FSE

Furry search engine

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You don a foxly body, falling to your hands-turned-paws, as your chest puffs out to match hers. The experience is intuitive, immediate, and yet alien. You do not have time to think, as you are sidling up behind her.

"We must run. I have a plan, but for it to work, we must make a new spy." Shanon remarks, already picking up her four-legged gait. Her voice has an ethereal quality to it, as if not quite coming from her vulpine mouth.

Before her last tail flicks past your nose, you are following on her heels, and soon making the characteristic leaping bounds of her kind, springing forth with front and back legs at once. Movement like this is intuitive, almost imperative, after but a few minutes. It is as if you had been a fox all your life.

"Who is this spy? Someone you know?" you ask.

"A forlorn soul who, like you, is dissatisfied with his role." Shanon replies. "I doubt we will have much difficulty, persuading him to change. No. He will not put up a fight, I think."

You ponder for a time, what sort of person gives up their humanity willingly, without doing as you have done--murdering countless people. You think about it for awhile as you go, prancing through the fields in foxtrot. You try to come up with something to break the silence, as the farmer's village of Brighthollow closes in.

"Why... why do you do this, to people... my love?" You find yourself appending 'my love', as a warm pulse surges through your mask, encouraging your servile instincts. The sense of a magical infatuation is frightening, and at the same time, soothing, as you run.

"People... people..." She seems to say it blankly, searching for the right words at first.

"People have a special strength. But when you're an animal, you're not treated as a person. Though, that shouldn't make me envious. I too, gave up being a human... it's just, people... are too strong. It's not fair if only humans are people. No, it's miserable, even, to think that, because you suffer like a person, not... like... just something that's alive, but like, something special--above other living things--that everything should hinge on your existing, or not, as the epitome of right and wrong."

"That didn't really answer my question." you say dumbly, skidding to a stop, as she begins peeking her neck around a bush, tails splayed flat in the grass, tips just barely raised.

"It's just that, I don't want to devalue all the interesting things humans do, or make," she says anxiously, still focused on what it is she's looking at. "But your kind... have hinged a great deal, on making sure that you survive. At great expense to other life. No, it's not as if we're intentionally enemies, see. I just want what is yours, to belong to... us. Hush!"

You go quiet, still not quite satisfied with her answer. It seems as if Shanon has given up her humanity, like you. Yet, she is not entirely unsympathetic toward humans. This is not in accordance with the stories you had long read of the wild ones; vile, selfish and depraved, hedonistic beings. Still, you--

A boy's voice cuts your thoughts short.

"That wasn't what we agreed on, Oren!"

An older male's throaty voice chortles, and supplies a retort.

"Lad, you're lucky the Watch lets you walk with ours, and talk your tall tales. Be a good sport, and don't get yourself run through by some creature, eh?"

"I can take care of myself! I've even learned how to hold a spear. Why won't you just... let me stand one shift, with Adriana--?"

You get a better look with Shanon. A scrawny blonde lad in brown rags is holding a pair of buckets on a rod, and arguing with a guard, who looks a bit tipsy. He must be off his shift, since he's left his helmet and weapon elsewhere. He swaggers about in an unfitting breastplate, grinning to show a missing tooth or two. He pulls the lad into a nelson, making him drop water everywhere, and gives him a noogie with his burly fist.

"Aye, see now your colors come clear. You've got a soft spot for the lady. And now yah'd best be coverin' that soft spot up real good, cause she's taken. And look at yah. Soakin' wet behind the ears. She'd as soon laugh as look atcha."

He hugs the drenched boy, who is clearly not amused.

"The deal was that I tell... ummph... Oren, let go!" he jams a fist against the oafish, mustachioed guard's chest-piece disdainfully."The deal was that I tell her about you, and you put in a good word, and let me stand an evening shift with her!" He turns red, trying to squeeze out of the older man's grip. Finally, Oren lets him loose, and he falls clumsily to the ground.

The drunk guard guffaws, perhaps not aware of the lad's scraped elbows, as he lands on hard flagstones, around a well he'd just drawn water from.

"No, Abel, you'd best play it safe... *hic* I've heard bad tales about the creatures she's faced down, and I hear she may be lookin' at a burnin' soon. Beasts have been wild, lookin' for her lately. Don't want you none of 'that' now. Now git that water back in the buckets. I'd best be getting back... 'fore she tans both our hides, thinkin' I'm letting you take sips off the top of the bottle again."

And with that, the burly guard takes off across the nearby vineyard, stopping just long enough to bang his head against a low branch, shake his ruddy face and curse, and keep hustling.

"Interesting. It looks like another tribe of beasts has set its eyes on one of the guards here, if the drunk is to be believed." Shanon whispers.

"It wouldn't be shocking news." you add. "I took a post here for a few days, before we met. The Lieutenant Captain, Adriana is quite the beast-slayer."

"I had pictured this a small village, by human standards." she replies. "I hadn't realized that such a high-ranking soldier lived within the town's walls. Besides yourself, Hunter."

"It's not so intricate a mystery. She's merely a Captain's lieutenant by virtue of how few guards here there are to bare such a lofty title. No doubt that shameful fop is of the fingerful of men in her direct command."

"And yet her strengths would seem to merit another of the Changed, seeking to infect her." Shanon adds, slowly becoming intrigued.

"So it would seem." you conclude.

"I wish her _infested_with fox fur," she grins, ambitiously. "Then, I'll find out what tales she has, from the creatures she's slain. Maybe she can even make a good companion, like you? Oh right--our spy."

You blink beneath the mask, tilting your fox's head quizzically. "Not the boy? Is that it?"

"He's it." she agrees nonchalantly, leaving you blankly following her tails with your perplexed, masked face, as she slips up behind him.

"Hello, Abel! Still with love on your mind, I see?" she calls.

The boy sits up, and Shannon licks his scuffed arms. He turns, and pets the magical fox.

"You're back, fox witch." he whispers. "I had almost thought you'd been a dream, but--"

He blushes, glancing back, as she takes on a stooped, human figure. She still sports the face and fur of a fox, and blankets the boy in her tails, holding him around his shoulders, almost maternally.

"--but I am quite real. As is your affection for another woman, or so I hear."

He jumps at that a bit. "No, no, I like you plenty, it's just--"

"Is she pretty?" Shanon asks concernedly.

"Well... I mean... I think she is." he whispers.

"Do you want her?" Shanon teases.

"She'd never fall for a kid like me..." Abel moans.

"I think you should give it a try." Shanon insists. "In fact, I know what will make it easy. I'll put a love spell on you both. When you kiss her, she'll fall head over heels for you!"

He seems to not know how to take this--being a diverse combination of flustered, excited, afraid, and overjoyed. "Really?! I m-mean, you're, you know... going to curse us both."

"Oh, you got me. You're right." she admits, playfully. "I really want to, though. You'd make a great pair of well..."

"--Excuse me for a moment." You interject, flicking your tails, and gyrating your neck a bit, to try and beckon Shanon.

"You brought another talking fox?" the boy asks, still nervously excited. "That's... probably a bad sign, right?"

"Can we talk for a second?" you whisper.

She nods, still looking at the boy, before slinking over your way, through the shadows, slimming back into a lightweight fox, as she tilts her head to you.

"Why is this boy so eager to aid us, if he is a friend with the guards?" you ask.

She raises a paw to her tapered muzzle, in an approximation of laughter. It comes out somewhere between a cackle and a snarl.

"He is jaded, don't you see? Like you. Only, instead of forgiveness, or perspective, this boy wants approval. He wants love. He wants... adult things. No one is allowing it, because they think he'll make a mistake."

You stare. "He's a lad barely worthy to be stepping outside a stable."

She nips your ear. "And that is exactly the thinking that drove him, lovestruck, to look for such outlandish help! This is our way to the town being ours!"

"I don't like it." you add.

"Think back to when you were his age! How many years have been stolen from you, because people said you were too young, too inexperienced? Did they offer you that chance, for experience? For love?"

"No, and I... point taken." You are glad foxes cannot blush. Losing your virginity to wild animals wasn't exactly what your elders had prepared you for, but it's not as if they allowed you much chance for relief of your own growing needs. Maturity had been slow coming. You too had suffered--long confusing lectures from the clergy that never really satisfied your curiosity, or lusts. They always ended in damnation, as the toll of a disobedient body. Of course, there was also the promise of commitment to someone selected for you. Come to think of it, you hated that time in your youth.

"At least let this boy fall for the girl of his dreams." she says, shaking you from your mental meanderings.

"Just don't make me molest him, and don't do it yourself."

"I'll give him a kiss." she concludes. "To pass on to the Lieutenant Captain."