On Constructing Dragons

"The problem with making dragons," Victor confided to me, "isn't making them fly." He smirked over my quizzical glance. "No, they're big, but you can fill those hollow bones with helium."

"Ingenious" I said before asking the obvious for him. "Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is making them breathe fire." He sipped his coffee. "Nothing living breathes fire. Took some serious throat work to handle the gases, and Sam figured out how to tip the tongue so it could spark off the teeth. But once we got that solved that things really started breaking down."

"Breaking down?"

"We had full fledged dragons in the lab. They were flying around and burning everything; it was a disaster! We couldn't figure out how to control them." I raised my eyebrows and took another bite. "We couldn't call in anyone outside the lab. That would have been a public-relations nightmare, not to mention research sanctions again. Tim figured it out; we brought in some of the new equipment from the time-travel lab and sent the dragons backwards."

"Oh? Where did you send them?"

"To the middle ages. They had loads of dragons back then."

The Year-Glass

The young man cackled, if a young man can cackle, when she showed him the medallion and asked her question, "No, no, nothing. Nothing is wrong with it, nothing at all." He spoke slowly, tracing each syllable with his tongue.

Sandra persisted, "It's the symbol for infinity, but it's sideways. See, the loops are supposed to be on the sides, not top and bottom."

The young man's smile grew wider. "No, it's not Infinity, definitely not Infinity. It is easy to mistake a Year-Glass." He stretched the word, Glass, into a soft hiss.

Sandra looked again at the medallion. An inch tall, it certainly looked like a lemniscate - the symbol mathematicians have used for unimaginably large numbers, a figure eight stretched and turned on its side. This medallion, "A Year-Glass," Sandra breathed, appeared to be turned on its side again - apparently only a stretched figure eight, with a tiny loop at the top. A simple white string made the medallion into a necklace. Heavy for its size, it rested comfortably in her hand. She traced the delicate curves with a long finger tail, shivering at the rough scales etches painstakingly into the metal. Bluish glass filled the two loops, bulbing slightly to either side. She pointed to two small slits, one on each loop, on the sides of the Year-Glass. "What are these?"

The young man's smile, already splitting his face, grew again. Somehow that smile became grotesque, but Sandra was not looking at him. "That, my dear, is how the Year-Glass works. You put something of yours in the bottom - a hair, a tear, a dream. You put something from someone else in the top. The Glass steals from the top, and gives to the bottom, you see."

"Steals?" Sandra glanced up, but only briefly.

"Steals, takes, retrieves, gives, yes, yes. All those things; a Year-Glass has much magic."

"Steals what?"

"Life, mostly, but it can steal other things, too. It depends, I can't really say on what."

Now Sandra laughed. "Right, okay. Steals life." She shook her head, then held it up to the light. "It is pretty though." She weighed it another moment in her hand, in her mind. "How much?"

A ♥

The guy had been sitting in that refridgerator for better than a couple hours. Good for him it was as big as it was. And off. He talked crazy, too. He said he saw dog sized bugs. Delirium. No records, no direct connection, but when a night club worth of people die, they need to hold on to something. He spent the night in a secured hospital room.

The next day, the detective took him back to the scene. "So, I was standing right here when people started screaming." In the kitchen. Back corner. "I saw these huge bugs, and I backed up into this fridge, and then I got stuck."

"You backed into an open fridge. Where were these bugs? On the wall?"

"Well, there was kind of a hole in the wall, and they were in there."

"Hole? Wall looks solid enough to me. Solid wall, and a couple dozen corpses fallin' over each other out there. You better have more than bugs."

"I swear, there was a hole in the wall, and huge bugs! I heard screaming, and saw the bugs, and that's it!"

The sargent walked in. "Times up. Diva's ready to blow this place."

Q ♣

The tapping had come from a refridgerator in a backroom, in a corner. Someone was alive in there, alive and calling for help. The detective tapped back, then called for help.

"I've got a live one here."

"Someone survived?" the Sargent. A nice guy, but a little slow on the uptake.

"Yeah, someone survived. They're in a fridge. I need some limbs to pull it out."

"Can't you just open the door?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, and let the poor bastard suffocate just like everyone else. Good thinking, Sherlock. Just get some people in here."

"Right. The Diva's here. She's gonna blow the building." Great. The Diva's a stuck up little prat who gets high on explosives. Loves to blow stuff up. What's she doing here? "She's demolishing the building. Someone seems to think that'll stop the gas leak."

"There may not be a gas leak."

7 ♥

The darkness faded like a hangover. The Spider was gone, replaced with a burning light. The hole was gone, replaced by clouds and air.

"He's awake." The scientist. Too bad the Spider didn't get him. I'd have laughed.

My multifaceted eyes cleared, and I saw... her... an Α, a Female.

2 ♦

A hideous Spider stared through the hole we dug. I hate Spiders. Beyond the centuries of constant torment, enslavement, and ritual meals, Spiders smell. I raised my claws to attack.

"It's not real." Θξ pointed to the flashing lights. "Robot. Not a Spider."

I paused for a moment, and swung my claws anyway. Spiders deserve to die.

K ♦

In the blackness, a light flashed. Spider spun, sensors probing. No light had penetrated this shell of ice since Spider had cut the last rock from it. Spider stole quietly towards the source.

The light flashed slowly, but constantly, from a small hole in the ice. Spider knew the terrain - had carved every inch of it. This hole was new. Unpredictably, sensors long silent in Spider's array detected something. Life. There was life in that light.

6 ♠

The wind didn't slow him down while he was on the ground, so he transformed back, and ran. The bird-skeletons didn't follow. Their black bodies absorbed the light around them, so that even flying in sunlight, details were hard to discern. The wizard thought of fish swimming deep beneath water's surface, horrible fish with no right to exist, huge fish, somehow flying, and dripping with hatred, fire, death.

Only one could know what they are, what to do. He must see his Oracle.

9 ♦

Out of the center of the black void rose a steep plateau. Once on top, Spider deposited the capsule into Pyramid. New orders. Maybe now they would be moving to a new planet, hopefully one with rich minerals. The orders must be rendezvous coordinates.

Spider waited for Pyramid - unusual. Typically Spider had something to do, and Pyramid's analysis could wait until the next report. But by all accounts, Spider had completed mining, and it was better to sit and wait, rather than waste precious metal by moving needlessly. Besides, Spider wanted to know when they would leave.

A ♣

Power still lit the room, though. The halogen emergency lights drown out the blues, reds, and greens of the dance lights. Those source-fours kept everything pretty warm, even if it was dead. A disco is a scary place when you're the only one still on your feet.

She stepped carefully over the few remaining bodies. The whole area was sealed off, quarantined. Nothing warm left alive, they said. Nothing could live in that gas.

taptaptap

What was that?

2 ♥

Finally, I stared directly into those multifaceted eyes. He sniffed deep my irritation and clicked. "Apology accepted, now go away."

"You're Ωω." Not a question. He knew his stuff. "I was waiting for you. Θξ. I need your help."

Hmm. Θ. He really is a scientist. I laughed to myself. "You need my help. I suppose you need a trench dug. Maybe some dung collected? Forget about it."

"It could mean a promotion. I don't mean within Ω; I mean above it."

I seethed curiosity and doubt. The bitter odor made him smile. No one moves above their station. It doesn't happen. How could he offer that?

8 ♦

Spider scuttled along on its sleek black metal legs. It navigated the sheer wall of ice quickly and easily. Each leg pounded a hold into the smooth surface, pulling a share of the massive body up further. Any level surface lurked miles and miles below, probably beneath the ocean of methane gas. This hunk of sick yellow chlorine was the only dry land on the planet.

Spider reached a hole and clambered through. Inside, a void stretched into the vastness of space. The chlorine shell of ice was almost completely mined. The puny volume on minerals Spider had collected barely sustained it, and soon, now, starvation would become a major threat.

4 ♠

The wizard slipped and fell into the muddy grass, stumbled back to his feet, and kept running. He could hear the sickening rustles behind him, gaining. They were heavy; he could hear the earth crushing underneath their feet. And they were fast. Too fast. The wizard panted an incantation, and then he was a moth. He flew up and up, dodging raindrops as best he could, and then he turned around.

It was worse than he thought.

It wasn't just one...thing... following him. It was many. And they weren't confined to the ground, either. Their skeletal wings shed the water from the storm, and somehow the wind wasn't even slowing them down.