"Sure," the man said, and suddenly there were blurry little feathers of gold light shimmering around him. They multiplied, and quite abruptly the man no longer looked human at all. A tan-colored deer sat, strangely contorted into the same very human sitting position the man had been, with his hooves tucked underneath him and the pink light falling across his muzzle and antlers and the mask-like stripes around his eyes. Where there might have been forelegs, however, there were wings instead, with a pair of claws that emerged from the wrist. He had not even dropped his cigarette--it was still pinched, smoldering away, between his claws.

"I'm not exactly made for distance flying," the peryton continued, seeming less blithe now, and talking mostly to himself, "but maybe I should give it a shot anyway. What've I got to lose?"

Hawk stared for a long moment at this change, taken aback. "Oh, yeah," he mumbled, and then pressed the heels of his palms over his eyes, the very smallest of embarrassed smiles overtaking him.

"You're smart to get a move on," the peryton told him. "This place is a death trap. I can't decide if I'm better off being outside..."

As he said this, and as Hawk pressed down on his eyelids, the rain came rushing back--he was lying flat  on his back, water streaming down from a slate sky. The blurry, speckly image of a barn owl came into view above him. Its eyes were voids.

The sight propelled him up off the pillow, and the peryton obligingly shifted to let him pull his wing to him.

"You ain't wrong," he said, scrambling off the bed. The peryton watched him do this hesitantly.

"Oh, uh," he said, "are you going?"

Hawk was already putting his pants back on and grabbing up his shoes. "Yeah, I--" he paused. "I think I'm givin' up too easy."

He started to go for the door, but then glanced back at the peryton rather self-consciously. "Uh...th-thanks."

The peryton returned his awkward smile. "Same?"

Hawk opened the door then to a brightly-lit hallway, and immediately stopped, coming face to face with the buffalo-headed man he'd passed earlier. The man was stooped down and had been about to put his keycard to the room in the door when Hawk had opened it, and he looked equally as surprised as Hawk. From here it was especially apparent how huge the buffalo man was--he quite literally dwarfed Hawk, who was already nearly too tall for the door frame, and his massive freckly arms were bigger around than Hawk's torso.