The Dragon's Diary [HWC2013]

HWC2013: The Dragon's Diary

by Lux Shyffer

So, yeah, I am Lux, and I am a dragon. No, dragons don't have opposable thumbs. Yes, they can occasionally trigger smoke detectors by accident.

I was born on the 31th of october 1998 from a bluish egg which was indadvertedly mixed in a Halloween basket full of blueish chocolate eggs. In such a basket I was carried by a high-pitched jumping-happy girl named Amber Shyffer, which later in the evening elected to end her high-velocity candy hunt throughout the city and rest in her warm house instead, finally ending my 4-hours episode of nauseas, head butts and deep questionings about human nature.

Since my egg was assumed to be just another candy, it goes without saying that I was born a bit prematurely, since high-pitched jumping-happy candy-fuelled girls can only but rarely realize that true chocolate eggs are not, you know, slightly hot to the touch. Then when I was born, at first I thought she had decided to call me "God", as in Oh My God, but then learned that I was given the name of Lux, which I think is indeed a wee bit less pompous.

My first official words was at first subject to a small debate, since Mother Amber and her fellow humans weren't sure about the vocal chord origin status of the sound. But after careful process of elimination and deduction, it was agreed that it was my first word indeed. So the first word I officially said was, "roar". Well, given my lizard size at that time, it sounded more like, "ree-eer", with a small one-inch flame briefly flashing in front of my mouth.

Mother Amber kept me in a nice and cozy closet; and I grew, thanks to her care. I unfortunately ate many innocent, living beings during that irresponsible time. Garlic and butter snails, asian-style chicken and sashimi fish were amongst my favorites. But as I reached adulthood, I realized that these things do augment my cholesterol, so I became a vegetarian.

Now, I realize many of you do not know how come a dragon can breathe fire. The truth is, our anatomy is different from other animals on Earth, except perhaps birds'. A dragon's stomach is inhabited by micro-organisms which convert sugar to methane, and like birds, we eat rocks, which provides the spark to ignite the methane. Of course, if we drink water, we won't be able to belch fire. That's why you never see dragons drink in the movies. If dragons would start drinking during the filming, they wouldn't be able to perform those spectacular fiery belches you see. But trust me, we drink alot of water to stay hydrated and avoid looking like a bloody desert lizard.

Many of you also think that we dragons are obsessed with gold and treasures. This is not true. Our interest in gold is purely academic. Okay, yeah, sure some dragons will subscribe to contests about who has gathered the greatest treasures in their cave. But I assure you this represents only a fraction of our population, only 85.9% of it to be more accurate. Those like me are interested in gold only for its scientific data. For instance: what is the RGB color of gold? What is the reflection index of gold? How many gold can only one dragon gather? Who's the Number 1 gold gatherer dragon this year? How well does gold looks on me? Things like that.

Dragons don't have opposable thumbs, but we can grab tools. All we do is use what you humans call the "index finger" and the "middle finger" to do it. Between these two fingers, we (and even you) can still grab teacups handles, even operate computer mouses, and more importantly keep on successfully screw up eating chinese food with sticks. Our long, 6-inches claws are also great to skewer marshmallows and roast them over a nice open fire. I can roast 10 of them in one shot.

I am so glad because this 31th of october will be my fifteenth birthday. Dragons reach adulthood after 13 years, but this year I had the chance of finally writing a bit about me here. I hope you guys learn more about our specie as I write. Now as you all know, dragons are about 33 feet in length. Contrary to urban legends, we can't cook food on our backs, since our body heat does not exceed 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Also contrary to urban legends, a dragon can belch only a limited amount of fire, and when this limit is reached, a dragon goes into a state which we call, "flameless" (not to be confused with "fameless", although one can easily lead to the other). That is, he looks very awkward with his opened mouth. The "look" looks a bit as if he's constantly about to sneeze (but each time unsuccessfully, of course) in alot of points in time. We do have wings but we can't really fly, since most dragons (except those with bone density anomalies) are too heavy to sustain flight. Our wings have the sole purpose of greatly slowing a possible fall, and let us kind of glide to the ground instead. Which is a nice feature when you occasionally live, like our ancestors did, in dungeons, made of very real bricks. These might have been dark ages for humans, but I can tell you alot of dragons saw stars during that time.

As you know, Halloween is the period in the year where the veil between other universes is thin enough for extra-universal entities to visit our universe (this has to do with the Earth's position near a spacetime anomaly). So that's why last Halloween we focused on welcoming these extra-universal entities. There was Polarians, which live in an "hell" universe lower than ours. There was Monocerans too, which are a beautiful version of our horses (and, unlike our horses, they are capable of speech). There was also human-like light entities, from a much higher universe than ours. Anyway, all of these made way into our universe in time. But the problem was that there was the World Championship Soccer Match which was held in France at the same time. So, instead of attending our welcoming party, every extra-universal entities went there instead and ordered a seat to watch France play against Australia. We followed them to France to show them (by "them" I mean the extra-universal beings, not the Soccer players) our support.

First, at our arrival, we went to a restaurant in France. The cook was also the owner, and greeted us. Mother and I weren't very fluent in french. So when the cook asked us,
"Belle journée, n'est-ce pas? toutes les tables sont à votre disposition. "
We thought he told us,
"Bell's journey, Nessie's pasta? The Table's song - abort Distortion. "
So we just smiled, and nodded in agreement. The french cuisine looks a bit like italian cuisine, but with the sole discreet yet perceptible difference residing in the fact that the menus are, you know, in french.
We decided that
"Tranches de pain et café" no doubt translated to "Trenches, pain and coffee", so we chose that (it seemed cheap) and braced for impact. Fortunately the dish turned out to be two bread slices with a cup of coffee.
After we ate we payed the bill. The cook was heavily surprised, and asked us:
"Quand même! Mangeons rien... est-ce votre devise à vous les américains? "
Which to us sounded like,
"Quantum! Manger Orion... is the vote device - at you, Lux -, Americans? "
So we paid, said nothing and then simply walked out of the restaurant.

Then, in the evening, at the soccer match, everything went chaotic. Monocerans poked with their horns all players they didn't like, Light entities were preaching "love your opponent" to the two opposing soccer teams, and the Polarians of Hell were arguing with bankers about the raise of taxes. At one point I saw a soccer ball heading straight at a Light Being's head.
"Watch out! " I yelled at him. He sure was a Worker of Light, but he wasn't wearing any helmet or anything.
The Being of Light saw the soccer ball.
"No, Lux", he replied to me. "Avoiding one's enemy doesn't make one love one's enemy. "
"What?! " I replied, but it was too late. The soccer ball went straight at his head of Light... and then passed straight through it, since all Beings of Light are ghostly by nature.
"Oh. Now I'm going to have an ethereal bruise", realized the Being of Light. He quickly rubbed his hand of Light onto his head of Light, and then resumed preaching. I got out of the way of an australian player who was attempting to save the game. Then I heard the conversation between the Polarian from Hell and the banker.
"If you keep raising your taxes, more and more people steal instead of paying, so they go straight to Hell instead of the higher realms. "
"Yeah, I understand. You get more people to control", said the banker. "And I get richer. It's a win-win"
"No, you don't understand. ", replied the Polarian. "Hell doesn't have the resources anymore to support such a growth of hellbound population. Hell is getting overpopulated. Our fire rivers get polluted with aluminium chocolate wraps. Urban areas destroy the hail-forests and its monster population. We just can't take it anymore. "
"I don't know, why not create hellish Civil wars? That'll bring the population down. "
"Hey, you just had the same idea than Seth, our government of Hell. You know, the one who won the 1999 prize of The Most Devious Entity... "
"Yeah, I remember. I get that alot as a banker. "
"Well that's it. The problem is, when people die in Hell, they come back to Hell! So basically, we're stuck with 15 billions of inhabitants, and it keeps rising! "
I lost interest in that, since we already have that problem on Earth, it was a bit like watching a sensationalist anchorman on TV but with a background of Hell instead of New York (yes, there is a perceptible difference between these two places). So I went back into my seat, and simply sat there.

Then, the 1th of november, the Halloween event ended, so all extra-universal beings went back to their respective universes. Me and Mother went back to America.

I often wonder what ideas other universes get of ours. Each time they come here , all they see is disguised people and heavy decorations everywhere. Won't they assume that the Earth is like that all year long? Maybe that's why the Celts simply placed lanterns on the ground to guide extra-universal visitors, but didn't disguised themselves. Now that we use all these decorations, these ghosts, these skeletons… maybe we scared them away?

Anyway. This year is not assumed to be the end of the world (unlike last year), so this time I think I'll just stay home. This year I won't even have to meet werewolves (the autumn full moon marks the period of the year where werewolves get very active). Many of you may wonder what does a dragon do when faced by a werewolf. The truth is, when a werewolf turns into a wolf, I just watch over him, feed him copious bowls of dog food and then give him a toy to gnaw. That way the wolf never gets hungry and bothers nobody. Okay, sometimes I do doze off, but then I let him play with my heavily-scaled tail. But, this year, if I'm lucky, on Halloween I won't have to baby-sit any wandering werewolves, since the 31th will be way after the full moon. Ooh, that means all I will have to do is breathe a fire in the fire place (I live in cold Canada), sit back, get my claws on a keyboard, and post my thoughts here and there. No, no candy hunt for me. We dragons can't eat hard candy - their crystallized sugar gets stuck in our teeth. The taste of peace and quietness has more value to me anyway. A taste which no fire can burn. I think that maybe peace... is a much greater adventure than anything else.

I hope you enjoy reading this short diary of mine. I also hope you great scientific minds find the information about our rare specie most helpful.

I wish all of you humans peace,

Yours, Lux.

Link to ToTheTenthPower's 2013 HWC thread: www.abovetopsecret.com...

BTW, sorry for my bad english - English is not my primary language.

reply to post by swanne


Nicely constructed story, written with humor. I enjoyed!

reply to post by grayeagle


My sincere thanks, and may I say your writing is quite superior - you have the quality of being truly fluent in english, while I make alot of grammatical errors -, which is the reason why I gave you a [s]SHTF[/s]... er, I mean S&F. Only seldomly did I encountered reports of death by tire, and only few people realize that they are as tragic as they are rare. Nevertheless, I keep on wondering an important yet mysterious aspect of yourself, which still eludes me and which I would hope to one day finally understand: How can a Grey Eagle write so fluently? Their wings are a bit un-adapted for such performance:



Yours, Lux

10 days and no one but Grey Eagle gave any feedback...

This is great, I have been miserable lately and needed the laugh! S n F for you.

reply to post by swanne


Very good, Mr. Swanne. I always enjoy your ability to tell a good tale. For a minute there, I actually started to forget that dragons don't really exist

reply to post by Tsu322


Many thanks!

reply to post by CLPrime


Hehe, thanks CP!

reply to post by swanne


You are very welcome my fire breathing friend.

I wish you the best of luck in the competition, not that you will need it.

reply to post by Tsu322

Tsu322
I wish you the best of luck in the competition, not that you will need it.

Thanks. But, about the competition... well, we are still mid-october... I say, the future is never set in stone.

reply to post by swanne



nice phantasy, swanne, very much enjoyed reading your story

and happy birthday to Lux in advance

reply to post by CLPrime


What do you mean they don't exist? Five mins with my Nan and you will see how wrong you are!

reply to post by Tsu322


I'm sorry, I meant they don't exist in Canada

reply to post by SovannaMaccha


Many thanks!

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday dear Lux-y!
Happy Birthday to you!

reply to post by swanne


I greatly enjoyed your story and to be truthful didn't see many grammatical errors as I was absorbed in it. And Happy Birthday Lux!

I wonder what would happen to a dragons flame if he/she drank alcohol?

TDawgRex
reply to post by swanne

 

I greatly enjoyed your story and to be truthful didn't see many grammatical errors as I was absorbed in it. And Happy Birthday Lux!

Thanks! I am glad you liked it.

I wonder what would happen to a dragons flame if he/she drank alcohol?

Since the dragon can choose whenever to spark the ignition, I guess the alcohol will simply be stored "for later use"... What is not clearly known is the unanticipated flame's magnitude after that.

Happy Halloween By The Way!

Yours, Lux

reply to post by swanne


Happy Halloween! That was a very cute story. I think it was written very well, I liked it a lot!

OpinionatedB
reply to post by swanne

 

Happy Halloween! That was a very cute story. I think it was written very well, I liked it a lot!

Thanks!