Welcome to the first installment of the Hybrid Children trilogy!

Author's Notes: And now for a little touch of the familiar, with a twist. After reading quite a few fics that start off in the prison, I decided to do my own version. Shyra here has quite the backstory, right?

Shyra: ...

Wild Cat 214: C'mon, Shyra! Say something for the nice readers!

Shyra: ...Why are you doing this to me?

Wild Cat 214: Um... let me get back to you on that.

What sort of backstory? A very twisted one, that's for sure. One that even I am trying to figure out while I write. But then again, that's what I'm doing half the time. Yup, I'm just weaving a tangled web of connections, coincidences, and characters.

Disclaimer: Just the OC's and my twists, people. Nothing else is mine.

"Few understand the ingenuity and strength of the Gryphus, that old race living in the desert known simply as the Wasteland. Even fewer realize that the city on the ground was merely one of their homes, the place they went when their mountaintop homes became too cold in the winter. But what many know is this: Gryphus society highly valued all children, even those born under questionable circumstances..." -Xavier Lang, author of Gryphus: The Truth About That Ancient Race

Eight years ago...

The excavators in the desert hadn't expected such a great find. A perfectly preserved the stasis sphere, not even scratched by centuries in the center of an abandoned city. And if the display on the outside was any indicator, the person inside was still alive. Few in their group could read the ancient Precursor dialect on the display, but those who could realized this was the discovery of a lifetime. From the readings on the screen, they could see that the being inside was female, approximately nine years old, and was the last known member of the Gryphus.

Dr. Emily Reed had always adored the legends of the Gryphus, most beloved of the Precursors' children. Shapeshifters, they could transform into mighty gryphons and back without dealing any damage to their own bodies, using a lost form of magic. She knew the proper term for them was therianthropes, unlike lycanthropes, because their transformations were based on genetics, not a virus or disease that fought against their being. And now, she had the chance to actually speak to one in person. Inside, she was as excited as a five-year-old on their birthday. Outside, she was a calm, collected historian and scientist, mildly interested in the discovery. Naturally, since she was the expert on the Gryphus, Reed would be the one to speak to the girl inside.

Swallowing back her nervous excitement, she input the old code that would open the sphere. With a hiss of steam and the creak of metal that needed oiling, it broke up into several slices of equally sized metal and slid apart, folding back into a curved chunk of gleaming layered metal. The coppery color shone, giving everything a faintly golden-brown tone, and a ball of soft padding and wires fell to the sand. It split in half to reveal the strangest sight Reed had seen in her twenty-five years.

The girl had short, fluffy silver hair, a soft green dress made of what looked like cactus fibers, and dark silver, organic designs on her arms, legs, neck, and face. That alone would have stopped them in their tracks, but there was more. Instead of the usual long ears, she had feathered cat ears of the same color as her hair, with smoky stripes on them. Wings sprouted from her back, with gunmetal gray plates of metal on the front edges, just like on the first joint of each finger where her nails should have been. A tail curled around her, silver tabby fur with small plates of metal running across the top to the feathered tip. She was definitely not human, but one of the Gryphus of yore.

Reed nearly squealed with delight, but managed to hold herself back. Instead, she knelt down and picked up the girl. The only sign that she was alive was the faint movement of her chest and the rapid heartbeat the scientist could feel against her arm, which gently cradled the wings from below. She looked at her with both interest and warmth. Reed had never found the man of her dreams, instead devoting her life to the Gryphus, and so she felt a flicker of maternal love toward this child. With no Gryphus around to take care of her, how would she be able to grow up properly? Perhaps, if the king was okay with it, she could raise the little fledgling as the daughter she never had...

"Reed, is she alive?" her close friend Beverly asked. The woman looked up from her charge and smiled brightly.

"Yes, Bev. She's alive. Poor thing probably doesn't know what happened here," she replied a bit sadly, gazing around at the ruined city about them. No Marauders dared drive near it or attack anyone inside, mostly because of their belief that the Gryphus had been gods, but there was still the problem of Metal Heads. No matter. With King Damas on the throne and his wife beside him, the war would be over soon. Queen Verity had recently announced that she was pregnant, so an heir was sure to be on the way. For the first time in decades, things seemed to be looking up for Haven City and its people.

"Well, let's get back to Haven. I'd say we've found ample evidence that the Gryphus existed, and that this was their city. First with the pottery, then with the scraps of cloth in that basement, and now this girl, this is all we need to prove that we weren't the only children of the Precursors," Beverly's boyfriend, Miles, said smugly. The rest all murmured their agreement, and slowly they began to pack up their equipment and artifacts. Reed would have joined in, but Bev put a hand on her shoulder.

"Hey, you handle the fledgling. We'll take care of the heavy lifting," she said warmly, grinning at Emily. The other woman smiled back and started walking toward their transport, girl in her arms snugly. She set her down in a seat near the front, then remembered that Gryphus children needed to be kept warm, like eggs, or else they could get sick and die, so she wrapped a blanket around the girl. The air conditioning in the excavator's ship was just chill enough to make goosebumps rise on her arms as she watched the girl sleep, eyes flickering underneath their lids.

But at the same time, a chill passed over her. There was something about this girl that seemed... off, somehow. Reed couldn't put her finger on it, no matter how hard she tried. Was it the feline, predatory aspect to her face that threw her off, or perhaps the inhuman ears? Either way, she knew that there was something different about her from what she had heard about the Gryphus. And Dr. Emily Reed, with her PhD in Ancient Culture, knew that she would find out someday.

Author's Notes: So, I first got the idea to write this a couple years ago, I think, and I just wanted to do this. I've got big plans in store, you know. Bigger than you could possibly conceive. Yes, you can try and guess what I'm scheming, but I doubt you will figure it out. That's not me being pretentious, but because I have a crazy mind! Muahahahaha!

As always, review please!

Wild Cat 214, flying out!