Welcome to Gaia! ::

There was an electronic hum and another click and the little screen above the intercom clicked on, showing Aubrey in her office, her unseen hands clicking away at the keyboard, pulling up her file. "Sure, Ms. Cassenwari. What do you want to know. I'll, uh, do my best."

Aubrey blinked and looked at the woman, trying not to snicker. "Well, uhm, I don't know. Maybe you should start small?" She clicked a few things on her keyboard. "How much do you weigh now? Do you know?"

Aubrey leaned back, thinking. "Maybe you can jump from some of the trees that over look the lake? I really don't know about your bone density either. Y ou could come down to the labs and I could do a physical. We theorize that you probably can't take full flight, but gliding or small flights is a possibility if weigh little enough, and you get the muscle strength in your arms.

Aubrey rolled her eyes. "Whatever. You know they say better safe than sorry if you change your mind. But of you insist - yes you can get medical attention. But don't do anything stupid. Dont' want the good doc think you're suicidal or anything. Have fun"

"Look here, if you want to experiement on your own and possibly injure yourself you go right ahead. I just find is incredibly silly that you'd rather 'take your chances' on your own instead of coming in and having us give you a physical. Whats the matter? Afraid we're going to stick you with something? I hate to break it to you, Miss Cassenwari, but if we wanted to test you with anything we could collect you whenever we damn well felt like it."

Aubrey took a deep breath and looked back into the camera. "I was just offering to help."

Greer flinched at the sharp bite of light on her dull eyes, hissing with pain as she slowly walked behind the guards leading her from the lab building. She could barely remember the island now, having let the memories and their color slip away for so long. It had been good and happy, a part of her brain said, but she refused to listen. The good and happy had gone away as it always did, and holding it in her heart only made the hurt grow stronger. The grey room had become her world, and in it's stark nothingness it had been perfect. Even after they'd stopped strapping her to the bed so she wouldn't hurt herself or others, she'd spent long days lying on her back with her wings crossed tightly over her chest. She didn't want to fly anymore. She wanted to lie there until her thoughts ceased and everything went away.

Every day, they made her get up and walk, preen, and excercise her flight muscles. They made her eat, and drink, and use the bathroom. A night they gave her drugs to make her sleep, once they discovered she'd lie there fighting slumber until she was too weak to move. They gave her a pen and made her hunt sometimes, giving her more injections when she refused to do it so she wanted nothing else. They made her jump into the air and take flight, making sure there were nets to fall into so she couldn't let herself break on the ground. They kept her alive and living. She hated it. She tore up the books they gave her and smashed the discman. She wanted oblivion, not life. No color, no words, no nothing. They tried to make her speak, but she was mute. She'd probably just shriek like a hawk if she tried anyway. What was the point.

But they'd kept her well, and had decided today they would release her into the wild. She ought to take to the skies and fly right into the cliffs, just to show them, but they knew she wasn't that strong. The hawk had taken over when she'd hid inside her own mind, and it wasn't planning on dying anytime soon. It was excited. It wanted a nest, a mate, a pack-

The guards opened the gates and continued on, heading towards the village. She was being taken to her duplex, home to dead bugs and empty things. Joy. She'd run as soon as they were gone.

But thinking of a pack did make her want to see her friends again. Ambrose, Amaya, Emelyn... which made her think of the dead and made the blackness well again. Goddamned depression. She was happy to go into nothingness, but the abyss before that bothered her to no end. It was weak and painfuls and-

That was the hawk ranting. Greer shook her head and walked on, spreading her wings suddenly for the stretch of the muscles required. The guards behind her jumped and raised their guns. She would have smiled but she no longer had the face for it. She didn't want to go back to her home, the place where she had been human and there was a clutter of dead memories waiting to spring on her. She wanted to fly suddenly, to wheel and soar and see if she could get high enough for the air to thin...

"I want to fly." she said slowly, stumbling over the words with a cracked and rusty voice. She needed to practice speaking everyday to get the words to come out of the beak right, but she was fairly certain she'd made herself understood.

The head of their little party stopped and turned, giving her a steady look. "You won't try to hurt yourself?"

"Not a fan of falling." she tried, spreading her wings again. "Birds fly."

The man looked at her for a while, and she wondered if he'd seen her before, when she'd been screaming all the time, or after when she'd just stared at the ceiling. He looked almost worried, but something made him nod suddenly and stride off, his compatriots following him back to the compound. Probably something the doctor had said.

The doctor. If he'd done anything to speed up her loss-

She shook her head, letting her thoughts slip away and feeling instead. The hot sun, the cool breeze, and the heavy ground under her talons. She didn't want to be standing on anything. She ran, fast, up an incline and to a ridge and jumped, flapping and kicking at the ground that tried to meet her. She caught the wind somehow and flew, really flew, free and fast and as high as she could go.

She could never go sit by the beach again. But the air was still safe. There it was muscles and breath and feathers, where thoughts couldn't catch her to burn.

Harris Hawks typically nested in cacti, but Greer was a bit out of luck on that count. Not only did such plants not come in her size naturally, but she did not live on a desert isle. You'd think the Doctor could have planned.

In lieu of a more traditional home, she'd taken up residence in one of the larger trees deep in the heart of the island's jungle. She was nesting after a fashion, building a home that was somewhere between a tree house and gorilla's nighttime resting place. Whatever worked. It was not the home of a master craftsman, but it served and helped the hawk settle down for sleep from dusk til dawn.

If another islander hand somehow hauled themselves through the maze of branches below to spy on her hideaway, they might have wondered if she had an anger-management problem or was just really clumsy. There tears in the bark everywhere, and not just in places a hawkwoman was able to perch. The lined horizontal and vertical bark alike, jagged because of distraction not anger. She'd been too busy looking somewhere else at the time when she made them, and lacked a true raptor's instinctive grace that made a surgical slash everytime. Looking closely, an observer might have realize eventually that there was an odd form of grouping to the marks. A classification, perhaps, since the resident university-trained entomologist was the one who made them. Such a watcher wouldn't have been able to figure out much more than that, but only due to lack of time. And an angry bird of prey landing on their back.

Greer was counting insects, something just to pass the time. It wasn't scientific by any means, but it gave her something to focus on when the hawk was fed and in enough of a stupor not to insist she go hunt down a pack to lead and care for. She whispered latin names to herself as a talon idly cut into the bark, standing for a cluster of ten today. Hunting, flying, sleep, and counting. Simple things that washed the pain away.

Wouldn't her mother be proud?

Greer perched in a tree, letting the trunk behind her take so of her weight in her avian version of lounging. Hunger had woken her this morning, reminding her she had finished off the boar and needed to hunt again. Another boar would be beast - calorically wise it made more sense than burning her already speedy metabolism faster in the pursuit of rabbits.

Golden eyes scanned the ground spread out below her, ready to alert her of any sign of movement. Focus on it first and decipher it later was the hawk's motto. The entomologist found it incredibly annoying.