Endangered Ch. 10

Both women were shocked and worried at the discovery of Radek's true origin, but promised to keep the information strictly to their brood. Petra quickly voiced her concern that Chris was out of contact and she had been having troublesome premonitions all afternoon.

Claire was surprised when the elemental nodded gravely and urged them to seek Tosh at his home address immediately for a trace on Chris and Hailey's whereabouts. She'd been expecting a polite dismissal of her mother's worries as nothing more than a pregnant foible. But the powerful elemental was apparently in touch with some of the more... illogical capabilities of magical connections. He wasn't about to discount any lead, especially given the seriousness of what was going on in South America. His own orders involved protecting the three dragons at all costs in Reyla's absence.

Mother and daughter ended up taking a human taxi across town to Tosh's address rather than sign out a vehicle from the pool. While the driver congratulated himself on landing such an attractive fare, Claire mused that Radek's activities had one silver lining. Their afternoon was turning into a veritable adventure. Once they took charge of Amy, Petra was going to be perfectly distracted for the rest of the day.

By mutual agreement, they decided not to worry Annabel, Immi, or Susan just yet, in case Tosh had a simple explanation.

"He's an arachnid, isn't he?" Claire confirmed as they double checked the address and swung open the ornate wooden gate protecting the pathway up to the house.

"I believe so," Petra said quietly as they walked past a beautifully manicured rock garden on one side of the compact yard and a large glass greenhouse on the other.

"Rare," Claire murmured as they approached the front door. "I remember his daughter from the night of the club shooting. What a butt."

"Don't be rude," her mother hissed, followed by a warning pinch on Claire's own well-formed rear end.

A brief outbreak of playful, silent retaliation ensued, stalling them on the landing. They took another moment to compose themselves afterwards. With a final sideways glance to her daughter, Petra pushed the doorbell button beside an intercom system. An unusual, multi-toned melody echoed inside for several seconds.

Without even the warning of approaching footfalls, Masatoshi himself answered the door. He bowed, mildly confused at the arrival of such unexpected and indeed, prestigious guests at his residence.

He was a handsome man, Claire thought. His short black hair seemed perfectly aligned, right down to the individual strand. Chris could stand to adopt some of that fastidiousness. The arachnid Being had a lean, wiry build and an economic, smooth way of moving. She wasn't quite sure how they aged, but he seemed young, perhaps in his mid-thirties.

There was a brief moment of awkwardness where neither party knew who should speak first before Tosh remembered the hospitality his mother had drilled into him as a boy and invited them inside with a broad, genuine smile.

"Petra, Claire, welcome. Please come in."

The young dragoness thought the way he slightly fumbled the r-sound in her mother's name and the l-sound in her own was just too cute.

"Thank you, Tosh," Petra gave him a small bow in return for his own, and got her first look at the interior of his remarkable home. "Oh, my..."

While the exterior of the house might have looked like any other in the neighbourhood, the interior had obviously been painstakingly transformed into a replica of traditional Japanese styles. Authentic rice straw tatami floors, dark wooden joinery, and sliding panels of paper and wood combined to stunning effect. A stumpy-legged table even sat in the large room adjacent to the entranceway.

What had caught her eye though, was the exquisite tapestry. It depicted a pair of dancing cranes locked in step on a frozen lake beneath a snowy, conifer blanketed mountain. Hanging opposite the lowered area of the doorway, the colours were so vivid, and the birds so skillfully portrayed that they looked ready to leap off the silk and continue their courtship around the house. It belonged in a gallery, one of the really prestigious ones.

"Hinata's work," Tosh radiated fatherly pride. "She is in her chamber as we speak."

"It's wonderful," Claire started forward to get a closer look, but her mother caught her arm before she stepped up onto the carpet.

"Shoes, dear," Petra drew attention to the neat pairs of discarded shoes lined up against the sunken alcove walling off the exterior doorway.

Claire followed her Mom's lead and put on a pair of strange green slippers Tosh laid out for her before they all moved to admire the tapestry.

Up close, the workmanship became even more impressive. The threads were so fine, so precisely woven. It must have taken thousands of hours to make such a beautiful piece of artwork, a masterpiece of fabric.

"Your daughter is an incredible artist," Claire said in wonder, holding back her desire to touch the soft, cool cloth. She just knew that as beautiful as it looked, it would feel even better to squeeze the fabric between her fingers and run it across her sensitive skin.

"Thank you," Tosh bowed slightly again. "She weaves more practical items most of the time, but once every few years, she finds inspiration. I do not mean to be rude, ladies, an unexpected visit from ones such as yourselves can only brighten one's day. May I inquire why you have come?"

Perhaps it was his politeness, or maybe Petra remembered something she'd heard long ago about Japanese customs. She reached into her purse and pulled out a large, brimming chalcedony crystal, presenting it to their host.

"Please accept this gift for you, or your daughter, in exchange for your welcome and the privilege of seeing such a stunning example of your race's craft," she spoke slowly, formally as the man hesitantly accepted the gift.

His dark eyes widened at his first touch of the creamy stone, sensing the magic thrumming inside. He placed it reverently on top a nearby wooden cabinet.

"My daughter will be flattered by your praise and delighted by your gift. Thank you."

"You're welcome. We came because we're worried something may have happened to our mate. His Maginet phone is unreachable. Not in service."

"Nani?" The man's alarm was instant and jarring as he slipped into his native tongue. Claire even took a small step backwards, surprised by his gruff tone before he shook himself and continued. "Sorry, sorry. Tell me what has happened, please."

He already had his own phone out as Petra recounted as much of their strange afternoon as she could without breaking the shocking news about Radek. He tried calling both Chris and Hailey himself, shaking his head as he heard the tone and the woman's voice.

"It should not be possible," he mused, sparking a series of worried glances between the dragonesses.

"They're not... oh hell... they're not dead, are they?" Claire wrapped her arm around her Mother's waist and pulled herself close in an attempt to brace them both for the worst.

"I don't know." He turned and slid aside a wooden door panel, beckoning them to follow him. "Come, we will access the system directly. I have authority to trace their last position in an emergency."

They stepped inside a dark, spartan room. Apparently, this was his workspace because three huge monitors glowed brightly from a short table in the middle of the room and behind them, a powerful desktop hummed away quietly. Beside the desktop, and connected by what appeared to be a standardised cable, sat a goblin-crafted Maginet Node, complete with quivering antenna. The room held nothing else.

Neither woman had seen a Node up close before. As Tosh knelt on a cushion to begin his work, they craned their necks to get a better look at the device that was the backbone of their magical communication system.

It seemed harmless enough, essentially a cuboid box of heavy looking, darkened metal. It had a few interesting features though, namely, the pair of footlong, continually oscillating golden antenna sticking from the top. A small hopper full of tiny gemstones stuck out from one side, providing magical fuel for the ingenious near-instantaneous communication device. A series of cable ports ran along the lip of the opposite side near the top, and only one was occupied, connecting to Tosh's computer. There was no electricity involved in keeping it going then.

"I heard, the goblin who came up with the idea put a piece of his bone in each Node," Claire whispered to her mother as Tosh logged in and began entering something in a program. "That's how the spell knows to find all the Nodes at the same time."

"Wrong," the administrator rolled his r a little as he worked. "It was a piece of his brain, kept alive in each one. The spell connects them all so he can talk."

"That's fucking creepy," Claire gasped. "Oh, sorry, Tosh. I didn't mean to cuss. Um... Michelle would kill to get her hands on one of these."

"She has already begged me," he chuckled. "Look, I've found them!"

The two breathed a combined sigh of relief, moving to kneel on either side of him as he brought up some sort of mapping software on the central screen.

"They weren't kidding about the desert," Petra said as satellite images of a rocky, dry canyon in southern Arizona quickly loaded into focus. Two blue dots orbited each other randomly in the creekbed. "Wow, this is sort of scary accurate. Can you trace us like this all the time?"

"Only if I consider it an emergency, or I'm ordered to by Reyla in pursuit of a criminal. I have to get screened by a psyker every six months to check my morality you know."

"I didn't mean it like that. Sorry, Tosh."

"It's fine. This is interesting, watch. They were here in this valley for several hours this morning, then suddenly, they shoot off to the East and vanish. That is the last data available." He pulled his cursor across a progress bar, slowing and zooming out as the dots began to rapidly track across New Mexico, vanishing altogether somewhere in Eastern Texas. "They must have been going very fast, but it's strange. The phones send a signal instantly if they're damaged or tampered, but no signal was received. Shutdown sends a similar message and forwards to voicemail. They just disappear. I have never heard of an active phone doing such a thing."

Claire frowned, there was something about the way they moved. So precise and with a gentle southward curve, "Can we see the altitude?"

"Ah! My genius girl," Petra bubbled. "They're flying, of course."

It took a few minutes, but Tosh eventually found a way to meaningfully portray the star-bound trajectory Chris and Hailey had taken a few hours before. They all scratched their heads for a while, trying to make sense of the data.

Petra, as an experienced and enthusiastic flier, knew that they'd flown too fast and much too high for any sane dragon. Tosh though came up with a new hypothesis for how the Maginet network worked, realising that their data cut out just after one hundred kilometres above the earth, the edge of the atmosphere. It was as he was searching the human internet for these figures that Claire put it all together.

"He's taken the little nerd to space," she realised.

"What? How?" Petra wondered. "They don't have any suits, and she can't ride him in space."

"In one of the damn bubbles they're always practising with. It has to be."

While the thought of their mate galavanting around in the void didn't exactly engender calm in either dragoness, it was at least good to know that he wasn't outright dead. They could also safely rule out the possibility of demonic involvement.

In the end, they thanked Tosh for his assistance and called a cab to get them back across town in time to collect Amy from school. On the way, they put their heads together with single-minded focus toward busting his balls when he returned.

***

Fine, powdery dust billowed softly out from underneath the perfectly curved surface of the orb as they touched down with a jolt.

It was a bit more of an impact than Chris had expected, the speed of their descent was hard for his dragon's flight instincts to judge in the light, alien gravity. The magic that assisted his ungainly body in the skies could still propel him through the void, but without wind flowing under his wings, it felt unnatural and disorientating. He wondered how Petra would fare, she was a peerless flier, or so he'd heard anyway. He must do something about that oversight before her pregnancy got too far along.

"Magnificent desolation," Hailey parroted those famous words, nervously flexing up on her toes beside his enormous form. In the Moon's weak grasp, her movement magnified to a small hop, and she scrabbled for a firmer grip on his foreleg. "Eeek! Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. I heard somewhere that California actually claims it as a park, we could get in trouble."

The dragon swivelled his neck through a complete panorama near the dome of their sphere. He took in everything, the bright, barren surface scattered with rocks and divots, the brutal sun beating down. He dared not look up into the darkness of space, because it hurt his eyes to look back down at the lunar surface afterwards through widened pupils. It was that bright. The ground rose behind them to the edge of a small impact crater, shallow and maybe one hundred feet across. The real kicker and the reason they were here was dead ahead.

"You think I give a fuck about the State of California?" he rumbled protectively. "If you want a souvenir, we'll get you a souvenir. You deserve it."

They both looked out through the dimming effect of the orb at the decent stage left behind by Apollo Eleven, still wrapped in gaudy, golden-red insulation foil that was only slightly dusty despite decades of abandonment.

"It's that box over there by the module, right?" he confirmed with a nod to the item in question. It rested on the footprint disturbed dust at the base of the lander, surrounded by a haphazard pile of what could only be called moon junk. All the stuff the astronauts had thrown out of their craft to make weight for as many samples as they could lift off the surface. Chris thought he even saw a dirty boot sticking out from behind a blocky white object with the NASA logo on it.

"I'm not sure honestly," she admitted. "That could be astronaut poop."

"Wonderful," he snorted.

He undertook a final check the orb's parameters, the last thing he needed was it rolling away with Hailey trapped inside. The protective flight membrane closed over his eyes, and he contracted the muscles around the ear slits at the base of his smallest backwards-slanted horns. A series of slow deep breaths followed, which he held with lungs empty. Finally, let himself be allowed through that Ether barrier once again, and made the first new footprint the Moon had seen in over forty years.

He sank much deeper in the powdery dust than he'd expected, but forged onward with the limited oxygen he had stored in his blood and tissues.

The unrestrained sun struck his scales with palpable force, refracting dazzlingly and sending a quiver up his flanks as an undeniable heat began to build. This was not the happy, gentle light that had greeted his mornings on the farm; it was a naked nuclear furnace. Perhaps it somehow knew what he planned. He squinted, closing his scaled eyelids to slits.

In contrast to the scorching heat, anything not touched by fusion light was deathly cold, like he'd dunked in Reyla's shadefrost. He was incredibly grateful of his dragon's internal genitalia, for he dreaded to think what might have befallen a pair of underslung jewels.

Chris couldn't hear a sound as he took his first steps, but an uncomfortable sensation grew all throughout his body, especially his joints. Magical regeneration kicked into high gear, fighting the effects of degassing in his thick blood. There was no nitrogen left in his system though, so it appeared would be okay for a little while longer.

Hailey clung to the tip of his purple tail as it finally slipped away, but he didn't look back. She could see his huge paw prints in the surface just outside, an eternal testament to his willingness to risk naked space for the sake of her little trinkets. She felt suddenly childish, yet warmed by his devotion. A desire to immortalise the moment sprung to life in her heart. Her backpack almost bounced in the low gravity, but she quickly found her Maginet phone and began filming the historic event despite the angry red symbol flashing in the notification bar.

Chris' vision was perfect as he hopped forward gingerly in the light gravity. Each step sent him sailing, and his eyes darting to judge where is feet would land next among the small rocks. Dragon instinct told him to raise his wings for stability in this strange quasi-flight, but he knew they would only get in the way. It might be fun to bounce around creating little puffy clouds as he went but he didn't have the luxury to explore.

It barely took more than fifteen seconds to reach the discarded module. He was about to nudge aside what must have been a space suit life support system and wade into the small field of debris when his prize made itself known very clearly to his dragon's greedy sonar. It wasn't the box, which probably was poop after all. There was something gold in the bleached, half buried pouch behind the astronaut's discarded space shoe.

He snatched it up between two claws and prepared to depart. That presented a small challenge, and he was about to try leaping backwards, so his tail didn't accidentally knock over the lander when something caught his eye in the soil on the other side. He snaked his way gingerly around the glittering decent stage, becoming conscious now that his empty lungs were beginning to protest.

A thin metal pole lay in the dust, surrounded by the astronaut's footprints. Curiosity demanded he give it a gentle tug, revealing a bleached, tattered, scrap of fabric attached to one end by a shorter, perpendicular rod. It took a moment for him to recognise the disintegrating remnants of the mission's flag. It had laid there for decades, half buried in the lunar soil. The sun had almost cooked it away to nothing.

That wouldn't do at all, magic surged up out of his core. His sentiment might have been brought on by lack of oxygen, or maybe he was just more patriotic than he'd imagined. Either way, he stood the now vibrant, spangled nylon back up, taking care to push the aluminium rod deep in the regolith and tamp down around its base with his big mitts. The dragon thought it a fitting atonement for his pilferage of the historic site.

Unbeknownst to him, Hailey caught the entire episode in digital memory, including the respectful little bob of his head before he started loping back to her. Even as a massive purple dragon, she thought he was just fucking adorable.

Reentry to the orb stripped him clean of the clingy dust, but his sensitive snout still picked up the hint of a burned smell, almost like the lingering scent in the BIA firing range. Huffing proudly, he dropped their loot next to Hailey's hiking boots.

Beaming lovingly, her intent to launch up in the low gravity and hug his neck was clear.

"Don't," he warned in his deep dragon rumble. "My scales are burning hot."

He shook his entire body like a wet dog, trying to rid himself of the maddening tingle. Truthfully, he was very relieved to be back inside their orb. The dichotomy of extreme temperatures he'd endured was at the limit of even a dragon's fortitude. Half of him felt pan-fried, while the other half wanted to jump into the damn pan to warm up. His breath was still coming fast and hard. Holding one's lungs empty was not so easy as holding them full, but it was preferable to them exploding in vacuum.