thebastion | Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons...

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Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons...

Who: A very disgruntled and possibly aggressive dragon kit
Open: Wide open! (unlike the door will be; Kitten can't reach doorknobs)
When: Day 152, afternoon
Where: Near the arrival point in the Bastion, or locked into whatever building you like
What: Kitten arrives and has questions. ...Also she didn't know about spell limits.
Format: Prose preferred but I'll match!
Warnings: Don't antagonize an angry dragon?

Kitten is very disoriented upon arrival on the plains. It isn't just the shifting of the ground around her, appearing as she moves. She reaches her magic down into it, the way she'd check for faultlines, but fails to learn anything of use. The circumstances allowing for kidnap of a dragon are few, and yet here she is, in a strange place unlike any of which she is aware in either the Mortal or Divine realms.

Noticing something on her wrist, Kitten claws at it, wondering whether it is the mechanism of her capture. She can sense something from the amulet, but it is an unfamiliar magic if it is magic at all.

For lack of any better plan, the dragon starts out for what seems like a beacon. She plants her feet firmly even with the knowledge that the ground on which she steps only appeared there moments ago. When she is finally picked up and taken to the Bastion, it's her first flight not clutched carefully in the talons of a grandparent; she is still far too young to fly, her wings underdeveloped.

She can see buildings, signs of life, in the Bastion. And so, Kitten shouts into the mind of anyone unfortunate enough to be within her range, doing her best to sound competent and intimidating, "WHERE AM I!? Why have you brought me here? Where are my parents? They had best be safe!"

That will do for a starting point.

Once she has either received at least a few answers or been thoroughly ignored, Kitten shifts the color of her scales. She blends chameleonlike into the area around her as she chooses a building to explore. A soft whistle, and the door opens on its own. She pushes it shut gently, quietly, and sneaks through the rooms unseen, doing her best to muffle any noise of claws on floor. Only someone with better hearing than human is likely to notice her footsteps.

The whistles are more audible, as are the latches of doors as they open at her voice and are shut carefully behind her. The fourth door, however, poses a problem.

Kitten senses no magic in it, but it won't open. Immediately, she turns around to head back the way she came, running at the door and whistling shrilly without any regard for stealth or silence. It stays shut. Kitten casts a bitter glance upward at the handle of the door, beyond her reach.

Hopefully someone comes to investigate before she takes drastic measures. You do like your doors and your buildings in one piece, I suppose.

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That sure is some loud shouting coming from the path to the Skyway.

Nanaki glances around first, looking to see if anyone more qualified to talk to a giant shouting dragon without worrying about getting hurt (like Paar, or maybe Rin) is around. But she sees nobody, so she decides to cautiously approach.

When she gets closer, she can see that this dragon isn't nearly as large as the other dragon that lives in the Bastion. Still, big thing with claws makes Nanaki a touch nervous. "Er, hi?"

Totally the best way to start a conversation.

Kitten is actually quite small. About forty five inches long, and a third of that is her tail. Her scales give away her actual mood to anyone who knows her well enough. Kitten is angry, yes, but she's also scared, and her scales are much pinker than the usual red of anger. She'd like to outgrow her involuntary color shifts. Then she can hide how she feels sometimes and just stay blue.

A small snort of smoke accompanies her response to Nanaki's greeting. "Do you have any answers, or just the greeting?" She's impatient, and Kitten has no parents or horse here to lecture here about her lack of manners.

The hallway of the apartments is full of odd whistles. Crona, not really knowing how to deal with odd whistles, does not open the door into the hallway until the whistles start sounding very frustrated. Then, cautiously, Crona walks out into the hallway.

A tiny dragon. The meister was not expecting to see a dragon so different from the little one currently curled in a patch of sunlight on the floor of Crona's apartment.

"H-hello." A friendly greeting, even though this dragon might not understand. "Do you need help?"

That's still 'way too big' in Nanaki's books. She's pretty sure Kitten is big enough to knock her down if she really tried, which is the worrisome part.

But Nanaki will still go ahead and answer Kitten's questions as best as she can, even if Kitten is being impatient. "I don't have all the answers, but I know some things, so maybe I can help you? It might be best to start at the beginning, though."

Being knocked over should be the least of anyone's concerns when it comes to dragons. The firebreathing, the bone-shattering whistles... those are a little more dangerous.

Kitten is still short on patience and tolerance. Rather than thanking Nanaki for offering to explain, she just says, "So long as you start!"

"I need my magic back! Bad enough to be brought here against my will and told all manner of terrible things, but this on top of it? Why don't my spells work?" Kitten has spent her whole day on edge and with very little patience. The lack of so basic a spell is one more frustration added to too many preceding it. She learned how to open doors with her voice at only a year or two of age. At sixteen, she is now trapped, unable to open a simple door with not a single ward or spell upon it.

For dragons, magic is a sense as much as an ability to be harnessed. The eating away at her repertoire of spells is very nearly the greatest possible worry for Kitten, second only to bad things happening to those she cares about. This has not been a good day.

[Fortunately for Kitten, Colin's workshop doesn't have lots of closed doors. The workshop itself is wide open in several spots. Loading bay doors? Open. Front door? Open. Supply room door? Propped open. A curious dragon can get in and out without any need to open a single door.]

[As for Colin himself, he's sitting at a work bench, hard at work on a set of radios. He's got good ears, but he isn't paying much attention to the stuff going on around him. Anyone sneaking up on him will be able to get pretty close to him before his proximity alert lets him know something's nearby.]

"You can only use spells three times a day." Magic. There's so much magic here. Crona will never really be comfortable with that.

"After three times things don't work as well."

The bone-shattering whistles are actually something Nanaki does not know about. She is rather lacking on experience with dragons. But she does start explaining when Kitten prompts her to, though she hesitates a bit on some of her words. "Alright, alright. Well, This place here is the Bastion. See, everything went kind of...wrong. Explosions, fires, stuff like that. It's not very pretty out there, especially not with the monsters and stuff. But in here, it's safe."

Kitten is well-camouflaged on her approach, scales matching to the colors of Colin's workshop. The courtesy of open doors is not returned, given who newly arrived she is and how uncomfortable she is with the answers she's received so far.

She makes as little noise as she can manage, but when she finally finds the apparent owner of the workshop, Kitten can't resist approaching more closely. She doesn't know the purpose of most of it, which makes Colin catch her attention. Both of Kitten's parents are mages. She's friends with the dean of the royal university and various palace science instructors. This dragon has spent much of her life in other people's workrooms, but none have been quite like Colin's.

"What are you making?" she asks via mindspeech before realizing he still can't see her. She drops the camouflage from her scales, back to her usual sky blue tinged with gold. Kitten will probably have some questions about the situation here too, but she doesn't want to hear the same answers just yet. Refusing to listen doesn't change things, of course, and if Grandfather Diamondflame were here he'd scold her for being so driven by sentiment. That's the problem, though. He isn't here. He might not be anywhere, if what she's been told is true.

"Am I to be as helpless here as a human babe, then? I cannot even open the door without magic!" Kitten shoots the doorknob a pointed look as she speaks into Crona's mind, snorting in annoyance. Sure enough, it's higher than her head, and probably impossible to reach no matter how she strains. Kitten would have to move furniture underneath it and clamber up. She cannot even manage that much without magic unless the furniture is lightweight.

Kitten was in such a temper a moment ago she probably would have tried to destroy the door before thinking to open it like a reasonable being. She may be an intelligent mage and a dragon, but she is still just a baby.

"What do you mean by 'not as well'?"

"Where is my world? Why am I not in it? Had I been dropped in a safe haven in the Divine Realms that would be one thing, easily reversible and a favor for which I'd be grateful." She shakes her head. It isn't. She's not anywhere connected to home or she'd be gone already. Even a baby dragon can move between realms at will.

"How did we get here, and how can I get home?" Stern and serious for most of it, the word 'home' carries a hint of longing. She wants her mama and her papa. Speaking mind to mind, there's only so much Kitten can do to hide how off-balance she's been left by the stark unfamiliarity of the situation.

"Sometimes it works. It usually doesn't." Crona puts a hand on the doorknob, not opening it yet. "I'm sure you'll be able to find someone to make a thing that can open doors for you."

"Is each spell limited to three uses per day, or is three the total number of any spell? Do spells rebound or cause problems after three attempts, or can I keep trying without consequence?"

She doesn't address the second part of what Crona said yet. The reassurance rings hollow because doors aren't actually what she's most worried about. They're just one more frustration piled on top of a whole series of concerns. Instead of thanks, Crona gets more questions. Kitten never seems to run short on those.

"Will I lose other magical abilities too? I can't talk without it. Will I be limited to three conversations per day?" She feels a little greedy saying that part, considering how recently she learned to speak into the minds of those around her at all. Kitten lived sixteen years without speech. She could do it again, but she desperately wants to avoid that. "Losing my sense of magic around me would be like losing my sight or my hearing."

Edited 2014-01-29 13:38 (UTC)

Colin doesn't seem to react at first, but that's mostly because his eye alerts her to her presence. He tenses ever so slightly in preparation to dodge a potential attack, but otherwise, he doesn't move from his spot or even look up.

When she speaks in his mind, though, he he lifts his head and looks at her. "Oh, you're a telepath," he says. "And a new one here... I see. Hello there!"

He turns his body to the side to reveal the pile of half-assembled technology on the table in front of him. "I'm working on a couple of radios," he says. "And since that may not mean anything to you, it's a set of devices that lets us communicate over long distances."

That's a lot of questions from a very small dragon.

"Three times for anything. Maybe you're allowed to talk with everyone as much as you want, because you need to talk to people."

Always a lot of questions. Crona missed one. "Will something go wrong if I try to use a spell? Would it hurt me or someone nearby, or just fail without repercussions?"

Kitten tilts her head quickly, shoulders not quite made for shrugging. "I do not need to talk. I got by well enough without it. I'm certainly grateful it hasn't been taken from me, though."

"No, it just won't work. That can be bad if you forget that it might not work, but it doesn't hurt anyone else."

A step forward, not wanting to scare the little dragon.

"C-can you not talk at all with your mouth? Paarthuranx is a dragon, and he can use his voice."

"What is a telepath? The word is new to me." Manners, Kitten. Even Spots, who would scold her for not at least offering a greeting after skulking through someone's workshop and being greeted as a friend in spite of the invasion. And Spots is a horse, a species would not credit much with manners. "Hello. My name is Skysong, but most call me Kitten. Mama says I have to grow into the name."

She approaches to get a closer look at the radios, not getting too close to the table lest its edge block her view. Kitten stands up on her hind legs and stretches her neck as far as she can. "Mages at home have spells that can do such things, but I've never heard of a radio either. How does it work?"

Kitten is thoroughly distracted from her next experiment regarding her abilities by the mention of another dragon. "I can speak, but not in any language you'd understand." She demonstrates with a series of sounds; whistles, trills, and croaks rather than anything a human would consider speech.

Eagerly moving on to the next topic, Kitten continues, "There is another dragon here?" And then with obvious confusion, "But no dragon speaks in human tongues. We all speak mind to mind once we're old enough to manage it, and before then only in the language you just heard. I understand human speech, I just don't have vocal cords made for it."

Colin is already amused, and he nods slightly. "All right then, Kitten-soon-to-be-Skysong," he tells her. "My name is Colin Starfury, or sometimes Merton when I'm up to no good. And a telepath is someone who has the power to communicate using their minds rather than their voices."

He turns to her more fully, and he grins. "Let me get you a seat so you can take a look," he tells her. He stands from his own bench and goes to get another stool from across the workshop. "I can tell you all about radios, but most people get bored, so... it's basically a system that uses high frequency waves to carry information of all sorts, in this case voices and sounds, across long distances. The radio has a transmitter to broadcast the wave, and a receiver to catch it."

"Not so soon. Dragons grow up slowly. I have over a decade left of infancy." As for the definition, she nods decisively. "All dragons are telepaths, then, once we're old enough. It's only the word that's new. I had help with my mindspeech. As far as I know I am the youngest to learn it in a very long time." Centuries at least. Possibly millenia. That's what happens when an opal dragon wakes up after a twenty century nap and decides it's time you learn to talk in a language your adoptive human family can understand.

She clambers awkwardly up onto the stool, leaning forward and looking closely at the materials on the table. "Waves? Those are how sound travels, I think. But you need something else to take it there, because sound would not go so far on its own." Her scientific education is primarily rooted in biology and geology. Technology is new.

"You're young yet," Colin confirms. "Give it a couple of decades, and it will seem like just a flash in the pan."

"That's exactly right, though. Sound travels in waves, and radio also travels in MUCH higher frequency waves. But then we're getting into much more detailed science there. I can go on if you like, but it would be a lecture."

He smirks then, and sits back down. "Basically, it needs a power unit to keep the transmitter going. The transmitter is what creates the waves, which travel considerably further distances than sound. And if there's a receiver, it catches the wave, translates its contents, and produces them from the sound producers, be they speakers, headphones, implants, or even a visual display unit."

He grins down at her, and he leans against the workbench. "I can keep going, if you like, but is this what you want to see?" he asks her.

In a couple of decades Kitten will still be a child, but her parents will be old by human standards. Rikash and Sarralyn, her two and three year old siblings will probably have children of their own. Or they won't, if what Kitten's been told is true. She won't think about it right now. She can't, whatever Grandfather Diamondflame would have to say about the undragonlike sentiment. She falls silent for a moment before latching on gratefully to the distraction Colin offers with his radios.

"How could sound be conveyed through a visual display? That is a different sense entirely." Kitten only minds lectures when they're telling her what she can't do or repeating things she already knows. New knowledge is always worth listening to, and she has far more patience for it than she does for anything else.

"I want a demonstration once they are working," Kitten replies decisively, "even if I cannot say anything aloud that those here would understand. Your workshop has a lot of things in it. What else do you make? Not just radios."

"That's actually pretty easy," Colin says. "A spectrograph is very easy tech to make, I'll have one up and running later this evening. Ironically, I need it to test the radio broadcasts."

He looks amused at that. "You're welcome to attend. What a spectrograph does is catches sound and convets it to a display of the sound waves into light. A couple of artists use them to create moving sculptures, others use it to communicate with Silicoids. Silicoids are an alien species of living rocks, and only a few of them can actually hear things. The species communicates primarily through light and vibration."

He smiles widely and gestures around the lab. "I can make anything," he says proudly. "But what I'm working on now are things to help the survivors here. The radios, for example, will be ready in a few days. I'm also working on a generator, and and engine for any ship I can manage to build here. Along with whatever requests people bring me."

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Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons...

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I should have specified size more accurately, sorry!

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Oh WHOOPS |D sorry

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