Chapter 2

The screen in front of Quincy shivered, then unfurled into something that looked like it came out of a video game:

“Honk?”

What Quincy meant to say was, “What in the world? Am I stuck in a video game?”

Followed by, “5 Int? Are you joking?”

He wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. Yes, he was apparently a Canadian Goose. Those notifications he’d been receiving earlier had translated into a “Chaotic” alignment, with an attunement level of 3. He would have taken offence at the score of 6 Charisma, but he could be honest and admit that honking wasn’t exactly the height of social grace.

As he shifted his weight on the branch, trying to maintain his balance, a sudden flicker appeared in his vision. The system seemed to be analyzing the way he moved—the subtle lean, the precise distribution of weight, the instinctive way he braced himself against the wind. It was a far cry from how a normal goose would stand; it was the muscle memory of a man who had spent years navigating urban rooftops.

Quincy blinked. A small, smug smile was translated into brief wiggle of his tail. He looked forward to testing his increased agility out.

He then focused on the blessing:

Quincy wasn’t sure what exactly communing was, but he tried anyways. He placed his hands (wings) in front of him and bowed his head.

“Honk. Honk honk HONK. Honk honk.”

Nothing happened.

“Hisssss…” he complained. The translation was better not put to page, but it contained many uncharitable inferences as to the state of the Lord of Chaos’s parentage.

The world swirled around him, and he found himself sitting on a small boulder floating in the eye of a silent maelstrom full of floating debris. Red lightning sparked throughout the storm, flashing in the distance as far as he could see. Similar boulders floated all around the edges of the storm’s eye, and in the center, a massive chimera which shifted piecewise between forms sat mediating. As he watched, its head shifted into the head of an eagle, while the body became that of a bear.

“Honk?” Quincy started as his attempt at honking came out of a human mouth. He looked down at his body, and it appeared that while in this space, he was back in his original human body. He cleared his throat uncomfortably, unsure if he actually wanted to disturb the colossal being. A screen popped up in front of him.

Quincy focused on the second option, the only one which he could purchase without spending every single point he possessed, and saw the point counter at the top of the window drain down. Below him, the colossus grunted in what might have been a chuckle, then the world swirled around him once more, and he was back, precariously perched on the branch where he’d woken up.

Below, a sharp crack split the air as something moved under his roost. His balance shifted as he peered over, and he wobbled a bit as a foot slipped before catching himself with a wing against the tree. He was beginning to understand why geese preferred soccer fields to nesting in trees. Even with a superior sense of balance, webbed feet didn’t offer the best grip.

“The bird can’t have gotten very far. You saw how unstable it was in flight.”

Quincy peeked over the side of the branch a second time. A half-dozen men in pointed, red hoods stomped down a trail which led under the tree. In the morning light, they looked much less intimidating than they had last night as he danced his way through their legs and swirling robes. The fabric was faded, and more than one of them had patched holes using unmatched fabric.

“Are you daft? You want to find a specific bird in a forest this size? We don’t even know which direction it went in.” The speaker was the fat cultist from before, flagging at the back of their little train line and sweating hard enough that his robes were dark under the armpits.

“Besides, I need to get back to the village before Tina wakes up. It’s nearly time to start the day, we’ve spent all night looking for the thing, and she already thinks these rituals are just an excuse for drink. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Tina, shmina. Come on, lad. You’re whipped harder than the horse that plows your field!” The shortest of the lot tried to give Tina’s husband a pat on the shoulder, but misjudged and slapped him on the back of the neck instead.

“Oi! Watch it! Didn’t you make the sacrifice last night? Did you wash your hands afterwards? Keep those hands to yourself.”

Quincy watched as they bickered back and forth, moving single-file down the path beneath him. A minute later, their voices faded into the underbrush, and he shook himself. He wasn’t sure what to think. They’d clearly summoned him into this world, which implied that they should be treated as deadly cultists, but it was difficult to reconcile that with the apparent buffoons hiking below him. He’d best keep an eye out for them, though, given the contents of his last system notification.

Quincy put the thought aside; he had more pressing concerns: for instance, what did geese eat? He pondered the question as he took off from the tree, flying up high enough to look around.

Up here, he could see what looked like faint swirls of light leading in one direction. Something in his chest felt good when he oriented himself towards it. To his right, the sun was rising over rolling hills sprinkled with farms, and to his left the forest sprawled out until it met white-capped mountains. Not too far ahead of him, a medium-sized town with a trading post met the trail where it led out of the forest. Thatched roofs capped the rough log buildings closest to him, but they made way for proper cobbled stone towards the town square. From a few of them, smoke made a path through the sky, making the town hard to miss, even at a distance.

Quincy made for the town. Strange as this new world might be, where there were people, there was food. He knew that much.

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Quincy first landed in a pond on the outskirts of the town, in the middle of a fenced pasture. Some goats grazed nearby, bleating as he flew overhead.

His first target was a small fish. He furled his wings and landed with a loud splash, scattering water all over and making any attempts at stealth pointless. A few fish darted into the reeds and Quincy’s stomach grumbled as he spotted them.

He paddled over to the reeds, nudging them aside with his long neck, but before he could make any moves, the fish were already gone deeper into the pool. Quincy would have pouted if beaks were capable of it, but he settled for drooping his neck.

Then, he spotted a few insects hovering by the pond’s edge. He edged over towards them. He was just a simple goose, enjoying the water. Not a predator, and definitely not interested in eating the bugs. He came up next to them, still darting around the plants in the shallow water, carefully reached his neck out, and snapped his beak.

“HONK!”

The bugs tasted about as terrible as he imagined they would have in his human form. He might have the body of a goose, but it apparently did not come with a taste for insects. He hacked a few times, then dunked his head into the water to get the grainy taste—similar, he imagined, to stale woodchips—out of his mouth.

Quincy would need to find something more suitable to his human preferences.

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Quincy flew over the town, searching for something a bit more appetizing. He flew towards the center of the city, circling the tall steepled church a few times, then caught the scent of something wonderful on the air.

Below, he spied a large wooden building with smoke coming out of a large stone chimney stack to its side. The front had large wooden shutters, opened to the street, and he could see a table pushed up against it to display items for sale. As he swung around for a second fly-by, his eyes settled on a small white bread the size of an apple set to the side. Perfect for a bird of his size.

Quincy considered his approach. The way he saw it, there were a two ways he could go about it:

First, he could try to steal it. The bread wasn’t very large, so he was pretty sure he’d be able to fly off with it, but there were quite a few people going in and out of the store and a baker’s assistant out front was currently shooing off a stray dog.

Or, he could try to get some coin and buy a loaf. He wasn’t certain how the bakers would react to a goose politely walking up and trying to pay for some bread. He’d also need to figure out how to get the coin.

It struck him that stealing from a place which sold food was a good way to get himself chased off after the first time, even if he got away with it. He didn’t much like the idea of having to find a new place to steal from every day, and word was likely to get around after a few heists. Quincy needed to find a way to either get the money, or figure out how to steal the food without getting caught.

He kept circling, looking for something promising. On his second pass, the church bells rang and a crowd of people gathered out front. Curious, he swept in for a closer look and landed. Visible from his perch on the church rooftop, beggars from all over were gathering around the priest with a breadbasket. He wore white robes trimmed with blue and gold, with a large symbol on the front which he recognized from the previous night on the flask of holy water.

While far from the organized lines he remembered at food pantries in his early childhood, children and women appeared to be given priority.

Free food was still food, so Quincy glided around and joined at the back of the crowd. Being vertically challenged, as most geese are compared to a human, he found it quite easy to weave his way through the legs of people at the edges. As he wound closer to the priest, people began to notice him.

“Is that a goose?” One bewildered beggar said.

“What the… watch it!” Another said as Quincy stepped on his bare foot. Quincy didn’t know what he was talking about—it wasn’t like he was wearing shoes.

Squeezing between legs, he nipped at a few heels, eliciting a few non-goose squawks from the crowd on his way through. He made it to the front, where a couple of thin children were receiving small, grayish bread rolls from the priest. Like he owned the place, Quincy waddled behind the children, in front of a man who smelled like he’d last seen a bath sometime in the previous century.

The man moved to object, but Quincy turned around. His head tilted to the side, and beady black eyes stared deep into the beggar’s soul. A quiet hiss leaked from his beak, then the beggar raised his hands and stepped back into the crowd.

The priest, having handed the children their rolls, moved onto the next person in line. Namely Quincy. He looked down at the goose, a loaf in his hand, and raised an eyebrow.

“Whose goose is this?”

Quincy shook his head and pointed his beak at the bread in the priest’s hand. He was nobody’s goose, but all the same, he was here for a single reason.

“Bread?” Quincy said, which came out as a lilted “Hunnn?”

The priest stepped around him and handed a loaf to the next person in line.

Quincy stepped in front of the priest again, this time emitting a concerned warble. He nudged the priest’s polished boots, then tugged at the hem of his robes. The priest snorted, then walked around him again.

This would not do. Quincy had survived the cultists, failed to fish, tried to eat bugs, and was, at this point in time, about as hungry as he could bear. He’d decided that he was going to do the right thing and not steal from the bakery, but being ignored triggered something inside him.

Quincy puffed out his chest. His neck stretched up to its full length.

“HOOOOOONK!” He shouted, directly into the back of the priest’s robes.

The priest stumbled, throwing his hands up to his ears and tossing the basket of bread rolls up into the air. A split second passed, as the crowd watched them arc overhead, then shouts sounded out as everyone scrambled to grab a piece.

The priest turned around and glared at the goose, a purple vein throbbing on his forehead.

“Guards! Get rid of this devil-bird!” he said.

Quincy felt someone pick him up from behind, binding his wings to his body with firm hands. He honked angrily, wiggled his tail as furiously as he knew how, and tried to bite at the hands holding him.

“Damn goose! Get out of here!”

A few seconds later, he found himself tossed unceremoniously into the alley next to the church. He turned around immediately, ready to fight his kidnapper off, but only caught sight of the guard’s back as he walked back into the crowd.

Quincy sat down in the dirt, mourning his lack of bread. In the crowd, he could still hear people shouting as they chased after rolls of bread. He closed his eyes and let out a low, rumbling whine as his stomach grumbled.

Then, something bumped against his tail. A torn roll, half smashed where two people had grabbed it and presumably fought over it. A red light glowed in the corner of his vision.

Somehow, the roll had gotten tossed over twenty feet to land at his feet and gone completely unnoticed. Quincy didn’t hesitate. The roll was gritty and slightly stale, but after nearly two days without food, it tasted like life.

The alley was dark, and after finishing the roll, it seemed as good a place as any for Quincy to catch a nap before moving on and finding a more permanent source of food. While he didn’t think the priest would ignore him next time, it was equally unlikely that the result would be more bread.

A pile of wooden boxes and barrels, just a bit farther into the alley with a pile of rope on top, looked promising to him. Quincy was just finishing nudging the rope into an impromptu nest when he heard a scuffle and a quiet voice from around the corner.

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