Prysmcat

  Right. Consciousness was a good start.

  I sat up on the rug, legs tucked up beside me and tail supporting me, and looked down.

  I wasn’t sure which registered first: that I was emphatically female, or that I was covered in vividly-coloured iridescent scales. It was a race to the top, and the two combined shattered my usual dream-induced delusion of normality. This was definitely not any previous version of me.

  I stood up, hoping to get a better sense of what I was working with.

  Overall, as near as I could tell and using the room’s furniture for scale, I was probably about the size of a jotun. And man, did I ever have both muscle and curves.

  The scales tended towards super-saturated reds with markings in bck and a purplish near-bck, but there were startlingly-white chevron stripes on my upper arms and upper thighs and several rings towards the end of my long strong snakelike tail. I experimented, and found that I could use the control I’d learned over my felid tail to at least somewhat influence it, but this tail seemed like it might be genuinely prehensile.

  Also, I had wings.

  Not scaly ones or membrane ones. Feathery ones, that folded against my back in an improbably tight and compact way that would probably go a long way towards keeping them from interfering. I dug around in dream memories and found how to spread them.

  They were huge.

  And brilliantly coloured, even more so than my scales. Still leaning towards reds and bcks with a bit of white, but there were minor markings in the blue of a peacock’s head and the green of a malrd’s and a yellow I couldn’t think of a bird comparison for but maybe dandelion flowers.

  The feathers seemed odd at first, until I thought of the ornithians: they combined scales and feathers with no problems. Why shouldn’t I?

  I was dressed, even if I could see a lot of me anyway. At least, somewhat. Graphite-coloured leggings had cutouts on the sides, showing off the thigh chevrons, and a hole at the back with a ribbon tie above it for my tail. Purplish-bck boots with thick soles and serious treads reached to mid-calf, ced up the front with red ces. The top I was wearing seemed to be complicated: it reached high at the front, covering the hollow of my throat, but had to curve to leave my shoulders and especially my shoulderbdes bare, while still offering support to quite substantial breasts.

  Were ornithians and simir mammals? How did breasts match with scales and feathers?

  The top had some kind of lightweight boning in it, reaching down to my sor plexus. It didn’t dig in anywhere, which was a relief because I’d heard dire things from Grace and other female acquaintances about torture devices known as ‘underwire bras’. That seemed to help keep it ft and keep my breasts secure. It was white with symmetrical red swirls on it. In the centre front was a paramedic’s simple interced pentagram.

  My ever-adaptable bag was still with me. It had turned itself into a backpack with narrow but cushioned straps, each with a sturdy slider buckle and snap a short distance above the matching hip belt. When I unbuckled the tter, I discovered that while I could, with some care and if I loosened the sliders enough, slide the straps off past my wings and shoulders, that was going to be impossible in a hurry or if my wings weren’t tightly folded. The bag itself had morphed into a kind of cross between a pear shape and a violin shape, narrower at the top which would presumably accommodate my wings, wider at the bottom below them. Sure. That seemed sensible and comfortable. The same pentagram star dangled from a gold chain spanning it just below where it widened. I shrugged it carefully back into pce, buckled it, and tightened the straps until it felt secure.

  Okay, what was I supposed to do with all this?

  I automatically tried to bring up my dispy, but it just gave me deep red streaks and fizzled out.

  Right. I was going to have to be outside the Quincunx for that.

  Usually at this point I’d been feeling eager to get back to Serru but had cked any sense of pressure. Right now, with my memory intact and intense curiosity about what I was—definitely not a jotun!—and the question of what skills I now had, I really wanted to just get on with this.

  The cast iron pedestal no longer held a touchscreen. Or anything else.

  I brushed past the chains and out, down the stone ramp with no difficulty thanks to the impressive traction of my boots, down further and then up to open sky.

  The touchscreen had called me by name and invited me to the Axis.

  It had given me an incredibly simple puzzle to solve, and offered an alternative answer. Serru and I were two, then Aryennos, then Terenei, then Heket and Myu, then Zanshe... that was the math.

  What else had it said? You already proved your willingness to take risks in a rescue, or something like to that effect. You get a pass this time.

  What had I proved, though? Each site had a puzzle, but they were all extremely simple. Putting tiles in pce to make a picture, matching pnts with use, lining up two concentric circles of tiles. Those turned up in mobile games at home.

  But every site had included meeting someone on the way in. Someone in some kind of need or distress. A rude injured person, a worried mule owner who couldn’t do two things at once, a gardener trying to race the tide to grow pnts that were needed by alchemists, a young felid distressed over the feasibility of being a warden.

  First aid before I gained my healing skills.

  Gathering and helping an alchemist before I gained my alchemy skills.

  Watering a garden with charged water before I gained my gatherer skills.

  Reassuring someone before... what? Except I had a pass on this one, apparently, having already proved myself.

  The puzzles inside the sites hadn’t been tests, not really, but there had been tests, and I hadn’t recognized them as such, had just reacted automatically.

  They were coming at least partly from my own mind. The tortie felid had said that her friend had told her being a girl was a reason not to be a warden. Since when did this world care at all about that? Just look at the skill distribution among my friends! That was, however, the kind of thing I’d expect in my world.

  Oh, I really wanted to get back to the gate so I could see what else had happened.

  Fortunately, I had long legs, and long fast strides, and the most comfortable hiking boots in the universe, so it didn’t take all that long to see the two white stone pilrs.

  On the road, I brought up my dispy.

  It was a very deep red, and I now had a little red quadrupedal ornithian symbol to go with my white human, yellow centaur, pink cat, and blue tailed merperson. Cute.

  I looked at my abilities wheel, turning it slowly.

  Find Person

  Stasis

  Cocoon

  Strength

  Resist Elements

  Swap Health Status

  It was a short list, but then, it didn’t really need to be long.

  I was my own search-and-rescue. Find someone lost and injured, use stasis to halt physical deterioration, protect them, fly them to safe ground, and protect myself while doing it. In isotion, it would have been more warden than paramedic, but I still had my knowledge and skills and tools, and I could swap to centaur once safe and be my own healer, which expanded it considerably.

  Wow.

  We’d been trying to decide what fourth set of skills could possibly interlock with healer, alchemist, and gatherer. This one did.

  I switched to aquian and took a look.

  Advanced versions of Search and Identify. Charging water into a weak Elixir. Charging water to... dissolve ingredients for alchemy? That was one I’d need to ask Terenei about.

  Felid had more potions, ones I wouldn’t dare try, like underwater breathing and making resuscitation hearts and sex change and species change and Elixir.

  And centaur had...

  Purification Rain.

  I stopped right there, losing interest in anything else. I’d gotten Healing Rain and Calming Rain st time, and had only used the former, after the festival attack, but they sounded like impressive area-of-effect magic.

  An area-of-effect Purification?

  My new self had Find Person. And wings. And some memories of how to use them.

  His preferred form was jotun, and he’d started in the Highnds.

  Find Person.

  I switched back to my new form, noticing that the changes barely moved my mana level at all, and brought up Find Person, thinking hard about Logan the Zombie King.

  When I used Find in aquian form, it gave me a glowing transparent blue-green dot that only I could see, showing me the direction, and it got bigger as I got closer.

  Currently, I could see a simir dot but in red, and the size was moderate—I wasn’t on top of him, but I’d had pnts and minerals come up much smaller when experimenting. Judging by the direction, he was in the Highnds.

  I really shouldn’t. My friends were waiting for me. They’d be worried.

  But if I could make them safer from him... wouldn’t it be worth it?

  I should at least go investigate. I could assess at that point whether there was anything I could or should do.

  So. Wings. Spread them all the way like this. And dream-memories told me the easy way to get into the air was to jump off something high.

  I beat my huge feathery wings a few times, and was sure I felt lighter. They could hold me. I had no reason to doubt that. I could still screw up and fall, of course, but flight was obviously what this form was meant for, the same way my aquian form was meant for water.

  Well. It worked or it didn’t.

  I stepped to the very edge, with my toes over empty space, and beat my wings as hard as I could. When I felt a hint of lift, I took one more step forward.

  I dropped, but not far, and before I even had time to panic, the downward motion was changing to sideways motion and I was gliding.

  Okay, this was just too cool for words.

  Do not ask me how wings attached at my shoulderbdes were enough to keep my entire lower body horizontal, in complete defiance of biology and physics that should have made most of my body inclined towards vertical dead weight. It worked by this world’s rules. Good enough, who was I to argue?

  The red dot was that way.

  I really wanted a word with him.