Stevie is an adorable pink Earth genasi druid. Peter is a dark clad raven guy. Together they do their best Link impression and go looking for a runaway chicken. Spoiler Alert: they end up facing one aggressive
dire hen.
⚠None.
Peter looked at the sack in his hands. It was the downward gaze of someone who had found himself in a situation he could never have predicted being in and couldn’t really discern what pivot in his path led him to it. His eyes were a bit unfocused because the real action -- the real spark -- was all in his mind, as he tried to contend with how bizarre this week was and how it wasn’t finding any traction with normalcy.
He was an inky black blot of a bird man. Literally. There were feathers and a beak and talons.
He had been walking with Stevie, who was a picture of pastel pink and flowers. Together, they looked like a mismatched pair of socks. Even by Irkalla standards, people were looking.
And, then: someone had approached them, frantic and frenzied. Their chicken got loose. If two such kind travelers as the Kenku and his Genasi friend would recover the winged creature, there would be a reward. Peter was silent -- albeit because replying was another level of bizarre that he was still navigating -- and Stevie had accepted on their behalf because, as far as Peter could guess, it was her nature. He appreciated that about her. Her selflessness was a language he also spoke, and right now she was something of the voice for them both.
Peter looked at Stevie, his gaze returning from some far-off place. He shrugged and lifted the sack. Allegedly it would bag a chicken. How? He did not know. It had been thrust on him as if he knew the ins and outs of wrangling poultry. Was it because he looked avian this week? If so, that was probably bordering stereotyping.
Stevie tried not to pay attention to appearances in general. For herself, that went double this week. She knew she was doing that thing. If she was helpful enough, if she was useful enough, if she was nice enough, forgiving enough… Then her problems wouldn’t matter. She’d be too busy to care that she looked like her mom that week.
Besides, Peter looked cool.
Stevie grabbed his hand and pulled him along. “Here chicken, chicken, chicken!”
Somehow that didn’t strike her as a particularly successful way to lure a missing chicken into a bag, but it was worth a shot, right? No chickens were particularly intrigued by her friendly voice, and Stevie let out a small huff.
“Maybe we should try finding ice cream to get Lion to help us?” Stevie looked at Peter. “Maybe he could follow a scent trail and lead us to the chicken? What do you think?”
And then, in a slightly lower register, not quite trying to mimic his voice but still trying to create a voice he might be more comfortable mimicking: “Ice cream? Or something else?”
Stevie was surprisingly adept at talking to Peter, being sure to stick mostly to yes or no questions, giving him words to repeat back to her. He wasn’t the first friend limited to communicating by mimicry she’d met, but she couldn’t quite tell how long he retained the language he repeated, and so she repeated herself to make sure.
He hadn’t said as much, but Stevie’s insistence on forward movement was a godsend for Peter, who recognized that having a goal and purpose stopped him from contemplating things he never thought he would have to. If he got stuck like this, were his people the kind that laid eggs? Did shampoo work on feathers? He plodded along behind Stevie, her hand gripping his taloned fingers and willing him to step back from those ledges that dropped off sheer cliffs into the unknown.
When Stevie turned to look at him, his eyes darted to the side as he tried to weigh the options. It shouldn’t be this hard, he knew. He was an engineer, a problem-solver, a quick-thinker. Usually, anyway. Right now, it was a struggle just following basic logic unless someone spelled it out. Was bird brain a thing? It felt like the same thing that prevented him from using his own voice was sapping his ability to originate thoughts and plans. That was even more terrifying to dwell on, and Peter pushed it aside.
“Or something else?” The tone, inflection, and volume were exactly Stevie’s. And she had been calling out to the chicken moments ago, which itched enough of his critical thinking to realize that there was more than one way to call a chicken. But. That required a chicken to mimic its sounds. And they didn’t have a chicken. Because they were trying to find a chicken.
He looked around. Then, shook his head. “Ice cream?”
Stevie let out a long sigh. She was not the brains among her friends. The plans of hers that worked usually involved listening and empathy, two things which chickens were probably immune to.
“Okay,” Stevie said. There was a weight and seriousness to the world. Stevie closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. Why were some of her most traumatic memories centered around transformation? Cat fingers. Kaiju. Werewolf. “...I think I have an idea. You just have to promise not to freak out. I’m sure it’ll be fine. It’s just I have this idea of things I can do, but also most of my attempts to shapeshift with my regular powers are usually terrible, but I’m pretty sure it works differently now and it totally doesn’t have to be the least bit terrifying at all, right?”
Stevie looked at Peter for confirmation.
That was probably confirmation, right?
It wasn’t like his beak could really smile.
“Okay. I’m just gunna try it. For the chicken.”
Stevie exhaled and then? She was a pale dire wolf. She didn’t know her clothing and things she carried would transform with her, hidden magically under her fur, but it was a good thing it did because she did not plan that out very far.
Or how the townsfolk might react to a large, white dire wolf.
She stood over five feet tall, and licked the side of Peter’s face to signal she was okay. (Okay, she might have licked the side of his face to confirm to herself that she was okay.) Then bowed down so that Peter could hop on if he wanted to.
Stevie was right that a beak didn’t really emote, but the tilt of Peter’s head was one of curiosity. Absurdity was the flavor of the week, anyway, so it wasn’t like she could do anything so wild that he’d back away at this point. And in the span of that time, he found himself face-to-face with a large wolf.
His response would have been ‘cool’, but his bank of replies to pick from limited him severely. What came out was a thick brogue, one very Dwarven in nature, that had been picked up as they walked the streets. “’Tis a well-balanced axe!!” Not quite the context, but hopefully the sentiment carried in the tone.
Then, a tongue ruffled a few of the feathers on his face, and Peter blinked. Grooming had been ingrained in instincts, but he merely smoothed the feathers down for now. Luckily, body language was still available to them both and he caught Stevie’s meaning. He looked around briefly, as if there was concern someone might be watching, then shrugged. The time for shame was long gone. He swung himself up and tried to make some sense of where to hold on without talons becoming puncture hazards.
No one braced him for this moment. No one could. The next voice from his mouth was a woman’s -- someone who had been riding horseback. “Steady ooooon.”
Stevie put her snout to the ground and sniffed the ground furiously. Her first steps on all fours were careful, making sure Peter felt and remained balanced on her back. There was no real frame of reference for scents, not from her human nose. The information hit differently, there was more nuance, it was overwhelming at first.
She found Peter’s scent, and traced along where his steps had been. She found the distraught woman’s scent, the one who gave them their mission, missing her prized hen. From there she started to pick up her pace experimentally, sniffing circles around her home until she caught something interesting, and faint.
And then without thinking, Stevie bound off in that direction.
Oops.
Even what would’ve been a strangle cry of surprise had to be picked from the tape deck. Peter couldn’t even make a sound until he selected a snippet. To everyone’s misfortune, it wasn’t the horseback woman’s sweet soprano, but the horse this time. A loud whinny erupted from his voice box. It caught Peter as off-guard as a few people walking the streets, who careened out of the way of a bounding dire wolf and the skinny Kenku that was gripping her neck scruff with desperation to not be shook free.
He held on tight, ultimately leaning forward to lasso his arms around her neck and steady himself. He’d forgotten what life was like before being able to adhere to nearly anything and everything. This was rattling him in a way he didn’t think he could be rattled. Admittedly, being a featherweight right now meant he was more along for the ride than able to brace himself to enjoy any of it.
His hood slumped down over his eyes. If he could have frowned, he would have.
Stevie was not the most graceful wolf. To be fair, it was her first time running around on four legs. Sometimes she slid making sharp turns. Sometimes she slid into things making sharp turns. Sorry, Peter. The chase was on!
(This was clearly karma for the times he swung around New York City with MJ. Clearly.)
She kept her nose to the ground, sniffling wildly, tail lashing about excitedly. Stevie couldn’t even tell if she was following the right scent, just that she had caught a scent and she was definitely following it, and for now, that was good enough for her.
Her merry chase ended in an alley, when Stevie froze. Was she supposed to do the pointing thing? She felt like she was supposed to do the pointing thing dogs did in old timey cartoons. Stevie did not try to strike a hunting pose, instead she hunkered down and let Peter dismount so they could continue their search for the missing chicken.
Movement stopped and Peter looked up from where he had buried his face in the scruff of a dire wolf’s neck.
They were in an alley that pinched inward as it continued, the buildings on either side were likely built without real thought given to the width given to egress between them, but that seemed common once outside the more planned parts of Irkalla. Engineering and architecture gave way to imagination and a certain amount of winging it the further into the back streets you went. Angled walls, sloping roofs. The alleyway was almost a tunnel beneath the leaning structures.
Peter attempted to climb down, but mostly slid off Stevie. He righted himself and took a look around. Then he looked down and noted a single white down feather at his feet. He picked it up and held it out to Stevie. It was a chicken feather.
The noise that came out of Peter was the ding of a brass bell, a sound borrowed from the marketplace when a merchant had sealed a deal with a buyer.
He then turned to look up for a moment before his struggling thoughts reminded him: chicken. He adjusted his gaze to something reachable to a flightless bird.
Stevie focused, and then she was herself. Forgetting they were on a very important mission, she collided into Peter with a hug, lifting him briefly off the ground before putting him back and releasing her grip on him.
“Oh my gosh! Did you see that? I did it! I shapeshifted. And nothing bad happened! And it didn’t hurt. And you got to ride on me like Lion and I followed the scent and that was so much fun. Do you want to do that again? We should do that again! …After we find the chicken.”
Ahem. Right. The chicken.
Stevie peered into the alley, and though her nose had caught its scent previously, and Peter found an important clue, it was hard to see where the bird went.
“I’ll go in and try to flush it out? You stand here and be ready to catch it in the bag?” she asked.
It was a bracing hug, and Peter’s feathered arms flipped outward instinctively. He brought them down in what amounted to an awkward return of the hug because… Stevie seemed happy? It took him some time to mentally catch up to why that was, but by then the hug was done and he was trying to track her string of exclamations and questions. He offered a few nods -- when it seemed like they were suitable answers, anyway -- and straightened out his rogue’s hood so it would stop shielding half his peripheral vision.
What a crisis it was, being something between human and raven.
He looked at Stevie when she asked her final question, then helpfully lifted the sack in answer. It was a plan. It seemed like a decent plan. Put the chicken in the sack. Easy.
“You stand here and be ready to catch it in the bag?” he parroted after Stevie. Then, he made the sound of the bell again. “Ding!”
“You’re getting really good at this,” Stevie said. Her smile was mostly happy. There was a twinge of something; memory, sadness. It wasn’t meant to look like pity. But Stevie remembered Lapis Lazuli’s time trapped in a mirror, how they had communicated just like this.
If Stevie had her normal powers, maybe there would be a way to help Peter. Something more than just… Maybe after catching the chicken, she could try to do something for him. But what?
Stevie let out a huff of breath and jogged into the alley.
Find the chicken. Peter would catch the chicken. It was really going to help someone and then-- and then-- would that make their day better? She hoped so.
Stevie disappeared into the narrow dark, behind crates and stacks of things left forgotten.
She came running back out a few moments later. Really, the large bag should have been a clue. It seemed more like a three, maybe four chicken sized bag. Slightly overkill for one bird.
About the right size for a dire chicken.
A dire chicken that remembered its ancestors.
“Oh, it’s mad! It’s mad! I made it mad!” Stevie said, covering the back of her head. It wasn’t that she couldn’t fight the chicken, she just didn’t want to. Instead of chasing a chicken toward Peter, Stevie instead ran toward Peter while being chased by an angry hen just over two feet tall, bok-boking furiously.
There wasn’t much to do when awaiting a chicken to come squawking out hiding. Peter opened the sack and looked inside it. It looked like the inside of the sack. He closed it and bounced on his feet. He looked around him, rolled his shoulders.
He leaned to the side a little to strain his eyes against the darker part of the alley that Stevie had vanished into.
And, then…
He heard her voice and his attention whipped up. He braced with the sack…
He braced for a normal-sized chicken. It was a critical misunderstanding of their task, honestly.
Instinct took over. A rogue’s instinct, anyway. He jumped to the side and ducked down behind some crates, waiting for the dire chicken to run past so he could try to bag it from behind. Sneak attack style.
Stevie was not prepared for Peter’s disappearance act. She saw him. Then she saw him move. Then-- where did he go?
Between the oversized chicken pecking at her heels and her sprint, she didn’t have time to wonder if Peter had just taken off. She just kept running. Making sense of what happened was a problem for Stevie Universe Future.
“But I’m a vegetarian!” Stevie shouted. They were in a magical world. Maybe dire chickens understood English. If it did, the aggressive chicken gave no indication as it continued to chase off Stevie, rounding the corner where Peter was crouched down.
It was down to timing now. Peter crouched, the sack in his grip. He braced himself on coiled legs until the second Stevie raced past first. He lunged out from hiding, swooped the sack -- which cracked as the fabric pulled taut -- and fumbled to cinch the loose ends so the captive dire chicken couldn’t get out.
And it sure did try.
The crowing echoed in the alleyway, muffled only by the fabric that was containing it. The chicken flapped and clawed. One wing burst free and clubbed Peter square between the eyes.
“Or something else?” Peter asked, once again dipping into his reserves of responses and not quite finding what he needed in the library. “Or something else?” It was Stevie’s voice, and it sounded much calmer than he felt while wrestling a bagged giant chicken. Feathers drifted outward from the sack as Peter fought to hold on.
Stevie stumbled over her feet the moment the chicken threat was dispatched. Well. Mostly dispatched. It took her a few seconds to shift gears from running away to running toward, just in time to see Peter get clocked in the face by an angry wing.
“Bad chicken!” Stevie admonished, as she tried to shove its wing back into place within the bag. Her other hand gripped the bag along with Peter to make sure they didn’t lose their target. It took a wild struggle and their combined effort to get the chicken secured within the bag. …It still continued to struggle, regardless.
“Are you okay?” Stevie said. She didn’t dare let go of the bag yet. With both of them holding it firm, they had the bird, but she wasn’t sure either one of them were in a position to keep it contained on their own. That was going to make transporting the chicken back to its rightful home the next challenge.
With Stevie’s aid, Peter was able to catch a breath. He looked at her, and it was hard to convey an eyeroll with the current arrangement of his features, but he gave it an attempt.
The voice of the chicken’s owner: “He might be lost and get hurt!”
Then, the snort of a donkey. It was as dersive a sound as any to express some exhaustion and frustration over how the owner had left key details out. Still, they’d done it. And now?
And, now…
How did they get this fighty bag of poultry back? There was the bag. And there were crates here. Peter nudged one with a foot from where he was helping Stevie hold the sack steady. It toppled over empty. He tilted his head at Stevie.
“Yeah,” Stevie sighed. She conversed with Peter as naturally with his catalog of sound effects as she did normally. His meaning was easy enough to understand and they didn’t exactly have their hands free to text. “But at least Chicken Not So Little can’t chase anyone else. Yeesh.”
She looked at the crate, and then back at the bag.
“I mean… if no one is using them?” Just then, Stevie felt a viscous jab of beak through the cloth of the bag. Ouch! That was it. Crate it was. Between the two of them, they were able to do it, with Stevie holding the lid of the crate to slam shut afterward.
“Okay, so… now we just have to carry the crate. Are chickens usually this angry?”
Peter looked at the crate, which was teetering slightly as the chicken continued to wrestle with the bag. Were chickens usually this angry? Only in The Legend of Zelda, that he could remember. That probably didn’t apply here.
Peter shook his head and shrugged. He leaned down to snag a hold on one side of the crate and waited for Stevie to grab her side.
A muffled “B’GOK!!” with at least two exclamation points following emitted from the bag within the crate. In turn, Peter offered the same back. “B’GOK!!” The crate quieted. Huh. How about that?
Stevie lifted her side of the crate with a grunt. With the two of them sharing the load, they’d get it, but Stevie had been able to effortlessly lift heavy loads since she was a kid. She had never put much thought into how easy certain things were for her until they were no longer available.
But the teamwork was nice. And she got to spend more time with Peter. A Peter that couldn’t talk or have his hands available to text, but that was okay. Stevie was determined to make it work.
“Heh, that was pretty good,” Stevie smiled when Peter quieted the chicken by mimicking it. Talking and lifting the crate with the surprisingly heavy dire chicken (or Mega Chicken, as Stevie thought of it) took a little extra effort.
Did she need to say more? Her hands where she gripped the crate were starting to ache, spreading into the tendons of her wrists.
“I was thinking, a city like this probably has a library, right? Maybe we should find out more about who you are. We’re only here for a week but maybe the information we find can also help people like you.” She paused. “Or we figure out a way to invent texting here. Probably with magic. They seem pretty big into magic. Maybe they already have magic texting here. We should find out.”
It sounded like a plan to Peter, who was still struggling with the general process of critical thinking. Bird brain, he decided. This definitely had to be called ‘bird brain.’ How could it not? The joke was right there.
He adjusted his grip on the crate and gave Stevie a nod. Her moral compass was reliable. And really? He was a little bit spooked by the notion of wandering alone in this place where he couldn’t ask questions of people. Where some people even looked at him and started to inch away, even.
“We should find out,” Peter echoed after Stevie. So, first: return the chicken. Then, off to the library. After that? Peter was sure Irkalla would have something at the ready to keep them busy.