[quote=Birdfolk cautionary folktale][i]It is said that King Khuak the Wise fell mad with prey-lust and shiny-want in the latter days of his flight,
crowing that he would hatch again from the great egg of the sun immortal, his nest eternal,
and in glory he departed from the communal tree to soar into its light,
never to return from the answers he found there[/i][/quote]
 
Haialark's head twitched corvid-quick from scene to scene: beautiful glowbaby shiny-shining emoji-bright; golem man, stone-strong and definitely a tank, cool cosmetics but direly in need of a better mic if he wanted to voice chat that badly; lovely symmetrical smoothface, so alluring she could hardly control the impulse to collect her perfect geometrical chassis and bioluminescent glowbaby together in her nest and polish them — 

GAWK! Daydreaming, the flashbang caught Haialark totally off guard. It so happened that simultaneously she hit the first peak on the fierce cocktail of stimulants intended to carry her through the next few days of raid-grinding. Everything looked mostly okay after a cursory sweep of her limited augmentations but she sincerely hoped her endocrine mods hadn't gotten disconfigured in the jump, because otherwise she was going to be one speedy roadrunner very shortly. 

It troubled her that trash mobs were fleeing from their destiny as delightful little bags of xp locking whales like herself into the frictionless dopamine loop of watching numbers go up. Haialark singlehandedly represented a full 19% of average round DPS in CTRL ALT ELITE, a guild forty-nine members strong on this highly planned raid and who were absolutely screwed without her to outpace the regen on the megadungeon superboss. 

Possessed of a supremely gifted mind when it came to MMORPG number crunching and the calculation of obscenely precise loot reward tables, Haialark instantaneously interpolated a rough polynomial curve of the revised guild DPS in function of buff cooldown timers according to a new pattern designed to conserve resources without her.

Maybe if they committed to a blind speedrun of the DLC she could pull something off, but her feathers ruffled as another thought cracked its shell against her mind. No one else seemed to be recognizing they were playing Empyrea Online at all. Had Haialark broken kayfabe? 

In the truly grognardy secret subquests five layers into the alternate reality game simultaneously occurring within the matrioshka doll of Empyrea Online deeplore, if you didn't embrace roleplaying with fidelity to your character archetype you could miss certain triggers and fuck up years worth of progress. Terrifying to consider what she might have put at risk.

Vision sharpened again, hawk-hunting, she watched the fleeing creatures. Their tiny little mammalian eyes, white and wide. So afraid. Noticing silverface near the warehouse, Haialark took a breath, feathered arms shifting into full streamlined wings, raven-black. Allowing her boiling thoughts of the raid to go dim and monochrome, she [url=https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/86/97/c086970a28de127d2a357dd45519980a.gif]ran[/url], a great bird of prey rushing towards her companion with a hooked beak built to slip between vertebrae and sever spines, violet eyes alien and unreadable.

Meaning no threat Haialark chirped, [color=8882be][b]"Of course, o stunningly polished one. Clever gambit, to hunt the hunter. Slip into their nests and crack their eggs. I shall open the way."[/b][/color] Naturally she shared their mutual understanding that this was a way of progressing the main quest to an inevitable boss encounter. 017 had shown she was going to be the utility bot stunlocking the enemy, and her support would assuredly be necessary for Haialark to optimize her DPS. 

This desire to be near 017 had absolutely nothing to do with her lovely metallic gleam, the declension of light off its surface, at each instant perfectly unique, shininess ever shifting... 

Haialark gently brushed the chain from her hands so it clattered against the door. She drew the breath inward, submerging herself in the divine yolk, and enacted the eleventh cawta of the wing, twenty-feathered strike of the roaring garuda (オタク面白い鳥人武道テクニック), the tip of her dark plumage thrusting forward at great speed so that its uttermost extreme rested softly against the lock. Haialark gave a squawk of exertion and her eerie purple luminescence radiated from the chain, rattling then exploding violently inward as if struck with great force, the door swinging open wildly on its hinges. 

Haialark self-rationalized that she wanted to show her likely role in the party as glass cannon DPS and that this also had absolutely no relation to any of her lovely glowing companions, and waited for the rest of the group to gather.