It had been a while since he’d last had a dream. Most nights he slept quietly, falling into a dreamless slumber from which he would eventually be roused by the morning sun.
Nevertheless, this night, a dream he did indeed see. In terms of its contents, it wasn’t a particularly unusual or remarkable dream by any means - one which many of us have probably had at least once in our lives.
He was falling. Plummeting ever downwards through the clouds, air rushing past him, as he continued to make his way ever closer to the ground below at a terrifying speed.
Terrifying? On reflection, perhaps not. Indeed, if there was one thing to note as being unusual about the dream, it was that he felt no fear whatsoever, despite a painful impact with the earth underneath him being all but inevitable. He simply regarded things with an calm and measured manner,as he almost seemed to enjoy his situation.
The ground was nearly there now, he closed his eyes awaiting impact, but instead of a thunderous crash into the dirt, he felt a strange yanking as his sudden descent ceased. Something had grabbed a hold of him at the last second, and held him aloft.
He craned his head upwards to look at what had grabbed him, and just as it seemed like he could make out the features of his ambiguous savior…
He woke up.
By the time Chris had showered and brushed his teeth, the dream had largely faded from memory, as dreams are wont to do.
He had heard some people keep dream journals, to preserve their dreams in writing before they manage to forget them entirely. Chris himself didn’t care much for the prospect. It seemed like waste of time. And time, was always in short supply in his life.
Chris was a farmer, not so much by any thought out career choice on his part, but simply because that’s what men of his family had always did. Sure, his younger brothers had left their hometown as soon as they could and never looked back, but as the eldest son of the Meyer family, it was his duty to take care of the family farm, just as his father had, and his father before him, and so on, and so on.
Going over the day’s tasks in his head, he suddenly remembered that he would need to put out rat traps in the attic. He’d been hearing scratching coming from there for a week now, and the last thing he needed was a rat infestation. With that decided, he made his way outside to his pickup, and drove into town to buy some rat traps, heck, maybe a little rat poison would be good to have as well, just in case.
On his way into the small town, on the outskirts of which he lived in, Chris noticed numerous pastel coloured creatures littering the sidewalks, pestering passersby for food and shelter. Indeed, even a town on the ass end of nowhere like his, wasn’t free of the creatures.
For his part, Chris cared little of them, sure he wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt them, but he sure as hell wouldn’t bother helping them either. His time was limited enough without having a creepy talking horse-thing to feed and house. The most he ever interacted with them was kicking if they were in his way, or tossing them a half eaten sandwich he didn’t like the taste of.
Luckily it seemed that the cold November weather had made the creatures more lethargic, as none bothered him on his visit into town. Small blessings. On his way back to the farm, he saw a grocery store worker chase away a pack of fluffies from digging in the store’s trash for food.
Having arrived home, Chris wasted no time in setting out traps in the attic. As he opened the door that lead upstairs into the attic, he noticed something. Lying just in front of the attic window, he saw a creature lying there.
At first he thought it was a cat, but upon closer inspection the damn thing was definitely no normal animal. It certainly had the hind legs of a cat, but instead of a normal, slim tail the creature had a tail more closely resembling the tail of a lion or some other large feline, with a large tuft of fur at the end of it.
The front legs were even further removed from conventional feline anatomy, as instead of furry paws, it had a pair of scaled talons, like those of a bird of prey.
Moving his gaze upwards, Chris’s confusion only mounted, as a large pair of wings extended from the creature’s back, near its shoulders. The wings were sloppily spread out, as though the animal had landed there and simply collapsed on the spot.
Finally, it’s head was a strange mishmash of feline, and avian features, as while it’s general facial structure was catlike, instead of a normal snout and mouth the thing had a beak.
Chris racked his brain trying to figure out just what the hell kind of mutant had made its way into his attic, when he suddenly recalled a half-remembered conversation with one of his cousins from Germany. He remembered something about a German biotech firm having plans on making their own entry into the bio-engineered pet market that had been established by Hasbio Inc. years earlier. Something about griffins.
Shit.
What in the hell was a German laboratory experiment doing in the attic of his rural Minnesotan farmhouse, and more importantly, what the hell was he supposed to do with its corpse?
If it was any ordinary animal, he’d have buried it in the woods out back, but this thing was either an escaped specimen, or some rich guy’s exotic pet. Either way, not something he could just throw away and be done with.
For the time being, Chris decided to get the cadaver out of his attic, and put in the large freezer he kept in his garage. He’d originally gotten it for preserving meat from hunting trips, but he’d been so busy just maintaining things around the farm that it had been sitting empty the entire time he’d had it.
As Chris hauled the body into a large garbage bag, he noticed something where the “griffin”, had been sprawled on top of. It was a damn nest, made out of straw and sticks like a bird’s.
And in the middle of that nest, he noticed something much more alarming.
An egg.
‘Well shit’, thought Chris.
This is the first part of a longer series I’ve been working on lately, and it’s a first in many ways, as it’s going to be a foray into a species other than baseline fluffies and also my first attempt at more hugbox oriented content. Not that much happened in this first chapter, but things will definitely be kicking off properly in the second.
