Damn it, of all the times for our resident medic to be gone, it had to be now! I frantically tore through the shelf where we kept our bandages and healing poultices, stuffing everything I could find into the crook of my arm before making a mad dash back to the bathroom. Mibata was still just standing there, his expression neutral despite the fact that he was still bleeding. Shit what do I do first, potion or bandage, do I try to stitch it, and what do I do about those bone things in the cuts? I fumbled with the supplies as my brother attempted to explain.

“Kayrux it’s alright, I am in no-”

I snatched one of his arms and began to pour some of the healing syrup into the wound, which only seemed to mix with the blood and run off the sides of his wrist. Not thinking clearly, I tried to pinch and pull the bony protrusions in the wound, only to have my brother wince and try to pull away. Fine, I’ll just…bandage over it, and we can go off to the clinic as soon as we’re done here. I tried to get ahold of the cloth and begin tying it over the cuts, but his free hand grabbed my arm and held me firmly away from the wound. I looked into his eyes with panic, but upon seeing the stern look he had I started to realize that he wasn’t thankful for my help.

“Can you just allow me to speak? I am trying to tell you that I am fine. This is not the first time this has happened, and it is not a true wound that can be mended by magical elixirs. Please allow me to explain before you waste our supplies on this trivial matter.”

Trivial? Mibata there is blood everywhere, how can you call it trivial when this looks like a murder scene. Alright, maybe it isn’t that bad now that I look at it closely, but you’re still way to calm for someone with spikes coming out of his arms. Wait…this is just like-

“I can see that you are understanding that this is another of the dragon’s changes. You were given spikes along your back, while I was given these.”

He turned his wrist over in my hands, and along my palm I could feel the sensation of bone and muscle alike shifting in his arm. The pointed tip of whatever this thing was slipped back into the wound, from which came a small dribble of blood before stopping entirely. His other arm did the same, and as he twisted his wrist the other direction the bony blade slid back into view once more.

“Tuleni has already inspected them, and has told me that they are a rare change a kobold can undergo, such as having wings, a forked tail, or other natural weaponry like your own spikes. These blades are merely growing in at a somewhat harsh angle, and as such are cutting into my hands. As long as I extend them regularly while they finish forming I will be able to prevent them from becoming crooked, which could potentially require an amputation ro remedy.”

He wiped away the blood on his wrist, and just before his hand began I could see the nearly invisible slit where the blade was hidden from view. The area looked irritated and had small nicks around the edge, but it appeared that a majority of the blood had come from his left hand where the spike caught his palm as it extended. Seeing this finally allowed me to calm myself, though I still kept looking over the red mess around the edge of the drain.

“You will probably say that it is awful, but I discovered this change while I was in the mushroom forest. I was reaching for a rotund toadstool on the ground, only to see my own essence splatter onto the ground as I reached for it. The lead forager saw this and commanded me to report to the closest healers, but upon learning of my name they sent word to our grandmother. Seeing her arrive on a lift to the bottom floor was intimidating, as she took the space of an entire lift because her presence demanded such space. She recommended that I stretch the new muscles for these blades often, but it was my own desire to keep you all from worrying that led me to hiding it. Looking back upon it now I realize I was foolish, and the situation we are in now is my own fault.”

You really were, and it totally is, but I can forgive you for caring about how we’d be worried. I reached to pinch at the bridge of my snout, but seeing the blood on my hand made me end up clenching my hand into a fist and resting my knuckles on my snout instead. The smell of blood was everywhere in the room anyway, so having it closer to my nostrils didn’t change how tense the muscles in my stomach were. Until I washed the blood off my scaled hands I couldn’t even grab my chalk and slate without staining them as well. The best I could do was thump my fist to my chest twice then point to Mibata, his response to be a tilted head and a questioning look.

“Is that supposed to be a way of saying that you still love me? I am joking, I can recognize the gesture just fine. Thank you Kayrux, I am sorry for making you feel any degree of distress. As juvenile as this may sound, I think a part of me was trying to show you how strong I could be as well, and from that sentiment spawned the misguided notion of hiding this development until it was usable. I would be a poor excuse of a brother if I suggest that you work on making yourself stronger and better armed if I did not try to do the same on my own. Well, now that this secret is out, shall we move out of here and clean ourselves off? I would very much like to disclose this with Bahruk without the macabre decoration of my own vital fluids.”

That was an excellent plan to go along with. My heart rate had finally returned to a calm pace, which allowed my to clear my mind enough to conjure up a filter rune with a variable limiter. I was about to activate it to clean the blood from my hands when I realized that my hard-coded limiters to keep me running at one-tenth of my power were all shattered from the altar incident, and a part of my mind told me that I really didn’t need them for this. If ten percent power from before was enough to keep a stable rune running, then just 1% could do the same thing. The power surged forth on a minimal degree of output, and the effect was the expected collection of any material that was not myself on my scales to coalesce in the palm of my hand.

Mibata, the walls, and the edge of the drain all got the same treatment, and the bloody, grimy mess was scoured away and dumped down the drain with a surge of water from a bucket. Now that everything was clean, I could lead Mibata into the hobby room and converse with him in a less cramped room that had more appropriate seating than the floor of the bathroom. I wrote my thoughts down and set them on the table as I reached down to pick up my isopod pet.

“You did scare me, but I can understand that idea of not wanting to worry the family. I’ve been doing it for too long, and now everyone is in danger so I need to be really honest. Is there anything you want to share, or you want me to share? I’m going to record it all on my typewriter so that everyone can keep track of it, along with the results of my scanning power.”

He reached up and scratched the space between his first and second right side horns as he pondered the query.

“Hmm, aside from the small scale progress of my transmutation abilities, the development of the natural blades, and a minor improvement in hand to hand combat I have made by sparring with a superior officer over the week, I cannot say that there is anything worth noting. I believe that visiting you in your workshop showed me that you have made progress of your own, but aside from being able to levitate metal and cause it to spontaneously heat until molten I cannot say that I know much about your combat magic. How has your electrical magic progressed?”

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The intrusive thought of giving him a weapon demonstration attempted to wriggle into my mind, but the fact that I could hear and sense the sounds and mana of dad working in the other room told me that firing off dangerous spells would have him in here panicking in a heartbeat. I clacked the keys of the typewriter instead, typing out some basic descriptions of some new ‘spells’ I had developed.

“I’ve tested a few new spells in the lab, and I know how to refine them. My first rune spells are a wind punch and a wind shield, one able to throw objects back with force and the other able to toss nearby objects away at high speed. Using the thunder rune and the stronger variant I call a lightning rune, I was able to channel electricity in its pure form without using mana for anything more than generating the power. So far it can be used to electrify the area around me or cut through plates of metal in an instant, but I am sure that with more practice I could weaponize it into a channeled beam that can melt its way through stone easily. For now I’m holding back on doing that until I make more progress with physical weaponry.”

Mibata’s eyes were drawn to the hammer on my bandolier as he nodded at the parchment I'd handed him.

“A wise decision to go along with a remarkable display of aptitude. Those abilities sound truly remarkable, and you must show me their potency some time. You do inspire me to try new methods of applying my own magical abilities, which I have had some success with. I did not mention it at first because I had thought it a minor detail, but I do believe that I have achieved a level of control similar to yours. Might I show you?”

I gave him a go ahead gesture, after which he brought a fist up between us that radiated his grayish magic. The scales around his knuckles darkened and shimmered as organic scales were turned into metal, and the mana locked in place without solidifying as it did with mana stones. I kept a scanner looking at him to tell me more about what was going on, and as it translated into my mind it seemed as though his skill was no longer draining mana like a leak from maintaining the effect. It was almost as if he paid the initial cost of transmuting the scales, but as long as he held the spell in place he did not need to fuel the reaction further. His mana stayed at a constant level as the passive regeneration rate was matched by the slow drain that maintaining the spell brought. He ended the effect, and as the mana flowed back into him I saw a good portion of it dissipate into the air around him as the vast majority went back into his source. I would say that he expended about 50 mana to transmute his fist entirely, and he was refunded 30 once the spell ended.

“Were you able to sense what I could feel? I had practiced in the late evenings to see if I could retain more of my magical energy and waste less effort in retaining control over the spell. I do believe that I have made a breakthrough in that regard. I only have so much mana after all, so I must learn to make the most of the miniscule pool of magic I have to draw from.”

That’s a pretty solid plan, and given how well he had held the transmutation in place I could already see a future where he would be able to turn his arms into steel for hours on end. Damn, just imagining him combining his fists of metal, some kung fu moves, and those hidden blades together gave me goosebumps under my scales. Alas, that future will have to wait until he has grown strong enough to hold more than just his knuckles in a durable form. Perhaps a new suggestion would give him some new ideas to play around with. I wrote this question on the slate as to not waste ink.

“Have you tried hardening your scales in other places? Elbows, shins, tail, you can weaponize just about anything if you get creative.”

A flash of inspiration shone from my brother’s eyes as he realized the potential of his ability. The magic in his source could not decide which route to take, but ultimately settled on his whip-like tail. The tip of his thin appendage turned to the dull iron-color that his knuckles had moments ago, and an experimental lash of his tail tested just how close to iron these scales really were. A loud snap came from the ground where he had struck, and where his tail had touched the ground with a blur of speed there was a small scar as thick as a finger. A confident smile radiated from his narrow lips, and a thankful bow followed his mirthful chuckle.

“As always, you are an incredibly inventive kobold my dear sister. The possibilities that this opens up are…numerous, to say the least. Ah, but speaking of possibilities, might we take a look at that elusive spying eye you have captured? I know it is sudden, but I have been wondering what these unseeable surveyors have looked like ever since you told me of them.”

I reached into my back and fetched the small orb, and in the light of the hobby room light I was able to see many details that the shadowed canopy of the multi-tiered city floors had obscured from me upon its capture. The eye was made from solid gold with silver engraved rune lines covering the surface in a spider web of repeating symbols that formed a prism across its surface. The pupil of the eye looked to be layers of multi-colored glass lenses stacked on top of one another, the edges traced with input points of mana conductive silver attached to the surface layer runes. My sensors told me that not enough magic currently stored in this device to run a rune of any size or shape, but the internal silver lines were slowly building charge over time using the ambient mana. There was quite a bit of damage along the bottom of the eye, no doubt from where it had skimmed across the stone floor.

I closed my eyes and began to map out the internal runic structure as it conducted mana while drawing the rune as best as I could on the slate and crafting a replica in my mind. A spherical cage with rings in the center, and a circular diamond shape pointing flat side out towards the front. Wait, this looked almost exactly the same as one of my sensor runes, except instead of spiraling lines and multi-tiered circles there was the diamond shaped system attached point first right into the center of the rune. Wait one second, was this perhaps a sensor that would look for something different from mana as mine were designed to do?

I replicated the design in my mind and made a copy in my left arm. A simple activation and running on the true 1% power gave me muddled information, which led me to believe that the multi-colored lenses in front of the rune acted as the rings from my own sensors. Accounting for this and placing rings before the diamond gave me a fully functional rune, but no matter where or what I pointed it at there was no new info. Perhaps this was something that my runes could not emulate. Drat.

I returned to mapping out the internal structure and sketching the runic arrays I could see inside of the device, but no matter what I did I just could not tell how this thing operated. Rolling it, jostling it, and even squeezing it yielded no secrets. With no other options I decided that giving the drone a few drops of mana to kickstart it might give me some kind of data, and goodness was this a great idea. Where before there were only patterns of interwoven silver veins across the surface, I could now sense that something was written in magic on the surface of the device from within. Old Pteronian characters written in tiny script, somehow conducting mana not through the letters like runes would, but in the shape of the words and a field around them as well. I wrote the words down on the slate, and confusion washed over me as I did.

“Fly. See. Link. Hide.”

I wondered what this could possibly mean as I passed the device to Mibata. These were just instructions for the machine, but how were the words being used by the device itself? Maybe this had something to do with enchanting, and imparting a desire into the user. I glanced to my brother as he inspected the device, his lips parting as he spoke the words like a command in an order that made more sense.

“Link, see, fly, hide.”

And just like that the drone lifted into the air, my brother looking dazed as threads of mana shot out and burrowed into his head. He shook his head, the eyeball mimicking the action in tandem with his own movements. He looked at me, the drone copying the action with a slight bobbing motion. He closed his eyes, and once he had the drone scanned the room from left to right, top to bottom, then looked back at me. With his eyes still closed, Mibata spoke to me with a slight smile on his lips.

“Kayrux, I think I know how these eyes work now.”