by Gabe Hudson
And somehow coming to this conclusion makes me feel better, like my decision to help Dean Floop catch my grandpa somehow brings me closer to my main goal, which is to score Runcita as my Queen for EggHarvest.
Thwack-thwack.
So with a renewed vigor and sense of purpose, I fly through corridor after corridor after corridor.
Check my powerstaff.
FLIGHT SPEED at 92 MPH.
The wind blasting over my green scales feels faboo.
And as I shoot down the corridor I keep whipping my scaly snout back and forth, trying to pick up Runcita’s glorious scent.
When I get to the end of the corridor I flap my wings and take a right down another corridor.
I fly by the Library. I fly by the Commons.
Then as I blast forth I see the Time-Traveler’s Lab up ahead and suddenly the door flies open and a cadet comes stumbling out of the lab capsule into the corridor and he’s cradling a little baby dragon in his forelimbs. Now both this cadet and the baby dragon are starting to disappear, to become transparent, and you can tell that they have no clue that they’re vanishing. And the baby dragon glances up at the cadet who’s cradling him in his forelimbs and snarls, “I hate you!”
Now I’d be willing to bet a pound of gold that that dragon cadet has gone back in time to when he was a baby dragon and abducted his baby self and returned to the present in an effort to prevent his baby self from growing up and suffering the horrors of childhood. But of course now both versions of the dragon are in the process of disappearing, and they don’t even know it. This sucker got his timestreams crossed and accidentally dropped an Existence Bomb on his own scaly green ass.
Where is my Queen?
So as I fly by the Time-Traveler’s Lab I make sure to keep a wide berth as a precautionary measure. Because my scaly grandpa Dr. Terrible has warned me again and again to stay away from time travel. Because my dad, Stenchwaka The Terrible, had been a time-traveling junkie. An addict.
Dr. Terrible says the disease is genetic, and so at all costs I should always avoid time travel. My grandpa says the reason my parents’ spaceship failed in their Fertility Mission and crashed on Earth is because my dad tried to take a shortcut through the galaxy to arrive on Earth. Which was their Designated Foreign Planet. Using time travel as a shortcut to get to Earth, where they were supposed to raise a Colony.
Dr. Terrible has warned me again and again that because of my genes I’m extremely susceptible to becoming a time-travel junkie. And once when I was younger Dr. Terrible even took me to a Time-Travelers Anonymous meeting so I could see what happened to dragons who get sick with the disease. Now as a youngster seeing all those old crusty dragons at the meeting, well it definitely scared me straight.
Because all those dragons had no memory left, from shooting up and down the timestream too often. I remember one old pathetic dragon fool at the meeting reared up on his emaciated haunches and flapped his wings and whispered, “Hi my name is…My name is…My name is…Sheesh.”
Then this old gnarled sad-sack dragon sat back down with his scaly head in his talons. Because the fool couldn’t even remember his own name.
And as a youngster I remember walking out of that Time-Travelers Anonymous meeting, holding my grandpa’s talon, and looking up at him and saying, “Dr. Terrible, I promise I won’t ever time travel. I don’t want to wind up like those idiots. I want to remember everything from my life. Thank you for being such a wonderful grandpa. I love you.”
My grandpa peered down at me and fetched the tip of his spiked tail to gently whap me upside my scaly green head. “Mind your manners, Gork,” he said. “Don’t ever use the T-word in front of me again. Remember, gratitude is weakness. And gratitude diminishes your WILL TO POWER. But that said, I’m glad to hear you promise that you’ll never time travel. Always remember. Just because your dad was a weak-willed moron, that doesn’t mean you have to turn out the same. So do yourself a big favor, and stay away from time travel. It’s just not worth it.”
Thwack-thwack.
I flap my wings as I zoom down the fiery corridors and keep whipping my scaly snout back and forth, trying to pick up Runcita’s glorious scent.
[ 16 ]
HOW THE UNVEILING OF DR. TERRIBLE’S EVOLUTION MACHINE LED TO DEAN FLOOP EXECUTING ALL THOSE CADETS OVER THE PAST COUPLE DAYS
Thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack.
Glance at powerstaff. FLIGHT SPEED at 117 MPH.
I lower my eyelids so the wind shear doesn’t mess with my vision.
Where is my Queen?
I fly by the SimuFlight Lab where Professor Noops is lecturing a group of dragon cadets on the finer points of stasisfield chambers. So they can arrive rested and ready to conquer any planet up to five billion light years away.
Thwack-thwack.
So on this glorious Crown Day morning, as I shoot through the Main Building, I revisit the grisly events which occurred earlier this week at WarWings. Which culminated in last night’s RageFest between Dean Floop and my grandpa Dr. Terrible. And Dr. Terrible’s disappearance. I reckon my strategy being that if I revisit the ghastly events which led up to last night’s RageFest and Dr. Terrible’s disappearance, then I can uncover a clue as to where that bastard Dr. Terrible is currently hiding.
Now like I was telling you before, the whole sordid mess started Tuesday morning when my scaly grandpa held that press conference on TV and unveiled his Evolution Machine, or Evo-Mach 3000. Now as soon as those vid clips from the press conference went out on the Blegwethian datastream, my grandpa was an instant celebrity all over the planet but especially here on the WarWings campus.
Word of Dr. Terrible’s twisted experiments flew around campus that Tuesday, and dragon cadets in the Dining Hall were all jabbering about the hideous and freaky creatures they’d seen recently on the grounds of Dr. Terrible’s Institute. Like one cadet claimed to have seen a giraffe with a shark’s head strolling around on Institute grounds.
Another cadet said she’d seen winged swordfish perched in the trees.
Another cadet claimed to have seen a swarm of saber-toothed butterflies descend on a bear, and a few seconds later when the butterflies flew away there was nothing left of the bear but a pile of bones.
So within a matter of hours, the rumors about my scaly green grandpa had reached a fever pitch among the cadets at WarWings.
Now Tuesday morning after debuting his Evolution Machine and the results of his first mind-swap on TV during the press conference, Dr. Terrible had flown to the mainland at the request of government officials to further discuss how his Evolution Machine might be utilized for military purposes. And so this past Tuesday night while Dr. Terrible was away on the mainland, three senior dragon fellas got real high by shooting each other full of PartyBullets. And then these dragon fools broke into the grounds of Dr. Terrible’s Institute because they wanted to see if all the rumors about the strange creatures my grandpa had created were true.
And nobody knows exactly what happened that night when the cadets broke in.
But one thing is for sure.
Everybody on the island heard those screams.
Those dragons’ screams were so horror-filled, they peeled the skin right off your eardrums.
Those hideous screams were so insane that they caused sleeping dragons to pop upright in their lairs screaming.
The scream was contagious.
I mean those three cadets’ screams there in the Institute were so piercing that a sophomore cadet on the other side of the island even leapt out of his lair, which was perched on a gorge, and didn’t open his wings and plummeted to the ground, killing himself on purpose. That’s how bad those screams were. Where a dragon fool would commit suicide just so he didn’t have to hear them anymore.
So late Tuesday night Rexro and his campus security goons found those three cadets on the Institute’s grounds. And the three cadets had lost all sense of reality and gone permanently insane and they had to be muzzled because nothing could
make them stop shrieking. Then Dean Floop and the WarWings Council of the Elders called an emergency meeting and determined these three screaming dragons would pose a serious security risk if they were ever allowed to leave the island.
So the three cadets were sentenced to death by firestream. And then the next morning at sunrise, those three cadets were marched out to the middle of the campus quad and blindfolded. And their talons and wings were shackled to prevent flight.
Dean Floop stood thirty yards in front of the three cadets and took his mark, and the rest of us demented cadets had to stand in formation behind the Dean.
Now the three blindfolded dragons stood there out on the campus quad, opening and closing their black beaks, but no noise was coming out and it was obvious they were trying to scream but they’d long since shredded their vocal cords and now their screams were completely silent.
So those silent screams served as their last words.
Then Dean Floop blasted each of those poor cadet bastards with a mega firestream, and all three of those cadets were reduced to a neat little pile of ash. And the rest of us cadets standing in formation were made to click our talons together in applause and flap our wings and lash our tails against the ground. And then we all simultaneously gave the WarWings victory salute, which is one raised index claw plus tail arched while blasting a firestream.
Then each pile of ash was collected and placed in a WarWings Honorable Remains Container and delivered to the parents, along with a posthumous WarWings citation for bravery in the line of duty.
Now if you’re a man-creature who’s reading this, then you should know it’s pretty common for us cadets at WarWings to die while getting our education. Only 38% of the cadets in every incoming class live to graduate from WarWings. And it’s not just because we have capital punishment here on the island.
Training at WarWings is dangerous. Colonizing exoplanets is serious business.
But somehow within minutes of the executions on Wednesday morning, word of what happened leaked to the media on the mainland. And the news satellites instantly started rolling out stories about how those poor cadet dragons had been executed.
So late that morning the WarWings PR machine leapt into action. They spun the story the best way they could. They deployed our most esteemed professors, who hit the Wednesday late-morning news outlets and said the three cadets had died honorably in the line of duty.
Suddenly on every outlet you turned to there was a WarWings professor decked out in their distinguished cloak and robe and being interviewed. And these professors kept explaining how those three cadets had died heroically in the line of duty while performing reconnaissance on a planet five million light years away.
But then after a sophomore cadet named Gleeg saw these false reports on TV, Gleeg sat down and penned a blistering opinion piece for the WarWings central datastream, The Digital Fire-Breather. And early Wednesday afternoon this dragon Gleeg’s piece was posted on our school’s datastream, and the headline read:
LINE OF DUTY? HA!
MORE LIKE LINE OF FIRE
YOU BIG FAT LIARS!
Now this dragon Gleeg who wrote the op-ed was known to be some kind of mega hotshot fiend in his sophomore class. And plus Gleeg descended from something like a hundred generations of WarWings alums. So on campus that Wednesday afternoon there’d been a real sense in the air that Gleeg’s article posted on The Digital Fire-Breather could deal a devastating blow to Dean Floop and the Council of the Elders and their entire regime.
Well Dean Floop and the WarWings Council of the Elders called an emergency meeting and determined the dragon Gleeg who’d written the op-ed posed a serious security risk and so he too was sentenced to death by firestream.
So early Wednesday afternoon, Gleeg was yanked out of class and then marched out to the middle of the campus quad and blindfolded. And his talons and wings were shackled to prevent flight. Dean Floop stood thirty yards in front of Gleeg and took his mark.
The blindfolded dragon Gleeg defiantly snorted firebolts out his nostrils and puffed out his chest and cried: “The truth will set me free! Because the pen is mightier than the firestream!”
Then Dean Floop blasted that poor bastard Gleeg with a mega firestream, and the cadet was instantly reduced to a neat little pile of ash. The rest of us cadet fiends standing in formation were made to click our talons together in applause and flap our wings and lash our tails against the ground. And then we all simultaneously gave the WarWings victory salute.
Then the pile of ash was collected and placed in a WarWings Honorable Remains Container and delivered to Gleeg’s parents, along with a posthumous WarWings citation for bravery in the line of duty.
But Gleeg’s execution had a galvanizing effect on us WarWings cadets. That afternoon you could feel the tension in the air all over the island. And by this point there were already whispers and rumblings that some of the senior cadets were plotting an uprising against Dean Floop and his nasty regime.
And that night MediaPods flew around above Scale Island, shining their insidious spotlights here and there. They were aiming to fetch some incriminating evidence and maybe score some interviews about Gleeg’s execution.
I remember at one point strolling out of the Library and cutting across campus and suddenly I was hit with a MediaPod’s giant spotlight from overhead. And I’m sure not proud to have to be telling you this, but when that fiendish spotlight lit up all around me, well I just dropped my books on the ground and flapped my wings—thwack-thwack—and flew like a bastard all the way back to my lair.
And so with the swarm of MediaPods choking the airspace over the island, things quickly escalated and spiraled out of control. Because that night an urgent security alert from the Dean’s office was blasted out to us cadets by powerstaff, instructing us that under no uncertain terms were we cadets to speak to the putrid media. Dean Floop had placed the entire island on a media blackout.
And then Dean Floop took command of the WarWings cadets’ communications satellite and went on the airwaves and declared the airspace above the island a no-fly zone. And within seconds of announcing the no-fly order over the airwaves, the swarming MediaPods were shot down out of the night sky and went crashing in a streak of bright flames straight into the ocean.
But the next morning—which was yesterday morning, Thursday—an indignant and rowdy group of thirteen cadet protesters stormed the Council of the Elders building on campus. These cadets had their tails raised in Threat Displays and were chanting tributes to their recently fallen comrades.
“No more lies! Not one more dragon dies!”
And:
“Our fallen cadets are heroes! The killers are zeros!”
Then Dean Floop and the Council of the Elders determined that these rowdy protesting cadets now posed a serious security risk.
So the thirteen cadets were detained in mid-protest and marched out to the middle of the campus quad and blindfolded. Dean Floop stood thirty yards in front of the dragons and took his mark.
And one of the blindfolded cadets puffed out his chest and growled, “Judge not lest you—” But then another blindfolded cadet cut him off and blurted out some nugget of wisdom and instantly they were all blurting stuff out and talking over each other so that you couldn’t understand anything that was being said.
Then Dean Floop blasted each of the thirteen cadets with a mega firestream and each of them was reduced to a neat little pile out there on the campus quad. And each pile of ash was collected and placed in a WarWings Honorable Remains Container and delivered to the parents along with a posthumous WarWings citation for bravery in the line of duty.
But Dean Floop’s hardline approach backfired. Because yesterday by late morning the public outcry on the mainland over the deaths of all those WarWings cadets had grown so loud and raucous that you could practically feel the entire planet vibrating. And the dragons on the mainland weren’t just demanding answers anymore.
They were calling for Dean Floop’s skull on
a platter.
Now apparently it was then, it was yesterday morning—the day before Crown Day—that the demented and dangerous Dean Floop decided to put my scaly grandpa directly in the line of fire and use him as a scapegoat for the past couple days of horror at WarWings. And that’s what led to the RageFest, and that’s what—
Thwack-thwack.
My thoughts are interrupted: savage bursts of air are exploding all around me, and the sound of dozens of psychotic dragons’ leathery wings thwacking next to my earholes. Then a ruthless flying cadet bastard smashes into the side of my scaly green head—boom!—and bounces off.
I feel dazed, but I keep flying. I’m hoping that whoever just smashed my head like that will go away if I just ignore them and keep zooming onward.
Then I see my attacker flying alongside me. I instantly recognize him. It’s this sophomore dragon named Twelk, who’s notorious for being a rising star on the varsity Slave-Catching team. Plus just generally being a real deranged sonuvabitch. And he’s glaring at me like the sight of me repulses him something awful.
Help.
[ 17 ]
THE DARK FIERY CORRIDOR
“Where’s your little robot chick, Weak Sauce?” Twelk snarls at me, flapping his wings and flying right up in my face. “Whatcha gonna do now that your Tin Can friend isn’t here to protect you?”
Then Twelk leans over and uses his leathery wing to whack my scaly green ass so hard that I go skidding out of control through the air.
Well like I said, Twelk is one of the youngest players on the varsity Slave-Catching team. And if you happen to be a man-creature who’s reading this, then you need to know that Slave-Catching is not only the most popular sport at WarWings, but at every institution of higher learning on Blegwethia.