Forgive me if I begin to sound irate, but I am always a little grouchy when I wake up from a seizure. 

When I was younger, I did not recognize that I was constantly sick.  I thought that I blacked out, or that time jumped.  I would do something, fall and twist my ankle, sprain one of my wings, go too long without eating, or stare into a blinking light, and wake up, ours later horribly nauseous and with a headache pounding at the inside of my skull like someone’s talon was wrapped around it and trying to crush it. 

Nobody told me that I was epileptic.  It was not until I made my way to Avalon for the first time that anyone realized it and cared enough to tell me.  I spent my childhood, if you could call those years cold and starving on the streets (the fact that I do not like to eat food being beside the point and probably a blessing under the circumstances) a childhood, illiterate.  Even though no one would have told me the nature and severity of my illness, I could have found a book on it, but it would not have helped because I could not read it.

Knowing the name of my blackouts and nausea does not help.  In the past I was merely confused, now I am...almost frightened by the notion and knowledge that I am one of a rare number that has epilepsy so bad that it is trigged by nearly everything from physical or emotional pain to blinking lights to too severe emotions.

When I wake up with that all-too-familiar pounding and squeezing of the skull and the slender contents of my stomach (bile, mostly, since I have refused to eat for the past week) threatening to sully my scarf, I know instantly what has happened.  There is no longer any momentary confusion, for I know now the nature of my blackouts, and I can immediately resume whatever task I had prior without too much pondering.

Except that I am not in the stone halls and chambers of the raining emerald isle, Avalon, nor under the glass dome of my disinclined homeworld, Carvathia.  This place, indeed, confuses me, with its moldy walls and sinking ceilings.  There is the smell of rot here, not necessarily animal, but perhaps vegetable material.  The air is damp and with a slight chill to it, as if the air outside this building is warmer but the building itself cannot muster that kind of heat energy. 

The building itself, or at least this room, seems to be abandoned.  There are papers strewn around cracked office desks, old and moldy and yellow and almost ready to fall apart.  I smell stagnation on my regrown antennae.  This building is older than its habitation, and isn’t inhabited by much, it seems.

My stomach churns, burning nausea spreading into my treachea.  I roll over, not thinking, just acting, and dry heave for several seconds before spitting bile out, the slimy mess clinging to my stitches.  I groan at the blood rushing into my head, making everything from my eardrums to my optic nerves pound.  Growls escape my scarred lips as my tail flits back and forth, trying to alleviate my pain much like tapping a talon would.

Holding my head, my palms covering my eyes and my fingertips so close to the antennae that my claws almost prick the sensitive appendages, I realize that I am without both gloves and scarf.  I lift my head up slightly, my ears drooping, until I can peer between my fingers.  A weightlessness about my head tells me that my hat is gone, too. 

I drop my hands and climb to my sharp knees, feeling around for my effects.  The ground is cold under my palms, my claws making scratching noises as I crawl along the ground, my wings dragging the floor. 

I find my dark red gloves and boots and conical hat, topped with a single, far-seeing eye, lumped together on top of my shabby scarf, which is more than twice as long as I am tall.  I pause as I reach for them.  Someone put them there...shrugging and still feeling naked without all of my clothes, I grab my gloves and begin sliding them on, muttering about needing to clip my claws and probably preen my feathers. 

I wrap my scarf around my face to hide my scarred stitches, dangling the ends so I can match them up and make sure I am in the center.  After that, I set my hat on top of my head, blinking my straw-like hair out of my green eyes, then pause.  There is a second party in the room.  His scent is on my clothes. 

Cautiously reaching under my jacket, I feel around for my scythe.  It is there, whoever is here with me may not have even seen it.  And even if they have, no matter how confidant they are as to not take it, they have no way to know that I am a master of illusion. 

I sense movement behind me.  I reach further under my jacket, slipping my scythe out of the loop that it dangles from.  I then pull the silvery object in front of me, slowly so that no attention is drawn to it...then in one fluid motion, I press the hidden switch that extends it to full length, the one that discharges the blade into fighting position, and spin around, stopping the blade from slicing off a head by mere inches. 

The person is taller than me, which surprises me because the only person ever to rival my height besides Carvathian Griffins was my half-dimensional double, Deathraptor Wren.  His skin is dark brown, with paler, fuzzy antennae dripping on each side of his face from where his eyebrows should have been.  He wears a scrap of fabric tied around his mouth, matching scraps of fabric assembled into a loose-fitting shirt and trousers, belted by what looks like leftover leather and a secondhand buckle.  Dusky gray butterfly wings with dark brown eyes flutter behind his back in surprise as he cocks his head to one side, bright red compound eyes watching me. 

He backs away slowly, justifiably afraid of my scythe and my speed with it.  He raises his right hand to show what he has in hands swathed in rags: my boots, the soles mud-free. 

“You're awake now,” he says.  “That’s good.  I’ve never seen anyone shake like that before.”

The way he says it implies that he has never been near enough to someone to know if they frequently drop where they are standing and fall into convulsions.  He may not even know what convulsions are. 

He looks almost like a Carvathian halfbreed, like me, except Carvathian Butterflies have single eyes instead of compound.  His height could be attributed to Griffin ancestry, but his wings are Butterfly, not bone and feather.  He has a back spur on digigrade feet ending in sharp claws, but it is not long or strong enough to help perching on branches or to crush open seeds as big as coconuts.  Not to mention that he hides no skin, showing that it is not poisoned because all plant and therefore animal life around here would be dead from carelessly leaning against it.  I smell the scent of forests on him, as well as blood.

Glaring sharply at my purloined boots, I lower my scythe and snatch them out of his hands and fling myself to the floor, spreading my wings out.  My leg bends right in the middle, my knee pressing sharply against the fabric to show how vastly underfed I am. 

DragonLady Morhi always said I behaved more like a spoiled child than a street urchin.  I chuckle darkly at the image of when I did the same thing to her, snatching an article of clothing and unceremoniously begin putting it on, growling at her for having taken it for whatever reason it may have been. 

I have little reason now to be upset if someone takes my gloves or boots to clean them for nothing, but I have not yet become acquainted with unpoisoned skin.  Dealing with people comes no easier. 

I glance up at him.  He watches me, curiously, starring at my talons.  It does not appear that he has seen anyone with feet that can be made into effective weapons or hands, and he emphasizes this by cocking his head to the other side, a bit more insectlike than birdlike and feline Morhi and chittering softly.

“A seizure,” I say one my right boot is on, feeling nervous by his staring.  As I said, I am not well-versed in dealing with other people.

His head twists to the other side.  His compound eyes blink, a translucent shield covering the many crimson spheres. 

I roll my slitted green eyes and continue, “A seizure.  I had a seizure.  It means I temporarily lost control of my motor functions.”

“Oh,” he says so softly that I mentally kick myself, reminding myself that few people can grow up on streets and have quite the...extensive vocabulary that I do.  Not every street urchin has theaters to run to when it rains, however artificially.

When both boots are securely on my talons, I stand up, almost two heads shorter than this winged creature.  I cock my own head to catch a breeze around my antennae, smelling him.  He does the same.

He does not smell Carvathian or Avalonian.  He smells not like the ocean spray that the seafarers of Avalon did, the flowers that the Butterflies of Carvathia brought with them when they settled Earth.  He does not smell like Wren’s world of greasy skies and machines belching smoke, or R’jas in her clean, mechanized world.  Or of Amelle and...

Amelle...

...In fact, this creature smells roughly like I did before Amanarath Re sent me to Avalon.  Dirty, hungry, tired.  Except there is the scent of blood.  Even on Avalon I did not kill for a meal that would not be enjoyed, but Morhi and her brothers did.  This isn’t dear blood, though.  It is...

“Who are you?” I ask, furrowing my brow, conscious of the scars left behind from my antennae’s amputation. 

The creature pauses for several seconds, questioning me and obviously wondering what I meant.  This definitely shows that he has had less social interaction than I have before Avalon, because I would have known that the market-people meant “Phantom” or whatever alias I could come up with. 

“Herald of Bad Omens,” he answers.  “Physical Embodiment of the Indian’s Curse.  Mystery of Point Pleasant.  Mothman.”

I nod slowly, understanding those titles.  I can’t say that “’Lexi” by a fellow hybrid is the worst I have been called.

“Red Death,” I answer.  “Alexan Firewing.  Black Plague.  Phantom.”

A/N: I almost didn’t update this (it was supposed to be a short story, anyway) because the Mothman freaks me out.  Royally. 

Be that as it may, another mothy-boy was too good to pass up.