“How many times do I have to tell you, Aeshma? You and your pet cannot simply speedrun the Queen’s Threshold. Unlike the last Boss – who was a stupid lunk like you, I might add – I’ve made quite sure of that,” mewled Tatzel over the PA. It hadn’t taken long for me to understand why she was so effective at getting under Aeshma’s skin. She was rude, haughty, and her voice was like metal scraping on glass. I couldn’t wait to watch Aeshma beat her up.
“I’m not a stupid lunk!” Aeshma screamed.
“And I’m not a pet!” I screamed, too.
“Ughh. I can’t believe a Human is here, talking to me like it’s people. It’s embarrassing enough that my predecessor got trounced by that detestable… Ge-erg, or whatever his name was, and his gang of idiots.”
Greg had been through here already? I guess that wasn’t surprising, considering he had told me that he was headed for the Queen’s Threshold just the other day. I wanted to ask Tatzel for more details, but our ‘speedrun’ was taking too much of my attention to have a full-on conversation at the same time. I was still sprinting after Aeshma, trying to ape her every move, but she wasn’t making it easy for me. She vaulted over high railings that I had to painstakingly clamber over, and took jumps that could’ve broken my legs. I was able to keep close enough behind her, but just barely.
We finally reached one of the stone towers. It had an enormous opening in the side, like a window sill, which was mostly accessible from a nearby stone bridge.
Aeshma jumped through the opening first, then helped pull me through after her. “Your pet sounds like it’s dying, Aeshma. You better slow down before all this exertion kills it.”
“I’m barely… breathing… hard,” I insisted. In all honesty I was feeling pretty out-of-breath, but that was normal after running so fast. Right? “I’m not a thing, anyway. My name is Roland.”
Tatzel’s pompous voice echoed through my mind. “Yes, yes, you told me already. You Reborn all have the dumbest names. Rr-o-lahnd? Pah. It doesn’t roll off one’s tongue the way a proper name should. So ugly. But I guess that’s fitting,” she said. “Also, you’re wearing jeans inside a Dungeon, which is a fashion faux pas.”
Aeshma nodded. “She’s right, Roland. I didn’t want to say anything but it is a faux pas.”
I looked at her in disbelief. Whose side was she on exactly? Besides, how did Tatzel know I was wearing jeans, when she said earlier that she didn’t have visuals on us?
I looked around, and then I noticed it: to my left, just beside the window sill, was a tall, humanoid statue with glowing purple eyes. It must have been one of those ‘seer statues’ Tatzel had mentioned. It looked like we were under total surveillance for now.
“Not that you have any right to talk about fashion crimes, Aeshma. Still dressing up in your little leather outfits, I see.”
Aeshma briefly stopped wrenching open a rusted metal vent embedded in the wall. She glanced down at her strappy leather chestplate and blushed. “Uh. No. Shut up. Still have your stupid… uh, your stupid tongue, Tatz?”
“First of all, would you puh-lease use my actual name, instead of that hideous nickname? And, secondly… what in the Queen’s fertile pastures does that even mean? Do I still have my tongue?”
Aeshma gave me a knowing look and waggled her eyebrows. “Oh, I think we all know what it means. Am I right, Roland?”
I swallowed hard. “Is it like… because of… kissing? At Camp? Or something? Like… did you two kiss?”
“Her? That’s disgusting!” the two women said in near-unison.
At least they’d found something to agree on. “Okay, geez! I’m sorry for making an extremely obvious assumption!” I muttered, throwing my hands up in mock offense.
Aeshma shook her head disgustedly. “Gross, dude. No, it’s like… because she’s got a forked tongue.”
Was that some kind of Monster perk? “Does it give her better deception skill or something?”
Aeshma grunted as she finally heaved open the metal vent. A cool, loamy breeze issued from the opening. “Dude, what are you talking about? No, she’s got a forked tongue because she’s a Dragon. She’s literally got a big, stupid forked tongue. Not everything has to be some huge, complicated, like… ugh.”
I glared at Aeshma, but she ignored me and started squeezing herself through the newly-opened vent. At least now I knew that Tatzel was a Dragon. I should’ve guessed as much after Aeshma’s ‘kick her scaly ass and turn her into a coat’ tirade… but I couldn’t have ruled out that she was a Naga, or a Lamia, or some other scaled Monster I’d never heard of before.
I knew about Dragons from stories back home, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from one in this world. “Does she breathe fire?” I asked.
Aeshma extended a hand to help me clamber through the vent. I was much smaller than her and passed through it easily. “Even worse. She breathes poison fog.”
“Even worse? Oooh, are you scared, Aeshma?” Tatzel asked. Her voice sounded quieter now, and like it was coming from behind us rather than from all around us. It seemed like the PA system was stuck at the vent, unable to follow us through to the roomy stone tunnel we now found ourselves in.
“Aeshma? Hello, can you hear me? Where… shoot, how’d I lose you? Hold on a sec…” Tatzel yelled, her voice growing more and more distant as Aeshma and I continued on.
“Soooo, a few questions,” I said as we tramped deeper into the tunnel. It was lit with the same sourceless, ambient light I had noticed earlier. “Where are we? Where are we going? And how well do you and Tatzel know each other, exactly?”
The Succubus made a face somewhere between disgust and annoyance. “I know Tatz from Camp. We had cross-Camp training for a few years at the end, and, lucky me, I ended up bunking with her and a couple other Dragons from her cohort.”
“Tatzel was a real pain in the rear, even for a Dragon. Always going on and on about how we should do things the right way, which somehow always happened to be her way. I remember one time, I wanted to sneak out for the night, and I had to stuff her in a – anyway, you don’t need to hear all the details.”
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I still didn’t totally understand why the Monsters trained at what seemed like a glorified summer camp, but I’m sure they had their reasons. “It sounds like you know her pretty well, then,” I said.
“Better than I wanna know her. Which is… you know, not at all. What were your other questions again? Oh yeah, where are we. We’re in a service tunnel. Here, check it out.” She ushered me over to a part of the wall which was etched with some kind of pattern. At first I thought it was more arcane runes – but no. On closer inspection, it looked more like the pictorial assembly instructions on build-it-yourself furniture. One corner showed, step-by-step, how to install the kind of vent Aeshma had recently ripped out; another corner depicted instructions for assembling some sort of fire-spewing contraption.
“Maintenance panel,” Aeshma explained. She brushed her hand across the etching, searching for something. “There’s supposed to be a latch somewhere… or, like, a little button… oh, screw it.” She wound up a haymaker and punched clean through, shattering the surface. The etching was actually on a thin stone facade, a single panel set into the surrounding wall. Now that it was shattered, I could see that the panel had concealed a hollow cubby about two feet wide and two feet high. Inside was a tangled mess of metal disks, twisting pipes, and stuttering flywheels.
“This,” Aeshma said, gesturing dramatically at the freshly-revealed mechanisms, “is a supply conduit for the Dungeon’s traps. Some of ‘em, at least.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Kind of like the Dungeon’s electrical box?”
“I guess some of this stuff might be electrified. Not sure why that matters. Let’s see here…” Aeshma said as she reached into the cubby and wrenched a pipe loose.
FIWNG! FWICK! FWOOSH!
A stream of tiny arrows shot from the pipe. Aeshma startled at the sudden stream of bolts and ducked out of the way, leaving me in the arrows’ path instead.
PWINK!
I got my shield – or rather Jie, buckled to my arm in the shape of a shield – up just in time to deflect one before it hit me in the face. I stumbled backwards at the unexpected impact. For how small the arrows were, they were shooting out of the pipe with a surprising amount of force.
“Turn it off!” I yelled. “Or at least point the pipe somewhere else!”
Another bolt bounced hard off of Jie’s sturdy surface. I prayed this wasn’t too much punishment for the Mimic to take. Was every impact taking a chunk out of his health pool? Or did taking the form of a shield increase his resistances?
Aeshma grabbed the end of the pipe and crushed it closed in her fist. Then for good measure she coiled the length of pipe up like a jelly roll. The arrows kept coming, but with no path out, they just plinked ineffectually against the metal sheeting.
Aeshma and I both let out a sigh of relief – until a sickening, pressurized metallic groan started issuing from higher and higher up the wall. I instinctively backed up a few steps from the clogged pipe. “Oh. Let’s just, uh… let’s just take a little jog, huh?” Aeshma suggested. Without waiting for my response, she turned tail and ran down the tunnel.
Only once we were a safe distance from the jammed trap-pipe did Aeshma let up the pace. “Hoo, I wouldn’t wanna be the Monster on custodial duty tonight. There’s gonna be arrows all over the joint,” she said with a laugh. “Oh! And here’s our exit! I knew we were close!”
She pointed at our destination – another metal grating screwed into the wall. I wasn’t looking forward to crawling through yet another vent, but I didn’t mind putting some distance between us and the damaged trap conduit. I imagined that much worse than arrows flowed through some of those pipes.
Aeshma braced herself against the wall and prepared to yank out the grating. “Before I forget, how’s little Jie doing?” she asked.
Jie’s surface had taken a few scrapes from the arrows. Little splinters dotted his pseudo-wooden planks and there were some minor scuffs on his metal rim. But even as I inspected him, his injuries seemed to be healing, the splinters gradually retracting down into the wood and the scratches buffing out into nothing.
Promisingly, I didn’t see any purple ichor coming out of him, like the Mimics in the cellar had bled when they were severely wounded. And he wasn’t squeaking or wiggling around or anything, either.
“I think he’s doing okay. It seems like as long as he doesn’t get damaged too badly, he can repair himself over time. Does that sound right to you? I mean, is that something Mimics can do? Or… is he hurt but he looks like he’s repairing himself? Like, is he just mimicking a healthy Mimic?”
“I dunno, man,” Aeshma said, giving the metal grating a half-hearted tug. “Can’t you read the Mimic Class deets?”
“How about it, Jie? Can you show me your Class info? Huh?” I cooed, rubbing at a steel rivet. But when I closed my eyes and conjured up the UI, I didn’t see any of Jie’s information there. Either the Mimic didn’t understand what I wanted, or he wasn’t in the mood to let me review his stats.
“That’s okay, maybe later,” I said. The rivet wiggled contentedly.
-------------
Excerpt from Chapter 58 of The Tome of Claws and Curses, by Quigley Sumptire. Archived on the Arcanonet.
-------------
The Dragon Class, in comparison to other classes associated with the Monster Ancestry, is surprisingly versatile. It is this versatility which proves the Dragon’s greatest strength.
This point is often lost on Humans, for whom the Dragon’s “jack-of-all-trades”ishness and lack of required specialization may seem perfectly banal. An individual Human may choose to become a Warrior or a Ranger or a Paladin, and find themself able to advance reasonably well in any of those capacities. In contrast, consider the fate of a Wilting Lonberry if it did not maximize its Trickery; or an Ogre which shirked away from Strength. In general, Monsters have few practical paths open to them if they wish to utilize their inborn Class abilities.
The Dragon is perhaps unique among the common Monster Classes in allowing its adherents to choose from a wide range of specializations without sacrificing viability. The Class presents a smorgasbord of options for the enlightened min-maxer, from martial and caster optimizations to the more practical social and roguish synchronicities, all equally effective. Thus it is not uncommon to encounter a Dragon who focuses on Strength adventuring alongside (or serving as bodyguard to) one who prefers a more magical, Intellect-focused build. Indeed, companionships of this sort are rumored to feature heavily in Dragon lore and ancient mythologies (see Chapter 205: Cultures of the Common Land Monsters).
Dragons are well-known for their innate hoarding behavior. Whilst the classic stereotype – a lone Dragon piling gold, gemstones, and other material treasures within their den – is perhaps deserved, in reality, hoarding behavior among Dragons takes forms almost as varied as their respective builds. Human-assimilated Dragons tend to keep their hoarded treasures in reputable banks and vaults, even going so far as to exchange their treasures for liquid currency. Others collect artwork or cultural artifacts, leading to some of the world’s finest galleries, libraries, and museums (all with a high price of entry, of course).
The complex psychology behind hoarding is beyond the scope of this chapter(1), yet it is a fascinating and curious aspect of the Dragon’s character, and one which undeniably contributes to the Class’s relative success in the fields of business, industry, and governance.
It must be said that another of their qualities gives them a preternatural advantage in this regard: their innate ability to Shapeshift into a smaller, bipedal form.
Most Dragons choose to develop their Shapeshift ability further, and can become indistinguishable to a Human to all but the most discerning eyes. Some, whilst able to become humanoid, choose to leave some hint of their true, monstrous nature visible whilst shapeshifted form. Fewer still elect not to advance their Shapeshift beyond the baseline, reptilian hybrid form. Dragons who choose not to level their Shapeshift are said to be the most fearsome – and, facing ostracization from Humans and Dragons alike, are typically forced into other Monster societies.
The class has one glaring design flaw: Dragons do not have the innate ability to fly(2). This is not widely known, as Dragons typically elect to acquire the Flight Perk before graduating from their Camp (and those few Dragons who don’t, tend to keep their inability a secret). Whilst nearly all moderate- to higher-Leveled Dragons possess the Flight Perk, a minority of younger Dragons only devote enough Levels in order to glide or otherwise arrest their falls. At the height of the flying skill tree, Dragons can ignore wind, drag, and even gravity itself to perform mind-bending feats of aerial acrobatics.
Overall, I give the Dragon Class a rating of 8/10.
(1) See Dalmin’s On Scales and Balances: Dragons in the Modern Age for a thorough treatment.
(2) I am not implying that Dragons should be more powerful than they already are; rather, being such a classic ability, Flight should have taken the place of Shapeshift as the Class’s default perk
