I awoke to find myself in a typical dark dingy cell. Rubbing the bump on the back of my head, I proceeded heavy footed up to the cell's bars. Looking from my cell, I couldn't see much. There was no occupant in the cell across from mine, and I couldn't see the contents of any of the other cells. Looking around my cell, it wasn’t very big. It was made of stone bricks and looked poorly maintained. There was a empty bucket and a dirty blanket on the floor in the cell. There were no windows; I assumed due to the fact a harpy would have no difficulty escaping from a window, seeing how height makes no difference. Feeling dejected and worn out, I sat down in the corner of the cell and gave into the urge to sleep.
I was awoken by the growl of an angry beast. That angry beast being my stomach. I hadn't eaten or drunk anything since I hatched from my egg. Slowly getting up from my nap, I stretched while yawning. Going against my personal standards I filled the bucket with natures sprinkler, and was disgusted that I couldn’t wash my hands. Ignoring the screaming in my head to wash my hands with non existent soap and water, I walked up to the cell’s bars, “Hey I'm hungry and thirsty in here, Queen Mother said to exile me, not kill me," I screamed at the top of my lungs. At first there was no response, so I continued to scream. Eventually I heard some movement and was greeted by a not so happy looking harpy in armor. She threw something on the floor and placed a pitcher of water down. "Thanks guard lady,” I exclaimed, licking my lips in anticipations of food.
"You can thank me later when I take you to the royal torturer to get your wings clipped, in fact, I should thank you for the show your going to provide me later," she said with the most sinister smile I had ever seen, she then proceeded to give an a insincere bow, and leave. Ignoring her, I went to get my long awaited food. I was not thrilled with the feast she had brought me. The so called food was a sandwich with visibly moldy bread and giant maggots like bugs.
"Ugh," was I could muster at this so called meal. Looking at the pitcher of water, it wasn't much better. It was more mud than water. At first I didn't even consider eating or drinking any of it, but the angry monster, my stomach, and thirst is a powerful motivator. As I picked up the sandwich, which to the guards credit was huge, the maggots started to squirm and thrash around. Holding back my urge to vomit, I told myself it was a sub from Subways. I then took a bite into the stalest bread I had ever eaten. I was greeted by an explosion of maggots innards in my mouth, not all of them died immediately and were squirming in my mouth, only to meet more bites from me.
"This bread is horrible, but these maggots...are delicious. The texture is godly, the flavor is liken to high quality shrimp," I said with utter disbelief in my voice. I happily threw the bread to the side and proceeded to inhale the maggots like they were ice cream. Almost choking, from eating to fast, I took a sip of the muddy water, it was not delicious but I was thirsty so I drunk as much as I could stomach. Normally I would be disgusted at the thought of eating or drinking such things, but I guess harpies have different constitutions and are kind of like birds, at least that is what I told myself. As I was finishing up the tasty maggot like bugs, I could hear some commotion from down the hall.
“I told you for the one hundredth time, I wasn‘t stealing , I was retrieving the book for the library!” screamed an unfamiliar voice.
“Yeah, yeah, and for the hundredth time, I don‘t care. Tell it to the judge not me,” said the guard harpy, with utter annoyance in her breath.
My cell was opened and a harpy was throne in. The cell was immediately closed, “Have fun with our little sibling, talk its ear off instead,” the guard said with a smirk, and quickly departed.
Looking towards the new harpy, our eyes happened to lock. There was awkward silence for a couple moments. I decided to break the ice by saying something.
“Hello sister,” was what I said in the best little girl voice I could muster. Which was not hard seeing how young I was. Pretending to be a girl seemed like it was the smartest decision. She looked at me for a second before she left out a sigh of relief and her shoulders drooped down.
“Hello, why is one as young as you in here?” she said head cocked to the side. I replied with, “I was hungry, so I might have taken some food that wasn‘t mine.”
In my previous life there were a number of things I was truly good at. There were even things I was truly great at. Lying and manipulating were things I was almost a master at. Being good at what I was, there was no way in hell I was going to tell her why I was really in jail.
Looking at her she looked like all the other harpies I had seen, brown feathers brown hair, except she was a tad shorter than harpies I had seen so far, barely 5 ft tall, and had a book worm aura around her.
“Why are you here sister?”, I asked with my new signature puppy dog eyes. Being young has its advantages, I secretly though. She sighed again before she shook her head and slapped her cheeks.
“One of our sisters borrowed one of the library books and took her sweet time returning it, so I broke into her house to get it back, however I’m not an expert thief of any kind and physical activities aren’t my strong suit so I was caught easily.”
“You like books sister?” I asked with interest in my voice.
As soon as I said that, her whole demeanor changed and she perked up. Gotcha, I though inwardly while ginning.
“I love books, that’s why I‘m the flock’s head librarian,” she said glowingly with pride.
“Have you read a lot of books?” I asked her hoping she would take the bait and give me information.
And give me information she did. She, Windy which I later found out her name was, liked books a lot and loved to talk about anything book related. It didn’t take much egging on for her to ‘voluntarily’ tell me everything I wanted to know. I will spare you the three hour conversation I had with her and tell you the summary.
The name of the planet I’m on is called Faden, the continent we are on is Eden. The time and year system are eerily similar to earths. There 12 months in a year, 4 weeks in every month ,7 days in a week and each day is 24 hours. The days of the week all called firstday secondday, thirdday, etc. The months are called firstmonth, secondmonth, etc. The money is copper, silver, and gold coins. With 100 copper equaling 1 silver and 100 silver equaling 1 gold. The mountain range we are on is known as Harpy mountain, due to the fact it boast the largest harpy population. Our town is called Faley, which is Queen Mothers’ real name. Our flock is currently the second most powerful of all the flocks. Harpies can live for a varying length of time dependent on their evolution path. With humanlike life span being the minimum. I also learned there are very few harpy queens.
For a harpy to become a queen she must be at least 500 years old, and must pass so kind of trial. There were a lot of other requirements, but Windy didn’t know them, due to secrecy surrounding them . It turns out that harpy queens are the only harpies that can reliably have children. Normal harpies were borderline infertile, with a rare non harpy queen successful pregnancy happening very rarely. Let me rephrase that, all harpies were capable of getting pregnant and laying eggs. However, most non harpy queen laid eggs, were stillborn. In the flock I was born in, all the current harpies are children of Queen Mother. Apparently once a harpy becomes a Queen Harpy, she gets a crazy urge to mate with strong males for a month, called Heat of the Queen month. So she goes on a journey and proceeded to bang every strong male she can find.
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Queen harpies, and any female harpy, have a very strange constitution, no matter what the male they mate with is, the child will always be a harpy, without fail. On another note, a queen harpies doesn’t lay one eggs like a normal harpies, she lays anywhere from 20 to 100. A queen harpy can also get pregnant from multiple males. It is not uncommon for harpies in the same egg batch to have different fathers. A harpy queen can also use any ‘samples’ from a male she has received for the rest of her life to get pregnant wherever the need arises, like after a war where her flock loses a lot of members. This mean a queen harpy can sleep with a male, collect his ‘sample’ and get pregnant with said ‘sample’ hundreds of years later. Harpy’s pregnancy last about 2 months, were a queen harpy‘s pregnancy last about a year. The eggs take 5 years to mature and hatch. They start the size of a chicken eggs and become the size of large dinosaur egg.
This world or dimension is vastly different from my old one, in that it has a sort of rpg system to it. There are magic, monsters, dragons, and all other kind of medieval fantasy things. It turns out those windows popping up that I had been ignoring, a habit I got from playing virtual reality games, was this worlds way of telling me I got a skill, trait, or leveled up. Its seemed harpies are considered monsters, therefore once we reached a certain requirement we evolve, into stronger forms. The bare minimum for evolution is being max level, which is 100. Meeting only the basic requirements takes you down the basic, weakest, evolution path. Although there are cases of monster reaching level 100 and not evolving. If you meet certain requirements as a monster can evolve into a variant species or even a subspecies, which are far stronger than their basic counterparts. For example a harpy is born a hatchling, which then normally becomes a harpy, which then becomes a high harpy. However if a hatchling has a affinity for ice magic instead of becoming a harpy they may become a ice harpy, which can then become a frost harpy. Both of which have a ice magic mastery and have the ability to breath a frost breath. I’m currently a hatchling variant, male.
While normal humanoid species, like human, elves and the like don’t evolve they can still stand on equal footing with monsters with their classes and class ups. Upon reaching level 100 in their class, said class will upgrade and this, like evolution, can repeated multiple time. Raising ones level gets progressively harder after each evolution or class up the stronger you get.
Now I’ll talk about skills and traits. One can acquire traits and skills through a multitude of different ways. Skills and can be learnt through repeated actions, study, practice, can be taught, or even acquired through rare magic skill books. Skills includes things like magic spell, healing abilities, special attacks, and such. While traits where more on the passive side, like tough skin, or improved vision. Skill and trait levels go from novice, basic, intermediate, expert, master, and finally grand master. Not all skill and traits have levels.
It turns out the mark of greatness I received is a really amazing thing. It gave me a trait called greater potential which ,like the name says increases my potential. It also grants the trait skill mutation which has a chance to grants bonus skills and traits whenever I acquired a skill or trait. For example if I acquired fire mastery, the mark might change it to holy fire mastery, or it might even give me fire resistant with it.
Now on to male harpies. Most of the information on male harpies was destroyed when the tradition to exile male harpies was first installed. So most things said about male harpies is conjecture, so the information was far from reliable. From what Windy says it was a known fact that all male harpies were 100% infertile. It seems that every time a male harpy was born, they would bring misfortune to their flock. While normal, female, harpies have a tendency towards violence, they do have a semblance of self control. Male harpies on the other hand seemed to have a incredibly hard time with self control. Most would eventually lose all control to their primal desires and would become beings of pure violence and lust. There were many famous male harpy serial murders and rapist in harpy culture. She even told me that harpies use male harpies as some sort of bogey man to scare misbehaving hatchlings.
It seemed that a male harpies have a sort of innate defect in them. They have an incredible urge to leave behind offspring and their inability to, causes some sort of internal conflict, that eventually seems to drive them crazy.
The last known and most famous of the male harpies, the one that brought on the exile tradition, was at one point in his life, was hailed as a war hero to harpies. It seems that in a war the harpies had against their sworn enemy, hawk people, he was a major factor in defeating them. Hawk people unlike harpies, had the heads of birds and complete humanlike bodies while having wings on their back. They were made up of men and women. The war was believed to have started when the hawk people started attacking the harpies unprovoked. The last known male harpy, named Hope, went most of his whole life, without any signs of losing control, but it seems that it was all a ruse. Harpies wouldn’t have found out his true nature, if it wasn’t for the disappearance of several hawk women war prisoners from jail. At the time the harpies thought that they had escaped and immediately started a search party to find them.
The search party’s search led them to Hope’s house. Slight screams of pain could be heard from inside. Fearing the escaped hawk women were attacking Hope, the party burst into his house, only to find no one inside, but slight screams could still be heard. After searching the residence the party came upon a secret door that led downward to a concealed basement. In said basement was a door where the screams seemed to be coming from. Upon opening the door the party came upon a truly horrifying scene. Inside Hope was currently torturing and raping a hawk woman. Her arms and legs had been cut off and he was currently in a sadistic cycle of using fire magic to burn her face only to use healing magic on her right after. There was blood, skeletons, and egg shells everywhere and a prison filled with dozens of mutilated hawk women and harpies. It seems he had been kidnapping hawk women for a long time and that was the reason the hawk people started attacking. He had been experimenting on ways for himself to have children. Seeing that his secret had been found out, he went on a daring escape killing dozens of harpies in the process, only to been killed by the queen harpy of that time. I asked Windy why not just kill all male harpies as a preventive. Windy said the problem is in harpy societies everyone is related, so the rules are more forgiving. There are rules that a harpy can’t be killed if they have committed no crime. So their only option was to clip the wings of any male harpy born and exile him to a place where they are likely to die.
After Windy finished I was a little shaken up. I mean, I don’t want to become some kind of monster. No, I won’t become a monster, I have 22 years of intelligence and self control. I’m no ordinary harpy. I’ll be fine, at least I hope, I thought to myself thinking to my uncertain future.
Author's note: This is a world building chapter. Next chapter are main character will be having a not so fun time. As always if you see any mistakes please point them out.