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Save Point: Of Lesser Wings

As Sethkill strolls down-street (trying his best to blend in) he has to keep repositioning his feet to avoid patches of chicle gum, the preferred consumer-driven habit and oral fixation of the Azatlani nation. For some reason it's considered perfectly acceptable to spit your chewed-out gum onto the sidewalks, and although most of it is hammered flat and has picked up a hardened sheen of brake-dust and street-grease, some of it is still fresh and sticky.

The strap-on bracers provide basic protection to the foreparts of his feet, and a little lesser to the arch behind in case of mis-step. Nonetheless his claws still stick out, and his outfit as a whole runs some risk of no shoes, no shirt, no service.

Still, at least it's better than the incessant betel-chewing of the Rama Empire, which is downright messy and leaves vivid stains. Tree-gum is more localized and can be more easily avoided.

The cars that race past have a sort of old-fashioned look about them, at least that's how he sees it despite the fact that they're locally manufactured to the latest spec, as part of Azatlani resurgence onto the world scene. Horns blare in a sort of button-bashing combat-by-proxy, as less pollution than he would expect still nonetheless forms a faint lingering cloud at street level, like misplaced high atmospheric chemistry, given that most of the exhaust is steam.

The fashion this year seems to be for pseudo-geometric patterns, the technological style. He pays close attention because if he's going to be here long, he should purchase one or more outfits to help him blend in, perhaps one of those poncho-type arrangements he's seen, which would drape nicely over his existing gear and could be excused as dressing up or down, depending on weather and the class of company. If he won't be wandering through any more deserts there's no reason to strictly adhere to what he started in, although its well-camouflaged high armor rating means he should probably keep it on underneath, like a partial vest.

He thinks he'd look good in one of the ponchos, maybe with a broad decorative belt shipping two carrying pouches, to give him more places to put stuff, and perhaps some oversize stretchy pants, which he could wear underneath the front-and-back paneled loincloths. They'd only go down to his lower set of knees, but there'd be enough space to accommodate a custom architecture of hips and thighs not really designed for in this local evolution, excusing its vagaries.

On just about every block, there seems to be a body-mod parlor, ranging from slick ones with an elegant back-lighting and corporate sponsors, such as the tasteful Freedom Of Form chain, all the way down to slightly shifty looking affairs with archaic neon signs which seem once to have done more conventional bodywork, such as tattoos and piercings. Discreet medical offices formerly for light cosmetic surgeries and high-end beauty treatments have come down, into the open, whereas the backrooms with needles have lifted their game from ink to incisions.

Some of the places seem to specialize in a particular species, or procedure. There are human-only mods places for the genetically purist, but they pale in comparison to the wide range of traits now so easily mapped from a much broader range of mammalian species. Pretty much anything with warm blood is reasonably fair game, and for simple dermal-only mods imagination is pretty much the limit. Why have the traits of a mere superstar athlete, when nature has been so open-minded with its solutions to every potential problem? The choices are abundant.

Rats are surprisingly popular, as are other animals that are not exactly talismanic, such as dogs. Possibly the people of the streets see them as being better fitted for survival, down here at lower levels, closer to what's left of the dirt, and also it probably avoids conflict with a traditional belief system that involves animals as symbols of sacred powers. He would have expected to see a great many jaguars, for example, but that's probably seen as arrogant, an assumption. There are fewer snakes and serpent-derived mods, too, maybe in reference to the long-standing association of the Rama Empire with pythons and nagas, despite this being totally inaccurate.

Some of the rat-girls have deliberately bare-skinned tails, pink and fat and quite sexually explicit in their fleshiness, like eager nightcrawlers that want to get to know you. He's not entirely certain whether to be attracted or repulsed by this, or what; it's seemingly just a thing, if you're a rat-mod girl, to tease the boys with playful tail contact. He sees one girl with better-learned muscle control than most using the curled bit at the end to help her pick up her purse, just for the small distance between pavement flag and waiting hand. Most of then have enough co-ordination to trail around and about other passers-by, although not as much as if they'd always had them for as long as they could remember. To re-arrange ones body is to re-learn ones space.

He passes one wearing an oddly apt t-shirt, torn off just under the text to expose her midriff, that reads, "I don't give my own ass..." and on the back "..that'll cost you money." High fashion sluttiness, at its very finest with all the designer accessories.

There's always someone with something, if you look hard enough, it's just the distribution that is entirely unexpected. He'd bet that if he was in those high towers, mixing up with glamorous types and sipping expensive double-filtered agave wine, there'd be jaguars and serpents galore.

He has a location and some possible contacts, but they're in a less than salubrious corner of the city, a recreational district near the waterfront that comes fully loaded with all the required clubs, restaurants, bars and brothels. Inevitably this spells too much strip-lighting, irrelevant during the day, and too many prostitutes at those awkward hours when no-one is hiring but a girl still needs a little extra cash for a packet of cigarettes, or a spare vape canister if she's that classy.

Azatlani views on sexuality are still a little rough by sethura standards, with the trade accepted but its sex-workers looked down upon, whore and slut being derrogative but still slightly exciting terms. The local metaphor for sexuality relates it to birds, specifically the display of plumage and ritualized mating dances by a number of the more common species in woodlands lying back from the bay, which were more like restrained jungles once, before the city swallowed them.

The comparison has bourne strange fruit, now that transgenic modification is the in thing with a sophisticate crowd (and not just their rebellious teenage children). Where once the streets would have seen carnivals, scantily-clad shimmying dancers showing more skin than legally allowed and rocking glittering scarf-wings tied from wrist to shoulder, the more blatantly sexual have jumped directly to giving themselves avian traits and letting cultural conditioning do the work for them.

He saunters casually past several groups of enhanced and augmented ladies, both old and young, but avoids being propositioned, probably due to his own scanty clothing and exotic physique. He's putting out, he hopes, a sort of hip and edgy minority vibe, as though he already knows the scene too well, an appearance of disinterest due to existing awareness rather than a lack of knowledge.

If he looked generic, oddly enough, they'd be all over him making teasingly suggestive comments, looking to earn some. His heavy hint of feral streets keeps them at a safer distance.

Many of the prostitutes have feathers, not true wings but still plumbed into their nervous system, implanted under the skin of their shoulders, necks and collarbones, and allowed to grow in. The feathers are enormously sensitive and trigger a tight pleasure response, making the job far more interesting if not necessarily safer, given that what causes pleasure can also be used to inflict pain. They have to wear low-cut, under the shoulder dresses to avoid imping at their own plumage, and keep on tilting their shoulders suggestively to try and angle passers-by into stroking their alluring soft down, and then maybe take it that bit further for a quick half-hour in a hotel room.

A few have taken it even further, upgrading their mammalian parts with samples from lycalopex foxes from the nearby coastal mountain chains, hoping to take on the golden-furred gorgeousness of the culpeos of the ranges. The result is surreal, feathered foxes in brightly phosphorescent skin tight leggings and matching arm-warmers, barking vulpine curses at dealers trying to cheat them on small sums drug deals, and smiling deceptively as they lure in new tricks to turn.

Most of them have claws, whether avian or vulpine, as according to their personal tastes. Subtle patterns of iridescent scales down long-outstretched legs, and matching talons extracted not from a bird but a lizard, because they look more seductive, glitter in the sunlight.

The nails match completely but not the hands, a bitter pragmatism when they make their living through touch, and one where they might have to defend themselves if it all goes wrong.

"Bloody pigeon," mutters one of the hookers.

"What?"

"Pigeon. A fucking-rat with wings. I mean go ahead and pick a damn species already." She taps out her cigarette on the bricks of the wall, to nods from her co-workers.

Because this is a slightly rough district, at many corners he sees the City Guard with their K-SEC units, enormous wolf-like beasts jacked up to shoulder-height using samples from direwolves and xoiliotzopilatl, then given a few extra enhancements to sharpen their critical thinking skills, along with more dextrous hand like paws to let them better subdue people.

Some of the K-SEC have been accessorized by their handlers with decorations, bizarrely enough, mostly feathers and dangly stones or medals that hang from their collars, or stickers and decals on the bulletproof armored harnesses that they wear to satisfy legalities having to do with being able to restrain them. (How a human-sized person is supposed to do this to a 'suppression unit' of similar weight and dimensions to a small vehicle is conveniently not specified). He sees a couple though that have tattoos of their units mascots or glyph in visibly furless places, like the ears, and even one that has been decorated with what have to be non-standard silver piercings. The actual ears are occupied by wireless earphones, punched through on one way locking tags like livestock markers, with the unit designation stenciled on them.

The idea is clearly that they're never beyond command range, and their handlers can also see the feeds from the built in cameras, stereo vision from either side of the head, that helps keep track of them. This does not really detract from the menace of an intelligent monster-dog wearing spiked leather cuffs on all four ankles, like it was a club bouncer or something.

There has been some vague talk of replacing these hulking beasts, which accidentally on purpose occasionally maul a few random undesirables, usually from behind whilst they are fleeing totally unarmed but still guilty of being unacceptably foreign or of an awkward minority. The suggested alternative is the use of fully autonomous machines, which will implement the law with implicitly a total, and quite possibly terrifying, impartiality. Thus far, cooler heads have prevailed, with only a few test prototypes being seen climbing stairs, opening doors and generally making trouble.

The guard themselves dress in stock black bulletproof body-armor, the concession to the fact that it is peace-time, with no active threats, being only that they aren't actually rocking automatics and don't have helmets on. Issue them the hat and a shield and they'd be quite effective units of urban oppression, just like their giant doggies.

Opinion seems to be divided as to whether a certain casual despite or a profound respect should be due to these actors of public order, and in some cases it probably comes down to how corrupt they are and whether or not they're abusing their position. Some of them seem to be on very good terms with the prostitutes and drug dealers, which may in fact not indicate being dirty as much as it reflects them being posted here every day, and getting to know the boys and girls. The ones who look the cleanest are probably the ones to watch out for, since the street-workers are giving them the widest berth and doing their best to avoid attracting their attention. Securing this area may or may not be a desirable career option, depending on who's doing it and why.

Sethkill finds the K-SECs oddly homely, since they remind him of riding jackals, albeit odd looking alien ones with funny front paws and worryingly intelligent looking glints in their eyes. You never see riding jackals inside the city any more, back home, and they're strictly to be found in the flame spaces outside planned urban centers, which are deliberately left full of their wholesome natural foliage in all its soothing red and gold and black. But if he thinks of the K-SECs as just being a type of riding jackal, like something out of a historically-themed weave simulation, it makes them relatively less threatening and he can walk past them without any signs of unease. Keep it casual, but not too much so, just disregard them because of course you've never done anything wrong so they are no threat whatsoever, and you won't give away those little physical cues that may attract suspicion or attention. Blend with the crowd if you have any sort of legitimate excuse.

He tries to treat it like a game, exploring a new city, looking about to see what is going on and get a feel for the real deal, as distinct to what he's seen at second-hand in Azatlani transmissions. Not jostling the locals seems like a sensible first step.

He brushes past a girl with huge black spacer piercings through enormous uplifted coyote ears, two on a side, like an old retro pair of freestanding speaker boxes with the tweeter at the top and the bass at the bottom. A mesh upper bikini with purpled titanium underwire, deliberately crude polished iron rings holding the whole thing together at shoulders and hips, and a gold moon and stars lucky charm dangling from a choker collar, completes the ensemble.

She smiles suggestively at him as she passes, catching him by surprise. A slender curvatured and silver-coated barbell through her tongue glimmers from behind her slightly pointed teeth.

That he could go with. She'd be the ideal piece of strange to finish off an evening.

A row of televisions blare from a shop window, all set to the same channel:

"Thrill transformations are on the rise with over a thousand young men and women, mostly from poor neighborhoods, illegally injected under various circumstances last year alone. Though there is now a branch of the insurance industry catering to this issue, with 'form restoration' becoming a standard feature of many policies, this is of no help to the poor and unemployed, many of whom end up in the prostitution industry, especially those targeted with attractive avian modifications.

Occasions of incidental arson, to eliminate any useful traces of genetic material which might help to undo the changes, have also been reported as this pushes the price beyond what most victims could afford and entraps them in the lifestyle. There have also been reports of wealthy or famous persons being targeted occasionally by assailants looking for attention, although mostly to no real effect as their targets are often already modified, or have installed protection."

Down the road a little, some gang members modified to look like tigers, one far more successfully then the other, are engaging in some sort of competitive improvised poetry battle from either side of a chain-link fence, microphones in hand. Only in Azatlan.

Sethkill can't follow most of it, because it mixes equal parts boasts, learned allusions, and slurs of each others mothers at lightning speed, mostly in various slang he's never heard of. But it looks as if the taller one, who more resembles a real tiger, is outclassing the shorter fatter one, who looks a lot more like a stuffed toy. They may all want to be tigerish together, but he doesn't really have the underlying physique to pull it off, not without radical changes that would leave him re-learning at the very least how to walk and move. Maybe if he lasts long enough, he can build something else a bit sturdier up on top of the dramatic gang stripes.

A couple walk past, seemingly having met up on their break, father carrying a cute little gryphon child with traits of jaguar and raptor blended harmoniously, her little wings flapping to keep her balance as he carries her on his shoulders and she points imperiously to a specific food-cart. She already has better co-ordination over her extremities than many of the girls he's seen today, some of whom seem to have incautiously modded in all sorts of traits for hastily contrived reasons, like someone dressing in the latest fashions or getting a poorly considered late night tattoo.

He encounters a surprising number of food carts and food stalls as he goes, small operations that cater to their lunchtime crowd, the ladies of the night being just as hungry as the businessmen of the day. Most of them are being managed by women, slightly older by and large, working under distinctively patterned and shaded umbrellas that let you find the vendor you want, even if she's not in quite the same place as of any given day.

His stomach growls just slightly at the smells and seems interested, so he decides to get himself a snack. He might as well get used to the local cuisine as soon as possible, since he's likely going to be eating a lot of it. Human-style foods have been comprehensively tested and confirmed edible to the sethura, a surprising development of almost absurd convenience, but as with anything there's always the awkward matter of letting your gut get used to it.

The more seafood and fish-dominated menu on the Vermilion Dragon was familiar enough not to raise any qualms, but these offerings are more dangerously exciting. The main staple seems to be a sort of flat bread, cooked ashy from a mass of raw dough that is often blued, yellow or red as per the varieties of corn that grow in the surrounding lands. The vendors deftly cut off a small piece with the edge of a greased flat-grill scraper, flatten it down with the back of same, then leave it to rise as much as it ever will for a few moments whilst grilling up fillings on the side.

The options on offer include some sort of shredded and marinated bird meat, faintly orange, hot peppers, in green and red, vivid squash blossoms and a sort of corn fungus, at least that's what he thinks it is from the signs. The whole thing is a riot of potentially delicious or appalling shades.

In a moment of bravery he goes for the philosophical order, one with everything, on the basis that at least that way the total proportion of anything disagreeable will be minimized, in comparison to the rest. It's a comprehensive systems test, is how he sees it.

Expeditions to various cultures have eaten many similar things with no ill effects, these flattened breads seemingly a human staple. Trying to make them more light and fluffy seems to be work in progress, which has yet to yield any definitive answers.

The randomly selected vendor he eventually buys from seems to have what might be flank of dog or deer as a special for those customers willing to splurge, so he orders some of that too. Azatlani currency is straightforward, polymer scrip with clear numbers on, and so there are no issues with making change. The inconclusively identified meat gets diced into little cubes before his eyes, so it can be seared up quickly and incorporated into the sizzling mix.

He thanks the lady and tests out his purchase by biting into it. Peppers crunch and the meat is all juicy, though he reserves judgment on the blossoms and corn fungus. It is piping hot, and possibly these peculiar flavors will grow on him, who's to say?

He traverses a couple more blocks and is just polishing off the last of the flatbread when he hears a voice calling his name from a nondescript side-alley.