Chapter 6 – The Flight of Many Colors

After cleaning up Ambi's blood, Beatrice stepped into a nearby bathroom and asked Ambi a few more questions. It was there where she learned Ambi's real name.

 "I suppose you know enough now that if you knew who I was already, there'd be no point in hiding my name from you. And given that you were willing to clean up my blood, I trust you. My name is Princess Ambi – though since we're sharing the same body, you don't have to use the honorific," Ambi said. Ambi had meant this as a gesture of goodwill, and it definitely seemed to work to increase their mutual trust.

 "Oh! 'Ambi.' That's a beautiful name!" Beatrice responded. She was taken aback that Ambi had already entrusted her with her true name after having introduced herself with an alias only a half hour prior. That must have been very difficult, and she was glad that Ambi was starting to trust her. Trust was the foundation of any relationship, and if they were going to be sharing a body, then they needed to have a good relationship. And the one sharing her body was a princess, no less!

 "Wait, if you're a princess and we're in the same body… gasp! Does that make me a princess too?" Beatrice squealed, watching her reflection in the mirror playfully put its hand over its mouth in faux shock.

 "Well… no?" Ambi replied, confused by Beatrice's weird behavior all of a sudden. "I'm a princess and you're a human woman who's sharing a body with me."

 "But since you're a princess and you're in this body which has your features, that makes this body a princess's body, right?" Beatrice asked.

 "Yeah… I guess that makes sense, I suppose. Since this body is, 'me,' so to speak, then I guess that makes it-" Ambi tried to reply before Beatrice interrupted her.

 "So then if I'm in a princess's body, then that makes me a princess too! I can't believe it!" Beatrice squealed with a huge grin on her face as she jumped up and down in excitement.

 "You can't be serious," Ambi sighed.

 "As a heart attack!" Beatrice replied energetically. She could tell that Ambi was slightly uncomfortable with this conversation, so she continued to mess with her. "Ahh, it has such a nice ring to it, princess B-, wait, I never told you my name, did I?" Beatrice asked, suddenly realizing that Ambi still didn't know who she was.

"No, actually, I was just about to ask you that before you started saying such weird things. What are you doing?" Ambi asked.

Beatrice ignored her question. "Hmmm… since your alias was 'Am,' before you told me your name, I suppose you can just call me, 'Bea!'" she exclaimed, once again grinning ridiculously.

"…Is that some kind of joke? I don't understand. Is that a reference to me being a bee or the last part of my name?" Ambi asked.

"Gasp! Oh my God, that's even funnier! So your name is literally, 'I-am-bee!' Haha!" Beatrice laughed.

"…okay, that's not funny," Ambi said, embarrassed not by Beatrice's statement, but by her own body's behavior that she was being forced to watch from the sidelines.

"Haaa…" Beatrice exhaled. "Sorry, I was just teasing you a bit. My name's Beatrice. Beatrice Lillianquist."

 Now that introductions were out of the way, Beatrice needed to get back home and Ambi needed to be someplace safe from attack, and Beatrice's home seemed to be the best option. Beatrice was a little concerned about being seen as she was on the way back home, and even more so after she looked in the bathroom mirror and noticed her new wings. Because her shirt was cramping her wings, Ambi made her take it off… which she did hesitantly.

 "I can't go outside without something to cover my chest! Women can't go outside shirtless! It's… it's not decent!" Beatrice had exclaimed.

"When I was in my original body, my thorax was completely covered with thick, brown fur. I think the same is true of ours. Judging by how constricted our chest feels, I'm fairly certain there's quite a bit of hair between your clothes and what you're worried about. I'm pretty sure nobody would be able to see anything. In fact, judging by the things your kind cover themselves with, most people might even think it's just clothing," Ambi mused.

"Are you sure?" She had to verify if what the voice inside her head told her was true. She looked down and noticed that a rather thick patch of brown hair was indeed sticking out from the neck of her shirt. It looked like there was so much that the shirt was actually struggling to hold it in despite how much bigger than her the shirt now was. Reaching her arms into her shirt, she slowly took it off before examining her new body hair. She put her hand on her chest and was shocked at how thick the hair was. She couldn't see anything through it, and she almost felt inclined to stroke it due to how soft it was. It was so weird seeing that much hair where previously there had been none. It was, in a way, mesmerizing.

"What are you doing?" the voice in her head suddenly chimed.

"Aaah! Wha- oh!" Beatrice responded, looking down and realizing what she was doing. Swiftly pulling her hand off her chest and standing stiff as a board as though she had been caught doing something weird, her cheeks turned bright red – well, as red as your cheeks can turn when they're yellow.

"Uhh… nothing!" she exclaimed, shaking her head. "I… uh… I'm not used to having hair right there. It kind of reminded me of my childhood cat!"

 She put her shirt in her purse and took her shoes off, which oddly didn't seem to fit her feet anymore, and tied them to her purse. They looked weird dangling from the purse the way they were, but what else was she to do?

 Slowly opening the door, she peeked out into the garden to verify that nobody was around to see her do what she was about to do. Seeing that nobody was nearby, she walked out into the garden before promptly putting her arms over her stomach.

"Geez… I'm not used to feeling a breeze right there…" she muttered.

"You ready for me to take over for a bit?" Ambi asked.

"Sigh… sure, go ahead. But what do I need to do for you to- whoa!" Beatrice asked before Ambi cut her off mid-sentence and took control of her body. Almost immediately, Beatrice – or, rather, Ambi – fell to the floor and hit her elbow on the concrete.

"Oww… what the fuck, Ambi? That fucking hurt! Why can I feel that when I'm not even the one in control of what I'm doing!?" Beatrice exclaimed, although her body's lips didn't move to speak the words she just tried to say.

Ambi grunted, her lips pursed tight from embarrassment and frustration. She suddenly shrunk herself and began crawling on all fours to orient herself toward the direction she intended to fly in.

It felt like her entire body was being compressed, and her vision blurred as everything around her got bigger in an instant. When the sensation stopped, Ambi moved her head around and Beatrice could see just how much bigger everything was. The feeling made her dizzy. She was now somewhere between an inch and two inches tall, though being on her hands and knees made her feel even smaller than that. Looking around her, she could see that the stone brick she was on now seemed to her to be about the size of the floor of the entire bathroom she was in earlier from her perspective. And that bathroom… the door alone looked like a skyscraper, and the building itself would take her several minutes to run to the end of. It almost made her dizzy just looking at it.

"Whoa… man, that's disorienting. I feel… squeezed. Is that the right word? Ugh, this is so weird…" Beatrice said, mentally.

"Hmmmmnnnnaaaaa," Ambi said before quickly closing her mouth. Beatrice couldn't hear her thoughts right now, but if she could then she'd know that Ambi had never used a tongue and vocal cords to communicate before and was feeling quite angry due to none of her body parts working the way she remembered them doing. She then spread her wings and tried to see if she could use them as well as she could when she was in a more familiar body.

"This body is so weird," she thought. "How am I supposed to stay balanced when I only have two legs? And how in the name of Earth is this speaking function supposed to work? It was so much easier when I could just use my antennae to communicate my thoughts!"

Suddenly, she could feel that her arms and legs were no longer on the ground. At the same time, an intense gust of wind kicked up beneath her.

"Well, at least one thing still works the way I remember it," she thought.

She then flew higher and looked down at the garden beneath her. It looked quite beautiful from this height, and for a brief moment Ambi almost forgot about how she embarrassingly failed to control her own body moments prior.

Beatrice couldn't believe what it felt like to fly. It was amazing! The world which once felt so big to her now felt so much smaller than her as she soared fifty feet above the ground. The wind rushed past her ears

Before taking off, Beatrice had taken her sunglasses off and put them in her purse. She hadn't wanted to since every time she had taken them off since she became one with Ambi, everything became super bright and she feared she'd get a headache if she took them off for too long. It wasn't just the normal brightening one experiences every time they take their sunglasses off, either. Everything around her would… change. She didn't know how to explain it other than that it was like putting a strange-colored filter over a picture and turning the brightness up by 20%. She couldn't put her finger on what color that filter was, though. For some reason, she just couldn't identify it. The fact was that she just needed her sunglasses if she wanted to see things the way she was used to seeing them. Still, it didn't take a genius to figure out that this was likely how Ambi was accustomed to seeing the world and out of courtesy for her strange new friend, she took off her sunglasses so that Ambi could see things the way she was used to while flying.

Now, however, she was starting to fully understand the extent of just how different Ambi's vision was from hers. For one, she could see everything much more acutely than before even though she was moving 100 feet off the ground. Normally, finer details would be much harder to make out at that range and moving objects would appear to blur with their surroundings. Now, however, she could see each individual detail of everything beneath her, from which condiments a pedestrian had on his hotdog to the lines between slabs of cement on the sidewalk. And it was all so… clear! It was like she was somehow watching slow-motion footage captured from a high-speed camera at normal speed without any loss of visual detail. She was even noticing things she had never noticed before, like the beautiful colors of car's windshields… wait, what!? Since when did windshields have color!?

Actually, several other things that were different colors than she remembered. Apart from the strange-colored filter over her eyesight, she began noticing very odd colors where no color should have been previously. For one, she could see thin strings of odd color throughout the road beneath her, and the strings of color seemed to enlarge near intersections. People's clothes and sunglasses especially looked completely different, too. And things that reflected the sun back into her eyes like the roofs of cars seemed to have completely changed color altogether! That wasn't even the weirdest thing she had noticed, either! As she flew, Ambi turned her head toward a strange bird perched on the roof of a building. Beatrice had never seen such a beautiful bird in her entire life, and her new eyes allowed her to see the fine details on each and every one of its wonderful feathers. It looked to be in the shape of a crow or a magpie, but the glistening, colorful patterns dotting its feathers made it almost resemble a miniature peacock. Its feathers shone a myriad of beautiful colors she couldn't identify, each one glowing dazzlingly in the soft, bright sunlight. Come to think of it, had she ever even seen colors like that before? Wait… now that she thought about it, everything she had seen before that either was a different color or which now had color that it didn't originally have was some kind of color she had never seen before. And the less initially colorful the object was, the more colorful it was now and the stranger the colors were. At least the clothes that had changed color still somewhat resembled colors she was familiar with – but then there were things like windshields and that bird which were all kinds of colors she couldn't even recognize. And some of them even seemed to glow, too!

"Whoa…" she muttered (mentally). She couldn't resist doing so; she had never seen the world like this before. She was completely awestruck – it was completely unreal, it had to be. There's no way any of this could be real. Even the SKY looked different – still kind of blue, but there was definitely some weird tint to it. She could feel the wind whistling across her bare stomach, her hair being thrown every which way by her wings, her eyes watering from the wind crashing into her face as she soared through the sky. There was only one way she could even think to describe the experience.

"Am- am I having an acid trip!?" she heard her perplexed voice ring out in her mind.