Time slowed down for Jon as she fell. She could see the ground approaching, far below her, but it was taking much longer than she knew it should. She remembered reading about this somewhere, she knew it was an illusion, that it was only her perception that was slowed. She didn't really have time to think about her situation, but her brain was playing every moment in loving slo-mo for her. Even if she could think, her body didn't seem to be responding to her commands, anyway; it was busy doing something else, but she didn't know what. There was some kind of enormous force being exerted on her wings, and it hurt like hell, but for some reason she was rigidly maintaining their position. Why? She had no idea.
As the moments ticked by, Jon noticed that the ground was beginning to move relative to her as well as toward her. She wondered briefly what was happening, before noticing that this change in direction was slowly accelerating. But so was the fall; by the time Jon pulled out of the stall and soared upwards, she was no more than fifteen feet off the floor of the canyon above which her nest was perched. Luckily for her, she was too stunned by what she had just been through to stop and think about what was happening, or she might have switched out of this instinctive auto-pilot mode she'd found herself in.
Overcome by the shock, denial, despair, and final relief that she'd been holding back, Jon burst into tears in mid-flight. Great heaving sobs wracked her body even as her wings kept a gentle, steady motion to maintain her altitude. Not only had she found herself in another world and an alien body, she'd very nearly died, and got to watch every second of the ordeal! And now on top of that, she was hungry, and her wings were aching like she'd never felt. She could see a little farm nestled in the foothills below her, and all she could think of was how much she just wanted to stop and rest and be thankful that she was alive.
Whatever part of her brain was guiding her seemed willing to comply, and she began to drift down towards the farm. As Jon approached the ground, she began to tilt her wings back to serve as air brakes; she'd picked up quite a speed boost coming out of the stall. She managed to slow down to a manageable speed as she came in for a landing, but the release of her pent-up stress had left her shakey and wobbly-kneed, and she ended her flight in a rough and extremely graceless somersault across the farmyard.
She laid there in a heap for a minute before someone came rushing out to her. She couldn't see who it was, and she didn't know how they'd treat her, and it didn't matter. All her problems were on the back burner for now, as she sat there feeling grateful that she wasn't dead. Well, all but one. "Please," she murmured, "I'm hungry."
Karyn sighed. This was taking far longer than it really ought to; whoever had designed the game had been way, way too into character customization. It had taken her the better part of half an hour just to get this far. She'd set herself up as the best combination support/attack mage character she could, after finding the closest class to what she'd wanted and picking a variety of traits to tweak it. She'd done this kind of thing before with some of the tabletop RPGs she'd played, except that then, she'd had a rule book to tell her how everything fit together; here, she was just making educated guesses. But heck, it was an '80s arcade game; how complex could it be?
She was starting out with some basic healing and ranged attack spells, and it looked like she'd get some decent buffs for Jon's character a little later on. The only thing that remained was to find the race best suited for mixed casting; given that there were upwards of a dozen to choose from, she'd have to put some thought into it. Karyn did the best comparison she could manage without a rule book before settling on a player race. With that taken care of, she pushed the start button...and everything went black.
