NOVEL SIMPLE 71 - A fair observation
Claire had surged to her feet with an utterly incomprehensive stare and immediately snapped her jaws aggressively at the sky several times before she seemed to actually wake up. David watched her slowly close her jaws, relax, and blink with extreme slowness before she started sniffing around for him in the dark.
“Claire!" David barked again, “The fucking stars are wrong! Look, look!"
Claire yawned enormously before picking at her snout with a tiny clawed arm and straightening up, “David. Shut up. Give me a second, Jesus."
David nearly exploded from the sheer volume of suppressed words he held in as Claire slowly woke up, grumbling about coffee and cigarettes the entire time. By the time she finally seemed to perk up and be present in the moment, David had thoroughly mulched the ground under his talons in anxiety. She swung her snout around to point directly at him, and to his credit, David barely even noticed the flutter of fear that naturally accompanied being skewered directly by the gaze of such a large reptile. He lunged across the ground like a liquid shadow, slithering through the darkness to leap into the embrace of a nearby scraggly tree.
Seconds later his upper body popped out of the foliage around Claire's eye level. He gestured wildly at each of the distant lights in turn as Claire gave him an amazingly deadpan look, not caring to follow his wild gesturing in the slightest.
“Nope. Too tired." Claire snarled groggily, “Just spit it out, small words.”
David flattened his ears at her but did just that, "There’s weird stars now. Red, Blue, Green, Purple, and Gold. Those colors sound familiar for any reason?”
“Mmmmm, no." Claire started with an unpleasant lilt to her voice before pausing, “Wait. Aren't those the System colors for uh…”
"Offense, Defense, Restoration, Control and uh… Utility, probably. Maybe. I have no idea. There are a lot of categories, and now feel kinda dumb, but that's still not normal! ” David ranted as he pointed again, slowly this time, at each in turn.
Claire grudgingly turned to squint at the sky until she finally picked out each of the out-of-place lights. She stared hard for a few minutes then simply nodded, turned, and took a few weary steps to lay back down with a thump. David was left limply pointing at the sky with a wounded expression on his toothy face, red eyeshine gleaming brightly in the darkness all around him as Claire yawned again and gave him a pointed look.
“Yeah, that's fucky. I don't like it." Claire rumbled as she began making herself comfortable, “That said, I can't do a damn thing about it. If they were falling on us right now, I still wouldn't be able to do anything about it. So I'm going to go back to bed, and tomorrow we can start hauling ass for the Observatory."
“Hopefully, it won't be so far gone that the huge-ass old vintage telescope they keep as an antique still works. Because I sure as shit don't know how to work a radio telescope, nor can I fart electricity.” Claire continued as she seemed to dwell on her last sentence before speaking hesitantly, "I bet there's a Mutagen for that, actually. Wouldn't surprise me.”
"But…fine. I guess you're right." David groaned as he tossed himself out of the tree like a sandbag. He landed with a small bounce, smacking grumpily at a tuft of grass on his way back to the spot he'd been sitting in since the sun went down. He flopped down into the thick foliage and sulked, shooting angry glances at the new lights in the sky from time to time.
“They make me want to smack them out of the sky for some reason." He admitted finally, “I don't know if they're good or bad but I know they're not natural, and it bothers me."
“More or less than turning into a giant bat monster?" Claire mumbled from where she was curled into a rough ball, already falling asleep again. By the time David turned at the slurred tone of her voice, she was already out, hissing softly with every breath. He was torn momentarily between being annoyed at how she always did that, and extreme envy at her ability to fall asleep whenever she felt like it, no matter how stressful the situation.
Less, I can at least wrap my senses around this freaky ass shit all over the place. See it, poke it, eat it if I'm feeling spicy, run from it if I need to. Those up there? Who fucking knows, that's new-new. I'd bet my wings those are either the Overseers…or maybe those Originators. Pretty sure the last time some fuckery came cruising by you could see from the dirt, it caused one of those mass extinctions Omega was so enthused with. Claire’s dinosaur-ish…, she should know better! Unbelievable. She’s right about the Observatory though, that’s a priority now rather than a vague goal.
David chittered to himself soundlessly as his body continued to reject sleep in all its forms and decided to get a little bit of practice in. He stood, shaking himself out of habit, and flapped upward with a single wingbeat before rising soundlessly into the air. He took a few minutes to fly in lazy figure-eight patterns above Claire, testing his new wings before trying anything fancy, happy to learn that he was much more responsive in the air. The increase in wingspan was a blessing and a trial, and he struggled for a while to adjust to his new turn speed.
Okay, longer wings are better for gliding for sure. Picks up the wind really fast though, that’s going to take some getting used to. I’ll have to flap more on the turns, I think, and when there are no updrafts anywhere for me to exploit, but that’s not a problem. It’s not like there aren’t always updrafts around, you can kind of tell where they’ll be by the clouds sometimes. Okay, now we practice a bit.
David leaned into the turn, evening out before he soared over Claire’s sleeping spot as he glided toward the small pond only a dozen yards from where she had chosen to bed down. He chittered out a few Echolocations into the area ahead of him before choosing a target at random, the muscles in his neck clenching violently as he spat a blindingly quick dart of saliva at the head of one of the cat tails. Between the angle of his approach, the wind, and the way the reed was swaying he missed spectacularly, with the attack scything through a few of the plants behind it. David watched them fall in exquisite slow motion, captured by the returning waves of his special as he huffed indignantly and tried again. This time the attack went high, continuing onward until it lost enough speed that gravity tore it apart and it dripped to the ground in patchy blobs over a long distance. David sighed, spiraling upwards with a few flaps as he hit the end of the pond and began to glide back around for another run.
What was it Dad said about leading targets...gotta compensate for wind and movement...maybe a little more oomph next time?
David clenched his neck muscles, expelling a thin stream of saliva that pocked the surface of the pond. An overcompensation, but progress nonetheless, and he grinned grimly, banking into another spiral to line up his next shot. He found himself sucking oddly on his tongue as he maneuvered himself into position, but it felt right so he just let it happen with a bit of a mental shrug. He continued to pulse the area ahead of him and attempted to aim via the returning images rather than entirely trusting his eyes.
On his next pass, David led the target more, picturing the swaying cattail's path in his mind's eye and overlaying it with the complex map from Echolocation. He released a concentrated saliva burst...which landed just short, exploding in a small spray of water droplets. Closer, but his range was still off.
Okay, a hair more power...and Pew!
This time the projectile sailed true, smashing through the cattail's thin stem and sending the downy seedhead tumbling. David let out a chittering squeak of triumph, his wings beating powerfully as he celebrated with an aerial somersault. He quickly evened out and spiraled up into the air again, wiggling happily at having finally landed a single shot, already imagining what he could do at full potential.
He settled into a groove, strafing run after strafing run along the pond's perimeter, gradually improving his aim every time, and he threw in a few bombing runs and long-distance passes for good measure. Misses became anomalies rather than the norm as he dialed in the appropriate lead and force for shots at varying ranges and angles by simple trial and error. Even when the shots didn’t land with enough force to instantly cut down the stalks, they still landed, and David was confident that it’d count for applying some of the debilitating effects he produced.
After demolishing the better part of the cattail patch, David turned his attention to more evasive targets; the unpleasant sting-tailed dragonflies still zipping back and forth over the water and rising angrily from the toppled vegetation. At first, his shots went wildly awry, failing to predict the frenetic direction changes. But with a fair bit of focus, and some slight cheating by watching how Spooky did it a few times when presented the opportunity, he steadily grasped the knack for leading and tracking his miniature adversaries.
By the time the sky had started to lighten in the east so imperceptibly that a non-nocturnal animal never would have noticed, David finally landed. He was panting, and his mouth was so ferociously dry that he had to restrain himself from simply swishing his jaws in the water before he began to drink. His tongue flicked out the moment that he felt the cool mud of the shore squishy beneath his hind feet, and he zoned out for a long moment as he guzzled an enormous amount of water without stopping.
Damn, I think I almost dehydrated myself there. Almost feel sick, I should have realized if I spent that long spitting nonstop I’d run out of water eventually. Heheh, I can actually hear it sloshing around in there, these senses are crazy fun sometimes.
David shimmied a bit from side to side as he snickered at the sound, reminding himself of a half-full water jug being shaken to determine how much it held. He stretched his wings, happy to find that despite the time he’d spent in the air the sturdy new limbs weren’t even the least bit sore. If anything they felt stronger than when he’d begun, the corded muscles standing out menacingly beneath the fur, and David spent a few moments admiring himself shamelessly before he chuckled. Two powerful bounces and a short glide brought him to the area he’d already stomped down a sleeping spot in and he slowly settled down, pulling a wing up over his face.
That was kinda fun. It’s a good starting point at least, having to scream at things to get the opportunity to start hitting them with status effects was rough. Having two ranged abilities will be nice too, most people don’t even have one. Really have a lot of good options to get my…what did Claire call ‘em, ailments? I think I like afflictions better, that's what the System calls them. Oh! What happens if I lick the Gloom, and then spit? Would that work? I don’t think it affects me, so I could probably…
David was still trying to come up with new combinations of ways to land his abilities when he finally started to drift off to sleep, lips wrinkling happily as he dreamt about shooting out the unnatural stars like candles.