Sage of Harmony (Season 2)

by Eon Seb

Run it's Spikezilla

Dragon instincts: Excerpt from a Study of Dragons by Midnight Void.

Hoarding is the most basic and dangerous of all dragon instincts. Hoarding is a hormonal reaction in young dragons to protect what they consider important. It's basic point was to make a dragon protecting their treasure stronger than whatever was trying to take it. Thus, the more they have to protect, the stronger they get. In a normal dragon family, the child or children’s hoard is carefully monitored by the parents to prevent their bodies from growing faster than their brains are ready to handle. Which is where the stories of dragons as monsters come from.

Most dragons see very few things (such as gold and gems) valuable enough to fight over, making true hoarding very controllable.

However for one dragon in Ponyville, this was not the case.

Midnight was currently helping the guard maintain order during the evacuation. For simplicity, they were having everypony slide into Pinkie’s party cave/ bunker where she had everything set up to wait out the current crisis. Spike was currently toppling buildings and was in the size range of an ursa minor. This was confusing Midnight as he should have been the size of Big Mac at the largest.

Fortunately, She had a surefire method to get him out of town.

Once everyone was safe, she ran to the forest entrance and pulled out 2 gems: Spike's fire ruby and the ocean sapphire she had gotten for him.

They had wound up on the bottom of his junk pile rather than as the main ingredients to his birthday dinner.

“Okay if his instincts as a gem collector still hold, these should be the most valuable things in town to him right now. But just to be safe,”

She scraped the gems together creating a noise somewhere between yowling cats and nails on a chalkboard.

Spike was confused. He smelled food, but all the tiny ponies had ran away. Thus, the only way he could get to anything was by tearing down walls.

Then he heard something horrid. What was making that racket? There, by the forest, was the tiny wood pony who had two of his gems!

Midnight knew immediately she had succeeded because she had to run for her life. The forest was going to take a hit for this but since Spike had dropped everything he was holding to chase her all she had to do was keep him wasting energy and he would go back to normal without a nearby hoard to protect, eventually.

What followed was best described as the plot of a bad monster movie as Spike tore through the forest trying to find his gems resulting in crushed timber wolves, cracked cragodiles , manticores involuntarily achieving upper atmosphere flight. Deeper and deeper they ran, culminating in Spike getting in a truly epic fist fight with a recognizable Ursa and a pissed off hydra. In fact, it ended up being a fight that would make any professional wrestling fan proud. Spike managed to win despite getting clothes-lined, drop-kicked, choke-held, pile-driven, body-slammed, suplexed and generally double-teamed constantly (though, in all fairness, with the obvious exception of the double-teaming, Spike WAS actually giving BETTER than he got).

All told, it took 9 hours to wear Spike out and, by that point, over an acre of the forest had been flattened.

While Twilight was making sure Spike was properly asleep and mourning the damage to her forest, the townsfolk had already started repairs. They were unsurprisingly adept at this as high levels of property damage were common (to the point of the town having an annual budget set aside with fundraising plans set up should it be exceeded in a given year).

The next day

Spike woke up with a pounding headache, vaguely wondering if this was what a hangover felt like (and making a mental note to never drink alcohol so he would never have to find out). He tried to get up like normal only to flail around and fall back on his front claws. This shocked him enough to notice some things.

1: he was outside, in the Everfree if he was not mistaken.

2. His legs were longer and more equal in size. As such, it was a lot harder to maintain his preferred upright posture.

He tried to remember what happened, earlier? Yesterday? But he came up with blurs and images of very tiny ponies “I don’t remember visiting Berry.”

Midnight showed up at that moment, but either she had shrunk (a distinct possibility with her plant based biology) or he had grown quite a bit. She hoofed him something which he quickly recognized as one of Zecora's potions which had been affectionately named wake up juice. After his head cleared she spoke "Well I have good news and bad news, the good news is you finally got your growth spurt. Congratulations on reaching adult size, Spike."

Spike's eyes bugged out.

'That's why everything changed" -He then realized that with an adult body, learning to walk upright again was going to take hours of practice to help his muscles re-learn that posture again, and not risk tearing them or losing his balance. "So what's the bad news?"

Midnight smiled, but it was very fake. "You have to help rebuild the parts of town you destroyed in a hoarding based rage."

As far as the town is concerned, it was the same as when Berry over-indulges or Derpy got carried away. In other words, it was just a fact of life. But, following that same logic, the one responsible for the damage was expected to help repair it as much as they were able after the fact.

Spike sighed, "This is going to take a long time, right?"

"Yep. So let's go, the faster we start the faster we get done."

When construction is done, finally:

Midnight stood in front of the town. Every pony had gathered in the meeting hall for her lesson on dragons.

"Thank you all for coming. Now to start I will explain the basis of dragons in general. All dragons, regardless of type or age, feed off of gems and crystals to survive. As dragons age and their core supply of magic grows, they will be able to survive longer and longer on a single meal. Adult dragons can go days on a single pure gem and last even longer through extended hibernation."

Here, she brought up two pictures: one of Spike in his current form and one of the red dragon who had been napping in the mountains a few months back.

"As you can see, the only major difference between these two physically is size and the fact that one dragon has wings and the other doesn't.

Some similarities include a diet of gems, a desire to hoard, incredible strength and a life span which has never been fully recorded by ponies (some dragons have even been around since before Celestia and Luna ascended).

Magically, on the other hoof, Spike is a gem collector; a group of dragons who are more native to Zebrica or Austrilaroo. They have an internal fire which, combined with their connection to the earth, allows them to burrow quickly and easily through the hardest earth and stone."

This ability had come in quite handy during reconstruction. Spike was able to carve out brick faster than some of the masonry ponies once he got the hang of it and could stop his claws from tearing up the ground.

"Fire drakes, as their name implies, are able to use their fire externally to devastating effect and due to having a connection to the sky (rather than the earth), have wings so that they can fly."-

This was basic biology in Equestria. All creatures with the ability to fly had a connection to the magic of the sky which gave them aid to achieve liftoff and maintain proper flight. Granted, there WERE some creatures that have wings but lack the ability to fly, but these usually fell into two groups:

Some groups of creatures who can't fly despite having wings simply lack the biology.

Other groups have bodies so large they could not fly even with proper biology.

"Socially, the 2 groups differ as well. While the fire drake tends to be solitary or stay in small family units, the gem collectors tends to live in large subterranean communities, basically filling the same environmental spot as diamond dogs. Due to this closer knit social structure, their societies have a large communal hoard of common gems to use as food and smaller personal hoards of rarer and hard to find gems that each individual had collected. Conversely, fire drake hoards tend to be massive and protected with extreme prejudice. "

The lecture continued on from here, covering facts that Twilight had found in old books and learned from either Zecora or the older entities in the forest. It was, by far, the most complete and in- depth explanation of dragons anypony had ever collected. It even included social, magical, physical and emotional difference between the 2 main dragon types. This same information would later become a staple of study in the book "The Lords of Fire and Treasure a Study of Dragons" by the ghost writer Midnight Void

Comments

[Comickook]

Again, thanks very much for getting this up AND for letting me help with the editing. I really appreciate you going to the effort on both counts. Once again, splendid job on the action, humor and future chapter set-up in all the right places. I'll definitely be looking forward to more, but will be quite willing to be patient.