The two ghastly human behemoths might have found a mere insect beneath their notice, but the same couldn't be said for the mother song sparrow taking a break from her brood of noisy nestlings to gather them some tasty morsels. The sparrow's earlier attempt to catch a drab moth had been unsuccessful, so the bird was eager to latch on to the bright bug with the black spots dotting its red body.
Jacob had just landed on the Toroid of Transformation, and was making a forlorn plea via frantic staccato clicks and ticks to be put back into his human body, when he heard a simple tweet.
When he searched for the source of the noise, he spied a huge monster covered with brown feathers. The enormous sparrow eyed him with an emotionless dark eye and lunged forward, beak open wide, screeching like a banshee.
"Shit!" Jacob cried. He dodged the bird, which doggedly took after the winged insect using its own powerful wings to match the little bug's flight.
"Oh no!" Jacob cried. "Go find a juicy worm! I'm nothing!"
The bird didn't deviate as it pursued him through every twist and turn of his flight.
As he flew, Jacob saw something. Or rather, he saw someone.
He saw his sister, Ashley, lounging in the backyard, reading a book, enjoying the sunshine. "She'll save me," thought the fifteen-year-old boy turned ladybug.
He flew with what felt like immense speed, but when he arrived and dropped onto the pages of her book, the impact his hard shell made with the soft pages sounded like a puny "plunk."
It was enough. The hungry bird passed overhead. Jacob heard the horrible wings whoosh as they carried the bird to a thicket of brush.
He looked up from the pages of his sister's book. He saw her huge face, looking down at him.
"Ashley!" He clicked his staccato bursts at her. "Help!"