町仙

[…Well, either way; this was a mistake that definitely needed to be corrected right now. There was absolutely no way that Kassie was a pirate, even if she did have a tendency to hurt others thanks to her parents’…”occupation”, or if one of her eyes was missing. Wait, now that she thought about it—did that spark the belief that she was possibly a pirate of some sort? I mean, most pirates had a missing eye, but…they’d usually wear an eyepatch, and Kassie’s mother wouldn’t even let her cover up the wound. It was a constant reminder of…the trauma she’d faced that night rather than anything else, not a mark to signify that she sailed the seven seas and went on adventures.]

[That sounded like a pretty nice idea, though…maybe she’d run away on a ship or something and spend the rest of her life pillaging other pirates, pilfering their gold, even if it was a bit too…far-fetched of a dream.]

Wow, if he was trying to do a good job of calming this girl down, he was doing awfully. Come on, Cho, you're better than this. Hurry up and befriend this girl so you can get some of that pirate treasure she's probably hoarding all to herself.

So he DID get it wrong? How could ANYBODY define ‘dawdle’ wrong? What kind of loser was Cho? He was such a loser. Why was it that every day Cho seemed like even more of a loser?

"I can’t believe you, Cho!" she said. "Dawdling means moving super slow, not super fast!" She groaned loudly. "Can we just go already? I am so hungry."

"No, no. It means super fast. Dragons are never wrong about words that start with d." It was an ancient rule. That he just made up right now on the spot. But either way, he followed after her because there was no way he was letting her walk into that fast food restaurant before he did. He needed to be the first of the two to get his very own car.

As to what mountains, though... Jeepers, he really should have paid more attention in Dragon school, by the sound of things. Well, the past was the past, or whatever that saying was. He was pretty sure that was it. Not that it made any sense to him, but that was okay. Human sayings rarely made sense to him.

"I need to go to, like. The mountains with caves in them. Because that's where my family is, or whatever. But I think most of the mountains have caves? So I dunno. All I know is that they're cl- what's that word. It's like when something's hidden? Clocked, or something." You'd think that after living in America with people who speak nothing but English for such a long time, he'd know the word cloaked, but sadly, he did not. Vocabulary was hard. So, so hard. Especially when you refused to go to school with a bunch of humans. Or really just school in general, because let's face it, he wouldn't like going back to dragon school, either.

"So anyway, I don't think humans can see them. The caves, I mean. They can probably see the mountains." I mean it'd be pretty weird if humans couldn't see the mountains at all. Like what would they even see instead, right? Just a huge empty space? That would be so weird.

Roni was simply incredulous. At least, she felt like she was. She wasn’t sure about the grammar of that sentence, but she didn’t care, she was definitely downright incredulous. Her face looked something like that time she accidentally ate a soggy potato chip.

"If dawdling is a normal dragon thing to do," she said, "you’re not a very good dragon, are you?"

Sometimes, though, even super cool radically tubular dragons had to admit they'd made a mistake. But not Cho. Because he was a super cool radically tubular to the MAX dragon and those guys never admitted their mistakes. Mostly because they never made any.

[Or…well, maybe not. Probably not, and that was thanks to her mother’s prohibitions on any sort of relationship that the blonde could possibly ever have. There wasn’t any need to have friends when you were only going to betray and possibly kill them, anyway…that didn’t exactly stop Kassie from wanting to have some kind of friendship, even though it was going to break her heart to have to kill them. The Troubles of Monstrous Beings: A Novel by Kassie Gillespie.]

[And then—he introduced himself, sure, but…a dragon? That wasn’t possible, was it? Says the frickn monster/human hybrid, but still! Here she’d been, thinking that she and her mother were the only supernatural beings around here…or maybe Cho was really into dragons or something? Those horns on his head could be made of clay or…something.]

He knew it! Not that that should be a surprise to anyone. After all, dragons had excellent deduction skills. And while it was true that Cho had his magic revoked before his banishment, he guessed that was just one of the things that dragons were born with and that no one could take away even if they wanted to.

But if you want an honest answer here, yes, dragon's deduction skills are absolutely 100% part of their magic abilities, so yes, when Cho's magic was taken away from him, so was his underdeveloped skills of deduction. He just wasn't quite aware of all that yet. And, really, can you blame him? His magic deduction skills were taken away from him, after all!

"Yes," Roni groaned. "Right now." She counted the money in her hands. Definitely enough for two happy meals. Not that she was going to get one. Obviously. It’s not like she was some kind of loser. Who wants a toy car, anyways. Not her. Not Roni. Only DUMB people want toy cars.

And detective work told him that it probably meant the latter. I mean why on earth would Veronica warn him not to be slow? He was never slow. Dragons were the complete opposite of slow. They were FAST. Super fast. Faster than Sonic the hedgehog.

So he followed Roni out the door and gave her a very serious displeased face. Super duper serious. He needed to make sure he knew how totally displeased with her he was.

[Regardless, and changing the subject internally, Kassie faced the man that “greeted” her; her expression revealed her anxiety, and she couldn’t exactly bring herself to smile at this point; how was she supposed to tell him that the place she’d moved from had completely vanished? Should she merely excuse it with something like, “I forgot”, or “It’s not important”? Should she dismiss the question and the person asking it? No…that was much too rude for the sweetheart that Kassie really was. How ironic that she was truly an awful creature that wreaked havoc.]

O-Oh, I…erm…I can’t quite remember where I moved here from. I-I apologize…and…if you’d like, you can just call me Kassie, since that’s my name and all… [What an awkward introduction. You really are a lost cause, poor girl.]

He could swing this, though. Most of the people he wound up talking to weren't exactly easy conversation partners. Which was sort of weird since he sucked at talking to people too, so most of his conversations with people just wound up being really awkward and probably full of gibberish, but whatever.

Oh, right, he was just staring at this girl now. He should probably say something.

[What could she do in protest? Nothing, that’s what. Her mother was much more powerful, having even torn out her own daughter’s eye without so much as a shred of remorse, even going so far as to leave the socket hollow, without anything to cover it. At the very least, by now, Kassie had grown accustomed to the partial blindness, though it was still extremely uncomfortable to realize that it was completely empty and, most likely, still a bit bloody—it still burned like hellfire, that much was for sure, but she was still lucky to even have an eye left.]

[Once the car was parked in their new driveway, Kassie took a moment to look at the town they were soon going to decimate; it was so beautiful, the sky a shade of baby blue, and the clouds so fluffy…it was going to be horrible to see this place destroyed because of them.]

Unfortunately, not every day could be some grand adventure, and whenever there weren't any interesting smells to be found, Cho spent the rest of his day wandering down the streets and staring hopelessly at the deli that he'd been banned from for trying to "steal" some ham from. He would have paid for it later, I swear, but some people just do not appreciate a nice IOU card, I guess.

There was something that interested Cho today, though. While he didn't usually stop to converse with humans, this one had an unusual sort of smell, which Cho decided, through super cool detective skills, meant she was new in town since he hadn't seen her around before and he was pretty sure that house was empty last week.

What he didn't realize until he got a bit closer, is that the girl only had one eye. Yeah, that was weird, but hey. Maybe she was a pirate or something. That'd be interesting.

Her annoyance changed into a more amused, slightly mocking expression. So he implied he could transform into a full dragon, was that it? He was welcome to demonstrate. As for their residence— Ciri thought there were some people who lived in the mountains, just not in caves perhaps. Either way, for a brat, he sure was convinced in his own right. Stubborn. Mostly stubborn. And annoying.

As for the listening part— she hadn’t done anything but that from the beginning. The boy seemed to confuse ‘listening’ with ‘believing what he said’. But that was the thing with someone who tried to convince you of something— once agitated, they were prone to become offensive and frustrated, losing sight of what they wished to accomplish. Ah, well.

He said nothing about looking at her. Listening. So she did, with both ears and her nose would have too, if it had that ability. Sadly enough, her unusually large nose didn’t come with extraordinary skills, not even an extraordinary sense of smell. And while the ‘dragon’-boy coughed up a… bit of smoke and then his lung, Ciri’s eyes were focused on her paper; writing down her next response. [I’m afraid my nose can’t hear, despite it’s size. But I’ve been listening from the very beginning, I can assure you of that. ] When looking up halfway her reply, the only thing she saw was a cloud of smoke and coughing young boy. The link with cigarettes was made quickly— now, hey. There’s a limit in trying to make someone believe they’re supernatural. He could cut it out now. [Aren’t you way too young to be smoking? If this goes on, boy, I’ll inform the police anyway. It’s no surprise that they don’t believe you if you say that, though. How about you lie to them? Where is it you’re heading, anyway?] Seriously. There was a limit to how far one could take a joke.

He was pretty sure this girl was dumb, though. Because she said she was listening, but it sure as heck didn't seem like she was. Although Cho was still under the childish impression that listening and believing were two very similar things.

He wasn't quite sure why she was threatening to call the police, though. He thought it was pretty obvious that fire wasn't a thing that was going to happen, and he was pretty sure you couldn't arrest someone for breathing smoke in someone's face. Especially when that face happened to be your own, even after all of your attempts. Maybe he'd learn to breathe fire someday. He really, really hoped.

Jeez, though, this girl wasn't even talking to him with real words, but she was still managing to rub him the wrong way. It was a world record.