The second egg finished successfully! It was definitely not less fun than the first one :] First ice, now fire :D

Blaze belongs to  i-am-me19
Enormous thanks to  tricksterd for proofreading my roleplay thing with the egg owner again :)

==========
==========


Your day was rather uneventful. You browsed the internet and voice-chatted with friends for the most of it, but there were no interesting submissions on FA and eventually even chatting with friends had to come to an end when your microphone stopped working all of a sudden. Angry at the defective junk, you decided to go to a popular auctions site and buy some new and good one right away.

You found a really good offer after just a moment of browsing and ordered something that seemed dependable enough. You just had to wait a couple of days for its arrival.

Still, since there was nothing more interesting to do for you anyway, you decided to browse the site for some more time and see what people had to offer. You found a lot of really cheap and good electronics and some nice looking clothes. You began to consider ordering a couple of more things, but decided to keep browsing, hunting for some particularly good offers.

Eventually, out of curiosity, you glanced at some weirder items categories as well to see what you would find there. You saw people trying to sell some really old items: a century old money, toys, paintings… Some of the stuff was really nice looking and costed half of nothing, while other auctions demanded tremendous amount of money for something very plain looking. Some things were apparently worth much more than they seemed, and were just waiting for someone who understood their real value, you thought… Or half of them were just a scam.

You weren’t sure how to qualify one particularly weird auction you found. Some person claimed to sell a genuine monster egg and tried to sell it in an auction form. The photos showed a rather dark egg with some darker stripes on its surface. You had never seen any egg like that and something told you that those stripes could be just plainly painted on it. That’s what the other people probably assumed as well, since the auction was reaching its end and there were still no bids on it, with the starting bid set at merely five dollars. Still, the whole thing had intrigued you as a nice joke and you read through the whole item description in the end, since you had nothing better to do at the moment anyway.

The seller claimed to be a treasure hunter and described a story about his adventure in a deep, forgotten tomb where a giant gold-maned beast guarded that egg. The seller ensured that from the egg would hatch a monster that would change his appearance depending on its hatching place and the food it would be fed in its youth, so apparently you could have a creature growing pure golden fur as well. The delivery was free and the current owner offered to add a written instruction to the egg too.
You knew there was something wrong about that auction. If it was such an amazing creature, why would the seller set such a low starting bid? A beast like that could provide an endless amount of money if it would only prove to be true! And what was the chance for someone to just go around and find monster eggs in ancient tombs? It was so painfully fake it had made you frown and smirk when you closed the tab and decided to forget about it.

…however, it proved to be pretty hard to get your mind busy with anything else and your thoughts kept wandering back to the story in the auction.

You wanted to check the new submissions on FA again but the site was down.

You wanted to text-chat with your friends but all of them were away at that moment.

You wanted to play your MMO game but the subscription period just ran out.

In the end, after making angry circles with your mouse for about a minute, you decided to check out on that weird auction once again. The time for it was just running out, so you couldn’t help but wonder if anyone would make any bid for it in the end or not. The vision of having your own huge monster pet started exciting you deep inside, of course, but you were sure that thing wasn’t real and getting yourself get tricked on so obviously far-fetched tail would be beyond naive. You took a deep breath and opened your browser’s history with a strong resolution to do absolutely nothing beside observing the end of the auction…

---

[the auction took place here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/14500189/ ]

---

…in the end, it didn’t end just with observing. When you came back to the auction, you noticed a couple of bids already and surprised by that decided to make one yourself on a whim. You weren’t sure why you did it exactly. Probably as a small joke out of the boredom, to see the previous bidders waste even more money on the worthless painted egg. You sat in your chair smirking, refreshing the auction page every so often, waiting for any of the previous bidders to outbid you. Time passed quickly, though, and no one else appeared with a bigger offer. The auction ended and you became the owner of the mysterious “monster egg”.

You sat silently, looking at the screen dumbfounded. For a moment, you considered contacting the owner to tell him it was a mistake and you’d like to back off from the whole auction, but you knew it would be a very unfair thing to do. You made a bid and won, so it was your responsibility to keep your promise. You made the payment on the seller’s account and provided him with your address. Who knew, maybe you would be positively surprised with your purchase after all. Just after you had sent the last email, your best friend appeared of Skype and at least you knew you wouldn’t be bored that day anymore.

The next week you forgot about the whole auction at all, until one afternoon you heard a knocking at your door. You opened the door lazily and nodded at the German Shepherd mailman with a friendly smile. You had got the ordered microphone two days before and didn’t expect any other packages beside the one from the auction, so you got surprised when the mailman didn’t hand you over any box, but just a single, very bulgy envelope. It didn’t even feel like bubble-protected inside, just simple paper. While you were sure nobody would send an egg that way, there was the address of the auction holder on it, so you assumed that he must had sent you the promised written instructions in it and the egg itself would still reach you eventually in some nicely protected box. It was obvious that transporting delicate items like that had to be very problematic.

You thanked the mailman and closed the door when he walked away. After that, you went straight to the kitchen, threw the envelope on the table with a dull thump and looked around for some sharp knife. When you managed to open the package at one of its ends, you noticed a thick note indeed, but the envelope was also tightly bulged with something else and it was very hard to take the note out. You took the knife once again, then, and holding the package in your hand you sliced the paper open through half of its length, making the dark stripped egg roll out and hit the table to your utmost shock. Before you could start wondering how was it possible for an egg to survive such a long way without any protection, the small round thing rolled out of the table and hit the floor before you managed to catch it. You shouted in rage, both at yours and the seller’s carelessness.

…so that’s how you wasted your sixty five dollars, you thought…

…but when you glanced at the spot the egg fell, there wasn’t the big yellow blot, like you expected. In fact, there was completely nothing there, because the egg, still intact, was still rolling away on the floor. You caught and picked it up, noticing in surprise that except for some dust and dirt on the shell, it was perfectly fine. No crack or even a scratch. Could it be that you bought just a painted stone? It was pretty light, though. Even though it wasn’t bigger than a regular chicken egg, it still should have weighted more if it was a rock. You ran to your computer and contacted your friends excited to tell them about the amazing thing you got your hands on.

By the time the night came you had the whole instruction note read through and debated deeply about what to do from then on. The instructions stated that the hatched pup’s traits would depend on the place the egg would be left to hatch. There were some poor sketches of a creature that, as the author stated, hatched from an egg left in a freezer box, so it grew to be a cold-bodied beast with a mane of ice. The egg could be placed in any other environment at all, though, and the whelp would be completely different each time. You could put it in a hot oven, in a bath-tub full of water, hang it on a tree or even throw into a trash bin. Whatever place you would choose, it would make the pup be born with unique traits based on that and you weren’t limited at all in your choice.

A small piece of paper stuffed in the note stated that the egg would hatch around September the 20th, which left you about a week of time. You knew it was a very important choice, so you decided to leave it for the next day and go to sleep for the time being. You put the egg on your night table and went to bed, thinking about all the various possibilities before finally falling asleep calmly.

When the next day comes, where will you put the egg to hatch?

---

[the owner chose a campfire as the hatching place]

---

When the morning came and you glanced at the egg sleepily, you thought you knew what to do with it finally. You were actually a bit surprised it took you so much time to realize. Every time you had to choose a magical element for your characters in videogames, you always chose fire. From Charmander to Fennekin, you always picked a fire starter in every Pokemon game. Why not to make yourself a huge blazing werewolf beast, then?

You had searched your closets for a big travelling backpack and a tent you bought quite some time ago, prepared all of the camping tools, some food and left your house with the egg in your pocket and heavy luggage on your back. There was no way to keep the egg in a fire for a whole week inside your house. You could use your gas stove for that, but the bills would kill you… Taking a short vacation for camping, with a real big campfire, was a much more reasonable option.

After getting to your favorite camping spot deep in the forest, near a lake, you set your camp swiftly and started gathering wood for the campfire. You needed to keep the egg in fire for many days, so you knew that no matter how big of a pile you gathered then, you would still need to make regular trips for more. For starters, you gathered a small hill of dry wooden branches about as tall as you were yourself and decided that it would suffice for some time. You made a big stone circle, put the egg in the center of it and started covering it with thin wood pieces first. After no more than ten minutes, you managed to start a nice, hot burning campfire to keep the egg warm in. After that, you just had to make sure to not let the flames go out.

All the time you weren’t tending to the egg, you were busy with a lot of other activities. You had taken your fishing rod with you, so you spent a lot of time fishing in the nearby lake. Even though you took some food from home with you, you still preferred to eat what you caught or found. There were a lot of tasty wild berries around and even some edible mushrooms. You didn’t take anything for hunting with you, but it wasn’t a big deal since you wouldn’t want to stray too far from the camp anyway.

Every time you were preparing to go sleep you made sure to put a lot of thick wood pieces to the fire. When you woke up in the mornings, it wasn’t blazing with flames anymore, but the egg was still lying covered in red hot pieces, so you hoped it was good enough.

The fourth day was dangerously cloudy and you feared it could start raining any moment. The clouds gathered over your head for the whole day while you could do nothing but keep the fire on and pray for the sky to clear up. Luckily, the night came without a single raindrop falling and the sky was clear again in the morning.

At the seventh night, weird crackling and squeaking pulled you out of your sleep. You had looked around startled at first, expecting to see some wild beast wandering nearby, but realized soon that the sounds come from your campfire and you approached it enthusiastically.

“My own werewolf beast is hatching! Like in the sketches, but much more awesome, because a fire one!”, you thought.

Both the crackling and squeaking stopped and nothing emerged from the burning wood pieces. You feared that the puppy had a problem scrambling out from below all the wood, so you took a stick and tried to dig it up yourself.

What you found, wasn’t a cool fire werewolf puppy, but a striped rodent munching on a burning wood piece, like it was a tasty nut. At first, you wondered if it really was the creature from your egg, but in the end there was no doubt, since the shell pieces were laying around it and you hadn’t heard about any other animal capable of surviving a high temperature like that of the campfire. After staring at it disappointed for some time, you finally sighed and accepted that you got something a bit different than expected. The hatching place being wood-based, in the forest, could have something to do with the beast’s appearance as well, you guessed.

When the weird creature noticed you, it let go of the wood piece it was eating and jumped at your leg happily, scattering the red flaring shards around. The little puppy’s body was so hot it burned your fur and hurt you incredibly, so you sent the whelp flying with an instinctive, defensive kick. The fire beast made a long arc in the dark forest night and fell like a shooting star somewhere in the grass, while you grabbed your black and still smoking spot of burnt fur on your leg, swearing loudly.

The burn still hurt when you stopped screaming, but you got used to it much enough to feel bad for treating your newborn puppy with a kick the moment it hugged you for the first time. You sighed heartbroken, listening to sad squeaking coming from the direction of the slowly spreading fire in the grass, where the little creature landed. After wearing the cooking gloves you took with you and went there.

The little whelp glanced at you scared, but when you got it in your gloved hands and petted on its big head, it squeaked happily and smiled wide, like if it had already forgotten what it was even sad about. It had probably the softest fur you had ever felt and it reacted enthusiastically to your scratches and petting. You found out that after a moment outside of the blazing campfire its body was still very hot, but the only part that still really burned with flames was its tail. Like a Charmander.

In the end, you decided you could live with the fact it wasn’t a canine-like beast. Just the fact of having a fire monster at all was great enough for you. And who knew what it would grow up to be in the future! The notes stated that the beast could change a lot depending on its diet through the first year of its life.

What do you plan to feed your puppy with, for the coming year, then?

Also, your little whelp needs a name! It was hard checking its gender with your thickly gloved hands, but after a moment of rubbing around you could swear you felt some small balls there. Assuming the puppy is a boy, what name will you give it?

---

[the owner named the puppy "Blaze" and chose to feed him with burning charcoal and charred meat]

---

The little fiery cub squeaked happily when you called him “Blaze” for the first time. It seemed like he liked the name as much as you did. You kept petting him with a smile, feeling proud of achieving what you wanted after so many days of hard work. You wanted a fire monster and managed to hatch one! That was definitely something to be proud of.

You started wondering if keeping a creature spreading fire all around him wouldn’t prove to be too problematic at your house… but you weren’t in the position to back up then, since the puppy had already been born. You just had to go on and see how the life will set for you two from the day onward.

You spent some time petting Blaze curled into a ball and sleeping. His little body cooled down a bit over time, but you still had to keep the gloves on your hands not to burn yourself. You also had to be especially careful of the flame at the end of his tail, but Blaze was sleeping so calmly you eventually felt comfortable enough to let your eyes close and fall asleep, together with your newborn pet. It had been a very peaceful time for both of you… until the morning came and Blaze set your shirt in flames with his tail after waking up.

You came back home around the noon, with Blaze sitting on the bottom of a metal bucket, to protect your car seats from catching fire. You went to your bathroom and put your puppy out of the bucket, since you were sure nothing was flammable in there. It was a completely new environment for him, and even though he didn’t seem to mind being locked up, you knew you needed to find a better place to keep him in.

You had to finally decide on his diet too. You knew you wanted him to be as fire-centered as possible, so you needed to find something hot for him to eat. The previous owner’s notes stated clearly that the beast can devour anything from junk food to steel nails, so why not just feed him burning wood, like you made him hatch in? Or even better, hot charcoal!

You left Blaze in the bathroom and went out for quick shopping. You bought a wide grill, a bag of charcoal, a chunk of seasoned grilling bacon and a big roll of steel mesh. Back home, you fenced a small area with your net, making a small improvised gate, put the grill inside and went to grab your pup. After scolding him for eating up your last roll of toilet paper, you took him outside to the fenced area and put him in the grill, on top of a small pile of charcoal. To your satisfaction, the pile caught up on Blaze’s fire quickly and the little rodent squeaked excited at the heat around him. You watched with a smile how your little puppy took the red glowing pieces in his small paws and munched them like nuts. It didn’t seem that hard to take care of him after all, you thought.

You were pretty hungry yourself, though, so when Blaze just kept sitting and eating for over half an hour, you finally took him out from the grill with barbecue tongs to finally grill your own bacon. The meat was sizzling over the hot charcoal giving an appetizing aroma, while your little monster jumped around the lawn excited, burning up small black spots wherever he went. It was fun watching him being so full of energy. You wondered if he would keep being so crazy even when he would turn into a bull-sized beast too.

In your great happiness and excitement, you started to text and call your friends to let them know about your amazing pet. You had quite a number of friends to call and tended to get too immersed into chats when talking about something really fascinating, so you stopped only after a stench of burnt meat started to sting your nose too much. When you finally remembered about your grill, the bacon was not much different from the charcoal you cooked it on. You took it out of the grill and looked at it sadly. However, you noticed Blaze was looking at it too, but more hungrily than anything. You offered the burnt piece of bacon to him, then and he started munching on it as happily as it was the most delicious thing in the world.

You thought it was pretty fitting, hot charcoal and burnt meat. You decided to make it his usual diet from that day.

And days flew quickly, with the energetic creature keeping you company. Blaze spent his days outside in the fence while being locked in the bathroom at nights. The puppy grew fast and after a month you decided he may start growing too big for your bathroom and the small fenced area you built for him. Luckily, he was an incredibly smart creature and he seemed to understand that he should stay close to the house when you told him to, so you decided that maybe the fence won’t be necessary after all. You still needed to make a place for him to sleep at nights, though. Basing on the seller’s notes, it was the best to assume that the puppy could grow to maybe even three meters tall, so you had to construct him a pet house that big. You bought a lot of bricks, cement and tiles, spent a couple of days working hard but finally managed to build your little puppy his new house with your own two hands. It was a pretty simple construct, but seemed solid and big enough for his needs. Seeing how happy he was from his new house seemed like a reward great enough for you.

Months after months went by and Blaze kept growing and developing on your fiery diet. A pitch black mane of fluff spurted out, his horns grew considerably and more of his tail got covered in flames. Eventually, a simple, pretty flame appeared between his horns too, floating mid-air mysteriously.

It started to be a bit problematic to feed your puppy when he grew really big, because of the sheer amount of food he required. Surprisingly, the problem got solved on itself eventually, when one morning you saw Blaze munching on a whole burnt goat you knew you didn’t give him the day before. You feared that maybe he went and stole it from somewhere else, but there were no farms with goats nearby. Besides, Blaze was a very calm and a bit timid puppy that didn’t seem like he would want to wander away from home at nights. There was no obvious explanation you could think of, so you just decided to keep a close eye on him from that time to see what the deal with that was. Even at nights, so you bought and installed a camera pointed at his brick house.

The answer came out merely three mornings later, when you saw your pet eating another burnt goat. You checked out the camera recordings and watched shocked at the captured video from the last night. Basically, a small group of black-hooded, creepy cultists visited Blaze and presented him the charred animal in a ceremonial way, with bows and murmured chants, like an offering to their Demon Lord.

When you saw that, you weren’t sure what to think of that. It was definitely disturbing... but they didn’t do anything dangerous and they even fed Blaze for you. As long as there weren’t any dangerous ceremonies involved, you decided to let them do as they pleased. Still, you changed the locks in your doors and windows, set a security alarm system and made it your daily routine to check out the camera records each morning. The gatherings under your house started to get very regular and more crowded, but not more dangerous at all. The cultists were so nice they even started to leave a box of cookies under your door from time to time too. There was really no reason to forbid them doing what they did.

Through your love and effort as well as the help of your new friends, Blaze grew up to be a huge and happy beast in a year. He was a little bit mean looking, but he had an incredibly kind heart and was a very friendly creature. The other people usually found him intimidating at first, but always realized fast how nice pup he was for real.

The same was your own opinion on him. You saw him growing and changing, but he never really changed much from the time he was just a freshly hatched whelp. For you, he didn’t really change at all. You felt that the one that changed the most through the year was you, really. At first, he was important to you only because of his unusual appearance and traits. You wanted him, because you wanted your own mysterious fire beast.

Right now, after so long time growing close to him, you don’t want him for his traits anymore, though. You want him merely because he is yours, and that is the reason enough to love him.