As had been her habit from the beginning, Berenice had woken today with the rising of the sun. Blinking sleep from her eyes and stretching her arms to their full extent, she stared around her little nest. The blown out remains of the small cabin had given her plenty of materials to work with, even a few bits of wooden walls left intact, so she had scavenged a few tarpaulins from the area and stretched them, lean-to fashion, from an L-bend in the remaining structure, forming a covered area of perhaps ten feet across and fifteen long. Inside this she had built a real bird's sort of nest, a drift of twigs carefully assorted and woven into a basket shape, lined with stolen sheets from clotheslines and bits of other soft materials to form a surprisingly comfy bed. Her body shape did not lend itself to lying stretched out as humans did, so she slept much like her avian cousins, in almost a squat, and was content with her arrangements.

The nest faced out into the woods to the north-east, towards Lost Haven, a name she had learned in the past few days. The corner of the wall functioned much as it had been designed to, despite lacking the top third of itself, and blocked the winds off of the Atlantic without taking them directly. On the lee side, the charred wooden flooring was mostly still covered in rubble, though the area immediately outside of the nest had been inexpertly cleared. Fishing line had been strung in several spots between prominences of shattered wood, and from these hung a dizzying array of objects, anything from coins and gum wrappers to small toys, brightly coloured pebbles, a bottle cork, several pieces of broken glass, and most confusingly for human viewers, a carefully folded green napkin.

Not that this location saw any human traffic, even when the cabin had still been whole, a fact that the previous occupant had enjoyed immensely before the accident that had blown him, his laboratory, and most of his reagents out into the water, for the cabin sat on the edge of a short sea cliff, a rocky uplift of the shore that within even a few hundred years might break off into the sea. Even now, the approach up to the place was full of spots where loose or jagged rock made footing treacherous, evidence that the promontory was slowly being pulled into the ocean below. Even the grass had ceased growing except in tufts this far out, reducing the likelihood that someone might want to hike out to it.

The mage who created Berenice had certainly never questioned why anyone had built a house this far out and away from civilisation, taking it as a boon that it existed at all. Berenice questioned it even less, as with no frame of reference for what might have been normal, she had no reason to assume anything was odd.

Later on that summer morning saw Berenice take flight for her first hunting trip of the day, hopping up onto her little wall and then spreading her golden brown wings out and diving off towards the water, only to pull up and wheel about towards the woods. Her approach, as always, caused the nearby seabirds to scatter, and it took almost an hour for her to spot a pair of oblivious squirrels sitting on an exposed branch. Thankfully for her grumbling stomach, they remained oblivious for the remainder of their very short lifespans, and she brought their bodies back to her nest to feast upon. Having only been alive for a few weeks as an adult, she had accumulated an astonishingly large pile of bones in her little scrap pile on the opposite side of the house. After having eaten, and remembering watching her little human friends carefully put their food remains into bins, she eyed the pile. Several bones with pleasing structures(a small dog pelvis, seven rabbit femurs, and the skull of a wood pigeon) were plucked from the scraps, having been picked clean by the luckiest ant colony in the area, and tied up onto the lines with the rest of her baubles. Having extracted what she wished, she examined the rest of the scraps, trying to figure out where she was going to get a bin that she could carry back.

Scouting for such an object took up a good portion of the day, and by the time of her afternoon meal (an unfortunate stray cat), she had concluded that the task was virtually impossible. She decided to consult with her experts on matters of human things, and made her way to the park overlooking the beach in West Lost Haven. The children who knew her were named Amy, Robbie, Ted, Owen, and Laura, and they had not seen their strange friend for several days, making them somewhat anxious that something had happened to her. It was these five that had taught her much in the past few weeks, including clothing herself, picking up, the necessity of keeping one's house neat, how to play hide and seek, why school was important, and so on. They had yet to broach the subject of why she was odd while they were normal, in part because they weren't exactly sure themselves, though more because the local news was always filled with fantastic stories of spectacularly strange things. And since demon invasions marked significantly higher on the list of Things That Worried the Parents than a bird lady, they simply assumed that she knew what she was about, despite her clear lack of domestication.

As she braked her wings and landed to perch on the safety railing, gripping the steel bars with her powerful talons, the five happened to be the only children at the park, unburdened by the presence of adults thanks to the proximity of their houses. They ran up cheering as she settled herself in her customary pose, the corners of her wings draping across the points of her shoulders to enclose her body. She grinned at them and said, [color=82ca9d]“Krrrak! How are the young on this day?”[/color]

The kids halted a polite distance from their friend. Despite their best efforts, Berenice had yet to master the art of bathing to a point of smelling at all tolerable, though she managed to keep herself free of blood or gore sticking to her. She still, however, smelled powerfully of bird and unwashed human skin, so they tried not to get too close. Amy waved at her, the red-headed ten year old de-facto leader of the group by virtue of force of will. She spoke up, saying, “We're okay, birdbrain. Where have you been? We were worried you got nabbed by the police!”

Berenice shook her head. [color=82ca9d]“No, no police. Trying to clean house like you say to. Very difficult. Much to be done. Need a bin.”[/color] She glanced across their faces and singled out the tow-headed Owen. [color=82ca9d]“Ow-win, where to get bin like that?”[/color] She gestured towards the garbage cans near the entrance of the play area. Owen glanced back to it, then turned back and shrugged. “I dunno, Berry. I think the city must put 'em there, but I don't know how to get one.”

Amy frowned, thinking hard. “I think my Dad said we got ours from the Wally World, I think they got them there.” 

The siren tilted her head to one side as she ingested this. [color=82ca9d]“Where this Wally World at? Who rules it?”[/color]

Laura pointed off into the city. “Over that way somewhere, I think. By the highway. I don't think they have a king, though.” Robbie shook his head. “The manager's kinda mean, but he doesn't have a crown or nothin'.”

Owen stared at the bird woman for a moment. “Something tells me, Berry,” he said, careful not to say anything too upsetting, “that they won't let you in.”

Berenice looked at him quizzically again. [color=82ca9d]“Why, Ow-win? Am I not allowed? Is it a club, like you?”[/color]

The children looked at each other warily. This was one of those uncomfortable subjects. While they had made it abundantly clear that they didn't care that she was part bird, they had not introduced her to any adults, only speaking to their parents about 'our friend Berry', which got the usual response whenever they came up with their latest hare-brained scheme for the day. As a precocious group of kids, they found this exercise exasperating, but they were also well aware that even in a town as odd as Lost Haven, and even in a loose a district as the area near the college campus, and [i]even[/i] in as weird a times as had occurred since the modern events they had seen, taking Berenice anywhere public aside from their meetings in the park was likely to cause no end of trouble. So they had been painstakingly slow in introducing even the [i]idea[/i] of her to their parents, and certainly weren't about to do something as brazen as [i]shopping[/i].

But these were complex subjects, ones they weren't really able to fully grasp themselves. Trying to explain ideas about racism or, in this case species-ism, to a girl who hadn't even grown up in their culture (or any culture, really) was a little beyond their abilities. Most of their efforts to train her in human activities was in an attempt to normalise her enough that their parents wouldn't freak out at her introduction, something the group had been carefully planning for the past few weeks. They were also aware, on a semi-conscious level, that however nice they were to her, Berenice was very much a dangerous creature. They only had to look at her feet, whose four-inch talons and grasping toes were gripping the fence somewhat agitatedly even now, to know that. Even her smile was a little un-nerving, owing to the amount of very sharp teeth in her mouth. They had yet to understand that she had even more dangerous abilities.

The beginning of Berenice's real troubles, which had yet to come to a head, had happened on one of her morning hunts. A young man had gone hiking in the woods for a wonderful and sunny Saturday during his summer break from college, and had happened upon her while she was perched on a stump, finishing her breakfast. Berenice wasn't exactly hard to look at, owing to the human body used as her base during her creation, but at that moment she had the remains of a rabbit hanging from one talon, and was holding a bloody chunk in both hands while gnawing at a bone, face and arms up to the elbow smeared and spattered in gore. The man had, quite understandably, panicked, but some wiring in his brain went astray, and instead of fleeing from the 'monster', he had frozen, slowly reaching for his belt. Being an experienced outdoorsman, he had his cell phone, a pocket knife, and bear spray at ready availability. With one hand he opened his phone's camera, while with the other he held out the spray, aiming at her with both.

Some internal danger sense notified the harpy that she was being watched, and her head snapped up just as the flash from the camera, which the man had forgotten to disable, went off. Startled, more instincts had taken over, and her hindbrain thinking she was under attack triggered her primary defence. So she screamed.

The piercing shriek rang about the woods for a significant distance, startling birds out of nests, sending fluffy animals scurrying for burrows and scaring the bejeezus out of other hikers in the area. However, the poor sod who had triggered it was far worse off, standing only forty feet from her. As the leading edge of the sonic blast hit him, his eardrums burst, and his mind reeled from the wave of magic that rolled along with it. Conscious thought was impossible, his perfectly normal human brain having no defence whatsoever leading to a mass disruption of neural pathways as it scrambled to find a way of dealing with this. Berenice had only let off a short burst, perhaps three seconds, but it left the man a gibbering mess, and he had fled into the woods, heedless of obstacles or reasoning. The harpy went back to her meal, satisfied that she had defended her kill from what her brain now knew was a food thief. And a phone lay on the path, screen broken but containing a video that would be very concerning to anyone viewing it.

This having happened several days ago, the man had been found, dried blood still on the side of his head, muttering to himself deafly and wandering the woods. The police had just today pieced together enough of his story to start tracking down where he was attacked, and just that morning another hiker had turned in the broken phone to the park service in case someone had been looking for it. With the GPS still operating, it was only a matter of time before the authorities knew they had yet [i]another[/i] strange and dangerous creature roaming the area.

The kids didn't know any of this, and Berenice barely remembered the event, but it was about to be a very significant part of her life. At the moment, however, social complexities were the issue of her day. And she was paying careful attention to he little friends' reactions to her question. [color=82ca9d]“Ah-mee,”[/color] she said. They hadn't yet figured out why she mispronounced their names, despite them pronouncing them very clearly when introducing themselves to her. [color=82ca9d]“Tell me. Am I not good yet? Is that why Wally won't let me have a bin?”[/color]

Amy, stalwart leader of the group and breaker of bad news when necessary, steeled herself to fudge her way through this conversation with bluster and confidence when she caught sight of something that caused her breath to catch in her throat.

Owen's parents, who earlier that day had told him to be home early so they could visit his grandparents, were entering the park. Their sacred space, their most favourite haunt, violated by the presence of adults! And much worse than merely their presence was that it coincided with Berry's. The meeting they had been so meticulously planning, their carefully laid schemes and hints and ideas, was about to come crashing down around their ears, and Amy could do nothing to stop it, now. She hissed through her teeth and whisper-shouted, “Down, quick!” But even as she said it she knew it was hopeless. Not only were they out in plain view with no cover, but getting their odd friend to understand why she had to hide would take much longer than the scant seconds they had. As it was, Owen's parents had already caught sight of them, and had stopped short in shock. And then Owen's mother screamed.