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"Alright, that would mean that the carbons would be balanced...if..." A few scribbles of his pencil later, and Peter smiled. "There we go...perfect," he muttered to himself, clearing off the last of the eraser shreds that still covered the paper. Finally, he was done with the normal chemistry homework, and the biology that had come before that, and he could do that back at his dorm instead of sticking around the library anymore.

He pulled out his binder, sliding the paper and the equations on them into their place. He sighed in contentment, glad that the whole thing was done. He'd been stuck in the library for almost the entire day, and the extended quiet had started to drive him a little bit crazy. Too much of that for his taste.

Then again, it was a mixed blessing. Few people talked where he could hear them, so he didn't get the chance to talk to many friends or have much to take his mind off of his homework. On the other hand, it also meant that he didn't have to hear people going on and on about the way that Stantman College had changed, and not for the better since the start of the quarter. Not when the laws changed and the new students started attending.

Peter lifted his eyes from the desk as one such new student passed by. He didn't know the guy's name, but he had seen him in several classes. He wasn't a foreigner, nor was he an idiot. He didn't reach the stratosphere, but he didn't hold the class behind either with his intelligence. He was not a jock, or a jerk, or anything else that normally bothered people.

He was just an anthro. Or a fur, as most of the complainers called them. A wolf anthro, to be specific, with pointed ears, a muzzle, fur, legs that belonged to a running wolf rather than a walking man: he was a mix of animal and human, something that most people still had a problem with here at the college, despite the more learned environment.

Peter remembered the first time he had seen them walking the halls. Unlike some of the other students, he had kept an eye on the news networks and their presence hadn't completely shocked him the way that it had some of the students. However, even he'd been a little surprised to see so many of them in one place, talking with humans with eyes even rather than downcast. Compared to the way that things went in everyday life, it was an immense change, and one that he actually was happy to see.

Most students, on the other hand, weren't as happy to see the wolves and the foxes and the other furs - Peter shook his head. Anthros. They were called anthros, not furs. Furs was the rude way to talk about them.

Most students weren't so happy to see the anthros walking the halls. Peter didn't agree, but considering how long their country had been segregated, with humans going to one place and anthros going to another, having them mixed in one building would have been rather strange. He didn't know the details of who had gotten the changes going, but he had a pretty strong suspicion of who one of the biggest proponents of the change had been.

Professor William Frank Grosjean. He was the biochemistry professor here at the college, and one of the very few anthro professors that Stantman College employed to teach their vast curriculum. A massive brown bear, he was one of the foremost authorities in the world - not just the country, but the world - on the subject of biochemistry. From what Peter had heard, the college had been paying fees for years to get the bear out to their neck of the woods to lecture about the different parts of the biochemistry discipline of study. Considering how famous Grosjean was, Peter imagined that was part of the reason the college had eventually stopped sending all that money out there to fly him in.

Instead, they had hired him.

It had been the scandal of the decade when he had first stepped onto the college grounds. All of the work to get him working for the college had been done in secret, using various different loopholes in the laws, and despite all of the arguments from the alumni of the school and the protests from the Board of Education, Grosjean had been able to maintain his position among the other, human professors.

Peter had managed to get a place in his class last year, and it had been an amazing experience. The professor might have been, as some students called him, a 'fleabag pile of fur,' though Peter had never seen any evidence of fleas on the professor. He might have been a bear, and thus went around with a little bit less clothes - and definitely less footwear- than any of his human colleagues. He certainly had a different teaching style, and whenever someone had brought up that this wasn't how any of the other professors taught things - without syllabuses, or any standard textbooks, or standardized tests - Grosjean had just shrugged and said one simple thing.

"This is how I learned."

Considering how learned the bear was, and how successful he had become, Peter wasn't going to protest learning the same way that the professor had.

And he was incredibly well learned. Peter had three of his books on the subject of biochemistry in his backpack, each one covering a different approach to the subject, each one with a different viewpoint. In each one, Grosjean had argued the viewpoints of different theoretical chemicals and applications of them, first from one side, and then the other. Each one had been postulated and argued marvelously, and Peter still wasn't entirely sure that he knew which one was the correct one to believe just from the arguments.

At the end of each book, Grosjean had the same concluding sentence. "I've given you the information, and I've given you the arguments. Now you get to decide how to continue them."

From that day on, Peter had wanted to become a biochemist himself. He'd changed his major on the spot, and he'd gone after any and all books on the subject that he could find, even conducting a few experiments on his own time to try to learn a little more by doing, rather than from simply rote reading.

They didn't all work, but he had found the whole experience fascinating. And the more he read of Grosjean's books, the more he learned about the bear himself.

Like the fact that not only was he a highly published scientist, but he was a hard worker in the civil rights movements between humans and anthros. It was an unpopular job, considering that most people saw anthros as nothing more than second -class citizens, and frequently a good deal less than that, but he had worked with the lawmakers and the petitioners for nearly a decade to start moving things forward.

In fact, now that Peter thought about it, that might have been a plan of Grosjean's from the start. After being hired at the college, he had pushed more and more for the teaching staff to be open a little more for those that had the skills, as well as those that had the human gene, to teach people about the world around them. It had taken him a few years, but last year there had been a few new teachers on the class list. Not many, only a few compared to the still massively human teacher log, but it had been a start.

And that was why Peter was sure that Grosjean had been a major player behind getting anthros into the school, behind getting rid of the segregation between the two different groups. Peter couldn't care less about having other students in the school, so long as it didn't cause him trouble with his studies. But it was just another amazing part of the story of Professor William Frank Grosjean.

He was absorbed enough in his little hero worship moment that the next book he tried to put in the bag nearly tipped the whole thing over. Peter jumped, reaching down and grabbing hold of the side. "Whoa whoa whoa!" he hissed to himself, just barely getting a grip on the leather bag before it could tumble over completely. The tip of a magazine pushed out, but thankfully it slid back inside before it could slide out all the way.

A quick look around confirmed that no one else had noticed anything, so he sighed in relief. Shaking his head, he stood up and swung his bag around, shouldering with a soft grunt. "Well, might as well get back to the dorm," Peter muttered to himself, heading out of the library and getting back outside.

As he walked across the paved paths on campus, he passed by the center statue of the college. It was a big bronze thing, ostensibly of the first headmaster of the college, Jonathan Stantman. Peter had his doubts that the statue accurately resembled the guy in any way, considering just how artificially regal they had made his face, like something out of an old portrait for officers or royalty. Still, there was a good message to the statue.

His eyes dipped from the statue's face to its hands, held outwards slightly. Each one held a book, one tilted on its side and supporting the one that stood a little higher than it did. The one that tilted had the title "Intelligence" on its spine, while the one that was supported - though higher up - had the title "Understanding" on it.

Peter had never needed that explained to him. The two books were the two virtues that the college tried to teach, intelligence and understanding. Of the two of them, intelligence was the first step. While it was good, it was not enough to reach for the top, and so one had to learn the second step as well, that of understanding. Yet, understanding could not be had without the intelligence for comprehension, thus why it was the second step.

Most of the professors said that the statue had been put up just after the first headmaster had resigned, and had stood as a monument for the many students to come through the college since. Considering just how few students seemed to really notice the statue on a daily basis, Peter had his reasons to doubt that it worked as well as the makers of the statue would have wanted.

Still, the statue had a few benches around the base, and it made for a good place for him to sit down. "I always forget just how long of a walk it is back to the dorms," he muttered under his breath, setting his bag down beside him. "Alright...just a few minutes, then back to walking." After all, he had a lot of homework that he needed to do, and the last thing he needed was to take time from his biochemistry project.

He smiled to himself as he thought about it. The project was nothing less than Ph. D. quality, something that he normally would have waited until after college to work on. However, there was something about this that he couldn't wait to do. He wanted to prove to the college - and to Professor Grosjean - that he had what it took to be a real biochemist.

As he sat there, imagining it, being a real biochemist, several other students walked by. Considering that they were muttering to each in the hushed mutters that was usually reserved for the more bigoted students lately, Peter closed his eyes, intending to ignore them.

They spoke just loud enough for him to hear, though, and after the first bit, he was glad that he did.

"Professor Grosjean has gone too far. Did you hear that he's letting some of those furs into his new research group?"

"Yeah. I mean, you think the guy's civilized - for a fleabag - and then you hear that he's putting his own kind into the group? Can you say favoritism?"

"Ugh, I know, right?"

He watched them walk away with a growing grin on his face. A research group, headed by his idol? How had he not heard of this? Probably because he wasn't in the biochemistry class this quarter, admittedly, but he should have been paying more attention.

But that was beside the point. The point was that the professor had a research group going. Anything that Grosjean put his hands on - at least in this subject - was as good as gold. If he could get into that, then there was no way that his work would go ignored. He could finally get his name on something important, and maybe, just maybe, he could get the professor to notice him a little more. He THOUGHT that he had gotten a good impression on Professor Grosjean in his class, but he had never been sure.

That didn't matter, he decided as he got to his feet. He grabbed his book bag, and then took off at a run for the Science building, almost running down some of the other students that were on their way back to their dorms after a long day. He shouted apologies over his shoulder at them, but he didn't stop running. A research group. A real research group.

"Please don't be closed, or full, or anything!" Peter muttered under his breath as he shoved the door to the Science building open. Several other students jumped back in shock, but he ignored them, running for the stairs. A wet floor sign was noticed just at the edge of vision, but it was too late. Hitting a puddle, Peter went sliding. "WHOA WHOA WHOA!" he shouted as he went past the stairs and into another hall. "OUT OF THE WAY! CAN'T STOP!"

Several students jumped out of his way, and others stepped back against the walls of the hallway as he continued sliding forward. His arms windmilled constantly as he fought to keep his balance and not fall over, but he just didn't stop. What had happened, did the janitors team up to mop this whole length of hallway today, just so that the first student to run got a nasty surprise? Kinda felt like it.

But there was a way out of it. He noticed the inlet for a set of stairs ahead. If he could time this just right...

On the verge of falling down again, Peter threw out his hand and grabbed hold of the railing leading up the stairs. Momentum carried him forward for a moment before his grip stopped his forward movement. He still had a fair bit of momentum build up, though, which swung him up and around, onto the stairs. Just like he remembered, the steps each had a gravely sort of edge to them, and even with wet shoes, when he put his weight on them he stopped.

Wobbling a few times out of sheer exhaustion as his adrenaline rush faded, Peter made his way up the stairs at a more measured pace. Not just because of the near fall, but also because he had been running the whole way here, and there was only so much that adrenaline could do for a normally sedentary sort of guy.

Still, it didn't take long, even at a walking pace, to reach the biochemistry floor. He smiled as he watched most of the students leaving their classes already, and walked around them. As long as he stuck to the sides of the hallway, almost against the wall, it didn't matter that he was walking against the flow. Yeah, he got a few bumps to the arm here and there, but nothing bad.

He soon found the professor's classroom, and he slid inside after waiting for one of the anthros to step out. Remembering to give a little nod to be friendly, Peter stepped inside.

The big bear stood on the other side of the room, gathering up some of his papers from the desk. Peter smiled to himself, watching Professor Grosjean's slow, measured movements, and just took a moment to see how the bear had changed in the last year.

Not much, he could tell. He was still a round guy, much like most members of his species. His suit was pushed out enough that some would have called him on it, if he didn't make a joke out of it most of the time. Yet, he wasn't out of shape. Peter remembered the time the bear had been in the cafeteria when a fight had broken out between two of the human students. The professor had gotten up and stepped right between the fighting pair, and, ignoring the kicks and punches they directed his way, carried them across the campus and threw them into the pool.

That had worked really well to clear up the fight, Peter remembered, and for a pretty good reason. Nobody wanted to fight when there was a guy that could ignore any punch you could give to break it up.

There was something slightly more dignified about the professor, though. Maybe it was the suit, Peter thought. It was a bit more flowing than he remembered it being last time, and maybe of a bit higher quality, though when it was a light brown, it was hard to tell quality from a distance. It matched well with his darker brown fur, though, and it seemed to be made for him. Or maybe the bear was made for the suit. Again, it was a little hard to tell.

Professor Grosjean stepped out from behind his desk, shouldering his bag as his bare feet came into view. He always was like that, Peter remembered, health requirements and hazard advisories be damned. Any and all warnings he received were laughed off, and considering there hadn't been one accident in the labs while he was in charge, Peter could understand why. Grosjean was just that competent, and he didn't have to worry about the stuff that most people did.

Shaking his head a little bit away from his memories, Peter walked down the aisles between the desks, holding out his hand. "Professor Grosjean, it's good to see you again," he said with a small smile on his face.

The professor looked up from his bag, a small smile of his own crossing his muzzle after a moment. "Ah, yes, Peter Seeberger, I remember you," the bear said, his voice rumbling, deep, relaxing in the way of waves lazily coming up on the shore were relaxing. "I was a little surprised to not see you in my advanced classes this year. Have you changed your major again?" he asked.

"Oh, no, no, nothing like that," Peter said hurriedly. God no, he'd not change that again. "I just needed to get a few other classes and credits under my belt. Bad luck, they were all offered in the same quarter that you had the best classes."

"Heh, that's just the way that the college system works, I'm afraid," Grosjean said with a shake of his head. He adjusted his bag. "Did you have something you needed? Some new project to talk to me about?"

"Well, not a project, per se." Please, please have room left, he thought to himself. "You see, I heard about your research group, and -"

The bear chuckled a bit, reaching out and patting his arm. "You wanted to join the group too, huh?"

Peter nodded, and he couldn't keep the embarrassing level of eagerness out of his nods.

"I thought you might." The professor groaned a bit, stretching out his arms as he yawned. "Look, why don't you come to my office for a little bit? We can talk about it a bit more comfortably there, and we don't have to worry about other students coming around and interrupting us for a little bit, huh?"

Smiling, Peter gestured for the bear to lead the way, and he eagerly followed behind him. After all, he remembered where the bear's office had been, but it would be only polite to let him decide the pace.

They only had to walk down the hall to the corner before they got to the familiar door, the wood scratched lightly by several years of the bear teaching there, and the knob having several small scars from the bear's claws. It was unlocked, Peter was surprised to see, and opened easily under the bear's hand.

Professor Grosjean's office had always been something of a smaller one, perhaps some parting shot by members of the faculty that didn't like him for being what he was. It was a corner office, and next to the noise from the stairs, the worst feature of it was considered to be the size. It was maybe two paces across diagonally, and that was if one was being generous. The floorspace was taken up by a small desk, two chairs, and what few other things the professor had managed to fit into the room.

The human remembered when another student had asked how he had managed to get even this much in. Professor Grosjean had smiled, and said just one word that had gotten everyone in the hallway laughing. "Tetris," he had said.

Putting his bag down on the desk, the professor kindly took Peter's bag as well, setting it down beside his own. He gestured for Peter to take a seat, and only after he had done so, did he take his own. "So, the research group," Professor Grosjean prompted.

"Yes, yes, the research group." Peter leaned forward in his chair. Not much, as there wasn't a great deal of room to lean into, but some. "I heard about that from a couple of the other students while they were passing by. I don't suppose that you have any room left in the group for one more student?"

The bear smiled softly at him. "Heh, I suppose I should have thought that you'd want to be part of the group. Considering how eager you were to start learning more about biochemistry since I came here, I guess I should have expected you here earlier."

"Well, I just heard about it today -"

"That was an observation, not a rebuke, Peter, don't worry." The bear waved his hand a bit, dismissing the issue. "I may have a few spots open still, but if you want to join the group, you need to follow the same procedure as everyone else."

That was something that he was a little concerned about. Peter hoped that the group was open to anybody, not just those that were in the class, but that was something he just didn't know. "So...what's the procedure?" he asked after a moment's hesitation. A little red filled his cheeks as he blushed. "I, uh, haven't done anything like this before, so I don't know how I'm supposed to go about this."

Chuckling softly in that rumbling way of his, Professor Grosjean reached into one of his desk drawers, flicking his fingers over some of the pages as searched for a particular page. "Don't worry, all kinds of first times are awkward. Remember how much help you needed with my class your first half of the quarter?"

"Don't remind me, please," the human said, shaking his head a few times. That had been an embarrassing month and a half, with him running to the professor after most of the classes, needing help. The lessons had been very clear, but the actual material, the work, was a good bit harder than his counselors had really informed him that it would be. Thankfully the professor was a good sport, and helped him out. Frequently and often, without complaint.

"Heh, very well. Ah, here we go." The bear pulled out a few pages, all stapled together, and held the packet out to him. "Here you are. Fill this out, and bring me a typed up proposal tomorrow afternoon, and I'll see if we can fit you into the group. All things considered, you should be a good fit, but we don't want to upset the administration too much this year. I'm sure you can understand why."

"Definitely." Peter took the pages with a grateful nod, opening his bag and sliding them between two of his books. They'd be safe enough there until he got back to the dorm, he reasoned, and if they weren't, then at least they would only be slightly crinkled before he got them again.

He stood up, offering his hand to the professor. "Thank you for this, Professor Grosjean. I've wanted to be part of your research for a long time now."

"Heh, so you told me most days in class, Mr. Seeberger," the bear said with a small chuckle. His large paw gripped Peter's hand, and it almost felt like his hand had been swallowed by soft pad and smooth fur, enveloped in the much larger grip. They shook hands, and Peter turned around, leaving at a brisk walk.

He never noticed that one of his magazines slipped out of his pack, landing on the floor of the professor's office.

#

Professor Grosjean shook his head at the human's departure, though he had a smile on his muzzle at the same time. "Always such an eager student," the bear muttered to himself.

He had quite a few memories of the different students that had come through the college in his years teaching here. Most of them were of single incidents, just because of the sheer number of students that he had worked with, but there were a few that stuck out more than the others.

Peter was one of them. William remembered several incidents in class when he had been rather impressed with the human. Not because of any particular brilliance in his work, nor for anything that he had done in defense of anthros, or anything along the lines. It had been his sheer enthusiasm for the topic that had grabbed the bear's attention, and had led him to pay a little more attention to him than some of the other students.

Oh, the human would never have been aware of it, the professor was sure. He had been available for help and conversation for anyone that needed it, but there had been times he had shuffled around some of the other students that wanted time with him so that he could have a little more time with Peter.

There was just something about the enthusiasm he showed that the bear appreciated. It was one thing to be brilliant at a subject. That was talent, and it was something that most people would have regardless of their own choice in the matter. It was appreciated, but it wasn't something that people could get on their own. Competence, that could be achieved, but raw talent was something that was either there or it wasn't.

Enthusiasm, though, that was something else. Enthusiasm, love for a subject, regardless of one's own competence in it. That was something that William always loved to find in his students, because it meant that they would pay attention in class. It meant that they would go out of their way to learn more about the subject, going through the library and finding any and all materials on it. Most of all, they never became arrogant about their subject, never assuming that they knew everything about it, and were always open to learning more about it, even as they advanced the knowledge available to everyone else.

Peter had that enthusiasm, and William knew that would make him a good addition to the research team. And who knew? Maybe if he was around some of the other anthros more regularly, there would be a little chance that he would join up with the civil rights movements around here. Rather unlikely, the bear knew, but the chance was there, and it would be the icing on the cake.

Getting up to shut his office door, the professor felt something crinkle under his foot. He blinked, taking a step back and bending over to look at what had made the sound.

He saw a magazine, having fallen on the cover. "Heh, Peter must have left this here," he muttered to himself. There had been something coming out of th student's bag when he ran off. "Well, I'll just give it back to him when he comes back tomorrow."

Leaning down, he picked it up and flipped it over, expecting to see some sort of article on biochemistry, or perhaps some other science journal.

Instead, his eyes went wide at the cover articles and the cover image itself. "Well...now isn't this surprising?" he thought to himself.

#

Peter ran the whole way back to his dorm. This time, there were no students to slow him down, and there were no more wet floors - thank heavens - so there were no problems for him. The stairs went by in a blur, and the hallway tiles blended together as he put the pedal to the metal.

He barely paid attention to the few students that were still out on the grounds as he ran by, too busy exulting in the fact that he would be in a research group headed by William Frank Grosjean. THE authority for all things biochemical. THE man to see when it came to picking out the cream of the crop for the next generation of scientists. Even apart from all of the research that they might do, just having Grosjean's name attached to his transcript this way would open up so many doors for his future that would otherwise be locked and bolted for him.

But he barely cared about that. What he cared about was the fact that the professor remembered him, and more than that, seemed to want him in the group with the others. The professor had faith in him, real faith, and that simple knowledge had him walking on air.

Well, pavement, but he felt like he was walking on air.

Bowling through the doors of his dorm building, he continued running down the halls, a giddy grin on his face. His room-mate should be out of the place tonight, something about a party off campus with some of the other guys. He'd have the whole place to himself, could play whatever music he wanted, and he could focus on the application to the research group to the exclusion of anything else. It was going to be -

WHAM!

Peter went flying backwards a few steps and landed on his butt, groaning at the already forming bruise across his front, and rubbing his nose. "Oooooh, that hurts," he muttered under his breath. He saw stars for a few seconds, and forced himself to sit still and let them fade away.

When his vision cleared again, he looked up. The source of his new-found pain was an open door. A door that had been closed when he had turned down the hall. A door that led into his dorm room.

His room-mate, another human named Erik, poked his head around the door. "Hey man, you okay?" he asked.

"Yeah, yeah..." Peter muttered. He groaned as he slowly pulled himself to his feet, wobbling back and forth a few times before he caught his balance. "I'll be alright. You?"

"Oh, I'm fine," Erik said with a shrug. "The door got most of that impact. What were you doing trying to knock its hinges like that?"

"Just in a bit of a hurry," Peter said. He grinned, his excitement undiminished from his hard knock. "I want to get this application filled out as quickly as possible so I can get it back to Professor Grosjean tomorrow."

Erik rolled his eyes. "You're on about him again? Come on, he's a genius, I'll give you that, but you're hero worshiping him. A lot." He threw a thumb over his shoulder. "Why don't you come with me, go to the party tonight. I heard that there's some anthro girls going there too. After striking out so much with humans, maybe you'll have some better luck with someone that's not so picky."

Peter shook his head, walking around his room-mate. "Nah, I really gotta fill this out," he said. "Thanks for the offer, though. Maybe you'll have some luck too, or are you forgetting the fact that you've struck out with everything on two legs for the last year and a half?"

"Hey, I'm not looking for a date, I'm just looking for some fun!"

"Maybe you'll be in luck and they'll be in heat, then. Don't see you getting much fun otherwise, Erik," Peter tossed back over his shoulder. "See you."

He shut the door behind him before Erik could give him another retort and locked it. That would keep him out of the way for a while, at least, and he wouldn't have to listen to the party animal keep going on about just how much of an animal he was. It had been getting pretty damn annoying the last few weeks, particularly after Erik had reached drinking age. Sober Erik was bad enough. Drunk Erik...well, it had been enough that Campus Security had been called a few times, and that was all that needed to be said.

Well, at least he had the room to himself tonight, Peter thought. Not that there was much. A TV placed flush against one wall, the heads of two beds placed against the wall opposite it. There was a desk that they had to share, and there were a few outlets for laptops and lamps and a printer, but that was all that they had.

Good enough, though. Peter walked across the room and plopped himself down on his bed, putting his bag down at the foot of the bed. "Alright, let's get this stuff out of here before the seams break...again." His bag had an annoying habit of doing that, and he'd needed to replace his bag several times over his time at college. Some people had told him that it was because of all the stuff he shoved in there, but considering the fact that he only carried what classes required - plus or minus a half dozen supplementary materials for some classes - that had to be bull.

Still, he didn't want to have to buy something to replace this one already, so he was careful as he took his textbooks, library books, and finally his magazines out. The textbooks and library books went on the desk, but the magazines he held onto for a moment.

He looked at the door again, thankful for the lock, but knowing it wouldn't keep Erik out if he had to come back for something. And if he started looking through these, he doubted that he'd have time to put them away before the door was unlocked and his room-mate got back. More to the point, he doubted he would hear the lock click while he was reading these babies.

Tucking them under his mattress, he shook his head. "I'll look at those later," he thought. If there was time after he finished working on his application, that was. He needed to get that done before anything else.

Getting his laptop out, he opened a word processor for the actual research proposal, and got to work.

The words flowed easily across the screen, and it didn't take long for him to relax and just enjoy putting this together. He admittedly didn't have much information about what the group was researching, but he did remember that it was something about East Asian fungi and their chemical components, several other things about them that slipped his mind as well. But that wasn't important, he thought to himself. As long as he could put together the proposal so that it read well and covered the basics, it should work out.

He kicked off his shoes absently as he worked, flexing his legs and his arms to get a little tension out of them before he got back to writing, time ticking away in the background.

When he had about a page and a half in normal type, he got to work on formatting it, getting it double spaced, a proper font and size, the works. It was a practiced effort, and it didn't take him more than a minute to get it the way that he wanted to look, nice and professional. He hooked the laptop up to the printer, and got it printing off before turning to look at the solitary clock in the room.

He was a little surprised at what he saw. It was already 7:00 PM, and he hadn't even had dinner yet. What time had it been when he'd gotten back to the dorm, he wondered. He didn't really remember, but it couldn't have been later than 6 PM, could it? Maybe...maybe 5 PM.

At any rate, he would need to hurry up and finish the application if he wanted to have dinner tonight, Peter thought to himself. Another student might have thought to get dinner and finish the application in the morning, but that was anathema to Peter's way of thinking. That, plus his eagerness wouldn't let him rest or eat until he had this ready to turn in. he was NOT going to lose a spot in the research group because he slacked off in trying to get into the damn thing.

His pen at the ready, he got one of his textbooks and put it under the application papers, flipping them open and reading through just what they asked for before he started filling them out. Name, age, major...it seemed pretty standard, really. There was a small release at the bottom, but the legalese was pretty clear, just stating that the signer released the group from liability from injuries. Anything that they discovered would still be something they'd get credit for, but injuries were things that were their own stupid fault and couldn't be attributed to the head of the research group or the college, basically.

He didn't mind signing that. Considering it was Professor Grosjean that led the group, he doubted that there would be so much as a single injury in the entire process. And even if there was, he knew that anything that happened to him would be his own fault, and he was pretty confident in his own skills in a lab to be able to avoid that sort of thing.

The other questions were easy to fill out, and the clock only said 7:30 by the time that he was done filling it out. He grinned. "Well, that was easy enough," he said. He pulled the printed out proposal from the printer - the double spacing having increased the length to three pages - and signed his name at the bottom, filling in the little space that he'd left for his physical signature rather than printed.

Now he could go get something to eat, and then maybe get back here for a little private time.

#

Sadly, dinner was not that good, some overdone meat that was ladled over bread and made into an 'open face sandwich'. Oh, he'd eaten it - no need to go to bed hungry - but it was a reminder that one needed to get to the cafeteria early for a good dinner. Too much of the good stuff had been gone by 8, and the staff had been working on cleaning up and getting ready to close down.

The icing on the cake had been when he'd gotten back, finding his room-mate just concluding...relations...with a busty female anthro. A wolf, he thought, but he could have been mistaken as he turned around and slammed the door behind him as soon as he caught sight and sound of what was going on.

He heard some rustling going on inside the room after a moment, and covered his face with a hand. "Erik, I'm going to kill you if you messed up my proposal," Peter muttered to himself.

The door opened again a few minutes later, his room-mate standing there in his underwear, and the anthro - a wolf, he had been right - standing there in nothing at all. She didn't even bother to cover her chest or groin where she stood, just looking at him with a questioning glance.

"Uh, Peter, this is Lianna," Erik said, gesturing to her. "I met her at the club today, and, well - "

"I came back with him to see if human guys are as good as our guys," Lianna finished. She shrugged a bit. "He was alright. Might do him again, if he can last a little longer."

Though the situation was utterly ridiculous, Peter couldn't help but feel a vindictive little surge of glee at the embarrassment that covered his room-mate's face. He sputtered a bit as Lianna turned around and gathered her clothes, and Peter turned away when she bent over. Not before he got a glance of her nether regions - and all that encompassed, considering what she and Erik had just done - but before he got too much of a vivid picture of just what was down there.

Lianna paused at the door, taking a small piece of paper out of her pocket before passing it over to Erik. "Next time you think you can last longer than five minutes, gimme a call. You're not bad, just a bit quick," she said before walking off, getting dressed as she did.

Not wanting to be stuck in the open with that going on any longer than he needed to be, Peter stepped past his embarrassed and blushing room-mate. A quick look around the room showed that his proposal was still where he'd left it, as well as the textbooks that were around it. He breathed a soft sigh of relief, one that he regretted as soon as he'd done it. The smell of the room was filled with sex, with the smell of male musk and whatever it was that wolves let off when they were...doing it.

Opening a window a crack, Peter turned back to look at Erik. "Did you really have to bring her back here?" he asked.

"What, you have something against wolves?" Erik asked, still glowing red.

"No, but I do have something against walking in on my room-mate doing it with someone," he said. "Not to mention that the room's gonna stink all night, and I was hoping for a good night sleep before I give Professor Grosjean my proposal."

Erik waved his hand dismissively, shaking his head as he walked back to bed. He didn't even bother moving the sheets, and now that Peter could see a little better in the dim light, he could see several...stains...from liquids in Erik's bed. "Get over it, it's not that bad. And besides, it was fun. Hell, you could have found a girl at the club tonight, if you'd gone. They were all pretty curious about human males, seeing how we were different."

"I'm not interested in being a science experiment for them," he said. He shook his head, picking his sheet up from his bed and waving it a few times, snapping it up and down in an attempt to get some of the smell out the window. It was only marginally successful, but it was enough to make the room a bit more comfortable, at least.

As he got his bed ready again, he gave Erik another glare. That had been just rude, even if it had meant he'd gotten a free view of a naked girl. Not the kind of girl that he would normally think about, but a free view.

Were all anthros so free with their bodies, he wondered? He didn't think that they were, considering that there had been no streaking anthros around the campus yet, but he could not name a human girl that would walk down the hall without the slightest care as she got dressed. Was it because she was anthro and they were human? Maybe, but he didn't really know. There was something about her confidence as she walked away that implied that it was normal behavior for her.

Shaking his head a few times, Peter forced himself to get in bed and close his eyes. It was too late to be considering this, and he needed to rest if he was going to give his professor a good presentation tomorrow. Confident as he was in his application and his letter, he knew that the presentation would be the make or break point for getting into the group. He was NOT going to screw this up. He couldn't.

#

Morning came all too soon for him, the alarm clock ringing for Erik's first class. His room-mate was already getting out of bed, getting dressed in some clothes that were just laying out on the floor before reaching out and turning off the alarm clock.

"Why don't you get some clean clothes on?" Peter asked with a small groan.

"It's gym class."

"Physical education."

"It's gym, plain and simple," Erik said. "I'm not gonna let them pretty up the name when it's just gym. And do you really think that anyone's gonna care if I stink a bit while I'm working out there? I'd like to save my clean stuff for classes where it matters."

"Or you could just do your laundry," he muttered into his pillow. The sun wasn't even up yet, either, he noticed. Damn early morning gym class, he thought to himself. Damn it all to hell.

Erik rushed out of the room, and despite his wishes for a little more sleep, Peter made himself get out of bed after Erik was gone. He'd be gone for at least an hour, and considering that he didn't have any class today, it meant that he had a little more free time to get a few things done.

Normally, he'd use this time to get a little more homework done, maybe get some studies in for a test. But considering that they were still a few more weeks away from having any real test for the first quarter, and the fact that there was no homework to do, he had another idea. Another, more fun idea.

Getting off of his bed, he leaned down to lift up his mattress. The magazines were still there, he noticed, untouched. At least that was one good thing about putting them there; any visitors that Erik brought along wouldn't notice them, and Erik would never put out enough effort in spying to actually lift things and move them. Just about the only good thing about a lazy room-mate, when it came to chores and such at least.

Pushing them apart, wondering which one he'd read this time, Peter smiled. They were a bit old, but the magazines were still fun. From the first issue he had managed to get here to the...

He paused, going back to the magazine on the top of the pile and then dragging his finger down along the line, counting them. Then he counted them again. And again.

After counting them five times, there could be no doubt. He was missing one of the issues, and when he had not touched them since he had put them under the mattress, there was no way that he had dropped them in the dorm, or had someone take them from here.

That only left the possibility that he had dropped it somewhere around the campus. While not great, it was slightly better than having someone find it here. It would only be thrown in the trash if someone found it on campus, rather than being found out to belong to him. At least he hadn't been stupid enough to put his name in the magazine; considering the content, he might find himself an outcast for a VERY long time if someone figured out it was his, and with all of the things happening on campus now, he needed acceptance - from professors particularly - if he was going to get what he needed this year.

While disappointing, Peter figured that it could be a great deal worse. A very great deal worse. So he got to his feet, and went to the bathroom to clean up.

The shower was quick, and so was brushing his teeth and getting his hair combed back after it messed itself up from sleeping. Clothes, books, and study materials were put together quickly, and he left the dorm room, locking it behind him.

If he was up so early, he might as well see if there were any new books in the library. He could kill some time there with a new book while he waited for Grosjean to be available in the afternoon.

#

The library opened shortly after he got to it, and he spent three hours inside. Not as much reading as he would have liked - as they were not due any new books for about a month, apparently - but more along the lines of searching through the different halls of the library.

At first, he thought that he might find some new books, but as time went on, he realized that he was just looking for the magazine he had lost. Eyes scanned the floors of the different halls, looking for a corner of a dropped magazine or some sign of the blasted thing, but everything was clean, clear. Even the tables and magazine piles at the other end of the library were empty of anything new or different. Good for him, he supposed.

He would have liked that magazine back, though. It was one of his favorite issues, and while the material was just a little...questionable...it was one of the few places that he had found that actually had what he was looking for. Not to mention that the magazine didn't reprint issues very often, which more or less left him out of luck if he couldn't find it somewhere on the campus.

When he couldn't stick to the library anymore, he walked around the campus proper, his eyes down more than usual as he looked for where it might have fallen. He had only been a few places yesterday, he knew, and when he had left the library to go see Grosjean, he still had all of the issues in his bag. So, the only places it might have fallen out were on the grounds of the campus, in the Science building, or in the hallways of his dorm.

The dorm was right out of the question, as he would have seen something on the floor when he'd left. The Science building was a possibility, considering how much sliding and skating he'd done on the wet floor, but he wanted to wait before going there, at least a bit longer.

That left the grounds, the biggest and most expansive single part of the college. Admittedly he had only taken a single route to the Science building and the same route on the way back, but considering some of the wind last night, the issue could have gotten to any part of the grounds. Or off of the campus entirely for that matter, but he didn't want to think about it that way.

So, he spent the next hour searching over the grounds, his eyes glued to the different trails at first, and then slowly spreading out to the grass around him. Occasionally he caught sight of some magazine, but when he got a closer look at it, it was clear that it wasn't the one that he was looking for. Wrong color, or wrong bindings, or wrong cover image, they always proved to be some other magazine that someone had discarded for some reason or another.

Peter was almost ready to start digging through trash cans when he looked up at the time. Past noon already, and approaching one. He sighed. That would give him just enough time to get a little lunch before he went to meet with the professor again, and even that might be cutting it a little close.

The last thing he needed to do was collapse from hunger while talking, though, and he'd already skipped breakfast. Lunch it was. He'd just have to look more later.

#

The cafeteria was pretty packed with other students, but he managed to find a seat after grabbing himself a burger with some fries. He sat down and started to eat, scanning the room as he did.

Despite the college trying to get the anthros and the humans to mix with each other, it seemed that they were still sticking to their own kind for the most part. Oh sure, there were a few furless figures among the different anthros, and there were some fuzzy sore thumbs among the humans, but they were the exceptions, maybe one percent of their respective populations. Other than them, it was all skin one side of the cafeteria, and all fur and scale and feather on the other.

A pity, Peter thought. While he wasn't particularly attached to the anthros on the other side, it was clear that they were just here to study, same as them. If their brains could make the cut, then what did it matter what the rest of them looked like? Wasn't that part of acceptance? Of understanding?

Of course, the humans weren't all at fault from what he saw. There were a few humans that came in late to lunch, and the anthros that they approached glared until they walked on. Apparently, there were problems on both sides, no matter how much that humans seemed to have more of them.

He shook his head, focusing on his food. The burger was only so good, really, considering it was still cafeteria food, but it was quite edible, and enough salt made just about anything tolerable. At least he didn't have to deal with the ridiculous things that Erik usually said during lunch. No, his room-mate was inflicting his terrible presence on other members of the student population today, he saw, as he looked at several guys laughing with him. Maybe he was sharing the events of the last night, though probably in a way that made him look a little better.

"This seat taken?"

Peter looked up as he realized the speaker was talking to him, and blinked.

Lianna, the wolf from last night, was gesturing to the chair across from him at the table, carrying a tray of food of her own. "I said, is this seat taken?" she asked again.

"Uh, no, go ahead and sit," he said.

She did, clicking the tray against the table. Her eyes drifted down to the papers that Peter carried, and she chuckled. "Heh, you're going in for the professor's research group too, huh?"

"Research group?" He blinked. "You mean Professor Grosjean's one? Yeah, I went to talk to him yesterday as soon as I found out about it."

"Really?" She smiled a bit more. "I got in the first time I talked to him. I was kind of surprised, really. I wanted to be a part of his work for a long time, and it's good to get a chance to show him what I can do."

"Me too!" Peter grinned. "Have you followed his work for very long?"

"For years!" she said. She reached down to her bag, pulling it up and flipping it open. Familiar titles by the bear professor filled up most of the bag. "I've read each one of these, and I'm going to be reading them again before long."

Peter grinned, his tongue loosening as he fell into easy conversation with her. It was good to find someone else that found the bear so fascinating as he did. They chatted with each other, completely blind to the way that others looked at them.

It was only when Peter's watch started beeping that he looked down at the time. His eyes went wide and he stood up. "Oh, I'm so sorry about this, but I gotta get to the professor's office. His class is about to end, and I want to get my application in before I lose the chance," he said. "But we gotta talk again, this was great."

"No problem," she said. "Your room-mate has my number. But hey, we might see each other in the group, so, fingers crossed?"

"Fingers crossed," Peter responded, actually doing the gesture as he hurried off. Tray in one hand and bag in the other, he rushed out of the cafeteria in another run, eager to get to his idol and make his presentation. Already a grin was forming on his face. This was going to go great, he told himself. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

It didn't take him long to reach the Science building, and this time he managed to avoid any watery hallways, skipping around the sign that marked the danger zone this time before reaching the stairs. He used the turns like slingshots, shooting him around faster than he could have turned on his own. Several students walking down had to dodge to the side to avoid being caught during his turn, but he barely noticed, too intent on getting upstairs.

He reached the classroom just as Professor Grosjean was leaving, and he waved as the professor started locking the door. "Professor, professor, I got my application here!" he nearly shouted, grinning widely.

The bear turned to face him, and smiled softly. "I knew you would. Come on, let's get back to my office," he said.

Peter nodded, falling into step behind him. However, even though he was giddy as hell, he could see that the professor was walking a bit more...stiffly than usual. "Are you okay, Professor Grosjean?"

"Oh, just a long day," the bear said. "Just some sore feet from not getting to sit down for a while. Don't worry about it." He waved it off. "So, you have your letter, your application, everything?" he asked over his shoulder.

"Yeah, I got everything put together for you," Peter said, his eyes drifting down to the bear's feet. Considering their shape, how they were flat and didn't come off of the ground the way that human's did, he would imagine that the bear could stand for longer than most people did without getting discomfort. Then again, everyone had their limits, and he imagined that the bear had probably been pushed a bit more towards his. "I think that you'll like it. I worked hard to make sure that it's really good."

"I imagine you did, Peter, I imagine you did." They reached the bear's office, and were silent as the professor opened the door. They stepped inside like before, their bags on the professor's desk, and the door shut behind them. Grosjean sat down in his chair, leaning back with his hands in his lap. "Do you want to give me the papers first, or the oral presentation?" he asked.

"Wouldn't you like a moment to rest your feet first, sir?" Peter asked. "You don't look very comfortable right now, you know."

"I'll rest while I listen," the professor said. "Besides, you want to get into the group as quickly as possible, don't you?" He laughed as Peter nodded, perhaps nodding a bit faster than he should have. "Go ahead, I'll listen. I can relax later."

Nodding his head, Peter stood up from his chair. He cleared his throat, giving Professor Grosjean a chance to get comfortable before talking. "Sir, I would like to present myself as a candidate for your research group. As you will see from the application that I prepared for you, I have many good qualities integral to being a good researcher, from a habit of taking good notes, following the scientific method to a T, and managing to keep to the process to ensure that there are a minimum of variables that can disrupt the experiment.

"Furthermore, you will see that my grades reveal that I am a good student, as well as a great deal of enthusiasm for the subject. I have studied biochemistry for over year now, and there is little in the school library and in the curriculum offered here that I have not at least experienced, if not fully absorbed. I believe that I would be a strong asset for your group, and I would greatly appreciate the chance to work under your supervision for however long you'll permit me to."

"I see, I see," Professor Grosjean said. He nodded towards the papers. "And these will reflect what you just told me, with evidence to back them up?"

"Yes sir, they will," Peter said, nodding his head. He had to force himself to keep from nodding his head more than that, though. "Any information about my grades or habits are included in my application."

The bear nodded, gesturing for Peter to sit down again. He reached over and picked up the papers as Peter did that, glancing over them for a moment. "If you will wait for a moment, I'll read through these," Professor Grosjean said. He shifted in his chair, grunting a bit as his feet pressed against the floor when he shifted position. "Sometimes, I am tempted to get a pair of shoes, just so I could have a little less pain after a long day," he muttered.

"If you would like, sir, I can give you a massage." The offer was out of Peter's mouth before he could think about it, and his eyes went wide as the professor looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. "I mean, if it doesn't bother you, sir. I've given several friends foot massages before, and they said that it helped them relax a fair bit while I did it. I'm fine if you don't want me to give you one."

"...No, I don't mind," Professor Grosjean said. He shrugged as he leaned back in his seat, lifting his feet off of the floor for a moment before extending his legs and placing them in Peter's lap. "I can appreciate a massage. Just don't go too hard, okay? My pads are a little delicate."

"I've heard that bear feet are like that, sir," Peter said as he looked down at his idol's feet. They were both quite large, and very flat, as bear feet tended to be. The toes were all around the same length, though they were plantigrade, unlike the digitigrade feet that most of the other anthros possessed. Maybe it was because wild bears had these kinds of feet as well? It was possible, he supposed.

He picked one up by the heel, and was surprised by the weight of the leg, requiring him to use both his arms to lift it up. After he had it up a bit, it was a little easier, but the weight of the bear extended throughout his body it seemed, and the legs were no different.

Hesitating for a bit longer, he took a moment to look at the underside. From what he remembered from...biology...most anthros had different feet than bears. They had a couple of pads around the center part of their foot, with others that were on the toes. The bear's foot was a bit different. There was a single large pad that ran from the...well, the human equivalent would be the heel, across the middle, up to the area just under the toes. It stopped there, with each toe having its own pad as well. The color change was interesting to look at, too, with the pad being almost pure black, easily distinguishable from the fur around it.

He ran his finger along the pad gently. Rubbing from toe to heel, it was mostly smooth, but rubbing it from the heel towards the toes, it had...well, he wasn't sure what it was. It was kind of like the elbow of a human who had dry skin, bristly in a way that only flesh could be. But he could tell that rubbing the way that a normal human would prefer a massage would not be the most comfortable for the bear. So, he decided to try a different tack.

Pressing his thumbs into the pad just under the toes, Peter rubbed in a downward, sweeping motion. He felt the pad shifting under his fingers a bit, giving under the pressure he pushed on it, sort of flowing. The pads had some malleability to them, he discovered, and he smiled at the way that his touches left small imprints on them for a second before the pads pushed out to smoothness again.

As he continued the slow downward sweeps, the professor sighed softly, the sound quiet but happy. It brought a small smile to Peter's face as well, and he started rubbing a little more firmly. He could feel the tension under the pads, and he wanted to give his idol a little more relief. Plus, a happy bear reading these applications could be a little more favorable than a bear that wasn't so kindly inclined towards him. It couldn't hurt, at any rate.

He made it down to the halfway point of the bear's foot when Professor Grosjean actually spoke up. "I have to admit, Peter, I'm curious."

"About what, sir?" Peter asked, looking up from the bear's foot with a speed that almost wrenched something in the back of his neck. "Did...did I do something wrong on my application?"

"Oh, no, no, nothing like that," Professor Grosjean said. He put the paper down on the desk again. "That is one of the most concise and clear applications and presentations I've seen in a long time. And yes, in this case, concise is a good thing," he added, silencing a question before Peter could ask it.

"Well, I'm glad to hear that, sir," Peter said. His fingers continued the slow, downwards rubbing along the pad, gradually making their way down to the bottom of the foot. "So, what were you curious about, sir?"

"Oh, I was just wondering if you did this very often," he said. "Massaging, I mean. You didn't have any hesitation with how different they are to your friends. Unless you've been socializing with some of the new students like some of your fellow humans?" The bear smiled as Peter blushed. "Perhaps Lianna, the girl that your room-mate has been bragging about being with?"

He groaned softly, and if he had a hand free, he would have covered his eyes. "Erik is an idiot, if you don't mind me saying so, sir," he said, shaking his head. "I was there when Lianna had to...leave...the dorms. He doesn't really have a lot of reason to brag."

"So she told me."

Blushing, Peter tried his best to ignore the implications of that. "Um, anyway, no, I don't have much experience with giving anthros massaging. I guess I just think quickly about how to work with something new or different."

There was a moment of silence before the professor nodded his head, leaning back in his chair with his hands folded over his lap. "I guess that makes sense," Grosjean said with a shrug. "But keep going. I'll tell you what I think after you finish up."

He nodded, getting his hands down to the bear's heel before pausing. Should he go over to the other foot now? Or should he do the same thing to this foot again, help his professor get a little more relaxed? He thought that he had gotten all the tension out, but he wasn't completely sure.

Best to go again, just to be safe, he thought. This time, he reached his hand up to the toes, pushing them back a little bit. He felt the muscles strain a bit under the pad, through the foot, but he knew that the stretching would be good for the bear. After a few seconds, he let the toes go, then pulled them back again, then let them go again. Each time he let it go for about a second longer, giving the muscles a little time to get good and stretched before he let them go.

By the time that he had done this five times, he could feel that the foot was much more relaxed. He smiled as he went back to the slow rubbing down the foot. This time the pad was more relaxed, and it gave under his fingers a little bit like putty, though more resistant and less malleable than putty. Came back to its normal form faster than putty did too, so perhaps it wasn't as good a description as he would have liked.

Nevertheless, it was good to play with the professor's pad, and he could hear that it was obviously making his professor a good bit more comfortable. Every third rub he heard a little groan from the bear's lips, deep, almost a growl of satisfaction, and it encouraged him to keep going, pressing his thumbs in a little bit deeper. It did make things a little bit harder for him, rubbing in the direction he was, but he enjoyed it nevertheless.

His attention focused more and more on the foot in front of him, as he worked to make sure that it was fully massaged and relaxed. He stared intently at the pad as it was depressed and then came back up, almost obsessed with it. It was...weird...to pay this much attention to a pair of feet, even for him.

It didn't take him as long to reach the heel again this time, and he put the foot down on his lap.

"Ready for me to continue?" Peter asked.

"Go ahead," Grosjean said, and Peter thought that he could hear a small note of satisfaction in the Professor's voice. "You're really good at this. Maybe I can hire you as my personal masseuse sometime, just so we're not breaking a student professor relationship here," he said.

"I wouldn't mind that," Peter said, though inside he liked that idea more than most people would probably understand.

"I'm not surprised to hear that, Peter," the bear said as he picked up his foot. "Particularly after what you left here yesterday."

Freezing in the act of stretching the bear's toes again, Peter's mind started racing a mile a minute. He'd left something here yesterday? Could...oh dear god, was that the magazine that he was missing? Did he seriously leave that HERE? Here, of all places?!

Slowly he raised his eyes from the bear's foot to see that Professor Grosjean was holding up the magazine issue in question, and Peter blushed so hard that he felt like his face was going to explode from the heat. "This is yours, isn't it?" the professor asked.

"Y-yes," Peter said.

Fine Fur Feet, the title of the magazine read. Most places refused to sell it, even adult stores, but there were a few publishers that did carry the publication of the thing. It was a magazine that catered to foot fetishists, generally those that were more interested in anthro feet than human ones. They even used the word 'fur' rather than anthro, though Peter could never really understand that, as the magazine didn't disrespect the anthro models inside.

The issue in question was one that featured a large bear on the cover, seated behind a desk with his feet up and taking up prominent space on the cover. The magazine wasn't a gay one, or a straight one, just an equal opportunity magazine. This one had just happened to feature a male bear rather than a female for a change.

Professor Grosjean flipped it back around, starting to read the article titles off of the front of the page, and Peter turned redder and redder with each one that was read off. "How to give proper respect to a fur's feet. The best massage method for any species. Pads and Paws: How to Worship." He paused, looking up over the edge of the magazine. "Do any of those sound familiar?"

"Yes sir," Peter said, his voice as quiet as his cheeks were red. Oh god oh god oh god, this was not how he imagined this day going. Not in the least.

The professor set the magazine down on the side of his desk, folding his hands in his lap again. "How long, Peter?"

"Sir?"

"I guess that was a little ambiguous, wasn't it?" the bear said. "Well, I guess how long have you had a foot fetish? And how long for us, too."

Hanging his head, Peter answered. His hands kept up their massage, though, moving on autopilot. "Well, I realized it a little bit after you came here, sir," he said. "Before that, there wasn't much about feet that did anything for me. But after you came in, always walking around barefoot, I couldn't help but be curious. And with all the internet access and high speed stuff we have here, well, you can guess where that curiosity went from there."

Professor Grosjean nodded in silence, and Peter felt compelled to continue. "Well, from there I started getting more interested. Never got the chance to really do much. I found a place that still published this magazine, so I got a subscription to it. That one is...well, it's one of my favorites."

"Well, I will admit that it probably had some helpful articles for this situation," the bear said with a small chuckle, one that drew a chuckle from Peter's lips as well. Professor Grosjean shook his head. "You know, anthros have a different view on sexuality and related subjects than you humans do. It's not as liberal as some of your species seems to think - we're not savages, after all - but we're not so prudish as you are."

"What do you mean, sir?"

"I mean that I could feel your growing erection under my foot the whole time you were touching my foot, and I didn't say a thing, because you were enjoying yourself." The bear pushed his foot against Peter's crotch, and the human only just suppressed a small moan from the touch, feeling his erection sandwiched between his own crotch and the bear's pads through the denim of his jeans. "Yeah, still there, I see."

This was very confusing to Peter, and he sat there dumbly as the bear sighed. "Look. I don't mind you having this sort of attraction. My question for you is this. Is this attraction going to be a problem for you if you join the research group?"

"No! No, of course not!" Peter shook his head rapidly. "No, I can focus on the research as well as any of the other students. I just want to study. I came here thinking about...about this," he said.

"You fantasized about it, though. Am I right?" Professor Grosjean said with a little smirk.

"Well..."

"Don't bother. You aren't going to lie, and the truth is written all over your face." The bear chuckled a bit, slowly lowering his feet from the human's lap. He stood up, looking down at Peter. "You know, most human professors would be absolutely indignant at this."

"I know sir," Peter said, looking down at the ground. This was perhaps the most embarrassing day of his life, no matter the fact that he had gotten to play with the feet that had gotten his whole fetish going. "What...what is going to happen now, sir?"

"Well, you are going to come with me for the weekend."

Sure that he had misunderstood, Peter looked up again, cocking his head to the side as he looked into the bear's eyes. "Sir?"

"I guess I should rephrase that. If you can, if you want to, I'd like you to come with me to my house for the weekend," Professor Grosjean said. "I want to talk with you a bit more. Find out if your enthusiasm for biochemistry is all that I think it is, or if you are more into it because I'm the one teaching it. Then I'll be able to tell you for sure whether you'll be able to join the research group."

The idea was so different to what he was expecting that Peter's mind was frozen for a moment. When it started up again, he honestly wasn't sure what to think.

On one hand, he was being invited back to the house of his idol, and the two of them would be able to be completely open to each other, both about the things that related to the subject and the research group, and about...other things. It would give him a chance to have one on one talks with the most brilliant biochemist that he had ever heard of or seen, and that was a chance that most people would kill for.

On the other hand, it meant that he would be under constant scrutiny. If he couldn't keep hold of himself, prove that he was as interested in biochemistry and science as he was in the bear's feet, then he would quite possibly be banned from the bear's classes and the research group, not to mention any other consequences he might face. Professor Grosjean said that he didn't go along with the prudity of most of humanity, but he didn't have much evidence of that. Not yet, anyway.

For just a split second, he was tempted to reject the chance, to not risk anything, and just hope for the best.

Then the moment passed, and he nodded his head. "I would love to do that, sir, if you don't mind having me for the weekend," Peter said with a smile that was, perhaps, just a little broader than it should have been.

"Heh, very good then." The bear pushed his feet back into the human's lap. "You can finish up your massage on my other foot, and then you go back to your dorm and pack. I'll come by later today, and then we'll head over to my house. It's not far, so you won't be out of touch if you get uncomfortable. I would prefer you stay for the whole weekend, though. If I'm right, then we'll have a great deal to talk about, and a great deal to do before you come back to your dorm."

"Yes, sir, thank you sir!" Peter said with a wide grin. He grabbed hold of the professor's big foot again, pulling it up to the appropriate angle and got right to the massaging. Now that he didn't have to be hiding it, he showed just how much he loved doing this, dragging his thumbs down the pad slower, a little more...tenderly, if one could be said to do that. He was conscious of the throbbing in his groin, but he didn't focus on it. It was just a relief to not be worried about the bear noticing it anymore.

His professor must have enjoyed it, because he was getting more vocal about it as well. Peter watched the toes clench, the claws extending into view ever so slightly with each little clenching curl. He smiled to himself, wondering what other things he might be able to do with Grosjean's feet.

Then he shook his head, dismissing the thought. It was supposed to be a trip to prove that he could enjoy the science as much as he could the fun here, and he couldn't let himself fail right at the outset. He needed to focus.

That was proving to be harder and harder with each passing second, he realized. Just holding the bear's foot in his hands was giving him all sorts of ideas, and he was forced to split his attention between Professor Grosjean's foot and his fantasies, pushing them out of his head before any of them could become too strong. He could tell that his massage was suffering as a result, but he had to make sure that he didn't blow his chance here.

The bear eventually pulled his foot back just as Peter was about to reach the heel, chuckling a bit as he did so. "Well, that was a good massage, Peter," he said. "Not the most focused one that I've ever had, but definitely a good one. Now, why don't you get back to your dorm. Pack anything that you like, anything that you need to be comfortable over the weekend while you're away from home."

Nodding, Peter got to his feet. He grabbed his bag, and he was about to leave before the bear cleared his throat. He turned, and blushed as Professor Grosjean held out the magazine that had revealed his secret. Quickly shoving it into his bag, he nodded in thanks before rushing out the door.

#

William smiled to himself as his student ran out of his office, slowly getting up and shutting the doors. "Such a shy kid," the bear muttered under his breath. "Shy, but such a good student."

He looked down at the mess in his office, the papers that were scattered across his desk, and the minimized program on his taskbar. It had all sorts of things that he could focus on during the weekend, but for once, he figured that he could have a little time off. He had earned it with all of the work that he had done around here, and considering just how many other professors there were around here that owed him a favor or two, he could get by with one weekend of slacking off.

Besides, his brain was more focused on what he wanted to do with the weekend, to test out the human, and make sure that he could walk the walk of biochemistry as well as talk the talk. He didn't mind the boy having a crush on him - or at least his feet - but if he didn't have the passion and the knowledge needed to be part of the research group, then he was just going to slow them all down. With the project that William had in mind, he couldn't afford to have anyone in the group that didn't have honest enthusiasm and knowledge of biochemistry.

The bear already had a few ideas of what he might test Peter with. Nothing that was too difficult, but a couple of things that would make it interesting.

And if he did a good job? Well, there were a few rewards that he had in mind for the student that proved himself. Some that they would both enjoy, for that matter, he thought with a small smile.

#

Peter had gotten back to the dorm as fast as his feet could carry him, and with the extreme adrenaline running through his system at the time, that was a great deal of speed. He brushed past his room-mate at the door and went to his small container of belongings, ripping clothes out of it and stuffing it in his bag. Seams be damned, he was going to spend time with Professor Grosjean one on one, one on one for a full weekend! Even if he failed the whole thing, this was an opportunity that he felt would never come around again, and he would never waste an opportunity like this.

Also in the bag were his textbooks, the magazines, and anything else he could think of. For a moment, he considered bringing along his laptop, but there were no notes of his experiments on that, and it would be a distraction. The flash drive he carried between classes would be fine, as well as the different notebooks in the bag. He had the feeling that the bear might appreciate more old fashioned stuff anyway.

"What are you doing? Some girl invite you out on a big date or something?" Erik asked.

"Get your mind off of girls for a second, and you might have a bit more luck with your grades, Erik," Peter muttered. He zipped up the bag - as much as it would go, anyway - and stood up. "Have fun having the place to yourself this weekend. Gotta go."

"Wait!" Erik called as Peter ran past him. Peter just heard him shouting, asking where he'd be, but he didn't answer. He was already halfway out of the building and towards the parking lot.

To his surprise, Professor Grosjean was already waiting for him. The bear had a rather large roofed car, no back doors, but some passenger room in the back. He had the window down, and waved at him as he ran across the campus grounds.

The trunk popped open as he walked closer, and Peter put his bag into the back He hoped that the bear wouldn't mind him doing a little laundry while he was around, considering the lack of clean clothes that he had been able to fit in there - one change, not really enough for the weekend - but it wasn't a big thing for him at the moment.

He hurried around to the passenger side, leaping into the car with a grin on his face. The bear must have found it a little funny, because Professor Grosjean laughed a little bit. "I guess you're looking forward to the weekend a little more than I thought you would," he said.

"Yes sir," Peter said, unable to get rid of his grin. "I've been wanting to do some work with you for a LONG time, and having a weekend with you? It's a dream to have this much time to talk with you alone."

"I don't know if I can put that in the positive or negative column of your evaluation yet, Peter, but it's flattering regardless." The bear shook his head as he turned the gear to drive. "Now, you're sure that you have everything that you might need for the weekend?"

"Of course."

"You're sure?"

"Yes, completely sure."

"Alright then." Pressing his bare foot down on the pedal, the professor sent them flying out of the parking lot, just under the speed that a policeman might stop them for. Peter grunted as he fell back against the seat at the sudden acceleration, but the bear just chuckled. "Sorry. I guess I'm almost as excited as you are to get away from the college for a little bit."

He just nodded. If the evaluation had already started, he didn't need to talk for a while. He wasn't sure if he could trust himself not to say something stupid anyway.

#

The drive took a little bit longer than Peter expected, but then again, he hadn't considered just how far the segregation rules touched. It wasn't just the colleges that were affected by the laws, but the people that lived in the cities, the restaurants, and even some of the people that lived in rural areas outside of the city limits. Admittedly those last people were a little laxer about it, or so he'd heard, but that didn't count for much when humans held all the power, and most of them wanted to keep it that way.

As a result, Professor Grosjean had to live a fair ways out from the human centric area that surrounded the college. Peter watched the city fade away behind them, all the familiar places that he had been too for most of his life falling behind them as they got further and further from the college.

He realized that they must be driving to the anthro part of the city, and he was proven right as the sidewalks started to fill with wolves and foxes and other animal folk, all of them walking around in different ways than they did around humans. None of them walked with their heads down, none of them walked with eyes that were dim and submissive, or even a little bit afraid.

Instead, they walked with their heads high, their steps sure. They didn't look like they were bothered by anything, and several of them were dressed in suits that outshone most of the suits and tuxedos that some professors wore to look better than they were.

It was very strange for Peter to see anthros acting like people. Well, as equal to people. Most of the ones that he had seen before this year had been all too eager to lower their eyes and step aside from any human that they encountered, like they were afraid. These anthros, though, looked like they would be more than willing to stand up for themselves if they were called to do so.

Hell, at one stop light, he saw several anthros looking in the professor's car. Looking at him. Their eyes narrowed, and he was surprised at the sheer anger that glinted in their eyes. They muttered to each other, and while the roar of the car was too loud for him to hear their muttered words through, he could guess that it was about him. And not happy words about him, either.

In that moment, Peter felt sure that, if he were outside of the car, and if he were alone, those two anthros would have roughed him up in a way that most people only heard of.

Then the light changed, and they were off again. Peter turned his head to watch those two fade into the distance, and only when he couldn't make them out anymore did he turn around again.

"Something wrong, Peter?" Professor Grosjean asked.

"Just...just a little surprised at the way that they were looking at me," Peter admitted, shaking his head as he settled back into his seat. "I didn't know that there were some people that were so angry. What did I do?"

"You're human," the bear said, shrugging when Peter looked at him. "It's as stupid as when humans look at me and the other anthros at the school and hate us just because we're what we are. Do you think that we're all that much better than you? We're certainly not any worse."

Admittedly the bear did have a point, but still, Peter had never thought of the situation like that. The two groups, anthros and humans, had been separate all of his life. It was just the way that things were, though the reasons for it escaped him. More tradition than anything else. But he didn't understand why that would have made anyone mad. Didn't most people want to stay with their own kind?

Not if they were like Erik, and like him, to a lesser degree, Peter realized. There were things about humans that he liked, and there were things about anthros that he liked. Erik took it to a whole other level, sleeping with them more than he would humans, and sometimes Peter found that to be just a little disturbing.

Then again, wasn't that something of what he had wanted with Professor Grosjean here? He fetishized and loved the professor's feet, and he would welcome any opportunity to play with them. He was honest enough to admit it to himself, and even to admit that he wouldn't want to do the same thing with any human - there was something about human feet that did put him off - but until now, he hadn't thought that he had been hypocritical of his room-mate. They weren't all that dissimilar, in some ways.

What else didn't he know about himself? What other things didn't he understand, and what things would he figure out while he was spending time with the bear?

"We're here."

He blinked, having not even felt the car come to a stop. Peter looked to the side, seeing the sidewalk, and then slowly looked up.

The professor's house was surprisingly modest. It was a small two story building, sandwiched between two larger apartment buildings on each side. The property had a steel fence around it, with spikes on the tops, and there were several small gardens in the yard leading up to the front porch. He didn't recognize all of the plants, to his surprise; he'd thought that he'd recognize most anything botanical by this point, after all of the time he had put into his studies of different plants and biochemical agents.

Opening the door, he walked around to the back of the car, the professor popping it open a second later. He got his back, not bothering to take his eyes off of the house. The trunk shut with a little lick after he got his bag out, and Peter shook his head as the bear put his big paw on his shoulder. "Well, welcome to my home," Professor Grosjean said. "Let's get inside, hmm?"

"Yeah...before anyone else starts glaring at me for being human," he said. He was suddenly nervous, feeling like there were eyes staring at him from everywhere. When he looked around, he didn't see anyone around, but it still felt like there was someone looking down on him, looking at him like he was someone that didn't belong.

Professor Grosjean opened the gate, and Peter rushed through quickly. Knowing that there was a steel fence around him made him feel a little safer, and when the professor walked through and locked the gate behind him, he felt safer still. Relaxing muscles he'd hardly realized were tensed up, Peter nodded towards the different plants in the garden. "Where did you get all of these, sir?" he asked. "I've been stuck in the library for weeks, and I can't recognize half of these things."

"Ah, these," the bear said with a smile. "I've been getting little shipments from some of my partners out in East Asia, little things that I've been wanting to use to supplement my own collection. Some of these are part of the research projects in the group, so you might get a little jump start on some of the others while you're here, provided that you can pass the tests that I have for you."

That was something that Peter hadn't expected, both that he might get a jump start on the others in the group here, and the fact that the things in here were from East Asia. He could just barely recall a few things that the books had about some of the plant life out there, but there hadn't been much materials in the library on the topic.

Now that he thought about it, the whole region of East Asia was strangely uncategorized and untouched in the biochemical literature that he had been able to get his hands on. Peter wondered why that was.

The professor walked by him, stepping up the few stairs before the front door of the house, and Peter followed behind him. His eyes lingered on the bear's big, padded feet for a moment before he forced himself to look away. It was harder than he thought, and he knew that he was going to have a hard time keeping his attention on the work and the test that the professor was thinking up for him if he couldn't even keep his eyes off of the bear's feet out here.

He walked into the house after the bear opened the door, and blinked at the sight that awaited him. The whole place was clean, spotlessly so, almost like something out of a cleaning chemical commercial. The wood floors sparkled with polish, and he would bet that, if he had his shoes off, he could have gone sliding on it without the slightest friction if he so much as stepped on it.

A few bookcases lined the walls around the room, and he could see hints of what was probably the kitchen to the left of the front room. To the right was a closed door that he assumed went to the bathroom, and just past the living room was a bedroom. It was darkened, and the door to it was only half open, but he could see the corner of a bed, which he assumed meant a bedroom.

"Just leave your bag here by the front door for now, please," the professor said behind him, and Peter leaned down slowly, putting it on the floor just as he heard the door close behind him. "Now, I think we're going to need to start testing your dedication to the field of biochemistry right away, if I am to be sure that you are really ready for the research group. Is that alright with you?"

Peter nodded as he turned around. "Yeah, that's fine. I want to get started - "

He broke off as he watched the bear unbuttoning his shirt, slowly pulling it open and off of his body. He blushed as the jacket and white shirt hit the ground, not all that far from where he had put his bag. "Um, Professor? What are you doing?" Peter asked, hastily averting his eyes as he saw the bear reaching down to the somewhat strained waist of his pants.

"I told you before, we anthros are not as prudish as you humans," Professor Grosjean said, shrugging just enough to be caught out of the corner of Peter's eyes. "When I'm at home, I don't bother wearing clothes. I can tolerate wearing this suit while at the college, since it's the home of many different people. But here, it's more of my rules, and I can wear what I want. Besides, it's part of your test."

"Is that going to be what you say for an excuse whenever you have something you want to do that I might be uncomfortable with?" Peter asked, a blush growing on his face. He could hear the zipper coming down, but since he was looking up, he couldn't see anything.

Once more, the professor shrugged. Peter heard the pants hitting the floor, and watched the professor's head move a little closer as he stepped out of them. "If that's what I need to do," the bear admitted. "But considering how much stuff there was in that magazine, including a rather graphic depiction of a footjob from a bear -"

"You read that?!" Peter asked, unable to keep the embarrassment out of his voice, sending his voice up an octave or two.

"it was a magazine that I had never heard of before. I wanted to make sure that it was at least accurate," the bear said. Peter could have sworn that he heard a bit of barely hidden laughter in his professor's tone. "Come on, are you going to be staring at the ceiling the entire time that you're here? It's going to make it a little difficult for you to do some of the paper tests that I was thinking of having you take. Not to mention impossible to look at the stuff in the garden outside, if you're going to staring into the sky the whole time."

There wasn't much that Peter could find wrong with that logic, though he wasn't sure how he liked the thought of looking at the bear's cock and balls all day. There was a part of him that wanted to deny that it was at all appealing, just like there had been a part when Professor Grosjean had first come around that had wanted to deny all attraction to the bear's feet, big and bare the way that they always were.

He could already guess that he was going to be revising his opinions of how he thought of himself sometime this weekend, but he wasn't ready to give up his view of himself as a straight guy with some fetish leanings. Not yet, anyway. But he needed to see where he was going around the house, so he brought his head down, his eyes following a second later.

The bear was a surprisingly good looking guy, Peter had to admit. He had a bit of a gut, sticking out past his waistline, but not enough to be called fat. Solid, definitely, and the word 'big' sprang to mind as the strongest adjective, but it was hard to use it without sounding insulting. There was a sort of...noble bulk to the bear, something that seemed to fit him, rather than make him look silly or oversized. Sort of like the rounder sultans that one sometimes saw in history books, their size working not to make them look lazy, foppish, or unhealthy, but instead rulers of their domain so confident in themselves, so brilliant at what they did, that they could do what they wanted.

That, in a nutshell, was the way that Grosjean was. Peter hadn't really thought about it that way, but Professor Grosjean had gotten so good at what he did that he could do just about whatever he wanted. How else had he gotten so many things changed around Stantman College?

Chuckling, the bear patted him on the arm as he walked by, the little swaying of his sheath and his balls unable to go unnoticed due to their grand size. "Looks like you don't mind what you see, at least. At least I know that I'm not going to be turning off the younger generation anytime soon," the professor said with a little chuckle. "Come, we have some work to do."

Following behind the bear, Peter's eyes were going nuts. Sometimes they went to the round, bouncy butt of the bear, sometimes he went down to the bear's feet again. It was driving his mind insane, trying to rationalize why he kept looking at the big naked bear, and no matter what idea he presented himself, he just couldn't convince himself it was curiosity.

Or, rather, he could, but it wasn't the curiosity that he wanted to think of himself as having.

Grosjean sat down on one of the couches in the main room, and he directed Peter to sit in the single chair, which he did. He looked at the bear, unable to keep his eyes from looking over his body. Even the other guy's...parts...didn't escape notice. There was something strangely interesting about the differences between them, and he wondered what it must feel like to have one's shaft wrapped up in a stretch of skin like the bear had. What did a sheath feel like? Did the balls tug on it when they bounced around, like he had seen the bear's do? Did it make it a little more fun when one did things?

"You're thinking of me in a few dirty situations, aren't you?"

Groaning, Peter shook his head, rubbing his forehead ."Sorry, professor. You just look so...so different from things I'm used to seeing."

"You sure? I saw that magazine, remember, and I remember the pages being a little bit sticky on one of the images, and I think that you got a good view of a bear's -"

"AH! AH!" Peter held up his hands, not needing the professor to go any further. "It's different in real life, okay? Really different, and I'm kinda needing a little time to get used to it."

"Heh, I guess I can understand that." The professor nodded his head, getting to his feet. "I'll be right back, Peter. Just sit tight," he said as he walked off towards the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

"Tight..." Peter muttered to himself, looking down at his pants. The tent there was making something tight, at any rate. What was the bear trying to test? Whether he was able to focus through being horny? This seemed a little more like torture to his libido than any kind of test of his dedication to the science of biochemistry.

But he wasn't going to give up. He was NOT going to fail.

#

William smiled to himself as he shut the door behind him. This was going to be a fun weekend, if the human was already this twitchy about the nudity. Would he go a little more nuts when it came to some of the real tests, the bear wondered? Would the human be able to take what the bear had in store and still be able to keep his mind on the subject of biochemistry?

It would be interesting to see, he had to admit. He walked past his bed and bent over, patting several different spots under his bed before he felt some cardboard under his fingers. "There you are," the bear muttered under his breath. He tugged it out with a bit of a grunt, blowing some dust off of the top of the box before pulling the lid off.

Yep, there they were. Several typed up tests for his subject. "If Peter can't pass these, then he has no reason to be involved in the subject." They were fairly basic tests, progressing in difficulties from the intermediate stuff that he had taught during Peter's class to the more advanced stuff that people would have needed to search out on their own. If Peter had been doing all the research that the bear suspected that the human had been doing, the actual knowledge was probably well learned in the human's mind.

But that wasn't the only thing he was testing for, and Peter would find that out soon enough.

Checking to make sure that he still had a pencil in the box and finding that he did, the professor nodded to himself before walking back out of the bedroom.

The human looked up at him as soon as he emerged, and he hid a chuckle at the way Peter's eyes drifted down to his crotch as if on some sort of instinct. However, he did not hide the smile he had, and walked a little slower than he might normally, making his sheath shift slowly from side to side, feeling it against his crotch just as he felt his balls touching against his thighs lightly each time that he brought his legs forward.

He dropped the box down on the couch, then walked over to the small table that he had by the couch. Gripping it by the rim, he pulled it over until it was in front of the human's chair. There was just enough room for him to put down the three tests - numbered in the corners - in front of the human, with a little room left over for the additional part of the test.

William sat down again, looking at the human with a small smile. "You're going to take these tests. The first one contains questions to topics I discussed in class. The second has a mix of classroom topics and a few newspaper articles, ones I brought up at some point or another. The last test consists of information you would only know if you went out and searched for the information on your own time, as well as having experimented to make sure that it was the truth rather than taking it as just theory.

"You are going to take these tests. You will have a time limit of two hours, and then I will take them and grade them. If you pass, then I'm going to put you into the research group."

Peter's face lit up, and he could only imagine the thoughts that were going through the human's head. Eager ones, he imagined, ones that were full of relief.

He was almost sorry to crush them when he lifted his legs, putting his feet up on the edge of the table closest to him. "And you have to do the test while my feet are up here," William said, unable to hide his grin. "You have to take your test while the objects of your fetish are sitting right in front of you. Inviting, distracting, arousing; you have to ignore that and pass the test if you want to have a chance to be in my group." He curled his toes, feeling the pads wrinkle up for a moment before he uncurled them, and he saw Peter watch every bit of the movement. "Do you think you can do that, Peter? Hmm?"

The human was quiet, the pencil held lightly in his hands. He continued to stare at the undersides of the bear's feet, his mouth slightly open, his breath coming in just-faster pants rather than calm, regular breaths. A little glance down past the 'equator' told the bear that Peter was already turned on, the front of his jeans bulging outwards from the sight.

He sighed. The human was a little too controlled by his fetish to be able to focus. Shaking his head, he pulled his feet back -

Only to have the toes of his right foot grabbed and his foot dragged back into place. The bear blinked, looking into Peter's eyes. The human had looked away from his foot and looked into his eyes again.

Slowly, he pulled his fingers off of the bear's foot, and then tapped the first test. "Start the clock, Professor. I'm going to do this."

#

How he was going to do this, he had no idea, but he was going to do this. Nothing, not the Professor's big, padded feet or anything else, was going to keep him from getting this position in the research group. He had worked too long, searched out too much information, to give up at this point.

Lowering one hand to his thigh, he leaned over the papers, looking at the first test. Just a glance told him that the first one would be easy enough, even with the professor's feet in his face. He hoped.

The pencil flew over the page as he signed his name and got to work writing out his answers. From the first question, he fell into the test, finding himself lost in the different questions as he pulled the answers of his mind. A small smile crossed his face as he started to get into the test, flipping over the first page to get to the questions on the other side. Then the questions on the other page after that. And then flipping that one over, his answers gaining momentum as he went through the test.

He was pretty sure that he had only taken about a half hour on the first test, and he put it aside with a smirk on his face. "That's the first one, Professor," Peter said, keeping his eyes down. He could just barely see part of Professor Grosjean's feet at this angle, and it was a bit of a distraction, but he could focus if he kept his face down. "I thought that this was going to be hard."

"Wait until you get to the third test, Peter," the bear said with a little chuckle. "You want hard? That'll challenge you, I think."

"We'll see, professor, we'll see." He pushed the first test out of the way - gulping slightly as he saw the professor put the paper under his heels - and got to work on the second test.

It was a bit harder, he had to admit, and he had to search through his memory of the different articles he had searched out in the newspapers after Professor Grosjean had mentioned them in class. He paused several times as he looked over the questions, and then he made his first mistake.

He looked up.

He looked up, and he saw the bear's feet pointed right at him. At this angle, it wasn't enough for him to see further, to see between the feet at the package that lay...well, further away, but he did get a wonderful look at the bottom of those big bare bear feet, the toes curling and uncurling slowly, the padded undersides flexing as the muscles under the pads stretched and relaxed. His imagination filled with the thought of touching them, of stroking them, and of doing...other things to them.

Peter shook his head, groaning as he looked back down at the paper. Yet, despite looking away from his professor's feet, he could still see them in his mind's eye. They were just so...sexy. So very sexy, and he had to keep thinking of mathematical equations to keep his erection from drawing too much attention away from the quiz.

Of course, he couldn't get it all out of his head. There was too much to think of, and he was soon very thankful that the quiz came with a pencil rather than a pen, as he had to erase the word 'foot' and 'feet' fairly often after that first glimpse. He blushed in embarrassment every time he saw himself make that mistake, and hoped that the bear couldn't see well enough to read his answers upside down on the paper.

Pushing himself harder and harder, Peter managed to get through the second quiz, pushing it aside. There was no clock around, but the professor hadn't stopped him yet. He must still have the better part of the second hour left, he hoped, and that would hopefully be enough to finish the final test. Just one more, he told himself. One more, and then you can ask for permission to leave and deal with this...problem....

"Here's the second test," Peter said, pushing it towards the other end of the table.

Grosjean didn't take it, though. Instead, he gestured at his feet. "Go on, Peter. Pick up my feet and put it under them with your other test," the bear said.

Peter looked up, into the bear's eyes, really hoping that the bear was joking, hoping to see some sign. There was none. Shaking his head, he reached out with a blush. His thumb dug into the bear's pads lightly as he lifted the foot up, and he felt the pad give under his thumb. He blushed, knowing it would be more than with a human, the texture different, and his imagination started flooding his mind with thoughts of what else he might have pushed against that foot in different times.

His erection throbbed in his pants as he lifted the bear's feet, slowly sliding his paper under them before lowering them again. It was hard to let go of them, but he reminded himself of the research group. He had to get into that. Anything else could wait until after he had the bear's permission to get into the group.

His hands shook as he got the pencil again and started the last test. The very first question threw him for a loop, and he groaned as he flipped through the pages, seeing that all of them touched on subjects that he had read a long while ago. Not a single question had been covered in any class, only in the different books that the library had on their shelves. Honestly, he wasn't sure that he could answer this test, not to the point of passing it.

"Giving up, Peter?" Professor Grosjean asked.

Peter's grip solidified on the pencil, and he shook his head. "No, sir," he said, signing his name on the paper. "I just needed a moment to think."

Okay, he could do this, he thought to himself. He could do this, could make it through this. He just had to remember the different topics that he had read over the last year. It couldn't be THAT hard.

Skipping over the first two questions in his search for one that he could answer, Peter found one at the third question. He smiled as he wrote out a couple sentences and an equation for the answer, and then searched for another question to answer.

He found one at the fifth one. Then another at the ninth. Gradually he started to gain momentum, and the more questions he answered, the more that he realized that he could answer, the information tangentially related to the other questions turning out to be the answers for the ones that had utterly bamboozled him before.

Through it all, he could feel the bear's eyes watching him. He didn't dare look up - not when those dancing toes and sexy feet were right in front of him - but he hoped that the professor was approving of him. It was taking all of his willpower to keep going with this, and Peter felt several sweat drops running down his forehead. Sparing his other hand to wipe it off before it could drip down on the paper, the human kept going, flipping over the page when he hit the bottom of it and getting to the other questions.

About halfway through the test, he heard the bear say, "You have twenty minutes left." Peter had no idea just how much time he had used with the first half, but he knew that he couldn't waste even a second of what he had left. Not if he wanted to get through this and pass the test.

It was made even harder as the bear scooted forward, the feet moving off of the other papers and coming to a rest just at the top of his current test. His whole body trembled at the sight of them, unable to ignore them anymore, and Peter felt like his cock was going to punch right through the front of his pants. It throbbed, and every part of his being wanted to reach out, grab those feet, and play with them.

Only the thought of disappointing the professor kept him from doing just that. The research group didn't matter anymore. The chance to work with the great Professor Grosjean didn't matter anymore. What did matter, the one thing that kept him in his seat and working, was the fact that he didn't want to disappoint his hero. He didn't want the bear to think that he was an utter pervert, and that he didn't appreciate the discipline and science that he had taught. He wanted to make Professor Grosjean proud, and he could not do that by being a slavering human that wanted to play with the bear's feet..

So, he kept writing. One question, then another were answered in scribbling letters. Peter worried that his answers would be next to illegible, but he couldn't slow down and make his handwriting neater, all too conscious of the passing seconds and minutes of his time here. His eyes flickered constantly between the paper and the bear's feet, watching every little flex of the toes, taking in every crease along the pads when the bear moved his feet. Oh, if his teeth weren't clenched, he was sure that he would have been drooling.

"Time," Professor Grosjean said, just as Peter put the period on the end of his last answer. The bear pulled his feet off of the table, gathering up the tests as Peter collapsed, facedown, on the table.

That had been nothing less than torture, Peter thought to himself. The temptation right in front of him, almost like they were being offered to him, at the price of being left out of his dream group. Now that they were out of his face, he wasn't sure whether he felt embarrassed at how he had behaved with them in his face, or whether he had liked the teasing, or something else.

Slowly, he turned his head to face the naked bear. He barely registered the way that the bear's genitals swayed with his steps as he paced around the room, reading through the tests. "So...am I...am I in the group?" Peter asked, his voice shaky and tense.

"Well, I am not so sure that I am going to be putting you on note taking duty if you're going to have handwriting like this," the professor said, coming back to the table and putting the papers down. "But your understanding of the subject is phenomenal. I would be an idiot if I didn't try and get you into the group as soon as possible." Professor Grosjean smiled, holding out his massive paw. "Welcome to the research group, Peter."

He stared in shock, just looking at the professor's hand. He couldn't even move, his body at once stiff and limp with relief. He felt tears starting to swell in his eyes, but he couldn't even reach up to wipe them away.

The professor seemed to understand, and instead of pushing things, stood up and walked around the table, kneeling by Peter's chair and pulling him into an embrace. Mechanically, Peter wrapped his arms around the bear as well. It was a little different, hugging a guy that was not only covered in fur, but also completely naked. Yet, it wasn't bad, either. And it was the professor, so he put aside any weirdness and just enjoyed the moment.

Their embrace ended after a few seconds, and the bear chuckled as he pulled the table back out of the way. Rather than sitting down immediately, though, the bear pulled the couch a little closer to the single seat that Peter had.

Peter cocked his head to the side as his professor sat down again, a little smile on his muzzle. "After all that work you put into the tests, and how hard it must have been to ignore your urges, I think you deserve to finally indulge yourself."

"Um..." He blinked, just staring. Professor Grosjean couldn't mean what he thought he meant, could he? "Sir?"

Chuckling in that rumbling way he had, the bear lifted his feet off of the ground, putting them into Peter's lap. The human groaned softly, particularly as the toes danced along his bulge, drumming against the tent in his pants. One foot ground against it, pressing his cock back against his groin as the bear explained. "I told you before, Peter, we anthros aren't as prudish as humans. We don't mind having our fun with different people, whether they're of our own species, different species, or with humans. If you want to play with my feet - and it's pretty obvious that you want to - then I think that you earned the chance to do it."

This seemed impossible, utterly impossible. Peter looked down at the feet on his groin, then looked up at the bear again, looking at him, asking him if this was for real with that one look.

"I'm serious, Peter. Go ahead, do what you would like to my big bear feet," Grosjean said. He pressed the wide pad of his foot against the human's groin again, and Peter blushed as he felt a little pre slip out of his cock, knowing there would be a slight wet spot in his underwear from that. "I know you want to. And no one will ever find out about this unless you tell them. I promise. I will not let other people know about this."

Well....if that was the case....

Peter slowly reached out for the bear's feet, grabbing one of them by the sides and lifting it up to his face. It was massive, and he would not be surprised if Professor Grosjean could cover his entire face with that foot. The mere thought was enough to make him tremble with desire again, and he suppressed the desire to thrust his hips forward against the foot still grinding against his erection.

Instead, he stuck out his tongue, slowly dragging it along the bear's padded foot. He felt the roughness of the pad as he took it from heel to toe, but he remembered from the magazine that the pad would take this sort of treatment from a tongue where it couldn't take it from a thumb or finger massaging it.

The taste of the pad was different than he expected. He had thought that he might find some sweat on the foot, something that would make the taste a little harder to take, but there was nothing of the sort. Oh, there was a musky sort of flavor, but the distasteful salt taste that he had expected was absent. Probably with the bear being barefoot so much, the sweat was brushed away before it could really settle into the pads. It made sense, in a way, and it made the natural foot flavor that much more enjoyable.

He couldn't stop himself from panting, moaning as he reached the top of the bear's foot and started to lick him again, and again. It was like a taste that he could not get enough of, licking over the bottom of the foot, 'cleaning' the pad with every lick. The black surface was a little rough under his tongue, but it was still smoother than he had thought that it would be, not bothering his tongue in the least.

"You know, you don't have to keep your pants zipped up, Peter," the professor said.

Already lost in his lust for the professor's feet, Peter didn't even question the suggestion. He lowered one hand to his pants, unbuttoning and unzipping his jeans in seconds. A quick tug brought his underwear down just enough for his cock to pop out, throbbing hard.

No sooner had he done that than the professor had reached out with his free foot. The padded bear foot, wide enough to cover his entire crotch, pressed down against his cock. It ground against him directly, the smoothness of the underside combining with Peter's pre to form just enough lube to keep it from being uncomfortable, and giving the human enough pleasure to make him moan louder than ever.

"Go ahead. I said you can do what you want to my feet, Peter," the professor said with a smile, even as he ground his foot against the human's cock like it was a welcome mat, a gas pedal, and other things of the sort. "I'm sure that you want to do more to my feet than simply lick them."

The bear didn't know how right he was, Peter thought to himself. He had to force himself to focus as his arousal threatened to get away from him, lifting the professor's foot towards his lips. The toes poked against his lips lightly before he started kissing them, affectionate little pecks of lust. They pulled back from his lips each time, but then they'd push back before he could move on to the next one, grinding against his lips, rubbing their smell against him.

On the last one, where a human's big toe would be, Peter opened his mouth and pulled it in, sucking along the toe, feeling its individual pad press against his tongue in a way that he hadn't felt with the rest of the foot. He groaned, sucking on it gently, tasting foot, slight sweat, and musk all over his tongue, overwhelming any other taste that might have been present.

He sucked on the toe for a few seconds before the professor smiled at him, pulling his foot back a little bit. "Go ahead, kiss under the toes, Peter," the bear said. Peter stared at him for a moment. "The only stickier part of that magazine than the picture of the naked bear with his feet up was the one with spit marks all over the bear's feet, right under the toes. I know you want to."

Peter wasn't sure how he felt about the bear knowing all of his fantasies, despite all of the time that he had spent hiding them, but he wasn't going to question it right now. He was just going to enjoy himself, and get the most fun out of this he could, while he could.

He pressed his nose just under the toes, and he felt them curl down around his face, the claw tips of the different toes pressing lightly against his face, pinning him in place. It brought a smile to his face, and he pressed his lips firmly against the bear's pads, his nose flaring as he sucked up the scent of the foot.

Just under the toes, the smell was a little bit stronger, but not offensively so. More like it was a special smell, one that was uniquely the bear's. Sweatier, a bit saltier, a little more moist in a way. The smell made his head swim, and his cock throbbed hard against the bear's foot as it was rubbed, teased, ground against.

He didn't know how long he was like that, just sniffing against the bear's toes, his lips kissing the black pads of the bear's foot, his cock rubbed by the bear's other foot. It could have been minutes, it could have been a half hour; it was so good that he didn't know just how much time had passed.

What he did know was that the bear pulled his feet back at some point, and Peter hadn't finished. He groaned softly, half reaching for the bear's feet before he could stop himself. He blushed, sitting on his hands as the professor got to his feet.

"Well, you are definitely going to be a fun person to have around for the weekend, Peter," Professor Grosjean said with a smile. He shook his head and wiggled his toes before walking towards the kitchen. "I'm going to go get us a few refreshments, then we'll talk a bit more about biochemistry for a bit. Then...well, who knows, we might do something else that's pretty fun."

Nodding his head absently, Peter could only watch the bear walk away. His head was still swimming with the smell that he had taken in from the bear's feet, the way that it had felt to run his tongue across the professor's foot, the way that it had felt to have the bear's foot right on -

"GAH!" Peter jumped up, grabbing his pants by the buttons and quickly pulling them back on. Underwear first, he reminded himself as he almost zipped his cock into his pants. He sat down with his face bright red as he realized just what he had done. He had taken out his cock for one of his teachers, and he had gotten a damn good footjob out of it as well. Almost to completion, for that matter.

But he had still taken out his cock right in front of his professor, something that had to be one of the most unprofessional things to do in the world. He looked down at his cock, which still throbbed needily in his pants. This was getting just a little overwhelming. Maybe it was a good thing that they were taking a short break to talk for a while, before he made a real pain of himself.

#

William smiled as he opened several cupboards, pulling out the cups for some tea and a few small plates to put down some food on. It wasn't to be a meal, so he didn't need much more than that.

For that matter, he wasn't going to need those for much,either, but it was good to keep up appearances.

As he prepared the tea in a pot on the stove, he reached into one of his drawers. It came open easily, and when he pressed a little indentation on the side of the drawer, the false bottom of it came out just as easily. He lifted it up and out of the way, looking behind him at the human in the chair, just to make sure that he wasn't looking into the kitchen and watching what he was doing.

From the looks of things, though, Peter was a little too busy looking down at his crotch. He jumped up for a moment, and it took all of the bear's self control to not burst out laughing at the dancing dressing up that the human went through as he realized what had happened.

"Humans, so uptight about their bodies," he said as he turned back to the drawer. Dragging his claws along a couple of packets, he eventually picked out a white one with a little 'S' written on it with permanent marker. The bear flicked a claw over the top of it, cutting a little hole in it.

He up-ended the packet over the human's cup, letting the powder flow into it until the bottom of the cup was fully covered. The little bit that was left in the packet was rinsed out in the sink - after the bear put on some gloves - several times, and when it was clean and empty, thrown out.

William had been a little surprised at the strength of the human's foot fetish. Oh, the magazine had told him that it was pretty strong, and so had the way that Peter had been distracted by his feet during the test, but he hadn't imagined that the human would lose it so much when he finally had the chance to play with the feet he loved so much. It had been interesting to see, from a scientific viewpoint.

More than that, though, it had been a little bit fun. Not to the point of getting him aroused, but it was fun having some time with a human so interested in servicing him like that. It was a reversal of what a lot of people saw in the few bits of human/anthro interactions out there, and William hoped that it would eventually become a little more balanced out.

But he wouldn't let this incident go to his head. As much fun as he might have with Peter during the weekend, he was still the professor, and Peter was still his student at the college. Out there, they would maintain the same sort of relationship. Equals, of a sort, the professor and the student. William had no interest in making the human into a slave or anything like that, something that he was sad to say that a good bit of the anthros he knew wouldn't have minded doing if they knew that they could.

The bear had different ideas. He wanted to have some sort of equality between the two, where they could choose what they wanted to do with an equal voice.

That didn't mean that he didn't want to have a little fun being in charge, and this weekend would be the perfect opportunity for that, the bear thought to himself. He smiled as he took the tea off of the stove, pouring it into his cup, and then pouring it carefully into Peter's, making sure that none of it splashed out, not even in a bit of a spray. Any of that powder getting anywhere but down a person's digestive system could cause some massive complications, and much as he liked having fun, he didn't want to have to deal with anything ridiculous right now.

Getting a few crackers and refrigerated 'finger' sandwiches - he didn't know why he stocked those things, but they came in handy from time to time - and placing them on the small plates on the tray with the tea, William walked back out to the main room. Things were going to get interesting in a hurry.

#

He looked up as the bear walked back in, blushing as he adjusted himself a little bit at the bear's approach. "Um, would you like some help with the -"

"No, no, I got it," Professor Grosjean said with a small smile. He walked around the couch, putting the tray down beside him before handing over a cup. "Here. You drink tea, I believe?"

"A little, yeah," Peter admitted with a nod. "More to test out the chemical reactions than anything else, but yeah, I drink tea."

"Well, I think you'll like this one. It's one that I found out about recently, and it's got a pretty good taste to it, as well as a few components to its make-up that work well with keeping you focused. Pointedly focused, I guess you could say. Not that you need much help with that," the professor said, gesturing down at Peter's groin as he chuckled, taking a sip of his tea.

Peter barely hid his blush at the comment, but took his cup with as much grace as he could. This was starting to get ridiculous, he thought. Was this how things went with other students when they came to the bear? He hoped not, but he couldn't shake the feeling that perhaps this sort of thing had happened before. Maybe it hadn't, but the bear was so at ease that it was hard to believe that this was just the culturally 'less prudish than humans' thing that the anthros claimed to have. Unless they were a hell of a lot less prudish, which would actually make this make some sort of sense.

The tea wasn't bad, he realized, and he took a bigger drink. A little grainy, maybe, but that was probably just a little sugar that hadn't dissolved all the way yet. The taste itself was actually quite good, though. "What kind of tea is this?" he asked. "If it works as good for keeping you focused as it tastes, I definitely need to get some."

"It's called the Other Side Tea," the bear said with a small chuckle. "I don't think you'll be getting this particular blending of tea at any store, though. It's something that I made myself. Lots of little experiments with different plants to get it right, you know how it goes."

He nodded with a little chuckle. Yeah, he knew how that went. So many different experiments over the last few quarters, some with making biochemistry mesh with some of his cooking to make it better, and other times just different things that he could think of to try and see if the theories in different books were right. It was far from conclusive, but it had gotten the knowledge to be a bit more practical rather than fully theoretical.

That reminded him. "Hey, would you like to see some of my notes from the latest project I tried? I've been keeping it all in one of the notebooks that I brought with me."

"I'd be delighted." The bear held out his hand for Peter's tea-cup, and he handed it over before running over to his bag.

The notebook in question was buried rather deeply inside of his bag, and he had to shift a few things out of the way before he could get to it. There was an embarrassing moment when one of his magazines slipped out as well - an issue with a fox on the front that was a good bit more risque than the issue that Grosjean had found - but he managed to get it back in before it could have been visible from the couch. When he had notebook in hand, he closed his bag up as tightly as he could make it shut, and then hurried back over to the couch.

He accepted his cup back from the professor and handed the notebook over, letting the professor flip it open. Taking occasional sips of his tea, Peter pointed out the different experiments he had worked on, including a few mushroom ones that had shown small signs of scientific interest.

The whole time he talked, Professor Grosjean looked at him and the notebook with interest. That was what he liked best about talking about this stuff with the professor. He was never interrupted and never chastised for what he was doing, never told that it was just something that had been done before, or that the answers had already been found. When the bear talked with him, it was only to offer encouragement, helping him find his way to the answer rather than letting him find out that someone else had gotten the answer already.

After all, it wasn't the official discovery at the end of the experiment that mattered, it was the fact that he had learned it himself. That was what counted, and the professor seemed to appreciate that.

But there was something strange. As they continued to talk, the bear seemed to get larger, looming over him in a way. At first, Peter dismissed it as the simple fact that the bear sat up straighter in the chair than he did, but when the difference in their height started to get larger than the near two feet normally there, he started to get worried.

Getting up from the couch, Peter realized that his waist didn't even come up to the couch's cushions. He stared as he continued to get shorter and shorter, the clothes he wore getting looser around his body. His jeans had already fallen down, but he was still covered as his shirt reached lower than it had before, almost covering him down to his ankles. "What's going on?!" he shouted.

"Don't worry about it, Peter, it's just a reaction to the tea." The bear shut the notebook, setting it down on the couch. "At least, a reaction to the stuff that I put in your tea."

"What do you mean?" Peter had to shout that, his normal voice too quiet to reach the bear as he reached a height of barely a foot, almost sliding through the neck-hole of his shirt. "Why did you do this?"

"Well, I thought you'd like being so small as to be underfoot all the time." The bear chuckled. "Haven't you fantasized about being chased around a house by a giant bear, his big pads threatening to land on you at any time, but knowing you were never in any danger? Tell me that you don't honestly want something like that, and I'll help you grow back to normal."

The human had to think about that, and in the process did slip through the neck-hole of his shirt. He blushed, but didn't dare move, already so much smaller that it would have been all too easy to get lost in the wrinkles of his clothing. It bunched up around him, and he barely could see over his former collar as he thought for a moment about the situation.

That moment was all he needed. He trusted the professor, and he had to admit, the idea was a hot one. He nodded his head, agreeing.

The bear smiled, reaching down and lifting him out of his clothes. "Alright, you better get moving. I'm going to be coming right behind you, and you'll need as much of a head start as you can get," the professor said with a smile. He gave the human a little pat with a finger, and Peter ran off.

#

The bear smiled down at the miniature human, watching him scurry across the wooden floor. He looked a little bit like a two legged mouse, though even mice were a little bit bigger than this human was at the moment.

Maybe he should have told Peter about the stuff he'd put in the tea, but then again, he had thought that it would be a good surprise for him. And he'd been right; Peter had taken to the idea like a duck to water, and he imagined that the human would be wanting to do this again sometime.

After all, the powder would wear off before the end of the weekend, and Peter would be back to normal size after that. No problems for anyone, no need to worry.

And in the meantime, a great deal of fun for the both of them.

After Peter had gotten a good few feet ahead of the bear, William decided to make his move. He walked slowly, taking his time with each step to make it thundering, powerful and loud behind his student. He watched as the vibrations of his footsteps - pretty forceful ones only partially from his bulk and weight - sent the human bouncing and wobbling back and forth, and had to hide a little chuckle. He hadn't thought that his weight and size would be enough to make Peter go back and forth like that, but it was almost cute.

It didn't stop the human from running, though, and William followed close behind. He moved slow enough that he almost thought he was going in slow motion, bringing his feet down just behind the human each time, making sure that he stayed just enough back so that the claws on his feet didn't rake the human's back or anything. The last thing he wanted to do to Peter was hurt him.

Suddenly the human turned to the side, running off towards the kitchen. The bear knew that he would never actually reach it, but he smiled anyway, enjoying the feeling of chasing after the human, the feeling of being in power and able to chase someone like his bear ancestors had.

He could tell that Peter was enjoying it as well, considering the way that he looked back at him with a smile. William smiled back, but he kept up the stomping motions, feeling the vibrations himself now. With some of the heavier steps, he was a little surprised that the human wasn't bounced in the air from the vibrations and thumps through the floor, but he supposed that might have been a little much to ask.

At the border to the kitchen, William brought down his foot hard, right in front of the human. He felt the little guy run right into his foot, and he grinned at the slight impact. It was barely enough for him to know that the human had run into his foot, but he still liked the light squirming feeling of the human's hands against his foot, the flailing limbs before the human ran away from his foot. Almost a tickle, he realized, but without the feeling of wanting to laugh from it.

The human was running towards the bedroom this time, and William chuckled. "Can't have that," he said, walking just behind the human again. Several times he brought his foot down to Peter's sides, and he watched the human jump away. Yet, he was sure that the human was still having fun.

He knew that he was enjoying this. The more that he chased after the little human, the more time that he spent showing the human who was in charge, the more he started to enjoy it in a different way. His sheath started to open, and he felt his shaft starting to come out into open air. Every step brought a little breath of air against his groin, enhancing his pleasure and making it a little bit more fun for him.

Once more he reached the next room before the human could, and he reached out, grabbing hold of the door and shutting it tight. He realized that Peter might have been able to slide under the door, and he brought his foot down, cutting off the crack at the bottom of the door.

But there was something strange. He was sure that Peter hadn't been able to get into the room yet, but he couldn't see the little human around him.

He turned around, looking from one side to the other. He listened,and he flared his nose as he sniffed for the human. He looked over his shoulder, being very careful to not take his feet off of the ground in case Peter was hiding around them, but no matter what he tried, he couldn't find where the human had disappeared to.

Then he felt a squirming under his foot, and he blinked. Then he chuckled. "So that's where you went," he muttered under his breath. The bear pulled his foot back a little bit, feeling the squirming against his foot getting closer and closer to his toes. Just as he might have moved his foot completely off of it, Peter's head poked out from between the bear's toes, and William froze, just looking down at the human with a chuckle.

"Having fun down there?" he asked, pressing his toes to the floor to keep the human from squirming out between them.

"Heh...is it that obvious?" It looked like Peter was shouting, but William had a hard time hearing him. He had to pause a moment, letting the quiet voice filter through to his mind before he nodded. "Um, can you let me up?"

"You want to be chased some more?"

"Well..." It was a fair distance from the bear's eyes to the human's face, but William could tell that Peter was blushing quite a bit. "It is that obvious?"

"Considering that I think I can feel your erection against the bottom of my foot right now, I'd say so."

That made the human blush brighter still, but Peter pointed upwards, pointing right at the bear's aroused cock. William knew that it was hard and throbbing now, and the only reason it wasn't doing more was because he hadn't touched it directly yet. "Well, I'm not the only enjoying it," Peter said.

"I won't deny that," William said with a shrug. He pulled his foot back the rest of the way, looking at the human. Shrunken like this, he looked so very different, at least to the bear's scientific eye. There were other purposes that he could fulfill in this size that he might not be able to do when he was smaller, and one of those functions were quite obvious to the bear. Perhaps it was an idea that he just got from being hard and horny, but it was a good idea, and one that he was pretty sure that the both of them could enjoy.

Quickly reaching down, he grabbed hold of Peter's body. It was a gentle grip he kept around the human, making sure that he wouldn't be injured while he was carried around, but he could tell that the human was nervous anyway. He didn't really blame him. If the bear had been shrunken that far for the first time, he would have reacted the same way. Hell, he had reacted the same way, but that was another story.

He carried the human back to the couch with him, sitting down with a thunderous flop. Well, thunderous to the human, he imagined, though to him it was no different than any other time he had sat down. William spread his legs slightly, letting his balls fall between his thighs, the bottoms of them touching the couch cushion, and still not fully lowered. If he had sat down a bit more forward, they would have hung down a little lower without the couch cushion to hold them up.

The human still looked a little confused, so William decided to answer his unasked question by lowering him down to his cock. Peter squirmed a bit in his hand for a moment as he was touched against the bear's cock, but William made sure that he wouldn't fall or anything from squirming around too much.

When Peter had calmed down enough - and had shifted his grip from the bear's fingers to the cock - William let go of him. The human squirmed, his bare feet 'kicking' at the sides of the bear's member, and William moaned softly at the way it felt. It was soft, gentle, but oh so different from the feeling of a tongue or a hand, or really anything else that he could imagine pleasuring him.

After giving Peter a little while to get used to the smell of arousal down there, as well as the feeling of grabbing hold of a slick cock that was not his own, the bear looked down at the human again. "Look, I know this is probably not what you were thinking of when you agreed to come here for the weekend, but there's a lot of fun we can have. I'll keep letting you play with my feet if you give me a little help with dealing with this thing. Think you'd mind giving this professor a hand with getting off?"

The human seemed a little confused, unsure, and William tried again. "Come on, you don't want your professor to go without after he helped you have all that fun, do you?" the bear asked with a small smile. "Please, just a little bit of fun with me, and then we'll go back to giving you what you want. Those big bare bear feet all over your body."

William could be wrong, but he could swear that Peter chuckled when he made that suggestion. But it didn't seem to matter, as Peter got a better grip a little under the tip of his cock and hugged it tightly. "I'll take that for a yes, Peter," the bear said, reaching down with one hand and wrapping his fingers around his shaft, sealing Peter against it and using him for a little more stimulation.

He could feel Peter's squirms and struggles beneath his fingers, but it only made the stroking all the more pleasurable. The bear leaned his head back, moaning to himself as he dragged his large hand up and down his cock, feeling it twitch against his fingers in arousal.

It didn't take long for his pre to start coming out as well, and he felt Peter squirm more when that started coming out. The human didn't seem to fond of it, so William tried to keep him a little bit away from the tip while he kept stroking. It didn't really matter where Peter was on his dick, really; as long as he kept squirming and shaking around in there, he would be able to provide the right amount of stimulation wherever he was. And oh, what stimulation it was, with the human kicking and squirming and flailing around under his fingers. It had him on the edge already, and he'd barely been stroking for a moment.

Considering the way that Peter seemed to be annoyed by the pre, William considered stopping his stroking, letting the human out. But there was one thing that stopped him, and even made him speed up a little bit.

Peter's erection.

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The human could hardly believe what he was doing under the bear's fingers, his mind awash with the feeling of being manhandled, half-suffocated in the hot, humid space between the bear's fingers and the bear's dick. It was a little bit hard to breathe in the enclosed space, but he did manage to get some air, each breath filled with the taste and smell of bear musk and pre. It was similar to his own smell, but much stronger, a little more...woody, earthy, mature than his own kind of smell.

At the start it hadn't been something he liked very much, but after the first minute, when he'd gotten a chance to get used to it, Peter found that it wasn't that bad. In fact, it was actually fairly enjoyable, and he could feel his erection coming back from before, getting stronger the longer that he was around Professor Grosjean's cock.

Before long, he started to hump against the cock, his arms wrapped around it as tightly as he could get them to be. Despite being flung around the top of the bear's cock, some of the pre still splashed back against him. The first time, it had been very...weird, different, but he had reached out his tongue, and tasted it. Any other pre that came to him after that went right into his mouth, the taste hardly something to worry about, just a little salty. And he liked to think that he was helping his professor a little bit more, his tongue flicking along the musky manhood of the genius professor.

Before long, he felt the cock under him start to pulse. He'd had enough masturbation experiences to know that the bear was going to blow before long, and considering where he was, he was likely to get doused in bear cum. There was a brief conflict in his mind, the straight, normal college student that he had thought he was fighting against the bear loving researcher that he was becoming.

The researcher won out, and he let himself ride on the bear's strokes. A couple of strokes pushed him from the middle of the professor's cock up to the top, and he moaned as the shifting motion also ground his cock against the smooth skin of the bear's cock. Once he was up there, it only took a moment to swing around so that he was on the bottom of the bear's cock instead of the top, and at that point, the view was a good deal different than anything he had seen so far.

He was face to face with Professor Grosjean's cock tip, and he could see the little hole, leaking pre and getting ready to shoot its load. Unable to resist the temptation, Peter stuck out his tongue and pressed it directly against the hole, licking at the flow of pre to get a fresh taste of it.

His tongue must have been the bit that threw the professor over the edge to his orgasm, because Professor Grosjean's hands tightened massively around his cock. Peter felt the pulses against his body as he was held tight against it as well, and he groaned as he was pushed near to his orgasm as well.

Cum splattered against his face, dousing him with musky bear juices as Professor Grosjean came. He gasped at the first shot and closed his eyes to keep the rest of the bear's orgasm from getting in his eyes, but he couldn't keep it out of his mouth. It flooded his mouth, and then splattered against his bare chest and down his stomach, leaving him so slick that he couldn't keep his grip. He felt more than he heard or saw the bear's final cum shot going over his head as he slid down the professor's shaft, only stopping when his feet touched against the bear's sheath.

When he cleared some of the cum off of his face and away from his ears, he heard the panting above him. He smiled, knowing the sound of a man that had his mind blown from a great orgasm when heard it. He had done a good job, he was sure. Professor Grosjean would be pleased.

Taking care to keep his hand against the sides of the bear's cock, and keep his balance along the edge fo the bear's sheath, Peter made his way around the cock. He looked up at the bear when he reached the halfway point, and stifled a giggle at the way that his professor looked.

His tongue was sticking out, and his eyes were half closed in contentment. A claws hand laid against his large belly, and his other cum soaked hand laid against his thigh. If anything, the bear almost looked like a cartoon drawing of a bear that had gotten way too much honey.

That thought overcame Peter's self control, and he giggled softly to himself.

It took a few minutes, but the bear eventually woke up again, shaking his head and looking down at Peter. He grabbed him, for which Peter was thankful, considering that the bear's cock was sinking back into his sheath, and slowly lowered him to the ground. Naked and cum soaked, he started making a puddle on the wooden floor almost immediately.

"Well, I told you that if you helped me, I'd help you, didn't I?" Professor Grosjean said.

Peter nodded, and watched with rapt attention as the bear lifted up one foot, bringing it around and holding it above him. He took the silent command to lay down, and did so, his arms above his head and his legs spread out, his cock pointed towards the ceiling in eagerness.

Smiling past the foot, Professor Grosjean slowly lowered it down, giving Peter a wonderful chance to get another close look at the bear's big, sexy feet.

They were a little moister looking now, probably from resting and being in his house a bit more, but the pads looked even better this way. His smaller size let him see them all the better, all the small details that his normal eyesight missed. There were tiny little brushes and bristles along it, nothing all that rough, but different textures, like soft brushes in a way. It was hard to describe it, but he loved it, the big central pad slightly shiny as it came down on his body.

The broad paw covered him completely, from his head to his toes. The pressure was a little much, but nothing that he couldn't adjust to, and the feeling of warmth, the unique texture of the bear's foot against his body - and most importantly against his cock - something that was worth just about any momentary discomfort to be able to feel.

Vibrations, probably a voice. Peter could hear sound, feel the vibrations going through the foot against his body, but there was no way for him to hear anything. All he did was press his arms up against the foot, as though he was trying to hug the pad. He was too small to even reach the other sides of the soft pad, but he didn't care. He just wanted to play with it right now.

The professor seemed to understand, and the foot rubbed back and forth over him. The cum coating along his body was enough to keep him from being bothered by it, keeping the friction to a reasonable level, the underside grinding against his body like the bear was wiping his feet off on a big welcome mat.

The feeling was utterly divine, and Peter couldn't hold still. The bear gaave him just enough room to move that he was able to thrust upwards against the grinding pad, and he did that eagerly. It was awkward, and it wasn't ideal, but it was enough to add to his pleasure. He moaned against the pads, muffling his own sounds as he licked and tasted the musky, warm pad.

Like when he was pressed against the bear's cock, he was stifled in warm, humid air, each breath tasting and smelling like cum and foot. It was something so different from anything that he was used to, but it was the sexiest thing that he had ever experienced at the same time. He growled and groaned, sounding a little like an anthro himself, humping to get more pleasure, desperate to go over the edge.

Oddly, fear was one thing that he never felt. All he felt was need, no fear, no worry that he was going to be crushed against the wooden floor, no thought that it might cause him to die to be under the bear's feet. He had trusted Professor Grosjean since he came to the college, and while this was strange, it wasn't going to be the thing that broke his trust in the professor.

He was almost there when the foot lifted off of him. Peter gasped softly, shaking his head a few times in disbelief, and he looked at the bear, wondering why he had taken the pleasure away when he was almost there.

The bear answered him by bringing both feet down on him at the same time. Part of him was stuck under the right foot, and the other was stuck under the left. They rubbed back and forth across his body, in the way that a bored guy would shuffle his feet up and down along a carpet while he was waiting for someone.

The new pleasure exquisite, and he was allowed to taste the foot that he hadn't when he was still normal size. The pad was fragrant with musk and with the slight sweat smell that had been there before, and Peter through himself into cleaning it, licking it, nuzzling and enjoying the feeling of it against his body. He timed his licks with the rubs against his cock, feeling his shaft throb, felt it leak pre.

Seconds, minutes...he didn't know how long he kept up the worship of the bear's feet, how long Professor Grosjean kept teasing his cock with his feet. All he knew was that he was in heaven for a length of time that would never be matched before he felt his cock start to throb again in earnest. It shook him from his daydreaming, musk-addled, foot tranced state, and he arched his back against the floor as much as the wooden floor and the pressure from above would let him, spurting his load on the bear's already cum soaked foot.

The feet went still as he came, and he felt the pad get moist and wet from his orgasm. Maybe just in the one spot, but definitely wet with his cum.

Slowly the feet were raised off of him, and the bear lifted him off of the ground a moment later. Peter wobbled as he was placed on the bear's knee, shaking his head a bit as he tried to bring himself back to the real world. It was difficult, but he thought that he would be able to do it if he had a chance to rest for a while.

While he recovered, Professor Grosjean looked down at him with a smile, stroking a finger lightly along his back. "Well, I think we will have a LOT to talk about this weekend, don't you, Peter?"

"Yeah...a lot," Peter responded. And for once, maybe he'd find the courage to talk about something other than biochemistry.