Fledgling Developments: 8
Jarzyl learns that displacement magic isn't quite what she expected.
Jarzyl Fledgling Developments: 8
Mini-series first chapter (chapter 1): https://sofurry.com/s/Rnoz2Yxm
Previous chapter (chapter 7): https://sofurry.com/s/ebQWBZb1
Vigorous, colourful, crackling energy shrouded Jarzyl’s view of the world, and the young dragon had to wait a few seconds for it all to dissipate away. It was exciting in an odd way, wondering whether she had succeeded in making it to her intended destination.
When the colourful sparks of magic cleared, Jarzyl swiftly discovered that she was not in her bedroom. She was staring at a vast metal wall that stretched up four or five storeys high, with the distant ceiling covered by a grid of lighting fixtures which bathed the entire space in harsh light. A second opposing metal walls bracketed the space, forming a tunnel so huge it could easily have contained her entire house, and many of the neighbouring houses too.
She was in an airship hangar bay—one of many hangars, which were connected together side to side like an immense segmented tunnel. There currently wasn’t any airship in this hangar, but Jarzyl clearly recognized this space for what it was. The air smelled faintly of oil and the sharp electric scent of magic. The young dragon started to stand up, but then she felt something against her side, and all her excitement drained away.
The egg was still right beside her, underneath her wing, resting innocuously on the metal floor.
Jarzyl froze up for a few seconds, then in a panicked motion she dropped back down and flipped open her wing to cover the egg again. “Oh, nullfire. Oh no. By the sky sprits, oh no!” She quickly lifted her wing just to double check that she hadn’t imagined it, but no—it was definitely her sibling egg, that she’d been keeping warm during dinner.
“What are you doing here?!” Jarzyl hissed to the egg. Then she glanced around. “What am I doing here?!” She hadn’t thought it was possible for her to displace something—or someone?—with her. Earlier in the afternoon she had tried multiple times to displace Atlas along with her, but all without success. Perhaps an egg was smaller and hence easier to displace. “Now is not the moment for panic. Take courage!” she muttered to the egg.
The egg did not panic, and its stoic indifference to this drastic new situation helped Jarzyl stay calm too. Still lying down on her front, she used her wing to hug the egg against her side and quickly glanced around. Though there was no airship in the hangar, it wasn’t an empty space— pipes and chains dangling from the ceiling like vines, while tables held tools placed neatly in their equipment boxes, and push carts were rolled to the side carrying crates and various spare parts of machinery. A pair of huge docking clamps stretched out from each of the opposing walls, their metal claws spread open and reaching to catch an airship, whenever one arrived in this hangar.
Before Jarzyl do anything, a trio of adult dragons suddenly flew in from one side of the hangar, heading right towards her. Jarzyl flinched, but the dragons overflew her without stopping. Their flight harnesses were all adorned with reflective stripes, and the one in the lead also had a radio set strapped to his chest, with the antenna wire trailing down his chest and attached to his tail. The three dragons, presumably engineering workers, swept across the entire hangar in mere seconds, then continued to fly on through the adjacent hangar spaces, heading onwards to some distant destination.
Lifting up her wing, Jarzyl carefully sniffed at the egg. It seemed undaunted by the situation. “Ok. Right. We’re not supposed to be here. Let’s go home.” She picked up the egg with her front paws and tried to walk on her hindlegs only, but this proved swiftly tiring and made her nervous that she was going to lose balance and drop her precious unhatched sibling.
The correct way to carry an egg was with a specially-made carrier sling pouch which would provide insulation to keep an egg warm and padding to keep it safe against any knocks—Jarzyl didn’t have one of those. She didn’t even have her flight harness because she hadn’t been wearing it at home. It was just her, and her sibling egg, and a whole airship hangar’s worth of equipment.
“Hold on a moment,” Jarzyl told the egg. She gently put it down on the ground, then scampered over to the side of the hangar. “Your elder sister will figure this out. I’m… I’m almost an adult, almost a proper drakken with magic. I can handle a little magical surge misadventure.”
Jarzyl quickly surveyed the workbench. Maintenance handbooks, portable tools, and other such things were spread out across the tabletop, but none of these were useful to her. Then she spotted a large sling pouch hanging from a hook on the wall. Jarzyl grabbed the cloth pouch and examined it—the heavy-duty fabric was thick and rough, and the inside smelled faintly like machine oil, but it felt clean and looked big enough to fit an egg.
Returning to the egg, Jarzyl put the sling pouch around her neck and then slipped her sibling into the pouch. “Now I won’t drop you. Great. You all good in there?” The egg didn’t respond, but Jarzyl nodded to herself, pleased with how responsible and serious she was being. Now to get out of this hangar and return home.
Surely that couldn’t be that hard.
Jarzyl went to go explore the hangar. Her claws clinked against the ground, with each step echoing slightly—underneath that metal floor was nothing but open air, and the free skies over which Avaeria flew. Hangars were mostly located at the bottom side of the City of Wings, with airships approaching or departing from the underside of the city.
Jarzyl went up to the wall and tapped her wing against it, and the metal surface sounded distinctly hollow. In truth, although the area she was in resembled a large singular tunnel, there were more hangars on all sides, forming a grid. These walls probably weren’t walls at all, but were instead huge movable panels which be reconfigured to divide up the hangar areas.
Sitting in the sling, the egg bobbed along gently with each stride. Jarzyl kept her steps as smooth and gentle as she could manage, but this very much slowed her pace. “By the sky spirits. This is stressful. Don’t crack, ok?”
In the middle of the hangar, one quarter length inwards between the two large walls, the metal floor was broken up by a narrow seam which formed a large, concentric rectangle. The inside of that rectangle was also metal flooring, but it was painted with bright yellow warning stripes.
“Those are the hangar doors. They fold downwards or slide open for an airship to come and go from this hangar,” Jarzyl said to her sibling, the egg. “I think… if I get those doors open, that’ll be our way out of here.”
The young drakka strolled over to a control pedestal placed at the side of the hangar. This control interface held many buttons, knobs, and levers, surely intended to control everything in the hangar—the doors, the lights, the ventilation, and even docking clamps or other technical things that an airship hangar might use. Much as Jarzyl appreciated airships, just having enthusiasm for the complicated machines didn’t mean she knew how to operate hangar controls.
“It should be this one. Bay Access Control Master Toggle. That’s probably it.” She made her best guess for which of the controls would open the door, and reached out to press the large button—but then paused. Jarzyl the bold, audacious, and reckless young fledgling would not hesitate to push an unknown button on a control panel. However, Jarzyl the mature, wise, and sensible (young) adult dragon was supposed to be doing the reasonable thing and setting a good example for her sibling.
Perhaps it was better not to press buttons at random. Jarzyl rested her paw on the egg as it sat in the sling pouch. “Maybe I shouldn’t open the hangar doors. That might sound an alarm. And there must be a smaller exit somewhere, for dragons to come and go. What do you think? You probably don’t think at all—you’re just yolk. Well, I think I shall be responsible.”
Jarzyl continued looking around the hangar, occasionally muttering to the egg. “Where are we even? I can’t have displaced us that far. The closest airship hangars to home are the Central Airship Docks, which are mostly run by my clan, Mintaka. That’s your clan too—our clan. We’re a Mintaka family, and you’re a Mintaka egg. I hope father isn’t too worried about us going missing. Hmm. Look, the wall says Central Bay 55.”
As the minutes went by, magical energy began building up again. Colourful sparks spiralled around her four paws. At first Jarzyl ignored her magic and let it do its silly thing, but then sparks started dancing back and forth across the leading edges of her wings. Idly she stretched out her right wing and gave it a flick, trying to shake off the magical sparks—the downstroke of her wing made a small little gust of wind, but then suddenly the world warped in a blur of magic.
Another whirling sphere of magic—her own traitorous, mercurial magic—yanked Jarzyl from the hangar bay and flung her to spaces unknown. The young dragon suddenly found herself in a small room that was around the same size as her bedroom, but lacking in all the familiarity and comfort that came with home. The egg was with her, wherever this was.
Jarzyl glanced around. On her left and right sides were featureless blank walls made from dull metal, while the wall in front of her had a closed door, next to a large window that was closed. The window glass was smudged with dirt, but Jarzyl could see there was another dragon sitting outside near the door. The room was spartan and undecorated, with the feel of an industrial facility or perhaps a prison cell.
Jarzyl strolled forward, and her claws made an echoey clunk against a metallic floor, as if it was hollow underneath—whereas the hangar bay’s floor had been solid and thick, meant to take the weight of heavy equipment, here the ground sounded like much thinner metal plate. The clunk of Jarzyl’s paws made the other dragon turn around. He was sitting down on a floor cushion, and had been reading from a magazine held in a paw, but now he threw a dismissive look at Jarzyl and resumed reading his magazine.
Jarzyl tried to push open the door, but it was locked. Instead she used the tip of her tail to knock against the glass window, which made that drake outside turn around to glare at her. Silently he pointed. Following his gesture, Jarzyl turned around and spotted that on the fourth wall of the room was a large poster.
In carefully printed font, the poster loudly declared, “DID YOU REMEMBER TO CHECK YOUR ROUTE FOR OBSTACLES?”
“Interesting,” Jarzyl murmured to herself. She rested her paw on the egg as she carried it in the sling, and she gently stroked the smooth shell.
The poster continued, “You are in the Sector 1 power core installation. If this was your intended destination, then you should instead displace to the main entrance via pad beacon: 1-438. If you are lost, the closest major transit gateway is the Central Logistics Depot via pad beacon: 1-1.”
“Very interesting,” Jarzyl decided.
On the wall beside the poster was a large printed map, with the header “Displacer Transit Network”. It showed Avaeria’s sector one in intricate detail, with dozens and dozens of locations throughout the sector marked out along with small numbers. At the edge of the map was more text for locations in the adjacent city sectors. Jarzyl recognized the map instantly—it was the city’s public transportation network, which relied on dragons with displacer affinity to quickly teleport other dragons around the city, faster and easier than flying, though with a fee.
Jarzyl tapped at the marking which was closest to her home—District Central School, pad beacon 1-030. A trained displacer, which she very much was not, would be able to sense a beacon by recalling its specific code and following its magical trace, teleporting to the exact location it marked. Then again, if she was a trained displacer, she didn’t need to follow beacons and could just teleport herself directly home.
And of course, if she had received any training at all, she wouldn’t have ended up randomly displacing herself here, wherever here was. Turning around, Jarzyl went back to the window and used her claws to tap insistently on the glass.
Up close now, she could see that the drake outside looked middle-aged and was wearing a flight harness with the words “Security” marked out on the shoulder straps. He glared at her, then he stood up and came to unlock the door and push it open.
He immediately started to berate her. “Can you not read the sign? Displace back to one dash one and try again using a route that doesn’t intercept the power core! It’s just wasting your time, whenever you get waylaid, instead it?”
Jarzyl nodded, then shook her head. “Um…”
The security guard continued his rant. “Every single day there’s one of you! Check your route! Isn’t that the first thing they teach you in displacer vocational training?”
“I haven’t—”
“It’s laziness, that’s what it is! Complacency! You get so used to displacing whenever you want, instantly being wherever you want to be, that you can’t take the effort to check your map and make sure your route isn’t cutting right through an obstacle. The whole point of displacing is about going somewhere—but if you can’t go to the right place, what’s the point?!”
Jarzyl nodded. Clearly this person had some pent-up opinions they wanted to air.
“Let me tell you—I always check my routes. Always. And I never end up with my displacements becoming waylaid to a power core installation, or a propulsion array, or a crystal vattery. It’s such a basic skill if you call yourself a displacer. That is the first thing they teach you in vocational training. Really, the first. You ought to sign up for a refresher course if you’ve forgotten that.” The drake nodded to himself, then he scowled at Jarzyl. “Or are you still in DTN training? You look young. But you’re not wearing a training harness. Are you starting night school?”
“Ah ha. Yes!” Jarzyl hurriedly cut in. “I’m not in training. I only just got my magic.”
“What?”
“I’m not a trained displacer. I’m a fledgling who—or maybe I’m not a fledgling any more—but I only just started using my magic today. I’ve been having these magical surges that send me all over to random places.”
The drake scowled at her, but not with much force. “Why didn’t you say that right away? You must live in sector one? Probably the Hasilt-Taslin neighbourhood?”
Jarzyl shook her head. “I live in District Point Mintaka.”
“The Mintaka neighbourhood, of course. No wonder you ended up here if you’re having surge teleports—this is the biggest concentration of magical energy in Sector One, and you live nearby.” The drake glared again, but there was no anger to his expression, just a mild annoyance and a face used to being grumpy. “What’s that your carrying? Is that an egg?”
“Yes, that’s my future sibling. I’m just trying to get home, you see.”
“You’re displacing around with an egg? Without any training?”
“I don’t want to be displacing around. I would just like to get home. Are you a displacer? Can you help me get home?” Jarzyl asked.
The security guard shook his head. “I’m on duty and can’t leave. You’ll have to get yourself out of here. My job is make sure that no one interferes with this place.”
“But what is this place?” Jarzyl asked. The security drake stepped back, letting Jarzyl walk through the door, and the world opened up around her. “Oh wow.”
Jarzyl had thought the hangar bay a vast room, but this space was so big that its scale was hard to comprehend. She and the security guard were standing atop a catwalk that hung from the ceiling, and directly below them was the biggest energy crystal she had ever seen in her life, shaped in an immense elongated tetrahedron. Each point of the crystal was connected to the walls by conduits that steadily pulsed with energy. Numerous lights fixtures were pointing down at the energy crystal, though it seemed to swallow up all that light into the reflective translucent material that comprised its lattice, and the air around it was glowing bright with blue energy. By the side of the room, dragons worked away on machinery, but they were clad in so much protective gear that none of their scales were visible at all.
“I recognize that! We took a school excursion to come see this place once. That’s the city’s power core,” Jarzyl said.
“Correct. That’s why we have this room here—it’s on the zenith resonance point, which is where displacers end up if they cut a path too close by. Now you should leave.”
“But how?!” Jarzyl pressed. “I don’t know how to displace!”
The drake looked at her like she was being silly. “It should come naturally to you. Just think of where you want to go, visualize the place in your mind, and then use a standard channelling stance. Come on now. Get some control of yourself. Don’t waste time.”
“Ok… well, here goes nothing.” Jarzyl thought of her bedroom, and then she spread her four legs and raised her wings. Sparks of energy immediately started to swirl around her, fast and active.
The drake raised his wings in a casual salute. “Go home, young drakka. That should be most natural place to go, even for a novice displacer. And don’t come back.”
“Home, take me home,” Jarzyl muttered. Then she moved her wings, and was elsewhere.
It wasn’t home. Jarzyl found herself stumbling to the side, then bumping against a wall. Once again she greeted by the sight of an airship hangar—Central Bay 55, declared the label on the wall—the exact same hangar she’d been in before.
Jarzyl clutched the egg against her chest, making sure it was safe. While this wasn’t home, at least she had voluntarily tried to make a displacement then succeeded in using her magic, even if she wasn’t getting the destination right at all.
Jarzyl’s neck frill slowly perked up as an idea came to her. “This is the great challenge,” she murmured to her sibling, dramatically. “My great challenge. I am resolutely determined to get my magic and be an adult drakken! My parents have control of their magic, my aunt has control over her displacer magic, so obviously I can do it too. Every dragon gets control of their magic! It really can’t be that difficult.”
As she was monologing, Jarzyl slowly spread out both wings to full extension. She settled her weight between all four paws, as if she was preparing to make a big takeoff jump. “I will get control of this magic, and I will displace us out of this hangar, and I will get us both home safely. Just you watch.” Then she spun herself and swung her wings, and the world whirled all around the young dragon again, filling the air with energy and colour and sound. Bravado aside, she didn’t actually know how to use magic, but simply tried to will herself into moving.
With a loud hum, Jarzyl displaced herself somewhere else. It wasn’t her home. She staggered forward, but the resonating hum didn’t stop. “Grrruu-hmmmm!” Glancing back, Jarzyl saw a shimmering sphere of magical energy whirling around like a dust devil—it lasted for another second, then suddenly imploded with a loud but final thump. A nearby push trolley rolled towards where the sphere of magic had been, then bounced lightly off the wall and came to a stop.
Jarzyl blinked, and her neck frill perked up. Her prior displacements hadn’t created any visible effect on the environment. “Weird!”
And she still wasn’t home. Instead, the wall ahead read Central Bay 54. She’d displaced herself into the adjacent hangar, which was just as vacant as the previous one. No matter. The sparks running along her scales seemed to have halved in number after her last displacement, but Jarzyl guessed that she still had enough magic to displace quickly again. “Sooner or later I’m going to reach a hangar where the doors are open. Or at least there must be technicians or someone who can help us.”
She raised her wings again, and then flapped them through that same spinning motion, and once again streaks of colourful magic surrounded her. But this time instead of simply reappearing somewhere else, Jarzyl felt a distinct jerk like she was being pulled sideways. The young dragon flailed out her wings for stability and stumbled to the side. The wall said Central Bay 55—she’d only managed to displace herself right back to the first hangar.
“Grrrhhmmmmm!” This time the resonating sound of magic didn’t stop—it rolled on and on, crackling like static electricity mixed with the discordant notes of a mistuned wing harp. Colourful sparks of red and blue swirled like a whirlwind, but then their colour changed to a deep violet and they stretched into long streaks that formed energetic, interweaving rings in the air that were too bright to look at directly.
Jarzyl dipped her head down to touch her chin against the egg sitting in the sling, just to make sure it was safe, and then she slowly backed away from the sight of swirling magic. She felt a gust of wind pushing against her furled wings, as air began rushing towards the bright sphere of magic. “That looks weird. I feel like this is not normal.”
Document folders and instruction manuals came flying off a nearby table and fluttered through the air before vanishing into the sphere. Metal tools resting on the tabletop rattled in their cases, and the entire table ominously slid an inch closer, but it didn’t pull all the way into that wild whirl of energy.
Then came another flash right beside her, which made Jarzyl yelp and flinch away. Except the magic imploded to reveal a familiar adult dragon with scales of a bold red colour, wearing a simple flight harness and pennant flags from clan Taslin—her mother’s sister. Jarzyl instantly felt relief flood through her. “Aunt Mira!”
“Hello—oh, ho!” Mira spun around, but her gaze swept past Jarzyl and locked on the whirling sphere of magic. “Sky spirits protect us. Did you do that? You carved a traversal bridge?”
Jarzyl’s neck frill perked up. “What?! What is that?”
“Stay back!” Mira waved her wing, gesturing Jarzyl away. “Do you have the egg? Stay way back!” The drakka took a step towards the sphere of magic, and the rushing wind tugged on her wings and the pennant flags tied to her wingtips. Mira took another step forward, and then she was sliding on her paws, being dragged towards the bright, whirling magical sphere. “Oh, you’ve really done it now. This bridge has quite a pull.”
With her claws fully extended, Mira briefly managed to grab onto a drainage grille on the floor, but then she winced and let go. Instantly she was dragged towards the magical sphere, yanked through the air even though her wings were closed. “Ouch. I think I just cracked my claw—” There came a flash of energy and a thump, and then she was gone.
Jarzyl clutched the egg against her chest protectively. “Aunt Mira…?” For a moment she was frozen with uncertainty. “Oh no.” She turned to the left, then the right, not sure where to go or what to do, then settled on backing up even further away from the wildly spinning sphere of magic.
Then suddenly orange lights illuminated and begun spinning on the hangar wall. A mechanical bell rang out twice, ding-ding, and then with the deep grinding of heavy motors and turning gears, a vertical slice of the wall started to lift upwards, revealing the sideways adjacent hangar. Whereas before the hangar had only been open in two directions, forming a tunnel with other hangars, now it was opening up in a third direction.
The bell kept ringing repeatedly, ding, ding, ding, ding. Grinding, mechanical sounds rumbled through from the floor as the entire wall slowly separated into vertical strips of equal width, all of which started sliding towards the ceiling at varying speeds.
Inside the adjacent hangar was her aunt—she was standing by the control pedestal, using her tail tip to precisely jab one of the buttons. As the hangar wall continued to open up, she stepped away from the controls and briskly strolled back towards Jarzyl, staying by the side of the wall to keep away from the sphere of magical energy. She flashed a casual grin towards Jarzyl. “Hello again, niece! Getting yourself into great trouble, I see.”
Jarzyl nodded. “Yes! Can you help me?
“That’s what family is for, isn’t it?” Mira raised her paw and winced. “Ow, yeah, look. I cracked my claw on the metal ridge of that drain. That’s annoying.”
“What is that thing?” Jarzyl pointed at the violently swirling sphere of magic. As the wall to the adjacent hangar kept opening up, now she saw that there was a similar whirling sphere of magic also within that hangar at the far wall. “You called it a bridge? A bridge to where… to right over there?”
“That’s your little mark on the world,” Mira retorted. “I saw your bedroom just now and that hole you smashed in the wall from your magical surge. A traversal bridge is essentially the same thing except you’ve managed to smash a hole through the invisible, intangible, underlying pages of reality itself.” The drakka tilted her head upwards, then magic flashed around her and suddenly she displaced herself straight upwards, on the hangar’s suspended mezzanine walkway. She started working at a different control panel. “You’ve created a little shortcut between these two hangars. Good job!” she yelled sarcastically.
“Thanks!” Jarzyl replied, equally sarcastic. “But I thought that displacement is always a temporary effect? If we could just permanently connect two places, why do we even need displacers for fast transport?”
“Because you cannot permanently connect two places. Obviously! Having displacer affinity is… is being a needle, to pierce easily into the underlying interconnect of all locations to find a swift shortcut to another location. But if instead of a needle you’re a fist trying to punch your way to a new location, you can end up distorting the magical fields which define spatial geometry, and carving a traversal bridge.” Mira shot a glare at her niece. “That’s very unhealthy, you know?”
Jarzyl’s neck frill drooped. “For me?”
“No, you’re fine. I mean unhealthy for the nature of reality itself. Locations are supposed to be logically connected and properly separated, not intertwined in one big mess. And traversal bridges don’t shut themselves down—they keep growing, bigger and bigger with more distortion.”
“Oh.”
“They track these, you know? Public Safety Command has sensors across the city to detect traversal bridges, same as how they respond to fires growing out of control. They’re probably triangulating our location right now. Let’s see if we can fix this before they find us.”
Mira spun a large wheel, uncoiling a long length of hose from the wall. Grabbing the hose end with her paws, she leapt off the walkway and spread her wings to glide down, landing right beside Jarzyl. “What magic is the opposite of displacement?”
“Rock affinity?” Jarzyl guessed.
“No, rock is the opposite of air. Obviously.” Mira gestured with the hose. “Water is the opposite of displacement.” She yanked on the hose handle, and shot out a jet of water across the hangar, which she then aimed right at the whirling displacement bridge. Instantly water began to spray out from the other end of the bridge in the adjacent hangar.
“Shouldn’t water be the opposite of fire, not displacement?”
Mira flicked her wings in a dismissive shrug. “No, silly. Fire’s opposite is ice. Hence firebreath and frostbreath. Do they not teach you elemental charts in school these days?”
Jarzyl tried to remember. She recalled Atlas had vaguely mentioned this before, since he had sometimes liked to read old textbooks. “They do not. I thought elemental charts have been debunked as not scientific?”
“Oh. Perhaps so. Then listen to your teachers in school, they know what they’re talking about.” Standing upright and holding the hose with her forepaws, Mira slowly advanced towards the traversal bridge. The sphere of magic was visibly distorting now. Instead of spinning like a whirlwind and forming a solid glowing sphere, it flickered and started to shrink away, as the water eroded it from within. “All I know is that back when I was in displacer vocational training, the first thing they thought us was to be careful not to force the magic too hard. And if you do accidentally carve a bridge, water will break it up.”
“That’s good.” Jarzyl nodded at her aunt, but she didn’t take her gaze of the traversal bridge for long. In the adjacent hangar, the other end of the traversal bridge was also distorting. Whereas at first the stream of water had come out in a smooth jet that splattered against the wall, now the water was coming out in all different directions, like a fountain that had broken and was spraying everywhere.
Then it was done. The traversal bridge shrunk down to a pinprick and disappeared in a small flash of colour, leaving a burst of colourful sparks that faded away swiftly. Mira adjusted the hose to change it from a concentrated jet into a wide spray of water, and she sprayed it all over the area just to be sure the bridge was gone, then she cut off the water with a tug of the handle.
Jarzyl let out her breath in a long, relieved sigh. “So is it fixed?”
“It’s fixed. You’re welcome. An airship hangar is a good place to accidentally carve a traversal bridge—water is easily accessible. And good thing you didn’t open the bridge in the hangar where my airship was docked, or I’d have to write an incident report.” Mira climbed up the hangar walkway and returned the hose to its reel. Then she returned to Jarzyl. “Are you well? Is the egg safe?”
“The egg is egg-cellent,” Jarzyl muttered, but her tail tip twitched nervously. “How did you find me? How did you know…?”
Mira let out an easy laugh. “Your father called me over the city telecom grid. You got his tail in twist. He was in a right panic when you vanished and didn’t come back—worried that you were gone, worried that you had the egg with you. I displaced from my house over to yours, then I followed after you to here in central. Did you do a double track? I sensed a vague connection to the city power core, then right back here.”
Jarzyl nodded. “You could track me? Using your magic?”
Mira raised her wings, and for a split second, magical energy swirled around all her limbs. “That’s affinity. I could sense the wake left behind by your displacement surge and came after you. Now let’s get you two back home. Pass me the egg.”
“Oh yes. Please take it. Thank you.” Jarzyl lifted the sling off her neck and gave it to her aunt. “I don’t how you do this… this whole parenting thing. It seems incredibly stressful to have another life reliant on your care.”
“You get used to it. And I’ve had incredible help—from your uncle most of all, but from your parents too, the wider family, the whole clan even. And… is this a tool bag?” Mira took the egg and lifted it out of the makeshift pouch. Reaching down to her flight harness, she took out a proper cloth sling and gently slid the egg inside. “It was probably this thing which caused the traversal bridge. Back in vocational school, we had to pass tests on displacing alone before we would be allowed to practice displacing with other people. Trying to do an escort displacement usually takes a year of practice at least.”
Jarzyl nodded as understanding dawned. “I didn’t know that! No one told me that! I thought displacement was safe.”
“It is safe! Mostly. Carving a traversal bridge is normally very difficult. Mostly it happens when a displacer tries to displace people than they’re rated for—you earn more DTN fees if you can move six dragons instead of four or two, evidently.”
“I see,” Jarzyl said. “I guess I’ll learn about all of that when I go to vocational school for displacer affinity. I’ll have to learn to control my magic so this weird stuff doesn’t happen.”
A flash of doubt crossed Mira’s expression, so quick that the younger dragon almost didn’t catch it. “Perhaps,” she said neutrally.
“What?! What is it?” Jarzyl demanded. “You think I wouldn’t be able to control it?”
Mira avoided her gaze. “I can’t predict the future. No one can.”
A flash of annoyance ran through Jarzyl and she scowled. “What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything. You’re thinking something, but you don’t want to say it aloud because it might bother me—can’t you be straight with me?”
Her aunt chuckled, then reached out her wing to nudge Jarzyl’s side. “Fine. You want to know what I think? I think you have so much magical power that it’s leaking out of you, all over. You are having a spectacular magical surge—it takes a lot of power to carve a traversal bridge. I just don’t think…” She cut herself off.
“You don’t think what?” Jarzyl scowled again. She wasn’t very good with looking cross, and that just made her aunt chuckle. “I’m an adult. Or almost an adult. Just say it.”
“Fine. I don’t know if you have displacer affinity. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. I would lean towards thinking you don’t. This… does not normally happen to fledglings who are developing displacer affinity.” Mira shrugged her wings casually. “When I was your age, sure, there were a few days where I found myself displacing randomly. But I never carved a traversal bridge until I was years into vocational training and trying to push the limits of my escort displacements. Traversal bridges require breaking reality in a way that is quite difficult and should feel instinctually wrong if you have displacer affinity.”
Jarzyl deflated, with her neck frill drooping. “Oh. Ok. So not displacer affinity.”
“Are you alright? I hope you’re not disappointed. I repeat, I can’t predict the future. Maybe you do have displacer affinity, maybe you don’t.”
The idea sat in her mind and Jarzyl turned it about, examined it from a few angles, and finally concluded that she didn’t know how to feel about this. “Whatever. Let’s go home please.”
Mira raised her wing and beckoned. Jarzyl scampered over to her side—now that she was no longer carrying the egg, a huge weight of responsibility had lifted from her back. “Your parents will be glad to know you are well,” Mira said. Then magic swirled around them, and they were elsewhere.
For an instant, Jarzyl worried that her unstable power would interfere with her aunt’s affinity and send them off course. But when the magic around them dissipated, they were right where they were meant to be—right on the doorstep of her home. The sky outside was dark, and the streetlights cast long shadows.
Jarzyl stepped forward, but before she could even knock, the door was swiftly yanked open from within. Her father rushed out and quickly pulled her into a warm embrace. “Jarzyl. You’re back!” With his wing on her back, he guided his daughter back into their house and hugged her again.
Home was warm and bright. It smelled familiar and the floor tiles felt comfortable against her paws. Then her mother came from down the corridor, and without saying anything she hugged Jarzyl from her other side. “Are you alright? Where did you go?”
“Hehe…” A soft laugh, almost a giggle bubbled out of Jarzyl’s throat—almost a childish sound, but she was so glad to be home and to see her parents that she didn’t care. She leaned her head against their necks and opened her wings to hug them back. “I was at Central Bay 55…”
Her father’s neck frill twitched. He turned to Mira, who also stepped inside the house and used her tail to pull the door shut behind her. “Then you were right, she did go in the direction of the airship docks?”
Aunt Mira nodded. “I told you I’d get your little troublemaker back, didn’t I? Nothing to worry about. Mostly. She was at central docks, then the city power core, then back to the docks.” Then she lifted the sling off her neck. “Galon, Zil, I believe this is also yours.”
Jarzyl’s father released Jarzyl from the hug and carefully took the egg from Mira. “Is it safe?! Is it warm?” He put the cloth sling around his own neck and hugged the egg against his chest.
“The egg should be fine,” Jarzyl assured him. “We just had a little sibling adventure, the two of us. But I was taking good care of it.” As she was talking, her mother touched the side of Jarzyl’s neck and sent a pulse of healing through her body. Sparks of healing magic swept across the younger dragon’s scales in a smooth wave, targeting small scratches or sinking into her muscles to ease minor aches—it brought a familiar feeling of comfort and wellbeing, even if it didn’t erase the tiredness accumulated from a long exciting day.
Jarzyl let out a soft sigh. “I didn’t think I could displace that far. I didn’t know I could displace anything along with me, least of all an egg. There were some problems. I carved a traversal bridge.”
“A traversal bridge?” asked her mother. “I’ve heard of those. At the medical centre, our emergency response displacer medics deliberately time their movements—they can’t go back and forth instantly, even when picking up a patient.”
Mira spoke up. “Exactly. It’s something that can happen when displacement magic goes awry, particularly with escort displacements. Location geometry gets messed up.”
Jarzyl nodded. “It was weird. There was a big whirlwind of magic between two hangar bays, sucking things from one hangar and spitting them out into the other hangar.” The magical sparks from her mother’s healing affinity had faded away from Jarzyl’s body, but now other sparks started to appear. These were bright and flickered through different colours, and they spun chaotically around her limbs instead of moving precisely like her mother’s magic. “Oh. Look—”
Stepping over, Aunt Mira gently but firmly pulled Jarzyl out of the hug with her parents. “Jarz, be careful. Don’t displace anyone with you again.”
Her father flipped his wing forward, covering the egg—as if it needed to be protected, from her. “Oh. I should have known. This was my mistake. You told me before dinner that you were having a magical surge and had been practicing displacements through the afternoon. I shouldn’t have asked you to keep the egg warm.”
“I wasn’t deliberately practicing displacements! The magic just happens, and I can’t stop it or control where I’m going.”
Her aunt said, “Well then until you get more control, you have to be careful around other people. Make sure you avoid doing escort displacements, for safety.”
“Safety? What do you mean? Is it dangerous?” asked her mother. “Was the egg at risk by being displaced?”
“No, I’m not dangerous! I was just… No one got hurt. Uh, except I guess Aunt Mira cracked one of her claws, but that hardly even counts as an injury. And no one warned me displacement magic was unsafe!” Jarzyl nervously shifted her weight between her paws, and her neck frill perked up from agitation. “Apparently if I displace someone with me, my magic isn’t controlled enough so it creates a traversal bridge. But it’s not unsafe for me or for the egg I think.”
Her mother reached out her paw and touched the egg, and from the point of contact there was a flicker of healing affinity. “The egg feels fine. The embryo is alive and healthy.”
Jarzyl nodded. She took a step towards the egg, wanting to sniff at it, but then felt guilty and backed away. “I took care of the egg! I was trying my best. Aunt Mira fixed the traversal bridge with water from the airship hangar. It’s all fine now.”
Mira nodded too. “All is well. Just don’t hug anyone for the next few days, at least until your magic is stabilized. Don’t touch anyone, in case you accidentally displace them and carve another traversal bridge.”
“Don’t blame me for this!”
“No one is blaming you—”
“I’m trying as best I can! And now I can’t hug my family, I can't hug my friends, I can’t… do… anything because of this ridiculous magic!
Her father looked at her calmly. “Jarzyl, don’t yell in front of your sibling. You must be tired from the day, and maybe stressed from your adventure. Take a deep breath and relax.”
Jarzyl took a deep breath but did not relax, though she did manage to avoid yelling by speaking in a hissed undertone. “Of course I’m stressed! I’m so stressed because earlier today I was having a horrible headache and thinking I was sick. And then I was even more stressed because it turned out to be a magical headache, and now I have no idea when or how I’m going to get control of my magic.”
She turned to glare at her aunt too. “And I’m stressed about the risks of having displacer affinity that no one has ever told me about, even though my own aunt is a displacer! No one told me that displacement is unsafe or that there are specific rules to follow! I don’t even know if I have displacer affinity or something else!” Jarzyl turned back to her parents. “And of course I’m stressed that I didn’t do right by my own eggy sibling, because I am very much not ready to be an adult and I don’t want to do adult things like being responsible for an egg. That’s not my fault! I didn’t decide to have a sibling or that I could be responsible! I’m not a responsible person why are you trusting me? I am just so stressed about this, whole, situation, because these… these blasted_…_ will you_…_ quit doing that…!”
More and more sparks of wild, unstable magic were accumulating around her limbs again. Jarzyl furiously flicked her paw to try and shake them off, though that just made the sparks accumulate on her other paw instead. “Stop it!” she hissed.
“Don’t fight it,” Mira suggested. “I’ll come get you.”
“No, I’ll come get myself!” Jarzyl retorted, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she meant with this. And then in a flash of colour, she displaced away from the house again.
The three adults drakken stared at the empty spot where Jarzyl had been standing. The house suddenly seemed muted and empty from the young dragon’s absence.
Galon spoke first. “I will go put the egg back into the nest box. Mira, bring Jarzyl back please. Carefully. She’s had a long day.” He headed to the living room, carrying the egg in the sling around his neck.
Mira waited till Galon was out of sight, then she let out a long sigh. “Zil, how do you manage to deal with this much fledgling adolescent drama on a daily basis?”
Zilarin lazily shrugged her wings at her sister. “You’re a shipmaster of the Mintaka merchant fleet—or you were, I suppose—now it’d be shipmaster of the Taslin merchant fleet. But you lead a whole crew, so surely you must know how to manage drama and conflict.”
“Believe it or not, professional aviators are not as moody and unstable as teenagers.”
“I can believe that. Hmm, how do Galon and I manage to put up with Jarzyl’s fledgling chaos?” Zilarin pondered the topic for a moment. “By the sheer power of unconditional familial love, I think. The same way I put up with your antics through the decades of our childhood, and indeed far into adulthood too. Guess you’d better figure out how to parent a fledgling before your own two reach the fledgling age.”
An immediate smile crossed Mira’s snout at the thought of her two young children. “It seems like only a few months ago Jarzyl was a tiny, chirpy little hatchling who always begged me to take her flying on my airship. Now she’s old enough to get her own magic and causing chaos. Do you ever miss the days when Jarzyl was still your little hatchling?”
“You know she caused as much chaos when she was far younger.” Zilarin smiled too. “But Jarzyl’s still my little hatchling daughter, and she always will be, no matter how big she gets. Just like how you’ll always be my pesky little tail-biting sister.”
Mira rolled her eyes and tried to poke her sister’s side—she would never be so immature in public, certainly not while on the job, but in private, Zilarin could always get a rise out of her. She raised her paw and gestured. “Hey, help me with this, would you?”
Reaching out, Zilarin grabbed Mira’s forepaw in her own, and with a small burst of healing magic, she fixed up the cracked claw. Then she indifferently nudged her sister’s paw away. “There. Now bring me with you, and let’s go fetch my daughter if you would be so kind.”
In a whirl of wild magic, Jarzyl vanished from the comfortable confines of her home and reappeared in a new destination. The air was wet all around her, dark, and there was nothing beneath her paws. The young dragon let out a shocked, incoherent shout as she swiftly began to drop. “Graah-bbaaaahhh!”
Jarzyl instinctually threw out her wings and managed to stabilize into level flight. She gasped a couple of deep breaths in time with her wingbeats, then sighed with relief and looked around. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness of night, and even then she found herself squinting and blinking away drops of water as cool damp air swept around her body, leaving streaks of moisture dripping from her scales. She was in a cloud, somewhere in the air, somewhere high above the city.
A bright, diffuse glow emanated through the cloud from the city lights below, and Jarzyl tilted her wings into a cautious descent. Flying in clouds was considered dangerous—rain, hail, icing conditions, wind shear and lightning were all good reasons why fledglings were taught in flight school to avoid flying into clouds. Fortunately the weather conditions were mild, and Jarzyl found no trouble other than getting rather wet from her flight.
After a minute she broke through the cloud base and flew into open air. Skyscrapers stood out tall from the city below, their spires and rooftops all adorned with lights to keep the buildings easily visible even at night. Jarzyl was a diurnal dragon and, unlike her friend Atlas, she was unused to nighttime navigation.
Then she spotted movement from one of the close, tallest rooftops nearby—a pinpoint of orange light that was moving from side to side. The orange light sputtered slightly as if it was from something burning, instead of the continuous glow or rhythmic flash of proper building lights, and then it waved again from side to side.
Jarzyl headed for that building and saw that it was a pair of dragons standing on the rooftop. It was her mother and her aunt, and her aunt was holding onto a lit signal flare and waving it to get her attention. Jarzyl felt a mix of annoyance but relief at the sight of her family members. She touched down on the rooftop and scowled at the two drakka. “How did you get here before me?!” she demanded.
Her Aunt Mira casually twisted the signal flare, and the brilliant orange burn started to fade. “I could tell that you displaced into the sky. Instead of just following right after you, I picked a rooftop nearby.”
“Bah.”
Zilarin stepped closer to her daughter. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.” Jarzyl flicked her wings and shook herself from nose to tail, rattling her damp scales and sending water droplets flying off her body. Mira stepped back, but Zilarin didn’t shy away.
“How are you feeling?”
Jarzyl sighed, but she drew herself up and nodded. She always enjoyed flying, and going through the cloud had been a sudden cold shower that depressed her earlier frustrations. “I don’t know. Where… is this? Are we still in sector one?”
“Yeah we’re still in central.” Mira gestured at the area around them. “This is DTN pad beacon 1-49. Mostly used by business people who need to rush between office locations in the day, and so they can afford displacer fees. I learned all the sector one routes back when I was in vocational training.”
Jarzyl sniffed miserably. “Which I guess I won’t get to learn, since I won’t go to displacer vocational training.”
Her mother looked confused. “You won’t? You don’t want to go?”
“No, it’s just that Aunt Mira thinks I don’t have displacer affinity. She thinks I’m having a great big magical surge and I don’t actually have the knack—the affinity for displacement.”
“I don’t know for sure…” Mira started to say.
Zilarin cut in. “Does that disappoint you, Jarz? Do you want displacer affinity?” The drakka glanced around off the rooftop, taking in the cityscape, dark but glowing with lights. “Your great-grandmother had displacement, and I wanted it too, when I was your age.”
Jarzyl perked up. “You did?”
“Oh yes. I thought it would be great fun to teleport around wherever I wanted to. Freedom. Yet I got healing instead, and that was a disappointment at first, until I realized I could help so many people in a medical centre. And now that work gives my life purpose—though my first purpose in life is to take care of my family, and of you, my love.” Leaning over, Zilarin affectionately licked Jarzyl’s neck—an old gesture, from when a hatchling was too young to clean their own scales and their parent had to do it for them—now a simple expression of warmth. “Don’t worry about what type of magic you get.”
“Alright.” Jarzyl made a soft, pleased rumble in her throat. “Interesting. So you wanted displacement too!”
“Some things change through the generations—in our time, fire and frost breath were in demand because people thought it was a classic, respectable type of magic. Nowadays electric and air affinity are hot. But displacement has always been popular. So yes, I used to want it when I was young.” Then Zilarin glanced at Mira. “Then my little sister got displacement, and that was annoying.”
Mira chuckled. “Tell her the story about how you got your affinity. She’ll like it.”
“I don’t think Jarzyl needs even more horror about getting affinity.” Zilarin looked hesitant, which only made Jarzyl all the more intrigued. Her mother recognized the look of curiosity on the young dragon’s face. “Fine. When I was… I think it was one year older than you are now, back when Mira was exactly your age. I got my affinity first, one day when we were home after school. It was a complete mess. In my bedroom I suddenly started bleeding all over, from my mouth, from my nose, my eyes, every orifice, every place that could bleed. It latest a split-second and then it stopped and I healed up all over.”
Mira spoke up. “It was not a split-second. It was maybe half a minute of horrible screaming and panic. I ran into her room and there was blood everywhere, I thought she had exploded. What an absolutely horrific experience. The smell of blood everywhere, all the red soaking into the sheets and dripping off the walls.”
Zilarin clicked her tongue. “This is considered quite rare of a side effect—just like your little fun with displacing everywhere. Most dragons have very normal, standard, uneventful transitions into adulthood. Also I wasn’t screaming, I want to make that clear.” She nodded at her sister. “She was the one screaming. And our father too. I was very calm through the brief process.”
Jarzyl laughed, then winced, then she laughed again. “Haha. I guess… I guess I haven’t had such a bad day today, after all? Not compared to what happened to you!”
Zilarin nodded. “Don’t even get me started on how much it cost to clean everything up. I offered to scrub the walls, but father—your grandfather—insisted on hiring professional cleaners.”
Improbably, Jarzyl found that the simple story had actually cheered her right back up. “I think I am good now. I’m good if I don’t get displacer affinity. I don’t need it. Because…” She turned to her aunt. “Because Aunt Mira, I think it’s great that you have displacer affinity, but I don’t want to be exactly like you.” She turned back to her mother. “And… and I don’t need healing affinity either, or stone affinity, even though I think you and father are the best. I just want to be myself, whatever myself is.”
“And you know we’ll always love you, no matter what affinity you end up having.” Her mother raised her wing, and Jarzyl stepped up for the hug.
Mira waited for a moment, then she came over and patted her wing over Zilarin’s shoulders and then Jarzyl’s too. “Shall we go home now?”
Zilarin nodded. “Take us back, please.”
Magical energy swirled all around them, and Jarzyl stared up into the dark, cloudy sky. “Now I’m hungry again,” muttered the young dragon. “I rather feel like going to get a snack first before going home…” But then the world shifted around them, and they were home.
TO BE CONTINUED