338. Sickness and health, 7

(Rose)

Our bodies are changing.

And it's much more than muscles receding or growing since we stopped being nomads.

My hair is long as I like now. It grew back, to its expected length.

More importantly, my masculine attribute are shrinking over use. Though it's been fun in the end, I'll feel more like myself once everything will be gone for good.

Bleue on the other hand...

She grew this two additional limbs out of her lower back. Including bones. It's as if she had a new pair of shoulders above her waist, and two long arms protruded from there. Her abdominal belt has been tensed to a weird degree by that, because her balance is tilted.

If they ware arms, they stretch upward from the shoulder blades, long and thin, with the equivalents to the elbows resting against her normal shoulders. In resting posture, these arms are lying along the fur of her back up to her neck. The later part of the arms is folded over with what would be hands, stretching back down to grip onto her new lower shoulders, and falling slightly further below like a skirt.

All that skin, flesh and bones is covered with feathers of various sizes and shades. They range from skin tones, hair tones, chestnut and brown, to dark blues, black and sometimes grey or spotless white for a few. The pattern is not uniform either.

Bleue ate twice as much the usual, and still looks thinner than before it started. We can see all the muscles of her abdomen between visible ribs and hips. Now that the last drops of her flesh are stretched toward her back.

They grew over weeks and weeks, slowly I want to say, but still it was incredibly fast for their size.

The more we made love, the more they grew, by some bizarre relation.

I transferred to her some of the power of a wish stone that changed my body, and stored far more power in that exotic form than I require as well. Over time, I was bleeding that unnecessary power, and it changed her as well.

Only both of these transformations were her wishes, never mine.

Bleue is still looking at her wings in wonders and joy. She still can't believe it. And she can stretch and move them alright.

She looks at me with light over her face.

B - You gave me wings!

In a way, I guess I did.

In the short time of a month or so, Bleue grew wings.

She opens them, spreading their more than three metres span behind her. It looks amazing.

B - Do I look like an angel?

R - No, not at all. Because of how low they are attached to your back, it doesn't looks like any angle depiction I know. Also the colours are not very Christian... You just look like... You.

She tries flapping her wings.

It creates some gusts of wind around. But they move far too slowly to ever make her able to start flying from a standing position. It becomes a little ridiculous to watch as she furiously flaps her huge wings, but her feet remain nailed to the ground as if nothing at all was happening.

She only manages to lose her balance and fall flat where she stood. Glorious beginnings.

Also her wing muscles are clearly too young. They hurt her after two or three minutes, and begin twitching erratically.

R - I'm sorry. You won't be flying like Ana anytime soon.

B - Gorblimey...

Ana laughs like any crow mocking you when you fall. We know it's a laugh, or the closest thing to it in her mind.

Bleue stretches a wing to brush Ana and annoy her.

Ana caws, it works. When she has enough she then bites Bleue's wing tips. Bleue yells her pain and gives up, flapping her wings back into a folded posture behind her back..

Bleue slumps.

She can't fly and we're all mocking her.

I pat her head. Poor dear poor dear.

Bleue looks back with a pouting face at Ana, whom still is around and curious.

B - Will you help me train myself and learn how to fly?

A - Yeah.

B - Thank you...

~

B - How would you change your body if you would?

R - I remember discussing that before. I think I would rather just be a little stronger and faster, more enduring, rather than having wings, or tentacles. Having a more powerful and able body would suit me fine. I'm fine with my appearance and number of limbs.

B - No wings for you then?

R - I'm a Rose, not a bird. I'm fine the way I am.

Except for that little thing.

~

I tend to what we loosely consider to be our fields and crops.

A jungle of hybrid plants and other edible and peacefully growing monstrosities.

Though the fruits and tubercles we harvest are mostly normal and edible, all of these really are abominations allowed by today's lenient laws of nature.

Although the first generation is unholy, we noticed the harvests when replanted actually regrow then back into roughly the normal plant they were if found elsewhere.

So I've begun creating a new field for the second generation of crops, born from the monstrous one but far more normal looking in the old ways.

Meanwhile, Ana & Bleue are playing together at being birds.

Bleue tried to jump from a building that was above the water of the bay. Her wings failed right from the start and she simply fell into the water straight down. I shouldn't laugh.

So for now, Ana is trying to teach her how to spread her wings and to flap them the right way.

It's worth of being one of my father's tales when I look at them.

A bird is showing the gymnastic movements to achieve and Bleue is following them as best she can. Looking at the bird and her doing them in tempo I can even guess without hearing them, it's really funny to look at.

Up, down, up, down, stretch, up, stretch, down, stretch... They're beautiful the both of them doing that.

They warm up their wings and Bleue follows with intense focus her teacher's caws and examples in movements.

I hope Ana won't teach her to caw at least. Or to peck. Oh well...

On her own, Bleue still trains flapping her wings to train her new muscles.

It still looks altogether funny, ridiculous and somewhat promising. Now I do notice that her body weight is being far more counterbalanced when she flaps her wings. There is a change.

She explained to me she learnt to flap faster and better by experiencing which ways the wings lowers its resistance against the flow of air, and which directions and tensions maximise that resistance.

That was the first great lesson of flight. Some ways you arrange the posture of your wings allow faster movement with lower resistance, and others slower movements but with far more impact on lift.

Learning which to use, to perfect, at the right times into the right heart tempo, that is the art of flight.

And what she learnt already made an impressive difference as she explained to me.

For us, air always has been like ether, something we know is there by knowledge mostly, rarely senses or experience.

We know what wind is, and how to use it with sails, but on body scale, not really. It's rare you try to walk against a wing so strong it affects your speed and posture.

Bleue tells me it's that reality, a thousand fold. At first, her wings were the same as me and my arms. Air was not really felt present because she was struggling with her muscles and the way to hold her wings and feathers. (She can move her feathers a little yes. It's quite lovely to look at.)

But as soon as she began tilting her wings the right way against the normal flow of air... The lift is brutal, because her wings are huge.

B - It suddenly feels like I'm in water and trying to swim. My wings feel the air and its weight, and my weight dragging me down, but I realise I almost have enough power to swim to the surface, upward. Or at least to float and glide. It's really odd that feeling.

She somewhat learns to feel the viscosity and pressure of air now. As a fluid. Not quite as heavy as water, but in between water and normal people's relation to air.

For her wings, air has similar viscosity and weight than liquid ether has for our hands. Something close to water but lighter.

B - It's worse than that. It's really changing upon the strength and speed you put against it. If you go gentle and light, it's like ether, but you can't fly. The stronger and faster you go, the more air feels like being inside a pool of honey. The resistance to your movement increases many times, but also the result. Air is really heavy... It's probably exhausting to swim up there all day long.

R - This means birds feel they're swimming in a way? Do you, Ana?

A - Don't know. Ana don't swim.

It could explain a little how some fishes decided or learnt to fly in the clouds now. Maybe it doesn't change much for them. Evolution wise, maybe the body of fishes is also adapted to flight nowadays?

It seems like a big stretch for the flying fishes. I don't really know. But it brings interesting considerations to me.

But after learning how to turn air into honey to her wings (her words), Bleue quickly became able to fly for real.

By gliding first.

I saw her learning from the edge of a roof, tilting her wings wide to touch and check the winds first. Then her feathers and wings becoming more firm, and following her movement in the jump ahead. Her body leant forward and her wings caught the wind like a kite, she flew off.

As I was gawking at her shape now in the sky, I realised there her wings were attached near the horizontal axis of her centre of gravity. Just as if she was trying to keep her body balanced and straight over a horizontal bar.

Somewhere around there was her deformed abdominal muscles belt, and on the other side just behind, the root and weight of her wings.

It now made physical sense to me as I saw her first flight, and how the slightest tilt of her wings changed the course of her entire body with ease.

Her body didn't change to look like an angel, it changed to be able to fly.

And oddly enough, there was a big difference in aspect. And somewhere between here and the other side, a thread of that spell knew where the right choice would be physically. I have no clue what had this knowledge, since it wasn't either of us. Biology will never cease to amaze me.

Meanwhile, I hear Bleue yell her joy in the sky as she glided her way above and over the bay, for a few dozens of seconds. I yelled cheering words at her too.

It was an amazing thing to witness.

She crashed into the sea and struggled heavily to swim back to shore. But she did.

It took her an hour to swim back the distance she had flown over in seconds.

She reappeared to me under a new light.

Gleaming in the afternoon.

Radiant like the sky.

Dragging her exhausted wings behind her exhausted self. All wet, she must have at least doubled her weight.

She looks like she'll pass out in my arms at the next gasp. But she flew. Her face radiates that amazing accomplishment and passion as if she was still in trance.

She's happy like she's never been.

Bleue began to fly.

~