Cas was excited.
No, like, really excited, more excited than she'd ever been in this life or her last.
Because, studies usually didn't end like this. Cas had ran and participated in over a dozen research studies over the course of her career. Studies where an entire staff worked months straight of all nighters, studies where graduate students poured their blood sweat and tears and tenured professors sacrificed their marriages because they were so obsessed with getting results. She'd participated in studies where they'd spent a hundred grand on a single machine and chopped off the heads of ten thousand mice... only to end up with nothing.
That was the nature of most things, Cas had accepted. No result, inconsequential results, a discovery that your life's purpose did not, in fact, matter. It was a racket.
Consequently, Cas was a pessimist when it came to this sort of thing. Privately, in her heart, despite what she'd told the villagers and what she'd allowed Kari to believe, Cas never once hedged that she'd discover the source of the problem, or that it would be fixable even if she had. She never allowed herself to believe that this could end in anything remotely pretty.
That was in the past, now.
Cas felt the sublime ease of having a great weight lifted off her shoulders as she lifted her eye-stalk skywards, looking up at the dark-spire.
It was a tall form silhouetted against the moonlight and casting a black shadow that cut the desert in half. The shadow was dark, but all around it, Cas could see millions of twinkling lights where the slimes's numbers reached their night time peak. They were smart enough, most of them, to time their over-ground movements during the cool hours. It was a beautiful sight, though the distance obscured any details of what went on near the tower.
A short snort, followed by a constipated cough interrupted Cas's musings. Cas had sealed off her tent body to keep the night air out... perhaps a bit too well, she noticed, as she looked through the transparent housing and saw a dense, suffocating fog building up on her interior. Flexing her figure, two flaps opened up at either side of the tent, moving like palm fronds to usher fresh air into the space.
Drowsily, Kari blinked her eyes open, looking annoyed. "Whatszis-" she murmured, looking up at the crystal eye sat perched in the upper beam of the tent.
Cas's first instinct was to shake the girl awake and scream the good news into her ears, but something stopped her. The girl, bleary eyed and clumsy, as she rolled back over herself to get into a comfortable position, reminded Cas a lot of her little sister. Perhaps, she'd been treating the girl too familiarly, Cas realized. It had been easy to treat the girl as a sidekick when she was a ball of slime, and even easier in some ways when she took on a human form. Cas now played the part of a sentinel, standing guard over the girl. It reminded her that the girl's friendship wasn't so simple. Cas was maybe the only person in her life she could grasp a hold of, after all.
It wasn't her place to share the heartache and disappointment of setbacks because Cas shared too much too early.
Still, as the last remnants of wakefulness drained out of the girl, Cas couldn't help but whisper: "Hey... hey, Kari. I think I found a way to fix this. I think everything's going to be ok..."
Kari's reply was clear despite her weak voice. "Hmm... I wish you hadn't." she replied sleepily, the reply coming automatically and with no forethought that could've implied deception. "I wish you'd just..." and the girl drifted away.
----------------------------------------
Flying was easy once you lost eighty-five pounds.
A gentle flap of her wings, one that left Cas straining like she was deadlifting the entire sky, and her body rose another foot into the air, gliding forward at a trotting pace. Another, herculean effort to force her massive wings down, and another gentle glide upward. It was amazing how suddenly take-off happened. A dozen failed designs, hundreds of minute adjustments, and all it took was this.
Flight was more a matter of altitude than height, Cass had realized. The last two days of practice had been her gradually extending the length of her agonizing descents from the top of a tree. But, gliding only turned into flying once you could gain altitude yourself. As long as each wing flap could just give her an inch of altitude... well, then she could go and touch the sky, getting there one inch at a time.
The desert below her was a giant baking pan, and Cas was only ten feet along when updrafts of hot air rose up to greet her wings.
"Whoaaaa...." Kari's amazed proclamation disappeared into the distance as the world fell a thousand feet below her.
It was a fun ride, if a harrowing. The updraft threw up eddies around her wings, and the headwinds canted her body up into a stall that threatened to flip her in two directions as once. Her, slow, inexperienced reactions to the surprises always came a second too late, and Cas was left in a perpetual scramble to keep her body aloft. All in all, it was an experience that reminded her of drowning in the middle school swimming pool.
Her astounding indifference to the danger of heights helped to keep her calm, however, and soon she'd reached an altitude of calmer winds. Another, heavy wingbeat and Cas relaxed her wings into a soft glide, looking forward and getting comfortable as she aimed for the rock pillar.
...
Cas had made the early mistake of designing her body to look like a bird, rather than trying to make it fly.
Yes, yes, birds do fly, but that's not all they do. Birds needed legs so that they could land, beaks so that they could eat, heads to hold their faces. They needed a large body to hold their heart, lungs, intestines and livers. They had so much crap weighing them down just so they could 'live'.
Cas had no such restrictions. Her body was, in the main, just a giant wing. Two large wings, shaped carefully into ellipses, twisted into arcs that hundreds of trial-runs had in formed, meet neatly in the middle of her body, which spared only a slight bump in order to house her crystal eye. Behind, a small fan of slime, held in place by a triangular skeleton and winching pully-muscles, was formed into an imitation of a bird's tail-feathers.
In the front, a short, thin neck held out a dense sphere of hardened material, hardly larger than a small marble. It was there more for weight distribution than anything else, and Cas hardly paid it any attention.
Above, a stabilizing rudder stuck out of her back like a shark-fin. It was the only appendage without a muscle, relying on Cas's shape change to twist into whatever spiral flight conditions required of it. Thankfully, flight conditions were calm and breezy at this altitude, and Cas was left with very little to occupy her mind for the long flight ahead.
Well, at least, that was the case until character sheet, as if sensing her boredom, popped up to say hi.
New Form Unlocked: Form 1
Would you like to rename?
A naming field blinked under the question, hovering over the new body's stats.
image [https://i.imgur.com/BSPsjM1.png]
image [https://i.imgur.com/m7uipg4.png]
Form 1: Stats.
Vital Stats:
* Health: 55 / 55
* Size: Small
* Armor: 4
* Movement: 60
Core Attributes:
* Constitution: 163
* Strength: 6
* Wisdom: 12
* Intelligence: 33
* Charisma: 48
* Magic Affinity: 5
This notification came with a sudden, sparkling sensation that ran across her body. It was the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of being comfortable in her own skin.
Strange enough to say, but... you know you can move your arm, and it just moves? How you can walk or dance or do any sort of complicated thing and your body just knows how to fire off the hundreds of muscle twitches to get the job done. Cas felt suddenly that she knew how to construct this body. Feeling confident, she turned her eye left, willing her body to bank smoothly... which it did with the hesitating, jerky motions of an amateur. Hmm... she supposed there was no substitute for practice when it came to actually piloting the body, however.
Cas had made it a rule not to glance at her character sheet while she was designing the body, certain that chasing stats would do nothing good for her design process. So, she was surprised to discover that she had Movement: 60 and Charisma 48!
And the charisma was the real charmer. That was higher than her human form!
Movement 60 was surprising considering she was flying at walking speed. Heck, she was an hour into this flight and she was only half way to her destination! The rock was only ten miles away!
Still, she considered, flight alone must've counted for a lot.
...
Cas thought it a shame that she hadn't managed to make her bird-based designs work. If she had, choosing a name might've been so much easier. As it was, ninety minutes into her flight, she stalled, throwing ideas at the wall.
'Kite' as a name, was out. Too childish, Cas considered. 'Spitfire' was too extra. 'Flying machine' sounded dumb. 'Glider lacked creativity."
It was amazing how many thoughts were contained in such a static figure. Cas had designed her body for stability, first of all. She felt every body that she'd glided through the air, and this design sat heavily in the wind, moving with large, lethargic sweeps, reluctant to change direction even when Cas herself tried to get it to. It was, simply put, a glider with training wheels.
Cas was glad for that. The design had saved her from crashing twice already. But, this also came with the unintended side-effect of making her look strange. Unlike most things in the sky, Cas's body flew like a brick statue, staring at it, the only hint of motion in the alien body were the shifting colors running throughout its surface, as red pigment came up to protect it from the hot sun-rays.
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This strange and alien figure, colored like a blood-drop against the blue sky, was quick to attract the attention of eyes trained to see open wounds as weakness.
Cas heard the first vulture before she saw it. The second sense with which she noticed it was touch, as a hard beak knocked lightly against her rudder, wobbling her body with a curious, testing fashion.
Cas had seen no need for a head on this design. So, of course, in her infinite wisdom, Cas didn't allocate a budget for one.
Her eye, she'd figured, could just float around in the center of her body and look around. She only realized her mistake thirty minutes ago, when she tried to look left.
Her underside, a flattened plane -- was an excellent viewbox.
Every other direction on the other hand... the wings to her sides, the dorsal fin up top, the pointed rear and complex head, everywhere around her was a fun-house maze of distortions that made vision quite impossible. So, with the sun arriving and temperatures rising, Cas had felt little compunction about darkening her exterior until it was an opaque, cherry red. Stylish color, not a great design for windows.
As soon as she felt that first knock against her dorsal fin, however, Cas withdrew all the pigment to her interior and looked up. She could see three distorted figures flying in lazy arcs above her, crisscrossing their paths as they scattered up, apparently startled by the sudden color change.
It was difficult to make out any identifying features through the distortion, but Cas could make out enough to tell they had four wings.
'Vultures', the thought came, remembering the circling figures that had apparated above the fallen Calf's corpse. Apparently, they were still hungry, not that Cas had left them anything to eat in the first place.
Feeling bolder, one of the figures descended again, knocking against her rudder with its beak, as if testing the strange vehicle's reaction.
Cas only wobbled in the wind. In fact, it was all she could do. She was barely flying as she was, any shape change or drafting action was out of the question for her unless she wanted to pick up plummeting as a new hobby. She couldn't even shout at them because she didn't have the space inside her body to create a lung, much less vocal chords.
In a grim twist of irony, Cas found herself stranded in the air.
Still, she wasn't worried. They weren't being threatening.
The vultures were circling around her now, and one came into view below. Strange, black-feathers with a furry texture hugged against its body. A head like a snake dangled down on a scaley neck, slitted eyes turning to look back at her.
Cas, felt no panic on account of this. Vultures were scavangers, not active predators.
Glock, glock.
Cas felt herself tilting, talons lightly scraping along her hardened back, as blunt teeth began teething at her dorsal rudder.
Everything was fine. Cas told herself.
CRGMBL.
A strange, crunchy sound, like that of breaking chiken bones sounded as the vulture easily tore away a corner of her rudder. The sudden mangle of her flight surface buffeted the winds around her, and her entire body shook.
Everything was absolutely fine! Cas yelled the thought. They'd back off once they got a taste of her acid!
Flicking her eye up, she could see the lizard-vulture licking it's scaley lips at the taste. Apparently able to stomach her taste. Cas felt she shouldn't have been surprised that a carrion eater could handle something as mild as acid. She was surprised to find that the vulture was willing to share, however, as it raised its head and let out a triumphant caw.
Whatever the vulture was saying, it's partners reacted like they'd just heard a five-star yelp review. The chaotic sound of black wings flapping closed in on Cas, and she could see the light being blotted out as all immediately rushed towards her.
Cas banked her wings, went nose down, and dove.
----------------------------------------
People often made the mistake of conflating diving with falling.
No, diving wasn't falling, not even close.
Falling was falling.
Diving was commitment.
For the first time in a long time, Cas felt the weight of commitment crushing her with sudden vertigo. As she banked down, cresting over the top of her stall, for a split second she recalled the feeling of being in the front seat of a roller coaster, as the whole vehicle shook and you rode slowly up the first crest...
Well, this was kind of like that, if you weren't wearing a seatbelt.
Cas banked down and rushed forward at a blazing... twenty miles per hour. Her own design now turned against her, as the body automatically stabilized itself into a gentle, thirty degree decline that urgently ushered her towards the rock spire at legal speeds. The buzzards fell back for a second, more out of surprise than anything else, Cas was sure, and quickly caught up, flapping gently and flying literal circles around her as they gave a curious chase. Cas found herself frustrated.
Had she still been human, she could have grit her teeth, stamped her feet, broken something or even just cried out for goodness' sake! But here it was, again, that nightmare of being trapped immobile while monsters looked to kill you.
Grack. Grack.
The sound rang hollowly through her interior, as balled up talons repeatedly harried her, knocking against her wings and body, apparently having just as much difficulty trying to destabilize her flight pattern.
Cas, looked away from the vultures, as their distorted figures hovered above her, coming down in turns to harry her. Instead, she focused her attention forward, towards the rock spire, and it was such a focus as she'd never felt before in her life. As far as Cas was concerned, in that moment, nothing existed in the world except for that spire and the plans she had with it.
She dove further, and -- flexing her body -- drew in all the stabilizers she'd grown on the underside of the body, shortening her wings and drawing her weight balance forward.
The changes applied in real time, and she could hear their effects as the air started whistling over the tips of her wings, and the ground started rushing closer. The spire was about a quarter mile ahead of her at this point, and at the speed she was going-
Badum-Badum, Badum-Badum, Badum-Badum.
It wasn't fast enough.
Cass didn't bother looking up, she could hear them. Their four-winged flight heralded them along on an alien rhythm, and -- chancing a glance up -- she could see they'd changed tactics to diving. She caught one just as it came to slam against her wing.
Cas dropped the wing -- shape-changing it so that it sprung in to miss the vulture by a hair. The manuever banked her into a hard right spiral which she rode until she was facing the mountain again. She'd gained speed, and she was almost where she needed to be. The changes she'd made -- hasty, sloppy -- they'd made her faster, but she was no longer flying in any proper sense. The best she could manage now was a controlled fall. The vultures seemed to sense this, backing off as they split apart, each gaining on the other as if hedging on her crash site.
Growing her wing back into place, Cas streamed back into level flight, the excitment of a finish line hitting her as she beelined for the spire and-
WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
The spire and it's constant updrafts had been a bane to her when she'd first climbed it. The wind drew away her moisture and the noise drove her insane, but -- Cas surfed over the top of the spire, rising a third again over it's total height in an unexpected rebound -- Cas thought she could find it in her heart to forgive the mountain.
The spire seemed to act like a giant chimney, directing all the ground-bound winds upward into a massive spiral of air that left Cas feeling like she could see the entire world. Flicking her eye downward, Cas applauded herself gleefully, expecting to see confused, frustrated vultures pecking at the ground or looking confusedly upward.
The vultures were patient and experienced creatures, however. They lived in the sky and had a sense for it that preempted her clever plans. Cas realized this too late when she didn't see any vultures below --
Badum-Badum, Badum-Badum, Badum-Badum.
The sound -- barely heard over the spire's howling updrafts, gave Cas just enough warning to look back before the vulture slammed into her, and sent her tumbling.
----------------------------------------
Falling was a dream.
Her body tumbled around her, but the world was perfectly still. Her eye stabilized itself, and she could see the rest of the body tumbling about its axis as the top of the spire came rushing up. The updrafts only became more intense the closer she came to the roof of the spire, and that slowed her just enough to gather her bearings, spreading out her wings, she arrested her fall, coming to a screetching halt and transitioning to a forward dive. The roof of the spire came up, and her harried, fast flight came to a crashing halt against the ground-draft, transitioning her to a fast flight that just barely kept her from scraping against the top of the spire as she darted across the top and fell off the other side.
It was embarrassing. Despite all this manuevering and desperate gambles on her end, the birds seemed to have no issue keeping a casual pace with her.
Immediately she dove as she came across the edge.
Flying forward several hundred feet to escape the updraft, she banked hard into a wide spiral that slowly dove her down to face the base of the plateau.
Her mind was doing a thousand things as she banked, and twisted and dove and kept a fearful ear out for the diving vultures.
She never turned away, however, from the scanning gaze she shot across the base of the spire. Looking with careful eyes for any strange shadows, for any flashes of darkness for... there!
The cave!
Without a moments hesitation, she drew her wings in, buzzed her rudder down into a decorative thing, and screamed into a hail-mary dive. Gravity pulled her gradually but unceasingly, as the wind picked up into a buffet, then a pitch, then a howl, and then into a noise she'd never heard the wind make before as it streamed over her skin.
Cas wasn't faster than the vultures, she knew. But she outraced them anyway, because she wasn't planning to slow down. She knew she could survive the fall, she just needed to make it into that cave.
BFRBFRBFRFBRBFR
A sound like a piece of paper rattling against the spokes of a bike wheel. Cas turned her eye too late. The top of her right wing was wobbling, looking like water as high speed winds battled against it's surface. Cas barely had any time to appreciate the sight before her wing exploded.
...
Did you know that if you jumped out of a plane at thirty thousand feet, you would hit the ground in around twenty seconds. Cas was one hundred feet off the ground when the disaster occurred. And she'd been diving at the time, too. Two seconds passed in a flash before she crashed.
She had lost half her mass with her wing. She didn't even try to salvage her flight, instead coiling herself up into a tight baseball and hardening. The world went dark as dense, hardened, slime closed around her crystal eye, and two seconds passed in darkness, and in silence, before her crash into the world.
The slime, a ball barely larger a fist, hit the sand like a cannonball, throwing up a line of dust clouds at it skipped across the desert and thudded against the sandstone base of the spire. Bouncing off the wall, it landed softly on the sand, and wobbled there for hardly a second, before a creature hatched from it.
A small, spherical creature unfurled itself from the ball. Four legs, a bar for a spine, and nothing else. It had been a lazy design, one Cas used to get up the tree for test flights.
It was one she'd practiced enough to change into swiftly, and the change couldn't have concluded quickly enough. Just as she righted herself onto four legs, the the vultures landed all around. Stabbing mouths came down in unison, teeth scraping divots into the creature's turtle-shell back.
Cas, not having any of it, barreled past the figures and sprinted wide. Her crash had gone off-kilter from her original destination but the terrain was familiar and she could see the cave opening right there.
The buzzards let out a strange sound, something like the quiet hiss of a lizard mixed with hyena laughter as they pursued on wing. Harsh shadows blinked over her like strobe lights as they passed her, each waiting for another to take the first plunge. They waited too long, however, as Cas made a quick, hobbling right, her clumsy gait just fast enough to curve into the cave as the first buzzard landed.
Cas, running to the far back, met the expected dead end. She turned her eye back, rearing on her hind legs.
The buzzards, snake-necks coiling high into the air in intimidating patterns, walked in drunken motions across the moss-grass. Their lizard faces held very little expressions, except perhaps a cool smirk of satisfaction that she could swear twinged at the edges of their lips. The lead buzzard, a large figure with multiple, harsh scars running down the length of his neck scales, slid forward with a confident expression and hypnotizing eyes. It was strange how quiet the creatures were. The only sound was the soft clicking of their talons, as their massive, puffed up bodies floated across with a ghostly presence.
Scarface reached within inches of her, and slowly pushed forward his coiled head, forked tongue licking out to test her surface.
The vulture never would find out the taste, as white teeth like guillotines smashed around his neck in a violent motion.
It was almost anti-climactic despite the violence of it, the life went out of the vultures eyes in a split moment.
Heavy, basso snarling filled the room as the Zanzibat crunched its jaws around the neck shook its head, sending fitful sprays of hot blood in every direction.
The other two vultures, eyes dilated into perfect circles, stood shock still for a moment before scrambling back in their shock. Their reaction came too late.
Cas, who'd been expecting the show, sprang forward with readiness. A hardened, chisel-like spike stabbed from her forehead, and she rammed it into the ribcage of the nearest living vulture. A strange, empty, deflating sound came from the creature as she slammed it back against its compatriot who -- pinned under their combined weight -- could only manage to lift its its neck before a flashing-tawny streak blew past, leaving it headless.
The vulture's corpse stood with alarming composure for a second, its wings fluttering senselessly as a red fountain bubbled from the top of it's neck.
Then, stumblingly, like a drunk, it took one, slow step then three fast ones before it collapsed, and expired.
The fox spat out the head in it's snout with a snort, looking at her with only half the disgust it had reserved for the vultures.
Cas looked at the Zanzibat, her oldest friend, her savior, and said to it the words she reserved for her closest friends:
Looking at the pile of vulture corpses, Cas asked: "Are... you gonna eat this?"