Project: NightWing

By

DragonLady of Avalon

The La Brea Tar Pits. 

Every year, thousands of tourists visit these fantastic death traps to catch a glimpse of what life was life during the Ice Age.  Paleontologists come just to study the tar-crusted bones, not quite fossils, not quite mummies, pulled from the sticky goo.  Every day, new discoveries are being made in the tar.

Dr. Saffron Lavrea and her son, Bug, were some of the paleontologists.  They had gone to California six months before to study some of the predators found locked in the tar.  There were two reasons they stayed so long.

The first one was a bison with a damaged ribcage.  Not so unusual, it was male, so it might have been in a fight.  But the ribs were more bent than broken, and had lacerations on the inside, as if something had chewed or clawed its way out.  The animal had died a very slow, agonizing death, and if it had been human it probably would have sought the tar pits as a quicker release. 

The second thing was child sized, between three and four feet tall.  It was built similar to a human, two arms, two legs, one nose, one mouth, and two eyes...except for a...number of structural differences. 

Its face was elongated in kind of a batlike muzzle, complete with twin sets of fangs, apparently for slicing and puncturing, and a set of molars probably for grazing on certain kinds of insects.  Its spine was twice the length it should have been, with its tailbone in the middle because of the extra vertebrae: the spiked tail.  Its feet had six toes, all mobile and almost opposable, ending in sharp claws, like talons. 

Its hands were what caught the most attention.  It didn’t have any.  It had wings, exactly like a bat’s.  The fingerbones stretched as far as the flight membrane would have, supporting said flap of skin and tissue from about shoulder to hip.  It apparently walked in a combination of balancing its upper body on its knuckles and somehow normally, as apparent by the digigrade look to the talons, but its hands were utterly useless for holding or grabbing things, unless you count the curved spike on the thumb.  Not long enough to really gut something, juvenile or not, that spike might have sliced open a throat, perhaps helped the creature perch on branches the way bats do. 

Those fingerbones could not have possibly gotten something that size off the ground.  They were too flat and brittle, not nearly flexible enough. 

Of course, how a creature managed to survive without any sort of hand and only small spikes as frontal protection beside two stubby horns was not nearly important as identifying the creature itself.  It bore a striking resemblance to many kinds of bat, yet no bat grew to be three to four feet tall.  Not to mention that it was, indeed, a juvenile, so was only going to grow larger. 

And what was it doing in a tar pit?  Often predators and carrion feeders wander into tar pits, seeking out “fresh” meat already trapped there.  Had this juvenile male bat-thing wandered into the tar pits after food, hindered by its cumbersome, useless wings?

Bug and his mother doubted it.  The fangs were too small, as were the molars.  They both doubted it was a meat eater, which only left vegetation, which was ruled out because the fangs would have served no purpose.

All and all, the sad being was apparently little more than a mishmash of contradicting parts.  That was, of course, until someone noticed something snagged on one of the bat-thing’s ribs. 

It was a preserved piece of fabric.  Leather, to be exact, and it might have been the tar, but it didn’t look like any animal living in that area.  And it wasn’t as if something else’s skin had gotten onto the bat-creature...it looked as if the bad-creature had been wearing clothes when it died. 

Now that was uproar in both the scientific and news fields.  “Unknown animal found in tar pit wearing primitive clothing”, read the headlines the very next morning.  That wasn’t entirely true, since most of the leather had dried and cracked away in the baking sun, just as flesh did, but that was certainly what it looked like and whereas a few scientists clarified the matter, none really argued. 

The creature was studied intensively, but without more than one specimen, not a whole lot could be gleaned from it.  That was, of course, until a settlement was found in the middle of the artic circle, near Brook’s Range, Alaska. 

There were little hut-houses stuffed with skeletal remains of abandoned animals in bone cages, including animals.  There seemed to be temporary paddocks and grazing ranges for, presumably, some sort of equine.  This culture was, indeed, advanced and an expedition was sent out almost immediately. 

Possibly because of eerie coincidence, perhaps fate or forces of nature humans cannot comprehend, Dr. Saffron, her husband, and her son went along. 

Maybe, the doctor thought as she followed her husband, the leader of the expedition, through the abandoned buildings, the government knows more than we do.

The expedition was funded by the Smithsonian, itself.  Whatever, whoever, built this tiny village was not only advanced, but it predated any known cultural activity going on in North America.  For that very reason, the government did not want any greedy corporation getting dibs on the dig.  They wanted it, themselves. 

Being born of two parents in the history fields, one paleontological, one archaeological, Bug was a genius in the real sense.  He was a linguist and spoke languages so old that they weren’t even dead, just dust, as fluently as English.  The reason a sixteen year old kid was on the dig? 

A wood carving thousands of years old, apparently scrawled by someone who was in too much of a hurry to use wood, but wanted their legacy preserved, anyway.

Let me tell you about the region this village was found in.

It was in the perfect preservation spot, sheltered on all sides by mountains in such a way that the mountains did little more than lower the temperature.  Nothing lived there, not even penguins.  The theory was that in the past, the area had been perfectly pleasant and hospitable, but something had happened. 

Something like...oh, I don’t know, the Ice Age, Bug thought, sliding a little on the ice as he and his family and team approached the village, known only as “The Ice Bat’s Home”, for reasons as of yet unknown. 

A recon team was already there, setting up base camp, and they waisted no time getting Bug to the wood he was supposed to study, nestled safely in a warm, but temperature controlled, tent in the heart of the camp.

It took the boy all of five minutes to recognize the mishmash of symbols, another five to decipher it.  It was several Native American dialects of European characters, telling what seemed to be a fairy tale. 

It spoke of demon bats who came to Earth in a giant, shining bird.  They fed off the life force of humans and some of the animals they brought with them, draining it through their necks after using magic to paralyze them.  Sometimes the human would not be killed, just paralyzed, and a female demon would lay her eggs in the human’s body, letting her children eat their way out. 

These beats could, indeed, fly.  They flew in huge packs, running down anything with a beating heart.  Several humans were apparently kept as pets, not to an individual, but to the entire group, especially the juveniles.

Whoever wrote this claimed to be one of the ones chosen to move on with the demons, to be taken into the sky and used as slaves or worse to the demon bats. 

Thinking of her find, Dr. Lavrea shuddered, remembering the state that animal’s ribcage was in.  No doubt the bison was used as a means for reproduction, like some wasps with spiders.  She touched her stomach, wondering what it felt like to have some sort of bat creature eating her from the inside out.

Danial Lavrae spoke up three seconds later with, “Are you sure this isn’t some mistranslation, or a fairy tail?  I mean, how does someone who speaks Native American write with Indo-European characters?”

“I don’t know,” answered the military advisor, leaning over Bug with his artifact.  “I do know that it isn’t entirely untrue.”

Bug’s eyes shot up. 

“How do you know that?” he demaned.

The four people standing in the tent stared at each other for a second.  Then, after a long silence, the military officer breathed, “Let me show her to you.”

For the first time, the Lavrae family was lead into The Ice Bat’s Village, more specifically into one of the storehouses.  This one was more or less empty, containing to frozen or fossil remains, just some cages and blankets and so forth.  There was only one paleontological remain in the room, and she was draped over one stack of small bone cages, fit for housecats or some such, as if she had fallen there.

Her eyes seemed to be open, as well as her mouth.  One wing was under her head, cushioning it, while the other wing’s spiked thumb touched the floor.  She had lovely black tresses cascading all over her face, accenting the horns at the crest of her head.  Her ears came to a delicate point, she was on her knees with her talons pointing out and her spiked tail curled around them.

She looked as if she might get up at any moment and ask why the four humans were invading her nap. 

Less than a day later, an excavation team dug her out of the icy film that coated everything and was beginning the autopsy.  The team had to wait for the ice to melt enough to get down to her, but could not risk the temperature going up so high that it damaged her.  By this time she had been given a name, “NightWing”, since her eyes were large enough to indicate possible nocturnalism, a theory boosted by the writings that Bug translated that suggested the demon bats only attacked at night.

While she was on the dissecting table, one of the doctors was very nervous.  He swore that left wing of hers just twitched.

“It moved,” he said, pausing with the scalpel in his hand.

“That’s impossible,” answered one of the nurses.  “She’s been dead for thousands of years, how could she move?”

“Probably just muscle twitches,” a third person put their two-cents in. 

But they all stared at the bat-thing nonetheless, more specifically at its one free wing.

Which promptly twitched the way a human hand would if its owner was regaining consciousness. 

The doctor’s breath caught in his throat.  He dropped his scalpel, narrowly missing his foot, then stepped toward the silver table.  His fingers sought the ice bat’s wrist, feeling for the arteries that ran beneath.

The next morning, the news didn’t run exactly what he felt, but they did note that the doctor turned as pale as a sheet, turned toward the camera that was recording the operation, and said, “Get me life support.  Now.”