Smacking someone in the face, she'd prepared for. Enduring words, she'd also prepared for. After all, how much could relative strangers possibly know about her to make their words effective? What happened over the next few seconds threw any confidence about every person in the room out the same window that cerberid vanished through. She briefly heard part of Sen's words before a frigid chill swept up through the wing that collided with Xue's body. Like the birds they resembled, harpies had an average body temperature of degrees 40 Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Direct contact with a blast of air below freezing sent her entire wing numb. Also unlike humans, her thin legs lacked thick musculature to keep her body light and aerodynamic. All great for flying. Not so great when being bulldozed by a super-cooled aura. Veins and arteries wound around hollow bones and close to the thin, scaled skin of her legs and feet. Whether it was simply her proximity to the blast, or her more more fragile physiology, the harpy's legs also immediately went numb and stiff, right up to the part where her bird legs seamlessly melded into her human body at the upper thigh. Her right wing felt mostly fine, as did her torso. Glass from the shattered window barely missed her, but the light fixture's sharp shrapnel slammed into her numbed shoulder. Blood oozed from the cuts sluggishly.
When the aura retreated, her iced skin burned from the rapid temperature change. Clamping her jaws firmly shut and furrowing her brow to keep silent, Brienne did her best to make it as inconspicuous as possible that she still couldn't feel her legs. Unfortunately, life has a tendency to kick you in the (in this case metaphorical) nuts whenever it can. Moving her wing to try and brush away some of the glass embedded in her feathered skin proved enough to unbalance her, and she tumbled over backwards, falling onto her ass. At least she didn't land on more glass.
Again, the next things that happened passed by almost too fast for her to form an opinion on them. The lavender-eyed guy's countenance twisted into something absolutely inhuman. Gem metamorphized into something even more monochrome than Xue, his eyes shifting to a deep pitch with crimson pupils. They shined, almost glassy, with an emotion she didn't even want to place. When he opened his mouth to speak, visions of sharks and other deep-sea creatures came to mind. A valley of knives scraped against each other in his maw. That definitely explained why he attended a school for monsters. Brienne's dark eyes opened wide, and she scooted herself backwards with her working wing, dragging her legs and body along with it.
Like a phantom, Bellatroix appeared in the area. Bending from her huge height to look the kitsune in the eye, she gave off a vibe different from her appearance. Taking a moment to place it, the harpy realized it reminded her somewhat of a leech, though she couldn't tell why. Above them, the light fixture creaked again, then outright fell out of the ceiling.
For fuck's sake. Snakelike, Bellatroix's tail snapped out from her back and grappled the thing before it even hit the ground... without looking at it. Brienne paled visibly, the strangeness of everything taking away from the pain in her shoulder.
Right. The harpy decided to leave everything after 'joining student council' out of her letter home. To her right, Sen said something that she missed most of, more preoccupied with everything falling apart around her. She waved a friendly goodbye to him, determined to not seem weak in front of people so much more powerful than herself. "Bye, Sen! I'll see you later."
With that taken care of, the harpy stared at her legs. The split second of frigid wind put her out of commissioned that easily? Rubbing at one with her non-frozen wing, Brienne took stock of her other wing. Not just cold, but pain radiated out of the spot where she'd contacted with Xue's face. Feeling slowly leeched back into that shoulder and further down the limb, and the harpy pulled it closer to her face. Pausing trying to warm her legs back up, she noticed that ever since she'd fallen down, she'd begun shivering slightly. Not for the first time, she wished harpies had an easier time regulating their body temperature. Temperate environs were the only ones that worked well for them. Poking around through her left-hand feathers with her right wing, she eventually put eyes on the aching part of her wing. The skin there turned an angry red shade that spread across a few inches at the least.
Tired of sitting on the ground, Brienne shook her left wing until the most of the feeling returned. With a few strong flaps (that pushed her a bit further from the group) she lifted off. Trying to keep the wind from her wingbeats contained proved mostly futile. Each flap sent a jolt of pain through her arm. Suddenly she remembered the glass shard poking out of her shoulder. With her wings busy keeping her from landing on the ground again, the harpy turned to the last tool she had. Turning her head at an awkward angle, she reached her tongue out to turn the shard a bit, then gripped it with her teeth. Yanking it out tore the cut a bit wider. Spitting the bloody glass shard out on the ground, Brienne awkwardly waited.