Chapter 2

Everything was in first-person, because it was a memory.

Yusei was driving a vehicle – a D-Wheel, Crow's knowledge filled in and she vaguely recalled spotting the red vehicle in the room – along a street at night, with light coming from lamp posts (again, Crow's knowledge of the world that she'd pulled intruded to be sure she knew what things were).

Suddenly, a girl's shriek reached his ears – did she really sound like that, her consciousness absently wondered – and his eyes wrenched upwards to the sky.

And there was that picture of her that she'd seen in Crow's eyes, plunging towards the ground and flailing in an attempt to stop or slow herself. And then she saw what had made her black out: her right wing hit that lamp post she'd thought she'd missed entirely, sending her into an uncontrolled spin!

Yusei's thoughts rang out to the present Angel's mind. "If she hits the ground, she could end up even more hurt than she already is!" He revved his engine, drove towards her, and then switched into neutral gear.

Her spiraling fall took her right into his lap across the front of the D-Wheel, her left wing folding as it smacked into his chest, and he gunned the engine again into a tailspin in the same direction she'd been spinning, spiraling around until all the momentum was gone and he could stop again, facing back the way he'd come with her broken right wing spread out before the front wheel. Upon registering how thin her bones felt, he was a little surprised that the sudden collision with him hadn't broken her other wing; apparently her bones were stronger than they seemed.

"Where did you come from? Well, I'd better get you to my place. At least it's close enough that I can get there before sunrise with how slow I'll have to drive." He revved his engine, and then started driving very slowly for home, the feathers of her right wing fluttering dangerously close to his front wheel and her tail dragging on the ground to his right.

Angel shook her head around, and then stared at the mark on Yusei's face, deeming that safer to stare at than his eyes. "You caught me while you were driving, when you didn't even know how fast I was falling relative to your speed!"

His eyebrows shot up. "Well, I couldn't just let you hit the ground! I'd never have heard the end of it!"

"Ah…" she let her gaze drop to his chest for a second. Then she held out her hand. "Thank you."

Yusei took hold of her hand. "You're welcome."

"So now that we've gotten that out of the way," Jack interrupted, "what shall we be doing with you now?"

Angel rolled her eyes. "I don't want…to be seen like this by a whole ton of people at the moment. But…I don't have anywhere to stay."

Crow grinned. "Hey, you could stay here if you want! I'm fine with it!"

Yusei nodded as well. "I don't mind either. Maybe we can help you find answers to why you've suddenly come here in a different form than you're used to."

Angel blinked at Yusei, trying to avoid locking eyes with him again. "But…I don't have any way to pay rent…"

Suddenly, inside her head, she heard a quiet voice. Let me worry about that.

Almost at exactly the same time, Yusei answered, "Don't worry about that too much. We had a mechanic stay with us who'd had amnesia, and he used his time to modify our D-Wheels…Angel, are you okay?"

Angel looked up from her attempt to chase down that soft voice in her head, confused. And she accidentally looked at his eyes.

At least it gave her the reason Yusei had asked, because once again she was looking at herself through his eyes. Her heel was tapping on the floor really quickly, almost like a nervous tic.

Angel looked down and tried to still the jittering leg. "I'm not trying to do that, really. I…I…" she closed her eyes and tried to analyze what was going on with her body.

Then she heard Crow clear his throat and opened her eyes again.

He was holding up a cable in front of her face. "I know this is technically for reading a D-Wheel's engine strength, not a human's heart rate, but…"

Angel stared at the cable for a second. Then she took it and set the bare metal end against her skin, just barely letting it slip under her shirt to press at a spot over her heart and pinning it there with her other hand.

Yusei walked over to a computer and tapped a couple of keys. The result on the screen was very bright to her sensitive eyes, but she made out from the glowing blue a glowing white line that was moving straight…except every now and again, it pulsed.

And that "every now and again" was in a steady rhythm. A fast rhythm, maybe four pulses a second.

Yusei's voice reached her ears. "Are you actually at rest right now?"

"Um…yes…?" she pulled the cable's end back out of her shirt.

"I'm not a medical student, but I think your heart rate is twice what it used to be."

"Oh."

Crow grinned at her. "Hey, I wonder how fast you are now…"

Angel glanced down at her feet. "I don't know. I do know that with my heart rate up, I'll have to try harder to get a decent workout, especially since I don't want to be seen right now."

Suddenly, the door slammed open and a high-pitched voice shouted, "Yusei!"

Angel screamed. She dropped the cable and her tail, partly spread her left wing and dashed almost straight into the back wall before spinning around to see the owner of the voice.

Two children were standing there. One had a single pigtail and was dressed in blue, while the other had two pigtails and was dressed in pink. Angel accidentally made eye contact with the blue-dressed child, and learned a few things. First of all, he had been the one to shout. Second, his name was Rua while his twin sister's name was Ruka. Third, all he was able to officially think at that moment was "WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS THAT?!"

Then Crow cleared his throat. "Well, I think we just got our answer to how fast you are."

Yusei also decided to pretend that nothing was out of the ordinary. "Yeah, I'd say from the scream to hitting the wall only took about a quarter of a second. Did you get their names?"

Angel nodded, setting a hand on her chest and trying to calm her heart down. Then she remembered that in her new condition calming her heart down was a losing battle, and lowered her hand again.

"Rua, Ruka, this is Angel. She's…new in town."

Rua finally got his mouth to work again. "Wow! You look amazing!"

Ruka waved a little. "You're…you're pretty."

Angel closed her left wing again. "Thank you," she answered, obliquely noting that she had her tail in a curve without thinking about it. Apparently all she'd needed to get her wing and tail controls properly hard-wired into her brain was a decent scare.

Rua walked slowly over, holding out a hand. "Um…can I touch your, um…"

Another glance at his eyes told Angel that he couldn't figure out if he wanted to touch her wing or her tail. She sighed. "Are your hands clean?" She may not particularly like her new appendages, but she knew that feathers needed to be just so or they were just a big frustration to deal with.

Rua pulled his hand back and studied it more carefully. "…Yeah."

"Then you can touch my tail." A careful thought had her tail slowly waving towards him. "I'll think about if my wings are off-limits or not."

Rua took up the invitation quickly, grabbing hold of her tail right below that large long-feathered bulb.

And that caused a very interesting trigger.

As soon as Rua squeezed at the base of the bulb, the long feathers shifted and tilted back to hide their base and Rua's hand, and revealed what had been hidden in their midst: a six-inch-long bulb of glistening flesh with inch-tall blunt spikes lined up in rows on it and a single opening in the top.

"Ooh! That's…um…"

Angel suspected that he was trying to avoid saying "weird," because she was thinking it looked weird herself. It was like a flesh-colored barrel cactus or something. "I didn't know that existed."

Rua lifted his other hand up. "Why doesn't this have any feathers on-" he touched the bulb. "Ehh!" Twitching away and dropping her tail – which caused the feathers to fold up again – he stared at his hand. "That…feels…ehh…"

"Now you've got me curious." Angel lifted her tail to her hand and gripped at the same place as Rua wiped his hand off on his pants. When she set a finger between the rows of blunt spikes, she found out why Rua had reacted the way he did: the reason for the gleaming was that it was slimy. "Huh. Is this some type of oil?" She rubbed at the slick spot on her finger. Then a smile played onto her face. "Oh, you've got to be kidding me…this transformation came with a feather-care unit?"

"That's for your feathers?"

Angel realized that the kids probably didn't know much about birds. "Yeah. Birds always have to preen their feathers to make sure they stay in perfect condition – otherwise they can't even fly. See," she waved the bulb, "it's got a wide-tooth brush that I can comb through my feathers to straighten them, and the oil is to waterproof them. It won't do much for dirt or mud, though, so I'd have to use this thing after I've used a normal brush."

Then she noticed that Jack was yawning. Boring, am I? Fixing a large smile on her face, she spoke again in a falsely sweet voice. "Why yes, it will be very difficult to brush the backs of my wings until I've had some more practice. Thank you, Jack, for offering to help me with that!"

His double-take was hysterical.

After laughing a bit, Angel took pity on him. "Don't worry, you wouldn't have to do anything. You'd just be directing me for where I should start a brush stroke." She walked past him. Then she extended three odd claw-like prongs from within her tail-brush, picked up a ramen cup, and plunked it into Jack's hands.

It took her another two steps before she realized what she'd done, and swiveled her tail up and around to stare at the end of her brush. "A…wow. Okay, I was wondering how I'd manage to use a normal brush when my telekinesis isn't working." She thought about what she'd tried to trigger, and managed to get the prongs to extend again from an opening at the end of her oil-brush. "I really need to do some introspection at some point to figure out what my spirit monster actually is."

A/N: This chapter is…kind of anatomical-detail-heavy, I know, but honestly this was the best place to put in all the detail about her tail tip. The next chapter, hopefully, will go a bit faster. (It'd better – this is 5Ds, where speed is essential!)