//------------------------------// // 5 In Which A Shocking Revelation Occurs // Story: Our Not So Simple Plan // by WolfmanWhite //------------------------------// Half an hour later, I was driving down the A483. My plan was to drive up through Chester and on to Manchester. It should take about an hour of driving to get to the Airport, give or take my handicapped driving ability. I had thought more than once that I should have searched for a disability car, before remembering that no, I'd decided that I was going to use this car so that's what I was going to do. I was committed. The black and white cat stared at me from it’s new position on the dashboard. It was named Sox, after my Nan’s old cat. Sox was about 3 years old when he showed up in my Nan’s backyard on my 7th birthday. I had spent a lot of time with her in my youth, my family was always too busy to pick me up from work and she lived just down the road. Probably spent most of my youth in that big cold house. While Sox lived at my Nan’s house, it was always agreed that he was my cat. He’d spit and hiss at anyone who came close, but spent every moment he could curled up in my lap, purring all the while. He looked a lot like Beth, which filled me with regret. I should have taken her with me. Either way. A good few years ago, nature did it’s thing and one of my scant childhood friends left me behind. “Just like everybody else.” I muttered to myself. Yeah, keep feeling sorry for yourself. It’s what you’re good at. At this stage, the Queen CD had given way to Hammer To Fall. An under-rated song often thought to be about the inevitably nuclear end of the cold war. Well Freddie, humanity ended. It just wasn’t the way you expected. The countryside rolled green as the carriageway cut through fields to reach England. Not too far away was the rather long bridge over the Dee Valley. In the distance, the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct stood proud across the gap. Built around 210 years ago in the middle of the industrial revolution, it ranked as a national heritage site and a point of pride for Wales. In that moment, as I crossed the bridge, I wondered just how long it was going to survive without anyone around to maintain it. Not long. You’re probably the last Welsh speaker on the planet, you twpsyn. You’re barely fluent. The language is going to die with you. The last surviving piece of Welsh culture is going to be a useless, anxiety ridden failure. Pressure built just above my eyes, pressing against my skull. I squeezed my eyes shut and slammed on the brakes. It was already dangerous to brake on a bridge but thankfully there was no oncoming traffic to worry about, so the car rolled to a stop uneventfully. Breathe in. Count to three. Breathe out. Come on, you’ll never get out of here at this rate. You need to focus on the task at hand. You’re never this bad, White. A little something like the end of the world shouldn’t get you so upset. I opened my eyes. I’d veered slightly into the oncoming lane, but that wasn’t an issue anymore. So I had that going for me, which was nice. Just slightly off in the distance at the end of the bridge was the sign proclaiming a welcome to Cheshire, England. I bonked my head on the steering wheel, electing a chirpy honk, before leaning back in my seat and gazing hazily at the rear-view mirror. The sign proclaiming “Croeso I Cymru” was about a hundred feet behind me, the Welsh flag stencilled below it as a blurry red blob. As I focused more on the flag, something inside me clicked. The door flew open as I jumped out and sprinted to the sign. What would have taken me thirty seconds before took me upwards of a minute to scurry up to the sign. I stared at it. The red dragon stared back. I continued to stare at it. It stared back awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable about this situation. I touched it, to make sure it was real. It was. I touched myself, to make sure I was real. I was. “Oh shit.” I said flatly. “I’m a fucking dragon.” A minute later, I had scooted myself back into the driver’s seat of the Rolls. As I went about my pre-driving ritual of balancing my stilts on the pedals I couldn’t help but think on the revelation I had just experienced. The idea was kinda farfetched all things considered, but it did make a strange kind of sense. I may not have wings or be terribly fearsome, but I could most certainly breathe fire. After holding my arm up to the stencil confirmed I was the same coloration it made me even more certain. y ddraig coch. The red dragon. Me. THE Welsh dragon. The mere thought made me swell with pride. The car lurched forward as it beetled its way over the bridge into England. I wound down the drivers window, stuck out my head and shouted at the top of my lungs, Queen blaring from the radio. “I’M A FUCKIN’ DRAGON SON! WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” The horn tootled in triumph as I cleared the bridge and entered Cheshire. It’d be a long time before I saw home again. Approximately one hour later, it occurred to me that I had not eaten a single thing since this whole business started and that traditionally eating was something I needed to do to ensure my continued existence. Shortly afterwards, I turned off the motorway and entered a service station. The motorways served as the arteries of the entire country, so naturally they needed places where people could cram fast food down their gullets and clog their own arteries with cheeseburgers. The building was a large 80’s plasticy affair, with a connecting tunnel linking the two buildings across the motorway. It had clearly put it’s glory days behind it and would probably collapse sooner than the Aqueduct, but this is one piece of human culture I don’t think anybody would wholly miss unless they were particularly attached to lukewarm coffee. After a tense moment with the petrol pumps, I managed to get the car fueled up. A “No Smoking” sign loomed accusingly above me, which I did my best to ignore. The petrol tank was filled and the car was sated. Now it was my turn. I was under the impression these places never closed, but sure enough the sliding glass doors refused to open. A brick through one of the doors soon changed its mind and I gained entry. Most of the service areas were gated off, which irritated me. I had chosen this service station because I wanted to gorge myself on McDonald's fries but the place was locked up, sure as sure. The only place that was open was the convenience store, which had its gate half-raised. It was enough for a normally sized person to duck under and I found it a little embarrassing that I could stroll under it unimpeded. The welsh dragon shouldn’t be so tiny! I also noticed that the light was on inside the store. Clearly someone was still inside it when the event hit. A copy of the early edition of the newspaper and a long cold coffee confirmed it. The Prime Minister grinned back at me like some kind of enormous waste of space from the front page of the paper as I checked around. Someone had definitely been in here. That much was certain. There was no sign of their body at all, no clothes. No keys. Nothing. A lot of doors were going to be missing their keys now. Which meant a lot of breaking and entering. Not that I minded, I was getting quite good at it now. I helped myself to a few chilled pastries that were packaged up and ready to eat. The first was a chicken curry pastry slice which I sniffed hesitantly. I’d always found these things too spicy for my tastes. But hey. I was a dragon now. How bad can spice be? I bit into it. “….NGGGAAGH!” Apparently I’m still a little bitch, dragon or not. A small amount of smoke emanated from my nostrils in complaint. I abandoned the half-eaten curry pastry and tried an old favourite. You could never go wrong with a sausage roll. Upon biting into it, it tasted better than I had expected. I normally preferred the things cooked instead of cold, but it tasted just like it had been freshly oven baked. I watched the smoke from my nose trail upwards to the tiled ceiling and wondered. It made sense after all, I must have some form of biological furnace inside of me. It only made sense that it’d be capable of cooking my food as I ate it. Of course this ruled ice cream out of the potential food equation, which made me pout. A distressing thought occurred. If I cooked food as I ate it, was I still capable of drinking? A liberated bottle of water from the stores cooler helped me test the results. I could certainly drink just fine, though water was going to taste lukewarm to me forever. On the plus side, the smoke from my nostrils had turned into steam vapor I could blow rings with. A bottle of coke helped me test things further. It certainly tasted a lot different now and left a horrible taste in my mouth. The best guess I could come up with was a little bit of the drink had caramelized and lined the inside of my mouth. I wondered just how badly alcohol would react to my new biology and decided that now wasn’t the place to test it out. After eating my fill of various pastries, sandwiches and bags of crisps I left the service station a little messier than when I found it. It was all going to rot eventually anyway, cleaning up would have been an exercise in futility. The Rolls had been waiting patiently while I conducted my science experiments. It was mid-morning, and I wanted to hit the airport by midday. The car trundled out of the station and hit the motorway once again. I used to zip down this road at around 50 and 60 miles per hour in my old, beat up clio. This prime beast of engineering was only going at 30 miles an hour maximum and it was really quite a sad display, watching it slouch along like an apathetic tortoise. The sun was high in the sky as I passed through Chester, it’s roman walls and beautiful storybook architecture glinting back at me. It was another beautiful day. Chester should have been rife with life, teeming from everyone from holiday makers to street sweepers. It’s streets were dead, just like Wrexham, with only the skittering of litter in the wind to show any sign of movement. I had never intended to stick around the place for long. Manchester was still several hours out but something inside of me made me stop and look, probably for old times sake. Wrexham was a boring down in an anti-fun deadzone. I remember Lightfox trying to find a card-game or comic book store for me to hang around in when I was depressed, but he discovered a perfect bubble around my town. No comic book stores, no tabletop stores, no Magic. Nothing. The closest stores were in Chester and I occasionally felt social enough to hang around there. My haunts were all locked up tight, with no method of entry sans crowbar or brick. I peered through the windows of the Games Workshop I frequented and saw their display models staring back at me. Well painted Warlord Titans and Tyranid Hive Tyrants sat in their cases and just beyond them, a large table full of Imperial Guardsmen. Over five hundred individual models, all painted far better than I ever could. My Guardsmen were congealing together slowly in my attic back home, never to be played with again. I drove past Laserquest, the local laser-tag joint. I had a few birthdays in that backlit, fog-machined warehouse. The faces changed over the years. Always few and disinterested. Friends tended not to stick around. The only things they wanted were free pizza and my videogames. Still. In those short times, I was surrounded by people I thought cared about me. I was happy. I clenched my jaw and a metallic plink sounded as the drillbit I had been gnawing on was bitten in two. That single bit had lasted me almost two days. As a replacement toothpick, it filled the gap and then some. I set about patting myself down looking for the big box of bits I had scrounged from the DIY store back home. I flicked a fresh one into my mouth and gave a tentative nibble. The same electric tingle taste the last bit had, along with… something else? It tasted almost like mint, except almost ten times as refreshing. It made my tastebuds sing. My eyes grew wider and my breathing heavier as I continued to gnaw on this singular drillbit. What was this?! Was it coated in some kind of poison? Some kind of mineral oil? I fished around my bag for the box again, upending it right there in the street as the bits went flying. I scratched around for the plastic package the bit had came in, cracking the case in my tense talon-like grip. Durabit Stainless Steel Drillbits. Diamond tipped. Diamond tipped. I ripped the bit out of my mouth with much effort, fighting my body the whole way. I was a boring kid, I had never done drugs at all, or anything similar to them. But now, I suddenly knew how they felt. I squinted at the tip of the bit. Diamond glinted back at me. I spent a few minutes staring at the bit, contemplating it. The urge to stick it back in my mouth was unreal. Why did it taste so good? ydych yn draig, wrth gwrs mae'n blasu'n dda. I was a dragon, or I thought I was. Maybe that had something to do with it? Could it be that my new physiology was geared more towards gemstones and minerals than actual food? There was a jewelry store nearby, perhaps that held some answers… A brick cascaded through the storefront glass of Precious Things, a local jewelers and watchmaker. A moment later, I squeezed my way through the small hole it had made in it’s path. I was beginning to grow reliant on my scaly armor, trusting it to soak up the worst of any damage I took. In fact, upon hitting the floor I examined myself. Even crawling through several buildings worth of glass my scales were almost pristine with only the dullest of marks to show they had been scratched. Looking closer, I could see the sheeny coat had already re-covered some of my older scratchmarks. I suppose my scales healed naturally over time, like my fingernails used to. Wait a moment, fingernails? I reached out and traced my talons across the glass. I was rewarded with an earsplitting shriek of cutting glass. How the hell did the cat-burglars get away with it in the movies?! That noise was deafening! It made me gnash my teeth, but sure enough I could cut the glass with my fingertips. I carefully facepalmed. There was never any need to use crowbars or bricks or anything of the sort after all. I flexed my fingers and gazed at my claws clinking together. At the very least, I supposed it was quieter than a brick through a window. I would really have to be careful. It’d be so typical of me to poke myself in the eye and blind myself, though that also got me wondering about how shielded my eyes were. I was assuming I’d either be flying or digging or whatever at some point, a stressful activity that would result in debris and grit in my eyes. Surely I’d have some form of protective layer over them? Only time would tell, since I was certainly not brave enough to test that theory out by myself. I gathered my wits and began taking in my surroundings. Precious Things was a relatively small, local jewelers, but even it had many, many cases full of various gems and jewels. I salivated unconsciously as I set about them. I started cutting cases left and right, clumsily slicing through them with my claws. Several times I slipped, my fist going through the glass and adding it’s alarm to the cacophony of the alarm outside. The first thing I sampled was a ruby, set into a gold ear-ring. The gold was inedible by my standards, or at least it was in it’s current state. Thankfully it was weak enough for me to bite the gem out with ease. The ruby fizzled on my tongue, tasting very similar to strawberry glucose, like a flavored candy ring, if it were somehow mixed with meth or something. The small gem was nowhere near enough to sate my appetite, and five more soon followed it. It felt as it my tongue was popping and fizzing with all the flavor. Diamonds tasted like mint, as was already established by the drill bits. Rubies were vaguely strawberry flavored. Emeralds tasted like apples. Quartz tasted like sugar, almost flat out. Those were the first few I tasted. There were many more, but their tastes were drowned out in the hurricane of ecstasy I found myself in. I gorged myself on every single item in the store, spitting out piles of chewed up gold and broken watches. I couldn’t control myself. I had never, ever experienced a need like this before. The need to consume it all. Pressure was building just slightly higher than my stomach and before I knew it, I erupted flame. Flame far bigger and stronger than any of my previous gouts spewed forth from my mouth, almost invisible to my eye except for the sheer eye watering heat. In that moment, I felt like a spaceship igniting its burners. It lasted for what felt like an eternity, a good, solid minute. The torrent of heat eventually came to a trickle, until finally it was quelled with nothing but a series of smokey burps remaining. The storefront wasn’t on fire, mostly because that implied that there was anything left to burn. Everything, from the brick walls, the plate glass and the wooden showcases was just gone. The wood had vanished, not even leaving a trace of ash. The glass and brick had melted into a congealing pile of molten slag. A small cooling sensation lapped at my feet. Looking down I could see the liquefied remains of the discarded gold pile pooling around the room. I stared in amazement, trying to exclaim my disbelief but all that came out was more smoke filled hiccups. My throat was raw and I wasn’t sure a bag of losanges could even come close to fixing it. My coughing and spluttering sounded like Wolf, He Who Gargles Gravel. The subsequent gigglefit of that thought turned into yet more coughing and spluttering. “D-...damn.” The break-room of Precious Things contained a thankfully still operating sink, which I proceeded to stick my head under until I could hear the scales around my mouth pinging from the change in temperature. I wasn’t even sure I had a tongue until I sluiced some water around my mouth. It was there alright, apparently made of tougher stuff than my old one. Spitting out the water, I noticed it was soot black. I guessed that the heat charred the insides good, but careful probing revealed no pain in the slightest. Well duh. It was built to vomit out this stuff. You could probably gargle lava. D-don’t gargle lava though. That would be bad. Flopping on my back, I felt the adrenaline die down. HOLY SHIT THAT WAS SO COOL.