Air flowing through his feathers. The distant smells of exhaust and smog drifting from below him. As Jalen glided high over Illinois, he couldn't help but feel elated. He was supposed to be scouting the area for anything that could "benefit" his employers, and of course, he was doing that. He wasn't paying much attention to his task, but he was still doing it.

Barely.

As he approached the sky over Chicago, he made sure to flap his large wings to gain more altitude. He wouldn't have normally done this, but he'd been ordered to do so by his superiors. Chicago was the location of a Youkai Organization base, and they didn't want him attracting unwanted attention.

Jalen snorted a little while he scanned the distant surface. Unwanted attention? It's like they WANT to stop me from having fun. he thought to himself. At his normal flying height people would just think he was a turkey vulture! A really large one, and not really the right colors, but people didn't usually care much about that. But no. He had to fly so high the smells of the collective humanity below all blended together...how was he supposed to do anything this high?

Wait. What was that? Jalen dipped as much as he could without breaking his orders, and tried to narrow down the odd smell. As he looked down the sidewalk below, he could see a young looking Chinese woman slinking down a set of stairs. As he focused on the scene below, he realized the odd smell was coming from the building she was standing in front of...more accurately, it was coming from her.

Jalen circled down to a building across the street and landed on the roof. He normally wouldn't be allowed to, but he had orders to investigate anything odd no matter the danger...on the condition he was "subtle.". If that meant he had to break his temporary orders to stay at a certain altitude, so be it.

Jalen changed his form to his human shape, feeling his wings shrink and condense into arms, and he could see the world glow more dim as his eyes turned to pitiful human orbs. Brushing his black hair to the side, he sighed. It wasn't ideal, but it would be easier to investigate if he wasn't in his monsterous form.

As he walked through the door opening to the roof of the skyscraper he could see a baffled security guard looking at him. Grinning devilishly, he clicked the button for the elevator. Something was going down at the building across the street, and he wanted to find out what it was.