Somehow I fell asleep. One moment I was awake, dreading the fact that my mind might start reverting to a baby’s thought process, which would really mess me up, then the next my body just slumped. I hope I didn’t roll off the side. What was surprising to me, however, was how quickly I was awake again. I have a theory that I will need to test, namely, that the time in my library is completely arbitrary and based more on how much active thought I use than how many hours pass.

After all I spent the previous night trying to see if there’s anything I can extrapolate from a few random feelings, while this night I just spent being confused for five seconds about just collapsing following by light hitting my eyes. It wasn’t like only a bit of time passed, because, at a minimum, one of my parents came by and moved me back in the center of the nest. I do not think it was instinct or moving in my sleep because I find the little bitten coin next to my head, meaning my parent saw me sleeping after finding my way to the side of the nest, saw me next to a coin with baby teeth marks on it, then tucked me right back to safety and gave me the dented coin like it was a teddy bear.

This may point to my parent being sapient, which would be nice. More things point towards me being an ideal kind of dragon and I am all for it. Now, speaking of other dragons, there’s my siblings. And they’re sleeping. Why though? Sure I understood them just napping yesterday, I am 90% sure I was born first and that they only got out of their eggs while I was sleeping, which may mean that we got our activity clocks inverted, but I figured at least one would be awake at the same time as me. Strange.

Well, maybe they don’t yet have the neural activity needed to do anything other than sleep. It’s been two days and I do not remember eating. We are a bit less round than yesterday, but still plenty plump so I figure we’ll only get hungry tomorrow. Maybe that’s when we’re supposed to actually start being dragons and walk around, maybe have our first meal? I don’t know about where we’d fit on the evolutionary tree, but I really don’t think dragons are mammals, so I doubt mother will bring us milk. Maybe it’s like birds and she’ll bring.. what? A dead snake or mouse to feed us? That’s… not exactly appetizing. Actually no, that’s gross and the image is playing in my head and I should feel my stomach turning but it isn’t. Alright, my mind is repulsed, my body is nonplussed. Something to unpack later.

For now I just attempt to get up and for the third time in a row I fail. Well, not completely, at least. I fail to raise myself off the ground but I manage to push myself forward instead, headbutting one of my sleeping siblings. Somehow, still doesn’t wake it up. Damn weird. Well, with my newfound mobility I manage to make record time reaching the edge of the nest… wait I have no idea how to guestimate length so I don’t know how big this place is. My perception is skewed since I am so tiny and close to the ground. Damn, that’s something I’ll need to solve. The definition of a meter is not exactly something a baby fat lizard can just follow, because how the hell am I supposed to mark down how far light travels in a vacuum during 30.663318988 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom?

I pause for a second, well, metaphorical second. Yeap, so much physics knowledge in this odd brain of mine that it still genuinely surprises me. I mean, I failed physics, twice, but now I just have the answer to most problems right here. My biggest problem was always that I couldn’t remember more than 3 equations at once and sadly that doesn’t cut it at college level. What was I doing? Right, I wanted to look around some more now that I could crawl. Hopefully my belly scales could handle being dragged around a bit.

It takes some effort getting down, mainly because I didn’t feel like turning into a ball rolling down the hill, but I managed to get down with only a bit of sliding at the end, as coins got loose. Note to self, my body is tough. Probably not incredibly so, but I am not feeling pain despite dragging myself over these coins and putting quite a bit of weight on my feet when I move. Well, that’s great, especially if I will live in this cave for a while.

I did look around previously, but it really is different when you’re up close and personal. The mountain of riches is absurd. Like I could unironically swim in all this stuff like I was in a cartoon. From down here I can also see more stuff around here, like the fact that there’s a sort of ring of silver around the pile of gold where the nest is. I thought all this stuff was just spread around here randomly, like a dump of riches, but the ring of silver seems intentional. I sniff at it, being hit with the scent of clean air and sterile bandages, then scratch at one with my claws, and the result is not what I expected. I originally thought it was fake when I saw just how shiny and clean it looks, but below the shiny coins, there’s more, less shiny ones. Actually, looking close, the symbols differ between the ones that started tarnishing and the ones that didn’t, meaning it’s less about purity and more about age. These are new.

Another thing to note, from the existence of these coins that I did not really think about yesterday, or rather didn’t get time to think. There’s people. At least there’s roughly human sized people with roughly human-like tendencies, since I doubt a dragon made these tiny coins. After all these are small for me, a baby, I doubt a real dragon can even hold a single coin it its claws.

So fantasy world with fantasy people with a fantasy society, probably. I will need to think about what relations there might be between whomever made this money and my parents. Dragons could be anywhere between noble, respected members of society and public enemy number one. The cave makes me think that reality is closer to a pessimistic answer.

Coins aside there is one thing I was wondering about, namely the gems and if they are actual gems. Honestly I can’t accurately test it, but I can at least give a good guess on if it is glass, plastic or something different. I doubt it’s plastic, but hey, you never know what a whole different world has in store. So I go for the closest gem to me, a dark blue one. I focus my eyes on it, seeing the intricate pattern within the crystal.

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I see waves. I see the slow movement of the ocean in its endless expanse of nothingness. I can smell the water, a faint trace of salt, I can hear the waves hitting each other and splashing. I am there. I am in the ocean and there’s no sky above or land below. It is just water encompassing my entire being and I run.

Well, I am being generous. I am not running, I am just clawing my way away from the pile of valuables and hide next to a jagged rock, breathing much faster than I should. Somehow my mind is both panicking and calm at the same time. It takes a minute for my terrified half to focus enough so I can understand what the hell happened. Short answer: dragon instincts. Long answer? I don’t know. I genuinely have no idea what happened. I can guess that something about me being a dragon gave me hallucinations but beyond that I don’t know.

This kept happening though. It was to a lesser extent, but I also focused less the last couple times. The gold and silver coins. I had sniffed them and got hit with the scent of power and growth, then with cleanliness respectively. The sapphire looking gem smelled like the ocean and like water, but I not only smelled it, I saw it. It might be a combination at work. The gem was big, actually. I’d say it was a bit wider than the coin at its widest, but it was sculpted in the form of a teardrop so it was comparable to an apricot. That was a lot more crystal than the metals. And with the gold and silver I looked a bit closer but I didn’t focus my eyes as much as I could like this time.

I have to keep in mind, it seems, that focusing any senses too much on something that might be precious will give me hallucinations. Is this drugs? Are valuable metals and gems just dragon drugs? Then mother must be extremely irresponsible.

Coping comedy aside, this does intrigue me, so time for a control test. I take a silver coin, a golden coin and the teardrop. With them like this I do notice that the gold coin is a bit bigger than the silver, noticeable but no more than that. Regardless, back to my test, what happens if I sniff each of these, with my eyes closed? Not too deep a breath, just normal breathing, but still close to the precious material.

First, the one I somewhat tested before successfully. It is still power and growth, but I sense something else too. At least part of the “more” from before seemed to be energy. It feels revitalizing just breathing in the air close to the coin. That’s interesting. Also I am not lost in it, maybe because I didn’t take a deep breath. Might as well see what happens then. And so I take my first deep breath of this life. Honestly I am surprised how much air I can take in, I feel like I became twice as wide by the time no more air can push its way in. Of course this deep breath seems to have done more than expand my rib cage. I do not smell just growth and power, there’s more. I realize, then, that in my rashness I forgot to think about the fact that I am sitting next to a small hill of mixed riches.

It smells like I fell face first into the spice rack, broke everything, and then took a deep breath. I cough and squeak, then shake my head, but I feel my body heat up. Of course, from all the coughing, I emptied out my lungs and went back to breathing normally while trying to calm myself up, but my body feels better than before, paradoxically. I follow the feeling of warmth and it literally just feels like I drank a whole bowl of soup. I can feel it spread, radiate, from my chest to the rest of my torso, to my limbs and head. I am pleasantly surprised then when I try again to lift myself up on my feet and actually manage to get off the ground. It only lasts a few seconds before my body collapses and I start breathing a bit harder, but that doesn’t matter.

I was stronger. For a moment my body was stronger. The warmth is replaced by normalcy, no, by actual cold, and I can’t help but breathe a bit deeper than before. Not a lungful, just a bit more. There was something happening and I needed to understand it, since it seemed my current body worked entirely differently from my previous one. A deep breath was enough to make me feel every smell I can think of, to the point where I had no hallucinations since they were all overlapping chaotically, but either one of the scents or the act of just breathing was enough to make me temporarily stronger.

Hypothesis one: Oxygen, I use a lot of it. There is the possibility that my muscles just consume so much energy to move my body that what I get normally isn’t enough. That is a dumb idea however, since if I was to get less than I should, my body would just naturally breathe harder. I’ve been high up in the mountains in my past life, where the air was thin, and my body naturally breathed faster to compensate.

Hypothesis two: Smelling salts. Just like there’s those salts that smell so bad they can wake somebody up from a concussion, maybe one of these smells gave my body a kick that forced it to use 100% of power, but the effect faded quickly and that coolness was a sort of backlash to the body, or a regulatory effect.

Hypothesis three: Magic. Dragon, fantasy world, magic. Holy trinity and all that. Dragons are supposed to be magical in a way or another, so say there’s mana floating about, in the air, and I just got a lungful of mana and used that to empower my body?

Hypothesis four: It was literally just adrenaline from my body thinking I was attacked after smelling a lot of everything all at once, and I am overthinking it.

Got no clue, but it’s fun to put feelings into thoughts. And now that I managed to calm myself down it is time to-

It happened again. I am back in the library, completely randomly and unprompted. One moment I am contemplating rocks and metals, the other I am out like a burnt matchstick. My siblings were still sleeping, I did not hear any sounds to imply otherwise, maybe I am being dumb by being active and I should be resting like them, maybe I am running through energy I don’t have and that’s why I don’t even get a slight warning.

Well, whatever might be the reason, I decide that I am not going to get anything out of my own mind to explain dragon biology. So instead I focus on passing the time faster, which actually works, somehow, as I open my eyes. Once again I am in the nest, and once again I am in a cuddle pile. I just shake my body and try to drag myself away, when I hear stomping. I freeze and look towards what I recognize as the entrance of the room. The sole entrance now that I think about it. I look at it and get a feeling of anticipation as something massive approaches.

I realize then that I am feeling something other than anticipation: hunger. And probably feeling the same thing, my siblings all stir awake, raising their heads and starting to make.. sounds? Yeah they sound somewhat similar to my squeak from before, but I can’t exactly focus on that. My focus is entirely spent on the entrance, massive as it is. I see the shadow way before I see a body. The earth is now actually quaking, a few pockets of dust from the ceiling coming loose and falling down slowly.

There she is. Yes. She. There is mother, before me.

That’s a lot of eyes.