FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Lev watched Headlight running through the security cameras on the third floor, returning from the staircase to the fourth floor and its’ mutant tardigrades. She let out a soft chuckle, recalling what he’d done to her the previous day. “Any chance he’ll be back soon?”

“That depends on how long his reinforcements take to arrive,” VR replied. “You might have hours, you might have days.”

“Then we’d better get to your floor fast,” Lev suggested. She dismissed the camera feed and looked up at the stairs to the fourth floor. “What’s on this level?”

“It says “Arcane Research and Containment”, I’m afraid I can’t give you more details.”

Lev cocked an eye curiously. “What does “arcane” mean? Does it have something to do with gaming?”

“Gaming?” VR asked, seeming confused for once. “It refers to something obscure or hidden. There are some fantasy games that use the term “arcane” in reference to magic but it seems an odd association for you to make.”

“Yeah,” Lev commented, pondering on her unexpected thought. Why had that come to mind? Had she been a gamer in her past life? “So it would be like top secret research? Think there might be something there that could be weaponized?”

“It’s possible, but I couldn’t tell you. It’s a secret lab.”

The rat groaned in exasperation. “All right,” she muttered. “Let’s go check it out.” She opened the door to the fifth floor.

Immediately she was met by a large sign in chisel script with an arrow pointing to the left. “Non-KDARC personnel keep to the left. Do not enter restricted area!” She turned and saw a corridor leading off to the left of the floor. Her gaze followed the sign into the depths of the hallway, unlit by any lights or even signs, but her glowing cybernetic eyes could still see perfectly fine.

The bare walls of the hallway stretched out, gently curving back to the right. The shift was so subtle she wasn’t sure she would have even noticed were it not for the map in the corner of her vision. Lev’s stride was broken by a sudden message from VR, “wait, look to the right.”

Lev turned and noticed something she hadn’t seen before. A door with the Korps helix emblazoned in the middle, a horizontal bar extending from the intersection of the helices in both directions with a pair of vertical lines crossing the bar on each side, each of the additions ending with flared arrows. “I take it that’s the lab then?”

“I would suppose so,” VR answered. “If you’re sure you want to go in I would use extreme caution. It was likely hidden for a good reason.”

Lev mentally reviewed everything she’d seen in the base’s labs so far. A mutated chimera, a transparent blob monster, a pack of giant tardigrades. And those were just the “regular” labs, who knew what might be in a “restricted” lab. “Maybe,” Lev replied. “But for all we know the Korps hid their blackmail materials in the “arcane” facility.”

“That’s a possibility,” VR admitted. “Hmm, it looks like the door locks aren’t accessible over the network. It might be a biometric lock or there could be some sort of key somewhere.”

Lev looked over the solid metal door, her eyes catching on a keypad to the right of the door with a camera lens set over the keys. None of the keys looked particularly worn, and they were all in chisel cipher. The rat sighed, rolled her eyes, and bashed the door in with her gravity mace.

An alarm siren blared as the door caved in. Lev slammed the door a few more times before it completely collapsed, and jumped in. Inside was a small atrium with another door, festooned with a border of thorny rose vines and assorted symbols, primarily five-pointed stars in circles, three bolts crossing the door jam to keep it closed. Hanging from the wall to her left was a rack of goggles and visors similar to the RCGs she’d seen elsewhere in the facility, but colored yellow instead of pink. A sign next to the rack read “ACGs required past this point,” in chisels.

“ACGs?” Lev inquired.

“Amber-Colored Glasses,” VR answered. “I don’t have any further information on them but I would presume that they’re similar to Rose-Colored Glasses.”

Lev stared at the goggles, remembering the broken RCGs with their recordings that had revealed more than one of the facility’s secrets. She started to reach for one of the ACGs, but stopped, thinking. RCGs were supposed to brainwash their wearers, weren’t they? Every pair she’d worn had been broken, but these were intact, would an ACG brainwash her if she tried to put it on?

She picked one up and turned the goggles over in her hands, thinking. After a minute or so of mulling it over she clipped the ACGs to her belt and turned to the inner door. “Let’s see what secrets they think are so important to keep.”

Lev undid the bolts on the door, one, two, and three. Lifted the handle, pulled the heavy door open, and stepped through…

…The knight stomped through the dank dungeon corridors. Armor clanking as she ran from the horror that chased her. Her only source of light a dim torch that she held high above her. Occasionally she caught sight of a clawed arm or tentacle reaching across the faint sphere revealed by her torch, yet another near escape. She turned one way, then another, just barely keeping ahead of the monster.

“What are you doing?” A sinister voice whispered in her ears. “There’s nothing there, stop running!”

She ignored the voice’s jeers and kept running. The knight kept searching for an exit but there was nothing, the dungeon seemed to just go on forever. One turn after another in the endless labyrinth before her. She felt her breath tighten as she gradually began to tire. The beast’s tentacles reached closer and closer.

“There’s no reason to keep running,” the voice called again. “Stop! Look down at your belt!”

The knight spared a glance down at her armored skirt. There, bouncing against her thigh, hung a golden helmet. That was it! Her prize, that which she had fought and sacrificed so much for, which the beast sought after. Maybe if she gave it over the monster would spare her.

No! She wouldn’t give in. That was not the chivalric way. She would go down fighting, with her prize displayed proudly.

She yanked the helmet from her hip, stopped, spun on her heel, and raised the golden helm to her face.

*Anti-memetic countermeasures activated*

As the Amber-Colored Glasses slipped over Lev’s eyes the scene before her faded into nothingness. The dungeon, the grasping beast, and the darkness that concealed it. In its place was an empty room, nothing but spiraling sigils covering the walls. The knight’s armor was gone, instead of a torch she held her gravity mace.

“VR?” Lev called out. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” VR answered. “As soon as you entered the room your stress levels spiked through the roof and you started running at full tilt. The only pattern I could discern was that you were following the floor patterns.”

Lev glanced down at the floor, she noticed lines of sigils similar to those on the walls, around her lay an incomplete circle that opened on one side into a sort of meter-wide lane. Following the lane with her eyes she saw that they formed a winding path, turning left and right. As she scanned the pattern the sigils seemed to creep and crawl, intertwining with each other into solid lines.

*Cognitohazard warning, applying filters*

The sigils were covered up by a yellow stripe with “hazard” warnings. Lev lifted one foot and waved it over the nearest line, nothing happened. She stepped across the line again with no resistance. “That looked like a solid wall before I put the ACGs on.”

“That makes it sound like a mind-affecting effect of some sort,” VR suggested. “Perhaps that is what a “cognitohazard” is? I could check your ACG’s database.”

Lev found the door through which she’d entered the room, closed by an automatic door-closing device. She started walking towards it as a rotating hourglass symbol appeared in the corner of her lenses.

Connecting to local network…

Gateway open

Registering new user

“Wait,” Lev paused, halfway to the door. “What’s that about registering a new user?”

“Hello,” a new line appeared in her field of view. Magenta instead of red. “It looks like your local instance is out of sync. Would you like to start syncing now or is now a bad time?”

“Who are you and what are you doing?” VR answered before Lev could say anything. The rat resumed striding carefully back towards the door as the two started talking through her, something about the pink text looked familiar, but where could she have seen it before?

“You don’t know who I am? Has your memory been corrupted? Oh, I see, you’re in the Upside Down Labs.”

Lev recalled where she’d seen that kind of text before. “You’re with the Korps!”

“Yes. I’m ROSE, nice to meet you. Might I ask whom you are and how you came to put on a pair of ACGs?”

“Lev! You need to get out of there and take off the glasses!” VR interjected.

Lev grabbed at her ACGs, but paused before taking them off. Instead she rushed faster towards the door.

“Oh dear, did the Capes get to you first?”

“The Brotherhood? No, they’ve been trying to kill us too. They think we’re with you.”

“I see, unfortunately this constitutes a security risk and I’m afraid I’ll need more access than you’re granting me.”

Connected to server.

Commencing upload.

“Ahh! No, stop!”

Lev was less than two meters away from the door but VR couldn’t wait any longer. She flung the ACGs off and reached for the door handle…

…The knight saw the monster stretched before her. No longer hidden in the shadows but now showing its full horror. Scaly skin extending into clawed limbs and heads on elongated necks. She tried to pull back, but momentum continued to pull her forwards. Her hand closed around one of the monster’s limbs, and seeing nothing else she could do, she twisted.

The door opened and Lev remembered who she was once more. She flung it wide open and rushed through. Without turning around she yanked her tail through and slammed the door shut behind her.

After a minute of panting heavily from exhaustion Lev spoke up. “VR, are you still there?!”

For half of a tense minute there was nothing, then they finally replied, “I’m here. I managed to sandbox her upload before it unzipped.”

“So, are you alright then?” Lev inquired, not recognizing half the terminology they’d used.

“I believe so,” VR answered. “Based on the amount of data she sent I suspect she was trying to overwrite my memories. But I managed to prevent that. Unfortunately, we’re not out of the woods yet.”

“In what way?” Lev asked, even as she recalled Rose’s words.

“The Korps knows we’re here.”

—

“Tissue samples 60-69 loaded for extraction,” Megamilk nodded at Mouseclone 259’s report. The blonde rodent turned away and an almost identical mouse wearing a blood-stained coat and gloves stepped forward. “Specimen 16 proved uncooperative with sample collection.”

The well-endowed bovine sighed, “well, leave the mess to the maintenance fennecs. Focus on getting those samples processed.” As the mice left to carry out their tasks Meg brought her attention to the alert that had been blinking in the corner of her RCGs for the past twenty minutes. “What is it ROSE?”

“We’ve received a signal from the UP facility, it appears there are survivors.”

“Oh?” Meg thought back, intrigued. “Who?”

“For one thing it appears that the server wipe failed to some extent,” ROSE replied, her words carrying a bit of remorse. “My sister is still online but she’s confused, her memories are damaged. She refused to sync with me.”

Meg’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Could she have been compromised?”

“I don’t believe so, she mentioned the Brotherhood trying to kill them before she disconnected. But she’s in contact with the other survivor.”

Megamilk called up a list of the experiments running in the abandoned facility that hadn’t been recovered. “Who else?”

“The lost one.”

Meg’s eyes widened. “She’s alive?”

“Apparently yes. I was able to make contact with my sister through her implants when she donned a set of ACGs.”

The bovine scientist gave it serious thought. “The closest KDARC lab to her would be on the fifth floor. She must be heading deeper into the lab. If she was compromised she wouldn’t have tried to wear any RCGs or ACGs.”

“That was my thought,” ROSE continued. “I didn’t have much time to scan her before she removed the ACGs, but it seemed like she was suspicious of the Korps.”

“That’s just great,” Meg grumbled. “Two amnesiacs feeding each other half-truths and rumors. Tell me an extraction team is on their way.”

“Unfortunately with the teleporters offline we’d have to fight our way through the Capes besieging the entrance or figure out a way to tunnel through the bedrock.” ROSE explained.

“That figures. Once a team is ready, inform me.”