soft, damp fur in response.

There was something very strange about this room, Eva decided. It was as if it wasn't entirely connected to reality, and that the dream world, even in a waking state, was not very far away. The mysterious fireflies outside the wall were still at it, swirling within their small groups, then swirling around other groups, collapsing, sparking, and expanding.

Along the floor on the other side of the table, nestled snugly against the tiger, Dani was caught in a dream as well. He was standing in a field of tall prairie grass, punctuated with white and gold daffodils. Dani leaned into a mild wind, the gusts of which were causing the flowers and grasses to sway in wave-like ripples. Looking above him, he saw icy cirrus clouds streaking across a starkly clear sky, their every sharp wisp plainly visible to him far below. Filled with a sense of inner peace, he rolled about in the field, enjoying the feeling of green life brushing against him, and playing with his tail.

In one particularly dense strand of grass he rolled over something soft, but definitely not a plant. Digging through the grass, he found it was a cute brown teddy bear, looking very tidy and new despite being outside. Smiling, he picked up the bear and gave it a big hug, and then laid down on the soft grass while still clutching it tightly to his chest.

A few moments later, the sky seemed to darken as if thick clouds had suddenly rolled in. He looked up from the bear in his arms to the sky, and noticed it was obscured not by clouds, but by a very large teddy bear.

Before the little cat could react, the bear scooped him up and held him in his arms. The circularity of the whole situation made Dani's mind tickle, so he simply smiled and hugged back at the huge bear while still holding on to the small one.

The big bear carried him lightly across the field, and from his vantage point Dani could see the green meadows extending for miles around.

"It's been awhile since I've seen you, Dani. You've grown quite a bit, and I'm glad to see you've not abandoned me or my kind. How have you been?" the bear asked.

"Eating Popsicles and helping out around the tavern and the stables. I couldn't be happier!" Dani beamed.

"That's nice. You haven't gone outside at night have you?" the bear asked, sounding very concerned.

"Nope," Dani responded, "I know better than that. I... hear it sometimes, or at least I think I do. "

"That's a good kitty," the bear responded, setting Dani carefully down in a field of brilliant orange and red poppies.

"Your guests tonight are very special, Dani, " the big bear whispered to him as his form began to change, becoming smaller and translucent, "you should help them in any way you can."

Dani nodded while watching the big bear become almost crystalline; its vaguely defined surface now containing nothing within it but tiny, blinking green lights.

"And do not underestimate their ostrich. While he may be a simple creature, he is also unique here, and there are things about this world and its creatures that only he can understand, or even sense. Be safe, Dani."

And with that, the bear disappeared, and the dream itself along with him. Dani faded contentedly back into a light sleep.

Tabatha's legs twitched slightly, brushing up against the soft blanket she was sleeping on. She too had been brought to the dream world, where she was standing on a longboard, surfing a 60 foot wave of liquid methane on an unimaginably cold, distant moon. Much like Jeff and his companions, Tabatha was not from around here.

The mechanical exoskeleton she wore responded to every twitch of her muscle, strengthening them as necessary, as she shifted towards the wave crest and then back down. A gas giant planet filled most of the sky above; storms that had been raging furiously for centuries clearly visible from the moon on whose unimaginably cold liquid surface Tabatha guided her surfboard. Thousands of stars shone between the planet and the horizon through the moon's thin atmosphere.

As she surged with and slided along the wave's surface, the inexplicable primal pleasure of the dance filled her being to the very core. She couldn't understand why it felt so good; it didn't seem to have any basis in evolution. She was simply providing the coefficients, with her body movement and positioning, to balance a very chaotic equation.

Her parents had paid for this little outing, as they tried hard to compensate for her lack of friends by providing her with such activities. The euphoria of such things always helped her forget, at least for a while.

As the wave broke up, she tumbled onto an artificial island. Her exoskeleton, the low gravity, and the specially designed island made the fall fairly gentle. She got up, grabbed her board, and walked up to just above the line of the tide. A short distance further up her ship hovered, awaiting her return. She pondered her ship, and her home planet, and her isolation. It all seemed so hopeless; she could only escape for short periods of time, but the reality of her life was never far away.

Her parents could see the constant sadness in her eyes, and knew that because of the social order of their world, and how different Tabatha was from the others, that she would never be accepted or happy there. Their species was, however, incredibly intelligent, and her parents among the brightest of them all. When she reached adulthood, they constructed the program which created the gateway that brought her to her current world, one they knew she could find happiness in.

Unfortunately, they could not follow.

She stretched out on the artificial island just beside her ship, watching the planet revolve slowly in the sky, and looking for familiar constellations near the far horizon. One had bright green stars that she could swear were moving whenever she'd look away from them...

Back in the room, the dancing fireflies were beginning to fade. Outside, the deep purple light of dawn was just beginning to fill the eastern horizon. All were sleeping comfortably and quietly now, except for one.

In his mind, Pete was back in the keep of Breadsmelter, an elderly wizard of some repute whose castle was just a mile or so northeast of town. One of Breadsmelter's experiments had gone awry, and he'd commissioned a few strong locals from nearby towns to help him resolve the situation.

Breadsmelter had only hinted that things were "a little out of hand", but when they arrived, it was as if the abstract art section of a museum had come to life while in the terminal stages of rabies. Stone blocks the size of basketballs, joined together by metal pipes, flung themselves against walls, each other, and anything in their path. Wind chimes spun madly through the air, their pipes whistling shrilly and slapping against the walls and ceiling.

All they had to do was remove these aberrant golems from the experiment room whose floor and wall etchings powered them, but it was a punishing task. The last one to be removed, a trio of coconut-sized wooden balls held together by a fine golden rope, had gotten the better of Pete. It had nearly knocked him unconscious, and the rope made a deep cut in his left arm.

Once it had been subdued and removed, Breadsmelter conjured a magic blanket to carry Pete off to the nearest town to have his wounds tended to. It had carried him along just above tree height, and despite the pain in his arm and a headache, he was able to enjoy this new view of the countryside.

When he arrived in North Woods, a town not far from his home of White Paws, the locals took him to their local doctor's house, and he slept for a bit after they'd cleaned up his wounds. When he woke up, he met the doctor's son, gazing at him with a look of admiration and... something else. This was how he'd met Dani, and while he rested up at the town's inn, the cat kept him company, playing games with him and listening to his stories.

On the last night before he was to return home, Dani sneaked out of his house and into Pete's room at the inn.

This was the point in time Pete's mind lingered on in the dream; just him and Dani under warm blankets on a cold night, snuggling, kissing, and simply enjoying being close to one another. It was not long after their first night together that Dani joined Pete in the tavern in White Paws. In the short time they'd been together, they'd already had so much fun, and had so many adventures, it really seemed to them both that they'd been born under a lucky star...

Pete finally awoke from the reverie, to the sensation of Dani licking his face gently. Above the purring of the cat he could hear his guests stirring behind him.

Morning had broken, as evinced by the dim blue light filtering through a small, thick crystal in the ceiling above them. Eva regarded the wall curiously, as it appeared to be a plain, normal wall again.

Tabatha was already busy helping out with the other kitchen staff, and Pete soon joined her. Dani busied himself unlocking the doors and removing the heavy coverings from the windows, letting the dim blue morning light in to the tavern's comfortable interior.

Jeff and Eva remained in the strange room for a bit, lounging on the soft rug and discussing the strange dreams and events of the previous evening. It had been less than 24 hours ago that Jeff was plodding away at code in his old world, yet it seemed as if his old life was already fading from memory. Jeff and Eva snuggled close, and the feel of his sheath rubbing against Eva, and the feel of her warm, dense fur against his, caused him to get hard rather quickly.

Just before things began to get messy, Tabatha and Pete entered the room again, bearing a hot breakfast. Jeff was a little upset at the interruption, but decided it would make things that much better the next time he could be all alone with Eva. The aching in his balls told him he'd better not take too long to get around to it, though...

They chatted pleasantly while they ate, and near the end of the meal, the subject of the strange town sign with the fractional population on it came up.

"Ah yes, " Pete said smiling, "we need to pay a visit to the accountant sometime this morning. I think you will enjoy meeting him. Come to think of it, your ostrich may enjoy meeting him as well!"

Jeff smiled and nodded. He was quite sure this accountant would be as fascinating as the other things in this strange place, but he had something else on his mind right now...

"I'm still a bit tired, " Jeff said sleepily, "could Eva and I perhaps adjourn for a bit to a room?"

Pete grinned to himself, knowing what Jeff probably had in mind...

"Certainly, just follow me!" Pete responded.

Jeff and Eva followed Pete to his front desk, within which was a small pile of doorknobs, consisting of the entire door mechanism. They had slender, curved golden handles on each side, and a smooth brass cylinder between them. Pete handed one to Jeff, who looked at it slightly puzzled.

"Just head up those stairs behind me, pick a spot of wall you like, and put the knob in. When you're ready to go, just bring it back down with you and put it back in the pile. No matter which doorknob you use to access your room, you'll always get the same unique one, which no one else can get to unless you allow them in. See you in a bit!"

Jeff nodded and smiled at Pete before trotting up the stairs, Eva following closely behind.

The stairwell opened up into a long hallway with only one door on the far end facing them. Jeff arbitrarily picked a spot along the left side of the hallway, and pushed the doorknob into the wall. The wall resisted at first, as if there was a surface tension to be broken through by the knob. Once in however, it seemed to snap into position, and when he turned it and pulled, a door-sized section of wall swung out with it.

Inside was a very cozy looking room, with a variety of cold drinks sitting in a bucket of ice, a bookshelf filled with books of all varieties, a few pieces of art on the walls and shelves, and a very comfy looking bed. The view of the woods outside through the window seemed slightly peculiar to Jeff, but not enough to really grab his attention from what he was focused on right now.

Eva wasted no time, running into the room and jumping on the bed. She looked back at Jeff smiling, her eyes sparkling, and beckoned him over.

Jeff needed no encouragement. He shut the door behind them, and then removed the knob from the wall and set it on a desk nearby. Sensing his relief was finally at hand, he smiled back at her, walked calmly over to the bed, and jumped in.