Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.20

1.20

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My eyes open.

For a moment, I simply stared at the ceiling above me. The dream that I’d had runs through my mind, and I need absolutely nothing to know that it had not been a dream.

“Ah.” I said, aloud. “Well, at least it wasn’t something as trite as a ROB.”

I shifted, the recliner following my movements as it folded up to a simpler chair.

“The better question is, how did that lead to me getting here.” I wondered to myself.

I... No.

The memories revealed the truth of this, now. My prior thoughts on my ‘Chozo half’, while originally something of a joke, were closer to the truth than I had known, then.

Than I had known consciously, rather.

What I was now was an amalgamate being, the merger of two compatible souls. The Chozo part of me had laboured to open a breach into... well, the best possible description of it was ‘The Chaos between realities’, and had then simply stepped through. That part of me had been approaching the end of life, and so done this... audacious insanity, in order to launch a thread of life beyond the reality that had seemed to be endlessly grinding it away.

I stood up.

And the Chozo part of me had found the Human part of me out there. Which... certainly raised a few questions on how the fuck that part’s soul had gotten out there. The Chozo part of me did not know.

There had been others. I- the Chozo part of me remembered that.

... And, I think, so could that Human part of me. It was hard to tell. The lead up to that was relatively clear, but during and after... Well. The Chozo part of me had been prepared for the rigours that unreality would inflict.

The Human part of me most definitely had not been.

Regardless, both had met, and the result was me. My Human personality had taken primacy because my Chozo soul had been so old and withered that it simply did not have the capacity to contest at all anymore. At the same time, the strength of my Human soul, as minor as it would have been during my Chozo soul’s heights, had fed vigour and vitality into the whole.

And so I had stabilized, that strength fueling true rebirth, completing the design that my Chozo soul had written in Essence.

The knowledge fills me, and I am struck by the realization that my Chozo half had well and truly completed what the ancient Empire had once sought to do when the Chozo had lengthened their life.

I am well and truly ageless, now. What had once required the Ascended to give up their physicality entirely had been achieved out of sheer, stubborn audacity. My soul is its own completeness, a spiral without end, a flame that fuels itself, and the entirety of my physical form is defined in my Essence, in my spiritual body.

Immortal, even in the face of that which isn’t reality.

It had left me with no more ability to navigate it, though. Certainly, also no more ability to think, there. Time was a concept for things with shape, and where I had been did not even have the concept of shape.

And so I had drifted, until I overlapped with a place that did have shape. And so I had arrived, with the only blueprint of my physicality being that of my Chozo half, because my Human half had never been prepared for it in the first place.

Thus, me. Chozo in truth, and yet more asides.

“How absurd!” I squawked out a laugh, and rose to my feet. “What marvelous arrogance!”

The room had changed around me while I slept. A thought made an Autgent project the time, confirming what I’d already suspected.

It was slightly after nine in the morning. I had slept for a little over ten hours.

The nanomachines had been busy the entire time. The floor was smooth and polished, divided neatly into tiles. It had previously been a slab or poured concrete, so it was quite the improvement over what it had previously been.

The walls, too, had been reinforced, smoothed out, metals threading through them. The room was also no longer a rectangle, because a small section at the front left corner had been consumed, matching the space of the office building above it.

The support pillars had received the same treatment as the walls.

Aside from the building itself, however, there were also new installations.

The fusion generator had been joined by two more of its kind. Power wasn’t necessary, the only thing they were meant for was speeding the production of heavier elements. Their spare energy was currently feeding a particle bombarder, which was in the process of synthesizing more exotic materials.

Along the back wall, next to my impromptu kitchen, several devices had taken shape. Most of them were tools, of which the most important was a Biovat setup. That would be very important quite soon, but right now, my attention was on the new walls that had sprung up next to my sleeping spot.

There was a door on the front, which opened up as I approached it. The inside was sealed, climate and environmental controls even more strict than the outside.

It was, perhaps, a bit unnecessary for what amounted to a bathroom. However, I did have an abundance of some elements, and so... why not?

I could recycle it all anyway.

I stepped in front of a mirror.

There was a disconnect that was immediately apparent to my Chozo half. The face that part of me had known as my own wasn’t the face that was staring back at me now. That face had been old, leached of colour by sheer age. That face had lost feathers, had skin that had wrinkled from time.

The face that looked back now was much, much younger. The full array of feathers was present, and each one was strong. Colour again marked it, streaks of blue and purple stretched across the base darker colours. The one thing that stayed unchanged between the older and younger faces was the glow of my eyes, still that deep, intense blue.

The last time my Chozo half had seen a face this young, my Chozo half had still been a Warrior.

I reached up, and took hold of the headpiece that I was wearing. Having stubbornly refused to even so much as shift during all of my incredibly rapid movements, it came off with only the slightest bit of focus from me.

I laid the smooth metal to my side, before I reached up to my neck and did the same thing with the decorations that wrapped across my neck and shoulders. After that, my hands went to the collar of my robes, and pulled. The clasps came undone easily, despite the fact that, much like my headpiece and neckpiece, they were held together by forces unknown to Human science, and I carefully took them off, avoiding ruffling my feathers as I pulled my arms back through the sleeves before depositing it on a rack. The nanites would be crawling all over both of them shortly, where they would make sure it was all molecularly clean.

Transforming would have achieved about the same result, but that wasn’t the point of this.

The inner layer of the clothing I’d been wearing underneath the robes was markedly more form-fitting, though it wasn’t particularly tight. While it would, at first glance, appear to be a single piece, it was in fact two pieces, one for my torso and upper arms, and one for my waist and upper legs. Between the both of them, my entire body, save for my neck, head, forearms, and lower legs, were completely covered.

My underclothes only had minor adornments, streaks of colour that followed the biological lines of my body underneath them. The only parts of it that weren’t original were the interfaces that I’d clipped to it.

As far as fashion went, this was actually a moderate oddity among the Chozo. When it came to underclothes, most tribes would have been perfectly fine with only a shendyt or loincloth to cover their lower bodies. The chest, typically, would be left uncovered.

Chozo, after all, lacked mammary glands. An entire taboo for Humans simply did not exist for the Chozo... Though there were other matters.

Dimorphism in general among Chozo was relatively low, and what tribe a Chozo descended from had more of an influence on the natural shape of their bodies than their gender did.

There had been a reason that my Chozo half had for this mode of dress, odd as it was for my culture. That reason was simple.

I reached behind my back, and ran the back of my talon along my spine. The chest-piece obligingly came apart, and I tossed it to the side, too.

In the recent memories of my Chozo half, I recalled bare skin, sallow and decrepit from the rigors of time.

Now, I had a set of feathers, a large amount of my body once more coated with an exceptional degree of fluff that came with youth and vigor.

My stomach, sternum, and neck were about the only parts that didn’t have a layer of feathers coating them, which was fairly normal for Chozo. It left most of the biological lines that stretched across my body exposed, though that also wasn’t anything unusual.

All that aside, though...

I was very similar to how my Chozo half had been in youth. I was tall, well above the average but still well under the actual maximum for a Chozo. Wide shoulders, narrow waist, wide hips, lithe muscles... And most importantly-

I reached for the core of my being, and flexed.

My Lifeforce surged. The biological lines of my body lit up with energy, waves of light flowing across my form, making my feathers shimmer briefly with iridescent light. The world sharpened, the glow of my eyes strengthening, as the fire of my soul surged.

From my very Essence, my wings emerged, extending from my back in a single flurry of movement. The air rippled with their passage, a shockwave passing through the room that made my robes ruffle and the two decorations shake.

I breathed out, crooning in delight as my wings stretched. They were large, each one half again longer than I was tall. For their colours, they started a dark grey, then turned blue and slowly bled to a deep purple at the very tip.

I flexed them, shifting them backwards and forwards, stretching them inwards and outwards. I moved them as far backwards as I could, and immediately found myself lamenting the small space when they collided with the wall.

It was pure satisfaction to have my wings out. They had lost their strength so long ago, taking more than I could give. The knowledge that I would never again have to give them up was one that filled me with a great deal of enthusiasm.

I brought them to my front, shifting them underneath my arms. My fingers threaded through the feathers, and I hummed as I smoothed them.

Wings. Incredible. Both parts of me were in full agreement on that, though the reasons varied. The Chozo half was split between joy at their recovery and the finally flying again, while the Human half was instead stuck on the sheer Fuck Yeah of the concept in general.

There weren’t many Chozo who still had wings, after all. Most of the Chozo had lost them after the fragmentation of the Empire.

... Shame that I wouldn’t be finding much use of them in the city, though.

My fingers stopped running through my feathers, and I shifted my wings backwards, moving them over my shoulders.

Damn that is a thought that sucks. Flight was such a nice thing, but it was so... attention grabbing. And I wasn’t yet in a position where I could afford to fuck around like that.

Well. I could afford to fuck around like that, but it just wasn’t worth it.

The day would come where I would eventually stop caring... And perhaps I’d be able to sneak a few flights outside of the City itself. I’d need something big as cover, though-

I paused, and rather abruptly remembered that there was going to be a storm very soon.

I smiled.

“I’ll need some temporary clothes.” I mused to myself, folding my wings behind me before pulling at the levers inside of my Essence again. My wings slipped away slowly, drawn back into my spiritual body. “I’m certainly not taking my fancy stuff out there.” Not when the rain was half radioactive materials and half acid. Neither myself or my clothes would be damaged by it, but it’s the principle of the matter.

Well, I know what I’ll be doing later. Right now, though, it’s time for a shower.