[Player Log Start!]

[Log Start: Terence Glasgow]

[Level: 2]

Humans were still alive.

That was… unexpected. And also not. Of course all humans couldn’t be dead dead. They needed to fix the Apocalypse, after all. This was- this was a new step. A chance to grab onto and gather new allies.

“Okay, our circumstances are… more extreme than that, even.” Jared promised them, and even he was shaken, as unflappable as he regularly was. To be fair, he had been getting a hell of a lot more flappable these days.

“But we’ll only speak with trustworthy folks.” Terry signed.

Jared nodded eagerly, “Yeah. What he said. And what he said was… we’ll only speak with trustworthy folks. Which does not include lower-level birds. Such as yourselves. Dreadfully sorry about that.”

The birds were obviously displeased by this statement. So much so that they were all fluffing up their feathers and letting out low chirrups. Even his Nature Affinity wasn’t needed to tell Terry that they were gearing up for war. He wasn’t looking forward to shredding them all over again, but if needs must…

“Look. At the magic cat-eared boy.” Asadullah interrupted, waving his hands around as he pointed to his ears, “You guys like these, right? Very eye-catching. Just wanna… I dunno. Look at them? The others were brought around by this.”

The crows all spun around to look at him, their eyes becoming almost impossibly beadier and shinier. One even dropped forward to pull at his ear. Asadullah winced and swatted at it, to no avail. The crow latched on and kept on tugging, as if it could dislodge the ear.

Terry had to threateningly lift his mold-encrusted glove to get it to back off. That thing had been on for way too long. He didn’t want to take it off, but it felt almost unhealthy at this point.

“You have magics?” The crow who had nearly pulled off Asad’s ear asked in bird tongue.

“Riiight, did we forget to mention the magic part?” Jared grinned slyly, “At this point, it’s hard to keep track of what surprises anyone and what doesn’t. But, yeah, we have magic.”

“And you turned this cat human with said magic?” The crow asked.

Asadullah crossed his arms, his tail puffing up like a bottlebrush, “I am not a cat.” He swore, “And have never been a cat.”

“Not even half-cat?” Terry asked from beside him with his fingers, “Or, like, I mean… how does a djinn even work? Does it have some amount of cat DNA in it?”

“I don’t know what DNA is.” Asadullah told him with all the confidence of someone nearly two hundred years behind Terry’s world in scientific progress, “But djinn aren’t any part cat. They transform on the outside. Not the inside. And I’m not part-djinn either. It wraps around me and gives me a new appearance. Sometimes it feels like we’re the same person, we’re so in sync, but we’re really not.”

Terry nodded, biting at his lips, “That… that makes sense.” His eyes drifted down to look at the golden bands wrapped around his arm, with blood red bangles shifting on his forearm in between the metal ones. Sunlight bounced off it, and a hairline crack caught it.

He squinted at it, trying to look at it carefully, but then Asadullah pulled it out of view.

“We have a lot of magic at our fingertips.” Jared continued, “We’ll be sure to show it off for you if you’ll cooperate with us. And try not to throw us into the fledgling pit in an attempt to get us to fly. We are humans. We can’t fly.”

The birds hawed and cawed, with Hookbeak grumbling in bird-talk, “We know that now. This particular flock of the Island Corps has been trained to deal specifically with humans. And we learnt that after the first group of humans.”

“…Reassuring!” Jared beamed, cheeks straining against the smile, “Are you taking the offer, or not? We can trade secrets between each other. Magic explosions for information.”

“We must converse with the higherups.” Limshaw replied, “Tell us where to reach you, so that once the okay is given, we will be able to notify you.”

“We’re not telling you that. Humans aren’t as stupid as you seem to think.”

“But while we’re asking you questions, tell us more about these people.” Asadullah grinned, chin resting on his hand, “Where are they? How can we find them? Are there people around here?”

The crows let out a volley of laughter, almost obscuring themselves with translations and behavior interpretation brackets. After much shouted discussion, Limshaw spoke in English again, “None of those questions are answerable, whether by our own volition or simply that we don’t know.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Terry and Asadullah exchanged glances proving exactly how bullshit they both thought that answer was.

“Meet you here in a week.” Jared negotiated to the crows, his eyebrow twitching.

“What’s a week?” One of the crows asked Limshaw.

“Seven days! Or do you not know what a day is?”

“No need to get snippy on us, Mx. We’re just working with our current system. None of your primitive and inefficient calendar-keeping methods. We prefer ten-day cycles.”

Jared nodded, bringing his hand up for a salute, “In ten days, we’ll meet back here. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“You… wanna shake on it? What’s the crow custom for making binding agreements?”

“Contracts. But a few seconds of intense eye contact will suffice.”

And then the birds were all taking off, flying far into the distance. Or… he thinks that’s what they did. Just to make sure, he turned to Asadullah and signed, “Are they really gone?? Make extra sure.”

Asadullah nodded, glaring as he looked around, his nose doing that adorable thing where it turned triangular and pink and furry stripes started coming from around it.

He gave a thumbs up to Terry, surveying the land, before lying his right hand flat, with his left hand perpendicular to it, before pulling it to the side, curling his fingers into a fist.

Terry blinked, staring at the gesture. Asadullah wasn’t even looking at him, still looking around. But then his eyes drifted back, “Did I… did I do this wrong?” He asked, “This was meant to say… ‘All Gone’.”

Terry smiled and nodded, “I know.” He agreed.

Behind them, Jared threw his head back and screamed, making them both jump away from each other, ready to attack the threat.

“What’s wrong?” Terry signed, edging the layer of plastic off his mold-eaten glove.

Jared gave them a dirty look, “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just… I hate you two.” He scoffed, marching away.

Asadullah’s big brown eyes were wide, quick to water, “What did we do?” He asked.

Terry shook his head, teeth worrying his bottom lip as he signed, “No idea.” He thought for a moment, before suggesting, “Maybe he’s jealous.”

“Jealous of what?” Asadullah asked, the tip of his tail flicking, “Because we’re friends? He’s got pretty cool friends, too. No need for him to be jealous.”

If they didn’t need any further confirmation that this imagined tension was, well, imaginary, there you had it, ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between. But Terry just shook his head and tugged the protective covering back over the mold glove, “Verity’s been unconscious for a really long time now. He’s going through it, you know? Gives him a short fuse.”

“That’s not an excuse to be an asshole.”

“And I’m sure he’ll clean up his act when we get back to find her safe and sound, and this entire situation resolved.” He soothed, turning around to catch Jared’s attention, who was looking steadfastly away from them. It took more than a few frantic claps, but the boy eventually came around, raising an eyebrow as Terry continued to sign, “Did you see any of that?”

“No. Because I was looking away. Thought you noticed.”

“I am not above hitting a sad boy.” Terry told him sternly. Or- well- you get it. He never really had a head for such speech tags, “You don’t get to have a little freak out in the middle of enemy ground, so pull yourself together before I do it for you.”

Jared took a breath, “Wow… when did you become such an asshole?” He asked, coldly.

“When did you?”

His mouth lilted into a smile, “Oh, I’ve always been an asshole. Just took you guys long enough to notice.”

Silence hung in the air between them as Terry stared at him, taking in this statement. It was like Jared was waiting for him to make the next move. To… react in some explosive manner. Already there was a shield going up behind his eyes. It was an expression familiar on Verity but not Jared. Never Jared.

But instead, he pinched the bridge of their nose, “Great. You’re doing emo shit now. I literally couldn’t care less. I mean…” He floundered, his impatience and courage failing him again, “I do care! I hope you work through whatever you’ve got going on. But… this is interfering with the mission. And the-”

“Mission takes priority.” Jared finished for him, sighing, “I’m losing my touch if you’re repeating my own advice back to me.”

Wait, Jared had been the one to say that? A lot of the things the others had said during the early days swum around in his memory now. But he had more tact than to say that while they were having a moment, so he simply nodded and kept his mouth shut.

Jared seemed to be doing a lot better now. Or at least, calmer. As he took a deep breath. “Sorry… been out of it lately. I’ll pull myself together. Can’t have the head people person be losing his touch.” A jaunty tip of his head, and then he was marching away.

“You’re going the wrong way!” Asadullah called out to him. Jared turned around and continued wading through the ocean as if nothing had happened.

“This is going to happen a lot, isn’t it?” He signed to Asadullah, who laughed and nodded.

The sky was darkening with alarming speed, now resembling dark mustard, as the sun balanced on the horizon, threatening to dip under at any moment. The islands continued to stretch in front of them, the skyline unchanging no matter where they ended up.

Ahead of them, Jared was picking his way through waist-deep waves with his crutches.

He didn’t know why they decided to do this now, but they found his hand – the not-moldy one – drifting down, fingers curling around Asadullah’s. He didn’t respond verbally, but he did tighten his hand around his, claws digging into Terry’s skin for a millisecond, before retracting deep into his skin.

It was a sweet moment. If slightly marred by when he drifted too far from an islet and nearly slipped into the ocean depths that lay between each miniscule landmass.

“God, be careful.” Asadullah laughed, hoisting him up more securely, so they were walking side by side.

“Just keep a lookout, Mano.” Terry replied.

His nose scrunched up for a moment, making it obvious that he had forgotten about that part. The close proximity gave Terry the opportunity to feel the bangles brush up against his arm. And he was not imagining it.

Asadullah’s bangles were cracked. Small, fragile, barely even something they could feel on their bare skin, but it was definitely there.

The question was how did it happen? And was Asadullah even aware of what had happened to him?

[Player Log End!]