Jon laid atop the mattress, feeling like she needed sleep but too busy thinking to actually drop off. So much had happened today, and she had so many questions...what was this place? Was she actually in any sense "inside" the game, or was the game merely a portal to a world that was like the one it depicted? (Like the books in the Myst games, she mused...) What did it mean that one of the people here was the spitting image of someone she knew, right down to the name? What would happen to centaur-Athena if real-Athena decided to play the game? Would she just take over that body? (What if she didn't choose to play a centaur? Or was this Athena a centaur because real-Athena would, hypothetically, choose to play one?) Would she know anything about her fantasy-world doppelganger? Did Jon's harpy body have a past as one of the people of this world? Had she lived in that nest on that mountain before Jon came along and got sucked into the game and into this body? Wouldn't she know if that were the case? Or would she? Was that where these weird instincts surfaced from, or were they just naturally part of being a harpy?
And what was she supposed to do now, anyway? There was what Athena had said about the people doing some kind of excavation at the center of the island (did that mean the inmost point of the "mouth" of the great bay, then? Presumably it must be at least a little inland from there, or it'd be pretty hard to excavate.) Jon liked the idea of getting to someone who could help her with her problem as soon as possible, but then, she really didn't know if they could help her with her problem. All she had on that was Athena's suggestion that maybe one of them would know something - and she had to weigh that against Athena and Chloe's mother's distrust of them. She had no real idea which of them was being the more sensible and realistic; it was just the one woman's opinion against her daughter's, as far as Jon knew. And she certainly didn't relish the idea of putting herself at the mercy of some crazed wizard, if that really was what they were like...but then, she didn't know that...
And what if they couldn't help her? What was she supposed to do then? Was there any way for her to get home, back into her own body? Surely there must be - she couldn't really be expected to stay as this for the rest of her life, or to live it out here...
She wondered what it was they were excavating.
She wondered what Karyn was up to.
She wondered why she couldn't get comfortable on this stupid mattress.
Oddly enough, it wasn't that it was a bit rough and pokey on account of being a canvas bag stuffed with straw. For whatever reason, she didn't find herself bothered by the sensation. It was just...it felt weird to her, lying flat on a more or less flat surface with her wings spread out and a blanket draped over her. It shouldn't feel weird, but it did, and she could make a guess as to why. It was these weird harpy instincts at play, again. She sighed. Given that she owed her life to them, she supposed she shouldn't be too irritated, but it was just bizarre having things that felt natural all her life suddenly seem uncomfortable, while weird urges she'd never had before felt like the natural thing to do. And...well, if she just gave in, where would it end? Would she be comfortable going around naked? Eating fresh-killed small game raw? Or...or finding herself...no, that didn't bear thinking about. She had to focus on finding a way home, back to her own world and her own body.
...but...she was going to need to sleep well if she was going to do that...
Sighing, Jon rolled off the mattress, piled the blankets into a makeshift nest, and curled up inside it, tucking her wings up against her breast. Within minutes, she was asleep.
Karyn looked around at her surroundings again. The sun was slowly making its way down toward the horizon, so it had to be sometime in the evening. On the bright side, that meant that it wasn't going to get any hotter. On the other hand, she didn't know how much she'd be able to see by moonlight, and she still didn't really know where she was or where she wanted to go. There wasn't much in the way of obvious landmarks out here, and she didn't have any idea which directions held anything of importance to begin with. About the one thing she did know was that she could see a line of what looked like cliffs or mountains off on the western horizon, below the setting sun. (At least, she assumed it was the western horizon - unless this planet spun the other way. Which was probably immaterial, anyway, at least for her purposes.)
She debated for a little while about what to do - she didn't really have a good reason to suspect that there was anything to be found that way, but then, the other three directions appeared, as far as she could see, to be nothing but desert as far as the eye could see. And maybe this was one of those places that was a desert primarily because the mountains kept the rain on the other side, like Nevada or...that one desert in Chile that she couldn't remember the name of because she hadn't been paying attention in geography. She could be nearly to the western edge of the desert, if that were the case. Granted, actually getting out would mean crossing the mountains, but maybe there was some settlement or other on the near side?
In the end, the issue was settled simply by the fact that at least the mountains were something that wasn't desert. Karyn just wished she knew how far off they were, but even at a modest walk (or whatever the multi-legged equivalent thereof was) she should be able to cover thirty miles or more if she kept it up overnight - and luckily enough, she was rested enough that she felt like she just might be able to do that.
Athena strolled through the mall casually, killing time. Wandering the mall was more her friend Zoe's thing, but Zoe was home sick today, and she just felt like being out and about for some reason, even if that meant hanging out by herself. She had been wandering around for about an hour now, and it was getting on to lunchtime, so she'd headed back to the food court. Luckily there was one place there that offered a decent vegetarian menu, and she'd gotten herself a little lunch.
It was when she'd finished eating and was dumping the trash in one of the garbage cans along the side of the food court that something caught her eye. Directly across from her was the old arcade; she wasn't all that much of a gamer, but she had fond memories of the place since it was where she'd first encountered Darkstalkers, which had been one of the things that sparked her nascent interest in Gothic-type stuff. What caught her eye was that there was a new machine at the back of the arcade. She felt a curious interest in it, for some reason, and strolled into the arcade.
"New game?" she asked the old man at the counter.
He smiled and nodded. "A rarity, at that. It never made it into production. This might be the only unit in existence. Just put it out today. I think..." He frowned, visibly searching his memory for something. "I...can't quite remember," he said, "but I guess nobody's tried it yet."
Athena nodded and walked back to the machine. The overt '80s-ness of the cabinet art suggested that the game probably wasn't in her range of interest, but she was still curious as to why it had caught her attention the way it had. She'd never claim to be "normal" (indeed, she took pride in that,) but she wasn't the kind of person that ought to feel an innate interest in old prototype arcade games. Judging by what the proprietor had said, nobody else around here was, either.
...only that wasn't true, apparently. The game showed some kind of character roster with two characters on it. The game wasn't showing an active play screen, but apparently it somehow had had a couple players who were allowed to leave their characters logged in, or something...? She didn't think anything like that would've been feasible back when this thing looked to have hailed from. And if there had been a couple players already, why did he think there hadn't? He had a clear view of the thing from the counter...
Something caught her eye. The copyright notice off in one corner of the cabinet's title panel identified the manufacturer as a "Parsons Entertainment," and next to it was the company logo, a sort of image of a man's face mirrored against itself horizontally. Athena recognized it as a common depiction of the Roman god Janus. That was...peculiar. Plenty of modern companies used Classical iconography, she knew, but she didn't think Janus was a popular choice for that sort of thing. It added to the sensation of just plain oddness she was getting from this thing. Intrigued, and a little on edge, she walked back out to the court and sat down on a bench, pulling out her phone to do a little research.
As it so happened, the moon was full and bright, and it illuminated the sands with a pale silver light. The night sky was breathtaking - the black was black, and the stars were bright and absolutely innumerable. Karyn had never seen anything like it, not even when she'd gone camping with the Girl Scouts - she supposed that this was what it was like when you weren't just outside a city, but countless miles away from anywhere that a city's light could even scatter to. In a world that had no such things as electric lights, it must look like this from everywhere, she thought. It was beautiful enough that it almost kept her mind off how tired she was.
She'd been trudging along across the seemingly endless expanse of desert that just kept turning up between her and her destination for hours now. Night had fallen, deepened, and when she looked back behind her to the east, she could see the black just beginning to warm up to a pre-sunrise deep indigo. Not only did this mean that in a few more hours, the sun would rise and it would begin to get hot again, it meant that she'd been walking for close to twelve hours now (well, counting the times she'd stopped to rest, anyway,) and hadn't eaten in all that time, either. She was tired, hungry, sore, and really, really hoping that she would actually get somewhere with food and a bed soon. At least the cliffs were close now, though there was a line of dunes obstructing her view of their base.
If nothing else, it had been a very good opportunity to practice walking on her new legs. The hard part wasn't so much walking as it was not walking like she did as a human. Walking on two legs was all about twisting your hips and shifting your weight and throwing your leg out to catch you as you slid into the next step, and the art of it was in doing it naturally and gracefully enough that you weren't stomping and lurching all over the place like a drunk zombie. Walking on six was entirely different; with that many points of support, you could hardly help but have a smooth ride (unless, that is, you were a newbie trying to walk around like you still had two,) and the trick lay in keeping their movements synchronized so that you moved smoothly along at a good clip. Indeed, once Karyn had gotten the hang of walking, she'd worked up to a running speed almost without realizing it.
That was the other trick - it was harder to pace oneself with six legs. Two had a clear rhythm and could be easily paced in strides-per-second; six was a constant cycle of activity, each leg stroking like a piston on a crankshaft, and the only clear measure was the frequency of the patter of her feet. (Was "feet" still the appropriate term? She really didn't know.) The upside to this was that it didn't require much in the way of technique to move fast without pulverizing her lower spine (and making her wish for a sports bra) the way she tended to do as a human; the downside was that the first couple times she'd just run without watching her pace, she'd wound up exhausted and out of breath - and having to sit and rest for upwards of half an hour - almost without even realizing it. That, and the tendency to lean down low when running was kind of weird - it made sense, in that it seemed to help her balance, but it felt strange, and if she leaned too low, she wound up dragging the ends of her hair through the sand.
She stopped for a minute and looked back over herself. She had tended not to think about it much while she was absorbed in walking, but when she stopped to consider it, her mind boggled a little at just how strange this was. Six legs! she thought to herself. I have six legs all of a sudden! She shifted her extra limbs around a little, feeling them move in response to her thoughts. It wasn't like there was one pair that was a mental analogue to her old human legs and then four extra bits hanging off her hips or something; all of them were equally a part of her body and belonged to her mental map of herself. (As for her hips, they were detached from her legs and were now safely ensconced within the forward end of her carapace. They seemed to be the pivot on which her upper body turned.)
It was odd; she could still remember what it felt like to have two legs and no oversized arachnid lower body, but she couldn't apply that knowledge to herself as she was and separate out the new parts. Intellectually, of course, she could enumerate the differences (or, at least, the ones she'd discovered thus far,) but she couldn't feel any distinction between the new scorpiontaur bits of her and the original-flavor-Karyn bits.
Of course, there was the stinger, as well, hanging a couple feet above and behind her head on the end of a long, curved, multi-jointed tail. Karyn wondered if it made her look menacing; in her mind, it was just a part of her. She'd taken a minute a couple rest-stops ago and tried to figure out how she would go about deploying it, if the need arose. To her surprise, instincts she hadn't known she had showed her that she could pitch forward onto her hands and extend her hind legs to push her back end up and whip her stinger forward. She'd done it a couple times, just to see, and the motion was surprisingly natural. She wondered what other instinctual knowledge she might have tucked away in the back of her brain somewhere.
The clothes were odd, too. She'd thought that in a desert you wanted to be covered up, but she was less dressed now than she had been when she got out of bed this morning - just a sort of loose top that left her stomach bare, and a skirt around the base of her human body, which she guessed was there for modesty. Yet she hadn't been uncomfortable in the heat - maybe she was just built for this environment now?
Pressing on, she made her way a little farther. She was up to that line of dunes now, climbing it, until finally she reached the crest and beheld a wonderful sight. There was a camp there, at the base of the cliffs. She could see tents, a fire, and a figure sitting by it. It was a little too far to tell for sure, but she thought it might be a scorpiontaur like herself. Either way, she didn't particularly care. A camp meant food and a bed and somebody to get directions from, or at least it might. Going less carefully than she probably ought to, she skittered down the leeward side of the dune toward the camp.
