Jon woke up quite suddenly; it was very early morning, still quite dark out. This happened often, when she was sleeping in an unfamiliar place. Granted, Karyn's house wasn't exactly unfamiliar, but it had been years since she'd actually slept over here - not since they were kids, before puberty had come along and put its own complications into that kind of thing. Now, it wasn't so much of an issue. She wasn't really sure what she thought of that - the idea that she was just "one of the girls" now, or at least fairly close, given that she hadn't even been one two months ago. But...all the same, it was nice to be able to hang out with Karyn any time, without any complications, without people getting the wrong idea.
It had started, yesterday, with Karyn's suggestion that, as Brittany had suggested, maybe they should take some time and see if they couldn't make a start at learning magic - "ordinary magic," as Brittany had classified it. Jon had agreed, but had wanted to find a private place to practice it, mostly for fear of complications if they should be discovered, but also partly because she felt a little silly even entertaining the idea of trying to do magic.
But the Madisons' house wasn't particularly private, what with four kids and two adults, and they found it hard to think of a better place - even in the woods, they were much more likelier to have a chance encounter with someone like Michael the raptor-girl than they would've been pre-Sun. Finally Karyn had just suggested that they do it in her room - she didn't have any siblings to barge in, and her parents would give her the necessary space if she had a friend over.
So Jon had come over for dinner, and then they'd made a night of it. They had indeed made some attempts to get started with magic - naturally they couldn't actually do anything, but as Brittany had explained, they focused on trying to develop some kind of rapport with the spirits of things. It was difficult to judge, for two girls who'd grown up in a world where such stuff effectively didn't exist, but it felt more or less like it was going well - slow, but well.
But they'd only been able to keep that up for a while before the essential silliness of the whole thing got to them. The idea of communing with nature just seemed so much like some kind of washed-up hippie quasi-philosophy, and finally Karyn had started to drawl in a stereotypical California surfer-dude voice about "getting in touch with the spirit of the universe, man," and Jon had broken down into uncontrollable laughter, causing Karyn to crack as well. It wasn't until quite some time later, when the laughing had died down, that they stopped to reflect on it - according to Brittany, that was the nature of things...but it was kinda silly, to them. Was it possible that, deep down, everything was a little absurd?
They'd discussed it. And they'd discussed the whole situation overall. And they'd talked about life in general, and stuff, and they'd made another couple attempts to focus on learning, and Jon had put up with a bit more than her fair share of Karyn's good-natured ribbing about Karyn finally having a girl friend after all these years. That had been...slightly annoying. Still, it was all good. It was a very good evening. Jon was surprised - she hadn't realized until now just how much room there was for she and Karyn to reconnect.
It wasn't like they had drifted apart - even before she'd accidentally changed the Sun, she'd counted Karyn as her closest friend, and since her change she'd been sticking closer to her than before, not least because of all the aspects of this life that Karyn knew her way around and Jon didn't - but it had been a long time since they'd had this much of a good time just hanging out together. The slug-girl smiled. It was good - and it'd been good to get away from her family for a bit, too. Not that she disliked them, but it was good to get some space now and again - especially while she was processing the idea that...that Mikey now saw her as a big-sister figure... She did wonder what they'd gotten up to last night, though...
Ricky had gotten the eggs beaten and was in the process of separating out the bacon slices (she'd had to resort to using a fork, since she no longer had fingernails) when she glanced at the clock and realized that it was actually 5:00 A.M. and not 5:00 P.M. She'd only rested for a few hours, then - and her parents weren't likely to be up until late afternoon at the earliest. Well, she couldn't very well start cooking anything just now, then - luckily she hadn't gotten anything made yet, so there was no harm sticking it back in the fridge until the evening. Well, after she finished the prep work, anyway.
She'd expected, if she ever changed, that she would've moved to a day-time schedule from her night-time schedule. But she'd decided not to, which would've meant that she'd just stay, as they did, active during the night and sleeping through most of the day. But now she wasn't even sure if she could sleep, and since she didn't have anybody on the day-side to help her, she couldn't really go out, either. Which meant that her day was likely to look more like bursts of activity punctuating hours of rest while she re-wound...
She finished her preparations and washed the bacon fat off her fingers - it took some doing, since it'd got worked into the cloth covering a little, but she got it out. Having hot water actually soaked into the cloth until she pressed it out was a bizarre sensation, and she found herself wondering exactly how her sensation worked now, anyway. Obviously she didn't have flesh-and-blood nerves embedded in the hard surfaces of her body, yet she could sense temperatures and had some tactile sensation, even if the feelings were different than what she was used to. Perhaps...well, there were old mechanical thermometers she'd seen, so she guessed there had to be a way to convert a change in temperature into motion, and it was possible that she had sensors working on that principle...and tactile pressure was already motion, that shouldn't be difficult for her body to incorporate. She wondered, though, how she could tell the feeling of wetness, or the texture of her own velvety covering...there was so much about this body, so much she'd have to learn...
So, then. It was still early in the day, and she had quite a bit of energy left in her mainspring. She couldn't really go out for any long period of time, so she'd have to just kill time inside until she wound down again. With what? She wasn't sure. She went back up to her room and sat down on the bed, noting again how her feet didn't quite reach the floor. She'd gotten so short - no taller than 4'8", she thought...she was going to have to reorganize her things so that she could reach them, now, but that was going to have to wait until she had somewhere to put them - she couldn't just cover her floor with piles of her things, not after she'd just gotten it straightened up.
A good nine hours remained until it would be time to start the night's activities...she'd run down again well before that, and much of it would be spent resting, but in the meantime...what? She supposed she'd better change clothes at some point - she didn't have sweat or body oils to build up in her clothes, but of course they'd still get a little dirty in normal use - but that might be better left until after she'd made breakfast - no sense going around smelling like bacon grease all night. She could kill time on the computer, she guessed, but the idea made her a little antsy - after all, the computer still had all her...pictures...and while she could simply not bother with that for the moment, the question of what her reaction might be still had her a little nervous. Maybe there was a book she could read, or something, or...well, if she really couldn't think of anything else, she could rest, and...try not-thinking. Would that...be anything like dreaming? There was no way to tell...
It was cold and damp out - not quite the season for morning frost, yet, but plenty cold enough that moisture condensed onto the grass and into the lower atmosphere in the mornings, and the first rays of the sun were only just beginning to evaporate it. Adam shivered a little - she was wearing a warm sweatshirt (its sleeves cut off and the sides opened to let her wings through,) but her lower body was still uncovered. Her plumage insulated most of it pretty well, and her feet, like some real birds', seemed to be designed to keep closer to the ambient temperature than the rest of her without losing much core body heat to the environment. Still, she was a little chilly. She flexed her talons, picking up first one foot and then the other closer to the warmer rest of her body, a little impressed by how well she could balanced on one leg.
She was a little nervous, too. She'd meant what she'd told herself - if she was going to be stuck like this, if she was going to have to live with the inconvenience of not having hands, with being unable to wear pants, with having to...to lay eggs on a regular basis...then she was damn well going to take advantage of the one thing she could do that no human could. She was going to fly - but it was a lot easier to say that than to face doing it. After all, she was still so new to this...she had only even been a harpy for less than a week, and she'd never even tried to fly before...and if she did manage to get off the ground, then...if she screwed up, there would be no parachute to save her, nobody to help her but herself...she was light enough that she was pretty sure her bones were hollow, they might break so easily...
No. Enough of that talk. If...if the others could do it...so could she. After all, none of them had grown up as harpies, and they certainly couldn't all be former pilots or anything like that - if that would even afford them any useful knowledge, she didn't know. It must be something that they just understood. And she...she didn't know. She couldn't consciously recall any kind of process, if she tried to think of one. But if she just tried to fly...
Taking a deep breath, Adam hunkered down slightly, spreading her wings. She flexed them a little - ready to move, not cramped. She let her body take over - wings raised, muscles tensed...and spring! into the air, and down went the wings, thrusting her away from the ground. Slice up, then down again. Adam looked down and gasped in astonishment - she had to have made thirty feet already. And despite what she'd expected, she didn't feel any sense of vertigo or nervousness at being this high - higher, now. She leveled off a good couple hundred feet above the ground - and it didn't actually seem that high, to her, but it was good enough for the moment.
What amazed her was how simple it felt. It wasn't exactly an unconscious action, but it came naturally enough that she didn't really have to think very hard about it - which was good, considering that she didn't actually know that much about it, intellectually. She was learning more by doing than she'd ever understood beforehand. It was like walking - she had to keep in mind where she was heading, but mostly her limbs took care of the details. Though unlike walking, she couldn't just come to a stop if she wanted to not have to think about where she was going - but she found, as she thought over this, that she could do pretty well at circling in place while her focus was elsewhere.
It was work, though. It wasn't like standing safely on the ground, where you could remain in place with only a little tension across the muscles of the legs and back. She couldn't stay up here forever - but then, neither could ordinary birds...or could they? She thought some of them could - didn't albatrosses and other sea birds stay in the air for long periods of time? But she wasn't a sea bird; according to her mother, she was a barn swallow, and her flight was more active. It felt strange to think of identifying herself that way, and she thought back to that girl in the mall - Sarah, was it? - who openly admitted that she didn't think of herself as human...
That was such a strange notion - of course she was human...or, she was a person...but Sarah had had a point when she'd said that those weren't one and the same anymore. She was a person...but she was arguably not human...up here, it seemed to be more difficult to think of herself as one. Up above the world she normally inhabited, even the buildings seemed smaller, more like dollhouses than things one could live in...even though she knew perfectly well that she was smaller now than she'd been as a human. And above her...
She hadn't quite realized that she'd been climbing for some time now - looking down again, she realized that she'd probably attained a thousand feet or so. And looking around her, she got a sense for the first time of how big the sky is. She, like most, had only ever seen the world at this height from a tiny little window in a passenger jet during takeoff. Pilots of small aircraft get a better view; but even enthusiasts who go up in nothing more than an ultra-light winged go-kart and a heavy jacket don't quite know it as fully as someone who is up in it by herself, in nothing but a sweatshirt, under the power of her own body. Adam was surrounded in five directions by the vastness of the sky, and in the one other direction by a world that now looked less like dollhouses and more like a model train set. It was simultaneously humbling and exhilarating, and for a long time she couldn't even think of anything else.
She was finally drawn from this slightly frightening reverie when she became aware of a shape in the near distance. Adam's vision was probably not as good as some real birds', but it was better than it had been as a human. She couldn't tell at this distance exactly what it was she was looking at, but it was much too big to be an ordinary bird, and it moved like a living thing - it must, then, be another changed person. Evidently they were aware of her, as well, as they were moving towards her.
Ordinarily Adam was still adjusting to life among the changed, and there was still a little twinge of nervousness when she was meeting someone for the first time. But as she was feeling at the moment, this was like being adrift on the open sea and suddenly spotting another raft - she was too grateful for the chance of having company up here to think much about mundane fears. She picked up her pace, winging towards the other person.
