FSE

Furry search engine

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Wet. There's a heavy rotund pressure on my chest. The air reeks of salt water and fish. And my face is wet. I'm also inexplicably tired. Maybe five more minutes and I'll pull my eyes open long enough to find out what's going on.

The familiar sound of "Arf arf arf" snaps my eyes open faster than the bolt action of a tranq rifle. Sitting on my chest, in a proximity strangely familiar yet as alien as the first time it happened, is a black speckled white pinniped. The feral zoo animal's eyes peer at me with curiosity misleading of it's dismissible intelligence, only to lick my face and roll off me. Rolling onto my side I watch it slide across the stone paved floor and 'jump' into a kiddy pool of icewater.

Stone paved floors.

I wasn't in the ice cavern anymore. Sitting up I look around and see that the walls were also made of large stone bricks. There was a window on the side of the room, but based on the amount of light leaking through it was full daylight outside. Which was good since aside from the plastic kiddy pool the room was distressingly antique. A hardwood bookcase with very basic medieval amenities like linen sheet and a chamberpot. A table and chair of lesser quality wood decorated with an empty candle stick holder. Not a single sign of electricity, technology, or even literacy. Admittedly, one might not just store things like that in a room with a wild animal or a coma patient, but then again who would place a coma patient and a seal in the same room unattended?

The answer of course was 83N. Only the fugitive think to house me in the same room as his... pet. At least I was fairly sure it was the same seal as one the comet; I could think of several reasons the rat would have removed the animal from his Hidey Hole of Hiddenness, but motivation of why he would house it with me... he must be insane because the only reason I could think of him housing the pinniped with me was he thought I had bounded with the feral creature.

The creature resounds with another "Arf arf arf" again... though strangely not in my direction. Following the creatures eyes towards the door, I'm fortunate to see it start to crack open. Not risking an attempt to see what is coming through, I quickly lay back down and shut my eyes. For a moment I consider also pulling back up the covers, but I quickly decide they're better positioned where they are.

"Heaven to Betsy," issued a distinctly female voice from the direction of the door, "Hold your horses you confounded creature, I'm coming." I feel a brief breeze of much fresher air blow into the room before the door is unmercifully shut again.

"Blimey," the lady retorts as her voice grows closer, "I still can't figure out why the Lady wants you in here with her friend. Goodness knows it can't be sanitary." There's the sloshing sound of a bucket being pulled through water, followed by it unceremoniously being clunked on the stone floor. "Heaven knows with the way you eat it would be easier to keep you closer to the larder." There's then the sound of many slick objects sliding across each other joined with a repeated plunk into the water. Once these sound cease they are quickly followed a clang against the stone floor... a distinctly more hollow sound from the clunk a few seconds earlier.

Buckets. She's removing a bucket of water and adding a mixture of ice and fish. Well at least they have the ability to make ice somehow, even if it's been provided by 83N... though what does she mean by Lady?

"Corse," she continues, "With the way you get into everything you'd probably eat us out of house and fish." The seal only responds with an "Arf arf arf" before presumably going back to eating his new grub.

"And look at this," I hear as her voice finally approaches closer, "You even managed to uncover the Lady's friend." Gently, I feel the sheets being pulled back over my chest. "Blimey, I know it's not proper to question Mother, but what could she be..." She doesn't finish the sentence as I lash out and throw my bed sheets over her, rolling off the bed and tackling her to the ground.

We land with her face just a few inches away from the kiddy pool. Thankfully there isn't a sound of her hitting her head. I have questions that need answers before I can knock her out. Unfortunately that means she's just as talkative as ever. "Crikey! What in the world is..."

My hands flash forward and over her mouth firmly. I make eye contact, finally identifying her species as koala. "Don't move. I won't hurt you unless I need to. You are not my target, but I will do whatever it takes to find him. Do you understand?" I slowly remove my hand from her mouth.

"Heaven to Betsy girl, I don't know what you think you're trying to do but..." my hand quickly slaps against her mouth again before she can continue.

"Right, let's try this again," I say again with exasperation. "I'm going to remove my hand from your mouth, and you aren't going to scream. You aren't going to talk. You're just going to nod your head up and down. Understood?"

Once again I slowly remove my hand from her mouths. Almost immediately she starts up again with, "Mother Superior will not put up with this kind of behavior. I don't care if the devil's taken you, this is no way for a patient to treat her nrph..." I wince as she bites my hand as I move to cover her mouth again. Thankfully in the MMIB I've conditioned for worse.

"Third times the charm," I mumble as she continues to gnaw at my fingers. "I don't know what you have been told, but the last thing I knew I was chasing a very dangerous rat when I blacked out. Everything about this situations tells me you are either working for him or for someone in collaboration with him."

"Thing is," I continue as I halt her constant chewing by gripping her lower jaw and pulling forward, "I work for an even more dangerous man. I mad man who turns entire worlds upside down just to make a dollar. But he's just the one giving the orders. I'm one of the ones doing the turning. So don't think that just because I won't kill you means you have nothing to fear from me. Am I understood?"

I flick the palette of her mouth to get her to open wide long enough for me to pull my hand free. And for a brief moment... there is actual silence. And when she speaks, "So it's true then," it's not what I was expecting.

"What is," I retort, rubbing the bite marks on my hand while mentally playing back the words she's been saying all this time. Aside from the dialect, something felt... wrong here.

"That you and the Lady," she elaborates. "It's true. You're... male" Something in her tone left me with the impression that she may as well have been accusing me of being a pink unicorn who had eaten her corn flakes.

Scrunching my eyes I pause to rub my brow, "What kind of question is that? Of course I'm..." I stop in my tracks as I finally look down at my own chest. Springing to my feet, I put a healthy distance between me and the mad koala. "Why in the world am I wearing a dress?!?"

The koala takes the time to straighten sits up, rearrange the sheets covering her and straightens her dress. "Looks more like a dressing gown than a dress. I mean crikey, if I walked out to trim the hedges in something like that I'd be a might bit..."

"That's not what I meant," I holler as a grab the offending garment and tear it off of me, ripping the seams. "There. You see? I'm one hundred percent male."

There she sits, rather unabashedly looking me up and down, before stopping at my crotch. "Hmm..." She doesn't respond for several seconds, causing me to cough to finally get her to look back at my eye again. "Oh, right, pardon. I just always assumed it would be larger."

Cocking an eyebrow, I can almost feel the blood vessels threatening to burst in my eyes. "Mame, if I wasn't married..." I pause, breathing outwards slowly to calm myself. "Right... let's keep our priorities straight. First things first. Where can I find a decent pair of pants?"

The woman looks shocked for a moment before pressing her hand against her bosom in indignation, "Well no where around here! This is a monastery. No lady walk in the halls of god without a proper skirt on."

Shutting my eye, I raise a hand to my temples. "Of course they don't. Second question; why are you surprised to see a man? Even if you're an orphan raised as a nun you must know that men exist."

"Oh, well I beg your pardon mame, but they don't. They haven't for thousands of years." I tilt my head over to the left, raising my right eyebrow. Without even looking at the confusion on my face, she continues, "One thousand, three hundred and... about forty something years ago, all men just vanished. Poof. No one knows where. No one knows why. And crikey, by now no one cares. Worlds has grazed destruction at least three times since then, so things that make losing half the population a nuisance in comparison."

All this sounded... earlier familiar. Only one person could confirm my suspicions, though. "Right... where is the rat?"

Giving her dress one final dust off, the koala stands up and turns towards the door. "The Lady left orders that you were to be taken to him when you woke up. We'd be there already if someone wasn't acting like a bloody ungrateful git."

Rolling my eyes at the constant use of feminine pronouns I follow her, grabbing the buckets she carried in here and follow her out into the strange new world... I might be entering this world unarmed, but I'm not going to be unarmed.