The First Feather on Earth

The Awakening

Marcellene "Marley-Marcy" Victoria groaned as she got woken up by the soft tip-tapping of talons on the ground, the breeze ruffling her hair and the floor feeling a little too grainy. It almost felt like she had no clo- oh god she was naked wasn't she? Shit. She thought, snapping her eyes open only to slam them back shut and hiss at the blinding sunlight... wait... hiss? Did she really just hiss?

Now that she was awake a little bit more she started to notice this odd feeling across her whole body, it felt like her skin was a bit too tight and almost... hard. She groaned inwardly, Ok that's the last time that I accept a drink at a rave party... I just hope to god nothing happened and proceeded to rub her eyes from sleep. This was met however with her arms feeling very different and her eyes being poked by two hard objects. "OW!" She exclaimed, opening her eyes and letting them adjust to the brightness, her raising an arm to help block the sun. She was on the sidewalk definitely with a bunch of seagulls surrounded her between some sort of large road, like a highway and a sort of lakeside park. She looked at her arm to see what was causing it to fell so weird, but at that moment she realized something wasn't right.

Her arm was no longer an arm. Now it looked like an over-sized black... rock... thing! Her heart leaped up into her throat. It was a solid black cylindrical mass that was littered with small holes. The holes were kinda oddly shaped though, they sort of looked like swirls were badly cut out of her. The kind of hole you would find in a fancy hole-puncher. She blinked a couple of times and gingerly looked down towards her body, her blood running colder and colder as she quickly saw that her body had also changed. She now had a weird black 4-legged bug body, if anything it looked like a cross between a horse and a beetle. Her legs were turned into a similar-looking thing as her arm was, and the other arm had shared the same fate.

She also now sprouted a very wiry tail that was both goldish and pinkish. As if one hair was gold while another was pink. And each strand was about 5 millimetres thick too! And on her back was a shell that made her internally question whether or not she was tripping major balls, because it looked like someone painted a pink-and-gold inkblot picture onto it, but at the same time it was slowly moving and adjusting, giving it a sort of a... ah, damn it... who was that guy from The Watchmen... Roarshank or something? Anyways it had that guys mask sort of feel to it.

Then she noticed the thick, wiry strands of hair coming from her own head, each one also the same pink-and-gold colour. At first, she wondered if she was simply still dreaming, starting to warm up to this thought until she remembered something drastically horrible. 'Wait... we don't feel pain in dreams... And it did hurt when I poked my ey-........ Aw for fucks sakes!' It took her a few minutes of her dry heaving on the sidewalk, the seagulls fluttering off with some rather rude squawks.

Eventually, she felt her stomach growl and realized that she still hadn't had breakfast. Looking upwards she could see that the sun was high in the sky, it had to have been somewhere around noon, and geez was she hungry. She sighed as she resigned to the crushing feat of reality, and groaned as she noticed that her sigh was underlined by a bunch of tiny clicks. She shook her head a bit and noticed an odd feeling on her forehead, and she groan-clicked again. She cried out in frustration, "What is it now!?" and noticed that she had a small lisp to her voice as well. She clumsily rose her arm... leg... thing up to her forehead and yelped when she felt something sharp hit her leg... yeah let's just say leg for now.

She groaned and sighed, "I need a mirror... Badly." And just at that point, her stomach decided to pipe up again and growl even louder, "...And food too." She groaned again and tried to stand up, not even bothering to stand on her rear legs and just tried to stand on all four. After some awkward shifting and using muscles she figured were foreign to her, she eventually got up on her legs and was barely able to balance. She quickly looked around and tried to figure out where exactly was she and just how she got here.

Marcy looked around to find that that there was some sort of oddly shaped mound nearby, with what looked like lettering carved in the bushes on top of it. On very wobbly legs, she slowly made her way towards the mound. She, of course, kept falling onto her face, only to get back up faster than the previous time. After the fifth time, however, she noticed a wooden sign beside her. It was really worn, but the lettering was still vaguely legible.

J.B. TUDHOPE
MEMORIAL
PARK
O̕͠P̢̧͘E̢҉̧҉҉R͝҉̷̕̕Á̛T̛͏̴E͘̕͢͟͏D̨҉̶ ͢͞B͞҉͜Y̸͟͠҉ ORILLIA

Marcy's face blanked as she tried to process this new information. Orillia? She never even heard of it. Just how far away is she? Who was this guy? Sure she wasn't exactly a huge history nut, but someone important enough to have his own park should've been at least mentioned in history class. Right? Sadly, the familiar feeling of her stomach painfully growling snapped her right out of her train of thought. She hissed and looked around some more, wondering where she could find a Denny's at least. Hell, she'll even take an Applebees. Shakily she tries to stand up once again, only for her stomach to angrily disagree, making her collapse onto the grass once again and clutching her barrel tightly.

She could feel her body convulse hard with raw, starving hunger. Pain spiked all throughout her body, her chitin itching angrily. Her wings instinctively buzzed and twitched as she could feel her body curling in on itself, her mouth gasping for something, anything to eat. She laid there, quivering and shaking, unable to do anything to sate her hunger as she could feel her stomach start to turn inwards. It was as if her stomach acids had begun to eat away at her own body.

She shuddered as her vision started to haze, the hunger gnawing at her soul. She would die here, wouldn't she? Alone, starving, afraid. Seemed fitting to her in a weird way, she always was the kind of person to push her loved ones away. Her mind started to wander, wondering if she'd see her parents on the other side. Her father absolutely, but her mother might've been good enough. Possibly. She chuckled weakly at the thought but then winced into another convulsion. Still, it was a comforting thought. Maybe her mother did finally escape in the end.

Marcy sighed softly as she slowly started to relax her body, resigning herself to this cruel and unusual fate. Letting her body drift away from her mind, the insatiable hunger dulling to an ache in the pit of her stomach. That was until she felt a soft nudge against the side of her cheek, waking her from her trance and blasting her nose with this heavenly aroma. Her mind blanked, the smell flipping some sort of internal switch, her base instincts guiding her on how to FEED.

And so she did.