Hellsborough Exposed

flatface feathers carry a fringe structure that kills the air-noise of a wingbeat, so the first you know of the strike is the talons already closing on your head and shoulders. The face itself is a wide dish built to gather sound the way a satellite receiver does, and a flatface holds its patch by voice alone — I've heard two argue a boundary for the better part of an hour without a blow landed, purely on who could out-hoot the other. They go for anything pale moving against a dark background, which makes a lit psycmask readout after dark a beacon that reads as "aim here".

Read some off-world research while I was away that ties air pollution — wildfire smoke especially — to depression and anxiety. Got me thinking about the murk, and everything in it we can't name, and the general mania of Hellsborough and everyone living under it. My empirical position, for what a field researcher's hunch is worth: there's something to that.