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Blurb: After mixing up his potions, Sini accidentally shrinks himself and gets squished by a paw. This story answers the important questions. Friend or foot-foe? Harmless game of tag or monster death race? How big can two dragons' paws grow?
“Rawrgh. Darn you, kleptomaniac ’coon!”
Magnolia leaves and pine needles scatter around the wide beating wings of Sini. The black-and-purple dragon swoops down into a clearing in a secluded area of the national park, where scraps of mushrooms, herbs, unguents, spices and oils remain on the mat of a person-sized table around two glass bottles of bubbly orange fluids. He had been about to drink his freshly made growth potion—had visited the park for the sole purpose of stomping about as a kaiju dragon, where it would cause no harm to anyone or anything (except the environment). That was until that sticky-pawed raccoon came and snagged his glorthcap shrooms. Well, at least the ’coon didn’t take either his growth potion or his shrinking potion. The resulting tantrum would have turned several acres of the forest into a hazardous wasteland of puffed poison air.
Sini peers into each potion with big round glasses. Alas, they look the same, and he labeled neither of them before he tangentially chased the thief. “Erm, I think this one was the growth. Yeah, THIS one—because it had been the second potion I made, and I would never set it on my right-paw side …”
Nodding severely to himself (as if the harder he nods, the more true it will be), he grabs the potion and uncorks it.
Why did he do a shrinking potion, anyway? Because the regents required for each potion are fairly the same. Might as well while you have them all laid out, right?
He glugs the potion. Both potions should taste like mimosas (orange juice and champagne), so nothing out of the ordinary so far. He purrs at the warm alcohol tingles that flow down his throat and fester in his belly.
He spits up a spray of orange, right before he can drink the last gulp-worth left in the bottle. Oh dear, wrong potion! A feeling of chest compression, of cold pricklies skittering over his scales! The thirteen-foot-tall dragon wails, and then his voice pitches higher. The bottle shatters on the ground. He shrinks to the size of a flapping elephant—then, to the size of a flying cougar—then, to the size of a large falcon.
“I really shouldn’t have made that damn cocktail after all,” he laments. He looks up at one of the stone benches of the table, tsks. “If I drink the growth potion right now, I’ll only grow back to about my normal size—at least, until the shrinking wears off. But then I’d only be kaiju-sized for a few seconds, because of the closeness of when I guzzled each drink … Guess I’d rather just wait till I’m me-size again …”
The wait game’s gonna take several hours, he thinks sadly. “Rawrg! Well, I could take a flight to tide me over … but had best not. I’ll lose direction and never find my set-up again. Ever!” With a single wingbeat, he bounds onto the bench; likewise, he lands atop the table. “Time for a snoozer, I s’pose.”
He curls around a speckled mushroom that’s about half his size and hairy around the rim of the cap. It doubles as a nice, plush cushion for him to cling onto until the snooze comes on. Come on it DOES, after he has sunbaked for a while. And, well, it’s a hearty sleep, a sound one too, for there aren’t any snores. Unfortunately, how silently he sleeps doesn’t affect how splendidly he smells to the larger beasties of the food chain, so, by and by, there’s this red wyvern hatchling of a cannibalistic breed, and it wings over the perimeter of the clearing, its slits-for-nostrils pulsating with content, smelling the scent of blackberries and plums and exotic meat and metallic musk that Sini and his breath exude. The hatchling looses the “GRAHCK” of a moody dwarfish carnivore—drops toward the table, talons-first.
Sini’s ears jump up—and so does he—when he hears the THUMP of the table. He wheels around in a flash, sees the great hatchling several times his size squall and lunge and peck at him with its draconic snout—Sini dodges that. “Nuu!” he cries, for the hatchling’s landing caused the growth potion to topple onto its side—it rolls towards the edge of the table—
He seizes the neck of the bottle in his forepaws as he cannonballs off the table, avoiding the SNAP of the hatchling’s jaws by just the length of a miniature dragon scale. Unfortunately, the bottle weighs too much for him. It anchors him toward the ground, despite the flurry of his wings, but at least he has saved the bottle from a dooming fall. Swooping inches over the ground, he drops it safely on a bed of grass, then scrambles under the table to the landing of the hatchling tailing him. He dashes under the table and under a bench, onto the bench, off of the bench to back under the table. In this tricky way, he gets the wyvern’s snake-like neck stuck between bench and tabletop. The table rattles as it screeches at him, but he’s soaring high overhead, free, free!
“That’ll teach ya to harass me!”
Meanwhile, somewhere close by in Mother Nature, a space dragon named Ridley roams the forest where its trees are widely-spaced. He searches for the right tree. It should be strong, but not rough around the bark-y edges. Its roots should be ergonomic for a dragon’s butt, because if not, how would he have a nice nap? And it IS the nice nap he is really searching for; the tree is just the means for it.
Naps, immobility: Those are the greatest gifts one can receive, he thinks. Also, foot massages.
Sini has just landed close by, for he has been airborne for several minutes, and it is rather difficult for a small derg to fly for long distances without feeling exhaustion. He prances steadily, looking behind his back constantly, in case the hatchling shows up again. He’s looking backward so much that he doesn’t notice the incoming earthquakes of footsteps until a shadow falls over him. Freezing in place, he looks up and sees IT: a giant foot of slightly sunwashed obsidian-purple: three-toed in the front with silver claws, an additional silver-clawed toe mounted on the back of the heel and protruding the other way. Why, the foot’s even longer than Sini!
The foot smells pleasant, of loam and fresh ingestible minerals. Though, Sini would rather not become part of a footprint just because the foot smells nice. So he makes to bound out of the way. THOOMMH, the foot flops down on him before he can escape, its claws scraping lazily through the moist loam. The sole rises. Stuck to the bottom of it in a deep trench of scaly sole flesh, Sini groans dizzily. Some people make snow angels. In that case, Sini has made a scale angel. Don’t you fear for his well-being! You should fear for him no more than you would fear for someone who’s been struck in a pillow fight!
“Wh-where am—?” he starts to ask, watching mud crumble around him and the ground fall away from him at a diagonal angle. “Mmmph!” Another footstep of the space dragon squishes him deeper into the pillowy bedding of the toasty scales. He watches a three-toed footprint fall behind whatever vehicle he is riding, tries to squirm free. But the squirming only nestles him closer to those muscles he can feel moving beneath the metallic surface.
Footprint, muscles, aah. He understands now that he has been stepped on, even if the realization makes him blush with a bit of annoyance. “You dare step on a dragon?!” he wants to sass the giant foot-owner—but he doesn’t. He knows exactly what he would do if he were still dragon-sized and a little critter sassed him.
It’s kind of massaging, this commute. Even if the occasional “OOF” he has to utter from each casual stomp of his transit giant is kind of bothersome, he appreciates the cuddliness of this foot-paw, the kinetic energy coursing through it and the leisurely lack of choice he has in this position. There is some therapy you can obtain from being forced to hang in one place and simply watch the scenery go by as someone carries you elsewhere, Sini thinks. He watches small plants and shrooms and little holes (of critters and insects) zoom into the distance below.
Ridley reckons he has stepped in something interesting, for every time he lands on his right foot, he can feel the “squish” and hear a little chitter reverberate against his toes. He even feels some sort of pair of leathery appendages whipping against the flanks of his foot. What could that be? Ah well. No sense in expending energy thinking about it. He will check out the bottom of his foot after a much-desired nap.
Ahead of him stands an ancient, fat yew tree. Even though he is twenty-nine feet tall, the tree is so big that some culture or other of little people have probably worshiped it at one time or another. Its size will accommodate his back, yippee! The mossy roots buttress the yew in such a way that they will not interfere with the comfort of his rump.
“Welp! Time for bed. Goodnight!” he tells his feet, then turns to face the trunk of the tree. He flops onto his butt, and lounges against the sturdy trunk. Quite instantly, a wave of serenity—of mental encouragement for inactivity—descends upon him. He shifts into the most natural pose, his posture melting into the shape of the tree as if it were grown for the sake of him being slothful against it. The hypnotic swirls of birds in the open canopy beguile his eyelids to lower. The chitter and chatter of chirps incites a yawn of his long, beakish, toothed dragon maw. He slumps into pure immobility.
A snore fest begins. It is a delicious snore fest. Its choir reaches deep into the roots of the tree, deep into the plates of the earth, which were last exposed to the air in times before the ancestors of the ancestors of either dragon still walked the planet.
Each snore motors against Sini’s back. He cannot stop himself from purring to each brusque quake. It is the most perfect vibrational full-body massage. So perfect, the technique surely must have been perfected with the help of lots of scientific research, Sini thinks.
In reality, such a snore is perfected by mastering the art of laziness, which has more to do with flopping down and going slack (whenever doing so feels like destiny) than it has to do with science.
In any case, the snore fest does a rare thing. It relaxes Sini to the extent that he feels lazy, too. “Nuwr!” He frisks himself awake. “Look at you, Sini. You may not be in any danger from the guy who stepped on you, but you’re wide open to wolves and hatchlings and things. You know what your body is saying to all the wildlife right now? ‘Free snack,’ that’s what!”
And so Sini enters a state of stress and obligation to oneself. He tries to unlodge his flight muscles, his back and parts of his limbs from the clingy padding of the foot, but he and the pedestrian seem to have fused together. One could argue that the fusion of two folk is a beautiful and harmonious thing, but Sini yaps:
“Nuhr! No harmony! Musn’t—be—grr!”
Ridley dreams of having his paw tickled by a bat, and sleep-talks: “Hehe, heh …”
At first, Sini is glad because he thinks the big guy has woken up, but immediately, a snore (“SNHNOOOOCK”) follows the subdued laughter, and Sini knows that he has riled up his hopes too much. He yells louder, trying to shatter the big guy’s dreams, but he can’t stir the space dragon too much, since he has the vocal pitch and volume of a pigeon.
Sini wails as loud as he can, and flails again and again, until he has expended all his energy. He fitfully crosses his forelegs and huffs. He brainstorms a few plots to free himself of this footpaw, i.e., What if there were a twig sticking out of a bush, and the tip were close enough for me to cling a hold and tug myself off of the foot? and What if there were a way for me to make the shrinking potion wear off faster? and What if a helpful animal comes along?
He labors his noggin for some time. Then, over the detritus and the tree-roots and the fungal caps comes scampering a squirrel. The squirrel frolics left and right with a little dash—of which many track-runners would be jealous, if the squirrel were their size. The squirrel reaches Sini, rears on its fuzzy legs and wiggles its nose at him. It is deciding whether or not I yield nuts, Sini interpets. If it thinks I yield nuts, maybe it will lend me a paw.
“You want an acorn?” he asks the squirrel, talking his purple poison breath over its face, the squirrel cocking its head. “I’ll give you one if you get me outta here.”
The squirrel skitters closer. After hesitating and whipping its whiskers, it scratches at his belly and flanks. That tickles.
“Yngh—gnah! No, wait—bad squirrel!”
Sini wishes no harm to the squirrel, but neither does he disbelieve in self defense. One dragon hind foot launches out and martial art kicks the squirrel in the stomach. Slobber flies out of the squirrel’s mouth. It rolls over its bushy tail and lands with a poof of leaves. It starts with a violent hop onto its feet, then makes to skedaddle; but Sini wraps his tail around his belly and forces up a toxic belch that sounds rather tinny, with his current size to blame; and the fumes unfurl over the squirrel anyway, stopping it as if it were a dog which has reached the end of its leash.
Huffing out the residual dragon breath, Sini stares in the squirrel’s direction with an unamused face. Mentally, he tells his toxins what to tell the squirrel. Since his belches are much more potent than his breath, the squirrel’s servitude should be a tad more controlled and less bestially stupid this time around. The intoxicated squirrel moseys to him on all fours, then rears up again and attempts to grab at one of his paws. Its paw-eye coordination is a bit ruined, due to how drunk he’s got it, so he has to maneuver his own paw helpingly for the squirrel to finally grab a hold.
In Ridley’s dream, Ridley has befriended the bat. He and the bat have had a rather exploratory romp around a bat-cave. But now, the bat has decided to move on with its life, to which Ridley sleep-talks: “Wait! Wherever you’re going, we can still play there!” and in his sleep he kicks his feet, which results in the squirrel getting martial arts kicked a second time, this time by the space-dragon’s paw cushion as a whole instead of by that paw cushion’s foot specifically.
Welp, the squirrel has been K.O.-ed, thanks to that. Sini recovers from the daze of involuntary attack, then gazes down at the body with a grim look. “Great, how am I supposed to get free now?” He’s resigned himself to being stuck as a footpaw ornament until his shrinking potion wears off. That is, until the space dragon giggles in his sleep and bicycles his legs in a couple of sudden full-body spasms.
“Ehh? What’s goin’ on?”
Sini gulps, feeling the quakes and judders of a mountain avalanching. If the giant’s foot were a theme park ride, it would likely be shut down very quickly on the grounds of being unsafe for necks and spines. Luckily, Sini is a dragon and has survived a literal avalanche of rocks onto his body in the past. You could say: The same way one must be tall enough to ride a ride, Sini has scales protective enough to ride THIS ride. Still, he’s not entirely eased by the quality of his natural defenses because a question lingers on his dome: What’s caused the giant’s giggle fit?
He looks sidelong at the pillows and folds of sole scales which overlook the sole pit in which he is entrapped. Nothing unordinary on either side. He looks up, and he sees follicles of squirrel fur clinging between Ridley’s toes. When each toe rubs together, they seem to produce a “Heehee!” from the giant, the way rubbing a stick against a violin string produces a “Scree-ee!” if the stick is in the wrong paws.
During the giggle fit, Ridley’s legs flail into all manners of positions, and so they eventually bend at the knees before driving down at the ground. “Wai—WAI—WAI—WAI!” Sini pleads, before he involuntarily utters a draconic squeaky toy noise, his body squishily sandwiched between damp earth and metallic warmth.
Hmm, smells like rain and cardamom down here, Sini thinks, choosing to take the optimist’s route in his pancaked state. His cozy rumble sends stimulatory signals all the way up Ridley’s ankle then thigh. And after a long adventure, the signals arrive in Ridley’s pterodactyl-like skull, and an alarm clock couldn’t buzz him awake better.
“Hum?” He blinks awake, releases a yawn groggily. “There’s a squishy thing on my foot. Oh, right, I stepped on something squishy earlier …” He wiggles his toes, and the squirrel hair teeters out from between them, and he huffs in relief. A pair of purple-membraned wings flutters out from the sides of his foot, and he raises a scaly brow. Although curious about what could be hiding underfoot, he reckons, turning his foot to the side would exhaust all the energy he acquired from that nap. That would be quite wasteful, wouldn’t it?
“Back to napping, then!” he says, then hears a shrill voice shouting at him from below:
“No, please—sleeping over nine hours a day is counterintuitive to productivity!”
In any less crucial moment, maybe it would be appropriate for us to shame Sini for assuming that Ridley oversleeps, but right now Sini really needs some shock factor in his lyricism to get the space dragon’s attention, lest he be a captive of the foot for several hours more.
Ridley squints at his foot. “So you’re a talkative foot cushion, huh? Who are you, I wonder!” He swings his harpoon tail beneath his sole, then gently brushes his sole off with the side of the tail-end. A small black-and-purple dragon topples onto the ground before him. Sini sighs in relief, fluttering his wings, sprawling like a cat during a yawn.
“Finally! I started feeling like the chewing gum that gets put under desks,” Sini grumbles. “You should really watch where you’re going! If I weren’t so durable, you would have a body count, and I bet you wouldn’t snooze as soundly with that on your conscious, would you?”
Ridley tilts his head. “Counting bodies wouldn’t be so hard, would it? It’s just the two of us here?”
A wise guy, are you? Sini thinks, growling. Just because you’re a giant, you think you can poke fun at me? Sini leapfrogs over the toes of Ridley’s foot, then lands sassily on the space dragon’s ankle. Ridley watches with intrigue as the little dragon strides across the broadening bridge of scales. Sini hops onto the exposed ribs of Ridley’s chest and prepares to huff a lethal toxin at the space dragon’s snout. But Ridley is oblivious to the dragon’s anger and sees merely a cute creature staring up at him.
“Good little beastie …” he mumbles sleepily, then strokes down Sini’s neck. Instantly, the vengeful, peremptory look on Sini’s face is impurified when his angry-looking jaws open up for a “Purrrrrrrrrr …” His furious eyes shudder, struggling to stay open. After a couple more strokes down the neck and then the tail, Sini’s eyes close, and he turns into a miniature motor, his body sprawling and wings moving in rowing motions to the petting.
Can’t … resist … his subduction power … Sini thinks, purring more deeply and loudly. All of the moodiness in his face melts away, and whenever that paw descends upon him, he erects his neck and nuzzles between the gaps of the claws, as well as over Ridley’s palm. Such … strong sorcery! Very well, sorcerer … you win this time.
Only after Ridley gives a halfway-decent stroke of the little dragon’s neck instead of a very pleasant one does Sini remember his main objective. Right, he thinks, I’ve been small for a few hours. By the time I return to my growth potion, I should be transforming back to my normal size, so I’ll be able to enjoy the growth properly! He gives Ridley’s talon a brisk nip, then wriggles free of that paw and looses his wings to full span. Ridley gives a soft “oof” as the tiny dragon bounces off of his chest and into flight.
“Wait,” Ridley says, sadly, “you’re not going away, like the bat, are you? Ah, you’re just playing with me, that’s what you’re doing! Well, what is this game then, tag? I must be it, then!”
As soon as Sini thought he had liberated himself from the space dragon, he hears thunderous feet approaching him. “Drat—the giant doesn’t want to let me go! Somehow, I’ll have to get him off my tail!” He flies higher. His tail goes shooting into the canopy, and a burst of leaves descends from the branches of an elderly elm tree. He leaps from one branch to another and another, a steep one. He clings to it then folds his wings, so that Ridley can’t see him from this angle.
“Ahh, so this isn’t regular tag—this is hide and seek tag, isn’t it?” Ridley steps below the elm and squints into its tangle of leaves and branches, which spans upward from the main trunk in the shape of an upside-down pyramid. He notices a little black tail swinging and smirks. His head rises over where the main branches begin; he’s probably tall enough to tag the tiny derg after just a wingbeat or two.
A hurricane whips leaves off the branches all around Sini, and then he yelps as a giant marble-purple hand explodes into the overstory, reaching around for him. “No, no, this certainly isn’t tag!” He bursts out from the shade of the tree, goes scampering down the airborne Ridley’s arm, then leapfrogs off Ridley’s head, flying off to somewhere safe from giant paws.
Ridley reflects on the words, “this certainly isn’t tag,” and interprets them to mean, “you certainly didn’t tag me just because I’m gonna run up your arm.” “Well, fair enough,” he says, “I’m gonna getcha anyway!”
And so Sini ends up with the huge guy stomping after him, and thinks, Oh no—it’s not a game anymore—he’s gonna get me?! What do I look like to him, food?! “You’ll never take me alive!” wails the purple derg. He swings his wings up into vertical sails and falls, then resumes flight just in time to swoop into a log, zooming into it without landing until he’s a few yards into the thirty-foot-long tree carapace. There, he hides and swings himself around either way, knowing that the giant’s face can only pop up from either orifice of the log.
“Heheh, we’ll see about that, feisty dragon!”
Sini feels grenades going off outside his log, coming closer, but he knows who the true culprit is. Get ready to gas him with your breath, he tells himself. Silence ensues. Then, that great breakish snout lowers itself to the hole, and Sini sees an eye preparing to peek in, but an echoing belch pipes through the log, mortaring purple smog out of the log, which causes Ridley to stand straight and recoil from the log.
“Well, excuse you,” he complains, “what did you eat for lunch?”
Ridley dips back down to lunge his paw into the length of the log, masking his nose from the foul-smelling fumes with the other paw. Instead of catching Sini, he ends up lodging his arm inside of the log while Sini skitters out of the other side. And the log is thoroughly attached, so when Ridley tries to jerk his arm free, he ends up swinging the log about like a polearm and accidentally cracking coniferous trees across the boles, giving them fractured spines and minor cases of scoliosis. Mentally, he apologizes to the wounded trees. Out loud, he can only muster the lackadaisical complaint, “Arg, pesky wood!”
Unfortunately for Sini, Ridley’s trying to multitask (chase after Sini and disarm himself at the same time), so Ridley’s log polearm ends up thrashing through the air after the little dragon. Oh lords, I’ve awakened his wrath by huffing my poisons at him, Sini thinks, fluttering away from the log weapon as fast as he can. I’ll admit, perishing by being eaten seems a lot hotter than becoming mashed dragon on the side of a tree corpse. But what is a little dragon to do, turn around and say, Sorry, please eat me instead? No, Sini is not such a slut that he would sell his faith of survival for cheap like that. If I could just get back to my growth potion, I could go kaiju on him—and then we’d see who’s runnin’ from who!
Alas, Sini hasn’t any sense of direction. Nor did he document the landmarks around him when he left his work area earlier, so how does he expect to find his bench? Since I don’t know what to search for, let me decide on what NOT to search for, he thinks. Areas where there are still glorthcap mushrooms are obviously areas I haven’t visited yet, and since the park is riddled with them, that should help me GPS track the bench. So he swoops onto a bough, and he regards the leafy patch of muck and grass and shrooms from his perch; and he takes off, and repeats this elsewhere, hoping that he’s getting “warmer” to his destination rather than “colder.”
That little derg goes winging off, more distant with every swing of Ridley’s irreconcilable polearm. “Wait!” he calls out. “Maybe we should establish some boundaries for our game of hide and seek tag? I am okay with turning around and counting to ten if we start over! I’d just rather not have to search the whole forest for you and get lost; and get very tired …” Since his log arm attachment refuses to come off, Ridley chomps down on it and whittles the wood away in the way of a woodpecker. With a THUMP, the gnawed-off log returns to its natural habitat. Ridley bounds after his friend, leaving in his wake a trail of dragon pawprints, each of them over a yard in length.
“Aah, there’s my happy little bench!” Sini cheers.
Ahead lies the clearing with the bench, and that’s not all. That red wyvern hatchling from earlier never freed its neck from between the tabletop and the bench: It is sleeping now in a rather unergonomic position. Sini feels rather ruthless for having trapped it there, earlier. “Why, I was stuck on a foot-paw,” he says to himself, “but at least I had hope. At least I had the snores of another being giving me faith that someone would notice me, by and by! This hatchling, though, has no senpai to notice it. All it has is cold wood to keep it company.”
Would it be hypocritical for him to believe this beastie deserves to be stuck in a place for hours, but not him? Perhaps not, Sini decides, perhaps the hatchling is known in these parts as a criminal and needed some time at the penitentiary. But I’d say he’s served a cruel enough sentence, and I do not think serving it any longer will cause him to come out from behind bars regarding himself as any less of a no-good felon.
And then, suddenly, Sini’s shrinking potion wears off, so as his wings break into the clearing, he grows back into a thirteen-foot-tall dragon. The timing of this has no causal relationship whatsoever with him becoming of the opinion that the hatchling deserves redemption. Nevertheless, for the rest of his life he will look back on this moment, either consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously, and regard his reversion to his normal form as a direct reward from Karma for forgiving a person.
Let’s have a real thinker about this. If any of us ever learns that a false perception of reality led us to become a better person, shall we then say, Fuck being a good person? Well, you already know my opinion on that. I am of the belief that delusion is sometimes for the betterment of a person, otherwise I wouldn’t be a storywriter. Regardless, I’ll be happy if you sit down to think about this, sometime, with your cup of coffee or tea or water, and come to a conclusion that seems to you most right.
Sini lands and fetches his growth potion. He uncaps it to drink it, but his idling has allowed Ridley to catch up with him. The space dragon pounces on him from behind and yells, “Tag, you’re it!”
And Sini wails, for he thinks he’s about to be stepped on or eaten or worse. “I shouldn’t have huffed at you so impolitely, I admit it. Please, don’t eat me or put me back under your paw!” Either of these things is something that Ridley could do somewhat successfully at his current size: He’s still twice as tall as Sini.
“Huh?” Frowning, Ridley retreats from Sini. “We’re just playing tag. It’s okay, little derg, there’s no need to treat this so seriously.”
“Y-you mean it?”
Ridley blinks confusedly. “Sure.”
Upon hearing this, the sensation of being hunted and doomed falls away from Sini, removing that psychological anchor from him, so he bounces onto his feet, looking gayer than ever, and he tackles Ridley’s chest happily, although this doesn’t pin Ridley to the ground: It merely nudges him back a couple of steps. Sini wraps his wings around the metallic torso of the dragon and steams his poison from his mouth in a celebratory way.
“Now, that’s a huge relief. I think I shall be able to sleep at night, now.”
He drops from Ridley’s abdomen onto three legs. In his airborne paw he holds still the growth potion, but he gazes into it with a new sense of purpose. After some time, he asks the space dragon what his name is; and then they exchange names. “Have you ever grown bigger or smaller before, Ridley?”
“Well, sure,” Ridley says, “that’s one of my programmed abilities. I just press a button, and my size changes. It’s that simple.”
“Bet’cha can’t grow as big as me,” Sini challenges with a smirk. He uncorks the potion and begins to glug.
“Grow as big as you?” Ridley chuckles. “I’m already bigger than you, and just a few minutes ago my paw was bigger than you. What—”
Before he can finish speaking, something happens to Sini. He grows from thirteen feet tall to eighteen feet tall, then to twenty-three feet tall, then to twenty-eight feet tall. Within mere moments, Sini has grown to be only about a claw’s length shorter than Ridley. He stops growing because he’s only drunk a third of the potion, but the more of it he drinks, the more dramatic his subsequent growth spurts will become.
“Aah, so is that how you grew bigger just a few minutes ago?”
“Oh, nah—thirteen feet tall is my regular size.” Sini’s voice has become deeper, bassier. He’s seeing the world through lenses similar to Ridley’s now. The table looks childish compared with him, and he could probably crush it by flopping down on it. As for the crimson wyvern whose neck is stuck between the bench and the tabletop, Sini could probably swallow it whole with a lazy gulp of his maw, because the creature’s shorter than one of his forelegs.
Having gotten distracted by the pleasureful senses of being a giant dragon, Sini hiccups in embarrassment when he sees Ridley staring at him.
“Ahh, but anyway … Now that I know you’re not going to crush me or devour me, I suppose there’s no screaming need for me to grow larger. Would ya like a sip of this, Ridley?” He holds the growth potion out. “It tastes like a citrusy alcohol. Made it myself!”
“Aww, hehe, thanks, Sini, but you ought to save that for yourself. I have my own method of growing, so I wouldn’t want to waste that on myself, you see.” To demonstrate, Ridley reaches at the nape of his neck and rolls his fingers over a few buttons. Suddenly, the clearing quakes, and Sini gulps and blushes at his new friend, who begins to throb in growth, suddenly becoming a head’s height taller than Sini and several dozen pounds heavier.
It’s hypnotic to the poison dragon (in a way similar to how his poisons are hypnotic to others): the expansion of the minuscule scales of the dragon’s fascinatingly long beak-like snout, the groans of muscle systems beneath … The segments of metallic plates of the long skull ripple outwards, each segment thumping in growth to a rhythm independent of the rhythm of other segments … The ribcage crackles, broadens, expands … The fierce, skeletal biceps writhe and elongate; the similar forearms stretch. Lustrous ridges that course down his thighs and flank the quadriceps expand, as do his claws, as does the segmented carapace that covers his tail.
With awe, Sini watches the transformation of the space dragon, who goes from staring eye-to-eye with Sini to rolling out his shoulders and puffing out his proportionately growing chest before the dragon’s face. Even the chest rises during the rumbles of Ridley’s swelling. The sporadic snarls and chuffs of deepening timbre that the space dragon looses while rising higher excites Sini. If Ridley were his enemy, this would be the sort of terrifying excitement which would trigger that sickly anxiousness of his inferiority complex. Someone with a severe complex might want to curl up in his presence, or perhaps they would feel a powerful anger which they would needst suppress, in order to preserve their life.
But Ridley isn’t the enemy. Trust has entered the equation, so even though Sini feels feelings akin to the aforementioned of a complex, they have been repurposed with a positive connotation. It’s like when you’re doing a trust fall: The fear of falling is still there, but once you’re finally caught, all of that fear evaporates, and a delicious feeling of relief and of belief in someone else immediately usurps those previous ugly feelings. In the same way, Sini feels as though once Ridley finally finishes growing, he will experience such a wholesome, pampering sensation.
Each of the dragon’s metallic obelisks for legs barge into the trees that outskirt the clearing. Gnarled roots creak and crack, and some of them are uprooted on smaller trees as the heels of Ridley throb with growth. Sini finds himself dwindling in relative size again, so that the level of his eyes falls to the dragon’s knees. “Not bad,” he says, “let’s see if I can keep up …”
“I’d like to see you try. Though, if you can’t keep up, I wouldn’t mind using you as a paw rest again.” Ridley winks.
Furrowing his scaly brows competitively, Sini upends his potion and glugs. That same rush a renowned fighting game video game player might get when they’re facing off against someone in the finals of a tourney, Sini feels thumping in his head and in his chest. Energy and alertness pool into him, and he can feel his bones budging outward. Muscles of his serpentine neck, backside, flight muscles, legs—they all squeeze into tight knots with trepidation, then spasm outward in a succulent, rhythmic growth which mows his paws across the clearing ground. He grows him from twenty-eight feet tall to thirty-eight, then forty-eight feet tall … That raises his head to the groin level of the Ridley, but already, Ridley has almost quadrupled his size.
With exponential growth, the space dragon rushes higher like a waterfall cascading in reverse gravity. From twenty-nine feet tall, he has grown to over a hundred feet tall. And his foot-paws have become so large, they could roll freight trucks underneath their soles and play with them. One of his paws rumbles down and crushes the table and its benches without Ridley being aware of the ordeal, while the red hatchling gets stuck to the bottom of his paw. A flabbergasted Sini calls up to him:
“How the heck did you grow so big, all of a sudden!”
Ridley shrugs and continues to grow unbridledly, indulging himself in the milkshake-sweet torrent of mass that surges out of his form. His spearhead tail cleaves off the heads of increasingly small trees that are spread past his radius, while he teeters and looms higher, the pleasant, metallic draconic scent of his body being multiplied with each expansion. For him, growing to the stature of a kaiju is no more significant an event than taking a shower. Though, if he had to choose between taking a shower tonight and getting huge as heck, he would certainly choose getting huge as heck. The same way rinsing your scales is a baptising feeling, outgrowing them and having to force your hide to grow big enough for you is a tasty feeling of rebirth. From his body an artificial earthquake rolls over the local land.
Sini empties his potion bottle until he’s rattling and infiltrating the tectonic plates with his own lesser earthquake. His body pumps its way from forty-eight feet tall to sixty-eight feet tall, and he roars, “Hrrrgh, yes! Getting bigger!”
Eighty-eight. One hundred and eight. He becomes just as huge as Ridley was less than a minute ago, but Ridley has already moved on into a more megalithic size and weight class. The space dragon grows to one hundred and fifty feet tall, and looks down at Sini with amusement at the way the dragon is geekin’ so much over a situation he himself considers to be normal and routine. “Indeed, Sini, that is what happens when you grow.” He chuckles. He adjusts a setting on the back of his neck so that his body idles, no longer growing. He waits for Sini to catch up and reach his size; and when the poison dragon does, they both equal one hundred and seventy-five feet tall, meaning they’re taller than ten storey buildings. As tall as low skyscrapers. As tall as the kaijus in the older monster movies.
Although Ridley could continue to grow endlessly, he stays at this height for now because Sini has peaked in size. What do the two of them do? They wade through the shallow sea of trees, budging into them and trampling them, testing the strength of their newfound sizes.
Sini finds an especial interest in finding smaller trees and plucking them up between his claws, and scaring smaller critters in a game of peekaboo. Ridley lazes amusedly next to the poison dragon, enjoying his virgin fascination with being huge. Perhaps they’ll stomp about the world together as giant kaijus. Later. Now, Ridley needs to take a big long nap to reenergize.
RidleyXDRidley -
RidleyXDSini -
xsiniBlurb: After mixing up his potions, Sini accidentally shrinks himself and gets squished by a paw. This story answers the important questions. Friend or foot-foe? Harmless game of tag or monster death race? How big can two dragons' paws grow?
Paw Cushion, Tag Partner and Kaiju Buddy“Rawrgh. Darn you, kleptomaniac ’coon!”
Magnolia leaves and pine needles scatter around the wide beating wings of Sini. The black-and-purple dragon swoops down into a clearing in a secluded area of the national park, where scraps of mushrooms, herbs, unguents, spices and oils remain on the mat of a person-sized table around two glass bottles of bubbly orange fluids. He had been about to drink his freshly made growth potion—had visited the park for the sole purpose of stomping about as a kaiju dragon, where it would cause no harm to anyone or anything (except the environment). That was until that sticky-pawed raccoon came and snagged his glorthcap shrooms. Well, at least the ’coon didn’t take either his growth potion or his shrinking potion. The resulting tantrum would have turned several acres of the forest into a hazardous wasteland of puffed poison air.
Sini peers into each potion with big round glasses. Alas, they look the same, and he labeled neither of them before he tangentially chased the thief. “Erm, I think this one was the growth. Yeah, THIS one—because it had been the second potion I made, and I would never set it on my right-paw side …”
Nodding severely to himself (as if the harder he nods, the more true it will be), he grabs the potion and uncorks it.
Why did he do a shrinking potion, anyway? Because the regents required for each potion are fairly the same. Might as well while you have them all laid out, right?
He glugs the potion. Both potions should taste like mimosas (orange juice and champagne), so nothing out of the ordinary so far. He purrs at the warm alcohol tingles that flow down his throat and fester in his belly.
He spits up a spray of orange, right before he can drink the last gulp-worth left in the bottle. Oh dear, wrong potion! A feeling of chest compression, of cold pricklies skittering over his scales! The thirteen-foot-tall dragon wails, and then his voice pitches higher. The bottle shatters on the ground. He shrinks to the size of a flapping elephant—then, to the size of a flying cougar—then, to the size of a large falcon.
“I really shouldn’t have made that damn cocktail after all,” he laments. He looks up at one of the stone benches of the table, tsks. “If I drink the growth potion right now, I’ll only grow back to about my normal size—at least, until the shrinking wears off. But then I’d only be kaiju-sized for a few seconds, because of the closeness of when I guzzled each drink … Guess I’d rather just wait till I’m me-size again …”
The wait game’s gonna take several hours, he thinks sadly. “Rawrg! Well, I could take a flight to tide me over … but had best not. I’ll lose direction and never find my set-up again. Ever!” With a single wingbeat, he bounds onto the bench; likewise, he lands atop the table. “Time for a snoozer, I s’pose.”
He curls around a speckled mushroom that’s about half his size and hairy around the rim of the cap. It doubles as a nice, plush cushion for him to cling onto until the snooze comes on. Come on it DOES, after he has sunbaked for a while. And, well, it’s a hearty sleep, a sound one too, for there aren’t any snores. Unfortunately, how silently he sleeps doesn’t affect how splendidly he smells to the larger beasties of the food chain, so, by and by, there’s this red wyvern hatchling of a cannibalistic breed, and it wings over the perimeter of the clearing, its slits-for-nostrils pulsating with content, smelling the scent of blackberries and plums and exotic meat and metallic musk that Sini and his breath exude. The hatchling looses the “GRAHCK” of a moody dwarfish carnivore—drops toward the table, talons-first.
Sini’s ears jump up—and so does he—when he hears the THUMP of the table. He wheels around in a flash, sees the great hatchling several times his size squall and lunge and peck at him with its draconic snout—Sini dodges that. “Nuu!” he cries, for the hatchling’s landing caused the growth potion to topple onto its side—it rolls towards the edge of the table—
He seizes the neck of the bottle in his forepaws as he cannonballs off the table, avoiding the SNAP of the hatchling’s jaws by just the length of a miniature dragon scale. Unfortunately, the bottle weighs too much for him. It anchors him toward the ground, despite the flurry of his wings, but at least he has saved the bottle from a dooming fall. Swooping inches over the ground, he drops it safely on a bed of grass, then scrambles under the table to the landing of the hatchling tailing him. He dashes under the table and under a bench, onto the bench, off of the bench to back under the table. In this tricky way, he gets the wyvern’s snake-like neck stuck between bench and tabletop. The table rattles as it screeches at him, but he’s soaring high overhead, free, free!
“That’ll teach ya to harass me!”
Meanwhile, somewhere close by in Mother Nature, a space dragon named Ridley roams the forest where its trees are widely-spaced. He searches for the right tree. It should be strong, but not rough around the bark-y edges. Its roots should be ergonomic for a dragon’s butt, because if not, how would he have a nice nap? And it IS the nice nap he is really searching for; the tree is just the means for it.
Naps, immobility: Those are the greatest gifts one can receive, he thinks. Also, foot massages.
Sini has just landed close by, for he has been airborne for several minutes, and it is rather difficult for a small derg to fly for long distances without feeling exhaustion. He prances steadily, looking behind his back constantly, in case the hatchling shows up again. He’s looking backward so much that he doesn’t notice the incoming earthquakes of footsteps until a shadow falls over him. Freezing in place, he looks up and sees IT: a giant foot of slightly sunwashed obsidian-purple: three-toed in the front with silver claws, an additional silver-clawed toe mounted on the back of the heel and protruding the other way. Why, the foot’s even longer than Sini!
The foot smells pleasant, of loam and fresh ingestible minerals. Though, Sini would rather not become part of a footprint just because the foot smells nice. So he makes to bound out of the way. THOOMMH, the foot flops down on him before he can escape, its claws scraping lazily through the moist loam. The sole rises. Stuck to the bottom of it in a deep trench of scaly sole flesh, Sini groans dizzily. Some people make snow angels. In that case, Sini has made a scale angel. Don’t you fear for his well-being! You should fear for him no more than you would fear for someone who’s been struck in a pillow fight!
“Wh-where am—?” he starts to ask, watching mud crumble around him and the ground fall away from him at a diagonal angle. “Mmmph!” Another footstep of the space dragon squishes him deeper into the pillowy bedding of the toasty scales. He watches a three-toed footprint fall behind whatever vehicle he is riding, tries to squirm free. But the squirming only nestles him closer to those muscles he can feel moving beneath the metallic surface.
Footprint, muscles, aah. He understands now that he has been stepped on, even if the realization makes him blush with a bit of annoyance. “You dare step on a dragon?!” he wants to sass the giant foot-owner—but he doesn’t. He knows exactly what he would do if he were still dragon-sized and a little critter sassed him.
It’s kind of massaging, this commute. Even if the occasional “OOF” he has to utter from each casual stomp of his transit giant is kind of bothersome, he appreciates the cuddliness of this foot-paw, the kinetic energy coursing through it and the leisurely lack of choice he has in this position. There is some therapy you can obtain from being forced to hang in one place and simply watch the scenery go by as someone carries you elsewhere, Sini thinks. He watches small plants and shrooms and little holes (of critters and insects) zoom into the distance below.
Ridley reckons he has stepped in something interesting, for every time he lands on his right foot, he can feel the “squish” and hear a little chitter reverberate against his toes. He even feels some sort of pair of leathery appendages whipping against the flanks of his foot. What could that be? Ah well. No sense in expending energy thinking about it. He will check out the bottom of his foot after a much-desired nap.
Ahead of him stands an ancient, fat yew tree. Even though he is twenty-nine feet tall, the tree is so big that some culture or other of little people have probably worshiped it at one time or another. Its size will accommodate his back, yippee! The mossy roots buttress the yew in such a way that they will not interfere with the comfort of his rump.
“Welp! Time for bed. Goodnight!” he tells his feet, then turns to face the trunk of the tree. He flops onto his butt, and lounges against the sturdy trunk. Quite instantly, a wave of serenity—of mental encouragement for inactivity—descends upon him. He shifts into the most natural pose, his posture melting into the shape of the tree as if it were grown for the sake of him being slothful against it. The hypnotic swirls of birds in the open canopy beguile his eyelids to lower. The chitter and chatter of chirps incites a yawn of his long, beakish, toothed dragon maw. He slumps into pure immobility.
A snore fest begins. It is a delicious snore fest. Its choir reaches deep into the roots of the tree, deep into the plates of the earth, which were last exposed to the air in times before the ancestors of the ancestors of either dragon still walked the planet.
Each snore motors against Sini’s back. He cannot stop himself from purring to each brusque quake. It is the most perfect vibrational full-body massage. So perfect, the technique surely must have been perfected with the help of lots of scientific research, Sini thinks.
In reality, such a snore is perfected by mastering the art of laziness, which has more to do with flopping down and going slack (whenever doing so feels like destiny) than it has to do with science.
In any case, the snore fest does a rare thing. It relaxes Sini to the extent that he feels lazy, too. “Nuwr!” He frisks himself awake. “Look at you, Sini. You may not be in any danger from the guy who stepped on you, but you’re wide open to wolves and hatchlings and things. You know what your body is saying to all the wildlife right now? ‘Free snack,’ that’s what!”
And so Sini enters a state of stress and obligation to oneself. He tries to unlodge his flight muscles, his back and parts of his limbs from the clingy padding of the foot, but he and the pedestrian seem to have fused together. One could argue that the fusion of two folk is a beautiful and harmonious thing, but Sini yaps:
“Nuhr! No harmony! Musn’t—be—grr!”
Ridley dreams of having his paw tickled by a bat, and sleep-talks: “Hehe, heh …”
At first, Sini is glad because he thinks the big guy has woken up, but immediately, a snore (“SNHNOOOOCK”) follows the subdued laughter, and Sini knows that he has riled up his hopes too much. He yells louder, trying to shatter the big guy’s dreams, but he can’t stir the space dragon too much, since he has the vocal pitch and volume of a pigeon.
Sini wails as loud as he can, and flails again and again, until he has expended all his energy. He fitfully crosses his forelegs and huffs. He brainstorms a few plots to free himself of this footpaw, i.e., What if there were a twig sticking out of a bush, and the tip were close enough for me to cling a hold and tug myself off of the foot? and What if there were a way for me to make the shrinking potion wear off faster? and What if a helpful animal comes along?
He labors his noggin for some time. Then, over the detritus and the tree-roots and the fungal caps comes scampering a squirrel. The squirrel frolics left and right with a little dash—of which many track-runners would be jealous, if the squirrel were their size. The squirrel reaches Sini, rears on its fuzzy legs and wiggles its nose at him. It is deciding whether or not I yield nuts, Sini interpets. If it thinks I yield nuts, maybe it will lend me a paw.
“You want an acorn?” he asks the squirrel, talking his purple poison breath over its face, the squirrel cocking its head. “I’ll give you one if you get me outta here.”
The squirrel skitters closer. After hesitating and whipping its whiskers, it scratches at his belly and flanks. That tickles.
“Yngh—gnah! No, wait—bad squirrel!”
Sini wishes no harm to the squirrel, but neither does he disbelieve in self defense. One dragon hind foot launches out and martial art kicks the squirrel in the stomach. Slobber flies out of the squirrel’s mouth. It rolls over its bushy tail and lands with a poof of leaves. It starts with a violent hop onto its feet, then makes to skedaddle; but Sini wraps his tail around his belly and forces up a toxic belch that sounds rather tinny, with his current size to blame; and the fumes unfurl over the squirrel anyway, stopping it as if it were a dog which has reached the end of its leash.
Huffing out the residual dragon breath, Sini stares in the squirrel’s direction with an unamused face. Mentally, he tells his toxins what to tell the squirrel. Since his belches are much more potent than his breath, the squirrel’s servitude should be a tad more controlled and less bestially stupid this time around. The intoxicated squirrel moseys to him on all fours, then rears up again and attempts to grab at one of his paws. Its paw-eye coordination is a bit ruined, due to how drunk he’s got it, so he has to maneuver his own paw helpingly for the squirrel to finally grab a hold.
In Ridley’s dream, Ridley has befriended the bat. He and the bat have had a rather exploratory romp around a bat-cave. But now, the bat has decided to move on with its life, to which Ridley sleep-talks: “Wait! Wherever you’re going, we can still play there!” and in his sleep he kicks his feet, which results in the squirrel getting martial arts kicked a second time, this time by the space-dragon’s paw cushion as a whole instead of by that paw cushion’s foot specifically.
Welp, the squirrel has been K.O.-ed, thanks to that. Sini recovers from the daze of involuntary attack, then gazes down at the body with a grim look. “Great, how am I supposed to get free now?” He’s resigned himself to being stuck as a footpaw ornament until his shrinking potion wears off. That is, until the space dragon giggles in his sleep and bicycles his legs in a couple of sudden full-body spasms.
“Ehh? What’s goin’ on?”
Sini gulps, feeling the quakes and judders of a mountain avalanching. If the giant’s foot were a theme park ride, it would likely be shut down very quickly on the grounds of being unsafe for necks and spines. Luckily, Sini is a dragon and has survived a literal avalanche of rocks onto his body in the past. You could say: The same way one must be tall enough to ride a ride, Sini has scales protective enough to ride THIS ride. Still, he’s not entirely eased by the quality of his natural defenses because a question lingers on his dome: What’s caused the giant’s giggle fit?
He looks sidelong at the pillows and folds of sole scales which overlook the sole pit in which he is entrapped. Nothing unordinary on either side. He looks up, and he sees follicles of squirrel fur clinging between Ridley’s toes. When each toe rubs together, they seem to produce a “Heehee!” from the giant, the way rubbing a stick against a violin string produces a “Scree-ee!” if the stick is in the wrong paws.
During the giggle fit, Ridley’s legs flail into all manners of positions, and so they eventually bend at the knees before driving down at the ground. “Wai—WAI—WAI—WAI!” Sini pleads, before he involuntarily utters a draconic squeaky toy noise, his body squishily sandwiched between damp earth and metallic warmth.
Hmm, smells like rain and cardamom down here, Sini thinks, choosing to take the optimist’s route in his pancaked state. His cozy rumble sends stimulatory signals all the way up Ridley’s ankle then thigh. And after a long adventure, the signals arrive in Ridley’s pterodactyl-like skull, and an alarm clock couldn’t buzz him awake better.
“Hum?” He blinks awake, releases a yawn groggily. “There’s a squishy thing on my foot. Oh, right, I stepped on something squishy earlier …” He wiggles his toes, and the squirrel hair teeters out from between them, and he huffs in relief. A pair of purple-membraned wings flutters out from the sides of his foot, and he raises a scaly brow. Although curious about what could be hiding underfoot, he reckons, turning his foot to the side would exhaust all the energy he acquired from that nap. That would be quite wasteful, wouldn’t it?
“Back to napping, then!” he says, then hears a shrill voice shouting at him from below:
“No, please—sleeping over nine hours a day is counterintuitive to productivity!”
In any less crucial moment, maybe it would be appropriate for us to shame Sini for assuming that Ridley oversleeps, but right now Sini really needs some shock factor in his lyricism to get the space dragon’s attention, lest he be a captive of the foot for several hours more.
Ridley squints at his foot. “So you’re a talkative foot cushion, huh? Who are you, I wonder!” He swings his harpoon tail beneath his sole, then gently brushes his sole off with the side of the tail-end. A small black-and-purple dragon topples onto the ground before him. Sini sighs in relief, fluttering his wings, sprawling like a cat during a yawn.
“Finally! I started feeling like the chewing gum that gets put under desks,” Sini grumbles. “You should really watch where you’re going! If I weren’t so durable, you would have a body count, and I bet you wouldn’t snooze as soundly with that on your conscious, would you?”
Ridley tilts his head. “Counting bodies wouldn’t be so hard, would it? It’s just the two of us here?”
A wise guy, are you? Sini thinks, growling. Just because you’re a giant, you think you can poke fun at me? Sini leapfrogs over the toes of Ridley’s foot, then lands sassily on the space dragon’s ankle. Ridley watches with intrigue as the little dragon strides across the broadening bridge of scales. Sini hops onto the exposed ribs of Ridley’s chest and prepares to huff a lethal toxin at the space dragon’s snout. But Ridley is oblivious to the dragon’s anger and sees merely a cute creature staring up at him.
“Good little beastie …” he mumbles sleepily, then strokes down Sini’s neck. Instantly, the vengeful, peremptory look on Sini’s face is impurified when his angry-looking jaws open up for a “Purrrrrrrrrr …” His furious eyes shudder, struggling to stay open. After a couple more strokes down the neck and then the tail, Sini’s eyes close, and he turns into a miniature motor, his body sprawling and wings moving in rowing motions to the petting.
Can’t … resist … his subduction power … Sini thinks, purring more deeply and loudly. All of the moodiness in his face melts away, and whenever that paw descends upon him, he erects his neck and nuzzles between the gaps of the claws, as well as over Ridley’s palm. Such … strong sorcery! Very well, sorcerer … you win this time.
Only after Ridley gives a halfway-decent stroke of the little dragon’s neck instead of a very pleasant one does Sini remember his main objective. Right, he thinks, I’ve been small for a few hours. By the time I return to my growth potion, I should be transforming back to my normal size, so I’ll be able to enjoy the growth properly! He gives Ridley’s talon a brisk nip, then wriggles free of that paw and looses his wings to full span. Ridley gives a soft “oof” as the tiny dragon bounces off of his chest and into flight.
“Wait,” Ridley says, sadly, “you’re not going away, like the bat, are you? Ah, you’re just playing with me, that’s what you’re doing! Well, what is this game then, tag? I must be it, then!”
As soon as Sini thought he had liberated himself from the space dragon, he hears thunderous feet approaching him. “Drat—the giant doesn’t want to let me go! Somehow, I’ll have to get him off my tail!” He flies higher. His tail goes shooting into the canopy, and a burst of leaves descends from the branches of an elderly elm tree. He leaps from one branch to another and another, a steep one. He clings to it then folds his wings, so that Ridley can’t see him from this angle.
“Ahh, so this isn’t regular tag—this is hide and seek tag, isn’t it?” Ridley steps below the elm and squints into its tangle of leaves and branches, which spans upward from the main trunk in the shape of an upside-down pyramid. He notices a little black tail swinging and smirks. His head rises over where the main branches begin; he’s probably tall enough to tag the tiny derg after just a wingbeat or two.
A hurricane whips leaves off the branches all around Sini, and then he yelps as a giant marble-purple hand explodes into the overstory, reaching around for him. “No, no, this certainly isn’t tag!” He bursts out from the shade of the tree, goes scampering down the airborne Ridley’s arm, then leapfrogs off Ridley’s head, flying off to somewhere safe from giant paws.
Ridley reflects on the words, “this certainly isn’t tag,” and interprets them to mean, “you certainly didn’t tag me just because I’m gonna run up your arm.” “Well, fair enough,” he says, “I’m gonna getcha anyway!”
And so Sini ends up with the huge guy stomping after him, and thinks, Oh no—it’s not a game anymore—he’s gonna get me?! What do I look like to him, food?! “You’ll never take me alive!” wails the purple derg. He swings his wings up into vertical sails and falls, then resumes flight just in time to swoop into a log, zooming into it without landing until he’s a few yards into the thirty-foot-long tree carapace. There, he hides and swings himself around either way, knowing that the giant’s face can only pop up from either orifice of the log.
“Heheh, we’ll see about that, feisty dragon!”
Sini feels grenades going off outside his log, coming closer, but he knows who the true culprit is. Get ready to gas him with your breath, he tells himself. Silence ensues. Then, that great breakish snout lowers itself to the hole, and Sini sees an eye preparing to peek in, but an echoing belch pipes through the log, mortaring purple smog out of the log, which causes Ridley to stand straight and recoil from the log.
“Well, excuse you,” he complains, “what did you eat for lunch?”
Ridley dips back down to lunge his paw into the length of the log, masking his nose from the foul-smelling fumes with the other paw. Instead of catching Sini, he ends up lodging his arm inside of the log while Sini skitters out of the other side. And the log is thoroughly attached, so when Ridley tries to jerk his arm free, he ends up swinging the log about like a polearm and accidentally cracking coniferous trees across the boles, giving them fractured spines and minor cases of scoliosis. Mentally, he apologizes to the wounded trees. Out loud, he can only muster the lackadaisical complaint, “Arg, pesky wood!”
Unfortunately for Sini, Ridley’s trying to multitask (chase after Sini and disarm himself at the same time), so Ridley’s log polearm ends up thrashing through the air after the little dragon. Oh lords, I’ve awakened his wrath by huffing my poisons at him, Sini thinks, fluttering away from the log weapon as fast as he can. I’ll admit, perishing by being eaten seems a lot hotter than becoming mashed dragon on the side of a tree corpse. But what is a little dragon to do, turn around and say, Sorry, please eat me instead? No, Sini is not such a slut that he would sell his faith of survival for cheap like that. If I could just get back to my growth potion, I could go kaiju on him—and then we’d see who’s runnin’ from who!
Alas, Sini hasn’t any sense of direction. Nor did he document the landmarks around him when he left his work area earlier, so how does he expect to find his bench? Since I don’t know what to search for, let me decide on what NOT to search for, he thinks. Areas where there are still glorthcap mushrooms are obviously areas I haven’t visited yet, and since the park is riddled with them, that should help me GPS track the bench. So he swoops onto a bough, and he regards the leafy patch of muck and grass and shrooms from his perch; and he takes off, and repeats this elsewhere, hoping that he’s getting “warmer” to his destination rather than “colder.”
That little derg goes winging off, more distant with every swing of Ridley’s irreconcilable polearm. “Wait!” he calls out. “Maybe we should establish some boundaries for our game of hide and seek tag? I am okay with turning around and counting to ten if we start over! I’d just rather not have to search the whole forest for you and get lost; and get very tired …” Since his log arm attachment refuses to come off, Ridley chomps down on it and whittles the wood away in the way of a woodpecker. With a THUMP, the gnawed-off log returns to its natural habitat. Ridley bounds after his friend, leaving in his wake a trail of dragon pawprints, each of them over a yard in length.
“Aah, there’s my happy little bench!” Sini cheers.
Ahead lies the clearing with the bench, and that’s not all. That red wyvern hatchling from earlier never freed its neck from between the tabletop and the bench: It is sleeping now in a rather unergonomic position. Sini feels rather ruthless for having trapped it there, earlier. “Why, I was stuck on a foot-paw,” he says to himself, “but at least I had hope. At least I had the snores of another being giving me faith that someone would notice me, by and by! This hatchling, though, has no senpai to notice it. All it has is cold wood to keep it company.”
Would it be hypocritical for him to believe this beastie deserves to be stuck in a place for hours, but not him? Perhaps not, Sini decides, perhaps the hatchling is known in these parts as a criminal and needed some time at the penitentiary. But I’d say he’s served a cruel enough sentence, and I do not think serving it any longer will cause him to come out from behind bars regarding himself as any less of a no-good felon.
And then, suddenly, Sini’s shrinking potion wears off, so as his wings break into the clearing, he grows back into a thirteen-foot-tall dragon. The timing of this has no causal relationship whatsoever with him becoming of the opinion that the hatchling deserves redemption. Nevertheless, for the rest of his life he will look back on this moment, either consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously, and regard his reversion to his normal form as a direct reward from Karma for forgiving a person.
Let’s have a real thinker about this. If any of us ever learns that a false perception of reality led us to become a better person, shall we then say, Fuck being a good person? Well, you already know my opinion on that. I am of the belief that delusion is sometimes for the betterment of a person, otherwise I wouldn’t be a storywriter. Regardless, I’ll be happy if you sit down to think about this, sometime, with your cup of coffee or tea or water, and come to a conclusion that seems to you most right.
Sini lands and fetches his growth potion. He uncaps it to drink it, but his idling has allowed Ridley to catch up with him. The space dragon pounces on him from behind and yells, “Tag, you’re it!”
And Sini wails, for he thinks he’s about to be stepped on or eaten or worse. “I shouldn’t have huffed at you so impolitely, I admit it. Please, don’t eat me or put me back under your paw!” Either of these things is something that Ridley could do somewhat successfully at his current size: He’s still twice as tall as Sini.
“Huh?” Frowning, Ridley retreats from Sini. “We’re just playing tag. It’s okay, little derg, there’s no need to treat this so seriously.”
“Y-you mean it?”
Ridley blinks confusedly. “Sure.”
Upon hearing this, the sensation of being hunted and doomed falls away from Sini, removing that psychological anchor from him, so he bounces onto his feet, looking gayer than ever, and he tackles Ridley’s chest happily, although this doesn’t pin Ridley to the ground: It merely nudges him back a couple of steps. Sini wraps his wings around the metallic torso of the dragon and steams his poison from his mouth in a celebratory way.
“Now, that’s a huge relief. I think I shall be able to sleep at night, now.”
He drops from Ridley’s abdomen onto three legs. In his airborne paw he holds still the growth potion, but he gazes into it with a new sense of purpose. After some time, he asks the space dragon what his name is; and then they exchange names. “Have you ever grown bigger or smaller before, Ridley?”
“Well, sure,” Ridley says, “that’s one of my programmed abilities. I just press a button, and my size changes. It’s that simple.”
“Bet’cha can’t grow as big as me,” Sini challenges with a smirk. He uncorks the potion and begins to glug.
“Grow as big as you?” Ridley chuckles. “I’m already bigger than you, and just a few minutes ago my paw was bigger than you. What—”
Before he can finish speaking, something happens to Sini. He grows from thirteen feet tall to eighteen feet tall, then to twenty-three feet tall, then to twenty-eight feet tall. Within mere moments, Sini has grown to be only about a claw’s length shorter than Ridley. He stops growing because he’s only drunk a third of the potion, but the more of it he drinks, the more dramatic his subsequent growth spurts will become.
“Aah, so is that how you grew bigger just a few minutes ago?”
“Oh, nah—thirteen feet tall is my regular size.” Sini’s voice has become deeper, bassier. He’s seeing the world through lenses similar to Ridley’s now. The table looks childish compared with him, and he could probably crush it by flopping down on it. As for the crimson wyvern whose neck is stuck between the bench and the tabletop, Sini could probably swallow it whole with a lazy gulp of his maw, because the creature’s shorter than one of his forelegs.
Having gotten distracted by the pleasureful senses of being a giant dragon, Sini hiccups in embarrassment when he sees Ridley staring at him.
“Ahh, but anyway … Now that I know you’re not going to crush me or devour me, I suppose there’s no screaming need for me to grow larger. Would ya like a sip of this, Ridley?” He holds the growth potion out. “It tastes like a citrusy alcohol. Made it myself!”
“Aww, hehe, thanks, Sini, but you ought to save that for yourself. I have my own method of growing, so I wouldn’t want to waste that on myself, you see.” To demonstrate, Ridley reaches at the nape of his neck and rolls his fingers over a few buttons. Suddenly, the clearing quakes, and Sini gulps and blushes at his new friend, who begins to throb in growth, suddenly becoming a head’s height taller than Sini and several dozen pounds heavier.
It’s hypnotic to the poison dragon (in a way similar to how his poisons are hypnotic to others): the expansion of the minuscule scales of the dragon’s fascinatingly long beak-like snout, the groans of muscle systems beneath … The segments of metallic plates of the long skull ripple outwards, each segment thumping in growth to a rhythm independent of the rhythm of other segments … The ribcage crackles, broadens, expands … The fierce, skeletal biceps writhe and elongate; the similar forearms stretch. Lustrous ridges that course down his thighs and flank the quadriceps expand, as do his claws, as does the segmented carapace that covers his tail.
With awe, Sini watches the transformation of the space dragon, who goes from staring eye-to-eye with Sini to rolling out his shoulders and puffing out his proportionately growing chest before the dragon’s face. Even the chest rises during the rumbles of Ridley’s swelling. The sporadic snarls and chuffs of deepening timbre that the space dragon looses while rising higher excites Sini. If Ridley were his enemy, this would be the sort of terrifying excitement which would trigger that sickly anxiousness of his inferiority complex. Someone with a severe complex might want to curl up in his presence, or perhaps they would feel a powerful anger which they would needst suppress, in order to preserve their life.
But Ridley isn’t the enemy. Trust has entered the equation, so even though Sini feels feelings akin to the aforementioned of a complex, they have been repurposed with a positive connotation. It’s like when you’re doing a trust fall: The fear of falling is still there, but once you’re finally caught, all of that fear evaporates, and a delicious feeling of relief and of belief in someone else immediately usurps those previous ugly feelings. In the same way, Sini feels as though once Ridley finally finishes growing, he will experience such a wholesome, pampering sensation.
Each of the dragon’s metallic obelisks for legs barge into the trees that outskirt the clearing. Gnarled roots creak and crack, and some of them are uprooted on smaller trees as the heels of Ridley throb with growth. Sini finds himself dwindling in relative size again, so that the level of his eyes falls to the dragon’s knees. “Not bad,” he says, “let’s see if I can keep up …”
“I’d like to see you try. Though, if you can’t keep up, I wouldn’t mind using you as a paw rest again.” Ridley winks.
Furrowing his scaly brows competitively, Sini upends his potion and glugs. That same rush a renowned fighting game video game player might get when they’re facing off against someone in the finals of a tourney, Sini feels thumping in his head and in his chest. Energy and alertness pool into him, and he can feel his bones budging outward. Muscles of his serpentine neck, backside, flight muscles, legs—they all squeeze into tight knots with trepidation, then spasm outward in a succulent, rhythmic growth which mows his paws across the clearing ground. He grows him from twenty-eight feet tall to thirty-eight, then forty-eight feet tall … That raises his head to the groin level of the Ridley, but already, Ridley has almost quadrupled his size.
With exponential growth, the space dragon rushes higher like a waterfall cascading in reverse gravity. From twenty-nine feet tall, he has grown to over a hundred feet tall. And his foot-paws have become so large, they could roll freight trucks underneath their soles and play with them. One of his paws rumbles down and crushes the table and its benches without Ridley being aware of the ordeal, while the red hatchling gets stuck to the bottom of his paw. A flabbergasted Sini calls up to him:
“How the heck did you grow so big, all of a sudden!”
Ridley shrugs and continues to grow unbridledly, indulging himself in the milkshake-sweet torrent of mass that surges out of his form. His spearhead tail cleaves off the heads of increasingly small trees that are spread past his radius, while he teeters and looms higher, the pleasant, metallic draconic scent of his body being multiplied with each expansion. For him, growing to the stature of a kaiju is no more significant an event than taking a shower. Though, if he had to choose between taking a shower tonight and getting huge as heck, he would certainly choose getting huge as heck. The same way rinsing your scales is a baptising feeling, outgrowing them and having to force your hide to grow big enough for you is a tasty feeling of rebirth. From his body an artificial earthquake rolls over the local land.
Sini empties his potion bottle until he’s rattling and infiltrating the tectonic plates with his own lesser earthquake. His body pumps its way from forty-eight feet tall to sixty-eight feet tall, and he roars, “Hrrrgh, yes! Getting bigger!”
Eighty-eight. One hundred and eight. He becomes just as huge as Ridley was less than a minute ago, but Ridley has already moved on into a more megalithic size and weight class. The space dragon grows to one hundred and fifty feet tall, and looks down at Sini with amusement at the way the dragon is geekin’ so much over a situation he himself considers to be normal and routine. “Indeed, Sini, that is what happens when you grow.” He chuckles. He adjusts a setting on the back of his neck so that his body idles, no longer growing. He waits for Sini to catch up and reach his size; and when the poison dragon does, they both equal one hundred and seventy-five feet tall, meaning they’re taller than ten storey buildings. As tall as low skyscrapers. As tall as the kaijus in the older monster movies.
Although Ridley could continue to grow endlessly, he stays at this height for now because Sini has peaked in size. What do the two of them do? They wade through the shallow sea of trees, budging into them and trampling them, testing the strength of their newfound sizes.
Sini finds an especial interest in finding smaller trees and plucking them up between his claws, and scaring smaller critters in a game of peekaboo. Ridley lazes amusedly next to the poison dragon, enjoying his virgin fascination with being huge. Perhaps they’ll stomp about the world together as giant kaijus. Later. Now, Ridley needs to take a big long nap to reenergize.
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Category Story / Macro / Micro
Species Dragon (Other)
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 173.7 kB
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