Fox Hunt
by Feathertail on 28/03/2011
Ryan jumped backwards, staring down at the street. He thought lightning had struck right in front of him.
Everyone, everything stopped, except for the seagulls overhead and the distant rumble of stormclouds. The crumbling skyscrapers and abandoned cars weren’t moving, but neither were the anthros out on the street. They were as frozen as he was, and he could do nothing as booted footsteps ran up, until a thick hand grabbed him by the collar and shook him.
“What are you doing here?” The man’s voice was muffled. Ryan looked up and saw not ears and whiskers, but a face-concealing gasmask with a shiny black visor. He was a human, like Ryan — like he was for now — and he was wearing some kind of gray and white urban camo gear. It looked like he’d come off of a military base.
Ryan was instantly scared. Military gear meant he was a Tea Partier, or with a militia or something. They had to be trying to claim the city. But if he was with a militia, then why did his nametag look … Chinese, or Korean? And what was with his strange accent?
Ryan coughed and tried to collect his wits, clutching his smartphone tight and hoping the man wouldn’t confiscate it. “I’m hunting for an animal … ”
The man shook his head. “What is your name?” he demanded.
He just blurted out his first name. “Ryan.”
“Rye-ann, this place is for Earth workers.” He shoved him backwards and let him go. “Go back!”
“But I-”
“Go back!”
Ryan stood there in a daze, watching him walk back across the street to where a woman in similar gear was standing. They were talking, but he couldn’t make out what they said; they were carrying some kind of machines over their shoulders, but he couldn’t tell if they were rifles or vaccum cleaners.
“‘Earth’ workers?” he thought, crouching behind a car. His reflection looked back at him, a lanky human teenager’s with messed-up hair and a worn-out shirt and backpack. He put it out of his mind as soon as he saw it, and dug in his pocket for his empty soulcrystal.
He got it out and looked through it and the car windows, and winced as an anthro bird walked past them, his feathered tail glowing with bright blue anima. But in the humans across the street, there was nothing … nothing but a tiny pinprick of light, a soulcrystal in the man’s pocket. What were they? he wondered. Robots?
Whatever they were, they were in his way. He tapped the screen on his smartphone, still glancing through the car’s windows at them, and checked the map of this area. Someone had posted a fox sighting in this neighborhood just last night, and he’d gotten up early so he could go look for it. But now the city was crowded all of a sudden — he had to have seen at least two dozen people so far — and these gun-toting, uniformed jerks thought they owned the place.
He couldn’t fight them, not that he wanted to. But a fox lived right here near the shelter downtown, if all these people hadn’t scared it off. How was he going to find it if …
Something splashed, behind him. He turned to look, and saw a red fox’s face looking up at him over the puddle it was drinking from.
His heart started to pound.
Slowly, Ryan reached for his backpack, sideyeing his reflection to guide his shaking hand. The zipper seemed loud — too loud — and the fox cocked its head at him as he reached in and got out his imprinter. It was heavy and awkward, machined steel with sharp edges, and he cut himself trying to fix the soulcrystal inside.
The fox had taken a few steps towards him. “Please don’t have rabies,” he thought, as he stood and aimed the imprinter with both hands. Through the lens on its back he could see the fox anima, thick and swirling and crimson like blood, and as he held down the lever on the side it started to flow towards his gem. Not enough to kill the poor thing … just enough to make him what he longed to live as. Or at least, to bring him as close as it was possible to get.
Ryan’s heart raced. He couldn’t think straight, and could barely hold the imprinter still. Seconds stretched on to infinity, but he only needed a few more of them before-
“What are you doing!?” It was the man in the uniform, behind him.
The fox bolted, and the stream of anima wisped away.
Before Ryan could think, he ran after it.
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