An Inflation Story

Story by Finchington on SoFurry

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Decided to try something a little different. This is my first ever story to feature inflation. I'm a little nervous to be presenting this, but I'm hoping it goes over well.

This was an April Fool's Day submission, by the by. Now that my chicanery has been noticed I am free from the bonds of kayfabe about it.


It was late on a Friday night at Mitch’s. The old bar had had its decorations changed for the third time this quarter. Apparently the proprietor was in his ska phase; the speakers overhead were currently being overtaken by one saxophonist making loud, violent love to his instrument at a speed that could only be described as “breakneck.” Among the clientele were a handful of people who were emphatically into the new vibe of the place. Most, however, were regulars who had long since acclimated to their local watering hole’s inability to stick to a music genre.

Dana was neither of these kinds of patrons. The almost-forty fennec had been a regular at this place years and years ago, in between college classes and odd jobs. She had moved back to the neighborhood after making her career in finance, and now that she had settled in to her new job at the bank across the street, she was falling into the same ruts she had worn for herself as if she had never left. The only things that changed, as she sat at the bar in her old spot, were that her suits had gotten better-fitted, her pencil skirt had finally crept to past her knees as modesty caught up with her, and her body had gotten softer and curvier as her track-and-field days got further and further away.

Draining the last few drops from her glass of whiskey, she set it down on the counter and waved to the bartender. “All right,” she said, “one more, I think.”

The bartender, a mid-twenties collie who had gone through the trouble of dying her head-fur in punky colors for the remodel, pulled the POS device from under the bar and consulted it. “Okay,” she looked up from the screen. “So, that twenty you gave me isn’t going to cover another one. Looks like you’re gonna be short about... a buck-fifteen.”

“What are you talking about?” Dana shrugged in confusion but, not wanting to actually cause a problem, she dutifully reached for her purse and began to scrounge for bills. “I used to always be able to get four hits of Pine Box with a twenty.”

The bartender shrugged back. “It’s been three to a twenty as long as I’ve been here. I dunno, Ma’am. Price increases. You know how it is.”

Dana had put two one-dollar bills on the bar and pushed them forward, just as the phrase “price increases” reached her broad ears. One of them twitched as the words sunk in. The bartender, unaware of what she had just set into motion, happily took Dana’s money and grabbed her glass to refill. To her credit, Dana managed a strained smile and valiantly attempted to seem like everything was normal. To the bartender’s credit, she was immediately distracted with another customer and was too busy to notice.

The fox’s head swam. Price increases. The phrase bounced around her half-drunk mind. She used to be able to buy four drinks with a twenty-dollar bill. Her heart pounded in her chest. She used to be able to buy four, but now she could only buy three. The price had gone up. Her breath started to come heavier, first through her nose, then through her mouth. Her eyes widened, her muzzle splitting open into a wide open half-smirk. Price increases. She had always known they were real, but every time she was confronted with the proof...

A young horse, barely old enough to be out of college, stepped out of the restroom and back into the bar. When he did, the first thing that caught his eye was an older fennec, hunched over the bar, steaming the side of a whiskey glass as she panted at it with the air of someone who not only just ran a mile, but really enjoyed the concept of running a mile. His brow crinkled. For a grim moment, he was sure he was looking at somebody who was going through something terrible. He experienced a moment of hesitation, knowing that he had not left his apartment tonight to play therapist to a stranger. However, unable to harden his heart and pretend he saw nothing, he walked up to the woman.

“Hey,” he said gently, placing a hand on her shoulder. “What’s wrong? Are you oka-?”

There was a meaty slap, as her hand clamped down on his. She had a grip like iron. Hot, pulsating iron. She looked up at him with an expression that, on a second glance, was not the look of somebody having a panic attack. Rather, it seemed to be something much more predatory, almost feral in its intensity. It lasted only a moment, just long enough for Riley’s pulse to spike in confusion and panic, before she caught herself.

“Uh... sorry,” she said, turning her head to the side and exhaling through her nose. When she met his eyes again, the look she had was no longer that of a slavering beast. Only mostly, though. “Sorry about that. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Uh... good.” Riley should have probably been relieved. Instead, he was keenly aware of the fact that his hand was still being held down against a warm shoulder by an even warmer paw. He could feel her pulse, undeniably strong, and the grip of her fingers that suggested that pulling himself away might very well involve pain. Nervously he looked from her face to the nearest exit.

It was obvious by her expression that the wheels were starting to turn. It was a long, tense moment before she seemed to make up her mind. When she did, she once again tried her best not to look like a predator. Dana leaned in, conspiratorially. “Say,” she said, “would you like to maybe... get out of here?”

“Uhh...” Riley was keenly aware of the rise and fall of Dana’s chest under his hand. He was also aware that that same hand was starting to get numb from how tightly it was being gripped. “Uhhhhh...” He watched, wide-eyed, as she took her drink in her other hand, upended it into her muzzle, and downed the whole thing in one go. The sound she made, when the alcohol came back to bite her, was the sort of thing Riley would have had nightmares about if it weren’t coming out of a busty older fox who had literally just propositioned him. He stood there, almost terrified and almost completely erect, and said the most articulate thing he could manage:

“Uhhhhh-h-h-h-h...!”


Again to her credit, Dana was able to keep herself composed and respectable looking during the cab ride back to her place. Even with a large quantity of alcohol in her, she kept herself limited to flirty looks and the occasional grope of her fellow passenger’s knee when she thought the driver was not looking. Riley was not nearly so composed, what with the obvious tent in his pants and the nervous laughter of somebody who was here at gunpoint. There was no universe in which the young horse was going to turn down an invitation like this. Not after all the times before this he had struck out. At the same time, however, there was also no universe where he did not spend at least a portion of the cab ride texting his roommate, telling him “if i don’t check in in like 4 hours i’ve been creased by a serial killer.”

His roommate responded with a completely unbothered thumbs-up emoji. The fact that he was willing to respond instead of leaving Riley on “read” was about as good a sign as Riley was likely to get.

It was a good thing on balance, because the moment they were past the door into Dana’s apartment there would be no time for any other forms of caution. He heard the click of the latch less than a second before a warm body was pinning him to the wall and a hot muzzle was pressed against his. Riley’s anemic desire to look out for himself was immediately forgotten, once he felt a tongue in his mouth and fingers pulling his shirt into fists and the insistent heat and weight against his throbbing crotch.

The two of them pawed and tore at each other with the subtlety of teenagers. It was a miracle that one or both of them did not trip on each other or the furniture, in their haphazard three-legged race to get to Dana’s bedroom. Fortunately for them both, the only one to fall was Riley, and it was backwards into a sensibly-priced memory foam mattress after Dana had playfully shoved him onto it.

“Get comfortable,” she said, her voice thick and sardonic. “I’m gonna put on something, real quick.”

Riley propped himself up onto his elbows and tried to look composed. He watched as Dana grabbed a small remote, pressing a button to cause a white projection screen to slowly lower itself against the wall opposite the bed. Looking to his left, he saw a projector taking up the whole of one of her night stands. “You’re not putting porn on, are you?” he asked. “’Cause I gotta tell you, lady... I don’t really need the help, right now.”

Dana looked from the horse in her bed to the knot of denim between his legs and bit her lip. “I didn’t think you did, sweetie. Don’t worry. This is just...” She shuddered as she flipped open a laptop on her desk and opened her “special software” that she kept in a hidden folder. “...this is just something for me, okay?”

“Uh... okay.” Riley looked around, nervously, but nonetheless he added “You’re the boss, lady,” with exactly the sort of unguarded inflection that suggested he could be convinced to call Dana something more charged than simply “Boss” if asked.

It was not lost on Dana, and if she was in any other frame of mind she might have been on board with the idea of messing with the fragile ego of a boy barely old enough to be out of college. However, at that moment, she had her program set up and her finger on the button to turn on the projector. “Don’t worry,” she repeated as she climbed into bed. “Just... do whatever you want.”

The two began to kiss, again. Riley’s hands almost immediately found their way to Dana’s chest, rolling her large breasts over her shirt. He would have started to go for her buttons, but apparently Dana had other ideas, because he suddenly found himself pinned down underneath her. He did not complain. His breath got a lot heavier, and a noise escaped his lips that was an octave higher than his normal talking voice, but he did not complain.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the projector screen light up. He was not really interested in looking, considering that at that moment he felt a hand plucking at the zipper of his jeans. Still, morbid curiosity compelled him to at least turn an eye in that direction. After all, a part of him still believed he was getting in bed with a serial killer, and so for all he knew the screen was about to show... pentagrams or whatever serial killers put on a projection screen before they did horrible sex-murder. Obviously, he wasn’t hoping for that. More than likely it was just going to be some weird embarrassing fetish material or... like, a photo of her ex-husband or something. He’d accept being a replacement cock for a woman’s ex. That actually sounded fun, in an extremely fucked-up kind of way.

When the projector finally stopped showing the company logo, and began to broadcast Dana’s laptop, Riley was confused. What he saw was not a pentagram, nor porn, nor a photo of a mediocre middle-aged fox. Instead what he saw was... a collection of graphs. Lists of numbers organized by year and fiscal quarter. Snippets of equations cut off in the middle to fit on the screen, with footnotes referencing a text document somewhere in the laptop’s hard drive. Crammed onto one slide of a corporate slideshow presentation was an absolute deluge of information, the kind of which a young man who stocked shelves at a grocery store could not even begin to identify, let alone interpret.

It was around this time that Dana realized that the charts were up as well. She rose up to straddle Riley’s hips, biting her bottom lip as she looked the numbers over. Of course, then she remembered the man underneath her. Ruefully, she looked down to find exactly the kind of apprehension she expected to see. “Hey,” she whispered, absently reaching up to the buttons on her shirt to try and rustle up a distraction. “You good?”

“What is that?” Riley asked.

“Don’t worry about it.” Dana pulled her shirt open, letting her bra-covered breasts spill out. She bent over and let the lacy black material scrape against the horse’s shirt. “I told you, it’s just something for me. Helps me get in the mood.”

“Yeah, but...” Riley chuckled, but it was the kind of chuckle one made when they were less “amused” and more “confused and once again wondering if he was in danger.” He looked back up into Dana’s eyes, then decided it was probably better to try and get an idea where her hands were. “...yeah but... what is it? Like, what do a bunch of numbers and graphs do for you?”

Dana thought for a second. There was clearly no getting around the question. Not even breasts could quash that “I think I’m being straddled by a serial killer” look in Riley’s eyes. With a sigh, she flopped down into bed next to him and turned him over to face the screen. “Okay, so...” She let her hand slip between Riley’s legs, hoping that keeping him hard would keep him in bed. “...what you’re looking at is economic data. Just a couple tables of... you know, financial... economic stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Oh, you know. M2. The velocity of money. Changes in prices over time. Just a couple of boring economic statistics...”

Riley sat up. He had been on weird enough parts of the Internet to know what “M2” meant. “This is inflation shit, isn’t it?” He sighed and began to pull himself out of bed.

“No, no, no, come on!” Dana rose up and draped herself over the horse’s back, fondling his body. “Please, sweetie. It’s just a little thing I need to get going. You don’t even have to look at it.”

“My mama warned me about people like you,” Riley replied, as he tried to extricate himself.

He had been so confused as a teenager when his mom gave him such an incredibly specific warning. She had never even told him to wrap up before that point, and then all of a sudden over breakfast she came out and said “Son, don’t sleep with financial analysts. Biggest bunch of degenerates on the planet.” Then she went back to her buttered toast and refused to elaborate further. At the time, Riley had thought this was about his missing dad. Then he found out that his dad was a dishwasher in Idaho and now he was completely clueless as to what had been in his mom’s head.

“Lemme go,” he said. “I’m probably gonna have to jerk off when I get home, but I ain’t busting a nut anywhere near this graph bullshit.”

“Don’t be like that.” Dana managed to find Riley’s crotch, and was demoralized to find it significantly less hot and hard as when she last touched it. “Just give me a second, baby. I’m sure I can get you to understand.”

“Woman,” Riley fumed, “I am two seconds away from crying ‘rape’ loud enough for the whole building to hear. Lemme. The fuck. Go!”

She leaned in, put all the velvet she could muster into her words. “How old are you, baby?”

Riley paused. More than two seconds had elapsed, but there was little he could do. He had a critical weakness for older women who called him 'baby.' “I’m twenty-two,” he admitted, begrudgingly.

“And how much money do you have in your wallet?”

“Uh... I dunno.”

“Rough number’s fine.”

“Like... fifteen bucks?”

Dana smiled. She stretched herself out, trying to maximize body content as she rumbled into his ear. “On the day you were born,” she explained, “that fifteen bucks would have been worth thirty.”

“Look, I told you I don’t want to deal with...” Riley’s ears perked, as the words sunk in. “Wait. Wait.” He looked back. “For real?”

Dana shrugged. “I mean, plus or minus a few basis points, depending on when exactly you were born.”

“Holy shit. That’s crazy.” Riley looked up at the charts, though he was obviously no better able to decipher them than he had been with a full erection. “I mean, I’d heard that the dollar had gotten weaker and all that, but I thought it was... like, only a couple of percent.”

“It is.” Dana placed soft, sensual kisses on Riley’s neck. Her hips rolled distractedly, trying to do something about the buzz between her legs as she slipped a hand down the neck-hole of the horse’s shirt. “It’s a couple of percent per year, you see. That kind of gentle inflation adds up over the course of decades. And since the government traditionally targets an inflation rate of two percent per year...”

“Targets?!” Riley would have made a dramatic movement, but that would have made the kisses on his neck stop. “You’re telling me that the government makes inflation happen on purpose? How is that fair? I haven’t had a raise in two years, but prices are going up! I...” Suddenly, he bent forward, as if the thought that dropped into his head had enough weight to force his head down. “Oh my God... oh my fucking God. Idaho’s minimum wage has been the federal minimum for the past seventeen years. That means that prices have almost doubled, but my dad’s been making the same amount of money.”

“Yes,” Dana growled, nipping at the horse’s thin ear as her panties began to soak through to her skirt. “You get it, sweetie. You finally get it.”

“He’s not gonna be able to retire.” Riley’s breath came in ragged pants. A potent fear shot through him, but one that also brought his erection roaring back into life. He leaned back, pinned down physically by Dana’s questing hands and mentally by the sheer enormity of the data in front of him. “I’m not gonna be able to retire. We’re all going to be working dead-end jobs for the rest of our lives, trying to keep our heads above water as money gets tighter and tighter, and things become more and more expensive...”

“Yes!”

“We’re all fucked.” He turned around, hungrily taking Dana’s muzzle in a kiss and pushing her down to lay atop her on the bed. “It’s like being trapped in the middle of the world’s slowest burning house-fire, with no way out.”

“Fuck...” Dana flinched. The thought alone almost made her cum, on the spot. “S-stop teasing me, little boy. Get those fucking pants off and come fuck me on the ashes!”

They could not get their clothes off fast enough. They quite literally could not get their clothes off fast enough. Riley’s shirt was in tatters by the time Dana had managed to prise it off of him, as were her panties (which were in sopping-wet tatters). No consideration was given for foreplay. The instant Riley’s long horse-cock was free, and Dana’s sex was open to the air, the two met with the gentle romance of a car crash. Riley threw his hips forward with all the might a part-time grocery clerk could manage. Dana lay back, legs spread wide, deliriously rattling off numbers she knew by heart. She paused only when her body began to shake and tremble, her orgasm hitting her after less than a dozen thrusts. Riley was only four or five behind, almost sobbing as he began to pump shot after shot of hot seed as deep inside of her as he could go.

For a few minutes the two stayed locked together, panting and shivering. Riley felt his member soften, felt it slowly pushed out of the fox’s hot belly. They stared at each other the way two people do moments before they’re both sent off to the gallows to hang, and also they just fucked each other to one of the most intense orgasms of their respective lives.

Realization set in, almost at the same time, but Dana was the first to voice it. “Fuck. Did you just cum in me?”

“I...” Riley looked down nervously at the trickle of white between the fox’s vulva lips. “I, uh...”

“Shit.” Dana sat up. “I’m not on anti-heats. Fuck, man, didn’t anybody teach you to wrap up?”

Riley ran his hands through his headfur, genuine panic seizing him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I can’t... I can’t be a dad. I can barely take care of myself. How am I supposed to feed two mouths for eighteen years-”

He stopped. Dana’s ears stood to attention. Slowly, the two looked each other in the eyes, as the exact same thought occurred to them. How expensive would it be to care for a child, after eighteen years?

Dana swallowed.

Riley licked his lips.

Finally the fox spoke. “We’ll go get a morning-after pill when this is over,” she promised. “Get. The fuck. Back in me.”

Minutes later the two were shaking the bed. Dana had gotten herself onto all fours, groaning as Riley speared her from behind. The latter was stretched out on her back, his hands reaching down to fondle her breasts after he had torn them out of her bra.

“Do you think...” Riley could barely speak, the whole of his breath dedicated to working his hips like a piston. “...do... you think that... prices will almost double in... in eight... fuck, I...”

Dana shook her head. It was hard for her to speak as well, but that was mostly because she was swiftly approaching her third orgasm of the night. “It’ll be worse,” she said, trying to tease the boy atop her. “With the way the government’s running things... right there! Right there! You’re gonna make me..!”

A half hour after that Dana was on her knees on the carpet, between Riley’s legs. She made a valiant effort to lick and suck the now twice-spent tower of meat in front of her back to life, while her fingers swirled around the seed that still slicked her sex.

“Read it,” she ordered, between sloppy cock-kisses. “Read it like a news broadcaster.”

Riley was still a little self-conscious about this, but he looked up at the projector screen. “After the meeting,” he read, “the Fed made the decision to hold interest rates steady, citing increased volatility and supply shocks following the declaration of war. Financial analysts now estimate the chance of even a single rate cut happening in 2026 is down to only five percent.”

“Five percent!” Dana cried. “Five percent chance of a rate cut! Oh, those fucking whores!”

An hour later Dana had lain Riley flat on her bed, where she proceeded to ride out her fourth and fifth orgasms, and was aiming for a sixth. Riley, who at this point was just on the cusp of his third, was exhausted and found his climax coming on slowly. However, being pinned down by an older woman was giving him more than enough energy to go on, especially when she started letting him say the words he wanted to say.

“Fuck... Mommy,” he whined. “Not... not so rough.”

“Say it right,” Dana growled down at him.

Riley blushed, but did not hesitate. “Not so rough, Mommy. Please. I can’t afford to go to the hospital.”

“Nobody can, baby.” Dana threw her hips down as hard as a sedentary office worker could manage. “The hospitals collude with insurance agencies to jack up prices to levels that would bankrupt you without insurance.”

Riley’s eyes widened, as he thought of the woefully insufficient coverage his job provided for him. He all but bawled as he drained his balls into the fox one more time.

Across town, as the sun set and the night began to settle in, a young ferret had just beaten a difficult boss in the hit video game Capybara Knight and the Quest for Oranges. It had taken him about a hundred attempts, and normally he would be punching the air and celebrating, but as the cut-scene of the Penitent Penguin dying wrapped up and control was given back to him, he found his eyes drifting over to his phone.

It had been well over four hours since his roommate had sent him that text message. He had sent three messages back to check in on him, and so far had gotten nothing back. The young ferret was starting to get extremely concerned.