A young dragon spends a typical day in her old home/prison. And then, for better or worse, everything changed when the Zebras attacked.
Iris knows about the world. It's two-thousand steps wide and five thousand steps long, and it has a lot of food. She just came out of a nap, and there's screaming outside. It's really annoying, but she does what she's told by the angry pony, because she does not want to die or, even worse, get more medications than usual.
She also knows the world is a lot bigger beyond the walls, but her wings are too small to fly and it's really cold outside anyway. She could really use another nap, anyway, if only the stupid pony could shut up.
And then everything goes to hell, and Garble is trying his damnedest to hump her.
Twilight Sparkles Home for Dispossessed Dragons is a nigh-legendary place in the wastelands, if only because it has anti-air defenses, as befits its former position at containing large aggressive fire-breathing magical reptiles, but also because of it’s position near the realm most ponies know as the “Very Sharp Glowing Place With The Sharp And Glowing Ghouls That’s Also Very Irradiated And Still On Fire, Oh Goddesses Why Is Everything On Fire, Do You Think Canterlot Is Nice This Time Of Year”, formerly known as the Crystal Empire.
It is well known among treasure hunters, if only because it has all the hospitality of the Empire with the benefits of having a working electric fence that’s also invisible. There is said to be tunnels that go under it that are mostly free from irradiation, but few ponies have been in them and even fewer have managed to survive them. And of course, any pony that has reaped the treasures of such a facility would be unlikely to tell.
..........…..
Two hundred years ago, in the middle of the war, Twilight Sparkle did not come up with the idea to “rescue” young dragons that either fought in the war or were found by Equestrians in zebra lands to “re-educate” them.
It was actually a joint project funded by Moral, Peace, and Image.
Goldenblood might have been involved, but this is pre-war Equestria.
That’s a forgone conclusion.
It was first brought up in a rather minor meeting conducted by two middle-managing Peace workers regarding the discovery that Bleakbane, a rather nasty piece of work that was apparently a cousin to the then-rampant Brimstone, was actualy female, and was found to have been tending to a clutch of more than forty eggs not ten miles away from the Equestrian border.
Naturally, forty eggs were later found by an Equestrian ground support team, but urgent orders from Canterlot that came far too quickly for some ponies told them to destroy them.
They were not, of course.
Half the clutch was taken into Peace’s care. Out of those twenty, two were transported to varying places of study across the country, and two more were later “lost” in Hoofington.
Again, Goldenblood.
In general, the meeting between the two Ministry workers was never officially documented, as it was actualy more of a lukewarm conversation between a rather love-blind mare and a love-blinded stallion who was trying to send some hints of affection by striking up a conversation about how he helped, in his own words, “saved some baby dragons.”
It was, however, documented as a meeting by the Moral agent who was watching the whole thing from a wandering Sprite-Bot.
It was later sent for review to another Moral agent, where it was lost for six months and was promptly forgotten about by everyone involved, as the stallion later found himself in Hoofington, Hightower to be precise, while the mare quickly found herself in Maripony.
Guess where she ended up in?
After two home invasions and an incident involving an exploding pumpkin, the papers suddenly found themselves inside the personal files of a Image paper-pusher, who later presented it to a friend of hers who worked in Peace.
It was eventually presented in a bi-monthly meeting between the local Ministry Hub reps in Manehatten, after which the basic idea presented within it, the creation of a “dragon orphanage” was refined to a more acceptable form as a “tax-deducible dragon orphanage”, and was eventually greenlighted by the council present.
The area around the Crystal Empire was chosen for the site, not only because of it’s extreme distance away from Zebra lands, but also because of it having a plentiful supply of, well, tasty crystals.
Image loved the general idea of having cutesy wootsy baby dragons making appearances in there posters and flyers, Peace loved it because it was Peace, and Moral loved it because baby dragons had the perfect head size to experiment with varying memory-altering magical items without requiring pony test subjects, which required messy forms.
And, er, it was good for moral. Yes, that too.
To sum it up, it was a public success right until the original batch of dragons housed in the facility hatched.
Two workers outright vanished from the public record after the fact, while another dozen or so were permanently put of out work by virtue of having baby dragon sized bite marks taken out of them.
As it turned out, Bleakbane was of a distinctly different dragonic breed than the ones ponykind was familiar with, as her entire brood, as it was later discovered, spewed acid and were born with wings, but were furthermore born with very sharp teeth.
After much of the original funding was cut, the staff at the state of the art facility was halved, much like the number of dragons that was left after local forces subdued and slayed when nessisarly.
The "patients" were mostly kept dazed and confused, with fitted there keepers fine. After all, they got most of there money by quietly letting ponies of presumably dark nature “examine” them during hours that were usually kept only by Luna’s Royal Guard.
Most of those ponies worked for another pony who's name sounded like "Moldencrud".
In the end, more than two-hundred dragons went into Twilight Sparkles Home for Dispossessed Dragons, and less than fifty survived there first six months of there stay. No more eggs were ever recovered by the Equestrians out in the field, and most of the teenagers subdued by them were either too eager to fight or simply tried to force themselves into a dragon-sleep to pass the time. Only one dragonling out of Bleakbanes brood survived, and she, a female known as Dragon #29, also known as Dursi The Slickscaled, managed to flee the by then descript building a few minutes after the end of the world.
Out of those fifty, only twelve were alive by the end of the world. The staff by then was bedraggled and generally underpaid and overworked. Even Moral rarely bothered them by then, and the two-dozen ponies who were on regular payroll by then were embittered by there failed attempts in helping what they saw as young, down on there luck teenagers who were on the wrong, usually fatal path in life.
This story is about a young thing who is just starting to know her place in the world, and falsely thinks that she has a bright future ahead.
....…..
She is a lithe, shy looking speciman, with scales that could be reasonably be called grey-green and with a neat little row of brown spikes running down her spine, and gifted with long, slender limbs and a face that could be called attractive, even to a pony. Standing up, she would be a little taller than six feet, a decent size for a dragoness who just awoke from her first real dragon-nap.
...........
In essance, this is the story of one of those teenagers.
This is the story about her last day alive prior to the end of the world.
"Can't you ponies get some meat in here?" Iris whined.
For the fifteenth time that day, the doughy mare with overdone makeup behind the five-inch glass panel that separated her room from the main hallway made a disgusted sound and went back to reading some pony gossip magazine.
"Please? I know there are some sheep nearby. I saw them last month when we got that free day outside. Please, just one? They don't talk, right?" Iris continued, laying on her stomach on the flat concrete slab that took up half the room she was in that counted as a 'bed' as according to government standards.
The fat green winged pony, after huffing lightly, actually threw her little clump of plastic at the glass panel ineffectually and began cursing at her. Whatever she was saying was muffled by the glass, but Iris was sure that at least one insult against her maidenhood was involved.
Iris, in retaliation, forced herself up into a standing position and tried to look intimidating. She got a little bit of satisfaction from the pony's startled little scream, but she herself flinched when a great booming sound echoed down the hall and even rattled the thick glass slightly. Needless to say, the little green pony started running the opposite direction.
The dragoness frowned. The only other one's left in the place who had the gut's to cause something now, after the last round of liquidation that did in Razorwing, were Garble and Vorator. And if Garble was still recovering from the tranquilizers they put in his food last week, than that meant Vorator was trying to break out. She shuddered. The huge brown dragon wasn't the same after he visited the Zebra capital, coming back all quiet and solemn and, shockingly enough, serious. The fact he changed his name from Stoneback was enough evidence for her to believe that the Zebras did some sort of mind-altering experiment on the poor guy.
Regardless, out of everyone she knew, the thickly built drake was the last one she expected to mature, let alone become completive. Even worse, possibly, was the fact that he actually fought Garble for dominance, nearly won, and simply gave up when he was nearly dead. And then, of course, he told them about the fact that the zebra's would give them an adult’s weight in gold if they assisted fighting the ponies in there little war.
Sighing, Iris got as compfy as she could in the concrete bed and thought about when she screwed up in life. It seemed simple enough, really. Leave the cave, see the drakes, have fun, and find a chunk of land that wasn't owned by an adult and live there, and repeat the part with the drakes until she found a winner.
It sounded decent in practice, until she found that the biggest group of males in the area that hadn't fled elsewhere were a bunch of assholes, and the few individual's who were decent were the other females she came along with to the traditional meeting place who were, of course, utterly smitten with the brutes. Of course, she had the luck to be all but chosen by the utter prick known as Garble, who, to her dismay, also happened to be the one drake all the other drakes followed nigh-mindlessly.
After her own less then satisfying Great Dragoness Migration, life became a grey blur of constant travel and petty infighting, with her on the outskirts of all the conflicts. Garble's little gang of a dozen or so dragons slowly whittled to just five, not including her. Ending up as the only female of the group was a event she found oddly satisfying, with the other dragons never saying one word against her, on the off chance Garble was in hearing range.
That was another thing. Garble acted odd around her. It was clear to her within the first five seconds of meeting him that he was the model for the type of drake her mother explicitly said to cull for the sake of dragonkind everywhere, as he looked at other creatures with either vague acceptance of existance,explict loathing, or lust, as his interactions with other males in his little gang, other males not in his gang and everything else that could form a complete sentence, and female dragons showed. However, he got almost focused when he looked at her, like she was a baby animal that was separated from her mother. That scared her to no end, and she dearly hoped that she wouldn't have to deal with him if he got the urge to act on his ideas, which were presumably rapey in nature.
Sighing, Iris crawled off the bed on all fours and began to walk aimlessly on the hard metallic floor, flapping her wings lightly. They were smallish, yes, but they were big enough to fly with, which was enough for her to be considered responsible for her actions. Then again, that just reminded her why she was in this hellhole anyway.
It was Vorator's fault, mostly. He showed up one day nearly a year after leaving the gang out of the blue, and after beating the living crap out of Garble he said he had an idea for him. Of course, at first he was upset at being told what to do, but after a while he got used to the idea that joining the zebras was his idea, and was satisfied by that. There were seven of the gang left by then, but the seventh one, a black scaled one named Slipas, ended up on the wrong side of a Roc and presumably got eaten. Presumably, of course, because everyone fled like hell after the big bird swooped down on them and all but brained him with a single talon. Really, in hindsight, they shouldn't have been in that range of hills, but the gang was heading though zebra lands already and there was no other option but to pass it by, which meant almost no goats to eat, which would mean we would have had to risk eating Zebra, which long since stopped being a option when they started shooting at things that looked like they could kill them.
To make a long story short, Iris half-thought, amusing herself by tearing at the metal with her pinkie claw, they all fought some ponies, got shot down, or, she thought, a little blush forming on her cheeks, surrendered, and they were promptly bound, put under with some potion or another, and shipped seemingly across the country to the little slice of Tartarus she was in. As far as she knew, it was down to her, Garble, and Vorator. Whitebreath, the odd albino one with the raspy voice, got shot when he tried to bite a pony in half, Slinkshift, the odd nerdy dragon with the hair, had a reaction to a drug that caused his brain to get messed up to the point his eyes were looking in different directions, to which the pony response was to have him put down like a animal, and poor Rainbreath. That poor blue-scaled bastard got the worst send off of them all.
He got chosen for one of the night time inspections by that group of ponies who never showed up anytime else and always carried a few crates full of drugs. No one knew what they did, exactly, but she once talked to one of the youngest one's in the center, a little grey drake named Stormscale who looked like he barely hatched a few years ago, swore he saw several carts trailing black objects in and out of the center. He clearly didn't know what he was seeing, but going from what he said, they clearly were coming from Rainbreaths room. She couldn't know for sure if the little drake was telling the truth, but everyone was up that night, considering the shear volume of his screams. She never heard anything scream that loud before, besides Garble in one of his rages and the Roc that killed Silpas.
However, Iris's grim reminiscing of the past was interrupted by a tapping on the glass. Groaning, she lifted her head off the ground, and blinked slowly. On the other side was a pony she had yet to see in the facility, which was surprising, considering how many were apparently leaving because of the supposed risks. To her further surprise, she took out a set of keys and shakily opened the door on the far right of the room. Getting up, Iris saw that the purple pony with the green hair had almost no signs of age or regret most of the other ponies wore on there faces like perverse badges of honor.
When the pony took a position near the far end of the room after shutting the door, Iris was shocked to not see any sort of protection on her, not even the standered tazer everyone else wore on there sides.
"You got guts coming in here without any protection, pony." she said slowly, trying her best to sound slightly intimidating. She personally believed she failed.
The pony, as expected, looked slightly scared when she looked up to meet my gaze, but shakes her head.
"No, I just need to...well...you are Nm. 45, right?" she said almost confidently.
Iris looked at the pony with suspicion. She was one of the one's without horns, which usually meant they were not one of the doctors, but rather one of the security forces. But this one didn't look as tough as the ones who were part of them, and more importantly she hardly looked threatening.
"Yes, but my name is Iris."
She nodded, and to Iris's surprise did not dismiss the last part of her sentence.
"Okay, Iris, my name is Fragrance, and you are leaving now." she said, shattering her expectations in a few simple words.
Trembling, Irises knees nearly buckled. "You mean, it's...there really are bombs that can blow up whole cities?"
The pony, whose name was apparently Fragrance, nodded. "Yes, it there is, and one is heading here soon."
Iris sat down on the floor, uncertain of her ability to stand. "Well, shouldn't there be a warning...an alarm or something?" she questioned. Then her senses took control. "Why are you telling me? Shouldn't you be running away?" she accused.
The pony looked hurt at that, and frowned slightly. "If you must know, I was going to give this place an inspection, but as it turns out the pony in charge flew away half a hour ago without alerting the staff. Also-"
Outside the glass, the lights in the halls turned red, which was basically code for a break out. Someone roared, and the faint warble of a screech echoed throughout the building.
Wincing, the mare tried to put a hoof on Iris's shoulder, but ended up touching the small of her left arm. She shifted slightly at the new, unexpected, and unappreciated gesture.
"I read your record, and you seem to be the only one with little history of violence. I need your assistance to get out of here." Fragrance said pleadingly.
Iris, however, was slightly more concerned with the noise outside. "Who is that? Did you let someone free?"
The pony let out a little exasperated sigh. "Yes, number 29. Now, will you please assist me in return for what I have done?"
Iris raised a scaled ridge. Number 29, or Dursi, also known as Slickscale, was a mean bitch who could spit acid and looked more like a overgrown serpent with wings and legs added on as a afterthought than a normal dragon. Furthermore, she was in the highest security part of the building.
"Your not from here, pony. Where are you from?"
Fragrance gave Iris a tired look, before trotting to the door and opening it.
Only to immediately shut it to escape being roasted by a burst of dragonfire.
Scrambling to the back for the room, Fragrance suppressed a glare at Iris and faked a smile. "If I am correct, dragons are resistant to each other's flame, yes?"
Iris simply opened the door without answering, and without looking back, began walking down the hallway freely for the first time in nearly a year, ignoring the panicked shrieks coming from either direction or the red lighting. In fact, she kept walking in the slightly scorched hall until the dragon on the other side of it began speaking.
"Iris, yes?"
Iris's eyes widened, and she slowly turned around.
Vorator must have taken a sleep in past month or so. He was still a juvenile as dragons went, but she was one too, and furthermore he was twice her size and nearly half again as tall. He was on fours and still taller than her, and his bulk, which at one time could have been just fat, was now purely rippling muscle, and his head was a slab of brown crowned with two conical horns with the slightest hint of a spiral at the top. The red light really didn't do him any favors in making him seem less scary, either.
He was also filling the entire hall, and looked angry. Understandable, as the world was ending.
"Err, yeah, Vorator, it's me. It's about time, right?" she said weakly, waving a hand as oddly as possible, given the time.
He snorted. "This is no time for jokes. Soon, the cursed city nearby will be destroyed, and we will be free." He swiveled his great head to the side and tilted it slightly. "Why is there a pony in your room?"
Iris chuckled lightly in an attempt to not run away as quickly as possible. "She let me out, why?"
He turned to look at her, and Iris felt her blood run even colder.
To her surprise, Vorator raised his tree-thick club like tail and slammed it against the wall, and like a wave, the entire wall shattered inward into itself. Iris felt her jaw slacken slightly.
Fragrance, after she stopped begging for mercy, slowly trotted over broken glass and stood between the two dragons.
"Well, you are mister...Stoneback, I presume?" squeaked Fragrance. Iris realized that, if she read on her record, than she would have at least glanced at Vorator's.
The behemoth of a dragon, however, continued to give the pony that was barely the size of his head a judging look.
"Yes."
Gulping, the mare continued. "Before this...thing blows over, I must ask, did you really learn from zebras in there homeland?"
Slowly, he nodded. "I did. Enough of this." he said, shifting his bulk onto his back legs, head nearly reaching the ceiling "We are to go before a less kind comrade of ours comes to kill us."
On cue, someone far off roared, and that roar was responded to by a pained scream and a few gun shots.
Iris knew that roar. "Garble."
Fragrance’s eyes went wide, while Vorator simply sighed.
"He is of little concern. He is a fool who thinks he is a king. Let him die." Vorator said before looking at Iris with something close to amusement. "Unless you want to save him."
Iris blanched, and Fragrance was trying to take deep breaths to help her ignore the fact they had wasted a decent time in the middle of a hallway talking about nothing of importance.
"Excuse me, but perhaps we cou-"
He voice was cut out by a low rumble, and the feeling of something utterly unnatural passing through the air.
The lights flickered for a moment, and that was it.
The silence in the structure was deafening for a few seconds, and then the few inmates continued there riot.
Iris was the first to speak, albeit somewhat weakly. "That was it, wasn't it? The bomb?"
Fragrance was surprisingly calm. "Yes, it seemed to have hit closer to the Empire closer than I first thought. I would think the surface is an irradiated hell right now, however."
It was Vorator's turn to be surprised. "How far underground are we, exactly? Two, three floors?"
"Five." Fragrance said simply. Vorator blanched.
"The younger ones are going to die, correct? With there cells being on the first floors?" he said slowly.
Fragrance shrugged. "I suppose. But right now, there are tunnels, and one of those tunnels has the hibernation chambers."
Iris blinked at that. What now? "Hibernation chambers?"
Fragrance chuckled. "This place has a lot of stuff just sitting around, and one of those things is a set of four hibernation chambers. I assume that, at the very least, one is still working." she smiled awfully at the huge male. "Sorry, but I don't think you could fit in one."
The silence in the reddish hall was palpable. Finally, the dragon shrugged. "I plan on going to the Crystal Mountains. Pure wilderness. I suspect Iris is heading there as well."
Conflicted, she looked at both of her possible choices for survival. Finally, but surely, she ran down the opposite end of the hallway, head cloudy and limbs feeling like lead.
Iris rushed down the hall and turned right, ignoring Fragrance's gasp as she tried to get as much space between her and everything else that breathed.
Really, she thought, she should have stayed back there, where at least there was safety, but she was scared and conflicted and hungery and, most of all, wondering if she was going to be alive at the end of the day.
Frankly, she didn't have much advice relating to surviving to fall back on. To be exact, the only advice she was ever given was given by her mother, which consisted of "Find a nice dragon boy", "Leave the nest or die, but try and keep in touch", and the eternal "Find a nice pile of gold and sit on it."
To her dismay, only two of those tidbits of wisdom could possibly apply in her situation, and while Iris has already followed the first two to there letters, the third one was entirely unapplicable and the first one got her into this mess in the first place.
Iris pondered for a few moments about what she should do, and continued to do so until she realised that the hallway she was in led to the mess hall, aply named for what was going on inside. It seemed that someone had already found themselves inside it, considering that there was still chunks of the concrete floor that was semimolten and the air was visably shimmering.
Iris also found the door locked, which she solved by biting on said lock. Her only issue doing so was that it tasted disgusting, like most things pony-made did.
Inside, the mess hall was just as bad as it looked from a view made of three inches of glass. The legs of the varying tables seemed to be fused to the floor, and the floor itself was warped and cracked from the heat. Iris did not dare to spend too much time in the room, however, as the ceiling was mottled and almost slimy-looking from the heat and little droplets of molten plastic fell from it like acrid rain. As such, she decided to continue running until she reached the end of the hall, which, to her delight, had it's door ripped from it's hinges and was partully melted onto the floor. And the ponies who guarded said door, at that.
She really didn't want to think about where they went, exactly, or why the hunk of melted metal that used to be a door had large irregular lumps coming up from under it, but she did so anyway,
She found that she really didn't care, after careful observation, as she felt something hard, like a small rock propelled by a tiny rocket, hit her temple, which caused her to yelp and look upward.
Iris, however, noticed a little lead orb sinking slightly into the ground, and brought it up to her face for closer examination.
It was a bullet, of course.
Looking up from her hunched position over the door frame, she found herself face to face with a small pale yellow pony with a pistol wedged in her mouth, eyes wide and fearful.
Iris, more annoyed than anything, tossed the little deformed ball out in the general direction of the melting room behind her, and growled at the little pony.
This caused her, and it was almost certiantly a her, to scream and throw her gun at Iris's general direction, where it harmlessly flew over her shoulder and into the quickly unidentifiable self-heating furnace formerly known as the mess hall.
Iris reared up to her full hight, stepped off the door, rubbed off the melted parts that stuck stubbernlly to her feet, and left the pony behind her and continued on down the hall. The little pony was clearly a doctor or somesuch, considering that she was carrying such a tiny gun as apposed to the one's that shot the half-inch shells that the guards carried. For a dark moment, she considered kicking the bawling creature into the molten mess behind her, but quickly pushed that out of her mind and continued to flee for someplace that seemed safe enough to rest in.
Unfortunately, the mess hall was directly next to the food storage area, which, to her mild horror, was already inhabited. Not only that, but the acidic stench of rotting meat filled the general area. There was no meat in the food storage area, which ment one of two things, neither of which was good for her or anyone else in the building.
A distant shifting sound eminated from the bowls of the massive room, and a harsh dissaproving clicking noise made Iris get on edge.
"Come in, come in." throatly rasped the unnatural horror from inside the storage center.
Iris, without much choice, obeyed.
After all, she wanted to live.
Dursi was a horror. She was clearly something other than a dragon. but what, exactly, Iris had no idea. Dispite not being a pure-blooded dragon, it was undisputed that she was deadly.
The serpentine beast was curled up on a large pile of gems and geodes that took up most of the cold grey room, and smiled smugly as Iris walked inside it.
"What do you want, Durrhurrsi?" Iris said gruffly, trying her best to not notice the stains and dark lumps of putrid organic matter fused to the floor that stunk of acid and pony.
Dursi raised her head off the pile and clicked her tongue, and began to make her way down the makeshift hoard, causing Iris to get a whiff of something awful.
"Oh, for shame, little Iris." she said disaprovingly. "Such a childish name. Durr-hurr-si. It even sound's silly. Like a pony name. Do I look like a pony to you? Really, Iris, I am trying to be nice for once. Call me Slick Scale."
Iris looked at the horrible head of the dragoness, and rolled her eyes. "Fine, fine, Slick Scale. What do you want?" pausing, she spared a glance at the pile of gems behind her "And I am at least a few years older than you."
Dursi reared up on her hind legs, which was impressive, as they were quite small for such a large creature. Iris found herself staring at the general area of what would have been Dursi's navel, if dragons had them.
"I am much larger than you, little Iris." Dursi said spitefully as she leaned over Iris slightly, causing the slightest droplet of spittle to drop from the larger dragons mouth and onto Iris's left shoulder, where it sizzled slightly.
Biting back a yelp of pain, Iris glared at the larger dragon. "What do you want from me!"
Dursi kept her eyes locked with Iris only for a few more moments before allowing herself to fall on the pile of gems behind here, on which she began to lounge on it like a throne. "Oh, come on, Iris, lighten up! The ponies have blown each other into little bits and your not even happy? Here," she picked up a rather sizable ruby that laid close to her left arm, "catch."
Iris caught the tossed gem deftly and, giving it a glare, bit it. It tasted wonderful, but it had an vomit-like undertone to it.
"So, you just want some company?" Iris said between bites, slightly wondering herself.
Dursi made a tiny shrug that caused several smaller gems to roll down her shoulders. "Is it so wrong? Besides, I wouldn't go the way you were going. Garble's mad as all out, and there's nothing stopping him from getting to you now. You know how it is."
Iris shuddered slightly. " Oh, he's a jerk, but you can't possibly think..."
Dursi picked up a orange-sized sapphire and breathed on it, causing the outside surface to bubble and burst like a rocky blister. "Sorry to be the one has to say it, but when it comes to you, he's a bit head's over heels for yeah, don'cha think?"
Iris sighed. Dursi shook her head sympheticly, Iris almost felt appreciated until she looked down, and saw what was probably a hoof sticking out of a grey-green sludge pile.
"You've killed a lot ponies." Iris said to the ground, a empty feeling creeping over her.
Dursi cracked a snaggletoothed grin. "Yeah, what about it? It's not like they weren't shooting at me."
Iris didn't want to look at the thing that was crouched over the small hill of foodstuffs. Her smell was enough.
"You don't even care, do you Dursi?"
The overgrown serpent blinked, uncomprehending. "Care 'bout what? Oh, the ponies." she moved a rather sharp crystal out from under her and looked at Iris. "Think about it. I was born here, you know."
Iris rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I know."
Dursi stared at Iris for a few moments, but after a tense few seconds she licked a claw, let the new layer of acid on it sizzle a bit, and slowly impaled a ruby with it like it was made of cold butter. "There stupid and tasty, like goats. But they taste better than that, you know. Or should, anyway, I bet you never even tried to take a bite-"
"Your not even a real dragon!" Iris spat out in disgust, causing Dursi to giggle wetly. "Your some genetic backwash from some swamp that should have been culled when you wiggled out of your egg!"
"Oh, I am simply hurt." she breathed, bringing a stunted seven-taloned claw to her breast." Ah, how can I live when I, a mere dragonkin, is in the face of true beauty? Oh, woe is me."
Iris, fuming, did not turn to leave, but still started moving towards the entryway. "So, what are you going to do now, Dursi? Going to stay here?"
The alleged dragoness grinned a crocodile grin that could have swallowed her whole. "Why not? Sure, the world's burning above, but I have all the gems I need until this blows over. And it's not like anyone here can kill little old me..."
Iris let out the start of a growl. Dursi didn't look impressed.
"Look, little one-"
"I am two years older than you!" Iris barked.
"-I understand it might be hard for you, knowing that you have no future." the serpent purred. "After all, what are you going to do, assuming you live? End up being the mother to some poor sap's eggs in some nice cave somewhere? Oh, I know you like the city outside, all bright and colorful, but let's be realistic here." she said as she slowly moved down the pile, more snake than lizard with her legs close to her side.
"You are doomed, like the rest of us. There's only so many good drakes to go around in this horrid little country, and many of them are in here, and most of them are going to die. We are all dead in the end, Iris, you know this."
Iris groaned. "And what are you suggesting I do, then?"
"I will live through this, you know. I can protect you from Garble. There's food here, and there's plenty to share. I know the way outside, too." she said simply and bluntly.
Iris was stunned. She had never gotten such a nice offer from...anyone before. There had to be a price.
"What do you want, Dursi?" Iris said, a little tired of amusing the other dragoness in the room.
The larger dragon, bearing a strangely happy look, got ever so closer to Iris. "Well, it's simple. I never did like the drakes, anyway."
It took Iris a good few seconds to comprehend what the creature said, and immediately afterwards started to break for it, managing to get outside the room before the larger dragon got closer.
Iris almost made it out the door entirely, but she had the terrible luck to run right on top of the yellow pony from before, now flanked by two Protectaponies.
