Post by Evangeline on May 17, 2008 22:43:03 GMT -5
Springtime in southwestern Colorado was a bridge between the thin snows of winter and the heat of summer, with unsettled wind and rains adding to the sense of transistion. It was after this that the wildflowers peeked their heads above the sparse soil as the year progressed from May to June - chicory, silvery daisy, tansy and mountain dandelions. All of these would be familiar to humans in their own native continuum, before the caldera eruption veritably smothered North America and plunged the rest of the world into volcanic winter.
The thousand or so who had been "elevated" across the parallel veil within the caverns of Ash Mountain, to emerge into the light of an Earth that had never known humans, welcomed the spring's flowers as they would friends thought forever lost. But in addition to the old familiars, they discovered species that were as new to them as the dominant races of this world - bright red luminescens or "taillight" flowers, the aromatic golden daggerleaf (which proved to have mildly hallucinogenic properties), and small, low-lying white flowers that grew in clusters of such density that they coated entire fields and hills wherever they took root, earning them the familiar name of "summer snow". They were also somewhat scent-heavy, and reckoned to possess biochemical properties that were mostly joked about, but never entirely dismissed by the natives.
After a cool, blustery spell in the first week of June, warm weather finally came with a sweet, sage-tinged rush. On the makeshift airstrip/heliport which ran an obtuse thirty degrees to the southwestern end of "The Mountain", a native Harrier II Plus flared her refined nostrils and shifted her weight across her undercarriage. The young jet woman made for a neat, compact package, with a certain well-bred prettiness of the sort associated with blooded horses, pedigreed sighthounds and exotic cats. Her movements were fluid and delicate, not just out of care for the humans passing within inches of her nose, but out of the same excellence of form as shaped her tapered wings and gracefully rising empennage. Her foresty green eyes, placed on her "canopy" in much the same orientation as a horse's, gave her a view that was panoramic, but also capable of precise depth-of-field when specifically focused. Patterns in wind, temperature, air pressure and electromagnetism were visible to her in overlays, vaguely like a head-up display to a pilot, speaking to her of thermals, downdrafts and turbulence as well as the physical evidence of certain states of mind in other people, much to the embarrassment of some of the humans she'd come to know over the past year.
A considerable wealth of information also reached her through the faculties of scent and sound which were the heritage of aircraft in general, vastly outstripping the senses of most of this world's ground vehicles. It was one thing to use an aircraft's services once in a while, but not everyone could work with them day-to-day, not without the aircraft gleaning a great deal of information about one's state of mind and health, not to mention personal and intimate matters just by catching a whiff! Those who got along best with aircraft tended to be steady, stable sorts who really didn't give a fig whether someone knew that they'd just had a "quickie" in the back caves two hours earlier.
The Harrier - Shayla Langford was her name - had learned quite a bit of human sexuality, finding many differences and many parallels. She was the last person who would make a summary judgement on this topic, having spent a sojourn in the regional demimonde as a seller of both substances and services after becoming estranged from her parents and siblings during her mid-teens. The intervening years had seen Shayla plying her illicit trade in aircraft society's nightlife, until she was befriended by a helicopter girl, Robin LeVasseur, who in turn introduced her to Kathleen Silvers, an older Skyraider who was one of the Raven tribe. It was Kathleen, a magic-user, who recognized signs of another talent in the Harrier, taking her "under the wing" and patiently weaning her off the road to self-destruction. Her new path took her on a collision course with destiny itself, as she was one of the first natives of her universe to lay eyes on a complete stranger to these parts - Man.
Presently, Shayla was luxuriating in the warmth of summer's first surge, nostrils flared wide to catch the hints of wild flowers and early herbs on the breeze. The threshold of summer was, indubitably, her favorite time of the year. New flowers and grass and fruit blossoms in the daytime. Crickets and fireflies and moonlit whispering trees at night. The antics of kids, lambs, calves and foals had added a new dimension in the lands which had been turned over to the humans and their livestock; occasionally a high, piping whinny would carry across the plain surrounding the eastern flank of the Mountain, past the more frequent barks of the stockdogs as they marshalled goats, cattle and sheep between the corrals clustered around the main portal of the complex. The pungent but honest scents of human-world animals provided a mordant counterpoint to the faint perfumes of the distant pastures. There were also the sounds of children shouting out their exhileration after a winter's confinement. Their brush with oblivion, not long before, seemed only to add to their energy level as they scrambled after one another in games of tag, Red Rover and snap-the-whip. Here and there, the occasional car carefully negotiated a path between humans and animals in the pursuit of his or her own business. Shayla watched them all as she languidly flexed her control surfaces and pondered her own agenda.
A light weight came upon Shayla's forward undercarriage, and several high-pitched chirps penetrated her reverie. She angled her head slightly to the side and down to see a khaki-striped helicopter infant looking up at her with glistening grey eyes. The child had the precocial characteristics typical of aircraft children, and the mixed heritage from her Dauphin mother and Blackhawk father were already becoming evident.
"Oh, hi Melissa." the Harrier smiled. "Did you get away from your momma again?"
Melissa, only several months old, was not yet comprehending words, but she chirped brightly back and nuzzled Shayla's face in an instinctive care-seeking behavior. The jet woman lowered her head obligingly and licked the dirt off the infant's cheeks. "You're gettin' into all kindsa dirt lately. I swear, they could give you a bath and put you in a completely clean room and you'd FIND dirt!"
The infant mewed with mild protest as Shayla's tongue went over her like a damp towel. The sound of amused laughter came from the right as a Eurocopter Dauphin glided up. "Melissa, are you bothering Auntie Shayla again?"
The Harrier looked up. "Hey, Robin. Mel's really starting to get around. Think she'll be flying soon?"
"Not THAT soon, I hope." Robin mimed a shudder. "Give her another three months. Until then, I'm perfectly happy to see her rolling around and playing with the dogs. She really seems to like the critters."
"Don't I know. Always down in the dirt with'em." Shayla observed as Melissa bounded towards one of the several Husky-Malinois crosses that had been born in the past year, to add to the population of working and herding dogs already present. She started to play-wrestle with the animal and, once again, was covered in dust, to the point that she was shaking clouds of it off her stubby rotor blades.
"You're an impossible little barbarian." Robin sighed in resignation as she went to fish her little daughter out of yet another mess.
The thousand or so who had been "elevated" across the parallel veil within the caverns of Ash Mountain, to emerge into the light of an Earth that had never known humans, welcomed the spring's flowers as they would friends thought forever lost. But in addition to the old familiars, they discovered species that were as new to them as the dominant races of this world - bright red luminescens or "taillight" flowers, the aromatic golden daggerleaf (which proved to have mildly hallucinogenic properties), and small, low-lying white flowers that grew in clusters of such density that they coated entire fields and hills wherever they took root, earning them the familiar name of "summer snow". They were also somewhat scent-heavy, and reckoned to possess biochemical properties that were mostly joked about, but never entirely dismissed by the natives.
After a cool, blustery spell in the first week of June, warm weather finally came with a sweet, sage-tinged rush. On the makeshift airstrip/heliport which ran an obtuse thirty degrees to the southwestern end of "The Mountain", a native Harrier II Plus flared her refined nostrils and shifted her weight across her undercarriage. The young jet woman made for a neat, compact package, with a certain well-bred prettiness of the sort associated with blooded horses, pedigreed sighthounds and exotic cats. Her movements were fluid and delicate, not just out of care for the humans passing within inches of her nose, but out of the same excellence of form as shaped her tapered wings and gracefully rising empennage. Her foresty green eyes, placed on her "canopy" in much the same orientation as a horse's, gave her a view that was panoramic, but also capable of precise depth-of-field when specifically focused. Patterns in wind, temperature, air pressure and electromagnetism were visible to her in overlays, vaguely like a head-up display to a pilot, speaking to her of thermals, downdrafts and turbulence as well as the physical evidence of certain states of mind in other people, much to the embarrassment of some of the humans she'd come to know over the past year.
A considerable wealth of information also reached her through the faculties of scent and sound which were the heritage of aircraft in general, vastly outstripping the senses of most of this world's ground vehicles. It was one thing to use an aircraft's services once in a while, but not everyone could work with them day-to-day, not without the aircraft gleaning a great deal of information about one's state of mind and health, not to mention personal and intimate matters just by catching a whiff! Those who got along best with aircraft tended to be steady, stable sorts who really didn't give a fig whether someone knew that they'd just had a "quickie" in the back caves two hours earlier.
The Harrier - Shayla Langford was her name - had learned quite a bit of human sexuality, finding many differences and many parallels. She was the last person who would make a summary judgement on this topic, having spent a sojourn in the regional demimonde as a seller of both substances and services after becoming estranged from her parents and siblings during her mid-teens. The intervening years had seen Shayla plying her illicit trade in aircraft society's nightlife, until she was befriended by a helicopter girl, Robin LeVasseur, who in turn introduced her to Kathleen Silvers, an older Skyraider who was one of the Raven tribe. It was Kathleen, a magic-user, who recognized signs of another talent in the Harrier, taking her "under the wing" and patiently weaning her off the road to self-destruction. Her new path took her on a collision course with destiny itself, as she was one of the first natives of her universe to lay eyes on a complete stranger to these parts - Man.
Presently, Shayla was luxuriating in the warmth of summer's first surge, nostrils flared wide to catch the hints of wild flowers and early herbs on the breeze. The threshold of summer was, indubitably, her favorite time of the year. New flowers and grass and fruit blossoms in the daytime. Crickets and fireflies and moonlit whispering trees at night. The antics of kids, lambs, calves and foals had added a new dimension in the lands which had been turned over to the humans and their livestock; occasionally a high, piping whinny would carry across the plain surrounding the eastern flank of the Mountain, past the more frequent barks of the stockdogs as they marshalled goats, cattle and sheep between the corrals clustered around the main portal of the complex. The pungent but honest scents of human-world animals provided a mordant counterpoint to the faint perfumes of the distant pastures. There were also the sounds of children shouting out their exhileration after a winter's confinement. Their brush with oblivion, not long before, seemed only to add to their energy level as they scrambled after one another in games of tag, Red Rover and snap-the-whip. Here and there, the occasional car carefully negotiated a path between humans and animals in the pursuit of his or her own business. Shayla watched them all as she languidly flexed her control surfaces and pondered her own agenda.
A light weight came upon Shayla's forward undercarriage, and several high-pitched chirps penetrated her reverie. She angled her head slightly to the side and down to see a khaki-striped helicopter infant looking up at her with glistening grey eyes. The child had the precocial characteristics typical of aircraft children, and the mixed heritage from her Dauphin mother and Blackhawk father were already becoming evident.
"Oh, hi Melissa." the Harrier smiled. "Did you get away from your momma again?"
Melissa, only several months old, was not yet comprehending words, but she chirped brightly back and nuzzled Shayla's face in an instinctive care-seeking behavior. The jet woman lowered her head obligingly and licked the dirt off the infant's cheeks. "You're gettin' into all kindsa dirt lately. I swear, they could give you a bath and put you in a completely clean room and you'd FIND dirt!"
The infant mewed with mild protest as Shayla's tongue went over her like a damp towel. The sound of amused laughter came from the right as a Eurocopter Dauphin glided up. "Melissa, are you bothering Auntie Shayla again?"
The Harrier looked up. "Hey, Robin. Mel's really starting to get around. Think she'll be flying soon?"
"Not THAT soon, I hope." Robin mimed a shudder. "Give her another three months. Until then, I'm perfectly happy to see her rolling around and playing with the dogs. She really seems to like the critters."
"Don't I know. Always down in the dirt with'em." Shayla observed as Melissa bounded towards one of the several Husky-Malinois crosses that had been born in the past year, to add to the population of working and herding dogs already present. She started to play-wrestle with the animal and, once again, was covered in dust, to the point that she was shaking clouds of it off her stubby rotor blades.
"You're an impossible little barbarian." Robin sighed in resignation as she went to fish her little daughter out of yet another mess.
