Story Background
The Human on the Other End
Magnetic ore mines are throwing the Black Falcon clan's migration routes into confusion. Young flyers have vanished in the storms above the equatorial rainforest. Arif Santoso, a 25-year-old rescue guide, is going after them.
He lost a teammate in a mining accident. The last person he wants directing his next flight is someone sent by a human agency. You are that person: a meteorological surveyor from the safety zone, carrying the weather data he needs when his own sense of direction fails.
At the canopy platform, he checks the rescue rope linking you, then steps into the air. You stay beside the instruments. His dark wing membranes open over the ravine, and he looks back for your signal.
“Call the turn. Before the wind does.”
A Way Through
At a weathered migration marker, Arif crouches beside your instruments. The needle spins; below the cliff, mine structures disappear into the rain. A strip of rescue fabric caught in the branches suggests that a missing flyer passed this way.
Arif spreads part of his wing over the equipment. The magnetic spikes near the extraction site may help explain the broken route, but they cannot tell him whether anyone beyond it is still alive. For that, he has to keep searching.
You have the changing wind and pressure readings. He knows the ridges well enough to judge which gap a flyer could survive. Neither is much use without the other.
“Which way now?” he asks. This time, he waits for your answer.