FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

When his eyes initially opened, the only thing Frosty saw was bright light. Lifting a hand, he shielded his eyes from it until they adjusted enough that he could lower it again. There was a crystal chandelier hanging overhead, casting a dull yellowish light over him and the surrounding room.

Strange, he didn't have such fancy décor in his bedroom, nor did most of his friends, and the reforming pod that he'd otherwise wake up in at CATS was certainly far from glamorous.

Where am I? Frosty sat up and looked around in confusion. He was sprawled out on a soft couch of some kind, a light sandy color covered in suede fabric. The sofa wasn't one he recognized, either. It certainly didn't look like the furniture any of his friends owned.

Looking around the room, the white cheetah took in his surroundings with growing confusion and curiosity. He didn't fully recognize anything here, and for the moment, he seemed to be alone. He was seated on a sofa at one corner of the room, his environment furnished with a number of other lounging chairs, a coffee table, and end tables with their own softly-glowing lamps.

The nearest side of the room featured a wood door, the walls lined on either side with well-stocked bookcases. The most prominent feature, aside from the ornate chandeliers at each corner of the room, was a large spiral staircase with a wooden handrail in the middle of the room, winding around a thick central marble pillar. The stair itself blocked his view of the opposite corner of the room, but as far as Frosty could gather, the room seemed to be perfectly square, stretching equally in all directions around the central feature. It was foreign to him, yet at the same time, there was something oddly familiar about this place.

Am I in a library? It seemed the most likely explanation, given the bookcases lining the walls. But how had Frosty gotten here? He couldn't remember visiting the library today, nor did it appear to be any library that he could immediately recall, and he'd visited a fair number of them during his tenure at CATS.

Frosty tried to think. The last thing he could remember was...what, exactly? Somewhere warm, dark, rather noisy from what he could recall...and a voice...

Oh, right. The recollection slowly came to him. A familiar voice crooning to Frosty, the steady pressure of a pair of hands roaming over his body...

The more he focused on it, the clearer the memory became. Frosty had been spending the afternoon with a friend. It was...

Then it clicked in Frosty's mind. Jake, the blue arctic fox. He was the one Frosty had been with. And then he remembered what the fox had been doing, immediately prior to Frosty waking in this place.

Digesting him.

It was his voice that Frosty could recall, crooning to the cheetah about how _good_he felt, how nice it was to have Frosty squirming in his belly. It wasn't an unpleasant recollection. It made Frosty blush, even, thinking back on how much his friend had enjoyed devouring him. Admittedly, it felt pretty good to Frosty, too. But he wouldn't admit that to Jake, especially since the fox had taken him by surprise.

"Okay, that's enough of that," Frosty mumbled to himself. He'd caught himself squirming on the sofa, daydreaming about slipping down the blue vulpine's throat, about the fox's belly clinging to his body and steadily squeezing over him. There were more important things to work out right now, like why he was in a library, and not his reforming pod, as he'd normally expect after being digested by a greedy predator.

A greedy, cute predator who happened to be a good friend...

"No, we're not doing this again." Frosty cut off his own internal musing to focus on his immediate surroundings.

As he rose from the sofa and took a better look around the room, things seemed to click into place, one after another. The sofa he'd been lying on. The color wasn't quite right, but the shape of it...

Then there was the coffee table. He was certain he'd seen the masterfully-carved wood somewhere before. The pattern was unmistakable, but something about the legs seemed off. In fact, just about everything within the room had recognizable features, the more he examined.

"Wait." Everything suddenly became clear in Frosty's mind, as if he'd focused a blurry image. Now he realized why this place felt so familiar. "Am I in the city library?"

Frosty couldn't understand why he hadn't recognized it sooner. He'd spent countless hours in this place, researching history books, occult tomes, and the paranormal to seek information related to unusual events that his job required him to investigate.

"But why the library?" Frosty asked aloud. He still couldn't figure out why his memory had lapsed, between drifting off in the fox's stomach and waking up on the library couch.

Another realization suddenly came to him. As quiet as the library was expected to be, there was always some level of background noise. Hushed whispers, the rustling of pages, the quiet hum of the air conditioning units. It was all missing. The room was dead silent.

"Where is everyone?" As he looked around again, Frosty seemed to be the only one here.

Had he been dreaming? Perhaps the encounter with Jake hadn't actually occurred. Maybe he'd simply nodded off while doing research. But surely they wouldn't close the library without letting him know first. Nor would they leave all the lights on.

Something felt off, still. Moving toward the winding stairway at the center of the room, Frosty looked up and down the flight of steps and listened intently.

Nothing. Not a soul.

"Hello?" There wasn't an answer. Just more silence. Frosty took the handrail and began to walk down the steps, circling around the marble column and leaning his head over the railing to peer across the next floor below.

Strangely, there wasn't a single person to be found. Odder still, instead of the lobby on the main floor, Frosty found himself looking out over an exact replica of the room he'd just left. The same chandeliers, the same couches and chairs, the same bookshelves and tables.

"That's strange," Frosty murmured. He continued down the stairs until he was at floor-level and stepped out. Indeed, everything appeared to be identical to the floor above, which certainly wasn't the case for the city library. Each floor of that place had its own unique layout and design.

Not here, though.

Perplexed, Frosty decided to continue down the stairs, and the cheetah's confusion was compounded when he was once again greeted by the same view as the previous two floors.

"Okay, what the hell?" Frosty asked aloud. Something was definitely not right about this place.

Instead of taking the stairs, he decided to go through one of the wooden doors at either end of the room, which normally lead to other wings of the library. It was a sprawling building, impressive in its own right.

But to his alarm, that wasn't the case. Instead of the elevated glass walkway that stretched to the next wing across the road, Frosty was again greeted by the room he'd seen several times already. He was starting to panic. He looked back through the still-open door, then forward to the room he was halfway between. They were completely identical in every detail.

"This can't be happening. This has to be a weird dream," Frosty murmured. He proceeded once again to the staircase and headed down, walked another flight of winding stairs, then another. Each time the result was the same. And he found that no matter how far he went down those stairs, he always ended up in the same room.

But the city library was only four floors tall, plus a basement level. He'd already gone down more flights of stairs than the library ever had. And yet somehow, he still was in the same place.

Frosty was becoming more and more convinced that he was dreaming. It wouldn't be the strangest one he'd had, but it was certainly up there on the list. Could he wake himself up from it?

Before he could attempt, a soft sound reached Frosty's ears. He hadn't noticed it until now, perking up to listen. It was...a soft hum of some sort? No, more than that. There was humming, but there were also hushed words being spoken intermittently, in an ominous language he didn't recognize. Where was it coming from? Initially it seemed to be coming from everywhere. But as Frosty focused, he realized that it was coming from above.

Well, it was more of a lead than he'd had up to this point, so he turned and proceeded up the stairs, turning his head and intently listening to follow the haunting hum. When he reached the next floor, it was no surprise that the features of the room were still unchanged. The sounds, however, were clearer now. But he still couldn't see what was causing them.

Frosty's head turned when he heard the direction abruptly change. It was now coming from one of the doors at the far end of the room.

"Okay, this is getting weirder and weirder." Despite his observation, he followed the hum. Frosty paused a moment at the door and listened. Yes, it was definitely coming from the other side of the door.

And when Frosty opened the door, he blinked in surprise. Sitting at one of the overstuffed chairs in the next room was his friend, Jake. The blue fox had his eyes closed, hands balancing a tome of some sort that was open in his lap. He was softly humming, speaking the words that Frosty had heard repeated several times now. Glimmering, ghostly red runes were slowly floating up from the open book and circling in the air around him, wispy trails of vapor following the symbols and casting a soft red glow on the fox's blue fur as they moved.

"Jake? What the hell?" Frosty blurted.

Jake jolted slightly at the interruption and opened his eyes, gazing in Frosty's direction. As soon as he did, the runes vanished entirely. He seemed just as surprised to see Frosty looking back at him from the open door, and neither of the two said anything for several seconds.

Jake was the first to break the silence. "Well holy shit, it actually worked."

Frosty blinked at him. "What worked?"

The arctic fox beamed. "My predscape!"

That didn't make any more sense to Frosty than the initial statement. "Your what?"

Jake rolled his eyes and closed the tome in his lap, placing it on the coffee table in front of him, then gestured around the room. "My predscape! We talked about this at the library, remember?"

At first, Frosty didn't. But as he thought on it, to the events leading up to this moment, the discussion slowly began to coalesce in his mind. He and Jake had been hanging out together at the library, nosing through occult tomes that perhaps they ought not, when Jake had stumbled across a rather unusual volume describing various methods that an individual could safeguard, or otherwise contain someone's soul, and what the recipient may experience, depending on the method used.

While it didn't detail reasons _why_someone might want or need to do this, a bit of playful back and forth banter had culminated in the idea of a place where a predator could keep their prey during, or after being digested. Not a physical location, but an imaginary one, that for all intents would appear real but only existed in the predator's consciousness.

Jake didn't add that a predator had kept him in such a scenario, though he hadn't bothered to ask why or how it worked.

"Predscape" was the term he and Frosty had agreed on.

And to test whether it could be pulled off or not, they had found a quiet, undisturbed corner of the library so Jake could eat Frosty. Although Jake hadn't bothered to tell Frosty about his role in the plan, simply executed it, to the cheetah's annoyance. Frosty didn't seem overly upset about it. Yet.

"Wait, so are we...like..." Frosty paused a moment and looked around, understanding why Jake had gestured to the room. "...am I in your predscape?"

Jake was outwardly beaming now. "Yup! This is a place that I crafted for you to hang out in. Since I, you know...digested you."

The blunt comment made Frosty blush. But he also looked less-than-amused at his friend's overt boldness. "You ate me."

There was a nod from the blue vulpine. "Yup! And you tasted amazing."

Frosty was still blushing despite his apparent annoyance. "You can't just eat me like that!"

The fox stuck his tongue out at Frosty. "What, do you want me to buy you dinner first?"

"Yes! I mean...no! I don't just go diving down the throat of any predator that wants me, Jake!" Frosty folded his arms and grumbled. He wasn't mad at Jake. He couldn't be truly mad with his friend, he was more bothered by the fact that he'd been caught off guard, than anything.

After a long moment, Frosty shook his head and sighed. "So, let me get the straight. You lured me off to a corner of the library, crammed me down your throat and digested me alive, just so you could test if this predscape idea is actually possible."

Another nod. "Yeah, basically! And here you are! I think I'll call it 'The Infinite Corridor.'"

"It's a room. In the library." It was, in fact, the same library that they'd been studying in.

"Well, yeah. This is all in my head, though. None of it is real." Jake still looked rather proud.

"The LIBRARY. That we were just in," Frosty persisted.

Jake furrowed his eyebrows and frowned. "What of it?"

"You could have made this into anything. AnyWHERE. A tropical paradise, an amusement park, a sex hotel, and you picked..." Frosty gestured around the room again, vigorously. "...the hecking LIBRARY?"

Jake looked genuinely offended. "Look, it's not like I'm an expert at this, okay? It's literally the first time I've tried anything of the sort, myself. You wouldn't believe how much concentration and focus it takes just to make it exist."

Frosty signed again. "Whatever. How do we get out of here?"

"I mean, that's easy for me. It's like waking up from a dream. You?" The fox shrugged. "Haven't the foggiest. I didn't read that far."

Frosty scowled at that and hastily stepped toward Jake, prompting the fox to raise his hands in defense and partially curl in his chair. "If you don't let me out of here..."

"You'll what? Digest even harder for me?" Jake shot back. As he spoke, wet gurgling filled the room, followed by a clear crackle.

It stopped Frosty in his tracks, tail lashing quickly as he stared daggers at Jake. Somehow, he knew the source, even though it seemed to come from the room itself. It was the sound of Jake digesting him. _Actually_digesting him.

"If you're not going to help, I'll find my own way out. Somehow." Frosty didn't sound confident even in his own mind. He turned and headed back through the same door he'd entered, closing it behind himself. To his annoyance, Frosty was once again greeted by the sight of his friend, still seated in the plush chair. The only difference was the direction he was now viewing the blue fox from.

Jake chuckled, having just witnessed Frosty marching out the door on one side of the room, only to emerge from the door at the opposite end.

"I know it's no sex hotel, but we could still fuck," the fox offered with an impish grin.

It was effective in defusing the tension of the moment. With a defeated sigh, Frosty folded his arms again, allowing a slight smirk of his own. "Fine. But I'm on top..."