FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

An anthropomorphic ermine man stared at the smoldering husk of a house fire. His hands were jammed into blue jean pockets and his white fur was partially stained with soot. It was a chilly morning. He had been in the city for a week or so following a magic incident one of his creations had caused to clean up the damage and see those most affected by it stabilized, and he had come back to this. His home and his business. Now ashes.

The Lily Boutique had been a facade. The front half of a quirky, one-story house served as a little occult boutique: increasingly legal enchanted items, occult fashion, and incense. He was reasonably well-read in chemistry, palmistry, and alchemy, and among those professions was able eke out a nearly-honorable existence on meager means. Beneath the main shop had been a deep basement with much more heavily enchanted items. The stone spiral staircase to reach it wrapped itself back up if unwelcome visitors walked down it. A few masks would screech obscenities and green flame if he didn't turn them off with his presence or passcodes. Two or three dozen ancient manuals had occupied shelves. There were things there that were best forgotten. Things the ermine had forgotten, like much of his strange, sporadic life. But things that were important. He himself had no innate, magical ability - which was extremely rare in a world where it was learned, rather than inherited - but to pursue his chosen professions despite that, a circle had been painstakingly hewn on a perfectly level plane into bedrock over the course of years. It contained the entirety of those years' savings worth of precious, enchanted gems and metals. And, of course, the back half of the little house had been, well, a home. Small, but serviceable. A bed. A computer. A nice desk. Some houseplants.

He was consoling himself that he could rebuild everything, because the circle would still be intact, when the sound of a car barely made the ermine's ears twitch. It stopped and a door opened, then closed. The ermine smiled bitterly to himself. He should say something insane, like, "Welcome to the Lily Boutique," or "We're undergoing renovations; you'll have to come back." He couldn't say those things, though. Instead, he simply turned his deep, purple-eyed gaze to the figure approaching him and raised a querying eyebrow.

Eryx, a college-aged lynx man with the look of a student athlete, couldn't clear the bewilderment from his eyes. He asked, "Are you, uh. The owner, of...?"

"Mm. Yeah. We're, uh." We're relocating. "We're cleaning out old inventory." Yeah, that was good. It was nice that whoever had done this had left the sign untouched. It was a painted, floral thing with the shop's name in barely legible, artistic script.

"I was gonna ask for help, but... do you need help? I'm Eryx." He extended a hand.

The ermine looked at it. Greetings were awkward when he didn't have command of a situation. "Hi, Eryx. I'm... we'll go with Stoat. Stoat sounds good, today ." He shook the offered hand and met the lynx's golden-orange, feline eyes. "Kind of you to offer. I'm still deciding what to do."

It felt weird. "Stoat" had been a frenzy of activity, trading and networking and building and branding, for four years. He'd forgotten what it was like to not have an answer. The fire had brought everything to a halt.

Eryx cleared his throat. "We can give you a ride somewhere, or - I mean I."

"We?"

"Um. A... friend of mine has a problem it - he - thought you might have an answer to."

"Well, I might still have an answer. Tell me the problem, and I'll see if consulting fees are in order." He crossed his arms and gave Eryx a calculating, curious look, feeling the familiar kindling of a business opportunity bring back a stir of mental activity. "I would usually invite you in for wine or water, but the floorboards could give out, and it's a nice morning. And, the pines naturally sound proof the area."

"My friend, uh."

"If you're going to lie to me, just do it. Don't be embarrassed about it. Do you even know what I sell?" Playful irritation flickered behind his eyes. This was it. This was more normal.

"Uh. Right. My friend has one of those Assistant things. And it uh. We need to know if they can be tracked."

"Ooooh... is it one of mine? I only personally lease two, but I've managed contracts on a bunch of them."

Assistants were the latest wonder on the magical markets, and the strangest and most exciting ones in the last decade. They were shaped like anthro animals, but were half a person's height and had jet black eyes with gem tone pinpricks of light for pupils. They were thought of as golems, because the material they were made of was synthetic, although they were capable of supernatural empathy and had wide varieties of talents that made them seem eerily conscious. Their personhood was a hot topic of debate, but most people agreed - and the Assistants supported - the position that they were not people, to the point that the only thing they really insisted on was that their pronouns be it/its.

"I, uh. I don't think so."

"Right, right, it's 'your friend's'. What did it do? Or what did you do? Did you steal it? Kill it?"

"No, no, it, uh, did something bad, and we, he, wants to protect it."

The ermine dramatically rolled his eyes. "You couldn't look more sheepish if you were wearing a sheep's skin." He raised his voice and called towards the car, "Come on out - I can see your ears over the dashboard."

The passenger side door opened and a small figure dropped to the ground with grace that belied its absurd appearance. This was not what Assistants typically looked like. It was shaped like a cream-colored fennec fox, but comically wide with muscular bulk*. It had the telltale black eyes, with amethyst dots of light that seemed as far deep in each eye as stars were in space. When it spoke, its voice was light and too clean to have an organic origin. Its tenor tones didn't match its bizarre physique. "We had come to ask your assistance in a dire matter. It appears you have one of your own, though. May I help?" Assistants existed to serve. The golem's fingers vibrated with the desire to aide someone who was clearly in need. It had probably been torture for it to sit in the car and listen to their conversation.

(A/N: Read "A little post-workout relief" for additional context!)

The ermine frowned down at it curiously. "I heard a rumor about you. What was your name... 'but you were there, with me, as we stood on the shore enrapt to behold three, four, and five moons soaring skyward, before-.'" His lips kept moving, but he stopped talking, as though he were trying to work out the rest of the sentence and was unsure of himself. All Assistants had long, poetic names like that. He shook his head after a moment. He couldn't think about this, not right now. "Who on earth owns you that keeps you looking like that? It looks downright painful."

"Enrapt is its own person." Eryx seemed surprised at his own defensive tone of voice when he said it. The fennec's ears blushed crimson at Eryx's words.

Stoat's eyes opened wide. The only time Assistants expressed emotion other than servitude was pleasure from knowing they had pleased their master or hearing their explicit praise, so this one liked what it had heard. This was so entirely novel it briefly made him forget about his collapsed home and business. "It's rogue? That's wonderful!" His reactions felt muted through his sense of loss. Any other time, he would have jumped in the air and started serving wine. Now, he smiled faintly. "Okay, okay," he said, taking a breath to reassess the situation. He indeed looked as though he were mentally putting things into specific boxes. "We'll back up a little bit. Too many questions hanging in the air.

"I sell a lot of things, here. Usually raw ingredients for potions and enchantments, but sometimes the completed item itself. Some do security, some do focus, some do silly things for kids, but some do kinky sex things that I hear aren't supposed to be possible. I also rent and sell Assistants, so I have expert knowledge about Enrapt that you don't. Assistants don't go rogue, so if this is true, it's absolutely novel and you will have some knowledge I don't. We have to trust one another. And finally, none of them can bear the suffering of a person, so for it to have attacked someone means something other than a recent act of arson has gone very, very wrong." He stopped talking for a moment to let all of that sink in. College kids like Eryx tended to think they knew everything and somehow also ask too many annoying questions. Laying out a few facts about the situation would hopefully build a groundwork of mutual trust, but also shut him up. Finally, Stoat turned his gaze to Enrapt. "May I inspect you? You seem to have, ah. Overeaten."

The creature was not accustomed to being asked permission. It sprinted the short distance between them and presented itself for inspection. Stoat crouched down to meet it. Despite the revelation about its independence, the ermine still handled it more like he would a dog or a cell phone than he would a person. His hands and claws combed through its fur and he checked its joints and fingertips and neck the way a tailor might a suit. He used his thumb to move around the skin of its face and check eyes, teeth, ears, and nose.

Eryx stiffened in more ways than one, to see the creature being handled so expertly and intimately, even if it was a clinical examination. "Is there anything wrong with it?"

The stoat caught the scent of arousal on the wind and sighed to himself. Assistants were frequently used as sexual partners, and if Eryx hadn't fucked this one, he'd at minimum thought hard about it. "I know this looks weird, but I'm gonna need you not to pitch that tent while I do this - save it for when I'm trying to get money out of you. Think of me as half vet, half vendor. First half pro bono, second half pro boner." To kill the mood entirely, he said, "I think this one's been beaten in the past. Watch." He nonchalantly grabbed Enrapt by its scruff and lifted it upward. There was a momentary pause before the thing came easily up off the ground despite its bulk. "See that? It resisted me for a second there and pretended not to."

"Mydeepestapologie-"

"Shhhh, you're okay." The ermine set the Assistant back down on its feet, ruffled its ears, and explained, at the sight of Eryx's boggled expression. "They all come with gravity suppression functions. Mine come with better ones, but they all come with some. You'd never want to make an owner feel like they couldn't carry their Assistant with them. This one has been mistreated enough that it misses the cue. It's heartbreaking." Or, it would be, if he could feel much right now. He supposed that would come back later. It was, at minimum, infuriating. "Damn whoever it was," he commented.

There was a long period of silence in acknowledgement of the abuse. It seemed to have multiple indications. The pine forest around them had likely been quiet during the fire, but birds had things to do in the mornings and plenty to say about it. The shop had been at the end of a long, dirt driveway that was an abrupt turn off a major highway. It was fully secluded from the road, and since the attack had happened entirely at night, there'd been no one to see smoke and report a fire.

Eryx asked, "Should we call the fire department?"

"No, no. No. They'll call the cops, and they'll arrest Enrapt here."

Guilt flashed over the lynx's face. "Why?"

The ermine raised the corner of one lip and tilted his head sardonically. "Really? It ate someone. Maybe multiple someones. Are you telling me that's not why you came to me?"

"Uh..."

"They're gonna put the anti-magic divison on this. Were there witnesses?"

"Many," answered Enrapt. "There's still a body. I believe I left him alive."

"Oh, good. Where are your papers? I take it you're a runaway. Never heard of one being set free and not going straight back to its vendor."

It nodded. "Yes, sir. My previous owner is on another coast and has not yet made efforts to find me that I am aware of. My papers are with them, sir."

"I have a few thoughts." The stoat stood up again. He told Enrapt, "Go through the rubble and see what all survived. It all should have, obviously. This should have been prevented. I made it so I don't even have to set the security when I leave. It should only let me in. It even stops frogs and stuff." As Enrapt briskly walked away towards the ruins, he turned his attention back to Eryx. "What did it do?"

Eryx's gaze lingered on it. "It'd set up a massage parlor at my gym. Would give free massages with happy endings and ask for tips." Ah, that explained the easy-access libido. Kid was a client at minimum, and maybe an admirer. "Apparently it was siphoning and storing mass from clients to go do... something, to whoever abused it, and then some powerlifter mistreated it, so it drained the fucker dry like he deserved." He looked smugly triumphant for a moment, then frowned and looked over the ermine's shoulder. "Enrapt?"

The shopkeep looked. Enrapt was repeatedly walking up to the burnt-out threshold of the front door and getting buffeted backwards, then trying again. With its determined, controlled movements and lack of reaction, it looked for all the world like an automatic vacuum cleaner that couldn't figure out how to get under a sofa. The ermine's eyes bugged out. "No... the security held? How? It can only let me through! I test it on door-to-door salesmen all the time!"

Eryx had heard of enchantments like that, but they'd always been not only out of his price range, but beyond his concern. Houses were a long way in the future, the way his life was going.

The ermine walked across the threshold himself and tapped gently on the scorched wooden floor with his foot to release the security enchantment, then waved Enrapt in after him. This time, the fox went right through and started its job. "I am... flabbergasted."

"What do they do to rogue Assistants? Or... I guess you'd call them defective?"

Stoat answered with a distracted air. The words came out as though rote, as though a tape recorder had been tripped. It was like asking a man in his eighties about Reaganomics, but about sex toy automatons. "Doesn't happen. But people have been trying to tighten the red tape on them ever since they started showing up. It just never holds. Litigation doesn't stick. I think the Assistants manipulate the state on their own, which is terrifying in some ways, but in others... They're like a puzzle box no one's even made the first step with. They avoid politics like oil avoids water, physical analyses say they're mostly silicon, carbon, and water, and no one's had the heart to kill one and do an autopsy. Magic analyses just come back null. They're little black boxes. People get bored by unsolvable puzzles.

"But, they get around The Disagreements and they're an enormous security risk. Can you imagine what international collusion among these things would look like? They could start and end wars." The Disagreements were an international anti-magic treaty that had been signed four years ago. It had ruined an entire industry and set back medical science by at least a decade, but it had been considered worth it to avoid another tragedy like the one that had led to its signing: The Garden. Critically, it had also rendered physical transformation - like the kind Enrapt had quite obviously undergone - impossible. Secrets and rumors abounded surrounding how it had been accomplished and how these little servants skirted it. It was one of the many reasons they weren't seen as people.

"Huh? I thought they were just really good butlers." Eryx had the self awareness to look sheepish. "Really, really good butlers, but..."

Stoat stared flatly at him and called out, "Hey Enrapt, how many books were in this house before it burned?"

"Twenty-three," floated up the synthetic tones from the basement after a pause of a few seconds.

"What were they about?"

Another second, maybe two. "Magic history, alchemy, enchantment, and what looks like an amateur fanfic someone was writi-"

"How many secret spaces are there?"

"Six. Three more in furniture."

The shopkeeper tilted his head with a "see?" expression on his face. "Their drive to serve means they soak up knowledge about people and spaces faster than you can imagine. They would run international relations if they chose to. The fact they haven't all been seized can only be that no one can push through the order." He paused and snorted. "I'm not convinced they can't see through walls."

"I can't see through walls, sir," Enrapt called up. "Only motives, and might I add that the ones in that fanfic are pretty contri-"

"Oh, how I just love it when the sex robots have personalities," he snapped, cutting it off with a melodramatic snarl.

"I'm sure we're inspiring for your character concepts," it riposted.

"Not one of my characters makes AOL start-up sounds when they get a hard-on," he barbed.

"Yes, sir, that might betray complexity."

"It's a hobby!"

"Have you considered... others?"

The ermine grinned despite himself. He realized the damn thing was cheering him up by getting sassy with him.

Okay, he thought. We have two problems. One is that Enrapt is going to become the first Assistant to be successfully seized by the state for assault charges and that probably shouldn't happen. The other is there's an arsonist on the loose who hates me. They're probably unrelated, but they might be related.

He wasn't ready to admit that he hadn't had the courage to go downstairs himself and that was why he'd sent the Assistant. "What all is down there?"

"This was an act of anger, sir," the synthetic voice floated up. "They used gasoline, but a lot of this is broken. I suspect a pickaxe." It paused for a long moment. The voice shook with unreadable, raw emotion. "Sir, I regret that I do not know you well enough to console you for this loss."

Stoat frowned. That was uncharacteristic. They weren't bonded, so it was natural for the thing to be uncertain, but also... they weren't bonded, so it wasn't Enrapt's job to console him. It had done plenty by cajoling him into some verbal sparring for a moment. Besides, when it came down to it, it was a house. He was coming around to the fact that these were just things. Expensive things, but he had some meager savings, and he had house insurance, and he had connections to rely on for lodging.

Comprehension broke over his face. The circle.

He started to crumble. He could barely remember life before that circle. Desperate, clinging to each moment, each heedless deal, each wheeling scheme. The circle had made him independent and grounded. It had given him power in a world where he was the only powerless person he'd ever known. He didn't want to fall apart in front of a customer, though. He couldn't. He defined himself by these things, these connections and contracts and debts of favors. He said, barely controlling his voice, "Just bring up whatever you can find, thanks. We'll get you two set straight. You'll be fine. Let's exchange phone numbers."

The black-eyed fennec ascended the stairs again with bundles of assorted odds and ends, most scorched black, under its arms, and a few things balanced on its head. The shopkeeper stoat scattered them on the dirt driveway and started picking through them with his fingers. There were large, semiprecious stones, many of which had been shattered; corked, glass tubes of precarious fragility; a mortar and pestle that were both cracked; and a few dozen other materials in similar states of damage. Eryx stood by awkwardly, not knowing what to do, but Enrapt acted as a third and fourth hand for the stoat, silently helping him organize the remains of his profession without bringing explicit attention to how little was left. "I had been just about to expand," he muttered pointlessly while holding a broken shard of onyx something was dripping from.

"Sir, please be careful - you've cut yourself."

"Hm? No, I haven't, this is..." He sniffed it. A liquid couldn't have survived the heat of the house fire. Even the strange things he'd made should have vaporized or combusted. "Where did you find this? Ouch." While turning it over and over in his hands, his finger slipped and a thin line of blood welled up to touch it.

"Close to the door. Was it part of your defense syst-"

Enrapt stopped speaking. The ermine with a forgettable name felt his mind simultaneously expand and contract like he'd dosed pure adrenaline. The details of the world flooded into his awareness while considerations of who had ruined his home dissolved like mist. He barely registered Eryx's presence. Instead, with all that consideration and planning and uncertainty out of the way, the only thing he knew was that somehow, a piece of him was standing on its own, a few feet away from him.

Black tendrils floated up his arm from where he'd been cut, like ink written onto the world instead of pages. He met Enrapt's eyes. He couldn't articulate a question, but it was confusing to him that what amounted to an appendage was standing and staring at him. He looked down at himself and plucked at his clothes. Again, there wasn't a question, but those shouldn't be there. Those stopped him from touching the world, the whole world, from sensing everything there was to sense, and they contained his libido, his sexuality, his drive to create more of himself, wrapped up behind layers of cloth. He removed them with a sense of wonder.

His body was... small. He couldn't see over the trees. He couldn't sink into the earth. That was wrong. He beckoned to Enrapt. Something like fear, or awe, or desire, or all three at once, was evident on a face that so rarely expressed anything at all. He asked, "How many of you are there?"

A familiar voice answered, "We don't know. More than one thousand, less than a hundred thousand. We are scattered and incomplete and complete and that is all."

The creature name Eryx moved and made concerned noises. Vines like tentacles erupted from the stoat's back and whipped around the lynx's waist and wrists and neck, and then one pushed itself between his lips, between his teeth, into his throat, and down it, to flood his system with opiates that rapidly relaxed and aroused him. His eyelids drooped and his struggles became slow, rolling writhes of barely restrained pleasure. Thoughtlessly, the nude ermine approached him and removed his clothes. The lynx was enormously erect.

Some faint whisper of warning kept the ermine from doing more than restraining him, so the vine in Eryx's throat slid free and hung loosely around his neck like a collar. He looked down at the purpling erection. His own member had risen from its sheath as this sensation of base urges and immediate action had taken hold of him. It felt like it had been a long time since he had felt real pleasure. He measured his arousal against the lynx's. It was certainly bigger... bigger than a normal person's should be, but still... lacking.

"What has happened to me?" he asked Enrapt. It was a command. It was a suggestion. It was a need. Enrapt was happy to oblige.

"You were sundered, sir."

--

"It's worth telling you the whole story because I think you deserve it, after what's happened to you. As much of the story as I know, anyway."

Forty Days Fasted, a heavily muscled brown wolf who looked as though he weren't as heavily muscled as he might have been at some past time, was sitting on Xander's couch. Xander was a small, lop-eared rabbit with fawn-colored fur who looked a little uncomfortable in his own skin, which was taut with lean, hard muscle. He sat next to Forty. They had both, in their time, undergone transformations that had changed them physically and mentally.

"Is it okay if they hear this?" Xander gestured at the two Assistants who were in their respective laps applying massages to their bare chests. Witness, a Malabar ground squirrel with beautiful orange and gold and purple hues, tended to Xander while Listens, an all-black sable whose fur seemed like a rift in the world, did the same to Forty.

Forty Days Fasted considered thoughtfully. In his low, resonant, patient voice, he responded, "Yes. They know what happened, inasmuch as they properly 'know' anything. I still don't understand... whether they're people, or machines, or..." He shook his head with closed eyes. "Regardless. They were in the Garden, because they were the Garden."

"Right. The thing where Denver used to be." Xander sipped on afternoon tea the Assistants had made. Lemon turmeric and a little honey. Delightful. Nearly as delightful as the small paws rolling circles in his abdomen and the plush rear seated over his bare erection.

He'd gotten rapidly comfortable with nudity around Forty, who seemed to prefer it and was, likewise, nearly lifting Witness in the air with the strength of his turgidity. As mentioned, these two men had undergone significant transformations, physically and mentally.

Forty nodded_. "The Disagreements in the Deep_ were crafted specifically to stop that man whose name you can't remember. We'll call him Lily. I assume, while the two of you were... intimate... you at least became aware of that?"

"Vaguely... I was more focused on, uh..."

"Repeatedly eating and fucking him, I know."

(A/N Read "In-Network 3/3" for additional context!)

Not much explanation is needed there. "Yeah." He flexed his erection to try to release the added sense of arousal the memory brought. It reminded him instead of why he had ten inches of rabbit cock instead of five, and he felt himself throb. Arousal was a constant threat in Xander's life, now. After a brief stint partially fused with Assistants, their empathic abilities and endless sex drive had nearly sent him gleefully diving off the edge of madness.

"A demon hid itself in a lily pond, centuries ago. It was a demon of blurred boundaries. Long story short, Lily got infected with a piece of it the thing had left buried in a library at his university. It successfully tempted him to bring his partner Phosphor - who looked an awful, awful lot like Witness there - to that lily pond, where it assaulted them. Some quick and lucky thinking later, Lily bound the thing to himself instead of letting it remain as a threat or consume them. That left a physical lily, sewn in by living vines, rooted in his spine. A constant reminder of the demon's nature, as a blending of mammal and plant."

Xander frowned. "Why doesn't it fuse with air? And the ground, and everything? Can it only do that with living things?"

"Good question. It tried to. It's not smart, though. Have you ever taken magic classes?"

"I learned how to light a match with my fingers in high school, but computers made more sense."

Forty nodded knowingly. His voice was low and smooth and confident. It was hard to tell how old he was. Was he too old for twenty-three? Was he young for forty-seven? "Well, if you'd gone further, you would have learned that in a world with language, the naming of things commands them. It's a deeper version of how I can get your attention and control your actions with your name. I say, 'Xander, how are you?' and you feel compelled to react physically, emotionally, and mentally. Think of something deeper than that. Think of if someone encapsulated everything you are in a name. It's very hard to do for mortals, who have whims and are mutable and change every hour of the day. But for entities like demons, who have condensed themselves into singular concepts, like 'air,' or 'boundaries,' naming them to command them works. Lily didn't know what he was doing, so he did it in a pretty bullish way that no one would ever use today. Like brute-forcing a password, to use your lingo."

"Well, people brute-force passwords all the time, still." Xander looked at a little smirk that appeared at the side of Forty's lips. He distracted himself from feeling sheepish by pulling open Witness's jaw with a thumb, to encourage it to use its lips and tongue in its treatment of him. He sighed as the velvet-like texture went to work on his chest. For all the seriousness, it just felt... good, to acknowledge the more sensual being he had become. "Point taken, though."

"So he contained this thing, at the cost of a normal life. I stayed with him. I felt compelled to help. I was already part of his powers, anyway - he'd transformed me from a state of feral unknowing into... I guess we'd call it personhood, as his first use of that power. We tried very hard to contain the demon. Lily got an apprenticeship with an enchanter instead of finishing school. I kept myself out of the way until we could figure out howy to safely give me this form so I could fit in with the world. We were partners in a lot of ways, and I adored him from my primal days, so romance was inevitable. And... over the years, the demon won. It eroded both of us. It had the perfect vessel, in someone who was careful and academic and a little power-hungry. I think when we started, we were still doing morally okay. We walked into bad places. We made bad people disappear."

"Disappear?"

Forty went quiet for a long time. His arousal had softened while he spoke. One broad wolf paw covered Listens' head to caress it. The movement was oddly loving, for someone who had just met the thing, and especially someone who seemed to know they were just automata. "We didn't start out knowing how to recover people, like we did for you."

Xander swallowed despite himself. He felt his arousal surge back into his senses. He remembered when he'd swallowed whole people into his body. He remembered when he'd swallowed these two Assistants. He remembered when he'd simply pressed on their bodies and made them meld with him, within him, until only hints, wisps of them remained. It had felt good. It still felt good even to think about. His ears burned as his cock throbbed painfully. To consume... completely...

Forty smirked again as he watched. He let himself relax a bit and be properly stirred at the sight of the smaller man getting turned on. He continued, "Lily never knew for sure whether he put Phosphor back together or just made a new Phosphor. Even when he'd done that, he'd been in a state of epiphany. So he made a lot of people disappear, experimenting. And as he did, he grew. Their mass, their energy, all became part of him, and he needed to store that somewhere, because of course, we didn't know how to compress it all, yet. He found a place on a mountainside, far from where he'd grown up, and established the Garden. It started small. It grew."

The big wolf sighed. He looked in Listens' black eyes as though looking through a lens to the past. The Assistant only stared, fully unperturbed by the story. "He - we - took over one mountain, then two. We-"

"There aren't mountains in Denver," Xander interrupted.

"Okay we weren't in Denver, but we were kind of near it."

"That's not really being in Denver," he teased.

"Well if we lived in Denver, we'd have people asking 'hey where do you go hiking' because it's such a thing there and we'd end up answering 'well we kind of are a bunch of the hiking trails' and we knew we couldn't just eat the whole city. Well. Not at first."

"Holy..." Xander thought about consuming a city. His body seized as a pre-gasm flowed down the belly of his cock. "S-sorry, how do you deal with this?" Witness's tail curled down and around to soak up the clear, viscous stuff and Xander shuddered.

"Years of exposure and practice. It sounds so insane to say it now, but we always thought it was okay, especially once we eventually figured out how to disentangle people. We wanted to see how big he could get. We wondered if we could ever get caught. We figured even if or when we did, it would be fine, because we could just let everyone go. But... I think I didn't pay enough attention. I think I didn't notice what was happening in his mind.

"He wanted to experience everything, was part of it. By taking just the worst criminals, he could only feel those lives. He learned how to leave a seed of himself with them and direct them, so he could live out redemption arcs and dark vengeances and even deaths, but that was only one angle. He started 'saving' the victims. He'd lure them back to the Garden and consume them, then send them out again. They were like spores. It spread through little townships, and then in the space of, what... a year after we started...? He was the city."

"How did no one notice?"

"Cops are easy contacts for criminal networks. They're the same in a lot of places. We ate the whole force. No word went out. Denver's an airport, but we're pretty sure Lily never set up colonies elsewhere. Kept things tight for a long time."

"How could his brain handle it? There's no way..."

"He expanded. His body became just an appendage. The main structure was a fungal cavern deep in one of the mountains. I didn't know. I thought he had just learned and grown and learned and grown. I was so... enchanted by him."

"How did you find out?"

Forty rattled some of his bracelets together. "These. I had never been even close to as powerful as Lily, so I'd never done the disentangling myself. I'd been scared of doing it wrong. The way my identity had been forcefully taken from me, I couldn't imagine taking responsibility for returning identity to someone else. So I designed these, to help contain the essence of a person. And I went to one of the orgies, and consumed to my heart's desire, and went to give everyone themselves back, to return to whatever semblance of normal life there even was, and..." Forty Days Fasted, who had saved and ended lives, and who could command anyone who could see to do his bidding, shivered in fear. "There was no one there. He'd taken everything."

--

The ermine who was being called Lily pressed himself inside Enrapt, whose body accepted him like a glove. He shuddered in pleasure. The creature had been made for this. It insulated him and warmed him. It crooned to hear his approval. On all fours, in parallel with the Assistant, he surged his body in rhythmic, rolling motions. He was fully entranced by sex, and Enrapt was fully devoted to it. He held himself on one arm and wrapped the other under Enrapt's form. The Assistant gave a quiet howl and its body trembled against him. It arched and pressed itself to him to meet him in perfect rhythm. He slid his thicker-than-natural, longer-than-natural, always-growing member in and out of its hole and drove deeper, deeper, so that he could feel himself up against its abdominal wall. He felt his balls land against its rear end with each thrust as they rolled and churned and worked to ready his climax, to gather and center his essence into a pure, physical manifestation of ecstasy and vivacity.

But being able to feel like that meant there was still separation. This was supposed to be part of him. Without ceasing his thrusting rhythm, he searched the pile of salvage for a collar. He didn't know, or want to know, or think to ask himself, why he had made the collar or how it had survived the fire or what it meant. He knew what it did. It was a simple band of dark brown leather with a silver hook clip. He wrapped it around Enrapt's neck. The creature hesitated for a moment, which was odd - it was his own body. It shouldn't hesitate. But it relented easily and accepted, and that was all there was.

Before, he had been thrusting deeper on each push inward because he'd had more cock to give. Now, though, with the collar changing the way Enrapt's physical form functioned, he felt himself extending the belly of his cock deeper even though it wasn't possible. He stroked Enrapt's abdominals from the inside on a thrust, then up to the middle ones on the next, then up to the upper pair on another, and then he was thrusting along the back of Enrapt's sternum, and still the little creature didn't care. It gave its body to his pleasure. The balls that had been bouncing into its rear end stopped, and just stayed in contact despite the continued movements. Everything was patient, not slow, not fast or desperate - constant, knowing, indulgent. And then he felt the ribcage enfolding his member, providing unparalleled texture and tightness. He felt the small creature's body grow lighter, felt its weight rise up from its crouched position on the ground, while his climax drew ever nearer.

Enrapt's toes sealed against one another like bits of dough being rolled into one smooth mass. Its broad, plush, muscular thighs joined with its calves as its knees bent and heels touched its butt, and in a swift, but gradual rush of sensation, the man called Lily felt as though his testicles simply expanded into that thick musculature, subsumed it, and claimed it. Enrapt's hands lifted off the ground to grasp the arm clutching it to the ermine's chest. The ermine pressed his cock up, up into Enrapt's throat, and felt the collar there squeeze around him. He rumbled low with pleasure and finally sat back on his knees to look down at what he'd done.

Enrapt's entire lower half had become one with him, so that the fox's muscular torso stood up, by flexing physique and by turgid internal structure, over two enormous testicles that draped over the nameless stoat's thighs. He spread his knees so those nuts could fall to the ground between them. He took the thin collar and pulled down on it. Enrapt's shoulders, still broad with the powerful muscle mass it had stolen, stretched like putty while the stoat brought the collar down like a cock ring. He moaned out loud with pleasure as it stroked each abdominal pair, because he could feel those as the belly of his cock. Enrapt tried to fish its arms out as the ring reached its waist, but they'd sealed to its sides. It crooned in pleasure, but there was something uncertain in its eyes. The stoat drew his fingers up through its fur. He gasped as new, sensitive nerves brought a surge of precum drool over Enrapt's lips to flow down its throat and chest.

"Right. You're one of the incubus ones, aren't you? Did you think... you would drain me, like you did that other man?"

He knew the answer. He also knew that it was insane for the Assistants to "want" anything. They were him. They didn't want. They served. They didn't dream. They served. He smiled as he pleasured his new, fennec fox-shaped and man-sized cock with his fingers, exploring the sensation of networks of nerves intended only for pleasure, newly integrated with fur, and muscle, and the vibrations of sound and inhalation. Enrapt's body flexed, and it forgot its goal - a passing thought on its path to the ultimate pleasure, the ultimate service - and let out its cascading, piercing tones of climax. Precum bubbled up out of its jaws. The ermine grinned as, in a strange way, his erection reached orgasm before he did. He stroked his fingers along the sensitive throat-become-glans, first tantalizingly as precum poured over them and the half-body flexed and writhed with restrained climax, then with animal lust, pulling at their fused pleasure centers and humping up into his arms until his orgasm roared out of their combined bodies.

The nameless stoat held onto the sides of his new cock as semen erupted from Enrapt's jaws like a fire hydrant to coat the ground near the ruined house in gouts of creamy white. It spewed out in waves of soaring ecstasy to soak the grass. He watched Enrapt's arms vanish into its sides and felt himself become thicker. He watched its neck swell and become indistinct from its shoulders and head, and felt like he was filling out and fitting into a mold. The whole of its body was his climax. He palmed its ears, which receded into the forming crown of his cock head to become mere cartilaginous nubs. Its eyes, those eyes so unspeakably black, closed and the eyelids sealed over. As they did, the purple color that had been so impossibly deep came to the surface, leaving twin spots as reminders. The shape of the maw made of firm flesh, like a snake or strange fish, remained, but teeth withdrew, and finally, as the last pints of semen surged out of the ermine, he leaned back with his brand new cock, its shape eerily bizarre and its flesh creamy white, and held it against his chest.

That seemed like a much more appropriate size.

--

"So I left," Forty continued after long moments of silence. He clearly didn't want the gravitas of the story to burden Xander or hang over the room like a pall, so he'd put Listens to the task of keeping him erect with his tongue and paws, and it was doing a predictably lovely job. It was on its knees with its maw servicing one hefty wolf nut and its fingers delicately rolling the other. For Xander's part, Witness had slid itself onto his shaft, as long as he was continuing to leak precum due to his unnatural and perverse libidinal urges. Despite his girth and length, the little creature showed no pain or strain, and simply sat, with a gentle swell in its abdomen while its fingers and tongue returned to their massage from before.

"Where did you go?"

"I didn't immediately go to the authorities. I... did some angry things. I did them in the name of testing the bracelets. I um. I made my own miniature cell. An accidental offshoot of Lily's. A little commune in the forest."

"Seventeen?"

"You guessed it. It was my own test of my limits, to see how many I could maintain as distinct individuals, with these as safety nets to save and restore them in case I was wrong."

"Magic like that... it's not just hard, right? Isn't it expensive? Otherwise we'd all walk around with like... back-up saves all the time."

Forty shrugged. "Well... on the one hand, it's not quite that advanced of a catch-all, though I think Lily could have done it. And on the other, we owned a city. We had plenty of money."

"Oh. Right."

"But eventually, I did. I realized he was too far gone for me to save. I went to the magic CIA - literally MCIA - and they tried to tell me they'd handle it from there. I demonstrated how powerful I was."

"You ate the MCIA???" Xander's claws clenched in Witness's back and he jammed its rear down against his groin as vicarious pleasure surged through him.

"Not quite that powerful, but yes, to a degree." Forty flexed his groin. He was for some reason able to grin and lick his lips at that memory, and his heavy cock bobbed over Listens' head. Something about forcing authority to listen. "They had trouble with me, at least. And then they agreed to help." He pulled the little creature's head back and pushed its muzzle inside the opening of his cock. It dutifully nosed inside and began bobbing its muzzle in and out of his flexible slit. He gave a pleasured sigh and moan. "God these things are amazing. I wish I'd come back to the world sooner."

"Yeah... So... What did they do? How do you take down a city? Did they bring an army?"

"Yeah. After I'd singlehandedly subdued half their upper management, they were convinced they needed firepower. Thus, The Disagreements. We didn't know if he'd already set up cells in other countries. We didn't know if he could. Not everyone liked it. A lot of people hated it. But this was the destruction of life on a terrifying scale and no one knew that or how it was happening. Governments act in fear to take control. I hated doing it, but I had to. I couldn't stop him on my own. We crafted The Disagreements, chose a cheeky name for them, and went up against Lily."

"And he was diffused among tens of thousands of people, so..."

"We forced his hand. When it comes down to it, he was one man and a demon, just with a lot of muscle. That can't stand up to the coordinated efforts of the world's best. We literally could not kill him, because we couldn't track the extent of his domain - how deep, how broad, how diffuse - but we could threaten to trim him like a hedge for as long and as painfully as he resisted. And... I'm like the Assistants. I'm an empath, especially with him. I used it to hurt him. In the end, I was the one who made him sign. I knew what it would do, so I told the people there it was on one condition."

--

A sable bartender finally, finally got back to his job at The Gilded Chasm, a strip joint where Forty Days Fasted had recently started working. His colleague and friend, Grop, greeted him by some nickname or another. He lied about having had a family emergency for a few days to his boss, Jef the jacked rabbit, who knew he was lying but also needed a bartender and, besides, liked the guy. Jef called him a different nickname.

The sable honestly didn't know a whole lot. He didn't care a whole lot. He cared about having well-polished glasses and serving perfect cocktails in a little underground club. He liked to quietly ponder, and ponder about his quiet pondering. He cared about keeping his people safe. If Grop needed to kill someone, fine; if Jef needed someone to talk down the cops after he threw a customer twenty feet for spelling his name wrong, fine; when the traitor Ten Panthers had needed to be quickly and quietly erased, fine. But his people, and his quiet existence, needed to stay that way.

He wondered if he had ever had a name. He wasn't really sure. He picked up a martini shaker Grop had used. The fucker had left a scratch on the side. That would come out of Grop's salary, and see if he wouldn't wrangle that from Jef the first thing he did back on the job. He left a smear of blood and soot across the scratch when he examined it.

Huh. Maybe he should have gotten cleaned up first. Maybe he had been a little distracted, for once.

--

"I made them swear not to prosecute him."

"WHAT."

"He was being torn in two. Section II, subsection 10z of The Disagreements, split Lily down the middle into two people. Neither one's name could be spoken or remembered outside of the signatories. They themselves couldn't hear or write or understand their own name. We knew he wouldn't read that far - he doesn't read that far. It was a way to keep him from maintaining his hold on the magic he was using. It was a clever Yin/Yang style spell from China. Creativity and vivacity and love for life and learning, with a destabilizing core of chaotic whim, went to one half. That's the one who turned himself into a live-in sex toy for you."

Xander groaned at the memory and clawed at Witness' back again. Forty grinned at what he'd made the rabbit do.

"And the other half - which looks like this little fella Listens here - got stability and responsibility and loyalty, with the dead weight of a fierce inertia. And wouldn't you know it, they managed to find one another?"

"No one was tracking them?"

Forty chortled. He looked down at where Listens' entire head was now being pushed into and out of his elastic, bulging member. "I told you, these were the top magic users in the world. Pride. They were 100% certain they were right, especially when it worked. They put a couple mooks on it, but paid 'em shit and did it as punishment. He signed. We all signed. Magic the world over blinked and part of it winked out behind the bars we'd put in place. Lily distorted and shattered, and the two halves we'd described - which together aren't really even close to a whole - were left there on the ground in front of us." Here, he finally showed signs of drifting back into memory. Listens didn't try to stop him. It simply sat back and touched his feet in soothing lines and spirals. "Naked and unaware of who they were. No one you could properly call" a name that slipped out of Xander's mind the moment he heard it "to put behind bars. Just two partial people who used to be him. Alive, because I'm sentimental. Dead, because he's no longer what he was. The Garden got cleaned up, but that doesn't explain these guys. What are you?" he asked Witness.

Its eerie green pupils met his without flinching. "We do not know, sir. We are the fallout of a great catastrophe. That much is clear from your story."

Listens chimed in. "We are not people. The people of the Garden are dead. It was confirmed by state necromancers."

Their voices smoothly blended into a single statement as they spoke back and forth. "But we are not the same as the others."

"The man you call Lily made us himself, whole cloth from himself and our base animal states."

"We are much like you, Forty Days Fasted, sir."

"We are certainly not just like you, though, sir."

"We are ten thousand suns and three green flashes."

"We are the certainty of harmony and that everything would be okay."

"We are fragments of memories in half of a man."

"We are two versions of his other half."

"We are a soothed nightmare."

"We are an echo of a demon."

"We are witness."

"We listen."

The room went still with silence in the wake of their declarations. Neither Xander nor Forty Days Fasted had ever heard Assistants speak in such a way. But these two were Lily's private creations. Cautiously, Forty asked, "Would you ever tell him any of this?"

The two little golems exchanged glances, then looked back to their respective 'clients.' "Forty Days Fasted, you know each word of The Disagreements."

"You know he cannot remember. He can never remember."

A tension that had only been half-felt left the air. Xander looked to Forty for confirmation. The muscle wolf nodded. "Thanks for telling me," the rabbit offered.

Forty nodded again. "You deserved to know the details. Most people just know it was a tragedy with a mad druid."

There was a long moment of reflection. Only the Assistants moved, with their fingers tracing gentle circles in the two men's fur.

Xander finally muttered, "It is nonsense that I am still this hard."

"I am very skilled, sir," said Witness.

--

The man recently called Lily looked at the large cat man kneeling before him. His vines slithered around the naked lynx. They bound him to spread his knees tie his wrists behind him. One coiled his neck like a leash. The wave of relaxants and hypnotics was finally receding. The ermine watched consciousness slip back in. The moment Eryx's eyes focused, he brought the muzzle forward against his massive phallus, that had once been Enrapt.

The cock's maw - rather than proper urethra - opened like a kiss. Eryx, half-blind from his drug-induced haze, knew the familiarity of those lips. He pushed against them in relief. The ermine grinned. The head of his cock stretched, wet and warm with precum that was like the most beautifully smooth silicon with gleaming strands from every surface to every other, and engulfed Eryx's muzzle. Another vine pushed against, then into, Eryx's exposed ass, to begin suffusing him with stimulating chemicals and sliding upward, inward, filling him. The cat writhed with the sudden penetration and the pleasure that rapidly began coursing through his veins. He squirmed, but couldn't move or balance on his own and fell forward as he was pulled inside.

The stoat snarled with pleasure as he felt that invasion. He had forgotten this. He had been collecting mass and power from those two new Assistants he'd made, but this, this had been denied him. Unable to control his own body the way he had once before... He couldn't remember the past, not quite, but he could revel in present. He swallowed hard with his new musculature and yanked the athletic lynx deeper inside him. His member ached with the stretch, but yawned greedily in hunger to accept its meal. How long had it been since he'd had a proper one? Little, torturous, cruel nibbles, three times a day like the regular folk. Mundane. Trite. Forgettable. This...

His shaft spread around Eryx's shoulders and drooled down his chest. His vines pressed deeper inside the man. One wound its way into his cock so it could spread the cat's muzzle again and move down his throat. Another invaded his ass, and another coiled possessively around his own, normal, regular, forgettable cock. But it brought unheard-of pleasure through that viscous substance that perfectly translated every detail of touch to ever nerve fiber. The cat squirmed in agonizing bliss within his captor's cock. His shoulders slid in, then his chest.

There was something extraordinary to consuming a meal bigger than oneself. The ermine growled low as he continued to flex and swallow, inches at a time, and each minute detail of the fur and muscle he was swallowing lighting up nerves on the inside and outside of his newly enormous, ravenous cock. He gulped greedily, trying to hold back his insatiable, gnawing hunger so he could savor this meal. His hips bucked with eager need. The vine coiling Eryx's cock flattened it against his belly to draw it inside the predator's own shaft, and the stoat shuddered as he consumed the man.

Deeper... and deeper... just that sensation of pulling him inside, was the peak of bliss and delight. And to watch him disappear... it piled that peak higher. Waves of pleasure coursed through him as Eryx's head and squirming body were curled downward, into his refurbished loins. His cock swallowed with its own fantastic musculature and gulped down hips and thick, well-worked thighs; it claimed knees and calves, lifting them off the ground; it seemed to pulse and reach like a snake for ankles, and feet, and toes, and then in a long, satisfied swallow, draw its prey down, and down, inside the predator entirely, curled up in a bolus of a meal that would soon become one with its master, owner, better.

Vines slithered out of the cock and withdrew into the ermine's back. A gorgeous lily bloomed and glowed in the morning sun with amethyst light between his shoulder blades. Inside, roots like the outer vines wrapped and coiled Eryx to invade and feed on him, and draw his essence inside the man sometimes called Lily. That man breathed deeply in satiation as he felt old muscles and urges and organs work again.

And then, the shopkeep came back. He blinked a few times. He looked down at a cock as thick as his own thigh and cream-colored like a fennec, with strange twin triangular shapes on its crown like ears, and spots on its head like eyes; and at a scrotum bulging with the diminishing shape of a person who seemed to be purring with pleasure even while he shrank away.

It wasn't that he didn't remember. He remembered every moment of the past hour. But he hadn't been himself. Or had he been himself? Something felt like it was missing. His phone rang, so he reached into his pants pocket and answered it.

"Hey, shopkeep." It was Forty. "It's Forty. Everything alright up there? I know you hadn't been back in a while."

He looked around. His house was still a smoldering wreckage. The loincloth and vest Enrapt had worn were scattered nearby the jeans, hoodie, and trunks Eryx had worn. There was a spray of cum ten feet long and two feet wide that led away from him. He wasn't sure what was happening inside his body, but he was pretty sure it was illegal and impossible, and was _certain_it was unethical. "Yeah, uh. Something's pretty cocked up. I'll catch you up on it once I've let it digest a bit, uh. Yeah."

"Ah, one of your famous 'not technically lies.' Well, do what you need to, but tell me if I can help, okay? I'm not just here to do your dirty work. I want to make sure you're okay."

"Listen, Forty, you know I only barely know who you are and what you do." The wheels started turning. The wheeling and dealing spun up in his head like a whirligig. "We keep our favors checked and balanced and I make sure no one dies while I try to get a business running. You know I owe you for the Xander debacle; are you calling that in?"

"No, but this better not be big enough that I could."

It wasn't technically. That had been a lot more than one Assistant and one person. "I'll keep your big buff wuff breast abreast of it."

"Alright. Jackass."

"You know me," he quipped cheerily.

"Better than you know yourself. Anyway, Xander wants to stuff both Assistants in his balls 'cuz he's a hungry bun what's been teased all morning and I wanna see how he fucks when he's fully loaded like that. I already put Listens halfway in - that okay?"

"Just get Witness back to its owner before he misses it - I'm already on thin ice with that guy and shouldn't push it. He's been a real mensch."

Forty's voice turned away from the receiver. "Hey hey let go of my hand - you eat me, I'll put your fuckin' lights out." There was a brief pause. The ermine used the interruption to check his loins. The cock had diminished significantly. It felt kind of neat to feel like he'd really turned Enrapt into himself like that, and would soon be able to just... tuck the two of them away behind his sheath and his underwear and a pair of jeans. What an old... odd desire.

"You still there?" he asked.

"Yeah, yeah, guy's still learning."

"Aren't we all."

"That's ominous as hell, shopkeep. Seriously, you tell me what's going on if it gets bad."

It was bad. It was really bad. He trembled with nervous excitement. He didn't have all the facts. His mind was a thin spiderweb of half-formed memories and a dream of having a successful little mostly-legal business. He knew he owed Forty... something. He knew he liked Forty... for some reason. But for reasons he couldn't put his finger on, he didn't want to say what had happened, yet. "It's all manageable," he answered. "Have fun with the megafuck bun."

"See you, shopkeep."

The nameless ermine hung up and stared at the phone. He slowly stood up. Eryx had been absorbed into him to the point the cat was more like a tiny kitten, curled up in his sac. The mass compression he had invented for Witness and Listens shouldn't have worked on him, but he was glad it did. Whatever had just happened had put another loophole in The Disagreements - and it felt like one that might nullify them entirely. He pulled on his clothes and stood for a moment with the knowledge of what, and who, he contained. He very carefully wrapped the piece of obsidian in a cloth. He looked at his house, and then at his car. Maybe brunch would help. After all...

He was hungry.