Harpy-me looked around, hovering in the air. I had no idea what sort of special arrangement we had with physics, but there was no way its occasional flap of our wings was sufficient to keep us airborne. On the other hand, what exactly it was looking for was no mystery whatsoever: Dinner. Thankfully, we seemed to have been moved well outside the city, so there should be some sort of wildlife around.

Alas, the dinner that it found was not wildlife at all. A group of three men standing around a black car. I was about to do my best to redirect harpy-me, when I spotted that two of them were in white lab coats. Had they just escaped from the facility? I couldn't imagine what else they were doing out here. I changed my plan from 'redirect' to 'spy', pushing ideas at harpy-me about observing an enemy, and how advantageous it would be to learn about them.

That was far too complicated for its small harpy mind to comprehend, so I showed us following one person who led us to a big group of lots of people, letting us eat them all. That seemed to work, even though it was a flagrant lie. Harpy-me flew in closer, and I could see that the third guy, who was wearing an expensive-looking suit, was talking on a phone.

"Look, I don't care about the police," he shouted, and from his following facial expressions it was obvious that whoever was on the other end of the line cared about the police very much. "Yes, I understand that the mayor is angry, but he doesn't need to dirty his own hands." The mayor? Angry about what? That they were turning kids into monsters, or that they got caught turning kids into monsters? From the dirtying his own hands bit, I would assume the latter. Our mayor being corrupt would come as a surprise to precisely no-one.

"That's what I keep saying. Number twenty-three has already completed her metamorphosis, but doesn't have a control chip fitted. They weren't even equipped to deal with the usual neutered monsters, and they're going to find themselves faced with a full-on biological weapon. The guns I saw them with won't even touch the thing. Trust me, everyone in that facility is dead. Leave twenty-three to the military to deal with; she'll attack a city before too long, there won't be anything to link her back to us, and the problem will solve itself. The only thing we need is a cover story."

Number twenty-three? Presumably that's me, given the numbering on my corridor, and the description. But this is the first I'm hearing of a control chip. Normal monsters are crippled somehow? Normal as in 'wild'? That would imply these people are chipping wild monsters? How? And... that kind of implies that the impacts I felt weren't ricochets. I'd taken at least five gunshots, and although harpy-me hadn't stopped to do an inspection, I was pretty sure that not one of them had pieced my skin. Or scales, or fur, or whatever. And military or no military, I intended to try very hard to ensure that harpy-me didn't attack any cities, nor would they find their victims and the police who rescued them quite as dead as they imagined. Looks like things aren't going to go quite how they expect.

Stolen story; please report.

"Fine, if you insist, but I still think it's unnecessary. And how should I know? We're fully paid up with the commissioner this month, and he'd hardly go against the mayor even if we weren't, so some ambitious captain or other must have got their own lead. Maybe that stupid team that started shooting in the middle of a damn street. It wouldn't surprise me if they were seen. They're the ones who brought in twenty-three too, the troublemakers."

I added the police commissioner to my list of known corrupt officials. And what was that about the people who brought me in? I was reminded of Alicia's 'take cover' joke. It sounded like they were following us at that point, waiting for us to get somewhere with no witnesses, but one of them freaked out at Alicia's performance, thinking they'd been spotted, and shot her.

"Don't you blame that on me, brother! Yes, we're supposed to fit the chips immediately, but the mayor ordered us to leave her alone when she started deliberately provoking her metamorphosis, because sedating her would reduce the quality, and then you failed to get us the new batch of chips delivered on time. We didn't have anything to chip her with."

Oh, so speeding my own transformation did cause them problems. I'd still have rather been rescued, but it was nice my efforts didn't go completely to waste.

That seemed to be the end of the guy's argument, and he hung up the phone. It was a pity I hadn't been able to hear both sides, but what I had heard was very interesting. The three of them started moving to get into the car, the two lab technicians remaining silent. It didn't seem like I'd get any more information from spying here.

Should I just let them leave? Try to follow the car? They had hurt so many people... Who knew how many others they'd done this to? He specifically said 'new batch', which meant there were those who came before me. And presumably there would be those who came after. I couldn't just leave them be. While I'd claimed to not be the type to seek personal violent vengeance, it wasn't exactly me in control right now, was it? I didn't need to attack them myself, I just needed to stop resisting harpy-me. And it wasn't 'vengeance' anyway, it was 'saving other kids'.

Harpy-me was starting to get impatient by now, wondering when these people would lead it to the extra food I promised, and even if I wanted to, I couldn't hold it back forever. So I stopped resisting. Harpy-me leapt, and the three weak little humans didn't stand a chance. At the back of the harpy's mind, imprisoned in the body of a monster, I smiled a metaphorical smile to myself as I watched three of my captors get torn apart by their own creation.

And then my metaphorical smile was quickly wiped from my metaphorical face when, despite my efforts to get it to leave the corpses and go hunt something else, it started to eat them.