Jon stared at the worm, weighing her options. She was certain that there was no need for this; once they were out of the forest, they could be in the city by nightfall, and with her satchel recovered, she should be able to buy food there - at least for the present, and hopefully whoever she was meeting at this Rooster pub would be able to get her some kind of work to keep them fed from that point. There was no reason they should have to worry about conserving rations, especially not at this price.
...but...on the other hand...it just seemed like things kept coming up ever since she arrived in this world. From her initial misadventure in getting down from the cliffside nest she'd arrived in to the inexplicable sense of foreboding she'd gotten at the prospect of staying with the centaurs any longer to the storm that had forced her to land to waking up to find all her possessions missing...it was literally one thing after another right now, so who knew what was waiting in the wings? It wasn't that she seriously expected them to be running out of food, but she hadn't expected any of the rest of that stuff either...
...which still didn't make worms look any more appetizing. She knew there were parts of the world where people actually did eat them, but on the whole she was perfectly content to let them have a monopoly on it. But...but...dammit, Maggie looked so hopeful when she was trying to be a help...
Jon sighed. Reaching out tentatively with one talon, she took it from Maggie. Shutting her eyes and gritting her teeth, she took a deep breath and popped it in her mouth. She could feel it squirming, and winced, but to her surprise she didn't have to fight a gag reflex. Still, she made a point of swallowing it quickly. Exhaling heavily, she found that...well, it hadn't really been that bad. Maybe it was something about being a harpy...? That thought made her a little nervous when she thought about the feeling she'd gotten back at the farm - she wondered if acting like a harpy would cause her to become more of one. But...well, at least it was over with, and disaster didn't seem to be setting in just yet.
She opened her eyes to see Maggie peering up at her curiously. "Was...was it really bad?" the younger harpy asked. Jon was a little shocked by how timid she seemed at the moment, compared to her downright effervescent attitude of mere minutes prior. She really does want me to be pleased, Jon thought. She mustered up a wry smile. "Don't worry," she said, ruffling the little girl's hair with her wingtip. "I...I just remembered it being much worse, that's all."
Maggie stared at her. "I thought you didn't eat 'em?" she asked.
Jon laughed in spite of herself. "I don't," she said. "But when I was little some older kids got me to do it on a dare." That had been years ago, in the tail end of kindergarten, when he'd first moved to Lakeside, not long before he'd met Karyn. It had been a singularly painful experience at the time - a couple of older boys in the neighborhood had dared him to do it, and he'd gone along with it because he thought it would make them like him. Instead, they'd laughed at him and called him weird, and it probably would've stuck with him through elementary school if they hadn't moved out of town the following year.
That had been a formative experience, in terms of putting Jon off of going out of his way to try to fit in with the other kids. (Which had been more or less for the best, anyway, as he probably wouldn't have become close friends with Karyn if he'd cared what the other kids thought - even if she was something of a tomboy, both of them had caught their share of harassment for having a kid of the opposite sex as a best friend.) Well, screw you, Jared and Rob, she thought to herself, it didn't kill me then and it's not gonna kill me now. I'd like to see you deal with half the crap I've been through this week, anyway!
Maggie, not being privy to her reminiscence, just shrugged, and to Jon's relief, brightened back up again. "Guess it's 'cause you're one a' us now!" she said. Jon shrugged. "Could be, I guess. But I think we'll make with the rations all the same; I can't imagine it'd be easy to find enough to feed both of us."
The little harpy nodded to herself. "I guess not," she said. "There's a lotta 'em in the morning when the grass is wet, but you still gotta look hard. The grownups always get more rabbits an' bigger stuff instead. Sometimes even deers. But I never learned howta hunt those kinda things."
Jon frowned as she fished some of their edibles out of the satchel. "Because you don't have somebody around to show you?"
Maggie nodded. "Uh-huh. I guess I shoulda maybe gone with 'em, but then I wouldn'ta met you, an' we wouldn't be goin' to the city..."
Jon sighed to herself. The idea of people just up and leaving their own child to fend for herself was so alien to her...well, at least the idea that it was in any sense "normal." Didn't they care what happened to her? Maybe this was just something about a species with a flocking instinct...? She handed Maggie an apple. "Well, maybe we can find someone to teach you how," she said. The little girl nodded thoughtfully as she bit into the fruit. "I gueff tho," she said. "Buh I thoth-" She caught herself as Jon tried to suppress a smirk, swallowed, and continued. "But I thought maybe we could figure it out or somethin'..."
Jon shrugged, tucking into her own meal. "Well, I don't really know any more about it than you do."
Maggie nodded. "I guess we both got a lotta stuff we could learn." Jon smiled in spite of the fact that she was even less keen on the idea of killing and eating larger animals (well, raw, anyway) than she had been on eating bugs. "I suppose so."
They both sat there for a little while, neither saying much as they ate. After they'd finished, Jon closed up the satchel again and swung it over her shoulder, shifting this way and that to try to get the strap to rest comfortably over her breasts. The sun was up enough by this point that it was easy to tell which way was east, so she struck out in that direction, Maggie skipping along just behind. "Anyway," Jon said, after thinking about it for a minute, "I don't want you to feel like you're a burden, okay? Heck, you're better at taking care of yourself than a lot of human kids your age."
Maggie grinned. "Really?" she asked. Jon nodded. "But...I thought you were mad 'cause the witch didn't ask you before sendin' me over?"
Jon shrugged. It did still cheese her off, but there was no reason the little harpy-girl should have to feel bad about it. "Well, yeah, a bit, but it's not your fault. And anyway, you're a help to me just by being here. You know way more about this place than I do."
The little girl couldn't stop herself from beaming. "An' I know about bein' a harpy, too!" she said proudly. "So I can help you with all that stuff..."
"Uh, yeah. Yep!" Jon smiled, if a bit awkwardly. She wasn't sure she wanted to get too accustomed to this. Still, she couldn't fault Maggie for her enthusiasm - and it was more than a little infectious. They walked on, and Jon began to softly whistle to herself.
Diana laid there in the vixen's burrow, not quite asleep just yet. Part of her - maybe the part that was a little kid again - objected to the idea of taking a nap in the middle of the day, but...well, she had been up the entire night, and she'd had a long walk on top of that, and...well, the part of her that was a cat didn't need any excuse for a nap. Millicent had gotten her a blanket, and she'd curled up on top of a rug the vixen had pulled up in front of the hearth; it wasn't burning at the moment, but there were still coals glowing from breakfast.
She sighed. She was trying to ignore her situation, ignore her ears and tail and pretend that nothing had changed, but she couldn't get her mind off of things. She wondered about what the fox had been saying about cat-people and humans; what difference would it really make if she was a...a mixed breed of human and cat-creature, versus just being a cat-creature that looked human? Or were those even different things to begin with? She wondered about travelling with the human boy and the strange clockwork girl; they felt trustworthy to her, but what would it be like having...well, older kids around? She felt silly thinking of them like that when in real life she was older than either of them, but from down here it was hard not to see it that way.
And where would they even go? She didn't know where in this world she could look to find a way to return to her own life. Was there some wizard somewhere who could send her back? Was there a portal or a magical gem or a dragon-god or something? She had absolutely no idea, and she didn't know if her potential companions would, either - from what she'd gathered, they were just looking to get away from somebody who wanted to sell the girl for profit or something. Maybe Melia would know...she wondered what the wolf-woman was really like, and whether they could trust her...
Without really thinking about it, Diana yawned deeply, stretched out on all fours, and then curled back up in the blanket. Her mind a confused jumble of questions, the little catgirl nodded off to sleep. As the troubles of her conscious mind slipped away, she stretched out in front of the glowing hearth and began to purr.
Sarah sat on the dais where the computer had been displayed, listening to the steady, gentle ticking of her own mechanisms. The mayor had already taken it off somewhere for safekeeping. She wondered who would have wanted to steal it, and why. Surely nobody in this world would have any familiarity with computers? And Millicent had said that they thought it was just some kind of art object from the Ancients' civilization. Was it just some obsessive collector who wanted it? That was an odd thought, but she supposed it was plausible enough if there were general interest in such relics (and based on the diary of her...her creator, she supposed there must be.)
Of course, that still didn't explain what it was doing here in the first place, or how it was still running. But those were questions that she couldn't begin to guess the answers to, and with no way to get past the login prompt, there was little chance of her figuring out anything more about it. Not that she imagined she'd have gotten much out of it to begin with, but it might at least have told her some more about this strange world she found herself in.
She wondered what would happen from here. They were safe for the time being, it seemed - but where would they go from here? Was there anywhere in this world where somebody might know how to...to return her soul to her real body? Did she still even have a real body to go back to? She felt her inner workings accelerate and start moving erratically as she thought about it. What if...what if she were dead, and she'd just been reincarnated into this life? If they sent her away...would she land in some other life on some other world, or just drift forever with no body to call her own?
No. No, she couldn't allow herself to think like that. Taking a deep breath (not that it actually did anything, but her human mannerisms were still force of habit even when they no longer really applied,) Sarah forced herself to calm down, feeling her insides gearing down until they settled back into a slower, steadier rhythm. It was no good panicking about hypothetical scenarios, and she had no particular reason to suspect that was the case anyway. But the question of where they could go from here still remained. Who do you turn to when you need to be returned to another life in another world? she wondered.
She heard movement, and turned to see Tom sitting down beside her. "Hi," he said. She smiled. "Hi."
They sat there for a moment without saying anything. Finally, Sarah turned to him. "Tom," she said, "...what happens now?"
He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I'm not sure," he said. "As long as we get a good little ways out of Fletcher's stomping grounds, there's little chance of us running into him. But beyond that? I dunno. I guess we could try to find a scholar or sorcerer or something who might have some idea of how to help you, but I don't know much about that stuff. That's magic, and I've always been more into machines."
Sarah bit her lip and suppressed a smirk. He probably didn't mean it like that. "Are there a lot of those around?" she asked.
He shrugged. "Depends on where you look and what you're looking for. Even in a city like mine, you get a fair number of jobbing mages looking for work, but they usually do basic utilitarian stuff like support magic for adventurers. The really powerful ones...I think there's a few colleges of wizards out there, but they mostly tend to keep to themselves, and by the sound of a lot of stories, a lot of 'em you're better off not getting involved with. I know you tend to find a lot of sorcerors around Ancient ruins and dig sites, though - I guess they all want a shot at figuring out their secrets. I bet they'd be pretty flabbergasted to meet someone like you..."
Sarah felt a little bit of discomfort at that thought - it was one thing to be in this strange form and have the people around her pretty much accept it without a second thought, but the idea of a bunch of old men gathering around to poke and prod at her mechanisms...eugh. But...well, maybe it wouldn't be quite like that. Maybe some of them were just the magic-using equivalent of Tom, enthusiastic young students of their respective subjects...
"So do we go looking for one of those, then?" she asked.
"I guess that might be as good a place to start as any," Tom said. "But we'd have to go quite a ways to find one they're still investigating. Near a big city like this, any ruins are liable to have been picked clean years ago - nothing left but the architecture, and even that might've been pulled down for fencing stone by some farmer."
"Well," a voice spoke up from somewhere below them - they looked down to see Millicent, calmly sitting on her haunches, her tail slowly sweeping from side to side, "if you're going anywhere, you might want to talk to little Diana. She was saying that she's got passage on a ship, and she was hoping you would want to come with her."
Tom stared at her. "The little catkin girl?" The vixen nodded. He shook his head in bewilderment - how would a little girl have managed that?
"Anyway," Millicent continued, "lunch is ready. Be quiet as you come in, she's sleeping."
