Dr. Tessa's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

Tessa sat cross-legged on her lab floor at three in the morning, surrounded by forty-two balled-up budget proposals. Nigel perched on her shoulder, preening her hair gently—his signal for yes, keep going. The numbers didn't lie. A comprehensive research center needed money, lots of it, and her current salary wouldn't cover the pond filtration system, let alone the observation tower. She grabbed her laptop and typed "conservation grants Australia" into the search bar. Two hundred results appeared. Her finger hovered over the first link. This was it—the actual beginning. Not dreams on blueprints, but forms to fill out, questions to answer, funding to chase. She clicked. The application asked for project scope, timeline, and estimated costs. She had all three memorized. The screen glowed in the dark lab. She scrolled through scientific forums, each one packed with researchers posting about endangered species protocols and field research methods. Someone in Perth had tracked migration patterns using audio recording. Another team in Queensland successfully bred threatened parrots in captivity. Tessa opened seven tabs, then twelve, then twenty. Her brain buzzed. Every post was a piece of the puzzle—monitoring techniques, breeding programs, habitat restoration. She grabbed her notebook and started writing. The MacBook's bird stickers caught the light as she typed faster. This information existed. She just had to learn it all. By dawn, her eyes burned but her list had grown to three pages. She needed field equipment—a canvas tent with a desk surface for processing samples outdoors before bringing them inside. A carrier sling with mesh panels to stabilize injured birds during transport. Basic tools she'd overlooked while dreaming about towers and ponds. The unsexy stuff that actual conservation required. She pulled up supplier websites and added items to her cart. Forty-seven dollars here, eighty-two there. Small purchases, but they added up. Her credit card could handle it. Barely. Nigel tapped three times on her keyboard. No, stop, enough. She leaned back against the desk leg and rubbed her face. The grant application sat half-finished in another window. The forum threads kept multiplying. The shopping cart total climbed higher. But her chest felt lighter than it had in weeks. She wasn't just dreaming anymore. She was learning, buying, building—one small piece at a time. The comprehensive research center was still years away, maybe decades, but this morning she'd started. That counted for something.