Construction Post: TOMU 2-25
Aug. 9th, 2011 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerin2:10-2:40: ~600 words (+500)
3:00-3:30: ~950 words (+350)
2:30-3:00: ~1350 words (+400)
3:30-4:00: ~1850 words (+500)
4:00-4:30: ~2250 words (+400)
5:30-6:00: ~2450 words (+200)
[3 hours. Less new material, but closing in on a closing.]
My mouth had suddenly gone very dry, but that was okay because I could no longer taste the chicken I'd just taken a bite off. I forced it down my throat.
It had always been a little cool for my tastes in the big open dining area inside the Arch... not quite uncomfortably so, just a little cool. Now I felt a chill clinging to every inch of exposed skin.
My mind replayed my encounter with Twyla, her standing right in front of me. Her horns had seemed longer... in my mind, I saw them growing larger still, more curved and pointed. She loomed larger.
Twyla... unassuming Twyla. The only person I'd ever met who could recede into the background better than me who wasn't a gnome. The girl I thought of as kind of mousy.
Could it possibly be true?
"Baby?" Amaranth said, reaching for my hand and then giving it a squeeze.
"What'd I say?" Steff asked. "There isn't some weird midlands human thing where it's rude to talk about sneezing, is there? I think I would have noticed that by now... not that I go around talking about sneezing all the time... or caring about what people think is rude."
I tried to shake off the growing image of a strangely lipless Twyla staring at me with all the intensity of a cat hypnotizing a mouse.
It couldn't be true.
Maybe it wasn't... it sounded like something from a joke. It really did. Sneezing fire. Even though it wasn't quite in keeping with Steff's sense of humor, I clung to the faint hope that this was all it was.
"Why... why do you keep saying she sneezed?" I asked, sputtering a little
"Because she did," Steff said. "Twyla didn't make fire... her nose did. That's why I said 'gesundheit' right after... didn't you hear me?"
"I did hear you say it, but I thought you were just being funny, you know?" I said.
Though it wasn't really all that funny either way. Sneezing fire fire was like a bad joke... like the kind you get in a birthday card or a kid's TV show. That was the only sort of place you ever heard about anything sneezing fire.
Still, even the worst joke was still better than a terrifying truth...
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective? Because while I can kind of see that, it seems a little avant-garde for this crowd."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked. The fact that she was so calm about it was sharpening an edge of desperation on the dread rising up inside my stomach.
Demons could produce flames, and ifrits could conjure them from air, and elemental creatures like salamanders were made out of living flame, but who sneezed fire?
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose? What did you think happened."
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
She had it. There was no widely-known variety of creature or being who specifically sneezed fire... but there were some who were known to exhale flames and were theoretically capable of sneezing, which is why this sort of thing was considered the height of all-ages humor when it came to sickly dragons.
Not that all dragons exhaled fire. But for people who'd never been up close and personal one, the big billowing gout of flame breath was the most dramatic and iconic image of a dragon available.
For those who had seen one up close, the most dramatic image of a dragon was a dragon.
Or, in my case, a smiling, silver-haired man in a suit. There was little that a flash of destructive breath could have added to that image in my head.
"Oh... wait... do dragons have horns?" Steff said as she caught on. "Because it would be weird if she's part dragon and also part whatever does have horns. Though I suppose having human and dragon blood in the same body suggests at least one ancestor of an adventurously amorous nature, so maybe the weird thing is that she doesn't have more extra parts?"
"Some dragons have horns," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. The ones that do have horns come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes, so really it would be hard to say if her horns in particular say anything in regard to dragonhood."
She was using her authoritative voice, which strangely she used most often when she was trying to hedge things... like uncertainty was the thing she was most certain of. Or like the less clear the truth was, the more sure she needed to be of herself. In any event, I could tell what she was trying to do... there was no way, sitting around the table, to prove that Twyla's horns hadn't come from a dragon so she was pointing out how hard it would be to prove that they did.
The uncertainty didn't help much... I'd never been convinced that she was part dragon, the mere possibility had been enough to get under my skin and start clawing around.
But it helped a little, if only because my mind was more inclined to focus on the possibility that she was than the equally possible chance that she wasn't.
"Um... not to say anything one way or the other about Twyla," Ian said, "but red dragons almost always have horns. Gold dragons, too... and those are the most common fire-breathers. A lot of pyromancers use one or the other in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'. Reds in particular tend to have horns like goats, or those antelope that look like they have javelins sticking out of their skulls."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular, because I imagined that if they were crowning a full-sized dragon's skull they'd be quite a bit larger. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger. I just couldn't see their color standing out or looking unnatural.
"Are her horns maybe kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did just say a few minutes ago that she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said. "I wouldn't call them velvety."
"Mmm, maybe I'm wrong," Amaranth said. "But then I tend to think of fawn horns as velvety, too, even though they're usually not... just one of those expectations versus reality things, I guess."
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
"To be strictly factual..." Amaranth said, her voice tinged with a level of uncertainty I wouldn't have ordinarily associated with facts, "we don't even know for certain that she breathed fire... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose, Steff?"
"No, Amy, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them yourself," Amaranth said.
"Have multiple orgasms?" Steff said.
"What?" Ian said.
"I mean, come again?" Steff clarified. "I am the gap between my ears and eyes."
"No comment," Ian said.
"You heard a sneeze, then you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
But that seemed like the best place to leave it, given that we weren't going to be able to prove anything one way or the other right then and there... or possibly ever, since the dragon issues I had didn't actually do anything to make Twyla's heritage my business.
So everyone kind of nodded and the conversation drifted listlessly away to other topics, though my mind stayed on dragons and kept coming back to them throughout the evening.
My dreams that night came in fragments. I'd say I dreamed about dragons, but that suggests a scenario, events. There wasn't anything so coherent as that... just snatches of eyes, teeth, and scales. More than images, though, there were emotions.
Not heart-pounding terror, but it's slow and steady friend: creeping, inexorable dread.
When I first read up on lucid dreaming the year before, I came across more than one source that made it sound like having complete control over one's dreams would flow naturally from the mere act of learning to recognize them. It's a dream, after all, and more than that it's your dream.
I've since learned that this is true... or seems true, while they're dreaming... for some people, but it's not the case for everyone. It's definitely not for me. Learning that I wasn't doing something wrong was a big relief, because the lucid dreaming books made it sound like it was something that would be basically automatic.
Really, if you think about it, it's a pretty ridiculous idea... how much control do you have over your mind when you're awake? I can imagine a bunny rabbit but I can't make myself see one that isn't there. I can try to ignore an unpleasant sight but I can't remove it from my view by willing it not to be there.
Lucidity might be necessary to control a dream, but lucidity itself isn't control. Some of the most vivid and clear experiences of my life have been the times when I had no control.
But I have learned to recognize dreams most of the time, and to wake myself up from them. When your dreams have been invaded as many times as mine have been, it's sort of a matter of self-defense. It wasn't something I did lightly, though... I've also gone through strings of unpleasant dreams often enough to know that trying to opt out of them night after night just turned me into a zombie during the day. Sleep was a need that both my demon and human sides possessed in equal measure, so it was one area where I was on the same playing field as most people around me.
Even that as an option was denied to me, though, because I never fell deep enough into
[2.5 hours in. Beginning part is shaping up well. May be just about done. Next hour will be used to close out the day.]
My mouth had suddenly gone very dry, but that was okay because I could no longer taste the chicken I'd just taken a bite off. I forced it down my throat.
It had always been a little cool for my tastes in the big open dining area inside the Arch... not quite uncomfortably so, just a little cool. Now I felt a chill clinging to every inch of exposed skin.
My mind replayed my encounter with Twyla, her standing right in front of me. Her horns had seemed longer... in my mind, I saw them growing larger still, more curved and pointed. She loomed larger.
Twyla... unassuming Twyla. The only person I'd ever met who could recede into the background better than me who wasn't a gnome. The girl I thought of as kind of mousy.
Could it possibly be true?
"Baby?" Amaranth said, reaching for my hand and then giving it a squeeze.
"What'd I say?" Steff asked. "There isn't some weird midlands human thing where it's rude to talk about sneezing, is there? I think I would have noticed that by now... not that I go around talking about sneezing all the time... or caring about what people think is rude."
I tried to shake off the growing image of a strangely lipless Twyla staring at me with all the intensity of a cat hypnotizing a mouse.
It couldn't be true.
Maybe it wasn't... it sounded like something from a joke. It really did. Sneezing fire. Even though it wasn't quite in keeping with Steff's sense of humor, I clung to the faint hope that this was all it was.
"Why... why do you keep saying she sneezed?" I asked, sputtering a little
"Because she did," Steff said. "Twyla didn't make fire... her nose did. That's why I said 'gesundheit' right after... didn't you hear me?"
"I did hear you say it, but I thought you were just being funny, you know?" I said.
Though it wasn't really all that funny either way. Sneezing fire fire was like a bad joke... like the kind you get in a birthday card or a kid's TV show. That was the only sort of place you ever heard about anything sneezing fire.
Still, even the worst joke was still better than a terrifying truth...
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective? Because while I can kind of see that, it seems a little avant-garde for this crowd."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked. The fact that she was so calm about it was sharpening an edge of desperation on the dread rising up inside my stomach.
Demons could produce flames, and ifrits could conjure them from air, and elemental creatures like salamanders were made out of living flame, but who sneezed fire?
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose? What did you think happened."
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
She had it. There was no widely-known variety of creature or being who specifically sneezed fire... but there were some who were known to exhale flames and were theoretically capable of sneezing, which is why this sort of thing was considered the height of all-ages humor when it came to sickly dragons.
Not that all dragons exhaled fire. But for people who'd never been up close and personal one, the big billowing gout of flame breath was the most dramatic and iconic image of a dragon available.
For those who had seen one up close, the most dramatic image of a dragon was a dragon.
Or, in my case, a smiling, silver-haired man in a suit. There was little that a flash of lightning breath could have added to that image in my head.
"Oh... wait... do dragons have horns?" Steff said as she caught on. "Because it would be weird if she's part dragon and also part whatever does have horns. Though I suppose having human and dragon blood in the same body suggests at least one ancestor of an adventurously amorous nature, so maybe the weird thing is that she doesn't have more extra parts?"
"Some dragons have horns," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. The ones that do have horns come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes, so really it would be hard to say if her horns in particular say anything in regard to dragonhood."
She was using her authoritative voice, which strangely she used most often when she was trying to hedge things... like uncertainty was the thing she was most certain of. Or like the less clear the truth was, the more sure she needed to be of herself. In any event, I could tell what she was trying to do... there was no way, sitting around the table, to prove that Twyla's horns hadn't come from a dragon so she was pointing out how hard it would be to prove that they did.
The uncertainty didn't help much... I'd never been convinced that she was part dragon, the mere possibility had been enough to get under my skin and start clawing around.
But it helped a little, if only because my mind was more inclined to focus on the possibility that she was than the equally possible chance that she wasn't.
"Um... not to say anything one way or the other about Twyla," Ian said, "but red dragons almost always have horns. Gold dragons, too... and those are the most common fire-breathers. A lot of pyromancers use one or the other in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'. Reds in particular tend to have horns like goats, or those antelope that look like they have javelins sticking out of their skulls."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular, because I imagined that if they were crowning a full-sized dragon's skull they'd be quite a bit larger. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger. I just couldn't see their color standing out or looking unnatural.
"Are her horns maybe kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did just say a few minutes ago that she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said. "I wouldn't call them velvety."
"Mmm, maybe I'm wrong," Amaranth said. "But then I tend to think of fawn horns as velvety, too, even though they're usually not... just one of those expectations versus reality things, I guess."
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
"To be strictly factual..." Amaranth said, her voice tinged with a level of uncertainty I wouldn't have ordinarily associated with facts, "we don't even know for certain that she breathed fire... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose, Steff?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them yourself," Amaranth said.
"Have multiple orgasms?" Steff said.
"What?" Ian said.
"I mean, come again?" Steff clarified. "I am the gap between my ears and eyes."
"No comment," Ian said.
"You heard a sneeze, then you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
[]
My dreams that night were... troubled. They came in fragments
When I first read up on lucid dreaming the year before, I came across more than one source that made it sound like having complete control over one's dreams would flow naturally from the mere act of learning to recognize them. It's a dream, after all, and more than that it's your dream.
I've since learned that this is true... or seems true, while they're dreaming... for some people, but it's not the case for everyone. It's definitely not for me. Learning that I wasn't doing something wrong was a big relief, because the lucid dreaming books made it sound like it was something that would be basically automatic.
Really, if you think about it, it's a pretty ridiculous idea... how much control do you have over your mind when you're awake? I can imagine a bunny rabbit but I can't make myself see one that isn't there. I can try to ignore an unpleasant sight but I can't remove it from my view by willing it not to be there.
Lucidity might be necessary to control a dream, but lucidity itself isn't control. Some of the most vivid and clear experiences of my life have been the times when I had no control.
But I have learned to recognize dreams most of the time, and to wake myself up from them. When your dreams have been invaded as many times as mine have been, it's sort of a matter of self-defense. It wasn't something I did lightly, though... I've also gone through strings of unpleasant dreams often enough to know that trying to opt out of them night after night just turned me into a zombie during the day. Sleep was a need that both my demon and human sides possessed in equal measure, so it was one area where I was on the same playing field as most people around me.
[2 hours in. Figured out part of what was wrong... I've been shying away from Mackenzie's emotional perspective, so there was no emotional reaction on her part to the conversation. I'm working on adding that in now.]
My mouth had suddenly gone very dry, but that was okay because I could no longer taste the chicken in my mouth. I forced it down my throat.
"Baby?" Amaranth said, reaching for my hand and then giving it a squeeze.
"What'd I say?" Steff asked. "There isn't some weird midlands human thing where it's rude to talk about sneezing? I think I would have noticed that by now... not that I go around talking about sneezing all the time..."
"Why do you keep saying she sneezed?" I asked.
It sounded like something from a joke. It really did. Sneezing fire. Even though it wasn't quite in keeping with her sense of humor, I clung to the faint hope that it was a joke.
"Because she did," Steff said. "Twyla didn't make fire... her nose did. That's why I said 'gesundheit'... didn't you hear?"
"I heard you say it, but I thought you were just being funny, you know?" I said.
Though it wasn't really all that funny anyway. It was like a bad joke... like the kind you get in a birthday card or a kid's TV show. Because that was the only sort of place you ever heard about anything sneezing fire.
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked.
Demons could produce flames, and ifrits could conjure them from air, and elemental creatures like salamanders were made out of living flame, but who sneezed fire?
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose?"
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
Amaranth had it. There was no widely-known variety of creature or being who specifically sneezed fire... but there were some who were known to exhale flames and were theoretically capable of sneezing, which is why this sort of thing was considered the height of all-ages humor when it came to sickly dragons.
Not that all dragons exhaled fire. But for people who'd never been up close and personal one, the big billowing gout of flame breath was the most dramatic and iconic image of a dragon available.
For those whohad seen one up close, the most dramatic image of a dragon was a dragon.
Or, in my case, a smiling, silver-haired man in a suit. There was little that a flash of lightning breath could have added to that image in my head.
"Oh... wait... do dragons have horns?" Steff said as she caught on. "Because it would be weird if she's part dragon and also part whatever does have horns. Though I suppose having human and dragon blood in the same body suggests at least one ancestor of an adventurously amorous nature, so maybe the weird thing is that she doesn't have more extra parts?"
"Some dragons have horns," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. The ones that do have horns come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes, so really it would be hard to say if her horns in particular say anything in regard to dragonhood."
"Um... not to say anything one way or the other about Twyla, but red dragons almost always have horns," Ian said. "Gold dragons, too. A lot of pyromancers use one or the other in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'. Reds in particular tend to have horns like goats, or those antelope that look like they have javelins sticking out of their skulls."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular, because I imagined that if they were crowning a full-sized dragon's skull they'd be quite a bit larger. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger. I just couldn't see their color standing out or looking unnatural.
"Are her horns maybe kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did say she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said. "I wouldn't call them velvety."
"Mmm, maybe I'm wrong," Amaranth said. "But then I tend to think of fawn horns as velvety, too, even though they're usually not... just one of those expectations versus reality things, I guess."
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
"To be strictly factual..." Amaranth said, her voice tinged with a level of uncertainty I wouldn't have ordinarily associated with facts, "we don't even know for certain that she breathed fire... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose, Steff?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them," Amaranth said.
"Have multiple orgasms?" Steff said.
"What?" Ian said.
"I mean, come again?" Steff clarified.
"You heard a sneeze, you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
[]
My dreams that night were... troubled. They came in fragments
When I first read up on lucid dreaming the year before, I came across more than one source that made it sound like having complete control over one's dreams would flow naturally from the mere act of learning to recognize them. It's a dream, after all, and more than that it's your dream.
I've since learned that this is true... or seems true, while they're dreaming... for some people, but it's not the case for everyone. It's definitely not for me. Learning that I wasn't doing something wrong was a big relief, because the lucid dreaming books made it sound like it was something that would be basically automatic.
Really, if you think about it, it's a pretty ridiculous idea... how much control do you have over your mind when you're awake? I can imagine a bunny rabbit but I can't make myself see one that isn't there. I can try to ignore an unpleasant sight but I can't remove it from my view by willing it not to be there.
Lucidity might be necessary to control a dream, but lucidity itself isn't control. Some of the most vivid and clear experiences of my life have been the times when I had no control.
But I have learned to recognize dreams most of the time, and to wake myself up from them. When your dreams have been invaded as many times as mine have been, it's sort of a matter of self-defense. It wasn't something I did lightly, though... I've also gone through strings of unpleasant dreams often enough to know that trying to opt out of them night after night just turned me into a zombie during the day. Sleep was a need that both my demon and human sides possessed in equal measure, so it was one area where I was on the same playing field as most people around me.
[1.5 hours.]
"What?" I said to Steff.
"She sneezed," Steff repeated. "That's why I said 'gesundheit'... didn't you hear?"
"I heard you saying 'gesundheit' but I thought you were just being funny," I said.
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked.
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose?"
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
"Oh... wait, do dragons have horns?" Steff asked.
"Some do," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. Some dragons have horns, but they come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes."
"Red dragons almost always have horns," Ian said. "Gold dragons, too. A lot of pyromancers use them in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular, because I imagined that if they were crowning a full-sized dragon's skull they'd be quite a bit larger. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger.
"Are her horns kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did say she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said. "I wouldn't call them velvety."
"Mmm, maybe I'm wrong," Amaranth said. "But then I tend to think of fawn horns as velvety, too, even though they're usually not... just one of those expectations versus reality things, I guess."
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
"To be strictly factual..." Amaranth said, her voice tinged with a level of uncertainty I wouldn't have ordinarily associated with facts, "we don't even know for certain that she breathed fire... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose, Steff?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them," Amaranth said.
"Have multiple orgasms?" Steff said.
"What?" Ian said.
"I mean, come again?" Steff clarified.
"You heard a sneeze, you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
[]
My dreams that night were... troubled. They came in fragments
When I first read up on lucid dreaming the year before, I came across more than one source that made it sound like having complete control over one's dreams would flow naturally from the mere act of learning to recognize them. It's a dream, after all, and more than that it's your dream.
I've since learned that this is true... or seems true, while they're dreaming... for some people, but it's not the case for everyone. It's definitely not for me. Learning that I wasn't doing something wrong was a big relief, because the lucid dreaming books made it sound like it was something that would be basically automatic.
Really, if you think about it, it's a pretty ridiculous idea... how much control do you have over your mind when you're awake? I can imagine a bunny rabbit but I can't make myself see one that isn't there. I can try to ignore an unpleasant sight but I can't remove it from my view by willing it not to be there.
Lucidity might be necessary to control a dream, but lucidity itself isn't control. Some of the most vivid and clear experiences of my life have been the times when I had no control.
But I have learned to recognize dreams most of the time, and to wake myself up from them. When your dreams have been invaded as many times as mine have been, it's sort of a matter of self-defense. It wasn't something I did lightly, though... I've also gone through strings of unpleasant dreams often enough to know that trying to opt out of them night after night just turned me into a zombie during the day. Sleep was a need that both my demon and human sides possessed in equal measure, so it was one area where I was on the same playing field as most people around me.
[1 hour in.]
"What?" I said to Steff.
"She sneezed," Steff repeated. "That's why I said 'gesundheit'... didn't you hear?"
"I heard you saying 'gesundheit' but I thought you were just being funny," I said.
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked.
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose?"
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
"Oh... wait, do dragons have horns?" Steff asked.
"Some do," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. Some dragons have horns, but they come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes."
"Red dragons almost always have horns," Ian said. "Gold dragons, too. A lot of pyromancers use them in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger.
"Are her horns kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did say she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said.
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
[]
"Though we don't know for a fact that this is the case... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them," Amaranth said.
"Come again and again?" Steff said.
"You heard a sneeze, you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
[Just begun.]
"What?" I said to Steff.
"She sneezed," Steff repeated. "That's why I said 'gesundheit'... didn't you hear?"
"I heard you saying 'gesundheit' but I thought you were just being funny," I said.
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked.
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose?"
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
"Oh... wait, do dragons have horns?" Steff asked.
"Some do," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. Some dragons have horns, but they come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes."
"Red dragons almost always have horns," Ian said. "Gold dragons, too. A lot of pyromancers use them in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns.
"Are her horns kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did say she's not very horny," Steff said.
[]
"Though we don't know for a fact that this is the case... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them," Amaranth said.
"Come again and again?" Steff said.
"You heard a sneeze, you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
3:00-3:30: ~950 words (+350)
2:30-3:00: ~1350 words (+400)
3:30-4:00: ~1850 words (+500)
4:00-4:30: ~2250 words (+400)
5:30-6:00: ~2450 words (+200)
[3 hours. Less new material, but closing in on a closing.]
My mouth had suddenly gone very dry, but that was okay because I could no longer taste the chicken I'd just taken a bite off. I forced it down my throat.
It had always been a little cool for my tastes in the big open dining area inside the Arch... not quite uncomfortably so, just a little cool. Now I felt a chill clinging to every inch of exposed skin.
My mind replayed my encounter with Twyla, her standing right in front of me. Her horns had seemed longer... in my mind, I saw them growing larger still, more curved and pointed. She loomed larger.
Twyla... unassuming Twyla. The only person I'd ever met who could recede into the background better than me who wasn't a gnome. The girl I thought of as kind of mousy.
Could it possibly be true?
"Baby?" Amaranth said, reaching for my hand and then giving it a squeeze.
"What'd I say?" Steff asked. "There isn't some weird midlands human thing where it's rude to talk about sneezing, is there? I think I would have noticed that by now... not that I go around talking about sneezing all the time... or caring about what people think is rude."
I tried to shake off the growing image of a strangely lipless Twyla staring at me with all the intensity of a cat hypnotizing a mouse.
It couldn't be true.
Maybe it wasn't... it sounded like something from a joke. It really did. Sneezing fire. Even though it wasn't quite in keeping with Steff's sense of humor, I clung to the faint hope that this was all it was.
"Why... why do you keep saying she sneezed?" I asked, sputtering a little
"Because she did," Steff said. "Twyla didn't make fire... her nose did. That's why I said 'gesundheit' right after... didn't you hear me?"
"I did hear you say it, but I thought you were just being funny, you know?" I said.
Though it wasn't really all that funny either way. Sneezing fire fire was like a bad joke... like the kind you get in a birthday card or a kid's TV show. That was the only sort of place you ever heard about anything sneezing fire.
Still, even the worst joke was still better than a terrifying truth...
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective? Because while I can kind of see that, it seems a little avant-garde for this crowd."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked. The fact that she was so calm about it was sharpening an edge of desperation on the dread rising up inside my stomach.
Demons could produce flames, and ifrits could conjure them from air, and elemental creatures like salamanders were made out of living flame, but who sneezed fire?
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose? What did you think happened."
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
She had it. There was no widely-known variety of creature or being who specifically sneezed fire... but there were some who were known to exhale flames and were theoretically capable of sneezing, which is why this sort of thing was considered the height of all-ages humor when it came to sickly dragons.
Not that all dragons exhaled fire. But for people who'd never been up close and personal one, the big billowing gout of flame breath was the most dramatic and iconic image of a dragon available.
For those who had seen one up close, the most dramatic image of a dragon was a dragon.
Or, in my case, a smiling, silver-haired man in a suit. There was little that a flash of destructive breath could have added to that image in my head.
"Oh... wait... do dragons have horns?" Steff said as she caught on. "Because it would be weird if she's part dragon and also part whatever does have horns. Though I suppose having human and dragon blood in the same body suggests at least one ancestor of an adventurously amorous nature, so maybe the weird thing is that she doesn't have more extra parts?"
"Some dragons have horns," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. The ones that do have horns come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes, so really it would be hard to say if her horns in particular say anything in regard to dragonhood."
She was using her authoritative voice, which strangely she used most often when she was trying to hedge things... like uncertainty was the thing she was most certain of. Or like the less clear the truth was, the more sure she needed to be of herself. In any event, I could tell what she was trying to do... there was no way, sitting around the table, to prove that Twyla's horns hadn't come from a dragon so she was pointing out how hard it would be to prove that they did.
The uncertainty didn't help much... I'd never been convinced that she was part dragon, the mere possibility had been enough to get under my skin and start clawing around.
But it helped a little, if only because my mind was more inclined to focus on the possibility that she was than the equally possible chance that she wasn't.
"Um... not to say anything one way or the other about Twyla," Ian said, "but red dragons almost always have horns. Gold dragons, too... and those are the most common fire-breathers. A lot of pyromancers use one or the other in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'. Reds in particular tend to have horns like goats, or those antelope that look like they have javelins sticking out of their skulls."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular, because I imagined that if they were crowning a full-sized dragon's skull they'd be quite a bit larger. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger. I just couldn't see their color standing out or looking unnatural.
"Are her horns maybe kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did just say a few minutes ago that she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said. "I wouldn't call them velvety."
"Mmm, maybe I'm wrong," Amaranth said. "But then I tend to think of fawn horns as velvety, too, even though they're usually not... just one of those expectations versus reality things, I guess."
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
"To be strictly factual..." Amaranth said, her voice tinged with a level of uncertainty I wouldn't have ordinarily associated with facts, "we don't even know for certain that she breathed fire... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose, Steff?"
"No, Amy, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them yourself," Amaranth said.
"Have multiple orgasms?" Steff said.
"What?" Ian said.
"I mean, come again?" Steff clarified. "I am the gap between my ears and eyes."
"No comment," Ian said.
"You heard a sneeze, then you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
But that seemed like the best place to leave it, given that we weren't going to be able to prove anything one way or the other right then and there... or possibly ever, since the dragon issues I had didn't actually do anything to make Twyla's heritage my business.
So everyone kind of nodded and the conversation drifted listlessly away to other topics, though my mind stayed on dragons and kept coming back to them throughout the evening.
My dreams that night came in fragments. I'd say I dreamed about dragons, but that suggests a scenario, events. There wasn't anything so coherent as that... just snatches of eyes, teeth, and scales. More than images, though, there were emotions.
Not heart-pounding terror, but it's slow and steady friend: creeping, inexorable dread.
When I first read up on lucid dreaming the year before, I came across more than one source that made it sound like having complete control over one's dreams would flow naturally from the mere act of learning to recognize them. It's a dream, after all, and more than that it's your dream.
I've since learned that this is true... or seems true, while they're dreaming... for some people, but it's not the case for everyone. It's definitely not for me. Learning that I wasn't doing something wrong was a big relief, because the lucid dreaming books made it sound like it was something that would be basically automatic.
Really, if you think about it, it's a pretty ridiculous idea... how much control do you have over your mind when you're awake? I can imagine a bunny rabbit but I can't make myself see one that isn't there. I can try to ignore an unpleasant sight but I can't remove it from my view by willing it not to be there.
Lucidity might be necessary to control a dream, but lucidity itself isn't control. Some of the most vivid and clear experiences of my life have been the times when I had no control.
But I have learned to recognize dreams most of the time, and to wake myself up from them. When your dreams have been invaded as many times as mine have been, it's sort of a matter of self-defense. It wasn't something I did lightly, though... I've also gone through strings of unpleasant dreams often enough to know that trying to opt out of them night after night just turned me into a zombie during the day. Sleep was a need that both my demon and human sides possessed in equal measure, so it was one area where I was on the same playing field as most people around me.
Even that as an option was denied to me, though, because I never fell deep enough into
[2.5 hours in. Beginning part is shaping up well. May be just about done. Next hour will be used to close out the day.]
My mouth had suddenly gone very dry, but that was okay because I could no longer taste the chicken I'd just taken a bite off. I forced it down my throat.
It had always been a little cool for my tastes in the big open dining area inside the Arch... not quite uncomfortably so, just a little cool. Now I felt a chill clinging to every inch of exposed skin.
My mind replayed my encounter with Twyla, her standing right in front of me. Her horns had seemed longer... in my mind, I saw them growing larger still, more curved and pointed. She loomed larger.
Twyla... unassuming Twyla. The only person I'd ever met who could recede into the background better than me who wasn't a gnome. The girl I thought of as kind of mousy.
Could it possibly be true?
"Baby?" Amaranth said, reaching for my hand and then giving it a squeeze.
"What'd I say?" Steff asked. "There isn't some weird midlands human thing where it's rude to talk about sneezing, is there? I think I would have noticed that by now... not that I go around talking about sneezing all the time... or caring about what people think is rude."
I tried to shake off the growing image of a strangely lipless Twyla staring at me with all the intensity of a cat hypnotizing a mouse.
It couldn't be true.
Maybe it wasn't... it sounded like something from a joke. It really did. Sneezing fire. Even though it wasn't quite in keeping with Steff's sense of humor, I clung to the faint hope that this was all it was.
"Why... why do you keep saying she sneezed?" I asked, sputtering a little
"Because she did," Steff said. "Twyla didn't make fire... her nose did. That's why I said 'gesundheit' right after... didn't you hear me?"
"I did hear you say it, but I thought you were just being funny, you know?" I said.
Though it wasn't really all that funny either way. Sneezing fire fire was like a bad joke... like the kind you get in a birthday card or a kid's TV show. That was the only sort of place you ever heard about anything sneezing fire.
Still, even the worst joke was still better than a terrifying truth...
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective? Because while I can kind of see that, it seems a little avant-garde for this crowd."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked. The fact that she was so calm about it was sharpening an edge of desperation on the dread rising up inside my stomach.
Demons could produce flames, and ifrits could conjure them from air, and elemental creatures like salamanders were made out of living flame, but who sneezed fire?
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose? What did you think happened."
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
She had it. There was no widely-known variety of creature or being who specifically sneezed fire... but there were some who were known to exhale flames and were theoretically capable of sneezing, which is why this sort of thing was considered the height of all-ages humor when it came to sickly dragons.
Not that all dragons exhaled fire. But for people who'd never been up close and personal one, the big billowing gout of flame breath was the most dramatic and iconic image of a dragon available.
For those who had seen one up close, the most dramatic image of a dragon was a dragon.
Or, in my case, a smiling, silver-haired man in a suit. There was little that a flash of lightning breath could have added to that image in my head.
"Oh... wait... do dragons have horns?" Steff said as she caught on. "Because it would be weird if she's part dragon and also part whatever does have horns. Though I suppose having human and dragon blood in the same body suggests at least one ancestor of an adventurously amorous nature, so maybe the weird thing is that she doesn't have more extra parts?"
"Some dragons have horns," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. The ones that do have horns come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes, so really it would be hard to say if her horns in particular say anything in regard to dragonhood."
She was using her authoritative voice, which strangely she used most often when she was trying to hedge things... like uncertainty was the thing she was most certain of. Or like the less clear the truth was, the more sure she needed to be of herself. In any event, I could tell what she was trying to do... there was no way, sitting around the table, to prove that Twyla's horns hadn't come from a dragon so she was pointing out how hard it would be to prove that they did.
The uncertainty didn't help much... I'd never been convinced that she was part dragon, the mere possibility had been enough to get under my skin and start clawing around.
But it helped a little, if only because my mind was more inclined to focus on the possibility that she was than the equally possible chance that she wasn't.
"Um... not to say anything one way or the other about Twyla," Ian said, "but red dragons almost always have horns. Gold dragons, too... and those are the most common fire-breathers. A lot of pyromancers use one or the other in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'. Reds in particular tend to have horns like goats, or those antelope that look like they have javelins sticking out of their skulls."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular, because I imagined that if they were crowning a full-sized dragon's skull they'd be quite a bit larger. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger. I just couldn't see their color standing out or looking unnatural.
"Are her horns maybe kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did just say a few minutes ago that she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said. "I wouldn't call them velvety."
"Mmm, maybe I'm wrong," Amaranth said. "But then I tend to think of fawn horns as velvety, too, even though they're usually not... just one of those expectations versus reality things, I guess."
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
"To be strictly factual..." Amaranth said, her voice tinged with a level of uncertainty I wouldn't have ordinarily associated with facts, "we don't even know for certain that she breathed fire... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose, Steff?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them yourself," Amaranth said.
"Have multiple orgasms?" Steff said.
"What?" Ian said.
"I mean, come again?" Steff clarified. "I am the gap between my ears and eyes."
"No comment," Ian said.
"You heard a sneeze, then you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
[]
My dreams that night were... troubled. They came in fragments
When I first read up on lucid dreaming the year before, I came across more than one source that made it sound like having complete control over one's dreams would flow naturally from the mere act of learning to recognize them. It's a dream, after all, and more than that it's your dream.
I've since learned that this is true... or seems true, while they're dreaming... for some people, but it's not the case for everyone. It's definitely not for me. Learning that I wasn't doing something wrong was a big relief, because the lucid dreaming books made it sound like it was something that would be basically automatic.
Really, if you think about it, it's a pretty ridiculous idea... how much control do you have over your mind when you're awake? I can imagine a bunny rabbit but I can't make myself see one that isn't there. I can try to ignore an unpleasant sight but I can't remove it from my view by willing it not to be there.
Lucidity might be necessary to control a dream, but lucidity itself isn't control. Some of the most vivid and clear experiences of my life have been the times when I had no control.
But I have learned to recognize dreams most of the time, and to wake myself up from them. When your dreams have been invaded as many times as mine have been, it's sort of a matter of self-defense. It wasn't something I did lightly, though... I've also gone through strings of unpleasant dreams often enough to know that trying to opt out of them night after night just turned me into a zombie during the day. Sleep was a need that both my demon and human sides possessed in equal measure, so it was one area where I was on the same playing field as most people around me.
[2 hours in. Figured out part of what was wrong... I've been shying away from Mackenzie's emotional perspective, so there was no emotional reaction on her part to the conversation. I'm working on adding that in now.]
My mouth had suddenly gone very dry, but that was okay because I could no longer taste the chicken in my mouth. I forced it down my throat.
"Baby?" Amaranth said, reaching for my hand and then giving it a squeeze.
"What'd I say?" Steff asked. "There isn't some weird midlands human thing where it's rude to talk about sneezing? I think I would have noticed that by now... not that I go around talking about sneezing all the time..."
"Why do you keep saying she sneezed?" I asked.
It sounded like something from a joke. It really did. Sneezing fire. Even though it wasn't quite in keeping with her sense of humor, I clung to the faint hope that it was a joke.
"Because she did," Steff said. "Twyla didn't make fire... her nose did. That's why I said 'gesundheit'... didn't you hear?"
"I heard you say it, but I thought you were just being funny, you know?" I said.
Though it wasn't really all that funny anyway. It was like a bad joke... like the kind you get in a birthday card or a kid's TV show. Because that was the only sort of place you ever heard about anything sneezing fire.
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked.
Demons could produce flames, and ifrits could conjure them from air, and elemental creatures like salamanders were made out of living flame, but who sneezed fire?
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose?"
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
Amaranth had it. There was no widely-known variety of creature or being who specifically sneezed fire... but there were some who were known to exhale flames and were theoretically capable of sneezing, which is why this sort of thing was considered the height of all-ages humor when it came to sickly dragons.
Not that all dragons exhaled fire. But for people who'd never been up close and personal one, the big billowing gout of flame breath was the most dramatic and iconic image of a dragon available.
For those whohad seen one up close, the most dramatic image of a dragon was a dragon.
Or, in my case, a smiling, silver-haired man in a suit. There was little that a flash of lightning breath could have added to that image in my head.
"Oh... wait... do dragons have horns?" Steff said as she caught on. "Because it would be weird if she's part dragon and also part whatever does have horns. Though I suppose having human and dragon blood in the same body suggests at least one ancestor of an adventurously amorous nature, so maybe the weird thing is that she doesn't have more extra parts?"
"Some dragons have horns," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. The ones that do have horns come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes, so really it would be hard to say if her horns in particular say anything in regard to dragonhood."
"Um... not to say anything one way or the other about Twyla, but red dragons almost always have horns," Ian said. "Gold dragons, too. A lot of pyromancers use one or the other in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'. Reds in particular tend to have horns like goats, or those antelope that look like they have javelins sticking out of their skulls."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular, because I imagined that if they were crowning a full-sized dragon's skull they'd be quite a bit larger. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger. I just couldn't see their color standing out or looking unnatural.
"Are her horns maybe kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did say she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said. "I wouldn't call them velvety."
"Mmm, maybe I'm wrong," Amaranth said. "But then I tend to think of fawn horns as velvety, too, even though they're usually not... just one of those expectations versus reality things, I guess."
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
"To be strictly factual..." Amaranth said, her voice tinged with a level of uncertainty I wouldn't have ordinarily associated with facts, "we don't even know for certain that she breathed fire... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose, Steff?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them," Amaranth said.
"Have multiple orgasms?" Steff said.
"What?" Ian said.
"I mean, come again?" Steff clarified.
"You heard a sneeze, you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
[]
My dreams that night were... troubled. They came in fragments
When I first read up on lucid dreaming the year before, I came across more than one source that made it sound like having complete control over one's dreams would flow naturally from the mere act of learning to recognize them. It's a dream, after all, and more than that it's your dream.
I've since learned that this is true... or seems true, while they're dreaming... for some people, but it's not the case for everyone. It's definitely not for me. Learning that I wasn't doing something wrong was a big relief, because the lucid dreaming books made it sound like it was something that would be basically automatic.
Really, if you think about it, it's a pretty ridiculous idea... how much control do you have over your mind when you're awake? I can imagine a bunny rabbit but I can't make myself see one that isn't there. I can try to ignore an unpleasant sight but I can't remove it from my view by willing it not to be there.
Lucidity might be necessary to control a dream, but lucidity itself isn't control. Some of the most vivid and clear experiences of my life have been the times when I had no control.
But I have learned to recognize dreams most of the time, and to wake myself up from them. When your dreams have been invaded as many times as mine have been, it's sort of a matter of self-defense. It wasn't something I did lightly, though... I've also gone through strings of unpleasant dreams often enough to know that trying to opt out of them night after night just turned me into a zombie during the day. Sleep was a need that both my demon and human sides possessed in equal measure, so it was one area where I was on the same playing field as most people around me.
[1.5 hours.]
"What?" I said to Steff.
"She sneezed," Steff repeated. "That's why I said 'gesundheit'... didn't you hear?"
"I heard you saying 'gesundheit' but I thought you were just being funny," I said.
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked.
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose?"
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
"Oh... wait, do dragons have horns?" Steff asked.
"Some do," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. Some dragons have horns, but they come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes."
"Red dragons almost always have horns," Ian said. "Gold dragons, too. A lot of pyromancers use them in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular, because I imagined that if they were crowning a full-sized dragon's skull they'd be quite a bit larger. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger.
"Are her horns kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did say she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said. "I wouldn't call them velvety."
"Mmm, maybe I'm wrong," Amaranth said. "But then I tend to think of fawn horns as velvety, too, even though they're usually not... just one of those expectations versus reality things, I guess."
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
"To be strictly factual..." Amaranth said, her voice tinged with a level of uncertainty I wouldn't have ordinarily associated with facts, "we don't even know for certain that she breathed fire... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose, Steff?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them," Amaranth said.
"Have multiple orgasms?" Steff said.
"What?" Ian said.
"I mean, come again?" Steff clarified.
"You heard a sneeze, you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
[]
My dreams that night were... troubled. They came in fragments
When I first read up on lucid dreaming the year before, I came across more than one source that made it sound like having complete control over one's dreams would flow naturally from the mere act of learning to recognize them. It's a dream, after all, and more than that it's your dream.
I've since learned that this is true... or seems true, while they're dreaming... for some people, but it's not the case for everyone. It's definitely not for me. Learning that I wasn't doing something wrong was a big relief, because the lucid dreaming books made it sound like it was something that would be basically automatic.
Really, if you think about it, it's a pretty ridiculous idea... how much control do you have over your mind when you're awake? I can imagine a bunny rabbit but I can't make myself see one that isn't there. I can try to ignore an unpleasant sight but I can't remove it from my view by willing it not to be there.
Lucidity might be necessary to control a dream, but lucidity itself isn't control. Some of the most vivid and clear experiences of my life have been the times when I had no control.
But I have learned to recognize dreams most of the time, and to wake myself up from them. When your dreams have been invaded as many times as mine have been, it's sort of a matter of self-defense. It wasn't something I did lightly, though... I've also gone through strings of unpleasant dreams often enough to know that trying to opt out of them night after night just turned me into a zombie during the day. Sleep was a need that both my demon and human sides possessed in equal measure, so it was one area where I was on the same playing field as most people around me.
[1 hour in.]
"What?" I said to Steff.
"She sneezed," Steff repeated. "That's why I said 'gesundheit'... didn't you hear?"
"I heard you saying 'gesundheit' but I thought you were just being funny," I said.
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked.
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose?"
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
"Oh... wait, do dragons have horns?" Steff asked.
"Some do," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. Some dragons have horns, but they come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes."
"Red dragons almost always have horns," Ian said. "Gold dragons, too. A lot of pyromancers use them in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns, if they were bigger.
"Are her horns kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did say she's not very horny," Steff said.
"I haven't seen her that much, but I think they're definitely more bone-like," Ian said.
"Velvety, horny, bone... is there any way to talk about horns that doesn't sound like something you'd find either in romance novels or slash fiction?" Steff asked. "Anyway, why are we suddenly concerned at the idea that Twyla might be part dragon?"
That was a hard question to answer. For me, it had a really obvious answer, but that answer wasn't easy to give.
Magisterius University's vice-chancellor was a greater silver dragon who had adopted human form and gone into school administration for reasons of his own, reasons that probably amounted to someone extended an empire into his territory and then built a school in the middle of it and it was something for him to do.
I'd had my own close encounter with Mr. Edmund Embries during my freshman year, though I couldn't talk about it. My friends knew the barest outline of it.
As a metallic dragon, Embries was classed as a "noble dragon", one of those admired for prizing the same qualities that humans and the people humans think of as civilized also prize. That didn't mean he was nice, or good, or even necessarily decent.
The authorities knew about him, but they were content to get along with him. He wasn't rampaging through the countryside or extorting money. His impact on the local population was probably not much compared to those lost to ghouls and the nastier things that lived in the woods. Whatever deal they had with him was probably considered to be a model of imperial-draconic relations.
I couldn't deny that it was better for everyone involved for a being as powerful as a greater dragon to be at peace with the political entity temporarily existing in the same space he's claimed for himself, but the Imperial Republic isn't just a government, it's people, and any deal that protected the Imperium but not its people was not a good one.
[]
"Though we don't know for a fact that this is the case... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them," Amaranth said.
"Come again and again?" Steff said.
"You heard a sneeze, you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.
[Just begun.]
"What?" I said to Steff.
"She sneezed," Steff repeated. "That's why I said 'gesundheit'... didn't you hear?"
"I heard you saying 'gesundheit' but I thought you were just being funny," I said.
"Well, yeah," Steff said. "But it wouldn't have been funny if she'd, say, burped fire. Except maybe from a theater-of-absurd perspective."
"You didn't think the fact that she sneezed fire was remarkable?" I asked.
"Of course it was... I remarked on it. I said gesundheit," Steff said. "What? It's perfectly normal for her tray to burst into flames but it's worth remarking on if the fire came out of her nose?"
"At the time I just figured it was a spell that got away from her," I said. "Any first year student with the right classes might be able to accidentally start a fire, or have one get away from them."
"I'm not sure what the big deal is," Steff said. "Is somebody sneezing fire scarier or worse than somebody uncontrollably producing fire other ways?"
"Um, I think it's more a matter of the field of possible candidates suddenly narrowing if you refine it from 'producing fire' to 'sneezing fire'... or, rather, breathing it," Amaranth said.
"Oh... wait, do dragons have horns?" Steff asked.
"Some do," Amaranth said. "The first generations of dragons were a lot more... individuated... than most races, so there are strong variations among their descendants. Some dragons have horns, but they come in wildly varying numbers and sizes and shapes."
"Red dragons almost always have horns," Ian said. "Gold dragons, too. A lot of pyromancers use them in their personal crests, or have those little mockdragons as familiars... the mocks don't usually have horns, so they have them altered to be more 'realistic'."
I tried to picture Twyla's horns... their color, in particular. They seemed in my head to be... well, horn-colored. Kind of ruddy. They didn't really stand out that much from her slightly pink skin or her blonde hair.
Were a red dragon's horns red like their scales, or more whitish? Either way I imagined them seemed to work... and so did Twyla's horns.
"Are her horns kind of... velvety?" Amaranth said. "Like antlers? I mean, I've never handled them but that's how they look to me. I think a dragon's horns would be more... horn-like."
"Well, you did say she's not very horny," Steff said.
[]
"Though we don't know for a fact that this is the case... I mean, did you actually see her blowing fire out of her nose?"
"No, but these ears don't lie," Steff said.
"Well, they might be giving you an accurate report, but you're combining statements from two different witnesses and then trying to fill in the gap between them," Amaranth said.
"Come again and again?" Steff said.
"You heard a sneeze, you saw fire," I said, seeing what Amaranth was getting at. "Sneezing is a pretty big distraction and loss of control... she wouldn't have had to actually sneezed fire for the sneeze to be the immediate cause of it."
Even as I said it, though, it sounded pretty thin... I knew she wasn't dabbling with a fire spell or anything like that, or else she wouldn't now be confused and concerned about what had happened. I'd had a few "sneezing plus fire" incidents when I was younger, so it was possible... but even if my face spouted flames involuntarily, that wouldn't spray the whole top of a table with it.