This way could be my book of days

[returnsmagic]

WHO: Aurican and Calvin
WHERE: City Park!
WHEN: 8/5
WARNINGS: when this goes into PG rating you know something has gone horribly wrong.
SUMMARY: A boy with a legendary imagination meets a beast of legend.
FORMAT: Prose!

Aurican is a social creature. He enjoyed the company of his nest mates and absolutely delighted in immersing with the elves. Such a small yet long lived people, with a certain dignity and grace that not even dragons can ever hope to compare. Oh, how he misses them.

However, this City - this strange, crude, yet intriguing City - befuddles Aurican. He never seen the like. He doubts that even Smelt have ever seen a human city like it. The strange, offensive smells, the gaudy architecture, the bizarre music: it was, for a while, too much for Aurican. He spent more of his time in a nice valley tucked away south of the City. It is only now does he finally peak out of his shady groove and explore a little more.

So now here he is, a massive gold dragon, sitting perfectly poised, using his long neck to look around. He believes what he is doing is called "people watching" - the observation of individuals as they go on their daily lives.

Unfortunately, it seems like they decide to forgo their usual pastimes in the park and scatter in Aurican's presence. He suppose that with a dragon like Khisanth for company for so long, they earned the fear of everything draconic.

What a shame. He'd like to hear what their lives are about.

Comments

[magicalworld]

Calvin goes to the park often. His dearest place back home was the seemingly limitless expanse of unspoiled woodland behind his home, and now that he's in the City the park is the closest substitute he can find.

When he goes today and passes people fleeing for their lives while yelling about a dragon, he's puzzled but not immediately alarmed. He knows he should be alarmed, but curiosity is much stronger, and he makes a beeline for the source of the commotion before any well-meaning Cityzen can rescue the kid from making a mistake.

So he runs forward, and he sees a dragon. An enormous dragon, a golden one even. This day is already looking up. Calvin approaches the creature warily but without abject terror- he knows that not every creature in the City necessarily wants to eat him.

[returnsmagic]

He is brought back memories of the elves, his first encounter of them. They were terrified of him as well and it took, well, a couple of decades for them to be used to him. Of course, he had given them gifts and peace offerings, such as giving them newly slain carcasses of deer or pieces of gold and precious stones he has "taken" from ogre tribes. Slowly and surely, they learn each others' languages and that's when the true friendship begins. (Though he is fairly certain that giving fresh kills to this particular group of people won't be as enduring as the wild tribes of Kagonos thought it was.)

But at least one person hasn't run away. He took notice of the young boy approaching him. When he speaks, it is in a low rumble.

"I sincerely hope Khisanth has not completely ruin a dragon's reputation."

[magicalworld]

"I don't know who that is." The boy fidgets nervously, but doesn't flee mainly because of how pretty this enormous golden lizard is. For a boy, Aurican is amazing more than terrifying. "Just tell me you're not going to eat me, okay?"

[returnsmagic]

"Another dragon, black scales in color. I recommend avoiding her, she is not very pleasant or very kind."

When he hears the boy's request, he chuckles, though it sounded more like a heavy rumble deep within his massive chest. "You don't need to fear of me eating you, or any of the populace. My diet is more aligned with deer, but I wouldn't say no to a cooked steak either."

[magicalworld]

"At least she should be easier to avoid than most of the other maniacs here," he says, craning his neck upward. "A dragon is hard to miss."

Calvin sits down in the grass with his hands behind him. "You eat deer? Like a wolf?"

[returnsmagic]

"Oh, I eat a variety of things, but deer are the easiest to spot. When I was very young - just barely as tall as you - I used to eat bats at the caves where I grew up. It was an ideal food for young dragons - bats came in large numbers and they always return to their roost."

He started to relax his forelegs, folding them underneath his chest so he can properly lay down. His wings stayed upright, so he looked like a giant, snake-like moth instead.

[magicalworld]

This kind of stuff is fascinating to Calvin. Carnivores? Bats? Giant wings stretching into the sky overhead? Yeah, he's not going anywhere for a while. Actually, he's just gonna scootch closer.

"When you were my size... hmmmm. What do bats taste like?"

Sorry for the delay!

[firstgoldson]

"It's been thousands of years since my last bat ... but I remember them being small and warm, like all creatures of fur are. Also sweet from a particular yellow dust they frequently have on their bodies. At the time I had never knew flowers existed, let alone pollen, so I assumed it was part of the bat."

He looks around and saw a cluster of blue and purple flowers, straight ahead of them. "It took a very long time to learn the most simplest of things, like flowers."

[magicalworld]

"You didn't even know what flowers were?" The thought amazes the kid, the idea that something this ancient was once that young. "Wow. How much time did you spend in the caves?"

[firstgoldson]

"I don't know. I was there ever since I hatched, and I and my nestmates were so far inside the mountain that while our nest was illuminated by the magic of our long-dead mothers, there were shadows outside the nest that frightened us, so we never went out of the cave. But I suspect we were there for at least several centuries, but it is hard to say. Staying in the cave did not teach us the passage of time."

But oh, he had some good memories with Smelt and Burll and even Blayze, even if his bad temper did not allow Aurican to get along with him very well.

"Perhaps it was best that we didn't try to leave the cave. The only way out of the mountain was by flight, and we were too young at that time."

[magicalworld]

Calvin's good feelings come to a screeching stop inside of him and his face falls. He doesn't really register much after the first part.

"Your Mom's dead?"

His guardian in the City was murdered last year. Even temporary, her absence was agonizing, sort of like how he hasn't seen his real Mom since he was last Ported in. The idea of having to be without a Mom for centuries is hard to process.