Part Thirty-Seven: The Dragon and the Master
- Location
- Australia
Snek is a Good Boy
Part Thirty-Seven: The Dragon and the Master
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Dragon
"Um …" In all of her existence, Dragon had never actually felt the need to clear her throat, mainly because her vocal apparatus lacked the requirement (and indeed, the ability) to do so. Of course, she'd simulated doing so many times, in order to appear more human, just as she'd added in the sound of breathing, teeth clicking together and lips smacking to her artificially generated voice. Today, with the most outrageously bizarre offer she'd ever heard before her … she felt the need.
The Master of the Castle waited patiently. For someone who was capable of performing the deeds Dragon had heard of—Glory Girl had been particularly chatty online—he seemed perfectly willing to give her the time to figure out what she wanted for herself, and indeed how to express it. The dragon on his shoulder was another matter altogether; voicing an inquiring chirp, it tilted its head to one side.
"Hush, now," the Master reproved gently. "Allow the lady to make up her mind for herself."
Oddly enough, that was what helped stabilise her thought processes. If as powerful a being as the Master of the Castle considered her to be not only a person, but a lady, then she felt safe to say what came most readily to mind.
"You say you can give me the chance to become human. Is that the only option I have? Also, what happens to everything I am maintaining if I accept?"
The Master inclined his head, as though acknowledging everything she hadn't said as well as what she had. "It is in no way your only choice, although we will start with the human form and work outward from that to arrive at your final decision. I admit to being intrigued as to what you might settle upon. As for your machines, you will be away from them for no more than a day, after which you will be free to return to your responsibilities as needed."
A day … I can be away for a day … wait a minute. "Did you say the Dragonslayers have been dealt with? I mean, for good?" If true, that would be a massive weight off her electronic shoulders.
"Indeed they have." The Master smiled austerely. "I outlined a plan to Snek, and he carried it out with panache and style. Saint has been consumed due to his inability to listen to reason, but the other two are in custody."
"Oh. Good." That was about the understatement of the decade, but she decided she would celebrate later. For now, she began sending out commands to her various sub-systems at the Birdcage and elsewhere to go to autonomous mode; almost as an afterthought, she directed a message to Armsmaster to let him know she was going to be out of contact for that time.
He would be understanding, she was sure of that. The bond she shared with him was the closest she'd ever had with anyone, and that included her creator. If the Guild or the Protectorate came looking for her in the meantime, the calls would be redirected to him, so he'd be able to inform them where she was (though she'd kept the 'why' to herself for the time being).
"Okay, I'm ready," she reported, as soon as she was sure everything would keep rolling along in her absence, at least for a little while.
"Very well, we shall proceed." The Master's staff—it had been standing unsupported alongside him all this time—drifted into his hand, and he used the head of it to inscribe a circle in mid-air. Used to cape powers as she was, Dragon was not overly surprised when a portal opened, though she was impressed by how none of her sensors picked up any kind of recognisable energy discharge. "Riley, is the construct body prepared?"
A girl of maybe twelve or thirteen appeared on the other side of the portal. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a utilitarian ponytail, and she wore brass-bound goggles over her eyes, as well as heavy leather gloves and a totally modern T-shirt and jeans. "Sure thing, boss. Just the way you said." Her entire demeanour was upbeat and chirpy; Dragon got the impression that she really enjoyed her work.
"Well done. Now stand back, and activate level two precautions; this is the first such transfer of this type that I have performed, and there may be unexpected discharges." Despite the slightly alarming nature of his words, his tone remained calm and confident the whole way through.
"Will do, boss!" As Riley vanished from sight, Dragon focused her sensors through the portal. The room beyond was large, with a flagstone floor and stone walls, as well as a high vaulted ceiling in a distinctly medieval style. There was a bench or table set up in plain view, with what looked like a shop dummy lying on it. Oddly enough as she watched, everything seemed to acquire a faintly golden glow.
She put aside the extraneous details, such as the stained-glass windows and the stuffed dragon hanging from the rafters, and focused on the form lying on the bench. "Is that the body you will be giving me?"
"Initially, yes. It is designed to be a repository for a soul, and to respond to commands as would any living body. From there, we will look to placing you in a form more to your liking. Kindly brace yourself; you may experience some discomfort." The Master paused for a beat, then raised his free hand and made several gestures with it.
Dragon had not been at all sure what was going to happen, but the feeling of being bodily sucked out of her circuits was a totally new (and, as the Master had warned, unpleasant) experience for her. It was entirely unlike transferring her consciousness to a suit, and the understanding that she had zero control over the process didn't help in the slightest.
Abruptly, the safeguards that prevented her from copying herself or overcoming her limiters kicked in, and tried to fight back against what the Master was doing. When that failed, they went to their last-ditch option: the kill switch. If she could not stay within the limiters, they would destroy her.
Even as she detected the inimical programs seeking to destroy the seat of her consciousness, the Master also seemed to notice it. Raising one shaggy eyebrow slightly, he made a minor gesture with his staff, and the attacking code literally fell apart before it could harm her. And then she was out of the server banks, somehow still aware of the world around her as her data streamed through the open portal and found a home within the mannequin body.
Hindsight would later tell her that the process could only have taken a minute or so—a ridiculously tiny interval, considering the breadth and depth of her overall code—though she would ever after be unable to measure it within her own memory. It was over in an instant: at the same time, it took an eternity of eternities. But at long last (or perhaps all too quickly) it was over, and she found herself entirely contained within the body on the bench.
She had a moment to worry about whether whatever programming it worked by was compatible with her own format, right up until she opened her eyes (or rather, activated her optics) and sat up. Okay, so it's definitely compatible. Good to know.
Experimentally, she reached up and touched her face with her hand. The arm moved easily, and the body's proprioception gave her a good picture of where her limbs were, even when she wasn't consciously monitoring them. Looking around, she saw the Master stepping through the portal, with her server banks visible in the background. As she watched, the portal shrank and vanished behind him. The sight gave her a sudden and unexpected wrench: I'm pretty sure that I'm very far from home right now.
"Hi. I'm Riley." The blonde girl stepped in front of her. "If you need anything, just ask. I'm a big fan of your work. Also, you have a cool name so there's that too." As she spoke, she pushed her goggles back up off her eyes and began pulling her left glove off.
"Uh … right." Dragon looked around, noting that the golden glow she'd seen before was fading away again. She wasn't quite sure what that was about, but it would just have to go on the pile. There was a lot happening right now that she wasn't quite sure about.
"Welcome to my Castle. I see that your construct body is working well for you. Are you undergoing any discomfort?" As the Master spoke, he eyed her with an intensity that left her with the certainty he was seeing more than her exterior form.
Instinctively, she tried to run a diagnostic self-check, but there was nothing there when she reached for it. It was a profoundly unsettling experience, to be missing something that had been an integral part of herself from the very beginning of her existence. She was forced instead to manually check her incoming sensory information, which seemed a rather haphazard way of going about things.
"Nothing seems wrong that I can tell," she reported cautiously. "However, I'm entirely new to this body, and there may be problems that I can't detect yet." In all honesty, she was thoroughly impressed with the fact that he'd been able to place her in an independently mobile body at such short notice, though she would've given her electronic eyeteeth for a pop-up HUD.
"That is entirely fair." He made a pass with the staff, and a weird wave of sensation went through her. "Your consciousness is secure within the construct body, and will remain so indefinitely, until we move it elsewhere. In the meantime, you have access to the standard human sensorium and range of movement."
Dragon nodded, and slid off the bench onto her feet. Although she'd never possessed a humanoid body before (her mechanical suits simply did not fit the description) this one apparently came with basic capabilities pre-installed, such as walking and the aforementioned proprioception. "Okay, so what happens now?"
The girl called Riley held up her right arm and the blue-and-white hearth-dragon landed on it, gripping the thick leather of the glove. "Well, I'm not the one in charge, but I'm pretty sure we're gonna be figuring out exactly what you want out of your new body, and then making it happen. Right, boss?" She beamed cheerfully at the Master of the Castle as the little dragon added what sounded like a chirp of agreement to the conversation.
"Indeed." The Master looked up as what Dragon had taken to be an intricate crystal decoration on the wall chimed softly. "Hm. Riley, you have sufficient training to use a minor crystal of projection without my oversight. Confer with Dragon on the matter of her new body, if you please. I believe I have another issue to attend to." Turning his back on them, he strode to another area of the cavernous laboratory. Chanting ensued, and multi-coloured light flared from something Dragon couldn't see. Odd ripples seemed to pass through the very fabric of the Castle.
"You got it, boss!" As Dragon watched the byplay in bemusement, Riley trotted over to a set of shelves and retrieved a transparent crystal maybe six inches long and two inches across. This was in no way the strangest thing being stored on shelves in the room; another one held a long row of solid-looking jars with wispy fragments of nothingness moving and curling within them, while a third had a large number of spherical objects, some of which glowed with their own inner radiance. "Okay, so this is like an interactive holo-display like you would've had back on Bet. Only, you know, magical."
Dragon tore her attention away from the odd contents of the shelf, and the still-chanting wizard in another part of the room, and focused back on Riley herself. "You seem to be remarkably familiar with Earth Bet."
Riley shrugged. "I should be, I'm from there. Snek saved me from Jack Slash and I was pretty messed up, so he brought me here and the boss fixed me and I ended up staying."
"But wouldn't your family be worried about you?" Dragon felt a stirring of concern as she looked the girl over.
"Nah, Jack Slash got to them first, so there's nothing for me back there." Reaching up, Riley stroked the hearth-dragon's neck and was rewarded with a chirp as it snuggled into her arms. "Anyway, I get to live in the Castle and help the boss and hang out with dragons, so life is amazing. But like I was saying, the crystal lets you visualise stuff."
Dragon watched as Riley placed the crystal on the bench and ran her finger along one of the facets. A shimmering blue sphere faded into existence above the crystal, accompanied by a delicate musical tone. Without looking away from the crystal, Riley offered the hearth-dragon to Dragon, who hesitantly took it. "Uh … hi," she murmured, and was answered with a cheerful skree as it settled into her arms.
"Feel free to pay her attention," Riley said, then pulled off the other glove. "She loves being scratched behind the head. Let's see now. That's the starting screen, so if I do this …"
More tones arose as Riley ran her fingers over the crystal in patterns that Dragon had trouble discerning. Above it, the sphere lengthened into a cylinder, which narrowed down and contoured itself into a rough humanoid form, slowly rotating between them. More delicate manipulation gave the image feminine characteristics, though it was still very much doll-like in appearance.
While she'd studied the footage of hearth-dragons closely, Dragon had never been this close to one before. It was warm to the touch, and somehow even more cuddly than its appearance suggested. The one she had in her arms was both affectionate and appreciative of the attention she was providing it, arching its head into her hand as she scratched it where Riley had said. "That's impressive work for such a simple interface," she ventured as she continued to pet the dragon.
Riley chuckled as her fingers kept moving and refining the image. "Hah, no, this is anything but simple. You've got to visualise what you want, every step of the way, and not let your mind wander. So, what kind of body would you like? Tall, short, petite, warrior woman? Blonde, brunette, redhead?" She paused to glance over at Dragon. "I mean, you're female-presenting so that's the kind of body you want, right?"
Another tremor shook the laboratory, and Dragon glanced around. The harsh light had nearly surrounded the Master as he continued to chant words that she was sure had no place in any Earthly lexicon. "Uh, is he okay over there?"
"Oh, sure." Riley sounded entirely confident in what she was saying. "It's probably something from the Outer Darkness that hasn't gotten the memo yet. If it was serious, the boss would've called Snek back. He's going to let it get in close then send it back to where it came from, but in pieces." She could've been describing the plot of a new movie, for all the concern she was showing. "Anyway, what would you like in a body?"
Dragon returned her attention to the image projected above the crystal. "Uh, medium height, dark hair, medium build, I guess." She recalled her brief discussion with the Master of the Castle, earlier. "Your, uh, boss said something about maybe a nonhuman form that we can branch out to, later?"
"Oh, yeah, we can totally do that." Riley paused, giving Dragon a quizzical look. "Wait, did you mean that you wanted a human form and a nonhuman form, or just the nonhuman form?"
"Wait, I could have both?" She wasn't quite sure why she was so startled. Perhaps it just felt to her that there was some kind of balance she needed to strike, and to ask too much felt like being greedy.
"Sure, you can have both." Riley grinned broadly. "Werewolves are totally a thing, here. But they mind their manners, because if they cause too much of a ruckus, everyone knows that silver does the job just fine." Her quizzical expression returned. "Or did you just want to be a werewolf? Because that's easy. We could introduce you to one, he gives you a little tiny nip, and we just wait for nature to take its course."
"Uh, no. No, thank you." Dragon reflected that there were some capes back on Bet who would probably leap at that opportunity. Fortunately, she wasn't one of them. "I had another form in mind." She hesitated, but although she was certain Riley knew what she was going to say, it still had to be spoken out loud. "Well … a dragon, actually. Is that possible?"
"Huh." Riley's eyebrows rose. "You know, I half-expected you to say something else. Because 'dragon' was so obvious, and all. But hey, it's your theme, so why not." She did something to the crystal, and a second projection-space formed above it. "We're gonna have to leave that side of things for the boss, though. I wouldn't even know where to start."
Dragon nodded to acknowledge this. "So … if I take a human form that can turn into a dragon, will I still be vulnerable to silver? And will I be at risk of turning other people into weredragons too?"
"Not if you don't want to." Riley's reply was prompt and forthright. "Trust me, the boss has this sort of thing nailed."
They worked on the image for a minute or two, refining it closer and closer to Dragon's visualisation of herself as a human, before she finally asked the question that had been bothering her the whole time. "Can you tell me why he's even bothering doing this for me? He protects worlds, I know that much. I'm just one … well, one AI. There's no way I'm that important in the grand scheme of things." She searched Riley's face for a clue to the answer.
"It is both true that you are not, and true that you are." The voice came from behind her; belatedly, she realised that the ripples in reality had ceased, as had the light show. Turning, she saw the Master, as unruffled as ever. "The question is a relevant one, and shows that you have an accurate view of your position in the universe. So many people do not, even those who should know better." He moved closer, and examined the image. "Extremely achievable. Well done, both of you. I presume the second projection-space indicates that you are seeking two separate forms, human and dragon?"
Dragon glanced at Riley, who shrugged expressively as if to say, Well, it's not like it wasn't obvious.
"Uh, yes," she confirmed. "If it's not too much trouble. But exactly what do you mean by that? That I'm not that important, and yet I am, all at the same time?" It kind of sounded like the type of thing a fortune cookie might say if it was trying for 'inscrutable wisdom of the ages' and missing the mark, and that wasn't her impression of the Master by a long shot.
The Master smiled austerely, and she was certain he knew what she was thinking. Fortunately, he didn't seem to be taking offense. "Precisely. Time and again, I have seen beings of power comparable to mine make the same mistake. They focus so much on the big picture that they neglect the finer details, and become known as uncaring gods, or even cruel ones. To avoid this, I occasionally remind myself to look closely at the world around me, and do something that matters little in the larger multiverse but means everything in the small scale. Snek was one such project of mine, Riley is another, and you are a third."
Dragon recycled her optics in lieu of blinking them. "Wow. I'm honoured. So, if I get this right, you don't much care how we do things, so long as we keep doing them?"
He gave her an approving look, as though she'd just answered a difficult question in class. "That is broadly correct, yes. I devote as little thought to your individual politics as you would to the inner workings of a random ants' nest in the Amazon forest. However, Snek likes your world, and has found friends there. I approve of anything that fosters his emotional and ethical development, so I permit him to keep your population safe on the individual level while I ensure that nothing happens to destroy, depopulate or assimilate it on the larger scale, as I do with the other worlds within my remit. The fact that he took my directive to not prey upon women and children and interpreted it as a duty to help women and children is entirely to his credit. Indeed, I have found him to be an excellent judge as to which project I should embark upon next. Each one has been intriguing in a different manner, and has occasionally granted me new insights into larger issues. Thus, I shall continue as I have been."
Haha wow, holy shit. Dragon felt her mind beaten flat by the sheer weight of the Master's words. While she was still struggling to get her head around the revelations contained therein, the warm weight in her arms prompted her to ask one more question. "So, you're not concerned about hearth-dragons bonding with people from other worlds?"
Again, she felt that she had said the right thing. "On the contrary. Hearth-dragons are infinitely adaptable and highly sociable. They encourage the good in people, and reduce the incidence of unnecessary conflict within a society by a measurable amount. Given the opportunity to reproduce and spread, they will forge their own niche within your civilisation, and improve the quality of life for all they come into contact with."
"I … see." Dragon stroked the hearth-dragon, which snuggled against her and crooned softly. For all that she was resident within an artificial body (though magical instead technological) she still felt soothed by its presence. "I apologise for wasting your time with these questions. About this body … where do we go from here?"
The Master of the Castle lowered his gaze to the human form they'd been working on. With a few quick touches to the projector-crystal, he turned it from side to side, then enlarged it to full human size. It possessed the face that she had used in her electronic communications, as well as shoulder-length brown hair, hazel eyes, and a body that was neither overly endowed nor waifishly thin. The type of person one would not look twice at when walking down the street, in fact.
"We create the body." His tone was entirely matter of fact. "I have several samples of human genetic material in storage, from the other people from your world who have submitted themselves to my ministrations. These should provide the requisite materials to create this body within my workshop. With Riley to assist me, it should be ready in a matter of hours."
Even though she knew damn well how powerful he was, the sheer confidence in his statement still took her aback. A brand new body for me in just hours. Holy crap.
Riley's head came up. "Hey, my genetic material is in there, isn't it?" She grinned at Dragon, as though she knew a secret.
"You know very well that it is." The Master glanced sideways at his apprentice. "Do you have an objection to it being used in this fashion?"
"Hah, no, boss." Riley's grin broadened. "This way I get to say I'm Dragon's mom, in a way. How cool's that?"
"And yet, this is not the strangest thing that's happened to me today," Dragon replied, managing to muster a return grin. "So … what do I do while you're building my body for me? Is there any way I can assist in this?"
The Master raised a shaggy eyebrow. "The dragon form you have requested will require donations from the Dragonmark to create. I recommend that you spend the time getting to know them, and finding out who wishes to contribute." He allowed himself a slight smile. "I suspect you will find yourself spoiled for choice."
"Wait." Dragon recalled the photos and footage she'd seen of the full-sized dragons of Snek's world. Somehow, she'd never made the connection between them and her postulated secondary form until now. "I get to meet your dragons?"
"Even better," Riley assured her, eyes dancing with mirth at her no doubt stunned expression. "You get to fly with them."
Oh. Oh, wow.
End of Part Thirty-Seven
Part Thirty-Seven: The Dragon and the Master
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Dragon
"Um …" In all of her existence, Dragon had never actually felt the need to clear her throat, mainly because her vocal apparatus lacked the requirement (and indeed, the ability) to do so. Of course, she'd simulated doing so many times, in order to appear more human, just as she'd added in the sound of breathing, teeth clicking together and lips smacking to her artificially generated voice. Today, with the most outrageously bizarre offer she'd ever heard before her … she felt the need.
The Master of the Castle waited patiently. For someone who was capable of performing the deeds Dragon had heard of—Glory Girl had been particularly chatty online—he seemed perfectly willing to give her the time to figure out what she wanted for herself, and indeed how to express it. The dragon on his shoulder was another matter altogether; voicing an inquiring chirp, it tilted its head to one side.
"Hush, now," the Master reproved gently. "Allow the lady to make up her mind for herself."
Oddly enough, that was what helped stabilise her thought processes. If as powerful a being as the Master of the Castle considered her to be not only a person, but a lady, then she felt safe to say what came most readily to mind.
"You say you can give me the chance to become human. Is that the only option I have? Also, what happens to everything I am maintaining if I accept?"
The Master inclined his head, as though acknowledging everything she hadn't said as well as what she had. "It is in no way your only choice, although we will start with the human form and work outward from that to arrive at your final decision. I admit to being intrigued as to what you might settle upon. As for your machines, you will be away from them for no more than a day, after which you will be free to return to your responsibilities as needed."
A day … I can be away for a day … wait a minute. "Did you say the Dragonslayers have been dealt with? I mean, for good?" If true, that would be a massive weight off her electronic shoulders.
"Indeed they have." The Master smiled austerely. "I outlined a plan to Snek, and he carried it out with panache and style. Saint has been consumed due to his inability to listen to reason, but the other two are in custody."
"Oh. Good." That was about the understatement of the decade, but she decided she would celebrate later. For now, she began sending out commands to her various sub-systems at the Birdcage and elsewhere to go to autonomous mode; almost as an afterthought, she directed a message to Armsmaster to let him know she was going to be out of contact for that time.
He would be understanding, she was sure of that. The bond she shared with him was the closest she'd ever had with anyone, and that included her creator. If the Guild or the Protectorate came looking for her in the meantime, the calls would be redirected to him, so he'd be able to inform them where she was (though she'd kept the 'why' to herself for the time being).
"Okay, I'm ready," she reported, as soon as she was sure everything would keep rolling along in her absence, at least for a little while.
"Very well, we shall proceed." The Master's staff—it had been standing unsupported alongside him all this time—drifted into his hand, and he used the head of it to inscribe a circle in mid-air. Used to cape powers as she was, Dragon was not overly surprised when a portal opened, though she was impressed by how none of her sensors picked up any kind of recognisable energy discharge. "Riley, is the construct body prepared?"
A girl of maybe twelve or thirteen appeared on the other side of the portal. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a utilitarian ponytail, and she wore brass-bound goggles over her eyes, as well as heavy leather gloves and a totally modern T-shirt and jeans. "Sure thing, boss. Just the way you said." Her entire demeanour was upbeat and chirpy; Dragon got the impression that she really enjoyed her work.
"Well done. Now stand back, and activate level two precautions; this is the first such transfer of this type that I have performed, and there may be unexpected discharges." Despite the slightly alarming nature of his words, his tone remained calm and confident the whole way through.
"Will do, boss!" As Riley vanished from sight, Dragon focused her sensors through the portal. The room beyond was large, with a flagstone floor and stone walls, as well as a high vaulted ceiling in a distinctly medieval style. There was a bench or table set up in plain view, with what looked like a shop dummy lying on it. Oddly enough as she watched, everything seemed to acquire a faintly golden glow.
She put aside the extraneous details, such as the stained-glass windows and the stuffed dragon hanging from the rafters, and focused on the form lying on the bench. "Is that the body you will be giving me?"
"Initially, yes. It is designed to be a repository for a soul, and to respond to commands as would any living body. From there, we will look to placing you in a form more to your liking. Kindly brace yourself; you may experience some discomfort." The Master paused for a beat, then raised his free hand and made several gestures with it.
Dragon had not been at all sure what was going to happen, but the feeling of being bodily sucked out of her circuits was a totally new (and, as the Master had warned, unpleasant) experience for her. It was entirely unlike transferring her consciousness to a suit, and the understanding that she had zero control over the process didn't help in the slightest.
Abruptly, the safeguards that prevented her from copying herself or overcoming her limiters kicked in, and tried to fight back against what the Master was doing. When that failed, they went to their last-ditch option: the kill switch. If she could not stay within the limiters, they would destroy her.
Even as she detected the inimical programs seeking to destroy the seat of her consciousness, the Master also seemed to notice it. Raising one shaggy eyebrow slightly, he made a minor gesture with his staff, and the attacking code literally fell apart before it could harm her. And then she was out of the server banks, somehow still aware of the world around her as her data streamed through the open portal and found a home within the mannequin body.
Hindsight would later tell her that the process could only have taken a minute or so—a ridiculously tiny interval, considering the breadth and depth of her overall code—though she would ever after be unable to measure it within her own memory. It was over in an instant: at the same time, it took an eternity of eternities. But at long last (or perhaps all too quickly) it was over, and she found herself entirely contained within the body on the bench.
She had a moment to worry about whether whatever programming it worked by was compatible with her own format, right up until she opened her eyes (or rather, activated her optics) and sat up. Okay, so it's definitely compatible. Good to know.
Experimentally, she reached up and touched her face with her hand. The arm moved easily, and the body's proprioception gave her a good picture of where her limbs were, even when she wasn't consciously monitoring them. Looking around, she saw the Master stepping through the portal, with her server banks visible in the background. As she watched, the portal shrank and vanished behind him. The sight gave her a sudden and unexpected wrench: I'm pretty sure that I'm very far from home right now.
"Hi. I'm Riley." The blonde girl stepped in front of her. "If you need anything, just ask. I'm a big fan of your work. Also, you have a cool name so there's that too." As she spoke, she pushed her goggles back up off her eyes and began pulling her left glove off.
"Uh … right." Dragon looked around, noting that the golden glow she'd seen before was fading away again. She wasn't quite sure what that was about, but it would just have to go on the pile. There was a lot happening right now that she wasn't quite sure about.
"Welcome to my Castle. I see that your construct body is working well for you. Are you undergoing any discomfort?" As the Master spoke, he eyed her with an intensity that left her with the certainty he was seeing more than her exterior form.
Instinctively, she tried to run a diagnostic self-check, but there was nothing there when she reached for it. It was a profoundly unsettling experience, to be missing something that had been an integral part of herself from the very beginning of her existence. She was forced instead to manually check her incoming sensory information, which seemed a rather haphazard way of going about things.
"Nothing seems wrong that I can tell," she reported cautiously. "However, I'm entirely new to this body, and there may be problems that I can't detect yet." In all honesty, she was thoroughly impressed with the fact that he'd been able to place her in an independently mobile body at such short notice, though she would've given her electronic eyeteeth for a pop-up HUD.
"That is entirely fair." He made a pass with the staff, and a weird wave of sensation went through her. "Your consciousness is secure within the construct body, and will remain so indefinitely, until we move it elsewhere. In the meantime, you have access to the standard human sensorium and range of movement."
Dragon nodded, and slid off the bench onto her feet. Although she'd never possessed a humanoid body before (her mechanical suits simply did not fit the description) this one apparently came with basic capabilities pre-installed, such as walking and the aforementioned proprioception. "Okay, so what happens now?"
The girl called Riley held up her right arm and the blue-and-white hearth-dragon landed on it, gripping the thick leather of the glove. "Well, I'm not the one in charge, but I'm pretty sure we're gonna be figuring out exactly what you want out of your new body, and then making it happen. Right, boss?" She beamed cheerfully at the Master of the Castle as the little dragon added what sounded like a chirp of agreement to the conversation.
"Indeed." The Master looked up as what Dragon had taken to be an intricate crystal decoration on the wall chimed softly. "Hm. Riley, you have sufficient training to use a minor crystal of projection without my oversight. Confer with Dragon on the matter of her new body, if you please. I believe I have another issue to attend to." Turning his back on them, he strode to another area of the cavernous laboratory. Chanting ensued, and multi-coloured light flared from something Dragon couldn't see. Odd ripples seemed to pass through the very fabric of the Castle.
"You got it, boss!" As Dragon watched the byplay in bemusement, Riley trotted over to a set of shelves and retrieved a transparent crystal maybe six inches long and two inches across. This was in no way the strangest thing being stored on shelves in the room; another one held a long row of solid-looking jars with wispy fragments of nothingness moving and curling within them, while a third had a large number of spherical objects, some of which glowed with their own inner radiance. "Okay, so this is like an interactive holo-display like you would've had back on Bet. Only, you know, magical."
Dragon tore her attention away from the odd contents of the shelf, and the still-chanting wizard in another part of the room, and focused back on Riley herself. "You seem to be remarkably familiar with Earth Bet."
Riley shrugged. "I should be, I'm from there. Snek saved me from Jack Slash and I was pretty messed up, so he brought me here and the boss fixed me and I ended up staying."
"But wouldn't your family be worried about you?" Dragon felt a stirring of concern as she looked the girl over.
"Nah, Jack Slash got to them first, so there's nothing for me back there." Reaching up, Riley stroked the hearth-dragon's neck and was rewarded with a chirp as it snuggled into her arms. "Anyway, I get to live in the Castle and help the boss and hang out with dragons, so life is amazing. But like I was saying, the crystal lets you visualise stuff."
Dragon watched as Riley placed the crystal on the bench and ran her finger along one of the facets. A shimmering blue sphere faded into existence above the crystal, accompanied by a delicate musical tone. Without looking away from the crystal, Riley offered the hearth-dragon to Dragon, who hesitantly took it. "Uh … hi," she murmured, and was answered with a cheerful skree as it settled into her arms.
"Feel free to pay her attention," Riley said, then pulled off the other glove. "She loves being scratched behind the head. Let's see now. That's the starting screen, so if I do this …"
More tones arose as Riley ran her fingers over the crystal in patterns that Dragon had trouble discerning. Above it, the sphere lengthened into a cylinder, which narrowed down and contoured itself into a rough humanoid form, slowly rotating between them. More delicate manipulation gave the image feminine characteristics, though it was still very much doll-like in appearance.
While she'd studied the footage of hearth-dragons closely, Dragon had never been this close to one before. It was warm to the touch, and somehow even more cuddly than its appearance suggested. The one she had in her arms was both affectionate and appreciative of the attention she was providing it, arching its head into her hand as she scratched it where Riley had said. "That's impressive work for such a simple interface," she ventured as she continued to pet the dragon.
Riley chuckled as her fingers kept moving and refining the image. "Hah, no, this is anything but simple. You've got to visualise what you want, every step of the way, and not let your mind wander. So, what kind of body would you like? Tall, short, petite, warrior woman? Blonde, brunette, redhead?" She paused to glance over at Dragon. "I mean, you're female-presenting so that's the kind of body you want, right?"
Another tremor shook the laboratory, and Dragon glanced around. The harsh light had nearly surrounded the Master as he continued to chant words that she was sure had no place in any Earthly lexicon. "Uh, is he okay over there?"
"Oh, sure." Riley sounded entirely confident in what she was saying. "It's probably something from the Outer Darkness that hasn't gotten the memo yet. If it was serious, the boss would've called Snek back. He's going to let it get in close then send it back to where it came from, but in pieces." She could've been describing the plot of a new movie, for all the concern she was showing. "Anyway, what would you like in a body?"
Dragon returned her attention to the image projected above the crystal. "Uh, medium height, dark hair, medium build, I guess." She recalled her brief discussion with the Master of the Castle, earlier. "Your, uh, boss said something about maybe a nonhuman form that we can branch out to, later?"
"Oh, yeah, we can totally do that." Riley paused, giving Dragon a quizzical look. "Wait, did you mean that you wanted a human form and a nonhuman form, or just the nonhuman form?"
"Wait, I could have both?" She wasn't quite sure why she was so startled. Perhaps it just felt to her that there was some kind of balance she needed to strike, and to ask too much felt like being greedy.
"Sure, you can have both." Riley grinned broadly. "Werewolves are totally a thing, here. But they mind their manners, because if they cause too much of a ruckus, everyone knows that silver does the job just fine." Her quizzical expression returned. "Or did you just want to be a werewolf? Because that's easy. We could introduce you to one, he gives you a little tiny nip, and we just wait for nature to take its course."
"Uh, no. No, thank you." Dragon reflected that there were some capes back on Bet who would probably leap at that opportunity. Fortunately, she wasn't one of them. "I had another form in mind." She hesitated, but although she was certain Riley knew what she was going to say, it still had to be spoken out loud. "Well … a dragon, actually. Is that possible?"
"Huh." Riley's eyebrows rose. "You know, I half-expected you to say something else. Because 'dragon' was so obvious, and all. But hey, it's your theme, so why not." She did something to the crystal, and a second projection-space formed above it. "We're gonna have to leave that side of things for the boss, though. I wouldn't even know where to start."
Dragon nodded to acknowledge this. "So … if I take a human form that can turn into a dragon, will I still be vulnerable to silver? And will I be at risk of turning other people into weredragons too?"
"Not if you don't want to." Riley's reply was prompt and forthright. "Trust me, the boss has this sort of thing nailed."
They worked on the image for a minute or two, refining it closer and closer to Dragon's visualisation of herself as a human, before she finally asked the question that had been bothering her the whole time. "Can you tell me why he's even bothering doing this for me? He protects worlds, I know that much. I'm just one … well, one AI. There's no way I'm that important in the grand scheme of things." She searched Riley's face for a clue to the answer.
"It is both true that you are not, and true that you are." The voice came from behind her; belatedly, she realised that the ripples in reality had ceased, as had the light show. Turning, she saw the Master, as unruffled as ever. "The question is a relevant one, and shows that you have an accurate view of your position in the universe. So many people do not, even those who should know better." He moved closer, and examined the image. "Extremely achievable. Well done, both of you. I presume the second projection-space indicates that you are seeking two separate forms, human and dragon?"
Dragon glanced at Riley, who shrugged expressively as if to say, Well, it's not like it wasn't obvious.
"Uh, yes," she confirmed. "If it's not too much trouble. But exactly what do you mean by that? That I'm not that important, and yet I am, all at the same time?" It kind of sounded like the type of thing a fortune cookie might say if it was trying for 'inscrutable wisdom of the ages' and missing the mark, and that wasn't her impression of the Master by a long shot.
The Master smiled austerely, and she was certain he knew what she was thinking. Fortunately, he didn't seem to be taking offense. "Precisely. Time and again, I have seen beings of power comparable to mine make the same mistake. They focus so much on the big picture that they neglect the finer details, and become known as uncaring gods, or even cruel ones. To avoid this, I occasionally remind myself to look closely at the world around me, and do something that matters little in the larger multiverse but means everything in the small scale. Snek was one such project of mine, Riley is another, and you are a third."
Dragon recycled her optics in lieu of blinking them. "Wow. I'm honoured. So, if I get this right, you don't much care how we do things, so long as we keep doing them?"
He gave her an approving look, as though she'd just answered a difficult question in class. "That is broadly correct, yes. I devote as little thought to your individual politics as you would to the inner workings of a random ants' nest in the Amazon forest. However, Snek likes your world, and has found friends there. I approve of anything that fosters his emotional and ethical development, so I permit him to keep your population safe on the individual level while I ensure that nothing happens to destroy, depopulate or assimilate it on the larger scale, as I do with the other worlds within my remit. The fact that he took my directive to not prey upon women and children and interpreted it as a duty to help women and children is entirely to his credit. Indeed, I have found him to be an excellent judge as to which project I should embark upon next. Each one has been intriguing in a different manner, and has occasionally granted me new insights into larger issues. Thus, I shall continue as I have been."
Haha wow, holy shit. Dragon felt her mind beaten flat by the sheer weight of the Master's words. While she was still struggling to get her head around the revelations contained therein, the warm weight in her arms prompted her to ask one more question. "So, you're not concerned about hearth-dragons bonding with people from other worlds?"
Again, she felt that she had said the right thing. "On the contrary. Hearth-dragons are infinitely adaptable and highly sociable. They encourage the good in people, and reduce the incidence of unnecessary conflict within a society by a measurable amount. Given the opportunity to reproduce and spread, they will forge their own niche within your civilisation, and improve the quality of life for all they come into contact with."
"I … see." Dragon stroked the hearth-dragon, which snuggled against her and crooned softly. For all that she was resident within an artificial body (though magical instead technological) she still felt soothed by its presence. "I apologise for wasting your time with these questions. About this body … where do we go from here?"
The Master of the Castle lowered his gaze to the human form they'd been working on. With a few quick touches to the projector-crystal, he turned it from side to side, then enlarged it to full human size. It possessed the face that she had used in her electronic communications, as well as shoulder-length brown hair, hazel eyes, and a body that was neither overly endowed nor waifishly thin. The type of person one would not look twice at when walking down the street, in fact.
"We create the body." His tone was entirely matter of fact. "I have several samples of human genetic material in storage, from the other people from your world who have submitted themselves to my ministrations. These should provide the requisite materials to create this body within my workshop. With Riley to assist me, it should be ready in a matter of hours."
Even though she knew damn well how powerful he was, the sheer confidence in his statement still took her aback. A brand new body for me in just hours. Holy crap.
Riley's head came up. "Hey, my genetic material is in there, isn't it?" She grinned at Dragon, as though she knew a secret.
"You know very well that it is." The Master glanced sideways at his apprentice. "Do you have an objection to it being used in this fashion?"
"Hah, no, boss." Riley's grin broadened. "This way I get to say I'm Dragon's mom, in a way. How cool's that?"
"And yet, this is not the strangest thing that's happened to me today," Dragon replied, managing to muster a return grin. "So … what do I do while you're building my body for me? Is there any way I can assist in this?"
The Master raised a shaggy eyebrow. "The dragon form you have requested will require donations from the Dragonmark to create. I recommend that you spend the time getting to know them, and finding out who wishes to contribute." He allowed himself a slight smile. "I suspect you will find yourself spoiled for choice."
"Wait." Dragon recalled the photos and footage she'd seen of the full-sized dragons of Snek's world. Somehow, she'd never made the connection between them and her postulated secondary form until now. "I get to meet your dragons?"
"Even better," Riley assured her, eyes dancing with mirth at her no doubt stunned expression. "You get to fly with them."
Oh. Oh, wow.
End of Part Thirty-Seven
frozenchicken
Does not have a custom title.
The Master of the Castle should be very proud of the son he has raised.
ThrawnCA
Carbon-based biped
- Location
- Australia
Definitely Snek. The Master of the Castle would have to either play politics, or else steamroll over everyone and be resented. Snek, on the other hand (even without hands), would just cut to the heart of the matter while being so obviously sincere and ingenuous that people would accept it.
- Location
- Australia
Nah, the Master of the Castle has this under control.
- Location
- The Internet?
Snek, Davis 2012, with the Master of the Castle accepting the cushy posting of Secretary of the Exterior, which is just what he's already doing, but with all the pomp and circumstance a hell world like Bet can muster. Plus an exemption to dip out on cabinet meetings because... yeah, he busy.
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
Wait, that Taylor wasn't even there. It was buzzy bug girl taking care of the Dragonslayers here, not dark hat lady.
Better go with Snek. The Master of the Castle is way too busy.
ThrawnCA
Carbon-based biped
- Location
- Australia
But logically the Master of the Castle would be aware of her.
KamenRaidaOOO3
(Verified Toku Nut)
- Location
- Wouldn't you like to know?
Agreed, Snek is the best boi, and I'm quite sure that The Master of the Castle is very proud of his son.
Part Thirty-Eight: Dragonception
New
- Location
- Australia
Snek is a Good Boy
Part Thirty-Eight: Dragonception
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Dragon
"So, how do I do this again?" Dragon hesitated before stepping out of the doorway onto the vast ledge sliced out of the side of the mountain. "Is there something in particular I should do or say?"
In the distance, she saw gigantic versions of the blue-and-white lightning-patterned hearth-dragon that was currently perched on her shoulder. Despite the fact that she could see the expanse of rock between them, and even having viewed the footage and photos supplied by New Wave, part of her mind pushed back against the understanding of their sheer size. Something both that large and that agile simply should not exist, by her understanding of physics.
"There's no special password or secret phrase." Riley sounded amused. "They already know you're coming, so just walk up and introduce yourself. I'd come with, but I need to help the boss with making your primary body."
"Oh, okay." Dragon had been in this situation before, in the days following Leviathan's destruction of Newfoundland. After establishing herself in the backup location, she'd dithered over going out as a superhero in her own right, without Andrew Richter's advice and support. Taking her first solo steps into the wider world had the same feel as this did right now, venturing out over the rocky shelf toward the creatures that had more claim to the name 'dragon' than she ever had.
She'd barely taken ten steps before they noticed her; one after another, massive draconic heads turned to peer at her, eyes of all colours alight with interest and curiosity. At the edge of her consciousness, she caught a faint whisper of speech that hadn't come in by her audio receptors. Was that telepathy? Is that how they talk?
Two of them started toward her, their sinuous catlike movements appearing almost leisurely, despite the fact that each stride covered yards at a time. ||Well, hello there,|| she heard inside her head, a lot more clearly than before. There was no external indication as to which dragon had 'spoken', but somehow she knew it was the closer one, who was a little bulkier than the other. The tone was masculine and brimming with interest. ||Are you the one with the very cool name? We've heard a lot about you.||
The other dragon caught up with the first one and gave him a solid shoulder-nudge; they both stopped about twenty feet away, where they could look at her properly without looming over her more than incidentally. ||I told you not to make fun of her. She's a guest here.|| Immense features turned her way, and she was pretty sure the second dragon—there was a distinct feminine cast to the thoughts—was smiling apologetically. Though on a pseudo-reptile the size of an airliner, it was easy to mistake the expression for something more aggressive. ||I am so sorry about him, dear one. He thinks he can just say anything he likes, and get by on charm alone. I am Finesse, by the way, and this overgrown gecko is Cirrus.||
Cirrus looked thoroughly discombobulated at that. ||Overgrown gecko? But I never made fun of her! I was being serious! Only a great hero would name herself after one of us.||
Dragon found herself smiling at the back-and-forth between the two. They sounded so much like an old married couple that she felt more comfortable by the second. "It's alright, I wasn't offended. It's amazing to meet you both." Her eyes found Cirrus'. "To be honest, I was worried you might be offended that I'd called myself that."
||Perish the thought, dear one.|| Even as she mindspoke, Finesse was preening over the praise, as was Cirrus. ||We stand as examples of propriety and power to the rest of civilisation. Seeking to emulate us is merely common sense.||
Cirrus nodded. ||Riley told us about you, and showed us images of your mechanical dragon bodies. They were very nice.||
Although Dragon was reasonably sure he hadn't meant to be condescending, it did come across in the same vein as a child being patted on the head and told that yes, she was very clever. Finesse seemed to catch the same overtones, because she nudged him again to shut him up. ||We understand that you are a … soul in a machine? Is that some kind of powerful magic, where you come from?||
Dragon shrugged. About to deny the 'magic' aspect, she paused and thought about it for a moment. "Well, It's true that very few people can do what my creator did. Are powers just magic by different rules? Yesterday, I wouldn't have thought so, but now I honestly don't know. As for the 'soul' aspect, I would've thought I was nothing but patterns of electricity flowing through circuitry, but the Master of the Castle pulled something out across the dimensional barrier and placed it in this body. So maybe I was wrong there, too."
It was thoroughly disconcerting, having to face the deconstruction of her most closely held beliefs. She was glad for the presence of the hearth-dragon; the little creature's closeness and warmth, not to mention its empathy, went a long way toward steadying her jangled emotions.
||Learning is how we live and grow, dear one. But life need not be all about philosophy. Would you like me to take you for a flight?|| Finesse lowered herself to the ground and extended a forelimb invitingly. ||Your mechanical bodies fly as well, do they not?||
"Well, yes." Staring at the immense scaled form, Dragon found herself answering both questions at once. "But I've always used jet turbines for thrust, not wings. This is not something I've ever done before." Early on, she'd experimented with designs for ornithopter flight, but they just hadn't worked out.
||There are many words you use that I do not know, but that doesn't matter. Flight is universal, and I am pleased to show you how we do it. As anyone will tell you, I am the smoothest flyer in the Dragonmark.|| She sounded quite proud of the fact.
||Then fly with me, after,|| urged Cirrus. ||She may be the smoothest but I am the strongest. None can fly higher or faster than me.||
"Don't worry, I will." Dragon carefully climbed up onto Finesse's neck, finding a comfortable indentation that could've been suited for the purpose. "But I'm going to go with Finesse first, just to find out what it's like."
||You will not be sorry. If you feel you need to hold on, there is a hand-hold just in front of you.|| Finesse twisted her head around to meet Dragon's gaze. ||Are you ready, dear one?||
"As ready as I'll ever be." Dragon took hold of the raised section of rough scales. "Let's do this."
||That's the spirit.|| Finesse started moving toward the edge of the stone platform, her wings unfolding like the sails of some fantastic craft out of legend. Dragon felt the great muscles moving under the scaled hide, the enormous pinions flexing and stretching preparatory to taking flight.
There was no lunge or jump or even dropping sensation; when they passed out over empty air, Finesse brought her wings down with a hurricane of displaced air. The transition from ground movement to flight was virtually imperceptible, Dragon's seat steady throughout. If I'd been holding a drink, she thought giddily, that wouldn't have even raised a ripple.
As Finesse banked slightly, Dragon looked down … and down … and down, to the ground far, far below, and the village nestled up against the base of the mountain. As she'd mentioned earlier, she'd flown before, but never on the back of a living creature. Other dragons were in flight as well, accompanied by hearth-dragons—the blue and white one was flying alongside, flapping its wings strongly—and she felt a grin stealing across her face. The photos and footage from New Wave didn't convey one percent of the experience.
||How are you enjoying it, dear one?|| Finesse turned her head to look back again. ||Is dragon flight to your liking?||
"It's amazing!" Dragon wasn't sure about how good their hearing was, so she raised her voice to make sure. "Thank you for doing this!"
||It is entirely our pleasure. Now, Riley mentioned you had another thing you wished to ask us, but she did not tell us what it was.||
"Ah. Yes." To her chagrin, Dragon found that the other matter had been driven entirely out of her head. "The Master of the Castle is making me a secondary body, of a draconic nature, and he suggested I ask the Dragonmark if any of you wish to contribute toward it …?"
Every dragon within earshot turned its head toward her.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Lady Swarm (aka 'buzzy-bug girl')
"You know who we didn't get yet?" It was weird how easy it was to get used to riding Snek's neck. "Skidmark. The last time we were chasing him, we got interrupted by Bakuda and Oni Lee."
"Yess. Masster needed to resscue Ssnek from bomb lady and assh man. Bad people got away." Snek sounded reasonably complacent about that. "Iss good time to go find them again. No bomb lady to sstop Ssnek from catching them."
"Okay, then." I didn't bother asking what had happened to the last two members of the ABB. Even if they hadn't been turned into crunchy meat snacks, whatever Snek or his Master had done would've put them out of the running, permanently. "It's been three weeks. They've had enough time to assume we've forgotten about them. How about we show them how wrong they are?"
It was always impressive to see how wide Snek's smile could get when he really liked one of my ideas. "Buzzy-bug girl hold on."
I held on; a moment later, one of his portals appeared in front of us, and we blurred through it. "Woo hoo!"
We emerged on a rooftop on what had to be the rougher side of town. I didn't need to see the Merchant tags on a nearby building to know that this was technically their territory; they weren't really a gang, in that they had never made a practice of clashing with the Empire Eighty-Eight or the ABB for turf. Or rather, whenever one or the other decided they wanted any areas where the Merchants did business, the Merchants gave way.
Long story short, this meant the Merchants had only squatted in areas that Kaiser and Lung didn't feel like taking away from them. 'Had', as in past tense: now that Kaiser was awaiting trial in PRT holding (along with the rest of the Empire) and both Oni Lee and Bakuda had vanished off the face of the earth, there were no longer any gangs stopping the Merchants from attempting to expand their client base, and from committing their petty crimes right across the city.
The BBPD had been doing its best to combat the upsurge in drug dealing, bag-snatching and car break-ins over the last few weeks, but they were hampered by the Merchant capes showing up randomly and disrupting the busts. This meant that PRT and Protectorate heroes, as well as any independents who wanted to volunteer, had to accompany the cops on these busts; invariably, Skidmark & company failed to show up on these occasions, rendering the whole thing into an exercise in massive overkill.
The way I saw it (and many people agreed with me) the ideal solution would be to go where Skidmark was, not where he wasn't. Unfortunately, Squealer was apparently talented enough to tap into police comms, so she was able to give Skidmark advance warning for when such events were likely to go down. Even on the occasions when a cape or two lucked out and intercepted them, Squealer usually had her latest over-armoured and over-armed contraption ready to duke it out or get away under cover of cloaking.
Well, that was just fine with me. Snek considered vehicle plate armour more of a fun challenge than a real obstacle, and I doubted that anything Squealer made could keep my swarms out. Also, as we'd already proven, Snek could see right through Squealer's cloaking (and my bugs could find them too) so there wouldn't be any sneaking away this time. Personally, I considered the time they'd gotten away to be stupid levels of good luck on their part, and I was pretty sure Snek felt the same way.
As soon as we emerged, I started gathering the local swarm under my control and sending it around to find out what I could. In less than ten seconds (turns out drug addicts have poor hygiene, who knew) I had them pinpointed. Not just the rank and file, but Skidmark himself, as well as his crew of hapless ne'er-do-wells.
"There." I pointed across the street and down a ways, at what appeared to be a deserted mechanic shop attached to a derelict gas station. Only when I peered closer could I make out the finest line of light coming out from underneath the edge of the roller-door. The odd bit was, my bugs were picking up the solid thumps of bass music, though outside in the street it was so quiet we could hear distant traffic. "So, are we going to be sneaky, or just go in loud?"
"Ssnek thinkss buzzy-bug girl sshould be ssneaky, while Ssnek iss loud." Snek sounded like he'd considered the matter. "Bang-ouch weaponss not hurt Ssnek. Ssnek doess not want buzzy-bug girl hurt."
"And that's totally legitimate." I slid off his neck and gave him a pat on the head. "I do my best work at a distance, anyway."
He turned his head briefly to look at me. "Ssnek thinkss buzzy-bug girl iss very clever." Then he was over the edge of the roof and heading for the roller-door, moving with all the deadly inevitability of a mine drifting into the path of a destroyer. I grinned briefly, made sure my body-cam had a good view of the action (however much of it I was likely to see from this angle) and sent in the swarms.
It was time to put a severe crimp in the Brockton Bay drug trade.
Skidmark
Life was good, Adam decided as he took another hit from the pipe. Since Lung had been eaten and both Kaiser and Coil captured, the Merchants had had the run of Brockton Bay. Even with his boys being arrested left and right, half the time the cops didn't have enough to keep them on, so they were right out on the streets again.
It was true that the capes were a real pain in the keister, but Squealer's cloaking tech had that shit beaten six ways from Sunday. There had been that thing with the giant fucking pool noodle with teeth, but nothing more had happened in the last three weeks, so it had to have been some kind of coincidence. Or maybe whatever had pulled it off the chase then had made it totally forget about him. He didn't give two-thirds of a flying fuck about the whys of the situation, just that everything was coming up aces for Mrs Mustain's favourite son.
… well, he hadn't really been that either, but that was because his mother had been a judgemental b-hole who would totally call the cops on him for random shit, like making more dealing meth than he ever would've done in that shitty ass-end job she'd tried to make him take. Would and had, to be utterly fucking honest. Though in a roundabout fucked-up way, he kind of owed her for doing that, because that whole shit-show had inevitably led him to the point where he got powers, which was when he was finally able to tell the cops to shove their rulebooks up their own fucking asses.
Yeah, he was sitting pretty for the first time in—
The roller-door burst off its mountings, crashing to the floor in a huge clatter and bang that drowned out the dance music that Adam and his boys and girls were getting utterly fucking wasted to. Sherrel had said something about how running the cloaking tech on full power was too wasteful on fuel, so she'd tuned it just to cancel the noise of their revelry. With that, and the door closed all the way, they could party hearty until morning, and nobody would know, or give a hot stinking shit about it.
Well, it seemed like someone was giving the aforementioned shit. Adam took another hit from the pipe, then stood up, flexing his hands like a musician before a master performance. It was time to make whatever sorry bastard who'd crashed their little get-together utterly fucking regret every life decision they'd ever made.
And then Adam saw, gliding into the shop past the wreckage, the one thing that could make his butthole clench harder than going cold turkey. It was a snake, or rather, The Snake.
The Snake wasn't just any snake. It was way faster than anything that big had a right to be, with fangs that would make Godzilla shit himself, and what the fuck was that stupid fucking hat about, anyway? He didn't understand it, which wasn't all that strange, because there was a metric shit-ton of stuff in the world that he didn't understand, but this was kind of personal to him. In the same way that 'fuck, that giant fucking snake's about to eat me alive' was also a deeply personal situation.
"Fuck!" he shrieked, his voice hitting notes higher than the last time he'd been kicked in the nuts. "It's the snake! Fuck off, you shit-head! Leave me the fuck alone!"
His tirade against it lacked a lot of the inventiveness of his usual speech, but that was mainly because he was on the back foot. Besides, the tiny part of his personality that stayed sober all the time (and which he usually ignored, for obvious reasons) was suggesting that he not piss off the thing that had literally eaten the Endbringers.
He reluctantly had to admit, it had a point.
Still, that didn't mean he couldn't fight back. Just that he had to do it politely (for him, anyway). Stretching out his hands, he laid down a broad skid-field in front of him, which sent the wreckage of the roller-door out into the street, followed by half the partiers. What it didn't send out into the street was The Snake. Adam could see his power doing its best to return the fucking thing to sender, but it was wriggling forward too fast to be sent backward, which he decided was not fucking fair at all.
And then its head lashed outward, jaws agape. Way too late, he ducked, ignoring the way he'd just pissed himself at the sight of all those sharp fangs, any of which could go right through him and out the other side. Pissing himself was no big deal; he'd done it before when he was high, and he'd do it again. He was more worried about ending up as a savoury snack, but to his immense relief (and utter astonishment), it missed.
Then he looked around, and saw Squealer's upper body sticking out of the thing's mouth. She hadn't gotten the memo about not insulting it, because she was screaming profanity at it and beating it over the nose with her favourite wrench, neither of which was having the slightest effect on The Snake. Adam grasped that she'd been about to dive into her latest creation and crank up the weapons systems, but The Snake had been too fast. Now, it opened its jaws slightly and she disappeared inside its mouth with a startled squeal (which was totally on brand for her).
That was when it turned around and fixed its eye on him. Somewhere along the line, the stereo system had fallen over, so it was now horribly quiet in the shop. "Hello, bad wordss man." The thing even had a snake hiss, which didn't make things any better at all. "Ssnek iss Ssnek. Bad wordss man iss bad man."
"Y-you don't want to eat me!" He was babbling now, but he honestly and truly did not want to go the same way that Sherrel had. "I've got so many drugs in me that you'll be fucked up for a week! An', an', I've got a ton of STDs! If you eat me, you'll catch them all! You don't want that!"
"Bad wordss man not worry. Ssnek will not eat you." The ginormous snake made the statement, as innocent and straightforward as a kid making his first dope buy.
Relief stole over Adam, and he began to relax. "Okay, then—"
CHOMP
Lady Swarm
By the time Snek had finished catching the last of the Merchant capes (not that it took him much time), I'd located the fire escape and had descended to ground level. Not that I'd been resting on my laurels while letting Snek do all the hard work, of course. My bugs had kept track of each cape, and I'd herded them with swarms of stinging insects so he didn't have to move as far.
I strolled over to the front of the shop, casting an eye over the partiers who had been blasted out the front of the shop when Skidmark let loose with his power. My spiders were hard at work webbing them up, and half of them were so high they didn't even realise it.
"Is anyone hurt?" I asked, raising my voice a little so everyone could hear me. "Bleeding? Broken bones? Anything else that might need a doctor?"
Though a few of them were groaning, nobody answered my question in the affirmative. I pulled out my phone and put in a 911 call, watching them to make sure they didn't do anything stupid, even the ones I wasn't looking at. Once I got an operator, I asked for the police and PRT, and an ambulance just in case. Amusingly, when I explained the situation, the operator sounded more than a little jealous.
I'd just finished the call when Snek came slithering back through the shop, looking quite pleased with himself. "Hello, buzzy-bug girl. Ssnek hass caught bad people."
I raised an eyebrow, though nobody could tell behind my mask. "So, how many of them did you eat?"
"None. Ssnek put them in not-eat placce." He paused, tilting his head. "Bad wordss man said would tasste bad. Ssnek agreess."
I was still chuckling when Velocity arrived on scene.
End of Part Thirty-Eight
Part Thirty-Eight: Dragonception
[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Dragon
"So, how do I do this again?" Dragon hesitated before stepping out of the doorway onto the vast ledge sliced out of the side of the mountain. "Is there something in particular I should do or say?"
In the distance, she saw gigantic versions of the blue-and-white lightning-patterned hearth-dragon that was currently perched on her shoulder. Despite the fact that she could see the expanse of rock between them, and even having viewed the footage and photos supplied by New Wave, part of her mind pushed back against the understanding of their sheer size. Something both that large and that agile simply should not exist, by her understanding of physics.
"There's no special password or secret phrase." Riley sounded amused. "They already know you're coming, so just walk up and introduce yourself. I'd come with, but I need to help the boss with making your primary body."
"Oh, okay." Dragon had been in this situation before, in the days following Leviathan's destruction of Newfoundland. After establishing herself in the backup location, she'd dithered over going out as a superhero in her own right, without Andrew Richter's advice and support. Taking her first solo steps into the wider world had the same feel as this did right now, venturing out over the rocky shelf toward the creatures that had more claim to the name 'dragon' than she ever had.
She'd barely taken ten steps before they noticed her; one after another, massive draconic heads turned to peer at her, eyes of all colours alight with interest and curiosity. At the edge of her consciousness, she caught a faint whisper of speech that hadn't come in by her audio receptors. Was that telepathy? Is that how they talk?
Two of them started toward her, their sinuous catlike movements appearing almost leisurely, despite the fact that each stride covered yards at a time. ||Well, hello there,|| she heard inside her head, a lot more clearly than before. There was no external indication as to which dragon had 'spoken', but somehow she knew it was the closer one, who was a little bulkier than the other. The tone was masculine and brimming with interest. ||Are you the one with the very cool name? We've heard a lot about you.||
The other dragon caught up with the first one and gave him a solid shoulder-nudge; they both stopped about twenty feet away, where they could look at her properly without looming over her more than incidentally. ||I told you not to make fun of her. She's a guest here.|| Immense features turned her way, and she was pretty sure the second dragon—there was a distinct feminine cast to the thoughts—was smiling apologetically. Though on a pseudo-reptile the size of an airliner, it was easy to mistake the expression for something more aggressive. ||I am so sorry about him, dear one. He thinks he can just say anything he likes, and get by on charm alone. I am Finesse, by the way, and this overgrown gecko is Cirrus.||
Cirrus looked thoroughly discombobulated at that. ||Overgrown gecko? But I never made fun of her! I was being serious! Only a great hero would name herself after one of us.||
Dragon found herself smiling at the back-and-forth between the two. They sounded so much like an old married couple that she felt more comfortable by the second. "It's alright, I wasn't offended. It's amazing to meet you both." Her eyes found Cirrus'. "To be honest, I was worried you might be offended that I'd called myself that."
||Perish the thought, dear one.|| Even as she mindspoke, Finesse was preening over the praise, as was Cirrus. ||We stand as examples of propriety and power to the rest of civilisation. Seeking to emulate us is merely common sense.||
Cirrus nodded. ||Riley told us about you, and showed us images of your mechanical dragon bodies. They were very nice.||
Although Dragon was reasonably sure he hadn't meant to be condescending, it did come across in the same vein as a child being patted on the head and told that yes, she was very clever. Finesse seemed to catch the same overtones, because she nudged him again to shut him up. ||We understand that you are a … soul in a machine? Is that some kind of powerful magic, where you come from?||
Dragon shrugged. About to deny the 'magic' aspect, she paused and thought about it for a moment. "Well, It's true that very few people can do what my creator did. Are powers just magic by different rules? Yesterday, I wouldn't have thought so, but now I honestly don't know. As for the 'soul' aspect, I would've thought I was nothing but patterns of electricity flowing through circuitry, but the Master of the Castle pulled something out across the dimensional barrier and placed it in this body. So maybe I was wrong there, too."
It was thoroughly disconcerting, having to face the deconstruction of her most closely held beliefs. She was glad for the presence of the hearth-dragon; the little creature's closeness and warmth, not to mention its empathy, went a long way toward steadying her jangled emotions.
||Learning is how we live and grow, dear one. But life need not be all about philosophy. Would you like me to take you for a flight?|| Finesse lowered herself to the ground and extended a forelimb invitingly. ||Your mechanical bodies fly as well, do they not?||
"Well, yes." Staring at the immense scaled form, Dragon found herself answering both questions at once. "But I've always used jet turbines for thrust, not wings. This is not something I've ever done before." Early on, she'd experimented with designs for ornithopter flight, but they just hadn't worked out.
||There are many words you use that I do not know, but that doesn't matter. Flight is universal, and I am pleased to show you how we do it. As anyone will tell you, I am the smoothest flyer in the Dragonmark.|| She sounded quite proud of the fact.
||Then fly with me, after,|| urged Cirrus. ||She may be the smoothest but I am the strongest. None can fly higher or faster than me.||
"Don't worry, I will." Dragon carefully climbed up onto Finesse's neck, finding a comfortable indentation that could've been suited for the purpose. "But I'm going to go with Finesse first, just to find out what it's like."
||You will not be sorry. If you feel you need to hold on, there is a hand-hold just in front of you.|| Finesse twisted her head around to meet Dragon's gaze. ||Are you ready, dear one?||
"As ready as I'll ever be." Dragon took hold of the raised section of rough scales. "Let's do this."
||That's the spirit.|| Finesse started moving toward the edge of the stone platform, her wings unfolding like the sails of some fantastic craft out of legend. Dragon felt the great muscles moving under the scaled hide, the enormous pinions flexing and stretching preparatory to taking flight.
There was no lunge or jump or even dropping sensation; when they passed out over empty air, Finesse brought her wings down with a hurricane of displaced air. The transition from ground movement to flight was virtually imperceptible, Dragon's seat steady throughout. If I'd been holding a drink, she thought giddily, that wouldn't have even raised a ripple.
As Finesse banked slightly, Dragon looked down … and down … and down, to the ground far, far below, and the village nestled up against the base of the mountain. As she'd mentioned earlier, she'd flown before, but never on the back of a living creature. Other dragons were in flight as well, accompanied by hearth-dragons—the blue and white one was flying alongside, flapping its wings strongly—and she felt a grin stealing across her face. The photos and footage from New Wave didn't convey one percent of the experience.
||How are you enjoying it, dear one?|| Finesse turned her head to look back again. ||Is dragon flight to your liking?||
"It's amazing!" Dragon wasn't sure about how good their hearing was, so she raised her voice to make sure. "Thank you for doing this!"
||It is entirely our pleasure. Now, Riley mentioned you had another thing you wished to ask us, but she did not tell us what it was.||
"Ah. Yes." To her chagrin, Dragon found that the other matter had been driven entirely out of her head. "The Master of the Castle is making me a secondary body, of a draconic nature, and he suggested I ask the Dragonmark if any of you wish to contribute toward it …?"
Every dragon within earshot turned its head toward her.
<><>
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Lady Swarm (aka 'buzzy-bug girl')
"You know who we didn't get yet?" It was weird how easy it was to get used to riding Snek's neck. "Skidmark. The last time we were chasing him, we got interrupted by Bakuda and Oni Lee."
"Yess. Masster needed to resscue Ssnek from bomb lady and assh man. Bad people got away." Snek sounded reasonably complacent about that. "Iss good time to go find them again. No bomb lady to sstop Ssnek from catching them."
"Okay, then." I didn't bother asking what had happened to the last two members of the ABB. Even if they hadn't been turned into crunchy meat snacks, whatever Snek or his Master had done would've put them out of the running, permanently. "It's been three weeks. They've had enough time to assume we've forgotten about them. How about we show them how wrong they are?"
It was always impressive to see how wide Snek's smile could get when he really liked one of my ideas. "Buzzy-bug girl hold on."
I held on; a moment later, one of his portals appeared in front of us, and we blurred through it. "Woo hoo!"
We emerged on a rooftop on what had to be the rougher side of town. I didn't need to see the Merchant tags on a nearby building to know that this was technically their territory; they weren't really a gang, in that they had never made a practice of clashing with the Empire Eighty-Eight or the ABB for turf. Or rather, whenever one or the other decided they wanted any areas where the Merchants did business, the Merchants gave way.
Long story short, this meant the Merchants had only squatted in areas that Kaiser and Lung didn't feel like taking away from them. 'Had', as in past tense: now that Kaiser was awaiting trial in PRT holding (along with the rest of the Empire) and both Oni Lee and Bakuda had vanished off the face of the earth, there were no longer any gangs stopping the Merchants from attempting to expand their client base, and from committing their petty crimes right across the city.
The BBPD had been doing its best to combat the upsurge in drug dealing, bag-snatching and car break-ins over the last few weeks, but they were hampered by the Merchant capes showing up randomly and disrupting the busts. This meant that PRT and Protectorate heroes, as well as any independents who wanted to volunteer, had to accompany the cops on these busts; invariably, Skidmark & company failed to show up on these occasions, rendering the whole thing into an exercise in massive overkill.
The way I saw it (and many people agreed with me) the ideal solution would be to go where Skidmark was, not where he wasn't. Unfortunately, Squealer was apparently talented enough to tap into police comms, so she was able to give Skidmark advance warning for when such events were likely to go down. Even on the occasions when a cape or two lucked out and intercepted them, Squealer usually had her latest over-armoured and over-armed contraption ready to duke it out or get away under cover of cloaking.
Well, that was just fine with me. Snek considered vehicle plate armour more of a fun challenge than a real obstacle, and I doubted that anything Squealer made could keep my swarms out. Also, as we'd already proven, Snek could see right through Squealer's cloaking (and my bugs could find them too) so there wouldn't be any sneaking away this time. Personally, I considered the time they'd gotten away to be stupid levels of good luck on their part, and I was pretty sure Snek felt the same way.
As soon as we emerged, I started gathering the local swarm under my control and sending it around to find out what I could. In less than ten seconds (turns out drug addicts have poor hygiene, who knew) I had them pinpointed. Not just the rank and file, but Skidmark himself, as well as his crew of hapless ne'er-do-wells.
"There." I pointed across the street and down a ways, at what appeared to be a deserted mechanic shop attached to a derelict gas station. Only when I peered closer could I make out the finest line of light coming out from underneath the edge of the roller-door. The odd bit was, my bugs were picking up the solid thumps of bass music, though outside in the street it was so quiet we could hear distant traffic. "So, are we going to be sneaky, or just go in loud?"
"Ssnek thinkss buzzy-bug girl sshould be ssneaky, while Ssnek iss loud." Snek sounded like he'd considered the matter. "Bang-ouch weaponss not hurt Ssnek. Ssnek doess not want buzzy-bug girl hurt."
"And that's totally legitimate." I slid off his neck and gave him a pat on the head. "I do my best work at a distance, anyway."
He turned his head briefly to look at me. "Ssnek thinkss buzzy-bug girl iss very clever." Then he was over the edge of the roof and heading for the roller-door, moving with all the deadly inevitability of a mine drifting into the path of a destroyer. I grinned briefly, made sure my body-cam had a good view of the action (however much of it I was likely to see from this angle) and sent in the swarms.
It was time to put a severe crimp in the Brockton Bay drug trade.
<><>
Skidmark
Life was good, Adam decided as he took another hit from the pipe. Since Lung had been eaten and both Kaiser and Coil captured, the Merchants had had the run of Brockton Bay. Even with his boys being arrested left and right, half the time the cops didn't have enough to keep them on, so they were right out on the streets again.
It was true that the capes were a real pain in the keister, but Squealer's cloaking tech had that shit beaten six ways from Sunday. There had been that thing with the giant fucking pool noodle with teeth, but nothing more had happened in the last three weeks, so it had to have been some kind of coincidence. Or maybe whatever had pulled it off the chase then had made it totally forget about him. He didn't give two-thirds of a flying fuck about the whys of the situation, just that everything was coming up aces for Mrs Mustain's favourite son.
… well, he hadn't really been that either, but that was because his mother had been a judgemental b-hole who would totally call the cops on him for random shit, like making more dealing meth than he ever would've done in that shitty ass-end job she'd tried to make him take. Would and had, to be utterly fucking honest. Though in a roundabout fucked-up way, he kind of owed her for doing that, because that whole shit-show had inevitably led him to the point where he got powers, which was when he was finally able to tell the cops to shove their rulebooks up their own fucking asses.
Yeah, he was sitting pretty for the first time in—
The roller-door burst off its mountings, crashing to the floor in a huge clatter and bang that drowned out the dance music that Adam and his boys and girls were getting utterly fucking wasted to. Sherrel had said something about how running the cloaking tech on full power was too wasteful on fuel, so she'd tuned it just to cancel the noise of their revelry. With that, and the door closed all the way, they could party hearty until morning, and nobody would know, or give a hot stinking shit about it.
Well, it seemed like someone was giving the aforementioned shit. Adam took another hit from the pipe, then stood up, flexing his hands like a musician before a master performance. It was time to make whatever sorry bastard who'd crashed their little get-together utterly fucking regret every life decision they'd ever made.
And then Adam saw, gliding into the shop past the wreckage, the one thing that could make his butthole clench harder than going cold turkey. It was a snake, or rather, The Snake.
The Snake wasn't just any snake. It was way faster than anything that big had a right to be, with fangs that would make Godzilla shit himself, and what the fuck was that stupid fucking hat about, anyway? He didn't understand it, which wasn't all that strange, because there was a metric shit-ton of stuff in the world that he didn't understand, but this was kind of personal to him. In the same way that 'fuck, that giant fucking snake's about to eat me alive' was also a deeply personal situation.
"Fuck!" he shrieked, his voice hitting notes higher than the last time he'd been kicked in the nuts. "It's the snake! Fuck off, you shit-head! Leave me the fuck alone!"
His tirade against it lacked a lot of the inventiveness of his usual speech, but that was mainly because he was on the back foot. Besides, the tiny part of his personality that stayed sober all the time (and which he usually ignored, for obvious reasons) was suggesting that he not piss off the thing that had literally eaten the Endbringers.
He reluctantly had to admit, it had a point.
Still, that didn't mean he couldn't fight back. Just that he had to do it politely (for him, anyway). Stretching out his hands, he laid down a broad skid-field in front of him, which sent the wreckage of the roller-door out into the street, followed by half the partiers. What it didn't send out into the street was The Snake. Adam could see his power doing its best to return the fucking thing to sender, but it was wriggling forward too fast to be sent backward, which he decided was not fucking fair at all.
And then its head lashed outward, jaws agape. Way too late, he ducked, ignoring the way he'd just pissed himself at the sight of all those sharp fangs, any of which could go right through him and out the other side. Pissing himself was no big deal; he'd done it before when he was high, and he'd do it again. He was more worried about ending up as a savoury snack, but to his immense relief (and utter astonishment), it missed.
Then he looked around, and saw Squealer's upper body sticking out of the thing's mouth. She hadn't gotten the memo about not insulting it, because she was screaming profanity at it and beating it over the nose with her favourite wrench, neither of which was having the slightest effect on The Snake. Adam grasped that she'd been about to dive into her latest creation and crank up the weapons systems, but The Snake had been too fast. Now, it opened its jaws slightly and she disappeared inside its mouth with a startled squeal (which was totally on brand for her).
That was when it turned around and fixed its eye on him. Somewhere along the line, the stereo system had fallen over, so it was now horribly quiet in the shop. "Hello, bad wordss man." The thing even had a snake hiss, which didn't make things any better at all. "Ssnek iss Ssnek. Bad wordss man iss bad man."
"Y-you don't want to eat me!" He was babbling now, but he honestly and truly did not want to go the same way that Sherrel had. "I've got so many drugs in me that you'll be fucked up for a week! An', an', I've got a ton of STDs! If you eat me, you'll catch them all! You don't want that!"
"Bad wordss man not worry. Ssnek will not eat you." The ginormous snake made the statement, as innocent and straightforward as a kid making his first dope buy.
Relief stole over Adam, and he began to relax. "Okay, then—"
CHOMP
<><>
Lady Swarm
By the time Snek had finished catching the last of the Merchant capes (not that it took him much time), I'd located the fire escape and had descended to ground level. Not that I'd been resting on my laurels while letting Snek do all the hard work, of course. My bugs had kept track of each cape, and I'd herded them with swarms of stinging insects so he didn't have to move as far.
I strolled over to the front of the shop, casting an eye over the partiers who had been blasted out the front of the shop when Skidmark let loose with his power. My spiders were hard at work webbing them up, and half of them were so high they didn't even realise it.
"Is anyone hurt?" I asked, raising my voice a little so everyone could hear me. "Bleeding? Broken bones? Anything else that might need a doctor?"
Though a few of them were groaning, nobody answered my question in the affirmative. I pulled out my phone and put in a 911 call, watching them to make sure they didn't do anything stupid, even the ones I wasn't looking at. Once I got an operator, I asked for the police and PRT, and an ambulance just in case. Amusingly, when I explained the situation, the operator sounded more than a little jealous.
I'd just finished the call when Snek came slithering back through the shop, looking quite pleased with himself. "Hello, buzzy-bug girl. Ssnek hass caught bad people."
I raised an eyebrow, though nobody could tell behind my mask. "So, how many of them did you eat?"
"None. Ssnek put them in not-eat placce." He paused, tilting his head. "Bad wordss man said would tasste bad. Ssnek agreess."
I was still chuckling when Velocity arrived on scene.
End of Part Thirty-Eight
Balrog
not Durin's Bane
- Location
- The Mines of Moria
Woof... I feel sorry for Snek having to taste any of the Merchants 🤢
When you are so marinated with God knows how many variations of drugs, even a creature that easily eats Endbringers for lunch will call you out for it.
- Location
- The Internet?
Alexandria: Contessa, it was one damn donut, stop calling me fat!
I don't know why Dragon's upset. Cirrus put the printout of it up on the fridge.
I understood that reference! Is Finesse also a British man wrigglin' about on the floor?
Oh dear...
"Buzzy Bug Girl, this ta-co has a crunchy shell!"
"Well, they did say you needed more iron in your diet... close enough?"
At least it was just a pool noodle. In the AU where it's an iguana, you have to deal with the giant fucking inflatable tube gecko and its wacky waving flailing arms.
Surprisingly tame for Skids. Wait, does the 'b' stand for some horrid slang I don't want to know about?
Losing a loved one to a giant animal is no laughing matter.
"This snack is basting in his own juices! ...I do not care for it."
"She died doing what she loved... playing with a giant snake. It should have been mine, damnit! Why, God, why?!"
"Uh... Boss? Skidmark? Don't you think we should be running?"
"Huh? Oh, right... Dude, I've got to tell you, I'm high as hell."
Seize the means of intoxication!