Limitless Evolution As a Snake

[System: right, on your feet, well uhh coils? We’re not done]

Done? Old Mate, I just fell off a building.

[System: yeah and you didn’t die, so technically that’s a win, means we can build on it]

Build on it how

[System: gonna find you some smaller stuff to jump off. Shacks, houses, that kinda thing. Work your way up]

I stare at absolutely nothing for a second, because I need a second, because my brain is still somewhere back around floor thirty screaming into the void.

Work my way up. You threw me off a sixty-story building with zero warning, and now the plan is shacks.

[System: gotta start somewhere mate. Can’t exactly start you at sixty stories again; insurance wouldn’t cover it]

There is no insurance; there’s you, and you are the worst insurance I have ever had.

[System: yeah nah, fair]

I push myself upright, wings folding back into their little scale pockets with that same aggressive snap they had coming out, like they’re just as annoyed about the whole ordeal as I am, and I take stock of where exactly I’ve landed myself, because up until now the answer’s just been alley, garbage, near-death, but now that my heart’s stopped trying to punch its way out through my sternum I actually look around.

It’s still the sewer, obviously, and there’s pipes running along it dripping something I don’t want to think about, but this stretch of it is different from the mess back near the Twawi market junction. There’s an actual road here, cracked asphalt patched over so many times it looks like a quilt, and there’s cars on it, real cars, boxy little things that probably haven’t seen the surface in decades, parked crooked along the curb like somebody’s actual neighbourhood got picked up and shoved underground. Rows of shacks and low buildings line the street, tin roofs, some brick, a couple that look suspiciously like they used to be shipping containers before somebody cut windows into them and called it a day. My apartment’s somewhere in this mess too, which I guess makes this home now, in the loosest possible sense of the word.

And there are people. Not many, but enough. At the corner down the block there’s a woman leaning against the wall with ears that flick every time a car rolls past, tail curled lazy behind her, watching me with the kind of stillness that says she’s been watching for a while. Further up, near where the road bends, there’s a guy built like a walking chunk of quarry, grey and blocky in that way that means golem, arms crossed, not moving, just there.

I clock them for about half a second each and then my brain files it under not my problem and moves on, because frankly I’ve got bigger issues, namely the fact that I apparently just agreed, by not actively fighting it, to jump off more buildings.

Shacks first though. Old Mate said shacks.

[System: yeah shacks that one]

Old mate tells me to look to the right toward a low tin-roofed shed maybe two stories up, sitting between two parked cars like it’s daring me.

That’s not even scary, Old Mate, that’s barely a building.

[System: good, glad you’re not scared; we need to keep this up, a few more hundred times!]

what.

[System: repetition, mate. you don’t learn to glide by almost dying once and calling it a day; you learn it by doing it fifty times til your body stops trying to kill you on the way down]

I look at the shed. I look at my tail, which is still doing that involuntary coiling-and-uncoiling thing it does when I’m stressed. I look at the wolf woman on the corner who has not blinked, as far as I can tell.

Fine. Fine! I’ll jump off the tiny shed. But if I die on the tiny shed, I want it on record that this was somehow worse.

[System: noted. Also, two stories is nothing; my nan fell off a ladder taller than that, and she was fine. She was annoyed, but she was fine]

That is not the comfort you think it is.

I climb up onto the shed roof anyway, scales scraping against corrugated tin with a sound like dragging a comb the wrong way, and I hold myself there for a second, tongue flicking out, tasting the air, which tastes like rust and nothing useful.

Glide, I say, out loud, mostly to see if it works without the added bonus of plummeting first. Nothing happens. I just sit there, feeling extremely stupid, wings very much not snapping out, cobra hood very much not doing anything useful.

[System: yeah nah, the word’s not a bloody magic carpet, mate. You actually gotta yeet yourself off the ledge for it to work.]

Of course it doesn’t.

[System: physics, innit]

I don’t dignify that with a response, I just pitch myself off the edge, and for one horrible half second every instinct I have is screaming tuck and coil, which is not aerodynamic, except then the word does its thing, glide, and my wings snap out and catch the air and I skim the two whole stories down to the road in what is honestly an anticlimactic non-event compared to the last one, and I land in a neat pile of myself on the asphalt.

[System: see. told ya she’d be right. good on ya, mate. that’s one down, only four hundred and ninety-nine to go for the arvo]

I did not almost die that time, but I really want to just go back to bed with Lyra.

[System: beauty. You stuck the landing and everything. well, mostly, your tail was doing something a bit cooked on the way down, but we’ll call it style points]

I glance over at the wolf woman on the corner, who has now been joined by a second one a little further down, both of them just watching, ears doing that little twitch thing, and I decide I genuinely do not care, because I have bigger things to worry about, like the fact that Old Mate is already pointing me toward the roof of an actual house two streets over, this one a solid three stories, tin and brick and a satellite dish that’s definitely not connected to anything anymore.

That one’s bigger.

[System: yeah, nah. That’s the whole bloody point, you drongo. Now stop your whingin’ and get climbin’. Lyra’s not gonna be impressed with a snake who can’t even stick a three-story drop without crying.]

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