Yay! First chapter! Enjoy, 'cause it gets a lot better from here.

She woke to the sound of seagulls outside of her cave. Checking to see that the other was asleep and praying that another other was also asleep, she quietly crept along the outside of the forest to a cliff. She sat there a while, then ran to the edge and threw herself off.

Shrieking as quietly as possible, she unfolded her wings... and landed heavily at the bottom of the cliff.

"Ow, dammit!" she cursed, brushing herself off and checking for cuts. The girl turned her head around as far as she could and looked miserably at her wings.

They were blackish-gray, feathered, and altogether useless. One could call them vestigial, if one wanted to be nice. The girl called them her 'useless bastard wings', and one would say after watching her jump off cliffs for days on end that the name suited them just fine.

She called herself Thorn, though that was not her real name, and she was about 2 percent emu. An emu (dromaius novaehollandiae) is a large, ill-tempered, Australian bird related to the ostrich and cassowary. It is also flightless.

Thorn was 98 percent human (homo sapiens), another usually flightless species. She did not lament this fact, unlike most humans. The furthest she got into misery over her situation was attempting to fly and failing pitifully.

"You can't fly, you know," said a sardonic voice atop the cliff. "Your wings are only vestigial."

"Oh, shut the hell up," Thorn snapped angrily, nursing a small cut on her head. She looked up to see the 'another other' she had prayed was asleep; Len.

He was tall, with feathery white hair, pale skin, and dark black eyes. Part of his hair stuck up in a strange and oddly endearing manner, but Thorn knew better than to mock him for it.

Len took out a small black notebook and started writing in it, muttering quietly, but audibly enough for Thorn to hear.

"Idiot... continues... to keep... hopes... up. I suggest... that she... stop... being... stupid and... do... something... useful... once and a while."

"Why don't you do anything useful?" she yelled at him, pulling her brown hair up in a braid with a string around her wrist. "I don't see you doing anything to get off this horrible place." When Len didn't answer, Thorn turned away and started running back towards her cave. "Whatever," she called back to the cliff.

As she had dreaded, the other who stayed in the cave with her was awake. He said against the wall, completely spaced out, his long legs tucked into his chest.

"Good morning," Thorn said as genially as she could. The other either didn't hear or refused to answer, instead staring into the depths of the cave.

"Do you want food?" she asked. "DO YOU WANT FOOD?" she repeated loudly.

"No."

The other was an Asian male, a foot or so taller than Thorn, with unkempt black hair and pale green eyes. He continued to stare into at the dark corner of the cave, completely ignoring her.

"I'm asking you only one more time. Do. You. Want. Food?"

"No."

"Well, I'm bringing you food anyway, goddammit, and I expect you to eat it. December, at least look at me when I'm telling you something!"

December turned his head extremely slowly towards the girl, with a calm -almost amused- expression on his face.

"You are so infuriating sometimes, do you know that?" she shrieked, running out of the cave. December turned his head back to the spot where he was staring. His eyes unfocused as he spaced out again.

Ah yes, I love these characters. Mostly because they're the most absurd recombinant (however the heck you spell it) combinations I could think of. (Well... I could've made kiwi bird, peacock, chicken, penguin... there are a lot of things worse than my characters.) If you wanted to know, yes, Len and December are avian hybrids, too. December's a demoiselle crane hybrid and Len's an -snicker- umbrella cockatoo hybrid. Yes, that's why he has the weird hair. -bursts out laughing for no reason-

Enjoy the next installment of O Flightless One, coming soon to a fanfiction website near you! XD