Cassiopeia woke to a bright light in her eyes, which withdrew as soon as she sat up. She was groggy with a tension headache beginning to tighten in her temples, and she needed to pee again, but that wasn't surprising. She'd been prone to stress-related fainting since she was a teenager, and had dealt with those symptoms before.
"Cassiopeia?" said an unfamiliar voice. "How do you feel?"
Cassiopeia looked up. She was in Mayra's living room, and her eyes found the figure of a squat human woman in her mid-fifties, wearing a blue nurse's uniform underneath a long jacket covered in pockets. The nurse had Cassiopeia's wrist in one of her hands, taking her pulse, and the penlight in the other. Mayra stood behind the nurse, looking concerned.
After a quick, intense round of questioning the nurse concluded that Cassiopeia didn't have heat stroke and that she should visit the nurse's station in the town below for some tests.
"Come by any time, we're never busy in this backwater," said the nurse, jotting down the nurse station's information on a spare notebook page before departing. Mayra escorted the nurse to the front door, thanking her profusely for coming on such short notice. The sky outside was dimming, which meant she'd been out for several hours.
The front door shut downstairs, and Mayra came back up. She stopped in the doorway and stared at Cassiopeia for a long moment. Cassiopeia pressed her legs together: she would be desperate to empty her bladder soon, but remembered that she'd gotten caught peeing on Mayra's property. Mayra owned and ran the sprawling airship docking yard where Cassiopeia had been working for only the past two weeks. It wasn't the quickest she'd ever lost a job, she thought dourly, but it was the one she'd most regret losing.
"I'm so sorry, Miss May," Cassiopeia blurted out suddenly. It occurred to her that she didn't have an excuse other than "I didn't think you'd catch me" and she felt her face redden.
"There's nothing to be sorry for, Cassie. It's not your fault that girl got into the yard," replied Mayra. She looked tired; her blue and tan feathered wings were slightly scruffy, and her dusky blue hair was slowly escaping her high bun. "Would you like anything? A glass of water? Some food?"
Before Cassiopeia could ask, Mayra had poured her a glass of water from the kitchen sink. Cassiopeia accepted it almost without thinking and drank the whole thing in two gulps. It made her need to pee even more, but also cleared her head a little and slightly dulled the post-fainting headache she had coming on. Twisting as she pressed her legs together harder, she thanked Mayra for the water and said, "That...girl?"
"Sreersha or whatever her name was," said Mayra.
Cassiopeia's brain was fuzzy, but after a few seconds it came back to her. "The one with the cat ears?"
"Yes," replied Mayra, her wings puffing out slightly. "What did she do to you? Did she hurt you? Did she give you drugs?!"
"...No? I just walked her to your workshop," said Cassiopeia. She stifled a yawn at the cost of a small, warm leak between her legs. She couldn't press her legs together any harder, and just barely managed to stop it.