Chapter 1 - Where am I?

(Word Count: 2,052)

Lily opened her eyes, and everything was wrong. Everything was… brighter. And larger. Huge, actually. Trees and even bushes and other plantlife towered over her. Where was she? What happened? It was hard to think clearly, as she was disoriented and confused, but it was almost like she had been shrunk. She then realized something else that had been bothering her. Her body sense was wrong. She looked down at herself, and started freaking out.

She was a bird. Like, a really tiny one. She was laying down on the face of a flower, and it was more than enough to fit her entire body. She took a long moment to breathe and calm down. When she felt ready, she tried righting herself … onto … her talons? Suppressing the panic that rose up again, she was now perched upright on the flower.

Lily had to take stock of her new body. She had a long beak. She stretched her wings out, and took a better look at herself. She had shiny, almost glittering, green and blue feathers, which trailed off to black at the ends of her wings and tail. ‘Am I a hummingbird? How does that even work? If I was going to be a bird, couldn’t I have been an eagle? Or even a hawk, or raven. Why’d I have to be prey.’ She tried to think of what preyed on hummingbirds, but couldn’t think of anything. She was super tiny though. ‘Maybe some large spiders, or insects?’ She wanted to cry, thinking of possibly being eaten by some sort of bug. 

She shook herself, clearing her mind of that terrible thought. She had to stay positive. What was something positive? ‘At least I have beautiful feathers.’ Her favorite color was a nice blue or green and this nailed both.

Having set aside the issue of her new body for the moment, she tried to solve her next question. What happened? She had a clearer head now, so she tried to recall the last thing she remembered.  She was walking home from the library, she just finished a long group study session with her friends. She was crossing the road…. A horn blared… Her mind hurt trying to recall it, but she pushed through. A truck! She was hit. It was late, and raining, so nobody was around to help. The guy that hit her just drove off and left her there. She recalled the brief moment of eye contact when he had stepped out to see what he hit, and the look of horror on his face, then he left.The last thing she remembered was the rain falling on her face.

Lily raged. Squeaking, chirping, and hopping around on the poor flower beneath her. ‘How dare that man just leave me there to die!’ She froze. ‘I had died.’ The realization hit her like a … well, like a freaking truck. The joke left a bitter taste in her mouth.

She looked around. ‘I don’t think this is heaven, and it’s too nice to be hell. Was I reincarnated? No, I would have come out of an egg if I was, but this body seems to be at least mostly grown by now. Transmigrated, like in the webnovels my roommate reads?’ She recalled what her roommate told her about those kinds of stories, when sharing the stories she found really cool. At the time, she was just listening to Laura because she liked her friend’s enthusiasm, but now Lily was blessing her for it. There was usually something like a system to provide help. It sounded ridiculous, but given the situation she was in, it wouldn’t hurt. Status? Nothing happened.

She frowned. ‘Status page? Menu! Help! Character Page! Open! System! System Open!’

Nothing happened. ‘Okay, it must not be one of those worlds. Think, Lily, think! Laura did talk about some non-system stories… What were those?’ 

Laura mostly told her stories of a person being transmigrated to a world with a system, which had already been ruled out, or into some fantasy setting and goes on to become an adventurer. That meant elves and magic! That didn’t sound too bad. ‘Maybe there’s a spell that can turn me back into a human again! Oh, or an elf!’ Lastly, were the stories of someone being transmigrated into the body of some villainous character in a Chinese magic setting. ‘What was it called? Chi Chi? Xi Xi? No, it was Xianxia!’ Anyway, there were always a whole lot of face-slapping protagonists and crazy young masters that can’t keep it in their pants.

Hopefully, it was the western fantasy with beautiful elves and adventurers, but either way there was magic involved. She felt foolish, thinking about her situation based on random webnovels her friend loved to read, but looking at her situation, being transmigrated into the body of a hummingbird after she died, Lily couldn’t deny the similarities. And having at least some grasp of her situation and having some expectations of what she could encounter was doing wonders for her sanity right now. 

The thought of being able to wield magic made her excited, and it took her mind off of the fact that she had died and was now a bird. At least, for the moment. She would have to try to meditate or something to see if she could sense her mana or the magic in the air. But perhaps not here. She didn’t know if the area around here was safe.

She looked around, but all she could see were the surrounding trees and plants that loomed above her and the flower she was on. She had to get a better view to actually be able to see where she was. Could she… fly? She flexed her wings experimentally. They seemed fine, so she should be able to.

She tried flapping her wings as hard as she could, and she shot into the air. Her wings moved a lot faster than she thought they would. In fact, they downright buzzed, like a deep bumblebee. She stopped herself and hovered there in the air, a good 5 feet off the ground. Mentally giggling to herself, she zipped around in the air, flying between trees and through branches. It all felt so natural, and she exulted in the feeling of the air on her face and flowing over her feathers.

She flew higher into the sky and shot past the tree tops. She was greeted by the scenery of an expansive mountainous area, covered in a deep forest. There was a lake in the valley far below, which glittered from the sun. She marveled at just how colorful everything was. Was this how hummingbirds saw the world? It was beautiful. ‘But I’m definitely not in Kansas anymore.’ She joked to herself.

The sun was still high up in the sky at this point, but she didn’t want to wait for nightfall to find a place to rest. She looked around more carefully, but she didn’t see any sort of building or signs of civilization. She would just have to find somewhere to camp out, a base of operations so to speak.

Lily flew back down and perched up on a nearby branch. All around her were the sounds of the forest. Bird cries and other chirpings. It reminded her of the potential dangers of her new surroundings and suddenly she felt very foolish for flying around as she did. Luckily she was so small that she didn’t think any large predator would bother with her. But she did think about what might find her tasty. Large spiders and insects. What else? Frogs. She looked around and now that she was looking for them, she could already see 3 different spider webs. She wouldn’t have been too bothered by them before, but now that she was so tiny they seemed like horrible death traps.

Unnerved, she flew a few trees away from them. Looking around in her new perch, she didn’t see anything in the immediate vicinity. ‘Ok, I’m in the wilds. What do I need? Shelter. Food. Water.’ She was a bird, so she thought about making a nest. It did feel like the right thing to do, some sort of instinct maybe, but she had no idea how to build one. She would just have to find a nook in a tree or something. Food. Now that she thought about it, she was getting pretty hungry. She knew that hummingbirds acted as pollinators, with their long beaks that were perfect for getting nectar. Maybe they ate smaller bugs too, but even then, Lily didn’t think she was quite ready to be eating bugs yet. Hopefully the nectar was filling.

It was surprisingly easy to find flowers. The bright colors of the petals contrasted very well with her vision. Flying from flower to flower, she stuck her beak in and drank the nectar of each flower she came across. It was good, nice and sweet. Her beak and face were getting covered in pollen though, as she didn’t have any hands to even try to be neat. Though she supposed that was the point in being a pollinator, to spread pollen.

She had her face stuck in the center of a flower drinking deeply, when she heard a crack nearby. Like a stick that broke. She lurched away from the flower in a panic and looked around. About 20 feet away, a huge brown bear was trudging through the trees. It didn’t seem to have noticed her, but she was still terrified. 

She had never even been to a zoo before, much less having a close encounter with a wild animal before. The only outdoor camping experience she had was the one time she went to one of those pre-prepped campgrounds, which even had wifi. So seeing a huge brown bear, now hundreds of times her size, rooted her in the spot. She stayed frozen, until the bear was long out of sight.

New priority. ‘I need shelter right now. Now, now, now.’ No longer hungry, Lily zipped off in the opposite direction as the bear. She didn’t really know what to look for, in a shelter. ‘Just a hole in a tree, I guess.’ 

She searched for a long while, until she came upon a cliff face. She was flying through the trees when suddenly she was out in open air, over a hundred foot drop. Her stomach lurched as the ground unexpectedly dropped away from her and she was a hundred feet in the air. But she was suddenly intrigued. She was searching for a nook in a tree, but maybe here on the cliff face was better? She scanned the cliff, and she saw that there were several solitary flowers that were growing on the face of the cliff. 

She flew to one of them, in the center of the cliff, and there was a perfect nook she could use. Luckily, it was empty and appeared to be unused. She landed and looked around. It was only about a foot into the cliff, but to her new size, this was spacious. Not only that, but this little plant she went to had two flowers on it. Shelter and food, check.

She hovered over to the flowers. They were beautiful. Each flower had what seemed like hundreds of petals, in a deep blue and purple. The center was a vibrant yellow with crimson red stalks to drink nectar from. Tentatively, she tried drinking the nectar from the closest one.

It was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. Richer and sweeter than anything else. Hungrily, she drank all of it and moved on to the second flower. When she was done drinking from the second flower, she was too full to move. So she nestled in right there, feeling safe within the many petals.

With her immediate needs taken care of, shelter and food, she could feel herself relax again. Now that she was safe, her thoughts began to return to her death, her new situation, what she left behind. Her family, her friends. All her hopes and dreams that she had for her future. Gone. 

Now, she was alone in some strange world. Who knew what sorts of dangers she faced here. She wasn’t even human anymore. She curled up deeper into the flower, lost in grief until she drifted off to sleep.