Here is another chapter! This one is very different than I had originally written, and is also much longer. I hope you guys like it!
The family of three did not make further attempts to find out what caused May to have her wings. There were several reasons for their decision. May had quickly decided that she liked her wings, they could not afford to see a specialist, and if people found out, then they might view May as a freak. Of course, Clark and Lauren never mentioned the last reason to May.
May gained new traits over the years following her first transformation. Her eyesight and hearing had improved, and she suspected that her well above average intelligence was connected to her unnatural wings. Among the more difficult to conceal traits that she had acquired was a massive appetite. Once she got her wings, her appetite doubled. It was not much of a problem, except for the funny looks she received during lunch at her school's cafeteria, and most people simply became used to seeing her eat as much as any of the boys on the school football team.
Once, while she was in tenth grade, a particularly large twelfth grade defensive lineman challenged her to an eating contest when he heard about her eating habits. She accepted. She had never actually been full that she could remember; since she got her wings, she would eat until she was no longer hungry. It was not a surprise to her when she easily won the eating competition, but everyone else thought that it was amazing, especially since she was rather slender. The linebacker had become too full to stand up straight, but May was perfectly fine. As she expected, she still was not full.
May had few friends in High School. In an effort to keep her wings a secret, she did not reach out much, and preferred to keep to herself. She spent much of her free time doing something that few her age would consider fun. Reading.
She did not read fiction or "entertaining" books. Instead she read books such as The Prince by Machiavelli, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and Frederick the Great's Instruction to His Generals.
Politics, war, and the way people behave. That is what interested May.
May had no boyfriend during High School, and had no desire for close companionship, male or female.
After graduating high school, May moved halfway across the country to Pennsylvania and began attending Swarthmore College.
She had requested to have a room to herself, and at first she thought that her request had been granted. She had just finished unpacking her duffel-bag, and all of her books had been put onto a bookshelf.
Her dorm room had one bedroom, one common room that led to the hallway outside, and one bathroom connected to the bedroom. Her bedroom had two beds, one on each side of the room, and May had just laid down to read a book when her door opened.
May got up to see who had just intruded on her room, and as she reached the doorway connecting the common room with the bedroom, someone came into the dorm through the door.
The girl was roughly the same age as May with long black hair. The girl was petite, but not scrawny, and she was wearing blue jeans and a navy t-shirt that said "Even duct tape can't fix stupid, but it can muffle the sound."
The girl was carrying a bag over her shoulder and pulling a suitcase behind her.
"Hi." The girl said with a big smile and a quick wave.
"Hi." May said awkwardly.
The two stood there for several moments while avoiding eye contact and waiting for the other to say something.
"Is this the bedroom?" she asked quickly while gesturing to the room behind May.
"Oh, yeah." May said as she stepped back through the door to the bedroom and made way for the girl carrying the luggage. "You can just...put your stuff in here...if you want."
The girl nodded as she passed by May, and she put her bags on the empty bed. After that, the girl turned to face May.
"So..." the girl said slowly. "Oh. I'm April." The girl said with another big smile as she offered her hand to shake.
"May."
"Nice to meet you." April said.
"You too."
The awkward silence returned, but was quickly broken by April. "I am going to unpack." April said as she turned to her suitcase and bag.
"Okay."
As April unpacked, May went to her bed to start reading.
"What are you reading?" April asked as she unpacked.
May chuckled a little. "Do you want to hear the full title?"
April turned toward May and raised an eyebrow. "I guess so."
"Leviathan or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil by Thomas Hobbes."
"I have no idea what you just said." April replied.
"It is a book about political philosophy."
"What is it about?" April asked, even though May had just answered that question.
"Thomas Hobbes, who wrote the book, naively thought that the problem of government should be approached from a mathematical mindset. He wanted to study politics like someone might study a triangle, by looking at it, measuring it, and figuring out its properties. Unfortunately, politics is far to complex to study it that way. Simply put, Hobbes believed that we should study politics by studying the way man is, not the way man should be.
"Beliefs such as Communism approach politics by trying to find out how man should be, and getting man to that point, but Hobbes thought that we should approach politics by finding out how man is, and working around man's flaws instead of trying to change them.
"Niccolo Machiavelli really pioneered this idea in his book The Prince, but Hobbes didn't think that anyone else before him had done a good job at figuring politics out even though this method, so he wrote Leviathan."
April stood unmoving for a moment. "You do know that school hasn't started yet?"
"I just like stuff like this." May said as she held up the book slightly.
"Let me guess. You're a Political Science major."
"Actually, I am a Chemistry major."
"Because you already have a Masters in Political Science?"
"Because I like Chemistry too."
Seven months passed. May and April became decent friends, and April tried, on many occasions, to persuade May to hang out with her friends. May always had some excuse or another to avoid such close social interaction.
It was an average March Friday at Swarthmore College, and May was having lunch in the cabinesque cafeteria. She had just sat down with her three full plates of food, when April walked up. April was wearing blue jeans and a clever t-shirt, as always. The shirt said "A.A.A.A.A. American Association Against Acronym Abuse."
"Where is everyone else?" April asked as she sat down across from May.
"What do you mean?"
"The other plates. Who are they for?"
"Me." May said, slightly confused.
"Wait, you eat like this all of the time?"
"Yeah. I thought you had figured that out by now." May stated. After living together for so long, she thought that April would have figured that out. May ate with April in the mornings, and she ate just as much then as she did at lunch.
"I thought that you ate that much for breakfast because you skipped lunch!" April said as she realized how much her roommate was eating every day. "How are you not, like, five hundred pounds!?"
"I have no idea, but if I don't eat this much, I'll get hungry pretty quickly."
"I have got to watch you eat all of this." April said with the same weird fascination that most people had upon seeing May eat.
"Suit yourself."
The two sat in silence for several moments as they ate.
"Did your Biology class let out early today or something?" May asked. The two had never eaten lunch together before because of their class schedules.
"No. Professor Davidson had a car wreck on his way here, so we had to skip."
"Is he okay?" May asked.
"I think so. It said that he would be back tomorrow, so it must not have been too bad."
"That's good. You wouldn't want to have to retake a class because of your professor being in the hospital." May said with a chuckle.
"Knowing him, he might come back in a wheelchair with an I.V. in his arm. He really gets into his stuff." The two laughed a little.
April stopped laughing when she noticed that May had a look of discomfort on her face.
"Are you okay?" April asked.
"I don't know. I feel kind of funny."
"What kind of funny?"
"I don't know. I guess I feel a little bloated, and nothing that I am eating is tasting as good as it was earlier." May said.
"Like you ate too much?"
"I can't eat too much." May said with confidence.
"You might want to see a nurse."
"No!" May exclaimed, and a little too quickly to seem normal.
April raised an eyebrow. "Suit yourself, but you should at least lay down or something."
May nodded, got up, grabbed her plates, and made for her dorm.
"Bye. Have a nice day. See you later." April quietly said after May was out of earshot. "Typical."
Although May made it to all of her classes later that day, she did not feel up to eating dinner, which was extremely odd for her. She went to bed with the same feeling of fullness that she had acquired during lunch, and, despite her discomfort, she fell asleep with ease.
May opened her eyes and quickly noted that she was not in her room. She was laying on grass in the middle of an endless field. Slowly, she stood. Everywhere she could see was covered in an endless field of knee high grass. She turned around in hopes of seeing something other than the endless field. She was not disappointed. Directly behind her had been a large structure about 40 yards tall, the height of an eleven to twelve story building. It was circular around the base, and its diameter was about one and one half times its height. It appeared to be a living organism, and when May saw it, she strangely knew that it was called a Hatchery. It was a knowledge that she had not memorized or figured out, and she had no way to explain how she knew what it was called. She stood marveling at the structure for several moments.
She awoke in her room, and looked at the clock next to her bed. It was seven forty six in the morning. Today was a Saturday, so there was nowhere that she needed to be. She was already wide awake, and knew that trying to sleep would only result in failure, so she got out of bed. May went to the bathroom and closed the door. Once safely out of sight, she began changing. She had made a habit of changing in the bathroom because it was the only place that she could safely extend her wings without risking being seen. After stretching her wings and changing, May headed downstairs to get breakfast.
Over the next couple of months, May had stopped eating as much as she usually did, and she had the same dream about the Hatchery every few nights. At first she ignored it, but then the dream started changing slightly every now and then.
At first, the only change was that the field of perfect grass had a couple of trees around it, but after two and a half weeks, the field looked more like a clearing in a forest with most of the ground in the clearing covered with purple Creep. She did not know how she knew what the Creep was called, but it did not really matter to her. Her main concern was her second semester of college. However, two days before classes were scheduled to end, she had the same dream as before, but this time, she recognized where the dream had taken place. It was well outside of the city limits.
She had been out there to hunt deer once with April and Ronnie Fisher, April's boyfriend. The trip was a disaster; April was bored, May felt a bit like a third wheel, and Ronnie was frustrated that the girls could not keep quiet. They thought that it might be exciting to go hunting, but ended up bored out of their minds.
The Saturday following the day that she recognized where the dream took place, which happened to also be the day after the last day of college for the semester, May got into the car that she had been saving up for for the last several years, and drove to a road near the field that the incredibly boring hunt had taken place. There was a gate leading into the woods past the shoulder of the road; the gate had the word "corps" on it written in large metal letters on the side.
She parked her car on the shoulder and got out to climb over the waist high gate. The lettering on the gate indicated that the land was owned by the Army Corp of Engineers. Most of the people who came to the area were there to hunt deer. May was hunting for something else entirely.
She followed the trail for several minuets before coming across the field the had seen in her dream. However, there was no giant biological building in the center. She had not really expected to find one, but she decided to explore the clearing anyway. After she walked to the other end of the field, she decided that there was not anything noteworthy to do or see, and she felt kind of stupid for looking at all.
She was beginning to get disappointed as she turned to head back to her car, but once she reached the center of the clearing, her body tensed up. Tense and unable to move easily, she tripped and fell to the ground as a pain erupted from her stomach. She gagged and began coughing blood. Then the world went dark.
