(Sorry, posted this to the wrong parent chapter initially.)
Sarah stood there debating what to do as the young man went in and out of the workshop, gradually stripping it of anything that looked valuable. He was going to leave her; probably not forever, but if he went to get someone else to help him move her, that would give her a chance to slip away, and she could figure out where to go from there. But on the other hand, he had the blueprints that had been on the table. Based on what she'd read in the old man's diary, whatever she was was very uncommon, if not outright mythical to these people; those plans might be the only real information on how her body worked, and her only chance of getting someone to fix it if anything should go wrong. She couldn't just leave them to go on the auction block and get sold to who-knows-who...but what could she do about it? If she let him know she was more than just a mannequin, he'd be sure to think she was valuable, and there was no way that would end well...but she didn't think she had much chance of just sneaking them away, either...
While she was pondering this, trying to stay as still as possible, the young fellow came in again and started looking around the shop for more valuables to load up. As he was scanning the piles of parts on the work surfaces, he paused for a moment, then cocked his head slightly. Sarah watched him out of the corner of her eye, trying to figure out what he was doing; then it dawned on her that he was listening for something. As he turned toward her, she realized with a sinking feeling that he could hear her ticking; nervously, she tried to will herself to stop, but even standing still she couldn't stop her mainspring from unwinding, any more than she could've stopped her heart from beating as a human. She half-contemplated making a break for it, but she had no idea whether she was even fast enough in this body to outpace an able-bodied young man - and anyway, he was already standing in front of her with a curious expression on his face.
"What is that?" he murmured to himself. "Are you a clock as well as a mannequin? Strange idea, that..." Carefully but casually, as if he were uncovering some piece of antique furniture rather than a person, he swept the coat off her shoulders, then looked around back at the thing that had been making such a noticeable hump in the back of the coat. He let out a low whistle. "Still working, even? Must be a hell of a spring you've got in there, it's got to be months since anyone was around to wind it. I wonder what you were supposed to be? Some kind of toy...?"
He began to prod around her back, apparently looking for some kind of clue as to her function. Sarah felt herself getting indignant; first he treated her like a mannequin, then he called her a toy, now he was poking his grubby fingers at her body? "Stop!" she snapped, whirling around with a frown on her face, then gasped when she realized she'd just given herself away.
The young man stared at her slack-jawed. Sarah glanced nervously around, but he was between her and the only obvious exit. She felt...erratic, as if things inside her were going just a little off-kilter, and held herself in the best visibly-irritated stance she could manage. She searched for words, but they wouldn't come; she hadn't thought this far ahead in the conversation, but she couldn't just back out of it now.
The young man took a hesitant step toward her; she wanted to step away from him, but held her ground. "Heavens," he said. "You can't be...I thought things like you were just fairy tales...but I guess that must've been his big project, huh? Explains a lot...but how did he ever manage it?" He stared at her. "I...I don't even know where to start," he muttered, half to himself. "I...tell me, did he give you a name?"
Sarah regarded him dubiously. She was hesitant to tell him anything, honestly, but...his entire manner had changed since the moment he realized that she wasn't just some mannequin. He was looking at her...not quite as if she were a normal human being, but at least as if he were talking to somebody and not just remarking to nobody about an inanimate object. "My name is Sarah," she said.
"Sarah." He started to smile a little. "Amazing. Tell me, though: if the old man really could build something like...like you, why didn't he tell anybody? There must've been some better opportunity than dying alone and impoverished, for someone who could accomplish something like this."
Sarah felt just a little twinge of pride at the genuinely admiring tone in his voice - if she'd still had the capacity, she might've blushed a little, but as it was she just felt something revving up slightly inside her - but it was also a little upsetting to be discussed purely in terms of someone else's accomplishments. "He didn't," she said flatly. "It's in his diary; he could never make it really work. He thought it needed a soul. I-" She paused, thought it over, then decided that there was little point in hiding anything now. "I'm...I was...I used to be human," she said, choking on the words a little. "Some...something happened to me, and somehow I woke up in this body." She sighed. "I guess...I guess somehow my soul must've been hijacked...? I don't know..."
The young man nodded thoughtfully. "Strange story indeed," he said. "But I've heard stranger. Still...makes it damned difficult to figure out what to do with you..."
Sarah bristled, feeling her entire mechanism accelerate. "You're not going to sell me!" she said firmly. She wondered to herself if she actually had any way of backing that up - how strong was this body? Was there any way she could stop him from taking her off by force, if it came to that? - but for the moment she held herself back from doing anything rash. The young man seemed a little surprise by her sudden show of attitude, then gave her a thoughtful look. "I...hmm," he mused. "I guess I can understand why you feel that way." He sighed. "But old Fletcher isn't likely to be so understanding about it. Soul or no soul, that body's technically part of the estate, and about the closest thing to something of value in it."
Sarah stared at him. "You...you can't be serious," she said, upset and a little baffled. He frowned. "Look, it's not as if I like the idea," he said. "I just..." He sighed, visibly torn. "Look, it was hard enough to get this job, I could really use the money, I...I..." He looked her in the eye; Sarah stared right back at him. His expression softened. "Aw damn it all," he sighed. "Damn it all to Hell, I can't do this. I'm not some damned barbarian."
Sarah regarded him warily. "So you're not going to try to send me off to auction then?"
He nodded. "No, of course not. Look, Fletcher didn't see what was under the jacket. As far as he knows it was just a mannequin. I can probably dig one up somewhere as a substitute and he'll just sell off the remainder of the assets and try to get insurance to pay for the rest. But we'll have to figure out what to do with you from there; if you hang around where he can run into you, it's not going to take him long to figure out where you came from."
She frowned. "So...what does that mean?"
He shrugged. "We'll have to get you out of the city. You stay out of sight; I'll finish up bringing the valuables over and come get you, then we'll get out of town. There's plenty of little spots out in the country where we can lay low for a few days while we figure out where to go from there."
Sarah stared at him. "Wait, you're going to pull up stakes and leave, just like that?" It seemed awfully strange to her to have someone she'd only just met be ready to skip town just to make sure she didn't get into any kind of trouble; part of her was a little suspicious as to his motivations.
The young man nodded, picking the coat back up and draping it over her shoulders again. "Pretty much," he said. "I'm not going to just sit by and let a person get sold off like they're property. Maybe in some parts of the world they're okay with that, but I'd like to at least think we're more civilized than that. Besides, Fletcher doesn't pay me that much anyway." He looked around for anything else of value. "And I have to be honest - I'm rather fascinated by you. I wouldn't have thought anything like this was possible; it's old fairy-tale stuff. Yet here you are."
Sarah wasn't sure how to feel about that. For that matter, she still wasn't sure what to make of this situation at all. Could she really trust this random guy she'd only just met, who was proposing to take her off who-knows-where in the dead of night? But then, what other choice did she have? She believed him when he said that whatever she was was mythical stuff, and she could imagine people having all kinds of problematic reactions if they found out it was real; what would people back home think if, for example, an actual thinking robot moved into their neighborhood.
Maybe it was a little paranoid to think like that. Maybe people would actually be fine with it. At least this guy seemed to be basically alright with things, and by his own admission he'd never even considered something like her to be a possibility before a few minutes ago. And in any case she couldn't very well hope to hide away from people forever. But even then, it did at least make sense to steer clear of the one person who she did have cause to believe might want to take advantage of her. And as for this guy...well, what other choice did she have? Whatever his motivations, he was offering to help her, and she had no way of knowing what to expect in this place without him, unless she wanted to try her luck with another random stranger.
"Anyway," he said, "it's not like we're running off to the ends of the earth here. We just need to get you out of his way, is all."
She sighed, hearing the gentle metallic tones of whatever corresponded to her vocal cords and the gentle hiss of the air rushing over them, and feeling a gentle shift in her mechanisms as she settled into...what, a lower gear? Something like that; she hadn't even realized she was running faster, but she supposed the tension of the situation might explain it. "Alright," she said. "But those plans you took - those have to come, too. And the old man's diary."
He looked at her, then nodded. "Right. Almost forgot about that. I suppose those are the only information we have on you, aren't they?"
Sarah nodded. The only information...and even that told her very little. Where was she? How did she get here? And was there any hope of going back to her old life?
Jon looked around her, surveying her surroundings from the air for the first time since her catastrophic, er, maiden flight yesterday morning. She still wasn't sure she was entirely comfortable flying, but it seemed like her body could mostly handle it subconsciously - on autopilot, as it were - and she was doing her best to not think about it too much, in case thinking about doing it distracted her from letting her instincts take care of it. Looking around provided a perfect distraction from any possible distractions.
She had no real frame of reference, at least consciously, but she guessed she was cruising at somewhere around a couple thousand feet. Surprisingly, this didn't really bother her unless she stopped to think about it; she had reached the kind of disconnect she remembered from flying in a jetliner where it stopped feeling like an uncomfortably great height and started feeling like looking at a model train set. It also helped that, the more time she spent not falling to her death, the more comfortable she became trusting herself to avoid doing so.
And it helped that the scenery was rather pretty. From up here, she could see that this was indeed an island - a large one, granted, but she could see shoreline off in the distance on her right. From what she remembered of the map, the farm was close to the southeast tip of the island, a little ways inland from the rocky cliffs she'd arrived on. She was gradually making her way northwest towards the small port town about halfway up the coast towards the center of the great bay that made up the east side of the island. As she understood it, there was a similar port on the north side of the bay as well; the reason there wasn't simply one larger city in the middle was that the larger mountain range at the center of the island came all the way down to the shoreline and terminated in rough, rocky hills and sheer cliffs. It was somewhere up in these mountains, she understood, that the researchers Athena had mentioned were doing their excavations.
She still wasn't sure what she thought of all that; while she did want to get back to normal as soon as possible, if not get all the way back home, and while a collection of what were - allegedly - renowned scholars and sorcerers seemed like as good a way as any she could think of, the notion that Athena's mother had planted in her head of being at the mercy of dozens of inquisitive magical mad scientists was not an appealing one. She wondered if that was really what they were like; there was probably no way of knowing for sure, but maybe she could find out more in this town. She wondered what that was like; she had some unsettling visions of cartoon medieval squalor, but on the other hand, the centaurs' farm had been perfectly nice, if a bit on the rustic side. And presumably people who weren't half-horse might even have something resembling real bathrooms...?
She thought about the centaurs. She had to admit, she was a little sorry to leave; they had been kind hosts for the two days she'd been with them, and it was a little frightening to leave a known safe place and head off to some place she knew even less about. But she couldn't stay there forever; even putting aside the weird feeling of foreboding she'd gotten at the thought of somehow becoming a pre-existing role in this world, she knew perfectly well she wasn't cut out for a life of farming. Besides, it was a little weird to be the subject of interest for teenage boys; she'd mostly been able to ignore it, but Chloe had mentioned offhandedly the night before that the two young farmhands thought she was pretty cute, and if it weren't for the fact that "it'd never work" (by which Jon assumed she was referring to the obvious physical incompatibilities, which really wasn't a mental image she needed,) she'd be jealous of her. That had been a bit disturbing.
Of course, she supposed that wasn't likely to go away no matter where she went. Evidently, the people of this world (or at least the one kind she knew of thus far) didn't find anything particularly objectionable about cross-species attraction, and if this place she was flying towards was much like other port cities, she supposed there would be any number of different kinds of people there. But, well, there wasn't much she could do about that other than to just ignore it and soldier on.
As the day wore on, Jon found herself getting incrementally closer to her destination. It seemed to take longer than she thought it should; as far as she could tell, she was moving at a pretty good clip, certainly far faster than she could have walked, but she couldn't stay aloft indefinitely. There were several times during the course of the day where she had to touch down somewhere and rest her wings for an hour or so. She had her lunch on one of these rests, atop a grassy knoll overlooking the shoreline, and sat eating the food that they'd packed for her and thinking about what she'd seen of the island thus far. She'd thought initially that the port city must be close by, and places like the centaurs' farm were little satellites of it. But she'd flown dozens of miles thus far, and still had yet to even spot it on the horizon. There had been small villages here and there, but she had simply flown on by; she didn't have any idea what to expect of such places, and until she'd gotten a handle on what this world was like it seemed like a better idea to just get to the place where she knew she could find help.
After she'd finished, she finagled the pack back onto her shoulder and took off again. More miles went by and more hours passed as she made her way towards the port city. Finally, as the sun was disappearing behind the horizon, she spotted a line of lights in the distance; that must be it! But no sooner had she made this discovery than she found herself flying into heavy cloud cover and then into a rainstorm. This wasn't really a surprise; she'd seen the clouds when she was still miles out, and while she wasn't excited about getting wet, it had been clear that it would've taken much longer to go around. However, she hadn't anticipated how much the storm would impede her. While the wind wasn't too violent, it was blowing in exactly the wrong direction, leaving her to work harder just to maintain airspeed, and while the water rolled off of her feathers quite nicely, it absolutely plastered her hair and shirt and even dampened the heavy canvas of the pack, adding a noticeable additional weight. It was clear after about fifteen minutes of this that she'd have to land and wait it out.
Jon cursed to herself; she'd hoped to make the city by nightfall, but there was no chance of that now. It was already dark out, and while the moon should've been close to full, the cloud cover had just about completely blocked it out. It was, consequently, very difficult for her to see where a safe place to land might be; she could see the rough contours of the terrain beneath her, but not much of the details. For the first time since her disastrous first flight, she felt actually in danger; stranded in the sky, needing to land but unable to tell where she could. So when she spotted a nearer source of light than the distant city, she wasted no time in banking left towards it.
Things improved a little almost immediately, as she was no longer fighting a full-on headwind. She still had to work to stay on course toward the light, but she managed. As she drew closer, Jon got a better look at the light. Nestled against the foothills of the island's central mountain range, there was what looked like a small wood; there must've been some kind of village or something inside it, because it was lit up with a gentle glow. She began to descend as she approached it.
As she did, she could see more clearly through the rain. The wood wasn't actually a wood at all, but a little forest of absolutely enormous mushrooms. The tallest of them had to be at least fifty feet, if not more, and they all glowed softly in the darkness. Jon was no mycologist, but while she knew that some mushrooms were bioluminescent, she didn't know of any that were colored in fluorescent pinks, blues, and purples like these. They seemed just slightly iridescent, the colors shifting slightly as she moved. She touched down on the sodden grass just at the edge of the mushroom forest, regarding it warily.
What was most odd about it was how ordinary everything around it was. The entire rest of the surrounding terrain had been the kind of scrubby, sandy grassland she'd expect to find just inland from an island shoreline and leading up to rocky foothills at the base of a mountain range. But here, in this one spot, things were just suddenly different. It was just a little eerie. On the other hand, it was shelter, of a sort. Most of the gigantic mushrooms had caps at least fifteen feet across; plenty big enough to keep the rain off while she rested and waited for the weather to clear. And if it was that or sit out in the rain all night... Shrugging, Jon walked into the forest a little ways - just far enough that the rain was off her and the ground was...well, not dry, but less damp and muddy, at least. She stopped underneath the cap of a particularly large mushroom and got as comfortable as she could at the base.
The gentle glow that filled the place colored everything strangely, and there was a soft haze in the air that Jon supposed might be spores from the mushrooms; she could look up at the cap above her and see the oversized "gills" that she was pretty sure were where spores came out of. It was strange seeing structures that were usually tiny on a human scale magnified so much; she could almost perceive it not as if they were huge, but as if she herself had shrunk to insect-size. She shook her head, trying to restore her normal sense of perspective. What a weird place this was. Now that the rain was off her, things were quieter; she could still hear it drumming low on the tops of the mushrooms, but here below things were...almost unusually quiet. Except, just at the edge of her hearing, a kind of gentle, hollow, almost bell-like hum...
The harpy sat underneath the giant mushroom, wondering what to expect in this place, and whether it was safe to go to sleep.
