Limitless Evolution As a Snake

[System: THREE!]

Wait, what happened to-.

Something hot and sharp zaps right through my tail, right where it’s wrapped around the ledge, and my whole body seizes for half a second, muscles locking up like someone yanked every nerve at once, and my grip just goes, just lets go, and the roof is gone and the wind is everywhere and I am falling, actually falling, off a sixty story building, like an idiot.

OLD MATE. OLD MATE WHAT DID YOU DO.

[System: Told you, duckling logic.]

THIS IS NOT A GRASS BOUNCE, THIS IS A SIXTY STORY DROP ONTO A DUMPSTER, TELL ME WHAT BUTTON I PRESS, TELL ME RIGHT NOW, IS THERE A BUTTON, WHERE IS THE BUTTON, IS THERE A BUTTON?

The city spins below me, all lights and glass and distance shrinking fast, my little useless wings flapping.

whap-whap-whap.

Against air that doesn’t care, and somewhere past the screaming in my own head I am waiting, praying, for Old Mate to say anything useful literally at all.

[System: ...]

Nothing. No answer, just silence, which is somehow worse than the laughing, because at least the laughing meant something was happening up there in whatever weird space Old Mate lives in.

Ground is getting closer, not slowly either, fast. Like really fast. Like I can see the individual bits of trash in the dumpster now, and that is not a distance I want to be able to make out detail at.

My hood, the cobra inbuilt one, flares out a little on the sides of my neck, just barely, like my body is trying something without asking me first. It doesn’t help; it helps a little, I think, or I’m just coping, and I am still falling. The hood is not a parachute. The hood is doing nothing except making me feel slightly more like a cobra and slightly less like an aerodynamic chorizo about to become a stain.

OLD MATE THE HOOD ISN’T WORKING, WHATEVER THAT WAS, IT DID NOTHING

[System: yeah nah that’s not it]

NOT IT? NOT IT? WHAT IS IT THEN, TELL ME, I AM RUNNING OUT OF BUILDING

And then, finally, right as the dumpster fills my whole vision and I can smell it already, actually smell the rotting garbage rushing up to meet my face, Old Mate says, real casual, like we’re chatting over a beer instead of me dying-

[System: just say glide]

WHAT

[System: glide, mate, say it. out loud if you have to]

GLIDE

The word barely makes it out of my mouth before something in my chest just unlocks, like a switch I didn’t know existed got flipped, and my wings, my stupid useless flappy little wings, snap wide open on their own and go rigid, catching air like they actually know what they’re doing, and my whole body tilts forward instead of down, and the fall turns into something else, something smoother, something that doesn’t end in becoming garbage-adjacent paste.

I glide.

I actually glide, skimming low over the alley, wind screaming past my scales, dumpster sliding underneath me instead of into me, and I flare out at the last second and touch down on the pavement soft as anything, tail first, like I meant to do that the whole time.

Silence.

My own heartbeat is so loud I can hear it in my ears, going about four hundred beats a minute, and my hands, when I look down at them, are shaking so bad I can’t tell if I’m still human-shaped or not.

I did not die.

But somewhere in the back of my head there’s a part of me that’s furious about that, actually, because dying would have been over, and this, whatever this is, the shaking and the smell of garbage and the sixty-story replay already starting on loop, is not over, so I just fold over, full coiled, and put my forehead on the pavement and stay there.

[System: awesome job, here’s 13 IP total. Easy, right? Now you know how to fly]

I don’t say anything for a second because I’m pretty sure my soul left my body somewhere around floor forty and hasn’t caught back up yet.

I don’t know how to fly, Old Mate. I know how to say a word apparently, and that’s not the same thing.

[System: glide’s a word, flying’s a word too, feels close enough]

It is not close enough. You nearly killed me; you let me fall sixty stories before telling me the magic word. What is wrong with you? What if I forgot how words work? What if I panicked and said "please" instead?

[System: then you’d be paste, mate. Good thing you didn’t]

That is not comforting.

[System: wasn’t trying to comfort you. was trying to teach you, teaching’s more fun when there’s stakes]

My heart is doing something that feels less like beating and more like trying to escape through my ribs.

So I can glide. Great. Wonderful, very useful skill to discover by nearly dying.

[System: you can glide, yeah]

Can I fly though? Like actual flying. Up, not just down-but-slower.

[System: nah]

Then why’d you say I know how to fly

[System: figure of speech, mate. gliding’s kinda flying]

It is not kinda flying, Old Mate; it is a controlled plummet that happened to end in a landing instead of a coroner’s report.

[System: yeah, that’s basically what flying is when you think about it]

I don’t have the energy to argue with that logic, mostly because some tiny broken part of my brain agrees with it, and that scares me more than the fall did.

I uncoil from the pavement in a slow, graceless spiral, my serpentine body feeling like one long, uncooperative muscle. The alley air hits my tongue: rot, rust, and something sweetly chemical. From atop the dumpster, a raccoon with one milky eye and fur the colour of oil-slicked pavement chitters at me, its tail lashing like it’s personally tallying up the inconvenience I’ve caused. Then its head snaps toward the mouth of the alley. A shadow falls over the wet concrete, long and unmistakably round.

[[[PLEASE READ THIS ON WEBNOVEL I NEED TO FEED MY DOGS]]]