Jon laid there, conscious but dazed, eyes only half-open. She felt strong, rough arms wrap around her under her wings, and someone lifted her into the air and slung her onto what felt like the back of a horse. Then they were moving somewhere, and whoever it was that was riding or leading it kept a steadying hand on her, making sure she wasn't going to slide off. Shaking from exhaustion, hunger, and the terror of her experience, Jon closed her eyes and slumped into unconsciousness.
She came to to find herself in a sunny, open-roofed atrium, lying on a simple couch (just a flat cushion on top of a supporting structure) just under the eaves. She glanced around, a bit surprised; she'd expected more of a traditional farmhouse from the glance at things she'd gotten before her crash, but while the overall construction of the house did seem to lean more towards the simple and practical (indeed, "rustic" wouldn't have been an unfair term for it,) the architecture was much less like either the sort of medieval European peasant cottage she'd have expected to find in a fantasy RPG (or, at least, in a world that she'd been transmigrated into by a fantasy RPG, or however this worked) or the early-20th-century American prairie clapboard kind of thing that was the first association her mind made with "farmhouse." She tried to place it, but couldn't, quite; the way the house seemed to be built around a central, open-air courtyard reminded her of Mexico or the southwest US, but little else about the style matched that, aside from the tiled roof and the fairly wide passageways leading off into other parts of the house. It almost struck her as a kind of budget-Mediterranean, or somesuch.
She sat up, still weirded out by the gentle bouncing of her uncovered breasts, and took a better look around. That didn't seem to be a bad assessment of it; the pool at the center of the room and the columns supporting the overhanging eaves (which were rather lengthy, and seemed to be designed to shade the edges of the room as well as to keep the rain off) definitely gave that impression, although the columns were, like most of the rest of the house, simple wood rather than stonework. She wondered idly whether the buildings in the game looked anything like this, but she was distracted from that thought when she heard the clopping steps of a horse's hooves approaching on the stone floor.
She turned to follow the sound, wondering who would go to the trouble of building a nice (if simply constructed) little farmhouse like this and then bring their animals right into it, especially when she'd seen a perfectly decent little barn on her approach to the property, but that question was answered when a figure stepped out of the passage and into the atrium. It was a teenaged girl - or rather, it was the top half of a teenaged girl. The bottom half of her was the body of a smallish horse or pony - small enough that her torso merged smoothly into the body where the horse's neck would have been with only a bit of outward flaring that suggested rather broad hips where the shoulders of her horse half were. Jon blinked, surprised to see such a creature, but supposing that there really was no reason for her to be, considering that she herself had been a harpy for a couple hours now.
The centauress turned to face her. She looked to be about sixteen or seventeen, and pretty in an understated, farm-girl kind of way. She was lightly tanned and had long black hair, which was matched by her tail, while the coat of her horse half was a rich chestnut color with white socks on her pasterns. She had a pair of pointed, furred horse's ears poking out from her hair at the top of her head. She was dressed in a pleated tunic that hung about to the base of her barrel, pinned at one shoulder by a simple brooch. She smiled at Jon. "You're awake," she said. "We weren't sure how long you were going to be out."
"Uh, how long was I out?" Jon asked.
"You were unconscious by the time my father brought you in from the barnyard," she said. "That was about an hour ago. Are you feeling alright?"
Jon nodded. "I...I'm okay," she said. "Just...a little shaken. And hungry." She bit her lip; she didn't want to come off as begging, but she was hungry. She hadn't eaten since breakfast, and while it might be only noon here, that had to have been six or seven hours ago now.
The girl nodded. "They'll be in for the midday meal soon," she said. "You can join us if you like. What exactly happened to you? Father said it looked like you'd forgotten how to fly. I didn't think that happened to you people...?"
Jon thought back on what had happened to her, mind reeling as she went over everything she'd experienced in the last few hours. She suppressed a shudder. Thrown into a different world and a different body, then falling off a cliff, just barely managing to not die through the intervention of instincts she hadn't even had before, and then landing in a heap in a barnyard... "I...I don't know," she said. "I...I'm not...not normally this. I was a...a human until this morning..."
The girl's eyes widened. "Really? You must have gotten on the wrong side of an awfully powerful sorcerer for something like that to happen."
Jon shook her head. "I...I don't know. There was this...this machine, and somehow it did something, and the next thing I knew I was this, and I was on top of a mountain. That's all I know." That wasn't entirely true; she knew her wish must be involved with this somehow, but explaining that (or the part about her actually being from another world and this one possibly being a video game) would make her sound even crazier, and she didn't have the stone with her anyway.
The young centauress gave a low whistle. "That's something," she said. "I've never heard of anything like that before. What's your name? Mine's Chloe."
"Jon," Jon answered, then bit her lip and wondered if she hadn't just given herself away. Granted, she had no way of knowing that these people would consider being transformed into the opposite sex any weirder than being changed into another species, or that they would be the kind of people to give her crap for it, but she wasn't looking to find out. But while she had the brief inclination to do like in sitcoms and come up with a spur-of-the-moment fake name, the fact was that she had no idea what a plausible name for a female harpy in this world would be. Granted, "Chloe" was a normal enough name, but for all she knew that was a weird name here and everybody else went around with names like "Ilh'ÀÌg'ra'xh Half-Blood the Destroyer" or something.
There was maybe just a hint of a knowing glimmer in Chloe's eye as she nodded, but if she actually knew or thought it was particularly bizarre, she kept it to herself. "Well, Jon," she said, "it's just about time to eat. I don't know if you can help set the table, but you might as well come with me."
Jon's capacity to help was significantly limited by the fact that she no longer had any hands, but she managed to carry some of the food from the pantry to the table by folding her wings to make a sort of basket out of them, and she actually managed to get it somewhat neatly arranged by the time the other members of Chloe's household came in for lunch. There were a good few of them, too. Chloe's parents were a bit closer to typical horse size, but kept the same general proportions, with the result that their human halves were a bit imposingly large (Jon wondered what, say, a Clydesdale centaur would look like.) There was a boy of about ten or eleven, whom Chloe introduced as her little brother Jason, and a couple of young men, one maybe a little older than Chloe and one a couple years younger; based on the fact that Chloe didn't introduce them as her brothers, and the way she kept none-too-furtively glancing at the older of the two, Jon got the impression that they were actually the hired help. Finally, after everyone else had taken their seats, another young centauress entered the room. She was a couple years younger than Chloe, and seemed a bit less social and more reserved than the others. She struck Jon as familiar for some reason, though she couldn't quite place her.
Jon wasn't too surprised to find that a centaur's diet seemed to be mostly grains, grain products, and vegetables in very large quantities, plus a fair supply of fruit, but while there was no meat in evidence, they didn't seem to have any issues with dairy products; she supposed that, after all, they were mammals. There was bread, butter, milk, and cheese, and although none of the cheese was exactly "normal" supermarket kinds, some of it was pretty good when she got used to it. After taking a while to get a handle on how to sit and work a knife with her talons, she managed to have a pretty good lunch.
She also realized why all the furniture here seemed to be the kind of simplistic cushion-on-a-bench couches she'd woken up on; centaurs had no use for a human-style chair, but with these they could rest their entire horse body comfortably on the cushion while they ate. All told, after the strangeness and terror of the morning, it was a much-needed relief from the stress for her. Well, mostly, anyway; she wasn't especially comfortable with the way the two young men looked at her. Still, they weren't openly leering or anything; indeed, nobody seemed to find her nakedness unusual. She wondered if this was normal for harpies in this world. Well, whatever the case, she hoped she'd be able to line up some kind of clothing or other.
After everybody had mostly gotten their fill, and the meal had scaled back to idle munching of various fruit, Chloe's mother turned her attention to Jon. "If I may ask," she ventured, "what brings a harpy like you down from the mountains? My husband tells me you seemed to hardly know your tail from your wings when you landed in our yard. Are you feeling well?"
"She says she was actually a human until this morning," Chloe said. "No surprise that she didn't know how to fly very well."
Her father raised his eyebrows. "Really?" he said. "That's unusual. How did it happen?"
"I'm...really not sure," Jon said, slightly unhappy at having to go through this line of questioning again. "I...encountered this...this kind of magical machine, and it malfunctioned somehow, and the next thing I knew I was up in the mountains, and I'd been changed into this."
Chloe's mother sighed. "Wizards," she said disapprovingly. "Always trying to come up with some fancy new thing, and never giving a thought to the consequences for ordinary people who get caught up in their little 'accidents.' And gods know how anybody is supposed to get these kinds of things sorted out afterwards."
The younger of the two centaur-girls got a bit huffy at this. "You know," she said archly, "if it weren't for people pushing the boundaries, we'd never get anywhere."
Her mother sighed. "Athena, you know perfectly well that I have nothing against responsible magicians," she said. "I'm quite happy to let you pursue your studies, you know. But there are far too many irresponsible crackpots pursuing their pet projects without regard for sense or safety, and never lifting a finger to help when innocent bystanders like our guest here get caught in the fallout."
Jon blinked in surprise. Athena? She looked more closely at the younger of the two centaur-girls. She'd missed it initially on account of the longer, loosely-arranged hair, the radically different clothing, and her being half-horse, but now that she looked again, the girl bore an unmistakeable resemblance to Athena, her sister Zoe's best friend. That was...odd, to say the least. She wondered if the Athena back home had any siblings; she'd never really paid much attention to her outside of Zoe having her over, so she honestly didn't know. Were there other doppelgangers of people she knew in this world? For that matter, she wondered if she bore any resemblance to her old human male self; she hadn't actually gotten a look at her own reflection since arriving. Well, her real self didn't have red hair, for one thing - but perhaps she would have if she'd been born a girl, or a harpy? She had no idea.
"Anyway," Athena said, "if I were her, I'd head up north to the excavation at the center of the island. Supposedly some of the best minds in modern sorcery are working there. Bet they could figure out something to do about her problem."
Jon blinked. Was this an island, then? She hadn't seen a shoreline from the air, but maybe it was just a large island?
"Athena, those are exactly the kind of people I'm talking about!" her mother sighed. "Whatever it is they're digging up there, I have no doubt that it's better left buried. Besides, that's dangerous territory. There are bandits and wolves and who knows what else in those mountains. I've even heard that people have been carried off by drakes in that region. And it'd be several days' trip even if she knew how to fly."
"Well it's a longer trip to any of the wizards' circles on the mainland," Athena said. "And there's no way anybody else out in this part of the world is going to be able to do anything about anything on the level of someone being changed into a whole other race! Unless she wants to stay like that..."
Her mother said something else, and then Chloe chimed in, but Jon wasn't paying attention; she was too busy thinking about what she'd just heard. The prospect of getting help with her problem sooner rather than later was definitely something she was in favor of, but she had to wonder how right Athena's mother was in dismissing the people Athena was directing her to as crackpots; the idea of having to put herself at the mercy of a bunch of crazed sorcerors or whatever was less than totally appealing, even before she factored in the supposed dangerousness of the trip. Still, if they were right there and she didn't apparently have to cross an ocean or whatever to get there...but then, to have to make any such trip all by herself, in a strange and unfamiliar world, without anybody to back her up...
God how she wished Karyn was here.
