Side Story: The Purpose Of Wings

A masked creature from beyond the world had assured Selen she wouldn't immediately die in her next life. She had a completely new body, one with feathers and a beak and talons, and no idea where she was. So when the Duke's men questioned her in a stuffy, musky stone room about who had robbed her, Selen claimed amnesia. She bore no false witness against people she'd never met, in a universe not her own.

One of her interrogators was pointy-eared with hair like green vines, dressed in somber grey and black. He spoke calmly when he re-entered the room. He had taken a long break after the first hour of questioning. "Please repeat what you said about the 'other world', miss Selen."

Selen had told the truth about that, too. "I remember things about a world with no magic and a lot of machines. I could tell you specific things about what countries it had, and what the map looked like." She had related bits and pieces about it already. The main thing she was holding back was that it wasn't just some fever dream, but her knowledge of the real world. Or at least the one she'd been born in.

The green-haired man gave her another skeptical look. "Your lack of memory is convenient, and your imagination bizarre. But you don't register as lying. You really know nothing of the Scaled Nation?"

"No, sir."

He spoke quietly with his colleague, an unsmiling woman in black who'd said little. He concluded: "We'll continue investigating the theft in our own way. In light of your family's good standing, you're hereby released. Return home."

Selen glanced toward a rack of iron tools that had been looming this whole time in one corner, unmentioned and unused. She shuddered and said, "Thank you. Can you show me where that is?"

The man peered at her once more, saying, "Hopefully you will at least remember the Duke's mercy." He turned away and whistled.

An automaton walked into the room. It was an elegant skeleton wreathed in vines and white flowers, smelling of oil and pollen. Intricately carved boxes studded its yellow-white cage of a body. A sort of robot? Undead? Whatever it was, it studied her with eyes of tinted glass.

"What is that?" said Selen.

"A Woven," said her interrogator.

As Selen stared, one of this world's bizarre "System" messages appeared before her in glowing letters: [Woven.] Selen had asked earlier what her questioner was, and the System echoed his answer by telling her, [Elf.]

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"Take this girl to the Two Hoots and release her."

The Woven nodded stiffly, and beckoned to Selen. Tiny bells chimed when it moved. Selen got up from the iron chair to follow it.

Selen's tail brushed against it. She had a fan of feathers trailing behind her, matching the pale ones covering most of her body. She stood on feet with four talons, one facing backward, and her hands were similar collections of spindly claws. But her arms were also wings, as though she wore very loose sleeves. She laughed, and it came out as a chirp.

The Woven was waiting, and only the interrogation room lay behind her. Selen walked onward with the strange bobbing gait she'd been given.

#

They blindfolded her and had the skeleton creature lead her somewhere, several times steadying her from falling. "Do you talk?" she asked her captor.

"I haven't been told to speak with you," it said, in a voice like bells in a whistling wind.

"Sorry, I don't know anything. Were you built by somebody?"

"Yes."

It didn't answer her other questions, and only let her stagger along its confusing route. The blindfold came off. She stood in the light of a bright moon... and a second moon like a copper coin. A medieval cityscape of towers surrounded her, the most prominent right ahead. Cold breeze rippled her feathers and made her stagger back, not used to the force.

Her escort said, "You may go."

"This is my home?"

It looked back at her, expressionless, its eyes reflecting moonlight. "I don't know if your condition is real. You seem impossibly ignorant."

"Ha, yeah," she said, figuring out how to bend one wing-arm to scratch her head. "I don't even know your name."

The Woven hesitated, then said, "I am City Defender Three. In time I might be something else. Good night, Aves, and keep out of trouble." It turned and began walking away with a faint whirr and jingle.

"Good night," she said, alone again. A whole city loomed around her, and a new world beyond that.

She walked up to the stone tower's broad double door. A sign above it had a logo of crossed feathers and the name "Two Hoots". It was then that Selen finally realized that the writing wasn't in her native English, and nor was any of what she'd just said or heard. Her new beak hung open and she mentally reached for the old words, as for a weapon at her side. Speaking aloud she said, "When in the course of human events... hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium... Mercury, Venus, Earth."

She remembered Earth and the laws of science and her homeland, and felt vertigo at the fact that she might be very far from any of them. She had died and found herself somewhere outside reality, offered a chance to take over for someone who passed away in another world. A ghoulish choice, to wear somebody else's skin, but she'd been assured that the original owner of this bird-girl's body had already moved on to whatever normally awaited souls in this place. And that to answer her next question, she was in no sense willingly signing away her own.

"Are you God?" she'd asked the masked creature called "System". Its cloak and mask hid a sense of distant light.

"Not as you see things. You may call me System. Now, here are six prospective lives. Do any interest you?"

Now, Selen had the option of running away from the family and society she apparently had inherited. "System" had dropped her into the new world with little explanation. All in all, she'd gotten a good deal so far. There was much to see.