FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

I wrote this whole thing in five or six hours, which is generally how I write furry stuff. It's light and fluffy and adorable, in direct contrast to the usual stuff I write (you can tell because I don't even need to put a content warning here). There may be a continuation to this, if anyone's dying to see more then let me know.

Ms. Haley had long been the chief correspondent for her nation's foremost adventure magazine for ladies. But though she had gone on many fine adventures and had seen many fine things, she had never once in her twenty six years of life stepped beyond the borders of her own country.

Truthfully, there was very little need to. Ms. Haley, like most other people of her nationality, liked her own country very much. It was set more southward than northward and so had a pleasant climate for most of the year, except for the winter during which time it snowed (though never enough to close the roads or shut down even the highest mountain passes). There were rivers and plains and mountains, a little pocket desert in the furthest west for those who enjoyed hot climes, and even a touch of tundra in the far north, though that was more accurately described as marshland according to geographers she knew.

The current Prime Minister was a friendly, amiable sort and Ms. Haley had even met him early one morning when she had been riding her bicycle to the bakery. It was a sign of a good leader, she thought, that they could be approached and chatted with on their morning commute to work.

The adventures in Ms. Haley's magazine took the form of bicycle rides over lonely mountain passes, pleasure cruises along the southern coast and fine canoe trips down pleasant, sun dappled rivers. Travel more than a few hours from the capital city, where she worked, was never really on the cards.

Which was a real shame to Ms. Haley. Technology had improved rather rapidly over the course of even her own lifetime and travel was becoming more accessible than ever. Airships rose every day from the hangars by the sea and Ms. Haley often found a reason to take her lunch close to the docks so she could watch the hover-ships hum over the harbor's placid waters, guiding tankers and other big vessels into port.

She'd even heard tales of great combustion propelled rocket ships that could pierce the skies themselves...though they had an unfortunate habit of exploding.

The happenings of the outside world didn't often touch her own nation. She could read about events in foreign lands if she read the newspapers (though not her own), but the dry print made it all seem so serious and bland. There were empires being founded in the east, trade disputes in the west, proud expeditions into undiscovered jungles off to the south...

It was after about the third or fourth article like this that Ms. Haley walked into the office of her editor, an older collie whose fur was beginning to fade into a uniform gray. Still, she was quick and smart and usually listened whenever Ms. Haley came to her with an idea.

"I'd like to go around the world." Ms. Haley said.

"Beg pardon?" Her editor asked.

"Our adventure magazine only covers happenings on perhaps one or two percent of the world's land surface," Ms. Haley continued, "...if I went abroad and had many grand adventures then I think that would improve our readership."

"Abroad..." The editor echoed, "Haley, do you know what the column after yours is about?"

"Gardening." Ms. Haley said without hesitation. She knew the composition of the magazine back to front.

"And why is that?"

Haley wanted to suggest that it was because Ms. Zinnia, the gardening correspondent, was very pleasant and often had genuinely helpful advice, but something told her that wasn't the correct answer.

She shrugged faintly.

"Because our readers have gardens." The editor answered her own question, strangely sagely in that moment.

"Well...yes." Ms. Haley said, feeling slightly foolish without quite knowing why.

"People with gardens don't often travel abroad. If they did then their gardens would suffer for it. It's the same reason that people with pianos don't often move house."

"My uncle had a piano and he moved house twice yearly." Ms. Haley protested. Her uncle had been very rich and very mad, which probably didn't help her point, but she stuck to it.

The editor sighed and removed her half moon glasses, rubbing her eyes.

"Another thing," she said, "many parts of the world don't share our nation's sense of progressive tolerance. Here it would be nothing to see a person going about their business in the nude. For a person born here their first thought might be that it was inconvenient, what with the average body having no handy pockets and all...whereas a foreigner might think that it was unnatural or even dangerous."

"I'm sure they're not all like that." Ms. Haley said.

"That's not even getting into how prudish many societies are about sex or even pleasure in general..." The editor sighed and shook her head slightly, as if disappointed by the concept of puritanical moralism as a whole.

"Well, not everything would have to be about that. I'd like to know how people in different places go about their days too."

"Your pleasure articles are your most popular." The editor reminded her.

Ms. Haley nodded thoughtfully. That was true...that and she really did like doing them, which she thought carried into her writing.

"Maybe it could be both," she suggested, "I could talk about how foreign peoples all around the world live their lives...and also fuck the stuffing out of them if it's at all possible."

The editor sighed, her eyes flashing to the side of her office, where a little chart showed the newspaper's current circulation. It had expanded during the winter months, when the weather was dismal and there wasn't much to do but read about people in sunnier climes having a good time, but now it had stagnated with the coming of spring.

The editor got nervous whenever they didn't add a few thousand subscriptions each month.

"Please?" Ms. Haley asked, and clasped her fuzzy paws together.

"We'll...send you on an experimental foray," the editor said at last, pinching the bridge of her muzzle, "you can go someplace that wont hurt the company pocketbook too much, write an article or two and send them back. If they don't set the world afire then I expect you to follow."

Ms. Haley barely even heard the terms, a great warm bloom of excitement swelling in her chest. She leaned across the editor's desk and planted a kiss on the collie's cheek.

"Thank you thank you, ma'am," she had to fight to get herself back under control, "I won't disappoint you. I'll, uh, I'll start getting ready right away."

"Take the rest of the day," the editor said, and then raised a finger, pausing Ms. Haley just short of the office door, "...and find yourself a valet. I don't want my chief correspondent going abroad alone."

Ms. Haley nodded rapidly, fetched her things from her own tiny office and hurried home, glowing with excitement.

It was only as she shut the garden gate behind her that the full reality of what she'd just gotten into began to really set in.

She was going abroad, very possibly around the entire world. That was...

Woah.

Ms. Haley took a look around her own garden, which had been overrun by tangly bunches of blackberry and rose vines, berries and flowers sharing space. She trimmed them roughly into shape every so often, so that they wouldn't envelope the house and swallow it whole, but otherwise left them completely alone.

Again she thought about the editor's words. What if she was right? What if the articles from abroad inspired only a limited ripple of interest and she was recalled?

Ms. Haley opened her front door and set her things onto her front table, forcing herself to be optimistic. Even if her project failed, at least she'd have gone to some foreign land and seen the sights there.

The question was, which foreign lands would she go to?

Or...wait. No. She was getting ahead of herself. She needed to pack. And find a valet.

Ms. Haley had a caretaker on staff at her home, which she had inherited from her uncle, and supposed that hiring a valet couldn't be too much different.

...Even if she wasn't entirely sure just what a valet even was. Were they a servant? An attendant of some kind?

In the end she had to look it up in the dictionary, which Ms. Haley did for various words with unashamed frequency. It was better to admit some small piece of ignorance and rectify it on the spot than deny such shortcomings and proceed to bumble on thoroughly uninformed.

A valet was a male attendant to a master. Ms. Haley didn't much think of herself as a master, but at the same time it would be nice to have someone to deal with travel specifics for her. That way she could focus on her articles and...other things.

She drafted a quick advertisement and rung up a services paper which catered to people within the city. The advertisement was short and, she hoped, not too demanding.

Seeking a valet for travel to foreign lands. __Must be experienced and willing to travel long distances.

With that she broke out an atlas and began planning.

Her editor had made it clear that there would no long, expensive trips. Not yet at least. That restricted her somewhat. Ms. Haley still wanted to travel in some comfort, she supposed she probably could get to the other side of the world if she really wanted to, but the prospect of stowing away on a coal ship bound for the furthest east or begging passage on a freight airship headed over the pole didn't appeal to her. While she was heading on an adventure, it did have to be commercially viable in case people in the audience wanted to trace her footsteps.

By the time she went to bed she'd succeeded in packing a great many things away...but still had no idea just where she was going to go. She had a cup of mint tea, looked at the atlas until fatigue blurred the lines and latitude markings into meaningless hieroglyphics, then had a quiet, dreamless sleep.

When she awoke the next morning to the brisk, excited noise of her alarm, she placed a call to the editor...who provided her with a rather skimpy budget for her travel expenses.

Ms. Haley supposed she would have to do some more travel research, then checked in with the services paper and was happy to find that she had received more than a dozen responses to her advertisement.

The first candidate, an elderly wolf with alarmingly thick bifocals, she had to send away because he was too old. The second, a fox, was too boring. Ms. Haley hated being so picky, but if she was to travel with somebody who was essentially a perfect stranger then she wanted to get along with them.

The third candidate, to her surprise, wasn't a man at all. Instead she found herself inviting in a small and very prim sable furred rabbit girl. The rabbit wore an ankle length dress and had a parasol folded under one arm. It was unusual garb for a warm spring day and she seemed slightly overheated. Ms. Haley fetched her a glass of water.

By the time she returned the rabbit had her references spread out in a small arc across the table. All of them were foreign, but clearly marked and with contact information that included the Border Ministry. She had her passport out too.

That was promising.

"What should I call you?" Ms. Haley asked, then supposed she probably wasn't playing the role of master very well. At the same time the thought of being intentionally superior to her servant (valet?) rubbed her the wrong way.

The little rabbit blinked, momentarily surprised.

"Emily, ma'am." She said at last, her voice very quiet. She was short enough that she had to sit on her knees to be able to look properly over the table. She looked almost like a child's doll, small and very, very cute. Ms. Haley found her accent, which blurred her vowels just a bit, heartwarmingly adorable.

"Emily, it's very nice to meet you." Ms. Haley said, and leaned across the table to kiss the little rabbit on the cheek. The insides of Emily's ears immediately went a vivid pink and she blinked hard, whiskers quivering.

"Oh, um...I...I'm happy to meet you as well, ma'am." Her professionalism was intact, but only barely. It seemed she'd been badly taken by surprise. She had to be a recent immigrant if this was her first job. Ms. Haley supposed she wasn't used to what local displays of greeting and simple affection looked like.

"I'm a journalist," Ms. Haley said, sitting down and sliding the glass of water to Emily, "and I'm going abroad soon in order to report upon foreign societies and customs."

Emily ducked into her glass and didn't come out until her nose had stopped twitching and she'd recovered herself somewhat.

"That's very noble," she said, setting the glass gently down, perfectly centered upon a cork coaster, "...if you look to my recommendations you will see that I have worked for both private and state employers. I am skilled at organization and will do everything I can to make your trip smooth and comfortable." Her eyes, a clear cornflower blue, remained steady throughout the entirety of her little speech.

Ms. Haley found something endearing about the little rabbit. Sure she didn't fit the traditional definition of a valet, and sure she fit the sort of prudish mold that her editor found so contemptible, but she was clearly diligent and smart.

And she was a foreigner herself. That could be useful.

"How soon can you begin?" Ms. Haley asked.

Emily blinked, surprised again, but this time pleasantly.

"Um...now. I can begin now, ma'am." She said, and Ms. Haley was delighted to see her new valet's(?) ears wriggle as she spoke, excitement leaking through her professional mold.

"Great," Ms. Haley said, slightly distractedly, "I'll need your contact information so I can let you know as soon as I figure out where we're going, then..." She trailed off, trying to figure out if she was missing something.

Oh. Pay.

Ms. Haley thought about what she paid her house's caretaker, then added ten percent atop that, to account for the possible dangers and privations of travel. When she named the figure Emily nearly fell off of her chair.

"That's...I will accept that." She whispered, nose gone pale, then provided her information and took a deep breath, looking back up to Ms. Haley.

"Thank you." She said, and truly, truly meant it.

Ms. Haley scratched Emily between the ears before she could stop herself, then let her head to the door, the little rabbit blushing furiously all the way.

Ms. Haley called the service paper to announce the filling of the offered position, then went back to her atlas, feeling that she'd made the right choice.

Now...where to go...?

It wasn't until later that she decided to go outside and take a walk. The streets were fairly empty, the afternoon sun shining down. It was still and just a little muggy. After a block of this Ms. Haley undid her blouse and walked the rest of the way bare chested. Again she thought about her editor's words. She probably couldn't do this same thing in a foreign country without getting in trouble over it.

Weird.

Yet, strangely, it made her want to go to those places even more. To see how those people lived and why exactly they thought the way they did.

She'd just have to go someplace that wasn't so damnably warm.

In an instant it clicked.

She turned sharply on her heels and raced back home, heart leaping in her chest.

"You want to go where?" The editor asked, caught completely off guard.

"The far north," Ms. Haley repeated, listening to static crackle through the phone lines, tracing each word she said, "all the way to the ice and the nomads and the aurora borealis."

"What's even up there to see?" The editor asked, "there are only so many ways you can describe an ice field."

"There are people too," Ms. Haley said, undeterred, "nomadic tribes and towns built around geothermal vents. There are dog racers and seal hunters and I've heard such interesting things about the local folklore. Did you know the nomads worship a sea spirit?"

"The north..." The editor sighed to herself. Despite her gruff tone Ms. Haley could hear just the slightest bit of interest. She was curious, if only because she wanted to see how such a trip would shake out.

"And I hired a valet," Ms. Haley continued brightly, "she's a little foreign rabbit, from the north."

"On the ice? Where the hell did you find her?"

"No," Ms. Haley raced to correct herself, "the regular north, not the north north. She's an immigrant. I think she'll be useful, and she's also really, really cute. You have to see her, I want to cuddle her every time she talks, her accent is..."

"That's good," the editor spoke over her, "you're making progress. Have your, uh, valet find affordable transport to the north and we'll organize a little going away publicity thing to let people know you're off to see the world. Then if this turns out to be a success we'll have momentum to build upon."

"Yes ma'am." Ms. Haley said enthusiastically and the editor ended the call.

Ms. Haley packed her atlas, then looked through her closet and found that she didn't have much in the way of cold weather gear. Being a red panda, she was already quite fluffy, and though her work often took her to the mountains, it was never cold or inclement enough to warrant more than a regular coat.

Now she was headed to the ice.

She'd need an upgrade. Emily too, probably.

She placed a call to the number Emily had provided, which turned out to be a hostel, the sort of place travelers stayed for a few days between legs of a trip. The proprietor called Emily over and in an instant the rabbit was there, cool and professional.

"Yes ma'am?" She asked.

"We're going to the ice fields," Ms. Haley said, then continued before Emily could even begin to react, "...and we'll need to shop for cold weather gear."

Emily was silent for a moment, then took a small breath.

"Yes ma'am." She repeated, and that was that.

Shopping turned out to be quite easy. There were heavy coats to be had, and not for very much either. Emily's quilted coat turned out to be too big, but the rabbit bravely waved off any attempts by Ms. Haley to have it resized, even though the sleeves covered her paws and the hem went down to her knees. She looked almost like a little black marshmallow waddling back and forth, letting herself get used to her new gear.

"I didn't see any changing rooms." The rabbit remarked as they exited the store, their new coats and heavy bloomers wrapped tightly in waxed paper, each package tied shut with string.

"Hmm?" Ms. Haley asked, not sure if she understood the question being asked.

"In my country there are rooms you go into when you want to try something on...like, at a department store or a fitting place."

"Why would you do that?" Ms. Haley asked, "that sounds like you're just asking for people to steal things."

Emily seemed slightly flummoxed by the answer but said nothing. Ms. Haley noticed the little rabbit had a habit of averting her eyes or even burying her face into the paper of her package each time they passed someone in even a slight state of undress. Ms. Haley smiled to herself, thoroughly amused.

Once they were home with their new things they packed and Emily dutifully went off to secure passage at the very cheapest possible price. When she came home her gait was very stiff and she refused to look Ms. Haley in the eye when she asked how the trip had gone.

"The travel clerk tried to kiss me." She mumbled at last, when pressed.

"On the cheek?" Ms. Haley asked.

The little rabbit's ears folded back and she nodded briskly, looking horrified.

Ms. Haley laughed,

"That's how people say they appreciate you," she explained, "...were you really polite to the clerk?"

Emily nodded.

"I'm polite to everyone." She said.

"Don't be offended if someone kisses you on the cheek," Ms. Haley said, patting the little rabbit fondly on the shoulder, "it's normal."

"Like when you...?" Emily had to look away, she was too embarrassed to finish the question.

"Mmhmm." Ms. Haley confirmed, and kissed Emily firmly on the cheek.

The little rabbit darted from the room and had to be coaxed back with a fresh cup of tea. Her blush didn't fade until after supper, which Ms. Haley ordered in.

Though Emily insisted on going back to the hostel, Ms. Haley quartered her valet in the spare bedroom and invited her to take whatever she wanted from the kitchen if she was peckish in the night. Emily listened to her ever growing list of privileges and, to Ms. Haley's surprise, looked almost sick.

It took her a moment to realize that the little rabbit was on the verge of tears.

"What?" She asked, dropping to one knee so she was more or less at eye level with her valet.

Emily fought back her emotions, though it took a moment and left her still quite shaky.

"You're being so nice to me." The rabbit managed at last, then slowly, like she wasn't sure if she was doing it right, planted a tiny kiss on Ms. Haley's right cheek.

Ms. Haley barely had time to react before Emily swiftly but very politely zipped back into her room and pretended to take great interest in the quilted comforter on the bed.

"Good night." Ms. Haley offered.

Emily returned the gesture, though she was blushing too hard to make much in the way of eye contact.

Ms. Haley went to bed and smiled to herself as she drifted off to sleep.

The rest of their preparations for the trip were relatively simple. Emily streamlined travel arrangements and, armed with a portion of the travel budget, bought guidebooks to the arctic and even a rudimentary language guide, though deciphering the nomadic tongue proved too difficult and she quietly shelved the book and let it be forgotten about.

Ms. Haley made regular calls to her editor, who remained cynical about the venture's overall chances of success, but did seem happy that her chief correspondent was having such a good time.

They bought boots and mittens, gloves and special reflective goggles that were meant to prevent snow blindness, and then, suddenly, the day of their departure was upon them.

Emily awoke Ms. Haley at dawn (Ms. Haley had stopped needing an alarm clock since taking a valet on) and they skipped breakfast in favor of gathering their bags, what seemed like mountains of them, and loading them into a waiting auto-car.

The car was alcohol powered and shivered when it started, enough so that Emily began to rise from her seat before Ms. Haley took her by the shoulder and levered her back into place. Auto-cars were always finicky at best, but Ms. Haley found they had a certain charm about them, even when the engines caught fire or simply stopped dead for no real reason.

This car however got them to their destination without delay and Ms. Haley tipped the driver, a fox who offered her a nice little kiss on the cheek before speeding off and wishing her good luck on her travels.

Emily still seemed baffled by the kisses but had stopped blushing quite so hard every time anyone did anything even slightly untoward in her presence. Her squirminess when being kissed however was still unparalleled, and Ms. Haley liked planting little kisses on the rabbit at unexpected moments, just to watch her try to keep on working even as her little cotton-ball tail twitched and she went red as a cherry.

Though Ms. Haley had asked about Emily's life before she'd come into her employ, the rabbit was very vague and only gave answers that could have fit into any of a dozen similar questions. It didn't seem she'd left a very happy situation behind in her previous nation of residence. Ms. Haley supposed she'd open up eventually.

The airship that was to take them to the north was slim and sleekly constructed, its envelope made of bright red cloth. It was a luxury craft which Emily had somehow managed to find half price tickets for. Ms. Haley had kissed her extra hard for that, a move which had just about knocked the poor rabbit flat onto her back.

They arrived just in time to be positioned atop a little stage close to the iron gates that led to the loading dock, and there, beneath the shade of the gently floating airship, Ms. Haley quickly found herself the focus of several dozen curious travelers. A banner had been unfurled above her describing her great trip to the arctic and how she'd soon reveal all there was to be learned about the people and their curious customs on the ice.

Emily managed to squirm her way more or less between Ms. Haley and the piles of luggage, clearly not willing to be scrutinized by an actively curious crowd. The editor soon joined them and cameras lined up in the front of the crowd, being set up on tripods. There was even a motion setup being erected, a fox in a waistcoat desperately turning a crank, trying to get his shutter up to speed before the announcement was made.

"Today I send my very accomplished chief correspondent off on a marvelous foreign expedition," the editor said, placing a paw on Ms. Haley's shoulder, "she will visit the harsh expanses of the arctic ice and reveal to us the secrets of the people who live there. How their societies function and which curious alien notions they hold...as well as which parallel beliefs they share with our own enlightened society. You will be electrified by what comes from this woman's travels."

Ms. Haley grinned, wondering if the cameras could see her glowing. Next to her, the editor leaned in to say something, voice only barely carrying over the applause of the growing crowd.

"Good luck," the editor said, "and remember, it's no folly if this doesn't pan out."

"It will." Ms. Haley said determinedly, and kissed the corner of the editor's mouth before turning to the crowd.

Her address was short and to the point. If she indulged herself in flourishes then she'd probably miss her flight. She introduced herself (though the crowd hardly needed it) and her valet, which Emily managed not to look openly horrified by. She detailed their destination at the top of the world and what knowledge she hoped to find. She was careful not to provide too many specifics, anything to leave the readers wanting more.

Then, as a steam whistle blew, she turned and stepped neatly into place before an amused ticket officer, who took both her and Emily's tickets, punched them, and handed them back.

"Be careful," he said gravely, "it's cold up there."

Ms. Haley smiled and promised she would be. Then they marched aboard, cameras flashing behind them.

The airship itself took on only a handful of passengers. It didn't seem the far north was an especially popular destination and suddenly Ms. Haley understood how Emily had come upon the half price tickets.

While Emily busied herself memorizing the airship's layout and the location of every amenity, Ms. Haley mingled with the other passengers. Most of them were quiet, grizzled types who didn't seem terribly impressed with her celebrity approach to travel.

While anecdotes about the north weren't exactly forthcoming, the view as the airship lifted off was spectacular, the city rapidly shrinking beneath them as the hydrogen filled envelope lifted them further and further into the sky. Emily, looking slightly pale and wide eyed, nevertheless showed Ms. Haley to the observing deck and then quickly rushed someplace where she could take deep breaths and not have to stare out into the open air.

Ms. Haley leaned over the railing as far as she dared and watched her city disintegrate into the cloud cover below them, misty tendrils of cool fog caressing her before they were above them and at cruising altitude. The new heights made her feel slightly faint, but the service crew of the airship were quick to hand out cups of mint tea, which proved immediately refreshing.

It was only when they turned north and Ms. Haley realized that there were too many clouds between her and the ground to see much of anything that she allowed Emily to show them to their shared cabin.

The cabin was cozy and surprisingly spacious for a shared berth, with a pair of beds stacked at one end (Ms. Haley took the more spacious bottom at Emily's insistence, though the rabbit needed a boost to get up to her own bunk) and a little window with red velvet shades. The window didn't look straight down, which relieved Emily enough that she left it open. Beneath the window was a little wooden desk where one could write or take their meals. A hot water tap and a little metal sink completed the picture, and a small folding, almost hidden door opened to a bathroom that looked to Ms. Haley to be about the size of a postage stamp. Still, the people who'd engineered the airship had somehow managed to fit a toilet, a mirror, a sink and a bar of soap on a string which fixed to the wall. It was miraculous enough that Ms. Haley took extensive notes on how everything slotted neatly together.

By this time Emily had recovered from her initial vertigo and they went together to the dining room, which seemed to be open at all hours. This struck Ms. Haley as delightfully modern, though she felt slightly bad for the poor cooks all the same.

There were maybe twenty tables and booths in the dining room, all bolted firmly to the floor. The tablecloths were about the same, weighed down in the corners so they couldn't slide out of place, and Ms. Haley took notice of a very slight magnetization of the silverware and dishes (which had little steel rims along their bottoms) so they could not easily slide off of the table in the event of turbulence.

The price of the menu was included in what they had paid for their ticket, but even so Ms. Haley had to prod Emily into getting anything beyond water and toast. In the end they both had eggs and toast and fried tomatoes, though Emily expressed some surprise that anyone would ever bread and deep-fry a tomato.

"At home we'd rub them in salt and cook them in butter until they were crispy," she said, then took a bite of her breakfast, "...but this is still good."

"Maybe we could visit your country at some point." Ms. Haley proposed.

Emily's eyes went down to her breakfast and she said something noncommittal. Ms. Haley wondered for a moment if she'd said something wrong, then distracted herself by asking for a pastry menu.

Breakfast ran long and by the time it was over Ms. Haley was ready for a nap. She hadn't slept terribly well the night before their departure, but now that they were safely in the air and on schedule the tension had drifted away and she felt properly sleepy.

Emily took the opportunity to walk the halls and Ms. Haley drifted off, her dreams full of ice and glowing lights in the sky.

Their trip to the north took them three days. Each day Ms. Haley typed out her impressions of modern air travel (very positive) on her travel typewriter and filed them neatly away. She'd heard interesting things about wireless communiques being sent by engineers in the far east but so far those remained rumors. And until those rumors became commercially viable then she'd have to wait until she came across a wired messaging facility to send her notes on.

From there the editor would paste each chunk of text she sent together, eliminate any shorthand that was left over, and hopefully have something readable at the end of the process.

It had all been a lot easier back home, where such infrastructure was so ubiquitous that she'd never been more than a few dozen miles from an appropriate machine. The north would be different, especially once she got out on the ice.

Ms. Haley resolved to keep her notes safe no matter what.

For the first two days the view from the observing deck was one of forests and then tundras. On the third day they hit the ice and, buoyed by a fine tailwind, arrived at their destination two hours ahead of schedule. That gave Ms. Haley, and the others who'd joined her on the observing deck, plenty of evening light to see the town of HotWind.

It was all one word. Either that or the spacing had been accidentally omitted on the welcome sign that was spelled out in the snow beneath them. The source of the name was apparent enough, for the town they'd arrived at was built around a massive geothermal vent.

In her mind Ms. Haley had imagined the vent being an open hole that gusted hot air and occasional sprays of boiling water into the sky, but instead it took the form of a great big rocky bulge that towered perhaps a hundred feet into the air. Occasional dark holes had opened out of the snow that coated the vent, and Ms. Haley could see trickles of silvery water falling from their edges, snow melted by the heat being pushed from the earth.

Turbines spun lazily in front of these holes, great rubber coated wires all leading to one big facility where a dozen steel and copper coils crackled and occasionally threw frightening arcs of blue electricity into the air. HotWind was brightly lit for a town in the middle of nowhere, and Ms. Haley could see motorized sledges sharing space with treaded auto-cars and sleds which were attached to large teams of excitable dogs.

Even from the air she could see it was bustling, the town as lively as the surrounding ice was dead.

Ms. Haley turned to Emily, the little rabbit tugging on her mittens. Both of them had gotten on their cold weather gear and were very much bundled. The temperature outside wasn't too cold, according to one of their fellow passengers, but who knew what that meant.

Then the gangplank was coming down, railings popping up, and they were disembarking.

To Ms. Haley's surprise there was a crowd waiting at the bottom, calling out, their voices mingling together into one general excited roar. She could see wolves and rams, foxes and caribou and other arctic creatures jostling for space, the disembarking passengers splitting them like water, ignoring every last one of them.

It took her a moment to decipher their shouts.

"Lady, lady, I'll carry your bags! Where you going?" A broad shouldered wolf offered, curling one bare arm to display the size of his biceps.

"I got a sled, I can tour you all around this town, show you _everything!" _ A fox countered the wolf's offer.

It was a terribly confusing situation. Were these people licensed by the town? Were they at all trustworthy? Ms. Haley froze in place, unsure what to do, then Emily had taken her paw and was guiding her through, mimicking the passengers in front of her, not offering the locals so much as a second look.

Ms. Haley, adapting quickly, did the same and kept her nose in the air, which seemed to dissuade the solicitors. They drifted away as the gangplank went back up and Ms. Haley looked down, surprised by the squeaking crunch of hard packed snow beneath her boots. There was no paving in HotWind, just snow and ice. The buildings sprung up unevenly, some looking to be in the process of sinking into the ice, others freshly constructed. But no matter how new the infrastructure everything looked strange and derelict and ramshackle, not at all purpose built...even if it had been.

Another arc of electricity popped in the air over town and though Ms. Haley and Emily jolted in unison, not a single other person did. Ms. Haley stared for a moment as Emily collected their luggage, then broke out her notebook and did her best to write with gloves on. She managed three words before the ink in her pen froze.

She resolved to get a pencil.

In the end one of the airship employees, a brown furred mink who shivered terribly in the cold, pointed them to a reputable hotel that sat along HotWind's main avenue. It's only flaw was that it was close to the power station, but the mink had no time to elaborate further before he was called away by his supervisor.

Ms. Haley gave him a kiss on the cheek, which seemed to restore some of the mink's color, then he was rushing away.

"What did he say it was called?" Emily asked, sounding faintly uneasy.

"The Frostbite Hotel," Ms. Haley said, and couldn't decide whether to be amused or horrified, "...c'mon, I'll help you carry the bags."

Walking through the snow was deceptively difficult and they had to pause to rest a few times as they walked along HotWind's main thoroughfare. It was wide, but had no clearly marked sidewalks, nor any indication of where parking was allowed. Because of this there was a confused tangle of sledges and dogs in front of most establishments and every so often Ms. Haley saw one or two of the teams turn abruptly into snowy whirls of dogs and teeth, yelps and canine squeals drifting free from the melee. These skirmishes never lasted more than a few moments before passersby laid into the mess with axe handles or shovel flats and peace was restored.

It wasn't uncommon to see splashes or dots of crimson staining the snow, blurred by passing feet.

Most of the establishments in HotWind seemed to be bars or other places where one could get well and truly smashed. The alleyways between them were crowded with refuse and drunks alike, and at least one of the seedier dives seemed to be in the process of burning down, though Ms. Haley couldn't tell for sure.

She suddenly felt completely, profoundly out of place.

Still, she resumed her march and kept up the pace until they were at the doors to the Frostbite Hotel, a two story wooden framed building that was leaning distinctly to one side. It was warm, though, and that was all that mattered. Ms. Haley and Emily tromped through the front door, dragging their bags behind them, and immediately a wolf had jumped to offer his help.

It wasn't the brawny wolf from earlier, though both had steel gray fur and amber eyes. This new wolf was slimmer and younger, a newspaper held between his teeth as he dutifully hauled their bags into a neat pile.

"Thank you." Ms. Haley panted, glancing to where Emily had half collapsed against the wall, speckled with snow and very much exhausted.

The wolf tucked his newspaper under one arm and extended a paw. Before he could say anything Ms. Haley had taken his paw and leaned habitually forward to give him a kiss on the cheek.

The wolf took this a little better than Emily had, but the insides of his ears still turned an alarming shade of pink and he became very stammery and bashful. The lobby of the hotel looked to be empty aside from him...if it could be called a lobby.

The Frostbite's first floor was all one big room, an iron stove stuck roughly in the middle, stoked so hot it was practically glowing. The floor was rough hewn boards which were damp with snow melt, scraps of ice clinging stubbornly to the boards where the stove's heat didn't quite reach.

On the far side of the room was what looked like a communal dining room, the only walled off place held what Ms. Haley assumed was a kitchen.

"Do you work here?" She asked the wolf.

He shook his head, still not quite able to make eye contact with her.

"I'm halfway through a run," he said, "I'm warming up."

"A run?" Emily asked, the rabbit having caught her breath.

"On my sledge," the wolf clarified, "I've got an electric one, 'cause juice is free thanks to the power station and subsidies and all that."

Ms. Haley almost asked the wolf to show her his sledge, but the thought of going back out into the chill was enough that she simply nodded, something else catching her attention.

"Electricity is free?" She marveled.

The wolf nodded and invited them closer to the stove. There were little handmade stools here and there, and Ms. Haley and Emily sat side by side, the wolf settling across from them. Little shimmers of heat distorted the air in front of his face.

"We got the thermal vent, and hot air from that comes right out of the ground, so no real need to pay for anything. I mean, the government gave us the power station, so..."

At that moment the lights flickered and as Ms. Haley watched the wolf's fur stood straight up, little crackles of pale blue light rolling between the soft gray strands. A tingly feeling rolled through her entire body and she looked down, realizing that the fur on her exposed tail was doing the exact same thing.

The wolf laughed.

"Sure it does that sometimes, but it's better than freezing to death or going full nomad and burning seal blubber."

A moment later everything was back to normal, the wolf brushing his fur back down with an audible crackle of static electricity. Ms. Haley quietly marveled that a person could be blasé about that, yet still be put off balance by a kiss.

"Well," she said, realizing the silence was beginning to grow, "my name is Haley, and this is Emily. She's my valet."

The wolf's eyebrows ticked upward.

"Valet?" He echoed, sounding surprised, "are you rich?"

"I'm a journalist," Ms. Haley corrected, "here to write a story about the north. Do you think you could help me, Mr...?"

"Chase," the wolf said, "and you're really writing about the north? Why?"

"It's a far flung and very foreign part of the world to people in my country. I mean, most of the word is, but this part especially."

Chase scratched under his chin, slightly perplexed.

"Huh..." He said quietly.

Emily spoke up.

"Where were you going on your sledge? Before you came here?" She asked.

"I work on contract," the wolf said, "so right now I'm contracted to the provincial government down south, I'm taking stuff to the nomads."

Ms. Haley perked up.

"Really?" She asked, "could you take us too?"

Chase blinked.

"To see the nomads?" He asked.

Ms. Haley nodded vigorously.

"It'd be a great article if I could sit down with them and learn about how they live on the ice, and what their culture is like, and..." She trailed off, trying to think what else she wanted to learn.

"So, can you take us?" Emily finished for her, then hesitated and sighed, "...we can pay you."

At this Chase's demeanor changed a bit. He smiled.

"Sure," he said, "I mean, might tickle them to see strangers more than once or twice a year. They got a whole ceremony for greeting travelers, you know that?"

"Really?" Ms. Haley asked.

Chase described the proceedings and Ms. Haley found that her pen had thawed out. She dutifully transcribed what Chase was saying, then added her impressions of the town of HotWind. Already she had quite a bit and she'd only been in the north for an hour.

And soon she'd be meeting real life arctic nomads!

"Could you take us tomorrow?" Emily asked.

Chase shrugged.

"If the weather's good...which it should be. Now, since the both of you combined are probably something like one hundred extra kilograms of weight on my sledge, and that'll slow me down a bit, how about we say..." He considered a bit, then named a price that Emily evidently found exorbitant. She scoffed and named a counter offer, eventually haggling the wolf down to something both of them found agreeable. They shook on the deal, Emily's paw completely enfolded by Chase's bigger one.

Ms. Haley watched, eyebrows raised.

"Huh," she said, "you didn't tell me you knew how to haggle."

Emily nodded proudly, looking satisfied with herself.

"It's a useful skill around here," Chase said, "government hasn't gotten around to enforcing much of anything, so prices are mostly negotiable. Keep that in mind."

Ms. Haley wrote that detail down, then looked around the empty hotel lobby again.

"...Do you know where the owner is?" She asked.

"Drunk." Chase said, and leaned back, balancing his stool on only two legs.

"So...?" Emily asked.

"Reach behind the counter and get yourself a key, I think the rates are listed somewhere back there, so leave the money and he'll find it."

"Are you sure he'd be okay with that?" Ms. Haley asked uncertainly.

Chase smiled and nodded, looking over the enduring skepticism on the pair of faces opposite him.

"I'm his son," he said, "I think I'd know."

Relieved, Ms. Haley leaned forward and kissed the wolf again, on the exact same spot. He just barely avoided toppling over, the legs of his stool coming down with a hard clack on the boards.

"Do all the pretty ladies in your country do that?" He asked after a moment.

Ms. Haley raised an eyebrow, amused and flattered by the implied compliment.

"If you're nice to them." She said, and turned to fetch a key.

The room they got faced the main thoroughfare and, though it was somewhat chilly, there was a small stove in the corner of the room. A pair of metal framed military cots occupied each side of the room and aside from a nightstand sitting between them there was no other furniture.

Chase helped them carry their luggage up to the second floor and piled it neatly in one corner of the room. Even he was panting by the time they were done, thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his canvas pants.

"Well," he said, stepping back into the doorway, "we'll be heading out early tomorrow, so I'd advise getting some rest." Then he was gone.

"He's nice." Ms. Haley remarked as Emily shut the door.

The rabbit sat down on her own cot, gauging the firmness of the mattress, which was only a few inches thick and seemed to have been stuffed with shredded cardboard.

"This is a strange place..." She said, then caught herself, "but there's charm to it."

"I think we'll know whether this trip is a success or not once we meet the nomads." Ms. Haley said, and turned back to her notes.

She had trouble falling asleep that night, even when bundled under the thick, wooly blankets that covered her bed. Emily had stoked the stove up and it glowed a pleasant orange in the corner, radiating a dull sort of heat. All she could think about was the nomads, and Chance, and the strange, strange place she'd ended up in.

Sure she'd met some interesting people and seen some interesting things, but if the rest of the trip turned out to be a bust would that be enough to base an article on? Again she found herself trying to salvage a potential failure in her mind. At least she'd have visited the north, she told herself...if the editor yanked the plug on her project.

Still, it would be embarrassing to have stood up on that stage in the airship station and promised the world to the good people...only to disappoint them.

Ms. Haley sighed and rolled over on her narrow cot, the springs beneath her squeaking. Eventually she found something close to sleep, curled into a tight little ball, and suddenly Emily was gently shaking her shoulder.

"It's time to get up," she said, "the sun is about to rise."

For a moment Ms. Haley was confused. Why was it so cold and why was the window above her head rather than off to her left? Then she remembered where she was and sat up straight, blankets puddling around her. Emily was dressed already and had her cold weather gear laid out around the fire, so it was warm and toasty when Ms. Haley dressed.

"You're a good valet." She told the little rabbit sleepily, then they were locking the door behind them and heading down he stairs, bringing only the essentials with them. Emily tucked the money belt with their funds beneath her coat and took a deep breath, looking deeply serious and responsible. It was cute seeing her like that, Haley decided, and couldn't stop herself from stroking the rabbit's ears.

Emily squirmed in place, but couldn't resist the faintest hint of a smile before she found a reason to escape.

They found Chase on the ground floor, stirring the fire with a poker, all dressed up and ready to go. He had a great big balaclava on and only his eyes showed, though Ms. Haley could see his tail sticking out behind him. It wagged for a moment as soon as he saw her, then the wolf was standing up, looking slightly sheepish.

"I brought breakfast," he said, offering out a pair of brown paper bags spotted with grease, "which we're gonna eat on the road, 'cause this is a long run we're about to do."

With that he was walking outside, Ms. Haley and Emily hurrying to follow. The warmth contained within her back was wicked out into the air immediately and she tucked her breakfast into her coat, feet skating over the icy, slippery snow. It had frozen as hard as iron during the night and Ms. Haley had her doubts as to whether anything could break it so long as it remained so cold.

Fortunately, they didn't have to walk very far. Chase had brought his motorized sledge out in front of the hotel and stood just in front of it, arms folded. He looked very proud of himself.

The sledge was larger than Ms. Haley had expected, though admittedly she didn't really know what size a sledge was supposed to be. Chase's was perhaps twenty feet long, a treaded set of tracks running along the rear two thirds, a long set of metal skis guiding the front. There was a covered rear section, the front given over to a steel sheathed engine that had been exposed to the elements, presumably so she could get a good look at it.

Ms. Haley could see a bank of lead acid batteries contained within, each as long as her forearm and gently humming. There were metal coils wound around them to prevent them from freezing, the rest of the motor roughly traditional, the sort of thing she might see in an auto-car at home.

Behind the driver's seat was a little enclosure covered in fabric, a tent on treads. Ms. Haley supposed that was where Emily and her were going to be riding.

She did exactly what Chase had probably been hoping for her to do and gushed over the sledge. It was wonderful how far battery technology had come, so interesting how neatly each segment of the treads locked together. She couldn't wait to see how fast it could go.

They loaded aboard, Ms. Haley still practically humming with excitement, Emily determined to find the safest spot on the vehicle and glue herself to it. Chase undid the back of the canvas enclosure and helped them in. It was dark inside, but to Ms. Haley's relief he left the back open.

"This'll keep the wind off of you," he said, "you need anything just yell. I'll hear you."

Ms. Haley nodded, then the wolf was gone, returning to the driver's seat. For a curious moment there was silence, then the fur on Ms. Haley's tail began to rise again. She looked out the back of the sledge, curious to see if the power station was throwing another arc, but the silvery morning sky was blank and uninterrupted.

Then she realized. Chase was starting the batteries. The engine was going. The hum she'd heard earlier intensified to something near a whine and suddenly the sledge was zipping forward, no buildup to its speed. Emily yelped and clutched onto Ms. Haley's arm, practically crawling into her employer's lap. Ms. Haley gathered the little rabbit there and for a breathless moment they were accelerating, racing through the empty streets, past the power station and the great bulging form of the geo-thermal vent, and out of HotWind entirely.

And suddenly they were on the ice, all traces of civilization fading behind them, lost in a whirl of ice and wind. The canvas flapped around them and, slowly, Emily fumbled through her pack with shaking paws and fetched their snow blindness goggles. Ms. Haley put hers over her forehead, for it wasn't quite bright enough to risk snow blindness yet, and stared at their path.

The sledge was shockingly quiet, and when Chase spoke he barely had to raise his voice for her to hear him.

"We're going top speed," the wolf called back to her, "sixty kilometers per hour!"

This was impressive enough that Ms. Haley impulsively wrote the figure down. She had to hold her pen under her arm for a bit between each word, to thaw the frozen ink.

...She definitely needed a pencil.

Still, the inconvenience hardly seemed to matter. It was a grand way to travel, she thought, racing over silk smooth ice at such a tremendous velocity. There was barely any bumping or rattling to be felt, it was as though they were passing over an endless white cloud, the sky above them, a blue eternity below.

"Town's right at the edge of the water," Chase said from ahead of her, as though he'd read her thoughts, "now we're over the Arctic Ocean. If we keep going like this for the next four or five hundred miles then we'll hit the pole."

"Does anyone live that far north?" Ms. Haley asked, raising her voice to be heard over the wind.

"I don't know," Chase said, thoughtful for a moment, "probably. Just more ice and seals and stuff, right?"

Ms. Haley knew that people had been to the poles before, explorers and scientists, but they hadn't stayed for longer than absolutely necessary. Even living here, a few hundred miles south of the pole, sounded impossible to her.

But soon enough she'd see people who managed it.

She settled back into her seat and watched the ice. Every so often they passed little lumps and ridges, but that was the only variation in the terrain. It remained flat and still and vast otherwise. After a bit she put her goggles on and the ice dimmed a bit, but that did nothing to take away the immense sense of scale she got even with her limited view.

Her notes grew and grew, Emily remained curled where she was, the little rabbit remaining perfectly still. She didn't seem especially happy to be doing this, Ms. Haley noticed, but she wasn't complaining either.

After a bit she fell asleep, lulled by the smoothness of their ride, the rush of the wind and the familiar blankness of the ice. Wrapping her arms fondly around Emily, Ms. Haley hugged her valet to her chest and drifted off.

When she awoke it was to the sledge slowing. Emily was sitting primly next to her, adjusting her goggles. They'd passed an enormous shelf of protruding ice at some recent point and Ms. Haley blinked as she saw it, the immensity of the aberration enough to take her breath away. The light had changed, late afternoon upon them, and golden sunlight stained the flanks of the ice shelf. She wished cameras were small enough to carry by paw. She'd have taken a thousand pictures.

Still, she supposed she had her words.

"We're getting close," Chase said up ahead, voice clear, no longer muffled by the wind, "they've seen us coming so I'm going slow, giving them time to get out the drums and all that."

"Drums?" Ms. Haley asked, mind still half stunned by sleep, then remembered Chase's words from yesterday. The nomads had ceremonies for welcoming travelers.

How nice of them.

And sure enough a moment later she could hear a loud resonant thumping pattern carrying across the ice. Emily straightened up, ears perking. A moment later a curious sound filtered through the whining hum of the engine and the persistent beat of the drums.

Voices.

The nomads were singing.

Ms. Haley squirmed in place, trying to imagine what the nomad camp looked like. What the nomads themselves looked like. She knew there were many different tribes, and those tribes had very different customs between them, in the same way that nations differed between themselves.

The voices grew louder as they approached and Chase called something friendly and deferential in a foreign tongue.

"You speak their language?" Ms. Haley asked, surprised.

"Why do you think the government contracted me?" The wolf asked back, and Ms. Haley supposed that made perfect sense. Then the sledge was coming to a halt, evening sun glinting of the treads.

Chase dismounted, boots crunching in the snow, and Ms. Haley popped out, helping Emily out behind her. The little rabbit glanced around her, face nearly lost in the ruff of her coat.

The immediacy of the nomad camp was surprising. They were perhaps thirty feet from the nearest tent, Chase standing next to the front of his sledge, glancing back at his passengers.

The nomads lived in a curious mixture of snow houses and fur lined tents, perhaps a dozen of them all arranged in a neat curving row that formed a fishhook shape. There were dogs here and there, wandering freely, possessions intermingled. There didn't seem to be any clear state of belonging, everything that the group had was communal.

Ms. Haley badly wanted to write that down but didn't want to look like she wasn't paying attention. The last thing she wanted was to be rude.

And besides, the nomads had come out to greet them. To greet her.

She had wondered for a moment if the nomads were wolves or foxes, something similar to Chase, but now she saw that they were neither. The men and women before her were reindeer, tall and dark furred. They looked a bit like elk back home, but even at a glance Ms. Haley could see differences. Their horns were smaller and covered with a fine, fuzzy brown velvet, and their fur was much fluffier.

She very badly wanted to hug them.

The singing and drums had stopped and now Chase was speaking with the two foremost reindeer, an older man with graying fur and a younger reindeer who looked to be his son. Ms. Haley guessed that the old man was the leader of the group, the younger reindeer his son.

The younger reindeer was certainly confident enough to be a leader in waiting. He said something to Chase and laughed, the wolf clapping the reindeer fondly on the shoulder. Then they were turning.

Ms. Haley extended a gloved paw, Emily doing the same after a moment. The older reindeer smiled and shook her paw, saying something quiet to the wolf.

Chase smiled and rolled his eyes.

"What did he say?" Emily asked.

"That I have a beautiful pair of wives." The wolf said.

Ms. Haley laughed even as Emily stared, momentarily mortified. She only barely managed to stick her professional visage back together. Chase shook his head, amused by her reaction.

"He's joking," the wolf assured her, eyes flashing to Ms. Haley, "now c'mon, they want to show you around."

The reindeer did just that, made curious by Ms. Haley's red fur and striped tail. She had to wonder if they'd ever seen a red panda before. More than a few of the children and even some of the adults couldn't resist stroking her tail, which tickled Ms. Haley in more than one way.

It was almost a little difficult to pay attention to the tour being given, even with Chase dutifully translating. There was so much to look at, and now that she was out of the sledge she could see the true extent of the blankness around her. But for the ice shelf to her south, now a pale purple blotch on the horizon, there was nothing but sky and ice, all civilization outside of the nomad camp completely invisible.

Somewhere over the horizon, unimaginable distances away, was her home. Ms. Haley knew that, but it was so far away she could scarcely imagine it even being there.

Even HotWind seemed distant beyond comprehension.

The nomad camp was small and compact, quite well planned. The families lived in their snow houses and tents, which Chase made sound quite cozy (snow apparently had fine insulating properties) and the dogs were penned up some distance away. When it snowed they simply burrowed down and made little snow houses of their own.

There were more dogs than people in the camp and most were penned up, only a few of the older dogs allowed to wander freely. The sled dogs were lively and good natured, tugging at their leashes as they caught sight of Ms. Haley and Emily, yelping and barking and wagging their tails. A few of the stakes hammered into the ice held no dogs at all and Ms. Haley took notice of that.

"Where are those ones?" She asked, looking to Chase.

Chase in turn looked for an answer from the old reindeer, who gestured broadly to the further north.

"Hunting and surveying." Chase said after a moment.

"Surveying?"

The wolf nodded.

"Looking for melt spots. All of the beacons are full of radium so they glow in the dark. Every spring the government pays the nomads to go around putting beacons next to all the melted parts of the ice sheet they can find. That way we know the best routes to take once it thins up enough for the icebreakers to come through and open the summer shipping routes."

Ms. Haley raised her eyebrows, delighted.

"How modern," she marveled, "why...this is a perfect example of the traditional and the new working together for the common good."

Chase shrugged faintly, looking to the nomads, some of whom were being sent various places by the leader, his son nodding along, seconding the old reindeer's commands. Chase laid a paw on Ms. Haley's shoulder.

"Don't be too optimistic," the wolf cautioned her, "when the shipping lanes open up it imposes a strict northern limit on the places these people can hunt. And towns like HotWind are expanding too. If we aren't very, very careful then folks like these are gonna be squeezed out of existence."

Ms. Haley nodded slowly, sobered by the wolf's words. Mentally, she amended her notes. Preservation of traditional cultural practices was an important thing for the peoples of the world to focus on, she decided. The idea of the nomads being driven south to HotWind and having to adapt to its noisy streets was...

She didn't want to think about that.

"All of that will be in the article." She promised, and Chase seemed slightly reassured. He turned and said something to the reindeer, perhaps relaying her words. The young reindeer nodded seriously and stepped towards Ms. Haley. Before she knew it she'd been enfolded in a hug, her face pressed into the warm fur between the young reindeer's shoulder and neck.

She was right, it was very fluffy and pleasant to hug an arctic reindeer.

When the reindeer broke his embrace she was sure her cheeks were glowing. He smiled and said something to her, and though she didn't know what it was the tone of his voice sounded very pleasant.

"Ah, look at you," Chase teased, "landing the chief's son."

Ms. Haley rolled her eyes at the wolf but couldn't suppress a smile. The reindeer were all fit and clearly looked it, built lean and strong. There had been an effortless sort of strength behind the younger reindeer's hug that she quite liked as well.

"So," Emily interjected, glancing to where the sun sat low in the sky, beginning to stain the horizon pink, "are we staying the night?"

"We should." Ms. Haley said, excited by the prospect of spending a night with the nomads.

"It'd be impolite to leave so soon," Chase said with a shrug, "and driving at night's no fun." He said something to the older reindeer, who nodded.

It wasn't long before they were guided to the very largest snow house, which seemed to be a tent with snow packed over top of the walls for added insulation. It was spacious inside, even with twenty reindeer inside, and they slowly gathered into a circle, Emily remaining glued to her employer's side.

The tent was lit with blubber lamps and greasy trickles of smoke drifted upwards to where Ms. Haley could see a smoke stained patch on the ceiling. The smell wasn't exactly unpleasant but she really had nothing to compare it to.

Once everyone was seated the older reindeer (what had Chase called him? The chief?) spoke, quieting the assemblage. Chase leaned in, translating quietly for Ms. Haley and Emily.

"He's explaining that you've come from half the world away just to see us and that it's an honor."

Ms. Haley smiled, feeling slightly self conscious but mostly aglow with gratitude. Now, she felt, even if the article failed the whole thing would still be worth it. Around her, the reindeer gazed curiously at her. As she watched the younger reindeer, seated next to his father, asked something.

Chase's eyebrows raised just a little bit.

"Was he talking to me?" Ms. Haley asked.

"He wants to know about your country." Chase said.

"Really?" Ms. Haley asked, perking up even more. Oh, this was great.

She cleared her throat and glanced to Chase.

"Don't use too many specified words," he warned her, "there usually aren't translations for those."

Ms. Haley nodded and vowed to do her best. Then she thought about her country, the place she'd lived all of her life. How could she sum it up for a group of nomads who'd lived their entire lives on the ice?

"Well..." She began, then realized where she could start, "most everyone lives in one place, in a house or an apartment. The temperature is lovely for most of the year, although September is usually unseasonably chilly and winter is...winter. We have sledding when it snows, but it's always downhill and usually there aren't dogs involved. Oh! And we keep gardens. We grow things in the dirt, flowers and berries and fruit. And it's all very, very nice."

She shrugged faintly, not sure what else to say. If she mentioned the Prime Minister then she'd have to explain democracy and a parliamentary system. If she told them about her job then she'd have to tell them all about newspapers and journalism and editing and...

The nomads sat quietly and listened to Chase's best attempts to translate what Ms. Haley had said. He seemed to be having trouble with how best to get across the general concept of September. But though some things clearly baffled them, Ms. Haley could see heads nodding and curious eyes going her direction.

Follow up questions were asked and she spoke of paved roads and running water and airships. Her words about airships in general inspired some enthusiasm from the children, who were used to seeing airships and liked them very much. They tucked their arms tightly against their sides and sped busily around the room, imitating the rumbling hum of an airship engine.

With that supper was served. Ms. Haley hadn't been quite sure what the nomads ate, but now she figured that out, with more than a little assistance from Chase.

There was bannock, a dense flatbread made from flour and lard, akutaq, a mixture of cloudberries and seal fat, and a steaming seal soup. It was all extraordinarily rich, befitting a high calory existence on the ice, and before too long Ms. Haley had to remove her coat. She felt warm and almost a little sleepy, almost overwhelmed by the events of the day.

It was slightly strange watching reindeer, a traditionally herbivorous species, eat meat, but she supposed there was likely nothing else to exist on this far north.

"This all came from a successful hunt earlier today," Chase explained to her, translating a boast from the younger reindeer, "everyone who took part got celebrated."

"How does a hunting celebration go?" Ms. Haley asked.

Chase considered for a moment, then shrugged and asked the younger reindeer. His question was met with a smile, the reindeer's eyes meeting Ms. Haley's.

Chase chuckled to himself.

"He asks if you'd like to see a recreation." The wolf said.

Ms. Haley was nodding almost before she even understood the question. A chance to see a ceremony up close and personal? This would be a fine thing to put in her article.

With supper winding down, the younger reindeer excused himself, fetching a pair of his fellow hunters as he did so. Ms. Haley put her coat back on and, Chase and Emily by her side, followed the three hunters out into the snow.

The sun had almost completely set and the first stars were beginning to come out, a flat, stinging chill settling over the land. Still, Ms. Haley stopped and stared straight up at the sky for a long moment, admiring just how clear it was. In the city there were enough lights that stars were only rarely visible. It was only when she was out away from the world that she could see the night sky as it was truly meant to be seen. But even then...she had never seen anything half as pretty as this. Each star glimmered like a shard of ice, the greater dust of the Milky Way glowing behind them, a hundred million little specks and planets and stars bringing home the vastness of the universe.

For a moment Ms. Haley felt very, very small. Then she shrugged the feeling off and followed the hunters into another snow house, this one small and snug, lit with a cozy amber sort of light that deepened the shadows and made Ms. Haley feel relaxed and almost a little sleepy.

It was warm in the house and she again shed her coat, Emily doing the same after a moment. The hunters, who weren't very heavily dressed to begin with, shed their lighter layers and in an instant all three were shirtless, the younger reindeer fetching a drum with a smile.

He pounded a steady rhythm into it and began to turn a slow circle around the center of the room, on which a pile of furs was gathered. Gradually, the other hunters joined him, picking up the chant. It was slow and almost a little melancholy. Chase leaned in, whispering to Ms. Haley and Emily.

"When a seal is killed its spirit goes to Sedna, the goddess of the sea. In order to ease the seal's passing it's given a drink of fresh water. It's important to treat a kill with respect, because your soul is linked to the seal."

Ms. Haley nodded slowly, entranced by the spectacle before her. As she watched the chant slowly changed, morphing into something else. She glanced to Chase, the wolf explaining.

"And now they're celebrating the life the seal brings through its death."

Even as he spoke the younger reindeer paused and extended a paw, inviting Ms. Haley in.

She accepted, wondering if she was to be part of the circle. It could be fun, she thought, to be close pressed with a bunch of fit, shirtless men. As she stood up she let herself pull on the reindeer's paw just a little too hard and brush it against her breasts. The reindeer went pink, but only for a moment. Then he was settling her into the furs at the center of the circle.

"Wait a minute, am I the seal?" She asked, eyebrows raising.

"I think you're Sedna." Chase said, then was being pulled into the circle as well. The wolf laughed and stripped off his own shirt to match his fellows, joining into the circle. Emily sat where she was, watching the spectacle unfold with a mixture of confusion and fascination. Her ears were perked and her nose twitched.

The tent was quite warm now and Ms. Haley stripped off her shirt without a second thought, like she might have done at home. In an instant her breasts were exposed, pink nipples standing out from the dark red fur surrounding them like little exclamation points.

The dance stuttered to an abrupt halt, the hunters looking to the younger reindeer for guidance, the younger reindeer looking in turn to the wolf. Chase's ears had folded back and he stammered for a moment before managing to find his words.

"They're, um...not used to foreigners." He managed, blushing very hard.

Ms. Haley felt embarrassed for a moment, then wondered why she was even feeling bad. So what if she was showing her body? That wasn't anything bad, nothing to be ashamed of at all.

And besides, the reindeer looked cute when they were flustered, and she could see a few of them desperately trying to hide growing bulges in their pants.

"Well," she raised her eyebrows, looking to Chase, "how would they feel about a friendly cultural exchange?"

Even as she said that she pushed her hips up and slipped her bloomers down over her hips, taking her panties with them. Her little pink slit, nearly hidden by her fluffy red fur, was already slick and growing wetter by the moment.

The ceremony fell apart entirely and after a moment of shock the younger reindeer slowly dropped to his knees in front of her, the fabric at the front of his pants straining. Ms. Haley guided his paws to her breasts and leaned in for a kiss.

For a moment the reindeer didn't even react, he was too shocked by what was happening. Smiling, Ms. Haley looked to the other members of the circle, all of whom were currently blushing and squirming in place, unsure what to do.

She beckoned for them to undress and then reached down to undo the front of the younger reindeer's pants. A thick, tapered cervine length flopped free against the inside of her wrist, thick and hot and throbbing with need. His balls were dark furred and heavy, she could barely fit them in the palm of her paw. Ms. Haley couldn't help but squirm in place as she admired their size and heft.

Emboldened, snapped free from his inaction, Chase slipped his pants off, the tip of a pink canine cock poking free from his heavy sheath. He was breathing hard but still had just enough wherewithal to turn to Emily.

"Are you gonna join in?" He asked.

The little rabbit stared at him for a moment, frozen as she was at the edge of the circle, then slowly shook her head.

"I...I'll just observe." She managed.

The wolf relayed her answer to the reindeer and they nodded, gazes shifting away from the sable furred rabbit. Instead they hurriedly undressed, eager to get in on the action before it was too late. Ms. Haley smiled at their sudden, almost desperate zeal, enjoying the way they blushed and fumbled. They were all young and probably hadn't done this very much.

The poor things.

She stroked one paw along the length of the younger reindeer's cock, sing the other to gently squeeze his balls, enjoying the little huffs and minute interruptions in his breathing that came with each burst of pleasure she gave him.

Even as she leaned in for another kiss Chase had slipped up behind her. The wolf slid his work roughened paws along her sides to the curves of her hips, the hot press of his stiffening cock grinding against her tail.

Moving along with the pressure behind her, Ms. Haley gently pressed the younger reindeer onto his back, straddling his groin as she did so. He let her get on top of him, the tapered tip of his cock brushing against the scalding pink of her slit for just a moment. Even as she teased him her tail flicked up behind her, soft fur caressing the wolf's cock. He trembled in place and a hot spurt of canine pre spattered her back all the way up to her shoulder blades. He was really worked up. All of them were.

Was this how foreigners were in general?

Poor things.

Ms. Haley longed to slip a pair of fingers into her slick pink cunt and simply burn through as many orgasms as she could until the growing fire inside of her was extinguished, but she fought the temptation back and kept her attention focused on the others. What kind of guest would she be if she did something so selfish?

On either side of her the remaining two hunters approached, lust erasing their nervousness bit by bit. They'd stripped down and well and their tapered cocks jutted out before them, achingly erect.

Adjusting herself so she was more upright, Ms. Haley took their lengths, one in each paw, and slowly sank herself down onto the younger reindeer's cock, letting it push into her burning depths.

He was thick enough that she had to roll her hips and gasp, working inch after inch of his member into her, trembling as she did. The reindeer helped her with this process, paws finding her hips. He slowly but surely pressed her down, forcing her into submission around his cock until he was fully hilted inside of her. Ms. Haley ground down, enjoying the feel of his balls pressed tight against her rear.

Behind her, Chase continued to grind against her rear, paws slipping around her front to squeeze her breasts. Ms. Haley had a wonderfully naughty idea.

"There's a bottle of something slick in my left coat pocket," she panted to Emily, breaking the rabbit from her shock, "would you pass it to Chase, please?"

Emily fumbled for the requested item and did as she was asked, her face burning as she scooted back into the corner, knees drawn tight to her chest.

Chase looked from the bottle of lube to Ms. Haley, surprised by what she seemed to be proposing.

"Are you sure?" He asked.

Haley leaned back to give him a quick kiss, a proper one this time. The wolf went pink and got busy with the lube. Beneath her, Ms. Haley could feel the younger reindeer beginning to thrust, pumping his thick shaft into her pussy, right up to the hilt with every thrust.

Cock still pressed against her tail, Chase quickly lubed a pair of fingers, Ms. Haley could hear him doing it. Carefully, he slipped the first one into her little pink pucker. She shivered as he did it, enjoying the sensation. She was relieved that he was being so gentle.

With two of the men taken care of, Ms. Haley turned her attention to the two reindeer she was stroking. They were huffing and panting, pushing their thick cocks against her paws. Picking one at random, which proved to be the hunter to her left, she slipped her paw up his shaft until she had his dark furred balls in her palm, then opened her mouth and let him hilt his cock in her throat.

He was energetic and quick, pumping his length over her soft tongue and into her warm, tight throat. Ms. Haley did her best to relax as Chase added a second finger to her tail-hole, stretching her further. Her tail quivered with each thrust that landed inside of her and she couldn't help but moan as a shivery, luxuriant sort of warmth coiled between her legs, driving the breath from her lungs, making her feel almost dizzy with pleasure.

In front of her, the reindeer fucking her mouth gasped and gripped the sides of her head, pinning her fluffy round ears back as he pushed his hips forward and came down her throat with a cry. His load drooled from the corners of Ms. Haley's mouth and her eyes slitted with pleasure as she swallowed as much of it as she could, gulping great mouthfuls of salty reindeer seed. His cock pulsed enthusiastically in her mouth, from base to tip, and she was sure to massage his balls, working to drain him completely.

The reindeer more collapsed than sat back when he withdrew, legs too trembly to support him. He looked dazed.

Ms. Haley wasted no time in swapping her oral attentions to the other reindeer, whose cock had begun to drool clear pre. She lapped it off his tip and ran her tongue along the sensitive underside of his shaft. In a moment he was pumping her face, balls slapping against her cum streaked chin.

Behind her, Chase let his fingers slip free from the hot, velvety grip of Ms. Haley's tail-hole. For a moment she was left empty, then she felt the slick, insistent press of his freshly lubed cock. Again she relaxed as totally as she could and let him push into her, the wolf grunting. He was probably about the same size as any of the reindeer, at least in terms of length, but there was the knot to consider. Still, he was gentle and took his time, breathing hard as Ms. Haley's silken hole squeezed down on his knotted member.

It took him only a moment to synchronize his thrusts with the younger reindeer's, and in an instant Ms. Haley was being rocked between three eager men, speared on their throbbing lengths.

She was openly panting now, Ms. Emily watching wide eyed from her place in the corner. the little rabbit's paws had traveled between her legs but she wasn't rubbing herself or doing anything lewd. Instead she seemed to have frozen, though the insides of her ears had turned a vivid pink and her nose twitched madly.

Before Ms. Haley could focus more on her valet she felt a hot press from beneath her, the younger reindeer grinding his cock especially hard into her stretched cunt. Then she felt the wonderfully familiar pulsing throb of his cock spasming inside of her, following an instant later by a small flood of thick, hot cum.

Ms. Haley came almost simultaneously, moaning and trembling even as he mouth and tail-hole continued to be stuffed. The sensation was one of warmth, she could feel that most clearly, blending with the load the reindeer had shot into her pussy, melding with the seed she'd swallowed and the pre sliding down her throat. Every bit of her felt electric and for a moment she very nearly lost cohesion. But there was still pleasure yet to extract. She wanted her partners to cum and know that they had taken part in something great.

She wanted this to be something that made their faces hot and their groins tight for years to come.

Chase, cock massaged by the eager spasms of Ms. Haley's tail-hole, pushed forward even harder, grinding the edge of his swollen knot against her stretched pucker. His thrusts jolted her forward, forcing the other reindeer's cock deeper into her mouth. He panted and groaned, eyes squeezed shut, and Ms. Haley gently squeezed his balls. Almost as though they were a trigger the reindeer's hips jerked and he sprayed a scalding load into the back of her mouth. She swallowed it dutifully, swirling her tongue over the tip of the reindeer's cock. He withdrew only reluctantly and fell back alongside his companion.

Beneath her, the younger reindeer's softening cock slipped free from Ms. Haley's pussy, a small flood of warm reindeer cum sliding down the insides of her trembling thighs. Her freshly fucked hole tingled, feeling almost unpleasantly empty.

Groaning, Ms. Haley pushed back even harder against Chase's next thrust, letting herself fall into a sort of presenting position as she did, one cheek pressed against the furs on which she lay. The wolf met her invitation and redoubled his efforts, tail wagging madly as he railed her ass with short, hard thrusts.

Ms. Haley reached back and speared a pair of fingers into her cream filled cunt, grinding her thumbs against her clit. She cried out, unable to keep the noise in, and and rode another shivery orgasm, pushing back against the wolf. His knot popped into her and for a surprised moment he was tight against her rear, then he leaned forward and locked his arms around Ms. Haley's middle.

Chase managed a few more ragged half thrusts, the red hot ball of his knot dragging back and forth inside of Ms.Haley's silken tail-hole, then his balls tightened and he spurted what felt like a liter of lupine cum into her tight ass.

His teeth found her shoulder and he bit down, not quite hard enough to break skin but enough for it to sting. The pain felt weirdly sweet in the context of her last orgasm and Ms. Haley let the wolf continue grinding his hips against her. She enjoyed the feeling of his knot inside of her too much to even consider complaining.

Eventually, sadly, Chase managed to tug his softening knot free and Ms.Haley slipped onto her back on the furs, enjoying the afterglow as hot cum drooled from both holes. Then, quite suddenly, she sat bolt upright and pointed one cum streaked finger to Emily.

"My notebook." She ordered, voice urgent.

Emily obediently handed it over and for a frantic few minutes Ms. Haley sat back against the furs and scribbled down her observations. The delightfully thick fur that people in the arctic had. The delightful way a reindeer's cock pulsed when he came. Her face grew hot and she rubbed her thighs slowly together as she wrote, experiencing each moment all over again.

The three reindeer watched her work. They weren't entirely sure what she was doing, but were content to leave her alone for the moment. Chase sat back with them and recovered his breath. He looked to the reindeer and for a moment they simply exchanged silent glances, unsure if what had just happened was wonderful or simply confusing.

Setting her notebook and pen aside, Ms. Haley lay back onto the cum streaked furs with a sigh of satisfaction before lazily looking to the wolf and the reindeer.

"Another round?" She asked sweetly.

They took her up on it immediately.