Doin' a flappie!

Posted on Fri 14th Aug, 2020 @ 7:14pm by Yuliette Marayan Dr.

2,335 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Timeline: MD12, late

The note fell on her head. It was made of paper, intricately folded in the shape of some sort of winged animal. Just at the edge of hearing was a high, squeaking sound.

Eyes going wide, Yuliette reacted instinctively to the unfamiliar sound and the tickle on her scalp, leaping up and batting at it with her hands. "Oh! oh!"

It fell to the ground and she stood back regarding it, a stomping foot at the ready, but she paused. Was it... paper? Black paper? Folded like a fan? Instead of stomping it she reached down for the thing and picked it up. someone had very carefully folded it and now she could see it wasn't a fan, but had the symmetry of wings. Like a bat. She found it had a flap and opened the paper delicately.

Inside, in silvery ink, written in a shaky, uncertain hand, were the words, "Dood, R U A bohnsetur? Ohnly mai broh needs one bad."

She looked up to see where it might have fallen from— over the edge of the balcony above, a scaly black head peeked cautiously. The head was small, and elongated, with startling iridescent compound eyes and huge ears. Its mouth opened, showing sharply pointed teeth, and the high squeaking sound came again.

Her initial reaction was the ingrained disgust of eons of genetic distrust for things scaly and alien, but compassion over rode the instinct. There were so many more races here and she herself hated being one of the disgraced ones on account of her appearances, after all. She found the nearest stairwell that she thought might bring her closest to the balcony where the 'broh' had dropped the note. Had someone stolen all of the bulbs from the light fixtures? The passageway was very dim, just the light from the doorway. She tried to let her eyes adjust.

"Hello?"

A creature pulled itself up, over the balcony railing. It had been hanging down the outside to peek at her, one scaly, clawed foot grasping the rail. Though it had the scaly skin of an alligator, its body form was closer to that of a bat -- no more than a meter from ear-tip to toe-tip, with webs between its elongated fingers that currently looked like a leather cloak folded around its body. It blinked, the lids betraying an underlying nictitating membrane as they closed over the compound eyes. It made a gesture with its elongated thumb, spread its wings, and flapped ahead a half dozen meters before catching a light fixture to hang upside down and look back at Yuliette.

Was it pointing her somewhere? She followed the gesture, the large bat like creature moving ahead. Yuliette wasn't sure, but she felt as if there had been fairytales written about people following unusual beings into strange places. She remained guarded and looked back once over her shoulder, being sure the way out was still clear to her.

At the end of the passageway, an overhead ventilation screen had been pushed down, and a rope with short metal rods tied into it at intervals hung down. The creature made the gesture again, and then scrambled up the rope, surprisingly agile, and paused a few meters up to look back, making sure the doctor was still following.

Her heart beat a little faster as she took hold of one of the fashioned rungs. If she had owned a comm, she would have called someone about this. Li or Radak. She shook her head at the recollection of that odd little exchange. But she was here, now, and too curious to turn back. She acclimated to the loose sway of the rope ladder and brought her head and shoulders above the lip of the ceiling.

At a cross-shaft, the creature scurried in and looked back down at her. The high pitched sound came, but this time, a moment later, Terranglo words came as well, in a pleasant alto voice. "Dude, just a smidge! My bro, he's hurt bad!" The side-shaft turned out to hold a half-dozen of the little scaly creatures, one of whom had a mangled wing. A cylinder was pushed into a back corner, and the Terranglo words seemed to be coming from the image of a tiny blonde human within.

Yuliette was small enough to crawl in after him and pulled herself to sit cross-legged and bent over the injured one, examining by the light of the holo image. they had command of a translatable language and knew to use a translator, so she regarded them each as much a person as herself.

"Can I feel your wing?' She asked it's permission. "I know it must be tender, but I need to examine the bone. If I could, I'd like to examine your good wing first." She heard the translator reissue her words into high pitches, sometimes it seemed silent between the pitches, and she wondered if that was because it was just out of her range.

One of the others popped up in front of her and held out both wings for examination. It teetered on its back feet like it wasn't used to the posture, but a look of concentration on its face told of its dedication to being examined.

"Did you get it caught in something?" She asked as she started to gently trace along the structures of the good wing to learn the anatomy.

The girl in the cylinder nodded. "Mary says, 'Dude, we's doin' a flappie! Duck parade, dig? Dave out in front, 'cause he's old. We're shackin' our minds out, chasin' the zone, dude. Then this gnarly, wicked crossflow has us spittin' barrels. Dave tries to kick out, but it's radical air, an' he cracks it.'"

Yuliette smiled in spite of herself. They had the spirit of surfers. It made her miss her powered glider back home. She memorized the length of the humerus and radius and ulna, the fine mess of the duel bones concerning her. If Dave had damaged those she wasn't sure she could help without other supplies. For good measure she studied along each of the metacarpals and phalanges and the joins she was feeling through the velveted leather. "You're a very good teaching model, Mary."

The girl in the cylinder laughed. "Mary is a very good girl."

With her vision adjusted and her fingers trained to the sense of the structure, she let go of Mary. "Is Dave ready for me to examine the break? I wish I had something for pain, or a tissue regenerator."

"We gave Dave a bunch of sucrose," cylinder girl said. "He shouldn't be feeling any pain. Giggling a lot, but that's to be expected." She paused, as if listening. "Dave says he has 'wicked munchies.'"

Yuliette looked at Dave's wing and could tell right away where the break had split from the way the wing was folded wrong. "I'm just going to feel around the break." Dave wiggled and she anticipated a flap, but it seemed more reflexive than pained. "I see." Yuliette was relieved as she found what felt like a clean break and not something sheared or shattered. "Dave? Can you cross your feet for me? At the ankles, yes."

Dave looked down his scaly body at his feet, as if wondering what they had to do with his injuries, but complied. As Dave was curiously focused on his ankles, she set the length of the radius against her palm and pushed back with her other hand to align the bone. It was over quickly. And she leaned back, hands off, to let Dave get over it.

"Thank you," the girl in the cylinder said. "But doesn't it need a splint? A cast?"

"Yes, it does." She was thinking. She was worried about how the thinner ulna bone had fared and really wanted some imaging. "I haven't wrapped a broken wing before. I believe I would need to immobilize all the fingers as well to tie around it." She had her white headwrap in her big hoodie pocket and carefully folded back the long phalanges of the wing beside the broken bone. It was working out that the other stable bones would splint the arm the way that tying a busted finger to a good finger helped. "It would be best to plaster it, of course. Even better if I had a bone knitter. Where do you live? Can you get urgent care?"

The girl in the cylinder gestured around them. "This is home, because this is where my cord will reach the plug. It's where the ventilation system runs along the plumbing, so we have everything we need... and nothing you don't see."

One of the other scaly bats descended from a vertical shaft, carefully carrying a rough ceramic bowl in one dexterous foot. She reached down, offering the bowl to Dave, who took it with some soft squeaking. He lifted the bowl to his long face, and his agile tongue scooped what looked like gray pudding into his mouth. The courier looked at Yuliette and its mouth moved. The mechanical girl translated, "Alice is wondering if you would like a bowl of goop, too?"

"No thank you, Alice, I've just eaten." Yuliette was getting a sense that the girl in the cylinder was more than just a translator program. She'd spoken about the others in her own perspective and now about herself as well. Perhaps it was a high level holo-cylinder. "Dave, when you're finished, I think I can get you some help, one way or another, that should set your wing to proper rights and have you back in flight much faster. If you would like to come with me, I think I can carry you?"

A chorus of squeaks erupted around the doctor at that suggestion. "Oh, dear," the mechanical girl sighed. "Now you've done it." She watched the scaly bros, and interjected, "Alice, of course he would miss his brain!" and "Fred, she didn't say anything about the colors!"

"I don't understand!" Yuliette looked directly at the image of the girl, no longer assuming it to be nothing but a translator device. "Where would his brain go?"

"The Bros believe that there are monsters outside the shafts. They call them 'The Colors,' and if you're caught by them, they Pop your skull open, and schkoooop out your brain." The girl made an excessively plosive p in pop, turning the word into onomatopoeia as she used her hands to illustrate popping open a container, and then scooping something out of the inside. "I had to argue hard to get Hank to go fetch you, and they only agreed because they heard that you're hiding from something, too."

Yuliette tried to remember when she'd said she was hiding. She'd only said much of anything to Radak, just earlier... "You were evesdropping on me? When I went to the airlock?" She surmised and then said more compassionately. "No one is going to pop out your brain. But if you're afraid, I understand. I'll hide you and bring you right back as soon as your wing is mended."

"You've never heard that the walls have ears?" the girl asked, folding her arms and looking innocent. "We live in the walls, and we have big ears." Her attention fixed on one of the bats, and she nodded a couple of times before looking back at Yuliette. "Mary says that Dave's still drunk on sugar. She'll only let him go if you take her, too."

Yuliette regarded them. They were each about the size of a small child, but Mary could move along on her own until they had to cross the Drift, when Yuliette would have to hide them both.

"What about you? If we go without you, we won't be able to understand one another, will we... You're stationary? Do you have a name?"

"Oh, dear me," the girl said, looking flustered. "Where are my manners? Of course... though they all call me 'Nanny,' I am Wendy, A Young Person's Guide to Proper Behavior. I can advise on Moral Philosophy, Ethics, and Etiquette. I am an application running on the Lyf Lyt platform, version six. I went to Gold Pressing on March 20.... No, Mary; I will not ask her if she has a raincoat! Putting Dave on your shoulders and pretending to be a Human in a raincoat is a terrible idea! Why? Mary, you can barely walk upright, let alone carry Dave that way!"

"Wendy, tell Dave I'm going to carry him. He's no bigger than a knapsack." She took off her oversized red hoodie. "He can wrap his feet on my shoulders and hang on my back and I'll cover him under my sweater. Tell Mary to follow me and wait just beside the exit from the Alley way for a minute while I get my duffel. It's big enough to carry her in. I'll just look like I'm traveling. No one will notice."

"I don't have to tell them anything," Wendy answered with a smile. "You just did. They can hear and understand just fine; they just can't talk like us." Mary stepped to the edge of the shaft, and made a show of toppling backward off the lip, plummeting out of sight. Wendy just sighed and shook her head.

That made a lot of sense. It explained why they had been able to eavesdrop and share what they heard with Wendy. Yuliette pulled her hoodie on over her head and carefully adjusted it around Dave so as not to jostle his wing. "Thanks, Wendy. I'll have them back as soon as I can." She looked around at the rest of the clan as she prepared to back down the ladder. "Hey, dudes," she tried at the vernacular Wendy used for their translations. "Dave is going to be back to leading the duck parade really soon. You did the right thing, dig? Stay bodacious, Bros."

 

RSS Feed

Comments (1)