Barrel-o-TF

There he was again. Jackie felt her key miss the lock as she tried to open up her apartment. She grunted, taking her eyes hastily off the giant wolf as he lumbered past, his steps soft but still weighty enough to rattle the doorknobs up and down the old hallway. “There’s my little cupcake.” The growl that rolled from the wolf’s throat sent a sudden shiver down her spine as Jackie realized he was of course addressing her. “Long day of work again?” Finally hearing the click of the lock, the girl turned her attention up again to the wolf bearing down on her. “Y-yes, like every day,” she nodded, struggling now to get her key back out of the lock. The grey wolf came to a stop a few feet away. It would have been a respectful distance if he was the same size as her, but stooped in this hallway like a grown man in a backyard playhouse, Jackie was left feeling severely crowded. As his eyes traced down her soft sides and ample hips, it was all she could do to bite her tongue, hoping to avoid a

Martin flipped through the sheets on his clipboard. He wasn’t exactly sure what qualified him to be a safety inspector, particularly at a place that seemed so thoroughly unsafe to begin with. He’d never worked for Avirans before. The little, feathered, raptor-like aliens had a peculiar eagerness to them, always in a hurry, always busy with something. One had emerged from an office, looking through his notes, clad in a white work coat and sporting a little teal ‘do of feathers. The little orange-haired human was less than five and a half feet, but even Martin stood head and shoulders above these guys. Not that it made them seem any more impressed with him. The Aviran had conducted the entire interview while walking from one office to another, and he moved so briskly Martin struggled to keep up. When they’d reached a door marked “no admittance” and his host slipped inside with no more than an “Okay we’re done,” he initially thought he’d been rejected out of hand. The inspector paced

Angelcap Glade was not a place most people visited these days. Indeed, the older and more superstitious residents of the nearby town would roll up their windows and refuse to stop for anything until they finished driving through. But the younger generation tended to be a bit more adventurous. There was even a campground that some people headed out to for a weekend, and they would always return with stories of nature that tested belief: curiously inquiring possums, thieving raccoons, and ravens that tauntingly dared them to step out of the light of the campfire. And then there were some who didn’t spare it a thought and headed into the woods for a morning run. That sort of thing typically didn’t end well. In fact, it was about the time that her bracelet slipped from her shrinking wrist that one particular jogger realized she was really in trouble. The fox she’d encountered had seemed just a bit large for her kind. In truth when she’d run into them, she’d thought it was a lost child

Deacon’s first shift as night manager of the warehouse was almost over. He’d known what he was in for, he was practically running the place already by the time the superintendent made it official. Now he just had the authority he needed to come down on that lazy ass Kent when he “didn’t feel like” doing his paperwork. Speaking of… had he ever finished setting up the truckloads for morning shift? Deacon stood from his office overlooking the warehouse and looked around for the lanky, sleepy-eyed high school dropout, probably trying to look busy somewhere. From the window he probably looked like an imposing sight, arms crossed up above the great steel racks. Deacon was only a bit taller than average, but he'd been told once he had bad body language, so when he took the promotion he also bought a few bright and colorful button-downs to try to offset any hostility. He was as surprised as anyone by how good he looked in them – they had a nice pop against his darker skin tone. A buzzer