“So-- birds, right?”

The wind howls, whipping blonde hair into a tangled mess, bringing tears to her eyes, and almost drowning out her voice. Behind her, four exasperated heads turn and look at each other.

“Everyone thinks birds have hollow bones to make them light enough for flight.”

A loose pebble slips, falls, becomes a minor rockslide. Up here, the oxygen is thin. To fall from such a height would be disastrous. She turns, pats a hand on a moderately flat rock, and waves her Jugulis over with frantic motions.

“But that’s not true. The hollows in bird bones are actually alveolar structures. They’re lungs. Their entire skeletal system is lungs.”

Something huge and wrapped in canvas slides off the Jugulis’ back, curved like the blade of a scythe. A pocketknife slips free and slices through knotted twine, pulling back the covering; the contents gleam in pale morning light, nearly a powerful beam in the sparse atmosphere.

“So it got me thinkin’. What if we took this idea-- pneumatized bones-- and flipped it.” She spins her fingers in the air, to illustrate. Reaches a gloved hand down and pats the cold metal before her. “What if, instead of using the pneumatization as a key component for survival-based flight, we made it less of a requirement, and more of a fun feature?”

Half-replicated from the thin carbon fiber-esque futuristic material of freya morningstar’s donated Iron Crown, thin, curved sheets of metal hinge from a long joint, like a distorted, sharp L-shape. They are light enough to be jostled in the wind. Invisible to the naked eye are the hundreds of tiny divots, overlaid offset, thin enough to be light but strong enough to withstand the press and pull and torsion of air.

“You know who has the funnest features? Dragons.”

She reaches over and sets a palm against the joist, sliding forward with a grunt of effort; a latch shifts, something clicks, and the metal flares, locking together to form a pendulum-shaped wing.

“The alloy is thin enough that, with the right maneuvering, it can catch and manipulate the air. Just like a real dragon’s wing.”

Deactivating the wing-- sliding the catch back down-- shifts the plates back into their smaller, scythe-like appearance, not unlike the segmented, spider-like wings of her Jugulis-- who she is now clambering over, as easy as a child on the Primape bars.

“So here’s the plan. We’re gonna-- deactivate these bad boys--,” she reaches down with her metallic arm and jostles some plugs on the side of her Jugulis. The beast’s wings on that side flop down with loud clunks.

The two lesser heads peer at each other with something akin to concern.

“Aaaand we’re gonna strap on this bad boy--,” the other mech in attendance, the Valiant, offers their armful of tow straps, then steps around the Jugulis to help maneuver the pneumatic dragon’s wing into place. A couple of loops, a couple of quick tugs, and the naked silver alloy lays down across the Jugulis’ side, clattering slightly in the wind.

“--aaand theeeeen I hook this bungee--,” click, tug, “--onto here, like so. And finally… we jump.”

Sima 2.0 walks fearlessly to the ledge, borrowed wing flashing like a beacon of hope and progress.

Or an S.O.S flare. It could be used for that, too.

“Everybody say Lyune-abunga!”

They pitch forward, into the abyss, the remnants of her scream stolen by the wind.

☾

Happy to report success with Operation: Odahviing. Yes, we did end up crashing-- but only because I don’t know how to drive-- a wing, or whatever.

Aand I had Rose use protect on us at the last second, so it wasn’t all that bad. Nothing a little elbow grease can’t fix. I think I’m onto something with this… pneumatic alloy. I just need to fine-tune it. Maybe Freya will let me borrow some dragon bones so I can get the details right? I’ll ask her… whenever I see her again.

In any case, I gotta put my knee back on now, and fix Sima’s wings.

…I should proooooobably do that before she eats me.