Jon stared blearily into the darkness through half-lidded eyes. Someone, she was pretty sure, had just bade her good morning, but it couldn't possibly actually be morning. No, definitely not. It was still night out. She could just barely make out the dim outline of the beams in the ceiling above. She must've been hearing things. Oh well, back to sleep...
"Come on, now, it's nearly dawn!" If she stared really hard, she could just see Chloe standing nearby in the darkness. "Don't want to miss breakfast, do you?"
She stifled a groan. Right, she thought. I'm on a farm. I forgot. She'd been through this once when visiting one of her more distant relations in Illinois. They were probably going to try to get her to pitch in with the chores, weren't they? She sighed. Well, if she was honest with herself, that wasn't unreasonable. She was an uninvited guest, and not even family, and it was nice of them to have done this much for her.
That didn't make getting out of bed in the dead of night any easier, but she managed it, more or less. Stretching, working the kinks out of her back, and rubbing at her bleary eyes with the "wrist" of her wings, she sat up, stood up, and shook her long red hair into some semblance of order. At this point, even the gentle shaking of her unrestrained, uncovered breasts with the motion barely perturbed her; all she really wanted was to get down to breakfast and hope to God that they knew what coffee was in this place.
Her eyes were getting more adjusted to the dark now, and she could see that Chloe was fishing around in a simple wooden cabinet looking for something. The young centauress turned around (or, at least, her human half twisted around, while her horse body shuffled a little to one side) and she smiled at Jon, holding up a loose bit of cloth. "Here," she said, offering it to her. "I guessed that, since you were a human, you're probably not used to going around with nothing on."
Jon smiled, in spite of her irritation at having to get up ungodly early. "Thanks," she said. "I really appreciate it." Chloe nodded. "Here," she said, unfolding it into what turned out to be a loose tunic not unlike the one she wore. She draped it over Jon's shoulders and wrapped it around so that it wasn't quite so loose and ready to slip off, pinning it at the shoulder with a simple little brooch. "I'd give you something more underneath," the centauress said, "but I thought you'd want to be able to get it off yourself if need be."
Jon nodded. She wasn't all that comfortable with the idea of wearing a bra anyway. Even this was a little dress-y for her comfort, but it was better than being naked. Well, mostly; it only hung down to her waist (she supposed that the centaurs, having nothing to hide up front, saved fabric that way,) but since as far as she could tell her privates were hidden by the downy feathers that covered her groin, it was pretty much as good as being fully clothed. Shrugging, she went down to breakfast.
Even with the sun still just threatening to start peeking over the horizon, things were already beginning to warm up. Karyn trudged wearily down the slope as the last quarter-mile down to the little camp seemed to stretch on for an eternity and a half. She'd surprised herself by actually managing to keep going pretty much all night, but she was definitely feeling it by this point. And she still didn't know what kind of people to expect, in this lone little camp at the foot of the mountains in trackless desert on an alien world. Not that it mattered much; she didn't really have any choice but to stop in there, come what may.
By the time she was within clear sight of the camp, the figure she thought she'd glimpsed earlier had already retreated inside the tent - no surprise, as the sun was starting to creep into view and things were already beginning to go from warm to genuinely hot. Karyn noticed now that, just on the other side of the tent, there was a well. That certainly explained why the camp was at this particular spot, though not why it was here in the desert at all. Finding a burst of new energy, she eagerly skittered across the last remaining distance, tossed the bucket that had been left nearby down the hole, pulled it up, and drank greedily.
It wasn't until she'd finished that Karyn realized someone was watching her. Nervously, she turned to see the figure from before standing in the entryway of the tent. As she'd vaguely suspected, it was a scorpion-woman like herself, though her skin was darker and she looked to be in probably her early fifties; her long, once-black hair was well on its way to being silver. Like Karyn, she was dressed quite lightly, with a loose wrap around her breasts and a skirt around her waist; she also wore some simple ornaments that appeared to be made of copper, and near her waist was a strange tattoo of a crescent moon.
Karyn just stared at her for a long moment - the first person she'd met in this world, and she was at once alien and oddly familiar. In one sense, it was bizarre and just a bit unsettling to look upon this creature with a human torso and face but a deadly arachnid for a lower body, but there was a part of Karyn's brain, somewhere in the deep, primal instincts, that saw her as kin despite that, and on top of all that her rational mind telling her that she shouldn't go making assumptions about people based on their looks, even if their looks did include the majority of a colossal scorpion into the bargain. She was still standing there, wondering what to make of all this, when the scorpion-woman finally spoke.
"It's getting warm out, child," she said. Her voice was dark and dusty, but warm. She moved back into the tent and motioned Karyn inside. "You'd better come in."
Curious, confused, a little nervous, but above all just glad to have a chance to be out of the sun, Karyn followed her in.
Athena sat in the food court, engrossed in her research. There was just enough information on Parsons Entertainment on the Internet to be tantalizing, but not enough to put the whole picture together. From what she could piece together, it was a very short-lived manufacturer of arcade games in the early '80s, dying in some kind of scandal before actually producing a single commercial release. It was hard to find much in the way of concrete details, but from what she could gather it was some kind of "Satanic panic" affair, with the company executives being accused of trying to promote witchcraft or something.
She had read enough about that kind of thing to know that historically it was all manufactured bullshit (and she wasn't the kind of person that automatically made the "occult = bad" association, anyway,) but...something about the feeling she got off that machine made her wonder. And what little more she could find about the case just piqued her interest further - the three leading executives had either died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances during the course of the investigation. Adam Parsons, the founder, was found dead in his cell with no apparent cause while being held for questioning (of course the police brought him in on suspicion of Satanism, Athena mused.)
And weirdly enough, none of them were the kind of people she'd expect to be developing video games in the '80s. Okay, Parsons was an electronics engineer, but with a background (and a much more successful career) as a military contractor, and the other two executives were a biologist and a theoretical physicist. How on earth do you go from any of those to building a fantasy arcade game? she wondered.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much more information to find on the Internet; just a few citations to newspaper articles from the time, which were either behind a paywall or just not online at all. Curious, Athena packed up her phone and headed out to the exit. Maybe the library might have something more...
