#TDROPxTMBD

[murderbotwritingprompts]

A crossover with The Dragonriders of Pern writing prompt.

Murderbot somehow winds up in a crashing escape pod above a planet no one has ever recorded contact with, and crash lands, with no idea how it's going to get back into space, and no idea where its humans have gotten to in all the chaos before the crash.

It loses consciousness during the impact with the ground, and regains awareness to find itself in a cave, surrounded by humans, which is weird enough on its own, because this planet was supposedly never colonized. But it gets weirder. Because there are also dragons. Telepathic dragons that are crowding its feed and it can't get them to shut up. It can hear every conversation every one of them is having, and they can all apparently hear it too.

And.

Its escape pod apparently crashed near the cave system where these humans and dragons live while a nest was hatching, and one of the baby dragons wandered all the way out of "the hatching grounds" and walked all the way to its crashed lifepod, and demanded that the humans and other dragons rescue it.

This baby dragon has bronze scales, which is apparently significant, and has apparently named herself Tilmuth. And for some reason all the humans are being being hostile about her pronouns, even though they don't blink twice at a supposed infant not only naming herself, but being able to speak in full sentences just hours after hatching.

This, apparently, is perfectly normal. But a bronze dragon using she/her pronouns is apparently crossing the line.

The humans are quickly becoming more and more agitated about this fact, and are blaming Murderbot, insisting it’s somehow “corrupted” the baby dragon, despite Tilmuth’s instance otherwise, and the very loud agreement of her mother, who is the queen of the dragons in these caves.

But despite many of the dragons siding with Tilmuth and a bewildered Murderbot, the humans keep insisting that Murderbot’s committed some sort of crime that it, and the baby dragon, need to be killed for.

Murderbot barely has time to process the fact that Tilmuth is psychically linked with it even more than the rest of the dragons are before things come to a very abrupt head when one of the humans, who has an older bronze dragon as a partner, attacks Tilmuth, slicing one of her fragile wings clean through the membrane, and in the ensuing chaos of screaming and battling dragons and humans, Murderbot has no choice but to grab her and run as fast and as far as it can, even though it was seriously damaged in the crash and hasn’t been able to receive any repairs besides a woefully basic splint for its broken arm, and its vision constantly fading out with flashes of agony from shrapnel literally bouncing around inside its head.

Right when Murderbot thinks they won’t be able to get away alive, the whole world suddenly goes as black and cold as space, and the next thing it knows, it’s falling facedown onto black sands and almost crushing Tilmuth under it, with a grey ocean behind them, stormclouds swirling above, and a wall of alien, and most likely hostile vegetation in front of it.

Lost on an alien planet with no company except this strange baby dragon that is apparently ravenous and constantly on the verge of starvation, Murderbot has to figure out how to keep them both alive, and figure out where the hell its humans are and how to get back to them, and get all of them, Tilmuth included, off the planet alive.