Chapter 4- Lessons Learned
When they awake the next morning, Crimsa tells her daughter that she is starting school that day at noon, explaining her deliberations with Relid.
Crystalia sighs, unexcited with the prospect of school as her mother had explained it.
"Cheer up, it'll be fun."
"How do you know?" Crystalia responds mentally.
"I don't know, I'm just trying to cheer you up"
At this point, Relid returns, having been out hunting.
"Dig in." He says dully, secretly dreading the departure of his daughter.
The family eats slowly, each one enjoying their meal and the company of the others; they finish eating around an hour before noon and Relid takes the scraps out to the compost pile behind their cave, muttering something quietly to himself. Crimsa dresses herself while her daughter does the same, and, as noon approaches, the three talk, making the most of every second they have.
When the time finally comes, the three take flight, bound for town and the school within.
Upon arrival, Crystalia notices that a lot of the young dragons aren't able to fly yet and that many of them are smaller than her; she also notices similarly sized dragons as well. As they approach, she drops to the ground, mentally telling her parents one last goodbye before her first day of school.
As she is directed to the room her teacher is in, she already finds herself dreading school; there is one thing about that morning that manages to change her mind slightly- they are asked to tell one interesting fact about themselves.
When they finally get to Crystalia, she tells everyone about her experience deep freezing part of the forest earlier that week; being forced to truly speak for the first time. This comment draws laughter from a doubtful teacher as class starts, and a feeling of wariness within Crystalia begins to morph into a deep feeling of malice. After about 30 minutes of dropping sticks as her concentration is broken repeatedly by some form of whining from another dragon, Crystalia masters the day's activity of levitating small objects by focusing her magic on it and moving her paw to move the object. As boredom begins to creep over her, she begins to experiment with visualizing different actions, fumbling and accidentally dropping the stick multiple times before managing, to the surprise of everyone in front of her, to slingshot the stick just by thinking about it.
Upon hearing a surprised yelp as a stick is pinned out of the air and into the far wall, the teacher runs over to Crystalia, who is, at that point, attempting to console the dragon that she scared by almost spearing with her stick. Crystalia barely has time to explain after admitting responsibility for the incident before the teacher sends her to the principal's office and calming the class. After she finishes calming the class, she grabs the stick out of the wall with the other still speared on the end.
When the teacher enters the office, Crystalia immediately growls out of sheer spite; the principal leads the two into the back office and asks them to take a seat, sitting behind a large desk himself.
"What happened here?" He asks inquisitively.
"I..." Crystalia begins, before being cut off by her teacher.
"She launched a stick through the air and speared another one into a wall." The teacher says.
The principal looks over to Crystalia before asking for her explanation.
"I was bored so, yes, I shot the stick through the air, but spearing the other was an accident." Crystalia replies truthfully, already tiring of the conversation.
"Why don't you show me exactly what you did?" the principal responds calmly, to the surprise of both teacher and student.
Before her teacher has a chance to speak, Crystalia telekinetically pulls the sticks apart, drops one, and slingshots the other into a dartboard on the other side of the room, hitting a bullseye; all without looking away from the principal. His jaw almost drops through the floor at the spectacle he had witnessed.
"How did you know how to do that?" he asks peacefully.
"I was bored, so I started messing around with visualizing a slingshot and launching the stick with it, and it happened." Crystalia drones on, her mind everywhere but here.
"I know mistakes happen, so I'll let you go with the assumption this won't happen again." He replies wisely.
"Thanks..." Crystalia mumbles, pulling the stick out of the dartboard before heading off towards class.
Upon returning, she gives the stick back to the young male that had it prior to the incident and apologizing once again for her mistake. He thanks her and, to her surprise, asks for her help with the assigned task she so easily mastered.
She accepts and helps him until the teacher arrives and tells them to return the 'materials' to her, ending the activity and sending the class out to play in the schoolyard. Being the kind of dragon she is, Crystalia finds a large tree on the perimeter of the fenced-in yard and lays down beneath it, meditating quietly. Her concentration is frequently broken by joyous squeals and the rhythmic patter of feet, each time resuming her meditation after the distraction has passed. She soon finds the limits of her patience as, for at least the fifteenth time in just five minutes, her concentration is interrupted and, as the noisy pair of youngsters comes around for a sixteenth pass, she breaks, her magic once again flowing freely, scorching the ground around her instantly and causing her eyes to light up with a fiery glow; as the noisemakers run right by her, they yelp in pain as their paws are burnt slightly, singing their scales slightly. The sudden pained vocalizations snap Crystalia from her entranced state, causing the ground to return to normal as she runs over to assist the injured dragons.
They shy away from her, not realizing she had no intent to hurt them.
"Look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you!" Crystalia says pleadingly, despising herself for harming another living being, "I can heal your paws if you want."
The two young dragons are obviously twins, their colors and patterns the same, the brother is obviously older, being only a couple inches shorter than Crystalia, while the sister is only about half her brother's size.
"Sure." The brother replies after a few seconds of thought.
Crystalia sits down once more and concentrates for a few seconds before a green arcane glow appears in her eyes and she begins muttering arcane callings under her breath, reaching out a paw and signaling for one of them to grab her paw. The brother is first up as he grabs her paw with his own. He shudders slightly as a tingling begins deep in his two burnt paws, working its way to the surface before fading away, leaving his paws unburnt. His sister takes a second to gather up her courage before she too grabs Crystalia paw and shudders slightly as the same tingling feeling works its way through her burnt paws; leaving them unburnt as well.
"What's your name?" The brother asks kindly.
"My name is Crystalia, what about you?"
"I'm Nolaltro but I go by Nol, this is my little sis, Lasia. Nice to meet you."
"Nice to meet you too, Nol, Lasia." Crystalia replies, looking between them upon saying their names.
"Sorry about before, I don't know what came over me. I just... Lost control..."
"It's fine, I'm more intrigued with how you managed it in the first place." Nol replies kindly.
"I can't help you there." Crystalia says abashedly, "I don't know how I did it. Things like that just happen to me when I feel extreme emotions."
For the first time since Nol and Crystalia began talking, Lasia speaks up.
"I've read of this kind of stuff happening before."
Both Crystalia and Nol jump slightly, not expecting someone else to begin talking.
"There have been very few throughout history, but there are myths of dragons with control over magic etched into their very existence," Lasia continues, "these dragons have been said to be the descendants of gods, although, that is just in mythos. Now they are believed to have a rare combination of genes that provide them with their ability to control magic to suit their emotions."
Crystalia is dumbstruck by the intelligence of such a young-looking dragon, and it must have shown because Nol chuckles slightly before dashing off with his sister to greet their parents. They try to bring their parents to meet Crystalia but their parents almost seem to ignore them, taking to the sky, their children in tow.
Over the next hour or so, other parents pick up their children, until Crystalia is the last one left. She focuses on returning home and, after only a few minutes, she is able to teleport herself back home.