The jungle is silent.
To the east, the land plunges down into the green, and to the west the mountains rise high above, but here there is foliage all around, and a game track, and a conspicuous lack of small mammals and birds.
You might even say it's too silent.
It's not where she came from! That's a great start. Her first order of business is to make sure nothing is going to try to eat her right this second, and then sit down with her wings trailing out on the ground behind her and start writing a bunch of stuff.
Nothing immediately presents itself, but after a few seconds seconds, a roar is going to come from somewhere in the jungle behind her. And then, not long after that, a scream.
Okay in retrospect it may have been dumb to sit down without making sure she had enough clearance to take off but, quick question, does she.
There's about ten meters above her before the understory of the jungle starts to fill up space properly.
The question is more about whether she's got space for her wingspan but that is also important information. Fuck.
Okay, she has some writing left. She's going to shove everything in her bag and then shoot straight up through the trees till she's well clear and then snap out her wings to catch herself.
She is now high above the canopy. She is not the only winged creature who has decided this was the correct response to the situation, though she does appear to be the largest by a good margin.
Good, small things are not super likely to try to eat her. She gets her bag fastened shut a bit more neatly and glides around, trying to see if she can get any glimpse of what's going on under the trees.
Over there, there's a clearing formed by several long-ago fallen trees, and in it, a large jaguar whose spots glitter like obsidian is circling around a group of four humans - two with spears and large round shields, one lying on the ground and bleeding, and one with a crossbow that they're trying frantically to load, looking for an opening.
How much writing does she have left. ...not all that much.
But she can sing a spell, too, if she doesn't need that much oomph. She sings: "There are four wingless people in that clearing, and some kind of animal, and one of the humans is badly hurt, and -"
And a static charge builds up in the air aimed right at the big cat. Not really a lightning strike. A daydream of a lightning strike.
The Jaguar will be tazed! It will stumble, and the humans will use this chance to stab at it further. Heavily wounded, it tries to retreat - as it does so, it turns briefly invisible but for its glittering spots - but the fighters will run it down and kill it.
Then, they'll turn to face her. The one with a crossbow will continue loading it, and one of the others will shout out a "Hail, stranger!". The third will go see about their wounded comrade.
She does not love that the guy with the crossbow - she's now seen it in action - is trying to load it again. Maybe he just thinks there are more jaguars. Maybe.
Translation is normally done in groups or at least pairs; one person sings the spell while another communicates and they trade off, catching one another up on what's happened so far as they forget what they sing. It will be pretty tricky to do alone without more writing than she would really like to be expending at this point. But she can get her hand into her bag and do a little of it anyway. Okay, that was just a greeting, and -
"Hello!"
"We thank you for saving our inferior selves! If we might ask of you, who are you and what way do you walk?"
Why are they so long-winded! She only wrote down so much worthless trivia to cast with! "Tireh! I came here looking for immortality."
"We are also seekers on the road to immortality! Will you share our fire for a time? Once we've made one, at least."
(The one with the crossbow gives the one offering an annoyed look.)
"Please forgive his abundance of caution! Most things which come out of these jungles are not interested in cooperating with humans."
He will stop aiming it at her. For now. There are other jungle directions to go be cautious about as well.
Then she will spiral down a bit closer. All the way down, if he doesn't twitch in a way she doesn't care for.
He's going to leave this to his friend, it's on her head if she gets her throat torn out. Instead, he can see about butchering that Jaguar they just killed.
The friend will say:
"I am glad you are willing to honour us with your trust. My name is Guo Rong."
"Guo Rong," she does her best to repeat. She pulls out her notes and resumes writing as fast as she can.
Guo Rong is inclined to think of this as a harmless idiosyncrasy.
"You are as a matter of course entitled to your fair share of the jaguar meat, thanks to your contributions." she says evenly, as though she expects Tireh to contest the statement somehow.
"I've never tried jaguar." The line she just wrote vanishes. She writes something new, unconcerned.
Rong ceased to pay much attention to the writing as soon as she determined it wasn't in a script she could read.
"It's only of the first realm. But that's enough to make this expedition entirely worth it."
"Are you not familiar with the realms of cultivation? I had heard that beasts had patchy cultivation knowledge, but to not know something so fundamental..."
"All cultivation is founded on the same underlying principles; it should work the same everywhere? No matter who is using it, qi is qi."
"Qi is the profound principle that fuels your powers and which you ingest or respire to deepen your cultivation? I don't know how it feels to you; they say beasts cultivate by instinct, but humans have to do everything intentionally."
"Monsters with innate cultivation are not rare, and some of them, like yourself, possess sufficient intelligence, refinement, and honour, to join civilization. It's rare, though."
"No, I mean like me. My species. It sounds like you don't know about us at all and you are making things up based on others you have met."
She looks mostly human, but in addition to the wings, she's got claws, not nails.
Guo Rong looks embarrassed. "I have never heard of a specific breed of monsters with your precise characteristics, this is true."
"Well, we've all got magic that works like what I do and doesn't have much to do with eating things. But I'm excited to try your kind! My kind does not appear to do immortality!"
The other spear fighter would like to have a furiously whispered conversation with Guo Rong about this!
"We would be delighted to introduce you to the clans so that they can consider you as a candidate for adoption and teaching."
"...sounds great!" she says, continuing to write furiously while some of her progress is undone whenever any information is exchanged.
The unintroduced spear fighter will give her a look. This look translates as: "I've seen what you're doing. And I want you to know I've seen what you're doing. So that you can know you're being watched, if you think of trying something." It is a very expressive look.
The crossbowman has finished stringing up and blessing the jaguar and the injured woman has collected herself enough to stand up and collect her sword from where it was dropped on the ground.
"We should get moving, before all this blood attracts scavengers. We have a reasonably secure place to camp not too far away."
They'll point roughly west towards the mountains.
"Maybe a half hour walk? We'll probably have to go fairly slowly, since we're burdened and have someone injured. If you fly above the trees, will you be able to keep track of us despite the canopy?"
"Hm. I'd need a lot longer to write before I could just teleport us all there."
"Better for us to just walk. If you're having trouble, we can slow down?" Rong turns to address the wounded swordswoman. "Same goes for you as well, Zhu."
(Some of the others form calculating looks.)
They will head off, then.
While they're walking, the second spearman will try and find a chance to talk to Tireh without the others being able to overhear that well.
She does not super want to try to talk while on the move. It's hard enough to stay upright when she's devoting her full attention to it, she definitely can't write at the same time.
Then he will not get a chance to, and they will instead make it to camp with only the typical amount of trouble hiking through dense jungle poses.
The camp is a hollow set into a cliff-face with a firepit already dug in such a location as to allow a third direction of approach to be screened off as well.
The hunters will take a break on log seats, conveniently already present (along with everyone's camping equipment) before they get started with all of the camp activities that need to be done while there's still daylight.
If they go take some hours to chop wood, carry water, and butcher jaguar, will she be done scribbling?
She'll offer to make a small rain so they don't have to carry water? Otherwise no, she wants a backlog of burnable information and is writing down every observation that she won't mind forgetting either because it will be obsolete or trivial to re-observe.
They would greatly appreciate the rain, that seems less likely to give them any waterborne diseases as well.
They won't bother her writing until the celebratory meal of grilled jaguar is completed, at which point they'll invite her to have dinner with them.
She will be happy to try the jaguar with everybody else. She's eaten seals and fish and mollusks, and has no idea what to expect a jaguar to taste like.
It's pretty tough, and tastes milder than seal, but still gamier than most fish, but the crossbowman does a pretty good job of slicing it thin in a way that makes chewing it not a whole project.
"I apologise", starts the crossbowman "But I realise that you have not been properly introduced to us, and that you would not be familiar enough with our clans to immediately recognise us as members on sight or to know what that means. I am Du Ye, and while you have already been introduced to Guo Rong, these other two are Jian Bojing" (the swordswoman) ", and this is Jing Yi. The Du clan manage the farms and ecosystems of the empire, the Guo clan pursue virtue and protect the people, the Jian clan study the blade, and the Jing clan are ... scouts, I guess you could say. They go where others cannot, and do what others will not."
She's got carnivore teeth but the thin slices don't make it any harder for her. It's decent eating. "I'm Tireh," she says, "and my people don't do clans, though I could give you the name of the beach I grew up on if you want it."
"Commoners don't really do clans either, they just keep track of who their father was and maybe their grandfather if he was important. If you join the world of cultivators rather than the world of mortals, whichever clans teaches you will probably adopt you."
"What's a beach? I've never heard that word before."
(It does seem to be a real word in the language Du Ye is speaking.)
"I don't think the earth has an edge? It just goes on as far as anyone has ever been since the days of the ancients."
"Wow, no ocean? Well, I don't know what it's shaped like here. I'm from a beach though."
"There might be an ocean somewhere, I've heard the term before, but only as a metaphor in an old book that I had to get explained to me. Thousands of years ago, humanity lived in more places than it does now."
"Records are patchy. There was a war between the immortals, they say, and then monsters moved in over the ruins in most places, which wiped out nearly everyone who survived."
"They can be all sorts of ways. There are demons and devils, but most monsters are just - animals who cultivate by instinct. Like the Jaguar we just killed - it was walking the same way as the Jing clan."
Jing Yi bursts into laughter in the background.
"Not a mundane way - a Way. One of the thirteen paths to immortality. Each is a way to live, a path which we will spend our entire lives walking down and never reaching the end."
"The imperial family are - well they're the closest of all of the clans to immortality, only they know the secret of achieving the fourth realm, which is the highest of the mortal realms. And they're in charge, and rightly so." (Guo Rong snorts) "Adopting you would be like them saying that you could be in charge of every living human one day. Obviously nobody would tolerate that."
