This is my first fan-fic, so don't be too hard if it's a little bad, but don't be too nice either. I'll try to update chapters quickly.
What Happened?
I was staring at black. Dark. Nothing more. I was in a closed space, and to be honest, I was a little confused. As often happens to me, I found myself talking to myself.
"Okay... So I'm stuck inside somewhere in an unknown place. First thing's first, what happened?"
A quick memory scan revealed what little I knew about my current location. The last thing I remembered before this was me lying down in bed and going to sleep.
"A dream?" I said to myself. "It's a probability. Feels a little too real for a dream though. If it is a dream... not bad. Hope I don't wake up too soon. Better check if I can get out of here."
I felt out with both arms, touching walls of a rough texture at about an arm's length away. Obviously, I couldn't stay in there for long, so I set about thinking for a way out.
"Hmmm... Ceiling goes about a palm length from my head. Maybe I can just bust outta here. Worth a try.", I said as I prepared to knock a good me-sized hole in that wall.
I wound up as far as I could, and realized halfway before my fist connected: 'Hold the phone. I can't punch holes in walls!'
I quickly un-fisted my hand and tried to stop the motion, but it was too late. My open palm smacked against the surface. *CRACK*
My jaw practically dropped at what I had just done.
"Holy pickles...", I said quietly as I stepped slowly out of my prison. I had busted a huge hole in the wall like it was nothing.
I could see now that I was stuck in a hollow tree. This led to some more confusion.
'How in the heck did I get in there in the first place? I couldn't have had the tree grow around me, but it was completely sealed off...'
I looked around myself to get my bearings.
"Okay, forest... This is a dream, right? Because this is pretty cool."
It was a fairly standard forest, the most noticeable feature being how stinkin' HUGE the trees were. Seriously, they were like the Tower of Babel of nature. Curiously enough, the leaves were sparse enough to let a good amount of sun through the canopy, allowing a grass-covered ground.
All of a sudden, I noticed the pieces of wood that were around me, thanks to my breakout of the arboreal prison in which I was contained. I kneeled down to inspect the woodchips.
'Sweet mother of meat... That's about 2 inches of wood, and I punched, no, I whacked it open with an open hand with barely more effort than breaking a pencil!'
Then I noticed my hand.
"Holy cheese!" I exclaimed.
Instead of the human hands I had before, what greeted me was practically scary. My old hands used to be pretty big. Actually, it was more the fingers. Short palm, long fingers, wide spread. That was me. I could reach 10 white keys apart on the piano. It came in handy for a lot of things. I had bigger hands than anybody I knew, but evidently the universe decided I didn't know what big hands were.
These things made my old hands look like bunny paws. Maybe part of the reason was the fact that they were green, scaly, and had sharp black nails poking out of the ends. That's right. Not off the top and then growing straight and flat like human nails. These things were round, pointed and slightly curved. And very sharp. The size of the hand was equally astonishing. As these things were about triple the size of my previous fingers, they needed space to stretch. The palm was huge. Enormous. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but they were big.
'What in the name of creamed corn and apple fritters happened to me?' I thought to myself as I gazed at my new extremities. My look of astonishment slowly but surely left my face.
"If this is a dream, I hope I don't wake up for a while." I said, smiling.
You may be thinking I'm crazy, but seriously. How many times have you dreamt something like this? "Not nearly enough" should always be the answer. I checked out my feet next. Here, some more prominent differences were made. They were big, just like the hands. I've always had big feet, but this was bigger. And the toe distribution was wierder. Four toes were located at the front, fully moveable separately, while one started higher up at the back of my foot and pointed backwards. I lifted one leg and tried to close my foot.
'Talon-like feet, with nails the size of human thumbs, but wider at the base. The foot closes in a grip , but opens straight, adequate for running. I must be good at climbing and hanging onto things.'
I slowly checked the rest of my body. On the front side, nothing fully special except for the scales and improved muscles. The arms and legs were slightly longer, and could definitely sustain more stress than my human muscles. On the backside, I started from the feet up. Imagine my surprise when I found a tail there. And not one of those hairy pony-tails or the furry, slim, cat-tails, this thing meant business, I could tell just by feeling it. Prehensile, I noticed. I swung it aroung to the front to take a better look at it.
"Sheer awesomeness" I remarked.
The thing's base was thicker than my upper arm, and it didn't thin out too quickly. The muscle in it was powerful, I could tell. It needed to be. To hold up what was on the end of it, anything would need a good bit of muscle.
"Dang. Just call me morning-star-tail."
Attached to the bulky wonder that was my tail was, of all things, a great big ball of something black (bone?) with off-white and slightly blunt spikes jutting out. And it was hard. And heavy. But my tail seemed to just swing it around like nothing.
I moved up my back a bit more in my investigations. Sprouting out of the back, to be exact, out of 2 spots on either side of the backbone, below the tips of my shoulderblades, were two magnificent wings, their membrane a rich purple. Funny I didn't notice them before, as now they were outstretched, and would certainly not have fit into the tree, as their wingspan was longer than my height, even.
'I guess they just fold up,' I thought.
With a bit of difficulty, as I had never operated wings before(hands up, everybody who has), I folded them flat against my back, and I could barely notice them from then on.
'Mental note, try to train yourself with your 3 extra limbs.'
All along my back, there were a series of spikes, triangular things that were slightly curved downwards going from the top of my head to the club at my tail, varying in sizes.
I decided that I would look at my face in the nearest reflective surface, so I wouldn't have any doubts as to how I looked. I tried to be quiet and listened for any sound of water. All of a sudden, I could hear things quite a bit more clearly as I felt some movement on the sides of my head. Evidently I had some sort of moveable ears.
A small trickling sound came from my left. I turned, trying to verify it.
"Well, might as well get there as fast as possible," I reasoned, and so I started to run towards the sound. *WHUMP*
".......Ouch."
I had somehow crashed into a tree a couple of seconds after starting to run. A tree that I knew was farther away than I thought.
"Whazzat?" I muttered, detaching myself from the tree and stumbling around. I examined my brake, heavily disguised as an inoffensive tree. It looked no worse for wear.
'Heck, someone might even think it's a new form of art to have a dragon's outline sunk into a tree.'
I continued my search for water, at a slower jog.
"Brain, take note," I said to myself. "Crashing into stuff hurts. Hurt bad."
About 8 tree crashes later, I arrived at a small spring. A trickling stream slowly poured into it, and it was a wonder I had even heard it in the first place. I took a few sips and observed my face in a tranquil space of the pool.
"Well, I'm not fully ugly. Maybe a bit intimidating at first glance, but not really ugly. Actually, I look pretty darn cool!"
My head had an unusual form. The snout was short and slightly wide and had a mostly hard surface, except near the bulk of the head, where my cheeks were, and the lips, which were soft. The overall form was crocodile-like, having a slightly flat part of the head directly over the body and a good-sized, but not very long, snout coming from this.
The snout was bulky and hard, with 2 spikes rather like short rhino horns at the end, near the nostrils, the one farthest from the eyes a tad bit longer than the other and both slightly blunt. My ears were interesting, almost like fins on a fish, moving depending on where I wanted to hear almost as if they had a mind of their own.
I opened my mouth and looked inside. There were two rows of teeth lining my gums, and a perfectly normal tongue in between. I closed my mouth and took another look at my face. My old gray eyes. Same as they always were, a sort of combination between green and blue but mostly a stormy grey. The nostrils were mere holes at the near end of the snout, but I noticed that they had a separate channel from the mouth, theoretically joining in the throat.
"Sweet." I spread my wings out to their full capacity and held the pose, the purple leather of the wings going well with the green scales that surrounded me. "Okay. What was before was sweet. This is officially epic."
I couldn't resist. I gave a slow, evil chuckle, glaring into the pool, as if I was the most evil thing in the world.
"MUA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAAAA!"
I'm pretty sure I scared the metaphorical socks off of the water.
I grinned at myself for a minute, but as time went on, I dropped my smile and stared at my reflection.
"This is too real for a dream."
Honestly, I felt kinda crushed. I knew how to know if I was dreaming, reality checks and just the lack of fuzziness when I thought about it. Lucid dreaming was a sort of a thing I trained myself to detect. I wasn't dreaming.
I looked upwards, dazed and confused.
"Where is this...?"
Heck, I had a life. And it was a pretty darn decent life too. Sure, I wasn't some boy genius, I wasn't immensely popular, but I had friends, I was known as a smart guy, I got good grades... And all of a sudden some cosmic force decides to rip out my thoughts and put them in a dragon? What's up with that? I shook my head, trying to think logically and not start bawling or something.
'If there's a way here, there might be a way back,' I thought to myself.
"I'm gonna need to learn a bit more. What other abilities do I have? What exactly is this world? It might be dangerous, I do have the body of a dragon, so I might have need for it. Also, I have less detail and an outline, for goodness sakes. What is this, a cartoon, or something? Who are the sentient inhabitants of this planet? What am I going to say to them? How should I act? What should I call myself?"
I decided to give the last question more thought.
'What should I call myself?'
I scratched at my head in thought, but somehow managed to scrape off some of my scales.
"Okaaaaaay... That was wierd. Do I have a bald spot now or something?"
Close inspection revealed no change in the state of my head, so I tried with other scales. With barely any effort, I removed a scale from the back of my hand, and I found another scale beneath it. That was weird. I tapped on my arm, and something there shocked me. Each time I tapped, the smaller scales in that area would somehow fuse together, or at least cluster closer. I jabbed a claw into my forearm, or rather tried to, but the scale mail that formed was too hard for my claw to penetrate, albeit I hadn't used much force.
'Wow. I wonder if I can do that on cue.'
I looked at my wrist, and willed the scales to merge. Concentrating hard worked, and I pulled out the enlarged scale.
"Wow, if it wasn't for how thin it was, I'd say it looks good for skipping."
I stepped back a few paces and almost mockingly tossed it like a frisbee at the water. To my amazement, it didn't touch the water. Rather, with the force of my throw, it spun into the air and boomeranged back at me. *CLANG*
"......Ouch... again." I picked up the scale, which had betrayed me and hit my skull, and held it up. It suddenly dissolved.
"I think... I'll call myself... Scales."
That's all for chapter 1, and I hope you all enjoy it. Hopefully, our scaly friend will make some contact with the ponies next chapter. It won't be long.