Jon stirred as she felt the morning sun seeping in through her eyelids. By this point it was no longer a shock to her to wake up to the feel of two extra weights moving with the rise and fall of her chest, or to feel feathers underneath her. Not that she was exactly used to these sensations, but at least she wasn't still waking up in confusion at her situation. The wrinkly, polished-leather texture of the giant mushroom that she was sleeping on top of was pretty unusual, though.
She yawned, stretched, and sat up, wincing slightly and leaning to one side to allow her tailfeathers to escape from underneath her. She looked around, remembering the events of the previous day. She hadn't meant to sleep all the way through until morning, but at least the rain had let up. It was still oddly quiet in the mushroom grove, and while it was clearly morning, the shadows of the enormous caps made the place still a bit darker and cooler, with the soft glow from the mushrooms themselves still just visible.
As she was looking around, Jon felt her stomach growl, and realized that she hadn't actually eaten anything since lunch yesterday. Well, she still had rations left in her pack; she'd have a quick breakfast, then take off and cover the last leg of the...of the...come to think of it, where was her pack? She was sure she'd grabbed it when she'd flown up onto this cap, but it wasn't here. She peeked over the edge just in case it'd fallen to the ground, but it was nowhere to be seen. And as she looked down, Jon realized that the tunic Chloe had given her was also missing; she was once again naked as the day she'd come into the world. Er, well, either world, really.
She frowned. For the pack to disappear, that was one thing, but she'd been sleeping in that tunic. There was no way it could've just come off by accident; clearly somebody was messing with her. She felt herself beginning to get hot under the notional collar. She was alone, confused, and now someone was stealing her supplies and the literal shirt off her back? What was this, some kind of prank? Part of her wondered if she shouldn't be feeling worried, but frankly she was more pissed off than anything. This would not stand...
Sarah wasn't really sure what constituted "casual" around here, so she mostly didn't think about it. It was easy enough to let herself settle into the rhythm of her own inner workings as they walked; something about this body just brought its own natural patterns of motion and timing. She wondered briefly what that looked like to outside observers, then remembered that she had one with her.
"Tom?" she asked. She was still getting used to the sound of her voice in this form; she had no particular idea how it was generated, but while there was a definite metallic quality to it, it sounded much more delicate than she would've expected some kind of clockwork mechanism to be able to produce. Really, that was how this form in general felt, despite the fact that she was a thing of metal and machinery (her reasonably convincing artificial skin notwithstanding.) Part of it was probably down to her being smaller than before (which was just exacerbated by her being mostly enveloped in the somewhat oversized traveling cloak Tom had dug up for her,) but in any case it was a strange feeling for someone who was used to being more outgoing and in-charge.
"Hmm?" he murmured, apparently lost in thought. "Oh. Yeah?"
"Do you think it looks too...um, mechanical, when I walk?" She was initially going to say "robotic," but she had no idea if that word would mean anything to him.
He regarded her thoughtfully as they walked, frowning slightly. "I...I don't think so," he said. "I guess...I mean, you don't move exactly like a human, but it's not stiff or unpleasant or anything, I think. I guess it's kind of hard to say what people would think, it's not like too many people have seen anybody like you before."
She stared at him, feeling some sub-mechanism accelerate somewhere inside her. "Are there...others like me?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Like I said, for most folks this is fairy-tale stuff. But you hear stories sometimes. A man knows a man who knows a man who has a cousin who once met a traveller who said that some far-off king has a mechanical ape in his court that can play chess. An adventurer in a tavern tells his tall tales about stumbling into a cave with the remains of one of the ancients' temples where there are golden priestesses still performing their rites centuries after all the worshippers have died, but of course it was destroyed in a sudden earthquake and he was lucky to escape with his life. People say that some rich merchant recovered one from a relic-hunter and keeps it secreted away to show to only his favored guests. Things like that. You know how stories are. But I've never heard of anything like you actually definitely turning out to exist before now."
She pondered this for a moment, feeling her winding key slowly turning behind her. "The old man's diary said something about the 'ancients' too. Who were they?"
Tom chuckled. "Isn't that the question! You really aren't from around here, are you?" Sarah shook her head, and he shrugged. "Truth is, nobody really knows. All anybody can say for sure is that they must've gotten around, because there's traces of them on every continent in the known world, and they must've died out a long time ago, because there's no record of any civilization matching what we know of them in even the oldest written records anybody's been able to dig up. Beyond that...who knows?" He laughed. "A lot of folks just decide that they were whatever they want them to have been. Humans think that they must've been human, animal-folk think they must've been animal-folk, drakelings somehow got it into their heads that the ancients were their legendary 'true Dragons' from aeons ago despite everything in their architecture being built on a human scale, and so on and so forth. And of course what little art we have from them shows enough of just about every kind of people that it's impossible to say for sure which of them are supposed to represent the ancients themselves, so nobody can conclusively disprove anybody else."
Sarah chuckled softly. "That sounds like people for you. But they had that kind of technology, then?"
He shrugged. "Mostly it's just bits and pieces of mechanisms that we don't know what they were for, as far as we've found. I think they've figured out that one might've been a kind of almanac. Certainly they were far ahead of anybody else when it came to clockwork and machinery, but as far as I know all the rest of that talk is just speculation based on things in their art. But...well, who knows? I guess I can't say that something like that isn't possible, not with you standing right here next to me. And if they had thousands of years' head start on the rest of the world with that stuff, maybe they did figure out how to do it at some point, before they died out."
He looked around. "Okay, we're coming up on the village here. Stick close and let me do the talking until we get settled in."
Sarah nodded and pulled the hood of the cloak over her head, obscuring her slightly less than lifelike hair. The apparent hump in her back made by her winding key was still noticeable, but...maybe they'd just think it was wings or something...
Darrin sat in the room that was supposedly hers, overwhelmed by everything that had happened. It was weird enough to have been transported to some other world and transformed into a pre-teen cat-girl, weird enough by far. But then she'd been taken "home" to "parents" she didn't know and who couldn't possibly be her biological parents anyway, and who sorta-kinda treated her like some kind of pet? To say nothing of planning to ship her off to some kind of finishing school...!
She looked over the brochure again; it made a point of mentioning that it was located in a very, very "scenic" range of mountains, safely removed from "dangerous influences." It wasn't hard to read between the lines: problem students can't just up and run off. She realized as she read it that her ears had gone back and her tail was puffed up; she was a little embarassed by this, as she still didn't know what to make of these...these oddly feline behaviors that seemed to come with this body. It was bizarre to find herself subconsciously acting like...like an animal, and on one level that was kind of upsetting, but on the other hand, the reaction of her "parents" to her new instincts was even more frustrating - she couldn't help being...whatever it was she was now! And why was it so wrong for her to act this way? They acted like being this cat-thing was some kind of character flaw - complete with sending her off to reform school! So she found herself in the odd position of being weirded out by this yet kind of wanting to embrace it anyway out of plain rebellion...
She sighed. Maybe she wasn't being fair to them. Maybe they meant well, and maybe this school wasn't intended to be some kind of juvenile detention facility the way she feared it was. But...well, that still didn't help matters much. She needed to find out what had happened to her, where she was, and how to get back to normal and back home - not get sent off to...to learn to be whatever these people thought a "proper young lady" was supposed to be! And she certainly couldn't do that if they sent her off to some remote mountain boarding school. She had to get out of this somehow...but her "parents" didn't seem like they were taking no for an answer.
But what was her option, then? To just run off like she'd apparently done before? That was a frightening prospect, and as she thought about it, Darrin felt her adult indignance and resolve slipping away in the face of her scared-little-girl feelings; she remembered how lost she'd felt this morning, and how much she just wanted somebody to look after her. Was she really up for anything like that?
And where was she supposed to go, anyway? She didn't know where to even start looking, and even if she did, it seemed like the police in this city knew who she was and felt obligated to bring her back "home" to exactly the situation she was trying to escape from. And she could hardly just try to make tracks for open country, not in this body...
A thought occured to her. Back at the restaurant, back when she'd first arrived here, they'd been eating fish. Without refrigeration, that had to have been gotten fresh from the water. And they'd been talking about food that, around here, probably qualified as "foreign." Was this a port town? She couldn't remember enough about the fish she'd been munching on to have any idea what it was, and she wouldn't have known for certain if it was a saltwater fish or not, but if this was a port, that would mean ships - and someone as small as she was now might have a chance of hiding away unnoticed long enough to get to somewhere good and far away, beyond any chance of recapture.
That was arguably an even more intimidating prospect than trying to make her escape on foot - who knew what kind of people would be on whatever boat she picked to stow away on? And what would they do if they did discover her? But then, she wasn't just any random stowaway - she was a little girl, and surely that would count in her favor somehow. And even if they just dropped her off at the next port of call, that would still be good enough. But she doubted that it would be as simple as just walking out the door and running down to wherever the docks were; after the altercation downstairs, she was sure her "parents" would be wary of further escape attempts.
Darrin looked around. Her room had a smallish window somewhat high off the floor, even considering that everything looked larger to her now, but it looked like it did actually open. There was a little desk beneath it; she tried standing on it, but still couldn't quite reach. Fortunately, there was also a little nightstand next to her bed; it took some effort to lift it, in this body, but she was able to get it up on top of the desk without too much trouble. Climbing up on top of the whole affair with a surprising amount of ease and comfortingly good balance, she peered out the window.
The initial survey was not encouraging. Her room was on the second story, and she hadn't realized until now just how high up above the street that amounted to. Pulling herself up a little higher, she was able to get a better view of the more immediate surroundings, and things began to look a little better. Her room was at the back of the house and overlooked a narrow alley, across from which there was another house. It didn't come up as high, but it was still much nearer than the street below. Her sense for distances was a bit uncertain, since she was still getting used to being this size, but there was no way the distance between the two buildings could be farther than about eight feet, and the drop to the lower roof was maybe eight or ten. That was a bit more than she was comfortable with, but...well, it was probably this or nothing, and if being half-cat was good for anything it certainly ought to be good for this.
Darrin was still contemplating this when her ears pricked up at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Panicking, she dropped to the floor and tried to return her nightstand to its former place as quickly and quietly as possible. She'd just finished when there was a knock on the door. "Diana?" came the voice of her "father." "If you're ready to behave, we'd like you to come down for dinner."
