As he became accustomed to his new wings, Bryan left the discarded bottle and had fun swooping like a hawk and soaring like an eagle, although his acrobatics were confined to Mr. Peace's cattle barn. His high-flying antics came with a price, however, and as he burned through his energy reserves, the feeling of hunger he had noticed earlier intensified.
It felt like someone had flipped a switch, and Bryan felt barely able to keep his wings buzzing to keep him aloft. He made a spiraling flight down from the loftier regions of the barn and landed on a bale of hay shoved against one of the walls. He extended his mouthparts, tasting the hay and finding it utterly unappealing and lacking in any sort of nutritional benefit for his tiny fly form.
"There's nothing in here a fly could eat," Bryan reasoned. He rested for a brief interval and forced himself back into flight and zipped out the cavernous barn door into the wider barnyard and the pasture fields beyond.
A stiff breeze made flight difficult for the exhausted, depleted insect. As he struggled, Bryan's shrewd fly senses detected a strong smell that excited the instincts of the insect and diverted Bryan from his path. Too tired to resist, Bryan let his bluebottle fly body go into auto-pilot. The fly skirted across the grass growing on the other side of the fenced pasture and circled a vast, dark oval that proved the source of the pungent smell. Other flies swarmed over the deposit that had been left amongst the close-cropped grasses in the pasture.
"Ugh!" Bryan thought even as his six tiny insect limbs landed atop the crusted surface of the vast cow plop. Other hideous flies, looking like mirror images of Bryan's new form, swarmed over and crowded onto the manure deposit. "I can't eat that!"
He watched the other flies used their mouthparts to feast on the manure. Some of them softened the crust with digestive enzymes regurgitated on the surface of the enormous cow patty before they sucked up the sludge through their proboscis.
Bryan felt sick, but he could not exert his will on the fly's body. His energy reserves were dangerously depleted, and the insect's instincts would not let it abandon such a rich source of nutrients. He felt like a helpless witness as his mouthparts began to suck up a slurry of the huge manure deposit.
After a hearty helping, the fly replenished its energy reserves and Bryan tried to use his brain to tap into control of the body, commanding it to fly again. He had decided he needed to get to Mr. Peace's home and let the man restore him, even if it was to bovine form. Anything was better than being a filthy insect that he had become.
His insect half, it appeared, had other ideas and wasn't yet ready to abandon the cow patty. Bryan buzzed his wings in frustration, but the fly's instincts proved superior to his human reasons.
While fly mind waged a battle for control with Bryan's human mind...