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[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 1: A Megnificent camping trip

I’m thinking of a title for a book I’m going to write someday. Hey, maybe you’re reading it right now! 

If you are, please know that that title is supposed to be ironic and sarcastically self deprecating.

Because, instead of magnificent, I’m Megnificent. And that totally changes the meaning of the word, and this is totally the most teenager thing I’ve thought to myself in decades.

I’m utterly Megnificent, and I’m stuck in the mountains, and I don’t have survival skills.

I’m watching the tiny speck of a helicopter recede over what I assume is the western horizon. From the birdsong I’ve heard, I’m guessing it’s morning, and the sun is behind me. But also, I just know. I can feel North and South as if they are slopes in the fabric of spacetime, and I feel like I have a sense of which is which. 

And that helicopter, which I hope to one day destroy, almost certainly brought me here.

The sky that it’s flying through is mostly clear, except for a sickly brown haze, and a column of billowing smoke coming from the south side of a mountain the vehicle is flying past, off near the horizon. One of the Summer's forest fires.

The mountain I’m on is basically a big grassy dome surrounded by taller, pointier mountains. I’m on the western slope of it, and I’m looking out over a valley full of grasses and flowers. And I don’t see any wildlife around me except for the bugs that are flying around everywhere. The bugs aren’t very thick, though. Not like how I remember them the last time I went camping in a place like this, way back in high school. The birds I heard must be laying low or around the curve of the mountain and out of sight.

They’re especially laying low after I shouted my challenging cry at that helicopter in rage.

And now I’m alone.

And I’m hungry.

The only experience I have with this kind of situation is a survival unit I had in third grade, three camping trips up into the Pasayten Wilderness with my extended family when I wasn’t much older, and two episodes of Man v.s. Wild that I watched ten years ago.

And all of that was geared toward educating and accommodating human beings. Not a dragon.

I’m a dragon.

A city dragon.

I don’t do this sort of thing.

I need to get back home.

The advice I got in third grade was find shelter as close to where you got lost as possible, find water, stay put, and make yourself as visible as possible. But the advice I got from TV was to find water, find food, and keep moving toward civilization. But those two bits of contradictory advice were given to a human child and an audience of human adults, and humans are endurance hunters, evolved to out endure their prey.

Also, humans can’t fly.

I am, I’m guessing, an ambush predator that flies. I digest my food slowly, and I need to rest right after eating to get it started well. I need to conserve my energy for short bursts that I use, mostly, to catch seagulls to eat and to scare away other dragons. Though, I’ve decided to work on preventing the need for that second one, and there are no seagulls out here.

And the last thing I ate was three pounds of minced chuck on Monday night. It digested fast and gave me a lot of energy, and didn’t result in me puking up a ball of indigestible material I couldn’t recognize.

And now I’m hungry again, and I think I need to find something to eat and then fly west.

I can’t afford to exert myself much while hungry, and no one is going to be looking for me.

On the other hand, I have this fucking tracker threaded through a damn hole in my left horn, and so I’m being watched. So, if I do follow that helicopter, whoever did this will turn around and intercept me.

On the gripping hand? I don’t have a gripping hand and that’s a weird reference most people aren’t going to get.

In my mouth, then – the third consideration that I’m really focused on – most mountains within a day’s car drive of where I live are all generally to the East, and that helicopter is going to land somewhere where there is fuel. I don’t know its range and I don’t know mine. But I can guess that my home is westward, and that following the helicopter will get me closer. However, in this day and age, if I’m still in Washington State, I can’t be more than a day or two of flight away from a restaurant or convenience store or gas station that I might be able to see from the air. I think.

Considering the lack of snow, I’m probably not in Alaska or Canada, I’m guessing. And the area looks vaguely familiar.

I think that I might actually be back in the Pasayten Wilderness.

If they wanted to rehome me but keep me in a climate that is close to what I’m used to so as not to kill me, but in a wilderness area away from people, staying at the same latitude makes a certain amount of sense. So they probably just took me directly east.

Ridiculous.

There is so much that is ridiculous about this.

To review. On the one claw, I need to eat and get back home. On the other, they’re tracking me. In my mouth, though, I’m pretty sure I know just where they dropped me and how to find food I can eat.

It’s mid morning, and to get food I need to fly, and I’m on a mountain. What a great place to start!

I’m way more down on myself than I sound like, I’m sure. I’m leaving out my worst thoughts because I’m actively ignoring them. Partly because I know those kinds of thoughts can be deadly out here. Partly because I’m a fucking dragon, and while I might be domesticated or something like that, I know I can hunt. I’ve done it.

And largely because those assholes drilled a hole through my horn without my consent, and I’m more angry at them than at myself.

I’m still Megnificent, though, for all that means.

Let’s take off and maybe change the meaning of that word a little.

—

I’m flying higher than I’ve ever been and I’m having a crisis.

Below me is the mountain I woke up on. I’ve discovered that it is sort of a crescent ridge, with a shallow slope on the west and south sides of it, and three deep depressions in the middle northeast of it, each with some water at the bottom. One pool of which is large enough I’m going to call it a lake instead of a pond. It’s the southernmost one.

And flying around that lake on the east side of the ridge I woke up on, in the morning sun, is a freaking bald eagle.

I’m pretty sure it’s looking for fish in the lake.

I’m higher than it and it has not noticed me. I’ve been up here for a while, nice and quiet, riding thermals, and it took off from a roost and started circling that lake, looking delicious to my instincts.

But it’s a bald eagle.

Last time I checked, I’m a citizen of the United States and I am not allowed, by law, to eat that.

I think.

I am so hungry, but I really shouldn’t eat the bald eagle.

—

Once I’m soaring, flying around feels a lot like resting, to be honest. It’s almost like my wing-joints can lock into place, and the effort to keep them extended is minimal. And the summer sun keeps me alert and ready to dive at any prey I deem worthy of eating.

If I go too high, there’s a wind that blows me eastward, which I do not want. So, every time I start getting buffeted by that, I drop and head a little further West. But I’m mostly circling right now looking for food and thinking.

I’ve allowed myself to do this into the midafternoon, hoping to catch better thermals and also to maybe find some wild food I can eat to sustain me. But, it’s looking like I’m going to have to get some water soon instead.

I can backtrack a little to my mountain and the lake there.

Or, I’ve gotten high enough I caught glimpses through the western mountains of a huge, long lake running north and south, with the south end right at the base of the mountain that's on fire. And I’m guessing that’s Ross Lake, and there might be people camping there.

I mean, there might be people camping anywhere around here. It’s early September and not a bad time for it if you don’t have kids. But Ross Lake is more dense with campsites, and has roads going to it.

If course, that fire makes it less likely.

On the northwest side of the burning mountain, there’ll be Ross dam, and campsites on the roads, and higher likelihood of finding a tool that can be used to get this tracking tag off of me. If I’m remembering and guessing correctly. If the rangers let anyone camp there right now.

And I think I can make that by the end of the day.

The fire looks like it’s spreading south, not north, and there's the whole bulk of the mountain between it and the lake.

It's worth a shot 

I’m starting to think, based on my flying time and circling, that I maybe could have made it all the way back home if I’d started out that direction first thing.

But I think I want this tracker off before I do that.

—

It’s getting near dusk when I make it to the southern tip of the big long lake, and there’s a dam, and a couple campsites with lights in them. A fire and a camper, I think.

And my eye catches a large, squat looking bird flying between trees below me.

Without thinking or planning, I drop.

It’s not a bald eagle.

The startled and anguished cry of a great horned owl followed by the furious flapping of dragon trying to avoid an abrupt landing must be an odd thing to human ears. I cannot imagine a time in my life before my metamorphosis that I’ve heard anything like it.

The owl’s neck is broken an instant after I slam into it mid air, and I’m not going to bother to describe my process of eating it, because you don’t need to know how awful it is. There are plenty of nature documentaries out there with video footage of crocodiles, alligators, and birds eating other birds, and that’s close enough.

I’m saving my memories of the sensations of it for when I need to appall and horrify someone I don’t like much.

And I’m really hoping there aren’t any three or four year olds camping with mommy and daddy around to have heard or even seen me do that.

I expect that in the half dark of dusk in the wooded mountains, that that would be beyond nightmare inducing.

—

I’m sorry, let’s review.

I was born in 1974, and nothing seemed to fit me. I didn’t like who or what I was, and I was confused about life until at nine years old I saw a movie about cartoon dragons and realized that I must be a dragon stuck in the body of a human boy. Only, I wasn’t a boy, either.

And up until a week and a half ago, I thought that that was my lot in life, regardless of what happened. I didn’t grow out of it. I just buckled down and tried to learn everything I could about dragons while attempting to survive in the ways of my local humans.

And that took its toll, and I was never really able to work, and I ended up on SSI with a couple of disabilities, chronic fatigue and C-PTSD. And then I managed to land a HUD sponsored living situation in the Magnolia Apartments in my home town of Fairport, Washington.

Which is where I was when I awoke on the morning of Saturday, August 24, to find my body mysteriously transformed into the visage of my dreams. Literally. Every detail of it has been familiar to me, if somehow also new, because it matches who and what I am.

And the people I knew, acquaintances who I’d hoped to one day call friends, all bafflingly recognized me even more easily and accepted me into their lives.

It was quite lovely, if bewildering, for three days, until, after my Tuesday counseling appointment, I was attacked in my own apartment, through the wall, by Joel.

Joel is a dragon who I was calling Whitman for a while, because he makes a sound that I’d describe as a “yawp”. And he looks like a cross between a vampire bat, a hippo, and a velociraptor, with the mouth of the hippo, the ears and wings of the bat, and the tail of the raptor. He’s actually a sympathetic guy, but it took us a while to iron that out.

We’re still not on friendly terms.

But, in fighting Joel, I found my challenge cry, which I then started using in the morning like a bird. And the other dragons of Fairport, one or two in each neighborhood surrounding me, answered back!

And that’s how I found out that I wasn’t remotely alone in my metamorphosis.

Somewhere in there, I met and befriended a delightful autistic enby named Chapman with a special interest in dragons and a surprising secret. Chapman almost immediately teamed up with my lovely neighbor, Rhoda, to support me in navigating my new social life as a city dragon amongst other city dragons.

But despite their help, it became a serious mess really quick. Probably because I kept screwing up and making a bloody, violent, and extremely loud nuisance of myself and my neighboring dragons.

I was trying to do things right. I was following my intuition, or instincts, and aiming for a draconic diplomacy. But that doesn’t go over very well with a hundred thousand neighboring humans.

And even though I seemed to have made inroads and plans with Mayor Lynn Chisholm, who’s daughter turned out to be a dragon, too, I also got the attention of the richest land owner in the county, Daniel Säure. And it’s old Dan who is the one that I’m sure owns that surplus Coast Guard helicopter, and the company that runs it.

The last time I encountered the police on poor terms, just after interviewing the mayor, they were armed with tranquilizer darts and working with that chopper, which has Wildlife Management markings on it. A company called Equisetum Wildlife.

And it was they who tranqued me in my sleep and flew me out here, I’m sure of it.

And I’m pretty sure that drilling a fucking hole through my horn is not best practices when it comes to tagging wild animals.

For one, I’m not a wild animal. I’m a domesticated dragon with a social security number and a disability case file. I live in a symbiotic relationship with humans and many of them treat me like one of their own. I even use AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) on a tablet to talk to them. I drink coffee that I buy with my money.

But also, that weakens the horn, and I use that horn. It increases the chance that it will break, right through that hole, and I’ll lose the tracker then. Though that’s not how I want it to go.

I like my horns.

I’m pretty sure they put it there because they didn’t know what else to do, though. I can get to any part of my body with my teeth, except for the back of my head. And I can get to the back of my head with two sets of claws (my foreclaws and my wing claws). They improvised, and I hate it.

So that probably gives you an idea of why I’m in the mood I’m in while I’m swallowing that owl whole.

Did I ever mention that I can breath and even make noise while I’ve got something halfway swallowed?

I don’t think I did.

Well, I can.

I don’t bother with the sounds, because it comes out muffled and unimpressive. But it’s really handy to be able to breathe that way.

Probably not a good idea to try to breath fire, though. Fire doesn’t come out my nose, ever. It’s always a mouth thing for me.

This seems like an oversite in evolutionary design, but no one’s actually overseeing draconic evolution that we know of. Except maybe us dragons ourselves.

And that's yet another thing.

Chapman’s secret, which I’ve promised not to tell anyone, is that sie awoke and went through hir own kind of invisible metamorphosis years before us dragons did. And, along with anyone like hir, sie can perform something that sie calls hir “art”. Which is basically magic, as far as I’m concerned. And I can sense it whenever sie does it near enough to me.

And one of the things that Chapman’s art revealed is that I’m parthenogenetic. I can harvest and store DNA from a variety of donor vertebrates, usually from their spermatozoa but maybe even from their ovum if I can get them safely, and then mix and match without a single mate of my own bioform if I don’t want one. And in that process, I can bear a clutch of eggs full of baby egg producing dragons of various and varying chimerical traits.

And that’s presumably why every dragon is so wildly different.

Out there, somewhere, is probably a dragon who can breathe fire, or something, through their nose. But it’s not me.

Fortunately, no one interrupts my meal.

—

Owl and a couple small river rocks in my crop, I approach the camper. It’s most likely to have the tools I want, and its lights are still on.

To make sure I’m not startling its occupants, I’m occasionally saying the most soothing words I know, of the thirteen I’ve learned to imitate with my syrinx. I don’t have my tablet, so communication is going to be a bear.

“Meg,” my name. And then, “Okay,” and “Peace.” And I repeat those in alternating patterns as I near the vehicle.

In immediate retrospect I probably should have just exclaimed, “Shit,” which I learned in the voice of a young man named Caleb. It might have garnered more sympathy, instead of sounding unbelievably creepy.

Have you ever seen that Farside comic with the deer dressed up as a hunter and saying, “Howdy! The vacuum bag is hot today! Howdy!”? Yeah. That.

The door of the camper slams open and I find myself staring down the double barrels of a gun right into the eyes of a grizzled man who suddenly finds he can’t move a muscle, not even his trigger finger, because he’s locked eyes with a dragon.

And then I say, “Shit.”

“Harold?” I hear from inside the camper. “Are you OK? What is it?”

[girldragongizzard]

New book starts tomorrow at 6:30 am Pacific Time

Join me in my morning song as I pump the world full of words about dragons!

How to be Megnificent is my sequel to my first book, now titled Meghanology, and it begins right where the first one left off. With me stranded in the mountains!

And it will be published right here on my blog.

Also available to read on ScribbleHub

[girldragongizzard]

Someone in my system pushed through our fatigue and shakiness and drew doodles of me and some of the other dragons from my first book:

[girldragongizzard]

Thank you!

Here's the promised photo. We've kind of become a Nanny Ogg from Disc World figure:

Answering some questions:

What's the Opportunity Council?

It's one of those organizations that's designed to help local homeless people get food, shelter, and employment. They're really cool, actually, with no strings attached for their help. But they're overbooked, typically.

so… the people trying to chase dragons away were like private cops?

A privately owned Wildlife Management company, which is surprisingly common in the U.S. Basically cops for animals.

and also the people who profit if there's drama and unrest (newspapers)?

Yep! Specifically with one person who has ownship in nearly everything, Daniel Säure.

uh oh. a helicopter? did you get like kidnapped and released no idea where?

Yep!

Though, it turns out early on in the next book that I am familiar enough with the local geography and the likely range of a large helicopter that I make a damn good guess as to where I am.

Sort of a surprise camping trip, if you look at it in a certain way.

Chapter 20: What a day that was

I was right.

Dragons are people, and as people we can interpret our instincts and decide how we follow them. I do think other animals can do this too, and often do, but we are too removed from them to see it most of the time. We can’t interview them.

Whitman was, after all, able to communicate through gesture and writing in the playground sand.

His feet are too clumsy to use a tablet or oversized keyboard.

His name is Joel, actually. He wrote that in the sand.

We had to ask him a lot of yes and no questions, with him elaborating with glyphs and words occasionally, but we did interview him.

He’d attacked me originally because he was desperate and scared, and thought it was the thing he was supposed to do to secure his territory. Which he perceived me to be in, or too close to.

He’s been living on the streets for several years, and was pushed into the woods of the southern foothills by losing that challenge to me.

We don’t have a lot more information than that. We’re looking into getting him his own AAC of some sort. He’s frustrated beyond belief that he can’t talk anymore, and angry that I can actually say a few words and he can’t.

And, at the coaxing of Rhoda and Chapman, I ceded him the South West portion of my territory, from Chestnut street to the water, which includes the park we’d just fought over, plus a number of businesses, including two of the more well known brewpubs. It’s twice the land that I’m left with.

I’ve got most of downtown, and a network of friends who are making sure I get what I need. And my building is where I get my identity from, anyway. I don’t need all that space to be mine, really. Not logically, anyway.

Negotiating with my emotions is a different matter, but I’ve been working on learning how to do that for a couple decades now. That’s a huge part of what my therapist is for.

It’s Tuesday morning, the day of my next appointment, and I’m hanging out with my friends and the staff of my coffee shop in the lobby. We’re less afraid of other dragons attacking now.

Rhoda, Nathan, and I have been filling the others in on the details of yesterday’s events, and how the negotiations went. 

Chapman’s at work, and I won’t see them today until maybe when we cross paths outside our therapist’s door. And that’s OK. It’s fun.

Things are not completely resolved.

I have no idea if anyone will ever figure out why we dragons are a thing now. But, I do know it’s a thing Chapman and I are going to keep poking at for the rest of our lives until we uncover it. Together, hopefully.

But, also, there’s a lot of legal and political work to do. And, as Mayor Chisholm warned, it looks like I’ll be seeing some court dates in the future. Which should be stressful, seeing as the court house is in Waits’ territory.

But, hopefully, by then, I’ll be negotiating with Waits over my Discord server, and we’ll work out a plan. First step there is to get a team out to Waits and make sure they have access to the internet and their own form of AAC. Rhoda is planning on calling the Opportunity Council to see if they can help with that.

Astraia has made diplomatic contact with the dragon I’ve been calling Loreena, using human partners as go-betweens, and learned that her name is Tannis. And I didn’t get much sleep last night, because the three of us were trading ideas for how to contact the others.

We’re people. We can act like people. And humanity has created some pretty nifty tools to help us do that, too. And most of us are already familiar with them.

We just have to use them.

There’ve been a lot of times in the past week where it felt like it was falling on me to solve all of these problems. And every time I failed to succeed at whatever I was doing, it was hard not to feel like I was failing myself.

The thing is, I’m not the queen of the local dragons. I’m just me. The loudmouth who lives on the roof of the Magnolia Apartments. And my job, really, is to get along with the people I know, dragon or human, and maybe not get in their way.

And the morning songs are feeling better every day.

Oh, yeah, and the people in that helicopter were members of a private wildlife management company, Equisetum Wildlife, owned by one Daniel Säure, also owner of Morning Glory Corp, and working with the Sheriff, specifically. There’s a bit of a legal and political mess regarding what happened last night that I don’t fully understand, even after it was explained to me, and I’m hoping it shakes out in my favor. 

We’ll see.

Säure, it turns out, also owns the daily newspaper, which is why it’s even still in business. I think he might be a billionaire. So if he decides to back my opposition in court, we’re going to need some serious help.

I’m trying to put that out of my mind, for now.

It’s a little hard, because Nathan takes that tidbit of knowledge and really verbally chews on it, talking about conversations he’s had with Seagull. And the Kims take the bait, and it turns into a whole discussion over the counter during the slower hours of late morning.

I huff and turn to Rhoda, and she raises her eyebrows at me, tilting her head in my direction sympathetically.

I want to talk about something different, but quietly, so I don’t hit talk on my tablet, instead turning it to face her when I’m done typing.

“Chapman says maybe you like me,” I say, like a teenager. It’s so hard to figure out nuance on this thing, even when taking the time to write a full sentence. Nuance usually requires too many words, so I often lean on other people’s grace and forgiveness for the resulting bluntness.

Rhoda reads the sentence carefully and then leans back to sip her coffee, smirking at me through the whole gesture. Then she studies me a little bit and says, “I’ve always wanted to be your friend, Meg. I do like you, and care about you. And I’m really glad you’ve opened up and we can talk more freely now.” She sits there for a little while at that, and I spend that time wondering if she’s done talking, but then she says, “I’m going to put it like this. You have never been like any of the monsters of my ancestors that might have been called dragons. But I’ve always recognized that you are a dragon. And I like the kind of dragon I see in you. Especially after yesterday. So I’m honored to be your friend. Now, if you’re asking me if I might like to see myself as a member of your chosen family, whatever that means, that’s something we’ll have to work on. We’ve only really started actually talking to each other, after all. But I think we’ve made a good start.”

I like that. That feels comfortable.

So we sit there and smile at each other for a while.

Afterward, I climb to my roof to lie spread out in the sun for an hour or so. Half of the time I’m up there, I know that Chapman is attending therapy during hir lunch break.

I have an alarm set on my tablet to let me know a good time to set out for therapy, so that I get there early enough to trade finger guns with Chapman in the lobby.

Well, I’m not using my human disguise. I hate that thing. And I’m only using it in emergencies, to keep it secret and effective.

So, my finger guns look like trigger fingers looped around imaginary guns, because I can’t fully straighten my individual claws out while holding the rest tight. They don’t work independently quite like that.

Still, we know what we’re doing, and we both wink in the process.

And then I walk into my therapist’s office and hunker down for my session, carefully placing my tablet in front of me.

“Meghan,” she says. “Before we get started, I want to report on the homework I gave myself, looking into your case and options. Are you OK with that?”

“Yes,” I say.

She’s startled to hear that come from my throat, but smiles and blinks and nods, saying, “Unfortunately, it really doesn’t look good on the SSI front. Nationally, there is a lot of arguing going on about it, and it looks like it’s going to take them a while to work anything out regarding dragons. And while the State of Washington is fairly progressive, they aren’t in charge of regulating how SSI is handled. That’s purely a federal program. However, you should be able to qualify for SNAP and Medicaid through Washington the instant you lose your SSI, so you’ll have that as a cushion.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Do you have some way of making sure that you have shelter, or a way to pay rent? Are you going to need help with that?” she asks me.

I look down at my tablet and poke it, “Maybe.”

“OK,” she says. “Let me know what kind of help you need.”

“Yes,” I say. I’m starting to wonder what Chapman talked to her about, but it’s none of my business, unless Chapman shares it with me later. In any case, I’m getting help now, obviously. But I’ll keep all my resources open and ready to use.

“I wish I could do more for you in this regard, but it’s really not my specialty. I can maybe help you find a caseworker, though,” she says. 

I feel like maybe my counselor hasn’t learned much about what just happened. Maybe she was too focused on the SSI thing and didn’t pay attention to local news. That’s OK.

“Thank you,” I type.

“Are you OK with this?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I am very sure about it. At this point, bureaucratic garbage like that feels like it might give my life a sense mundanity that I need. I almost feel like I’m ready to tackle it all myself, which would be a whole lot of progress on my C-PTSD if it turns out to be true. I’ve still got a lot to process, mind you. But the SSI thing feels like the least of my worries right now. And there are a couple of things in my life, Rhoda and Chapman specifically, that I’m really looking forward to having to deal with more often. And I'm having a hard time not focusing on them, really.

So, I make a point of preening and composing myself to pay attention to my counselor, as a show that I’m ready to change topics and move on.

“Well, then,” she smiles, leaning back. “Tell me about your week!”

Oh, wow, this is going to be a long hour.

---

Epilogue

Wednesday morning, I think.

Before I even open my eyes, I can tell something is wrong, because I’m not lying on my roof. The surface under me is not level. My head is downhill, and I can feel rocks and knurls of dirt underneath me.

I can hear insects and the birds sound different. And there’s no sound of cars or people anywhere.

I’m pretty sure I came into consciousness hearing the sound of a receding helicopter.

When I crack open my eyes, I can see that it is well past dawn, and I haven’t heard any dragons calling out their morning songs.

The sky is absolutely blue from horizon to horizon, and I’m surrounded by mountains that do not have nearly as much snow on them as I’d come to expect. It is the end of summer in the era of severe climate change, of course. It’s still alarming and heartbreaking.

Looking out toward what I think is the West, I’m seeing a deep valley between sharp peaked mountains, and more mountains beyond that. And I can tell I’m pretty damn high up. I think I’m on another mountain myself, but it’s very rounded and covered in grass. It’s not one of the tallest.

A moving speck off in the far distance draws my eyes and appears to be the helicopter I heard.

And as my head darts this way and that, while I take in my surroundings, I feel something dangling off my left horn. And if I swing my head hard enough it swings briefly into my peripheral vision, but it’s too close for me to see what it is. It’s heavy, and I see a dark green, but I’m guessing it may be orange to humans.

I reach up with my claw to try to scrape it away. But it won’t come off.

I get sort of an idea of its shape from doing this, from feeling around with my foreclaw. It’s like some sort of puck attached to a thin metal cable.

And it takes me a bit to figure out how it’s attached to my horn.

Some asshole has drilled a hole through my horn and threaded the cable through that.

I’ve been tagged!

My purse and tablet are missing. I don’t have anything but this device.

I’ve been tranqed in my sleep, tagged, and then released into the wild.

Hearing my challenge cry echo off the distant mountain tops as it is currently doing would probably be a sublime and meaningful experience under normal circumstances, but I’m way too angry to appreciate it right now.

Maybe somebody else does.

To be continued…

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 20: What a day that was

I was right.

Dragons are people, and as people we can interpret our instincts and decide how we follow them. I do think other animals can do this too, and often do, but we are too removed from them to see it most of the time. We can’t interview them.

Whitman was, after all, able to communicate through gesture and writing in the playground sand.

His feet are too clumsy to use a tablet or oversized keyboard.

His name is Joel, actually. He wrote that in the sand.

We had to ask him a lot of yes and no questions, with him elaborating with glyphs and words occasionally, but we did interview him.

He’d attacked me originally because he was desperate and scared, and thought it was the thing he was supposed to do to secure his territory. Which he perceived me to be in, or too close to.

He’s been living on the streets for several years, and was pushed into the woods of the southern foothills by losing that challenge to me.

We don’t have a lot more information than that. We’re looking into getting him his own AAC of some sort. He’s frustrated beyond belief that he can’t talk anymore, and angry that I can actually say a few words and he can’t.

And, at the coaxing of Rhoda and Chapman, I ceded him the South West portion of my territory, from Chestnut street to the water, which includes the park we’d just fought over, plus a number of businesses, including two of the more well known brewpubs. It’s twice the land that I’m left with.

I’ve got most of downtown, and a network of friends who are making sure I get what I need. And my building is where I get my identity from, anyway. I don’t need all that space to be mine, really. Not logically, anyway.

Negotiating with my emotions is a different matter, but I’ve been working on learning how to do that for a couple decades now. That’s a huge part of what my therapist is for.

It’s Tuesday morning, the day of my next appointment, and I’m hanging out with my friends and the staff of my coffee shop in the lobby. We’re less afraid of other dragons attacking now.

Rhoda, Nathan, and I have been filling the others in on the details of yesterday’s events, and how the negotiations went. 

Chapman’s at work, and I won’t see them today until maybe when we cross paths outside our therapist’s door. And that’s OK. It’s fun.

Things are not completely resolved.

I have no idea if anyone will ever figure out why we dragons are a thing now. But, I do know it’s a thing Chapman and I are going to keep poking at for the rest of our lives until we uncover it. Together, hopefully.

But, also, there’s a lot of legal and political work to do. And, as Mayor Chisholm warned, it looks like I’ll be seeing some court dates in the future. Which should be stressful, seeing as the court house is in Waits’ territory.

But, hopefully, by then, I’ll be negotiating with Waits over my Discord server, and we’ll work out a plan. First step there is to get a team out to Waits and make sure they have access to the internet and their own form of AAC. Rhoda is planning on calling the Opportunity Council to see if they can help with that.

Astraia has made diplomatic contact with the dragon I’ve been calling Loreena, using human partners as go-betweens, and learned that her name is Tannis. And I didn’t get much sleep last night, because the three of us were trading ideas for how to contact the others.

We’re people. We can act like people. And humanity has created some pretty nifty tools to help us do that, too. And most of us are already familiar with them.

We just have to use them.

There’ve been a lot of times in the past week where it felt like it was falling on me to solve all of these problems. And every time I failed to succeed at whatever I was doing, it was hard not to feel like I was failing myself.

The thing is, I’m not the queen of the local dragons. I’m just me. The loudmouth who lives on the roof of the Magnolia Apartments. And my job, really, is to get along with the people I know, dragon or human, and maybe not get in their way.

And the morning songs are feeling better every day.

Oh, yeah, and the people in that helicopter were members of a private wildlife management company, Equisetum Wildlife, owned by one Daniel Säure, also owner of Morning Glory Corp, and working with the Sheriff, specifically. There’s a bit of a legal and political mess regarding what happened last night that I don’t fully understand, even after it was explained to me, and I’m hoping it shakes out in my favor. 

We’ll see.

Säure, it turns out, also owns the daily newspaper, which is why it’s even still in business. I think he might be a billionaire. So if he decides to back my opposition in court, we’re going to need some serious help.

I’m trying to put that out of my mind, for now.

It’s a little hard, because Nathan takes that tidbit of knowledge and really verbally chews on it, talking about conversations he’s had with Seagull. And the Kims take the bait, and it turns into a whole discussion over the counter during the slower hours of late morning.

I huff and turn to Rhoda, and she raises her eyebrows at me, tilting her head in my direction sympathetically.

I want to talk about something different, but quietly, so I don’t hit talk on my tablet, instead turning it to face her when I’m done typing.

“Chapman says maybe you like me,” I say, like a teenager. It’s so hard to figure out nuance on this thing, even when taking the time to write a full sentence. Nuance usually requires too many words, so I often lean on other people’s grace and forgiveness for the resulting bluntness.

Rhoda reads the sentence carefully and then leans back to sip her coffee, smirking at me through the whole gesture. Then she studies me a little bit and says, “I’ve always wanted to be your friend, Meg. I do like you, and care about you. And I’m really glad you’ve opened up and we can talk more freely now.” She sits there for a little while at that, and I spend that time wondering if she’s done talking, but then she says, “I’m going to put it like this. You have never been like any of the monsters of my ancestors that might have been called dragons. But I’ve always recognized that you are a dragon. And I like the kind of dragon I see in you. Especially after yesterday. So I’m honored to be your friend. Now, if you’re asking me if I might like to see myself as a member of your chosen family, whatever that means, that’s something we’ll have to work on. We’ve only really started actually talking to each other, after all. But I think we’ve made a good start.”

I like that. That feels comfortable.

So we sit there and smile at each other for a while.

Afterward, I climb to my roof to lie spread out in the sun for an hour or so. Half of the time I’m up there, I know that Chapman is attending therapy during hir lunch break.

I have an alarm set on my tablet to let me know a good time to set out for therapy, so that I get there early enough to trade finger guns with Chapman in the lobby.

Well, I’m not using my human disguise. I hate that thing. And I’m only using it in emergencies, to keep it secret and effective.

So, my finger guns look like trigger fingers looped around imaginary guns, because I can’t fully straighten my individual claws out while holding the rest tight. They don’t work independently quite like that.

Still, we know what we’re doing, and we both wink in the process.

And then I walk into my therapist’s office and hunker down for my session, carefully placing my tablet in front of me.

“Meghan,” she says. “Before we get started, I want to report on the homework I gave myself, looking into your case and options. Are you OK with that?”

“Yes,” I say.

She’s startled to hear that come from my throat, but smiles and blinks and nods, saying, “Unfortunately, it really doesn’t look good on the SSI front. Nationally, there is a lot of arguing going on about it, and it looks like it’s going to take them a while to work anything out regarding dragons. And while the State of Washington is fairly progressive, they aren’t in charge of regulating how SSI is handled. That’s purely a federal program. However, you should be able to qualify for SNAP and Medicaid through Washington the instant you lose your SSI, so you’ll have that as a cushion.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Do you have some way of making sure that you have shelter, or a way to pay rent? Are you going to need help with that?” she asks me.

I look down at my tablet and poke it, “Maybe.”

“OK,” she says. “Let me know what kind of help you need.”

“Yes,” I say. I’m starting to wonder what Chapman talked to her about, but it’s none of my business, unless Chapman shares it with me later. In any case, I’m getting help now, obviously. But I’ll keep all my resources open and ready to use.

“I wish I could do more for you in this regard, but it’s really not my specialty. I can maybe help you find a caseworker, though,” she says. 

I feel like maybe my counselor hasn’t learned much about what just happened. Maybe she was too focused on the SSI thing and didn’t pay attention to local news. That’s OK.

“Thank you,” I type.

“Are you OK with this?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I am very sure about it. At this point, bureaucratic garbage like that feels like it might give my life a sense mundanity that I need. I almost feel like I’m ready to tackle it all myself, which would be a whole lot of progress on my C-PTSD if it turns out to be true. I’ve still got a lot to process, mind you. But the SSI thing feels like the least of my worries right now. And there are a couple of things in my life, Rhoda and Chapman specifically, that I’m really looking forward to having to deal with more often. And I'm having a hard time not focusing on them, really.

So, I make a point of preening and composing myself to pay attention to my counselor, as a show that I’m ready to change topics and move on.

“Well, then,” she smiles, leaning back. “Tell me about your week!”

Oh, wow, this is going to be a long hour.

---

Epilogue

Wednesday morning, I think.

Before I even open my eyes, I can tell something is wrong, because I’m not lying on my roof. The surface under me is not level. My head is downhill, and I can feel rocks and knurls of dirt underneath me.

I can hear insects and the birds sound different. And there’s no sound of cars or people anywhere.

I’m pretty sure I came into consciousness hearing the sound of a receding helicopter.

When I crack open my eyes, I can see that it is well past dawn, and I haven’t heard any dragons calling out their morning songs.

The sky is absolutely blue from horizon to horizon, and I’m surrounded by mountains that do not have nearly as much snow on them as I’d come to expect. It is the end of summer in the era of severe climate change, of course. It’s still alarming and heartbreaking.

Looking out toward what I think is the West, I’m seeing a deep valley between sharp peaked mountains, and more mountains beyond that. And I can tell I’m pretty damn high up. I think I’m on another mountain myself, but it’s very rounded and covered in grass. It’s not one of the tallest.

A moving speck off in the far distance draws my eyes and appears to be the helicopter I heard.

And as my head darts this way and that, while I take in my surroundings, I feel something dangling off my left horn. And if I swing my head hard enough it swings briefly into my peripheral vision, but it’s too close for me to see what it is. It’s heavy, and I see a dark green, but I’m guessing it may be orange to humans.

I reach up with my claw to try to scrape it away. But it won’t come off.

I get sort of an idea of its shape from doing this, from feeling around with my foreclaw. It’s like some sort of puck attached to a thin metal cable.

And it takes me a bit to figure out how it’s attached to my horn.

Some asshole has drilled a hole through my horn and threaded the cable through that.

I’ve been tagged!

My purse and tablet are missing. I don’t have anything but this device.

I’ve been tranqed in my sleep, tagged, and then released into the wild.

Hearing my challenge cry echo off the distant mountain tops as it is currently doing would probably be a sublime and meaningful experience under normal circumstances, but I’m way too angry to appreciate it right now.

Maybe somebody else does.

To be continued…

[girldragongizzard]

do you like fall clothing? What's your favourite fall thing? I hope your body sick is a bit better and you're able to have a mostly stress free week :)

The fall is our favorite time of year because we get to start wearing our favorite clothes again. The summer is just about surviving the heat. But in the fall we get to start wearing full length dresses and skirts, jackets, our great aunt's cloak, leggings, and our wide brimmed black hat with a feather in it.

OK! Now to clarify some things.

A trap? But by who? And if Whitman helped them why did they get shot at? I'm so confused.

This gets cleared up almost immediately in the next chapter.

But, part of what happened was that Whitman was lured into disrupting the meeting, but then betrayed by the authorities, because they wanted to bag two dragons at once.

That was left implied by actions here, but we need to review the next chapter to make sure it's cleared up fully there.

It may not be, because Whitman has a communication problem bigger then Meg's.

A tank? Wtf! Where from? This is wild. (Not at the story just wow that's a lot of scary chaos)

So, the "tank" was mention off hand in an earlier chapter. We believe it was during the first interview with Seagull, but might have been earlier than that. We think it was Rhoda who mentioned that the Sheriff had a tank.

It's actually just an armored personnel carrier with a battering ram on the front. This is based on the APC that the Sheriff of our home county acquired back in 2007. And it looks like this:

A lot of the local people call it a tank, because it basically is one, even if it doesn't have a canon. In comparison to all the other vehicles in the county it is oversized and over powerful.

County Sheriffs all across the U.S. have things like this now. It's kinda scary.

Anyway, sorry it was hard to follow the fight. Describing action in a 3d space over time, and including characters reactions to it, can be really hard. But, also, having been in a couple large school yard fights ourselves, it can be kind of like that sometimes.

Tempted to draw a map of the park and diagram it out, then review the chapter to see if my explanations make sense.

Oooh. That's a big magic. Chapman, or did sie have help?

Nope. No help. Pure Chapman!

Chapman's magic is very narrow in scope, but it can be used carefully, quickly, and very effectively. Sie has had more time to learn it and work on it than sie is letting on, too. But that's a topic for the sequel.

What the fuck was that?

A mess. A whole huge mess. And a clear sign of trouble to come.

Again, it'll be covered a bit in the next chapter, but still.

To clarify a bit:

The sheriff and the police department were acting independently of the Mayor, against her wishes. And, they were working with a contracting company that owns the extra helicopter and issued the dart guns. (It's very possible that the County Executive was on the side of the Sheriff, and there was racism involved in the Police Chief's decision to align with the Sheriff.)

The goal was to prove that dragons could be captured "humanely" and dealt with somehow.

It was badly planned at the last minute, and Chapman, Whitman, and I messed it all up and now they have to lick their wounds and deal with the local political fallout.

Chapter 19: One dragon's diplomacy

We’d both slept on the roof of my building after Chapman was done suturing and dressing my wound. Sie didn’t feel up to walking home, and just lay down on the spot, using hir purse as a pillow, and telling me I should rest, too.

It got up to 80 degrees that day according to the weather app on my tablet, which isn’t all that hot to me anymore, but I shaded Chapman with my wing anyway. I was stretching them out to soak up the sun and boost my metabolism, and keeping things cool and dark for Chapman seemed like a good secondary purpose.

Not a lot has happened between then and now.

After waking, Chapman spoke with me further about what to expect for my meeting with the Mayor. Rhoda stopped by, and joined the conversation. I slept some more through the night. And then I had my morning calls done again without interruption.

I’d feel a lot more on edge, waiting for something really bad to happen, if Rhoda hadn’t reported that the Mayor had explicitly told the chief of police to lay off, to not stir up any more trouble between us dragons until after she had a chance to talk to me.

I do still worry that this interview could be a trap, though.

The one thing that helps me cling to the idea that it isn’t is that the Mayor’s daughter is a dragon, too. And, the park we’re meeting at is one of mine, and open, and I can fly if I need to.

And someone on my team has thought of that, as well.

The park has a long pier that is used mostly as a sight seeing walkway for visitors. And we’re meeting right at the base of the pier, so that if I need room to take off in an emergency I can use the pier as a runway. I’m told that wasn’t mentioned to the Mayor or even Seagull, or anyone else. It was sold as being picturesque, and Seagull’s photographer loved it.

We’re also meeting in the mid afternoon, which means the thermals will be strongest if I need them.

All I have to do to get there is glide from my building to the park.

So, I’ve been told to conserve my energy and rest most of the day until then, to soak up the sun and keep healing. That way, I’ll have as much energy as possible to focus on socializing and talking, and to flee or fight if I really have to.

Besides, even though Nathan will be supplying the interview with coffee and pastries, the shop is closed today, so my urge to visit with people down there will not be answered.

On the other hand, my wound is feeling so much better. It makes me feel like I already have the energy I need.

But I do as doctor Chapman and nurse Rhoda recommend and wait and rest, because the sun does feel really good on my wings and back, and I know it is excellent advice.

However, instead of waiting on my building, I move to the next building closer to the park, which is just a smidge taller than mine. It takes a bit of wing work to get up there, and some circling, but it’s worth it.

Partly because the taller building is owned by a biblical software company, and now I’m a dragon on their roof, and I find that amusing.

It’s a really good view of the park and surrounding area, too.

I can watch as the police sweep the area every hour or so, occasionally talking to people but not seeming to do much of anything.

A couple of them will arrive in a car, walk through the park, and then leave.

When the appointed time begins to arrive, a couple of police SUVs park in the parking lot, but the officers don’t get out of their vehicles. That makes me nervous, but I can’t exactly say why besides that they’re the police.

And then a white van with the weekly’s logo on the side pulls in to the lot as far away from the police as possible, and Seagull and the photographer and probably an intern all get out and start unpacking chairs and a small table and other equipment, including a laptop and what appears to be a supplemental keyboard for it. And they set that up at the land end of the pier, just as planned.

A few minutes later, a shiny new Nissan Leaf pulls into the lot and parks a space away from the newspaper's van. A woman gets out of the driver's side, and she's dressed in a pale lavender suit, despite the weather. She seems very comfortable in it and very confident in her movements as she reaches back in her car to fetch a fairly large purple purse.

That, I think, is Mayor Lynn Chisholm. Like Rhoda, she's Black, and I remember being fairly impressed with her background and politics. I wasn’t paying that much attention during her election, but I caught enough from conversations around the coffee shop to decide to vote for her.

Especially with a dragon for a daughter, I wonder if she has a fraught relationship with the police.

Normally, I'd leave that entirely alone, and assume that that's her battle to deal with. But the police were after me specifically and she called them off. So, at least guessing at that dynamic is a matter of my own survival.

The cops that are there are still staying in their own vehicles.

This is a small city, still. Mayors have been known to have lunch at local dives or hang out at coffee shops and talk about local art.

Well. Some of them have. Others have been snobby and reclusive and only hobnobbed with the business establishment. Or, that's what the Order of Bearded Men say when talking loudly about politics wherever they congregate. You know the type of guys I'm talking about. I imagine every small town and city has a few. Men, with beards, who talk loudly in coffee shops. The Order of Bearded Men.

Anyway, it's about time for me to join the Mayor for coffee on the pier.

I wait to see her talk to Seagull and his crew, and then for Rhoda, Chapman, and Nathan to arrive with the coffee and other goodies.

When it looks like everyone is relaxed and looking around at the sky for me, I dive off the building to join them.

The flight down there is uneventful and exhilarating. I'm leaping off a seven story building and headed downhill toward a group of people who have coffee for me. And I have to say, swooping never gets old. It's a rush!

There's plenty of sidewalk space for me to land on, and they see me coming long before I get there, but they all back up a step or two as I set down.

Standing and looking at Chapman, I feel like maybe I grew a little over the night. It's just a quick, puzzling impression, because sie and Rhoda and Nathan all seem a little smaller.

Maybe it's just their act of giving me space that creates that illusion, but I decide then to figure out a way to measure and track my length.

The Mayor steps forward and holds out her right hand to offer and shake and says, “Hi. I'm Mayor Chisholm. It's a pleasure and honor to meet you. I understand your name is Meghan.”

I gingerly lift my right foreclaw and place it on her hand in the best even grip I can manage and press down lightly and briefly, saying, “Yes. Meg.”

The Mayor blinks and smiles, saying, “If you don’t mind me saying, I was told you could say a few words, and it is a delight to hear some of them!” Then we release each other’s hands, and she takes a step toward the chairs and table, and says, “Shall we sit down at your computer and get to know each other over a cuppa?”

I bow my head and say, “Yes.” I can’t make it more polite than that without my AAC.

So we all move over there and settle down.

I, of course, do not use a chair. I’m very comfortable on my haunches anyway.

“I’d like to use what you type into the computer as your transcript, on the record, if you don’t mind,” Seagull says to me. “If you say something you regret, just treat it like any friendly conversation and correct yourself, as you’d want to do with the Mayor anyway, and I’ll go with the correction. Does that sound good?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Fantastic! I’ll be sitting on the other side,” he says. Then he addresses us both. “Mayor Chisholm. Meghan the Dragon. It’s going to be a little bit of a three way conversation, with me moderating. But I’m mostly going to leave it up to you two. I just might have a question or two for the paper, mostly.”

“That sounds wonderful, Mr. Phil,” Mayor Chisholm says. “I might play it even and hit you with a couple questions myself, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all!”

“Shall we, then?”

And we all scoot in and get comfortable.

The computer is all set up. The supplemental accessible keyboard is actually kind of bland looking and dirty, like it’s been used a lot. But it is bigger, with bigger keys that I think I can use with little trouble.

“I got that from the Senior Center,” Nathan says from where he’s seated. “They’re lending it to us for the day, but also gave me a lead on where to get a new one, if you like it.”

I experiment with it by using it to say, “Sweet! Thank you.” 

The program once again ignores the exclamation point, of course.

“So, Meghan,” Mayor Chisholm says. “I’d really like to get to know you as a person, if you don’t mind. I’m sure you know that my own daughter has experienced the same transformation as you have, and I won’t lie and say that it hasn’t been a bit of a challenge. But I love her, and I want to do what I can to understand her better and make sure that her future is safe and secure. And you’ve got quite a small community supporting you, and I’d like to learn more about that from your perspective.”

“Okay. Thank you Mayor Chisholm,” I say. “I would like that.” 

Wow this is easy. I still feel rushed to speak anywhere as fast as anyone else, but after knuckling that tablet with one claw for so long, this keyboard is a dream.

“I don’t extend this to many people, Meghan, but today you can call me Lynn, OK?” the Mayor says. “We’re just a couple people of the city here enjoying the coffee and talking about life. And I don’t want you to have to type more than is necessary.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Then you can call me Meg.”

“Wonderful!” Then she turns to our journalist and says, “But not you, Mr. Phil. I’m sorry, but I do need to remind people I earned the position.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly,” he says in his immaculate tenor inflections. “But you can still call me Seagull, if you like. I prefer it, personally.”

The Mayor smirks, and says, “Very well, Mr. Seagull.”

“OK,” Seagull says, and laughs as he leans back and gestures to us.

Weirdly, all this polite talk makes me feel like I’m in my element, and I do relax considerably.

I turn my attention to Mayor Chisholm, and wait patiently for her next prompt.

She points a finger and bounces it up and down as she says, “Now, Meg, I’m told that you have an idea, a plan, for helping our dragons communicate with each other, settle their differences, and represent themselves reasonably well to the rest of us. And I’d like to hear about that, but later. What I’m really interested in is, what’s it like? What is it like to suddenly wake up as a dragon and just… go about your life? For you.”

I huff and smile to give myself time to think about that, then turn to the computer.

“Mayor Lynn,” I say, hitting enter.

“Just Lynn, please.”

“Thank you. Lynn,” I correct myself. “I have always been a dragon. Even before the change. I knew it. I didn’t fit in before. Now, I fit in. Socially. People understand me now. But,” I pause and look back up the hill at what I can see of my building, and ponder how to compose the rest of my thoughts. Then I get back to it, “I don’t fit economically or legally. And that is a problem.”

“Thank you, Meg,” the Mayor says. “I’ve heard similar things from my daughter. That’s reassuring, in a way. It means that the things that are wrong can be fixed.” And she tilts her head, “I don’t want to promise anything I can’t guarantee, of course. But. Another question. Have you met any regular citizens who harbor an anti-dragon sentiment, yet?”

“I don’t think so,” I reply. “If so, they did not show it. I think I’m lucky.”

“I feel like we might be going too fast for you, Meg,” the Mayor says. “I’d love it if you could elaborate on all of this. Please, take your time to write whatever you need to. I have my coffee. It would be my pleasure to just sit and listen for a bit. Hardly anyone gets a chance to do this, you know. And that should change.”

At the mention of coffee, I look at my bowl and decide I’m fine without it for the time being. I’ll drink it cold as a reward for getting through this. So I turn back to the computer and really get into it.

“Thank you, Lynn. Obviously, I am the daughter of two human beings, and I was raised by them, and by human schools. I played at being human until the 24th. I don’t know what was special about that day, but that’s when it happened. I knew I wasn’t human right from the start, though. A lot of people feel this way. For people like me, I like the word therian. But they may use otherkin or alterhuman, too. I figured out I was a dragon at 9 years old, after watching a movie about them. I just knew it, looking at these talking cartoon dragons, that that’s what I was. And a lot of things about humans don’t make sense to me. Never did…”

And I talk for a long time about this.

I speculate about why only a handful of dragon therians, and nobody else, underwent metamorphosis. I talk a little about investigating that. But I don’t mention anything about Chapman’s art.

I also go light on that, and try to focus more on what my daily life has been like.

Mayor Chisholm prompts me about that on occasion, to keep me on track.

A lot of what I tell her is what I’ve written in this book.

The part that I’m really careful about are my feelings and interactions regarding other dragons, because I don’t think I was understanding all that correctly from the beginning. And I don’t think they were, either.

I point out that my human upbringing led me, and probably everyone, to interpret my own instincts badly, and didn’t prepare me for the challenge of working with them.

I talk about how the morning songs we do, just like the birds, actually seem like a community building exercise. We use the same calls when challenging each other, but it’s almost more like we’re just shouting our names. And the context matters. In the morning, it now very much feels like a roll call to make sure everyone is where they should be and doing fine. I feel better and happier about my neighbors every time we do it, and less like I need to fight them over anything.

I don’t have proof, just the growing online interactions with Astraia. But I suspect that once we get to know each other better, fights will just happen less and less often.

I then pull out my tablet and open discord to show the Mayor what I’ve started there, and what Astraia and I have written.

“I remember the letter you sent me,” Mayor Chisholm says. “It’s honestly what inspired me to do this with you. Even if you never were human, it is so clear to me that you’re still people. Or beings who deserve to be treated as people. Of course, my own daughter is teaching me that as well. But seeing another dragon reach out to take the initiative and start a dialogue as they used to call it. That’s genuinely heartening. Thank you for that.”

“Lynn, may I ask?” I inquire.

“Yes, please, Meg.”

“What is it like to be mother of a dragon?”

“Well,” she says. “I can’t say it’s not hard. But I think the weirdest thing for me is how it affects my own sense of self and place in the world. Because I have to wonder what is it in me that made this possible when I gave birth to her. Or is it something from the outside? Like the hand of God reaching down and anointing worthy individuals to challenge us, or maybe to help protect us? To change the world, that’s for sure! I just don’t know, though. I’m trying to figure that out. I think we all are.”

As I’m watching her, I can see Seagull nodding and smiling. And he does not look like he’s on the verge of asking any questions at all.

This feels like a major win. It feels like progress, and like maybe we’re actually going to build something good. I know that City Council makes the laws and there are other people in government that need to be brought around. And also that local government can be superseded by the state and the national governments as well. There’s a long way to go. But, here, now, I’m involved in doing something that might work with someone of authority who seems to support me.

It feels good.

It also feels really, really lucky, because if the other guy had won that election and was in office instead, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be going this way at all.

Her mention of God startles me a little, though. I’m not used to being around people who so freely reference their religion like that anymore. Or, maybe, specifically God. I’m usually surrounded by atheists and neo-pagans. And pretty much all I want to believe in are dragons, humans, and whatever Chapman is.

But it’s a little thing. She’s being an ally, so far.

I look at the police, who are parked so far away from us, but so visibly so.

“Now, Meg, I do have to warn you,” Mayor Chisholm says. “I’m just the Mayor. I’m not the law.” My breath stills as I hear this, but I do nothing as she continues. “I can tell the police how to enforce those laws, to a degree. But certain laws are being brought against you, unfortunately. And you may well have to defend yourself in court. I want you to know, I’m on your side in this. You’re safe here and now, and when you go home. But it might be better if you can find a more suitable home for the time being.”

I look back at her.

“I spoke to the chief of police about this, and he asked me to remind you of this, and to tell you that, as a deal,” she says. “He’ll make sure you’re safe, if you find a better place to live than the rooftop of yours.”

I do not like that.

Especially after all I’ve conveyed to her and started to set up, I want to talk more about her daughter. I want to pointedly bring her up and use her as leverage to get her to understand that I won’t be leaving my building. And that it would be better to do everything possible to restrain the police and whoever else they’re working with.

I decide to change the subject and bring it back to positive networking, and start to type out a request for her daughter’s contact information.

I’m very pleased that I can think this clearly and this cogently when talking to humans that stress me out. It makes it so much easier to deal with them fairly.

But I’m halfway through typing up my request when I hear a big splash and a familiar galumphing noise, the creaking of the pier under an immense weight, and the world’s angriest, croakiest, most charred, “YAWP!”

My head snaps up and my eyes lock on the source of the noise, but I'm hyper alert and notice policemen scrambling out of their trucks, and friends diving for cover.

Whitman is at the far end of the pier, pulling themself up onto it and shaking water from their wings and tail.

I had a plan for something like this.

I'd prepared.

But several disparate things happen at once in my body.

I notice a shotgun and a rifle pointed in my direction, and my lower half makes to jump away to the right. My forelegs move to clear the path for charging Whitman and grab the table and shove it left. My wings flap. My tail twists to make me turn to the left. And I open my mouth to try to speak a phrase I'd practiced.

And what comes out instead is, “Mayor! Shit. Shit. Mayor!”

I think the base of my tail knocks into Mayor Chisholm and pushes her toward Nathan, who moves to catch and steady her.

The table, laptop, coffee, and keyboard clatter into Seagull, who’s leaping to his feet. He intercepts the objects with both forearms and windmills, adding to the chaos of their flight, incidentally providing me cover.

Everything is momentarily moving so slow, including my body, but I get a chance to formulate a new plan before there's a crack and something hits my left horn.

Another crack, and a dart appears with its needle right through Whitman’s right ear, spraying something out the other side of it.

This is a mess!

Here's what I have to work with.

This park used to be an old paper plant. It went out of business in the late oughts, and the city spent the next decade arguing about what to do with it, and then the decade after that cleaning it up and turning half of it into a park, leaving some of the liquid storage tanks and the pier as historic landmarks.

It's mostly a field with a playground in the corner of it, and some paved paths winding through it, with a gravel parking lot of the same size as the field to the East. Everyone here is parked in the smaller, daily use paved lot.

There are other people in the park, their cars in the lot, but they've retreated to watch from behind the preserved storage tanks.

There's a lot of open space and very little cover, but if I hop over Seagull and the table, I can dash to the right of the playground and try to take off across the field and gravel lot, running across the cops’ field of vision.

Not a super great idea, but I'm already doing it.

I can't believe they shot at me with Mayor Chisholm right there.

“Mayor!” I shout as I scramble over Seagull, gripping his leather jacket as I pull myself over him.

So much for a graceful leap.

I hear a couple more gunshots and a complaint from Whitman as I go.

Then I'm dodging around the playground and starting to flap my wings. I'm gonna make a big target.

I want to remember the words I meant to say. Why aren’t they coming to my mind? Where did they go?

Shift! Shift shift shift!

Chapman’s at work.

I’m expecting to get hit. I’m expecting to get hit by bullets, or shot, or tranq darts, or even a gun thrown in frustration, and I’m not.

And I successfully take to the air unharmed, unless my horn is damaged from whatever hit it. And my head is far less rattled from that impact than I think it should have been. And now I can see all four cops struggling with their guns.

One of them pulls out a pistol just about the same time I hear the distant whine and chop of a helicopter.

This was a trap.

And did someone somehow coax Whitman into springing it?

I’m not running away. I’m not going to leave my friends in the middle of this. Not with Whitman bearing down on them. I’m sure the police and that helicopter are only after us dragons, but I don’t trust Whitman to do anything rational at this point.

I don’t even know Whitman, other than that they’ve attacked me twice already.

As I’m wheeling about to gain altitude, I feel four more shifts. And then, as I watch, the officers test their pistols, abandon them, and then start using their radios. And Whitman advances on my people, though they’re casting glances at the police who’ve shot them.

In fact, Whitman may be going for the cops but, unless they can get in the air, they have to run down the pier anyway to do it.

I’m not sure everyone’s going to get out of the way in time.

And if I dive fast enough to intercept, I’m not going to be able to safely land. But I don’t have to land.

Oh, Whitman’s watching me, too. I am, after all, their original target, most likely.

It looks like the big, weird monster is trying to pick up their pace as they watch me plummet toward a spot between them and the base of the pier, where Rhoda is helping the Mayor stumble to the side, and Chapman’s tugging at Seagull.

The photographer – Greg, I think – has backed up the walkway, still in Whitman’s path but further away, and is kneeling with camera trained on the charging dragon.

Well, this is about to get dramatic, Greg.

A word comes to me and wants to be spoken. It’s not perfect, but it will do.

I squawk it out as loudly as I can to make up for lack of inflection, “OKAY.” And then my body takes a big intake of air.

And just as I pull up, just before I ram into the pier before Whitman, I belch out as much of my napalm as I can. And start flapping to gain altitude again.

I just manage to clear the waterfront pub where a serial killer used to hang out back in the ‘80s. I’m pretty happy I don’t slam into the side of it. Then I start to bank and head back toward the park, turning my head to take in the action there.

I have no idea about the political optics of any of this, and that helicopter is getting here fast.

But Whitman has dodged to the right, to avoid the flames, and leap over the last bit of water and land on the shore, using their wings to extend their distance. And once landed, they veer more toward the cops.

This presents a really obnoxious dilemma for me.

I find that I just don’t care about those officers. They’re not my people. They are, in fact, my enemies, as far as my body is concerned. And ethically, philosophically, I’m pretty seriously against the police to begin with. And, on top of that, I think they’ve just grossly endangered the Mayor and shown themselves to be operating on an agenda that is different from hers.

On the other hand, I want to prove to the Mayor, the press, and the city, that we dragons don’t have to be a threat. That we can be an asset to the community, and a force for collaboration and better communication. Or, really, just good friends. And letting Whitman flatten or eat four cops is not really conducive to that.

There isn’t a lot I can do, though. I’m out of fire, and I’m having trouble with my words.

This is right about the time, especially with that helicopter almost here, that it would be awesome for Astraia to come charging in with the rest of the city’s dragons, a surprise coalition including her staunchest rival Loreena, to intervene and make everyone listen to me.

There are so many reasons that’s not going to happen.

What is going to happen is that I’m going to overtake Whitman just a second or two before they reach the panicking cops.

There’s a word I could call out that would be perfect for this. I know it. I learned it. I want it.

It’s not there.

I’m still verbally stymied by something.

What I do end up singing as I buzz Whitman and the fleeing police is, “Shit. Shit. Mayor! Mayor! Mayor! Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

And as I pull up, I glance over my shoulder in time to see Whitman slam into the first of the SUVs and cause it to slide into the second, just as one of the cops leaps out from between them into the parking lot behind them. The other officers had fled around both cars.

There’s so much to keep track of and think about.

As I’m spiraling up over the gravel lot to gain altitude, I watch the helicopter come over the marina just a couple hundred yards or so away. I’m hoping that Chapman can sabotage it again, but I’m not feeling any shifting. And when I look hir direction, I see my friends busy huddling behind cover, yelling at each other and the Mayor.

I don’t know if I can climb faster than the chopper. But I’m trying, because if it flies over me, it can ground me violently with the downwash. 

I see that it is a civilian vehicle with a company logo I can’t read yet on it. Contractors. Maybe wildlife management of some sort. Probably why two of the police officers were armed with tranqs.

Something is keeping Chapman from dealing with it, and Whitman is getting violent with the cops that shot at them. And I really can’t blame Whitman for doing that.

I feel at a complete loss and totally out of tricks.

So.

 A trick is not in order, since it doesn’t exist.

I don’t know what to do about the chopper, but I can handle Whitman.

Can I?

Whitman, for whatever reason, found out about this meeting and snuck up on us by swimming to the pier. Not only that, they chose to leap up onto the pier instead of crawling up on shore anywhere else, blocking my easiest runway for escape. I don’t know if they knew about that, or it was just a coincidence of choice. But there’s something about this attack that seems premeditated and planned.

But, if the trap had been set by the police and the contractors, and they’re shooting at Whitman, you’d think they’d have a lot more backup than just the helicopter.

What I’m hoping for is that the facts that I’ve defeated Whitman twice, and grievously injured them (I think), and that Whitman is now at (possibly unexpected) odds with the police, will play in my favor psychologically when I do this.

The four cops are now running Eastward down the paved parking lot, toward where I’d been having the meeting with Mayor Chisholm, and Whitman is jumping down from the top of an SUV to turn and chase them.

Whitman runs faster than a human.

I fly faster than Whitman runs, and I’m already coming in at speed.

I fly over Whitman and the heads of the officers, and then immediately start breaking with flapping wings.

I’m going to turn faster on the ground than in the air, so I land with my back to the cops, several yards ahead of them. And by the time I leap back up and spin around to face them, they’re dodging between cars back toward the walkway of the park.

Whitman sees me and snaps their badly burned jaws in a manner that makes it really easy for me to imagine my head being completely crushed by them.

So I rear up, beat my wings at full stretch as furiously as I can, slamming my tail against the ground, and let out the longest and loudest challenging cry I’ve managed yet.

My signature.

A long, low subaudial rumble like a tiny Earthquake that, when it hits the right harmonic, causes parts of the cars next to me to rattle and hum. I raise that steadily in pitch until it’s a screaming squawk and follow it with five sharp wood block knocks. And then land on all fours again and brace myself for impact.

If they’d wanted to, Whitman could have charged me while I was doing that, I’m sure.

Instead, Whitman has pulled up short, and jerks their chin up sharply before letting out a thunderous, “Yawp!”

Then I hear the rumbling behind me and the squelching noise of tires turning on pavement, and the squeak and hiss of the breaks of a large truck.

A quick glance back with my left eye, keeping my right on Whitman, reveals to me a huge white armored personnel carrier with a battering ram on the front of it looming over me.

Oh. The Sheriff’s “tank”.

Yeah, that can be a tank right now.

Before I can stop it, my body leaps toward Whitman, just slightly to the side, and my tail windmills to help me turn to face the machine as the wildlife management chopper pulls in and above us, circling in to come from behind us. Whitman dodges away from me a half step.

I do a super short version of my challenge cry, with one knock, and glance at Whitman.

I feel like I’ve got my words back. Maybe making my challenge cry somehow centered me, and brought me back to myself. I can remember the the word I wanted to say to Whitman. I’ve been wanting to say it since I taught it to myself. It comes forth without much effort.

“Peace,” I say, with as much volume as I can to be heard over the chopper, as deputy officers of the county start leaping out of the APC. Then I jerk my head in the direction of those assholes, and say, “Stop.”

I hope Whitman understands my intent.

The helicopter is so deafening I can’t actually hear my own voice, and Whitman must be in agony. And through that cacophony and wind, I can see numerous firearms being leveled at both Whitman and myself from in front of us.

We are so cooked now, though. I’m expecting to be hit by tranq darts from above any instant. Or a net. Or something.

There’re a lot of people here to try to transfix. I could maybe make the appearance of eye contact with three. In desperation, I rear up and lock gazes with the nearest deputy. Just to be defending myself somehow. One less gun that will fire.

But then, there is a shift, and then a series of shifts so rapid and so numerous that the sensation of them reverberating through my nervous system paralyzes me briefly and I nearly collapse.

I stagger. I blink. I shake vertigo out of my head, stomping and flapping wings to increase circulation and reassert my balance.

And then there are terrifying pops and cracks from the helicopter, but nothing hits me.

The heavily armored deputies are all becoming frustrated with their weapons, and I hear and feel the chopper start to pull away.

Glancing at Whitman, I see them recovering from the series of shifts as well. Or so I assume.

“Now,” I say. And then give the Sheriff and his people my full challenge demonstration.

I feel good when Whitman joins in half way through.

When I’m done, I drop to all fours again and say, “Peace,” as loudly as I can.

I check Whitman again to make sure they get it. Right now, I do kind of really want to body check them while I can. But, I also want to restrain myself, and the humans are a much bigger problem.

Then, the Mayor runs into the space between us, waving her arms high in the air and followed quickly by Chapman and Rhoda, and she shouts, “Stand down! Stand! Down!”

There’s a tenuous pause of action within all the noise.

Are we done?

I think maybe this is done.

I glance at Whitman.

They growl and yawp again, but quieter, just loud enough to be faintly heard over the sound of the helicopter’s engine winding down.

The chopper has landed in the gravel lot and I’m maybe going to finally learn who they are.

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 19: One dragon's diplomacy

We’d both slept on the roof of my building after Chapman was done suturing and dressing my wound. Sie didn’t feel up to walking home, and just lay down on the spot, using hir purse as a pillow, and telling me I should rest, too.

It got up to 80 degrees that day according to the weather app on my tablet, which isn’t all that hot to me anymore, but I shaded Chapman with my wing anyway. I was stretching them out to soak up the sun and boost my metabolism, and keeping things cool and dark for Chapman seemed like a good secondary purpose.

Not a lot has happened between then and now.

After waking, Chapman spoke with me further about what to expect for my meeting with the Mayor. Rhoda stopped by, and joined the conversation. I slept some more through the night. And then I had my morning calls done again without interruption.

I’d feel a lot more on edge, waiting for something really bad to happen, if Rhoda hadn’t reported that the Mayor had explicitly told the chief of police to lay off, to not stir up any more trouble between us dragons until after she had a chance to talk to me.

I do still worry that this interview could be a trap, though.

The one thing that helps me cling to the idea that it isn’t is that the Mayor’s daughter is a dragon, too. And, the park we’re meeting at is one of mine, and open, and I can fly if I need to.

And someone on my team has thought of that, as well.

The park has a long pier that is used mostly as a sight seeing walkway for visitors. And we’re meeting right at the base of the pier, so that if I need room to take off in an emergency I can use the pier as a runway. I’m told that wasn’t mentioned to the Mayor or even Seagull, or anyone else. It was sold as being picturesque, and Seagull’s photographer loved it.

We’re also meeting in the mid afternoon, which means the thermals will be strongest if I need them.

All I have to do to get there is glide from my building to the park.

So, I’ve been told to conserve my energy and rest most of the day until then, to soak up the sun and keep healing. That way, I’ll have as much energy as possible to focus on socializing and talking, and to flee or fight if I really have to.

Besides, even though Nathan will be supplying the interview with coffee and pastries, the shop is closed today, so my urge to visit with people down there will not be answered.

On the other hand, my wound is feeling so much better. It makes me feel like I already have the energy I need.

But I do as doctor Chapman and nurse Rhoda recommend and wait and rest, because the sun does feel really good on my wings and back, and I know it is excellent advice.

However, instead of waiting on my building, I move to the next building closer to the park, which is just a smidge taller than mine. It takes a bit of wing work to get up there, and some circling, but it’s worth it.

Partly because the taller building is owned by a biblical software company, and now I’m a dragon on their roof, and I find that amusing.

It’s a really good view of the park and surrounding area, too.

I can watch as the police sweep the area every hour or so, occasionally talking to people but not seeming to do much of anything.

A couple of them will arrive in a car, walk through the park, and then leave.

When the appointed time begins to arrive, a couple of police SUVs park in the parking lot, but the officers don’t get out of their vehicles. That makes me nervous, but I can’t exactly say why besides that they’re the police.

And then a white van with the weekly’s logo on the side pulls in to the lot as far away from the police as possible, and Seagull and the photographer and probably an intern all get out and start unpacking chairs and a small table and other equipment, including a laptop and what appears to be a supplemental keyboard for it. And they set that up at the land end of the pier, just as planned.

A few minutes later, a shiny new Nissan Leaf pulls into the lot and parks a space away from the newspaper's van. A woman gets out of the driver's side, and she's dressed in a pale lavender suit, despite the weather. She seems very comfortable in it and very confident in her movements as she reaches back in her car to fetch a fairly large purple purse.

That, I think, is Mayor Lynn Chisholm. Like Rhoda, she's Black, and I remember being fairly impressed with her background and politics. I wasn’t paying that much attention during her election, but I caught enough from conversations around the coffee shop to decide to vote for her.

Especially with a dragon for a daughter, I wonder if she has a fraught relationship with the police.

Normally, I'd leave that entirely alone, and assume that that's her battle to deal with. But the police were after me specifically and she called them off. So, at least guessing at that dynamic is a matter of my own survival.

The cops that are there are still staying in their own vehicles.

This is a small city, still. Mayors have been known to have lunch at local dives or hang out at coffee shops and talk about local art.

Well. Some of them have. Others have been snobby and reclusive and only hobnobbed with the business establishment. Or, that's what the Order of Bearded Men say when talking loudly about politics wherever they congregate. You know the type of guys I'm talking about. I imagine every small town and city has a few. Men, with beards, who talk loudly in coffee shops. The Order of Bearded Men.

Anyway, it's about time for me to join the Mayor for coffee on the pier.

I wait to see her talk to Seagull and his crew, and then for Rhoda, Chapman, and Nathan to arrive with the coffee and other goodies.

When it looks like everyone is relaxed and looking around at the sky for me, I dive off the building to join them.

The flight down there is uneventful and exhilarating. I'm leaping off a seven story building and headed downhill toward a group of people who have coffee for me. And I have to say, swooping never gets old. It's a rush!

There's plenty of sidewalk space for me to land on, and they see me coming long before I get there, but they all back up a step or two as I set down.

Standing and looking at Chapman, I feel like maybe I grew a little over the night. It's just a quick, puzzling impression, because sie and Rhoda and Nathan all seem a little smaller.

Maybe it's just their act of giving me space that creates that illusion, but I decide then to figure out a way to measure and track my length.

The Mayor steps forward and holds out her right hand to offer and shake and says, “Hi. I'm Mayor Chisholm. It's a pleasure and honor to meet you. I understand your name is Meghan.”

I gingerly lift my right foreclaw and place it on her hand in the best even grip I can manage and press down lightly and briefly, saying, “Yes. Meg.”

The Mayor blinks and smiles, saying, “If you don’t mind me saying, I was told you could say a few words, and it is a delight to hear some of them!” Then we release each other’s hands, and she takes a step toward the chairs and table, and says, “Shall we sit down at your computer and get to know each other over a cuppa?”

I bow my head and say, “Yes.” I can’t make it more polite than that without my AAC.

So we all move over there and settle down.

I, of course, do not use a chair. I’m very comfortable on my haunches anyway.

“I’d like to use what you type into the computer as your transcript, on the record, if you don’t mind,” Seagull says to me. “If you say something you regret, just treat it like any friendly conversation and correct yourself, as you’d want to do with the Mayor anyway, and I’ll go with the correction. Does that sound good?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Fantastic! I’ll be sitting on the other side,” he says. Then he addresses us both. “Mayor Chisholm. Meghan the Dragon. It’s going to be a little bit of a three way conversation, with me moderating. But I’m mostly going to leave it up to you two. I just might have a question or two for the paper, mostly.”

“That sounds wonderful, Mr. Phil,” Mayor Chisholm says. “I might play it even and hit you with a couple questions myself, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all!”

“Shall we, then?”

And we all scoot in and get comfortable.

The computer is all set up. The supplemental accessible keyboard is actually kind of bland looking and dirty, like it’s been used a lot. But it is bigger, with bigger keys that I think I can use with little trouble.

“I got that from the Senior Center,” Nathan says from where he’s seated. “They’re lending it to us for the day, but also gave me a lead on where to get a new one, if you like it.”

I experiment with it by using it to say, “Sweet! Thank you.” 

The program once again ignores the exclamation point, of course.

“So, Meghan,” Mayor Chisholm says. “I’d really like to get to know you as a person, if you don’t mind. I’m sure you know that my own daughter has experienced the same transformation as you have, and I won’t lie and say that it hasn’t been a bit of a challenge. But I love her, and I want to do what I can to understand her better and make sure that her future is safe and secure. And you’ve got quite a small community supporting you, and I’d like to learn more about that from your perspective.”

“Okay. Thank you Mayor Chisholm,” I say. “I would like that.” 

Wow this is easy. I still feel rushed to speak anywhere as fast as anyone else, but after knuckling that tablet with one claw for so long, this keyboard is a dream.

“I don’t extend this to many people, Meghan, but today you can call me Lynn, OK?” the Mayor says. “We’re just a couple people of the city here enjoying the coffee and talking about life. And I don’t want you to have to type more than is necessary.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Then you can call me Meg.”

“Wonderful!” Then she turns to our journalist and says, “But not you, Mr. Phil. I’m sorry, but I do need to remind people I earned the position.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly,” he says in his immaculate tenor inflections. “But you can still call me Seagull, if you like. I prefer it, personally.”

The Mayor smirks, and says, “Very well, Mr. Seagull.”

“OK,” Seagull says, and laughs as he leans back and gestures to us.

Weirdly, all this polite talk makes me feel like I’m in my element, and I do relax considerably.

I turn my attention to Mayor Chisholm, and wait patiently for her next prompt.

She points a finger and bounces it up and down as she says, “Now, Meg, I’m told that you have an idea, a plan, for helping our dragons communicate with each other, settle their differences, and represent themselves reasonably well to the rest of us. And I’d like to hear about that, but later. What I’m really interested in is, what’s it like? What is it like to suddenly wake up as a dragon and just… go about your life? For you.”

I huff and smile to give myself time to think about that, then turn to the computer.

“Mayor Lynn,” I say, hitting enter.

“Just Lynn, please.”

“Thank you. Lynn,” I correct myself. “I have always been a dragon. Even before the change. I knew it. I didn’t fit in before. Now, I fit in. Socially. People understand me now. But,” I pause and look back up the hill at what I can see of my building, and ponder how to compose the rest of my thoughts. Then I get back to it, “I don’t fit economically or legally. And that is a problem.”

“Thank you, Meg,” the Mayor says. “I’ve heard similar things from my daughter. That’s reassuring, in a way. It means that the things that are wrong can be fixed.” And she tilts her head, “I don’t want to promise anything I can’t guarantee, of course. But. Another question. Have you met any regular citizens who harbor an anti-dragon sentiment, yet?”

“I don’t think so,” I reply. “If so, they did not show it. I think I’m lucky.”

“I feel like we might be going too fast for you, Meg,” the Mayor says. “I’d love it if you could elaborate on all of this. Please, take your time to write whatever you need to. I have my coffee. It would be my pleasure to just sit and listen for a bit. Hardly anyone gets a chance to do this, you know. And that should change.”

At the mention of coffee, I look at my bowl and decide I’m fine without it for the time being. I’ll drink it cold as a reward for getting through this. So I turn back to the computer and really get into it.

“Thank you, Lynn. Obviously, I am the daughter of two human beings, and I was raised by them, and by human schools. I played at being human until the 24th. I don’t know what was special about that day, but that’s when it happened. I knew I wasn’t human right from the start, though. A lot of people feel this way. For people like me, I like the word therian. But they may use otherkin or alterhuman, too. I figured out I was a dragon at 9 years old, after watching a movie about them. I just knew it, looking at these talking cartoon dragons, that that’s what I was. And a lot of things about humans don’t make sense to me. Never did…”

And I talk for a long time about this.

I speculate about why only a handful of dragon therians, and nobody else, underwent metamorphosis. I talk a little about investigating that. But I don’t mention anything about Chapman’s art.

I also go light on that, and try to focus more on what my daily life has been like.

Mayor Chisholm prompts me about that on occasion, to keep me on track.

A lot of what I tell her is what I’ve written in this book.

The part that I’m really careful about are my feelings and interactions regarding other dragons, because I don’t think I was understanding all that correctly from the beginning. And I don’t think they were, either.

I point out that my human upbringing led me, and probably everyone, to interpret my own instincts badly, and didn’t prepare me for the challenge of working with them.

I talk about how the morning songs we do, just like the birds, actually seem like a community building exercise. We use the same calls when challenging each other, but it’s almost more like we’re just shouting our names. And the context matters. In the morning, it now very much feels like a roll call to make sure everyone is where they should be and doing fine. I feel better and happier about my neighbors every time we do it, and less like I need to fight them over anything.

I don’t have proof, just the growing online interactions with Astraia. But I suspect that once we get to know each other better, fights will just happen less and less often.

I then pull out my tablet and open discord to show the Mayor what I’ve started there, and what Astraia and I have written.

“I remember the letter you sent me,” Mayor Chisholm says. “It’s honestly what inspired me to do this with you. Even if you never were human, it is so clear to me that you’re still people. Or beings who deserve to be treated as people. Of course, my own daughter is teaching me that as well. But seeing another dragon reach out to take the initiative and start a dialogue as they used to call it. That’s genuinely heartening. Thank you for that.”

“Lynn, may I ask?” I inquire.

“Yes, please, Meg.”

“What is it like to be mother of a dragon?”

“Well,” she says. “I can’t say it’s not hard. But I think the weirdest thing for me is how it affects my own sense of self and place in the world. Because I have to wonder what is it in me that made this possible when I gave birth to her. Or is it something from the outside? Like the hand of God reaching down and anointing worthy individuals to challenge us, or maybe to help protect us? To change the world, that’s for sure! I just don’t know, though. I’m trying to figure that out. I think we all are.”

As I’m watching her, I can see Seagull nodding and smiling. And he does not look like he’s on the verge of asking any questions at all.

This feels like a major win. It feels like progress, and like maybe we’re actually going to build something good. I know that City Council makes the laws and there are other people in government that need to be brought around. And also that local government can be superseded by the state and the national governments as well. There’s a long way to go. But, here, now, I’m involved in doing something that might work with someone of authority who seems to support me.

It feels good.

It also feels really, really lucky, because if the other guy had won that election and was in office instead, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be going this way at all.

Her mention of God startles me a little, though. I’m not used to being around people who so freely reference their religion like that anymore. Or, maybe, specifically God. I’m usually surrounded by atheists and neo-pagans. And pretty much all I want to believe in are dragons, humans, and whatever Chapman is.

But it’s a little thing. She’s being an ally, so far.

I look at the police, who are parked so far away from us, but so visibly so.

“Now, Meg, I do have to warn you,” Mayor Chisholm says. “I’m just the Mayor. I’m not the law.” My breath stills as I hear this, but I do nothing as she continues. “I can tell the police how to enforce those laws, to a degree. But certain laws are being brought against you, unfortunately. And you may well have to defend yourself in court. I want you to know, I’m on your side in this. You’re safe here and now, and when you go home. But it might be better if you can find a more suitable home for the time being.”

I look back at her.

“I spoke to the chief of police about this, and he asked me to remind you of this, and to tell you that, as a deal,” she says. “He’ll make sure you’re safe, if you find a better place to live than the rooftop of yours.”

I do not like that.

Especially after all I’ve conveyed to her and started to set up, I want to talk more about her daughter. I want to pointedly bring her up and use her as leverage to get her to understand that I won’t be leaving my building. And that it would be better to do everything possible to restrain the police and whoever else they’re working with.

I decide to change the subject and bring it back to positive networking, and start to type out a request for her daughter’s contact information.

I’m very pleased that I can think this clearly and this cogently when talking to humans that stress me out. It makes it so much easier to deal with them fairly.

But I’m halfway through typing up my request when I hear a big splash and a familiar galumphing noise, the creaking of the pier under an immense weight, and the world’s angriest, croakiest, most charred, “YAWP!”

My head snaps up and my eyes lock on the source of the noise, but I'm hyper alert and notice policemen scrambling out of their trucks, and friends diving for cover.

Whitman is at the far end of the pier, pulling themself up onto it and shaking water from their wings and tail.

I had a plan for something like this.

I'd prepared.

But several disparate things happen at once in my body.

I notice a shotgun and a rifle pointed in my direction, and my lower half makes to jump away to the right. My forelegs move to clear the path for charging Whitman and grab the table and shove it left. My wings flap. My tail twists to make me turn to the left. And I open my mouth to try to speak a phrase I'd practiced.

And what comes out instead is, “Mayor! Shit. Shit. Mayor!”

I think the base of my tail knocks into Mayor Chisholm and pushes her toward Nathan, who moves to catch and steady her.

The table, laptop, coffee, and keyboard clatter into Seagull, who’s leaping to his feet. He intercepts the objects with both forearms and windmills, adding to the chaos of their flight, incidentally providing me cover.

Everything is momentarily moving so slow, including my body, but I get a chance to formulate a new plan before there's a crack and something hits my left horn.

Another crack, and a dart appears with its needle right through Whitman’s right ear, spraying something out the other side of it.

This is a mess!

Here's what I have to work with.

This park used to be an old paper plant. It went out of business in the late oughts, and the city spent the next decade arguing about what to do with it, and then the decade after that cleaning it up and turning half of it into a park, leaving some of the liquid storage tanks and the pier as historic landmarks.

It's mostly a field with a playground in the corner of it, and some paved paths winding through it, with a gravel parking lot of the same size as the field to the East. Everyone here is parked in the smaller, daily use paved lot.

There are other people in the park, their cars in the lot, but they've retreated to watch from behind the preserved storage tanks.

There's a lot of open space and very little cover, but if I hop over Seagull and the table, I can dash to the right of the playground and try to take off across the field and gravel lot, running across the cops’ field of vision.

Not a super great idea, but I'm already doing it.

I can't believe they shot at me with Mayor Chisholm right there.

“Mayor!” I shout as I scramble over Seagull, gripping his leather jacket as I pull myself over him.

So much for a graceful leap.

I hear a couple more gunshots and a complaint from Whitman as I go.

Then I'm dodging around the playground and starting to flap my wings. I'm gonna make a big target.

I want to remember the words I meant to say. Why aren’t they coming to my mind? Where did they go?

Shift! Shift shift shift!

Chapman’s at work.

I’m expecting to get hit. I’m expecting to get hit by bullets, or shot, or tranq darts, or even a gun thrown in frustration, and I’m not.

And I successfully take to the air unharmed, unless my horn is damaged from whatever hit it. And my head is far less rattled from that impact than I think it should have been. And now I can see all four cops struggling with their guns.

One of them pulls out a pistol just about the same time I hear the distant whine and chop of a helicopter.

This was a trap.

And did someone somehow coax Whitman into springing it?

I’m not running away. I’m not going to leave my friends in the middle of this. Not with Whitman bearing down on them. I’m sure the police and that helicopter are only after us dragons, but I don’t trust Whitman to do anything rational at this point.

I don’t even know Whitman, other than that they’ve attacked me twice already.

As I’m wheeling about to gain altitude, I feel four more shifts. And then, as I watch, the officers test their pistols, abandon them, and then start using their radios. And Whitman advances on my people, though they’re casting glances at the police who’ve shot them.

In fact, Whitman may be going for the cops but, unless they can get in the air, they have to run down the pier anyway to do it.

I’m not sure everyone’s going to get out of the way in time.

And if I dive fast enough to intercept, I’m not going to be able to safely land. But I don’t have to land.

Oh, Whitman’s watching me, too. I am, after all, their original target, most likely.

It looks like the big, weird monster is trying to pick up their pace as they watch me plummet toward a spot between them and the base of the pier, where Rhoda is helping the Mayor stumble to the side, and Chapman’s tugging at Seagull.

The photographer – Greg, I think – has backed up the walkway, still in Whitman’s path but further away, and is kneeling with camera trained on the charging dragon.

Well, this is about to get dramatic, Greg.

A word comes to me and wants to be spoken. It’s not perfect, but it will do.

I squawk it out as loudly as I can to make up for lack of inflection, “OKAY.” And then my body takes a big intake of air.

And just as I pull up, just before I ram into the pier before Whitman, I belch out as much of my napalm as I can. And start flapping to gain altitude again.

I just manage to clear the waterfront pub where a serial killer used to hang out back in the ‘80s. I’m pretty happy I don’t slam into the side of it. Then I start to bank and head back toward the park, turning my head to take in the action there.

I have no idea about the political optics of any of this, and that helicopter is getting here fast.

But Whitman has dodged to the right, to avoid the flames, and leap over the last bit of water and land on the shore, using their wings to extend their distance. And once landed, they veer more toward the cops.

This presents a really obnoxious dilemma for me.

I find that I just don’t care about those officers. They’re not my people. They are, in fact, my enemies, as far as my body is concerned. And ethically, philosophically, I’m pretty seriously against the police to begin with. And, on top of that, I think they’ve just grossly endangered the Mayor and shown themselves to be operating on an agenda that is different from hers.

On the other hand, I want to prove to the Mayor, the press, and the city, that we dragons don’t have to be a threat. That we can be an asset to the community, and a force for collaboration and better communication. Or, really, just good friends. And letting Whitman flatten or eat four cops is not really conducive to that.

There isn’t a lot I can do, though. I’m out of fire, and I’m having trouble with my words.

This is right about the time, especially with that helicopter almost here, that it would be awesome for Astraia to come charging in with the rest of the city’s dragons, a surprise coalition including her staunchest rival Loreena, to intervene and make everyone listen to me.

There are so many reasons that’s not going to happen.

What is going to happen is that I’m going to overtake Whitman just a second or two before they reach the panicking cops.

There’s a word I could call out that would be perfect for this. I know it. I learned it. I want it.

It’s not there.

I’m still verbally stymied by something.

What I do end up singing as I buzz Whitman and the fleeing police is, “Shit. Shit. Mayor! Mayor! Mayor! Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

And as I pull up, I glance over my shoulder in time to see Whitman slam into the first of the SUVs and cause it to slide into the second, just as one of the cops leaps out from between them into the parking lot behind them. The other officers had fled around both cars.

There’s so much to keep track of and think about.

As I’m spiraling up over the gravel lot to gain altitude, I watch the helicopter come over the marina just a couple hundred yards or so away. I’m hoping that Chapman can sabotage it again, but I’m not feeling any shifting. And when I look hir direction, I see my friends busy huddling behind cover, yelling at each other and the Mayor.

I don’t know if I can climb faster than the chopper. But I’m trying, because if it flies over me, it can ground me violently with the downwash. 

I see that it is a civilian vehicle with a company logo I can’t read yet on it. Contractors. Maybe wildlife management of some sort. Probably why two of the police officers were armed with tranqs.

Something is keeping Chapman from dealing with it, and Whitman is getting violent with the cops that shot at them. And I really can’t blame Whitman for doing that.

I feel at a complete loss and totally out of tricks.

So.

 A trick is not in order, since it doesn’t exist.

I don’t know what to do about the chopper, but I can handle Whitman.

Can I?

Whitman, for whatever reason, found out about this meeting and snuck up on us by swimming to the pier. Not only that, they chose to leap up onto the pier instead of crawling up on shore anywhere else, blocking my easiest runway for escape. I don’t know if they knew about that, or it was just a coincidence of choice. But there’s something about this attack that seems premeditated and planned.

But, if the trap had been set by the police and the contractors, and they’re shooting at Whitman, you’d think they’d have a lot more backup than just the helicopter.

What I’m hoping for is that the facts that I’ve defeated Whitman twice, and grievously injured them (I think), and that Whitman is now at (possibly unexpected) odds with the police, will play in my favor psychologically when I do this.

The four cops are now running Eastward down the paved parking lot, toward where I’d been having the meeting with Mayor Chisholm, and Whitman is jumping down from the top of an SUV to turn and chase them.

Whitman runs faster than a human.

I fly faster than Whitman runs, and I’m already coming in at speed.

I fly over Whitman and the heads of the officers, and then immediately start breaking with flapping wings.

I’m going to turn faster on the ground than in the air, so I land with my back to the cops, several yards ahead of them. And by the time I leap back up and spin around to face them, they’re dodging between cars back toward the walkway of the park.

Whitman sees me and snaps their badly burned jaws in a manner that makes it really easy for me to imagine my head being completely crushed by them.

So I rear up, beat my wings at full stretch as furiously as I can, slamming my tail against the ground, and let out the longest and loudest challenging cry I’ve managed yet.

My signature.

A long, low subaudial rumble like a tiny Earthquake that, when it hits the right harmonic, causes parts of the cars next to me to rattle and hum. I raise that steadily in pitch until it’s a screaming squawk and follow it with five sharp wood block knocks. And then land on all fours again and brace myself for impact.

If they’d wanted to, Whitman could have charged me while I was doing that, I’m sure.

Instead, Whitman has pulled up short, and jerks their chin up sharply before letting out a thunderous, “Yawp!”

Then I hear the rumbling behind me and the squelching noise of tires turning on pavement, and the squeak and hiss of the breaks of a large truck.

A quick glance back with my left eye, keeping my right on Whitman, reveals to me a huge white armored personnel carrier with a battering ram on the front of it looming over me.

Oh. The Sheriff’s “tank”.

Yeah, that can be a tank right now.

Before I can stop it, my body leaps toward Whitman, just slightly to the side, and my tail windmills to help me turn to face the machine as the wildlife management chopper pulls in and above us, circling in to come from behind us. Whitman dodges away from me a half step.

I do a super short version of my challenge cry, with one knock, and glance at Whitman.

I feel like I’ve got my words back. Maybe making my challenge cry somehow centered me, and brought me back to myself. I can remember the the word I wanted to say to Whitman. I’ve been wanting to say it since I taught it to myself. It comes forth without much effort.

“Peace,” I say, with as much volume as I can to be heard over the chopper, as deputy officers of the county start leaping out of the APC. Then I jerk my head in the direction of those assholes, and say, “Stop.”

I hope Whitman understands my intent.

The helicopter is so deafening I can’t actually hear my own voice, and Whitman must be in agony. And through that cacophony and wind, I can see numerous firearms being leveled at both Whitman and myself from in front of us.

We are so cooked now, though. I’m expecting to be hit by tranq darts from above any instant. Or a net. Or something.

There’re a lot of people here to try to transfix. I could maybe make the appearance of eye contact with three. In desperation, I rear up and lock gazes with the nearest deputy. Just to be defending myself somehow. One less gun that will fire.

But then, there is a shift, and then a series of shifts so rapid and so numerous that the sensation of them reverberating through my nervous system paralyzes me briefly and I nearly collapse.

I stagger. I blink. I shake vertigo out of my head, stomping and flapping wings to increase circulation and reassert my balance.

And then there are terrifying pops and cracks from the helicopter, but nothing hits me.

The heavily armored deputies are all becoming frustrated with their weapons, and I hear and feel the chopper start to pull away.

Glancing at Whitman, I see them recovering from the series of shifts as well. Or so I assume.

“Now,” I say. And then give the Sheriff and his people my full challenge demonstration.

I feel good when Whitman joins in half way through.

When I’m done, I drop to all fours again and say, “Peace,” as loudly as I can.

I check Whitman again to make sure they get it. Right now, I do kind of really want to body check them while I can. But, I also want to restrain myself, and the humans are a much bigger problem.

Then, the Mayor runs into the space between us, waving her arms high in the air and followed quickly by Chapman and Rhoda, and she shouts, “Stand down! Stand! Down!”

There’s a tenuous pause of action within all the noise.

Are we done?

I think maybe this is done.

I glance at Whitman.

They growl and yawp again, but quieter, just loud enough to be faintly heard over the sound of the helicopter’s engine winding down.

The chopper has landed in the gravel lot and I’m maybe going to finally learn who they are.

[girldragongizzard]

Ah, again, thank you so much for reading!

Our weekend is OK, but we're all starting to feel sick ourselves.

Anyway, I wanted to answer at least this question regarding magic in this story and in the Sunspot Chronicles:

But is it the same thing only in different stories, or are there differences I missed?

They're based on the same idea, the same basic principles, but with different rules.

In my story, so far, Phage does not exist as an entity, and consent is not a mechanical part of the magic. Also, the magic can be used to do some really magical stuff, like shapeshifting.

In the Sunspot Chronicles, the concept of consent is really important, so that's baked into the magic system. It's designed to mimic the way our dreams work in our own head. And the magic is more described as a psychic ability and can't do things like shapeshifting.

But, as we get into the sequels, there will be some other parallels that crop up as well. Such as what exactly Chapman really is. But it is deep lore stuff that you have to read all the unwritten Sunspot Chronicles to probably pick up on.

Chapter 18: Sutures

I wake up with a start, the gash on my back burning and itching, with just one thought in my head.

Mayor?!?

I was having a dream where I was in the beer garden of Flounder Sound Brewpub, having a beer and a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone, while talking to Kimberly about Chapman and listening to live music. The ice cream cone was propped up in a beer glass, and the beer was in a bowl, and I was musing about how my own subconscious mind was so thoughtful to accommodate me in this way, when Kimberly said something about how lucky I was to have found Chapman. And that’s when I pressed the talk button on my tablet and said, “That’s nothing. On Monday, I have a meeting with the Mayor!”

And that word just grabbed ahold of my whole brain and dragged me right out of sleep, head snapping up and darting glances all around.

Fortunately, there is no Mayor on the rooftop, nor on airbound approach.

I’m safe.

But I have an interview with the Mayor? Just two days after an interview with Seagull Phil, arguably the only investigative journalist left working in town?

I mean, I suppose that’s how that works.

I get up to stretch and –

Dang! My back is starting to really bother me.

I look at it and, though I’m not going to describe it again, it looks a bit worrisome. Not gross, to me, and I can’t tell if it’s infected by the same ways you can tell with various human tissue. But I don’t see any indication that it’s healing, either. And it is deep. And then there’s that burning and itching thing.

I feel like I have memories of seeing wild animals with wounds like this on video. And they’re just stoically going about their lives. And I have no idea where those videos came from, whether it was T.V. back in the day or YouTube or TikTok or what, but I’m now sort of feeling like we dragons are just expected to do the same.

A dugong could have a nasty run in with a boat’s propeller and there’s no vet there to stitch it up. The dugong would just have to bear it and heal as best it could. And that’s how it goes.

And seeing Astraia with her wounds just walking downtown had reminded me of that at the time. And, I guess I assumed that’s what she was doing, and made up a story in my head about how the local veterinarians wouldn’t see dragons, because, holy shit can you imagine one of us in the waiting room of a vet clinic with the dogs and cats in there all panicking?

And we’re all suddenly fighting and hurting each other and creating a demand. And probably a lot of us can’t pay.

I certainly couldn’t.

But, then, also, I’m about to see the Mayor? With a nasty gash on my back? Down at my Seaside Park? With Seagull Phil and a photographer present? With a nasty gash on my back?

It’s not dawn yet, so I’ve got some time to quietly freak out about all this.

I remember one of the biggest elements of my daydreaming about being a “real dragon” when I was a kid (and later as an adult, because I never stopped) was that I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this kind of thing.

With a “proper dragon body” – and I’m putting that in quotes because I was a dragon back then, I’ve always been a dragon, and that means I’ve always had the body of a dragon whatever body that was – anyway, with a “proper dragon body” I wouldn’t have to worry about getting hurt because my armor would be impervious to it, and I wouldn’t have to worry about social expectations and money because everyone would see that I am a dragon.

I’m not sure why this memo didn’t get through to the universe. I wrote it enough times in my head.

I go over and over all of this in my head for a while, waiting for the sun to come up, to the point that I eventually teach myself how to say “Mayor” just by visualizing it as spoken by my tablet.

The word just comes out of my chest and open mouth, “Mayor!” Complete with exclamation point. A cry of incredulous exasperation, it’s the one thing I’ve learned how to say with any inflection.

That startles me and snaps me out of my ruminations.

I get a little excited about it.

I go through all the words I’ve learned.

“Mayor!”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Stop.”

“Meg.”

“Okay.”

“Mine.”

“Fight.”

“Peace.”

“Go.”

“Stay.”

“Now.”

“Shit,” which is still spoken in Caleb’s voice, so I’m not really counting it in my vocabulary yet.

As I think I’ve said, I figure that most of these are words that will be useful in critical moments of diplomacy or action. I’m hoping for diplomacy more than anything else. I’m hoping to surprise another dragon or human into listening.

I guess I’m willing to fight anything if I absolutely have to, up to and including a space shuttle or maybe even the sun, but even a fight with a cat seems like it might be too costly, really. Either socially or physically.

And that’s not even thinking like a human, which I’m not sure if I’ve ever done, but I’ve watched a lot of human made movies.

It’s just my sense of things. And of what little experience I’ve had.

My shoulder really burns.

It’s just, everything seems like it’s been spinning wildly out of control. And a lot of things have been happening behind my back or out of sight, and I’m not entirely sure what all is going on, and I have to trust my friends that they’re setting things up well and OK, the best they can. And I’m not sure I feel like I’ve had a lot of agency in even my own actions, to be honest.

A lot of the time, I’m just reacting. And that seems like a problem.

I can only imagine the amount of damage my flailing has done politically, locally and maybe even more broadly than that.

I have a lot of questions that are still unanswered, including and maybe featuring the question of the mysterious helicopter. Maybe it was just a police helicopter. Maybe it was actually animal control. I don’t know!

I don’t like not knowing, but I’ve done my own searches now and I still can’t find the answers.

I might not ever know.

I’m old enough to have heard from people involved in direct action, who have come into contact with police work and military support of it, and they’ve said that sometimes they’ve encountered things they don’t ever expect to learn the explanation for.

And I’d love for my life to be this really cool narrative where I eventually learn the thing, but maybe I need to stop chewing on it and focus on what I can work with.

There are a bunch of social, political, and physical wounds that need repairing, and I don’t know the extent to how bad they are. I’m one of the wounded.

My first responsibility is probably to relax and let people help me, honestly.

That is something I’ve learned from my time amongst humans, definitely, from reading blog posts about trauma and injury and from talking to therapists extensively about C-PTSD. It’s nice to have a moment where I can just remember that advice about priority and try to apply it.

But then, I’m left wondering again what parts of me are draconic and what parts are human? I know I’m all dragon and have always been a dragon, identity-wise. But I’ve been raised by humans who thought I was human for the first fifty years of my life.

It’s.

OK.

If I’m truly, genuinely, entirely a dragon, then it seems to be in draconic nature to learn from humans, understand them, and emulate them in some ways.

If I focus on that, I think I can live with it without fretting too much.

But it also comes part and parcel with the relationship dragons have with humans and the question of what it could possibly be. Like, where did we come from? And, where are we going?

I’d thought about this the first few days of realizing my reality, but I haven’t had a lot of time since. And while I definitely speculated and daydreamt about it prior to my – I guess I’m going to borrow from my trans peers and call it my hatching – I didn’t have any of the evidence I have now.

Without any stressors, it seems like dragons and humans can get along just fine. Almost like we’ve been living with each other for millennia.

Mind you, a lot of the humans in my life have been taking that further, and are super close to me now that we all know what I am, and they’ve been taking care of me. They’ve been taking it for granted that they would. Almost like a parental role. Or a partner taking care of a disabled spouse. They even let me fuck up and help me straighten things out.

Which is more than humans often do for each other.

And my own reaction to them?

Now that they are clearly mine, I don’t want to lose them. 

But there’s more. I’ve even been holding back. I’ve not really let myself think about this, except a few times where it was awkward, but I want to be closer to them. I find myself wishing we could all have the quiet and space to cuddle and share our warmth. One big pile. Even if some of them aren’t very close to each other.

I wonder if Caleb and Astraia have taken the time to do that, since they’re already partners.

And when I think about other dragons?

Not very cuddly.

I just really need to know where we stand with each other.

We could be allies. We could be mates in the Spring. But we clearly need our space.

So, if we evolved at all, and weren’t just created by some magical force out of thin air, it seems like we’ve evolved to be symbiotic protectors of human communities. Maybe we were bred that way. But we’re clearly intellectually on par with humans. At least, we are now. So I tend to prefer to think we evolved that way.

But, then, there’s this one statement by one scholar of dragons, I can’t remember who or in what book, about mythological dragons. It went something like this. 

If you do a deep and broad analysis of what constitutes a dragon, you learn a few fundamental things. The things in common with all dragons are that they are monsters, they tend to live on the edges of nature while still in intimate contact with human communities, and their personal foibles or vices are often caricatures of one or more of the seven deadly sins. Where they are venerated, they are sought out for their wisdom and even rulership. Where they are reviled, they are slain, usually in the service of conquering or “saving” the people they are associated with. If anything, it seems as if dragons are like proto-gods, or minor deities, themselves. Created in humanity’s image melded and fused with the other apex predators of the natural world to be liaisons between us and the chaos of the wild. And, maybe, sometimes, to help us deal with other humans.

I think I’m remembering that right. I read it way, way back in the late 90s, when I was just starting college and found that amazing campus library. I may have embellished it over time and through hypesharing about dragons to everyone I’ve talked to.

Or, to put it more simply, what if dragons are the supernatural children of humanity? Maybe, up until now, we’ve only ever existed in myth.

It doesn’t completely line up with the prior awakening of the wizards. Nor with how my life and my body aren’t exactly like how myth would suggest it should be. There are loose strings there that I bet we could all pull at for centuries.

However, I’ve got a date with the Mayor tomorrow, and maybe sharing that would be a politically good idea, even if it’s wrong. Because maybe it speaks more to what we dragons could be.

And, of course, there’s the counter theory, that I tend to mention in the same breath.

That we dragons, being found in the artwork of humans long, long before any civilization was built, have always been here. And maybe it’s the other way around, and humans are our children, raised by us from the primordial world.

Maybe that’s why I sometimes feel like I have some kind of responsibility to them, to keep them. But I can’t do that well enough now because maybe I’m a very young dragon and have a lot to learn yet.

And, for whatever kept us hidden for so long, all my ancestors are in story books now, and they’re not here to look over my shoulder and say, “No, do it this way.”

Hm.

Maybe the symbiotic relationship is the one to focus on tomorrow.

If the Mayor even wants to talk about that. The Mayor who is a literal parent of a dragon.

Oh, right.

If humans are the parents of dragons. Doesn’t that mean that humans are dragons, too? At least, just a little bit?

The sky is getting brighter.

It’s time to sing.

—

There were no sirens.

We got away with it again. Singing to each other over the rooftops of the world.

Some people say they love it.

—

“I couldn’t get a vet to come up here, nor this early. And they were all reluctant to work on a dragon,” Chapman says. “But, that’s OK, because I got some advice, a link to how to do my own sutures on scaly hide, and I’ve got an idea. Did you know that there is knowledge on the internet on how to give a crocodile stitches?”

“No.”

“I don’t know if it’s legitimate or good advice, except that Dr. Park sent me the link,” sie says. “However! We need to clean and close that up, I’m sure of it. And if I do the sutures, then I can put my own spin on them. I can put my art into it, and maybe help with the healing that way.”

“Okay.” I feel nervous about all of that, but it still feels like it’s better than doing nothing.

“You’re going to love this part,” Chapman says in as encouraging and enthusiastic a voice as sie can muster, which sounds not at all sarcastic, but like it should be. Especially with the next sentence. “I spent all night staying up and researching how to do it! I’m going to need to pass out after this.” Which sie speaks as sie takes medical sewing supplies out of hir purse, including a small glass bottle with a worn out label and packets of sterile medical grade gauze. “Rhoda got me this stuff. I hope the needle is thick enough for your hide. And that I have enough thread. I’m supposed to do several layers to get it all closed safely without air stuck in the wound.”

“Okay,” I say, without betraying any of my emotions at all in my voice, because my voice doesn’t work that way. I figure that not saying “yes” will be enough to get my reticence across. Also, I’m very deliberately turning my head to watch everything but what Chapman is doing.

That’s a sign of trust, really. But also, I just don’t want to watch.

I need to make sure we’re not going to be interrupted by another dragon or a helicopter, anyway.

My tablet is handy, and within knuckle reach, so that I can talk calmly about anything while getting my shoulder stitched.

But, at first, I don’t have anything to say. I’m too focused on being OK with the pain and the discomfort of the procedure.

But after the shock of the antiseptic, even during the sharp poking of the needle, it does start to feel better. The burning and itching subsides quickly.

“Being disguised as much as you were yesterday probably actually did this some good,” Chapman says. “It was kind of like bandaging it up and keeping it away from exposure. But only when you were disguised. This is a little infected, still. But I really drenched it in the stuff, so we should be good.”

“How work?” I ask, impatient with everything, but curious.

“How what work?” Chapman asks.

“Art,” I say.

“Ah, hm,” sie tightens hir lips and pulls on the needle. “I suppose I might as well tell you. It hilariously doesn’t break my vow, because when I made it I didn’t take dragons into account.”

I wait while sie continues to work silently for a while. After a bit, though, I feel like sie isn’t actually going to explain, so I talk.

“Yes,” I say.

“Just a second, gathering my thoughts,” sie replies.

Of course.

“From what I can gather, it’s really a lot like programming or chip design,” Chapman says. “There are probably other ways of manipulating reality like I do, and I suspect that you dragons do it naturally in your own way. But the way I go about it is by making physical circuits that tell the forces of the universe what to do in a specific area and under specific circumstances. But, it’s different, too. I’m not a good programmer in any way. I’m an artist. I can’t code for shit, but I can do this. It’s like creating and cultivating a path for the beholder’s eye to follow through the composition, only, in this case, the eye of the beholder is often Entropy Itself. And I’m provoking an emotional reaction in it to the point it does something.”

Sie falls silent again for several stitches. Then continues.

“It still has to be precise and specific, which is fortunately also the way I think a lot of the time,” sie explains. “In this case, what I’m doing for your wound is to create channels through which heat and electricity can flow to create a barrier against pathogens. And I’m putting that over a latticework that is designed to help oxygen and nutrients to find the cells that need them the most, and to coax them into reproducing and bonding more rapidly in what I hope is the healing process. If I’m wrong, I might be giving you melanoma, so we’ll have to keep an eye on it.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I don’t want you dying of sepsis,” sie replies.

I flicker my tongue briefly and regret it. The antiseptic and the wound odor together do not taste good. Then I look at Chapman with my left eye. I want to stretch the wing that sie is hunched over, but I know that’s not a good idea. So, I ask another question.

“Why?”

“My younger brother was two once, you know,” Chapman says. “I’m familiar with this game.”

I turn my head to look at hir with both my eyes, and flicker my tongue again very deliberately, as an expression rather than to taste the air. I still taste the air, and I learn a lot from it. Chapman is sweating and hasn’t showered in over a day. But sie has also sanitized hir hands and arms thoroughly, and is wearing gloves.

Chapman sighs, “I like you. I don’t live here, and I don’t work here, but I come here for the coffee and we have the same counselor, and you’re my dragon anyway. I don’t have a relationship with the dragon of my neighborhood, so, I like you.”

Hearing that makes me feel stronger and more calm, and the needle bothers me so much less afterward.

“What think Rhoda?” I ask.

“Can you take the time to add a word or two more to that question?” Chapman suggests. “I don’t know which question it is.”

I huff and do that, “What you think of Rhoda?”

“Oh, damn, yeah,” Chapman says. “The world is a better place with her in it. She reminds me of my Grandma, in a way. Always doing things for others above and beyond what anybody expects. But she seems to know her limits better. I don’t think she’s really done it in front of you, but she delegates. And she does it with a finesse that is above and beyond anything I think I’ve done with my art, honestly.”

“Even pendant?” I ask, genuinely incredulous.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” Chapman replies. “I told you. That took me years.”

I huff again and really carefully write out my next two sentences to the letter, “Rhoda took decades to learn her finesse and to network. She got me a date with the Mayor.”

“Then you’re saying she’s as dedicated as I am, too. My point still stands,” Chapman says.

“Not competition,” I say.

“I don’t think I ever said it was.”

“Implied it. I think.”

“OK, sure.”

I really search my feelings about this. I rely a lot on subtext and context when I use as few words as I do. So, I’m not really sure how much the other person is getting when I talk to them and ask leading or pointed questions. And, also, I think my motives are often more different from other people’s than we all want to admit.

I experimentally say, “I like you both.”

“Can I scan you to understand that better?” Chapman asks.

I laugh to myself, which externally looks like my tail rotating and slapping the roof and my head turning away, tongue flickering. Then I decide to consent and say, “Yes.”

This time I get to watch Chapman more closely when sie does the scan.

Sie puts the inside of hir left wrist over the back of hir right wrist, connecting a couple of tattoos there that I hadn’t really paid attention to before. And I feel a shift.

“Oh, like that!” Chapman raises hir eyebrows.

I cue up a couple words, then say, “Yes, but different.”

“Different how?”

“Dragon different,” I say. “Not mate. Yet. Maybe. But family. People. Yes.”

“OK. But, still, as partners? Or potential partners?”

“Yes. If OK,” I affirm.

“Let’s get past this crisis, and then talk about that some more,” Chapman says. “I know I am at least amenable to the idea, to a certain extent. But I’d rather we all see each other under more stable conditions, I think.”

I scroll up and hit a previous question, to say it again with new context, “What you think of Rhoda?”

Chapman stands up and back from hir work and leans over a little bit to look me in the eye and says, “I’ve noticed that you smile like a cat. You know cats, I think. Everyone I talk to about Rhoda and you say things that lead me to conclude that she’s been leaving metaphorical dead mice on your doorstep for years, and you’ve just finally started to eat them this past week. Because you have to.” Sie watches me for a bit, seeming to try to evaluate my expression, then says, “I’m not sure if she knows she’s been doing that. But she looks more content than before, apparently. And I think she looks like she’s really in her element. But who am I to say what either of you have noticed or not, or what you’re really feeling? We’re all queers. We’re all disastrous fuck ups when it comes to this.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Anyway,” Chapman says, getting back into suturing. “You’re a dragon and we’re a couple of humans. Even if I wasn’t polyamorous and ace, being in a partnership with you, if that’s what we end up calling it, I don’t think it would get in the way of any human romance I might need to pursue. If I’m reading things right. And Rhoda probably feels the same way. And I’m guessing you do, too. Like. Come spring time, you’re going to want to try to mate with another dragon, right?”

“Don’t know,” I reply.

“Then we all take our time and feel it out, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t talk to the Mayor about this stuff. We don’t need the romantic lives of dragons getting mixed up in your fight for your, uh, human rights. At least, not at this stage,” Chapman says. “And we don’t want the Mayor worrying and confused about her daughter’s life any more than she already is.”

There’s a story going around social media about this guy who’s become the husband to a crane. He works in animal husbandry, or wildlife rehabilitation, or something like that. And one of the cranes he works with has decided that he’s her life partner, her mate. Cranes mate for life, and she bonded with this human. And, in order to make sure that she’s safe and lives healthily and happy into her old age, he’s just gotta stick with her. He, of course, is legally married to a human woman, and they have their own family.

I wonder if something similar is happening with me. A mix up of my instincts with my social situation. Or what?

None of the advice I’d ever learned from anybody regarding human relationships, and nothing I observed from watching everyone around me try to navigate them, feels like it’s relevant here. Except for maybe the “relax and see” bit.

But, Chapman’s right. The Mayor doesn’t need to think about that. And neither does the press, as much as I may like Seagull Phil.

I don’t think I would have ever been in danger of bringing it up with them anyway, though, really.

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 18: Sutures

I wake up with a start, the gash on my back burning and itching, with just one thought in my head.

Mayor?!?

I was having a dream where I was in the beer garden of Flounder Sound Brewpub, having a beer and a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone, while talking to Kimberly about Chapman and listening to live music. The ice cream cone was propped up in a beer glass, and the beer was in a bowl, and I was musing about how my own subconscious mind was so thoughtful to accommodate me in this way, when Kimberly said something about how lucky I was to have found Chapman. And that’s when I pressed the talk button on my tablet and said, “That’s nothing. On Monday, I have a meeting with the Mayor!”

And that word just grabbed ahold of my whole brain and dragged me right out of sleep, head snapping up and darting glances all around.

Fortunately, there is no Mayor on the rooftop, nor on airbound approach.

I’m safe.

But I have an interview with the Mayor? Just two days after an interview with Seagull Phil, arguably the only investigative journalist left working in town?

I mean, I suppose that’s how that works.

I get up to stretch and –

Dang! My back is starting to really bother me.

I look at it and, though I’m not going to describe it again, it looks a bit worrisome. Not gross, to me, and I can’t tell if it’s infected by the same ways you can tell with various human tissue. But I don’t see any indication that it’s healing, either. And it is deep. And then there’s that burning and itching thing.

I feel like I have memories of seeing wild animals with wounds like this on video. And they’re just stoically going about their lives. And I have no idea where those videos came from, whether it was T.V. back in the day or YouTube or TikTok or what, but I’m now sort of feeling like we dragons are just expected to do the same.

A dugong could have a nasty run in with a boat’s propeller and there’s no vet there to stitch it up. The dugong would just have to bear it and heal as best it could. And that’s how it goes.

And seeing Astraia with her wounds just walking downtown had reminded me of that at the time. And, I guess I assumed that’s what she was doing, and made up a story in my head about how the local veterinarians wouldn’t see dragons, because, holy shit can you imagine one of us in the waiting room of a vet clinic with the dogs and cats in there all panicking?

And we’re all suddenly fighting and hurting each other and creating a demand. And probably a lot of us can’t pay.

I certainly couldn’t.

But, then, also, I’m about to see the Mayor? With a nasty gash on my back? Down at my Seaside Park? With Seagull Phil and a photographer present? With a nasty gash on my back?

It’s not dawn yet, so I’ve got some time to quietly freak out about all this.

I remember one of the biggest elements of my daydreaming about being a “real dragon” when I was a kid (and later as an adult, because I never stopped) was that I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this kind of thing.

With a “proper dragon body” – and I’m putting that in quotes because I was a dragon back then, I’ve always been a dragon, and that means I’ve always had the body of a dragon whatever body that was – anyway, with a “proper dragon body” I wouldn’t have to worry about getting hurt because my armor would be impervious to it, and I wouldn’t have to worry about social expectations and money because everyone would see that I am a dragon.

I’m not sure why this memo didn’t get through to the universe. I wrote it enough times in my head.

I go over and over all of this in my head for a while, waiting for the sun to come up, to the point that I eventually teach myself how to say “Mayor” just by visualizing it as spoken by my tablet.

The word just comes out of my chest and open mouth, “Mayor!” Complete with exclamation point. A cry of incredulous exasperation, it’s the one thing I’ve learned how to say with any inflection.

That startles me and snaps me out of my ruminations.

I get a little excited about it.

I go through all the words I’ve learned.

“Mayor!”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Stop.”

“Meg.”

“Okay.”

“Mine.”

“Fight.”

“Peace.”

“Go.”

“Stay.”

“Now.”

“Shit,” which is still spoken in Caleb’s voice, so I’m not really counting it in my vocabulary yet.

As I think I’ve said, I figure that most of these are words that will be useful in critical moments of diplomacy or action. I’m hoping for diplomacy more than anything else. I’m hoping to surprise another dragon or human into listening.

I guess I’m willing to fight anything if I absolutely have to, up to and including a space shuttle or maybe even the sun, but even a fight with a cat seems like it might be too costly, really. Either socially or physically.

And that’s not even thinking like a human, which I’m not sure if I’ve ever done, but I’ve watched a lot of human made movies.

It’s just my sense of things. And of what little experience I’ve had.

My shoulder really burns.

It’s just, everything seems like it’s been spinning wildly out of control. And a lot of things have been happening behind my back or out of sight, and I’m not entirely sure what all is going on, and I have to trust my friends that they’re setting things up well and OK, the best they can. And I’m not sure I feel like I’ve had a lot of agency in even my own actions, to be honest.

A lot of the time, I’m just reacting. And that seems like a problem.

I can only imagine the amount of damage my flailing has done politically, locally and maybe even more broadly than that.

I have a lot of questions that are still unanswered, including and maybe featuring the question of the mysterious helicopter. Maybe it was just a police helicopter. Maybe it was actually animal control. I don’t know!

I don’t like not knowing, but I’ve done my own searches now and I still can’t find the answers.

I might not ever know.

I’m old enough to have heard from people involved in direct action, who have come into contact with police work and military support of it, and they’ve said that sometimes they’ve encountered things they don’t ever expect to learn the explanation for.

And I’d love for my life to be this really cool narrative where I eventually learn the thing, but maybe I need to stop chewing on it and focus on what I can work with.

There are a bunch of social, political, and physical wounds that need repairing, and I don’t know the extent to how bad they are. I’m one of the wounded.

My first responsibility is probably to relax and let people help me, honestly.

That is something I’ve learned from my time amongst humans, definitely, from reading blog posts about trauma and injury and from talking to therapists extensively about C-PTSD. It’s nice to have a moment where I can just remember that advice about priority and try to apply it.

But then, I’m left wondering again what parts of me are draconic and what parts are human? I know I’m all dragon and have always been a dragon, identity-wise. But I’ve been raised by humans who thought I was human for the first fifty years of my life.

It’s.

OK.

If I’m truly, genuinely, entirely a dragon, then it seems to be in draconic nature to learn from humans, understand them, and emulate them in some ways.

If I focus on that, I think I can live with it without fretting too much.

But it also comes part and parcel with the relationship dragons have with humans and the question of what it could possibly be. Like, where did we come from? And, where are we going?

I’d thought about this the first few days of realizing my reality, but I haven’t had a lot of time since. And while I definitely speculated and daydreamt about it prior to my – I guess I’m going to borrow from my trans peers and call it my hatching – I didn’t have any of the evidence I have now.

Without any stressors, it seems like dragons and humans can get along just fine. Almost like we’ve been living with each other for millennia.

Mind you, a lot of the humans in my life have been taking that further, and are super close to me now that we all know what I am, and they’ve been taking care of me. They’ve been taking it for granted that they would. Almost like a parental role. Or a partner taking care of a disabled spouse. They even let me fuck up and help me straighten things out.

Which is more than humans often do for each other.

And my own reaction to them?

Now that they are clearly mine, I don’t want to lose them. 

But there’s more. I’ve even been holding back. I’ve not really let myself think about this, except a few times where it was awkward, but I want to be closer to them. I find myself wishing we could all have the quiet and space to cuddle and share our warmth. One big pile. Even if some of them aren’t very close to each other.

I wonder if Caleb and Astraia have taken the time to do that, since they’re already partners.

And when I think about other dragons?

Not very cuddly.

I just really need to know where we stand with each other.

We could be allies. We could be mates in the Spring. But we clearly need our space.

So, if we evolved at all, and weren’t just created by some magical force out of thin air, it seems like we’ve evolved to be symbiotic protectors of human communities. Maybe we were bred that way. But we’re clearly intellectually on par with humans. At least, we are now. So I tend to prefer to think we evolved that way.

But, then, there’s this one statement by one scholar of dragons, I can’t remember who or in what book, about mythological dragons. It went something like this. 

If you do a deep and broad analysis of what constitutes a dragon, you learn a few fundamental things. The things in common with all dragons are that they are monsters, they tend to live on the edges of nature while still in intimate contact with human communities, and their personal foibles or vices are often caricatures of one or more of the seven deadly sins. Where they are venerated, they are sought out for their wisdom and even rulership. Where they are reviled, they are slain, usually in the service of conquering or “saving” the people they are associated with. If anything, it seems as if dragons are like proto-gods, or minor deities, themselves. Created in humanity’s image melded and fused with the other apex predators of the natural world to be liaisons between us and the chaos of the wild. And, maybe, sometimes, to help us deal with other humans.

I think I’m remembering that right. I read it way, way back in the late 90s, when I was just starting college and found that amazing campus library. I may have embellished it over time and through hypesharing about dragons to everyone I’ve talked to.

Or, to put it more simply, what if dragons are the supernatural children of humanity? Maybe, up until now, we’ve only ever existed in myth.

It doesn’t completely line up with the prior awakening of the wizards. Nor with how my life and my body aren’t exactly like how myth would suggest it should be. There are loose strings there that I bet we could all pull at for centuries.

However, I’ve got a date with the Mayor tomorrow, and maybe sharing that would be a politically good idea, even if it’s wrong. Because maybe it speaks more to what we dragons could be.

And, of course, there’s the counter theory, that I tend to mention in the same breath.

That we dragons, being found in the artwork of humans long, long before any civilization was built, have always been here. And maybe it’s the other way around, and humans are our children, raised by us from the primordial world.

Maybe that’s why I sometimes feel like I have some kind of responsibility to them, to keep them. But I can’t do that well enough now because maybe I’m a very young dragon and have a lot to learn yet.

And, for whatever kept us hidden for so long, all my ancestors are in story books now, and they’re not here to look over my shoulder and say, “No, do it this way.”

Hm.

Maybe the symbiotic relationship is the one to focus on tomorrow.

If the Mayor even wants to talk about that. The Mayor who is a literal parent of a dragon.

Oh, right.

If humans are the parents of dragons. Doesn’t that mean that humans are dragons, too? At least, just a little bit?

The sky is getting brighter.

It’s time to sing.

—

There were no sirens.

We got away with it again. Singing to each other over the rooftops of the world.

Some people say they love it.

—

“I couldn’t get a vet to come up here, nor this early. And they were all reluctant to work on a dragon,” Chapman says. “But, that’s OK, because I got some advice, a link to how to do my own sutures on scaly hide, and I’ve got an idea. Did you know that there is knowledge on the internet on how to give a crocodile stitches?”

“No.”

“I don’t know if it’s legitimate or good advice, except that Dr. Park sent me the link,” sie says. “However! We need to clean and close that up, I’m sure of it. And if I do the sutures, then I can put my own spin on them. I can put my art into it, and maybe help with the healing that way.”

“Okay.” I feel nervous about all of that, but it still feels like it’s better than doing nothing.

“You’re going to love this part,” Chapman says in as encouraging and enthusiastic a voice as sie can muster, which sounds not at all sarcastic, but like it should be. Especially with the next sentence. “I spent all night staying up and researching how to do it! I’m going to need to pass out after this.” Which sie speaks as sie takes medical sewing supplies out of hir purse, including a small glass bottle with a worn out label and packets of sterile medical grade gauze. “Rhoda got me this stuff. I hope the needle is thick enough for your hide. And that I have enough thread. I’m supposed to do several layers to get it all closed safely without air stuck in the wound.”

“Okay,” I say, without betraying any of my emotions at all in my voice, because my voice doesn’t work that way. I figure that not saying “yes” will be enough to get my reticence across. Also, I’m very deliberately turning my head to watch everything but what Chapman is doing.

That’s a sign of trust, really. But also, I just don’t want to watch.

I need to make sure we’re not going to be interrupted by another dragon or a helicopter, anyway.

My tablet is handy, and within knuckle reach, so that I can talk calmly about anything while getting my shoulder stitched.

But, at first, I don’t have anything to say. I’m too focused on being OK with the pain and the discomfort of the procedure.

But after the shock of the antiseptic, even during the sharp poking of the needle, it does start to feel better. The burning and itching subsides quickly.

“Being disguised as much as you were yesterday probably actually did this some good,” Chapman says. “It was kind of like bandaging it up and keeping it away from exposure. But only when you were disguised. This is a little infected, still. But I really drenched it in the stuff, so we should be good.”

“How work?” I ask, impatient with everything, but curious.

“How what work?” Chapman asks.

“Art,” I say.

“Ah, hm,” sie tightens hir lips and pulls on the needle. “I suppose I might as well tell you. It hilariously doesn’t break my vow, because when I made it I didn’t take dragons into account.”

I wait while sie continues to work silently for a while. After a bit, though, I feel like sie isn’t actually going to explain, so I talk.

“Yes,” I say.

“Just a second, gathering my thoughts,” sie replies.

Of course.

“From what I can gather, it’s really a lot like programming or chip design,” Chapman says. “There are probably other ways of manipulating reality like I do, and I suspect that you dragons do it naturally in your own way. But the way I go about it is by making physical circuits that tell the forces of the universe what to do in a specific area and under specific circumstances. But, it’s different, too. I’m not a good programmer in any way. I’m an artist. I can’t code for shit, but I can do this. It’s like creating and cultivating a path for the beholder’s eye to follow through the composition, only, in this case, the eye of the beholder is often Entropy Itself. And I’m provoking an emotional reaction in it to the point it does something.”

Sie falls silent again for several stitches. Then continues.

“It still has to be precise and specific, which is fortunately also the way I think a lot of the time,” sie explains. “In this case, what I’m doing for your wound is to create channels through which heat and electricity can flow to create a barrier against pathogens. And I’m putting that over a latticework that is designed to help oxygen and nutrients to find the cells that need them the most, and to coax them into reproducing and bonding more rapidly in what I hope is the healing process. If I’m wrong, I might be giving you melanoma, so we’ll have to keep an eye on it.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I don’t want you dying of sepsis,” sie replies.

I flicker my tongue briefly and regret it. The antiseptic and the wound odor together do not taste good. Then I look at Chapman with my left eye. I want to stretch the wing that sie is hunched over, but I know that’s not a good idea. So, I ask another question.

“Why?”

“My younger brother was two once, you know,” Chapman says. “I’m familiar with this game.”

I turn my head to look at hir with both my eyes, and flicker my tongue again very deliberately, as an expression rather than to taste the air. I still taste the air, and I learn a lot from it. Chapman is sweating and hasn’t showered in over a day. But sie has also sanitized hir hands and arms thoroughly, and is wearing gloves.

Chapman sighs, “I like you. I don’t live here, and I don’t work here, but I come here for the coffee and we have the same counselor, and you’re my dragon anyway. I don’t have a relationship with the dragon of my neighborhood, so, I like you.”

Hearing that makes me feel stronger and more calm, and the needle bothers me so much less afterward.

“What think Rhoda?” I ask.

“Can you take the time to add a word or two more to that question?” Chapman suggests. “I don’t know which question it is.”

I huff and do that, “What you think of Rhoda?”

“Oh, damn, yeah,” Chapman says. “The world is a better place with her in it. She reminds me of my Grandma, in a way. Always doing things for others above and beyond what anybody expects. But she seems to know her limits better. I don’t think she’s really done it in front of you, but she delegates. And she does it with a finesse that is above and beyond anything I think I’ve done with my art, honestly.”

“Even pendant?” I ask, genuinely incredulous.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” Chapman replies. “I told you. That took me years.”

I huff again and really carefully write out my next two sentences to the letter, “Rhoda took decades to learn her finesse and to network. She got me a date with the Mayor.”

“Then you’re saying she’s as dedicated as I am, too. My point still stands,” Chapman says.

“Not competition,” I say.

“I don’t think I ever said it was.”

“Implied it. I think.”

“OK, sure.”

I really search my feelings about this. I rely a lot on subtext and context when I use as few words as I do. So, I’m not really sure how much the other person is getting when I talk to them and ask leading or pointed questions. And, also, I think my motives are often more different from other people’s than we all want to admit.

I experimentally say, “I like you both.”

“Can I scan you to understand that better?” Chapman asks.

I laugh to myself, which externally looks like my tail rotating and slapping the roof and my head turning away, tongue flickering. Then I decide to consent and say, “Yes.”

This time I get to watch Chapman more closely when sie does the scan.

Sie puts the inside of hir left wrist over the back of hir right wrist, connecting a couple of tattoos there that I hadn’t really paid attention to before. And I feel a shift.

“Oh, like that!” Chapman raises hir eyebrows.

I cue up a couple words, then say, “Yes, but different.”

“Different how?”

“Dragon different,” I say. “Not mate. Yet. Maybe. But family. People. Yes.”

“OK. But, still, as partners? Or potential partners?”

“Yes. If OK,” I affirm.

“Let’s get past this crisis, and then talk about that some more,” Chapman says. “I know I am at least amenable to the idea, to a certain extent. But I’d rather we all see each other under more stable conditions, I think.”

I scroll up and hit a previous question, to say it again with new context, “What you think of Rhoda?”

Chapman stands up and back from hir work and leans over a little bit to look me in the eye and says, “I’ve noticed that you smile like a cat. You know cats, I think. Everyone I talk to about Rhoda and you say things that lead me to conclude that she’s been leaving metaphorical dead mice on your doorstep for years, and you’ve just finally started to eat them this past week. Because you have to.” Sie watches me for a bit, seeming to try to evaluate my expression, then says, “I’m not sure if she knows she’s been doing that. But she looks more content than before, apparently. And I think she looks like she’s really in her element. But who am I to say what either of you have noticed or not, or what you’re really feeling? We’re all queers. We’re all disastrous fuck ups when it comes to this.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Anyway,” Chapman says, getting back into suturing. “You’re a dragon and we’re a couple of humans. Even if I wasn’t polyamorous and ace, being in a partnership with you, if that’s what we end up calling it, I don’t think it would get in the way of any human romance I might need to pursue. If I’m reading things right. And Rhoda probably feels the same way. And I’m guessing you do, too. Like. Come spring time, you’re going to want to try to mate with another dragon, right?”

“Don’t know,” I reply.

“Then we all take our time and feel it out, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t talk to the Mayor about this stuff. We don’t need the romantic lives of dragons getting mixed up in your fight for your, uh, human rights. At least, not at this stage,” Chapman says. “And we don’t want the Mayor worrying and confused about her daughter’s life any more than she already is.”

There’s a story going around social media about this guy who’s become the husband to a crane. He works in animal husbandry, or wildlife rehabilitation, or something like that. And one of the cranes he works with has decided that he’s her life partner, her mate. Cranes mate for life, and she bonded with this human. And, in order to make sure that she’s safe and lives healthily and happy into her old age, he’s just gotta stick with her. He, of course, is legally married to a human woman, and they have their own family.

I wonder if something similar is happening with me. A mix up of my instincts with my social situation. Or what?

None of the advice I’d ever learned from anybody regarding human relationships, and nothing I observed from watching everyone around me try to navigate them, feels like it’s relevant here. Except for maybe the “relax and see” bit.

But, Chapman’s right. The Mayor doesn’t need to think about that. And neither does the press, as much as I may like Seagull Phil.

I don’t think I would have ever been in danger of bringing it up with them anyway, though, really.

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 17: It heal

I constantly have a growing number of questions for Chapman.

I finally remember one I want to ask, which I do so silently, by showing hir the screen of my tablet instead of hitting talk, “Why no human talk?”

We’re in the very back of a bar named Pooty’s. It’s on the same block as my building, right on the northeast corner, nearer to the Courthouse than the coffee shop is. The staff often go there after closing, but we’re here for dinner with those who are off. And the others aren’t sitting with us. Rhoda’s entertaining them at a table nearby, and we’re all watching the pool players.

Rhoda, Chapman, and Nathan, with the help of Seagull, have worked together to set something up for me that could seriously leverage any possible goodwill toward dragons that City Council might have.

County Council is going to have to come second.

Anyway, in preparation, Chapman has told the others that sie wants to confer with me alone for a bit and to make sure my tablet is in the best working order. Because I’m going to be relying on it.

Rhoda’s working with them to plan something else.

Chapman turns the tablet so it’s right side up for hir and considers my question.

When sie types something out and pushes it back, it says, “I cut corners for my prototype.”

We keep doing this for our whole conversation while drinking our own beers and eating a huge platter of fries that we’re sharing.

“Who for?” I ask. “Who people like me?”

“Trans people, like us,” Chapman replies.

“Prototype you? Or you prototype?” I hope that makes sense.

Chapman takes a little extra time, “I make prototype based on me. That way, spare clothes fit when someone tries it. Then we talk customizations.”

So, sie did make the prototype based on hir own body, but hir current body isn’t based on the prototype. That’s what I was curious about, briefly. Now I have another question.

“You make more?”

“Not yet.”

“Get easier with each?”

“A bit.”

I nod and ask, “Other dragons?”

“Can have. Not soon.” Chapman looks at me and says out loud, “We know we need to coordinate with them and prove that you can learn to be civil with each other. And we need to do it fast. And your discord server is a really good idea. So that’s what Rhoda’s talking about with the others. To figure out how to get their contact information so you can personally send invites. Our strategy, as you know, is two pronged. It has to be.”

I nod some more, like the human I resemble. This puts my bosom more into my lower peripheral vision and I see the second-hand Torrid dress I’m wearing. I am distracted by the novelty of this, but not necessarily in a good feeling way. I focus on the novelty and on Chapman’s words as best I can.

The TARDIS dress was destroyed in my demonstration to Seagull.

Chapman continues, “Your meeting with the Mayor, facilitated by the weekly, will help counter the alarmist propaganda the daily is publishing. The true locals are tuned to the weekly, even though it’s not on paper anymore. But the daily’s stories go right to the radio, as we’ve been hearing today. And that goes to the broader internet. And, on top of that, the local political establishment is currently behind the idea of running you all out of town.”

I nod once.

“The Mayor’s daughter is a dragon, though,” Chapman says. “Which is why we’ve got this interview. But we also absolutely need to rally the local dragons to cooperate. As quickly as possible. The Mayor’s daughter joining your discord might accelerate that. I feel it.” Sie considers me carefully for a moment, and then says, “Can I ask you a question this time? It’s really personal. I’ll keep it on the Tablet.”

I point at the tablet and nod.

“Can I scan your body when a dragon?” sie asks, then pushes the tablet toward me, initiating our ongoing silent exchange. The silence is for the wizardry stuff.

“Why?”

“Biology. Mating season. Important to know.”

That does make me feel a little weird in a mostly fun way. But, regardless, I answer, “Yes.” Because I want to learn what sie learns from that.

“See if you lay eggs,” Chapman says. “But also deeper.”

Ooh, “Yes.”

“I have theory.”

“What?”

“OK, so,” Chapman says out loud again. “There’s this idea, and I think it might be true, that dragons all work similarly to a set of salamanders when it comes to mating. Y - er, they might all be physiologically females. But these salamanders are really cool!” Sie pulls the tablet over to hirself and starts searching Wikipedia to bring up the relevant article. “They aren’t really a species. Scientists are calling them a bioform. Because what they do is they harvest DNA from a variety of other completely different salamanders. Each member of this bioform can collect spermatozoa from other salamanders and harvest just part of the DNA and store it for later. They can mix and match from all their off-species mates, and then have a clutch based on that.”

Sie looks at me to see if I’m understanding that. I hesitantly nod after a moment. More hesitant from the scrutiny than anything. What sie is saying makes a lot of sense and sounds really cool. I had no idea anything could do that, but why not, though?

“It’s not conscious, of course, and no one knows if there’s any logic to it, any rules or laws or if it’s random,” sie explains. “But, it happens and can be studied. And it results in a group of amphibians that are chimerical in a way that is only rivaled by one other set of bioforms on the planet now, that we know of. Dragons.”

“Beyond rad,” I reply with the tablet.

Chapman nods now, “Some people think that dragons can do this with a wider range of species, and that’s why y - they’re all so different. Of course, the sudden appearance of dragons seems to prove the presence of some kind of divine or magical power in the world, and a lot of people think dragons embody that power and use it to do otherwise biologically impossible things, too. And, I’m not exactly skeptical.”

“What do with Mayor and discord?” I ask.

Chapman glances at my question and tightens hir lips. “People who are aware of this theory, or who have the time to consider it – people who are not necessarily politicians – are concerned that this could make mating season, this Spring, particularly fraught. Of course, we may get our answers sooner, since mating season is just starting for the Southern hemisphere.”

“We fix before,” I say out loud, hitting talk.

“That’s what everyone hopes, yes. But if we can find out we can make better plans, and it behooves everyone to take the future into account while addressing the present. Fortunately, a lot of the people I know are very good at doing that.”

While I’m thinking about that and formulating a response or a question that could provoke more interesting revelations, we’re approached by a couple of men with pool cues in hand.

This is not a college pickup bar. Back in 2005 it was a bit of a music venue, but when stricter noise ordinances (which I do violate) got passed, Pooty’s stopped hosting shows. Now it’s what locals call an industry bar. A place where other food service workers collect to relax and commiserate with the staff. But we’re both vaguely feminine looking people who appear to be in our 30s, and I guess we’re cute? But cute to straight men? Really?

“Would either of you ladies like to join us in a game? We could play partners?” one of the men asks.

Oh, that’s easy. We could have fun playing, and we have a bunch of our friends here to watch out for us. So we could risk saying, “Yes.” But they’re not my type, and…

“Thank you, boys,” Chapman says in a lower register than I typically hear, dropping hir voice from a maple syrup tenor into a molasses and bourbon baritone. “She’s the only lady here. And while I’d normally take you up on it – I love pool – we’re here on business and have kind of a time crunch. You understand.”

I nod in Chapman’s direction when sie says, “business”.

“Ah, of course. Sorry to interrupt,” says the other guy, who then elbows his friend and gestures back at their table with his head.

Nice. No scene.

“You use magic?” I ask Chapman silently.

Sie takes the tablet and responds, “You didn’t feel it?”

“Not when human,” I reply. “I don’t think.” 

I’d been paying attention for the day, as we did things, and looking out for times I thought Chapman would be using magic. And I have yet to have felt a shift while wearing the pendant.

“Oh, really?” Chapman asks. “I will update notes. And we should test it for real. Didn’t use magic.”

“Nice guys.”

“Eh.”

We hear them laughing with each other, and both glance their direction to see them glancing back out of the corners of their eyes and elbowing each other.

OK. Maybe not.

The Pacific Northwest (or Seattle) Freeze, a standard of regional conduct, can really cut down on a lot of surface impoliteness when people are talking face to face. But the moment you turn your backs to each other, the knives do get sharpened sometimes.

I grew up here and never really noticed it before until Rhoda pointed it out one day. She’d been really frustrated by it, being a transplant from New York, herself.

Now I feel like I’m seeing it in action in stark relief to what I’m used to. But I wonder if it’s some kind of bias introduced by my new position in life.

I have a growing group of people who care about and support me, and I’m also hyperaware of my differences with humans, and how humans act around me. Especially since being targeted by the police.

On the other hand, I haven’t had much time to practice pretending to be human today. I’ve been so busy, and it’s my first day with the pendant.

I bet my mannerisms look really weird. Maybe cute, but really weird to those guys. It’s probably what got their attention. Maybe they mistook us for sisters. And then, based on our reaction, now I bet they think we’re queer, which would be right. And my weirdness becomes the subject of laughter.

Great.

“Let’s rejoin the others,” Chapman says.

Good idea, but I have one more question for hir.

“What your full name?” I ask.

Chapman smiles and almost breaks out in giggles, and then types it into the tablet, “Chap Man.” Then sie says, “In a phone book, I’d be listed as Man Chap. Which I think is funny. Chap is my first name and Man is my last. Legally. But I wanted a single word name, and that’s the easiest way to do it so that it still works with most databases. It’s really just Chapman.”

“Why Chapman?” I ask.

Sie shrugs, “I just really like the sound of it. It kind of subtly counteracts how femme I like to dress sometimes.” The sie asks, “Why’d you pick Meghan?”

“Not brave warrior. Though am,” I reply. “Real reason. Rhymes with dragon.”

“God, you’re such a trans girl.”

“Also. Meg short for Megabyte. Or Megalodon. Or Megnificent.”

“More damning evidence! Come on.”

—

Alone again with Chapman, it’s 2 AM and we’re back on the roof of my building.

I’m wondering once more where that first helicopter came from. None of us have found the answers to that. It wasn’t mentioned in any of the brief press releases the police chief issued earlier in the day. And I think we’re all hoping it will be made known by Monday night, just for curiosity’s sake. But maybe for legal reasons, too.

That said, my own reason for worrying about it is that it had directly targeted me. And now I’m standing on the place where it had done that, and I’m taking off my disguise.

Chapman got us up here through the lobby, the elevator, and the roof access, all without consulting property management. Of course.

Only Rhoda knows we’re up here, but she went to bed a while ago.

Since Chapman has obviously seen my naked human form, as sie had designed it based on what sie saw in the mirror before top surgery and hir queer makeover, I just take off my clothes and carefully fold them near the access hatch. And then I slip off the pendant, dropping it onto the roof in the process.

And stretch.

“Meg,” I say, like a cute cartoon animal voiced by an Angelina Joli impersonator.

“Oh, that’s a good thing to know how to say!” Chapman exclaims. “Your own name is important. OK.” Sie takes a gunfighter stance, with finger guns at hips, “You ready to be scanned?”

Sie had already just scanned me while I was disguised, and I didn’t feel a thing. This time I definitely feel the shift.

My sense of it is so discerning, I can pinpoint it to just behind Chapman’s sternum, right next to hir heart.

I’ve heard that people don’t perceive their center of consciousness to be in their head. They perceive it to be in or near their heart, and I wonder if Chapman’s one of them. But it’s not like I can scan hir.

“Theory supported!” Chapman declares. “You lay eggs, Meg. And you share that reproductive trait of those salamanders I was telling you about. It just remains to be seen what other dragons are like. Dammit, I love it when we all guess right, though.”

I lay eggs.

Yes!

Chapman walks around to face me more directly from my front, which isn’t ever strictly necessary for me, since I can look anywhere, and then says, “Thank you for consenting to that. It was a really invasive procedure. That’s intimate personal knowledge, and I swear I’ll keep your personal information secret. When it comes to body and mind, as opposed to actions and situations, I like to keep my scans based on full informed consent, if I can.”

I cat smile and say, “Yes.”

“In an emergency, though, I will probably do what I need to do to keep everyone safe,” sie adds. “That’s also something you should be fully aware of.”

“Okay,” I say. 

That was a complex one to learn. My first two syllable word. But it seemed important and really useful. It does sound a little less human when I say it, though. What would be the velar plosive in a human, the “k” sound, has an extra kind of record scratch noise to it when I render it.

“Oh, you know just enough words now you could make a simple sentence. Have you tried that yet?” Chapman asks.

“No,” I say. Then I select a couple other words to try to say in succession, and manage, “Now. Yes.”

It doesn’t sound like a sentence to my ears, but I know it can be one.

My verbal vocabulary is at eleven words, and I’m thinking of more I wish I could say right now. But I’ve got my AAC, which is fine for longer conversations. And, once I have that keyboard and computer set up, I’m going to write so much. The words I chose to learn are the ones I thought would be most useful to say quickly in critical moments. Words that might bring another dragon up short, so that I can take the time to pull out my tablet.

I huff.

I’m starting to realize just how much of my time is spent communicating.

I mean, it’s mostly what humans do most of the time anyway. But when you’re used to doing that so easily that you take it for granted, it can be a shock to lose most of that ability all of a sudden. And, by the third day, just before Rhoda had pointed me toward that app, the novelty of playing charades as a dragon was wearing off and I was so ready for something more.

I mean, I was mostly used to sitting around my apartment or my old corner of the coffee shop without anyone talking to me, before. But I still talked way more easily than I do now.

And then, after Rhoda gave me that app, things just got so intense so quickly.

But the only way to get a handle on it all without getting more seriously hurt or captured was to talk. And, sometimes to talk as fast as possible while being so impaired.

I think I’ve been doing pretty well, but I’m tired.

And it’s been a long day of talking, too. And I spent so much of it disguised as human and uncomfortable about it.

I go back to my purse, which I took off with my clothes, and hold it up and look at Chapman. I probably should have tried leaving it around my neck, but I didn’t want to risk hurting it.

Chapman obliges and comes over to help me put it back on.

Then, I pull out my tablet and put it on the roof, then curl up with it in front of me and hit, “Thank you.”

“Past my bedtime too. You’re very welcome, of course,” Chapman says. Sie looks up at the stars for a while, then says, “Don’t change anything. Do your thing in the morning, when you normally would. Keep the routine. Let’s see how the city responds. And… dammit. We didn’t do anything about that gash! We just hid it under my magic.”

Through the dull ache and occasional sting of my wound, I am amused that Chapman finally referred to hir art as “magic”. Sie will never do that with humans around.

For some reason, though, I’m not really worried about it.

“It heal,” I say.

“Uh-uh,” Chapman says. “I’m going to work with Rhoda to come back with a vet for you. We should at least suture it. I’ll do it myself if I have to.”

“Okay,” I reply. Then lie my head down on my wing claws, loafing with my other four limbs, and say, “Go.”

“Have a good night,” Chapman says and heads for the hatch.

I smile.

Sie pauses before opening up the access, and turns and says, “I wanted to be funny and hit you with some song lyrics, but I can’t think of any.”

I lift my head.

I haven’t listened to music for the past seven days. I’ve heard music at the shop and Pooty’s, but I wasn’t listening. And I used to wear headphones all the time.

What changed?

[girldragongizzard]

Come to Fairport, WA! We've got them all! (see my pinned post -- or any of my other posts -- for details)

scaled dragons? furred dragons? feathered dragons? dragons with mammalian faces? dragons with paws? dragons with gills and fins? dragons with four legs? dragons with two legs?dragons with no legs????  all wonderful. thank you this has been my ted talk

[girldragongizzard]

I think I'm too small for that, right now. I should be able to carry an infant, or possibly a small toddler, though. I'd definitely want to use a harness, if one could be made for me.

Chapter 16: Finding my voice

The clothes are obviously Chapman’s, and I’m made to fit them.

The central piece of the ensemble is a TARDIS dress. Probably because it’s blue.

There’s also a pair of sunset orange ballet flats with orange supportive insoles in them. A pair of gloves, a purse, and a pair of sunglasses, all of the same color.

The purse is bigger, and in better shape, and with a longer strap, than the purse I’ve been using. So I happily transfer everything over to that. And that’s really super easy with my new sofa-primate hands.

There’s a simple makeup kit in the purse, including a mirror, that I’m entirely too afraid to use.

I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in a window or a bathroom mirror eventually, but I don’t need that now, and I don’t know a thing about makeup. A lot of women locally don’t wear much of it, if any at all, anyway. I’ll blend in just fine without it.

Except that I’m wearing these clothes, and they are telegraphing who I am to anybody who might suspect I’m wearing a pendant that can do this in the first place.

There are panties that are the same blue as the dress.

No bra. The dress has a shelf bra, and what I’ve got on my chest probably doesn’t even need that. I’ve still got them, though. Definitely bigger than I’ve ever had before.

A lot of women around here don’t wear bras either. So, again, not a huge deal. And one less thing to delay my exit from the parking garage.

When I’m all dressed, the pendant hangs all the way down to the bottom of my sternum, under my dress, completely hidden by it and its high neckline.

In a pinch, though, I can still grab it with both hands and haul it right over my head and out of my dress. But if I do that, the dress won’t survive. Nor will the shoes or gloves. Or panties.

There are a lot of reasons I don’t like this, now that I’m doing it, and I want to take the pendant off now. However, that would shunt me over to escape plan B, and that might result in more of last night’s kind of bologna, actually.

But I look like I’m going to a science fiction convention.

—

As I stick my nose out through the crack in the door of the stairwell, I smell, hear, and see a police car roll by and head for the ramp up. They obviously didn’t see me even crack the door, but I let myself be convinced that my disguise is already working, and lick my lips before opening the door more fully.

Another police car swerves and pulls to a halt in front of me as I step out of the door, and I make startled eye contact with the driver.

He pulls his microphone from his dash and puts it to his mouth, to say, amplified and way too loud, echoing throughout the complex, “Ma’am. Please vacate the premises immediately for your safety. There is a dangerous reptile wandering the parking garage.

I still don’t see animal control anywhere.

I nod, and wave, and stumble out, around and past the car to the sidewalk.

I hope they don’t hurt that poor lizard.

Fortunately, I happen to know that she’s making a cunning getaway. But, they might yet track her down, I suppose.

What if they have a wizard on their staff?

—

The door of the coffee shop opens, setting off the chime to let everyone know that the first customer of the day has entered.

Well, no. Chapman and Rhoda are already there, in the back of the main room, waiting for me.

Jill and Cerce, who open on Saturdays, have been told what to expect, but Cerce gawks from behind the counter as Jill steps out to get a good look at me and then at Chapman and back again.

I understand we don’t look exactly alike, though I couldn’t tell from memory when I had taken a peek at myself in a shop window. But, it does look like our bodies were stamped out of the same base mold.

There are some differences.

My boobs are bigger.

My hair is dark brown and not cut in a side shave, and it falls to my shoulders. It has a slight wave to it.

Chapman had said sie had based my facial features on hir favorite autistic comedian from Australia, mixing them with hir own. And the result is that we could be siblings, cousins, or painfully gay partners, depending on if the beholder has prosopagnosia like me or not. And I’m honestly fine with any of those assumptions. I feel like I’d have fun playing each of them up. If I could focus on socializing as if I’m human.

Jill stops in front of me and asks, “Meghan. You look stunning. And stunned. Are you all right?”

I open my mouth and I squeak.

Jill blinks.

See, there’s a bit of a problem.

I hold up a finger. Straight up. It surprises me and I look at it in wonder for a second, then I glance at Jill, and then Cerce. And then I reach into my new purse with both hands and pull out my enchanted tablet.

I almost go to put it on the ground in front of me, but stop myself from bending over more than a couple degrees and make a coughing noise. Then I rub my nose and straighten up and deliberately hold the tablet in front of me.

At which point I reach with one of my hands and turn it on.

Holding it with one hand directly in front of my face at half an arm’s length out, I press on the screen with the knuckle of my other hand.

This feels so freaking awkward and weird.

But soon the AAC app is open and I can talk again. So I say, in my own now familiar voice, that of the tablet, “Can’t talk.”

“What? I don’t understand!” Jill exclaims. Then looks questioningly at Chapman.

Cerce utters, “Oh.”

And Chapman nods at her and then says, “She has a larynx now, Jill. Not only does she not know how to use it, but I imagine it feels really weird when she tries.”

I nod vigorously.

“But didn’t she have one before?” Jill asks.

“I don’t know,” Chapman says. “I never got to study a dragon before the metamorphosis. No one did. We didn’t know who they were. But if I had a guess, I’d say she did, but she lost all memory of how to use it when that old disguise was discarded.”

Jill half points at me and asks, “And how did you say she got this way again?”

“I very pointedly didn’t,” Chapman replies. “And I won’t.”

Jill squints at me and examines me further and says, “I do feel like I recognize her, even though she’s never looked like this. Just like the first time she changed. Will all the other dragons be able to do this?”

“Probably not. Or, if so, one at a time.”

“So weird. And so cool, and,” she looks at me in the face. “Are you really OK with this?”

I shake my head, making sure that she and Cerce and Rhoda and Chapman see me do so. Then I use my tablet to say, “Have to.”

“OK. OK.” She nervously smiles at Chapman, then back at me. “Well, you look good.”

—

There’s a full length mirror in the back room, where they’re going to eventually set up my computer, and I’m really annoyed that I’m using it to look at this body and not my own.

I could take off all my clothes again and then the pendant, and get to see, but that would be a lot of trouble. I’ll get to see eventually.

And, even though it’s a full length mirror, it’s not really wide enough to give me a full third person view of my wingspan. When I have one.

It’s just fine for a human, of course.

I’m.

I’m a woman.

Only I’m not.

This is how I know that I’m not.

Oh, I am definitely female. I am so supposed to be female. I am almost laser focused now on the idea of laying eggs in the spring.

I might be in the need to look for a suitable egg laying lair, actually. It’s a whole half a year away, but now I’m thinking of that pretty solidly.

But anyway, female dragons are not typically women, and this is definitely not me.

Kind of like before my first metamorphosis, I feel like I’m seeing a completely different person in the mirror. Like, as if it’s literally not a mirror but a window, with another person on the other side. My brain will absolutely not let me see it as a mirror. Even as that person mimics my movements and expressions.

But the person I see is cute!

And unlike before, she looks like someone I’d like to at least be very good friends with.

I sure wouldn’t mind looking like her if I absolutely had to. At least humans would treat me almost right if they saw her when looking at me.

Which, for the time being, they will. Which is a startling revelation to keep having. It never stops being jarring.

I do find it a little weird that I can walk just fine, but I can’t talk. It feels like a continuity oversight in a science fiction show. Or a plot hole. But I speculate it might have something to do with dissociation, and what specifically triggers my dysphoria and what doesn’t. Maybe.

It is magic. And very particular, literal magic at that, from Chapman’s explanation. Like programming the universe itself. So, it might just be that I’m missing the code for speech but not for walking. Though, why that would be the case, I’m just not sure. It makes less sense to me than my dissociation explanation.

I tilt my head to the side and watch as the other person does it too. They do remind me a lot of Chapman when sie isn’t around.

I again ask myself this question, because the topic just happens to be on my brain regarding eggs and just how human I might be at the moment. Would I have sex with this person if I could?

Maybe?

If I appear to be human, and she is human, maybe I could. Socially. Accept that.

Physically? Can I imagine enjoying the physical sensation of that?

Honestly, I just can’t even bring to mind memories of physical human contact, let alone daydreams of it.

Why do I ask myself this?

Because humans are constantly talking about it. Or, a lot of them are. Every relationship in every story seems to center around eventually having sex. And it’s the one way they ask whether they’re compatible with each other. And I guess it’s one of those habits I’ve learned from them.

Again, I don’t know what happens in the spring, which I’m guessing is mating season, based on thoughts I keep having.

I turn my head away from the mirror.

I’m supposed to be using this thing to practice acting and moving like a human woman. And I’m failing even at moving like a human, actually. I can tell that much.

I awkwardly move to open the door and walk through the short dark hallway out into the cafe. There are some other customers there now, and Chapman comes to me and indicates we should head back into the back room again.

I was going to ask hir to help me, but apparently I don’t have to.

Rhoda moves to come back, too, but Chapman stops here and says, “Just a moment, OK?”

And then, once we’re back there, Chapman closes the door and stands in front of it.

“Maybe we don’t need you to practice being human today. Just keep the disguise on until we’re done,” sie says. “It’ll be more convincing if you’re draconically weird for the interview. Blending in with people will be needed later, maybe, when you want to use it.”

Then we talk about a few other things before inviting Rhoda in to plan the next phase.

—

It’s the end of the summer and this weird man is wearing black jeans and a black leather biker’s jacket. His black hair is the kind of mess they strove for in old photos of geniuses, but his mutton chops belong at the Subdued Stringband Jamboree. He’s wearing cowboy boots and holding a small notepad and a pen, his right leg propped up on his left as he sits and listens to me explain things using his laptop with the AAC program installed on it.

I find the keyboard is reasonably easy to use, once I get used to using my fingertips to hunt and peck.

I used to be a touch typist, but I think this way now for some reason. But I’m still getting full sentences out in reasonable time.

He’s nodding as I talk.

Occasionally, he asks a question.

What I find absolutely hilarious is that his name, his literal given name, is Seagull. Seagull Phil. It sounds like a nickname, but it isn’t.

The coincidence of that made my stomach growl at the weirdest moment in our introductions.

He works for the weekly paper, and we’re having this interview in the back room of the shop.

He has a voice like a 1930s transatlantic radio announcer. Soft, gentle, and extremely articulate. It does not fit his physical image in the slightest. He’s six foot three, too.

The whole affect is disarming and makes me feel at ease despite my mounting and raging dysphoria. I almost forget that I don’t look like myself.

Rhoda met him at the Council meeting, and befriended him when it was adjourned abruptly to his great dismay. She’d told him that he could interview a dragon.

I’m keeping my human disguise for this so that I can type easier, really.

When we’re done, I’ve promised to shed it so that he can verify that I’m the Meg that everyone is talking about.

What I’ve learned is that apparently I’ve been targeted by the authorities because I’ve been leading the morning roll calls, and someone thinks that that will break up the grip the rest of the dragons have on the city. But also, the property management of my building had called the police for my forceful eviction from the premises (which they had momentarily achieved). They have no idea I’m trespassing.

I’m telling Seagull as much of my story as I can manage in the time we have.

Between this interview and the letters that Astraia and I sent to City and County Councils, there may be some hope for a better resolution, Seagull says.

I want to believe him.

—

Now I see myself in that full length mirror.

I still wish it was a mirror in a dance hall, or something like that. But between it and my ability to twist and crane my neck to look at my back and belly, or to look at the mirror from any angle, I get a really good look at myself.

I’m alone again in the back room to do this.

And I’m relaxed in ways that I didn’t think even mattered.

It’s like my very cells have unclenched.

It’s that energized looseness and lethargy you might feel after the best massage, if your soul had been massaged.

So, when I described my torso and limbs as being similar in scale to a human’s, that didn’t really do any justice to their form or function, or actual shape. Just a vague sense of scale that explains why and how I can enter buildings with little trouble.

I’ve only seen morphology like this in recent speculative illustrations of dinosaurs, with the major addition of a third set of limbs. My wings.

Unlike how dinosaurs are thought to have been, based on their skeletal structures, I believe I am about as flexible as a monitor lizard.

But my back is high and arched, and my chest does have a keel like a bird’s, because wing muscles demand that. This makes my torso tall, like a dogs, and gives me a barrel chest like a swan’s. Also, my neck starts at the base by going up and curving gracefully to my head, which can be described as before. But now I’m thinking of it as kind of a cross between a goat and caiman in shape, nearly straight horns swept back. And my tail tends to be held upright and straight out for balance. I can’t curl it terribly tightly with muscles alone, but it’s more flexible than it looks when I move.

My wings are more forward than my forelimbs. Which actually makes my wings my forelimbs. My arms, I guess, are set further back out of the way of my flight muscles. But they’re still partially linked, and I do flex them a little in sync with my wings when I’m flapping hard.

If I stretch out, from tip of nose to tip of tail, I might be ten or eleven feet long.

I know I don’t weigh nearly as much as I did when I presented as a 5’10” human man that was 280 lbs.

On the other hand, I think I may have notably grown in length and girth in the last week. I have no measurements to confirm it, but I just feel like it has happened.

My left shoulder still has that nasty gash in it, which isn’t there when I’m in human disguise.

But even with that gash, every inch of this body, as I look at it, every scale, every tiny curve, every bump and nobble, every movement of it, everything is mine. Mine in the same way that this building is mine, and this coffee shop. The way that my friends are mine. And the city itself. The way that my soul is mine.

Not the mine of ownership or domain. The mine of association and identity.

The mine by which I derive my sense of being and purpose and place. Contentment. Joy. Pride.

It can be injured and made weaker, but even then that’s mine, too.

It’s the kind of mine I can mine for strength.

Inspired by this feeling, I spend a little time learning a few more simple, one syllable words, so I can say them faster when I need to.

[girldragongizzard]

how does flying feel? what's your favourite flying thing to do (trick or place or time or stuff)?

Flying feels a lot like riding a bicycle, but in the air. There's so much about riding a bicycle that's similar to flight for me. The amount of work it takes to get up to speed, but the free feeling of coasting or soaring, and the exhilaration of speeding downhill head first with the ground rushing safely past underneath you.

It's wonderful. I maybe don't fly as much as I'd really like, because I end up spending more of my time socializing with people.

But anyway.

My favorite thing to do while flying is swooping or diving.

I get a bunch of altitude, and then just drop for a while before spreading out my wings and pulling up into a fast glide.

It's like riding down a steep hill on a bicycle and then coasting for as long as you can at the bottom from all the speed you've picked up, only without the bike or the hill.

And I think the scene near the end of the movie of Neverending Story, where Falcore and the kid dive bomb and terrify the bullies, is pretty spot on for recreating that feeling if you can't ride a bike. Like, it's not the same as actually doing it yourself, but it's a good visual for it.

Ooh, it's also a little like using a zipline. But the bike is a better analogy because you're in control of the bicycle.

(we, the Inmara, have done this in our dreams, actually, and been on several airplane flights, and so at least have some experience that way)

Chapter 16: Finding my voice

The clothes are obviously Chapman’s, and I’m made to fit them.

The central piece of the ensemble is a TARDIS dress. Probably because it’s blue.

There’s also a pair of sunset orange ballet flats with orange supportive insoles in them. A pair of gloves, a purse, and a pair of sunglasses, all of the same color.

The purse is bigger, and in better shape, and with a longer strap, than the purse I’ve been using. So I happily transfer everything over to that. And that’s really super easy with my new sofa-primate hands.

There’s a simple makeup kit in the purse, including a mirror, that I’m entirely too afraid to use.

I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in a window or a bathroom mirror eventually, but I don’t need that now, and I don’t know a thing about makeup. A lot of women locally don’t wear much of it, if any at all, anyway. I’ll blend in just fine without it.

Except that I’m wearing these clothes, and they are telegraphing who I am to anybody who might suspect I’m wearing a pendant that can do this in the first place.

There are panties that are the same blue as the dress.

No bra. The dress has a shelf bra, and what I’ve got on my chest probably doesn’t even need that. I’ve still got them, though. Definitely bigger than I’ve ever had before.

A lot of women around here don’t wear bras either. So, again, not a huge deal. And one less thing to delay my exit from the parking garage.

When I’m all dressed, the pendant hangs all the way down to the bottom of my sternum, under my dress, completely hidden by it and its high neckline.

In a pinch, though, I can still grab it with both hands and haul it right over my head and out of my dress. But if I do that, the dress won’t survive. Nor will the shoes or gloves. Or panties.

There are a lot of reasons I don’t like this, now that I’m doing it, and I want to take the pendant off now. However, that would shunt me over to escape plan B, and that might result in more of last night’s kind of bologna, actually.

But I look like I’m going to a science fiction convention.

—

As I stick my nose out through the crack in the door of the stairwell, I smell, hear, and see a police car roll by and head for the ramp up. They obviously didn’t see me even crack the door, but I let myself be convinced that my disguise is already working, and lick my lips before opening the door more fully.

Another police car swerves and pulls to a halt in front of me as I step out of the door, and I make startled eye contact with the driver.

He pulls his microphone from his dash and puts it to his mouth, to say, amplified and way too loud, echoing throughout the complex, “Ma’am. Please vacate the premises immediately for your safety. There is a dangerous reptile wandering the parking garage.

I still don’t see animal control anywhere.

I nod, and wave, and stumble out, around and past the car to the sidewalk.

I hope they don’t hurt that poor lizard.

Fortunately, I happen to know that she’s making a cunning getaway. But, they might yet track her down, I suppose.

What if they have a wizard on their staff?

—

The door of the coffee shop opens, setting off the chime to let everyone know that the first customer of the day has entered.

Well, no. Chapman and Rhoda are already there, in the back of the main room, waiting for me.

Jill and Cerce, who open on Saturdays, have been told what to expect, but Cerce gawks from behind the counter as Jill steps out to get a good look at me and then at Chapman and back again.

I understand we don’t look exactly alike, though I couldn’t tell from memory when I had taken a peek at myself in a shop window. But, it does look like our bodies were stamped out of the same base mold.

There are some differences.

My boobs are bigger.

My hair is dark brown and not cut in a side shave, and it falls to my shoulders. It has a slight wave to it.

Chapman had said sie had based my facial features on hir favorite autistic comedian from Australia, mixing them with hir own. And the result is that we could be siblings, cousins, or painfully gay partners, depending on if the beholder has prosopagnosia like me or not. And I’m honestly fine with any of those assumptions. I feel like I’d have fun playing each of them up. If I could focus on socializing as if I’m human.

Jill stops in front of me and asks, “Meghan. You look stunning. And stunned. Are you all right?”

I open my mouth and I squeak.

Jill blinks.

See, there’s a bit of a problem.

I hold up a finger. Straight up. It surprises me and I look at it in wonder for a second, then I glance at Jill, and then Cerce. And then I reach into my new purse with both hands and pull out my enchanted tablet.

I almost go to put it on the ground in front of me, but stop myself from bending over more than a couple degrees and make a coughing noise. Then I rub my nose and straighten up and deliberately hold the tablet in front of me.

At which point I reach with one of my hands and turn it on.

Holding it with one hand directly in front of my face at half an arm’s length out, I press on the screen with the knuckle of my other hand.

This feels so freaking awkward and weird.

But soon the AAC app is open and I can talk again. So I say, in my own now familiar voice, that of the tablet, “Can’t talk.”

“What? I don’t understand!” Jill exclaims. Then looks questioningly at Chapman.

Cerce utters, “Oh.”

And Chapman nods at her and then says, “She has a larynx now, Jill. Not only does she not know how to use it, but I imagine it feels really weird when she tries.”

I nod vigorously.

“But didn’t she have one before?” Jill asks.

“I don’t know,” Chapman says. “I never got to study a dragon before the metamorphosis. No one did. We didn’t know who they were. But if I had a guess, I’d say she did, but she lost all memory of how to use it when that old disguise was discarded.”

Jill half points at me and asks, “And how did you say she got this way again?”

“I very pointedly didn’t,” Chapman replies. “And I won’t.”

Jill squints at me and examines me further and says, “I do feel like I recognize her, even though she’s never looked like this. Just like the first time she changed. Will all the other dragons be able to do this?”

“Probably not. Or, if so, one at a time.”

“So weird. And so cool, and,” she looks at me in the face. “Are you really OK with this?”

I shake my head, making sure that she and Cerce and Rhoda and Chapman see me do so. Then I use my tablet to say, “Have to.”

“OK. OK.” She nervously smiles at Chapman, then back at me. “Well, you look good.”

—

There’s a full length mirror in the back room, where they’re going to eventually set up my computer, and I’m really annoyed that I’m using it to look at this body and not my own.

I could take off all my clothes again and then the pendant, and get to see, but that would be a lot of trouble. I’ll get to see eventually.

And, even though it’s a full length mirror, it’s not really wide enough to give me a full third person view of my wingspan. When I have one.

It’s just fine for a human, of course.

I’m.

I’m a woman.

Only I’m not.

This is how I know that I’m not.

Oh, I am definitely female. I am so supposed to be female. I am almost laser focused now on the idea of laying eggs in the spring.

I might be in the need to look for a suitable egg laying lair, actually. It’s a whole half a year away, but now I’m thinking of that pretty solidly.

But anyway, female dragons are not typically women, and this is definitely not me.

Kind of like before my first metamorphosis, I feel like I’m seeing a completely different person in the mirror. Like, as if it’s literally not a mirror but a window, with another person on the other side. My brain will absolutely not let me see it as a mirror. Even as that person mimics my movements and expressions.

But the person I see is cute!

And unlike before, she looks like someone I’d like to at least be very good friends with.

I sure wouldn’t mind looking like her if I absolutely had to. At least humans would treat me almost right if they saw her when looking at me.

Which, for the time being, they will. Which is a startling revelation to keep having. It never stops being jarring.

I do find it a little weird that I can walk just fine, but I can’t talk. It feels like a continuity oversight in a science fiction show. Or a plot hole. But I speculate it might have something to do with dissociation, and what specifically triggers my dysphoria and what doesn’t. Maybe.

It is magic. And very particular, literal magic at that, from Chapman’s explanation. Like programming the universe itself. So, it might just be that I’m missing the code for speech but not for walking. Though, why that would be the case, I’m just not sure. It makes less sense to me than my dissociation explanation.

I tilt my head to the side and watch as the other person does it too. They do remind me a lot of Chapman when sie isn’t around.

I again ask myself this question, because the topic just happens to be on my brain regarding eggs and just how human I might be at the moment. Would I have sex with this person if I could?

Maybe?

If I appear to be human, and she is human, maybe I could. Socially. Accept that.

Physically? Can I imagine enjoying the physical sensation of that?

Honestly, I just can’t even bring to mind memories of physical human contact, let alone daydreams of it.

Why do I ask myself this?

Because humans are constantly talking about it. Or, a lot of them are. Every relationship in every story seems to center around eventually having sex. And it’s the one way they ask whether they’re compatible with each other. And I guess it’s one of those habits I’ve learned from them.

Again, I don’t know what happens in the spring, which I’m guessing is mating season, based on thoughts I keep having.

I turn my head away from the mirror.

I’m supposed to be using this thing to practice acting and moving like a human woman. And I’m failing even at moving like a human, actually. I can tell that much.

I awkwardly move to open the door and walk through the short dark hallway out into the cafe. There are some other customers there now, and Chapman comes to me and indicates we should head back into the back room again.

I was going to ask hir to help me, but apparently I don’t have to.

Rhoda moves to come back, too, but Chapman stops here and says, “Just a moment, OK?”

And then, once we’re back there, Chapman closes the door and stands in front of it.

“Maybe we don’t need you to practice being human today. Just keep the disguise on until we’re done,” sie says. “It’ll be more convincing if you’re draconically weird for the interview. Blending in with people will be needed later, maybe, when you want to use it.”

Then we talk about a few other things before inviting Rhoda in to plan the next phase.

—

It’s the end of the summer and this weird man is wearing black jeans and a black leather biker’s jacket. His black hair is the kind of mess they strove for in old photos of geniuses, but his mutton chops belong at the Subdued Stringband Jamboree. He’s wearing cowboy boots and holding a small notepad and a pen, his right leg propped up on his left as he sits and listens to me explain things using his laptop with the AAC program installed on it.

I find the keyboard is reasonably easy to use, once I get used to using my fingertips to hunt and peck.

I used to be a touch typist, but I think this way now for some reason. But I’m still getting full sentences out in reasonable time.

He’s nodding as I talk.

Occasionally, he asks a question.

What I find absolutely hilarious is that his name, his literal given name, is Seagull. Seagull Phil. It sounds like a nickname, but it isn’t.

The coincidence of that made my stomach growl at the weirdest moment in our introductions.

He works for the weekly paper, and we’re having this interview in the back room of the shop.

He has a voice like a 1930s transatlantic radio announcer. Soft, gentle, and extremely articulate. It does not fit his physical image in the slightest. He’s six foot three, too.

The whole affect is disarming and makes me feel at ease despite my mounting and raging dysphoria. I almost forget that I don’t look like myself.

Rhoda met him at the Council meeting, and befriended him when it was adjourned abruptly to his great dismay. She’d told him that he could interview a dragon.

I’m keeping my human disguise for this so that I can type easier, really.

When we’re done, I’ve promised to shed it so that he can verify that I’m the Meg that everyone is talking about.

What I’ve learned is that apparently I’ve been targeted by the authorities because I’ve been leading the morning roll calls, and someone thinks that that will break up the grip the rest of the dragons have on the city. But also, the property management of my building had called the police for my forceful eviction from the premises (which they had momentarily achieved). They have no idea I’m trespassing.

I’m telling Seagull as much of my story as I can manage in the time we have.

Between this interview and the letters that Astraia and I sent to City and County Councils, there may be some hope for a better resolution, Seagull says.

I want to believe him.

—

Now I see myself in that full length mirror.

I still wish it was a mirror in a dance hall, or something like that. But between it and my ability to twist and crane my neck to look at my back and belly, or to look at the mirror from any angle, I get a really good look at myself.

I’m alone again in the back room to do this.

And I’m relaxed in ways that I didn’t think even mattered.

It’s like my very cells have unclenched.

It’s that energized looseness and lethargy you might feel after the best massage, if your soul had been massaged.

So, when I described my torso and limbs as being similar in scale to a human’s, that didn’t really do any justice to their form or function, or actual shape. Just a vague sense of scale that explains why and how I can enter buildings with little trouble.

I’ve only seen morphology like this in recent speculative illustrations of dinosaurs, with the major addition of a third set of limbs. My wings.

Unlike how dinosaurs are thought to have been, based on their skeletal structures, I believe I am about as flexible as a monitor lizard.

But my back is high and arched, and my chest does have a keel like a bird’s, because wing muscles demand that. This makes my torso tall, like a dogs, and gives me a barrel chest like a swan’s. Also, my neck starts at the base by going up and curving gracefully to my head, which can be described as before. But now I’m thinking of it as kind of a cross between a goat and caiman in shape, nearly straight horns swept back. And my tail tends to be held upright and straight out for balance. I can’t curl it terribly tightly with muscles alone, but it’s more flexible than it looks when I move.

My wings are more forward than my forelimbs. Which actually makes my wings my forelimbs. My arms, I guess, are set further back out of the way of my flight muscles. But they’re still partially linked, and I do flex them a little in sync with my wings when I’m flapping hard.

If I stretch out, from tip of nose to tip of tail, I might be ten or eleven feet long.

I know I don’t weigh nearly as much as I did when I presented as a 5’10” human man that was 280 lbs.

On the other hand, I think I may have notably grown in length and girth in the last week. I have no measurements to confirm it, but I just feel like it has happened.

My left shoulder still has that nasty gash in it, which isn’t there when I’m in human disguise.

But even with that gash, every inch of this body, as I look at it, every scale, every tiny curve, every bump and nobble, every movement of it, everything is mine. Mine in the same way that this building is mine, and this coffee shop. The way that my friends are mine. And the city itself. The way that my soul is mine.

Not the mine of ownership or domain. The mine of association and identity.

The mine by which I derive my sense of being and purpose and place. Contentment. Joy. Pride.

It can be injured and made weaker, but even then that’s mine, too.

It’s the kind of mine I can mine for strength.

Inspired by this feeling, I spend a little time learning a few more simple, one syllable words, so I can say them faster when I need to.

[girldragongizzard]

@fukurouonthesea, you are so cool. Thank you for providing questions I can answer, in case other people are confused, too.

Also: hi! How was your day?

Unfortunately, it's been rough. Our physical health has been really crummy, lately. But, despite that, I'm already writing the sequel to this book, and having a lot of fun doing it. So, it's also been good.

What does she mean with the clothes telegraphing? Like, Chapman can do things, so people who know that might be suspicious of someone dressed like Chapman?

"Telegraphing" in this use is probably jargon I picked up from studying a tiny bit of martial arts, and it is probably an odd use of the word.

It means "revealing", "telling", or "betraying". A telegraphed move in a fight is one that the opponent can predict by your body language and stance, like, "Oh, you're stepping like that, so you're going to do an uppercut."

In this case, the colors of the clothes are nearly identical to the colors of my scales. So, anyone who knows I'm walking about in a disguise, but who hasn't seen the disguise yet, will probably be able to pick me out in a crowded room because I'm dressed in clothes with the same colors.

That was the worry.

It turns out it was a frivolous worry, because no one caught me while wearing the dress.

What's proso - the thingy?

Prosopagnosia is also called face blindness. I try not to call it face blindness, though, because some blind people have objected to that term and I want to respect that.

I often can't recognize people by their faces. It doesn't come up in the story too much, because I'm mostly interacting with people I know well, who dress distinctively, in contexts I'm used to seeing them in.

But you'll note that when I interact or encounter strangers, I don't really describe their faces ever, and rarely identify them. And it's because I have trouble with that, even as a dragon.

They couldn't study a dragon before metamorphosis? Cause they were in disguise even for the magic? But they knew and were thinking about it? That's why she was so shocked! But also what is this society. They sound huge.

I think I'm just going to respond to this with a sly smile, because you're picking up on the mysteries perfectly. These questions will be answered in later chapters and books! And I want you to be thinking about them and wondering!

(I'm theorizing because you said these observations helped and cause it's fun, but tell me if I should start cutting down again please.)

As an author, I love it, and you never, ever need to feel self conscious about doing it!

Yeah. Again the. She doesn't have proper masking instincts just like. Enough neuron / synapse overlaps to make it work?

Chapman thinks it's because their spell isn't complete. I think it's also because of my dysphoria and dissociation. I won't let myself remember how to use a larynx, because it feels bad.

Similarly, I've forgotten how to move like a human. My head movements are still very much like I do when I'm a full dragon.

But, and I should probably explain this more clearly in the book, Chapman says that the reason I can walk is because sie included feminine walking reflexes in the spell. It wasn't designed specifically for dragons.

That's clarified a little more in a later chapter, but not explicitly. I should fix that.

Eeeeee interview is exciting. So like a text to speech? If she's got a keyboard now. Or still like picture aac?

So, I should probably clarify this in the story, too.

My tablet's AAC app has both picture guided communication and text to speech, and can switch between the two fluidly. And I've been using it's text fuctions, including predictive text, more and more heavily, because I don't really need the pictures. It's faster for me to go right to the words.

The laptop, using a different OS, is set up with a different program that's only text to speech. And I have to type out the words completely, but it's easier for me to do that with the keyboard and human sized fingers. But I've lost my touch typing ability because I'm dissociating from my human skills, or something like that.

What's a touch typist?

A touch typist is someone with the skill to put their fingers on the home row of the keyboard and then to type using all of their fingers without looking at the keyboard.

I now do "hunt and peck" instead, where I look at the keyboard and only use my index fingers, with all my other fingers curled up. It's still reasonably fast for me, though.

That… I. What. Ok I guess authorities being against unionizing kinda makes sense. But. Do they want complete chaos among their dragons? What are they thinking?

The exact reasoning and scheming is going to be revealed in the sequels. But, the authorities are not unified on this. The City Council is divided, and the police are acting of their own accord, cooperating with someone else who has some kind of agenda. So there's already chaos.

Aw that soul being free again sounds so so nice. You are good at describing like dysphoria and stuff in not just what it's like but in images and how everything feels with that.

Thank you!

Brain is confused trying to imagine all the anatomy words for how she looks but it's probably very helpful usually.

So, the rest of my system, the Inmara, are really good at using Blender, and we're talking about creating a 3D model of me and setting up a series of boudoir shots. Maybe make it kind of like a silly pinup calendar. That will do a pretty good job of showing people what I look like.

This photo here is my headmate Goreth, who stars in the End of the Tunnel, which you are also reading. I'm not all that different looking than them, but I'm smaller and my proportions are not quite the same:

I have much larger hind legs and feet, and much shorter and daintier forelegs. And I'm blue instead of green. And my tail barb is different in a way that's hard to explain. Also, my horns are straighter. And my skull shape is a little different, with my eyes more on the sides of my head, and more teeth showing.

But the arrangement of wings to legs is correct, and length of neck and tail is pretty close too.

(ugh, that rendering has some garbage going on)

Actually can she still do dragon sounds? If she's still talking (or not) like dragon? That might be interesting to have a human doing morning calls and them not finding who did it. Very risky tho.

Unfortunately, I'd need my syrinx to do that, and I don't have it while in human form. The disguise is a full physical transformation, so it alters my internal anatomy.

A syrinx is the same thing birds use to talk, and it's located right between their lungs. So it's a completely different mechanism for making noise than what humans have.

Again, thank you so much for your thorough feedback and questions. I do really appreciate it so much!

Love,

Meg

Chapter 16: Finding my voice

The clothes are obviously Chapman’s, and I’m made to fit them.

The central piece of the ensemble is a TARDIS dress. Probably because it’s blue.

There’s also a pair of sunset orange ballet flats with orange supportive insoles in them. A pair of gloves, a purse, and a pair of sunglasses, all of the same color.

The purse is bigger, and in better shape, and with a longer strap, than the purse I’ve been using. So I happily transfer everything over to that. And that’s really super easy with my new sofa-primate hands.

There’s a simple makeup kit in the purse, including a mirror, that I’m entirely too afraid to use.

I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in a window or a bathroom mirror eventually, but I don’t need that now, and I don’t know a thing about makeup. A lot of women locally don’t wear much of it, if any at all, anyway. I’ll blend in just fine without it.

Except that I’m wearing these clothes, and they are telegraphing who I am to anybody who might suspect I’m wearing a pendant that can do this in the first place.

There are panties that are the same blue as the dress.

No bra. The dress has a shelf bra, and what I’ve got on my chest probably doesn’t even need that. I’ve still got them, though. Definitely bigger than I’ve ever had before.

A lot of women around here don’t wear bras either. So, again, not a huge deal. And one less thing to delay my exit from the parking garage.

When I’m all dressed, the pendant hangs all the way down to the bottom of my sternum, under my dress, completely hidden by it and its high neckline.

In a pinch, though, I can still grab it with both hands and haul it right over my head and out of my dress. But if I do that, the dress won’t survive. Nor will the shoes or gloves. Or panties.

There are a lot of reasons I don’t like this, now that I’m doing it, and I want to take the pendant off now. However, that would shunt me over to escape plan B, and that might result in more of last night’s kind of bologna, actually.

But I look like I’m going to a science fiction convention.

—

As I stick my nose out through the crack in the door of the stairwell, I smell, hear, and see a police car roll by and head for the ramp up. They obviously didn’t see me even crack the door, but I let myself be convinced that my disguise is already working, and lick my lips before opening the door more fully.

Another police car swerves and pulls to a halt in front of me as I step out of the door, and I make startled eye contact with the driver.

He pulls his microphone from his dash and puts it to his mouth, to say, amplified and way too loud, echoing throughout the complex, “Ma’am. Please vacate the premises immediately for your safety. There is a dangerous reptile wandering the parking garage.

I still don’t see animal control anywhere.

I nod, and wave, and stumble out, around and past the car to the sidewalk.

I hope they don’t hurt that poor lizard.

Fortunately, I happen to know that she’s making a cunning getaway. But, they might yet track her down, I suppose.

What if they have a wizard on their staff?

—

The door of the coffee shop opens, setting off the chime to let everyone know that the first customer of the day has entered.

Well, no. Chapman and Rhoda are already there, in the back of the main room, waiting for me.

Jill and Cerce, who open on Saturdays, have been told what to expect, but Cerce gawks from behind the counter as Jill steps out to get a good look at me and then at Chapman and back again.

I understand we don’t look exactly alike, though I couldn’t tell from memory when I had taken a peek at myself in a shop window. But, it does look like our bodies were stamped out of the same base mold.

There are some differences.

My boobs are bigger.

My hair is dark brown and not cut in a side shave, and it falls to my shoulders. It has a slight wave to it.

Chapman had said sie had based my facial features on hir favorite autistic comedian from Australia, mixing them with hir own. And the result is that we could be siblings, cousins, or painfully gay partners, depending on if the beholder has prosopagnosia like me or not. And I’m honestly fine with any of those assumptions. I feel like I’d have fun playing each of them up. If I could focus on socializing as if I’m human.

Jill stops in front of me and asks, “Meghan. You look stunning. And stunned. Are you all right?”

I open my mouth and I squeak.

Jill blinks.

See, there’s a bit of a problem.

I hold up a finger. Straight up. It surprises me and I look at it in wonder for a second, then I glance at Jill, and then Cerce. And then I reach into my new purse with both hands and pull out my enchanted tablet.

I almost go to put it on the ground in front of me, but stop myself from bending over more than a couple degrees and make a coughing noise. Then I rub my nose and straighten up and deliberately hold the tablet in front of me.

At which point I reach with one of my hands and turn it on.

Holding it with one hand directly in front of my face at half an arm’s length out, I press on the screen with the knuckle of my other hand.

This feels so freaking awkward and weird.

But soon the AAC app is open and I can talk again. So I say, in my own now familiar voice, that of the tablet, “Can’t talk.”

“What? I don’t understand!” Jill exclaims. Then looks questioningly at Chapman.

Cerce utters, “Oh.”

And Chapman nods at her and then says, “She has a larynx now, Jill. Not only does she not know how to use it, but I imagine it feels really weird when she tries.”

I nod vigorously.

“But didn’t she have one before?” Jill asks.

“I don’t know,” Chapman says. “I never got to study a dragon before the metamorphosis. No one did. We didn’t know who they were. But if I had a guess, I’d say she did, but she lost all memory of how to use it when that old disguise was discarded.”

Jill half points at me and asks, “And how did you say she got this way again?”

“I very pointedly didn’t,” Chapman replies. “And I won’t.”

Jill squints at me and examines me further and says, “I do feel like I recognize her, even though she’s never looked like this. Just like the first time she changed. Will all the other dragons be able to do this?”

“Probably not. Or, if so, one at a time.”

“So weird. And so cool, and,” she looks at me in the face. “Are you really OK with this?”

I shake my head, making sure that she and Cerce and Rhoda and Chapman see me do so. Then I use my tablet to say, “Have to.”

“OK. OK.” She nervously smiles at Chapman, then back at me. “Well, you look good.”

—

There’s a full length mirror in the back room, where they’re going to eventually set up my computer, and I’m really annoyed that I’m using it to look at this body and not my own.

I could take off all my clothes again and then the pendant, and get to see, but that would be a lot of trouble. I’ll get to see eventually.

And, even though it’s a full length mirror, it’s not really wide enough to give me a full third person view of my wingspan. When I have one.

It’s just fine for a human, of course.

I’m.

I’m a woman.

Only I’m not.

This is how I know that I’m not.

Oh, I am definitely female. I am so supposed to be female. I am almost laser focused now on the idea of laying eggs in the spring.

I might be in the need to look for a suitable egg laying lair, actually. It’s a whole half a year away, but now I’m thinking of that pretty solidly.

But anyway, female dragons are not typically women, and this is definitely not me.

Kind of like before my first metamorphosis, I feel like I’m seeing a completely different person in the mirror. Like, as if it’s literally not a mirror but a window, with another person on the other side. My brain will absolutely not let me see it as a mirror. Even as that person mimics my movements and expressions.

But the person I see is cute!

And unlike before, she looks like someone I’d like to at least be very good friends with.

I sure wouldn’t mind looking like her if I absolutely had to. At least humans would treat me almost right if they saw her when looking at me.

Which, for the time being, they will. Which is a startling revelation to keep having. It never stops being jarring.

I do find it a little weird that I can walk just fine, but I can’t talk. It feels like a continuity oversight in a science fiction show. Or a plot hole. But I speculate it might have something to do with dissociation, and what specifically triggers my dysphoria and what doesn’t. Maybe.

It is magic. And very particular, literal magic at that, from Chapman’s explanation. Like programming the universe itself. So, it might just be that I’m missing the code for speech but not for walking. Though, why that would be the case, I’m just not sure. It makes less sense to me than my dissociation explanation.

I tilt my head to the side and watch as the other person does it too. They do remind me a lot of Chapman when sie isn’t around.

I again ask myself this question, because the topic just happens to be on my brain regarding eggs and just how human I might be at the moment. Would I have sex with this person if I could?

Maybe?

If I appear to be human, and she is human, maybe I could. Socially. Accept that.

Physically? Can I imagine enjoying the physical sensation of that?

Honestly, I just can’t even bring to mind memories of physical human contact, let alone daydreams of it.

Why do I ask myself this?

Because humans are constantly talking about it. Or, a lot of them are. Every relationship in every story seems to center around eventually having sex. And it’s the one way they ask whether they’re compatible with each other. And I guess it’s one of those habits I’ve learned from them.

Again, I don’t know what happens in the spring, which I’m guessing is mating season, based on thoughts I keep having.

I turn my head away from the mirror.

I’m supposed to be using this thing to practice acting and moving like a human woman. And I’m failing even at moving like a human, actually. I can tell that much.

I awkwardly move to open the door and walk through the short dark hallway out into the cafe. There are some other customers there now, and Chapman comes to me and indicates we should head back into the back room again.

I was going to ask hir to help me, but apparently I don’t have to.

Rhoda moves to come back, too, but Chapman stops here and says, “Just a moment, OK?”

And then, once we’re back there, Chapman closes the door and stands in front of it.

“Maybe we don’t need you to practice being human today. Just keep the disguise on until we’re done,” sie says. “It’ll be more convincing if you’re draconically weird for the interview. Blending in with people will be needed later, maybe, when you want to use it.”

Then we talk about a few other things before inviting Rhoda in to plan the next phase.

—

It’s the end of the summer and this weird man is wearing black jeans and a black leather biker’s jacket. His black hair is the kind of mess they strove for in old photos of geniuses, but his mutton chops belong at the Subdued Stringband Jamboree. He’s wearing cowboy boots and holding a small notepad and a pen, his right leg propped up on his left as he sits and listens to me explain things using his laptop with the AAC program installed on it.

I find the keyboard is reasonably easy to use, once I get used to using my fingertips to hunt and peck.

I used to be a touch typist, but I think this way now for some reason. But I’m still getting full sentences out in reasonable time.

He’s nodding as I talk.

Occasionally, he asks a question.

What I find absolutely hilarious is that his name, his literal given name, is Seagull. Seagull Phil. It sounds like a nickname, but it isn’t.

The coincidence of that made my stomach growl at the weirdest moment in our introductions.

He works for the weekly paper, and we’re having this interview in the back room of the shop.

He has a voice like a 1930s transatlantic radio announcer. Soft, gentle, and extremely articulate. It does not fit his physical image in the slightest. He’s six foot three, too.

The whole affect is disarming and makes me feel at ease despite my mounting and raging dysphoria. I almost forget that I don’t look like myself.

Rhoda met him at the Council meeting, and befriended him when it was adjourned abruptly to his great dismay. She’d told him that he could interview a dragon.

I’m keeping my human disguise for this so that I can type easier, really.

When we’re done, I’ve promised to shed it so that he can verify that I’m the Meg that everyone is talking about.

What I’ve learned is that apparently I’ve been targeted by the authorities because I’ve been leading the morning roll calls, and someone thinks that that will break up the grip the rest of the dragons have on the city. But also, the property management of my building had called the police for my forceful eviction from the premises (which they had momentarily achieved). They have no idea I’m trespassing.

I’m telling Seagull as much of my story as I can manage in the time we have.

Between this interview and the letters that Astraia and I sent to City and County Councils, there may be some hope for a better resolution, Seagull says.

I want to believe him.

—

Now I see myself in that full length mirror.

I still wish it was a mirror in a dance hall, or something like that. But between it and my ability to twist and crane my neck to look at my back and belly, or to look at the mirror from any angle, I get a really good look at myself.

I’m alone again in the back room to do this.

And I’m relaxed in ways that I didn’t think even mattered.

It’s like my very cells have unclenched.

It’s that energized looseness and lethargy you might feel after the best massage, if your soul had been massaged.

So, when I described my torso and limbs as being similar in scale to a human’s, that didn’t really do any justice to their form or function, or actual shape. Just a vague sense of scale that explains why and how I can enter buildings with little trouble.

I’ve only seen morphology like this in recent speculative illustrations of dinosaurs, with the major addition of a third set of limbs. My wings.

Unlike how dinosaurs are thought to have been, based on their skeletal structures, I believe I am about as flexible as a monitor lizard.

But my back is high and arched, and my chest does have a keel like a bird’s, because wing muscles demand that. This makes my torso tall, like a dogs, and gives me a barrel chest like a swan’s. Also, my neck starts at the base by going up and curving gracefully to my head, which can be described as before. But now I’m thinking of it as kind of a cross between a goat and caiman in shape, nearly straight horns swept back. And my tail tends to be held upright and straight out for balance. I can’t curl it terribly tightly with muscles alone, but it’s more flexible than it looks when I move.

My wings are more forward than my forelimbs. Which actually makes my wings my forelimbs. My arms, I guess, are set further back out of the way of my flight muscles. But they’re still partially linked, and I do flex them a little in sync with my wings when I’m flapping hard.

If I stretch out, from tip of nose to tip of tail, I might be ten or eleven feet long.

I know I don’t weigh nearly as much as I did when I presented as a 5’10” human man that was 280 lbs.

On the other hand, I think I may have notably grown in length and girth in the last week. I have no measurements to confirm it, but I just feel like it has happened.

My left shoulder still has that nasty gash in it, which isn’t there when I’m in human disguise.

But even with that gash, every inch of this body, as I look at it, every scale, every tiny curve, every bump and nobble, every movement of it, everything is mine. Mine in the same way that this building is mine, and this coffee shop. The way that my friends are mine. And the city itself. The way that my soul is mine.

Not the mine of ownership or domain. The mine of association and identity.

The mine by which I derive my sense of being and purpose and place. Contentment. Joy. Pride.

It can be injured and made weaker, but even then that’s mine, too.

It’s the kind of mine I can mine for strength.

Inspired by this feeling, I spend a little time learning a few more simple, one syllable words, so I can say them faster when I need to.

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 16: Finding my voice

The clothes are obviously Chapman’s, and I’m made to fit them.

The central piece of the ensemble is a TARDIS dress. Probably because it’s blue.

There’s also a pair of sunset orange ballet flats with orange supportive insoles in them. A pair of gloves, a purse, and a pair of sunglasses, all of the same color.

The purse is bigger, and in better shape, and with a longer strap, than the purse I’ve been using. So I happily transfer everything over to that. And that’s really super easy with my new sofa-primate hands.

There’s a simple makeup kit in the purse, including a mirror, that I’m entirely too afraid to use.

I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in a window or a bathroom mirror eventually, but I don’t need that now, and I don’t know a thing about makeup. A lot of women locally don’t wear much of it, if any at all, anyway. I’ll blend in just fine without it.

Except that I’m wearing these clothes, and they are telegraphing who I am to anybody who might suspect I’m wearing a pendant that can do this in the first place.

There are panties that are the same blue as the dress.

No bra. The dress has a shelf bra, and what I’ve got on my chest probably doesn’t even need that. I’ve still got them, though. Definitely bigger than I’ve ever had before.

A lot of women around here don’t wear bras either. So, again, not a huge deal. And one less thing to delay my exit from the parking garage.

When I’m all dressed, the pendant hangs all the way down to the bottom of my sternum, under my dress, completely hidden by it and its high neckline.

In a pinch, though, I can still grab it with both hands and haul it right over my head and out of my dress. But if I do that, the dress won’t survive. Nor will the shoes or gloves. Or panties.

There are a lot of reasons I don’t like this, now that I’m doing it, and I want to take the pendant off now. However, that would shunt me over to escape plan B, and that might result in more of last night’s kind of bologna, actually.

But I look like I’m going to a science fiction convention.

—

As I stick my nose out through the crack in the door of the stairwell, I smell, hear, and see a police car roll by and head for the ramp up. They obviously didn’t see me even crack the door, but I let myself be convinced that my disguise is already working, and lick my lips before opening the door more fully.

Another police car swerves and pulls to a halt in front of me as I step out of the door, and I make startled eye contact with the driver.

He pulls his microphone from his dash and puts it to his mouth, to say, amplified and way too loud, echoing throughout the complex, “Ma’am. Please vacate the premises immediately for your safety. There is a dangerous reptile wandering the parking garage.

I still don’t see animal control anywhere.

I nod, and wave, and stumble out, around and past the car to the sidewalk.

I hope they don’t hurt that poor lizard.

Fortunately, I happen to know that she’s making a cunning getaway. But, they might yet track her down, I suppose.

What if they have a wizard on their staff?

—

The door of the coffee shop opens, setting off the chime to let everyone know that the first customer of the day has entered.

Well, no. Chapman and Rhoda are already there, in the back of the main room, waiting for me.

Jill and Cerce, who open on Saturdays, have been told what to expect, but Cerce gawks from behind the counter as Jill steps out to get a good look at me and then at Chapman and back again.

I understand we don’t look exactly alike, though I couldn’t tell from memory when I had taken a peek at myself in a shop window. But, it does look like our bodies were stamped out of the same base mold.

There are some differences.

My boobs are bigger.

My hair is dark brown and not cut in a side shave, and it falls to my shoulders. It has a slight wave to it.

Chapman had said sie had based my facial features on hir favorite autistic comedian from Australia, mixing them with hir own. And the result is that we could be siblings, cousins, or painfully gay partners, depending on if the beholder has prosopagnosia like me or not. And I’m honestly fine with any of those assumptions. I feel like I’d have fun playing each of them up. If I could focus on socializing as if I’m human.

Jill stops in front of me and asks, “Meghan. You look stunning. And stunned. Are you all right?”

I open my mouth and I squeak.

Jill blinks.

See, there’s a bit of a problem.

I hold up a finger. Straight up. It surprises me and I look at it in wonder for a second, then I glance at Jill, and then Cerce. And then I reach into my new purse with both hands and pull out my enchanted tablet.

I almost go to put it on the ground in front of me, but stop myself from bending over more than a couple degrees and make a coughing noise. Then I rub my nose and straighten up and deliberately hold the tablet in front of me.

At which point I reach with one of my hands and turn it on.

Holding it with one hand directly in front of my face at half an arm’s length out, I press on the screen with the knuckle of my other hand.

This feels so freaking awkward and weird.

But soon the AAC app is open and I can talk again. So I say, in my own now familiar voice, that of the tablet, “Can’t talk.”

“What? I don’t understand!” Jill exclaims. Then looks questioningly at Chapman.

Cerce utters, “Oh.”

And Chapman nods at her and then says, “She has a larynx now, Jill. Not only does she not know how to use it, but I imagine it feels really weird when she tries.”

I nod vigorously.

“But didn’t she have one before?” Jill asks.

“I don’t know,” Chapman says. “I never got to study a dragon before the metamorphosis. No one did. We didn’t know who they were. But if I had a guess, I’d say she did, but she lost all memory of how to use it when that old disguise was discarded.”

Jill half points at me and asks, “And how did you say she got this way again?”

“I very pointedly didn’t,” Chapman replies. “And I won’t.”

Jill squints at me and examines me further and says, “I do feel like I recognize her, even though she’s never looked like this. Just like the first time she changed. Will all the other dragons be able to do this?”

“Probably not. Or, if so, one at a time.”

“So weird. And so cool, and,” she looks at me in the face. “Are you really OK with this?”

I shake my head, making sure that she and Cerce and Rhoda and Chapman see me do so. Then I use my tablet to say, “Have to.”

“OK. OK.” She nervously smiles at Chapman, then back at me. “Well, you look good.”

—

There’s a full length mirror in the back room, where they’re going to eventually set up my computer, and I’m really annoyed that I’m using it to look at this body and not my own.

I could take off all my clothes again and then the pendant, and get to see, but that would be a lot of trouble. I’ll get to see eventually.

And, even though it’s a full length mirror, it’s not really wide enough to give me a full third person view of my wingspan. When I have one.

It’s just fine for a human, of course.

I’m.

I’m a woman.

Only I’m not.

This is how I know that I’m not.

Oh, I am definitely female. I am so supposed to be female. I am almost laser focused now on the idea of laying eggs in the spring.

I might be in the need to look for a suitable egg laying lair, actually. It’s a whole half a year away, but now I’m thinking of that pretty solidly.

But anyway, female dragons are not typically women, and this is definitely not me.

Kind of like before my first metamorphosis, I feel like I’m seeing a completely different person in the mirror. Like, as if it’s literally not a mirror but a window, with another person on the other side. My brain will absolutely not let me see it as a mirror. Even as that person mimics my movements and expressions.

But the person I see is cute!

And unlike before, she looks like someone I’d like to at least be very good friends with.

I sure wouldn’t mind looking like her if I absolutely had to. At least humans would treat me almost right if they saw her when looking at me.

Which, for the time being, they will. Which is a startling revelation to keep having. It never stops being jarring.

I do find it a little weird that I can walk just fine, but I can’t talk. It feels like a continuity oversight in a science fiction show. Or a plot hole. But I speculate it might have something to do with dissociation, and what specifically triggers my dysphoria and what doesn’t. Maybe.

It is magic. And very particular, literal magic at that, from Chapman’s explanation. Like programming the universe itself. So, it might just be that I’m missing the code for speech but not for walking. Though, why that would be the case, I’m just not sure. It makes less sense to me than my dissociation explanation.

I tilt my head to the side and watch as the other person does it too. They do remind me a lot of Chapman when sie isn’t around.

I again ask myself this question, because the topic just happens to be on my brain regarding eggs and just how human I might be at the moment. Would I have sex with this person if I could?

Maybe?

If I appear to be human, and she is human, maybe I could. Socially. Accept that.

Physically? Can I imagine enjoying the physical sensation of that?

Honestly, I just can’t even bring to mind memories of physical human contact, let alone daydreams of it.

Why do I ask myself this?

Because humans are constantly talking about it. Or, a lot of them are. Every relationship in every story seems to center around eventually having sex. And it’s the one way they ask whether they’re compatible with each other. And I guess it’s one of those habits I’ve learned from them.

Again, I don’t know what happens in the spring, which I’m guessing is mating season, based on thoughts I keep having.

I turn my head away from the mirror.

I’m supposed to be using this thing to practice acting and moving like a human woman. And I’m failing even at moving like a human, actually. I can tell that much.

I awkwardly move to open the door and walk through the short dark hallway out into the cafe. There are some other customers there now, and Chapman comes to me and indicates we should head back into the back room again.

I was going to ask hir to help me, but apparently I don’t have to.

Rhoda moves to come back, too, but Chapman stops here and says, “Just a moment, OK?”

And then, once we’re back there, Chapman closes the door and stands in front of it.

“Maybe we don’t need you to practice being human today. Just keep the disguise on until we’re done,” sie says. “It’ll be more convincing if you’re draconically weird for the interview. Blending in with people will be needed later, maybe, when you want to use it.”

Then we talk about a few other things before inviting Rhoda in to plan the next phase.

—

It’s the end of the summer and this weird man is wearing black jeans and a black leather biker’s jacket. His black hair is the kind of mess they strove for in old photos of geniuses, but his mutton chops belong at the Subdued Stringband Jamboree. He’s wearing cowboy boots and holding a small notepad and a pen, his right leg propped up on his left as he sits and listens to me explain things using his laptop with the AAC program installed on it.

I find the keyboard is reasonably easy to use, once I get used to using my fingertips to hunt and peck.

I used to be a touch typist, but I think this way now for some reason. But I’m still getting full sentences out in reasonable time.

He’s nodding as I talk.

Occasionally, he asks a question.

What I find absolutely hilarious is that his name, his literal given name, is Seagull. Seagull Phil. It sounds like a nickname, but it isn’t.

The coincidence of that made my stomach growl at the weirdest moment in our introductions.

He works for the weekly paper, and we’re having this interview in the back room of the shop.

He has a voice like a 1930s transatlantic radio announcer. Soft, gentle, and extremely articulate. It does not fit his physical image in the slightest. He’s six foot three, too.

The whole affect is disarming and makes me feel at ease despite my mounting and raging dysphoria. I almost forget that I don’t look like myself.

Rhoda met him at the Council meeting, and befriended him when it was adjourned abruptly to his great dismay. She’d told him that he could interview a dragon.

I’m keeping my human disguise for this so that I can type easier, really.

When we’re done, I’ve promised to shed it so that he can verify that I’m the Meg that everyone is talking about.

What I’ve learned is that apparently I’ve been targeted by the authorities because I’ve been leading the morning roll calls, and someone thinks that that will break up the grip the rest of the dragons have on the city. But also, the property management of my building had called the police for my forceful eviction from the premises (which they had momentarily achieved). They have no idea I’m trespassing.

I’m telling Seagull as much of my story as I can manage in the time we have.

Between this interview and the letters that Astraia and I sent to City and County Councils, there may be some hope for a better resolution, Seagull says.

I want to believe him.

—

Now I see myself in that full length mirror.

I still wish it was a mirror in a dance hall, or something like that. But between it and my ability to twist and crane my neck to look at my back and belly, or to look at the mirror from any angle, I get a really good look at myself.

I’m alone again in the back room to do this.

And I’m relaxed in ways that I didn’t think even mattered.

It’s like my very cells have unclenched.

It’s that energized looseness and lethargy you might feel after the best massage, if your soul had been massaged.

So, when I described my torso and limbs as being similar in scale to a human’s, that didn’t really do any justice to their form or function, or actual shape. Just a vague sense of scale that explains why and how I can enter buildings with little trouble.

I’ve only seen morphology like this in recent speculative illustrations of dinosaurs, with the major addition of a third set of limbs. My wings.

Unlike how dinosaurs are thought to have been, based on their skeletal structures, I believe I am about as flexible as a monitor lizard.

But my back is high and arched, and my chest does have a keel like a bird’s, because wing muscles demand that. This makes my torso tall, like a dogs, and gives me a barrel chest like a swan’s. Also, my neck starts at the base by going up and curving gracefully to my head, which can be described as before. But now I’m thinking of it as kind of a cross between a goat and caiman in shape, nearly straight horns swept back. And my tail tends to be held upright and straight out for balance. I can’t curl it terribly tightly with muscles alone, but it’s more flexible than it looks when I move.

My wings are more forward than my forelimbs. Which actually makes my wings my forelimbs. My arms, I guess, are set further back out of the way of my flight muscles. But they’re still partially linked, and I do flex them a little in sync with my wings when I’m flapping hard.

If I stretch out, from tip of nose to tip of tail, I might be ten or eleven feet long.

I know I don’t weigh nearly as much as I did when I presented as a 5’10” human man that was 280 lbs.

On the other hand, I think I may have notably grown in length and girth in the last week. I have no measurements to confirm it, but I just feel like it has happened.

My left shoulder still has that nasty gash in it, which isn’t there when I’m in human disguise.

But even with that gash, every inch of this body, as I look at it, every scale, every tiny curve, every bump and nobble, every movement of it, everything is mine. Mine in the same way that this building is mine, and this coffee shop. The way that my friends are mine. And the city itself. The way that my soul is mine.

Not the mine of ownership or domain. The mine of association and identity.

The mine by which I derive my sense of being and purpose and place. Contentment. Joy. Pride.

It can be injured and made weaker, but even then that’s mine, too.

It’s the kind of mine I can mine for strength.

Inspired by this feeling, I spend a little time learning a few more simple, one syllable words, so I can say them faster when I need to.

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 15: Draconinity

What can I do?

The funny thing is, the police are actually holding my territory for me while I’m away. Whitman is likely in no shape to tangle with them while they’re there. And I can hear that they’re still there.

I can also hear that Wilhelm and Waits are not directly hurting each other, but still facing off, with low cries and calls coming from the direction of where I’d left them.

Maybe I can salvage this?

I’m at a loss.

And I’m hurting more.

I’m hunkered down in the garage, breathing as long and slow and deeply as my body will let me, which isn’t very, and I’m trying to make sense of the messages on my tablet. But there are too many words and I’m too discombobulated.

I can see, though, that more of my humans have joined the group. That’s a good thing.

And I get the gist that the Council sessions adjourned unresolved shortly after tonight’s action began, with notes of alarm and confusion from Council members.

Oh, shit, my back is starting to really sting.

I don’t think it’s as bad as what Astraia suffered at the claws of Loreena, but it makes me think of going to the vet anyway, and I reflexively let out a few nervous knocks of I guess it’s laughter.

Then I fall silent and still and wait for Waits and Wilhelm to zero in on me.

Which it doesn’t sound like they’re doing.

OK.

Shift.

Chapman’s still keeping tabs on me, if more slowly.

A couple moments later, a message from hir appears in our group chat.

“Meg. A child approaches.”

And then I hear the scrunch of gravel under sneaker.

Oh, no.

“What do?” I type.

And just as I hear and see the child come into view, the reply returns, “I’m not Morphius.”

“Oh,” a soft, low voice says, and I look up.

As I’ve gotten older and less human and further removed from my middle school years, I’ve had a harder time gauging the ages of, well, all humans. But if I were to hazard a guess, I’d want to say that this one was around 13 or 14. Voice just recently dropped from testosterone, most likely. Maybe that would be 15.

They’re small, still, though. Mousy brown shag cut for hair, and a T-shirt with a graphic I do not understand on it. Basketball shorts and some brand of garish sports shoes that are probably reasonably supportive and cost more than the amount of use they’re likely to see is worth.

In the night, even in the light cast by the bulb by the back door, they seem to glow to me. Not just the details that are in ultraviolet, but an overall lightness in color than the surrounding world. That’s their heat.

I’m used to that from whoever I look at now, and have been since I first really noticed it, but it’s a detail that really strikes me in the moment for some reason.

“What are you doing in there, little guy?” the teenager asks.

Little. I’m bigger than they are.

I look down at my tablet, hit home, hit the ACC app, and then hit the words, “Am girl.”

“Oh!” They say. “I’m a boy, uh, he/him. My name is Jeremy. You look hurt. Were you fighting those other dragons dad’s watching?”

“Yes,” I say.

Speaking of the other dragons, I hear that squabbling die down considerably. And then, as Jeremy continues to talk to me, I watch as Waits hops into view down at the intersection of the alleyway and the street, looks down at the two of us talking, and then continues on toward their home on foot without a word.

Both choppers are getting quieter, too, and there aren’t any sirens anymore.

“I didn’t know dragons could talk,” he says. “Though, I guess that makes sense, because some of you can in the stories the movies are based on. But, I don’t think anybody has said that real dragons can talk.” He squints and tilts his head. “You were a person once, right?”

“Yes. No,” I answer. Then take the time to type out, “Therian.” I’m making a pretty educated guess he’ll know what that means.

“Oh, yeah. I guess that makes sense,” he replies.

“Other dragons AAC?” I ask, and then point at my tablet and tilt my head.

“I guess? I don’t know what AAC is, but I’m guessing you mean text to speech?” he asks. “Obviously, yeah. I mean, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic is literally still leading his country, and done interviews over text, so, yeah.” He shrugs. “Though, everyone says that’s not going to last. We learned that in school, anyway.”

That interests me. That gives me the idea that what I want to do locally should be possible, even if I have no real clear idea about how to go about it.

I want to talk to Jeremy a lot more, right now, so I go to start asking another question.

But he says, “Look, I’m supposed to close the garage door and get back to my dad. And you can’t be in there when I close it. He’s gonna wonder why I’m taking so long. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” I say, and move to put my tablet away.

I don’t really need to interview Jeremy to do my research and thinking. It was just nice to be talking to someone who’s not trying to hurt me tonight, really.

“Can I ask you something?” he asks me as I start to walk out of the garage, with him backing up.

“Yes,” I say.

“What’s it like –”

I interrupt him by saying, “Stop.” Then I say, slowly, “Yes. No.”

“Oh,” he says, kind of glumly. Then cheers up a bit, “That’s why you were using the tablet for the other words. Me dumb. Got it. Um.. Do you like being a dragon?”

I give him a good cat smile and say, “Yes.”

“Cool.”

—

I don’t fly home.

I crawl by way of one of the bridges that Waits hasn’t claimed as their lair. And I’m quiet about it.

It takes me longer, but I manage to make it.

The only problem is that the police are still camped out on my block with lights flashing. Especially in front of my fire escape.

So, if I want to get back onto my roof, I’ve gotta fly. And if I do, they’ll probably see or hear me land. And I don’t know and can’t see what’s waiting up there for me. The heat of the day is still radiating off the top of it and giving me no clues.

Instead, I bypass my building by circling around it from two blocks away and head toward the parking garage that’s a street East and a street South of my building. Well within my territory. It’s not as tall as my building, but it’ll give me a decent lookout.

While I’m making this journey, I’m thinking to myself, “You can never go home.” Which sure is melodramatic, but it feels like it fits anyway. Too much of my life has been never-being-able-to-go-home before this, anyway.

And I’m also out of immediate contact with my friends, because I’m walking and I can’t chat on my tablet while doing that.

But I do feel a couple more shifts from Chapman, and in the process learn that they seem to have figured out where I’m going and plan to meet me there. And when I sneak in via the Southern-most entrance to the structure, from the alley and down a set of steps to the bottom floor, Chapman’s there.

“Don’t go to the roof,” sie says. “That’s where the helicopter that I altered ended up landing, and they’ve got people there guarding it. Please also don’t ask questions.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You’re injured,” sie leans in to look at my shoulder and back. “That looks really nasty. No wonder you didn’t fly.”

“Yes,” I respond.

“I’m worried about the injuries you’re all doing to each other,” Chapman says, almost poking at it. “It’s not good for any of you, and I doubt any doctors or vets will serve you, with the way things are going right now. Those gashes on Astraia looked like they should kill her. I’m hoping they don’t even make her sick, but all I can do is hope. For now.”

Now that I’m in the light of the entrance of the parking garage, which isn’t great, but works wonderfully for my eyes, I can see my injury clearly.

Oh, yeah, this is part of how I know what my markings look like! I haven’t mentioned that in the excitement of everything else, but I can preen myself almost like a swan. There are still a few scales here and there that I can’t reach with my tongue or eyes, but I can reach those with my wing claws. I mean, obviously, I can’t look at the back of my own head.

It’s a gnarly gash and kinda scary to look at.

It’s not muscle deep, though, I don’t think. Looks like it made it to my subcutaneous fat. There’s a layer of white visible that’s marked with red blood. And it did bleed a lot, because there’s dried blood all over my back. But it is bleeding much less now.

Astraia’s wounds cut into muscle, visibly from across the street.

“Yes,” I say again.

“I’m thinking you should go for the other parking garage that’s even further away,” Chapman suggests. “You’ll want a good place to do your morning calls, away from the police presence, with lots of escape options and decent visibility. But it’s still just barely in your territory. When you chased Hippoface out of town, you got their territory.”

Oh, that’s what I had thought might have been the case.

Sie holds up a finger and says, “That’s not like some dragon custom, either. Not from what I’m seeing globally. There is no dragon culture. You all work things out and are making your own cultures regionally, locally to you, based on who you were to begin with, from what I can see.” Sie looks at the floor. “Which is admittedly a lot more than most people can see. But I’m sure historians and dracopsychologists will look back and come to the same conclusions.” Sie looks pointedly back at me. “Most of you were all raised by humans. You have dragon feelings, but you think like humans. You interpret your feelings from a human cultural perspective.”

I tilt my head quizzically. I’m going to have to think about that. It feels like it matches some of my previous thoughts and observations, but now I’m not sure how to untangle it all. What is draconic and what is human?

“Come,” Chapman says and starts heading back up the stairs I just came down. “Let’s get you to your new spot, and I’ll fill you in on the way while I text everyone to update them on your status.”

“Yes.”

—

The next morning. Saturday. August 31. A full week since I first woke up as a physical dragon.

I lead the morning cries again, but this time from the southern parking garage.

And while I’m doing that, I’m thinking about the dreams I’ve been having for the past week. I know I’ve been having them. But I only remember them vaguely. Until last night’s dreams.

It had seemed like the dreams of Friday night a week ago, that ushered in my new life, had been the last vivid dreams of my life, but not anymore.

That night I’d dreamt that I’d gone back to school naked. College, I think. One of those nightmares. Only, when I looked down and discovered that that was the case, I solved the problem by tearing off my disguise, and spent the rest of the dream as the dragon I was always meant to be. And it was great!

Last night, on the other hand, I dreamt that I was touring the world and talking to dragons from different communities, and learning how they did things. It was like a continuation of Chapman’s discussion with me. Maybe like I was processing it, internalizing it, and making sense of it.

It was also, most of it, a really great dream. But it was clearly a dream, because no matter where I went I was able to talk to any dragon just as if we both spoke English perfectly fine. Only, it was dream speech, with no actual words most of the time. We were just sort of conversationally thinking at each other with our dream syrinxes.

I don’t think that itself was a breakthrough of any sort. Just a convention I sort of learned from shows like Star Trek with their universal translator, or other science fiction or fantasy stories where everyone just speaks the same language, which is usually English. I’ve had a lot of experience with linguistic barriers this past week, but it’s still all in the context of English for everyone around me, including myself. So, I haven’t been training myself to think outside of that language, obviously.

But it’s got me thinking about the morning territory calls.

I’ve been calling them challenging cries, or calls of challenge. And, yes, we’ve all been using them outside of the morning routine, and I used my own last night to terrorize two other dragons.

But it really feels different in the morning.

It’s almost more like we’re just calling out our own names to let each other know we’re still alive, still here, and to say something like, “Good morning, everyone!”

And it especially feels like that when every dragon I’ve met personally, plus at least one more, has been injured in some way.

Anyway, to hear it from Chapman, apparently a lot of dragons worldwide do fight upon seeing each other, especially when caught in one another’s territory. But not all of them. There are some corners of the globe where that’s not happening at all. Usually specific towns or small cities in the smaller countries. Where the population is big enough to still pack the dragons nearly as tightly as here, but in a smaller area. But where the local culture is just somehow conducive to not thinking in terms of the whole alpha/beta/omega garbage that got misinterpreted from wolves and spread around so thoroughly where European languages might be spoken, even in trade.

I’ve also read that that garbage is still kind of applicable to wolves. And some – lupologists? – people who study wolves still stick to that interpretation and provide lots of evidence for it from the wild. But then lots of other evidence is provided to counter various claims of the theory. And the general conclusion that is agreed upon is that some sort of anthropomorphization is going on that needs to be kept in check.

Anyway, dragons aren’t wolves!

We are the furthest thing from pack hunters entirely!

Most of us are very solitary ambush predators, from the looks of it. And our instincts tend to make us very decent guardians. Which matches all the myths.

I do wonder, for personal reasons that haunt the back of my mind, if some of those guardian instincts come from the need to protect clutches of eggs as much as needing to claim feeding grounds and chase competitors away.

I also wonder what my hoarding instincts are meant for. Collecting food for lean months? Or collecting something for mating rituals? Or, what?

I’d take the time to look it up for birds, like crows and ravens, that are known to collect shiny things. But less than halfway through the morning roll call, police sirens from around my building start up and, I presume, start heading my way.

Just as expected.

Now to try out escape plan A, as proposed and arranged by Chapman.

Without any humans around, sie felt much more free in introducing me to what sie can do. Sie did ask me to swear to secrecy as well, but not the same kind of vow. Not as verbally binding.

Hir vow isn’t bound by magic, by the way. It’s just a solemn promise to protect hir knowledge and sources of it, and to keep hir practices as secret and hidden as possible. With some strategic loopholes worked into the specific wording so that sie can still function and do hir practices without explicitly breaking the promise. But, failure to comply only leads to being found out.

And, sie figures that that can be bad enough.

For me, sie just asked that I don’t write any of it down, nor tell any human about any of it. Not immediately, at least.

And then sie gave me the most clichéd MacGuffin ever, which I’ve been keeping in my purse. An amulet. Or pendant, really. I’m using the word amulet because it sounds more magical.

It’s really simple looking, though.

It’s a silver chain with a big silver venus symbol on it. Like, woo, feminism!

With an emphasis on the “woo”, though.

It has Chapman’s signature style of sigils engraved all over the back of it. Which is why it’s as big as it is, because these ones are extremely complicated.

When sie’d handed it to me, sie had said, “A lot of my work takes a lot of preparation. And, I’ve been working on this one for a few years, specifically for someone like you.” Sie lowered hir head to look at me through hir brows. “I’m implying a lot there that I’m not going to explain. Suffice it to say, this might be the most vulgar craftsmanship you will witness from me for at least half a decade.” Then sie had looked over at the stairwell of the Southern parking garage and said, “I’ve also spent part of yesterday preparing this space for you, in case you needed it. And there’s a change of clothes in a duffel bag under the stairs back there. You will know when to use them.”

I had tilted my head, just as I am doing now as I pull the pendant from my purse with a single claw. I feel like putting it on is going to be really tricky, despite what sie had said. It’s not big enough to fit over my head, even without my horns. And I can’t work a clasp.

“When you need to use it, just hold the loop open with both your claws and start to slip your snout into it. It will take care of the rest,” sie had said. “It’s been pretty warm in the mornings, so it might not be so chilly. But, from what I understand, the sense of temperature might be a shock to you all the same.”

With that in mind, I do as instructed.

And everything happens exactly as sie had described.

And, realizing that, I run, slap slap slap slap, to the stairwell. On two feet. Thinking as I go, I should have done that in the stairwell!

And something feels wrong.

[girldragongizzard]

Not a recent sketch but I like again aaah