FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Come on, it's Friday!" Icon tugged at Axel's sleeve. "There's nothing important to do right now and the R&D nerds said I can only play with their new toy if I bring good sample data for them! That means someone new!"

The weasel looked at the clock (slow), looked at his inbox (empty), and glanced at his theoretical supervisor (bored). Katrina handed out jobs, had seniority on the team, and handled interfacing with the other departments, but wasn't really a supervisor or boss. She also had truly great hearing, so when he glanced her way, she shrugged and made a little shoo-ing motion with one hand.

"Okay, fine. Drag me upstairs to R&D."

"Yay! Thanks Katrina! Come one, you're gonna love it!" The little cross fox was definitely not on duty. He never wore board shorts and sandals when he was on the clock. Granted, his attire while he was supposed to be seducing and satisfying clients was eclectic, but never this blandly mundane. Axel had fallen into the trap of business casual, and almost his entire wardrobe consisted of polos and khakis in various muted and neutral colors.

He could probably break out of that by just asking to borrow some things, but the last time he'd given Icon even a hint of that idea, the little fox had just about burst with glee at the thought of playing dress-up on Axel.

Elevator up a few floors, from post-production to R&D. He'd been surprised when he signed on with the Finest. He knew they did a lot of things, from feasts to fucking, including pornography videos. He did some of the editing on those. He hadn't expected an in-house R&D department quietly pushing the envelope in experience delivery. Experience delivery, a very mundane way to say "how deep into the pleasure can we get a consumer?"

A little deeper every day, so far. A year or so ago they'd debuted full sensory ride-along recordings with a gloriously intense "hunt, chase, fuck" scene that had gotten rave reviews and demands for a sequel. Being inside the bunny's body, feeling every breath and bounce as she got spit roasted had been wild.

They'd been making serious money selling the hardware and recordings since then, with a new one or two coming out every few months. Axel had been editing one yesterday, erasing a wayward camera from the frame of view of the POV actor.

What did R&D have this time?

"Yo! Icon you got us a guinea pig? Nice! Hi Axel, don't worry, this is only going to hurt a lot!"

"Fuck you, Larry. How's the leg?"

"Unfortunately I get to keep it. Come on back to lab six."

Lab six was one of the VR labs. The equipment was constantly changing, shifting, growing, and that meant the back of each chair was a tentacled mass of wires. Organized. Sort of. A little. There was probably a method to the madness.

Larry waved Icon to one of the chairs, and let him adjust it to his usual settings. Not really any adjustment needed, he'd clearly been in the chair recently, and only needed to snuggle in and relax. Axel took more adjustment, the lanky weasel body architecture needed some special settings to get just right. The chairs themselves were pretty stock, there were a few dozen of them in various places around the building, for when you really just needed to feel like you were drifting on a cloud. Perfect cushion, perfect support, once they were adjusted. A lot like float pools, but dry.

The cluster of wizardry that settled at the back of his neck was not standard issue, though, and was the real reason for the chairs. If you're going to be effectively out of body for a while, your body needs a nice place to be. Not being able to interpret a stiff spot or muscle cramp for an hour or two could lead to some really unpleasant results when you woke back up.

After confirming that the chair had him feeling boneless and weightless, Larry tapped a few keys on his console and sent Axel into empty blackness.

The buffer zone was always scary. No amount of familiarity could adjust a mind to suddenly having zero input and output on all channels. It was as short as possible every time, but it always left him fighting mild panic when things finished connecting.

What slammed into focus wasn't the usual lobby or debug console screen. Not even the character select that he'd had last time. Being stuffed into a first person ride-along in a really goofy, short little fantasy scene had been fun. He'd opted for the dragon and had, uh "claimed his sacrifice" all over the rock she was chained to.

This was different. He was standing on some sort of textured platform, wide and flat. There was a cliff to his left, that met another cliff ahead of him at a neat ninety degree angle. Not the greatest scenery. They both went up several hundred feet, and that left two directions. There was a weird forest of a dozen or two perfectly vertical trees, and then... nothing much.

Then there was sound, huge thuds getting louder and louder, closer and closer. He registered the size of the thing before he really understood what it was, but that was definitely a foot that landed on the floor in front of him. That it was large enough to build a home in wasn't relevant, that was a fox foot.

"Hi down there! Larry, I think your scaling was wrong, he's more cricket sized than mouse sized."

"Fuck. Hold on, I'll get it sorted." Larry's voice had no origin, it was outside the construct of the... game? Axel was not sure what to call this. He was in control of the body, so game was probably right. Body. His wasn't terribly coherent at the moment. Lots of weird textures that hadn't mapped well.

Icon was another story. That was very clearly Icon, and the detail was astonishing at this scale. He could see the individual strands of fur. As he was studying, Icon seemed to shrink, although he quickly figured out that he was growing. That stopped well before he was happy about the disparity, he was still about a third the mass of Icon's foot. Tiny. But the scaling issue had been resolved, and that let him see what he was in. It wasn't a tiny version of him.

"I'm a fucking mouse?" A generic body, slightly stylized, but clearly a mouse morph.

"You're a mouse, yep. The fucking part is up to you, but we didn't program genitalia into the body, so good luck."

"Okay, what did you program into it?"

"Running, jumping and climbing. Also being afraid, that was fun. We can't actually stick fear in your brain, but we can replicate the physiological response for you, which is close enough. Speaking of running, both of you find and occupy your respective blue boxes. You're both out of phase for this part, so you can't see where the other player is until the game starts."

Icon blinked out of existence, and the actual game area cleared up a little. A kitchen. There were two doorways, one of them with a door in it, the other sporting a few strips of caution tape. Might be added later, but the game area was just a kitchen at the moment. His blue box was under the overhang of a kitchen cabinet, out of sight from the rest of the room.

"Axel, voice for you only. Icon can't hear. Your objective is to get to the green circle at the top of the refrigerator without getting caught. If Icon can catch you and prevent you from moving for five seconds, you lose. We're still working on balancing the game, so there's no like damage or anything. No pain scaling, no incapacitation. You're effectively a game item, so don't worry too much about getting stepped on."

"Aside from being pinned for five seconds?"

"Well that kinda goes without saying. Have fun!"

There were two short, low-toned beeps, and then a third, louder and longer, and Icon's feet popped into view.

"Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum! Where's my little mouse?" The fox was laughing already, looking around, moving to peer under things. Axel heard a cabinet door open, and filed that. The furniture had volume and internal space. There were some strange colored overlays on some of the terrain. Some pale blue sections of floor, and some faintly orange tinged areas on the vertical surfaces.

Little popups hovered into view. This is slick, this you can climb, these shadows hide you from view, this surface makes noise when you touch it. Useful information. So basically an immersive platformer, with a neat little conceit. No problem, Axel was pretty sure he could have handled this with his natural body, and a few testing bounces and dance steps told him this body was wired tighter and springier than his was.

He waited until he saw the shoes point away to his left to dart out, bearing right to find a shadow behind a table leg. Display told him the table legs were too sheer and smooth to climb, but the chairs were wood, not metal, and he was able to scale one of those almost as fast as he could have walked the equivalent distance. The seat felt like a massive plateau, the backrest fairly traditional as far as morph seating, with one off-center support for a wide cushion.

He leapt, caught the fibers of the cushion, and coiled to jump on to the table.

Landing on a table setting and sending the fork skittering across the table had not been part of the plan. Icon turned far more quickly than anything that big ought to be able to, tracking the sound until he saw Axel scrambling to hide behind a butter crock. Which turned out to be a mistake, that attempt to hide. If he'd been more aware of Icon, he might have dodged the glass that came down over him and thunked into the table, effectively pinning him in place. He pushed against the glass, but there wasn't any give. Icon had enough relative mass to keep the glass firmly in place against the table.

Five seconds passed, but there wasn't any notification that the game had ended. The green target area was still faintly visible at the top of the fridge. "Hey Larry?" Icon seemed to be wondering the same as him. "I caught him, why haven't I won yet?"

Larry's tone was a little hard to interpret. Mischievous? "He can still move. Hell, if you're not careful lifting the glass, he'll have a very quick route to his escape point."

"So the game isn't over until I physically restrain him for five seconds? Not just trap him? Fine, fine, making me go through with all the details." Icon set a book on the top of the glass. "Don't you go anywhere, I need a thing."

The fox stepped away, and Axel immediately began trying to jar the glass enough to knock the book off and give him an out. He probably only had a few seconds before-

Too late.

Icon slid a piece of paper or plastic or something under the rim of the glass, forcing him to dance to stay on top, then neatly flipped the glass over leaving him slumped in the bottom.

"The game ends when I, with physical contact, stop him from moving, right?"

Larry's voice showed some confusion, slow to respond. "Yeah, that's right. Why?"

"Why indeed." Icon took the slip of paper off the top of the glass, looked down into it, then grinned wide. Very large teeth, at this angle. "Yeah, he looks about the right size."

Larry and Axel both followed that with "wait, what are you-" but it was far too late. Icon opened wide, tipped the glass up, and swallowed the mouse whole.

For Axel the sensations were complex but brief. He got wetness, heat, constriction, the feel of muscles contracting around him as the fox swallowed, then... weird nothingness.

He blinked, and was back in the lab, where Larry was tearing a strip off of Icon. Trying to, anyway, it didn't seem to be distressing the fox any. Axel was still dazed, trying to process what had just happened.

"-the hell did you think you were doing? We hadn't programmed that option in yet and we sure didn't program it as a surprise ending!"

"Oh relax," said Icon. "I knew which scan you were using, and you're the one who insisted that Imbri wear the sleeve to, and I quote "measure the length and elasticity of his throat". If you're going to get me throatfucked by a horse in the name of science, I'm going to use the gathered data as I see fit."

Of course Desire personnel would have the most thorough and meticulous scans of any VR model. Inside and out. Have to give customers the absolute most accurate fuck dolls VR could produce, after all. Axel had even edited some of that data. A first person experience, however brief, was something else entirely.

"You're just lucky the game recognized an invalid state and dumped immediately. There's no telling what kind of input Axel might have picked up inside an empty body space."

"Just add a stop at the bottom of the throat that triggers the lose result. Don't you even pretend that the minute we release this game, vore enthusiasts the world over aren't going to immediately try this. Disable the option without consent from both parties, but leave it in there."

Axel was busy staring at his hands and trying to get his brain to start cycling again. He'd been dead, he knew it. Eaten, swallowed, capital D dead. He didn't really register outside the confusion until Icon put a hand on his shoulder.

"So, you wanna talk about why you're sitting here with a thousand yard stare and a boner that could kill a moose, or do you want me to handle number two so you can consider number one?"

Larry scoffed. "For the love of fuck, get a room you two. I don't need to add cleaning up after you two to my task list."

And then Icon was, again, dragging him somewhere on a Friday afternoon.