>>5813526“…No,” you sighed. “What is it with you and… You know, never mind. Maybe you can go for a walk or something? Go menace some tourists, give me time to think?”
“Don’t threaten a girl with a good time if you ain’t gonna’ deliver, kid,” Zith-Zi joked, grinning and nudging your ribs with a bony elbow—though less bony since she’d arrived and began eating into your already meagre post-Muffins budget.
“Quit it!” you snapped. “I’m trying to focus. The first step is comparing the feather samples I took to this catalogue of known birds of the world, to determine his composite parts… And I can’t do that with you poking and prodding at me!”
Zith-Zi rolled her eyes and flopped backwards onto the desk with a weary groan. Zith-Zi hopped upon her chest to nestle there, as he seemed to enjoy doing, and she idly strokes his nose, between his eyes.
“Well,” she mused after a time, “he can breathe fire. Does that help?”
You stopped your reading mid-sentence and, after a moment, slammed your tome shut with a slam that startled the little drake into croaking and hopping down. His goblin mistress sat up, overlarge ears curling in displeasure as she glared at you.
“WHAT?!” you demanded.
“What?” she replied.
“You didn’t think that was IMPORTANT?”
“Well, he doesn’t do it much anyMORE,” Zith-Zi replied defensively. “But he used to when I was a kid.”
You looked to Hershy, still fluffed-up with irritation, and your mind churned in your skull. Drakes superficially RESEMBLED dragons—some even said they were a creation of the dragons of ancient days, who were suggested by a small body of literature to have been capable of working some magic of their own. NO drake, though, could breathe fire, or produce any other sort of spell. Such working required a connection to a source of sufficient mana. Humans achieved this by accessing the Elemental Planes—as did you—while more orthodox adherents of the Feycraft like the Ashurati drew upon natural forces with the aid of sacred words and rituals passed down by the unseen spirits of the True Fey. This little feathered newt-creature had no extraplanar connection that you could sense—not at all like your summoned elementals—and OBVIOUSLY was not Fey or capable of working fairy ritual magics.
So… What was he?
“I think it’s time for me to go back to school,” you murmured.
You got up and grabbing your cloak as you did so. You stretched out a hand and whistled and, with a huff of put-upon exertion, your research subject and primary patient leapt to your outstretched arm. You winced a little at his sharp claws, briefly considering the leather pauldron before dismissing the idea as simply too silly.
