FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

It had been several days since the city's internet access had been shut down completely as they tried to determine the cause of a massive computer virus outbreak that had destroyed several virtual reality hubs, including a central city hub. Even though teams of special investigative units had been brought down to the city to investigate, no group was any closer to the truth than when the incident actually happened. They had initially managed to narrow down the primary infection to the central data hub that serviced a large area of the city, but when they went there to try and find others who could corroborate their evidence, they either were too far away from the destruction to see what happened or they were extremely uncooperative. One snow leopard in particular seemed to have a string of bad luck as he had the twentieth-straight door slammed in his face.

"I hate my job..." the feline said as he moved over to the next door. "Maybe this will be lucky number twenty-one." As he was about to knock on the door it suddenly opened for him, and just as he was about to start his pitch he had to crane his head up and keep his jaw from dropping to the ground. The wolfess that stood in front of him was huge, at least head and shoulders taller than him and wore only what appeared to be a modified neoprene sensory suit.

"Can I help you?" she asked as she looked down at him.

"Yeah... uh, hi there," the snow leopard stammered slightly before he finally found his words once again and cleared his throat. "My name is Special Agent Frost and I'm here to talk to you about the attack that happened on the node in this area. I was hoping that you may be able to help me with what happened at that time, Mrs..."

"You can just call me Stormy," Stormy replied as she gave him a fanged grin. "Special Agent Frost, huh? Didn't realize they were bringing the big guns out on this one."

"Well there was near catastrophic damage done to several nodes in the area besides the central city one," Frost explained. "Strangely it seems that most people around here don't want anything to do with us even though we're trying to help, especially in your building. You're the first person that's allowed me to get more than four words out before they slammed the door in my face."

"They probably thought that you'd go snooping around their personal business," Stormy replied as her grin widened slightly. "Why don't you come inside? I think I may have something that will help you out, I found it in my personal VR space, but due to the restriction on node access I haven't been able to submit a ticket for it yet."

The snow leopard nodded and tried not to look relieved as the hulking canine allowed him access. He was so grateful to finally get a potential lead he failed to notice the almost predatory look on Stormy's face as she closed the door behind him. As they walked inside Frost commented on how clean everything was, something that Stormy remarked that she made sure her home was something to be proud of. In reality several of the people that she had consumed while on her rampage had belonged to cleaning services who were more than willing to come to her dwelling to clean it for her.

Once they got to the living room Stormy asked Frost if he wanted anything to drink and he asked for some tea. While she made it the snow leopard pulled out his datapad in order to log the fact he had finally made contact with someone, but frowned as he failed to get any sort of connection. After several attempts he sighed and put it back, with no hub to communicate the standard lines used for more rudimentary communication were still likely flooded. Instead he got up and looked around a bit while he waited for the wolfess to get back, and as he passed by the bedroom something caught his eye that caused him to gasp slightly in surprise.

"You got the new XI-43 VR and AR processor?" he said just as Stormy came back with two mugs, the wolfess nodding while she handed it to her. "That's unbelievable, how did you manage to get yourself one? I thought they were going for like twenty thousand credits and were completely sold out."

"Well don't tell anyone, but I happen to have a contact at the factory that made them and he sold me one on the cheap," she said as she sipped her own drink while she watched the snow leopard examine her new toy. The truth was somewhat close to that, though it was due to the contributions of her loyal followers as well as skimming a few accounts, herself, that allowed her to make such a grandiose purchase. "Now you said you were investigating the attack at the central city hub?"

Frost had to tear himself away from the technologically advanced piece of equipment in order to look back at the wolfess. "We have quite a few teams out at the moment trying to figure out what is happening," he explained to her. "The fact of the matter is that destruction of this scale in such a short amount of time is unprecedented, and if we don't find the source of it and shut it down then the next time it happens they may not be able to reverse the damage. Now I know this is a bit of a long-shot, but did you see anything strange going on in either your personal node or did you happen to be at the hub during the time of the attack?"

"Well," Stormy began to say as she got up. "I was mostly just chilling in my own personal node when the network shutdown happened, but while I was wondering why my access to the main hub was shut down, I did notice something strange that I managed to record. I left it in my node, you're more than welcome to go in and give it a look if you want."

Frost could hardly contain himself as he nodded. Not only was he going to try out the wolfess' badass setup, but he may finally get a lead on this case. Stormy smiled at him and got up to go to her room, then poked her head out and told him that she was ready to patch him in when he was. The snow leopard almost hopped onto the chair offered him, stripping off his clothes to reveal the neoprene suit below it. Had he not closed his eyes to get ready to get hooked up to the system he would have seen the hungry, almost feral look that Stormy gave him before she hooked him up.

A few minutes later the snow leopard opened his eyes again and looked around the node that contained Stormy's virtual world. While he wasn't sure if the wolfess was watching on her viewscreen he reported to her what he saw, which wasn't good. Most of the assets in the area had been smashed to some degree, though as he continued to move forward he suddenly realized that the single plot of land he was on was not the only land she owned. As he pushed forward his jaw dropped in awe at the city that had been created beyond this simple area, a string of nodes owned by her and maintained by a multitude of people. When he looked on the server list of those currently connected to the node he found hundreds of names, all of them with the same tag SotG.

"Stormy... I have to say this is unreal," he said as he moved back to the original and oldest building, though there wasn't much left of it. "When you told me you had a personal node I didn't realize it was so expansive! No wonder you need such powerful hardware... if I had this much data running through my node I'd probably blow out my rig. And how in the world did you get so many people to help you on this, what do they get out of it?"

As Frost got closer to the destroyed building there was only silence on his comms, but when he reached the door he got his answer. "They get the chance to worship me," Stormy's reply came in, the words chilling Frost to the bone at the certainty of it. "Just like you will."

Frost immediately tried a hard disconnect from the world but found himself unable to, and when he tried to reach the exit portal he found it blocked. When he tried to open a channel to the outside world he found his text screen flooded with the same two words over and over again... join us. The snow leoaprd's virtual avatar began to shake as he began to run towards the city only to see a number of others walk towards him, some of them nearly double his height and with all of them with electric blue eyes that stared at him. As a last ditch effort he entered the house to try and find some sort of portal key, wiggling through the wreckage in the search of anything that he could use to try and make a desperate escape.

What he found instead was an old malware case, one that had been already opened and used quite a while ago. "My god..." he said as he picked it up. "The virus... it-"

He hardly got to finish his sentence before the roof of the small building was lifted up and tossed aside, the naked wolfess towering over him as she looked down at him with a malicious grin as her eyes glowed. Before he had a chance to run she leaned down and picked him up with two fingers, swiftly bringing him up to eye level. "Please!" he shouted as he hung so far above the ground that he could hardly make out those that had gathered below him. "Just let me go and you'll never have to see me again, and I won't tell anyone that you're the virus!"

"You got one part of that right," Stormy replied as she tipped back her head and opened her muzzle, the snow leopard squirming as he was raised even higher before she let go. He let out a loud scream that was music to the kaiju virus's ears as he plummeted down towards her own maw, disappearing down inside it before she snapped her jaws shut. At that point the process of assimilating such a small avatar was near instantaneous, almost immediately the avatar reappeared and ran up to her feet. Once he got there he buried his entire body into her fur and proclaimed everything he was, her Servant of the Goddess tag appearing next to his name just like all the others.

When they returned to the real world once more Stormy snapped out of her trance before the snow leopard reconnected with his body. She had been getting better at not needed a rig in order to get into the virtual world, but that was mainly because of the powerful hardware that was also hers. At this point she knew that anything else would be far harder, though she hoped that she would be getting the proper access at this time. She got up and moved over to the snow leopard just as he opened his eyes, which now glowed blue in her vision as he immediately fell to the floor and began to nuzzle at her feet.

"I would have thought that you military types would have a little stronger resistance to my reprogramming than that," she said with almost a sigh. "Was sort of hoping for a challenge... oh well. I guess I will just have to settle for all the information you have on the defensive measures they're planning to try to find and destroy me."

"Yes goddess," Frost said as he returned to a sitting position. "While I'm not privy to all the information on the current operation, I must tell you right now that you are in dire danger..."

********************************************

Meanwhile in the parking lot of an abandoned shopping mall a huge tent was set up, flanked by all sorts of vehicles, including an eighteen-wheeler that was backed right up to it. On the inside of the tent a dozen armed guards sat and waited as the door slowly opened and revealed the only piece of cargo it held inside. "Well no one told me that there was going to be a party," the shadowy creature said as his glowing green eyes peered out from the darkness. "If I had known I would have brought a cake or something."

"Shut up technomancer," a male tiger dressed all in black said as he walked up the ramp to the glass cube that contained the creature within. "You know why you're here and you know what we need of you. We also know that just bringing you up to the surface is an extreme risk, which is why you're not going to leave that box until you're safely back in your cell. That box, by the way, is triggered by electrical signals to deliver a fatal shock of electricity to your body should you try and access any systems outside of the ones we specifically give you. Do you understand?"

"I understand that you guys are seriously paranoid," the creature replied with a laugh before he looked to the guards that were positioned outside. "Don't suppose I could get a few of you to push this box into a drive-thru? I'm not picky, I'll even order off the dollar menu if that government budget of yours blew the load on the box and accommodations."

The man shook his head and left the trailer to the sound of the creature's laughter, meeting up with a serpentine scientist that had started to walk with him. "We made all the arrangements we could on such short notice General Hasker," he explained as he handed the other man a chart. "The tent that we're surrounded by is essentially a giant faraday cage and we've planted jammers as deep into the ground as we could go without losing signal integrity. Along with the portable living quarters he's secured in, you should have no trouble containing his power while he looks for the potential cause of this."

"It's the looking part that I'm worried about," Hasker replied as he looked over the notes. "Last time this monster was on the loose we nearly lost an entire city to his twisted desires. I saw the damage, even when he had been removed those who had been brainwashed by him still kept this drone avatar that he made them install and wanted nothing more than to serve him. Now we got this rabid dog on a leash and are trying to use him to sniff out another rabid dog."

"I can assure you, sir, that this leash is a little stronger than most," the serpent replied. "The computer terminal that the technomancer will be using is completely black boxed and unable to access the internet itself. The only thing it can do is call in information, so while he can get the data he needs he has no way of sending any data out. All that will be handled by an intermediary that he won't be allowed to touch, essentially continuing to cut him off from the virtual world."

Hasker merely grunted in reply and waved the other man off, continuing to stare at the papers he had been given. Due to the potential for infection no one inside the tent was allowed to have any sort of electronic device on them. This meant that everything had to be done old school, even the use of old fashioned trolley lifts in order to get the mobile prison cell out of the semi and into the quarantined zone. Once they had finished the creature was finally brought out into the light, the draconic sabrewolf grinning at Hasker as he held out a hand.

"Well then," the technomancer said. "Shall we begin?"

Once Stormy had been completely briefed by the turncoat she sent him on his way. Though the snow leopard was more than reluctant to leave her side he didn't turn down her order at all, leaving the wolfess alone to ponder her next course of action. She shouldn't have been surprised that they military would respond to her presence, but the mention of this new cyberweapon of theirs had her slightly disconcerted. What made things worse was that the main operation was staying completely off the grid for some reason, which made tracking them down even harder.

Assimilating the snow leopard gave the giant canine a plan though, one that would require a bit of risk, but great reward if she pulled it off. Up until that point she hadn't left the building, remaining content to allow her acolytes to build a city that she would occasionally come in and have a smash at. While it was somewhat satisfying it wasn't the same as taking over the raw data of another individual, something she just got the taste of once again when she ate that avatar. Now her hunger had arisen once again, something that needed to be satiated by the outside world. The thought of corrupting and destroying data and avatar alike caused her to lick her lips and press her hands against the neoprene that covered her breasts, though after only a short while she grew bored with the sensations and stopped.

She sighed as she looked out the window. Though she knew that the snow leopard would have had sex with her in a heartbeat, it wasn't something that she was interested in. Mating with such an inferior being was beneath her, just like all the buildings and avatars she had crushed in the real world. While she had hoped that maybe a specialist would have been more enticing it ended just like with the others, a disappointment.

Right now what she needed was information, and though she could just wait for Frost to try and find more for her, she needed to be proactive. The next morning she awoke to start her investigation, gathering information from her drones in order to figure out where to go next. It didn't take long for her to find an answer, several of them reporting that a large military operation had been set up in the area of the old mall. She used all the infected phones and electronics as a means to scan the area, but when she did she frowned when a large area of her map turned up as a black hole. The only thing that she could think of was that they were somehow jamming everything within a certain radius, which meant that it was going to need a personal touch as she grabbed her coat and walked outside.

For the first time in a while Stormy walked the city streets with only her coat and her neoprene interface suit, though it was the fact that she stood head and shoulders above the rest of the anthros that caused people to take looks. Even the naturally large horses and dragons that normally towered over others had to crane their heads up to look into her eyes. Occasionally as she walked she would see someone with glowing blue eyes given her a nod, her loyal minions continuing to live their lives as normal like she instructed. Eventually she got a small coffee shop that was just outside the area of the mall that she ducked inside.

Even this far away she could feel a sense of unease about the area from there, as though her existence would simply evaporate if she stepped too close to it. It also seemed to be interfering with the local wifi here as well, hearing the barista complain more than once that she couldn't get a signal. People that were inside the coffee shop all had the same sad, forlorn look on their faces as they drank their coffees and stared off into the abyss, likely a result of withdrawal from the virtual world that they had been cut off from. Stormy knew the feeling all too well and lamented the fact she couldn't help them out, or be eating or stomping on them in real life.

As time passed Stormy continued to try and figure out how she could learn more about the strange tent that they had set up and the contents therein, but anyone who was there had military credentials and without any sort of internet she couldn't get close enough to determine whether they had any sort of RFID or anything like that. She needed one of them to go outside of the signal dead zone in order to get a better read on their situation, and when she saw outdoor patrols she had an idea that just might work.

While she sat in the booth of the coffee shop she closed her eyes and used the internet the coffee shop used in order to get her presence back out into the internet. Though it was nothing like the virtual world, she found with enough practice she could manipulate electronics and machinery that she hadn't infected yet into doing simple tasks for her. She could feel herself begin to sweat as she targeted once place in particular, the small atmospheric satellites that helped control the weather of the region. It took considerable effort and she could feel herself strain to connect as many of the nodes as possible before she gave them a simple command, nothing more than a flick of the switch before she returned to her body with a gasp.

Stormy didn't have to wait long to see if it worked. The white, puffy clouds of the sky began to darken and thicken as it blotted out the sun. People in the streets looked up as rain that was not supposed to fall today started to come down in droves, causing people to scatter as they used whatever they could to protect themselves from the deluge. The wolfess grinned and took a drink, waiting for what she hoped would be the fruits of her labor to come into the door.

About ten minutes later she saw two military anthros suddenly come into the coffee shop, their bodies soaked to the bone as they cursed the sudden change of weather. "Now it says that there's going to be a downpour today," the fox said angrily as he looked up at the television that was playing in the coffee shop. "I wonder how long ago they chose to update that little piece of information."

"It could have been this morning for all we know," the lizardman said angrily as he tried unsuccessfully to shake the water off of his clothes. "I hate the fact we can't have our phones on us at all while we're on patrol, do they really think that we're going to go crazy because we want to check on our profile updates in the vicinity of that thing?"

"Well I heard that those who were affected by it before acted like they were possessed," the fox replied. "I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have that happen to me. Now hurry up, we only have like ten minutes to order and I don't want to get yelled at today because I took too long to get a cup of coffee, they'll think we're just trying to wait it out until we get mall duty."

Stormy's frown deepened as she processed what was being said while the two military personnel went up to the counter. While they never mentioned exactly what it was, the fact that it was so dangerous they couldn't have electronics around it was disconcerting. It also provided another problem that since none of the military personnel had any sort of electronics on them it meant that they weren't particularly vulnerable to her machinations, either. That meant unless she snuck into the area blind and powerless she wasn't going to get in at all. As she continued to watch the two, though, she saw something that caused her to regain hope that all was not lost quite yet.

Despite their embargo on electronics she saw the lizardman pay for his coffee with a paypass, a small electronic device that securely keeps all your routing information and doesn't work unless it's close to your person. That meant it had a connection to the lizardman himself, which means that she could potentially corrupt it. Unfortunately the signal on that device is particularly weak to avoid accidental charges and hackers, but she potentially had a way around it as she gulped down the rest of her coffee and moved towards the counter.

She had discovered during her down time that if an item was small enough and had an electronic signal she could cause the physical object to move, like a form of electronic telekinesis. Up until this point she had only moved a small square of plastic that contained a memory card, now she was about to try something much bigger. When she got close to the two she pretended to wait for the fox to give his order, which thankfully was a long one as the held her hand near the pocket where she had seen the lizardman put the paypass. The wolfess concentrated as hard as she could without looking too obvious and saw the cloth begin to twitch just when a sudden shout from the lizardman to hurry up caused her to jump and lose focus.

When the lizardman moved over to the other side of the counter to look at the desserts that were stored there Stormy tried not to growl as she pretended to do the same, once more holding her hand close to his pocket in order to pull it up. She could feel the energy that came off the device as she clasped a mental hand around the item. Just as she did the lizardman squatted down to read the description of the pie there, and Stormy's eyes widened when the paypass continued to hover there where it had been in the male's pocket a few seconds ago. Before anyone could see a floating device she snatched down and grabbed it, curling her fingers victoriously around it as her corruptive code began to seep inside.

It only took a few seconds before it was fully compromised, and though she could wait for it to happen all on her own, it would go much faster if he paid for something to access the account. When the military fox finished up her order she took a few steps back and knelt down, then went over to the lizardman and tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me," she said as she held out the device. "I think you dropped this?"

The lizardman's eyes widened slightly as he went down to his pocket to find it empty, then looked back up at her. "Thank you kindly," he said as he took it from her. "I would have been in big trouble if I lost this."

"Well luckily for you I was just coming up here for a refill," Stormy said as she tried to flirt a little. "Had I not craved another drink someone less scrupulous might have come and picked it up without a word to anyone."

"Well I guess you can count me lucky," the lizardman said as the wolfess waited to hear the words she desperately wanted to hear. "How about I buy that refill for you? Least I could do for you saving me from having to cancel this and get a replacement."

Stormy breathed a mental sigh of relief as she accepted his offer, watching with internal glee as he used his paypass once again to pay for her cheap refill. The two thanked each other once again and she went back to her booth, watching the lizardman and fox as they waited for their orders to come up. She didn't have to wait long as the lizardman suddenly told the fox that he had to go the bathroom, then turned and walked towards the bathrooms while he began to shake his head. The fox looked confused for a second before he continued to wait, which was when Stormy got up to make her move.

The coffee shop bathroom was only one toilet and when she went to the men side she found it unlocked. When she opened it she found the lizardman on the floor, twitching and convulsing as his eyes began to show tendrils of glowing blue in them. "You know viruses are quite tricky," Stormy said as she closed the door and locked it behind her. "Especially computer viruses... you think that your avatar is safe because the virtual world is down, only to be shocked when you become infected with one because your avatar is linked to your bank account, which in this case was also linked to that paypass."

"G-goddess..." the lizardman hissed as the corruption continued to take hold.

"Good boy," Stormy cooed as she rubbed a hand across the scales of his head. "Now in a few minutes you're going to go back out there and rejoin with your fox friend. But before that you're going to tell me everything you know about his military operation that you're guarding..."