Eidetic
Cygnus X-1
She was an organic.
She was an organic!
The thought repeated itself over and over in her mind, like a mandate of doom from the laws of physics themselves. Organic. She was... one of those little creatures. She'd never actually seen one herself, but the older and less massive stars had whispered of their existence, Sol especially, so Cygnus had some idea of what they were like. Tiny creatures of volatile molecules, self moving, self serving, brief and minuscule, forever struggling to hold off their disintegration by taking in various chemicals and excreting others. They didn't look at all like what she'd expected, and judging by how many planck lengths across she was, they were... smaller than she expected. And now she was one of them!
She'd gone through the abode of the winged organic almost in a daze, just a small part of her mind devoted to learning its language. Most of her consciousness was stuck in a loop of horror and denial. She didn't want to be an organic. She didn't want to admit it. She couldn't be one. She couldn't be made of flesh, filled with fluids and solids, stuck at a meager three hundred degrees. She couldn't, but she was! Cygnus could feel permanent, true death creeping up on her, the utter termination of all she was or could have been looming over sixty five powers of ten closer than it had prior.
She was terrified. Organs she didn't know the purpose of fluctuated in ways she wasn't sure but was fairly certain that weren't normal. She couldn't die here! Not like this! Not like one of these! She didn't want to die, not yet, not when her afterlife was supposed to have been so long!
How long did she have before failing? What was the organic's health? Cygnus didn't know and not knowing ate at her because for all her life she'd known everything she ever needed. All the laws of her universe and the multiverse beyond were hers to know. The names of Lords and Ladies far beyond her own Lord danced in her mind. But now? She knew nothing of what she needed. She was going to die here, alone and unknown, and -
Get a grip, she told herself. Panicking will do you no good. You need to make use of these organics.
But that wouldn't work. She was just an organic! Cygnus was utterly impotent, trapped here on this planet who-knew how many light years from Two-Two...
That's not true! The laws of physics allow a method to return to form. You can use it. But was she going to live long enough to invoke those laws at all?
It was when the part Cygnus X-1's consciousness focused on the real world accidentally buried herself under strange rectangular prisms that she jolted back to focus on her situation. Clarity sparked within her like her first fusion reaction. It didn't matter how unlikely her success was. She had to try. And that meant first getting a firm grasp of what she'd need to do to keep her organic body alive. The winged organic with her had proven to be somewhat intelligent. The actual level of it was still questionable, but she could use it as a reference. Hopefully.
She focused on the organic, standing above her with a certain expression on its face. Anger. How did Cygnus know that? Was it organic instinct? Did organics even have instincts? If they did she'd have to pay close attention to them. She repeated its language with poor pronunciation - it had a language? - and made an effort to dislodge herself from the rubble. The surprisingly good smelling rubble.
... smelling?
The organic let out a sigh of atmosphere and moved over to her, using its grasping limbs to move the rubble off of her. Was this what solids felt like? Eugh. Once she was free, it moved a grasping limb to her right grasping limb and made a gesture. A moment later, Cygnus thought she understood and moved her own 'hand' there, and moved the fingers to try and grasp it.
The creature then pulled her up. Cygnus's limbs scrambled underneath her for a few seconds, clacking against the ground, but before too long she'd been hoisted into standing, a head and a half shorter than the feathered creature. Cygnus X-1 wavered a bit, but found her balance thanks to some innate sense of orientation, and stabilized.
"Alright, if you're gonna live here, rules!" She didn't understand a word of what it was saying. "No touching anything unless I tell you. No - "
"Books?" she asked. If these organics had a spoken language, then there was a slim chance they'd figured out recording. Sol had mentioned something like that recently; for all that insufferable gas ball couldn't stop talking about his organics, it seemed like it would come in handy for her now. If she could somehow gain access to their full language, then she could tell them what she needed and they would get it for her.
Assuming they decided to, of course. Organics not doing what she wanted them to could end up being a problem.
"Books," the organic repeated. The two sphere-like objects that she decided were how it saw rolled in their sockets. "You want books?"
She considered it for a moment. "Book," she corrected for singular. Cygnus pondered how to go about communicating it. She motioned to the organic and, with a hand, mimed it talking. Then she gestured to herself, mimed talking, and said, "No. Book?" she asked.
The organic pondered that for a moment, then nodded. It made a gesture to follow it and moved elsewhere in its nest. She followed after it clumsily, carefully putting one limb in front of the other with loud clip-clops, the pressure waves pounding against short, open protrusions from her head.
The room the organic lead her to was, she supposed, slightly different from the others, though she really wasn't in any position to judge them. There were a lot of thin, almost planar rectangular white sheets scattered about, with colored markings on them. Most of these sheets rested on some sort of elevated 'desk', and there were even smaller, cylinder-esque things in various colors.
"Okay, you pick up language pretty quick, let's see if you can't read." It grabbed one of the blank sheets and placed it on the floor, as well as one of the cylinders. The organic marked the paper with a strange, triangular symbol. It pointed at the symbol and made a cawing noise.
Cygnus stared at it.
It made the cawing sound again, tapping the symbol with more force, and comprehension dawned. Cygnus, with some difficulty, manipulated the gasses in her to produce the same cawing noise.
It nodded, then drew another symbol, and made a slightly different noise. She repeated it. Then it drew both the symbols next to each other, and combined the noises in order from left to right. Cygnus X-1 recalled those two noises being used as part of its language, and she understood what it was doing. Good. Exactly what she wanted it to, and she didn't even have to tell it directly to do so. Idly, almost without her say, Cygnus folded her non-grabbing limbs underneath her body and lowered herself to the ground.
The next symbol had a strange, hacking noise. Cygnus tried to replicate it, but then it felt like something got stuck in her neck. Her body convulsed lightly, inhaling and exhaling jerkily. The organic stepped around to her back and began hitting her on the back, which seemed to help clear up whatever irritation had taken place. "Easy, easy. Most non-griffons have trouble with that, don't feel too bad." She tried the noise again without success, though she only convulsed once and didn't need the organic's help to stop. On her next try, she got it. "Right, fast learner. Okay, next is the letter Krat."
The organic continued to bring her through the inscriptions, one by one, until she had learned thirty of them. Then it showed her some combinations of two or three symbols that lead to a different sound entirely. She had repeated trouble pronouncing them properly, however, so it stretched longer than it likely should have. Once it had showed her the ten combinations of such, it wrote a series of symbols.
"Vinur," it said, laying next to her and pointing to them.
Ah yes, that was its name, wasn't it? These organics named themselves. She repeated the name, her pronunciation slightly improved.
It gestured to her, as if to ask her name. Sadly she didn't know how her name would translate into the organics' language, so instead she responded with a negative, "No."
Vinur frowned, but said nothing. Instead, it produced a low rumbling noise and the expression on its face changed. She wondered what the source of the face change was. It stood up and motioned for her to do the same. It was still strange for Cygnus to send what felt like chemical signals through spindly limbs, watching them react and feeling their tiny sensory inputs change as she unfolded her limbs and rose to her full, minuscule height. Cygnus X-1 followed after the organic, slowly and carefully to avoid falling and damaging herself.
They made their way through a corridor, decorated with what she assumed were depictions of other places on the world she found herself on. They were in rather poor detail, if she had to be honest.
Eventually, the organic brought her to a larger room, connected to the one she'd almost injured herself in, with some wooden rectangle protruding from the middle, which in turn circular white objects and metallic weapons on its surface. Vinur made a motion that she interpreted as 'stay in place'. For a moment Cygnus felt anger rise from her depths at the prospect of being told what to do by an organic, but she suppressed it. She was out of her depths on this world. While she was unfathomably knowledgeable about the workings of reality, that did not mean she knew how these organics worked.
She stopped before one of the white circles, looking down at it and wondering what the weapons were for. Meanwhile, the organic went elsewhere and rummaged through what Cygnus assumed were containers. She watched it carefully, intrigued as Vinur emerged with reddish slabs of solid in its grasp. It put them in another box, which glowed for a few moments, and then he retrieved them, pinching the two lightly. It spread its wings and flew towards her, careful not to hit the ceiling, and landed near her. It put one of the reddish slabs on her white, circular plate, and the other one to another plate, which it sat next to.
Cygnus watched it sit in interest. Its forelimbs remained extended, but the hind ones folded so that Vinur's back sloped downwards. Curious. If the organic sat that way, it was possibly more comfortable. Normally, the two main sections of Cygnus's organic form seemed to produce about a half-pi radian angle with each other - more or less - but when she attempted Vinur's method of sitting, her back half sliiiid down to an angle of about five-pi-sixths radians. Being shorter than the organic, she had some trouble viewing the table and her hind limbs almost slipped on the smooth floor thanks to their equally smooth surfaces, but she got herself acclimated and stared at the red slab.
It was fairly irregular in two dimensions, somewhat like the Magellanic Clouds, but its depth was smooth and even. There was some sort of... aroma drifting off of it like stellar wind. Cygnus could feel it triggering something in the beakish protrusion on her face, the one with two holes, and dihydrogen monoxide spilled into her mouth. She lightly touched it with one of her brown hands; it yielded slightly, and Cygnus felt moisture gather on her surface. She drew the hand away and looked at Vinur, unsure as to what she was supposed to do with this new object. Rub it on her face and absorb it through her surface?
It sighed. "You don't really know anything, do you? Okay, watch me." It took the weapons into its grasp and stuck the multi-pronged one perpendicular into the slab, and used the other to separate a small part of the item. Cygnus X-1 paid close attention to the movement Vinur's limbs used, and repeated it. With some difficulty, she cut a small part off of her incredibly smelling blob.
"Good, good. Now, do this." While Cygnus was busy repeating what it said, it took the strip it had cut off and put it in itself. It moved its 'mouth' up and down repeatedly, and then made a strange sound. Cygnus saw something - presumably what it had put in - slide down its throat and seemingly vanish.
Was... that how organics were supposed to eat?
Cygnus grabbed the strip she'd cut off. Despite being only a few degrees hotter, it was warm to the touch. She dropped it into her own mouth and oooh.
What was that? It was incredible. Sensations she didn't know how to describe flooded her awareness, magnified trillions of times to accommodate her vast consciousness. It was joy, it was happiness, it was fulfillment. It seemed to come from a muscle in her mouth that she could move around at will, and Cygnus X-1 felt even more liquid flood into her mouth.
She tried to replicate what Vinur did, and discovered that her mouth housed two sets of hardened structures. She discovered she could cut the 'food' into smaller bits, and spent some time doing that under the organic's full attention. What did she do then? Move it lower? Cygnus pondered how to do that and, once she had a good idea, took a deep breath to get the food down.
Hrk.
The sound of her breathing in cut out as abruptly as it started and a terrible sensation started rising from her core, the same pressure as before. Vinur looked at her curiously, then shouted. "Rotten feathers, you did!" It got out of its seat and moved around to her back, wrapping its forelegs around her.
Fear descended on Cygnus X-1 like a hydrogen cloud. What had she just done? Things felt wrong. Why did they feel wrong?! She'd done exactly what Vinur did so why was she feeling like this? Was this how she was going to die?! She kept trying to get gasses moving in and out of her, that was what she needed to do to alleviate the pressure but it wasn't working!
"Come on, how did this go? Um... this?" it asked. Vinur moved its grasping limbs against the middle of Cygnus's upper body, then pushed against her once, twice, and a third time.
Cygnus X-1 experienced an unpleasant sensation as something inside of her moved up, she felt part of her insides become gaseous for just a moment, and she reflexively spat out something in her mouth. Gasses began moving in her properly, and the pressure faded. Whatever Vinur did, the food she'd eaten came out and landed on the plate, a pile of red mush that didn't look nearly as... desirable as it had before.
Vinur let go and stepped before her, shaking its head. "No," it said, took a deep breath, and repeated the word 'no'. It held up what remained of its own food and repeated the swallowing motion, and said a new word. "Yes."
Yes? So that was the word for positive? Good to know.
A few more motions later, and an up close visual of how organics 'swallowed', Cygnus had a better idea of how to eat as an organic. It was ridiculous, though. Eating, breathing, and communicating through the same hole? That was just a recipe for disaster. Still, she cut another piece from her food, relished in the sensation it sent through her 'tongue', and once it was sufficiently chewed up she carefully swallowed. She felt the wet solid slide down her throat, but no pain came.
After a pause, she decided she'd figured out eating, and methodically finished the rest of her food. At one point Vinur brought her a container holding what appeared to be dihydrogen monoxide, and she 'swallowed' it the same way she had the food. The liquid was cool and rejuvenating as it went down, soothing an ache she didn't realize existed. She finished in about fifty percent more time than her organic host did. After that she stood from where she sat and followed it back to the room with books, whatever they were.
Now that she had some idea as to what the organics' language was like, she could read the inscriptions on the side of the books. High Talon Torekk, Old Tiercel's War, To Serve Equestrians, and a particularly thick one labeled Dictionary of Avian, circa 2495 AD. If only she knew what any of it meant. "Anything in particular you might want to read? Not like you'd know what any of it means..."
Cygnus's grasping limbs moved across the books, and she decided on the thick one, grabbing it with both limbs and pulling it out.
... trying to pull it out. It was too massive for her organic form to move easily. Slowly it started to edge out, but before she could succeed Vinur stepped in, pushed her aside and with seemingly no effort pulled it out in one grasping limb. It motioned for her to follow, and she did, right back into the same room where the winged organic had shown her what she assumed was its kind's language in most basic form.
She wondered why it wanted her there.
It placed the book on the ground, facing up to show its unknowable title to Cygnus X-1. Sitting down, she reached out a limb and felt around.
Interesting. It appeared the book was made of many smaller quadrilaterals, arranged on top of each other and held together by an as-yet unknown mechanism. She gripped the thicker, top layer, and moved it up and over to the side in a circular arc, revealing small symbols on the book's inner surface. Cygnus started flipping through, seeing tiny symbols in bold, with a much larger number of non-bold symbols next to them. The bold ones went in a progression, and there seemed to be an order as to how they were arranged...
A list! she realized. This book was a list of words the organics had. The information it held was invaluable to her; establishing a method of communication with the organics was her highest priority, next to keeping her body intact long enough to return. She began moving through the book, looking at each page once and then moving on.
Vinur made an odd sound. "Are you seriously reading the dictionary? Look, whoever you are, you're not going to learn anything from this. Especially not if you don't actually read any of - forget it. I'll chalk it up to a centaur thing. You just... stay there, I'm going out for a flight. No, can't leave her alone. I'm gonna just, be around I guess and you don't understand a word I'm saying do you?" She looked up at it, then back to the dictionary. "Didn't think so." It left, leaving Cygnus to her memorization.
Astute, Bag, Bite... Cygnus read through them quickly, analyzing what must've been definitions and storing the sequences away in her unfathomable memory. It relieved her to know that despite being some three hundred octillion times less massive, her mind was untouched by her transformation and dislocation. She continued the monotonous movement of flipping rectangular slices over and over again.
Dapper, Dictionary, hmm, that's also in the title of this book. Dumb, Eager... Cygnus did have a problem, of course. Her current knowledge of the organic language was terribly limited, so while she was making short work of the book she anticipated difficulty arranging the symbols into anything meaningful. She expected there would be a cascade; the more terms she knew the more easily she could decipher other terms. And then again, she had multiple samples of Vinur speaking as a base, so she was reasonably confident in her ability to piece together their language
Xenophilia, Xenophobia, Xylophone...
Before too long, Cygnus finished up her scanning and closed the heavy book. Now all she needed to do was arrange it into something like a language. Most of the words and their - presumably - definitions were indecipherable to her, but that wouldn't be the case for much longer...
If. The. Understand. To. The words circled around in her mind, complete with diagrams next to them. Shared words between definitions branched outwards and back together, looping around and around. Hundreds of terms she didn't know about, such as Art, Murder, Government and many others orbited her. She tried to imagine them, and came up with what were no doubt cheap replicas of their true forms. And she had a sneaking suspicion about the power they called magic.
One word in particular perturbed her; grammar. She had some idea of how to construct sentences in the organic's language, Avian, but she wanted perfection and the dictionary was lacking. Cygnus needed to find Vinur and ask him (Him! The organics had genders) to speak to her a great many sentences.
Or maybe Vinur was a her. But she'd randomized it to 'him'.
Cygnus drew herself up onto all four hooves and left the dictionary behind, heading off the explore the area. By which she meant Vinur's house. She looked into the dining room, then into the nearby kitchen. So many terms, all of which came to her as she navigated the hallways. Plates. Dishes. Cerut steak. It took some time to find Vinur, during which she went through the living room, past paintings. She also spotted a window out into the area beyond Vinur's brick house, and found herself staring outside.
Outside of the window, it was dark. The structures built by the griffon-organics didn't interest her, but the sky did. It was so black, but the stars were unfamiliar and the galaxy structure indicated a spiral galaxy. They shimmered and twinkled in the sky, so close she could touch them, talk to them, ask them for help.
But she couldn't. Cygnus X-1 was on her own. She moved on from the window.
She found Vinur sprawled out on a blue bed wrapped up in sheets with his beak puncturing a relatively small hole in the down-filled pillows. She carefully trotted to his side, almost losing her balance several times. She was short compared to the bed, so she had to rear up and put her forehooves on the mattress to comfortably see the organic who had so generously taken her in.
"Vinur," she said, looking at him. He was turned towards her, breathing slower and more evenly than when she last saw him. Both eyes were closed, fascinating eyelids securely hiding them from visible light inspection. What was he doing?
The word sleep came to mind, and it prompted Cygnus to frown, the motion coming instinctively when she was unhappy. She could wake him up, but there had also been mentions of drowsiness and such in the dictionary. She didn't think Vinur had enough mind power to use proper grammar for her to learn right after waking up. She needed another source of grammar.
She found her way back into the living room, to one of the bookshelves. She looked through its selection of literature and decided she'd start at the top. The shelf was too tall for her to reach the highest books, so she reared up and braced her forehooves against it to elevate her upper body and reach just a little higher. Once that was done, she plucked the first book and settled back down.
Cygnus X-1 cracked open 101 Fantastic Recipes for Omnivores and sat down to begin perusing it, flipping through page after page. Once she was done with that, she placed it back and pulled out the next book, and then the next book, and then the next book.
The organic had exactly two hundred fifty seven reachable books across two bookshelves, some thicker than others. Quite a few were too heavy for her feeble organic form to lift, so pulling them out of place was an exhaustive process, and exhaustion was a relatively new experience that she was not taken with. Especially once they were far enough out and crashed to the ground, her form too weak to fight even the planet's pitiful gravity. But despite those problems she kept reading, devouring every word she could get her hands on. Steadily, Cygnus formed a more complete picture of the Avian language.
As the hours passed by and the books she had left dwindled, the ex-star was aware of two things. One, there were quite a few books she was too weak to place back, so she arranged them in a ring around herself. Two, there was a slight prickling sensation behind her eyelids. Was it exhaustion? No, she knew what that was like, and what she felt was different. A lack of sleep, perhaps? Did Cygnus X-1 need sleep at all? After all, she did not look favorably on the idea of spending a third of her time as an organic completely helpless. Still, the sensation accumulated as time went on, quite rapidly in fact, making Cygnus's vision blur and forcing her to occasionally take deep, yawning breaths against her will.
But it didn't accumulate as fast as she could go through the books, and it did nothing to impair her memory directly, or so she hoped. The books, both fiction and nonfiction, gave her a good insight into some things the dictionary hadn't covered, with the most recent of events being the return of the so-called Crystal Empire. She kept reading and reading, and by the time Cygnus finished the two hundred and fifty seventh book her head was lolling in all directions. Her eyes stung and she felt a terrible sensation inside of her that she deemed close to 'nausea'.
Cygnus put back the last book, a fiction book titled 'The Last Seapony' and, when she turned around, tripped over her own hooves and fell to the ground. She breathed out a little heavier, but found herself unwilling to push herself back up.
The feelings that she was almost certain came from a lack of 'sleep' suddenly magnified themselves. She laid on her side and rested her head against the floor. Cygnus X-1 closed her eyes -
***-_***_-***-_***_-***-_***_-***
- and opened them. For a moment Cygnus was startled. Where was she? She felt so unmassive, and HD 226868 was gone and it wasn't dark and her gravity was gone - then she remembered. The sudden, inexplicable transformation. The griffon. Reading through its, his books to gain a firm understanding of his language, the knowledge of which seemed more refined after sleeping. Nearly suffocating herself on meat. Being stranded, all on her own.
Cygnus frowned and made an effort to stand. Her legs were stiff and she had trouble untangling them from where they'd fallen when she fell asleep. While the symptoms from her reading escapade were gone, confirming that it had been a lack of sleep causing them, but now there was a strange lethargy surrounding her thoughts and something in the corner of her eyes. Cygnus lifted her hands and rubbed them, flicking strange gunk away.
As she pulled herself to her hooves, the feelings faded away quickly. She had done it. She knew Avian now, and a fair bit about the world she found herself upon. She could begin finding a way home, but it was a difficult task. There was a great many things she'd need to do, not the least of which was harnessing the greatest magic on the world for herself. Then she needed to design an array that would send her back properly, and do it. All easier said than done, unfortunately. Her organic body may yet have unpleasant surprises.
Cygnus X-1 wandered to a window and looked outside. The sky was that abominable shade of blue that reminded her of where she was, and the yellow star was low on the horizon. Griffons walked and flew around, all in different colors, shapes and sizes, but adhering to a general body structure. She pulled away after a second to take in the scene and looked herself over.
What organic had she become? She'd seen a few illustrations of the 'ponies' and 'zebras' in Vinur's books, and her lower body seemed fairly similar, but her upper body was vastly different, more akin to the 'minotaurs'. Perhaps she was unique? Not out of the question, she was a cosmic being after all. She was also fairly certain that her 'unique pony minotaur organic' body was both hungry and thirsty. Cygnus set off for the kitchen.
Once she was there, she pondered on how to produce the slabs of meat that Vinur had. She spotted the box he had taken them from, so she tried to reach into it. After some investigation, Cygnus found it relied on a latch to open part of itself, which revealed a large amount of 'meat' food and glowing blue markings along the inside. She reached in, surprised when her grasping limb's temperature dropped a few degrees, and that those few degrees were enough to make her feel cold. The word hypothermia sprung to mind, and she was quick with her actions.
She pulled out a single piece of 'Cerut Steak' and carried it to the box that the organic had probably used to warm it. Cygnus X-1 nearly dropped it in the process, but she threw it in and paused to consider how to operate it, or for how long to keep the steak inside.
The definitions she'd read meant that the box before her was almost certainly a microwave oven, which was great insight into its function. Vinur had heated two such slabs at the same time, to a specific temperature, using electromagnetic radiation. Cygnus ran the numbers in her mind, and figured out how long she'd need to heat one slab to that same temperature. She converted the planck time into seconds, put the slab in, and manipulated the dials whose labels she now could understand.
A little over a minute later she pulled out the meat, wincing when it almost burned her hands in addition to how paradoxically heavy it was. She returned to the table - now clear of dishes and utensils - and sat down. A few unhinged drawers later, Cygnus found the knives and forks, so using those she began to eat.
The food felt just as remarkable going down her throat as it had last time. There was, however, the problem that she hadn't paid attention to where the organic had gotten dihydrogen monoxide from for her to drink, so it left her throat feeling painful, thirsty.
While the former black hole pondered how to go about rectifying the problem, she heard something moving behind her. She carefully maneuvered her hooves around to see the organic, Vinur, approaching. One talon was raised to his eyes, rubbing them. "Oh, you're up already?" He yawned. "Early riser, huh? Or maybe I just slept in. Yeah, that's probably it." He sniffed, gave Cygnus a strange look, and meandered past her.
That's one solution, she thought. Cygnus spent a moment searching for the words and calling up the pronunciation. "I require dihydrogen monoxide."
The organic squawked and spread his wings, hitting them against the wall. He tumbled forwards, fell, then turned around to face her with wide eyes. "You what?!"
"Dihydrogen monoxide," she repeated. "If I am not mistaken, you know it as water. I require water, and do not know where you keep it."
"You're talking," he said quietly. "In complete sentences. What the pluck? Yesterday you could barely even say three words, now you're using, I don't know, chemical formulae?"
"I developed a firm grasp of Avian, thanks to your..." She searched briefly for the word. "... hospitality."
"You expect me to believe you learned an entire language." With each phrase, his pupils and irises contracted a little more.
"Yes."
"From scratch."
For a moment Cygnus X-1 was confused, but put together the context of the statement and realized from scratch meant from nothing. "Yes."
"Overnight."
"Yes."
"Why would you think I'd believe that?! How did you just learn an entire language in the time it takes me to sleep in?"
"I read your books."
He raised a brow, coming closer to her. Vinur was taller than her, so she had to look up to maintain eye contact. "Which one?"
"Ones. Plural. Specifically, I read the books I could reach, all two hundred fifty seven of them, plus the dictionary." Vinur's beak opened weakly and a wheezing noise came from the organic's throat. "I require dihydrogen monoxide," she repeated.
"Whoa whoa whoa, back up!" She didn't step backwards. "You expect me to believe that over last night you read over two hundred books, and memorized them so efficiently that you learned Avian from it? That sort of memory just doesn't exist!" He was breathing heavily and quickly.
What? Cygnus X-1 felt an eyebrow raise itself on its own. "You mean to tell me that such easy feats of memory are unheard of on this world?"
He nodded, and started rummaging through shelves that Cygnus couldn't reach, pulling out a large container filled with dihydrogen monoxide, a glass, and poured some into said glass. "Yes, they don't happen. I mean, photographic memory's not, I mean, unheard of, but it's pretty rare, and never on this sort of scale." He held out the water to Cygnus, which she grasped and eagerly drank.
"I see." She put the empty cup on the floor.
Vinur was quiet for a while, staring at her. She returned the stare. "This throws out that theory. Amnesia, I guess?" he muttered, then looked intently at her. "Well anyway thank you for, um, not draining me."
That was odd. "Draining you of what?" she asked curiously. And he thought she had amnesia? Which theory was the one he discarded?
"Nothing!" he shouted, backing up and raising his left talon. "Nothing at all!" He sniffed again. "So you made yourself breakfast?"
"I ate recently," she said. "But what was that about draining?"
Strangely, Vinur's eyes flicked left and right. "Drain... my funds. When I took you in, I thought you were going to cost a lot more to keep safe than you did." Oh. It made sense, given the organics' method of assigning value based on scarcity. But...
"Keep me safe?"
He tapped his talons against the ground. "Well, you know, considering you're a centaur and all that. I mean, eventually I'll have to - "
With him calling her a centaur, Cygnus X-1 got an idea and said, "Stop. If you're going to keep me here, you'll need to know a few things to ease the process and minimize problems."
"Like what?" he asked.
"Let's move somewhere where you'll be comfortable, this may be a long story."
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Hmm. I like this
There is no dark tag so I have hope the comment in the summary where she'll kill anyone in her way won't happen. Or at least be silly.
"Organs she didn't know the purpose of fluctuated in ways she wasn't sure but was fairly certain that weren't normal."
Hm. Perhaps "Organs she didn't know the purpose of fluctuated in ways that she wasn't sure but was fairly certain weren't normal."?
I am curious about these Lords and Ladies... I tried researching who named HDE 226868, but I didn't find it.
They have microwaves? Interesting. It sounds like the cold box was magical, though.
"Cygnus find the "
found
Aw, and the chapter ends...
pretty good so far it has a interesting idea original plotline and is very well executed
keep up the good work you've got me very interested 
Wait, the what? Stars have nobility?
A very unique read. Don't think I've come across anything quite like on this site. Very intriguing ideas. I look forward to the continuation of Cygnus X-1's adventures as an organic meatbag.
In terms of stars the oldest we know HD 140283 aka the Methuselah star is a sub-giant with an estimated age of 14.46 billion years. That might raise an eyebrow or two for those of you who remember that the age of the universe is estimated as 13.77 billion years with an uncertainty of 800 million years. It is also estimated to be a second generation star, forming from the remnants of the very first generation of stars. It is also 190.1 light years away away from Sol.
Well now. This is different.
...
Keep going.
Well, she learned fast.
Organic meatbag.
Typo there.
I'd argue that her transformation broke those laws in the first place...
As good an estimation as any.
Sol wasn't very detailed, was he. Well, he's an asshole anyway.
She recognizes that it does a few paragraphs back, so that's a slight inconsistency, for her to suddenly express surprise.
Hm... So it's probably French.
Or, well, close to it. Can't recall a language with a "Krat" in it. Sounds Slavic for all I know.
So... more German then. Slavic languages are normally over thirty, and French is twenty-eight. German is thirty, from what I recall.
Might have a word there.
Tense thing here.
Now I'm hungry.
I wonder if instant memory is a centaur thing, or a planet-turned-organic thing. It's useful in any case. I wonder if any of these definitions matter to her if she doesn't know the words...
I just like that part, is all.
Never took Vinur for a literary griffon, huh.
Damn, girl.
After Tirek's own heart, I guess. Actually, now that I think of it, something coursing through the galaxy and eating away planets' powers... and then Cygnus is a centaur... huuuuh.
Here's hoping that we are availed the details of the, uh, opposite urges.
Math being useful. Now I saw everything.
Faceappropriatelimb.
I like where Cygnus is going, for one... She's a much better iE character than most I've seen (or made).
Everyone else entretainment: *Monkeys figthing*
Me: Living Black Hole learning to eat.