1 A Lonesome Dove

Jurishen couldn't believe he could've been trapped in this exercise in the form of a bird. Of all the creatures he could have become, why was he to be subjected to test as a flighty bird brain?

Once Jurishen had come of age... he had been tested by the lore of Kurine. On this far fetched adventure, he'd already taken flight, of course, but here in Antizat, he had learned under tutors and become proficient. Why had the exercise taken this path? He slowly cooed and preened his feathers. Then he stretched his wings and took flight....going a short distance....to a nearby tree. As he landed on the welcoming branch seemingly stretched out in greeting by the old oak... he took stock of his situation.

Jurishen was only 17 when he began to be tested for fitness of both mind and body, for a top secret project, his Mother had told him.

As he closed his thoughts to his past, he became more aware of his current surroundings. Once Juri had been a cat, and before that a monkey and a prairie dog. He wasn't very fond of THIS form.

But as he'd become more aware, he had noticed this old tree seemed to be "alive" with a strange heat pulsing from it in a way that could only be described as a heat heartbeat. as he moved from branch to branch, he smoothed his feathers and cocked his head to one side, and looked closer....

YES! It was something he hadn't perceived immediately and couldn't quite fathom. there almost seemed to be a strange pixelation in the

air, but the harder he tried to focus on it, the blurrier it seemed to appear. In all his previous exercises in this mindwarper he never saw a quite pronounced shimmer anything like it before.

Juri guided his small body toward the shimmer and became tranfixed, sucked into the portal, if that is what it could be called, now he was tumbling through space in a directionless free fall to seemingly nowhere. His vision became blurred and he soon passed out.