Introducing Ieesha to Earth
A gentle dragoness introduced to humankind.
How did I introduce Ieesha to the public? Well... it actually wasn't that difficult. My dragoness - with her forty meter long golden-bronze body and wings - was already a very gentle creature by nature; she already broke all the tropes as it were. She wasn't aggressive, except for when it came to protecting me from harm. She didn't kidnap princesses or hoard treasure; ideas which she found alarming and absurd; instead, she loved knowledge and books. Like dragons of fantasy, she did breathe fire--but she herself explained that there was no magic at all with that; it was a biological process, glands in her throat producing a kind of biological napalm-like spray that she could expel, which then ignited on contact with the air.
She and I took lots of photos of just her at first; how she spent a day. We took photos of her sleeping on the fleece pile that was her bed, stretched out, or pawing at the air in dreams. We took photos of her waking up, all bleary-eyed, photos of her having an omnivorous breakfast to show she wasn't strictly a carnivore, and then more pictures of her reading a book with her reading machine, then still more of her tinkering in her lab with her telekinesis, Ieesha the scientist. Later, we went outside and then it was pictures of her being silly, and frolicking in the grass, or fields of flowers. Snoozing gently on a beach even as curious children ran up and tried to touch part of her. Pictures of her laying very, very still, swamped with puppies and kittens.
The high-definition video of her talking to herself in her native tongue - cheeping, chirruping, birdlike, with nary a snarl or roar to be heard - blew up the Internet. The next video - of her speaking her alphabet and then singing a simple hatchling's song - made the linguists flip out with excitement. Was any of this staged or set up? No. The pictures and videos we took together of her were all real. What humanity saw of Ieesha... was just who she was: a gentle giant, a "soft" dragon who curled about her human rider so gently at night, tucking him 'neath her wing, nuzzling his face, singing gently. Being a mammal helped, for she had the right facial muscles to smile without showing teeth, not to mention her expressive midnight-blue eyes.
Of all things, the image which secured her future on earth was one of her crying, tears running from her eyes, down her snout. She'd been thinking about her parents, missing them terribly, and of course the thoughts led to her silently weeping. I'd taken a last photo before moving to comfort her as the Observers took a final photo of us together, me holding her head in my arms as she wept. The world embraced Ieesha and she and I paid back that kindness in full, working as ambulance, disaster relief, and search and rescue for anyone and everyone, no matter what country.