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."