I woke slowly, staring blankly at the ceiling of a camping tent for a moment, before my memory slapped me in the face with a reminder of what'd happened in the last 24 hours.

"Ah... fuck," I groaned, scrunching my eyes closed and wishing in vain that things hadn't gone all weird. Not that it would help, of course: wishing never changed anything, in my experience. Well, except for the occasional well-placed "Wish" spell in a game of D&D, but that was beside the point. Rubbing my face as I sat up, I mentally reviewed the series of events that had led me to be here in what I was starting to believe was Equestria.

~~~~
(Approximately 24 hours ago, give or take...)

When all this started, I had been on a day trip to Seattle with my family, and we'd stopped in at the Seattle Art Museum to see what fun stuff they had on display. There was always interesting stuff there, even if I didn't always get it. As fate would have it, I'd broken off from my generally slower-moving family, and thus I was alone when I stumbled across an entire exhibit of masks from numerous times periods and multiple points around the globe. It was only after I'd been looking at them for a minute that my near future became a möbius double clusterfuck. Glass cases started exploding, a few masks started flying around through the air of their own volition, guards were called... It was a whole ordeal in and of itself.

Of course, before anyone could begin to get a handle on the situation, I suddenly found myself at home, which was tens of miles away. I also, for some reason, had two of the masks from the museum in my possession. I hadn't grabbed them, of course, but by now I was pretty sure I was no longer in control of things. So I grabbed as much stuff I could cram into a couple backpacks (trying to stick to the legendary "Ten Essentials" as possible), and prepared to go "on the run". Of course, I also grabbed a few non-essentials, like a charge cable for my phone, a few power banks, my small collection of throwing knives, and a handful of swords. Yeah, I had swords, but they were mostly of the cheap, fantasy, "display-only" type.

I wasn't exactly sure why I had been in such a hurry to pack and get going, to be honest. I mean, perhaps the more paranoid part of my mind was thinking that the police or the government was going to show up at any moment and... I didn't know what they'd do then. The more rational part of my mind, however, argued that there was no way anyone could know I was at home, let alone that I appeared to have teleported there from the museum, so there wouldn't be anyone "after me" just yet.

Not unless they have some sort of spatial distortion sensors or something currently blanketing the Pacific Northwest, the paranoid part of my mind had argued. No-one really knows what they get up to in their spare time. After all, if teleportation is a thing, then all bets are off...!

The internal dialogue only went down hill from there. To make matters worse, just as I was dropping a tic-tac container full of my D&D dice into my backpack, next to my laptop, I heard someone loudly banging on the front door and shouting "FBI, OPEN UP!" Given that it was neither April 1st nor Halloween, I panicked. I grabbed everything I'd prepared, cracked open a top-story window above the back yard, and jumped. I wasn't thinking then, but in later days, I came to think I was hoping whatever power had transported me home would take me somewhere safer.

Apparently, something somewhere registered my intentions, because I had barely left the windowsill before a black void of sorts opened beneath me, and I found myself falling through the strangest place. There were sights and sounds I couldn't fully comprehend, no matter how I tried. All in all, it was like a combination of Harry's first portkey experience in both the original "Goblet of Fire" novel, and the subsequent movie adaptation.

Right down to the part where I ended up smacking face-first into the dirt at my "destination".

The first thing I'd done was just lay there and ache for a bit. After spending a couple minutes like that, I rolled over and looked in the approximate direction of the sky. What I saw was a tangled canopy of tree branches that didn't let much of the sky peek through. This concerned me.

"What...?" I asked, already completely done with the day. I sat up and looked around. "Oh, what? The fuck am I now, of all places...?"

What I saw in my surroundings was not encouraging: I was in some sort of Creepy Forest. And yes, those capital letters are there for a reason: everything around me screamed "evil, scary dark forest where bad things are waiting to eat you," from the gnarled black trees with creepy face-like holes to... everything else, really. It was almost like something out of a kids' cartoon, made real, but still to the level of creepiness that would normally directed at kids for such a setting. It even had a sort of artificial, contrived edge to it everything.

And that made it even creepier for me, somehow. In addition to that, I subsequently noted that I was wearing an unfamiliar suit of full body armor of a mostly medieval-age variety. Of course, it had a few more "modern" design elements, mostly in terms of being more functional than flashy, and it seemed to have quick, dynamic movements in mind. And not only did it feel so light that it was like I was just wearing my normal clothes, I could swear I felt stronger somehow. That, or it all was super light, and quiet to boot. I even had a helmet of sorts, with a visor-like thing that only covered the top half of my face. It felt like an angular masquerade mask, though I couldn't tell what it was supposed to look like.

The color scheme of the whole ensemble was, for the most part, a monochromatic black-and-white affair, with some smattering of silver, gunmetal grey, and the occasional splash of lime green. Most of the torso armor was black, as was the left pauldron, with the right being silver. Just about everything on my arms below the pauldrons was a soft white, save for a single slotted plate bolted to the outside of my right bracer, and the grey/black gauntlets on my hands. From the hips down, things were dark grey and gunmetal, interspersed with black. I didn't exactly feel like trying to remove my helmet just yet, though, so I didn't know exactly what it looked like.

On top of everything else, I couldn't see any of my stuff lying around. A quick pat-down of my body proved none of it was on my immediate person, and nothing seemed to be hanging in any of the local trees, from what I could see. I had to admit, I was starting to freak out and shut down at the same time.

"Nope...!" I said, dropping to a sitting position and hugging my knees up under my chin as I started talking to myself. "Nope, nope nope nope. This shit doesn't just happen. I mean, I know I'm a fan of various kinds of fiction-based stories and stuff where things like this suddenly happen to the main character -- or, well, characters, really, -- and they go off and have an adventure or twelve, and I'll admit I tend to point out times where Art and Life begin to imitate one another, but this is ridiculous! The only logical explanation for this is that my personal perception of reality just shattered, and I'm going through some psychosis or whatever while my mind tries to restart in safe mode or whatever...! I mean, I may have hoped, prayed, or even dreamed of something strange like this to come along and shake up my life a bit, but not only is it impossible by any stretch of the know laws of physics, it's completely improbable to boot, so the odds of this crap being real are literally not in my favor. And now I'm rambling about all this to an empty, creepy forest, doing practically the exact same thing most first-time protagonists do where they deny and/or reject the universe's hand-written invitation to adventure and glory after having their peaceful, boring worldview so crazily shook by something out of the blue that... fuck, I lost the handle on that sentence. But seriously folks, what the ever-loving FUCK is going on here?"

I took a deep breath, and another look around the freaky, "evil" not-forest around me. While I'd been busy with my verbal rant, the still-functional and irrational portion of my mind (which was probably holed up somewhere in my left brain at the moment,) had been running a mile a minute, comprising several scenarios out of what limited data I had available to process at the moment. Such sources of information included my past Boy Scout experience, the events of the last hour, and the gist of just about every story I'd devoured where someone ended up alone and confused in an unfamiliar wilderness environment. The general idea was as follows:

I should probably stay put, to an extent, whilst keeping an eye out for predators or other hostile wildlife, and wait for someone to come find me. The only reason that last part would have even a remote chance of working was, in my infinite wisdom, due to how fast the so-called "FBI" had shown up after I'd appeared in my house. If they could track a shorter translocation so swiftly, they would no doubt be showing up wherever I was within the next... what, few hours? A couple days, maybe, depending on the speed of federal bureaucracy in the good old United States of America. Assuming, of course, that whatever had tipped them off to my location was able to see the entire globe.

And what makes you so sure that you're still on Earth, or even in the same reality you started out in?

That thought brought me up short. Yes, the local atmosphere tasted and smelled relatively the same as I was used to breathing, even factoring in ambient forest smells. The local gravity seemed the same as Earth-normal, and the sunlight appeared to be "normal" too.

"You know what?" I suddenly asked myself aloud, not caring if I got a response. "I should try and get a lock on my surroundings. Maybe climb a tree or something, take a look around. Maybe I'll discover civilization...? Yeah, that sounds like a great idea...!"

I got up and turned to the nearest tree. "Hey, you! Tree! C'mere, I'mma climb your ass...!" I told it, accusingly. I then proceeded to climb the damned thing, with some minor difficulty, in less than a minute. This, in and of itself, was slightly remarkable for me because the armor I was wearing wasn't exactly conducive to the act, though it didn't get in the way as much I had expected. Once I got to the top, I had a decent-ish view of the surrounding terrain. In one direction, I saw what looked like a town off in the distance beyond the distant treeline. In another direction, I saw what looked like a couple tower-esque structures, indicative of either a castle or fortress, all of which seemed to be closer to my current location. I wasn't entirely sure which way was North, in all honesty, and I couldn't even be sure that it was the same time of day here as it had been back at home, so I couldn't even try and use an old trick I'd heard of that involved using the hands of an analogue timepiece to determine where North was.

Making a mental note of the "castle's" rough direction in relation to the tree, I climbed back down to ground level and, having nothing better to do, began walking towards the "castle". Perhaps there was someone living there, from whom I could solicit some measure of help. Or just crash for the night.

After a fair bit of walking (and the climbing of a few less-scary trees to confirm I was still on the right track,) I crossed paths with a small lizardlike creature with a chicken's head. From what little I was able to see of it before it had scurried back out of my sight, it seemed to be both fearsome and comical in build, though at the moment it was completely terrified, hence the running and squawking across my intended path.

Yeah, I thought to myself, dunno what that is, but either I spooked it, or it was running from something else. In which case, it's time I moved on.

And so I did.

In short order, I came through a break in the trees to find my destination. I was both surprised and disappointed by what I saw. What I had originally believed to be a castle was, in fact, a set of ruins. The place had obviously once been an opulent center of activity for those in the higher echelons of society back in the day, but no more; instead, it looked like a bomb had gone off and wrecked the place. There was also a large, jagged, gorgelike scar in the landscape, which ran around the better part of the ruins. I could also see a couple of old, questionable bridges across the chasm, which would allow access.

"Wow," I said, amazed by what I'd stumbled across, "look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair; nothing else beside remains. Never thought I'd appreciate that tidbit to this extent. Who was it that said that again? The name started with an 'O', I remember that much. Oedipus...? Wait, no, no no no, that's totally the wrong one..."

It was around this time that I heard something growling from somewhere behind me. I turned around and saw a creature straight out of Mediterranean mythology: it was a large, lionesque creature with long, hornlike ears, crimson batlike wings, and a massive scorpion's tail. It also looked hungry, and angry.

I know what that is...! part of my mind told itself, while the rest was screaming to run, which is what I almost immediately did. That's... No, not a Chimera, those are different. Fuck, I know these things, why can't I remember the name?

Before I knew it, I was already halfway across the nearest bridge, having run at a pace I had never before come close to achieving. At the time, I put it down to sheer adrenaline. The only time I looked over my shoulder was after I was on solid land again, just in time to see the stone bridge beginning to collapse. The creature was about a third of the way across when it happened, but was quickly able to return to the far side of the chasm before the bridge could fall out from underneath it.

The bridge didn't have far to fall -- nothing more than six or seven stories -- but it still made lots of noise on the way down. Once that had quieted down, the monster began yowling and pacing, never taking its eyes off me. A few seconds later, it stopped pacing, gave an evil feline grin, and then spread its wings wide.

Manticore, my mind supplied at long last, capable of flight, can deliver swiftly fatal stings, and in some instances, can breathe fire...

To my dismay, it leapt into the air and began flying across the fissure towards my general direction. As it progressed, it gave a mighty roar that I actually felt in my bones. Before long, it had landed uncomfortably close to my position, and bounded towards me. I managed to duck behind some rubble as it took a stab at me with its tail, then scrambled further around the ancient stone as it continued to follow.

The next time it tried attacking with the tail, I did something stupid. Just after I'd jumped back and it stuck in the ground, I leaped forward and grabbed hold of the tail, clamping my feet around the joint just behind the stinger. Of course, this left me in a prime position to get myself swiped by the beast's massive claws, but it chose to yank its tail back instead, and begin flailing me about. I held on as tight as I could for several seconds, until I once again dangled before the Manticore's face. It snarled, and I reacted on instinct. I pushed back off of its stinger just as it lunged forward to bite me, leaving it to chomp its own stinger. Fortunately for one of us, (three guesses as to which,) the Manticore didn't sting itself in the mouth, though it did crunch the stinger's chitinous shell pretty bad, effectively rendering it useless until it theoretically healed.

Not that I'd be around that long, it seemed.

While the Manticore was busy thrashing in pain from its self-inflicted wound, I had scurried behind another bit of rubble. In seconds, the beast had recovered its senses enough to begin sniffing around, looking for me. Its apparently keen senses were quick to pick up my scent, and upon pinning down my new location, the Manticore leapt into the air once again, using its wings to gain a bit of altitude.

It was just as I noticed a deep, heavy flapping sound from off to one side, when everything was again shaken by a roar that would've put the famous Jurassic Park T-Rex roar to shame. I looked up in time to see a massive blur of color tearing the Manticore our of the air. After a couple seconds, my mind had finally processed what I'd just seen: an honest-to-God dragon had just snatched the smaller Manticore mid-flight, and was even now tearing out its throat while hovering. In what was most likely my dumbest move yet, I jumped up from behind my hiding spot with a laugh and a whoop, pumping a fist in the air.

"Hah ha!" I cheered. "Well done, dragon!" The smile on my face froze and fell as the dragon turned to look at me, then swooped towards my location. I had barely managed to turn around before I was tightly grasped in one of the dragon's foreclaws, and was being carried off to who-knows-where.

I was of several minds about the situation, just then. Part of me was excited and fascinated, given that I was in the presence of a real, honest-to-God dragon, who was carrying me through the skies. Overshadowing those positive emotions was a mask of fear; I was being carried by a dragon that was also still carrying its latest kill in its hindclaws, and I was concerned that I'd be the appetizer for the main course. On top of that was anger, mostly at myself for having been so dumb, though some of it was directed at the dragon for having decided I was even worth taking.

Among all of this, however, I was also strangely calm. I wasn't compelled to start kicking and screaming, for one, though I did start nervously singing. It was a stupid little song I'd found on YouTube, made from a flipped Google Translate audio sample, which in turn consisted of synthesized Japanese-accented "Engrish".

♪I like hotto doggu, because aiyt-es notto a-a-a doggu. Do you like hotto doggu? (hotto doggu?) Eeeto, eeeto, eeeto hotto doggu: hot-to doggu burgur, kokah-korah!♪

Sing that twice, followed by sixteen repetitions of "hottu doggu" for a chorus, then wash, rinse, and repeat. Boom, you've got the gist of the song. Most folks would find it annoying to listen to it more than a couple times through, but I could listen to it all day and be just fine. Given that I wasn't exactly the greatest singer at the best of times, and that the entire song had been run through autotune, it was probably pretty reasonable that the dragon didn't exactly appreciate my "artistic" self-expression just then.

It growled loudly, craning its long neck underneath itself so it could glare at me with its baleful golden eyes. "Could you shut it for five minutes?!" It -- no, she, -- demanded. "Whatever you're singing, if you call it that, is extremely annoying...!"

"Oh, it speaks!" I exclaimed, and continued without thinking overmuch. "Could you set me back down over there? I've never been inside a forgotten ruin before, and I was hoping to explore."

"Nope." She replied. "You're coming with me to my cave. It's rather fortunate that I stumbled across you, honestly; I've run a bit short on lab rats for my little experiments, and you're the perfect specimen for my next test."

"Wait, how is that good luck?" I asked, starting to kick and struggle against her grasp. "I did not consent to this...!"

"I meant it was fortunate for me," the dragoness spat back. "You're not involved in this."

"Uh, I'm feeling pretty involved here...!"

"Not where it matters, you're not. That said, your contribution will be duly noted by compatriots. Your sacrifice will garner me the personal attention of our Lord of Shadows."

"What do you mean, 'sacrifice'?" I demanded, kicking a bit to see if I could dislodge myself from the dragoness' grasp. "I've got nothing on me to 'sacrifice' to or for anything -- or anyone -- and I certainly want nothing to do with this dark lord of yours."

"You misunderstand. You will not be sacrificing anything: you are going to be sacrificed, for the good of our agenda. In all honesty, you're the first decent test subject we've been able to get our claws on for any reasonable length of time. This is a marvelous opportunity that has fallen at my doorstep, and I'm not going to let the chance you present to slip my grasp...!"

"The fuck are you on about?" I exclaimed, thoroughly confused. "I'm no-one's -- whoa!"

The dragoness had banked sharply in midair, and we were now circling a tall, narrow mountainous peak that looked to be the grandfather of all stalagmites.

"Ohhh, I'm getting Myst flashbacks...!" I said, to no-one in particular. "It's like the Spire link-in flyby got busy with the bird ride from Edanna, except the result's not gonna be fun...!"

A second later, as we came round again, I was summarily dropped on a ledge outside a cave of sorts in the mountainside. I barely had time to consider getting up before I was buffeted by harsh winds as the dragoness herself came in for a landing, still clutching her kill.

I seized my moment of opportunity and hurried to the edge of the ledge, and stood there defiantly. "I'll jump...!" I declared. "Let me go free, or I'll do it!"

"Really...?" The dragoness asked calmly, a faint grin twisting her countenance. "Are you so devoted to your cause, little lab-rat, that you'd end your own life so readily just to try and thwart us? Go ahead, then: I'm not stopping you. I don't need you alive, after all. I just want your body...!"

"Uh, I need an adult...!" I said, cautiously. I mean, I was in my twenties already, but... this was getting weird. Well, weird-er. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying enough attention, and was unable to react in time when the dragoness surged forward and grabbed me again, pulling me close to her face.

"I am an adult...!" She growled with gleeful malice, then chucked me headlong into the cave. I slid and rolled until I collided with what turned out to be a massive pile of gold, gems, and other medieval-age rich-people stuff. Talk about cliché.

"Honestly, I half expected you to put up more of a fight when I captured you," the dragoness commented, pausing as she dragged the Manticore carcass further into the cave. "That's what I get for finding such an unusual specimen. I've never seen, heard of, or smelled the likes of you before. Not that it matters: you'll do just fine for my purposes."

"Seriously, I only just showed up here, like, an hour ago, and I have no idea where I even am! Hell, far as I know, you and that Manticore shouldn't exist! I mean, I'm obviously not in Kansas anymore, but still!"

"Spare me the tall tales," the dragoness told me, her tone dismissive as she rolled her eyes with great exaggeration. "Now, prepare yourself: if you're lucky, in mere moments, the only thing you'll be feeling is oblivion."

"That, or disappointment." I replied, grabbing a handful of the priceless stash behind me. "Go ahead: flip that coin. Speaking of which...!" I hurled the handful of coins and other glittery debris in the direction of her face. She instinctively recoiled as some of the stuff bounced harmlessly off her snout, which gave me enough time to scramble onto the pile of treasure. I nabbed the hilt of a sword from the pile and yanked the whole thing up in a shower of valuables. Giving it a few brief test flourishes, I readied myself for the fight of my life.

"A foolish effort," the dragoness told me. "What do you plan to do with my favorite toothpick there; turn me into hors d'oeuvre?"

"I'll have you know, I'm one-eighth Norwegian...!" I said. "My ancestors were slaying dragons mightier than you in their sleep, back in the day...!" Blatant lies, those were, but she didn't know that.

"I thought you implied my kind didn't exist in... I believe you called your homeland 'Kansas,' yes?" The dragoness asked, creeping slowly forward with a malicious grin on her snout. She obviously believed she'd caught me in a lie, though I could only hope it was not the one I was currently feeding her. "If so, then how could your ancestors have done as you claim?"

"There used to be dragons," I explained, "but not anymore. It's been generations since anyone's seen a real, live dragon. Closest anyone gets would be going to see some of the bones we've got on display in some of our museums."

"Bastards!"

I never had a chance to react as she suddenly spun and slammed me with her tail, which sent me flying across the cave to slam into a wall. I may have blacked out for a couple seconds after the impact.

"Ya fookin' wot, mate?" I demanded in my best imitation-British accent, and stood up as my vision cleared. "I'll fookin' fight ya, ya daft cunt!"

I was immediately slammed against the wall again, held in place by one of the dragoness' giant claws as the sword clattered from my hands.

"I'm sorry," the dragoness said, with evident sarcasm and scorn, "I don't think I heard you over the smell of my people's blood on your hands. Care to repeat that for me?"

"Punish not the child for the sins of the fath--hrk!!" I was cut off mid sentence as she pressed hard on my torso.

"Oh, sorry, still didn't catch that. Care to try again...?"

"Do not... meddle... in the affairs of dragons..." I gasped, head drooping from the pain, "for you are crunchy, and... and good with ketchup."

"Better." The dragoness said, then looked to one side. There was the sound of fluid-filled glassware being abruptly -- and violently -- shifted into motion, and a stoppered Erlenmeyer flask arced into view. With a surprising deftness, the dragoness caught the fragile glass container and popped the cork out of the flask's neck.

"Wait...!" I gasped, holding out a hand. "Before you, uh, do whatever you're about to do... What's your name?"

The dragoness, with the flask already halfway to her lengthy snout, paused. With a curious eyebrow raised, she turned to impale me with her gaze. "Why do you care...?"

"I'd rather know your name, if I'm about to die or whatever, than go out in ignorance."

"Hah, little late for that...!" She snorted. "Fine. It's Gilraea. Happy?"

"Mmm. Good to hear it at least starts with a 'G'. At least some people's parents stick to the old ways..."

"What do you--" Gilraea stopped, blinked, then squinted at me. "You're stalling, aren't you...?"

"Not by intent," I admitted, "but, to be fair, it's only natural."

There was a brief pause, and then Gilraea spoke once more.

"Alright, then," she said, "since I let you ask me a question, I have a question for you."

"Yeah?"

"Die."

"Wait, that's not a ques--" I got no further before she slammed back the contents of the flask and exhaled some sort of thick, viscous gas all over me. I coughed and wheezed, struggling to breathe, but I could feel myself fading fast. Faster than should have been possible.

"That's because I don't make requests," I heard Gilraea say, and then everything went dark.

~~~~
(Sometime later...)

I was gently awakened to the sound of a rapidly-looping alarm going off in my ears. It wasn't harsh, or loud, but it was definitely enough to get my attention.

Especially because it was so eerily familiar.

I scrunched my eyes against the sound, not wanting to fully leave sleep. I was quite comfortable at the time, to be honest, and pleasantly warm. I was perfectly content... For about five seconds, that is. That was how long it took me to place the alarm that was still going off. It was at that moment that my calm was irreparably damaged.

Wait, I thought, opening my eyes, that's the "low-shield" alarm from Halo...! Why am I...? My train of thought came to a screeching halt as I finally realized I was seeing a holographic HUD-like interface before my eyes. Nearly all of it was fuzzed out to some degree or another, save for an empty-looking bar at the center-top of my field of view, which was flashing between red and dark teal. There were a couple smaller bars under it as well, each of which were following suit.

A female voice said, slightly louder than the ongoing alarm.

"Uh...?" I said, without thinking. As I did, there was a faint ping...! sound, and a text box popped up, reading as follows:

Charge energy reserves from ambient source?

{Y} / {N}

"Uh... Yeah, sure, do whatever," I said.

With that, the alarm shut off and I could see the bars begin filling, each one receiving attention in turn until they were all green.

"Yeah, sure... Do that..." I muttered, tiredness beginning to set in again. Seriously, who even was that voice? I'd never been one for playing Halo, but I could definitely tell it wasn't Cortana, and it definitely wasn't Siri either. It was also, thank the gods, not GLaDOS. But whoever it was, their voice was still familiar, though just outside my full grasp. It was, in a word, maddening.

While I was lightly pondering the issue, I tried shifting position, and noticed a few things. First off, I was suspended in some form of gelatinous fluid, which immediately posed several potential issues: namely, how was I breathing?

I had a quick answer for that one. Somehow, the visor/helmetthing had seemingly closed around the lower half of my face, leaving me with some sort of air supply. I wasn't sure where it came from, seeing as there shouldn't have been enough in the helmet alone for me to take a full lungful of air, but that was an issue for another time; my arms, legs and most of my torso were giving me that jarring sort of half-asleep tingling you sometimes get when you've put pressure on a major nerve or blood vessel for too long. My brain must've been really scrambled, too, because I almost could've sworn I was starting to get some weird form of phantom limb sensation: I would swear was "feeling" a couple extra arms, and what might've been a third leg.

The voice in my ear told me.

Ok, now I was starting to get a major sense of Deja Vu. I continued wracking my brain for answers as I blindly moved my aching limbs, probing my environment. I almost immediately found my hands and feet colliding with a smooth, rigid obstruction that wrapped around me in all directions, flawlessly, serving to contain me within this strange gel. It was almost too close for comfort.

As the voice spoke, lines of digital code began writing and erasing themselves in rapid succession in a corner of my HUD, and then a series of symbols popped into existence in the center and dragged themself off to the right-hand edge of my view, one after the other. The final symbol -- more of a logo, as I was quick to realize -- stayed firmly in the center, haunting me with its unmistakable familiarity as the voice spoke again; it was a downward-pointing equilateral triangle with three bars radiating from its center to touch the corners, all of which was enclosed within a hexagon. The triangle's corners were almost, but not quite, touching three of the hexagon's corners, while three short bars radiated inwards from the remaining corners to almost, but not quite, contact the centerpoints of the triangle's sides. The logo shrunk and dragged itself into the top-right corner, and with that clue in place, I finally recognized the voice.

ADA said. I was just getting ready to voice my disapproval to the universe at large, when she cut in again, once more in a clipped, businesslike tone.

There was a beep, and an animated image popped up in my field of view. For a brief moment, it showed a simplified white stick figure in a T-pose, only to have just about everything below the collarbone briefly flash red and became something more akin to a bipedal semi-draconic stick figure. This second image included wings protruding from the shoulders and a tail sticking to one side of the hip. The diagram toggled back and forth a couple times, before a bit more of the figure turned red in the second diagram.

ADA supplied.