A nice image done for me by ScissorsRunner. I cooked up a little story to go along with it as well, for those who remember once upon a time that I actually did write things. I hope you enjoy it, and if you like the image please give the artist some love!

https://www.furaffinity.net/user/scissorsrunner/


The youngling Child parted from her travel companions, who joined her in a brief song of farewell, when she spiraled down from the clouds toward the big compound of her working place sprawled where an abandoned town once lay. The asphalt of the roads was long gone, dissolved to make fuel, but that left paths for the many humans and Diggers to make their way back and forth on hard-packed dirt. A near cloud of Children flitting about showed how materials made their way from one building to the next that could no longer make their way across the narrow corridors through field and forest.

The West Baltic Discovery Complex was a city-sized and nearly self-contained mixed-species facility for new research and development. The algae ponds and crop fields presented a contrasting patchwork from aloft against the dens and human buildings spread every which way along the one wheeled vehicle road looping the complex. The remaining unused land, except for landing glens for adult Children had been given over to a thriving young forest of trees. Looking Glass took in with a glance all the dragons and humans going to and fro. The watch dragons on their overlook platforms next to multi-defense cannons called out to her in roared greetings, she was a familiar silhouette about the place.

Looking Glass’ destination was one of the smaller buildings of the sprawling compound, E-shaped, it was easy to spy from the air with its sunflowers for seeds and oil growing on the rooftop garden. She swooped low over the roof, causing Diggers and humans to look up from their horticultural efforts to offer roars and waves in greeting. Looking Glass did a vertical loop as she sang her greeting in return. The Child had been examining the skylights dispersed all across the roof for cleanliness. It was the plants growing within the structure that concerned her. They were her second responsibility, after all. Once she’d ensured the rain channels were clear, she banked up onto one wing and spiraled down to where she landed with legs and arms flexed in a crouch. It was time for her to engage in her primary task for the day.

It took Looking Glass thirteen tries after peak sun to get her card to be accepted by the overly high-placed security reader next to the door on the wall that was more recycled glass and aluminum than anything else. It was made with towering levels, to fit Children, but was drab and uninteresting to the tiny fledgling in color and construction. The young Child stood on her legs next to the portal, one arm holding her away from the building’s grey patchwork side as the other tried to get her access to the interior with increasing anger. Her wings half unfurled to rattle along with her scales in her agitation. At last, the key panel beeped as it unlocked, allowing her to walk her legs back to fall to the ground again, her ID hanging from her neck on its lanyard to drag along as she raced to open the door before it relocked.

“Humans...” Looking Glass growled, making Janice from accounting, who just happened to walk by, go wide-eyed with a start at Looking Glass’ rattling scales and stormy scowl revealing her fangs. The human fled with the springiness of a deer and her long braid of head fur flying behind her. The young dragoness let her go without a word but for the scent of emotional hurt that came from beneath the scales along her flanks. Nothing good would come of chasing after the human to tell her everything was a-okay. Just lots of unnecessary fear screams.

Looking Glass coiled herself to turn around in the cramped side entryway to gaze resentfully with slitted eyes up at the height of the card reader. Even ten sun orbits after the Children and Dreamers had appeared in this world, humans still slipped into the mindset of building things with only themselves in mind. Children’s quadrupedal bodies just did not allow for the same arm movements of humans. But the tiny Child’s anger vanished as quickly as it had appeared. She was better than the humans, and she would show it by not ripping the door off its hinges and flying away with it to drop in a reclamation plant. She was not an impulsive hatchling anymore.

Besides, today would be the day when her trials demonstrated that cells taken from blue-green algae could be enticed into scaling a molecular scale frame to build a structure with chemical signals and her mind.

Yeah, that’s right, her mind!

She closed her eyes and gaped her jaws, just a little, in a draconic smile as she huffed laughter and ambled on through the labyrinth of labs in the building. It had more glass and shining metal than Looking Glass preferred instead of the vines running up the walls and the growths of ferns in pots she ambled by with her claws clicking to join with the shuffling of the humans. She was only two sun orbits old but she wanted to put all the books on biochemistry to use that she had found in the university library buried by bomb craters just one town over.

Most of them were wrong she had decided after much thought, of course. But she let the humans have their fantasies.

She slowed her walk, stopping to lift her nose and inhale at each meeting of the air currents from all corners. The human man behind her fell over her body, chest high to his, with an alarmed whimper and a great deal of mussing her carefully folded wings. Looking Glass snuffled again for her assistants and found them after a second, past the smells of bleach and the humans who weren’t a tenth as clean as they thought they were. Her team’s scent trails were less than two minutes faded. She shook off Liam, an engineer collaborating on the Amsterdam energy project, to free her wings to resettle after opening them all the way to the ceiling, four meters overhead. Her wing claws clacked against the epoxy-sealed floor as they stacked neatly once more. Looking Glass took pride in her wings and hated them feeling ruffled messily.

There was angry shouting in Dutch, and then a horrible metallic screeching that sounded like mild steel and had Looking Glass’ ears pinning backward with distaste. She lifted the muttering Liam off the ground by the waist and tapped him once in the stomach, good-naturedly as her Mère Étoile had taught her. He folded over her tail with an “oof” as she looked back with one magenta and ash eye to give him a gentle reminder to look away from his data pad when walking.

“Tes yeux doivent être vigilants, Liam. C'est la quatrième fois que tu t'égares sur le chemin du dragon.” She gestured with one hand at where she stood, a fluorescent yellow path heavily marked by claws and dragging tails. At that moment an older Child, placing his feet carefully around the humans and his head stretched forward due to a lack of overhead, came around the corner from the rooms of resources a plenty, wearing his cape with the epaulets that marked him as a security supervisor. The humans in the hall ducked into niches built for them as he passed in a disruption to their comings and goings. The sun pouring through the ceiling panels was blocked by his body in a pall that traveled with him over the personnel of the facility.

“Your friends are destroying the break room, again, Looking Glass,” the elder Child told her. His thought patterns conveyed the image he had seen to her.

“I hear you,” she rapidly chirped. Dismayed, but not surprised. She could smell the faint fear of the humans coming from that direction. “Could you get me a new self-identifier card? I was tempted to break the door today after seven tries.”

The security chief scented his assent as Liam moved to a nook of his own, having to bat some ferns from his face. The medium-sized dragon fairly well filled the hall at the widest point of his wing joints. In another decade or so Maél wouldn’t fit at all. Looking Glass raised her head to allow the older Child to remove her lanyard as he strode past without stop, his chest above the humans and his comforting smell filling the hall. The Child presence of each other had a calming and steadying effect on them both. Looking Glass could smell it in his scent.

Their matriarch, Penelope, sensed their need and deepened their connection briefly in the hall until they shared a churl of contentment. Looking Glass would find a nice rabbit stew for Maél after he had willingly shared his warmth with her during a sleep time yesterday. There were so few Children here inside and the lack made her feel cold and empty. This facility of the sprawling compound had not been built large enough for the adults she could feel in her mind working outside on the grounds and patrolling the perimeter. The gentle whispers and caresses of her constellation kept her through the days and nights she worked when she was apart from them.

The humans just didn’t like having to walk the distances an adult Child required to be comfortable. Claustrophobia being common among the creatures of the sky when out of sight of the blue firmament, as anyone should expect, Looking Glass thought. When rooms were half a football pitch in size, it was a tad inconvenient for the humans, she had to admit. Even if she thought it was good exercise for them. They were so alarmed and tense these days about the loss of the oil and the time of the end of days after the golden-eyed aliens had made good on their judgments. She would do what she could to help the humans of course, but Looking Glass regretfully had to admit the survival of the rather fragilé creatures was not presently assured.

Taken by the sudden fledgling urge to play, she bounded in and around Maél’s legs down the hallway. Even running up one of his wings when he lowered it for her, peeping happily atop his shoulder with her head eeling past his neck to look down on the streams of scientists going back and forth until they reached the cross junction where her office was. There, they parted ways once they’d briefly exchanged neck caresses and she jammed her left eye, the right never seemed to work, against the scanner to unlatch her door. The door swung inward with a bang and the dragoness tumbled into her private work study, landing in the pillow-filled depression she rested in while working at the large tablet on the floor that passed as her computer.

Her room was useful at times, but she did not prefer working alone. The humans thought being away from touch and scent a good thing of making much of life work, but no dragon certainly did! It was so much more productive to settle into a big get-together for work. The ideas moved better with scale touch. Some sun-around, the humans would get the life picture. But, for now, the dragons had to be thrilled with nibbling at the edges. Too much change made the humans panicky, and they were already far too much of that.

The infant researcher went to a crate in one corner, one she had painted a large X in nasty green on to be sure it was never confused for anything else, and turned around to extract a bottle of cognac, pre-zero day age, with her tail while select-checking her unread messages. She was careful not to accidentally open the bottle as it never ended well for anyone when a Child drinks the alcohol, but it was also about the only thing that could make the Diggers behave. They drank like the fish, as humans said. Although it wouldn’t typically make them sick-drunk like humans, it was still a powerful motivator to behave when their claws started flashing.

She turned to the frame that held her carrying satchels and ducked her head into the loop that went around her neck before both secondary straps were tightened about her arms with tugs of her mouth. It rubbed her fin something awful, but that was still easier than hobbling on three limbs to carry something. Looking Glass was not about to ruin her wing creases by using her thumb spurs either, no thank you! She stuffed the Cognac into the central pouch and then ran from her den, her tail flicking the door closed. Hoa and Rakeem would drink all her supply if she left the portal open, as she normally would.

Like all Children, she didn’t like barriers much and thought they were generally inconvenient at best. But, as she had to keep reminding the humans whenever they complained, if they didn’t want her to use their stuff, they needed to hide it better or write that it was not to be used on it.

Looking Glass ran in leaps around the many humans and a few other Diggers that she gave a tail rub to in passing. She didn’t need scent with the racket her team was making. The young dragoness considered the matter, and decided the most likely instigator of the Diggers’ short anger response was a stuck tasty treat in one of the human’s vend-o-matics.

The estimation was confirmed by Looking Glass’ human gofer, Mila, cowering at the portal way to peer into the break room with one eye.

Another raptor scream of frustration came from within before a vend-o-matic door was launched twirling out to rebound from the opposite wall. Besides the casualty of the vend-o-matic, Looking Glass could tell the fight wasn’t a serious one, despite the flying furniture. If it were serious, the humans would have all been running for the exits instead of nonchalantly passing by.

“Zurück, weibliche Hilfskraft!” Looking Glass admonished Mila on her way into the room. The female Child dodged a table by crouching into a scramble with her chest flat to the floor and wings furled, the furniture flying over her head to crash into the wall of the sterile place of respite.

Annnnnd, there they were. Scale cousins Rakeem and Hoa arguing with each other. Quibbling, it seemed, over a small pile of protein bars in front of a vend-o-matic quite torn in half.

“They are not for eating now!” roared Rakeem, lowering on his folded legs to place one arm over the treasure trove and gather them into a pouch on one limb. Hoa charged and rammed him across the room midway through his endeavor, throwing every piece of furniture in sight out of their way until Rakeem left a dent in the wall in the shape of his outline. He was unfazed by the violent assault, however, and between them their claws slashed and crossed with sparks and loud unpleasant noises as their argument continued at blink and miss it velocities.

“Enough!” Looking Glass shrilly whistled, and asked for the strength of her matriarch to make the paired Diggers calm the vent scales down! She flicked her wings up to block the shards of glass raining down from the covers of the overheads when that strength came and shattered the glow sources. The two diggers however resisted the mental nudges of the suggestion to calm, their minds were much stronger than humans’, but it got their attention and ended the squabble.

The bipedal pair looked up, blinking in confusion at the interruption as their eyes lost some of the intensity they had when lashing out like this, with the drake above the dame on her back. A very bad spot for him as it freed up all her powerful limbs. He had her pinned with his talons against the floor. She held his neck just beneath his jaws in a vise-like hand and had one long foot lodged against his belly. Looking Glass wondered if Rakeem knew he was about to be launched into the ceiling. She decided he likely did not care, the fall would not injure him. “What do you want, Wings? We were arguing about food allocation,” he said in French.

“Lupakan itu sekarang. Dengar, aku punya hadiah untukmu,” Looking Glass, AKA Wings to the pair of Diggers, said in Indonesian to them both. “Mila, please come with the cups,” she added in German to the human female. Beckoning with her tail to the short woman to deliver on her most important task, keeping the two Diggers calm enough to make the lattices that only they had been able to master.

Looking Glass’ assistant warily came into the room, keeping her boss dragon’s five-meter-long body between her frail human form and the Diggers, who were anything but frail. They themselves were busy with the business of disentangling with shoves of each other, much more good-natured with the promise of drink at hand. Mila pulled from the small pack she wore at her waist two beautifully carved wooden cups that she had made as a gift for the Diggers and took the cognac from Looking Glass’ chest carrier, allowing the young dragoness to flee to the room's furthest corner.

Even the smell of alcohol made her feel not herself. The last time it had gotten too strong she had come back to her own mind to find herself attacking her reflection like a dizzy bird in the human’s sanitation place. Looking Glass had cried miserably in the embrace of Maél’s tail beneath his sheltering wing that day until her egg bearer came storming into the complex’s park. Helene had been anxiously calling Looking Glass’ hatch name before landing and hit the ground running to lick her egg daughter’s tears away and soothe her troubled thoughts with a song that Maél joined in with to calm her roiling dismay. It was a memory dear to Looking Glass when the wind was in her face.

Now, Looking Glass folded her legs and shifted her arms to sit on the cold stone floor, soothing her haunches and underside from a night and day of flight. The black scaled dragoness enjoyed the coolness sufficiently that she slid her hands on the stone until her whole body was pressed against it with her tail tip tapping on the floor. Comfortably as far as possible from the opened bottle. The paired bipedal aliens waited with fixed attention on the cognac as an equal share of a brimming cupful for them both was allotted. A rare treat from their usual industrial-grade moonshine that doubled as a disinfectant for the lab utensils. Their tongues appeared now and again to run across their many teeth in anticipation and their tails swung in synchronized sweeping arcs.

“You will have to pay for the vending machine.” Looking Glass said in French, using the preferred human word. French was the one language that all three members of her team had in common. Nothing like the thirteen languages that Looking Glass knew so far to navigate beings from all over the Europe and Asia. She was only just four moons older than two star orbits after all.

“We don’t care about that,” Hoa said heatedly before reverently receiving a wooden cup of intoxicant in her large four-fingered hands. She arched her neck to bring her snout down above the cup and sniffed with deep appreciation showing in her eye colors. “What is human money to us after we were slaves to make it in Sri Lanka? Now, we learn, we are treated as equals, and we get drinks. Our den and our pod are everything else. You keep the human’s money, and the evils that come with it.”

Looking Glass pinned her fins back and her tail fell lifelessly to the ground with disappointment. What a… what a… merde. She didn’t know a word for what she felt yet. A sense of lost opportunity. It was hard for her to believe these two were once human, and had the still mysterious status of being adults, or of enough sun orbits for the humans to consider the physically immature Diggers so, when Looking Glass had never been human or an adult. Many more mysteries for her to solve. That’s what those titles meant to her.

The winged dragoness had a vague suspicion that being an adult meant unlocking a new ability, like in those old video games she’s seen, although it must not be a very useful one. Most adults she had sniffed in her time had reeked of fear and stress at all times, which wasn’t helpful in the least, so she did not want to be an adult, ever, if that is what it entailed.

Yet she had proven herself to those whose opinion meant all to her, and now she was the boss Child of her team. Matriarch Penelope had decided it was so, and her human mate had agreed after the formality of interviewing Looking Glass.

Of course the money did not matter. Whoever said it did? But she had to find some way to make them care about damaging the things and the stuff, and the book of pictures Looking Glass had found about dragons was wrong once again. This time about the greed of those with scales, tails, and claws. She had not met a Child, Digger, or Dreamer yet who slept on the wonderfully useful elements of gold and silver like a nest.

Although Looking Glass had had to sleep on her heaps of books a few times to keep other fledglings from thinking they were free to make their own for a time. They were not hers, and she had to keep them safe for the forgotten library and the Dreamer who had declared it his territory of responsibility. No one rational being wanted to argue with somedragon like that. Of course, the humans had gotten quite the wrong idea after seeing her office place and congratulated themselves once more about mixing make-believe with the real because it fit their assumptions.

At first the young dragoness thought might it be fun to be one of “them”, the ones in charge. But instead it turned into much worry about everything and getting everyone on the same book. Or was it the same page? Looking Glass huffed. Humans and their precise, not precise, languages. The pages were in the book! Sometimes she didn’t want to be the boss and instead wanted to be with her other fledglings tackling the bigger mysteries of the funny world.

As soon as the project met all hopes, she would give up being boss Looking Glass and go back to being Jump and Tumble, the science fledgling who reads the chemistry books. Or maybe take on a new name and try something else. Maybe she could figure out why the human babies screamed instead of talking to say they were hungry, lonely, or spoiling themselves. Looking Glass had known three languages before she even hatched; she did not see why it could not also be so for the human hatchlings that resembled very noisy potatoes in their blankets.

Looking Glass listened to a radio playing the top of the hour news next to her as the Diggers relished their drinks and made nice with the wary Mila. The news stories were familiar ones, and just as treacherous skies as ever.
The young Child turned the radio off with a flick of her tail when Hoa licked the last drops from her snout and handed the cup back to Mila, temporarily pacified along with her den-mate Rakeem.

“Today will be trial series twenty-four, okay?” Looking Glass said. “I will be thinking very hard to make the cells adapt to the cubic lattice you made two suns ago, Mila. Hoa and Rakeem, see what you can do about fortifying shapes sixteen through twenty for replication. Mila, how is your mold for twenty-five?”

“I need another three cc’s of your saliva, Looking Glass. But I should be done today.”

“Very pleasant skies!” Looking Glass exclaimed and threw up her wings, bright with happiness and accidentally sending two metal tables flying with the movement of her powerful second arms. The family shared her glee and encouragement, bringing smiles to their faces and excitement to their scents. Looking Glass was so close to them that her radiant emotions were infectious across their common bond. “Rakeem, gather your protein, and Mila.” She pushed herself away from the comfortable stone and twisted her head to look at her human teammate. “Say something more, will you? You’re in danger of being lost in the background of the story!”

“Eh-hehe,” Mila tittered nervously, sidling back towards Looking Glass as Hoa nearly split her head in half with an enormous display of her many teeth. An expression of her impatience. “I think I’ll just talk with you more later. Alone.” Her eyes trailed the two Diggers until they’d left, singing a song from their native lands in their smoky resonant voices. Something about a journey unfulfilled.

Looking Glass huffed. She hoped that she didn’t lose Mila to her fear. The winged dragoness had just gotten the Humaness habituated so that her heart didn’t race away and kill her from stress. It took sooooo long to find Humans with the skills needed and the nerve not to soil themselves the first time a Digger needs to wear their claws down on a grindstone. Or when they find the eyes of seven sub-adult Children peering at them in a dark auditorium, wondering why they are being screamed at like the sky is falling.

“Mila,” Looking Glass rumbled quietly, her voice nowhere near as melodious as the Diggers’, instead as rough as the scales covering her chest. “Stay near me today if they scare you more than usual, and once we’re done, I’ll find a wing for you to Brussels. We will see if we can’t find an upgrade for your tri-wheel cargocycle. How’s that sound? A female’s day, as you Humans say! We can talk about the wonders of consumerism, biting the tails of dominating drakes, and the difficulties of human breasts! As egg bearers that is what to do, is it not? We could fly to see the North Sea Alliance going out on their evening patrols. Very different from the ground view, and you get to witness the glorious orange and yellow star set as additional length of tail!”

Looking Glass extended her neck and rubbed the smooth scales on the side of her muzzle on Mila’s cheek with her best hatchling comfort tone. She tried to comfort her, anyway. The young Child knew the humans were afraid of the deep rasp of her voice and could hear none of the nuances that should have set them at ease.

“Um…okay. Just please…” The human woman stopped, shaking with fear against Looking Glass’ side as another raptor shriek came from the hallway, followed by a man with his shirt in ruins running past the breakroom doorway. A clipboard flew through the air chasing after him. “Don’t let them hurt me,” Mila pleaded with the shimmer in her eyes that meant she was about to cry.

“Ah,” Looking Glass bobbed her head knowingly. Mila thought it was her team friends acting up again. “That was Shere Khan from transportation.” The dragoness paused for an instant, reading the lights in her mind before getting her answer. “Shere Khan’s human gofer snarled her authorizations again.” The young team leader patted Mila on the head with her wing hand, it was how the humans liked to feel safe, she had gathered. “Hoa and Rakeem have no real urge to hurt any humans. They remember too well being some of you! Besides,” the dragoness added comfortingly. “If they really wanted to attack you, it would be death before you knew it with their strength! No pain at all. I understand that is a human’s fear, is it not? The pain before your eyes close forever?”

The whimpering and shaking of the human female against her side only grew markedly worse, and her terror scent rose to overwhelming levels in the young Child’s snout.

“Why did she have to pick the name of a man-eating Bengal tiger as her own?”

This was the opposite of the calming she had hoped for. Looking Glass was glum to realize how little she knew about relating to the humans. Two of her egg siblings would know, but not the science fledgling. She felt uncomfortable with the dizzying sensation that she did not, in fact, know everything at the age of two. Like standing on the edge of a great abyss full of books and the knowledges when she had only read three. Or maybe four hundred and seventy-two.

“Our task is at hand, Mila, let’s go before Hoa compounds a chemical to kill whatever has annoyed her last.” Looking Glass gently raised one wing arm to embrace Mila and nudge her forward towards disinfection.

It wasn’t a big issue for the human woman, all she had to do was change shoes, wash her hands and arms and put a cap over her head fur before entering the clean room. But for the scaly quadruped and her equally scaly bipedal friends who could wear no protective feet shoes as the humans knew them and had no choice but to sit or lie right on the nasty human floor when chitchatting due to a lack of space for dragon couches, disinfection was a hassle.

The team leader dragoness let Mila go at where they went through their separate cleansings, the human taking Looking Glass’ carry harness with her. After a visit to the sanitation room, it was better to get that out of the way before putting on cloths, she stepped forward into the pool of disinfectants that would not irritate her scales nor those of the Diggers.

She snapped her scales, all of them, open and closed to shed a cloud of vapor after the pressure jets had blasted her from snout to tail. Shaking her body to dry her fins and wings next. Looking Glass left the airlock with Rakeem and Hoa, who had been exchanging claw scrapes on their necks in ritual friendliness. Which was good, they should be calm for at least the next hour after the social preening.

Mila had already donned the white gown of imminent respect and was waiting on the other side of the automatic swishing of the interior door. Once
Looking Glass was there, she handed the two Diggers their lab coats to dress each other, as they preferred. Mila approached Looking Glass last of all with her quadrupedal coat of many buttons in her human hands for placement around seven limbs.

Looking Glass hated the pressure of the clothing against her fin and scales, but it was important that she wear it! How else will she see what spilled? In addition she had to uphold the look of the boss science fledgling. Still, putting clothes on the aliens was an egregious usage of what cloth could be found. One lab coat for someone the size of Maél could do the same for fourteen humans.

“I like it better when you wear clothes,” Mila told her, pulling the straps tight to keep the coat clear of her limbs. “It isn’t right for such intelligent beings to be shaming themselves in public this way by exposing yourselves.”

Looking Glass said nothing. She had flown this path before. There was no talking the humans out of their contradictory ideas on what cloth needed to be worn where and when. Like many other Children and Diggers, she simply ignored their demands to preserve modesty, whatever that was. If she found it, she would step on it. Maybe she would eat it afterwards too, it depended on how hungry she was at the time.

After suffering through the cotton being snapped about her wing roots, she was ready to enter the lab and get to the work of the afternoon. Instead, she found a reason why she couldn’t. Looking Glass pointed with one wing thumb and a terrific shriek of alarm at seeing Rakeem licking Hoa’s snout as they both thrummed with lidded eyes. Looking Glass most certainly did not want them doing what they were about to do. They’d be lost for the rest of the day if they started.

“Surface Contamination! No, very bad, very bad!”

With their bonding broken, the raptor-like former humans grumbled on their way back to the pool to splash the disinfectant on their muzzles as Mila opened the door to the clean zone. Now, the hard part. The fun part of mix and match and see what hatch!

****

The first six experiments of the series failed, but Looking Glass was not dismayed when they paused for reflection. She sat perched on her thinking chair and fanned her wings to scoot in circles in the cleared area made for her inner thoughts while she engaged with her Constellation. An approximation of flight that she had to be content with to think clearly while in the clean lab. The thoughts of hundreds of other Children flashed between her mind and theirs as they sought a solution. Maybe she wasn’t holding the plant cells with her thoughts the right way. The chemical signal felt right. She could sense the cellular attraction to the scent, but it was not enough.

Rakeem had joined with her as well in the galaxy of beings that were their family while he clawed the designated frustration spot, a thousand-kilo I-beam cemented into the floor for dragon or human use. His light was dimmer than that of a Child’s, still a hundred times brighter than the fragile humans’, but twisted with the chaos of his stormy mind. Hoa had found an empty counter and lay on her side, asleep with her tail tip tocking rhythmically against the floor in time to her rasping snores. Her light calmed for a time by sleep and the Guiding Stars pouring encouragement into Looking Glass’ mind.

A tapping on one of the interior glass windows drew Looking Glass’ attention to Gustav, her boss man with no head fur but some face fur, waving a tablet in one hand. He put it in the through slot as she flapped her wings to roll her way over.

She read the screen with a glance and then raised her head to look at the frazzled man.

“There aren’t any more vending machines within three thousand kilometers. They’ve all been smashed, just like ours. It might have been one of the last ones in Europe, uh… Water Bubble,” the beanpole man wearing the neck choker with seven colors of his white shirt said. He looked particularly without color this sun cycle.

“Why do you call me that? I was only trying a new name out last day around,” she cocked her head to fix her amethyst eye him in confusion.

“Uh…” the man with the nicely shiny head said, doing the fidget thing humans did with their hands. She wanted to mimic the motion, but when her wings shifted to do so it sent her on a slow spin on her stool. She had to curl her head upside down over her back to keep Gustav in sight while she waited for the revolution to complete. Which made his flat face do that crinkling thing that she had a hard time understanding. Her face certainly didn’t squirm like the humans did to show emotion. What use was that with their terrible eyesight?

“I did not like it. So, back to Looking Glass I have gone,” the scaly scientist explained to her business human. Humans were funny about their names. Humans were just funny.

“Great, little girl,” he said and sighed, rubbing that ridiculously small and useless nose of theirs. “This is their last chance, Looking Glass. I can’t have a danger like them around humans. I’ve had thirty complaints after all the damage they did to the break room. You’re going to have to transfer them to an outdoor project if this happens again.”

“I’m right here, Gustav,” Rakeem stalked out of sight of the window right up to it while crouched low. He popped up with his mouth opened and fogging the glass. Looking Glass smacked him in the back of his head with her tail reprovingly for the colorless…color… of fear he put into their boss without purpose. The Digger craned his head to hiss at her, unfortunately complicating the situation by waking Hoa, but Looking Glass hissed right back with her wings open.

Nanogram for nanogram she was stronger than the Diggers, and within a decade or two her scales would be a match for their claws. She would not be afraid of them as the humans were.

Still, there was no reason for Gustav to be waving around that bad-bad ultrasonic sound generator the humans thought was an anti-dragon gadget. Neither the Children nor the Diggers were those wild dogs running everywhere. It was just annoying.

It took a while, and required assigning Hoa and Rakeem to take turns dragonning refreshment kiosks at the main intersections of the compound to make up for the sales from the vend-o-matic and other tasty treats, before Gustav was satisfied. It turned out the protein bars were home-baked by the mates of the staff for emergency treatment of the needy at the compound. Looking Glass felt guilty about being happy that the paired Diggers finally found a reason not to be throwing claws everywhere. But she was sure any remorse over her not-lie, not-truth subterfuges in nosing them along would pass when the outcome was better for all.

Mila walked over from her enclosed square of the lab, pushing a cart in front of her stacked with covered petri dishes.

“Next batch is ready,” the human woman said. She poked at a tail in the way of her cart with a broomstick. Whose tail it was she had no idea when it disappeared into a tangled knot of dragon appendages.

“Gustav, you go now, goodbye,” Looking Glass flicked her wings dismissively. The action unfortunately rocketing the young Child across the lab to crash into and over an empty workstation with a cry of alarm as she cartwheeled into the air.

“But I wasn’t done,” Gustav muttered as he walked away, shaking his head.

“I’m healthy!” Looking Glass’ head popped up over the counter to look at her boss human walking away, muttering about how being a manager used to mean something. “Okay, assume places to start next test!” Looking Glass said instead, turning to her team.

The young scientist took her stool up in her hands and banged it against the edge of the sealed concrete countertop until it was more or less straight again and nosed it in front of her preferred microscope. Adapted for her not-human eye focal points! She gently slapped the brakes that she had made from a spring and a few pieces of aluminum on each stool wheel with her tail to fix her position.

“Before you start,” Rakeem said, picking at a gouge in the pillar of stress relief contemplatively with one claw. “You have been using strength to try to force the cells to grow on the scaffold.”

“I’ve asked nicely, too!” Looking Glass protested, but Rakeem flicked her comment away with his tail tip.

“Gustav waving around his sound cannon made me think of a pet I had when I was a human boy. A jungle rat that I trained to do tricks. I’m glad that I could remember. Being human seems like a dream, now.”

“Ah! Tricks! Yes, like our tricks! What is your suggestion, Rakeem?”

Hoa leaned forward and hissed something to him that Looking Glass did not understand. Rakeem responded by planting one hand over her face and pushing her away, not smelling particularly impressed.

“Inject some of the attractant directly into the bamboo cells for consumption. Teach them that it is food. Make them want to do what you ask. Train them to do what you want, do not force them.”

Looking Glass went back and forth with her family of lights about the idea rapidly before throwing her wings up in celebration. “Brilliant, Rakeem! Congratulations go to you if this works! Very nicely done.” The Child channeled the warm approval of her family’s Guiding Stars into her team, making them all stop with eyes closed. The two Diggers thrummed with happiness and Mila’s face skin did that weird reddening thing as she hugged her arms around herself. Everyone was happy happy, Looking Glass approved.

The boss Child shared the basking of good and then gave directions for the alteration in the test procedure. Mila documented all with her clever, fragile, little hands. The humans shook each other’s hands to convey greetings to strangers, but would not shake Looking Glass’ hands. She looked at her appendage and wondered why. The young Child picked up a reinforced baking glass that was somewhat the size of a human hand and squeezed gently.

Ah, that is why, she decided firmly, shaking the glass crumbles from the impenetrably thick hide of her hand palm into a sanitation bin. They worried about breaking like crumbly glass. How ever did they come to rule this world?

Looking Glass wanted to turn away when the preparations were complete to her microscope. Reluctantly, however, she did not at seeing the resentful glow in Hoa’s eyes directed at Rakeem, busily stacking glasses of different attractants on a tray for transport.

“Hoa, be a good dragon! Everyone has their turn for very nice ideas,” she tried to reach out to sense her intentions. Looking Glass received nothing, as usual, but did not like the color of her eyes. Looking Glass was no Matriarch, and struggled to make sense of the Digger’s spiky thoughts. Unlike Mila, still with that beaming smile on her face, who she could read like a rare paper book at ten kilometers distance. The touch of Looking Glass’ Guiding Stars to Mila felt like her lost younger sister’s embrace.

With some trepidation, Looking Glass turned to her microscope with the syringe Mila placed in hand, maneuvering her limb submillimeter by submillimeter until she saw the needle piercing the wall into cytoplasm far enough to spray the filaments that most enjoyed the nutrients. Then she squirted more infinitesimal amounts in front of the cell on the delivery tracks leading to the three-dimensional matrix. Then she applied her mind to cajoling the cells along.

The first cell squirmed forward in agonizing slowness to the blobs of food, and Looking Glass couldn’t contain her excitement as she danced on her stool. Huffs of delight left her mouth as she stood to plant her hands on the table and devour the sight of the cells on the move. They had success! They had success! Oh, she could hardly contain herself as the first cell contacted the matrix and oozed upwards. A burst of emotion from the youngling lit up the entire sky of her Constellation as the progress passed from Child to Child and Digger and Human and all.

Not even Mila’s gasp, and Rakeem’s shrill cry of alarm and betrayal as Hoa launched him off his feet, were enough to dampen Looking Glass’ thrill. Her team had made important first flight! Wasn’t the shattering of glass such a fun musical noise of celebration?