FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter 2

World Ambassadorial Relations Services Corp HQ, Coast City

Basement level three, deceased records repository...such an eerie place. No regular employees, no surface access, no light switches until one is twenty feet into the stygian darkness of the seemingly endless room. When opening the doors to access the vault, one finds that the hall lights extend only a miserable five feet into the depth robbing void leaving one with the impression of an endless path into the abyss. Just a few steps in and everything became vague shapes a few more and there was just a solid wall of forever. Staring into it felt like gazing into an unfathomable future that was somehow impossibly, staring back. And then there was the pulse...

The rational mind told you that the sub-basement plant's processing center caused the sub levels to thrum and vibrate as the ventilation system carried the vibrations upwards. But gazing into the darkness of deceased records whilst listening to that sound?

The rational mind had no place here.

This was a heartbeat and breathing sure it came from all around, but when staring into that impenetrable gloom, it was almost certainly coming from some terrible fiend lurking just out of reach and view, eager for one to step into it's jaws. Unfortunately for special agent Cruz, it was her job to walk unflinching into those jaws and yank out the fangs of the offending. Well...today it was just to drop off a file she borrowed to help her track down her last offender. It had been a favor that she'd been allowed to use it, so courtesy dictated she return it herself.

So she took a breath, let it out and simply walked forward into the darkness, fingers trailing along the wall looking for the switch. The slightly dust-laden texture of the egg-shell colored walls she couldn't quite see guiding her along with it's bumpy irregular texture, a texture that slowly gave way to the smoothness of plastic covering that surely came before the actual switch and then....a smooth fine textured material that was as much like fur as a baby's brush is like hair. It was smooth, fine and soft, yet you knew this was not fur, it was too....wrong. It was more like scales. It was then that she noticed them opening before her, the eyes.

Like lights turning on in the dark, first vertically they flared crimson before membranes slid back horizontally to expose baleful yellow slits that were as feral as they were alien to the world she lived in. Then another pair of slightly smaller eyes opened above and behind the first set, and then a fifth opened horizontally. This one sized between the other sets and placed in such a way as to lead one to believe it was the center of the brow. Were that not bad enough, a half dozen or so much smaller eyes opened up after that seemingly at random around the first set. And yet for all their otherworldly light, they shed no illumination upon the face that sat in, nor the world around them.

The ever so smallest of a squeak escaped her lips, adrenaline and reflex working slightly faster than restraint and training, which almost immediately turned into embarrassment and faster still into the flames of outrage. "Darnit! You just think you are so dang funny, don't you, Minase?" The only reply she received being a deep guttural sound somewhere caught between an alligator growling, a man chuckling and a canid panting, all in all, deep, disturbing and often ominous. Then the texture beneath her hand flowed away from beneath her fingertips, the eyes surging toward her before vanishing startlingly right in front of her face immediately before she felt the file snatched from her hand, vanishing into the darkness before a voice like a cigarette smoker gargling gravel grated back from the gloom.

"Still such a cute young bunny aren't you? Here, let me take this for you...it must be SO heavy, especially with the weight of all that failure and deathhed from her hand, vanishing into the darkness before a voice likea cigare dragging it down..." Though it was darker than black in that room, she knew he could see her face, so she glowered in the formless direction of his voice for the sake of letting him know how she felt about his 'help,' then smoothing out wrinkles upon her business skirt that she could neither see nor feel, she reached for the light switch once more.

What she met was that same wall of flesh once more, but considering where his eyes were gazing at her from, it seemed impossible that his body, even his flank could be there blocking her reach considering what the file had to say about what the upper reaches of his mass potential. Then she felt it, something like serpents covered in fur rubbing against her legs. First one, then three, next dozens as if the room was filling up with them, teasing beneath her skirt. Memory kicked in and she recalled more that she knew about him: tails! He was not restricted to a single tail; surely this was just him trying to unsettle her once more. Before she could open her mouth to protest though, he spoke almost as if reading her thoughts.

"I got this, why don't you go and paint your nails, or polish your little necromantic celebratory icon, I just love watching you kiss that little mutilated corpse on a stick, or press it to your brow when you are thinking...really drives home the idea of the peaceful and loving nature of humanity... SO. Full. Of. Love. Right?"

Gasping in outrage she started to reply when one of his tails poked far up beneath her skirt as to almost brush against her crotch. Reflexively her legs crossed, her balance wrenched with the opposing pivoting of both heeled shoes as her knees crossed and she would have fallen on her rump if a chair hadn't slid up behind her. The resulting sudden stop caused her to tense up her cell phone jerking out of her breast pocket to land upon her lap the only thing keeping her from lurching up to reject his so called help. "I don't need any favors from you Minase and your game of playing Mr. Big and Bad doesn't scare me! You are just rude and grotesque, so save your games for the rogues and criminals and leave me out of it! I am /not/ one of your toys!"

Punctuating her outrage she slapped her hand down on the arm of the chair hard enough to make her phone shift and she had to lean forward and catch it before it slid off her thighs to the ground. Catching it caused the screen to momentarily light up blinding her in the gloom and apparently her thumb hit the photo button as she turned it away from her face, blinking rapidly to clear her vision of the flash blindness. Then she could see again and realized that his eyes were looming over her, her attention grabbed by the feeling of a single sticky droplet falling to the tip of her nose.

"No? Well, too bad, the job is done, so you may as well just go to lunch, text another thanks to your friend filled with smiley faces and then skip off to the next task graciously scraped off for a newbie like you, just remember, call me when you want to play with a real male and get the job done right." With that said, his eyes winked out, presumably closing or turned away from her view. Rather than argue with someone she wasn't sure was still there she got out of the chair, turned in place to face the light outside the room, and then pushed the chair aside so there was nothing between her and the exit all the while thinking to herself [Take that!], for she was certain he would have thought she'd trip or stub herself on the chair. Closing and locking the door were an afterthought as she walked away, warmed by her tiny self-created victory, one of many she had to generate since the fateful day she learned she was to be working with a monster named Orufe'.