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A Renegade Reborn

Pt 3 - Refugee

By H. A. Kirsch

--

Let's recap. I'm Hawk and I'm a fox addict. (Hi, Hawk!) That's not funny, I shouldn't make fun of addiction. I do like foxes, though.

I'm Hawk and I'm from Earth, an Earth full of animal hybrids of various popsicle flavors. I ran a sex club, and that was fun, even if sometimes I did stuff that probably wasn't fun for the people it was being done to. Then, Earth went to shit. In order to escape, a quote-unquote "friend" of mine offered me a spot on a rich-people genesis ship that was going to populate some other planet somewhere. So, I got turned into a wolf popsicle for real, and defrosted on a space station as one of the few survivors of three ships of thousands of people. After having my DNA spirals repaired, I was sold as an "indentured contract worker" to a bull (from my hometown!) who was running a sex weed farm while squatting on a space station. The people who owned the space station didn't like that and came to kill all of us and regain control over the station. We killed most of them and got our asses off the station. And just when everything was looking up as we arrived at a newer, bigger space station to sell off our leftover sex weed, the bull guy - Cal Hopswith - was instantly crushed to death in an accident right in front of our noses.

Oops.

--

The Daleon Station Security Force had to question us. They separated Strake, Varius, and myself to do it individually. I was last, which meant I had to wait the most. I also didn't get to see what happened to the other two.

The interrogation room was hardly worthy of being called that. The attendant was a Selnari hyena in a bland security uniform who had a desk with a computer workstation, and then a device that looked like a large platform with four towers around it that took up much of the space.

"Hello," he said. "Please state your name."

"Hawk." He typed that into his computer, then paused. "It's just Hawk. There isn't a last name, or a middle name."

"Ahh, I see the change request. Where did you perform that change?"

Oh great. "It was..." I realized that there were other devices in the room, various cameras, up in each corner, all trained on me. The back of the hyena's computer also had a camera array, and it was spewing enough infrared laser light at me that I could see faint dull red speckles to either side of the obvious camera hole. "I can't remember the name. C4 something? Some station. You know that I'm a human from Earth, right? From Dominion Prime? A ship that got picked up? I got the option to correct my file, so I corrected it the way I wanted. I've gone by Hawk since I was a teenager."

Both of his eyebrows went up, and he continued typing. "Ahh, yes, I do see that. I also see that you were contracted out on an indentured contract. However, the signature is exactly the same as every other contract that we've recovered from that station, despite the names being different."

I raised an eyebrow spot. "I didn't actually sign anything. It just happened. They just kinda snapped this collar on me and stuffed me in a fuckin' transport ship. I don't think the people there liked me. I'm kind of an asshole." I figured I could be honest and smug at the same time, and it'd work in my favor, especially because I am kind of an asshole."

"Do you know why you're being questioned?"

I really wanted to stare at the camera, but wondered what that'd say about me. "Uh, well, there was just an accident that killed, uh, the guy who was contracting us."

"I am going to show you something disturbing. Unfortunately, you do have to watch. Before I show you, can you please describe the circumstances of the accident. You do not need to include information from before you arrived here on Daleon. I will ask you about that if I need further clarification."

I didn't have any problem visually recalling what happened. "We were moving some cargo from our ship across the docking bay. Uh, we being Cal, the bull guy; Strake, the tiger; and Varius, the horse guy."

"Can you describe your relationship to them?"

"Cal was the... indent contract holder? Slave master? Whatever you call the guy who uh, contracted our asses. Strake was his security guy. Varius was just... another indent like me. Is that what you call them? I keep hearing people say indents. I thought that was a thing you do when you type."

"Continue with your description."

"Well, we were moving some stuff across the docking... bay, thing, whatever, and I don't know where we were going with it. Cal did. We were going to get it appraised. It was a few crates of Prak on some little hovering things. I know you said not to go back further but we were Prak farming, that's what we were contracted to do. Anyway, we're walking along and Cal bashes his hovering dolly thing into the leg of this big storage rack, and then pulls the thing away. Me and the other two guys just keep walking, and then I turn back to see just what's up with Cal, if he needs help, and the rack is just falling right down on him. This big crate thing just..." I smacked one of my hands into the other. "There wasn't any time to do anything."

The hyena nodded. "I am going to show you a reconstruction of the incident, provided by security cameras and scanners. This is required by security policy. I realize it may be disturbing."

An image appeared inside the boundaries of the four posts on the tabletop device. Not a flat image - it just looked like a miniature view of the docking bay. People were moving about, working, and there we were. I could see myself pausing for a moment to look at the shoddy workmanship, and then continuing ahead. Cal and his dolly banged into the same footing; he was clearly not looking where he was going. He wasn't even looking at us; as far as I could tell, he was just looking around while talking. The impact caused the footing to start to buckle and splinter, and the moment he passed, it gave way. As he walked forward, the rack fell, the top crate slid off, and it flattened him. Thankfully, the reconstruction ended there. It wasn't gory, it was just obvious what happened.

"Does this reconstruction match the description you just gave me?"

I felt nauseated and panicked, and my mouth was frothy. "Yeah. Man. That fucking sucks. Just like that. Splat. There's all this space shit and location points or whatever and antigravity, and some fuckin' box can still fall off a shelf and flatten you into the floor."

The hyena typed more, and then the 3D image disappeared. "Unfortunately, Cal Hopswith was killed in the accident. While that may seem obvious... according to medical examination, he likely died instantly of brute force crush trauma to the skull. Your description matches the reconstruction of the event, in addition to the corroborated stories of the other two individuals accompanying you. You are not charged with any crime; the incident has been determined to be an accident due to lack of maintenance and lack of adherence to docking bay facility safety and material handling regulations. The storage system that failed has been cited multiple times within the past six months."

"That sucks," I said. "Sorry if I don't sound... more something. I'm kinda dazed. Everything's been happening so fast. I only knew the guy for a couple of days, anyway."

"Cal's death has released you from your contract obligations. His insurance policy will cover your balloon payment. You are free to go."

That actually made me feel worse. "Uh. Wait a minute."

The hyena froze, as if I had just made a terrible mistake.

"I just, I don't fuckin' know where to go. I don't really know much of anything. I'm... you didn't ask for what happened before this, but I got defrosted off a generation ship that had apparently been floating derelict for five hundred years, or something like that. Then, I got sold into slavery. Then, our station got attacked because Cal was squatting his operation on what was supposed to be a derelict station. Then, when we escaped, what happens but he gets squashed like a bug. So what happens to me?"

The hyena sighed. "I'm not supposed to perform any kind of social work actions, and I'm not supposed to discuss anything else, but... look. I know it sounds like you were doing something illegal, but it's only a little shady, and it wasn't your fault since you got nonconsensually contracted. For that matter, everything that happened on Outpost C4X8 when you got picked up from Dominion Prime was... I don't even want to get into it, it's way too much stuff and I'll get yelled at. There's a big investigation that just wrapped up. I'm sure you can get the full story later. All I do is run these security questioning things. Anyway, I'm trying to tell you that you're not a criminal and no one should be coming after you. We ran a check with Syneth Mining and they did in fact send a team to recover the station, and had been under the impression it was housing pirates. It was not housing pirates, you weren't pirates really, however they do have contract jurisdiction to use force when recovering their property which was not declared derelict. It may or may not be easy for you to understand some of this if you are indeed who you say you are. When you leave this office, you'll be sent through discharge and they'll send you to a social worker. Have a good day, and I apologize for your loss."

Completely dumbfounded, I got up and walked out of the office where indicated. There was no trap; I just went out a different hallway to a discharge processing area where a waifish white dog lady sent me into yet another room.

This time, I didn't even get to talk to a person. It was a remote conference. "Hi there. Don't worry about paperwork, we have everything from your indent contract. Which, I can see, is fraudulent, so hopefully your name really is Hawk?" The person holding the conference was a fox, though one of the vibrant orange and black cross variety.

"Yeah." Bureaucracy incoming, right?

"We have arranged for you to live here on Daleon as a refugee due to your... unusual origin. You'll receive an apartment, welfare stipend, and employment placement assistance. You'll also receive the same public medical care as anyone else in the Galactic Network. Note also that public transport is also free of charge. There is private individual transport available, but that's just if you feel like paying money for someone to chauffeur you around. If you want to transfer to another station or travel elsewhere in the Network, you will need to secure funding or apply for a need-based waiver. You will be considered a citizen of the Galactic Network once you finish some electronic paperwork."

"Really." Hmm. Maybe galactic bureaucracy isn't so bad. "I don't have to go on some waiting list? I don't need a lawyer?"

He cocked his head. "What?"

"What I just said. You're just gonna give me that stuff?"

"Refugee status is immediate citizenship, and Galactic Network citizens all have housing and welfare guarantees. What would you do otherwise?" He looked genuinely confused.

"Have you... have you dealt with any other humans who've uh, like, come from that ship I was on? Dominion Prime?"

"No sir, not me, and in fact, you're the only one who's actually turned up after being sent out on fraudulent contracts. It looks like you were the last one processed before Network Security showed up at C4X8. There are a small number of other claimants however they didn't come from the Dominion ships and that was over a decade ago..."

"Huh. It's just... kind of a change of pace from Earth. My Earth. Five hundred years ago." I started to get that crawling pit feeling in my stomach.

"It's very interesting when you say 'Earth'. No one would generally ever run into someone from there. Anyway, instructions for locating and accessing your apartment are in your wristcomp, and you'll find there are some non-perishable food items in there already. You're going to want to go to the nearby entertainment plaza, trust me on that, unless you like eating nutrition bars. You'll also have your scheduled employment profiling appointment set up, as well as a medical checkup in a few days due to your having received bioregeneration recently. Again, it's all in your wristcomp. I'd also suggest, but it isn't required, that you look into ocular implants. They're way more convenient than those old wrist things." He lifted his bare wrist and tapped at his much more svelte computer - it might as well have been a large wristwatch.

And with that, I was suddenly a citizen of the Galactic Network, which - did I mention that name sounded kind of, I don't know, boring? If I ran what apparently is a democratic socialist federation across the entire fucking milky way galaxy, I would not call it "The Galactic Network". Maybe Selnari are inherently boring or something.

"Oh! One more thing." The fox's eyes flicked about as he did something, and there was a chime and a snapping sound. My shock collar fell off onto my collarbone and then the floor. "That wouldn't have been a good fashion statement, eh?"

"Thanks, I guess." I got up, nodded, and walked off.

Getting around Daleon seemed terrifying, and yet my wristcomp did in fact tell me exactly where to go and what to do to navigate my way through two different trams. I didn't really pay much attention to exactly where I was; everything was unfamiliar, yet not unrecognizable. It's hard to give an impression of a Network space station to someone who hasn't seen one. Back on Earth, the only space stations anyone ever had seen were cramped scientific endeavors, with no artificial gravity so every surface was covered with something functional and cluttered. They were only as large as they needed to be. At the very end of my time on Earth, the station before boarding Dominion Prime was primitively similar to Daelon, but even then that was only because there was headroom to walk around.

Daelon had headroom, but it was also absolutely packed. Imagine some hyper-dense urban location. Old Tokyo. Old Hong Kong. The Kowloon Walled City. Imagine a cyberpunk movie where the urban jungle was so dense that one never saw the sky. Now imagine that's because there is no sky, because you're inside of a thing. Imagine a huge shopping mall, except people live in it, and there are a lot more plants. Daelon was full of plants. Real plants, as far as I could tell quickly. They smelled real. Buildings, plants, and people.

I eventually made my way into an apartment block. It was an outside entrance style one, where the walkway to the entrance looked down on a simple central courtyard. There were places to sit, gather, and a playground for children that looked not unlike the byzantine plastic "Enrichment Activity Play" ones that upper-crust neighborhoods spawned when I was just a little too old to bother playing on them any more.

There were not a lot of people out and about. I had a sense - and by sense I mean 'the clock on my wristcomp' - that it was actually pretty late in the evening. There were still a few people out, though, Selnari of all ears and tails. All manner of dress, from work uniforms like mine, to Hener harnesses like the one Cal had made me wear on top of my uniform, to clothes that would not have been out of place on Earth, to clothes that looked like they belonged in haute couture fantasy. Most of them looked at me, and for a little too long. Like I was worth looking at.

Everyone who gets into leather and rubber and clothing fetish and stuff like that, eventually realizes that they want other people to look at them and think they look cool, as much as they want to look at themselves and think they look cool. This was not that kind of attention. This was the look given to someone who didn't belong in the neighborhood. On the surface, I couldn't imagine what was that different about me. I was a black wolf with yellow eyes and a surprisingly punk-industrial combination of utility and flagrant sexual presentation. In my limited experience of 'a few days' and 'exiled weirdos farming Prak on someone else's property', that was pretty typical of these 'Selnari' hybrids.

My wristcomp located and let me into my new abode. Inside, it was a quasi-studio. A corner kitchen area with an island bar, and recognizable but technologically progressed cooking appliances. A 'living room' space with a television and sound system, a sectional sofa and two chairs. A full bathroom with a shower and a tub, toilet, sink, washing mirror over the sink and full dressing mirror on the door. The bathroom had a central floor drain and my wristcomp noted that while it was designed to be aesthetically pleasing, it was also a wet bathroom and could be washed out entirely using the shower sprayer. That was nice. Earth bathrooms always had some really fucking stupid thing wrong with them that made a simple toilet overflow ruin whatever was below.

The bedroom was not separated entirely, though it was an entire room off to the side, sharing that half of the overall floor plan with the bathroom, walk-in closet, and front utility closet. The bed only had a walkway along one side of it, allowing the occupant to curl against the other wall. There was a curtain that could be drawn across the opening for the room, and even an actual partition divider that could be placed there, or removed and put anywhere in the room like a dressing screen. The bedroom space also had some strange hooks in the wall and there was a hammock stretched across at what would have been an uncomfortable angle. My wristcomp indicated this was removable and designed for Tark, who found it more comfortable to sleep that way. I didn't know what a Tark was, and assumed they were weirder than regular Selnari. Maybe I could hammock if I wanted to pretend I was on a tropical fucking island.

I wouldn't say the apartment was Great. It wasn't Fancy. It was nice, in that it wasn't run down, gross, smelly, damaged, or loud. That last one was a surprising bit - even though it had an outside door, I couldn't hear a peep from the loud pre-teens who were having some late discussion party down in the courtyard. Some things never change.

It was private, and quiet, and completely livable, and apparently I didn't have to do a fucking thing to live in it except actually live. The stuff on the bed, the blankets and everything, were even fucking comfortable. There were enough pillows and blankets for three people! I was so impressed by how comfortable it was, that about halfway into trying to create a feral wolf nest, I just fell asleep without even changing out of my clothes.

--

Hawk stood on the access decking alongside the Prak 'field', then stood down in it working on the material. No matter how much he poked and prodded it with a rake, the darkly verdant plant with vibrant red roots quickly curled up into brown muck as he teased the plants in two.

_ _

He turned his head to see who he could ask for help, and saw no one else, only the other plots that stretched forward and downwards as they ringed around the central station axis.

_ _

He turned back and found himself staring at someone. A coyote, with a muzzle expression of someone who had just been annoyed. The coyote spoke. "You can't do this. You're one of us. You're useless here. You're just some rich asshole who lucked out of armageddon on his home planet."

_ _

Hawk turned away and the coyote stood there again. This time, he was clearly frozen, features distorted in all manner of ways that Hawk couldn't even recognize. "You could have saved me if you'd been faster. You could have held the door. You were too busy fondling your gun and doing what that bull's dick wanted you to do. Just because I fucked k-"

_ _

Hawk turned away again and ran to escape, only to trip and fall hard against utility flooring. His ankle was restrained with medical restraints, and the remainder of the harness trailed up like a spiderweb to a bed festooned with monitoring equipment. Someone reached down to help him up, a spotted yellow and black hand. "Here you go, you just need to get back in bed. We just need to medicate you some more so you won't make a fuss," the female leopard said, and as she helped him up, the restraint webbing coiled around him like actual spider webs, digging and burrowing into his skin.

_ _

"Rich asshole, probably thinks he can do whatever he wants around here," the leopard said. "Oh shit, it's not even working. We'll have to put him back in cold storage."

_ _

The webbing dissolved and Hawk dropped into a tank shaped scarcely larger than a coffin. He banged on the walls of it and nothing attracted attention. He screamed, though his voice felt so insignificant that it barely made it past his canine teeth. The tank closed and cold fluid gushed in, so impossibly cold, as cold as the coyote had looked, incredibly cold, unlivably cold-

I woke up in desperate, drooling terror, shaking uncontrollably. No tank, no fluid, no Prak field, no Kale. I was in bed. Naked; I'd taken my clothes off at some point. Lying on top of my drowsy attempt at a blanket and pillow nest, with my feet up against the cold, hard wall. I got up and started to get the shakes, then checked the temperature. Sixty two fucking degrees! It wasn't one of those make-believe thermostats, either. The apartment computer panel in the bedroom space seemed extremely accurate, as breathing on it raised it a couple of degrees. I adjusted it to a better seventy-two, and warm air already started to flow around.

The initial shakes went away as I curled back up in bed, and were replaced by a heart-pounding woozy feeling. Oh fuck, I'm hungry. I crawled back out and checked the refrigerator. Nothing, though there was a placard that indicated nearby where I could buy food and also meals. The cabinets held what the social worker had mentioned: nutrition bars, just like the one I'd eaten on Strake's ship. I managed half of one that tasted like strawberries and chicken, a combination that wasn't bad but not what I wanted to eat by any stretch of the imagination.

Time to get some real fucking food.

Outside, there were even fewer people than when I'd first entered the apartment, though it was definitely not night. There was more light, and it very prominently came from up above. Instead of there being a sky with a sun in it, the 'roof' over the living spaces had a bar of light at one edge that I swore was moving slowly as I stared at it.

I decided to trust that placard, left the apartment block, and turned left and went down an alleyway. There were several shops, none of which were open yet. The end of the alleyway opened into a terraced courtyard plaza surrounded by what had to be restaurants. Most of them were shuttered, but several stalls were open, and there was an entire row of automated vending machines.

One of the real shops, which was oddly called The Rise, claimed to feature "Selnari breakfast foods all day". Great, the "family restaurant" lives on. No one was in line, but it was open and there were cooks and an attendant, a young raccoon who chittered in surprise as I walked up. "Hey, I don't know shit about what to eat around here. I'm kinda new. So if I order something stupid, don't fuckin' hold back."

"Uhhh, yeah, ok," the raccoon said, with the familiar confused disinterest of someone who was just old enough to legally work their first job and not prepared to actually serve a customer yet. It might have been whenever in the future and wherever in the galaxy, but fast food was fast food.

I read over the menu. Scrambled Terin eggs. I didn't know what a Terin was, but it made eggs, and they would be scrambled and from the picture were a reasonable-enough orange color, so how weird could that be? Hooly, which seemed like it would be some sort of burrito from the picture. Rasik tea, which hopefully was 'hot leaf water'. No sign of coffee anywhere on the menu, but I could deal with that. For now.

It would take a few minutes to prepare my order, so I wandered around the nearby area, scoping out where I wanted to sit. The upper tiers of the terrace looked more like regular table service restaurants where you sat for a particular place. I was in the 'mall food court' area, which was fine by me. Fancy-pants breakfast food was always kind of a letdown. You can only make a pancake so good.

While keeping an eye back on the breakfast place, I noticed that I could see both the two lupine cooks on duty and the procyonid cashier. They seemed to be having an animated conversation I couldn't hear over music and the sounds of cooking and ventilation, though they kept looking my way and then speaking more words. A small line formed where I'd just been ordering; I'd gotten there just before some minor morning rush. The new customers too looked over my way. I did my best born-in-Brooklyn "hey, what're you lookin' at?" gesture, and it at least got them to stop.

Then I looked up to the next tier up: someone was lounging about at what maybe was a cafe, and was not just looking at me, but watching. I'd noticed them when I'd walked in, a rabbit with a drink in one hand and a tablet device in the other. I got a few looks then and just figured it was what everyone was doing to the weirdo, but now it was definitely I'm watching you and trying to look like I'm not. "Hey, you." The rabbit's ears swung up and they swiveled their head with a snap. "Didn't your ma tell you not to stare?"

Instead of looking away, the rabbit grin-squinted their wide eyes and feigned shock. "Oh, I've been caught!" Before I could respond, they continued. "And my what?"

"Your... your mother," I said, feeling the hot flash of being put on the wrong side of a snappy fucking conversation. "Everyone's fucking staring at me. I just want breakfast."

"Hmmf," the rabbit sniffed, then stashed their tablet in a satchel and left their table. Instead of taking the proper way to get down to where I was, a set of stairs, they slid over the low safety wall, sat and dangled, then dropped down just four feet away. "Stare they should. You look more than ridiculous."

I cackled. "I've seen the people who wander around this station. There's nothing ridiculous about a wolf like me." I kept an eye on the food stall, which appeared to be assembling my breakfast. The rabbit continued looking derisively at me. "What? Is there something fucking ridiculous about me? Do I look like I'd even know what it is? Do you even know who I am?"

"Obviously not someone important, and obviously someone oblivious," the rabbit continued. I was pretty sure he was male, not having any obvious breasts, and while wearing ruggedly casual clothing, I was pretty sure I saw a bulge.

"I'm a fucking human. As in, from Earth." The rabbit widened his eyes as I spoke. "So really, tell me all about the mistakes I'm making, because I've been through some shit over the last few weeks since I got defrosted out of a space-faring icecube tray and enslaved to make sex weed." I didn't bother explaining that I'd spent less than a full day at the sex-weed operation. I was gonna milk that one for sure.

"Well, fucking human, I am Marece and I am Selnari and more correctly I am Hener and you are not allowed to wear that harness. You aren't allowed to wear that at all," he then stepped up and plucked at one of the leather harness straps, "And you especially are not allowed to wear it on top of some disheveled industrial coverall from... did you say 'sex weed'?"

I laughed at the same time the food stall called me over. I retrieved my food, and one of the cooks said something that sounded like slang I didn't know but sounded like a 'here you go' type of statement, and then followed it up with, "He right," and a nod of his wolfy muzzle towards 'Marece'.

I gave the cook a frown and a side-on look, then took my plate of food over to a table and sat, purposely ignoring the rabbit. Time to see what I'd ordered. Terin eggs: tasted eggy, although way more savory than chicken eggs. Hooly: kind of like a dessert tamale - like coconut and pineapple or something - except it didn't taste like coconut or pineapple or anything I recognized. Rasik: very, very similar to Earl Grey black tea with something milky making it cloudy.

Meanwhile, Marece stood by and watched me eat.

I got about halfway through, put down my utensils - thankfully, Selnari used forks and knives - and looked over at him. "So what, rabbit, are you the fashion police or something?"

That made him turn his muzzle up and he crossed his arms over his chest. "Hmf! I am not a rabbit, I am a hare."

"No wonder you look crazy."

"What does that mean?!" He bleated. "You're the one violating important social values. Hener clothing is for Hener only. You earn it, I suppose, maybe more like, it is part of being in the order. And you are not in the order. You are not even Selnari. Well..." he started to continue, then seemed to catch himself.

I thought about explaining why hares looked crazy, but this clothing thing was a problem. "If it makes you feel any better, I'm wearing it because some guy made me wear it, under fear of... I dunno, being whipped or something. He was my... slave-owner. And also because I own two just pieces of clothing and I'm wearing both of them. If I had a better option, believe me, I'd take it. You don't know how much I'd take it. Everyone's fuckin' staring at me and not the fun way."

Marece looked slightly confused, slightly smug, and mostly still indignant. "Let me use stronger language. If you do not take that harness off and stop wearing it, I am going to be the least of your problems. I am not going to do anything, who am I to do something, I am just enjoying tier-2 synthetic coffee before going to work. Someone else will likely do something, and whatever you've heard about the Hener-"

"Aside from something about sex worship, I have no fucking idea who they are or what they do. Hey, did you say coffee?"

"Sex worship! I suppose that's a rude way of explaining it. Aside from sex worship, you would be very wrong to think of Hener as inherently non-violent or anything like that. Depending on where you go, you risk either being attacked, or arrested."

Throughout this heated conversation, I finished my breakfast. I didn't really have enough experience with Selnari food to decide if it was good but it was more than edible. It wasn't more than thirty seconds after finishing that I felt a very sudden need. "Uh. Hey. This threatening me with beatings and forced labor stuff over my choice in clothing is fun, but uh. I think I need to go to the bathroom." I made sure my deadpan face reflected that I was not just running my mouth. Then, to make sure: "The toilet."

"Hah, well, you have discovered the wonders of the Hooly." Marece then pointed towards an alcove several yards away. "Take this as a valuable cultural lesson, human wolf, and come out of the toilet wearing those coveralls and not that harness."

It seemed like I was supposed to recycle my plate and utensils, as they weren't made of anything permanently sturdy, and I chucked them in the bin indicated by Marece and then headed quickly for the alcove. Fucking bunny rabbit telling me what to wear. Thankfully, Selnari bathrooms on Daelon had toilet stalls. Half of them were seated toilets and half were squat toilets, which had a protective rail around the hole to prevent accidentally stepping into it. There weren't any of what I'd call a 'urinal' and while there were two bathrooms, there was no indication of them being gendered.

How can shit be this normal and fucked up at the same time. I ate breakfast. Someone's hassling me. I get an apartment. I fucking got defrosted off a space ship from a planet that people say doesn't exist any more or something, and I'm having a conversation about clothing? And why can't I wear a harness around? I saw other people in that shit. It then occurred to me that Marece mentioned Hoolies. What the hell did I eat! Wow. That's like colon drain cleaner! I wasn't in distress; it was more like having two black coffees on an empty stomach right after waking up.

Once I was finished, which while unsettlingly thorough left me feeling in a much better place to digest my breakfast, I got up and washed my hands and was about to leave the bathroom. Then I remembered what Marece said. He's probably fucking with you. Then, no, you idiot, who would be that adamant with a stranger in public? That wolf line cook seemed to agree. The raccoon was talking about you. Everyone in line was looking at you.

I took the Hener leathers off and bundled them up into my hand. Even the gloves. Not the boots, though. I wasn't going to walk around bare-pawed. I walked out of the bathroom, and found Marece standing and waiting, double-fisting his tablet and his drink. It really smelled like coffee. "Here. You happy?" I then chucked the gear into the bin. "Hope you don't mind if I keep the boots, I kinda don't want to walk around barefoot. Don't want to step on any needles or broken glass."

"That's fine, those particular ones are not anything special. Did you say needles?" He abruptly looked at me instead of feigning lack of attention. "Why would there be needles?"

"I dunno, this is a kinda... urban, blue-collar-looking, kinda... place."

Marece looked as shocked as when I first had said it. "I don't follow what you're saying."

I felt a twinge of pain at realizing my expectations were my expectations. Five Hundred Years. "Never fuckin' mind. I'm used to a different kinda place. I oughta introduce myself. I'm Hawk."

"I know it sounds restrictive, Hawk, but believe me, we do not have that many social normals to follow but that one is an important one. Selnari are open and permissive, except about things that intentionally harm others or act without consent. I realize we have indentured service contracts but even those are quite heavily regulated and almost entirely outside of the Network."

"Uh-huh. Look, it's been nice talking with you, and being made to throw away something that I personally thought was pretty cool and hot at the same time, but I gotta go do a bunch of stuff. Apparently, I'm a refugee, a citizen, and I have some kind of appointment at Occupational Provisioning." I checked my wristcomp and indeed that was the rest of my fucking day.

Marece winced. "Ahh, that is going to be extremely boring. They'll surely give you some synthetic coffee though."

"Good. I fucking want coffee more and more every time I think about it. What's this synthetic thing about?" I lingered because I didn't want to just hurry up and wait, and also because there was something alluring about Marece in a je ne sais quoi kind of way.

"Right. Culture lesson, I guess, there are four tiers of foodstuffs. Tier 1 are stable, non-perishable provisions. You've probably eaten those nutrition bars by now. Tier 2 is maybe the bulk of food people eat, either lab-grown or greenhouse-grown or synthesized food. Terin eggs are one of the exceptions, and mostly because Terin reproduce compulsively and are low-maintenance animals. Tier 3 is... natural agriculture? So things like terran cattle, Selnari meats like Lower Tarak, wild-grown vegetables. Tier 4 is specialty, tariffed food. Usually delicacies, so anything that all but a small group think is weird or gross and always expensive. I'd stay away from eating a lot of Tier 1 food, as it's just there to make sure you have nutrition. Tier 2 is fine. Don't bother with Tier 3 and 4 around here. It won't be that amazing and will still be expensive; you want to go to the rich end of the station for that, and it'll only be more expensive. And back to your original question," Marece took a deep breath after rambling, "Coffee is usually Tier 3 and thus very expensive. Tier 2 synthetic coffee is just fine. They can engineer in flavors so it tastes like it smells, for once."

"I'll be the judge of that," I laughed, and then finally decided to wander away, head buzzing with new information that I didn't know how to fit.

--

Occupational Provisioning was exactly what Marece warned me about: boring. Lots and lots of tests and interviews. I gave the same answers to slightly different questions at least four different times; I took five written tests and one computerized test and they were all inscrutable and difficult and the proctors purposely gave me no help or guidance. It wasn't like taking a test at school; more like someone trying to figure out what I knew and what I was good at for practical purposes. There were no wrong answers in the sense that I wasn't being graded or expected to get an "A" or something. I just felt really stupid when I didn't have a clue what was being asked.

The testing left me exhausted and honestly feeling like a moron. There was a lot of questioning about history and culture on two of the tests and one of the interviews and I knew nothing at all. My answer to 'What are Selnari?' was 'I dunno, they're furry people like me, but not me.' I only knew about the food tiers because of that prissy rabbit who made me throw away the sexy part of my outfit while I was eating breakfast.

The output of the whole day was, "We'll contact you in the next couple of days with some prospective employment opportunities, both public and private." Then, it was right back home. I decided to pick up some groceries, mostly because I was hungry and the grocery store was on the way. I immediately ran into a problem, in that there was some recognizable food - apparently 'terran food', never capitalized, were things that had come from Earth centuries past - and the remainder was Selnari.

I also learned that I had money. A lot of money. A lot more than I'd thought; I had seen something like one hundred thousand credits after contract end, written on paperwork, but I had ten times that. I wasn't sure if one million credits was a lot or not; generally one million of anything is a lot of it, and either that's a lot of money or you live somewhere with hyperinflation and it's enough to buy a sandwich. This did not appear to be one of those places.

There were also a ton of legal statements in what amounted to an e-mailbox I could get to from any computer that recognized me, most of them indicating stuff to do with being a refugee and compensation for mistreatment as part of the C4X8 Incident. That explained the money, I suppose. I suddenly had a rotten feeling of how much time had passed since being defrosted. Had I really only been on the Prak thing for a day? How many weeks had I been at the Bad Station Place - C4X8? There's no way a legal settlement happened so fast - legal anything back home had taken weeks, months, years. Was it already ongoing? Was it rubber-stamped?

While thinking all of that, I mindlessly followed my wristcomp's direction back to my apartment. I was just opening the front door when someone called out from two doors down. "Look who's a neighbor!"

I looked over. It was Marece, doing the same thing as myself. "Great. When I leave in the morning, I'll have someone to criticize my outfit."

He frowned and flicked his ears together. "You are going to be stuck on that, aren't you? How did your occupational provisioning go?"

"I feel like a fucking dumbass now, so I'll probably get a job licking toilets clean. I'm hungry again. And I don't have any fucking clothes I want to wear, which is a big fucking deal for me because I'm a pretentious, sartorial freak."

He looked as pensive as a hare could look. "You seem to have the food solved, as you know where to go eat, and you're also carrying groceries." He pointed to my bags, as if I was unaware I was holding them. "I suppose I could tell you where you could get more clothes." He looked me up and down, then cocked his head. "Or, I could show you. That might be more fun. You did mention you were contracted to a 'sex-weed' farm. I'm not sure what that is, but it involves sex, and you didn't seem disgusted by the prospect."

"I used to run a fetish-kink gay nightclub back on Earth. It's the opposite of disgusting to me. And sex weed is just what I'm calling Prak."

Marace lit up. "Oh! Oh! Okay, well, then I definitely ought to show you where you can get a new outfit or two." Now he sounded sly and not just snappy. "I'm sure your computer can tell you how to make something edible with what you bought. How about you come over here and knock on my door in about.... Two hours? And I will introduce you to Mezz-5."

I looked around, suddenly self-conscious, probably just from hunger. "Yeah, alright," I shrugged, and went into my apartment. The entire exchange spun around in my head thanks to the 'I really fucking need to eat' feeling along with the 'that synthetic coffee only lasted an hour' feeling. Mr. Bun-Bun was right about cooking instructions, especially since I chose 'novice' and told the computer that I know how to 'stir-fry'. I ended up with something that was definitely edible and probably tasted good once one developed the taste for Selnari meat, real or synthetic. To me, something that looked like chicken and apparently came from a large and not very agricultural lizard thing, tasted kind of like strawberries. It was the same stuff I'd eaten in bar form recently, not a mix of flavors but that was apparently the flavor.

Also, what the hell was Mezz-5?

I went out onto the front walkway after decompressing for a bit, and waited for Marece to show. It was early evening, as the 'roof light' was quite golden and its bar was well over at the opposite side from the morning. I looked around and realized something; I couldn't really see very far. There were either buildings in the way, or the faux sky, or landscaping. If I had just awakened one day and walked outside the apartment, I'd have no idea I was on a space station at least for a little while. The only real indication was that funny feeling like my molecules were being rubbed on sandpaper, and even that was only there when I went looking for it. Thankfully.

"Are you now sated?" came the hare's voice. I looked over and was completely taken aback.

"Holy shit," I coughed, as Marece was wearing an extremely different outfit. Gone was a practical work outfit, and in its place was something akin to the Hener harness stuff I'd seen and worn myself, except significantly more elaborate. The harness started at a neck collar and had a d-ring'd piece that came down to the collarbone as a V, which met up with a variant of a pulling harness and 'Trojan' harness. Instead of simple straps, the hare's left pec and shoulder was covered by leather at a slant like asymmetrical armor, leaving the other side free. Both arms were covered in opera-style leather gloves that ran up to the bicep and interlinked with the harness. He also had a sort of cape which came down to just below the knee, and which was affixed to the armor portion with a pleat while the other side had just a leather strap going to the back portion.

His groin was covered in a jockstrap codpiece pouch that again interlinked with the harness straps via metal rings. I still didn't know if Marece actually considered himself a 'man' though he was very, very obviously a cock-owner under that codpiece. His legs were covered in over-knee boots that had a low riding heel.

Everything was blue, although the harness, codpiece, gloves, boots, and cape were all slightly different shades, the harness being nearly powder blue and the boots and gloves being dark navy, while the cape was almost black. The final touch was a masquerade mask of sorts that covered his face and left his lower jaw free, made of black formed leather with blue highlights.

"Mmmh?" Marece said, and turned around, a deliberate and salacious pose.

"What are you fucking wearing!?" I continued to gawk. Despite being a wolf, I'm not really a bunny person. I mean bunnies are alright. There's nothing wrong with 'em. I just tend to go after other species first. Like foxes. Despite what I just said, Marece looked either fuckable or like he should be whipping my cock with something painful, or perhaps somehow both at the same time.

"Why do you think I was going on so strongly about not disrespecting the Hener? I am one. I'm just of a looser persuasion than some. For instance," and then he rattled off a whole sentence in that weird language, "I can speak TIL just fine but I'd rather speak common English. I also don't wear this all the time, as it doesn't help me do my job. Now. We are off to Mezz-5." He then turned and walked down the stairs to the courtyard proper, with the snap of riding boot heels.

Previously, as in earlier that morning, Marece had a ginger way of moving around that looked like he had somewhere to go. Right now, that fluid energy looked like a sashay. I followed along, feeling even dumber than I had before, using my own wolfish walk to stalk and stomp behind him. Wolves - including canis lupus familiaris, the domestic dogs - are not graceful animals. We're big tough idiots that barge into a room and run right up to sniff someone in the face, or worse.

We boarded a nearby tram, and Marece sat with his cape off to one side, with one of his boots up on the other knee. No one paid either of us any mind. Actually, scratch that. People kept looking at me, like they were keeping an eye on the wolf. Part of it was probably because I was tall; with the exception of some horses, bulls, and the biggest varieties of tigers, I was usually about one head taller than a lot of people back home, and here was no exception. One of the reasons I'd paid attention to that infernally stupid maned wolf Alzarre when I first met him was simply that he was taller than I was - I think he was six-foot-eleven to my six-foot-seven. I also had a tendency to glare. I think it's where I picked my self-given name from; brow always furrowed, piercing yellow eyes, wolf stare, predatory sexual appetite: Hawk.

What people didn't seem to be doing, was looking at how we were dressed. Several other Selnari on the tram were also obviously Hener from their attire, including a pair of female lynxes who were chattering away in TIL, and a male stoat who was not wearing Hener attire but nonetheless qualified as 'dressed to fuck' in a much more club-boy-of-the-future way. Maybe he was going where we were.

"So, where are we going, anyway? I mean, what is Mezz-5? That's a weird name."

"Mezzanine 5, which is so named because it is the fifth of ten mezzanine plazas in Daleon. Some other stations name them actual names; I don't know why Daleon didn't. It's up to the populace. There's five main district cylinders and two plazas each."

"Alright. And... what does that mean? All I know about mezzanines, is they're, what, the middle tier of fuckin' seats in a theatre."

Marece moved his foot around, and I stared at it. He seemed to recognize this, and did it again. "Do I have to explain everything?" he groaned, and rolled his eyes behind the mask. "That's a joke. Of course I have to explain everything to you. As I mentioned, Selnari have a permissive culture, for the most part. However, permissive does not mean everywhere. You wouldn't go and have sex in a restaurant, or in a busy alleyway, or anything like that. Instead, there are entertainment plazas, both on the stations and all over on various planets and moons and asteroids and other settlements. Shops, restaurants, nightclubs; not all of it sexual of course, that's only about a third of each. Outside of the plazas, people tend to be somewhat private. Selnari are empathic, I hope you've been told, and constantly being in groups can be overwhelming."

"And we're going to one of those places."

"Yes, hence me dressing up. In the more sexual parts of seps - that's the shorthand, Selnari Entertainment Plaza, if you run into an awkward acronym like that it's likely from Tark - it's just a... it's a fun thing for people to dress for attractiveness. What you'd probably consider clothing and gear fetish is quite commonplace with Selnari. It's actually a little mystery as to why. There's a lot of historical discourse on it, the Hener devote a lot of effort really, if you like being bored by things you otherwise enjoy. Anyway, I am not going to pass up the opportunity to find something or someone to do. As for you... what sort of clothing do you want? Of course, you can buy all manner of things everywhere, virtually or in person. I just have this feeling." He made very strong eye contact with me when he said that.

I looked around the tram, then outside of it. I didn't want to answer the question right away because I suddenly felt very self-conscious and that was a feeling_I did _not want to have. Also, this tram didn't just go around inside of a district in the space station - it left our sector or whatever and went into a more central area. I abruptly got the sense of how large Daleon was. The station overall had looked like a large cylinder made out of smaller ones arranged axially, when I saw it from space. We had to be in one of the smaller cylinders, and even 'small' in this case was enormous. The space was huge and cavernous, and districts were arrayed about on the inside. There were some areas that were elevated up from the districts, and we seemed to be headed to one of them. There were also some absolutely gigantic trees and vines winding their way throughout the cylinder, so it was more of a loose jungle inside. There were also gaps between the districts, I could see stars, and then the edge of a sun?

"Excuse me... Hawk, did you say your name was?" I looked down, and Marece had put one of his boots into my lap. "I asked you a question."

"Sorry, I was just... everything's new around here. What's this?" I decided to play along and grabbed at his foot. In addition to there being a leather-booted foot in my lap, which I now held behind the ankle, I felt a warm sensation from him. I'd felt that from Varius back on the Prak station. "What clothes do I want. Okay, sure. Leather. Jacket, pants, boots, gloves, whatever. Ideally, I'd like to look like a cowboy."

Marece slid down in his seat, until his lower back was in it, and he could put his boot on my chest and push me back into mine from across the aisle. "Mmm-hmm." Shit, he was flirting with me. Again, no one seemed to mind, and it wasn't really overtly sexual, just an overuse of someone's feet. "This kind of boot? You can't wear the rest of this kind of outfit. If it's a harness, jockstrap or codpiece or briefs or whatever, it's always Hener. I suppose you're free to wear everything else. What's cowboy, though? You want to look like a bull?"

I petted his boot like a lapcat, then moved it to the seat next to me. "What? No, a cowboy. You know... western." Marece looked blankly back at me. "Like a brimmed hat and chaps and..." Then I sighed. "Yeah, okay, I'm in space on the other side of the galaxy, right? Why would you know what a cowboy is?" Come to think of it, I hadn't seen anyone except Cal dressed in anything approximating American western attire. "What a fucking... that's my favorite look, if no one knows what it is, then either I'm fuckin' sunk or I get to be a trendsetter." I imagined dressing as a gunslinger, giving people the horny stink-eye, and getting my dashing leatherclad wolf face plastered all over pinup magazine website virtual-whatevers. Oh, that was a fun fucking thought.

The tram pulled into a station and Marece pulled himself back to sitting, then stood up and moved towards a door. I followed, and we stepped off onto a platform labeled "Mezzanine-5". In a general sense, it was like the restaurant and shopping plaza near my apartment, except much, much larger and much busier. A large number, but not all, of the pedestrians were wearing very interesting or revealing clothing.

The crowd sorted out quite a lot once we got out of the transportation hub. One of the pathways led to a food court, and that was the most mixed 'normal' crowd from what I could see. Another led through some gates with security stations, and that was entirely masked peacockers. We went a third way, which was listed as a shopping mall.

There were two distinct areas in the shopping district; a huge open-air fair market, and then numerous shops around one side of the large plaza space. The other side had some landscaping and lounge area that seemed to leak over into the 'food court' by way of some pathway bridges.

Marece led me over to one of the actual shops. "Hide and Seek? Ungh. I wonder what they sell," I rolled my eyes, though I had a good feeling and that good feeling made me wish I'd oriented my dick in a better direction inside my coveralls as it was now cramped.

I expected, and yet was not fucking prepared. I knew it was going to be a leather store. I did not expect the sheer amount of variation. There were some very recognizable styles present; biker jackets, leather bar vests, tall boots with laces, buckles, or just smooth leather toe to knee; leather pants; leather shirts; some chaps although not nearly as many as I'd seen back home and none that coded as 'cowboy'; an entire section devoted to Hener outfits which ranged from simplistic to shockingly elaborate well beyond Marece's already gaudy current attire; and again nothing that screamed cowboy at all. If anything, there was a strong 'gilded age' flair as well as what I would term, 'space-punk' the more I thought about it over the coming weeks.

"Well? Is this what you meant?" Marece asked, gloved hand askew on one of his hips.

I kept looking around. I can't believe this. "Uh, yeah."

"Perfect!" He grasped at my biceps, then let go and started to walk away. "You can go ahead and pick out whatever you want, and I am going to see what trouble I can find for myself. Oh, you'll need a mask if you want to go to the pleasure area." He headed right back out the door with no further instructions.

"Hey, where are you going?" I thought about going after Marece. "Little shit. I guess I can occupy myself here."

How the hell did I end up in space, at a leather store that might as well have been "Black & Silver" back in Lainsville? Since I couldn't be a cowboy, at least not easily, I decided to see what I could be, since that was more practical than feeling suspicious about everything.

In addition to a surprisingly large selection, there was also the tiering system used for food. Tier 3 was real leather from real animals, be it things like cattle, or things like lizards. Tier 2 was synthetic but organic (as opposed to inorganic). I couldn't readily tell the difference. Tier 1 was outright 'pleather' or other kinds of plastic, and honestly, it looked just as good, though it didn't smell the same at all.

I eventually settled on something that looked workable for daily wear as well as fun times. A leather coat that had a very future-militaristic bent, with a lapel that crossed over the entire chest and buckled in four places along the side of the chest, or which could be worn open somewhat like a frock coat. The front came down right above the belt line, while the rest of the coat was knee-length with a taper from back to front, like a futuristic tailcoat.

The arms had adjustable wrist gussets that let you choose whether to wear them under gauntlets or with regular gloves or nothing at all, plus a snap panel for wristcomp access. No shirt, because I generally didn't wear shirts unless I had to. I didn't like the way they felt on my precious fucking chest fur. Fitted leather pants that had an angular sailor drop front but no codpiece pouch swell. I loved codpieces, but did I really want to show off all the time? Ehh. Not when I'm waiting in line to eat a Hooly, I guess. Gauntlet gloves that were close-to-arm and almost elbow length, which had snap-open cuffs again for those like who used wristcomps. Tall riding-style boots that had more of an engineer big toe box, as well as both an ankle and top cuff harness. Everything was ink black and real Tier 3 leather. Ohh, the smell.

I went into a changing room and put everything on, and immediately encountered some tech wizardry. Instead of just a mirror or three for full views, there was some sort of display screen that generated a 3D model of me in real time and let me look at it from any angle I wanted. That was helpful. Great to see what someone else would see as I stepped my boot on their face while calling them a naughty little faggot fox. Hmm. Foxes.

I really need to look right when I play dressup. I need to channel something about myself, from deep inside. I need to look like I feel, look like I act, look like I sound, look like I smell. This outfit did all of the above. No more 'tall dark mechanic grease-monkey' wolf. I felt like I could walk into a room and people would look at me because they needed to. They'd look at me because if they didn't, they'd regret it. Not just because there was _something_about me that they knew that I didn't, which drove me nuts so far. That's what it really was; the look of, "oh, look at _him,_doesn't he know?" No, I don't know.

Also, it all cost fifteen thousand credits. Damn. That seems like a lot of money. On the other hand, no one seems to bat an eye about me spending it. Even better; they offered to let me wear it out and would send my 'street clothes' back to my apartment. What service! I took advantage of it.

Next stop: my actual intended destination, the Pleasure Area. It was not called that. It was, and I'm not making this up, The Shadows. There was a security gate manned by two Selnari: one Eurasian badger and one very bored maned wolf. I felt a little pang of remembrance for Alzarre and his salacious, flippant, intoxicated leggy self. Think, "Captain Jack Sparrow", except somehow everything he ever suggested to me led to something bad, including the entire arc of my life since about age twenty-two. At the same time, aside from the same species and proportion, this maned wolf had not the slightest bit of physical aura that Alzarre ever had.

A slow trickle of people were entering, and the pair simply looked them over and passed under some type of scanner. The other 'partygoers' seemed equally male, female, and whatever Selnari called genderqueer. I got that one stuck in my brain for a few moments as I lingered around, watching and pretending to fool around with my wristcomp. No one had explained gender stuff to me here, and it was plainly obvious that some Selnari were not intentionally looking male or female. Earth had never really gotten its brain around that, and I'd only barely started coming to terms before being freeze dried and turned into space ice cream.

None of them had wristcomps, and they all had masks. Some were simple masquerade-style affairs that covered the eyes, some were half or whole face, and one vulpine wore a stunning whole-head helmet made out of leather. I gawked at it for as long as I could see them.

I decided to try my luck, despite what Marece had told me. I walked up and the formerly bored guara immediately flipped down a gate. I felt like a car trying to leave a parking garage. "Uh-oh."

"No entry without a mask," he said, as droll as he looked.

"Uhh, well, you know, I uh..." oh shit, oh shit, no one tells me no and I don't know what to do. Growl.

The badger looked around, then to me, then to his coworker. The maned wolf spoke again. "Why are you trying to get in here without a mask?" Now he sounded suspicious and had his ears back.

"Brak, you dunk, it's that guy from Earth."

"What? He's from Earth? No one's from Earth, no one who looks Selnari!" Now the maned wolf pulled out a weapon, or at least something I thought was a weapon. It looked like two pistols attached at the butt of their handgrips, only wide enough to fit a hand between. I immediately put my hands up.

"Hey, I'm not tryin' to cause trouble, I'm just, ignorant. I'm just a big, dumb, stupid fuckin' wolf."

"Brak, put that thing away before I tet you onto your face," the badger groaned to his comrade. "That spaceship that turned up, Dominant something, he's from that."

"Yeah," I said, and also moved a step closer to the badger and away from the maned wolf. "I'm just some rich asshole from Earth in the 21st century who froze himself to solve his problems in the future. News update: it didn't work so well, because I'm having a problem right now."

"How can you be sure?" Mr. Guara was still not having it.

"Because my fucking implants tell me who he is, and also, when was the last time someone didn't know what was going on? I swear, you have your brain rotted by all that v-stim stuff you watch, so much you wouldn't even know if your own leg fell off. Okay, you," the badger turned to me. "You can't go in here without a mask. That's just a rule. Everything past this gate is casual and out in the open, and also completely hidden. You can have sex in the open. You can get into clubs and do it there. Usually the public stuff is pretty vanilla. Groping, oral, anal, frotting. The clubs, they're all different, they go from there on to stuff that I don't feel comfortable talking about. The club entrances are going to be weird since you have that wristcomp, but it'll just tell you what to do. You'll see what I mean. You negotiate everything with people, no just grabbing. Consent is mandatory. Do not test that rule. You don't get a pass if you're from out of network and you don't get a pass if you're really from Earth. No one gets a pass. If you need a mask, there are plenty of vendors. I'm sure you can get one wherever you got that space-pirate getup." He gestured over me. "There's a couple open market stalls too, right over there." He pointed past some landscaping, where the very edge of the marketplace had wrapped around the 'food court' and connected to where I was standing presently. "I'd stick to the open market stalls. Those are all super independent arty shit people. Real cool stuff."

The maned wolf continued looking a bit dazed and also terrified. I realized that he wasn't exactly looking at me, more like through me. "Fine. Fine. He only has one name, though."

"So what? You have like ten."

"Stop making fun of my lineage!" The maned wolf then angrily said something unintelligible; it must have been in that TIL stuff.

I decided to take the badger's advice, and used their coworker drama as cover to just get the hell out of there. I wandered over to the edge of the marketplace, and immediately found the stall in question. The marketplace reminded me a lot of something from back on Earth: the Renaissance Faire. Aside from all of the silly bullshit anachronisms, ren faires were always good for gobs of really interesting leather gear. Boots, gloves, greaves, gauntlets, entire suits of leather armor, and everything was ornate and flashy like drop items from fantasy roleplaying videogames. You know, Legendary Leather Pants of the Hawk and stuff like that. Did anything like that really exist in use in history? The only thing 'renaissance' about most ren fairies was their sartorial frippery.

Anyway, the stall. The banner was "Luzi X" and there were an array of masks, hoods, and what I'd consider 'helmets' due to their full-enclosure hard-shell intensity. Various different species, a shocking explosion of color options, facial expressions from blank to gleeful to horror-movie vicious. No one was browsing at the moment, and there was only one apparent employee. Judging by their name badge on their ornate dragon-scale leather shirt, they were Luzi.

"I see you come over! Angry-stripe sent you," they said. I say they not because they were an ambiguously-gendered Selnari, but because they were not a Selnari at all but some sort of dragon-lizard creature and I had no idea what kind of gender pronouns they used. They had the same accent Varius had from back on Cal's station, and so I assumed they were one of the things called "Tark". "They are good for that. You are the space-wolf."

"Isn't every wolf a fuckin' space wolf? We're in space..." I do not like this 'being completely out of my fucking element' thing that's going on right now. Why the fuck did Marece have to piss off somewhere to get his dick sucked or whatever.

_ _

"I saw you try to enter the Hener Shadows, without a mask. I have masks. You get one of mine, you get the eye of all around." Luzi spread his arms out. His shirt was more of a tunic, and a sleeveless one at that; I noticed that his actual scaly appearance looked ordered on the top of his arms and very strangely disordered on the underside, almost like scars. "Many credits, but whatever. All Tier 3 and above. Like your outfit, space-pirate."

"Space-pirate, huh? Second time I've heard that. Well, I'll look around." Space pirate. Space pirate.

"I make anything for you custom, if you want synthetic, will finish in just fifteen minutes. Leather and skins, that will take days. Or, if you like the display, it is yours right now."

Being a black wolf who usually wears entirely black clothing, I felt I needed to keep that theme up, so it really restricted me to just a small handful of on-display things. It didn't seem to matter whether organic or synthetic; fetish clothing was as much black and hints of brown and red as it was riotous color in this place.

I didn't see anything I liked at first, and was about to turn back to inquire about some sort of synthetic print, or maybe to check out another vendor, when one of the intermittent breezes on the station kicked up and moved some piece of colorful prop fabric aside. It had been haphazardly draped over a mask hood. Black, some kind of leather material, full neck but a cowl hood with an open lower muzzle. Open eyes, funnel-style ear splints that hid the wearer's real ears and yet let sound down into the base; and a style of carved leather, multi-layered with rivets, heat-formed base leather, and diamond quilt for the back of the hood and down the neck. It zipped up the back - I unzipped it and put it on.

"Luzi" materialized in front of me and held up some small device. "For your look!" he said, and I saw the flicker of a very dim laser from the device. "Ahh, hold on," he fussed with the device, "you are space-wolf, new here, you do not have the eye chips," and he smacked the device as if it wasn't working. An image flickered on the wall behind him. Me, in real-time, except when I stopped moving, it kept moving its head side to side almost ninety degrees each way, like the projection mirror at "Hide and Seek".

It looked amazing on me. I posed a couple of times, snarled, cocked my snout straight up. "That's fucking great! I feel better about this fuckin' place already." I air-snapped with my muzzle. "I'll take it."

There went another three thousand credits, which again seemed like a lot, and yet not that crazy, and yet I had no frame of reference. I did have more credits than I felt I should have. A little less now, though a million is a thousand thousand.

I 'wore it out the door' so to speak, though I was already 'outside' as much as one could get on a fucking space station while still having air, and headed back over to the entrance to the 'Shadows'. I swung my arms out, gloved palms up. "You gonna let me in this time..." and then I recalled what the Tark craftsperson said, "Angry-stripe?"

The badger chuffed, and did not react the way I expected. He neither laughed, nor got tough with me. He just nodded to his partner, reached over, and sightlessly palmed his hand against a panel that scanned it. "Go on through. Remember what I said," he then tapped at his wrist and muzzled towards my left arm.

I nodded, didn't quite understand what he was on about because I was too excited wearing the fucking leather wolf mask of my dreams, and walked in. The initial area of the "Shadows" was a small plaza platform with landscaping like the other areas of Mezz-5, except this one wasn't busy. Someone came in behind me and went immediately for what looked like an alleyway. Except there were only alleyways, five of them, each labeled only with inscrutable characters. I couldn't see straight down any of them. This sounds dangerous. What if someone's waiting behind the bend?

I pondered following the person - who was a housecat wearing a flashy pink mask, a leather boudoir harness, digitigrade sandals, and absolutely nothing covering her breasts or groin. I decided that would be creepy, because following a woman into a dark alley seemed creepy. I picked the farthest opening away, and walked in.

After the first jog of the space, it opened up slightly, and felt like a strange little parkway. There was some landscaping and sculpture down the center, forming a sidewalk boulevard on either side. There were several Selnari, two of them waiting and the rest talking amongst each other, a few even drinking something. There wasn't any visible sex. Hah, maybe that badger was full of shit.

I had no idea where to go, so I pulled my gauntlet back and looked at my computer. Oh, a map. The alleyways formed a sort of maze, though there were several 'clearings' and numerous business doors indicated. One of them was indicated behind two ferrets who were quite lasciviously sharing a drink from a narrow glass, though despite what the map said, there was no door anywhere at all. I poked at the device more, and when I looked back up, the two ferrets - both in hunter green bodysuits that looked rubber-ish - were looking at me and then tittering amongst themselves. One looked male; the other didn't seem to have obvious genitals or breasts.

In fact, everyone who could see me was now looking at me. I was the only one looking at my arm for anything. I was a little bit taller than everyone else in sight. I felt like the big, bad wolf. It gave me a hard-on, which I took no pains to try and hide in my codpiece. Not like the fashionable leather would hide it in any way; I looked like I had a plantain banana stuffed under the black leather. Then I decided to wander, making sure to walk past everyone.

As I wandered the 'maze', I picked up on a few things. About half of the people present were clearly Hener, with their distinctive harness-boots-gloves look. The remainder were wearing basically anything that looked flashy and revealing and likely to be used for sexual purposes.

All of the 'businesses' had hidden doors - despite not being able to see them, people would 'disappear' through them and out of sight. I wasn't sure what trickery was afoot there, although considering we had anti-gravity and were on a big air-filled cylinder floating around in space, it wasn't magic. More concerning were the looks. People looked at me, and if I looked at them, they seemed startled, flustered, or instantly paid me attention.

I saw at least one other black wolf dressed similarly, and to my eye, there wasn't anything truly different about him and me. The part of his muzzle that was visible was black fur and white teeth, he had orange eyes, and he had a black leather outfit. I guess it's a type. I tried not to stare at him, though had to look enough to see if anyone was ogling him, and they were not. His outfit wasn't the same thing, just the same idea. Leather pants, boots, coat, gloves, mask. Everything was uniquely different though - his gloves were dress-style under the cuffs, the coat was utilitarian like leather infantry gear, his boots were stock equestrian riding style, and his mask had a surprising feral flair to it while mine was just stern and glaring.

I turned down an alleyway to find a small group of people having a discussion, holding drinks in narrow containers like big laboratory test tubes with a grippable shaft. Two of them were foxes. One of the foxes was wearing a full-enclosure suit that looked like a rubber version of the mercenary gear I'd seen during the Prak station attack. That immediately unsettled me, enough that I stared, and turned quickly to leave. I turned down the next alleyway, and despite what my wristcomp indicated, it looked like a dead end. I explored down to the end and found that it had one of those mirages; the connection to the next alleyway over was shown on my map as a sort of drink cafe.

I turned around and the mercenary fox was right there. "Holy shit," I growled. "Look, I-"

The fox creature was shorter than me - no surprise - and his gear looked like a heavy rubber suit with plastic armor atop it. The colors were similar to a red fox, except reversed as to body parts - his legs and arms and the ear portions of his helmet were red, while the rest was black with some gray highlights. This is fishy. This reminds me of something.

"Holy shit," he said back to me, voice clearly audible and clearly distorted by being electronically projected outside of the helmet. He cocked his head, and then stepped to my side. "Say something again."

"What? Something again," I growled. "Do I have some kinda fuckin' stutter or somethin'?"

He immediately yanked his helmet off, exposing a head that was colored similarly to what he'd just removed. "Wow! No way! You sound just like this guy I used to kinda work for back home!"

He wasn't _just_familiar. I did the same thing with my cowl hood. "Fucking... shit... Mike? Mike Jasek?"

"Hawk! Wow! This is crazy! Awesome!"

Michael Jasek is a weird fox who used to kinda work for me, as he said. He was an extreme geek and dork and collected costumes from science fiction and fantasy stuff, made fetish gear for a living, and ran this little 'basement extension' of a local leather sex shop in Lainsville called "Black & Silver Leather". Well, he did all of that. Who knows what he did nowadays. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Going to probably do some weird sex! I heard about the Dominion Prime ship on a news thing and saw a picture of you and thought wow no way who would have thought! And now you're actually standing here! What the fuck are you doing here?"

"I'm the wolf, I ask the questions. But whatever, I uh, well I paid to get on one of those Dominion ships - okay, I paid a hacker - okay, it was a friend of mine. And so they froze me. And I got unfrozen on some space station by some overworked creeps and they sold me into slavery, working on a Prak sex weed farm, and some mercenary guys kinda dressed like you showed up and killed everyone, and so we got outta there, and then showed up here and the boss bull guy who happened to be from back home just like you, got killed in an accident, and now I'm on space welfare and dressed like a sex wolf and standing in an alley talking to a fox. Which coincidentally is what kind of sex I'm looking for - the fox kind."

His tail was not encumbered by the outfit and he lashed it around so excitedly that he grabbed it with a hand to stop it. "That's an adventure! You were on there for five hundred years! I've only been here for about fifteen. Everyone else who came the long way has been the same. That would have been maybe... since a month or so before you went up there, I'm guessing, as the collapse happened pretty much while those ships were taking flight."

"The long way?" Oh fuck no, now I have to think about what happened-

He let go of his tail and it dropped. "Yeah. I guess it bypassed the time... difference. We... it's... it's a long story," he said, and put his ears flat back against his head. He looked very pained. Then, he looked down at the mostly full 'drink' he had, back up at me, and the injured look vanished in a split second. "You said sex weed? Prak farm? You should drink this!" He handed it to me.

I looked down at it. "That's suspicious. Here, have a pill, it's fun! What the fuck is it?"

"It's basically a Prak drink. Most of the time people use it like this, when you chew it, it's so disgusting and you have to spit it out. I guess some people like passing a wad of it back and forth. It's like Prak-balling. Like snowballing. Get it?"

"You snowball a lot?"

He put his ears back in a different way. "N-no, maybe some spit play... anyway, yeah, have that! It's fun! I'm assuming you're here for fun. You said something about foxes but I'm already going to be busy. If you want another in the future, just go in through there. That's a Praktarn, which is a sort of Prak cafe bar thing." He pointed to the seeming dead end. "I know it looks weird. You don't have eye things yet, right?"

I looked at the tube of stuff again, sniffed at it. It only slightly smelled like the noxiously grassy-dirty thing Cal had spit into my mouth. Thinking about that situation made me feel very unsettled again. To push the thought back out of my mind, I downed the drink with a messy slurp and wipe of my muzzle.

"Here. Get rid of that for me. I gotta do wolf stuff now," I said, partly testing to see what he'd do. The Mike I remembered would have seamlessly rolled with it despite it being rude to just order someone around.

He took the vial. Yep, rolling with it. "Go out of here and to the right, and go into the bar there. It's more your kind of place, and if you want something _really_more your kind of place, just ask around. You know what I mean. I know you know what I mean. If you're really Hawk." He winked performatively, and put his helmet back on. "I should get back to my friends. We're about to go do something! I think it's going to be electro-fisting!"

Yep, that's Mike alright. I put my hood back on as well. "Yeah, thanks. Fuckin' see you around, huh."

I stomped off in the direction he indicated. How the fuck did he get here? I guess the same way Cal and Strake did. As he warned, there was one of those invisible door setups. This time, I navigated the door with the help of my wristcomp; I paid a cover charge, and the mirage dissipated, showing me a real door I could open. Inside the small foyer was another door and an actual security officer - a black labrador dog - who scanned me with some nondescript wand and sent me inside.

I was standing in the front room of a dim yet colorfully lit bar room, modestly filled with patrons of all Selnari flavor as well as two or three Tark. The colors were moody and served mostly to make it safe to walk around. I sniffed at the air, and could smell vague scents of alcohol, that Prak stuff I'd just drank, leather, rubber, plasticky smells, and a pervasive stink of male sex. Everyone there was male.

I made my way to the bar counter, and was just about to speak to the bartender - a very stern-looking rhino - when a feeling washed over me. The smell got to me and I could feel my muzzle curling into a grin. _It smells like fucking dick in here. I love that smell. I fucking love it. _ I looked around; perhaps a third of the patrons were walking around with their cocks out, some of them erect, and one white wolf in Hener gear lounged nearby with his black shaft half-hard and absolutely smeared with semen. When he saw me looking, he made a little string between gloved fingertip and his cocktip with it, and licked his chops, though then looked around the room as interested in everything else as me.

"This is disgusting," I said to the bartender, who snorted. I was about to crawl out of my own fur, I was so horny. Disgusting, sure, in that 'I'm disgusted so much I'm going to do it myself!' kind of way that happens when one is horny enough.

"You're that Earth wolf, supposedly. Supposedly Earth. Earth Wolf," he said, repeating it like it was a new nickname. I huffed, and he sniffed. "You're on Coolen, aren't you." I stared back at him. "It's a drink made out of Prak. Prak is-"

"I know what the fuck Prak is, I was slaved into some Prak farm before I got here, after I got pulled out of my fucking freezer compartment on that ship. You probably know all that, don't you. I heard it was all over news broadcasts." As horny as I was 'forced' to feel, I also felt on edge, agitated. The fact that the rhino guy was kind of hot in a burly thick way, and smelled amazing, didn't help. If he flopped his cock onto the counter, I would have licked it while talking. "Hey. So maybe I should buy a drink. Recommend me something that a wolf like me oughta drink and that won't kill me by mistake."

He pulled a glass out and poured three things into it with just enough bartender flair that he didn't look bored. "Came to the right place. Sure, this is a bar, but everyone's here to fuck. I mean more than usual in this Shadows shit. If you're drinking and not fucking, you'll get stared at." Despite his gruff words, he had a strong Selnari accent. He slid the drink towards me, then held out a device. "Bump your ancient history computer shit there." I did as directed, and it deducted ten credits. "See, you've got the hang of it already."

"We had tap-to-pay back home." Oh god, I have to say it, don't I. "Five hundred fucking years ago. At least people still wear leather in the future."

I took the drink and looked over my shoulder. The white wolf was still there, and as I stared at him, he looked back at me. His eyes dropped to his cock, then up to me, repeating several times.

"You oughta go see that wolf. I think he likes you. I know he likes you. I can tell. You know about that, too? The arkanum?"

The what? Is that the empathy shit? "Yeah, but I'm left the fuck out," I shrugged towards the bartender, then took my drink in hand and walked the few paces over to the wolf. "You lookin' at me?"

"Do you like to cum?" He then gestured to his cock. "Go have a wolf-smell. You will surprise." There was that weird TIL accent and stilted English again.

I tasted my drink. It tasted like honey and whiskey and yet like neither. It was also _very_good and I drank half of it at once. "Wolf-smell, huh." I put a boot up on the couch next to him - he perked his ears forward and his cock swelled. I leaned down, and he grunted softly, straining his erection up to full tilt again. I sniffed, and instantly gagged. "Oh fuck," I grunted, wrinkled my bare snout up, and sniffed again. He had the kind of cock musk that, frankly, I really liked. I squinted, and sniffed elsewhere on him, then back at his cock. "Hey, you're a disgusting wolf. That's not your smell. That's..."

"Do you like to cum, on me? Then next wolf will come and smell," he said, and his tail thwapped the seat on the other side of him. "I can touch if you like, just climb here," he patted his knees as he put both both knees together, boots on the floor. "Please, Earth Wolf," and I swear he spoke those words while eying the rhino bartender.

"Don't fuckin' call me that. Call me Mister Wolf," I said. He raised his eyebrows. "Go on. Say it."

"Please, Mister Wolf," he said.

I stepped down, swung my leg over his knees, and straddled onto him. "I haven't even been in here five minutes and I have some wolf begging for my cock. What a fucking place." As I spoke, he reached up and felt over my jacket, then down to my thighs, then back up to massage me through the leather flap. "I really like this Prak stuff everyone likes around here. I really feel good." I slurped the last of my drink down, tossed the empty glass - which was more plasticky than anything - onto the empty couch seat, and leaned forward to grab the back of the couch behind his shoulder. "I also like this Hener stuff. I don't know shit about whatever that really means, but you all dress the way I like. And you supposedly worship sex for a religion. How could I say no to that?"

The white wolf smiled up at me, then lifted his muzzle and nosed my chin, then licked me. I licked him back reflexively, and in seconds, our tongues were tangling up, teeth clicking in a wet, feral kiss. He pulled at the snaps of my sailor-front flap and my cock and balls flopped right out into his gloved hand. "You are big wolf," he said, and set about touching every inch of my shaft with his leathered fingertips.

"Yeah, yeah," I grunted, distancing myself from the kiss so I could watch what he was doing. "You're no small guy." I was at least three inches longer than he was, though he was much thicker. Thinking about sitting on his cock made me clench up defensively.

After stroking my foreskin back and forth for a few moments, he ran his thumb and index finger around underneath the skin and behind my cockhead, then lifted them up to his face and sniffed. He groaned, and with his other hand held our cocks together, so I could feel his throb. "You smell like a strong wolf."

"Freshly uhh, genetically... reconstructed... or what the fuck ever happened after they unfroze me. Really makes me feel virile, even before that Prak stuff gets into my system." I ground against him. I felt like I could ejaculate any second, and yet, just like with Cal, I didn't.

I looked over my shoulder; the rhino was talking to a couple of patrons who'd entered after me, though he looked over my way a couple of times. As he was pouring someone's drink, he subtly toasted me.Is this a setup? Is this how they get people to have fun and buy more drinks? I looked back to the wolf. He looked a fair bit drunk, eyes half-lidded and swooning, although he was as hard as someone who was on viagra and not alcohol. "So this Hener stuff, you like sex?"

"Sex is core of life," he said, and his teasing touch turned into a warm, leathery milking handjob. "Sex is core of emotion. Sex is core of... between us," he said, and moved a hand between us, visually illustrating something he didn't seem able to articulate in English. Then, he said a rather long sentence in TIL. "I do not know how to say it in CE."

"CE..." I mumbled.

"Common English, what you speak, but you sound weird, hard to understand."

"Can you understand it when I say, I really like how your gloves feel? They're real nice. Pet my snout." He reached up and stroked my bare fur; I sniffed, rubbed and licked at his fingers. "That's a good wolf."

He stuck his tongue out, and curled up his black lips.

"You like being called a good wolf? A really good wolf would tug on my balls with his other hand, and then maybe I'll do what he asked for." I wasn't even done talking and he did what I mentioned. "Yeah, just like that horse... from before..." I felt the familiar clench going right up into my stomach from my balls. I can usually control myself pretty well - did I say that before? Tugging my balls? That will make me orgasm. I squirmed in place, then backed up, slid one boot down to the floor and bent the toe to half stand. I gritted my teeth, and braced myself, and then snarled as an intoxicated climax hit me. I watched my seed pump out all over his gloved hand, and he quickly let go of my balls so he could aim me at his cock. I painted it with spunk. By the time I was drooling it out, his cock looked like he'd dipped it in a bucket of wolf cum.

He leaned up and kissed me again, a wet few licks, and then stroked the side of my hood. "Thank you, Earth Wolf."

"Fuck if people are gonna start calling me that," I groaned, then stood up. No one seemed to have a problem with me letting my cock flop out, even if it dribbled semen, so I just stretched my back and bobbed my muzzle to the Hener wolf, and decided to explore the rest of the bar.

Not only did I not know the name of the place, I couldn't pronounce it anyway - my wristcomp listed it written both in "CE" and in completely alien characters, and it looked like the kind of word that I'd butcher instantly. It reminded me vaguely of Gaelic or Welsh or something, consonant pairs that were probably silent or pronounced like a "Z" when they were two L's on paper.

Also, there was no exaggeration about how the place was for sex. The only reason people weren't having sex was they were either getting a drink, talking to each other - likely about someone else having sex in the vicinity - or going to the bathroom. Surprisingly, no one was fucking in the bathroom; I went and had a nice, hot piss in private.

The 'sailor front' of my pants came off entirely, so I unsnapped the bottom two snaps, folded it up, and tucked it into a jacket pocket. I went back out onto the floor, and decided to see who I could watch. Aside from everything else I like, I've been a voyeur for a very long time. Especially if I can watch while pretending to or actually being hidden. There's something more fun about that than just standing next to someone and ogling them while stroking off.

I can't even remember all of what I got to watch over the next half hour of wandering around. As much oral as any animal hybrid could manage - including a horse giving a very loud and messy blowjob that had me almost getting off as I watched from around a glowing plant decoration. Anal several different ways. One of those 'person getting cummed on by a circle of other men' things. The place didn't seem to be much for bondage or any kind of BDSM play, although one of the guys pounding another guy in the ass - a cheetah on the bottom and a slightly fat german shepherd doing the pounding - had a cock sheath with a 'knot bulge' on it which prompted the cheetah to yelp each time it was yanked in and out. There was a bunch more. I milked my cock until my balls hurt watching scene after scene.

I noticed that the rhino bartender seemed to go on break. He headed to the back part of the club, and went through a 'staff only' door. I got an idea and slipped in right behind him.

"Hey, you can't do that. We have a security system," he said, and immediately put his hand on a panel. Instead of activating an alarm, that stopped a countdown.

I shrugged. "I wanted to ask you somethin' and I couldn't catch up before you came in here."

"Ask me what? I'm not part of the entertainment here," he said, then took something out of a leather vest pocket and sucked from it. He then blew smoke at my face. It smelled like roasted cherries and almost within seconds started giving me a slight headache.

"Is that fucking nicotine? That's not the question. I uh, I'm wondering what other kind of places are around here, and you have to know, right? You're a bartender. You know all the stuff that's going on."

"What kind of 'other places' do you like?" He looked around, then motioned me to follow him. After dodging some stuff that looked like storage crates, we went through another door and out into an alley. Unlike the other parts of 'the shadows', this didn't look like it was meant for people to mingle around in. It looked like where stuff was delivered and garbage was taken away. I could smell the garbage from a few bins nearby, and there were a few dubious puddles on the ground, as well as a small dome-shaped robot cleaning up one of them.

The rhino looked left, right, and then unbuttoned his leather pants. He pulled his cock out - he was even more of a cannon than the wolf was - and started to piss right onto the synthetic ground. The robot nearby stopped what it was doing, flashed red, made a few angry beeps, and rolled over to where it was just out of piss shot. "Yeah, you thirsty, you little shit," the rhino said. "C'mon, Earth Wolf, what do you want?"

"I'm uh, lookin' for some place where it's a bit more rough. Maybe like I could pick from some guys who are... you know, tied up, for display. Bonus points if they have foxes there."

"Tied up, huh. Everything around here's consensual. You gotta negotiate it, Earth Wolf." He waggled his cock clean, and put it back into his pants. The robot rolled up and started cleaning the new puddle. "See? Little domey likes it."

"It's just cleanin' the floor," I said.

"You think it doesn't like doing it? That thing exists to lick my piss off the alley floor." He then grabbed me up close. While he was just slightly shorter than me, he was thick enough that he could have pushed me right through one of the walls, and they didn't look made out of paper or anything. "This is a service alley. Go down to the other end, and there's a door. It's not like a mirage door, it's a regular one. Right, up, left, down, right. Like a circle. It's a private club. Tell them Clint sent you if they ask. I think you'll like it. Don't abuse your fucking privilege, though, Earth Wolf."

"I'm really from Earth, you know... it's just... alright. Thanks."

"Have fun, space pirate," the rhino said, and went back inside. Space pirate, huh.

I knew all about back alley shenanigans. At my club back on Earth, The Pit, the 'patio' was set up with part of the actual back alley blocked off so people could pretend they were fucking behind dumpsters and stuff, without actually getting squashed when the trash truck came through. It didn't matter how much crazy stuff went on inside; almost every weekend, I ended up having to call the cops on the alley. That's where things got real.

Where indicated, I found a door, and there was a control pad. It didn't look like a fancy piece of mechanics like most of the rest of the station - the door looked very DIY, and the control pad was several triangular buttons screwed together. I pushed the triangles in the order given, which didn't seem very secure, and they flashed green and then the door popped ajar. I walked inside, and was greeted with yet more Male Stink, although this time it didn't have the delectable bar smell of wherever I'd just been. I was in a dark and dingy foyer, and it smelled like sex was kept there. The foyer space looked like it was part of the station I wasn't supposed to be in.

There was a bored leopard at a desk at one end. "Alright, who sent you in here?" He asked, not even bothering to look at me.

"Clint, the rhino from down the-"

"Alright, go in," he said, and smacked a very industrial red button that looked like it would STOP something rather than start it. A door slid open with a bang, and I walked through. "Clean up your own messes and honor the stop word, or grunt, or whatever."

I walked into somewhere I would have set up myself as a themed room at The Pit. We were definitely in a part of the station that wasn't meant for the public, as there was bare industrial mechanical pipe and duct work everywhere, including a few things labeled with, "don't touch" "really, don't touch" "if you touch this you'll get your cock blown off by arc flash", and the like, including hand-lettered TIL. There was a bar, and a few tables, all of which seemed to be made out of junk or things welded together. The bartender was a doberman, except half of his face, part of his neck, and his whole left arm were synthetic. He looked like he should have been a cyberpunk costume, although as I got closer, I didn't think it was a costume.

"You're that wolf from the news broadcasts," he said, and I noticed that his throat was part of the synthetic plastic and metal. When he talked, it sounded like his voice was coming out of his mouth by way of a speaker. "Another fucking space pirate."

"What is this space pirate thing? I don't know shit about space pirates. I'm from Earth." When I said that, the very rough-looking other patrons - think renegade bikers, in full leather gear, except... space bikers - all stopped talking and looked at me. "Great. This is gonna be my thing from now on, everyone knows what I am and thinks I'm a freak or something. Well, yeah, I'm a freak, and that's why I'm here."

"You wanna see the goods? You got anything you like?" The dog wiped at the bar, and then nodded to a counterpart, a very solemn-looking deer whose rack was broken on one side, the jagged edges modified with a couple of serrated knives. The deer took his place, and I went with the dog off to a back hallway.

"I told Clint I wanted to, you know, find some foxes. Preferably... like an auction. Do you know what I fuckin' mean? Or is my Earth accent fuckin' with you?" The more I talked, the more I felt like the old me and less like I was handed everything I wanted on a platter.

"Foxes? You're in luck. We've got three today," synth-dog said, and coded into a door. We walked into a room that, I shit you not, looked like some kind of nightmarish kennel. Cages, big enough to hold people, rows of them. Some of the occupants were on cots or sleeping cushions, one of them was using a toilet device, and the rest were chained up kneeling. There were a few other people walking around, one Tark and three other Selnari, two of which seemed to be employees as they had the same logo badge that the synth-dog wore on a chain-studded leather jacket.

"What the fuck kinda place is this," I whispered, near his ear.

"Short term companion indents." He shrugged. "It's a living." He walked up to a series of three cages, each one holding a male hybrid fox. Two were in Hener gear, and one - who looked the most bereft at his situation - was completely nude.

I made eye contact with that fox, a seemingly unwashed red fox with sagging ears, and he gave me puppy eyes. Despite how the situation looked and kind of felt, it gave me a throbbing erection, which the dog noticed. "He's a real runt, isn't he? I had him in with the other ones, and they kept picking on him."

He really looked rough and worse for wear, and yet when the dog spoke up and he flinched, he also started to sport a serious erection.

"Too bad I didn't get to see that," I said, as my heart started to pound. I think I'm actually doing something bad. "So what?"

"Five hundred credits, you get a room and a half hour. You want an hour, it's a thousand credits. No discount for more time." The dog held out a device, the same kind of scanner the rhino had used. I bumped my wristcomp. "That's ancient stuff. Maybe you really are that guy from the news."

"Nah, it's just an act. I'm really some rich slob from uh, the rich slob part of the station."

The dog got out some very old-fashioned keys and unlocked the cage, then went in and unlocked the fox's chain restraints from a spot on the floor. He then handed me a leather-handled chain leash - it led to a choke chain on the fox's neck. Not the kind with prongs; it was just a slip loop. If he ran away or I pulled, it would tighten up. I could feel my balls draw up when I saw how that worked. "Here you go. No blood, no broken bones, if he grunts or yelps three times fast, you quit what you're doing. That's the stop word around here. And we have virtual security watching you, so if you fuck around, you are going to find out fast. You got it?" Suddenly, his voice synthesizer sounded extremely serious, and I could even hear a weird raspy sound coming past it, like he was actually trying to talk at the same time.

"Sure," I nodded. I am definitely doing something wrong bad. The dog led me along, and I led the fox along. He didn't seem to want to follow, and that meant I ended up choking him a little. After about twenty paces, I had to stop and adjust his collar. The dobie led me to another hallway, and into a private room. Like the rest of the place, it stank of sex, and there were visible stains on the walls. It looked like the last couple days of occupants had nutted wherever they wanted and no one had come along to clean it up. There was a cot with a mattress in the room, and it had no sheets and a couple of bare pillows. It too had very obvious fluid stains.

There was a futuristic device on the wall that looked like a sink, mirror, toilet, and some small vending machine. I poked at it, and found that it dispensed lube, condoms, and a small fabric-wrapped poultice that I sniffed at. It reeked of Prak. I looked down at the toilet; it was smeared with semen, as if someone had been bent over it and railed.

"Have fun," the dog said, and shut the door. With him gone, the room was silent except for our breathing. No sounds came in from outside, and there was no music, no white noise, not even an infrastructure whirr from the prison-toilet-cum-lube-dispenser.

The fox was nude save for hobbling restraints - chain cuffs on his wrists, ankles, and a chain that went between them so he could walk around, but he had to bend over slightly and he couldn't move fast without tripping. He looked like he'd been wearing them long enough that they'd worn his fur down. As soon as the door closed, he climbed onto the mattress and hunkered down on all fours, with his rump up in the air. His asshole was loose and messy with dried spunk.

I wonder what that bunny rabbit would think if he knew I was doing this. He'd probably stop talking to me. "So you're a filthy little fox runt, huh?" I then gave him a curt smack to the rump. He immediately flinched, whimpered, and struggled to try and reach back to cover himself. He couldn't, not with the chains on. "I asked you a question, that wasn't fucking rhetorical." Whack!

"I'm.. I'm a filthy fox, sir..." he whimpered.

I frowned and felt a familiar crawling feeling. I hate that word. I doubled up the chain from the leash, and tapped it against my palm. "I don't like being called that. Call me Mister Wolf." I then whacked him across the rump again. It made less of a noise than a gloved smack, though he jerked forward and yowled, clearly more pained.

"No! Please don't!"

I leaned around and looked; his cock was askew to the side and as he pleaded, precum oozed from the tip, and his foreskin rolled back as he shifted against the dirty mattress. I hit him again. "Call me Mister Wolf."

"Please, M-m-mister wolf! Don't hit me! Please just fuck me!"

I hit him again, and he yowled again, face scrunched up, fangs bared, and tears boiled over out of his squeezed-shut eyes. I almost came on the spot. I'm a sadist. I'm sorry, I can't help it. Also, he was about to orgasm himself, or at least it looked like it. It had to be an act. I knew this sort of thing from back home; some people are just messed up and like pretending.

I took the Prak poultice, rolled it in my fingers, then reached for his muzzle. He flinched his head away like I was going to hit him, and I just grabbed and pushed it in. "Nnh, nhh," he groaned.

"Shut up and take it, I did some earlier, so you're gonna do it, too." I had to work to keep it in his mouth - his tongue trying to push it out through his teeth, and he really cranked his jaws open. All of that fuss really had him chewing at it, and he made a few disgusted sounds including what I thought was a very real retching noise. I let go and he spat it out to the side, though he also swallowed hard.

I looked around the room; supposedly, I was on 'virtual security'. There weren't any visible cameras, though I stared at the 'vending machine' since who knows what it was up to. I wasn't up to any good; I assumed everything else in the room was the same way.

I looked back to the fox. He opened his eyes, and then his pupils dilated and his brows lifted, and he moaned loudly.

I got some lube out of the dispenser, applying it right to my cock like I was saucing a hot dog at a food court. I don't think they have hot dogs here; I didn't see any yesterday. I went back to the mattress, nudged my slippery cockhead against his ring, and he clenched. It did no good; the moment I leaned forward, the muscle rippled and easily spread open, and he let out a high fox noise. "I like foxes. You're the best kind of fox. Easy to use, and you can't fight back." That made him squeal and pin his black ears flat against his head. I pulled back out, all the way, and nudged back inside.

"Mister wolf, n-not so fast, please," he whispered.

"Shut up, I didn't pay for a simpering fox," and then I whacked him with my open leathered palm to the side of his rump, with my cock a few inches inside. I felt him jerk and his cock actually spurted precum a foot out onto the stained mattress. "I paid for a fuckable one. You have any idea how long it's been since I fucked a nice, squirming fox-hole? You got any idea?" I leaned over his back and talked against his ear. I could feel it twitching against my whiskers. When I thought of That Phrase, instead of feeling a black pit inside my stomach, I felt intense, vicious arousal. "Five hundred fucking years."

"Stop, take it out, use one of those... t-things, I don't know where you're from, you could have something," he mumbled.

So I pulled out. "One of these?" I dispensed a condom. There were a multitude of different options; I picked one that was black, reservoir tipped, and which the machine assured me would fit my cock. "You want me to wrap it up?" I tore the packet open, then held it under his muzzle. "I'm from Earth, so, No." I tossed it onto the mattress, right next to a very obvious cum stain.

"Nnn-" and I covered his muzzle.

"You don't have to complain so hard. Don't worry, you're already loose from whoever else fucked you earlier. I wonder who it was. That dog? Maybe he's got some weird synthetic spiky dildo for a cock." I pushed back in, slick and bare. Despite how he struggled against me, he also pushed back and I could feel his muscles loosen outwards. I went in almost to the hilt all at once, before he hunched and tightened up, then whimpered into my gloved fingers. "Maybe that rhino, from... whatever bar I was in, who told me about this place. His cock would have me walking funny for a week." He kept struggling, and I grabbed one of his wrists as I hunkered over his back.

When I say 'struggling', you have to understand, that if you were watching this depraved and unsettling carnal act of anal intercourse, you'd see me fighting with him like he didn't want it, and that would look bad. And if you looked closely, you'd see him very obviously humping backwards over my cock. I barely had to move. I actually had to pin him down to the filthy sex bed in order to get my own thrusts into him, without him just riding me like he was going to ge off doing it. This is definitely an act. What if these fucking Selnari are telepathic, what if it's not just empathy, what if they know what I think about and they knew I wanted this all day and it's all a big fucking setup. I didn't like the idea; it made me feel angry, and that made me want to screw this cum-crusted vulpine condom even harder.

I tried to flatten him out, and it wasn't working, because I had to get him to put his arms straight down against the bed and he kept trying to get back onto all fours. I kept pumping into him and feeling like I was just on the edge, and then some little thing would pull me back. This fucking Prak is driving me nuts. I only have half a fucking hour. I finally grabbed at the chain leash and pulled on it, hoping it would get him to settle down a little bit. He started to writhe against the bed, straining his muzzle this way and that, while fox fur stuck through the chain links. "Ahhh, nnh, stop, stop," he groaned, while I could feel him throbbing around me. "Stop!" Almost, shit, yes!

He then bleated out three fast grunts, and twisted to the side, hard cock flat against the mattress surface as his spunk audibly splattered out against itself in an elongated wet splotch.

Immediately, several red lights came on around the room where I had seen only blank wall. I pulled out of him and my own seed arced all over his back, the back of one ear, and clear past him to splat the wall next to one of them. "Fuck, what the hell is that?"

Click. He grabbed at one of the wrist cuffs, and it released. It was press-in like safety play handcuffs. He grabbed at the chain collar and loosened it before I could get my fingers in to help. "I'm okay! I'm okay! Don't do anything, guys!" He looked at the wall and laughed. "Haha, you hit the camera!"

I could still feel orgasmic pangs inside me, cock bobbing and drooling seed, while I felt otherwise panicked. "They're fucking watching?"

"I don't know if it's people or just a computer, but you know, I just... you got a little bit too crazy with that choke collar. Also," he then put his ears back again, "I really wanted to stopword out right when I came, it makes me squirt harder."

I glared at him. "What."

He shrugged and looked back. "What do you mean, what?"

"You're... you're literally crusted with cum and piss and I don't know what else, you have fur rubbed off from the chains," I grabbed his forearm and lifted his hand. Yes, it was.... I squinted closer, no it wasn't. It was trimmed. "Son of a fucking bitch."

"You should see my balloon payment! After three months, I get thirty-five thousand credits! And for those three months, I get a sex vacation! Three meals, I don't have to work, and I never have to worry about getting sore balls because they're shriveled up by the end of every night. Nice guys, mean guys, sometimes they just jack off on me and I have to do myself." Instead of looking like a diseased runt, he looked impishly gleeful. "I'm only here here for a week. I get to roll around on harem cushions in the rich part of Daleon next week. Actually, that's worse, they like to talk about their feelings. What feelings do rich people have?" He then picked up the unused condom, unrolled it, spun it around a few times, and then shot it into the sink like a rubber band. Upon seeing my continued expression: "Come on, did you think I was really a dirty sex slave? I mean, sure, indent contract, but come on. That real stuff's illegal. If this wasn't a network station, they'd get spaced if it was real, and honestly the behavioral reconditioning for critical crimes is supposed to be way worse."

"You're a fucking brat."

He beamed.

I stood up and stretched, shook my cock off at him, and went to go for the door. And found it locked. "What the hell?" I tried the handle a few times. After the fourth yank, a chime sounded.

"You done in there?"

"Yeah, I'm done in here," I said, and the door unlocked. I opened it and peered out into the hallway; the cyber-doberman was just on his way back over.

"Alright, I'll escort you to the exit, and that'll put you back into one of the shadow alleys. Hope you had fun," he said, as if this situation was completely nonchalant. I didn't know what to say, so I just let him lead me along. Just before we went through the 'door', I took out my fly flap and snapped it back on, bundling my cock back up under leather. I went through out into the alleyway, and was dispensed behind some landscaping. I could see some other people in there, and when they weren't looking my way, I stepped out and headed out. Just like all day, when they saw me, they kept staring.

--

My little apartment didn't have a balcony beyond the shared walkway to get to the front door. However, every few units, there was a walkway between them that went behind the building. After I got home, I left my hood inside, went to the bathroom, grabbed some snack bar that promised flavors neither chicken nor strawberry, and went out to get some fresh air.

That's a joke. We're on a space station. There's no fresh air. However, behind the 'apartment building', there was a bit of greenery. Some real landscaping, a melange of verdant plants and a little babbling stream. There was a slight, continual breeze, and it smelled as fresh as anything I could remember. Definitely more fresh than the last decade or so back on Earth.

"Oh, is that you?"

I turned and saw Marece step out onto an equivalent overlook, separated from mine by a low shrubbery. He must have come from the next walkway over. "Nah. You must've mistaken me for another," and I summoned up as much drama as I could muster, and then growled, "Earth Wolf."

He went crazy-eyed, flicked his ears, and then cackled. "Earth Wolf! I'm not surprised. You ought to look up the news broadcasts. Or don't."

"How about, Space Pirate? That one's more concerning. How do I look like a space pirate? I'm just wearing a leather coat."

"Ahhh, you should look that one up, too. Specifically, the name Xeryx." He drew two X's in the air with his fingertip. Marece was no longer wearing a blue leather Hener outfit, and was instead wearing just a pair of green spandex-like shorts. He leaned on the railing, almost miming what I'd been doing. "You don't really look like him. You just look similar to him. If that makes any sense. No one really knows who he is. He's a popular mystery. How did your trip to Mezz-5 turn out? I see you have a new outfit. Much better than the coveralls. Much less offensive than the Hener gear you were very erroneously told to wear."

"I was on a station full of... exiles, what was I supposed to do, say no?"

He flicked his ears up straight and got that crazy look again. "Ahh. You didn't answer my question. I don't see you wearing a mask..."

"I left it in my apartment. I don't need it here. I'm not trying to get fucked. I'm just thinking."

"You hardly look like the type to get fucked."

"You'd be surprised. This is a nice spot to think. What's with the fucking creek and waterfall and stuff? We're in space. Isn't water a commodity?" All I really knew about space was that it was a big, cold vacuum, unless you were near a star, in which case it was a radioactive hot vacuum.

"Mmm, it turns out, the humanoid brain - humans and Selnari alike - is structurally assembled such that natural greenery and other forms of organic things like plants, stimulate a sense of worldly calm. Also, I believe it helps with the air quality. You still didn't answer my question."

I looked around. No one else was around. "What the fuck kind of nosy-ass bunny rabbit are you?"

He went crazy-eyed again. "Mister Hawk, I am a_hare-_"

"What kind of nosy-ass crazy-eyed fuckin' HARE are you? I got a new outfit, I got a flashy mask hood thing, I went into The Shadows, and do you want me to keep going?"

He held up a finger, then walked off the balcony and out of sight. A few moments later, he returned, only on my side, and came right up next to me. He then motioned for me to lean down to his ear.

"Oh, we gotta be private, huh? I don't see any little kids. The playground thing's out front. Whatever. I went into some bar, run by this rhino guy, and met some Hener wolf. I came all over his dick. I guess he liked that kind of thing. Then, I felt this kind of itch, because I... because I'd had this Prak drink, it starts with a C. I wanted something a little more... rough. The rhino showed me this place at the end of a back alleyway. I think it was run by this doberman dog, who was some kind of cyborg. I had a lot more fun there. With a fox."

Marece gave me the crazy-eyes again. "Really."

"Yeah. Really. I was mean to him. The fox. Of course, he wanted it, I mean he was there for it, he was some kind of indent prostitute I guess. He seemed pretty chill about the entire thing, even though I'd thought he was some captive little slave runt at first. You're not gonna like this, but I feel duped. You know what that means? I'm not a good guy. I used to do bad stuff a lot. I never really got caught for it. I never really got mine. And now that I'm here, and I had my genome rebooted or whatever, it's like I'm making all the same steps, and this time, it's even easier. There's nothing I gotta worry about! I can't even do something bad to someone for real, it's just a game."

Marece did not give me squinty eyes, or crazy eyes. He just looked pensive, and vaguely twitched his tail. "Selnari are encouraged to express the dark side of themselves, as much as the light side. If you really believe that there's a dark and light side, and not just some continual gradation. There is, of course, no dark or light, and yet we are cursed to think of it that way."

"What philosophical bug crawled up your ass all of a sudden?" I chuffed.

He looked at me with shock, and a little confusion. "You have odd sayings. I'm Hener, remember? We're a weird religious order based on sex, to phrase it in a way your pea-sized wolf brain coughed up." He looked distinctly uncomfortable now.

"So Selnari get to have fake-rape sex-slave clubs, and if they really rape someone, they get thrown out an airlock. Makes sense." I turned wholly towards the bunny rabbit. "Who the fuck are you, really?"

"I told you, my name's Marece-"

"No, I mean, who the fuck are you? I might've only been here two days but I've bumped into or past a whole lot of people and exactly two of them have approached me to say anything about anything. And one of them is you. The other one isn't a stranger, and is none of your business."

"I am," he said, and seemed to puff himself up as much as a _cute little bun-bun_could, then continued: "A hare with a boring, bureaucratic desk job, who would like a little more excitement in his life, and who just found out he lives effectively next door to none other than The Earth Wolf."

"Too bad it wasn't the Fire Wolf. He sounds even fuckin' hotter than me," I rolled my eyes. "It was a fox. A guy from Earth, like me. My Earth. Wolf Earth. Except he was a fox, not a wolf - same deal as the tiger security guy and the bull from my little Prak Farming adventure. Why am I telling you this like you know what I'm talking about?"

"Hmm, mmm, that's not that surprising, there've been a multitude of handfuls of people claiming to be from 'a different Earth' for the past few years, and some of them have come through this station," he nodded.

"What bureaucracy do you work for, anyway?"

Marece pushed away from the railing. "A boring one. I ought to get to sleep. I have a long day of boring desk job tomorrow," he said, away from me, voice reflecting off the backside of the building as he sauntered down the walkway back to the front.

I didn't trust a word he said.