FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Life can be broken down by 'it' moments. Moments in your life that divide all your experiences to before 'it' and after 'it'. For a person it might be a breakup, a new job, a move. Ghandi's life, the twin towers, the execution of Henry I, were all 'it' moments for their respective countries. They changed things. And yet each of these where mere drops of water compared to what happened. Everyone could remember exactly where they were, especially those who were effected. Just the fact that it was possible changed the way we looked at the world.

I remember it so vividly, I could tell you every detail of what I was wearing, what I was smelling and feeling and hearing with what was my limited senses at the time. I could tell you what I had eaten a few hours before and even the colors of the sunset when 'it' hit. But the thing I remember most was what I saw.

I had run outside of my parents house when I had heard the rumbling sounds. I was at the corner of the street, looking west. It was a large wave of energy, like some sort of nuclear explosion, coming at us. Now I realize I didn't see anything crumble or break in front of it. There wasn't a sudden gust of wind, the birds in the trees and the dogs in their yards weren't even ruffled. But I was terrified. The wave came, like the largest cliff imaginable running at you, and I couldn't move. Some part of me, despite every other instinct screaming at it, decided I was going to be alright. The wave came, passed over me, through me, inside me. And I was never the same again.

I still don't know if that small part of me that thought it was going to be ok was right. But regardless, My name is Darius Woodriff, people call me Dare, and I used to be human.

~***~

"Humans and Furs are welcome, and many people frequent it every night.... I can never resist it's song I lack the strength of will and had no friends to whom I could confess and have them tie me to the mast. Of course if I did I would find the act of being tied down only adding fuel to the fires that burned inside of me."

• Sisco, Don't Judge Me

Two years and a few months later, I was sitting at my desk in my apartment in Logan, Utah. My fur was damp with sweat as I furiously pawed myself to real furry, tiger porn stars on my laptop. And despite there being only regular human beings on the planet earth two years earlier, I do mean fur, paw, and the two porn stars were very much real furry tiger men really fucking each other in their real ass holes. And it was damn sexy.

"God... fuck..." I muttered to myself between heavy pants, my paw already lubed from a natural combination of sweat, precum and good old sex drive as I rubbed up and down my shaft in a manic fashion. The two men on the computer screen grunted and moaned as they started to build up a pace, their striped fur glistening perfectly in the video... which all warrants an explanation.

It was a complicated thing to figure out, and not all the details were really clear, but that wave of energy, now known by most as simply 'the change,' had been world wide. It had affected a perfect one third of the population, evenly amongst every country, ethnicity, gender, economic/social group and age. There was no pattern, no discernable reason, and no answers to be had as to where it came from. It was only known that it originated in San Francisco, CA and that everyone affected had become something different, something animal like. The two men on screen could have been any race you could imagine before, but now they were perfect tiger Adonis's.

I felt myself climaxing quickly, the pressure building from the base of my dick upwards. Without really thinking about it, I started stroking harder, faster, driving myself towards orgasm.

"Oh please, oh god, oh fuck." I whined. I closed my eyes, my triangle ears bent back, my lithe, feline tail began to thrash uncontrollably, I could feel tension spread up my body and my back arch, fur in every place imaginable stood on end. I was so close, I needed release, I burned for release, I would have begged for release if I had been able to put more then three words together without groaning. There was a long, powerful moment while I stood at the edge, propped on the high point of my own pleasure with a rubbing hand and shear willpower. Then, suddenly, I felt my dick shudder, and start pumping. A sudden flood of seed shot from my member, the white spunk landing on my light, golden chest fur. My whole body shuddered in toe-curling, moan inducing orgasm. The pleasure seemed to go on for immeasurable moments before I finally collapsed in exhaustion.

A moment or two later as the orgasm died and faded, I finally noticed that the video was still going. Suddenly, without my penis guiding my thoughts, seeing the two hugely buff tigers fucking each other's brains out was less appealing, so I quickly exited out of the screen. I looked around my desk at a few of the toys I had considered before deciding on a simple rub off. I had a few different lubes, a dildo or two, but not much else. The effort of using any of them seemed like overkill at the time, and now that the orgasm was done it all seemed pathetic.

I moodily grabbed the shirt I had been wearing and used it to mop up the mess on my chest and paw. Then I started to mope. I just felt so useless sitting in my room every night, jacking of with whatever turned me on at the time. I had been raised in a religious family, which in Utah meant Mormons, which meant masturbation was bad, so there was a little guilt trip to it too. And under it all was the fact that I liked watching guys fuck, not strait couples, and no matter how that turned me on I wasn't going to come out to my parents. It was too uncertain and dangerous. It would be one more thing that made their son a freak, and I couldn't handle that.

Top all this off with a severe lack of a social life and a body as scrawny as two sticks tied together, and I was just about as sad as a kitty cat could be.

Part of me wishes I could say that I had a roommate or a friend that helped me out then. A call on my phone, a knock on the door. But none of those things happened. My roommates were pretty much absent almost all the time, and none of my friends were here in Logan. Instead I was alone in my apartment that night. I did, however, eventually turn my computer back on and made it to my favorite furry site, way-furry.com.

The thing was, I was already into furry porn before it was shot on camera. It sounds hipster-ish when I think about it too much, but I'd been looking at the stuff since I was sixteen and lying about my age on internet surveys. It was something that really got me to think about my own sexuality in a way, noticing when I was more inclined to see artwork with two dudes in it, feeling more aroused when it described someone taking it up the ass. For a while I figured it was just because it involved the parts I had, and I knew how that felt, but some time around my Senior year I stopped kidding myself and added one more brown layer to the shit pile that was my own guilt. The site itself though was really supportive and nice. The people on it were people I could say ANYTHING to, and they didn't judge, didn't say I was a freak. It said something about the community that I didn't only go there when I was horny.

Even after the Change happened, way-furry stayed open, partially as a support site, partially still as porn (it added a live camera feed section, which I visited often), but always had it's creative community, and that was what I was here for now. There was a story that, despite being really light on the porn, was a story I came back to again and again. It was a sweet little tale about an otter kid running into a fox boy in high school and the two of them falling in love. The otter wasn't even aware of his own sexuality before he met this fox, and the touchingly shy way he figured the whole thing out really resonated with me.

As I read it again, it made me sigh with want of a completely different kind, one I couldn't just rub away. Why couldn't I find someone like that? Someone who was head over heels for me? I could count on one hand the times I had ever been complimented for my looks by anyone of any gender, (parents and family members not included) and I hadn't even really had so much as a secret crush in high school. I knew it was just a story, but stories came from somewhere, didn't they? I got to the end of the story, and simply sat there. I really wished the story could just keep going, stay just as cute, just as meaningful, but that was all he wrote.

But suddenly it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't. There weren't any links in the author's comments, and it wasn't in a folder of the rest of the story, but what if the guy was just disorganized? Or maybe he just didn't think to put them all together? For a moment, I thought it was worth a shot, but then I looked at the time. It was after midnight on a Sunday night. I had class in the morning, and as much as it might help distract me from my own worries, I needed to sleep. I resolved to wait until tomorrow and see what other things he had in his gallery. As I closed my laptop, turned off the lights, and curled up in the blanket heap that was my bed, I only wondered where the story of the otter boy and his fox might lead.

I closed my eyes and slowly nodded off to sleep.

~***~

School this semester was a special kind of torture for me. To be honest, the classes weren't bad, it was the being around people. It was almost always one of three interactions: dude is hot and I want him, chick is hot so I should want her, or secretly the person is judging me and knows I want dick oh god, oh god. There were also the people who, despite only lacking fur for the flip of some metaphorical coin, seemed to look down on people like me, people who had been hit by the change. It wasn't BAD per say. None of the racism, sexism, or general bigotry was really overtly BAD compared to other places. People from Utah were just too nice to start name calling or hate beatings. But you could still feel it in their gaze, and they weren't likely to remember to invite you to a party or offer you a seat either.

It was interacting with these people that was bad, but the classes weren't. And my favorite one was Literature. Part of this was because I love books of all kinds. The other part was the teacher. Mr. Dalton was an middle age 'coon guy who seemed to make it his job to give the sheltered, innocent, bigoted kids of central Utah a cold splash of reality with the reading assignments he gave. It was only a few weeks into the spring semester and already he had lost two students who just couldn't handle books that made them question gender roles, religious reasoning and racial bigotry, which recently started to include anthropomorphic individuals. The best part was, he was an interactive kind of lecturer, so we got to speak up.

I loved speaking up... about most things.

"But can you really say we're a less racist nation?" I asked a still human girl named Evalin across the room. "I mean, sure we have laws passed to stop people from being racist, and we may be a little more comfortable with black people then we used to, but look at some of the problems that were going on BEFORE the change. Before that, we STILL had discriminatory laws against illegal immigrants in Arizona, and it pay rates were still WAY out of balance in favor of middle age white men."

Just as Evalin tried to open her mouth, I kept going. "And don't get me started on statistics about right AFTER the Change! The kinds of riots, violent crimes, and the number of fired employees and discriminatory laws were astronomical. It's taken us until now to MAYBE get SORT of close to the right laws to protect anthros MOSTLY."

It felt nice as I finished that most of the heads in the room were nodding. Although it was mostly an anthro class, and even amongst humans it was quickly becoming unpopular to hate on 'anthropomorphically unique' people. It was slowly making it's way into the general consensus that anthro's were pretty much unchanged from who they were and, with old ethnic markers erased, they should pretty much be treated as just general people.

This didn't change the fact that there was still a lot of bigotry in the world, which the girl across the room was vehemently trying to refute.

"But we did pass those laws, and a few others for other groups as well. Gay marriage is now legal in more then 70% of the US," She argued. Normally, I would have taken time to notice the hint of desperation in her voice. It was a white guilt thing to try and deny this kind of thing, I used to experience it all the time before the Change. Before I became the recipient of a few less then friendly words for no reason. Normally I would have noticed this and really tried to drive it home, because it wasn't helping anyone. But mostly, I suddenly felt jittery and nervous with the last addition to the subject. Suddenly, I was stepping on egg shells and I couldn't seem to get my thoughts together very well.

"Yeah, but..." I stumbled, "laws being passed doesn't... doesn't stop people from..." I tried to keep it together, but it was too distracting. What could I say that didn't give the whole jig up?

As if by some miracle, Mr. Dalton saw that as the perfect time to move along with the class.

"Yes, laws don't necessarily stop discrimination," he said, completing my thought exactly. "Now keep that in mind as we have someone read the next section."

I sighed in relief as we moved on. Another crisis averted.

~***~

A few hours later, I was sitting in a campus café, munching on a pepper and beef sandwich and trying to burn through my computer science homework. I really wasn't all that computer savvy, to tell the truth, and learning programming language was both intriguing and frustrating as hell, but in the end it all left a sour taste in my mouth for one reason: I needed to be good at it, and I wasn't.

It was really because I needed to be good at something practical. I had hobbies, like reading, martial arts, movies, video games, and I had even written a few reviews for our high school paper, none of them really lent themselves towards a steady job. My parents really tried to be nice about it, tell me to follow my dreams and all that bull, but it was the same with the judgmental Utah people and them; I could feel the disappointment in my parents as easily as I could feel the distain from the judgmental people.

So I tried to do something my parents could be proud of, with ill effects. This was the end of my second year, and I'd already switched my major from Aerospace engineering to civil engineering, and even to plain old Math before the current Computer Science. Programming was less soul sucking then any of the other three (mostly due to a distinct lack of Calculus), but it still seemed off to me. I could get most of the programs to work, but it never seemed satisfactory. Like it wasn't really worth the trouble.

Speaking of trouble...

"Damn little shitty son of a bitch fucking ass wipe." I mumbled to myself. I had run the debugger (the thing that looked over your code and told you if you wrote something against the rules), and it had SAID nothing was wrong with it, but when I ran the program it basically laughed and pooped out an error message. I could hear the little gremlins that ran my Mac giggling, but it might have been the blood rushing to my ears. This was literally due in two hours, and I was SO CLOSE.

Just when I was about to commit Lap-top-acide, I heard someone say my name behind me.

"Dare?" a soft voice asked. I quickly stopped speaking whatever profanity was currently spewing from my lips and tried to casually turn around. It was a human girl, about five foot seven or so, with average length brown hair and dressed in the conservative fashion sense of a Utah winter, and she was a friend.

"Hey Alex," I said as sweetly as I could, like it could excuse whatever she'd overheard. "How's it going?"

"It's going... fine Dare," she said carefully, "are you alright?"

I sighed. Alex was my cousins roommate, a close cousins roommate, and it was just about the best convenience that she was actually graduating in Computer Science soon.

"It's this program that's due soon," I admitted, scooting over for her to see.

It was a testament to her being near graduation that she didn't even need to ask what the program did, even with my notorious lack of in-program notes. She just scanned it for a few minutes, searching for mistakes.

It wasn't so bad with people I knew, people I was sure I had fooled about the big IT. Alex was familiar so I didn't feel so bad about not wanting her physically. It was normal to not want to hit on your female cousins roommates, right? Alex did, however, seem to represent everything I should have been. She was human, first of all, having been spared from the Change. Her family was Mormon, she went to church, she was brilliant at all sorts of very useful and practical things. She honestly could have been born of my parents wet dreams for me.

And yet there was something about her that made her an instant friend. I could talk about my favorite books, movies, bands, and causes with her. Unlike a lot of Utah people she seemed to be much more aware of people around her, more able to understand what they were thinking and feeling. It made her someone I wanted to talk to in a lot of ways. But the lack of sexual tension kept me away a lot.

"Found you're problem," she said at last. She pointed at the screen and I followed her finger to the specific point at the end of a line. It was a seemingly innocuous, insignificant place in the code, until she said four little words.

"You're missing a semi-colon," she said simply. I could literally feel stupid landing on me from the heavens.

"Sh-... Really?" I asked, only narrowing avoiding cussing. "I thought you didn't need them at the end of a function title?"

"You do if you want them attached to your .h file," she explained. "It's hell, I know, but if you really insist on putting all of these functions on one file..."

"But why didn't the de-bugger catch it?"

"Because you put it all on one file, main program and all. The computer thinks this one is just an extra side function and doesn't use any of the private functions from your .h." She stopped mid explanation to sit down next to me. It was only then that I realized she was sitting really, REALLY close to me. "So," she continued, "the program is making completely new variables here, and since you don't define them, it's just taking whatever junk data is already in those cells, and sometimes that make it all go... kaplooy."

I stopped feeling awkward long enough to feel some awe and dread about computers. THIS is what I was signing up for? Where a single misplaced semi-colon could ruin a whole project? And she could SPOT that?

"That's... that's messed up," I finally said.

"It's not so bad," she replied, "And everything difficult should work fine. How long did this take you." She started looking at me intently, and I started to feel a little pressured.

"Oh, you know..." I trailed off, before grabbing the remains of my sandwich and close my laptop, "maybe a few hours, didn't really start it until today." I started to get up, my mouth still moving to cover any protests about leaving. "But I still have a lot of stuff to do before class so I probably better get going, but thank you so much for helping Alex and I owe you one Idon'tmeantoberudebutI'vegottagoby!" I barely managed to leave without a fuss, mashing the last words together as I left. It was only until I was half way to the corner of the next building that I looked back. The glass wall of the café gave a perfect view of her looking after me. That couldn't be good. I was just glad that after one more class, I was going to be home and away from all these people.

~***~

It wasn't until later that night when I finally remembered that story, the one about the otter boy and his fox boyfriend. I had, in my infinite perceived patheticness, already pawed off twice, once complete with dildo, and was really about to consider going and getting a move, or pawing off for a third round. But then as I was browsing way-furry it struck me to look. As it turned out, there were several extra chapters, simply under a new name and all without a folder. While I was mildly miffed that I had missed this for so long, the fact that they were there made up for all of it.

I sat down to read.

I was never the same again.