Eeyore:  You say that about many of my stories.  Hmm...guess you read more than I do (obviously).

I’ll poke at new species instead of you.  I was thinking using Deathraptor for an old species, but I also been poking at something I been trying to find a niche for since I started Raptor. 

Chapter One

Sarabi Krysta placed her right pawpad against the panel beside her opaque gray door and waited for it to scan.  She sighed as it did, reminding her that she was alone in the world, as she was the only one it would respond to. 

She had no boyfriend, no potential mate, and no family.  She had been on her own for several years, since she had gotten out of the foster care system, and did well.  Though she was still in school, she held down a job as a performer at a local restaurant, even though it wasn’t needed. 

She danced because she liked it, not because she needed the money.  Her parents had left her enough credits to live well off of until her own death, and even after that, there would be plenty of credits left over for her own cubs, or perhaps for the government to seize control of and place back into circulation. 

When the scan was complete, the opaque door dissolved away into an opening to her apartment high above the ground.  Her own voice greeted her, purring a salutation as she stepped through the portal and onto her plush white carpet, soft on her pawpads and picking slightly at her hooked claws.

The entire room was furnished in white.  She liked white.  It was depressing sometimes to a nocturnal species, mysterious.  What you saw when the suns were up and the moons were hiding wasn’t always what really occurred, and for that, Sarabi liked it. 

She strode past her couch and absently tossed her dance bag on it, heading into the kitchen where her aud/vid was blinking its small red light, an indication that someone had tried to contact her while she was working.

Probably Misyure Castan with my grades, Sarabi thought, thinking of her teacher.  She wasn’t liked by many teachers.  Sarabi had her head on the dance floor, spinning with the music and was known to permanently scar the ones that challenged these thoughts, no matter the age.

Misyure Castan was one of the few teachers who understood that Sarabi believed she had a gift beyond the academics, a gift that needed to be cherished and honed if it was to survive, which it should.  He believed that, no matter what it was, if a child displayed genius, they should be trained in that area, even if it is only for a class period half that of the academics. 

Many of the other teachers, not all, but many, did not understand that philosophy.  They knew that Sarabi danced as a job even though she didn’t need the credits, so why did she need to be taught in school?  What disgusted Sarabi in all that was how the ones that played sports had teams to join, as well as the ability to play during break, mealtime, or physical training.  All Sarabi had opened to her was dancing at a steakhouse or joining a team, which would interfere with the job. 

Even though she called it her “job”, Sarabi didn’t think ill of it.  It was a lot freer than the dance club at school, which she adored.  “Job” was just what she called it because it wasn’t necessary. 

She smiled at the memory.  Kanata Steakhouse was a legitimate restaurant with a stage show as their claim to fame.  They had no diva, each girl and the occasional boy could come up with their own routine, but they had to get it approved by the manager, Missyuera Tanath, who required that each routine was fit for a family audience. 

Sarabi smiled.  She’d never been turned down.  A slightly gothic, a little punk, but she had her morals. 

She passed by the imitation wood table, bumping her right hip and pinion against it gently, to get to the cooling unit and the aud/vid.  She gently tapped the touch button and listened to it play.

“Miss Sarabi Tana Krysta, you have been selected in a random drawing to win an all expenses paid vacation and a set of new equipment, curtosy of the Zalis Company...”

Sarabi let the machine ramble.  She didn’t care, didn’t put a whole lot of faith into anything that said she had “randomly” won.  Those things were usually scams.  Surfing the vidnet, she had more than ninety times seen, “if this is blinking, then you’ve won...”.  Anyone ever seen it NOT blinking?

She smirked to herself and continued to the cooling unit, pulling open the white door and searching around for something sweet or high in protein and still attached to the bone.  The ribs that had been her dinner the previous week had finally been consumed, but there was still a jar of sweet pickled greenroot and she grabbed the jar and carried it into the living room. 

Sarabi didn’t have many possessions.  She wasn’t much of a material girl.  She had furniture, a vidnet display mounted into the wall, and a few necessities, like the aud/vid, the cooling unit, the freezing unit, and a large and small heating unit for cooking.  She played video games when she was bored, but she could afford to get hers off the vidnet and did not need to limit herself to one gaming system.

She also had not many friends.  There was no need for them, either.  Growing up in the foster care system had taught her that the only person she could rely on to always be there was herself.  She had seen children come and go, get adopted permanently, move on to other fosters, and getting passed around.  Sarabi was one of those, always passed around and never in the same place twice. 

She supposed that was what damaged her social skills so much.  She couldn’t even remember where she was born.  She was told it was a forest south of where she now stood, but wasn’t sure.

She wasn’t exactly violent.  Sarabi just didn’t like being messed with and took no crud from anyone.  A week or two at school taught the smarter Valkyries to stay away from her, the more stupid ones considered her a target, either with a fist or an aud/vid number. 

She sighed again.  People always wanted what they couldn’t have. 

And she?  Sarabi didn’t know what she wanted.  She supposed she wanted to be free, but she wasn’t sure what that was.  She had nothing to tie her down.  With her talent, she could dance anywhere.  It wouldn’t be too long before she was finished with her education and she had no family to impress or please. 

Sarabi took a seat on her couch and drew her black and white, furry legs under her, wrapping her wings about her like a leather blanket.  She chewed on a greenroot and gave the vidnet a verbal order to turn itself on and slowly flip through the channels, displaying what was on them, once she finished swallowing. 

She found little of interest.  There was some seismic activity along the planet’s fault lines, but other than that, it was relatively quiet.  Valkyries were an active species, always doing something, making discoveries or breaking records. 

There was nothing she liked on any of the educational channels and she usually ignored the entertainment channels. 

Disappointed with the morning’s lineup and it being too early to go to sleep, she ordered the vidnet to play the song she was formulating a routine for and decided to work on that for awhile. 

It was from one of her favorite stories, about a ghost that lived below a theater and fell in love with one of the actresses.  Sarabi herself fell in love with the voice of the man who played the ghost. 

His voice wasn’t always pretty to hear, but he poured his heart and soul into the song the same way Sarabi poured her heart and soul into her routines.  She supposed that with all her genius, even she was not always absolutely perfect, but she had spirit, and that is what counted. 

After she listened to the song two or three times, enough to finish her greenroots, she climbed to her feet and stretched in time with the music, reaching first one leg beside her body so she balanced on the other, so that her hip tendons were properly warmed up.  Then she would switch and lift her other leg off the ground, straight in front of her and up as high as she could get it, while balancing on the other leg.  Her wings, too, went through a rigorous stretch, beating and extending, moving the individual wing muscle in her chest, and slinkily rolling her back vertebrae by vertebrae. 

That finished, Sarabi worked her striped tail as she waited for the song to start over.  Once it did, Sarabi did not exist in the mortal realm anymore.  She existed in her mind, dancing beside the ghost.  She spun and swirled in ways that would make even the supplest of Valkyries dizzy, rolling her strong belly muscles like a serpent in fast motion. 

Sarabi was a blur of black and white, a flash of jewel green eyes in the darkness when she danced.  She could not be caught, could not be stopped.  When she danced, there was only one thing in her world: the music. 

She loved every moment of it, the way all of her muscles and half her organ systems worked together to form one dynamic image.  She lived for the thrill of adrenaline as she danced on her toes, always at a risk, no matter how slim, of slipping and digging her hooked toeclaws into her pawpads and poking them out the other side.  Sarabi’s existence was merely for the lights as she squeezed the muscles in her hands and feet and lit her body burning with electricity.

She was Sarabi, she was a dancer.  She was the physical, visible version of the music she danced to.  She was music made flesh and blood, nay, its puppet, its toy.  As the music commanded, so Sarabi obeyed, hard and fast and free enough to send her collapsing in a pile of shed fur and sweat, panting with her large lungs to gather more air so she could do it all over again.

That was the type of girl Sarabi was.  What she wanted, she got by her own means.  Granted, she wanted little, but whatever she DID want, peace, privacy, she found a way to get, one way or another. 

When Sarabi finished dancing, the sun was beginning to peak through the open windows.  Sarabi growled, hating the coming dawn.  She had better things to do than sleep.  Given half an opportunity, she would dance until she wore her legs off, then do a handstand and dance on her hands until they wore off, too. 

Still growling, she stood and commanded the doors and windows to go to opaque and lock, then instructed ceiling panels to open, preferring natural light to sleep by than artificial light. 

Sarabi flipped the vidnet channel to a cop drama show and flopped onto the couch behind the coffee table, spreading her wings out beneath her comfortably as she fell, then folding them around her.  Her toes kneaded a woolen blanket at her feet, but she didn’t bother to pull it up yet.  She was still warm from her dancing. 

Because of that, the apartment was cool, but since she hadn’t told it to warm, preferring a blanket, it wouldn’t, and sometime during the day she’d seek the blanket. 

She slept lightly, like all Valkyries, batting a pointed ear at any sound except those that the apartment and vidnet made, the ones she was accustomed to.

On that particular night, it was a very bad night for her to be such a light sleeper.  In one single instant, all of Valkirion seemed to shake, shuddering in mid-cycle hard enough that an alien sitting in his foo fighter could see the ripples in the atmosphere.

Sarabi’s eyes popped open, shining with the light of the suns, which made her wince and snarl in protest.  She hissed again, bearing her fangs like she’d been burned as she felt her couch bumping the wall behind her.

Knew I should have slept in my bed on a school night, she grumbled to herself, silently muttering about bad luck. 

She hoped that the tremors would die down.  She had never been in a valkiriquake before.  The city of Red Dawn, named for the burning sun that first peaked its head over the horizon, was too far away from many fault lines. 

When it didn’t die down, Sarabi’s mind began to race.  Her deeper instincts told her to get the heck out of her apartment and away from anything larger than a sapling. 

She called out to her door to open and then shut and lock once she was through the portal and booked it right out of the living room, spreading her wings as soon as she felt her pawpads strike the airborne road, beating them until she lifted herself in the air, pushing away from the narrow street and catching an updraft.

One thing about the daytime: the thermals are a lot better. 

She hovered above her apartment.  Valkyries were a height-loving species, building their homes in trees and their cities around them until they figured out how to build dwellings that didn’t constrain them within walls.  The cities were built on multiple levels, built on top of each other and not hindering too many trees, linked by streets that were more bridges, easily reached on foot or on wing. 

Sarabi wasn’t the only one that had been awakened by the quake and others were pouring out of their apartments and dwellings and trying to catch whatever updraft they could since the fans that artificially created them had failed down below. 

A/N:

This Sarabi is based of a fancharacter I made when I started writing.  I picked that name because I liked the sound, anyone know where Disney got it?