Richard hoped like hell that the harpy knew what she was doing and wasn't leading him into a trap. The pull of gravity had him pulling a dive at least as fast as any peregrine he had ever seen. The wind was streaming past him so fast that even his predatory avian eyes were watering from it, the slightest gust tugging at his feathers so hard that it felt like they were about to rip free of his body. And the ground was coming up way too fast.

Then he saw her suddenly flare her wings and shoot forward, parallel to the earth without smashing into it. He angled his tail feathers to keep his own trajectory from colliding with the deadly ground and crossed an invisible line that alleviated the inexorable pull of that massively increased gravity. He flared his own wings and arrowed after the human-bird hybrid. She had a good lead on him, and he had time to appreciate the technique of her flying as she managed to snap her wings in to spin through a leafless tree that was in the way, and then she was suddenly blasting upwards. He had only a second to try and figure out what had caused it, and he saw that the grass was the key. A swift glance back confirmed it. Where the gravity pulled down, the vegetation was flattened, beneath him standing normally, and where the harpy had vanished back into the sky it was fluttering as if being blown from beneath by a fan.

Okay, got the key. Now to just survive this...

He didn't have any time to alter course, so he found himself being blasted upwards towards the fluttering female. She had apparently been caught off guard by the sudden reversal, more like being pulled upward than blown, and had ended up on her back once more, fighting to flap back towards the ground as they were swiftly sent towards the cloud-capped sky. He wasn't sure if something bad would happen when they hit the clouds, but considering that the race was bordered on two sides by the sheer walls of the valley, he wouldn't be surprised if that was considered a boundary as well. The fae didn't take very well to cheaters and rule-breakers.

He pulled his wings back as he coasted in an inverse dive, flaring to slow himself as he came close, and latched onto one of her wings near the shoulder. The remainder of his momentum was spent to right her, and he released almost immediately, then began powering forward towards what he hoped was the edge of the area. It was hard to tell with the ground so very far below, but he thought he could spot a point not too far forward where the change took place again. The beat of wings much larger than his own sounded behind him, and he chanced a look back to see the harpy beating hard on his tail. And gaining ground. Her blood red eyes were fastened on him, and her lips were peeled back in a grin that showed... very inhuman teeth, very sharp. If Richard had been human, he would have gulped.

She seemed... sort of human, but those eyes were terribly unnerving, and the way she seemed determined to catch him... When he felt the upward push finally relent, he decided to turn height into speed and pitched himself downward once more. He aimed to intersect with a "down" area about at the height of the valley edges. Judging by the last one, that should spit him out with a good clearance to the valley floor if he could just get enough speed to blaze through it. He became a feathered bullet, guided by small twitches of his tail. Then the gravity rush took over and he became more of an intercontinental ballistic missile. After the next "up" area, he chanced a glance behind him once more. The harpy was barely one of her own body lengths behind him. He had planned on coasting up and letting the natural curve of his trajectory take him along, but instead he put his wings to work in gaining distance, though he heard her flapping just as hard behind him. The final down gravity area was a good bit wider than he had anticipated, and he ended up coming out of it with his keel scraping the blades of grass beyond it, moving so fast that he didn't even need to use his wings as much more than slight rudders to keep him aloft, just the pinions at his tip enough to push his direction of travel upward.

Then he found his wings suddenly fully extended, catching air and sending him into a tailspin that very nearly snapped his spine.

Richard blinked up at the sky, or he tried to blink. His lids seemed to be stuck about two-thirds open, glued to his eyeballs. He was looking up into a feminine face with blood-red eyes, and suddenly realized where he was and what was happening. He had blacked out, probably from the g-forces of his spin, but he was surprisingly hale and hearty. Or possibly in shock. He didn't hurt, was the point, and he tried to flutter and flip himself onto his back. The best he seemed able to do was to feebly flap and wag his talons through the air.

That terrified him. Maybe it wasn't just shock. Maybe he had been hurt far worse than he feared, so badly that he was cripled. Not only would he be out of the race, he'd be dead and eaten, never seeing his home again!

"RICHARD!" came a shout that damn near cracked his skull. "Finally! I thought you had died... It's a reality shift. You have to get through it, somehow. Everything that enters the area is altered from its normal shape into something else. You'll revert once you reach the other side."

Angelmaris... Reality shift? With aching slowness, as if he was wrapped in billions of bandages so that he could only alter his position with extreme effort, he lifted his head to glance down at himself. Instead of feathers, he saw fuzz. Instead of powerful, gripping talons, he saw a pair of plastic sticks with imitation bird feet sticking out of his stomach. A glance to either side saw that his wings were imitations as well, rough shapes that looked like cartoon drawings of bird wings.

I'm a STUFFED ANIMAL! he shot back with all the force he could, but there was no further response from the fae. Then again, the rules of the contest only said that they could be given guidance, not answers or running commentary...

Then he remembered the harpy and turned his attention back to her. She... wasn't a harpy any more. She looked like a regular human, except for the red eyes. And the pointed ears. And the sharp, sharp teeth. She was smiling and reached hands out from beneath the feathered cloak that covered her to pick him up. Then she looked past him and her smile vanished. He only had to wonder for a second why because she turned him.

The pair of them had made it through the inversion and gravity sections in the lead, but that didn't mean there weren't other creatures in the race that were at least equally capable of fighting their way through those sections. The nightmare horse in particular seemed to be the least affected, though the fire and smoke of its mane were being pulled towards the ground so that they formed a puddle. Even as he watched, it finally made its way through into normal gravity and gave itself a vigorous shake. Then it looked at him. Right at him. Despite the half mile difference, he could feel the hot malice behind that gaze, and it opened its mouth to whiny out a furious challenge. That thing had scary teeth. The harpy had perfectly normal teeth so far as he was concerned.

She turned him back to face her, cocked her head to one side, then jerked her head backwards with a quirked brow. Richard did his best to nod, managing a clicking up and down motion. It felt like something was grinding in his neck when he did it, but not... in a painful way? Maybe he had some kind of internal mechanisms, more of an animatronic doll than a stuffed animal. Either way, it didn't much matter so far as survival was concerned. He couldn't fly, and he could very definitely not fly in the shape he was currently. The harpy, on the other hand, looked like she was perfectly mobile, and that was his best chance of getting through the area quickly.

She smiled again at his nod, and he was very much less frightened by it this time, then she leaned in to nuzzle her nose against his stuffed beak before tucking him beneath an arm and taking off. That... was confusing. Birds tended to do that to show affection, nuzzling beaks and preening one another. Did harpies do that? Well... he could sort through that later. Right now, he couldn't do much of anything except try to give a squawk of thanks.

"You are the wind beneath my wiiiiiings," came out of his beak.

Richard wished that he could facepalm.



Tags: avian, bird, red-tailed hawk, harpy, race, competition, transformation, clean, nosex, no sex, male, female

Summary: The race continues, and the harpy seems intent on catching Richard. But when a new obstacle appears, he finds out that maybe she wasn't trying to catch him for the reasons he thought.