‘I have a status.’

Species: Great Eagle Owl (young)

Age: 0

Name: -

Gender: female

Status: sapient, healthy, exhausted

Level: 1

Class: -

Strength: 1

Constitution: 1

Dexterity: 2

Perception: 4

Intelligence: 12

Wisdom: 8

AP: 0

Skills: locked

‘Go away!’

Apparently just thinking the word ‘status’ made it pop up in my vision. There it was again. Black letters with white edging. Readable no matter what I was looking at. But also slightly transparent so it did not actually obscure my vision. Of which I had none. Yes, I was still blind and now I knew why.

I was an owl. A Great Eagle Owl. But that did not really matter. All owls I knew of are blind for the first week or so. Or was it two weeks? Anyway, I would not see anything for a while, besides shades of orange and black through my eyelids. Like right now. Someone seemed to be really close to my face right now. I could hear soft hooting. Maybe this was my mother? She might have been worried because I was not moving.

‘Sorry mum, having a bit of an existential crisis right now!’

Damn. This was weird. It was also uncomfortable. I was laying on top of my broken eggshell right now. With nothing but some tiny down feathers to protect my weak body. It kind of hurt. My status said I was healthy though so it could not be that bad. Still, it was unpleasant. So I tried to move. Try being the keyword. I was still exhausted from the ordeal of hatching.

Huh. I just hatched. From an egg. I was a bird now. An owl. A bird of prey. I would have to hunt for my own food. Swallow it whole and vomit out pellets of indigestible. This was so freaky. Was this a dream? But how could I feel so exhausted in a dream? Feel the cool chill of the air caress my feathers? The warmth of my mother sitting next to me in the nest?

No, I was pretty sure this was not a dream. I could never move enough to give my mind the experience necessary to make up something like this. I struggled some more and somehow managed to prop myself up onto my feet. Leaning against a rough wall I let out a weak squeak. Mother’s shadow returned to me and her beak gently went through my feathers, removing the last bits and pieces of eggshell and gunk.

Soon after a flapping sound reached my ears. Hooting ensued and I realize my father must have come back with food for mum. The sounds grew more excited and a shadow moved over me again. Slightly deeper hooting and I knew the one preening my down right now is my father. I let out a squeak and slightly lifted my head towards him. I was still exhausted, so I could not get it up that much, but my father gently touched my beak before he turned away.

Seems I was loved by my parents. Lucky me! Though I think I was loved by my previous parents as well. I did not really remember them. I just got a warm feeling when I thought of them. I hoped they would not mind if I enjoyed myself in this new life.

The next few days passed in a blur. Literally. I could only see a blur of orange and red or black and grey depending on the time of day and how close my parents or my siblings were to my face. Oh yeah, I had siblings. Three of them. They hatched within two or three days each. I was not exactly sure, I could only count the sessions of very long darkness as night.

I also zoned out a lot from exhaustion. Moving about even just a few steps to get food from mother took a lot of my energy. But it also made me stronger! Looks like I did not need to level to increase my attributes. This was what my status looked like now:

Species: Great Eagle Owl (young)

Age: 0

Name: -

Gender: female

Status: sapient, healthy

Level: 1

Class: -

Strength: 4

Constitution: 4

Dexterity: 5

Perception: 7

Intelligence: 12

Wisdom: 8

AP: 0

Skills: locked

All my ‘physical’ stats had gone up by a huge amount! And my Intelligence? Wisdom? Well. I did not need to exercise my brain to eat, shit and sleep so I might have been able to increase them as well somehow. I was just too busy, you know. Eating, shitting and sleeping.

It was tough when you had three siblings competing for the same food you want. But since I was born first, I was the strongest and biggest! I could get all the food I want! But I was a good big sister. I made sure my little siblings got enough. I did not really need to though. Mum already split everything fairly. And dad worked so much! How could he catch so much food! It looked like he was a professional hunter!

And then one day I managed to open my eyes. Finally! Light, my old friend, oh how I missed thou! Colour exploded in my vision, is what I want to say, but there was not all that much colour around. Right. Owls have mostly light receptors. They can see a lot of detail, but colour is a secondary concern. Maybe there was a skill for that?

Even without colour though I could tell our nest was on the side of a cliff or mountain. There was a small indent which some would exaggeratedly call a hole. This was where I and my siblings were huddled up in. In front of us, our mother guarded us with unerring perceptiveness. Past her, I could see a small platform, beyond which an endless sky extended. I could not see the ground from here so I carefully edged forward along the sidewall of our little home.

When I came up next to mother, she looked at me and tilted her head questioningly. I gave a squeak and a nod and moved a little further forward. She stopped me immediately with her wing. A gentle shove kept me inside our home.

‘I want to see the world, mum! Please let me out?’

No amount of cute head-tilting or dog eyes (owl eyes?) could make her relent though and she shoved me back again, this time a little harder. I squeaked in protest and tucked my head in. Moping. I knew how to mope. I moped for years in my previous life. I could last a lot longer than you, mum! But she did not care.

Only when father came back did she look at me and my siblings again. To feed us. While father sat on the edge of the cave and kept watch. Wait, were there predators out there? Was it dangerous? Was that why you did not want me to go outside, mum? Oh. Thank you! I guess I could wait until I was a little bigger to see the world.

Over the next few days, my vision gradually improved. I think it had something to do with my Perception attribute. It rose to nine points just a moment ago and I could make out more colours now as well as more detail. Some small shadows flew around the sky outside our little cave and I could make out small birds. Or at least they looked small from this distance. Mother warily eyed any that came close to our home and sometimes took off for a few minutes to chase one of them away.

How did I know that, when I did not see her after she left the cave? Well, sometimes she came back with blood on her talons or beak. And once she even brought a dead bird clutched in her talons. Some kind of small hawk or falcon, if my guess was right. Said victim then immediately got plucked and fed to us chicks. What a brutal world. I guess this was what they call law of the jungle?

Mother also had beautiful plumage. As did father, but mother's was a little prettier. She had soft white facial feathers beneath her eyes and beak. On top of her head, they were a dark brown, matching with her near-black bill and ear tufts and in beautiful contrast with her almost glowing orange eyes. Her back and wings were mostly brown, going to a lighter shade near the tail and with white spots on the covert feathers’ tips. Her chest and belly were mostly white as well, with a few brown spots. The underside of her wings was also mostly white with regular brown stripes on the underside of the covert feathers. Her feet were covered in dark brown feathers and ended in near-black talons the same as her beak.

Father looked very similar when I still had bad colour-vision. But he did not change any. His feathers stayed the same dirty monochrome grey, where mother’s turned a lively dark brown. Only his eyes looked nice. They were a shining gold-yellowish tone. I still hoped I get mum’s, she just looked so much nicer! A girl had to be pretty!

I suppose right then I was just as ugly as my siblings. Crumpled downy grey feathers, not even long enough to form proper wings, huddled into a corner and dirty from filth and blood from our food. Yikes! The first thing I wanted to do when I could leave was finding a place to take a bath.

Though I guess we were tossing this down anyway and the juvenile feathers that would come after as well. Bathing seemed less important, now that I was no longer human, huh? Convenient, but I still wanted to be clean. That was why I started preening myself and my siblings. When we were huddled up all the time, they needed to be clean as well or all the work I did would have been wasted.

Speaking of my siblings, the last one opened their eyes just yesterday! Now we could all see each other! But they did not really seem all that smart. I tried gesturing to them, but they only screeched and squeaked a little not getting anything I wanted to tell them. Even mother did not pay much attention to my antics. Even though I waved good morning and good night to her every day and thanked her for the food she mostly just kept watch and sometimes pushed me to the back of the cave. I think I might have been annoying her a little.

But I was just so bored! Now that I was no longer exhausted heavily from taking a few steps or even just eating I wanted to do something. Something other than watching the occasional bird in the far sky from the safety of the cave. The only reason I had not tried to push past mum again was because of that very reason: it was safe here. With mum regularly going out to fend off attackers of some kind and father sometimes returning from his hunt with very ruffled feathers I could only be thankful for their protection and stay in here.

And so my thoughts wandered. How did I get reborn as an owl? Why? Did someone do something to make me come to this world? Would they make me do their bidding once I was strong enough, or were they just watching for their own amusement? Or was this all an elaborate dream? Did I not actually die and just fell into a coma? With my mind reaching freedom of imagination usually only possible when you were separated from any sensory inputs?

It was no use. I could not tell if this was real any more than I could back in that hospital bed. And I had a lot of time to think about everything back then. Way more than these two weeks in a cliffside hole.

So I did not think about it. Instead, I went back to my status. Which had not changed much. A point here and there in the physical stats, but nothing else. Skills were still locked, I still did not have a class or name and my status still said healthy.

I was wondering if there was anything I could do to improve my mental stats. Maybe going through some mental puzzles would help? Playing chess against myself? Or doing some calculus in my head? Nah, no way. I was not smart enough to do that kind of thing. But some basic exercises might already help.

So I tried to just think. I did some basic maths, wrote poems, tried to recall the history and details of my life. I did not get far. My maths were fine, not anything spectacular but I managed to do some basic multiplication and division and even solved a simple term I made up on the spot. When it came to poems I gave up quickly. I liked reading and all kinds of stories but poems never really clicked for me. They just make it unnecessarily complex to follow along. When it came to history though I could only recall some very general stuff. For example, I knew there were two world wars but I did not remember who fought against who and for what and who won. I just knew it ended with a terrible bomb called a ‘nuke’ which killed hundreds of thousands of people. I knew cars existed and they were somewhat new, like a little over a hundred years or so. And I knew before that, people used horse-drawn carriages or just went by foot. But I did not know anything about how they worked.

Even worse, when it came to my own life the details were even more ambiguous. I only remembered the hospital bed, having some kind of terminal sickness and the day I died someone held my hand. That was it. Oh, and I remembered I was female and still in my teens. Probably. The teens. I know I was female. I was female now, how could I not have been female in my last life? That would not make any sense.

Even after days of thinking and trying to remember stuff nothing changed. No upgrades to my Intelligence or Wisdom. Skills were still locked and no sign of how to get a class. Damn. Even though I played so many video games. I should know how some of this works! Wait. Did I play video games? I did! I remembered something! Maybe I needed some sort of trigger, emotional or otherwise, to remember my previous life. Or maybe I just made it up. Urgh! How would I tell?

I could not. I was just going to stop thinking about it. If I did remember something, nice. If nothing else came back, whatever. This was my new life! I could move! Soon I would be able to fly. Because I was an owl! No social obligations would hold me. I could go wherever I wanted and only needed to find a small cave to hide when I wanted to rest. And hunt when I was hungry. And keep my feathers clean, because I was not a hobo! Damn. Not as much freedom as I thought. But still! Flying! I could not wait!