girldragongizzard

[girldragongizzard]

This kind of stuff is SO fun to write, too!

In my story, I did introduce a bit of magic in the central transformation that smoothed over recognition and acceptance problems. It was kind of critical to do that in order to have the story I wanted to write.

So, getting a new state ID as a dragon wasn't an utter disaster.

But consider pooping.

When you're a big honking dragon that eats a LOT of ground chuck and seagulls because you're still growing, where do you poop?

Do you think you poop in a toilet?

(I didn't actually write about my final solution to the problem because it's not exactly legal or environmental, but writing about the discovery of the problem was definitely a blast.)

Like, what I'm saying is, don't just write this stuff for your readers. Write it for yourself. It's hilarious fun.

And, also, amazing therapy for any therian.

I wanna see more post tf stuff where you have to adjust to your work with your new form, or try and fail spectacularly. Yeah sure you just got turned into a dragon, but we have this very important business meeting you need to attend. Claws gouging the doors while trying to be careful on the handles, frustrated growls setting off smoke detectors because the printer is being deliberately annoying.

Trying to line cook while you're now a pooltoy and cant grab any handles. Gotta make sure your new robot body is intrinsically safe before we let you work near the grain powder and flammable vapors. Your little kobold legs are so short you can't drive yourself anymore, but its even more of a problem cuz you're supposed to be driving a semi 7 days of the week.

Can you confirm its you anymore when you need to show id? This dog is trying to buy some fireball whisky, but her id says shes a human. "Do you know why I pulled you over?" "Is it because I'm made of slime?"

I need to see the adjustment period

[girldragongizzard]

Epilogue 7: Egg

The burden of being a person is that you can look around at the situation of the world at large, your own circumstances, and the instincts and drives that push you toward certain reactions to that situation, and you know that as a person you have the willpower and agency to make a choice. So you feel the responsibility of trying to figure out the right choice and to push yourself through to do it, even if it's against those instincts and drives. And then you watch yourself follow those instincts and drives anyway.

It's how humanity got here.

I was born in 1974. I was conscious and building memories before Reagan was elected, and I remember one of his debates with Carter. I don't remember it well, but I remember it was important to people. And after that, things got dark and scary.

I was raised during the end of the Cold War, during a time when no one who took it seriously thought it could or would end in any way but nuclear holocaust. And on top of that, I was educated by my teachers and parents about just how imminent and deadly global warming would be.

And then I watched as seemingly everyone forgot about all of that.

But, there are still way too many nuclear weapons on the planet, and way too many close calls with them. And, oh, look, there's that climate change. And the predicted conflicts and genocides as a result of that climate stress have been ramping up for the past several decades, becoming a backdrop a lot of us take for granted. The world's forests burn while militaries bomb the shit out of civilians and cut off their routes of escape.

And, lo and behold, the sixth global mass extinction has begun, and we dragons are, according to the Artists I've spoken to, the final confirmation of it. Never mind that seventy or so species of life form go extinct every day. Gone. No more. Something weird and alarming has happened as a result of the chaos and now the world has us dragons.

Except that we might turn it all around.

When I look back on my life, before dracomorphosis, I don't remember ever thinking that I would have children. I figured I'd die single and unmated. And that if I ever did find a partner, I'd never be able to support a child. I couldn't support myself. And, I had this weird unfounded suspicion I was sterile or something, which I think was an emotion rooted in fatalism and self loathing, really. But, you know, it's hard to have any sort of hope or sense of self worth when you're raised in a world that's obviously been doomed from before the start of your own life and nothing you ever do measures up.

I also certainly didn't see bringing a child into this world as any sort of ethical thing. I resented being alive, myself, and I saw all birth as a profound cruelty.

Though I mostly kept that to myself, because I didn't want to make anyone else feel more miserable for any reason.

I think that when I was freed from my prison of a previous body, my personality did change pretty fundamentally, though. I'm way more aggressive and fearless than I have ever been in my life. Impulsive beyond my own belief. And despite having fewer words, I talk to way more people way more often. I'm outgoing, and I'm enjoying life, and I recognize myself.

And now I'm proud to be having a child.

I feel like I'm making the world a better place by doing it. And I don't believe my child is going to suffer. I think they are going to thoroughly enjoy whatever life they have, in a way I don't think other lifeforms can ever be sure of.

It isn't fair at all. But, it's what I'm doing.

And I may not have even had a choice in the matter, except to eat my own egg after laying it, effectively aborting it. That is an option that did briefly occur to me and repulse me. But, if I hadn't bred with anyone, I'd very likely have produced a parthenogenic clone. Which would have been sort of a disappointment, but I'd still have been so proud and protective of her.

Instead, I got to experience a whole variety of sex this Spring, and then lay this precious, wonderful egg.

An egg with a surprise in it!

And laying that egg was a trip and a half.

It's about the size of my head, and almost oblong. It's nearly cylindrical, with straight but tapered sides, capped with rounded ends. Clearly shaped to roll in a circle, and to have as much interior space as possible while still being able to pass out of my cloaca without tearing anything.

I woke up in the middle of the night to contractions that felt an awful lot like an urgent shit, and I knew I couldn't make it to the outdoors fast enough. It felt like shapeshifting would have just squeezed it out faster. But, then, what started coming out wasn't soft feeling in any way, so I knew exactly what it was.

I stood up and arched my back, lowering my haunches to the ground and looking back between my legs with my head upside-down. And I got to watch it come out!

And seeing my own cloaca stretch like that was weird. Humans who give live birth can sometimes see that kind of thing when viewing it in video afterward. Or, their partners get to watch sometimes. But seeing your own body do that in real time feels like it's extra alarming. The egg came out big end first, and it is quite a bit bigger than a human baby's head. So, there was this red and yellow smeared mottled green surface in the middle of my stretching vent, and it just kept getting wider and wider, and I had no idea how wide it would have to get.

But, what you have to understand is that my haunches are much, much wider than any human's hips now, and my body is bizarrely, magically malleable.

It didn't hurt much.

It felt, at most, like being badly constipated with explosive diarrhea behind it. My gut was cramping and burbling and roiling, and I realized I also hadn't really had the sense of being pregnant before this. I'd just thought the mass was all part of my growth, and was worried I didn't even have an egg to lay. But now that it was moving, I had a sense of where it was and what it had been displacing.

Arching my back like I was doing then felt like it was helping to keep the rotated egg from pressing against my stomach and diaphragm. Which, I'm not sure makes sense compared to other vertebrates, but that's how it felt. And resting my head against the floor made it feel like I had something to push against during a contraction.

And then my cloaca got as wide as it needed to be and slipped around the bulkiest curve of the egg, and my butt went up in the air as the rest of it fell out and rolled to the floor in less than a second.

What followed was that feeling of needing to push more of something out of my gut very urgently, but having nothing there for the muscles to work on. And I felt so much lighter.

And then I really wanted that little sucker and my own ass to be as clean as possible, and I made that happen.

No need to tell you how. Though, it settled my gut to do it.

And now the egg sits on the least used cushioned chair in our living room. Green against green, at least to my eyes.

I put it there, carrying it slowly and carefully in foreclaws, before shrinking myself down enough to go wake Rhoda up and tell her what happened, to drag her out and show her our greatest prize.

That was about a month ago.

I'm not a mother quite yet, but I sure do feel like one.

—

It's a summer evening. I'm digesting three seagulls with the help of some rocks while I watch Joel snooze in the middle of his park. A family is eating takeout dinner at a picnic table near him and the kids keep trying to get up to go over and bother him, but their parents keep telling them to finish their food first. I can't hear them, of course, but their body language says everything.

I'm wondering if Joel would let our child play on him, too.

I also idly wonder if Astraia will teach them how to play D2R and other computer games.

And will Anurak go flying with them and teach them about the spawning habits of salmon?

I have this weird mix of draconic and human child rearing ideals in my head, and I don't know which ones are relevant. And, in part, that's because so much of it gets to be cultural, apparently. The dragons in the Southern hemisphere are each having their own experiences, and it's different by region as well as culture. And really, truly different dragon by dragon.

The draconologists who've started compiling the data have identified a few trends, similar to with human children. Like I said before, dragon whelps mature faster in some ways. But whether they stay with their parents or strike out for their own territories, or mingle with humans or other dragons really varies a lot.

I just don't know what my own whelp will be like until they hatch, so all I can do is daydream and make contingency plans.

And the way that Joel tolerates strange human children really makes me hope he'll do the same for a little dragon.

I know I would. But the more dragons that can socialize with my child, the better for everyone, I think.

And then I hear a familiar voice. One I haven't heard for several years, accompanied by the sound of a couple of children, and two other, deeper sounding familiar voices.

Familial voices.

They're right below me, where car doors are now slamming.

My body shudders and rumbles. And I pull myself closer to the edge of the building, so that I can hang my head over it and look down. My claws sink into the stone trim.

I can't clearly identify my emotions.

I'm maybe startled, excited, scared, anxious, and eager. I feel like when I'm hungry and I see a particularly doofy and vulnerable seagull below me.

But what I see is my sister, her husband, their two kids, and our parents walking toward my coffee shop from their cars.

For a very silly moment, I imagine bullseye targets on the tops of their heads, like that Farside comic with the caption, "How bird's view the world." And my rumbling stutters like a laugh.

I feel a sudden growing affection and a hope that I don't trust is well placed. But they're here!

Why are they here?

Do they even know who and what I am, now? I haven't messaged any of them. I've been too scared.

I can't go down there and appear to them as I used to be. It's the one shape I absolutely cannot bring myself to take. It's not even that I can't stand the dysphoria of it. I just can't do it.

But I know that shouldn't actually matter.

People who know me will always recognize me. It's like a little weakness. A flaw that sometimes comes in handy. Bewildering and strange, but reassuring.

I've gotta go down there.

They're here for me. They have to be. There's no other reason they'd come all the way up to Fairport and my coffee shop. And they look happy, and I need to see them, even if it goes badly.

I push myself away from the edge and pull myself up into princess form to quickly message Rhoda, "My family are here! At the shop! You can meet them!"

Then I message Chapman, too, realizing sie might like to see them as well.

And then I slip into my smaller natural self and leap off the building.

—

Sometimes, as a person, you've got to grapple with your instincts and drives, even as you watch yourself following them, and steer them in a new direction.

Like, making the decision between hunting a living scavenger or eating grass fed beef.

And sometimes, you can call a halt to them. Like, after a long, lovely dinner with the Artist of Being A Dragon where nothing went wrong, you might still be able to decide, "Nope. My child is going to have only the people I love to draw their traits from."

And sometimes when you've made a choice like that, it helps you face the harder things.

Like telling your seventy-six year old parents that you still think of them, even though you haven't said anything to them for years.

You hold the pride of having stuck to your principals in your gizzard, and you digest it along with your seagulls, and it nourishes you as you do the hardest thing you've done since October.

—

As I cross the street toward the shop from where I landed, I can see my family clustered around two of the big rectangular tables pushed together in the dining area. There's six of them, and maybe they're expecting me, so that makes sense. The audacity of them to rearrange the furniture pricks my secondhand embarrassment a little, but I ignore it. Nobody's bothering them about it.

The shop isn't terribly crowded, either.

Nathan is working alone, but I see Bri and Miriam hanging out doing the books on another table near my family and talking to my Dad and Mom.

It's my nibling, Rika, who sees me first, pulling on my sister's sleeve to point me out to her. Emelie lights up and smiles.

Everyone else looks and I get a mix of half viewed expressions through the windows from them, and feel myself under scrutiny. It's too much for me to tell how each person seems to be feeling, and I've never been great at that anyway. But I definitely feel put on the spot in a way I haven't felt since my first interview with the Mayor.

I feel my body stiffen up and start to strut, and I try to make it stop. I want to be relaxed, like this is normal.

I can't really manage it directly, and I feel like various parts of my body are the wrong size or misshapen or something. But I'm not shapeshifting, thankfully. I do almost balloon out to my full size, but I manage to focus on the door handle as my goal well enough to calm down and get there without doing so.

But just before I press the door latch with my nose to open it, I remember something.

I haven't even come out to any of my family as trans.

My hatching and transition was just all so sudden, and then followed by so much stress, I never messaged any of them. At least, I don't recall doing so.

I've daydreamt about doing so. I've made lots of different tentative plans that I've never followed through on.

And I know that, because of Rika, they're probably cool with trans people. Apparently. Now, at least.

But, I didn't communicate. And I should have.

And if they're looking at me now, because of the way the dracomorphosis worked, the way it resonates in the minds of the people who know us, they can already see.

That might explain some of the expressions.

I push down on the latch. And then I push against the door with the top of my head. And I walk inside.

And before I look up, I can already see that my Mom is coming into the lobby, arms out for a hug, looking sideways and the other way to figure out how to do so, and saying something about hoping to see her new grandchild.

I'll need to get my tablet out to tell her that it's too early for that, but that they can all see my egg if Rhoda invites them up.

I do briefly wonder how she knows that much.

—

It turns out that I've been memed.

There've been a few news sites, some of them garbage AI clickbate sites, that have run copycat articles on me, taking words from the Weekly's and Daily's articles. And screenshots of those have gotten around the social media sights I don't frequent. But that Rika does.

One of those articles deadnamed me, because the police did, and a bunch of trans people jumped on that to write corrections, and that got spread around. And that all happened nearly overnight, so it was one of those little corrective memes that Rika first saw. And it still had my deadname on it, so they knew it was me. Then, when they dug a little further, they found a photo of me that the Weekly's photographer had taken and that clinched it for them, and they got excited.

The first thing they told my sister was, "Your sister is trans!"

Not that I'm a dragon, but that I'm trans.

It turns out that being near a billionaire when he gets swallowed by a nightmare, and being the last person seen flying around the sky with him, kind of makes you an icon, apparently.

Weirdly, my Tumblr blog has not yet received the fallout from that. No one's found it yet, except the handful of followers I already had. So I didn't know.

I think, maybe, Rhoda's no bullshit field is still at work, since I also have yet to experience any legal trouble from any of this, either.

Is that also having an effect on the mood of my parents?

I don't know.

Possibly.

They are being way more understanding than I feared they'd be.

—

The hallway in front of our apartment is really crowded with us, and soon, the apartment will obviously be too small. I've been subtly shrinking myself to fit better.

At first, I was deluged with so many questions that I couldn't answer them even if I had taken princess form for the thumbs. Dragon's blood boon of universal language would have helped, but I still don't want it. And I don't want to shapeshift in front of my family yet. I want them to get used to me being truly me, even if I'm now smaller than I was when I first walked in the door of the coffee shop.

Shapeshifting would spur so many more questions, too. So many more.

Nathan had had to intervene, with his strong voice, and remind everyone that I use AAC to talk, and to slow down for me.

Then Rhoda showed up, and then Chapman, and it got a little easier, because both of them could talk for me.

But they both inspired even more questions.

I settled a lot of them by finally remembering this blog, and pulling it up and shoving it in front of Rika, who smirked because they've already been reading it. Natty leaned in to get an eager look, too. And then when everyone else saw my pinned post with the table of contents they realized just how much I'd already written.

And shortly after that, it was decided and agreed upon by everyone, including Rhoda, that they needed to see the egg.

So here we are.

I like to visualize the egg sitting in that quiet, empty apartment in silence just before the flood of humanity about to hit starts filtering in through the opening front door.

As Rhoda unlocks and opens it, the noise of a couple of excited children and their equally excited but hushed parents washes over the space and finds the egg. And maybe the fetus that's inside is already complex enough to recognize a few words. Maybe it knows, somehow, instinctively, that it's about to be surrounded by family.

And then Rhoda pushes the door wide, walks inside just far enough that there's room, and Rika and Natty jostle their way around her and start rushing to the living room. But Emelie calls out to slow them down, reminding them that this is Rhoda's apartment, not theirs. Justin, her husband, apologizes, and Rhoda dismisses it.

"I am so glad to be in the presence of children," she says. "With my cane, I'm not as unstable as I look. And I don't get enough of it. Please, come in."

"It should be safe to touch the egg, if you don't jostle it," Chapman says. "If Meghan and Rhoda are OK with that."

"Yes," I say, feeling apprehensive but wanting that contact to happen anyway.

"I'm OK with it, since Meghan is," Rhoda says.

That quiets the kids down significantly, as they start whispering instructions to each other while crouching down to look at and touch the egg before the rest of us can even see it.

I'm taking up the rear, because I've already seen the hell out of that egg. I shoved it out of my ass. I know what it looks, smells, tastes, and feels like.

And, also, being at the door allows me to guard the entrance, to make sure no rival dragons are coming through it to eat my egg. Not that that would happen here, or in that way. My brain just insists this is a reason, so I let it think it's a good one.

Rhoda stays in the kitchen as she watches my family file by, one eye on the too small tea kettle.

"Don't worry about it," Chapman says to Rhoda. "We've all had drinks downstairs anyway."

"I know," she replies.

And, I make it into the apartment and turn to close the door by the time my parents make it into the living room to see the egg.

There's a pause of quiet. It makes me wonder what they're all thinking. I listen carefully to see if I can catch anyone whispering or something.

I feel a little tense.

Then my Mom exclaims, "It's so small!"

And I turn to face the wall and bonk it with my head. Maybe a little too loud for the neighbors.

[girldragongizzard]

Epilogue 6: Molly

I am so much more calm now that I've laid my egg.

It sits in a chair in our living room, and I think Rhoda feels more obligated to watch it than it actually needs. I keep telling her this, that she needn't fret about it or keep an eye on it. It's secure in her apartment and will be fine. But I think that does go against everything her human instincts are telling her, and I can't exactly convince her to be a dragon about it.

I was going to leave it on the roof for everyone to see, but she would not hear of that.

The thing is, I need to surround it with a hoard, and there isn't really room in the apartment for that.

I'm trying to pretend that all her belongings are hoard enough, but I know that's wrong.

So, while I'm much more calm and centered, and back to my not-horny self, I'm still feeling tense and conflicted as I walk into the coffee shop to distract myself with people and sugar.

I've been practicing my shapeshifting in subtle ways. My favorite thing to do is reduce my size to where I was when I first experienced dracomorphosis. It's very convenient, I can fit through doors, and I still feel like myself. I also feel like I communicate best while being myself. However, I really only do this when I'm planning on going into a building somewhere. And I still can't hold it when I'm unconscious. I take up the whole kitchen now when I sleep. But, this is to say that I've shrunk myself down to a manageable size to visit my friends, but I haven't gone faerie princess or anything else.

It feels a little bit like making the whole world bigger. I've gotten that used to my recent growth.

"It's always wild when you do that where I can see you," Jill says as I enter the cafe. "It looks like you slide away from me for a moment. Or like when they do that thing in movies where they zoom out the lens but move the camera closer? My eyes don't like it much when it's not on a screen."

"Sorry," I say.

"I didn't say I didn't like it much," she smiles. "Oh! We've got a message for you. Like we're a post office or something. The outside of it is signed 'Molly's Parents, Tim and Adelle'."

Oh. Oh, shit. I hope it's not a restraining order or a sternly worded rebuke or something. But it's also been so many months since I encountered her. All of the ideas I can come up with for why they'd be trying to contact me now are Not Good.

But, I'm a dragon who has challenged, faced, and refused to back down from a clearly bigger dragon. And letters are flammable.

I tell myself this in order to approach the counter and slip into a form more suited to opening and reading letters without inadvertently ripping them to shreds, even though I'd rather Jill read it for me.

"That never stops being wild, either," Jill whispers. "Can I get you your yooj?"

"Yes. Please," I say. Then I pick up the envelope and tear it open with a claw-like fingernail, to pull out the letter itself.

Dear Meghan E. Draconis, Our daughter, Molly, has been speaking about you ever since she met you last September. You seem to have made quite the impression on her, and we'd like to thank you for treating her kindly. I have to admit, it has taken both my husband I a while to come to terms with the idea that she might also be a dragon, and that her games of make believe as a dragon were not a fanciful phase. It did not seem like the same kind of serious thing that being transgender is. Even with actual dragons like yourself walking this world, now, it was hard to take seriously. In any case, it seemed like you were very busy with dangerous things. So we have been avoiding your neighborhood ever since, despite how much Molly would like to talk to you some more. However, last month, we left the city to visit Molly's grandmother, Tim's Mom, out in the county. Suffice it to say, the next morning was a bit of a challenge, despite how much Molly had warned us it might happen. She has been paying more attention to the news regarding dragons than we have, much to our collective embarrassment. And she is, in fact, a beautiful little dragon. And we don't know what to do. Worried about the other dragons in the city, Molly has opted to stay with her grandmother for the time being, and we stay there to be with her as much as we can. And we've been following her lead, just as we have done with her earlier transition. However, I think we are all overwhelmed, and Molly is still very much interested in talking to you. Do you think you could pay her, and us, a visit, so that she can ask you her questions? Regards, Adelle & Tim.

The header of the letter includes the county street address, along with a phone number and a couple of email addresses, giving me a choice of ways to respond.

I feel a profound sense of relief that helps me ignore my itch to lavish my egg with riches I really can't afford.

I pull out my tablet and use it to tell Jill, "It's good news. Molly hatched. I'll answer this while I have my coffee."

Jill looks back at me and asks, "You still want it in your big bowl?"

I stare at her for a couple blinks, and say, "Yes."

"Okidoke! Just checking," she chirps, and continues making my drink. "How's the egg?"

"Rhoda is reading it Star Trek fanfiction," I report. "But the egg wants gold. Mounds and mounds of gold."

"Oh, that's gotta be rough. How about you compromise and read it the Hobbit?"

"The egg does not need to know about the Hobbit," I respond. "We do not need to give it an anxiety complex before it hatches."

Jill snorts a little snicker and says, "OK."

We have a bit more of a conversation where I ask her about her plans for school next year, and she tells me what Cerce has been up to since she moved to Seattle.

I hate when the staff has turnover, or when regulars move away. But I know it happens. Humans often have a nomadic inclination, even if I don't really understand it. They are persistence predators. They are used to following their prey into new territories to tire them out and eat them then. I'm an ambush predator. I stay near the shore in this nice little town so that I can dive bomb seagulls and slam steak like shots.

Later, I send an email to Molly's parents telling them that I would very much appreciate a visit. And I give them a list of online resources for newly out dragons, including an invitation for Molly to join my server. I tell them that it is the best way for her to negotiate travel through the city with the other dragons. And I ask them what times work best for Molly.

Then I relax back into my slightly smaller than true form and go about drinking my coffee the way nature intended me to.

—

"Now you've totally got to go meet her," Kimberly says, barely refraining herself from pounding the table and upsetting our tacos.

"Yes. I. Go," I say and then stuff my mouth with food and tilt my head up to swallow it.

"Good!" Kimberly says, then bites down on half a taco.

Nathan turns to Rhoda and asks, "Are you going as well?"

Rhoda shakes her head, "The bus doesn't go there, and Meghan's flying. Someone has to stay home with the child, anyway."

I glance at her, still working on my on my food.

"Mmm!" Kimberly exclaims though her mouthful.

"Didn't Meghan say dragon eggs are fairly independent?" Nathan asks. "I could drive you both."

"Nah. I never met Molly, and I don't really care what Meghan or the internet says about dragon eggs," Rhoda says. "That's my child, too, and I'll take care of it how I see fit." Then she adds, "No offense, Chapman."

Chapman shrugs and says, "No, I get it. I appreciate your lead, too."

Rhoda nods, then says, "Jacob always wanted a baby sibling, so I'm giving him one, and I'm doing it right. Even if that mostly means reading it stories for the time being. People made fun of me for doing that for Jacob, and he turned out hyperlexic, so I think I win."

"Yes," Kimberly says, swallowing. "But Spirk?"

"Listen, girl," Rhoda says. "No child of mine is going to go without their queer history. And it is every child's right to hatch already knowing everything there is about Our Lady Uhura."

"OK. Super fair and reasonable. Forget I questioned it."

"What are you going to tell Molly?" Nathan asks me.

I pick up my tablet and hit it with both thumbs, "'Welcome out.' Of course. Then I will answer questions. Whatever she wants to know."

—

She's literally trans pride colored. More or less. There's some gold and purple there, too, like in her eyes and claws and horns.

Imagine you have an even morph of a fox and a cougar, and then you give her bat wings, horns, and iridescent white fur with blue and pink striped diamonds along her back. Blue on the outside, pink on the next ring in, and white spots in the middle.

And I am not by any stretch the smallest dragon in the county anymore. She's not much bigger than a coyote.

And she bounces and rolls and prances about, whining and growling giddily, as I make my landing on her grandmother's blueberry farm. She can also make infrasonic noises. I think all dragons can.

She's basically saying, "Meghan, Meghan, Meghan, Meghan, look!" over and over again. Then, "We both have diamonds! See?"

I'm not the only one who can understand her, I'm sure. Her body language is pretty obvious. But I'm probably the only one that recognizes the combination of gestures and sounds as actual words.

It's not quite the season to start picking the blueberries, so the work on the farm is minimal, and there's only a couple of people watching from ladders or other farm equipment. The ladders are for a handful of pear and apple trees, and one of the barns.

And then there's her family, all human, as far as anyone knows. Her parents, her grandmother, and someone I'm told is her uncle.

"Hello," I greet her family with my syrinx. And then, I say in draconic, "Molly. Pay attention to me."

She stops her frantic gyrations and asks, "Yes? What?"

"You've grown," I tell her, even though it seems she physically shrank. "It looks like your shedding will be different than mine. Can you understand what I'm saying?"

She just tilts her head in confusion.

Ah, OK. So, she's instinctively shouting what's on her mind in draconic, but she doesn't know how to really read it yet. Simple commands from me might get her attention, but anything complex is maybe something I'll have to teach her somehow.

I'm not sure how to do that, honestly.

So, I turn into my princess self and reach to adjust my purse and pull out my tablet. And everyone's eyes get real big, including Molly's.

Oh, yeah. Not everyone has seen me do that. The news articles may have mentioned it, and I thought the rumor mill would have taken care of the knowledge for everyone else by now. But, seeing it is different than reading about it, probably.

Molly immediately starts dancing again, wanting to know if she can do it, too.

I sigh.

"How do you talk to your parents?" I type into my tablet, and let it speak for me.

Molly stops and holds up her racoon style hands. She has them on her hind legs as well. And now I can imagine her climbing all over everything, and carrying food home with all fours while flying.

And her mom holds up a large phone and smiles and Molly scampers over to her to receive it.

Then she quickly turns to me and swipes out, with a voice that sounds like an anime character, "I can't say words, so I have to use the phone. Thank you for coming! How do you change shape? Can I do it?"

"Hold up," I respond, hitting talk after each sentence, as usual. "First. Thank you, Molly, for allowing me to visit you in your territory. As a gift I bring you what I know. I will be happy to answer any of your questions. I'd also like to talk to your family as well. As for shapeshifting, it is one of my natural defenses. I was taught how to explore it by the Artist of Being a Dragon. They are long gone, touring the world. If you can do it, I can teach you what they taught me. But you might have to take the first step yourself. Perhaps I can try coaching you later." Then I look at her parents and grandmother.

"Thank you for seeing us, Meghan," her Mom, Adelle, says.

"What about moving back to town?" her Dad, Tim, asks.

"There isn't much room there," I tell them. "I believe this is her territory now. I don't think she will want to move."

"Yeah, no," Molly says with her phone.

Her parents get disappointed looks, and her uncle screws up his lips like he's thinking hard about it, but her grandmother appears delighted.

"Ah, we were hoping it could be negotiated," Tim admits.

"What if she learned how to shapeshift like you?" Adelle asks.

"There are always tells," I tell them. "Clues. And everyone who knows me recognizes me. No matter what shape I take. And every dragon recognizes me as a dragon."

"Oh."

"She might be different. We are all very different. But I don't want to mislead you," I say. "Also, I can only hold a shape that isn't mine for a couple hours, and revert if I sleep. If that is the same for her, even if she can truly hide, it will be a risk. But, that doesn't matter. This is her territory. This is where she belongs, and wants to be. It is part of who and what she is."

They both take deep breaths, while Molly looks more excited by my words.

"Have you been making your morning calls?" I ask her. "Have you heard your neighbors?"

"Yes," she responds, bouncing and rumbling a little in her excitement, incidentally repeating her word in draconic.

"When you do that, you're speaking in draconic," I tell her. "We have our own language, and you know some of it instinctively. Those calls tell you how big your neighbor's territories are and where their boundaries are. It's subtle. You are also telling them the same thing about yourself, especially if you know your territory. You unconsciously put it into your call."

She pulls her head up and swivels her ears toward me, saying without typing, "Tell me more."

I turn toward her Grandmother and ask, "Should we go where you can sit?"

"Oh, yes, please!" she says. "Come on inside! Do you like pie?"

"Do you have tea or coffee?" I ask.

"Folgers?" she asks.

"Tea, perhaps?" I try to smile like a human for her.

"Red rose!"

"That would be lovely, thank you." Then I turn to Molly as we start walking toward her house. "I can't teach you how to speak or read draconic. I was taught through magic. But, I think I can show you examples and tell you what I'm saying, and that might help."

—

It's been a long day of hard conversations with Molly's family. I came out in the morning, planning on being there all day, and so I have. I've had lunch and tea with them, and it looks like dinner is on the table for me, too.

It's late afternoon, and the two of us are playing in one of the dirt roads on the farm.

Technically, I'm training Molly while her uncle watches. But it feels like play to me, and I'm enjoying myself.

I'm wondering if I might get to enjoy this with my own child. It's not exactly what I imagined for draconic motherhood, but I want more of it.

It started with me showing her some simple phrases and individual words in draconic, then spelling them out on my tablet or saying them with my syrinx. And then repeating them.

And she took to that very fast. She seems primed to learn how to talk to other dragons. And maybe we all are. It does seem to be an instinctual language that just needs conscious verification that we're speaking and reading it. We do hear it, too, but since it's mostly expressive and gestural it feels like the word "reading" is more appropriate.

So then we started having simple conversations very quickly, which almost immediately turned into a game of chase, because the quickest, easiest things to say in draconic involve chasing, dodging, hiding, seeking, pouncing, and negotiating whether or not it's still a game.

I've shrunk myself down to her size, to make sure it's fair, and we check in on each other a lot. Which means repeating phrases and making them second nature for her.

And then, I throw in something tricky for her. I take the form of a snake and slither right under her, only to appear as a frighteningly huge dog when she turns around, startling her. Then I give her the play pose and wait.

"No fair!" she responds immediately.

"Yes, fair," I reply, bouncing and becoming a raccoon and clapping.

When she tries to pounce on me, I run under her as a rat.

The way this feels is hard to describe, and I expect harder for most people to imagine.

I've studied each of these shapes by watching examples of them, animals, in person, and visualizing what it would feel like to have their bodies. And then, I simply took their shapes, much the same way that I learn how to imitate various noises and calls of other things. My body just seems to know what to do.

And when Molly turns again to face me, I'm my full sized self, saying, "It's easy if you can do it. Hold on. Let me use my tablet."

I'm pretty sure she got the gist of that. So then I walk over to her uncle and hold out my claw for my purse. He seems relieved to give it to me.

And I pull out my tablet and drop it to the ground, to turn it on and knuckle out, "Try human. Visualize what human feel like. Fold yourself into shape. That what it feel to me."

She tilts her head, "How?"

"Do not know. Try," I respond.

Her ears go back flat on her head and she snarls, leaping forward a short distance, crouching at the end of her leap.

"Not like that," I say.

"Hard," she complains.

I think about this for a second.

It looked like she was saying, "no," in the most stringent of terms before attempting it. Maybe she really doesn't want to be human. So, I quickly consider some alternatives, and the quickest that comes to me is a trans girl stereotype and already partially present in her draconic form.

"Try a cat," I tell her.

And it comes so easily to her, she's startled by it and pops right back out to her natural self.

I give her a big draconic smile, and type, "Do fox."

She quirks her head to the side, ears tall, and suddenly she's a fox.

I'm taken aback and very pleased for her.

She's going to be better at this than I am, and she doesn't have any tells that I can see.

[girldragongizzard]

Epilogue 5: The Artist of Being a Dragon

In early May, I guess, Chapman and Nathan got together again at the Makerspace and made me a set of bluetooth headphones I can wear.

Because Chapman is involved, they have a mix of retro-radio and classic cyberpunk styling. They have a cherry wood finish with a gorgeous laser etched esoteric circuit print on them. The metal parts have a rose gold color. And the pads are real leather. And they are weirdly durable. I am unable to scratch them.

Still, Chapman begged me not to take them into a fight.

They're pretty special, because, like my tablet they have an indefinite battery life, and they don't block much outside sound. Wearing them is like having a surround sound system arrayed out on my rooftop, with me in the middle of it. The music can end up being louder than other noises, but if it isn't, there's nothing in particular keeping me from hearing anything else.

Before dracomorphosis, I would have preferred sound blocking headphones, to manage my sensory processing disorder. But now my ears work the way my brain expects them too, and I really need to be able to hear what's going on in the rest of the city. Especially if another dragon is calling out. Especially right now, while I'm still constructing an egg in my uterus.

I kind of feel like "uterus" is the wrong word for that, as much as I like having one. Mine's more of a fucking crucible.

"Fucking" is the operative word there, you know.

Anyway, they did this because several of my humans thought that music would help calm me down and help me bide my time between suitors and other distractions. And, I honestly really appreciate it.

So, then, Kimberly gave me Chappell Roan's "The Rise of Fall of a Midwest Princess" and holy shit. Lesbian music is Like That now?

If you were to reread my trilogy while just listening to that album, I think it would make a pretty good soundtrack and give you an overall better feeling of what it's like to me. Though, I have some other music now to add to it.

Incidentally, I've been listening to that album almost nonstop on repeat, except for when I'm exploring her other music, and going down little pop culture rabbit holes. For instance, a few days ago, I heard her cover of "What's Up?!" by 4 Non Blondes, which I absolutely remember losing my shit to when I was a teenager. So, I had to revisit their music, and that particular album, "Bigger, Better, Faster, More!".

Did you know the lead singer of 4 Non Blondes was an out lesbian while she was singing for that band?

I did not.

I would have thought at least Kurt Loder on MTV would have told me, but nope! I do not remember that happening. Maybe I missed it.

It turns out that nearly every female led band I loved when I was a teen was queer in some way. And also, like, Billie Joe Armstrong of Greenday. What?!

So, anyway, I had a little week of collecting both old and new queer music, and that's my whole playlist now. I've also got Mary Lambert in there. And Karen O and Metric, though I'm not sure if either of them are queer, but they fit in the mix really damn well anyway. Oh, oh, and Halsey's song "I'm not a woman, I'm a god." And then the Nimona sountrack led me to Santigold, and she led me down the path of Black queer artists, and now I've got Jackie Shane and Janelle Monae. And I'm asking Kimberly to hook me up specifically with trans artists.

And she's like, "Darling, I'm in five bands. Here's my Bandcamp."

If I had a bedroom wall of my own, it would be slathered with posters by now.

I've never understood that, but I do now.

We might be headed toward the latest hottest Summer on record, with an utterly devastating hurricane season to follow, and I might be a harbinger of massive evolutionary upheaval during one of the world's biggest and fastest mass extinction events, but humanity sure is showering me with the best music ever at just the right time.

Sorry if that seems like flippant disregard for events that are killing way too many people and other animals, but things are changing. It's not going to turn out the way it was going to just a year ago. The future is different now. And you're part of it.

All of this is to say, though, that on this afternoon I'm listening to that Chappell Roan cover of "What's Up?!" while lounging on my rooftop, giving everyone else a break from my intensity. And my tail is flipping back and forth to the music, kind of like a cat's. If a cat had a little single-horned thagomizer to make a satisfying thump with.

I have no visits scheduled for the next three days, and I'm just letting myself get lost in the music.

I've listened to this song enough, I might be able to sing portions of it. Not as words I understand coming from my mouth, but as music. A sort of whistling that sounds a lot like the instruments, and maybe occasionally the vocals.

I might actually be trying to do that. And it might not sound great to anyone without my headphones on, but I'm alone up here and no one can stare at me or tap my shoulder.

And yeah, some of my neighboring dragons might be complaining occasionally. Or, they're reacting to something, but I've got my eyes closed and I don't care.

And then I feel it. My Artistry sensing nerve gets plucked.

It feels like a chittering skitter, with some snaps and ratchety clicks. There's a rhythm to it that matches the music I'm listening to, and reminds me a little bit of a dolphin and a little bit of Nine Inch Nails. And in particular, I find it soothing. Soothing and energizing.

My muscles want to relax every time it repeats, and I also feel the need to look.

Which I do.

I've already pinpointed where it's coming from, so my head has turned and is tracking the source before I even open my eye.

There's an Artist in the sky.

And like Fenmere, they are a dragon.

Their colors, in the crudest of terms, are green, gold, blue, and brown. But, like, whole gamuts of each of those colors. There are too many words to pick from to describe them. They're almost opalescent in places. It's like if a forest were a sunset with wings, talons, tail, and the most glorious head of teeth, horns, wattle, eyes, and scales.

Holy crud, that face. That pattern of scales!

Have you seen the wattle and jowls of a dragon iguana? Do a search and look. It's like that, but shaped a bit different, because their head is more like a cross between a melanosuchas (a type of really cute caiman) and an ankylosaurus. And I might have more visions of more animals in my head than I've ever realized.

I'm wondering if there's more to it than nearly fifty one years of an intense special interest in dragons and animals that look kind of like us. I almost distract myself from the wonder that's circling me by thinking about this, but I really can't.

If you could just see the flight muscles at work on this creature.

The shape of those claws!

My child must —

I mean.

I don't see any kind of material offering in this person's possession, so they must be here on some other business, Artist to dragon, or dragon to dragon. Or they are mistaken about my willingness to bend on my own demands.

Unless they're carrying it in that generous crop of theirs, and they'll barf it up for me. That'd be —

Um.

This is an Artist, Meghan. Do not fuck with them.

I touch my tablet twice to turn off the music, sort of to irritate myself out of my infatuation, and manage to call out, "What?"

As I do that, I notice that I also jerk my chin up once, slightly gaping my jaw, and slam my tail down on the roof. And I know that that means exactly the same thing as the English word I've just uttered.

"I come, your Highness, bearing the gift of language for you and many enticing traits for your egg to choose from," says my latest suitor. Only, they say it by jerking their chin up twice, chirping and trilling, tilting their left wing down toward me ever so slightly, and wiggling their ass mid flight as they circle.

The "Your Highness" part is just my brain's interpretation of servile deference, and I have to say I react to it as if it is genuine and not at all embarrassing.

But, OK, as I'm succumbing to this rakish drake, I do need to take an aside to address something that's been bothering me. Irking me. In the wake of defeating a very wealthy and powerful white supremacist, it feels pretty gross to be so focused on collecting desirable genetic traits for my child. Even now, I'm reacting to it by thinking about who I should fuck next to compensate, and that's not a charitable way to think about whoever that might be.

Except, look. We're not here to breed a new master race. I do not believe we're meant to replace any lifeforms on the planet. We're here to mix things up, and inject more creative diversity back into all the species of the planet when they might need it the most. I don't know exactly how, when all we can work with at the moment are the more complex and larger animals.

But, like, imagine this. This is just a wild hypothesis I just made up on gut feelings and instinct, and maybe something that's going on between me and this draconic Artist. What if we're not actually changing anything for the current megafauna of the planet? What if what we're doing is actually on the microscopic level, with bacteria and single celled eukaryotes, with fauna, flora, and fungus? All of it? Maybe even viruses?

What if every time we have sex with another creature, we're collecting more than just their reproductive gametes, but also their microbiome? And mixing that with our own?

What if our own microbiomes are as diverse as we are? And spreading and breeding with the rest of the world on that level?

What if my child is to be a culmination of all of the life I've sampled, maybe even eaten, so that they can carry that diversity with them as they go find a new territory?

And you might worry that we might bring new and wildly dangerous diseases, and that might be the case. But we live in harmony with humans now. We are part of your lives and well being. A symbiotic relationship forged in myth and dream. What if, for those of you who are close to us, we're also sharing some of our immune system, because that's what all our microbiomes can be?

Like, all of this is just raw speculation, with no evidence sparking the thought. Just wishful thinking based on horniness and some internal sense of identity and purpose I feel I was born with. And this sex drive that makes me want to fuck everything that's willing.

With a mythological being such as myself, there's got to be a reason for that, and this is what I've come up with.

Maybe I'm lying to myself and to you, but I think we represent the opposite of what the racial purists are fighting for. That's what I want us to be, at least. I want life on Earth to live long and diverse and beautiful, and to explore all the ways it might do that.

But still, for my first time around, I'm restraining myself and focusing on people I can talk with in some way for potential mates.

And by the Shadows of the Moon, this dragon that's cruising around me is using the language of my own dreams to talk to me, and I'm talking back!

"My name is Dragon," they say. "And I am visiting every Dragon Queen to offer myself to her egg and elucidation."

Dragon. Are they the Artist of Being a Dragon? Is there such a thing?

And Dragon Queen? Is that what the whole "queen" thing has actually been about? The term we're going use for this year's egg layer? I kind of like that.

"Elucidate me, Dragon. What do you know?" I demand.

"Allow me to land."

"Do, and prove yourself."

They circle one more time and swing wide so that they can come in straight and slow to land in front of me on the very edge of my roof, giving me as much room as possible. Then they take a few steps forward, bowing their head low, tail and wings high in the air, talons to the ground. Their tail is rigid and shaking, reminiscent of the convulsions of a cloacal kiss.

The royal audacity of them!

"Go on," I say. I could dash my tablet on the sidewalk below and it would not impair my ability to speak with this one. And the only noises we're making are infrasonic to humans and quiet enough that dragons a block away wouldn't clearly hear us.

"My Art is being me, and I am very good at it," they brag. "But I did not fully understand it until nearly a year ago, during dracomorphosis. I have always been a dragon, but I did not know the word for it until it was invented. And I couldn't speak to other dragons until you existed. You have given me the meaning I've been seeking my entire life. And I am here to thank you for it."

"Humans would call you Silvertongue," I observe, masterfully withholding my true feelings behind a mask of indifference, I think. But, ooh, if they aren't lying, that's some valuable information! "Tell me more. But drop the act."

I feel their skittering shift, and then they lick the air with a tongue that is silver colored.

"Like the grandest of stories, I can change my shape to resemble any creature I like. My form is as malleable as your own voice, and so is yours. You can already take another form. I can and will gladly teach you the rest of that skill, and set you on the path to exploring it for yourself," they report. "Also, anyone who drinks a portion of my blood can speak to any animal, including humans. And I am prepared to give that gift to you, should you accept it. In return, I only ask of you to accept my sweetest intercourse, and whichever of my natural traits your child wishes to retain for themself."

"You are very bad at not talking like a courtly suitor," I comment.

"I am a courtly suitor, My Queen," they say, bowing again.

"You are also an Artist, and I've been told not to trust Artists. By other Artists," I say.

"Wise," they admit. "I would tell you the same. I would tell you not to trust me. But you need not. If I offend you at any point, strike me down and consume my body. I will let you."

My body is telling me that I have never heard anything so hot in my entire life. I feel myself going a little crosseyed with it.

I take a very deep breath and let it out slowly through my nose, knowing that even that gesture is an expression that speaks volumes to Dragon, here.

Also, I have to say. As a trans person and therian who has experienced a significant amount of physical dysphoria, this talk of my child choosing their own physical traits from the samples I collect for them? The idea that they could have some kind of agency before they even exist? That's making me melt, even if I don't know if it's true.

I want it to be true.

Still, I feel like I should test this individual definitively somehow. Something to get them to show me their true devotion. I want the dragon magic that they say they can teach me, but if I already have it I can figure it out myself. No, it has to be something personal for them.

But what?

Oh. I know what I need, actually.

I reach for my tablet and use it to message Rhoda. And I make Dragon wait so that I can tell her, "I have a strange Artist here courting me. They call themself Dragon." I look meaningfully up at Dragon, then back down at the tablet and send the question, "May I ask you to judge them in your own way, and give me or revoke your consent for them to court me? I'll take any answer, including figure it out myself. I just wanted you to have a say, if you want it."

After a little bit, I get the reply, "Meghan, that's a lot."

"It is," I reply. "I am a little overwhelmed and about to say, 'yes'."

"Cool yourself, and make them wait," she tells me. "I'm on my way up now. I want to get a look at them."

"Thank you. I love you," I respond.

I get a black heart emoji in return. It's her thing for me when she's too busy to type anything else, and she's being reassuring.

"Wait," I tell Dragon.

"Very well," they reply.

And we both settle down and loaf. They're smiling. I'm not. I'm watching them like they might steal my food.

Then I think, Rhoda shouldn't have to open that hatch by herself, so I get up, keeping on eye on Dragon, and go to open it for her.

I'm well ahead of her movement, of course. She takes the elevator, and I'd expect nothing else of her. But also, she doesn't walk all that fast. And I sit there on my haunches, resting on my foreknuckles, tail wrapped around me, watching Dragon.

Eventually, I hear her cane. And then she softly curses before climbing the ladder, cane clanging against it, and coming into view.

I hold up a limp-wristed claw for her to use as a handhold, and then gently help to lift her out of the hatch, so she can step easily onto the roof.

And she steps forward and hunches over her cane and squints at Dragon.

"Can you talk, or do you need a device?" Rhoda asks.

I feel that stuttering shift again, and then Dragon replies, "I can talk."

"You're too fancy," she states.

"I am the Artist of Being a Dragon," Dragon responds. "How else can I be?"

"Crude. Monstrous. Of the people," Rhoda tells them. She gestures expansively at Fairport, and I know she's indicating my neighbors. "You know. Good qualities."

"Ah."

"Eh," she waves a hand at them. Then she turns and heads back toward the hatch. Stopping there, she looks up at me and says, "This isn't my business. This is dragon stuff. It's up to you."

I expected her to say something like that, but I still feel an incredible amount of disappointment. I don't want our relationship to be that divided, particularly over this. She matters to me, and the impact that I have on her life matters to me. Since I am going to lay an egg and see to it that it hatches, I want that child to be as compatible with her as possible. If she wants nothing to do with my child, that's fine. I just want her to have every opportunity to negotiate that relationship herself! I want her to know that it is her business if she wants it to be.

This breaks my resolve and I feel the need to tell her. Before I can stop myself, I'm stretching to reach my tablet and pull it within talking range to say, "I want this be your child too. If you want."

The look on her face startles me, such an intense mix of emotions, and she asks, "How?"

"Somehow," I respond. "Maybe Chapman help."

She is fully informed by now about how my breeding works. She knows I'm opening myself up to every dragon in town, and why, and she agrees with it. And she knows I've marked myself as not open to humans on my app account. And I've already said multiple times I intend to take all of the childcare into my own claws and mouth. I'll accept help from my family, meaning her and my other humans, but I won't expect it. It should be disappointingly light work, in any case.

She closes her eyes and relaxes every muscle with an exhale of breath, then turns more calmly and looks at Dragon again.

"I can see what you see in them," she says. "I imagine they can teach you a lot, too, of course. And the more we both know, the better." She squints at me with a grim but satisfied smile, considering me in some way, and then points at Dragon and addresses them, "You. Come down to our apartment and have dinner with us. You and I have gotta talk some shit before I let you court my girl, you hear?"

"Yes, Ma'am," says Dragon.

"That's a good start." Then she turns to me, "And you. You shoulda asked me sooner. But I get why you didn't. You were thinking of me and tryin' a give me space, and I appreciate that. But you should know that if you hadn't a asked just now, we'd a had a talk later tonight." She grins, looking really smug. "And it sounds like it mighta gone well anyway."

—

After a long talk with Dragon, I decide I do not want to be able to talk to or understand seagulls, so I forgo that particular offer. Even if it means I won't ever be able to speak a human language fluently, I'm fine with that. I can fully speak and understand draconic now, and people can learn that if they need to.

[girldragongizzard]

Epilogue 4: Mating Season 0.2a

As Spring has developed into a full blown season, Meghan has become downright silly. And it's been fun to watch.

She's been wanting to have boudoir photo shoot done with her as the subject for a while now, nearly since her dracomorphosis. And when she found out that Rhoda took almost all the photos in her apartment, she's brought it up with more frequency. And, why not? It could be healing for her. She spent so much of her life trapped in that human body that was ruled by testosterone, anatomy she didn't vibe with, and all the baggage of the social expectations of being a man, when that's definitely not what she was. A girl should get to feel hot and sexy in a safe way at least once in her life.

And now that Meghan's hormones are so obviously putting her in a certain mood, it was agreed by everyone that soon would be the best time for that photo shoot.

And as Meghan stretches and rolls into a new pose, rumbling like a subwoofer, Rhoda looks down at her phone and smirks.

As much as she misses her old Canon AE-1 35mm film camera and the smell of the darkroom, a good photographer can make any camera sing. And she doesn't hate what her phone can do. It's certainly faster, and a better fit for where these photos are going. It's not, by any means, a good camera. But she knows its limits, and how to take advantage of them. And being able to see your photo right after taking it saves so much work and storage space.

She can delete what she doesn't like immediately, and ends up with a high percentage of good shots.

On the screen is the last photo taken, a closeup of Meg gaping, eyes closed, left foreclaw laid on her snout like a bashful cartoon character reacting to attention. The contours, scales, and spines of the rest of her body create a landscape behind her head, fading into the blur beyond the focal range, engendering a sense of atmosphere perspective. And Rhoda flicks it between the different filters to get an idea of what she might like better. But she saves it untouched for now.

With this pose she wants to start another series of shots that include more of the setting.

See, Meghan doesn't really have a boudoir. She has Rhoda's kitchen. And they did have to talk about this. Maybe six months ago they could have done this photoshoot there, which could have been funny. But Meghan's now too big for that. Rhoda can't fit in the kitchen to take any photos when Meghan is sprawled out in there trying to look all fetching and ready for a dragon. It just doesn't work.

The roof of the building is her other bedroom, and the city as a backdrop would be so fitting, but there's no furniture there. No props. And getting something up there and arranged is just a bit more work than anyone wants to exert for this. Especially since if was left up there it would be exposed to the weather, so they'd have to take it all back down again.

There's a local independent theater troupe that offered to lend them their stage and set pieces, but Meghan wanted something that she associated with herself. And while she's been an avid audience member of their productions, taking advantage of the free community tickets, she doesn't act there, so it didn't seem to fit for her.

And it was right when they were in the middle of talks with Bri and Miriam of the coffee shop, to see if they could use it for a set, when Meghan was hit with that itch on the back of her neck, and Rhoda saw the first signs that another draconic molt was coming on. Certain scales here and there looked dull as the outer layer of skin over them started to lift away.

"Meghan," she'd said, quietly. "Molting is a bit like stripping, you know. And your scales look particularly gorgeous right afterward. Why don't we go and do the photoshoot in the alley right now? It's definitely one of your more private places, even if it's not yours."

And so, that's where they were, with the molting kit and everything.

Instead of eating her skin right away as it was peeled off, Meghan agreed to let it sit about here and there as part of the backdrop. It didn't come off all in one piece, or even significant sheets, like a snake skin. But the pieces were large enough to provide interest in the background, and to turn the ground around her into sort of a bed of flakes.

And the greatest fortune was that this shed had started in the mid afternoon and had progressed through sunset, so there'd been a variety of light to work with.

When the twilight of the alley had obliterated any shadows, Rhoda got to work on helping Meghan finish up the shed, cleaning the last irritating bits of dead skin away.

And now, in the darkness of the night, the streetlights were casing a new kind of glow and set of shadows throughout the alley. And Meghan has become downright prancy.

The fact that she's on her back, struggling to remain still enough for photography, stretching her muscles as slowly as possible and taking some direction on what to move to catch the light just so, is clearly a testament to her willpower. And probably short lived.

Rhoda kneels down to get a quick shot over Meghan's shiny belly scales, a bit of her gleaming knee and her twisting tail, and taps her finger on the dumpster in the background, so that Meghan is hazy and twinkly in front of the comic page grunge of the nighttime alley, bricks of the building wall stretching up through the frame. And then a second photo focused on Meghan.

She steps back a few paces to get all of Meghan in the shot, then, with the flaky ghostly white remains of her old skin around her, adorning the stains of the alley pavement, next to months old gum splotches and a cigarette butt smashed flat by Meghan's gyrations earlier.

"My dearest girl," Rhoda says then. "You are nigh well climbing the walls. Why don't you go ahead and do that for real? Over there, near the corner of the building! We'll get you silhouetted against the street light. And then from the outside with the alley behind you."

By the time she's done talking, Meghan has already scrambled to her feet and bounced over to the corner of her apartment building and is quickly clawing her way up.

“Ok, stop right there, like that!” Rhoda calls. “And let me get over there to get a good angle.”

As she makes her way, she realizes two things. One, a really fantastic angle would be from directly below, with Meghan looking back over her own haunches. And two, Meghan’s claws are capable of sinking a full inch into rock and brick. She’s damaging the building by climbing it.

—

Back in November, someone in Chili made a dating app for dragons and named it exactly the same thing I would have named it. Mating Season.

It's still in alpha, but there's been some updates, and it's not too terrible.

It actually allows humans and other species of people to use it, too. You just have to agree that by setting up an account on it that you are agreeing to be courted by a dragon. There are some filters for region, and a territory map with a dispute resolution chat.

It needs a lot of work. But it was clearly started by someone who recognizes therians. The inclusion of other species isn't just about anticipating other mass metamorphoses. Though, it does seem hopeful for that, too, even though nobody I talk to thinks it's likely. Not without some massive cooperative Artistry. The dracomorphosis is a dragon only thing, but people are working on it. On the app and other transformations.

I'm very nervous about using a dating app. Especially when it's more of a mating app. It's just a kind of scene I know shit about.

But, fuck, I have never been this horny and excited for this long before. The whole season feels like fucking Christmas, and everyone is a present I cannot wait to unwrap.

It's amazing to me that I've been able to keep my flirting with Rhoda to the minimal half dancing I've managed.

But, I know her and where she's at emotionally, and I don’t want to push the idea of adding her DNA to my first child. Her offering to take hopefully sexy photos of me for my Mating Season account is plenty wonderful and meaningful.

But. I can't stop thinking about how excited I'd be to help her have another child. And also trying to figure out how we could even make it work.

In theory, if we can get an egg from her inserted up into my reproductive organs, my body will take care of the rest. It can dismantle the gamete of anything and pull useful DNA from it, according to every relevant Artist who's scanned me or another dragon. It's just what we dragons can do. It's maybe why we exist, originally.

Humans gave us more meaning than that over the past few million years, though. Which might be why we all have trouble seeing them as a separate species a lot of the time.

Anyway, I think if I write too much more about this, I'll make myself a target of prudes and purists. If I haven't already.

And, you know what, screw them.

I'm actually hoping to get myself several draconic mates, but I'll settle for one. And what the Hell is wrong with me?

I have never understood physical attraction. The way that most of humanity has gone on about getting wet or cumming in their pants at the sight of someone hot, and having lists of celebrities they get to fuck even if married to someone already, has just always baffled me.

Like, having a life partner or three? Yes, please! Finding out what sex is about? Sure. Lots of naked cuddling and sleeping together? Absolutely! And I've certainly had some physical preferences for those things that I never actually got to test.

I've literally dated no one. And if you'd ever asked me what I'd like in a partner, it'd have been a list of personality traits. Completely. And most of those traits would match Rhoda and Chapman.

Most importantly, I've never daydreamt about having sex with someone else before. No one in particular.

Oh, I've had my sexy time daydreams, but they were, uh, well… I might be about to fulfill most of them now, if I'm lucky, I guess.

Because, like, right now, if Anurak, Joel, or Astraia came dancing on my block, I'd do any one of them. Astraia particularly, but I'm not feeling ultra picky.

I have my family. Right now, I'm looking for how to fill my egg with strength. And while I have a strong emotional preference for fellow girls, my sex drive is utterly indiscriminate.

OK, another thing.

Apparently, not all of us dragons yearn to lay an egg this year. It's maybe one in twenty-five of us, while the others seem content to sit it out or contribute DNA to someone else's egg.

This played out in the Southern Hemisphere last year, and us Northies are now experiencing the same thing.

The result in realizing this is that since I feel the yearn to get broody, I feel an urgency about it, too. I am going to lay an egg, my body tells me, with another parent or not. And it better damn well hatch! Because it might be 25 years before I feel the need again. Maybe.

So, this is what I'm thinking about while clinging to the wall of my building, claws slowly sinking further and further into it, muscles vibrating.

It seems daunting. Chapman did the math for our local population, and depending on how fast whelps mature and whether or not they stick around, we could be seeing upwards of 133 dragons present in Independence County by the time I feel the urge to have a second egg (assuming it takes that long for me). That seems like a lot? We feel really packed in at around 50 or so. Of course, there's some room to expand out in the rural areas and the wilderness, if anybody is willing to move. And our children may wander out that way. Though, we also know that some dragon therians are doing that already, hoping to undergo dracomorphosis, and often succeeding.

Nobody really knows how many dragons the Earth can sustain. It's not so much a problem of food supply, no more so than for humans, where that's a problem mostly caused by capitalist hoarding for price gouging and profit. It's more our territorial nature.

You'd think our instincts would adapt to our population density. But, then, maybe they have, and that's why I'm the only dragon in the Southside that's gearing up to bear an egg.

Anyway, based on what's happened elsewhere in the world, I think I can expect my egg to come out sometime in June, and to hatch sometime in late August. Which, in olden times, would be just in time for harvest. So, human support of their local dragons could include a variety of food, including slaughter of elderly livestock.

But, then, whelps, or infant dragons, are not terribly dependent on their parent. Within a month, they can typically hunt on their own, but they'll also learn to depend on anybody offering them food. And none of the new generation are particularly old yet, but we know that most of them have learned to understand a number of words. Some can already imitate sounds and some language, even. It really, really varies, of course, but there are so many other trends we can see, too.

For instance, I know that if I mate with mostly humans, my child can come out looking almost entirely human. It should be possible with two humans even, making me sort of a surrogate mother. It depends on what my body wants to do. And while there are a handful of dragon parents who've reported that they could consciously decide what their baby was like, most didn't or couldn't. And scientists and dragons alike are still doing the numbers to try to figure out what the natural influences might be. The speculation, or hope, is that it's somehow based on what the local ecosystem needs. That would be cool.

But, the few dragons who've had mostly human babies had to help their children hatch, and they were the equivalent of preemies. They got enough draconic DNA and whatever metaphysical inheritance we have to offer that they're doing fine and growing fast, but it's a concern.

There are two humans I'd accept for mates, and one of them is only nominally human, and I think we'd need medical assistance in making it work between us. But, as I said, I'm looking at mating with at least one other dragon.

My profile on Mating Season 0.2a so far reads:My name is Meghan Estragon Draconis (she/her) I live in downtown Fairport WashingtonYou know who I am. And if you don't, you can look me up.I will be laying an egg this year. If you want in, bring a steak, a seagull, or sushi, and be polite and respectful. I'll return all favors that I like. Please RSVP.(I'll be uploading photos soon. You know, to brag and entice you.)

Ah, Rhoda's waving that she's done. Next step is to go up to her apartment for tea and to review the pics.

—

So, this is what I look like!

I mean, I've seen myself in enough mirrors and windows now, and by just turning my head and looking down at my body, that I've got a pretty solid idea of how I appear and how my body is built.

But there's something about seeing a photograph that your own very skilled partner has taken. Never mind nearly 200 of them.

I think I've described how my body looks and works in terms of comparisons to other animals before. I don't think those comparisons are completely off, particularly in how my snout, jaw, and brow really do look like some photos of caimans I've seen. But when you do things like add in the larger cranium, dragon eyes, and the goat horns it really changes how it all looks.

And I've got this little hole at the front of my mouth where my tongue comes out, like a lot of snakes and lizards have, and I think it's the most adorable thing. I think if another dragon had that, I might not be able to resist their advances even if they were an asshole.

Well, I can draw a line at people like Säure pretty easily, still.

But anyway.

Rhoda got this one photo of me bounding down the alleyway, looking over my shoulder at her, wings partially spread, tail whipping in a little corkscrew. I can even see the toe beans of my right hind foot. My scales are sparkling in the streetlight, my back spines casting stark pointy shadows across them.

I see myself.

I remember doing that.

I can put my mind back in that moment, and feel where my limbs were and what I was thinking.

I remember hoping she'd chase me through the streets of the city, but knowing she couldn't really do that.

And I wonder.

When other people look at photos of themselves, especially cisgender humans, is this what they experience?

I think I love myself.

I think I love being myself.

I think I love being alive now.

And I think that, for the very first time in my life, I won't feel ashamed to bring another being into this world.

If there's a chance they'll feel like this, it will be worth it.

[girldragongizzard]

Epilogue 3: The Fenverse

"People say that my experiment failed dramatically," Fenmere the Poet says to me as we watch the proceedings. "But those that do weren't there. And they fail to acknowledge the beneficial repercussions of what the Harmless Free Radicals did. But, of course, I never finished the comic, so there's no record. Still…" She gestures at the two Artists working to restore the wooded wetland of her old vacant lot.

I've read what remains of that comic, what's left online, and I really can't see how it was part of anything big. There's very little that's special about it, and it's messy and weird. But, then, the outward appearances of the works of the Artists are often like that.

What I can see now, however, is that Chapman is crouched down working with Scilla the Botonist, quietly and carefully, murmuring in low relaxed tones. I am, in fact, in the presence of three Artists and they are not bickering, arguing, snapping at each other, or otherwise showing any sort of friction between them. And that is profoundly, disturbingly unusual. And nice.

This work started with the new year, actually. Every month, Chapman and Scilla have made their rounds to each of Säure's burn scars, and started prepping them for a year of intense, planned but wild growth. It only took that long to get started because they had to form the business and strike up a contract with the city to do the repairative work instead of someone else. Though, that was helped along thanks to certain connections I'd already established, and a few strategic pieces of poetry by Fenmere.

This is my first time going along for the rounds, though, so Fenmere is bragging to me about what she's done to make this possible.

I'm genuinely interested, of course, because this is Fairport and Artist history, though I was even alive for a lot of it.

"I was the first, you know," Fenmere says. "This is why I've called myself 'the Worm' for so long. A reminder of my first form, but also of how lowly we all truly are. A reminder to myself to be humble, though I'm still very terrible at that." She looks at me for a moment as if to see if I'm about to react to what she's said, but I'm afraid I'm a disappointment to her. She continues after a breath, "I got to see the hatching of each of my siblings, and watch them grow with the help of the others in a way I didn't get to experience. And almost immediately, there was fighting. We've never all got along. Too many differences."

"Ah," I say.

I've been constantly working on my vocabulary, but I seem to be coming to the limits of it. So, I've started collecting noises that are as versatile as possible. The various grunts of acknowledgement that English speaking humans use to keep a conversation going. It seems that I can learn to imitate an unlimited number of noises, really, but only remember a small handful of them as words. So when I practice and use a new word for long enough, my memory of a less used one will become less available when I need it. I'll never talk like a human without my AAC, and I'm totally OK with that. Often, I prefer it.

"Now I know what people like Säure and his ilk say about us Artists. I know they call us the Architects, or other terms and phrases of similar provenance and intent. And that my work, my Fenverse, must seem like playing into their expectations," the Poet explains in her strange, rough, lispy voice, mouth opening a minuscule fraction to let the air and sound from her syrinx escape, her nostrils doing most of the work. "But, I don't give a flying shit about them. Whether we're talking about ants or gods, cooperation is better than eternal conflict. And the world really has seen too many eons of chaos as it is. I think it is high time for some more harmony. Don't you?"

"Yes," I agree.

She gestures with her right claw at the ground of the land surrounding the creek, which gleams in the morning sun, and says, "When they are done planting this round of seeds, I'll bless the lot with some of my words, and we'll be ready to go to the next location. This should never have happened. But we can bring it back to its original half-assed glory of municipal environmental posturing within the year, and to something much better by the next. The raccoons and deer will love it!" She turns to smile at me, eyes doing the same slow blink that I do. "Of course, the Earth needs far more work than this. And if something isn't done soon, this lot will burn down again in no time. But I think with how us dragons have turned out, and how we may be shaping humanity and the world itself in ways that we Artists could never achieve, there should be some hope!"

I bob my head.

"But I am still inordinately proud of what I did," she mumbles. "The Fenverse was probably my greatest work."

"How?" I ask, happy that that word bubbled up in time to use it.

"Did you know that not all poetry must be written or spoken in words to be considered poetry?" she asks me.

"No," I reply, honestly. That sounds like bullshit.

"It is true," she says. "I've been composing poetry since billions of years before language existed, so I should know, of course. In any case, it was simple. I used the ridiculous shenanigans portrayed in my comics to lure representatives from the various cliques and factions of my siblings. And then, when all the important players were here, I bound them in a poem, the Fenverse. And despite what they think, it worked. I was so cunning, I disgust myself."

As I said, having read the comics myself I still find that hard to believe. But, again, Rhoda once said that the Artists are like the scientists to the ants that are the rest of us. And I certainly know that the Artists can Do Things. Chapman, for instance, can draw a few careful lines on a paper cup and turn it into a megaphone. Or with a few different lines, and a hole in the end, it becomes a small jet engine. So I don't discount anything Fenmere is saying, as hard it as it is for me to emotionally accept it.

—

Way back. Thursday, October 24, 2002, if I recall correctly.

The new coffee shop finally opened its doors where the old Donut Kitchen used to be. The sign on the brick column in front of the door had the business' logo as big as a child. And it was a child. A cartoon of a black haired girl holding a huge steaming cup of coffee.

I was the first customer. I'd been checking their "opening soon" sign every day to be sure I remembered the hour correctly. 6:30 am, October 24.

It was a different set of owners at the time. They'd eventually sell the place to their employees, after starting their own roastery. All such good people, even if they occasionally had their differences.

That day, I put up with the company of others to start a line at the door at five o' clock. And the owners, who were staffing the counter that morning, were bewildered and delighted by the enthusiasm of these five people, as if they found themselves hosting a rock show with first come first serve seating or something. I don't know why, but when the doors opened, the other four people stepped aside and insisted I go first.

I was wearing New Balance shoes from K-Mart, a pair of jeans I found at Good Will that were a bit too baggy and held up by a belt my grandfather gave me, and a huge gray hoodie. The biggest hoodie I could find, hood up, with my beard poking out from it. There was a crumpled up collection of dollar bills in my fist in the pocket.

This was before I'd become fully disabled. I think the job I had at the time was at a record store. It wasn't going well. The boss was a high strung anal-retentive dick.

Look, I've never really used words like that to describe anybody before. It's not my style. But there really isn't a better way to describe this guy.

I'd already put myself on the waiting list for the Magnolia apartments, though. I think I knew where I was headed already.

Anyway, I did not look or smell like someone anyone should give deference to. But for the brief few seconds, I was treated like a lady, and it hurt in such a good way. And I'm sure none of the people there knew or would have guessed why.

I ordered a cowboy cookie and a double tall mocha with no whipped cream, and then immediately saw my favorite seat, off in the far corner.

The golden upholstery, high back with wings, and deep shadows of the twelve buttons punched through the padding all called to me, but the location was the best part. I could watch the whole cafe from there, and the parabolic array of my hood would channel sound from the front into my ears.

So that's where I was sitting when the wild haired, goateed person in a navy blue trench coat walked in, shoving their hand deep into their satchel to pull out a stack of neon orange quarter page handbills. They were so excited. And, now, I know that most people looking at this person would have gendered them a man, just like what they would have done looking at me. But, I know better now, so I'm using they/them in retrospect, even though their name is a stereotypically male name.

I really don't know many enbies named Jonathan.

After placing their order, and introducing themself, which they did with excruciating politeness and care, they pushed their stack of handbills forward on the counter and said, "I'd like to ask if it's OK for me to distribute these weekly comics here. They're kinda weird, but my friend draws them, and we both thought this would be the perfect place, because your logo looks like one of her characters!"

Both owners of the shop leaned forward over the counter to look at the sample of the comic, Andi up on her tiptoes in order to see, and Henry leaning in sideways, hands busy wiping down a freshly cleaned mug.

"Oh, yeah!" Andi said. "These would be great! We'd be honored to carry these!"

"Oh, sweet. Thank you!" Jonathan said, then took most of the stack and turned to put them on the windowsill near the counter. "Is this a good spot."

"You bet," Henry said.

Then Jonathan, waiting for their drink with hands in pockets, looked my way and pulled a hand out to wave.

I guess I waved back.

They grinned, then kept looking around the shop in awe of it.

The decor was the same back then as it is now, but the colors of the walls and ceiling were different. With the new owners came a fresh look, but still in the same basic "actually the Victorians really loved color" theme. The fixtures and collection of strange glassware in the windows have remained. The glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling were added much later. They were absent when Jonathan took in the place.

Walls the color of milky coffee were trimmed with golden orange molding, and the ceiling was an amazing yellow. The furniture and counters were painted in a circus rainbow of reds, blues, greens, yellows, and the occasional purple. The radiator was painted a dark russet.

"Great Scott, I love this place," Jonathan said.

"Thank you!" Andi exclaimed, handing them their drink in a to-go cup.

Then Jonathan left.

Andi shot me a smile before returning to her place behind the counter.

The other four customers who had been waiting with me outside the door were also scattered around the shop, and had watched the exchange. One of them stood up to go look at one of the comics. I watched them flip it over and read something on the back, then put it back down, grunting. Then they left.

After a couple of hours, I was the only customer in the shop, so I got up to see what the fuss was about.

The comic was titled Harmless Free Radicals and was marked as copyright 2002 by Fenmere, the Worm. It was printed in thick black toner on this Astrobrite card stock, four up and then trimmed into these little handbills. This one had only one panel. It was a scratchy cartoon of a girl, a lot like the one on the shop's logo, sitting on the floor next to her bed, with some kind of little dragon made entirely of shadow perched on her bed looking over her shoulder. She was holding a set of the comic handbills.

"More cards?! How? I thought they came out once a week! It's only Thursday!" the little dragon exclaimed. I felt like I could hear her voice.

"Shush! Stop breaking character! We have to maintain a suspension of disbelief in order for this to work," the girl replied in low tones, I imagined.

There was a url. It was a webcomic in the early '00s. Of course self-referential meta fourth wall breaking bullshit was totally in at the time. Well, all the webcomic authors seemed to think it was a hit.

—

After an hour or so of listening to Fenmere talk about her big scheme, her Fenverse, I'm maybe ready to say more than just a word here or there.

During a pause in her speech, while she's busy observing the work of her siblings, I turn and plod my way over to the sidewalk and pull out my tablet to put it on the concrete. Then I look at her and wait for her to notice. She has fully forward facing eyes, like a human's, so her peripheral vision isn't as great as mine.

"So, in any case," she starts saying and then looks over to where I was. Then she notices where I am and how I've pulled out my tablet. "Yes?"

"Ian and Brenna starred in comic," I tell her. "What about Ink and Jenifer?" Ink was the little dragon and Jenifer the girl.

"Oh, yes," Fenmere says. "Everyone in the comic was a real person who lives today. Though, Ink is Jenifer's imaginary friend. She's sort of a special case."

"And Jonathan?" I ask. "They aren't a hampster."

"Oh, yes they are," Fenmere says.

"Like Kimberly a poodle?" I ask.

"Oh, beans, no," Fenmere chuckles. "That's 'Hamster, with a capital 'H' and an apostrophe before it. The cartoon was a liberty to throw people off, but Jonathan is from Bellingham. A Bellinghamster."

"Bellingham? Where that?" I ask.

"Somewhere else," Fenmere says. "It's unimportant now. In any case, as I was saying, in order to make the whole thing work I had to bind Fairport in the treaty as well. It's inherently part of the alliance. So, when my siblings come here, there's a minimal amount of trouble they can cause each other. And when I'm present, it's peaceful."

"Wait," I say.

"Yes?"

"You started comic in 2000?"

"I did."

"And you finish in 2015?"

Fenmere cringes and says, "I stopped in 2015. The Fenverse was completed then, but not the comic. I'll always regret that, but there are more important things to do now."

"What is Fenverse?" I ask, even though she sort of already explained it. I want a more detailed description. Something's itching at the back of my mind.

"My entire life's work," Fenmere says. "A poem written with the fabric of reality itself, where my siblings are the words, and this city, Fairport, is the signature. I had to use the inherent magic of humanity to make it work, though. Other people, other animals, would have eventually sufficed. Humans were just lucky enough to put together the right mix of dreaming, beliefs, and science, I think."

"Why Fairport?" I ask.

"Because I was here at the time," Fenmere replies. "It's nothing that special, except maybe it tends to isolate itself from the rest of the world too much, and lies to itself about its own nature. Like a lot of small cities across the world. So that isn't all that special, either, just the right properties for what I needed. Also, I like the coffee here."

"Are people of Fairport part of Fenverse?" I prod, getting to the crux of my itch.

"Oh, I suppose yes, they'd have to be, since the city wouldn't exist without them," she responds, looking up in the air at something in her mind.

"I bound by Fenverse," I say.

"You were here, so yes," she says.

"Rhoda bound by Fenverse," I point out.

"Oh."

I get up and walk away. I've got some thinking to do.

I think I'm going to want to compare notes with Chapman, when sie is free to think about this kind of thing. And I want to figure things out more clearly before I talk to Rhoda about it. And, I also wish I was in better touch with Ptarmigan. There were a bunch of things the Artists were doing when we were fighting Säure that didn't have obvious effects, and they didn't explain what happened. I feel like the same thing is going on here with the Fenverse, whatever it really was.

More particularly, I think the Artists aren't always fully aware of the side effects of their Arts. Or they don't care.

I have no idea if it could be true, but Fenmere's exclamation when I pointed it out seems to indicate it's a distinct possibility.

If Rhoda and I are part of the same enforced treaty that was meant to bind all of Fenmere's siblings to some sort of harmony and peace, maybe that was a force in the way the dracomorphosis unfolded. It might be how Rhoda became the Bellwether, or the Dreamer.

Because right about the time Fenmere was putting the final touches on her life's work, a poem that was billions of years in the making if we believe her, Rhoda was freshly grieving the loss of her child, Jacob. Only a handful of years into that grief, at most. Not a perfect coincidence, and other people in the city must have been grieving things. But still.

I'm not sure it's relevant in the grand scheme of things, though, besides giving Fenmere something to think about. To bring her up short next time she's doing something that big.

Things still happened the way they did, and a bunch of other things that were going very badly have started turning around.

I'm not sure anyone would really want to risk rewinding things and doing them differently, even if we could do that.

I know I don't.

[girldragongizzard]

Epilogue 2: Valentine's Day

The afternoon walk from Fairport Communications Company inc. (Printers) to Meghan's coffee shop is meditative today.

The sky is mostly blue, with those smallish clouds that look like cartoonists had something to do with them. And, that means that in about an hour and a half, when the sun sets and starts turning things pink, the whole sky is likely to become a trans pride flag of sorts for a moment.

Everything feels light and relaxed. Even the birds, which are usually fighting with each other over scraps, or dodging a particular dragon, are chill and just chatting with each other.

There is a moment of absurdity, though, when Chapman comes within three blocks of Mandy's Botanical Hand Basket, which mostly sells flowers. The thick flow of almost entirely cis het men to and from that shop is almost identical to the behavior of ants, as if the shop is the colony. With just a few things reversed, since they're taking bouquets away from the central location, rather than to it. But most of them are following the same trails as the others, because there are only a few parking lots nearby, and all the street parking is full.

Upon first seeing this phenomenon, which sie has definitely seen many times before, Chapman can't help but stop to watch it.

Courting rituals are an ancient tradition across all the species that exhibit sexual reproduction. And, really, Chapman has seen it all. But there is something about experiencing this particular ritual while also inhabiting a human body, especially one that isn't obligated to participate on either end of it. There's this weird mix of feelings. The feeling of, "this is what my people do," combined with the feeling of, "they don't want me to be a part of it," and, "thank Entropy I'm not!"

Because of hir experience of recently growing up in this culture and in this time, Chapman hasn't been immune to the socialization surrounding Valentine's day in any way. Sie remembers first experiencing the day when buying mass printed cards for all of hir classmates in first grade. Sie also remembers receiving flowers from a boy as a senior in high school, despite the fact that sie had already come out as asexual and non-binary at the time. But, sie has always been seen and treated as an outsider to it by most people, and knew that hir developmental path as someone inhabiting a human body would be one that deviated from the norm.

And as sie stands now, no cis het man is likely to feel obligated to buy hir flowers or chocolate, and none of hir partners have expressed a desire to receive them.

Though, Meghan, being a dragon, will almost certainly always appreciate a gift of some sort. She hasn't talked about that much, but every time someone has given her a gift, Chapman has noticed a particular gleam in her eye and a restless resettling of her posture that indicates some kind of excitement. And it's totally within the history and makeup of dragons to yearn for gifts.

The problem is that Meghan doesn't really have much space to keep anything. So most gifts for her work best if they're food, or consumable in some way. But Rhoda's apartment would probably have room for flowers.

Huh.

Chapman wonders if sie is seriously considering participation in the activities of that throng of compelled men over there.

Flowers really would be a good idea. Meghan is a trans woman, after all, still within her first year of coming out. She should get to experience that. If the flowers have any sort of a scent, she's going to find tasting it on the air interesting. And, again, Rhoda will appreciate them, too, probably. Probably.

Sometimes, flowers are really a bother, or feel pointless. But Rhoda will almost certainly understand even if she doesn't care for them herself.

But maybe not chocolates.

Maybe…

Sushi.

Oh.

That would be another bouquet of scents for Meghan, and a kind of food that would be easy on her digestive system and full of nutrients. And it might be closer to what her body needs than what she's been eating lately. That tail barb has always struck Chapman as something useful for catching fish.

And a sushi party would be so good!

Hm.

OK, fight for the flowers first, then grab sushi from the Co-op on the way to the cafe. It'll make hir late, but then it'll give hir a chance to mix it up with the guys, which should be amusing.

Chapman straightens the skirt of hir heart print dress, adjusts hir waistcoat, then flicks the brim of hir top hat, and steps into the fray.

—

Rhoda's been in and out of the shop all day, checking in on people she knows at times they're usually there. And Kimberly has just not left the place, even though her shift has been long over.

The girl is practically melted in her seat against the wall and draped across a third of her table, with hooded eyes and the kind of relaxed grin of someone stoned and amused by a particularly complicated dust mote. But as far as Rhoda knows, she hasn't popped outside for a smoke. She's been in that spot, in that pose, ever since she clocked out and flopped there, apron still on.

Occasionally, someone will ask her how she's doing and she'll say, "Yes!"

There's an untouched to-go cup full of cappuccino on the table near her right hand.

Now, since Meghan has extended her rounds to include the territories of her favorite neighbors, she can be expected to be gone until late afternoon. And she'd said something about trying to return around 4:30 to meet her and Chapman, which is why Rhoda's here now. But neither dragon nor Artist have shown up yet.

So, after ordering and receiving her tea, Rhoda chooses to sit at Meghan's favorite table, facing the door, which puts her right in front of Kimberly.

Then she looks slyly over at the off-shift barista and observes, "You've been like this for two days now."

"Woof," says Kimberly. And then she breaks into uncontrollable soft giggles that jerk her whole body just a little bit.

It was a full moon the night of the twelfth. So, for the whole time that the moon was visible in the sky, Kimberly got to be a big poodle. And from what Rhoda understands, she just spent the whole time lying around her apartment because she forgot to arrange for someone to come give her a walk or something. But clearly that was just wonderful.

"So, that was a good choice for you, then?" Rhoda asks.

"Oh, yes. I think so," Kimberly says, without moving or opening her eyes any further. "I do think so."

Although she herself does not understand the need to be a dog, even for a short time, or what it's like to be a dragon, Rhoda finds herself wanting to cry over it anyway. In happiness for Kimberly, and in sadness for those who won't get the chance to be their true selves. But, here in public she chokes that back, and says, simply, "I'm so glad."

Watching the world become this new thing, a place where the secret, the spiritual, the soulful, and the fantastical can become something physical in a way that was never, ever before possible, has been a powerful experience. One that shakes her heart deeply, every day. And, even though she's somehow supposedly the catalyst for this transformation of reality itself, she somehow feels more like an observer. An auntie watching her nieces and nephews coming of age and reaching for the stars and actually grabbing them successfully.

And she thinks she is really so fine with that, honestly.

She really can't wrap her mind around the idea that she's the incidental center of it all. She'll take the protection that offers, but she's not sure she can ever fully believe it. Better to be a person amongst people. And if everyone else is more relaxed and happy because they get to be who they are, so much the better.

It's nice, and maybe today can be another good one.

And then Nathan has to have the audacity, during a lull between customers, to look up from the till and ask, "So, Rhoda? What are you all doing for Valentine's day?"

"What?" the word leaps from her mouth before she's even aware that she's uttering it. "We all for what, now?"

"It's the fourteenth," he says.

"Yes?" she prompts him, narrowing her eyes.

"Valentine's Day."

"Please don't say those words together again," she tells him, spearing him with a meaningful stare.

"OK," he says. "But you are aware you've got yourself a girlfriend who's experiencing this day for the first time as a girl, and she's a dragon, and she has a personfriend who has a lot of experience with this sort of thing."

"You do not have to lecture me, young man," she quips. She's pretty sure he's older than she is, but he deserves it right now. "She can get the lovey dovey shit from me every other day of the year, and I'm not withholding it today – mind you – but I ain't having nothin' to do with this." She gestures at the world expansively. "Got it?"

"Got it," Nathan says. "That's fair. It's a shitty day for a lot of people. Forget I brought it up."

"Thank you." She appreciates he doesn't delve any further or ask anything, and that Kimberly is too out of it to get into it too. She'd rather not recount that part of her history.

"Want a day old?" Nathan asks, holding up a plastic wrapped cookie with a look on his face that's not not a smirk. "It's on me."

"Is that a snicker doodle?" she asks, squinting at it.

"Yep!"

"You do know the way to an old woman's heart," she says, reaching her hand out across the room to wait to receive it.

"It's my pleasure, young lady," he says, taking a few steps out from the counter to place it in her hand. And then, in the process, he sees Kimberly out of the corner of his eye and stops to look at her. "And you, my dear, should go home. Have you even touched your cappuccino?"

"Huh?" Kimberly raises an eyebrow and cracks an eye open to peer at him. Her hand that's near her drink doesn't even twitch.

Nathan steps up to her, to loom over her, fists on hips, and fills his gruff, stern voice full of mirth to say, "You know, we need these seats for paying customers. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to move along."

"Wrong coffee shop," Kimberly snorts.

"You got me there," Nathan says. "You need anything, kiddo? You doin' alright?"

"Like a… big bowl of water, maybe?" Kimberly asks.

"You got it," Nathan chuckles. And then he says over his shoulder as he goes to get the drink, "But you're getting one of the big cups, because the salad bowl's claimed and its owner is due any minute."

"Oh, of course. Thank you!"

"OK," Rhoda says, placing the cookie down on the table next to her tea, and turns to Kimberly. "I'll bite. What's it like?"

Kimberly perks up, sitting up straight and stretching, her eyes widening, "Oh, OK." She looks up at the ceiling for a moment, jaw slack, then says, "So, it happens more than just the one night. It doesn't have to be a completely full moon, so I get the effects for like, six to seven days a month. Which, for me, is like, I guess I get to call it my period or something. And that's pretty fun. But, then. For several hours each night, I don't have to worry about shit, Rhoda. Nothing." Then she tilts her head and stares at something in the middle of the room, and furrows her brow a little. "OK, I do need to worry about shit, specifically, and pee. But nothing else. Like, I don't have thumbs. It's fucking great."

"Do you notice a difference in the way you think and feel?"

"Well, I'm still me, if that's what you're asking," Kimberly says, leaning forward with elbows on knees. "But, yeah, like. I'm colorblind when I'm a poodle, and that's different. I notice that. And everything smells different. My whole body's different, too, and I feel a big relief from that, actually. It's so freeing. But I haven't really been around people yet, so I have no idea if I understand, like, words, or anything like that. But when I have to make decisions and shit, I'm just me. I know what I'm doing. I think the part I don't like is the loneliness. But I've never liked that. I need to find some cool roommates."

"Do you think you'd get along with another dog?"

"Sure! Maybe? Depends on the dog, of course. Same with people."

And then Kimberly's head twitches as something behind Rhoda, outside, catches her attention. So Rhoda turns to see.

All the tension and stiffness in her body loosens, and all the coldness in her bones warms, as she watches Meghan land on the corner across the street. A fizzy golden light rises in her being from her heart to her head.

Meghan in the afternoon sun truly is like a piece of heraldry in stained glass come to life, the indigo diamonds along her back glowing almost as strongly as her eyes. The way that her muscles and bones work together under her gleaming scales to accept the weight of her body and fold those intricate wings safely against her back, is as beautiful a sight as any other creature on Earth. And the way her head snakes around on that swan-like neck to peer into the window of the shop, to see if she, Rhoda, is already here, conveys the eagerness between people. To make a reconnect after a time apart, even if was just a day.

Yeah, that's her dragon.

Already her mind is slipping into the patterns of planning what they'll do together. The things to share and talk about. The work she's done on her book, the passages she's eager to share with her partner. To hear word from around the city, to learn what their friends are up to. Which tea to drink tonight. And maybe talk about what camera to save up for, someday, to get back into photography maybe.

Meghan is getting a bit big. She'll have to take her protective coloration, as she likes to put it, to get through a door. But that just makes her a more formidable doorstop when she's asleep at night, and Rhoda likes that, too.

There isn't much that she doesn't like about Meghan right now, and a whole lot that brings her joy and excitement, and she knows that's a distortion. Seeing only the good because things are going so well for once, like at the beginning of a relationship. But she'll take it for as long as she feels it.

It's been too long.

—

There's Rhoda in the coffee shop, in my spot.

She knows that's where I like to sit, so I can watch the other customers as they walk in and order their drinks, but she got to it first fair and square. She's waiting for me!

I now what the day is and how she feels about it. We talked about that a long time ago, and how the abuse from her ex has made it hard for her.

So, our goal is to treat it like any other day between the two of us, and I'm so cool with that. I never really thought of it as my holiday, either. I gave up on it a long, long time ago. And then I started seeing all the commercial pressure heaved upon men to perform for it, and honestly, it felt contrary to absolutely everything I'd been taught about feminist theory and fighting the tyranny of the division of the genders and binary sexism.

Also, we're not truly a romantic couple, are we?

We're something different, I think. An autistic ace dragon and her wise woman. We're certainly not doing anything straight, in any case. It's a friendship, of course, at the very least. Though it's definitely more than friendship, too, and has room to grow.

Before the dracomorphosis, cross species relationships were always referred to as pets, service animals, charges, and things like that. But the vast majority of us dragons have human parents and human relationships of all sorts. Some say we're the children of humans, and humans are the parents of dragons. And though I know that that's not truly the case, it's close enough to help everyone feel a bit better about how it all might work.

Now, related to that, it turns out, of course, that for the Southern hemisphere dracomorphosis happened just before their mating season. So we actually now know something of what to expect about that, since those of us up North calmed down enough from our own turmoil to read up on their experiences. It was chaos for them, because there was the political upheaval around all that at the same time as millions of horny dragons started courting everything.

I think I've got a better handle on my instincts now than I did a few months ago. I'm feeling prepared for it. So, I think I can ultimately restrain myself when necessary.

But, Hailing Scales as Chapman would say, I sure as fuck can't keep myself from skipping and strutting when I see that look in Rhoda's eyes!

To try to contain it, I start to put on my royal ball gown of starlight halfway through the crosswalk, feeling the weight of that tiara settling into my braided hair. But it doesn't help all that much.

I bounce lightly on bare feet up to the front door and open it with a flourish.

"No shoes, no service!" Nathan calls out to me, the smirk on his face betraying the joke.

I am the one exception to that.

"Hi, Rhoda," I say, and curtsy in front of her on my way to the counter, pulling the bottom of my dress out wide and high between thumbs and middle fingers, pinkies flared. And then I twirl to the counter and relax out of the camouflage, claws clicking on the floor. "The yooj," I chirp.

"You got it," Nathan says and turns to reach for my stainless steel salad bowl. "Put it on your account?"

"Yes," I confirm, and then hop over to our table, pushing the chair aside to settle down into what's usually Rhoda's spot. Then I pull my third tablet, a brand new one, out of my third purse, a near identical replacement for my last one, and put it on the table in front of me. And as I'm turning it on, Rhoda speaks.

"You took your time," she says. "Everything OK out there in Dragonland?"

I notice the huge stupid grin on Kimberly's face as I lift my knuckle to do my typing. And I spare her a thought, mentally congratulating her on her second transition. I'm so glad it's going so well for her. It gives me so much hope for others, and I feel an echo of her euphoria as a kind of compersion.

"Well," I say. "Astraia and Caleb trying get me play D2R with them, but need gaming rig. I had explain that."

"I don't even…" Rhoda starts to say, then her gaze lifts up as the door chimes again with the entrance of someone else.

My head twitches to the side enough to put them in the center of my right eye's vision.

I see a heavily laden pride striped grocery bag with a huge bouquet of roses and lilies above that, swaying precariously through the door in front of a gray and black top hat with a red and white heart print dress, and a pair of self decorated Doc Martins. Of course there's a person in there.

Before I can piece the visual clues together, my tongue lashes out to taste the air, and in addition to the scents of the coffee shop I pick up fresh fish, vinegared rice, wasabi, soy sauce, the flowers, and…

It's Chapman!

[girldragongizzard]

Epilogue 2: Valentine's Day

The afternoon walk from Fairport Communications Company inc. (Printers) to Meghan's coffee shop is meditative today.

The sky is mostly blue, with those smallish clouds that look like cartoonists had something to do with them. And, that means that in about an hour and a half, when the sun sets and starts turning things pink, the whole sky is likely to become a trans pride flag of sorts for a moment.

Everything feels light and relaxed. Even the birds, which are usually fighting with each other over scraps, or dodging a particular dragon, are chill and just chatting with each other.

There is a moment of absurdity, though, when Chapman comes within three blocks of Mandy's Botanical Hand Basket, which mostly sells flowers. The thick flow of almost entirely cis het men to and from that shop is almost identical to the behavior of ants, as if the shop is the colony. With just a few things reversed, since they're taking bouquets away from the central location, rather than to it. But most of them are following the same trails as the others, because there are only a few parking lots nearby, and all the street parking is full.

Upon first seeing this phenomenon, which sie has definitely seen many times before, Chapman can't help but stop to watch it.

Courting rituals are an ancient tradition across all the species that exhibit sexual reproduction. And, really, Chapman has seen it all. But there is something about experiencing this particular ritual while also inhabiting a human body, especially one that isn't obligated to participate on either end of it. There's this weird mix of feelings. The feeling of, "this is what my people do," combined with the feeling of, "they don't want me to be a part of it," and, "thank Entropy I'm not!"

Because of hir experience of recently growing up in this culture and in this time, Chapman hasn't been immune to the socialization surrounding Valentine's day in any way. Sie remembers first experiencing the day when buying mass printed cards for all of hir classmates in first grade. Sie also remembers receiving flowers from a boy as a senior in high school, despite the fact that sie had already come out as asexual and non-binary at the time. But, sie has always been seen and treated as an outsider to it by most people, and knew that hir developmental path as someone inhabiting a human body would be one that deviated from the norm.

And as sie stands now, no cis het man is likely to feel obligated to buy hir flowers or chocolate, and none of hir partners have expressed a desire to receive them.

Though, Meghan, being a dragon, will almost certainly always appreciate a gift of some sort. She hasn't talked about that much, but every time someone has given her a gift, Chapman has noticed a particular gleam in her eye and a restless resettling of her posture that indicates some kind of excitement. And it's totally within the history and makeup of dragons to yearn for gifts.

The problem is that Meghan doesn't really have much space to keep anything. So most gifts for her work best if they're food, or consumable in some way. But Rhoda's apartment would probably have room for flowers.

Huh.

Chapman wonders if sie is seriously considering participation in the activities of that throng of compelled men over there.

Flowers really would be a good idea. Meghan is a trans woman, after all, still within her first year of coming out. She should get to experience that. If the flowers have any sort of a scent, she's going to find tasting it on the air interesting. And, again, Rhoda will appreciate them, too, probably. Probably.

Sometimes, flowers are really a bother, or feel pointless. But Rhoda will almost certainly understand even if she doesn't care for them herself.

But maybe not chocolates.

Maybe…

Sushi.

Oh.

That would be another bouquet of scents for Meghan, and a kind of food that would be easy on her digestive system and full of nutrients. And it might be closer to what her body needs than what she's been eating lately. That tail barb has always struck Chapman as something useful for catching fish.

And a sushi party would be so good!

Hm.

OK, fight for the flowers first, then grab sushi from the Co-op on the way to the cafe. It'll make hir late, but then it'll give hir a chance to mix it up with the guys, which should be amusing.

Chapman straightens the skirt of hir heart print dress, adjusts hir waistcoat, then flicks the brim of hir top hat, and steps into the fray.

—

Rhoda's been in and out of the shop all day, checking in on people she knows at times they're usually there. And Kimberly has just not left the place, even though her shift has been long over.

The girl is practically melted in her seat against the wall and draped across a third of her table, with hooded eyes and the kind of relaxed grin of someone stoned and amused by a particularly complicated dust mote. But as far as Rhoda knows, she hasn't popped outside for a smoke. She's been in that spot, in that pose, ever since she clocked out and flopped there, apron still on.

Occasionally, someone will ask her how she's doing and she'll say, "Yes!"

There's an untouched to-go cup full of cappuccino on the table near her right hand.

Now, since Meghan has extended her rounds to include the territories of her favorite neighbors, she can be expected to be gone until late afternoon. And she'd said something about trying to return around 4:30 to meet her and Chapman, which is why Rhoda's here now. But neither dragon nor Artist have shown up yet.

So, after ordering and receiving her tea, Rhoda chooses to sit at Meghan's favorite table, facing the door, which puts her right in front of Kimberly.

Then she looks slyly over at the off-shift barista and observes, "You've been like this for two days now."

"Woof," says Kimberly. And then she breaks into uncontrollable soft giggles that jerk her whole body just a little bit.

It was a full moon the night of the twelfth. So, for the whole time that the moon was visible in the sky, Kimberly got to be a big poodle. And from what Rhoda understands, she just spent the whole time lying around her apartment because she forgot to arrange for someone to come give her a walk or something. But clearly that was just wonderful.

"So, that was a good choice for you, then?" Rhoda asks.

"Oh, yes. I think so," Kimberly says, without moving or opening her eyes any further. "I do think so."

Although she herself does not understand the need to be a dog, even for a short time, or what it's like to be a dragon, Rhoda finds herself wanting to cry over it anyway. In happiness for Kimberly, and in sadness for those who won't get the chance to be their true selves. But, here in public she chokes that back, and says, simply, "I'm so glad."

Watching the world become this new thing, a place where the secret, the spiritual, the soulful, and the fantastical can become something physical in a way that was never, ever before possible, has been a powerful experience. One that shakes her heart deeply, every day. And, even though she's somehow supposedly the catalyst for this transformation of reality itself, she somehow feels more like an observer. An auntie watching her nieces and nephews coming of age and reaching for the stars and actually grabbing them successfully.

And she thinks she is really so fine with that, honestly.

She really can't wrap her mind around the idea that she's the incidental center of it all. She'll take the protection that offers, but she's not sure she can ever fully believe it. Better to be a person amongst people. And if everyone else is more relaxed and happy because they get to be who they are, so much the better.

It's nice, and maybe today can be another good one.

And then Nathan has to have the audacity, during a lull between customers, to look up from the till and ask, "So, Rhoda? What are you all doing for Valentine's day?"

"What?" the word leaps from her mouth before she's even aware that she's uttering it. "We all for what, now?"

"It's the fourteenth," he says.

"Yes?" she prompts him, narrowing her eyes.

"Valentine's Day."

"Please don't say those words together again," she tells him, spearing him with a meaningful stare.

"OK," he says. "But you are aware you've got yourself a girlfriend who's experiencing this day for the first time as a girl, and she's a dragon, and she has a personfriend who has a lot of experience with this sort of thing."

"You do not have to lecture me, young man," she quips. She's pretty sure he's older than she is, but he deserves it right now. "She can get the lovey dovey shit from me every other day of the year, and I'm not withholding it today – mind you – but I ain't having nothin' to do with this." She gestures at the world expansively. "Got it?"

"Got it," Nathan says. "That's fair. It's a shitty day for a lot of people. Forget I brought it up."

"Thank you." She appreciates he doesn't delve any further or ask anything, and that Kimberly is too out of it to get into it too. She'd rather not recount that part of her history.

"Want a day old?" Nathan asks, holding up a plastic wrapped cookie with a look on his face that's not not a smirk. "It's on me."

"Is that a snicker doodle?" she asks, squinting at it.

"Yep!"

"You do know the way to an old woman's heart," she says, reaching her hand out across the room to wait to receive it.

"It's my pleasure, young lady," he says, taking a few steps out from the counter to place it in her hand. And then, in the process, he sees Kimberly out of the corner of his eye and stops to look at her. "And you, my dear, should go home. Have you even touched your cappuccino?"

"Huh?" Kimberly raises an eyebrow and cracks an eye open to peer at him. Her hand that's near her drink doesn't even twitch.

Nathan steps up to her, to loom over her, fists on hips, and fills his gruff, stern voice full of mirth to say, "You know, we need these seats for paying customers. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to move along."

"Wrong coffee shop," Kimberly snorts.

"You got me there," Nathan says. "You need anything, kiddo? You doin' alright?"

"Like a… big bowl of water, maybe?" Kimberly asks.

"You got it," Nathan chuckles. And then he says over his shoulder as he goes to get the drink, "But you're getting one of the big cups, because the salad bowl's claimed and its owner is due any minute."

"Oh, of course. Thank you!"

"OK," Rhoda says, placing the cookie down on the table next to her tea, and turns to Kimberly. "I'll bite. What's it like?"

Kimberly perks up, sitting up straight and stretching, her eyes widening, "Oh, OK." She looks up at the ceiling for a moment, jaw slack, then says, "So, it happens more than just the one night. It doesn't have to be a completely full moon, so I get the effects for like, six to seven days a month. Which, for me, is like, I guess I get to call it my period or something. And that's pretty fun. But, then. For several hours each night, I don't have to worry about shit, Rhoda. Nothing." Then she tilts her head and stares at something in the middle of the room, and furrows her brow a little. "OK, I do need to worry about shit, specifically, and pee. But nothing else. Like, I don't have thumbs. It's fucking great."

"Do you notice a difference in the way you think and feel?"

"Well, I'm still me, if that's what you're asking," Kimberly says, leaning forward with elbows on knees. "But, yeah, like. I'm colorblind when I'm a poodle, and that's different. I notice that. And everything smells different. My whole body's different, too, and I feel a big relief from that, actually. It's so freeing. But I haven't really been around people yet, so I have no idea if I understand, like, words, or anything like that. But when I have to make decisions and shit, I'm just me. I know what I'm doing. I think the part I don't like is the loneliness. But I've never liked that. I need to find some cool roommates."

"Do you think you'd get along with another dog?"

"Sure! Maybe? Depends on the dog, of course. Same with people."

And then Kimberly's head twitches as something behind Rhoda, outside, catches her attention. So Rhoda turns to see.

All the tension and stiffness in her body loosens, and all the coldness in her bones warms, as she watches Meghan land on the corner across the street. A fizzy golden light rises in her being from her heart to her head.

Meghan in the afternoon sun truly is like a piece of heraldry in stained glass come to life, the indigo diamonds along her back glowing almost as strongly as her eyes. The way that her muscles and bones work together under her gleaming scales to accept the weight of her body and fold those intricate wings safely against her back, is as beautiful a sight as any other creature on Earth. And the way her head snakes around on that swan-like neck to peer into the window of the shop, to see if she, Rhoda, is already here, conveys the eagerness between people. To make a reconnect after a time apart, even if was just a day.

Yeah, that's her dragon.

Already her mind is slipping into the patterns of planning what they'll do together. The things to share and talk about. The work she's done on her book, the passages she's eager to share with her partner. To hear word from around the city, to learn what their friends are up to. Which tea to drink tonight. And maybe talk about what camera to save up for, someday, to get back into photography maybe.

Meghan is getting a bit big. She'll have to take her protective coloration, as she likes to put it, to get through a door. But that just makes her a more formidable doorstop when she's asleep at night, and Rhoda likes that, too.

There isn't much that she doesn't like about Meghan right now, and a whole lot that brings her joy and excitement, and she knows that's a distortion. Seeing only the good because things are going so well for once, like at the beginning of a relationship. But she'll take it for as long as she feels it.

It's been too long.

—

There's Rhoda in the coffee shop, in my spot.

She knows that's where I like to sit, so I can watch the other customers as they walk in and order their drinks, but she got to it first fair and square. She's waiting for me!

I now what the day is and how she feels about it. We talked about that a long time ago, and how the abuse from her ex has made it hard for her.

So, our goal is to treat it like any other day between the two of us, and I'm so cool with that. I never really thought of it as my holiday, either. I gave up on it a long, long time ago. And then I started seeing all the commercial pressure heaved upon men to perform for it, and honestly, it felt contrary to absolutely everything I'd been taught about feminist theory and fighting the tyranny of the division of the genders and binary sexism.

Also, we're not truly a romantic couple, are we?

We're something different, I think. An autistic ace dragon and her wise woman. We're certainly not doing anything straight, in any case. It's a friendship, of course, at the very least. Though it's definitely more than friendship, too, and has room to grow.

Before the dracomorphosis, cross species relationships were always referred to as pets, service animals, charges, and things like that. But the vast majority of us dragons have human parents and human relationships of all sorts. Some say we're the children of humans, and humans are the parents of dragons. And though I know that that's not truly the case, it's close enough to help everyone feel a bit better about how it all might work.

Now, related to that, it turns out, of course, that for the Southern hemisphere dracomorphosis happened just before their mating season. So we actually now know something of what to expect about that, since those of us up North calmed down enough from our own turmoil to read up on their experiences. It was chaos for them, because there was the political upheaval around all that at the same time as millions of horny dragons started courting everything.

I think I've got a better handle on my instincts now than I did a few months ago. I'm feeling prepared for it. So, I think I can ultimately restrain myself when necessary.

But, Hailing Scales as Chapman would say, I sure as fuck can't keep myself from skipping and strutting when I see that look in Rhoda's eyes!

To try to contain it, I start to put on my royal ball gown of starlight halfway through the crosswalk, feeling the weight of that tiara settling into my braided hair. But it doesn't help all that much.

I bounce lightly on bare feet up to the front door and open it with a flourish.

"No shoes, no service!" Nathan calls out to me, the smirk on his face betraying the joke.

I am the one exception to that.

"Hi, Rhoda," I say, and curtsy in front of her on my way to the counter, pulling the bottom of my dress out wide and high between thumbs and middle fingers, pinkies flared. And then I twirl to the counter and relax out of the camouflage, claws clicking on the floor. "The yooj," I chirp.

"You got it," Nathan says and turns to reach for my stainless steel salad bowl. "Put it on your account?"

"Yes," I confirm, and then hop over to our table, pushing the chair aside to settle down into what's usually Rhoda's spot. Then I pull my third tablet, a brand new one, out of my third purse, a near identical replacement for my last one, and put it on the table in front of me. And as I'm turning it on, Rhoda speaks.

"You took your time," she says. "Everything OK out there in Dragonland?"

I notice the huge stupid grin on Kimberly's face as I lift my knuckle to do my typing. And I spare her a thought, mentally congratulating her on her second transition. I'm so glad it's going so well for her. It gives me so much hope for others, and I feel an echo of her euphoria as a kind of compersion.

"Well," I say. "Astraia and Caleb trying get me play D2R with them, but need gaming rig. I had explain that."

"I don't even…" Rhoda starts to say, then her gaze lifts up as the door chimes again with the entrance of someone else.

My head twitches to the side enough to put them in the center of my right eye's vision.

I see a heavily laden pride striped grocery bag with a huge bouquet of roses and lilies above that, swaying precariously through the door in front of a gray and black top hat with a red and white heart print dress, and a pair of self decorated Doc Martins. Of course there's a person in there.

Before I can piece the visual clues together, my tongue lashes out to taste the air, and in addition to the scents of the coffee shop I pick up fresh fish, vinegared rice, wasabi, soy sauce, the flowers, and…

It's Chapman!

[girldragongizzard]

Epilogue 1: The dog days of Winter

We've taken to using my rooftop for the experiments.

Or, rather, we continue to do so. We never stopped.

The building management has completely given up. It's become clear that I'm a permanent non-rent-paying resident of the property and that I will go where I please, and that any authorities that are called will not do a damn thing about it. But, also, since around the time that Säure mysteriously disappeared one Saturday afternoon, after his last horrific rampage back in October, things have been going remarkably well for the whole block. The city and county at large, really, but particularly well for the Magnolia apartments and all the businesses that shared the first floor.

Because of that, it's possible that some see me as good luck, though I know I'm really just another feature of that luck.

A lot of the horrific shit going on in the rest of the world seems to be taking kind of a break, but I don't know if that's related at all. Still, it does give us some emotional room to enjoy the smaller things. In any case, a lot of people are writing about the global effects of dracomorphosis, and you can read their blogs and articles, so I'm going to remain focused on my local experiences. They're what I can write about best.

So.

The experiments.

On the rooftop with me today, on a cold Saturday in January, is Chapman, Kimberly, and a new person.

And Kimberly is so goofy with nervousness. She does know how to dress warm in her style, with fuzzy black mittens, a thick black scarf and knit wool toque, fat furry black boots, long johns, quilted jacket, and a poodle skirt. This should be good enough for 55 degrees, really. It's not that cold. But she's shivering, and I know it's a mammalian response to excitement, akin to shock. And she occasionally jumps up and down, and claps her mittens together. Then, while most of the time she's very quiet and serious looking, she gets a wild grin on her face and it looks like she just wants to run wildly around the rooftop.

Any time someone asks her a question, it takes her a second to respond, and it's either too subdued and quiet to understand, or she just responds with a loud, "Yeah?"

So, for anybody who's familiar with the conversations she's been having with Chapman, it should be pretty obvious what's going on.

And I'm just watching.

I can't not be here for this.

I've gotta be here for Kimberly.

And I've gotta spend time with Chapman when I'm not spending time with Rhoda.

But it's the new person I'm paying particular attention to right now.

She's kind of a tall, skinny woman, with short, spiky blond hair, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt with broad horizontal stripes under a lab coat. And the way that she's standing next to this huge cardboard box from a refrigerator delivery and talking to Chapman about the particulars of how to render hir circuitry, I feel like I'm being deliberately reminded of a huge chunk of my childhood.

She looks to be in her twenties, close to Kimberly's age, but I know she's much older than that.

I guess when you're the Artist of Transformation, you can appear however you like whenever you'd like.

She's going by the name Jones, though, which breaks the visual illusion a bit, if you were following me in the first place. (It's OK if you weren't, I'll explain it to you in the comments if you need me to.)

So, here she's pointing at the box and saying that Chapman needs to put the circuitry on the inside because otherwise it will break the aesthetics of "the transmogrifier". And Chapman is holding hir chin with one hand, hir elbow with the other, and sighing and nodding. While Kim grins really big and beams at me with what looks like utter embarrassment.

"That is going to be harder," Chapman says. "I can do it, but it will take longer. The more surface area I can utilize, the faster it will be to draw the channels needed, believe it or not."

"I know," Jones says. "But my work is almost all about appearances, you know. And that's sort of important on my end. It's a compromise."

"Really."

"Yes," she nods definitively. "Before we can transform Kimberly into her true self, we're going to have to transform this box into its true self, which is a transmogrifier. And that requires things like this." She pulls out a plastic game spinner from her coat pocket and a brad from her other pocket. "And we're going to need to draw up a dial on the side of it. Also, a visual representation of some rivets and vents and other controls and dials would be really cool, but less necessary."

Chapman rolls hir eyes.

"Don't give me that."

"I want to trust her on this," Kimberly says. "Can we do it her way? Please?"

"Yes," Chapman says. "It's just… Yes, OK. No, this is way cooler, obviously. Let's do it."

Jones claps her hands and beams at everyone. "Perfect! So, we've got two Sharpies, right? I'll work on the outside while you do the inside. Common, let's tip it over. We'll rotate it as we go."

Chapman's sigh sounds like it could give me lift.

"Is this what you usually do for transformation?" Kimberly asks.

Jones shoots her a deadly serious look and says in a flat voice, "No. This is specifically for you."

"Oh." Kimberly looks like she instantly regrets being there at all.

"Relax," Jones says, loosening back up. "I know exactly what I'm doing, and I love it."

Kimberly's hesitant grin looks more like a grimace, but Jones doesn't notice because she's now entirely focused on working with Chapman.

"We are absolutely going to be doing this differently for the larger populace," Chapman says as sie pushes the box over, and then reaches down to adjust what is now the bottom flap so that sie can work on it.

"I was thinking, like, pills, or something," Jones says.

"I definitely cannot do shit with pills," Chapman grumbles as sie gets into the box.

"Well, that's a you problem," Jones quips cheerfully.

Getting Jones to come here was a trick.

Getting her attention was easy, once we'd located her and devised a way to deliver to her the pendant Chapman had made. And all that work had been done with some massive scanning circuits drawn in chalk on my rooftop, and many, many nights of Chapman frowning and cussing about it. Which was then followed by the use of an artistry fueled homing rocket, which sounds as utterly ridiculous as what we're doing today. But when Chapman explained that using hir Art to channel kinetic energy was really the simplest thing sie could do, I guess it made sense.

The rocket just had to be designed to survive the trip, and to not hurt anyone upon "landing".

In the end, it turned out to be a simple hobbyist's rocket with a payload bay that was then covered in Chapman's signature decorations. But the rocket part was converted into a cardboard jet engine of sorts with the strategic application of physical intakes on the sides of the fuselage. And that was part of the steering mechanism as well, apparently. And before I could protest that it looked unworthy of the task, it had been launched with the pendant aboard, and gone.

"It's the next phase that I hate," Chapman said, heading back to the roof hatch. "Now we've got to talk to each other."

Two days later, sie received an email from Jones, upon which sie informed me by texting me, "It begins."

Over the course of the following month, I didn't see much of Chapman. And when I did, sie insisted on talking about other things. But sie eventually explained, apparently when things were starting to go well, that Jones needed to be argued into visiting and working with hir. And, not persuaded by good arguments, but enticed simply by being argued with. At a certain point of investment, she would lose patience with the email and need to do the arguing in person.

And then, theoretically, once she was here, they could settle the arguments and get to business.

And then I'd asked Chapman, "Why?"

Chapman had then looked directly at me with exhausted eyes and simply waited until I apologized.

Now, as I'm watching the two of them, it really looks like Chapman is doing the bulk of the work. There's a constant shifting come from hir while sie is in the box. While the grating static that comes from Jones only happens when she puts her pen to the box, and she does that for about a second or two every few minutes. The rest of the time, she just stands staring at the box and frowning, taking various poses of exaggerated concentration.

After a while, I can't contain myself and I key up a question I soon regret, "Are you putting on an act?"

Scowling at the box, Jones says, "Do you know what a magic trick is, Meghan?"

"Yes," I say.

"It's theater," she says anyway. "I'm not the Artist of Metamorphosis, thank everything. But that means I don't work biologically. I'm the Artist of Transformation. That's magic, and that's theater. Everything I do is theater." She gestures sideways at Kimberly, "And our volunteer, here, needs a good show. Otherwise, why participate in it?"

"Oh."

"Now, the reason we're getting away with using a simple cardboard box is three fold," she says, stepping forward and adding a circle to represent a rivet near one of the corners of the box. Just so. "For one, Chapman's Art is absurd. Have you seen what sie can do? It defies all logic."

"No it doesn't," Chapman protests.

"Please don't interrupt," Jones retorts. "Anyway, sie can do things like slap some kind of esoteric squigglies on a piece of paper and cause an explosion with it, and that's in hir sleep. So, the substrate that sie uses is nearly irrelevant."

"Also very not true," Chapman says.

"Shush."

"You shush."

"Secondly, we're combining Arts, which is totally a big no-no for anything nuanced or careful, which, thankfully, we're not doing in any way," Jones explains.

"Oh, Hailing Fucking Scales," Chapman shouts. "OK, turn."

"Not yet!" Jones yells back. Then she jabs at the top of the box with her Sharpie to place another rivet, and then says more quietly, "OK, now."

Chapman starts getting out of the box to carefully turn it over while Jones steps forward to try to forcefully roll it while Chapman is in it, and it just hits me I am actually, yes, watching siblings interact with each other.

They are acting entirely like little children, too.

"Stop, stop, stop, stop," Chapman is saying, while Jones continues her explanation.

"Thirdly," Jones says. "My magic only works while no one is looking, so we've got to put Kimberly in some sort of box. We can't see her transform, after all. That would be too weird for it to happen. And we're doing this on the cheap, because we're cheap."

"Oh," I say again.

"So, yeah, it's an act," she kicks the box, and Chapman pops out of it and throws hir Sharpie at Jones.

Kimberly has been sidling over to me while this has been going on, and now she's right by my side.

She leans over and murmurs fairly quietly, "Maybe we shouldn't be annoying the immortals with questions."

"No, it's fine," Jones turns to her and says.

And Chapman waves hir hand dismissively, saying, "Yeah, no, you're good. Keep it up."

And then they go back to the business of constructing the transformation device. And the afternoon proceeds pretty much like that until it's done.

In the process, I learn pretty definitively that while I can sense the use of Art, I don't sense every use of it. Though, it doesn't have to be aimed at me to trigger the sensations. And I'd already worked out that the amount of energy being harnessed or altered will affect the range of my sense, a lot like being able to hear sound. But, it is some other specific quality of the act of an Art that causes the notable vibration, or whatever it is that I'm picking up. I don't know what it is, but I do get Jones to tell me when she's using her Art and when she's not. And it turns out she's been using it constantly since before she arrived. Chapman confirms something similar about hirself.

Also, because each Art is so different, it's probably going to take a while to learn just what it is that I'm sensing. But Chapman is all about helping me figure it out, when we're done with this.

So, with that, it starts to sink in that the whole act of arguing and bickering with each other, and the occasional roughhousing, is an indelible part of combining their Arts. And I end up thinking about Ptarmigan and how she talked about working with nightmares and what was a nightmare and what wasn't. And how she'd sometimes engage with them through her scribbling, and sometimes she wouldn't. I think, sometimes, it seemed like the strongest use of her Art was when she was talking to someone, and I never sensed anything then.

I remember that a while ago Rhoda said that the Artists were to us as humans were to ants. That when they talked to us, it was like when scientists were communicating with ants by laying down pheromone trails. To one party or the other, it might seem like something that makes sense is being communicated, but really neither the scientist nor the ant has any way of knowing what the other is thinking or intending.

And I also remember when Ptarmigan tried telling me that the world was a plural system, like a person with DID or OSDD, that we were all its system members, and that Rhoda was its frontrunner in a nightmare.

So, that's got me thinking, what if the universe is like that, too? What if reality itself is just one big colonial entity. And what these two Artists are doing right now is trying to act as translators between Kimberly and the rest of the universe, in order to negotiate some sort of agreement?

Which.

It's.

I'm probably completely wrong. But I kind of like that thought at the moment. It helps me make sense of what I'm seeing. It helps me be OK with how this act between the both of them sort of feels like when a Kindergarten teacher talks to an adult as if the adult is one of their students.

And then, when the two of them are done, they both physically relax and smile at each other. I think they've completely dropped the adversarial posturing.

"OK," Jones says. "All we do now is lower this thing over Kimberly here, with your consent, of course. And then I rotate the spinner from human to werepoodle, as you see written on the box. And we give it a second, then we remove the box."

"Yep," Chapman says.

"What?" Kimberly asks in obvious disbelief, a hint of nervous laughter in her voice.

"We just did all the seriously hard work," Chapman says. "The rest is just activating the device, and we made it that simple. It's really like when Meghan puts the pendant on. Five years went into that piece, too, you know."

Kimberly half points at the box and protests, "But five years didn't go into this cardboard box, though. Right?"

"No."

"It was synergy," Jones says. "And also, when Chapman made that pendant, sie was working way outside hir wheelhouse. This time you've got me involved."

Kimberly looks at me and asks, "What does it feel like?"

"Nothing much," I knuckle into my tablet. Then I sigh and take my princess form to deploy my thumbs, "I didn't notice the change until I started doing things. Moving made it feel wrong right away, but that's because I'm not Chapman."

"I based the human form on my pre-transition self," Chapman explains. "She felt physical dysphoria over it."

"You had to transition?" Kimberly asks.

Chapman waves fingers to the side. "That's off topic, but yes. I'm just always most comfortable as a post transition trans masc enby, if I'm human. Which requires going through the process every life. It's a thing."

"I have a similar problem that's harder to describe," Jones says. "Every Artist has these quirks. Even when we're other animals, or storms, or computers, or whatever, we're queer in some way. I mean, by human standards. I prefer the word atypical. It's more accurate and broad enough. But queer people are cool, so queer works, too."

"Yeah. I like queer a lot," Chapman says.

"OK. Fuckin' cool," Kimberly says. Then she slaps her thighs. "I guess I'm ready for this? I'm kind of scared, actually. It's a big, weird step."

"Oh, if you don't like it, we can turn you right back," Jones says. "That's super easy. We just put the box over you again, and turn the dial the other way. Boom. Done."

"Oh," Kimberly says. "It's still scary."

"Like transition?" Chapman asks.

"Yeah? Kinda? But this is magic. Or Art. It's weirder."

"We did this entirely to your specs, your request," Chapman says. "In theory, based on my scans to back you up, you'll just feel even better. It'll be like taking HRT. You know, when you took those pills and nothing obvious happened, but you felt better right away? Like that. But even more reversible."

"OK! Let's do it! Let's get it done before I jump off the roof to avoid it!"

Jones holds up a hand. "Don't do that.

"I won't," Kimberly says. "I want this too much. But I'm getting that intrusive thought from all the adrenaline."

"OK. Come stand right here, in the middle of the roof, then, please."

"Got it."

And then, once Kimberly is situated, Chapman and Jones both pick up the box and lower it over her.

"You doing OK in there?" Chapman asks.

"Yep!" Kimberly says. "I think so!"

"Okidoke," Jones says, and then reaches out and twists the dial to aim it at the word "werepoodle". And then she says, "One Mississippi."

"Huh," Kimberly's muffled voice comes from the box.

"Picking up the box," Chapman tells her, and then sie and Jones remove the box.

Nothing about Kimberly appears to have changed. I didn't even feel any kind of shift when the dial was turned. Though that's similar to what happens when I use the pendant. Or, what doesn't happen.

Kimberly looks confused and disappointed, holding her mitten clad hands up and turning them over. She's obviously clenching and unclenching her fingers within the mittens.

"You did say 'werepoodle'," Chapman says.

"Right," Kimberly responds.

"It's not a full moon."

"Oh, right!"

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 20: A measurement of the future

A Megnitude is a unit of measurement of my own inner bullshit.

It’s really that simple.

It’s a Meghan thing. If you’re not a Meghan, you might not get it.

You can always change your name, of course. I did it!

In fact, I recommend it.

OK, so. I may be a dragon, but I’m also a trans girl. And we trans girls have a long and storied tradition of turning our own names into puns. We also have a common habit of looking in mirrors a lot and taking a whole bunch of selfies. It’s an understandable thing if you’ve had a lot of trauma over how you look – thank you, dysphoria – and especially if you’re in the process of healing from that. It’s actually healthy. Also, we end up having to draw a lot of boundaries, usually (though I’ve been kind of spared from that myself). And this tends to give us the reputation of being full of ourselves. At least, it’s a common criticism.

But, honestly, have you seen cis people? Holy shit, humans are so obsessed with how they look and how they’re perceived. And they criticize each other for it all the time, while dressing themselves up and grooming themselves carefully to be seen for what they feel they are. And trans people really aren’t the only ones posting selfies.

As a dragon, though, I’m definitely full of myself.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that I was raised by humans, or if it’s my instincts, or if it’s because my instincts are derived from how humans have shaped dragons through the ages. But my status in this world is utterly dependent on who respects and supports me, and if that status falls I run the risk of being killed. Either attacked by another dragon, or mobbed by angry and hateful humans. Or starving due to lack of support and access to food.

If I don’t step forward and fill the shoes I’ve been given, I’m in trouble. And I could always feel that, throughout my whole life. I was, for the longest time, on the verge of death because I couldn’t fill the ones laid before me.

So, when one morning those shoes were covered in scales and tipped with talons, and they finally fit, you bet I stepped forward and called myself “queen”. I literally felt like one.

As I’ve pointed out before, I’m not actually a queen. But I think people have embraced the title and leaned into it because it’s part of the games of Supporting Your Local Trans Woman and of Taking Pride In Your Dragon. 

Wentin, on the other hand, probably kept bringing it up because it knows how to push the buttons of its victims.

But, very similarly to a drag queen, as a dragon I am a symbol of royalty, of what it maybe could or should be. Maybe a parody of it, but one to be taken seriously in a way when within my domain. Not that I rule anybody, but that I represent the reason why everyone in my territory is there and part of it.

And looking back, I can kind of see how it all played out that way, too.

My audacity to speak up first, to scream the loudest in the mornings, to speak to the press and the Mayor publicly, to write letters to all of the local politicians and to the people through the news media, it all got attention.

Similar to how all the rest of us focused on Säure as a symbol of what’s wrong in our world, I became the center of his focus.

And like how he was just the latest in a long line of stewards of his family’s wealth and power, and how that estate will continue long after his death, I’m just the loudest voice of my neighborhood.

Also, finally, the mistake that Säure made was that he ostracized his own support network while he focused on me, ignoring all the work that my friends were doing.

So if we’re going to celebrate his absence, and we can certainly do that, we must do two things in the process of that:

Remember that he wasn’t the problem, just a tiny part of it. And so be ready to lay the groundwork for the next battle.

Don’t congratulate me. Congratulate yourselves. You took him down. I was just there sticking my tongue out at him while you did it.

And, I don’t have any idea of what our future is going to be. This whole planet is on the precipice of so much disastrous change. And with the advent of us dragons, it’s only going to get weirder. Especially when mating season arrives.

Oh, and if anybody is wondering why the law hasn’t stepped in to straighten things out, and why I haven’t had a big showdown with the police or the military, consider this. It’s been less than two months. And the whole world is dealing with this. Fairport’s kind of a small corner of all that’s going on, and Säure’s downfall happened so fast.

Already elsewhere in the world, dragons are both being attacked by their local militaries and courted by them. But only the most high profile or the most vulnerable of dragons yet. That kind of action will come around here eventually, and maybe soon, but with the work of our Artists and what was going on with Rhoda, the local forces were overwhelmed, I’m sure.

And maybe everyone’s still waiting for the national election to decide things more seriously.

So.

In the meantime.

While we still have the time to say such things.

Those of you living here who stepped up and became part of what we were doing, thank you. Thank you, with all my heart and my gizzard, for becoming, however briefly, my family. Thank you for saving me.

Love,

Meg

—

I guess it’s a Sunday morning. Barely, still.

I know I decided to provoke Säure on a Saturday, one day ahead of my public plans. And that that would mean that the following day would be Sunday. Today, in theory. But somewhere in there I lost track of the days, and I almost don’t care anymore.

I don’t think I know the date, just that we’re still in October. Presumably.

I could look at a computer, tablet, or phone or something to find out.

Instead, I’m licking the air above my tea in Rhoda’s living room, filling the silence between her vocalizations with long slow blinks.

I’ve never described her apartment, but now that I guess I live here I might as well.

The layout is identical to what used to be my apartment. It’s sort of a C shape. You walk in the front door and after the short entry vestibule you’ll find yourself passing through the kitchen. To your right will be the sink and dishwasher, framed by the oven and the fridge. To your immediate left will be the door to the bathroom. It doesn’t take very many steps to go from there to the living room, which extends to your left. It doubles as a dining room if you put a table and chairs in half of it. The outside wall, opposite the door, has four windows. Then, if you turn left and walk the length of the room, you’ll find the door to the bedroom, and if you turn to go in there you’ll have turned 180 degrees from entering the apartment. The bedroom���s kind of small. There’s a closet tucked in between the bathroom space and the building’s hallway. To get to the bathroom from the bedroom, you have to walk back through the living room and the kitchen, but it’s not so far that you’ll pee before you get there.

But any apartment in the building will be exactly like that. I don’t think they even mirror them. So, the doors aren’t across from each other in the hallway, you have to go up or down the hallway a little to get to any neighbor.

But what makes it Rhoda’s is what she’s put into it, of course.

Her favorite colors seem to be shades of burgundy, various hues of green, and bone, with accents of gold or brass. And I can’t overemphasize the importance of green and bone in her life. She’s managed to find textiles with patterns of these colors and decorated both floor and wall spaces with them. And then, between woven wall hangings, she has photos of her child, Jacob, and of places that seem important. I know that some of them are places that they’d visited together, and others were related to where her family had grown up. And most of them are black and white, but not all. Those with color are intensely green. And every photo that’s hanging looks like it was taken by a professional photographer preparing for a gallery opening in New York, I imagine.

Very artsy.

She’s the photographer.

In the livingroom, there are the low bookshelves with books I think I should read, topped with ceramics and carved wooden things. Everything there was either found in a thrift store, garage sale, or a free bin. She’s spent quite a long time collecting it all. None of it came from her parents, I’m told. She’s as proud of it as I am of my junk, only she has reason to be.

And interspersed between all of that is her crochet supplies and projects.

The central piece of her living room is her coffee table which, as I’ve described before, is full of magazine clippings of animals from all over the world. Many of them are pretty standard fare for zoos and children’s books, gorgeous creatures that everyone is familiar with. But the rest of them are really exotic and strange, the types of creatures you learned about as a kid but then grew to believe couldn’t be real. Or the bizarre monsters from the deep that you didn’t learn about until just yesterday on your favorite social media or something.

I love that table so much.

What little furniture she has is eclectic and from different eras of design, but still managing to fit her themes of color.

And when I lick the air to enjoy my tea, I also pick up the volatile compounds from all over the rest of her apartment, and her sweat, of course, no matter how much she tries to hide it with soaps, deodorants and perfumes. My tongue is just that sensitive. It's also my favorite scent. Something natural.

The strongest smells, though, are the spices from her kitchen, the wax of the few candles she owns and uses, and her favorite perfume, which is reasonably floral but also a little herby and spicy.

I’ve never been a fan of perfumes of any sort, and hers still stings my tongue now. But I’m developing a sense of comfort in it anyway.

I really like the teas she has, as I’ve been rotating through them, because they’re all strong enough to couch my tongue in their esters and tannins and carry me mentally to various realms of vegetation and imagination.

Anyway, I don’t really see much of her bedroom. It’s her lair, not mine. I get to enjoy my spot in her living space, and sleep on my rug near the door, and that suits me just fine. I’d never fit on her bed with her in it, even as small as I am for a dragon. 

And I can’t sleep in my human disguise. I tried it once, and woke up in full dracoform. It really is like holding a muscle tight. I can’t help but relax it when I lose consciousness.

I can start sleeping on the roof again, though, with Säure gone. But I’m probably going to save that for the warmer months, unless Rhoda needs me to give her more space.

It doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen, though, because right now she’s talking about eventually moving and asking me if there’s any way I could move with her. By which, I mean she wants me around wherever she goes, apparently.

“I love the community here. I really do. And if I do move, I’m going to really miss the coffee shop. Maybe more than I’m willing to admit. But, Meghan, I still always feel like an outsider here,” she says. “I need�� more diversity. I can’t put it any other way. I need more people who are like me, and I need more different kinds who aren’t. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I say, because I’m pretty sure I know what she’s saying. Not because I feel remotely the same. I don’t need to. This makes sense to me.

My people, dragons, are extraordinarily diverse. But, before we knew we were a people, I was living amongst so, so many human beings who looked like me, and I was as lonely as anyone can get. However, very, very few of the people in this town are like Rhoda. It’s gotta suck.

The whole Pacific Northwest is notoriously bad for this. But, within this region, even moving down to Seattle would give us a wider range of people to meet and interact with, if we can get past that Seattle freeze thing.

That’s the other problem with this area. It takes a long, long, long time and some sort of secret password to get past friendly acquaintance to make a close friendship around here. Or, even to simply be considered a local. Some people were born here and have never been able to achieve it.

“I know that moving’s a really fraught topic for you dragons, of course,” she continues. “You’ve got your territories, and your humans, and your own politics. But, do you think you could look into it for me? Explore the idea?”

I tilt my head in question.

“You know I’m not moving without you,” she says. “Consider that a given.”

I pull my head up a little higher.

“Don’t give me that,” she says. “Meghan, I’ve adopted you. I’ve thought long and hard about this. I’ve had my moments. And I want you to really understand this. I’m not your prize. I’m not something you’ve just won by surviving whatever’s just happened. I found you. You’re part of my hoard. And I guess I like taking care of you, when you’re not galavanting around doing dragon shit all day, and I don’t want to stop doing things that I like. We should all get to do things we like.”

I very carefully smile at her instead of doing anything else, to make sure she knows I’m acknowledging her.

“And, also, about the immortal thing,” she says, taking an even more stern tone. “I’m going to tell you that I hear you. And I accept you. Even if you turn out to be some monstrously long lived thing of narrative spirit or something. Even if you see the end of the universe as you said. I think I’m even ready to accept that. Because, right now, you’re just you, and I get to know you as you currently are. And that’s what matters to me. But also, maybe because it gives me something that I find I can’t let go of.”

She stops. She doesn’t explain that. There’s a little bit of a tear in her eye, but she doesn’t wipe it. She lets it sit, and then nods.

“We’ve got to get you another tablet or something. I like talking, but I like hearing your voice, too,” she tells me. Then she leans over to fish her phone out of her purse, which she then turns on and puts down on the table, pushing it toward me. “Use that. You get to tell me anything you need to, you know. Tell me I’m full of shit with this move thing, if you have to. Though I might well argue with you about it if you do.”

I pull myself into my princess disguise to pick up the phone and open the AAC app, saying with my syrinx, “Thank you.”

“Of course, Sweetheart,” she says.

Then I type out what I can, “I don’t feel like talking. I am enjoying my silence. Talking is work. I’m Tired.”

“Yeah, OK,” she says. “After yesterday, you get to be tired. We all do.”

We sit and enjoy each other’s company for a while, like we’ve gotten used to, and it’s good.

Then I say, “My family is in Seattle. I want to visit them. It might go bad.”

She nods, and says, “I’d go with you if I could. But don’t let me hold you back, if flying down there’s easier.”

I smile. Then I decide to offer her another thought, thumbs tapping the screen rapidly, “I think if I move, it will have to be out in the country, away from any cities. On the edge of any territories.”

I try to do that thing where humans move their mouth sideways and attempt to look sardonic, or wry, or conciliatory. Like a visual, “I’m sorry, but I also understand.” 

She reacts like I got it right.

“Let’s survive the next few months and give it some years,” she says, waving her hand. “I’ve still got lots of bacon cinnamon rolls to eat downstairs, anyway.”

I frown in my way, which means I open my little human mouth a little, and type, “You helped me so much. I wouldn’t be the me I am now without you. Moving will help you. What else?”

“Friendship isn’t an exchange or trade, Meghan,” she says.

“What else?” I repeat.

“Well, OK, you’re holding it,” Rhoda leans forward a little and points at her phone. Then she jerks her head up and says, “Exit out of that app and click on Docs. Open the first file and read it.”

I do as she says, and while I do she continues talking a little.

“I can’t remember if I told you I was writing this. But I’ll repeat myself anyway.” She points at the phone some more, poking her finger at the air. “You really are the only person I know who can help me edit it. At least before I send it to a publisher or something. Either way, I need you to read it. Please.”

After another moment’s pause she speaks again.

“I told you that you had a lot in common. I don’t think I’ve said just how much. Maybe I was embarrassed or something. Maybe in denial.”

—

Jacob

Preface

I will never be done grieving, but it’s been too long and I am more than ready to start celebrating my child’s life again. I invite you to do it with me.

Let’s let him live in these pages and our hearts!

On August 24th of this year (2024), something strange happened to us all that I think he would have just loved. Three days later, it was his 26th birthday. And on that day, I decided to give my best friend a present in his name, though I didn’t tell her that at the time.

It was a small, cheap gift, one that cost me only a couple dollars for an app. It was the ability to talk. And I think that may have changed everything for her. Just like it did for Jacob and me when he finally put his own words together.

Talking isn’t the most important thing a person can ever do. There’s lots of other ways to communicate, too, of course. But so much of what we do in the world with each other is use words.

So when someone doesn’t talk when you expect them to, it can be profound. It can, sometimes, shake you to your core.

When your child doesn’t start talking at least by the age of two, you know something is going on. When the silence goes on to three and four years old, you start looking for reasons and maybe you start thinking you should have looked earlier.

But with Jacob, I had a way of talking without our voices a lot of the time, and that felt special. He taught me how, honestly, by reaching for what he wanted.

Once I realized that that was all I was going to get out of him for a while, I would see if he wanted anything by holding up various objects or foods to see his reaction. And if he ignored me, I knew he didn’t care for it. But if he looked at it and reached for it, it was his to have. And he did reach for me, too. At least I had that.

Over time, and fairly quickly, we developed a lot of ways of communicating non-verbally. Some of them were just like how most people do with their families, and others were unique between the two of us. But I’ll get into that in the rest of the book.

Maybe to the point that I’m getting to, I  also knew he could hear me, because I started reading and talking to him as soon as he was born. And even though most of the time he didn’t show the kind of outward interest that most children are said to show, he still would react to my voice sometimes. And when he started walking, he’d actually mind me, especially if I explained why I wanted him to do things or avoid other things.

I didn’t have nearly as much help as I should have, especially since I wouldn’t let his sperm donor into his life, or mine. And that is all I will mention about that man in this book, or ever. But without that help, I also didn’t have a lot of voices telling me what I should or shouldn’t do to parent him, and I went with what seemed to work for him. And I went with love.

I think that is so important. And he did show love back, in his own way.

That I was able to do this still amazes me, though. I had good friends at the time, who watched him too, and let me lead in parenting him, and I’m sure that’s what saved us both.

People really need their friends.

In any case, here is the part that I think is relevant to so many people now.

His favorite book right from the getgo was Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like by Jay Williams and Mercer Meyer. So I read that to him every day. In the first days I was reading it to him it was really beyond his comprehension, but I loved the artwork so much that I just had to show it to him anyway. But I think he got it pretty quick.

And then, when we started going to the library together, he’d drag me over to the section where all the dragon books were and pick out a new one for me to read to him over and over again while we had it checked out. This was during that time when dragon books were all the rage and coming out in droves. It was the best timing.

And if this seems like a coincidence to anybody, I assure you it’s not. It is, absolutely, one of the reasons I was drawn to my best friend. When she spoke in the coffee shop about dragons, which she did whenever anyone mentioned them for some reason within earshot (and you really wouldn’t be surprised how often that happens in a college town coffee shop), it always reminded me of Jacob. When she was able to talk like that, she had the same manner as he did.

Because, I did, one day, finally get to hear Jacob’s first words.

You know, when you start hearing about autism, you start hearing stories like this, and you might think, “Oh, no. That’s too fantastic to be true.” Or, “None of the autistic children I’ve known have been like that.” But autistic people are all so different. Each one is such a unique treasure, with their own unique joys and challenges. And occasionally, one of them is just like one of the stereotypes or fairy tales.

Jacob was hyperlexic. By age six he was insisting on reading all of his own books, silently at the table, back straight, flipping the pages himself, when most children are still struggling to learn to read in first and second grade.

And, of course, I let him, because I was proud of him and it gave me time to get other things done.

Then, one day, without looking up from his book he said, in a bit of a clipped carefully pronounced monotone, “Mama. Did you know that some people used to worship dragons. They made friends with them. And fed them food. And the dragons protected them and kept them safe.”

He didn’t know how to inflect a question to make it sound like one, but I was shocked. 

Of course, I knew the first words out of his mouth would be about dragons, if he ever spoke. Dragons were his passion. His first special interest, as the doctors would say much too late in his life. But I was not prepared for full sentences.

I think I was too floored and thrilled that my child was so articulate that I didn’t realize just what he was saying, even when he said the next thing.

And then he looked right at me.

But not in the eyes.

And said, “You feed me, so I will protect you.”

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 19: All the little Megnitudes

“I think, maybe, I just don’t understand what is physics anymore,” Kimberly says to Chapman, who is working hir way down the impromptu potluck buffet ahead of her, picking up vegetables and crackers to add to hir plate.

“What do you mean?” Chapman asks.

“Well, as Meg explained,” Kimberly says, apparently too distracted to put anything on her plate as she follows Chapman. “How the big dragon go in the small man then go in the smaller stomach of the monster thing, when the conservation of mass and energy? And for that matter, how the Meg fit in the princess? That’s not physics, is it? And yet there’s the pendant you made. Is it like hypercube shit?”

“No, there are no hypercubes involved,” Chapman says.

“But how?”

Chapman stops and gives her an even appraisal out of the corner of hir eye, and then asks, “How much of your life would you like to dedicate to exploring the explanation to all that?”

Kim, behind Kimberly, says, “Please, you two, don’t hold up the line.”

It’s late. Around 11:00 pm. And we’re all in the coffee shop, which has been converted once again to a meeting place for us, courtesy of Bri and Miriam.

It took a while for everyone to gather food from their fridges, prepare it to some degree, and bring it over. Several of us had wanted pizza, but all the pizza places were closed. And still are. They closed about mid afternoon, when it became clear that there was a huge city wide dragon fight going on, and people needed to figure out relatively safe places to be.

While that was going on, I’d been given access to my second-hand computer in the back, so that I could write up what I remember happening. That way everyone could read it and be informed, and I wouldn’t have to try to explain it with my utterly demolished tablet, or my inadequate personal vocabulary.

Most of my friends read it on their phones while cooking, or while riding on their way back downtown. And when everyone had finally arrived, Rhoda had played it for the rest on her phone using the same text to speech voice I use.

And I also just uploaded it to my blog, as is, along with all of my speculations as to what Säure might have been thinking and feeling as it had all gone down.

Ptarmigan is here, looking extremely worse for wear, but Wentin is not. My draconic best friends are outside, again. And their humans have joined us, as is now usual. Even Gary is here.

It’s actually maybe way too much for me, after today, but at least I’ve eaten a handful of celebratory steaks provided by Nathan. They’re petite sirloins he’d been saving for himself, but insisted that I should have.

And right now, I’m in my old corner, where I used to sit before my dracomorphosis, curled up beside my old favorite chair, which is now occupied by Rhoda.

And I’ve got a bowl of steaming hot Sky Between the Branches tea, and I’m focused on the sensations of letting that steam curl around my tongue and bringing it in to my Jacobson’s organ. It fills my head with visions of the deepest, most rotten woods I’ve ever visited. Which maybe would remind me of Wentin, except that I’ve actually spent more time in the woods with my parents than with it.

So I’m thinking of family.

I think I really do want to figure out how to go down and visit them, respectfully of the other dragons down there in Seattle, and let them and my sister know who I really am.

Everyone else here is talking to each other in small groups about how they survived the day, or participated in my plan, and filling in each other's gaps. Or, they’re speculating about how things are going to play out legally and politically from here.

I did manage to leave the park of ball fields before Säure’s helicopter did, indeed, deliver a fucking car. But I’d watched from a hiding place as they placed it in the middle of the park. It was an outright replacement of the vehicle that Joel, Anurak, and Wentin had destroyed.

There was no Säure to retrieve it, after the helicopter left, and I just turned and flew away myself.

It might still be there right now.

With Säure having called my name, I’m pretty sure everyone in the city knows I was involved in today’s events, but maybe not how.

If Rhoda’s no-bullshit field still extends to me, the fallout might be pretty light, actually. But nobody knows exactly what it’ll prevent.

Before she went to get her own food, Ptarmigan came up to me and put a hand on my back and said, “Whatever you’re thinking. Whatever you are worried about. Do not talk to the police. Ever. Never.”

So, I’m thinking a little bit about that, too. I’m a little baffled that she thought to say that right when I was considering whether or not to answer their questions should they come looking for me. And I really don’t know if I’ll follow her advice. But I feel like I should.

Right now, though, I really don’t feel like talking to anybody.

I want to make sure that my people are OK and safe, which is why I’m even here. But I think I’m actually feeling shaky, not physically but mentally, and maybe I should find some place quiet to be instead.

But I also don’t want to be alone. I need Rhoda near me, and maybe Chapman.

What I should do, at some point, is go out and be with the dragons who are visiting my territory. Astraia, Anurak, and Joel deserve my acknowledgement at the very least, and I should figure out how it is that we dragons can actually socialize with each other.

I know that those three have developed an understanding between each other that I’m not actually a part of, that I don’t get. I’m not even sure how and when it formed. But I appreciate it. It reassures me.

Seeing the partial silhouettes of them, occluded by the reflections in the windows, lounging out on the street corner together under the streetlight, studiously ignoring any passing car together, reminds me of watching children clamber all over Joel in his park. It’s a welcome new normal, even if it isn’t mine.

But, after today, I’m uncertain of just about everything. At least at the moment.

I watched a person die.

Someone I’ve repeatedly visualized killing myself, over and over.

And I’m old enough, I’ve lived amongst humans long enough, that I’ve heard all of the arguments for and against the death of a person like him, whether he was human or not. And my own personal feeling is that it doesn’t matter that he wasn’t a human.

Ultimately, we all die. Even if we’re immortal, it seems. The Artists all love to say they maybe die more often than humans do. And we don’t really know about dragons, but we suspect we’re like the Artists that way. Maybe humans are too, actually. Reincarnation is a thing some of them dream about. I’ve been over that before. But it was going to happen to Säure sooner or later, anyway, and I wasn’t the one to make it happen. 

And now I can’t be. Wentin stole that from me. Or saved me from doing it.

More importantly, I think Wentin saved me from walking into Säure’s trap.

No matter how hard I tried – no matter how impervious to his attacks I seemed to be – no matter how much help I had from my community to face him – I was just so underpowered in the face of his shadow.

All I could really ever do was scream loud enough to distract him, and flee when he came for me.

And I’m not even sure why I was capable of doing even that much.

It makes me feel small and weak. Smaller than a human, at the moment, though I’m pretty sure that’s my C-PTSD exaggerating things.

Despite the physical contact of Rhoda lazily scratching and stroking the top of my skull, I simultaneously feel less and less like I’m able to move while having the intense urge to turn and run up the wall to get away from everything.

Ptarmigan puts down her plate, leaning over in her chair to look closer at me and says, “Hey.”

I don’t think I even twitch to look at her better.

“Hey, Meghan,” she says softly in her deep baritone, and gets up to come over to me.

Rhoda responds by putting her palm flat on my head, in a protective feeling gesture, and frowns, but doesn’t say or do anything else.

“Meghan,” Ptarmigan says again, and the room quiets down as everyone notices this exchange happening. “Meghan. You’re going to have one hell of a nightmare tonight. And it’s probably going to haunt you for a while. But it won’t be Wentin, Meghan. Remember that. It won’t be Wentin. It’ll just be you and your brain. Got it?”

I manage to raise my head under Rhoda’s hand to look Ptarmigan right in the eyes. It would transfix us if she were human, and lock us in a challenge if we were dragons. But she just smiles.

“What do you want, Ptarmigan?” Rhoda asks.

Ptarmigan points at me while looking at her, and says, “Meghan’s in shock. I don’t think it’s bad enough to kill her or make her very sick, though you should watch her for sure, and maybe give her some heat and fluids. But today was ultratraumatic for her, and I’m just reassuring her. Wentin is out of the picture now. At least, for the foreseeable future. It left.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” Rhoda tells her.

So Ptarmigan stands up and looks down at her with furrowed brows, “Maybe try hearing my words without putting subtext into them. What I want is irrelevant here. I’m helping Meghan. I’m telling you how to help her some more. And now I’m walking away. And that’s all that needs to happen between us. But maybe give Chapman more charity than that.”

And then Ptarmigan turns and walks away, past her chair and food, around and through the others, and out the door into the night.

I turn my head to look more clearly at Rhoda with my left eye, and I see her watching Chapman, who’s visible in my right eye.

After watching Ptarmigan go, Chapman’s resumed talking intensely with Kimberly, and when I pay attention to their words I find out they’re discussing shapeshifting in more detail, with mention of what sounds like definitive plans.

“Mm,” I hear Rhoda vocalize.

“Hey,” Cerce says, having come over with Jill in tow. “We were just looking up how to treat a lizard that’s in shock, and I don’t know if any of it is right for you. But heat really is like one of the biggest things. We can turn up the thermostat, and you really should drink your tea while it’s still warm.”

“Are you doing OK, Meg?” Jill asks.

Rhoda looks down at me and says, “She does feel colder than usual.”

“Yeah, I’ll take care of that thermostat,” Cerce says and turns to go and do that.

“What can I do?” Jill asks, looking at me first, then Rhoda.

“If you can get Chapman to come over here for me, that would be good,” Rhoda says in a low and very controlled voice. “Tell hir what’s up.”

I am just too tired for this, so I put my head back down.

I do notice that everyone else is starting to watch me more closely, glancing my way during their conversations or between bites of food. And Nathan gets up from where he’s at to come over and sit more closely, but he doesn’t say anything.

Then Chapman does come over with Jill behind hir, and kneels down beside my head and holds hir hand out. But sie asks Rhoda, “May I?” 

Rhoda just nods.

Then Chapman asks me, “Meg, can I scan you, please?”

I slowly close my eyes in an affirmative. 

And sie nods and puts hir wrists together, and I feel that shift.

Chapman stands up quickly and turns to the rest of the cafe to ask, “Does anybody have any dry erase markers? I’ll take a sharpie if you don’t, but I need them right now.”

Kim drops her food onto a table to get up and run to the front counter.

I think I fall asleep at that point.

—

Ptarmigan was right, it’s not Wentin.

It turns out that Säure really does still exist, and he’s on the moon with me, chasing me and terrorizing the moon dragons.

Always, at night, in my head, and when I’m awake, too. He’s become an indelible part of my story and I can’t get him out.

He can never catch me in my nightmares, because I’ve been trained too well.

But he doesn’t have to.

Because I have him.

—

When I awaken, I’m in the same spot I last remember being. Because, of course, no one who can fit in the cafe is strong enough to move me.

Rhoda is still in the chair, and Chapman is sitting talking to her. I can sense this even before I open my eyes.

“What do your other tattoos do?” Rhoda is asking, to my left, above me.

To my right and in front of me comes Chapman’s maple syrup voice, at about the height it would be if sie was sitting, “A lot of emergency stuff that rarely comes up.” I hear hir chair scrape briefly against the floor, and feel it through the floor, too. “This one, for instance,” I imagine hir lifting up the side of hir shirt. “If I touch an activator to it, it will give my body the kind of electric shock needed to restart my stalled heart.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“When I’m not having a heart attack? It is.”

“Why did you show that one to me?”

“Trust.”

Rhoda grunts.

“You’re probably right not to trust Artists, Rhoda,” Chapman says. “You weren’t too far wrong, any time you’ve criticized us, or warned Meghan about what we are. At least, the times you did so in front of me. We play at being mortal when we take our physical bodies, but we can’t really understand it. If we have no other memories, we at least always remember what we are. And that informs everything we do.”

“Then why are you convincing me to trust you?” she asks.

“I’m not. I’m putting my trust in you, Rhoda. Like it or not, you’re an anomaly, and a really powerful one,” Chapman explains. “I expect you’ll be as fleeting as any other human, but while you’re here you’ll change everything around you. You already are. And that’s going to draw more attention.”

“I do not like the sound of that. I do not want attention.”

“Right,” Chapman says. “So, I want to teach you how to avoid it. I want to show you what you can do to fend off Artists you don’t want to have anything to do with, starting with myself. And if you do it right, you might not even have to think about it much.”

“Hm,” she grunts.

And then there’s a knock at the door. One made by a large, confident fist, but not urgent.

I lift my head and open my eyes to see that we’re the only three in the cafe with darkened lights. Everyone else has left. 

And through the windows, I can see a huge, dark form of something with wings and horns hunched over just outside the door.

Chapman is glancing that way, too.

But Rhoda lays a hand on the top of my head and says, “Hey, Meghan. How are you feeling?”

“I’ll get the door,” Chapman says. “It’s the Poet.”

“Fenmere?” Rhoda asks.

“Yep,” Chapman confirms.

“The Worm.”

“Yeah. That’s… that’s kind of her thing, she’ll have to explain if you want to know.”

“Not sure I do.”

“I’ll leave it up to you, but we really should talk to her and debrief each other.”

“Fine.”

Chapman gets up to go open the door.

“Bri left me with the key,” Rhoda says to me. “I get to lock up when we’re done here. Which we should be, now that you’re awake.”

I don’t feel like talking yet, so I slow blink at her and let out a low infrasonic rumble. And I look at myself and see dry erase temporary tattoos of weird circuitry all over the back of my torso, between my wings.

I do feel warmer and more energized than before.

I wonder if this is really why Rhoda is even talking to Chapman right now. But, am I that important to her? She really does have her own thing she needs to figure out, too, and it seemed like they were talking about that, mostly.

Whatever. I remember that Chapman and I have time that maybe Rhoda doesn’t have. I know where my priorities lie currently, if Rhoda continues to reject Chapman. And I know Chapman would agree. Sie’s told me as much.

I give a big sigh as I watch the Poet squeeze through the door in what should be an impossible way. She’s way too big for it.

“But I guess we’ve got another guest,” Rhoda says.

And with a voice that sounds to me like an electric sander being applied to an oak desk, but with a distinctly feminine lisp, Fenmere tells Chapman, “Thank you for helping me put that fool to rest, dear Physicist. I owe a debt of gratitude to Meghan and Wentin as well. I’ve been watching that family carve up and devour the county for over a hundred years now, and I can’t bear to see the likes of him in control of what they’ve seized.”

“Well, come all the way on in, Fen, and tell Meghan that yourself,” Chapman says. “She’s right over here.”

Rhoda lets out a big, long sigh.

Fenmere walks kind of like a gorilla, with big, strong, powerful arms on brachiating shoulders, but fat saurian rear legs. Her bat-like wings are set right where a human’s shoulder blades would be, between her arms’ shoulders and her spine. It’s an anatomy that makes absolutely no sense, and would probably be useless for flying, but they are fairly big wings anyway. And we dragons really don’t always make any sort of biological sense.

Her hide looks like a fine moss, and she has belly scales like mine that are the color of bleached wood. Where her skin shows, such as her wings, it looks like algae stretched out over the surface of water. 

Her head looks like an evenly applied morph between that of an alligator and a horse, but with two tusks jutting up in front of her huge nostrils with an impressive underbite. And she has tufts of white, Spanish moss textured hair at the end of her chin and the tip of her tail, and as a big glorious shaggy mullet crowning her head. Two long, thin horns, straighter than mine jut out from the back of her skull.

And she has the ability to talk without opening her mouth any significant amount.

“Meghan,” she says in that voice.

Rhoda and I were told that Artists could be any type of animal, including dragons, but for some reason I’d thought that Fenmere’s cartoon caricature of herself wasn’t an actual self portrait. But, apparently, it is.

Fenmere settles down on her haunches before me, and I lift my head to acknowledge her. Her thighs do That Thing. They’re so round. And she barely fits between the tables of the coffee shop. I suspect she’s bending space somehow, honestly.

I can’t begin to imagine how that’s a power of being the Poet. But I’ve now seen some dragons do some pretty amazingly weird things.

“I’ve been reading your blog,” she says. “I’m a big fan, and as a fellow dragon I’ve found your experiences fascinating.”

I want to ask her so many questions, beginning with how long she’s had this form of a dragon. But I don’t have my tablet anymore, and I don’t have the vocabulary to do so. So, I just slowly bow my head and bring it back up in acknowledgement.

“However, I have to ask,” she tilts her head a little to the side. “I know you can’t explain it now. But maybe please do write about it in your next post. You’ve invented a delightful word but failed to elaborate.” She rests her foreclaws on her knees and leans forward a little, furrowing a brow that’s nearly as expressive as a human’s. “Can you please tell me what a Megnitude is?”

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 18: Third Megnitude

Sensation probably comes back to me faster than it feels like it does.

If it took longer than a moment or two, I imagine I’d be crushed.

The surface beneath me is hard, slick like varnished wood, curved, and tilted, and my ass is notably higher than my head.

The instant I have control over my muscles, I scramble to my feet, claws scuffing and sliding across what is actually varnished wood. And I blink my eyes and look around.

I appear to be on the starting ramp of a now barely functional roller derby rink, in a darkened arena lit only by the waning sunlight coming in through the high windows and skylights. And the ambient light coming in through the ragged hole in the wall I apparently just came through.

And through that hole, I see glimpses of Säure’s moving body as he lifts himself up from the ruins of his stadium.

And as he lowers his head to turn his eye toward my hole and look at me, I hear and see movement in the corners of the gym around me.

I dart my gaze here and there to take it all in.

Oh, shit. The derby team is here, in the arena with me!

Oh, fuck.

Oh, crap.

“Go,” I say, incapable of giving my voice any urgency, but making it as loud as I can. “Now.”

And then I cough up a little aerosolized flame to emphasize the urgency, and turn and run from the new entrance I made to the building myself.

I slam against the doors on the west side of the room, just before anybody else reaches them, banging them open and damaging the frame in the process.

I do my best to keep my rapidly moving tail away from any calves or thighs as I bolt through the door and scamper down the hallway past the lobby of the hockey rink on my right, and the concessions stalls to my left.

There’s a big set of three glass double doors at the other end, and I can hear skates and sneakers squeaking and rolling across the laminate flooring behind me.

The ground shakes with a muffled whump. And then again.

Then, just as I’m crashing through the front doors of the complex, the whole world shutters with a quick succession of four impacts.

And I stumble into the parking lot just in time to be struck with Säure’s cry of fury.

It’s like someone took the T-Rex roar from the first Jurassic Park movie and stretched out the waves into the infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges even for me, and then turned the volume up so high that people struck by the sound don’t so much hear it as they are pushed through a portion of spacetime forcefully by it.

My mind refuses to register the experience as anything intelligible as it’s happening, and it’s only afterward that I start to make sense of it.

I don’t have to turn my head far to look over the building at him and catch him snapping at something in the air to the left of his head. Something I can’t see.

“Go,” I say, my voice severely muffled to my own ears. “Go. Go. Go.”

It hardly need be uttered. The team is dispersing and scrambling for their cars. I hope the time it takes to get into them and get them started isn’t too long for their safety. Especially with me in their midst.

But Säure does look distracted.

He snaps at the air a few more times, blindly, unintelligibly.

So, I take the moment to turn and face him and stretch all my muscles.

The soot and ashes from Laserbreath’s attack over there have mostly been blown off my scales, but I’m still dusty and dirty looking. Smudged.

I am, incredibly, miraculously, unwounded. At least, nothing like the gash on my shoulder that’s mostly healed now. But I’ve been seriously banged up, and my whole body hurts in places and ways that worry me.

The more I work it, though, the more ready I feel to do something else.

Then I remember something I can do that I haven’t really played around with much, except on my own when I’m bored. I have no idea what good it will do here, but if Säure’s so harried and confused, maybe I can add to that.

I do a fair imitation of Joel’s yawp.

Then I bolt to my right, circling the building and headed in the direction of the nearby elementary school. There are probably kids in there, I know, but I’m not going to draw him there, this is just a quick feint.

Wait. Are there children in there? It’s Saturday.

Still. There might be.

Round the corner and mostly out of sight, I let loose with the loudest series of poinks I can manage.

Then, I turn and run along as close to the side of the building as I can, past the front doors again, and over to the North of it.

And there, I let out the most anguished dying man’s scream I can remember.

And I keep going.

We’re actually in Tannis’ territory, and she’s confused by the sudden close presence of three of her neighbors, so she shrieks like a singing banshee. Perfect.

And then I’m crashing through the wooded wetlands to the north of the Sportsplex, between it and the soccer and softball fields, and I’m whistling like Wentin as I go. That’s a really easy one to mimic, honestly. A spooky sin wave of a voice.

Briefly, I think I can hear Wentin croon in my ear, “Adorable.” 

But it’s not there. To get that close, it would have to enter the full vision of that eye, nevermind the peripheral. And there’s no such movement or presence when it happens.

This is a large wooded area that we didn’t draw Säure too, and I wonder briefly if the Poet is hiding in here. It’s her favorite kind of haunt, I’m told. But I don’t see her.

I hope that if Säure follows me to the northern fields, he doesn’t do too much damage on his way.

And then there are more poinks far behind me, faster and more poignant, strident, than I managed to make them, as Astraia joins in on the taunting.

And that triggers a series of call backs from the surrounding territories. A whole cacophony of dragons. And it sounds like they are closing in!

Holy shit, are they all fools like me?

Then, the weirdest thing happens.

I hear my own cry come from downtown, across the freeway and over building tops, from my own roof. Distant and taunting.

I did not coordinate with anybody to do that. I don’t particularly want that to happen. But I also don’t even know how it happens. Who is imitating me from my own roof?

I can only think of Chapman. I wouldn’t put it past hir to be able to craft a noise maker of any sort by scrawling a pattern all over the tar black roof in trans pride chalk.

Why, though? 

More confusion?

We don’t want to draw Säure into the populated areas of the city, I don’t think. Not that we aren’t already surrounded by inhabited buildings and homes right now. But not downtown!

It feels like when things started to derail, everyone lost cohesion, and they’re all now flailing about. Just like me. Communicating badly with dragon calls at best.

I really just wanted Säure confused enough to stall him from going after me and the Flounder Pounders. I am so hoping the derby team made it out of there.

I feel a few more thumps as Säure repositions himself on the ground and maybe starts pursuing what he thinks of as me.

A glance over my shoulder shows me his tail swinging high over the Sportsplex, as he’s turned around, and I stop to watch. I don’t exactly feel safe, but I’m clearly not being threatened at the moment.

I observe as he makes an attempt to jump and lift himself in the air, but his wings cannot find purchase and he slams back into the ground like a building falling to its hands and knees.

And then he rears up on his hind legs and roars again with that space folding auditory assault of his.

And I think clearly, for the first time today, this all might have been a huge mistake.

By provoking Säure, I’ve seriously endangered the city. And if we can’t subdue him before the National Guard is deployed, or something like that, it could be even more of a disaster than it already is.

I wonder why anybody went along with this plan of mine.

What am I doing?

Welp.

I’m going to do everything I can to bring him to me in an open field, then.

What we can do there, I have no idea.

I’d love to talk to him, but I only have a limited array of vocabulary for that. It’s grown over the past week, in preparation for this. But I also know my ability to talk under pressure is unreliable, too.

But, If I can get him over these wetlands to those fields, I at least know that we won’t be fighting too near any houses. And that feels critical to me.

On the other side of those fields is a light industrial area with businesses that should be closing up shop now, if they haven’t already done that three to four hours ago.

I can’t believe how long this fight has taken. But we’ve been flying all over the city before this, I guess.

Meh.

Time for me to see if I can figure out how to fight an offensively picturesque, spiky, mobile, infuriated hill.

I turn back and start bounding through the thin trees and brush toward the northern fields again.

As I near them, I catch glimpses of people standing near their cars, watching Säure’s antics behind me, over the treetops.

I start repeating my signature cry. Loud and insistant and over and over.

And the enormous monster must be reacting to me because, as I burst from the treeline, I see everyone in sight buckle at their knees and turn to run, looking over their shoulders up at the sky.

Yes, you fools, get the fuck out of here!

These look like the stragglers of a few games that must have been going on in these fields before this all started.

Boom!

Boom, boom, boom!

Säure is now actually following me.

Thump, bump, boom!

I can see his towering head looming higher and higher as he nears my location, while I’m galloping out to the middle of the fields.

When I get to my chosen spot, I hop and turn to face him, crouching on springy legs ready to lunge or bolt to either side, and call with my entire diaphragm, “Stop.”

It’s not a yell or a shout. There’s no emotion to it. But, like my morning song, it’s loud enough to be faintly heard two neighborhoods over.

I know he can’t not hear it.

And he does stop. He pulls back his head, tilting it down at me, and opening his mouth menacingly.

“Talk,” I call out.

He tilts his head to the side, mouth still cracked open. It looks way less quizzical that way. Though, still questioning. As if asking me if I’d like to step inside his maw.

“Fuck. Chapman,” I say at the same volume. “Fuck. Ptarmigan. Fuck. Artists. You. Me. Talk. Peace.”

That would probably go over badly with everyone who overheard, if key people didn’t know that this was actually part of my original plan.

Why not desperately stick to it, actually?

I’m losing.

He can actually get me if he chases me all day.

But, I’m seeing that he’s still hesitating to go full out. He doesn’t want to hurt his hoard, the city, more than he has to. The stadium must have been a calculated sacrifice, or a moment of pure passion. But he pulled himself up short of the Sportsplex, even if he was being distracted by something else.

And while he’s been walking after me, now, he was mincing, picking his foot placement carefully.

So, while I could dodge into the rest of the city to avoid him, and leave him the choice of following me and possibly killing people, or letting me get away – and I’ve shown I’m willing and capable of doing that, actually, as much as I don’t want to – the fact that I’m stopping and offering him a chance to negotiate might actually be enticing.

I wonder if he can talk in full dracoform.

I’m not sure why he wouldn’t be able to.

“Meghan,” he says, voice thundering across the county.

Yeah. This actually feels embarrassing and tense. I’m putting myself on the very public spot by doing this.

“Truce,” I reply. Another new word of mine, just for this use.

“No. You. Give. Up.”

“No. Truce,” I insist.

“You. No. Bargain,” he responds, loud enough for the Sheriff to hear, it seems like.

“No,” I tell him. “I. Threat. I. Go. You. Fight. Fairport.”

He jerks his chin up, mouth open and says, “Ridiculous!”

In response, keeping my eyes on his head, I feint to the side, toward downtown. Then I bark, “Okay.” 

I keep my body tense and leaning that direction, to make it clear what I intend to do if he pushes the matter.

“Stop,” he says.

“No,” I reply. “You. Truce.”

This is the point at which the cartoon villain would call my bluff and pounce on me, forcing me to dash into the city and risk him following me to the injury and deaths of hundreds to thousands of people.

All the other dragons have fallen silent to our conversation. At least that part of the plan is working now. But it’s kind of creepy. As if we’re the only two dragons in town, now.

I can watch him considering the situation I’ve pulled him into, weighing all the risks to himself. And he’s been presented with a few that neither he nor I fully understand.

I still haven’t felt Ptarmigan do anything, but Chapman and the Poet have been laying enchantments on Säure that were not fully explained to me, out of a need for expedient secrecy. Similar to why I’ve been lying in my blog. And something is also keeping him from flying, it seems.

I still don’t think he’s quite grasped that he’s the villain in this story, though. But, then, that is a bit subjective to who the audience is, I guess.

This is scary.

Everything is telling me he’s going to pounce, or attack in some way.

He’s so powerful, there’s no particular reason for him not to. Not in the short run, at least. And while the long run is the crux of it, the longer he pauses to consider, the more time my Artist friends have to craft another snare for him, or pull the snares tight that already surround him. And he’s got to be thinking about that.

But, you know? All the cartoon villains in the world were written by humans, with human sensibilities and motives.

This is a dragon.

And though I’m less than a rival, I’m vermin to him, I’m right in the middle of both his hoard and his food supply. And I’m apparently really annoying to him. I’ve got his attention.

I don't know. I have been projecting a lot of thoughts into his head that might not be there. Maybe he's just visualizing all the ways he can swallow me, or he knows things I don't.

I wait, poised to gallop and fly away at an instant twitch on his part. And as much as I really don’t want to see anybody die or lose their house today, I am damn well prepared to run into the city. Now that I’m against this wall, I want to survive.

“Okay,” he says. Then, after a meaningful pause, he says, “Talk.”

I. Do. Not. Relax.

I’m trying to think of a word I know that I can remember that has enough meaning for a negotiation. And I feel like my mind is slowly going blank as I try to search it.

This is the worst time for losing what little speech I have! But it’s happening.

“Talk,” I manage to repeat, feeling really lame about it.

He jerks his head. With his mouth open, I’m sure it looks like a silent mirthful laugh to a human, but to me it’s pure threat. And my muscles twitch.

“Talk,” I say again.

“Yes,” he replies. “Talk. You. Talk.”

Damn him. He’s gotta see I don’t have my purse. My tablet is gone. He’s mocking me. He’s putting me on the back foot by insisting I do something I can’t do very well at all.

Though, I was the one who insisted on talking instead of fighting.

I wonder if I can speak as much with body language as anything. If we could both take human disguise and get to the library somehow, we could use the computers there to actually talk to each other. 

I still don’t know exactly what I want to talk to him about, but having him concede to do that with me would be far better than dancing through Fairport trying to fight each other.

Especially if we can do it in human disguise, because then he’ll be stuck for a while, and then we can actually do something about it.

I’m thinking, maybe, since he was the one who just destroyed several wetlands and the city stadium, we let the police arrest him. As much as I hate to lean on that corrupt institution, it would be a wonderful irony.

He’ll probably just get a slap on the wrist, but it’ll be a start.

I jerk my head sideways toward downtown, and manage to say, “Go. Talk.”

Let’s see if he can figure that out.

He looks the direction I indicated.

Then he closes his mouth and tilts his head to look at me with his right eye, and says, “Top of Tower.”

Ah, his restaurant of choice. His turf.

If he can provide phones, or tablets, or something to talk with, I’ll take it.

“You’re paying,” he says.

That’s a whole phrase he taught himself.

I cannot afford that restaurant. But, this does give me the opportunity to stiff him in return for him stiffing me, if I play my cards right. So, I’m going to agree to it.

The trick now is trying to figure out how we’re going to get there from here.

Maybe I just have to agree and then wait to see what he does.

Can I remember the word I need? I can.

“Okay,” I say.

“I. Drive,” he says. And then he lifts his head and makes a weird warbling noise with his syrinx. It’s kind of like a klaxon but also some kind of bird song. There's a whistling to it, with a rhythm of ultrabass infrasonic rumbling. It might be just a little too complex for me to imitate, but I definitely can't match the volume.

It echos off the surrounding landscape like a fog horn.

And then, when he’s done he looks at me again, and says, “Wait.”

“Truce,” I repeat, hammering down on my key concern.

“Truce,” he says.

And then I remember one of the phrases I'd worked on the last few nights, and it’s perfect.

“Shake on it,” I say. And then, I awkwardly stand on my hind legs and hold out my right claw, expectantly.

There's no way he can shake my claw while he's that big. Even if he did some silly gesture like present me with a single tree sized talon, he'd too easily crush me with a twitch. And there’s no way I'll stay where I am to let him do that.

He studies me carefully.

I wish I could guess what he’s thinking.

I suppose I need to show him a gesture of trust. Not that that's at all a reasonable expectation in this situation. But I don’t think reason or fairness factor into anything Säure does.

OK.

I want to sell this to him. He's gotta be feeling uncertain and vulnerable with all the weird bullshit we've been trying to pull on him. And he has some kind of curse the Poet just put on him.

But if he called for a ride and we are going to the Top of the Tower, he’s going to commit to taking human form.

He blinks and changes the angle of his head, still studying me.

There must be a reason he’s not insisting we fly to his home in our dracoforms.

Maybe he guesses I'll never agree to it. So a semineutral human establishment is in order. A place I'd agree to go to.

He must really want to work with me.

Or, to turn the trap I've laid back on me, and to attack me when I've let my guard down.

I know how quickly I can change my shape.

It's not quite fast enough to dodge a UV laser, if I'm in human disguise. He could burn me then. But, my human skin doesn't feel like it's my insides or anything vulnerable like that. When I'm in that shape, I can still feel my scales covering me.

It's really an unknown risk. But at least I'll see him opening his jaws first.

But, if he pounces instead, I'm sure I can revert and dodge in time. When it comes to that kind of interaction, I have yet to find a dragon besides Anurak that can touch me. Not even Wentin can.

I decide to do it.

I sigh with a big breath, and fold myself up into my faerie princess outfit, then give him a closed lip smile and hold out my right hand again.

Säure rears back in a movement that looks like my doom, closing his eyes.

But then he opens them again and takes four tree crushing steps through the woods between us and dives down into his businessman disguise only a few yards ahead of me.

Straightening his tie and then stretching his arms as he looks down at them, he begins to walk forward toward me.

His face is so good at portraying smugness with hardly a muscle twitch. His straight backed walk makes him look like he's buoyed physically by his own confidence.

“Shake on it,” he says in a human volume, reaching out with his own right hand just as I hear a helicopter approaching in the distance.

I can't believe how much the sound of that kind of contraption puts me on edge.

It's a very silly idea to ride a helicopter from here to downtown, where there’s no-where to land it. Unless maybe this one is going to deliver a car. It could actually airlift a car here, if it's a big enough chopper.

Well, I think that’s what he did with his song, call that chopper.

Maybe it's the trap.

And I feel the back of my neck tensing as our hands near each other under the increasing sound of air being smacked by rotor blades.

Then movement catches my eye, as it does. 

It's right behind Säure’s head from my point of view, so he doesn't seem to see the shift in my gaze. Or, maybe neither of us can really react in time.

Because time itself seems to dilate.

As our hands go from six inches away from each other, to within an inch, between thumps of the distant helicopter blades, I watch as Wentin blooms from the darkness between trees in the twilight, and lopes as if in slow motion across the field to rear up above and behind Säure.

And just as Säure reacts to the look on my face, wide pupils almost in perfect circles, mouth opening, Wentins jaws snap shut over his top half.

Limbs jerking, failing to transform, Säure is lifted up into the air, and swallowed like a seagull with a freshly broken neck.

It takes Wentin only three jerks of its head to imbibe Säure.

And then the billionaire is gone.

—

I don't really know how long I've been staring at Wentin as the helicopter continues to close the distance. But the vehicle is probably very nearly here.

And in that time, the nightmare doesn't explode with a suddenly expanding kaiju bursting from its stomach.

I'm not just bewildered, I'm in shock.

Wentin winks.

And I'm still in my princess disguise.

“My dear Queen Meghan,” Wentin eventually says, just barely audible over the helicopter. “It has been my honor to serve you, but really, next time, you will have to finish your meal yourself.”

And then it turns and leaves.

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 17: Second Megnitude

That voice, that insidious crackly hissing voice, begins reciting the most incredible clichéd pap inside his very mind.

“With a sky of dragon belly Where a fearful terror reigns While the city cowers beneath it We sing and turn your fate”

And yet, despite how ridiculous and silly it is, he feels something begin to happen.

—

Let’s establish another bit of important planning I’ve done, as I’m landing in the Eastern end zone of the Fairport stadium (it has an official name, that of some businessman, but I don’t care for it).

I’ve left almost everything valuable that I own with Rhoda. 

In particular, I’ve left my ID, name change paperwork, and SNAP and debit cards. The pendant that Chapman made me is not with me either. I still have my purse and tablet, in hopes that they’ve both got the enchantments necessary to survive whatever is coming my way, so I can use the tablet to try to talk to Säure.

Now, whether I’ll survive is a different matter, but I’ve also got a lot of things going for me at the moment.

I’m trying to focus on my uncertainty and anxiety, though, making myself a more obvious target to my adversary, hoping he can feel those emotions radiating from me. So I’m not going to reiterate just what’s going to save my hide right now.

But once my velocity has slowed enough that I can bounce around to face my incoming doom, I do so, and then I let loose with my territorial song once again, just to let him know I’m here and I’m challenging him.

“grrrrrrrrRRUMBLE-SQUAAAAAWK-NOKNOKNOKNOKNOK!!!”

I can see that the sun is about to start setting, shining through a string of poplar trees that are lined up along part of the freeway, visible just above the high wall of the stadium.

And just above that is the increasingly growing shadow of Säure, wings stretching from South to North like an incoming storm, his underside all limned silvery and gold from the sunlight.

His belly scales glow like pearls the size of Winnebagos.

They might actually be bigger than that. His size baffles me.

He roars right back at me and it’s a little bit like being hit by a cosmic oscilloscope.

I stand my ground.

—

Once she makes her final challenge, his eyes pinpoint the speck that is that whelp of queer ersatz royalty, Meghan. 

But his thoughts and intentions are dashed by the next verse.

“The smokey columns rise And dance in wind's refrain Pushed by wings of envy We sing and turn your fate”

Consciousness reeling from whatever foul Architecture these words are constructing, he does manage to remind himself that he can take his time to really burn this one, this Meghan.

He needn’t do his dive bomb routine. He can just soar and spear her with his death ray until the poem has run its course, and maybe even after that.

And he opens his mouth to do so, before his impulses can be interrupted by more words.

—

I do wonder which of us has the greater hubris. Säure or me?

He’s already made numerous mistakes, and he’s digging himself deeper and I’m sure he knows it. Right now he should be in the grips of whatever the Poet has in store for him delivered by Chapman’s speakers.

And, also, since he’s now become the new nightmare of Fairport by terrorizing nearly everyone in the city for so long, that puts him squarely in Ptarmigan’s crosshairs, if her quip about Finland was perchance a lie.

Some of the other stuff I said she said was a lie on my part.

And he’s the clear villain and maybe I’m the people’s champion. And narrative physics should be in my favor.

Oh, I hope.

However, I know that I’m far enough away from the infrastructure of the stadium that he can light me up without doing much damage to it. And I’m counting on magics and powers that are as yet untested by a direct attack on this scale. I’m counting on Rhoda’s need for me to be strong enough that her proclamation will bend everything in my favor, and this will be the only proof of that, if it works. And I really don’t know what Poetry can actually do. It seems almost childish to call on it.

Furthermore, while I think that my imperviousness to my own flames might extend to other forms of heat, that’s really only a wild guess. A fervent wish.

And then, there’s still also the question of whether I can even get him to come down and talk to me if his breath somehow doesn’t hurt me.

He could just try to land on me.

Worrying in thought takes far fewer words than what I’ve written here. I’ve considered these fears and swallowed them within the two heartbeats it also takes me to realize the Poet’s verses won’t likely be done by the time Säure attacks me.

And there it is.

His jaws move and his head becomes the largest sunlamp. I don’t even understand how that works, only that I’ve seen something similar in a movie. And it sparkles with static. It's a true laser.

My nictitating membranes have flipped up reflexively, like natural sunglasses, but I’ve still got brilliant spots on my retinas where his mouth marks the sky.

And every inch of me and the ground around me for several yards reflects that fizzing indigo-white light.

I can smell ozone, the turf smoking, and the hot metal of the goal posts baking in the laser.

And that’s without tasting the air with my tongue.

—

Once he’s started, he doesn’t even think. He just sets himself to the task as the hideous words continue to filter through him.

“We know you think you own us But your cries they reek of shame And we rise to turn and face you While we sing to turn your fate”

He can’t feel Meghan’s fear anymore, and he hopes that means she’s gone and no longer a problem for anyone. But he’s on automatic. He’s going to torch that spot of ground until he’s about to land on it.

—

The figure lurking in the control booth of the stadium watches impassively through UV blocking wraparound sunglasses that were maybe a little too pricey for not being actual laser grade safety goggles.

Even with them on, it’s nigh impossible to tell what’s happening out there. Not with human senses, anyway.

Timing here is going to be everything, and even though Säure is obviously flying in as slowly as he can it’s still a meteoric descent.

It might not matter if Meghan survives, honestly, but the world would be a nicer place if she did.

The modifications to the stadium’s electrical systems that the Janitor managed to cobble together at the last minute better not go to waste, either. That required a deal that was surprisingly costly.

Siblings sure do love to stick it to you when you’re desperate for time.

Behind the figure in sunglasses, in the darkness of the room, something large moves.

—

“No one owes you allegiance No one here feels your pain Struggle to no avail, Dear Säure We sing and turn your fate”

And that seems to be it. There’s a distinctive pause in that onslaught of supposed poetry, and his mind clears.

Just in time for him to cut off his own blitz, close his mouth, and pull up before slamming into the entire stadium.

He doesn’t feel anything more in particular. While the poem was being recited, something was happening, but now it’s not, and he has no idea what it was.

And as he rises, he steals a glance at the ground below him.

The circle that marks ground zero of his attack is charred completely black and he can’t see Meghan in it anywhere. If her corpse is there, it’s as black as the grass beneath it.

So he takes a deep breath as he works his wings, filling his blood with oxygen to feed his muscles, and to soothe his nerves.

What a nothingburger.

It’s all done and maybe now he can deal with the remaining Architects who’d swarmed his county on his terms, rather than that whelp’s.

He closes his eyes and imagines the peace of his soon-to-be newly reconstructed lair.

And that vision is interrupted by a, “wump, wump, wump, wumpwumpwumpwmprrrrrrrRRRRRRAWACK-NOK-NOK-NOKNOKNOK!!!!”

—

There’s a movie I never watched that had a super famous scene in it, like, back in the 80s. I remember my classmates talking about it on the playground, and one of my friends at the time just fast forwarding to the scene on his parents’ VCR when I visited so I could see it. I wasn’t at all interested in the movie, but this stuck out to me.

There’s a soldier in the jungle, and behind him is a muddy cliff. And as the camera zooms in, an eye appears in the cliff. My memory of it is that we see both eyes slowly opening, but I’ve gone back and checked and it’s just one eye that’s there.

I like to imagine what I just did looked a bit like my memory of that movie, the black patch on the ground slowly opening a pair of flame orange dragon eyes followed by an opening dragon mouth full of teeth.

Säure couldn’t possibly have seen it. He was too far up by then and I saw him looking away. I couldn’t see his eyes. But I like to imagine it anyway.

It’s pretty amazing just how covered in soot I became from that laser attack. But I also feel like maybe I learned something about physics.

I’ve definitely learned something about myself.

Is all this black ash all over me a layer of dead skin? Or several? Am I ablative?

Taking a deep breath after having croaked my loudest call yet, I glance down to find that my purse is now a molten wreck on the ground. All the leather is nothing but charred scraps fluttering around the remains of my tablet.

Shit.

If Säure does take the bait the Poet is about to deliver to him, and comes down here to talk to me, I’m going to have to lean on my emergency vocabulary.

I don’t think this is going to work, but I’ve got to try.

On the other hand, I also expect a few more attempts on my life, first.

—

“No applause is necessary. Snapping like a beatnik will suffice,” the Poet’s voice audibly carries a smirk. “And now that you’re my captive audience, it’s probably worth mentioning that if you take your human disguise, the bone conduction speakers installed on your horns will drop off. So, if you are done with my show, feel free to tune out at any time.”

He’s in the midst of arching his back and twisting to find Meg and slam down onto her as hard as possible when these words slice through his consciousness.

And he thinks this is easy. He can just switch to his disguise and back in a matter of seconds, incidentally allowing himself to change his position more quickly at the smaller size and weight.

But before he does, the Poet quips, “Oh, and please do attempt that at the highest altitude possible, Dear. You’ll want plenty of time to figure out how to remove your costume, afterward, won’t you?”

That gives him a pause of alarm.

Of course! He’s been played like a puppet this whole time. Why should he assume anything the poet is saying right now is the truth? It’s meant to manipulate him one way or another. He knew this while flying into the whole mess. Even if he’d stayed at home, he’d have been playing into their hands.

He can’t disregard what the Poet says, unfortunately. Which leaves him only one reasonably safe thing to do, remain in his true form for as long as possible. Morning Glory Stadium has been overdue for demolition and replacement for nearly a decade now, anyway.

Time to force that issue.

He could just land carefully, folding himself up into his humanoid form as he reaches the ground, to confront Meghan that way, but he doesn’t want to, and it seems like the thing they’re all trying to get him to do.

So, he scans the charred area of the field and its surroundings, but he still can’t find her. He likes to think of his eyesight as exceptional, as he can see clearly to the horizon no matter how high he flies. But the truth is, if something is small enough he just can’t focus clearly on it.

It hardly matters. If she’s still in the stadium, as her challenge seemed to indicate to his ears, he highly doubts she can evacuate in time to avoid being crushed.

So, he folds his wings and slams down into it with all the force of his incredible mass.

And as he does, he catches sight of something fluttering like a moth down the ball field, away from his center of impact, desperately attempting to get out from under him.

—

Maybe I don’t want to test being crushed, actually.

Just before he pulls his wings in to drop, I feel like I notice some kind of telegraphed movement and I just bolt. It’s almost as if I’m a fly that’s about to be swatted, and my body moves before I realize what’s even happening.

The greatest source of movement in my vision is now the ground as I’m sprinting up to takeoff speed, so I’m hyperfocused on that.

Blades of carefully manicured grass proceed toward me in the deepening twilight of sunset under the swiftly dropping doom above me. Every couple of divot ripping gallops, a white stripe of chalky paint flies under me. Sometimes I think I spot a bug, but I think that’s my imagination.

Wings are up, waving to feel the wind and judge a sense of lift while providing the balance I need to shift to a two legged gait, and I bring my forelegs up to my chest. I’ve still got quite a ways to go before I make it out of the stadium.

Which is good, on the one claw, because I don’t see any obvious thermals in front of me, and I’ll need that room to gain enough altitude to make it over the stadium wall before I slam into it at the velocity I’m trying to go.

On the other claw, I think Säure might just hit both ends of the stadium at the same time, he seems big enough to do it, and I’m not sure I can make it out before he does.

I take a big leap and I flap.

Two more flaps in quick succession and I’m airborne, and I just keep going. I breathe in as much oxygen as I can and I focus on that feeling of being chased I’ve experienced so frequently lately.

Either I’ll make it or I won’t, but I’m going to ride every sliver of an advantage I can think of.

And then I experience something fascinating.

Säure is big enough that he’s compressing the air underneath him as he falls. Actually, anything falling does this, though it’s more noticeable with an object that has flat sides, like a box. Drop a box on a dusty concrete floor, and you can see the particles being pushed out from under it by the wind of its descent.

Säure, like me, is normally aerodynamically shaped to avoid pushing that much air around as he flies through it. But he’s now attempting to body slam the stadium, to hit the ground with as much surface area as possible, and he can’t help but reflexively spread his wings a little as he nears impact.

And, with my wings spread, the feel of that wind is a bit more intense than I ever could have expected.

It’s warm from the compression, and lifts me up from below and behind like the billowing currents from a jacuzzi jet.

It’s almost gentle, but it makes staying upright in the air harder, and it pushes me forward at a constantly accelerating rate.

For a few even more terrifying moments I’m worried the wind will slam me into the stadium seating.

I’m now moving so fast I can’t imagine pulling myself up in time.

But as the air pressure rises, I’m less dense in relation to it, and the current also has to go up and over the stadium wall, and I’m flapping, and using my fire below me to create my own thermals, and it’s the direction I want to go, and I’m suddenly free!

And there’s parking lot, freshly heated by the now setting sun.

I don’t know if I’m quite clear yet, but it feels like safety and affords me the moment to wonder if anybody else happens to be in or near the stadium. I didn’t see any runners using the track, but somebody might be taking shelter there in the ruckus of today’s attacks.

Oh, I hope not.

And then the wind blows sharply and as hard as anything I’ve ever felt, tumbling me snout over tail, wings wrenched this way and that, just before I’m hit by a literal shockwave full of dust and debris.

There is a sound.

The entire city hears it.

Possibly the county.

They must feel it.

It has to have registered notably on the Richter scale, though I’m not on the ground to sense it that way myself.

I’m so disoriented and numbed by the whole experience, I’m not even sure I’m still alive.

—

In the darkness of trees on the lee side of Fairport Arboretum, as far from the sun as possible, Wentin steps into an unoccupied trail and opens its mouth.

It starts hacking and coughing just like a gigantic housecat with a hairball, arching its back and thrusting its face toward the ground.

Within seconds, its convulsions are productive and a person-sized lump unfolds from its throat and sprawls out on the gravel and mud of the trail.

Wentin doesn’t wait, doesn’t say anything. Instead, as soon as its charge is vomited up completely, it turns and leaves.

It has business to attend to.

The person-sized lump moves and starts to half-flail and half-brush wetness away from what appears to be a hair covered face.

“Bleh,” Ptarmigan says, instantly regretting the act of speaking as it exposes her tongue to Wentin’s digestive fluids.

Well, that plan was demolished.

—

Säure had turned and twisted, using his wings unintentionally to maneuver effectively, so that he landed on his belly, tail to the East, head facing the sunset. And he’d opened his eyes from blinking just in time to watch the shockwave of his landing slam the whelp Meghan into the wall of the Sportsplex Arena just across the parking lot and street.

That portion of the building’s wall implodes with the impact.

He starts to get up, lowering his head to glower at the mark of her destruction, to walk over and crush that structure as well.

And within two steps, he hears a voice in his ear. His left fucking ear, not his head. It’s not coming from his bespeakered horns. There’s something near his ear with an obnoxious, whiny voice.

And it says, “I forbid you from flying higher than the trees around you.”

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 16: First Megnitude

There are a handful of vacant wooded lots around town, similar to the one that Säure just torched. And they are each, in their own way, important and meaningful, and really shouldn’t be touched or harmed.

They can, however, be repaired. In a way. And it has also been fairly easy to keep them free of people.

So, we’re sacrificing them for this. And he’s the one that is going to end up on the hook for it. Because everyone can recognize just who he is, and they see him doing it.

One after another, we draw Säure to each, and he torches them. Just like he did before. The exact same maneuver.

At least, for the next three.

The final four, however, are fairly close together. Which means he has to wheel about more, and slow down his flight.

And then, afterward, he continues to circle, confused as to what has just happened and why nothing more is vying for his attention. The scanning has stopped.

And instead of chasing him all over town, I had decided to make my way to that general area and do my circling at near street level, below the tree tops.

I was really hoping to catch him early, but we’d set this up just in case I couldn’t.

And now comes the really tricky bit.

Now I have to try to take advantage of his confusion and slower flight, and his ridiculously enormous skyscraper sized bulk, to get as close to him as I can.

Doing things this way did feed his belly with the fear of the people, of course. He’s stronger now than he was when he first took flight.

It’s a calculated risk.

But the thing is, I now need to make another calculated risk on top of that, and it’s terrifying.

And I didn’t plan this out in detail, because I had no idea what he’d be doing at any given moment. It’s totally an engage-and-adapt kind of situation. But I got the idea from my last encounter with him.

I think I want to get higher than he is to do this.

—

Sirens fill the air with their thin wailing.

Eight columns of smoke rise from the Fairport landscape all around, and he has caused them.

And suddenly, the incessant taunting message has stopped.

By the third signal, he knew that he wouldn’t find the Physicist at any of the locations he was drawn to. It was too obvious what was happening. And he would have flown off and returned home, in disgust and a refusal to play the game, if he wasn’t so buoyed with power and sustenance by the third attack.

Each subsequent wetland destroyed fed him less fear than the last, but the rush overall was so much more sustained and filling that he decided he might as well keep going.

It was as if the wiley Architect was personally inviting him to feed on this municipal buffet of popular terror.

A strange choice in strategy, since it has only made him stronger and more ready to defeat the jaws of any actual trap that may be set.

But now there’s nothing at all.

Is he being invited to keep rampaging of his own initiative? Has he been shown “safe” targets that endanger his source of food as little as possible?

It’ll only work for so long. There’s only a limited source of unpopulated properties within the city limits. Over the course of time, he’ll just have to get more creative if he wants to keep this surge of power up. And eventually, he won’t see any other option but to start killing people, and he knows that way leads to his ultimate destruction. Starvation being only the long term risk. Even now, he’s made himself the target of the U.S. military, who are likely holding back in order to watch him and attempt to find his weaknesses.

There’ve been a small handful of other dragons his size around the world, and a couple of them have had their run-ins with modern weaponry. Säure isn’t looking forward to that. 

But they were ugly beasts, clearly inferior to him. He suspects he has power that they did not. He just has to unlock it, like he did his ability to transform himself into something smaller.

Is that what this is? Has he been chosen by the Architects for one of their plans? Is he being given the opportunity to grow and learn at their hands?

He doesn’t want to believe it, despite how insistent the thought is. They’re nefarious and capricious beings, proving themselves untrustworthy and ultimately villainous. So, if he is being fed for some purpose of theirs, the day that he is to be discarded violently and ignobly cannot be far behind that moment of fruition.

No.

He must learn more and come to understand it.

So he’s making a figure eight low around the last four marked targets, which are now growing into larger conflagrations.

The neighborhood is the true center of the city, which has grown mostly Northward over the past few decades. Right on the edge of Downtown, the old Faiportian name for it being the Alphabet Ghetto, it’s no longer an area of any particular poverty. People who consider themselves to be middle class, as laughable as that is, have collected there. And now he can feel them cower so deliciously every time he makes a pass over their homes.

It’s full of old stick-built houses of various styles and so many trees. If the fires he’s started do spread, it could be a disaster for the city, and the people know it.

And his movement is spreading smoke all around the neighborhood.

If he wanted to, he could reach down with one claw and remove most of the roof of any one of the houses. Just one crushing swipe, and that family would have shelter no longer. They’d fear for their future more sharply, and he’d get the rush.

But his business right now is to find clues. To keep an eye out for movement or markings that indicate the actions of the Architects, or the Physicist specifically. Maybe a sign has been left to direct him further.

So, he’s focusing on that in the low and cold afternoon sun, only barely obscured by the smoke.

In the very edge of his peripheral vision, he catches a flicker of denser, darker fluttering movement in one of the smoke columns, and his head snaps to the side to allow his eye to center on it.

One of the city whelps is carrying something bulky up into the sky, using the heat of the fire as a concentrated thermal.

Bold.

He wonders how it can exert so much effort while breathing all that smoke. It should be weak and easy to snatch out of the air.

He turns and glides in under it, opening his jaws, and recognizes Meghan with a duffle bag just before he gets so close he has to use his memory of her location to zero in on her. With a maw as big as his, he doesn’t need a lot of precision.

He feels a bump and a scraping up his snout and forehead, once again.

Damn!

She’d done that before. He was certain she wouldn’t be able to evade him a second time, especially with all the power he’d just soaked, and the lack of oxygen in the air her tiny lungs must draw from.

This time he bucks his head back, in order to throw her and disrupt her flying, and then beats his wings hard to rise as fast as he can, leveling out quickly to pick up speed and turn as swiftly as possible. 

If he can just catch her falling and flailing with that ridiculous duffle bag in her claws…

—

Monday, September 2, over a month ago.

Dusk was falling fast in the Fairport Arboretum, and Wentin had already helped me confirm once again that I can tap into reserves of stamina and strength that should not exist. When pushed by circumstance to desperation, I can fly and fly and fly and fly.

The monster had suddenly stopped, and was now watching me from the ground while I clung to the highest part of the last tree I’d flown to that was still strong enough to support me.

It had been chasing me about the clearing that contained the observation tower.

Now it tilted its head at me and said, “Next lesson.”

“Yes,” I responded, feeling ready to do this.

“I forbid you to fly higher than the tree tops above you,” it said. “Which means, you cannot even cross this clearing. To evade me, you must enter the woods and remain there. And height will no longer be your savior.”

And with this proclamation, I knew I would not physically be able to do what it had just forbade of me. Unless I expressly refused to continue my training. If I wanted my lessons, I’d be bound in every way by its arbitrary rules.

But this felt familiar and doable. I’d only been training with Wentin since I could remember. It had been chasing me in my nightmares since my very first one, since before I was born. And when these memories gripped me, and I knew myself to be within one of those nightmares again, I could do the things I’d done before but had forgotten upon awakening.

This time, I would not forget.

But then Wentin ran at the observation tower, leaping up at it, and bounced off its supports to launch itself directly at me.

And all I could do was dive right into the woods, flapping briefly and as strongly as I could between trees to change my direction and keep moving, never to rise too high but also never to touch the ground.

And Wentin was ever closer behind me, leaping from trunk to trunk as if gravity fell in the direction that its toe beans pointed.

One moment above, and the next below me, it very nearly caught me in its claws or teeth countless times, on into the night.

And all I could do was push my ability to dodge and weave amongst the trees well beyond the bounds of my own belief.

—

But Meghan isn’t there.

She’s nowhere to be found. Not behind him. Not to either side. Not anywhere.

Not even on the ground, what there is of it he can see.

So he accelerates and twists and turns, trying to find her, hoping that she’s not found some way to cling to him like a remora or lamprey or something horrible like that.

—

Having Säure rise up beneath me as I’m trying to fly up and gain much needed altitude while carrying a bag full of electronics is worse than the first time.

Previously, I had been diving toward him, and had very little time to decide what to do, but I saw him head on with my own eyes. I was facing danger and in a split second would either die or evade it.

This time, I had been flying away from him and he was still catching up to me. It reminded me viscerally of all my chases with Wentin, from as early as I could remember in my life.

But, Säure’s enormous rising bulk and hot breath gave me the boost of air I needed to sail over his mouth and nose, and drop down to his brow yet again, scrambling over it and his skull to the space between his horns.

And there I’ve ducked into the draft of his head. There’s a pocket of air there as he passes through the sky with any speed, and it takes very little effort on my part to hide in it.

I’ve been practicing nightly since my last training with Wentin, and honing my ability to turn on my tail like a dragonfly. I can’t do it if I’m not in The Zone as they say. I have to be in the same state of mind I’m in when having a nightmare and taking control of it.

But Säure rising up beneath me to swallow me like a bug was certainly enough to put me right in that mental space.

Now, I’m surrounded by six gigantic horns, each the size of a hundred year old tree.

I examine the nearest one and find that it has these nice long crenulae, ridges with grooves between them, where I can stick a bone conduction speaker such that even I’d have trouble reaching it afterward. Nothing’s going to knock it off once it’s in there.

The trick is that I didn’t think to unzip the duffel bag beforehand, so now I have to do it while maintaining flight behind a rapidly and erratically moving dragon cranium.

I have to dodge and weave with the visual cues of Säure’s movements, and it’s no different for me than dancing with Wentin in its woods. Pure adrenaline and reflexes and some kind of violation of physics. And then, while I’m doing that, I reach down with my right foreclaw and grasp and grasp and grasp to hook it through the large loop of thin webbing strung through the zipper pull that I put there to allow me to open it while in dracoform.

In a lucky flurry of movement, I do open it, but nearly lose the bag.

It flutters precariously in the grip of my left rear claw, the speakers inside remaining there thanks to centrifugal force pulling them into the far corner of the bag, away from its opening.

My rear claws aren’t really meant for gripping. They’re my running feet. But I can strain to clench them around something if I absolutely have to, and I’ve been doing that this whole flight.

And I’m about to lose the bag entirely, it’s so precariously gripped between one claw and my big fat pad.

With the next strong downward beat of my wings, I arch my back, bringing that rear claw forward and grasping with both my foreclaws for the bag.

And I get it. It’s secured.

And I have to dodge and weave some more, and I nearly get slammed by gigantic dragon neck, and I find myself doing a barrel roll before having a moment where everything is relatively steady and easy to deal with.

Säure is pausing to think or choose his next move.

I let the bag hang from my left claw, and shove my right claw into it, reaching for a speaker. It’s the size of a bacon cinnamon roll.

It’s designed in such a way that I can easily feel where the adhesive side is, and can adjust my grip accordingly, its textures obvious even to my digits.

The adhesive isn’t sticky while I’m holding it. It’s a pad of foam-like material with Sharpie drawn circuit patterns all over it. All I have to do is touch it specifically to Säure’s horn, and it’ll stay there.

So, arm held out, speaker aimed appropriately, I dive in toward one of his horns.

—

Suddenly there’s a pop and a hum in his own skull. 

It feels like it’s coming from his lower left horn. Like an audial dimension of space has opened up in his head, unfolding from a point just outside of his usual perceptions.

And then another one, from the lower right horn.

He lets loose with the loudest screech of fury and indignant rage he can muster. And then, mid flight, reaches up with his right foreclaw to attempt to scrape whatever it is off of his horn.

The effort nearly has him plowing full bodied into the city, and he hardly avoids clipping the tallest trees with his rolling left wing. But he manages to right himself and pull up enough to flap safely to a higher altitude, slowly and agonizingly free from destroying his own hoard below.

Two more pops in quick succession increase the sensation of space opening up in his consciousness, and he shakes his head.

He can’t seem to stop this from happening!

He tries to duck his head as fast as he can, sharply and unexpectedly, but there’s two more pops, and all six of his horns are humming and his entire skull with them.

—

The next time he rises to gain altitude, I leap off the back of Säure’s head to give myself as much velocity as possible and dive toward the city below and behind him. I’ve already discarded the duffel bag, letting go with the last two conduction speakers placed.

I’m sure that bag is fluttering to the ground slowly enough it won’t really hurt anyone. I tell myself this.

It’s certainly less of a concern than the laser breathing angry aircraft carrier in the sky that’s literally feeding on the emotion of fear.

The turbulence caused by the work of Säure’s wings is fierce and buffets me this way and that, but I manage. It feels like dodging invisible trees.

This next phase will have to be up to everyone else.

—

Briefly, static fills his mind, followed by a distinctly feminine voice that's low and full of smoke, algae, and seashells, tinted with an accent that wobbles between something vaguely Scottish, what could be French, and a Vancouver B.C disc jockey.

He knows this voice. He's heard it before, nine years ago.

“Good afternoon, Daniel Aurelius Säure,” the Poet of the Architects says to him in his head. “Welcome to KFEN, the impromptu radio station that's in your head. I hope you've enjoyed your buffet of nightmares. Now we have a special after dinner act to serve up just for you, on behalf of the people of Fairport.”

He climbs as high as he can to see if he can leave the range of the transmission, but to no avail. But this gives him the aerial room to attempt to scrape the contraptions off his horns without crashing.

While he reaches for one of his horns with his claws, the Poet continues.

“Please relax. This will only take a minute or two,” it says. Then, as if to a sound tech while still on the air, “Can we have a mic check? Testing? Testing? One, two, three.”

And on the beat that would be four, a cacophony of whelp cries rises up from the neighborhoods of Fairport furthest away from him. It's like a circle of sound, faint on the wind, made of disparate calls.

And on the next beat, those from the next closest territories call out.

He can’t quite reach the device that's on his horn. He can’t feel it. He can tell it's still there by the ambient hum in his head. It's just too small, and hidden too well in a crevice of his horn.

And the next closest whelps cry out, as he works to regain altitude.

What if he folded himself up into his human form? Would these radio receivers follow him and still plague him, unreachable? Or would they fall off?

And then the whelps directly below him, including Meghan, call their challenges.

So, she's done her work and left him.

Immediately, he starts circling to change his location constantly.

Then the call cycle repeats, starting with this furthest from him again, and narrowing in, like an audial bullseye.

They all know where he is, and they're that coordinated. The bullseye adapts as he moves.

And of all things, the fear of the people he’s been feeding on begins to abate, sharply.

All he feels is the sudden loss of the flow of nourishment. There’s no other sensation.

But in its absence, it's too hard to not imagine a smugness, a pride, and a sense of regained confidence aimed at him.

The whole city begins to feel like his enemy, and he doesn't like it.

And then the cycle of calls occurs a third time.

He noticed something last time. Meghan’s distinctive cry has moved. Not only is he weaving and circling, but she is making a bee-line to the stadium.

Last time she was in the third circle of calls. Now she's in the second.

And she makes a point of crying out, too.

Is she trying to lead him there?

If she is, she's making herself a target. 

Säure has no qualms about burning her in the middle of a nearly defunct sports field. So he turns and follows.

“Now that we’ve got your attention, Säure,” the Poet’s voice cuts through his skull and mind again, “I’d like to recite you some of my poetry, if you don’t mind.”

[girldragongizzard]

Chapter 15: Trust me

Saturday afternoon, I find myself alone on my roof, looking out over a relatively quiet Fairport, with nothing left to do. It’s late enough in the season that the Farmer’s Market is no longer in session, and even Joel is nowhere to be seen. No children playing with him in his park.

I’ve spent the morning hanging out in my favorite coffee shop, listening to my friends banter and run their business. But then the shop got really busy and I left, to let them deal with the lunch rush.

That’s over, though, and the block is quiet again. People just haven’t really been staying downtown for as long as they used to since Säure started terrorizing the city. Even now that everyone’s kind of gotten used to it, and they joke about how he’s not really going to do anything, business hasn’t really recovered. And now I’m basking in what little sunlight the day has to offer.

And tomorrow’s The Day.

So I send an SMS message to Chapman, “Scan him.”

Yes. I lied. About a myriad of stuff. It was strategic. I learned about the tactic from reading gritty fantasy novels about military companies with horrible stinky wizards, because I was a weird girl. 

I hope it works.

—

It is Saturday, October 12, 2:31 pm, and Daniel Aurelian Säure has his nose in a spreadsheet and is losing patience with it.

This is something he’d normally delegate, similar to how he now has a lawyer reading and handling what to do about a certain impudent dragon’s tumblr blog, but he’s chosen to focus on this problem himself as a sort of old therapy. A way to try to keep his mind off of things that have gotten particularly galling. Such as a certain impudent dragon’s tumblr blog.

See, about a month and a half ago, his Point Roberts estate, where he is now in fact, underwent rapid, unexpected and catastrophic renovation.

He’d had to work particularly hard since he woke up under the starlight that early morning to keep it under wraps. To learn how to hide his own bulk, to control himself well enough to communicate to his people, and then to unlock his protective coloration in order to step back into his own shoes and take command again.

Fortunately, his master bedroom was well out of sight of any of his neighbors, and he had easy access to the water from there.

The rest was harrowing, nigh impossible, and a test of his very being. And he’s still not sure if he remembers it all very clearly. But, fortunately, he’d learned well from his grandfather, and had set up his businesses to operate efficiently and effectively even with his sudden and unexpected absence.

They’d all performed admirably. It was just the broader local politics he couldn’t account for without his own frequent personal touch, and he had to do some damage control once he was ready to start making public appearances again. And that had necessitated researching the new players on the stage as thoroughly as possible. And reading certain interviews with a certain impudent dragon who’d managed to capture the public’s imagination somehow just before one of his companies had tried to thoughtfully relocate her to environs much more suited to her kind.

In the process, he’d become emotionally entangled with her existence and influence. Especially when she managed to do something so useful as quelling massive civil unrest with only her voice.

And then he’d unexpectedly run into Meghan in person, and everything fell apart so quickly after that.

The fact that he didn’t have anything to blame but his own lack of self control didn’t make it any better.

And one of his favorite cars was destroyed during his own meltdown. Being directly attacked by one of the neighborhood dragon whelps didn’t help, of course. But he shouldn’t have put himself in that situation to begin with. He shouldn’t have tried to negotiate with Meghan on his own. He’d very nearly reverted to his natural form right there in the brewery, and that would have been an utter disaster.

Not that flying fully draconic over all the neighborhoods of Fairport hadn’t been the worst political move of his career.

But he’d also learned something profound about himself in the process.

When he’d done that, his need to eat physical food had plummeted dramatically, and he’d felt energized.

So, he’d commanded Morning Glory Corporation to start publicly distancing itself from him, to effectively fire him, and continue carrying out its mission, while his family still retained ownership of the company. And he started experimenting with this new mode of feeding he’d seemed to have found.

But, unfortunately, his flights weren’t just attempts at learning more about his own power. He also clearly had the attention of one of the local Architects, and he’d started trying to teach it to leave him alone.

Unfortunately, he realized couldn’t do any actual damage to the city, or anyone in it, and continue to feed at full efficiency.

When he tried to push himself that far, something in him pulled back with alarm, and he understood this to be his instinctual need for sustenance. Whatever he drew from the terrified populace would not come from a dead one.

And then, in the meantime, Meghan had started slandering him in her blog.

That had enraged him and sent him out on more feeding frenzies, which was also when he’d tried boiling to bay to instill more terror and fear.

It had worked, briefly. But the energy he had been gaining was starting to wane. He was getting less and less of it each time.

And that’s when he had changed tactics. He needed to start studying how to apply terror more directly. Instead of the subtle politics of fear and control he’d inherited from his family, to keep an iron grip on all his sources of wealth, now he needed to learn how to cultivate raw, physical terror for as long as possible, or supplement his diet with enormous quantities of meat.

Remaining in human guise did help with the need for massive calories, a bit. It was almost like it put his greater self into sort of a hibernation. But it was hard to keep it that way, and when he burst forth he was ravenous.

So, to give himself time to study and plan his new future, he relegated keeping track of local politics, and specifically Meghan and her pet Architects, to his personal team of lawyers and publicists.

And turned his own attention back onto raw numbers. Namely, the slow and careful, constructive renovations now proceeding on with his Point Roberts estate.

Which is what he is working on now.

He’s dealing with the pure numbers part of it. The time, money, materials, weight, space, energy consumption before, during, and after construction. All of it. This is one of the things he is particularly good at, gifted, even. Trying to find the best combination of variables to get the most out of a situation.

Usually, he’d leave this particular job to his contractors and do the numbers of his business dealings. But his home is personal. It’s important. It’s foundational. And with everything else in turmoil, turning to the care of his own lair is the best thing he can do. Everything will fall into place around it.

If he didn’t know any better, with the way things always turned out when he took this sort of control in something, he’d think he was one of the Architects himself.

But, as he’d learned from his family, you couldn’t be one of them. No one could. Not unwittingly. You couldn’t even join them if you wanted to. The Architects all knew who they were and there were never any more than 900,000 of them. And never any less, either.

And it was so funny, the people who could be considered mundane aware, that Meghan had linked him to because of his use of language, had no clue. No clue at all about just what the Architects were and how deep into Earth’s history they stretched. Those who say they’ve noticed so rarely actually have. They might dream and imagine all sorts of wild possibilities, but never truly allow themselves to believe any of it to be true. Only that the stories were convenient and compelling lies used to control the masses and bring them in line.

But he had books, ancient books, with names of Architects and the structures they’ve been building, passed down from father to son in his family for generations.

And some personal experience as well.

Just nine years ago, there had been a convergence of the Order of the Hunter and the Guardians right here in Independence County. And –

There’s that infernal buzzing from the Physicist!

He can’t bring himself to focus on his numbers or to get them to do what he wants, because his mind insists on racing over things he can’t control, and now this.

The Physicist is measuring him.

He’d promised himself to not rise to the occasion this time. To take a deep breath, tell himself there’s nothing he can do, and to refocus on his work.

But then it happens again.

And again and again in quick succession.

Is the Physicist deliberately trying to get a rise out of him?

Is that what that Devil’s Creature is doing?

Then, very specifically, Säure must refuse to engage.

Unfortunately, just as he turns back to his spreadsheet, pressing his fingers to his temples, he notices there’s a pattern.

He has to listen to it, and shortly he recognizes that it’s a sequence of long and short bursts of buzzing. So obviously Morse code, which he doesn’t know. 

Fortunately, jotting down the sequence is easy to do. And he keeps doing it until it repeats. Then he marks where it repeats, and then uses his computer to look up Morse code and how to translate it.

There’s a very easy to use translation app that comes up right away, using dashes and commas. So he plugs it in and the app instantly comes up with the most likely result.

“Your numbers won’t add up,” Chapman is repeatedly telling him.

—

Point Roberts is not exactly visible from my rooftop.

It’s on the other side of a bunch of low lying foothills that create the contours of the Lummi Reservation and the city of Jam, across a stretch of water beyond that. It’s a piece of land that’s only directly connected to Canada, but belongs to Washington State, and tends to be a great place for the wealthier residents of the area to live. To get to it, you either have to drive through Canada, or take a boat, helicopter, or seaplane.

Or swim or fly as a dragon.

I know where to look, though, because we’d long ago looked up where Säure is known to live, and that’s the result we got. Which had really only verified Chapman’s scans.

I can feel Chapman’s shifting, myself, coming from the very southern edge of Fairport, in what I’m led to understand is a vacant lot near Valley Parkway. That’s going to draw Säure right over my home, if he’s angry enough to attack directly. And the lack of any houses in that lot will make it a potential target for actual violence. We’re thinking that if Säure catches sight of that, it’ll draw his focus.

And boom, there he is.

Rising into the distant sky like a small mushroom cloud. Glowing even in broad daylight.

Oh.

He is pissed.

In preparation, I dive off the roof of my building and drop, spreading my wings.

—

Whenever he relaxes into his full self, Säure is reminded just how big and terrifying the world looked to him all the years leading to his metamorphosis. When he is fully stretched out, whether standing on the shore of his estate or gliding over the land of his territory, everything looks right and as it should be. And the relief is palpable.

And when he is all scrunched down into that little worm-like form and his eyes are only as far apart as any human’s, things tower above him that shouldn’t. And walking anywhere seems to take excruciating ages. It has always seemed that way.

But right now, even though he feels this change, he feels something bigger.

His rage, and the need to see if an Architect can be killed.

Maybe, this time, he’ll get lucky and find the tiny, supposedly immortal goblin residing in a place where he can safely land on it.

Or scour it from the face of the Earth with his breath, without singeing his own hoard of souls.

It takes almost no time for him to cross the distance to Fairport, and the buzzing of his nerves won’t stop.

He almost doesn’t notice the cry of one of the whelps as he passes over the land it thinks belongs to it, he’s so focused.

But this cry is followed by another. Not by the rippling of all neighboring cries as Meghan has taught them to do, but the cry of the next one he passes over.

This doesn’t bother him so much as itch in the back of his mind.

It smells of some kind of coordination. But, of course, that would happen where there are Architects present. It’s to be expected. This merely confirms to him that this is some kind of trap he’s only going to have to destroy.

And this continues as he crosses farmland into suburb and crosses over city toward the buzzing of the Physicist.

He even hears the telltale cry of Meghan as he passes over downtown Fairport. She’s not on her roof. He knows she likes to make her rounds.

He’ll deal with her in time. The Physicist is well outside of her territory.

In fact, he can see the location from where he’s at. His exceptional eyesight can pinpoint the lot where his nerves tell him where the Physicist is.

It’s confusing.

Why would that Architect hide in there?

It’s a piece of greenway, a part of the watershed, a wetland where the local creek runs through the neighborhood, protected for a group of spawning salmon and whatever birds and other fauna want to hide in the foliage there. People aren’t even supposed to wander into that lot.

A well placed ray of concentrated UV energy should obliterate the Physicist there without harming a single human soul, and the Physicist should know that.

And it’s not running from him.

What could it have in store for him? Something like the light traps left on Meghan’s roof?

There’s no substrate on which to craft one of those. And he didn’t feel the Architect at work attempting to create anything, unless this buzzing of communication is achieving something else as well.

Well, the only way to discover what this trap is is to spring it, and he certainly can do that.

At first, he flies in low over the cozy little neighborhood of students and lower class families, rumbling infrasonically as he goes to strike an instinctual fear into the populace below him, their nerves jangled by sound they cannot hear as the sun is blotted out for a moment. And he soaks it in.

The local whelps have announced his arrival as he flew in, and that only added to the anticipation and tension that everyone must be feeling.

Then, when he’s past the lot with the Physicist in it, he pulls up and rises up as high into the air as his godly wings can lift him.

When he can’t pull himself any higher, a point at which he is touching the very Heavens with his nose, he twists and turns and sets his eyes on his mark, pulling his wings in.

Straight down he plummets, opening his jaws.

—

What I see, as I come in low through campus and the streets of Southside Fairport, rocketing through the territories of gronk_lizard and Brenna, is what I’ve actually always expected an orbital laser weapon to look like.

An instant flash of iridescent flames off on the other end of the neighborhood in front of me, quickly overcome with rising smoke illuminated by intensely glowing indigo light from above.

There’s no visible ray, not even for me. Not until it meets the smoke.

But then this gargantuan white monster of muscles, scales, horns, teeth and claws snaps its wings out and pulls itself up from its dive toward that conflagration and misses the ground there, sliding over rooftops directly toward me.

The downward rush of wind cause by the passage of his wings, and the compression of the air necessary to keep Säure aloft, quashes the fire right out, flattening charred trees and brambles in its wake, and cause the smoke to disperse in rolling swirls that spread out over the surrounding houses.

Not quite the maneuver I was hoping he’d make.

I’m going to have to wing it now.

Fortunately, Chapman’s shifting starts up again from somewhere else in the city, right on cue.

I’ll have the time to catch up and figure this out.

It’s probably worth mentioning I’m using my rear feet to carry the duffel bag that Chapman gave me a while ago to hold clothes in.

It has something else in it now.

This slows me down, but it will be worth it if I can catch up to a bewildered and increasingly frustrated and flustered Säure.

As I rise behind Säure’s passage to turn and follow him, I glance back at the now destroyed lot.

The Poet used to live there, if her old comics were true. But she’s taken to residing in other haunts now.

And the sirens of several fire engines start up.

—

Rhoda pours some tea into a cup that isn’t hers or Meghan’s and places the pot back down onto the table.

She likes to collect old school magazine clippings of animal photos from all over the world. There are a handful of publications that have always been good for this, and she’s been vulturing the library and garage sales for discarded copies every year, to cut them up with her general use scissors.

She’s sandwiched her favorite images in a big collage between the two panes of glass of her coffee table. It’s a table designed specifically for this kind of decoration.

The pot goes onto the wicker tray, which is obscuring a family of meerkats, a tiger, a handful of butterflies, and an elephant.

But she moves the cup and its saucer across the table from where she’s sitting and places it next to a komodo dragon. Which she likes to imagine is a meaningful gesture on her part, though she can’t quite imagine just what it means besides the thought of their mutual concern.

She looks up at her guest.

“I can’t help but think that Meghan’s plan is too elaborate,” Chapman says. “I’m not even sure that her insistence that we obscure everything we did behind all that thin misdirection was worth the effort. But, I did my best to contribute to it. I don’t think my parts will fail.”

“Mm,” Rhoda nods. “I know I don’t fully believe what you and Ptarmigan told me, and I do resent it. I get that it wasn’t your doing, but I still resent the hell out of it. But, for all of us, I am keeping my faith in it, Chapman. Lord help me, but I am.”

“Thank you,” the Physicist says, taking a sip of hir tea.

“What was it you made again?” Rhoda asks.

“Well,” Chapman says, putting hir tea back down. “I call them Timed Scan Autorepeaters and Reliable Adhesive Bone Conduction Speakers with Long Range Receivers. Nathan ordered the components a couple weeks ago. I just put my mark on them, really. The Autorepeaters are old record players hooked up to remote triggers, with specially decorated LPs on them. Powering them was as simple as powering Meg’s tablet. Easy peasy stuff. Mostly just had to fret about shipping time.” Chapman’s head perks up and sie looks off into the distance. “Oop. Gotta trigger the next one.”

Sie picks up hir phone and presses a widget in the quick menu of the lock screen.

—

It wasn’t all lies. Mostly, there’s just a bunch of stuff I didn’t tell you (or Säure) about. And more than a few extra conversations. Don’t worry. Now that he’s out and about, I’ll do my best to keep you up to date.

I started all of this right after our lunch date. A number of things he said tipped me off to just how much he’d been keeping tabs on me, and I couldn’t have that.

[girldragongizzard]

I am breaking kayfabe. I need to.

This post is not canonical to my novels, and neither are the tags of the previous post.

But I need to brag and share.

I've just had a daughter (in our system - we're headmates of @theinmara), and I've been helping her come up with a name for herself.

After a couple hours perusing lists of names, she chose Nettle.

Then, just now we had this conversation:

Me: Ooh! You should name your tumblr blog girldragonthagomizer!

Nettle: Mom! I don't want a blog. Tumblr is such an old person thing!

I might get her that url anyway, just to make sure it's there for her when she grows up.

[girldragongizzard]

Not to critique evolution, but I would think orange and black stripes wouldn’t be as good for camouflage in a forest as, say, green and black would.