Chapter Text
He avoids you for the most part, and hasn’t spoken a single word to you directly since you arrived on the meteor with the huge Prospitan ship anchored on top. He looks almost the way you’d imagined, or rather, the human parts of him do. He’s got the right basic features- the curve of his nose, the arch of his brow- but he’s too delicate to fully invoke the phantom memory of your guardian, and you’re not sure if that’s one of the consequences of being prototyped with a bird, or if that’s just the way he looked (looks) as a younger version of him. It’s also in the way he carries himself, even accounting for the absence of legs. He can fly and glide with those broad, feathered wings, and float when he concentrates, but he usually defaults to anchoring his long, prehensile tail on the floor to stay upright. You remember the confident swagger of your predecessor, burned into your memory by hours of studying old footage, memorizing the way he held himself during interviews or walked through a crowd, and this orange, almost-doppelganger has only the barest hints of the confidence you anticipated when he moves silently through a room, tail whispering against the floor as he drags it fluidly behind him.
You know that Dave (your Dave) had fine hair, so blonde it was almost white, but this Dave’s hair isn’t really hair anymore. From a distance there’s nothing unusual about it, but on the occasions when you get close, you can see the way the currents in the air lift it too easily, like it doesn’t have the weight it should, and you’re surprised by how badly you want to examine it more closely, find out whether it’s a side-effect of being a sprite, or if it’s a holdover from the bird anatomy, and some kind of hair-feather amalgamation. You want to examine the structure of a strand beneath a microscope, sketch the composition of the fibers in your notebook, you want to satisfy your curiosity at the way it somehow bristles along with his feathers when he’s angry or surprised. It’s the only part of his physiology above the neck that seems to have changed, not counting whatever bird-like behaviors have been spliced into his brain.
But the most strikingly inhuman parts of him, besides the tail and wings, are his hands. They’re a parody of avian feet and human fingers, the elongated digits segmented with rough flesh and tipped with long, scythe-like claws. You’ve figured out from watching the way the light plays across them when he moves that they’re not sharp along the edges, but pointed at the tip, and they stay that way, despite your having secretly witnessed his efforts to blunt them by dragging them savagely against the hard meteor rock, which only dulls them temporarily. You know that he tried to cut them once, and you witnessed the aftermath when he mangled one of them halfway off with a pair of scissors. The claw had still been partially attached (the cut hadn’t been anything close to clean), but the blood supply running through the quick had been damaged, and the orange dripping down his arm while a distraught Jade wrapped a towel around his hand finally confirmed your suspicion that his blood was the same tangerine color as everything else associated with him.
You’ve had several opportunities to “accidentally” touch the feathers on his wings, and their texture is nothing unexpected. But the downy feathering that covers every inch of him from the base of his throat to where you approximate his hips should be is uncommonly soft. He doesn’t seem to shed them, you don’t think they normally come off unless they’re pulled or damaged, but you’ve been fortunate enough to discover a single discarded one during your time on the meteor, and you kept it, hidden away in your sylladex. It’s no larger than your thumbnail, probably from somewhere around his neck, and it’s silky soft, like real bird down (seagull down, specifically. It’s the only kind you’re familiar with). Despite its outwardly uniform color, the way it shimmers when you turn it slowly against the light is almost ethereal, hinting at a dozen other shades and hues.
He’s become your own personal scientific obsession. You want to know what makes him tick, how the avian anatomy melded with the human, how the tendons and muscles of his wings fit into his back. You want to run your hands over him, find out whether or not the original human bones of his hips are still intact or if they’ve been modified to accommodate his curiously serpentine tail. You’re especially interested in his hands, you want to take them in your own and feel them between your fingers, map out where each phalange begins and ends, and deduce the proportional relationship with the oversized claws. You want to compare him to the articulated seagull skeletons you’re familiar with, make him stop shying away and hiding from you like a wild animal so you can sit him down and document the shape of his mismatched body in lines of graphite. One way or another, you’re going to solve the mystery of this orange, winged lamia with the face of your ancestor, and you’ll overcome all of his unwarranted, misdirected resentment and vindictive disregard towards you to accomplish it.