Penny had grown up in a city a long way away from here. This place wasn't her home before, but with no way to get back, it sure as heck was now. She'd pretty quickly found new companions in the desert here in the form of a herd called Anubis's Heiratic, and she'd settled in pretty nicely. They were, like her, girls (or mostly girls), who didn't much like it when boys got in the way, or when boys invaded their space, or when boys just generally told them what to do. In terms of avoiding all of the icky obnoxious things that boys did, the Hieratic was a paradise. There were still boys there, but they were off to the side, not really in the spotlight. They were there to be boyfriends, so far as Penny could tell.But you had to have a job, so now, at a much younger age than she'd ever guessed, Penny had a job of her own: she was a messenger. Mostly that meant taking messages from people who were scouting or exploring or whatever and taking them back to the Pharaoh and her staff. Mostly it was boring stuff, lots of flying out over a long landscape devoid of the city streets, urban crawl, and concrete that had made up so much of Penny's youth.
There were things she liked about this world, duh! For one thing, she liked the fact that she was in a fantasy world. There were actual princes and princesses here, to the point where using her usual nom de vol was a little off. "Professor Princess." Well, that's what she'd been known as for a really long time. It felt uncomfortable to go back to being just plain Penelope Sutton, child genius and techno-prodigy.
But it was what it was. The excitement of actual royalty had to be mingled with the bitterness of being normal and not, y'know, royal. She was going to have to take the bad with the good, even if there was more bad here than good. None of her experiments so far had provided any promising leads on getting back home. Penny continued on her flight across the plains when she saw a flicker of movement down below. She carefully landed out of sight and popped her head out of the bushes.
There, walking between the trees, was a white youth with butterfly wings, wearing gold jewelry. He seemed to be talking to a green and white dog walking next to him, but honestly it was the jewelry that caught Penny's attention. It was pretty--very pretty. She wondered how he'd gotten it, tiara and bracelets and all, and her old predilections to larceny resurfaced. She was gonna get that bling, and she was going to wear it. All she had to do was get it. She stepped slowly out of the bushes, keeping an eye on that dog.
