“Alright, now you just need to ease her in. Just take her easy,” said my father, Ferdinand.

“Yeah…but like you should also be firm because sometimes these big ones can get away from you,” said Thad.

“Er…Okay,” I said. Grunting in the affirmative and gently driving our family’s new car down the street.

“Ah! Eyes on the road, eyes on the road!” said my little sister. Shrieking shrilly, and more than a little exaggeratedly, considering we weren’t even going that fast.

So, I was sixteen now. Sixteen and a half, nearly seventeen. Things have been going well for the Dunkel family. Ferdinand was well-established as part of the senior management of the construction company he worked at, and in a few months, he’d be eligible to buy some of the stakes and become one of the partners. Reina had recently been promoted at bank. Yijun’s art career had taken off to the point where her work was starting to spread well-beyond Grand Basin.

As a result, our Dunkel family was able to expand our house, and Ferdinand recently came back with a car that was almost-new. Officially making us a two-car family, if you included the small pick-up truck fathered used to drive to work with. He’d bought it off of one of his bosses, since the boss was buying a new one. The car was a mid-sized luxury sedan. It was a real swanky vehicle too, with light armor plating on the sides, front, and roof. The wheels and chassis were elevated just enough to be driven off-road in the case of bandit or beast attacks. There was also a mount that could be used for These were details, that were actually fairly standard for even non-motorized vehicles in the core-worlds.

In the core-worlds “how much ammo can it hold?”, came right after “does it have cupholders?”. That was just the kind of world we were living in. Anyway, since we had two cars now, my father suddenly decided that he should teach me how to drive. Emile was still too young to learn, though she was in the backseat biding her time and watching along. Thad, who’d already learned how to drive ages ago, was helping dad teach me, mostly for the sake of getting hands on the family’s new luxury car at some point.

As for me, though I was perfectly capable of operating this car, and a great number of other, much more complicated, vehicles, I was going along with this circus just for kicks. Also, it seemed like a great opportunity for family bonding. It might have also been a great way for me to ‘not’ focus on a paper that I was supposed to be writing for my final semester at the Grand Basin Academy.

*************************************************************************************************************

Another morning came to pass. I waved goodbye to my brother as he headed off for the restaurant he’d started apprenticing at since he’d graduated and communicated an interest in the culinary arts to our parents. I went my own way, heading to academy. Ultimately, heading into a building that housed the lecture halls and classrooms for the upper-level of the school’s high-school.

I entered my homeroom a little before class started and sat at my desk in the left-most, back-most, corner of the room. I opened a textbook and did a data-extraction and analysis just as a matter of practice and procedure. The materials for the school’s courses had all long ago been downloaded into my memory, but I routine revised my internal data all the same, just in case some new revelation resulted in a new understanding of the information I had on hand. This hadn’t happened yet, but there “was” a non-zero percent chance of it happening, and no real cost to these revisions.

As I was revising, I felt, heard, and smelt newcomers entering the classroom. Eventually, one of those newcomers sat directly next to me. I looked up and saw it was Ollie. Full name Olympia Oldriska Bryer. Average height. Slim, athletic build. Dark brown-black hair. Purple-brown eyes. Light-tan skin. An angular face spattered in freckles.

Ollie was a classmate…I can also say with 87-percent certainty she was likely also my friend. The first, and perhaps only, one, I had made in 17 years of being alive in this world, and eight years of attending the Grand-Basin City Academy.

“Mornin’,” said Ollie. Speaking with a lazy, yet oddly prim and proper, drawl that had hints of her origins in the rural outlands beyond Grand-Basin City mixed into it. Like someone had taken a librarian from the streets of Oxford, England, and dropped her in the 18th American Wild West. Eventually, resulting in our resident Cowboy-librarian.

The floor screeched as her chair was pulled back from the desk, and screeched again, as Ollie scooched back forwards. She pulled her books and notebooks for the first class of the day from her backpack.

“So…I don’t suppose you did last night’s homework did you? I didn’t quite get to it last night,,” said Ollie.

“Of course, I did…” I said.

“Right…Well, what would be the odds of you letting me get a look at your answers?” said Ollie.

“You know, they say when you cheat you’re really cheating yourself?” I said.

“True…But I’m fine with cheating myself…You see, even if I cheat myself, ‘I’ still win…” said Ollie.

I rolled my eyes.

“Flawed logic aside, my notebook’s in my desk….Feel free to help yourself,” I said. Leaning back so she could reach in and grab the notebook with my homework in it.

“Thanks,” said Ollie. Snagging my notebook and beginning the task of shamelessly copying all the answers.

“By the way, my birthday’s coming up…I don’t suppose you’d want to hang out that weekend?” said Ollie. Her tongue sticking out a bit as her pencil flew over her notebook’s lined surface.

“Nhm…Query….Is that an invitation or a general question?”

She sighed.

“An invitation…”

“In that case, I don’t believe I have anything scheduled for November 12th….”

“Great, well, consider yourself invited…You can bring Em…and Thad, too I guess…though, I don’t think he’ll want to come…It’ll just be me, my sisters, my moms, and maybe a few other kids that I’m friendly with…” said Ollie.

“Understood,” I said. Nodding and resuming my reading.

I don’t know exactly how, or when, Ollie, Ollie, and I became friends. It just sort of happened. Maybe it's down to the fact that for whatever reason we kept ending up either A) in the same class, B) deskmates, or both.

*************************************************************************************************************

The next week came. It was decided that I would go over to Ollie’s house first before my siblings and the rest of her guests joined her. For once, sitting through the academy’s classes no longer felt like a dull process of people watching, and taking in scientific, cultural, and historical inaccuracies and over-simplifications in the form of heavy-handed pedagogy. If that sounds like I’d grown disenchanted with the school, it’s because I had, but then again that’d be the case for most 17-year-olds.

Like most endeavors, school stops being exciting and fun once attending it starts feeling like work. Never mind, that for me it wasn’t particularly hard work. Never mind that it felt like a project that was finally “over”. Work was still work, and the extreme ease of my own personal experiences with the school meant that I spent most of that time being incredibly bored.

Returning to the matter at hand, the big day had arrived. I’d already let my parents and my brother know that I’d be heading over to Ollie’s to “hang-out” prior to the party. My parents gave their blessing fairly easily because I almost never went anywhere, and I might or might not have spent a few weeks before feeling them out on the matter. Had Ollie said no, I would have created an imaginary friend on the far end of the city for me to go visit.

Once classes ended, I walked home with Ollie. She was in a fairly good mood for whatever reason, despite some earlier reluctance that I’d sensed in regards to her assisting me with this matter. Or maybe it was because today was her birthday. Olympia also seemed nervous for some reason. I assured her that I wasn’t intending to do anything too unreasonable, or too dangerous. Ollie then snorted and said,

“You know that sounds like you’re definitely about to go do something slightly unreasonable and dangerous, right?”

I didn’t really have a rebuttal for that, and since designating the young woman as my friends, I found myself feeling reluctant when it came to deceiving them. So not wanting to lie, I chose to say nothing.

I followed Ollie home, so that her parents, the two Missus Bryers could see me. Ollie’s house was one-half of a duplex. Their family’s half had been painted blue-green, while the other family’s half was painted greenish-blue. Samantha Bryer was tall, had dark-brown hair like her twin daughters, fair skin, and blue eyes. She worked as a nurse at one of the local clinics. Celine Bryer was petite but muscular. Her hair was blond and her skin dark. Her eyes were an interesting shade of orange. She worked as a technician in one of Grand-Basin City’s Water Treatment and Sewage facilities. Both women also happened to have strangely strong magical signatures indicating practitioner status.

I greeted Ollie’s mothers and made small talk for a few minutes before Ollie and I headed to Ollie’s room. For whatever reason, Samantha called after us, telling us to keep the door open.

“Huh…So, you 'do' have windows…” I muttered as we arrived at Ollie’s room.

“What?! Why wouldn’t I have any windows?” said Olympia. Her brow furrowing behind her glasses.

“I assumed your mother feared that there would be poor circulation in your room if we closed the door…” I said.

“....” Ollie just stared at me. And I naturally found myself playing back the last few minutes for context, sensing that I might have misprocessed, and misunderstood, something that had just happened.

“.....Right, well, you know…CO2 poisoning ‘is’ the silent killer,” said Olympia. Looking oddly flushed.

“Ah…Okay. Well, it’s a good thing that you do have a window…It gives me a convenient means of egress and ingress...I’ll try to be back quickly,” said. Already climbing out the window.

“Wait, What do I say if my parents ask where you are?” said Olympia. Whispering agitatedly.

“Say that I’m in the bathroom…If they come too frequently for that to be plausible, or it becomes implausible for other reasons…You can say that I went out to grab us some snacks for the birthday festivities…I’ll endeavor to bring something back to lend credibility to this…” I said.

*************************************************************************************************************

Once I’d left Ollie’s place, I quickly made my way out of the city. My enhanced agility turned me into a blur, my powers made me a soundless, largely invisible blur. Soon, I’d left behind the concrete, brick, and scrap metal jungle of the GBC and found myself surrounded by not but scrub grass and small shrubbery. Five minutes was all it took to get me a good distance away from Grand-Basin City, and pretty much any other inhabited settlements.

I was miles and miles away from pretty much anything, and for once even if the silence was incomplete, the dull cacophony in my immediate surroundings had abated some. And soon things would grow even quieter for me. First, though, I needed to cast several wards upon myself. Spells that would shield me from sight, hearing, and sensation, whether direct or technological, or magical. I didn’t want to show up on anyone’s radar, and I meant that in a literal and figurative sense.

Once I was finished protecting myself from being observed or discovered, I crouched down and pushed inwards. The world exploded around me, creating a not-so-shallow crater as the soil and greenery were blown away from my body. I pushed again and the crater grew deeper and wider. I pushed a third time, and finally, my wings came out. They were terrible, crimson-black things, made of…I’m still not entirely sure what they were made of, and I was the one that created them.

I knew they were made of me, and they were made of blood, and darkness, and magic, but I wasn’t sure what else had been mixed into them over their eons. Just like I wasn’t entirely sure exactly what I had become after all those centuries under my mother’s gentle care and tutelage. Thankfully, the things were capable of making themselves invisible. And perhaps, sensing my own repulsion to the sight of them, the wings generally seemed to default to that state.

I called them wings, but really they were just twelve amongst a grand myriad of multipurpose “limbs” that had been adapted to, and evolved for, a great number of tasks and purposes, during my former life. I used the term wings, because right now I intended to use their flight utilities.

After fighting, studying, and consuming, numerous avian, insectoid, angelic, demonic, draconic, and fae beings I’d learned how to utilize my wings for the purposes of flight. My telekinetic abilities could allow me to levitate and move at many times the speed of sound, but my wings could allow me to move at speeds that far exceeded the speed of light.

Thus after bringing out my wings for the first time in this new life of mine. I leaped up into the air, flying beyond Tesson’s atmosphere, leaving the planet’s orbit, and heading to a nice quiet, lifeless solar system, for the purposes of doing some quick and messy refinement work on my physiology. Work that I’d been waiting to do for a while now, but until now had dragged my feet on for…reasons. Reasons of laziness, and reasons of simply enjoying the feeling of just being a kid for a while, and just being like everyone else.

However, since I wasn’t like everyone else, I felt compelled to take this final step and begin the process that would complete the merger of my old-self and new-self. As much as I was loath to do so, I needed to complete this process because I suspected I would fall into an unstable state if I failed to do so. So up I went, into the depths of space, for the sake of consuming a few dozen planets and stars, as fuel for my final metamorphosis.