Pleasurable as it might have been picking apart the character of the truculent Credenso, there was too much else to talk about for the travelers to stick to that sport for long. After a little more mileage had been gotten out of the vicissitudes of commando training, the conversation turned quite naturally to the duties Lizzie had been occupied with prior. Sindy, particularly, knowing that the dragon girl had spent a good portion of the morning with the mysterious Gap Dragon, was eager to hear about it.
Lizzie's face grew sad at the question. "He's not doing well," she said. "The Bioarsenal is ill-equipped to serve as a zoo, but that's the only place they can think of to keep him. He was pitiful, poor thing, almost down to skin and bones. They try to maintain him, but really don't have a clue how. It was almost pathetic how happy they were to see me. He'd recently mauled Siegfried, his previous handler -- took a whole vial of phoenix tears to save the man. But that treatment wouldn't serve for the dragon. Nothing they tried did."
"But you set them straight, right?" Sindy asked.
"In time. It took a while to establish communication -- he's a feral, bestial creature, not at all like the puissant, subtle dragons of my native China."
"Sorry? Aren't all dragons, well, dragons?"
Lizzie shook her head. "The term encompasses a broad range of living things, both purebreeds and halflings like myself, some only marginally related to the others. Consider your own kind, Sindy. Primates encompass tree shrews, lemurs, monkeys and apes in addition to man. Fortunately, dragons do share certain elemental qualities and affinities, to talking to the Gap Dragon wasn't quite as difficult as a man talking to a gorilla. But it certainly wasn't easy."
"But you did speak with it," Sindy persisted. "So, what's the matter with it?"
"He's out of his native element," Lizzie told her. "He's a creature of magic and dream, native to the Gorge. The Peripherals undoubtedly preserved his life when they rescued him from that place, but condemned him to a slower death by bringing him here. Here, he finds it much harder to draw on the earth and air and sustain his vitality. But what's killing him is the lack of dream. He needs the dream dust of the chasm, and he's not getting it. The harvesting of his shed scales for their unique properties only makes his condition worse. He's taken to eating them when he can, which he would never do in the wild. Otherwise the dreamstuff that goes into them is lost to him."
Sindy clutched at her belly guiltily, as did a number of her companions. She hadn't realized that the treatment preserving her from the horror that was childbirth in the Antipodes could be harming another creature. "What's -- what's the be done?" she stammered.
"In the short run, I've recommended recovering all scales not absolutely ... needed for other purposes, and feeding them to the Gap Dragon. That will help a little. Long-term, his only hope is return to his native habitat."
"Where," said Mort, "the Hallucigens would probably get him."
Dabbler sighed. "Another intractable problem solvable only through victory over the Supers," she noted.
Lizzie nodded. "If then."
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Wed Feb 18 00:14:35 2004
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