I was reasonably certain my human was not the shapeshifter. He looked like Commander Zideo. He smelled like Commander Zideo. He had jumped into action like Commander Zideo, doing something selfless that I don’t think the shapeshifter would have attempted. We are, after all, talking about that mean humanoid who had crystallized Addrion and attempted to do the same to the Princess–and worse, flicked my ear that one time.

This dragon was having none of it. He rallied the pengoons to action, and dozens of them went to work seizing Zideo’s wrists and ankles and hair. I expect that Zideo could have punted any one of them over the nearest roof, but their combined strength was enough to overpower him.

I attempted to intervene, and attempted to ward them off with some of my most vicious snarls. I snapped in warning at those reaching for him, giving voice to my most basic animal threats, but could not quite bring myself to follow through with harming the little creatures. I glimpsed Peligrosa, who stood with her flippers over her beak, and the sheer power differential between me and the pengoons made me feel like the bad guy, though they were so clearly in the wrong. I lost my tactical advantage in hesitating, and they formed a wall between Zideo and me.

“I’m not him!” protested Zideo. “I’m me!”

“Sure,” said the dragon. “Me too.” He stirred the air in a circle with his claw. “Convey him to the city jail.” The pengoons lifted like a bedsheet from all corners, and began to transport him down the street. “The rest of you, what you waiting for? Get buckets and start formin’ a line!”

The dragon’s voice was highly nonstandard, as each word dragged through inches of thick molasses (whatever that actually is) on its way out of his mouth. It reminded me of the dialect of Lisa’s landscaper, all twanging diphthongs and dropped consonants. It was such a distinctive style of speaking that Lisa and Zideo had often laughed and impersonated him after he had left the premises, preceding all w-words with an h: hwat, hwy, hwen, hwere.

The dragon pulled off the thin spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “All this excitement is gonna give W. H. Gobo a headache. I dare say I’m in considerable danger of a migraine.” Consi-dribble danjuh of uh mah-grain. He wiped the lenses down against his pinstripe vest, and noticed me for the first time. His brow, an animated ridge the thickness of a cucumber that hung snout, scrunched low and made half-moons of his eyes. He thudded over, his muscular tail flexing behind him. He walked vertically, like a human, but knelt his long neck so that he could look eye to eye at me. The threat was not lost on me, but he was too sapient for me to take it seriously.

In a low voice, he said, “Now, I know a predator when I see one. What’s your story, sport? Xue-Fang’s new guard dog? What happened to the teddy bear?” Hwat happund to the teddeh beah?

I was rather too baffled to reply. Nothing could be achieved by growling at this creature out of human myth. He was many times my weight; the mass of his tail alone was probably ten Cormacs’ worth of muscle.

“You don’t look like a killer to me,” he said, scratching his chin and staring deep into my eyes. “No, you’ve been…fed. Coddled. Too comfortable for too long, I’m thinkin’. Hmm.” A fine silver chain slid out from his vest, clinking audibly. He stood upright, snatching it and stuffing it back in–but not before I caught a glimpse of its pendant. “I’ll give you a choice, from one predator to another. You can go to jail with your master, or make yourself scarce. I oughtta mention that the jail’s warmer than spendin’ a night on the mountainside.”

“I can mind the dog, old chap,” said Helmgarth. “He’s well behaved and won’t be a bother.”

He stood up straight and cocked his head sideways. He squinted, then put his glasses back on. “As I live ‘n breathe. Helmgarth Hulsson?”

The seneschal, warden, whatever he was now, waved meekly. “W. H.,” he said with a nod. “Where’s the real mayor?”

W. H. sighed so heavily that smoke came out of his nose. The townspenguins were returning with buckets, water sloshing out the sides.

“Let’s catch up in the town hall,” he said, “as soon as I’m done putting out this fire."

With a cloud hanging over my head, I trailed a safe distance behind the jail-bound parade of pengoons. They marched in step like a black and white army of avian ants. There was some confusion among the bystanders whether they were supposed to cheer for the arrival of a human, or cheer for his capture. In the end, most of the town was conscripted to assist with the fire line, methodically ferrying buckets from the frigid well.

As they dragged him into the jail, a facility with four walls and less square footage than Lisa’s den, my mind raced through ways I might prevent Zideo’s imprisonment, or failing that, effect his escape. Not a one presented itself that would not result in me maiming one of these poor creatures, which I would have gladly done in service of liberating the best human of all time, except that they were just so darn cute. The aura that Peligrosa exuded, which disabled logic and pragmatism and replaced it with the unignorable instinct to protect and cuddle, was apparently a ubiquitous trait among these peculiar birds. Even as the jailer–a squat, spear-wielding bruiser wearing a fuzzy ushanka–slammed the sliding gate closed on rickety wheels, I found that I could not deliver on my plan to bite his haunch and distract him.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

The jail itself was little more than a man-sized boundary of bars in the middle of an otherwise empty room. I thought I might be able to squeeze through the gaps with some difficulty.

“Nice,” Zideo fired at the backs of his deliverers. “You should practice gratitude.” He sat back against the bars on a creaky, wood floor, crossed his legs, and crossed his arms. He sighed, and I licked his elbow reassuringly through the bars. “Okay, guy,” he said, and scrubbed my ear until I kicked involuntarily, scraping the floor. “You’re right.”

Zideo began to talk to himself, or possibly to me, bemoaning his treatment. “We don’t even have one piece of this sun,” he said. “This is a disaster.” He stood up and paced, looking for an escape. The pengoon guard eyed him suspiciously, and pounded the butt of his short spear on the wood.

“Man, whatever,” said Zideo. The room itself presented no clear avenues for liberation, even though it felt like it wanted to. The need for a path–one with exciting obstacles and daring jumps–was endemic to this planetoid, but even that mystique sensation could not coalesce into something useful. There was nowhere to go, and the bars, although ceilingless, were too high for a human to jump over.

He tried to fit through the bars, and gave up when his shoulder caught and eyes bulged. “Hurgkh.” He attempted to jump and see if he could grab the crossbars at the top of the cell. “Huh.” He repeated the test, and turned to me. “Did you see that? Did I jump higher than normal?” He tried again. I had not often watched my human do athletics, although I knew he was capable of them. It did seem uncommonly high. “I think I have like an extra foot of ups right now.” He jumped again, in place, and a puff of dust fled from his Jordan-shoes upon landing. “You think that’s the platforming at work?” he asked, but these things were quite beyond the scope of my canine ken. Ever the scientific mind, was Commander Zideo, and he began a series of tests on himself. He tried a forward flip from a standing jump and landed it on the first try, although his feet stumbled and his shoulder clanged against the cell bars. The pengoon prison guard hammered the butt of the spear on the floor, but seeing that Zideo paid him no attention, went back to guarding. Emboldened, Zideo attempted a backflip, which resulted with him face down on the dusty prison floor.

Undeterred, he went through the paces. He attempted what he called a “double-jump,” which appeared to be him just kicking at the height of his leap, and was disappointed. He tried a spinning jump and voiced his displeasure that it didn’t make “the sound.” He put some effort into gaining speed and sliding on his side, with one leg folded and one extended, but there was not nearly enough room for this and he wound up kicking his guard. The surly pengoon threatened him with the spearpoint through the bars, but I did not intervene due to the aforementioned aura of cuteness. Plus, his heart was not in actually harming his charge—that much was obvious.

Once it became clear that Zideo was reasonably safe, and that his emotional state was passable while he was preoccupied with physical experimentation, I wandered out of the prison. If I could not provide him comfort, it was better to look for survival supplies or, better yet, some means of escape.

I took to the web-worn main street of Pengoon Peaks, where the light was fading. A quick note on this: I did not see a sunset and had not ever actually noticed a sun in the sky. It was the kind of blue-gray light of an overcast day, which are admittedly few in Airy Zone. If there was a sun here, it had yet to show its face.

Although there was an air of disaster recovery now that the fires had been extinguished, the citizens no longer hurried through the town. They carried lumber and tools, they clustered in small groups around reconstruction efforts. As a side note, I have since learned that a group of penguins on land is called a “waddle” and on sea is called a “raft,” which makes a lot of sense. I think it only fair to apply this to pengoons as well.

Even half-destroyed, the town was pretty in a kind quaint and rusty way. The homes, their roofs now smoking from damage rather than chimneys, still maintained that kind of sense of a cozy cottage, even with charred gaps in the ceilings and walls. Temporary barriers against the coming night were erected, spare corkboard nailed in place and tarps weighed down with stones.

Those not involved in town reparations saw to one another’s needs, which were voiced almost constantly. Pengoons milled about in their homes, raiding fridges and chests and asking one another for “Hamburger?” One tiny gray chick wept, sobbing “Thirsty! Thirsty!” A heavyset civilian with a pair of pants for his clothing affectation stood in the street with great sadness on his face, his flippers stuck deep into his pockets. I knew it was sadness not only because of the frown on his beak—which itself was a surprise—but also because he sighed heavily and said “Sad!” out loud. The others were too busy to help him with this, so I, recalling the way humans’ faces light up when they see me, trotted over. The pitiful creature may have been partly responsible for Zideo’s imprisonment, and I feared that any succor I offered him was part of that as well, even if it was only emotional. But, as Ma used to say, one good lick deserves another, I committed. I licked his face, and he squinted at first and sputtered, wiping dog saliva out of his black eyes. He blinked at me, then fled screaming.

Much has been said about dogs learning tricks, but even a dog can learn a lesson about cross-culture interactions. Oh well.

Pengoon chicks went back to their play, chasing one another around houses and casting invisible spells at one another. A mother attempted to close her partially burned front door when she saw me coming, and it crumpled into a pile of ash and splinters.

There was a fountain in the plaza, out in front of town hall, where I found W. H. Gobo sweeping burned wreckage aside with his tail. He looked at me, it seemed, with understanding in one eye and mistrust in the other.

Helmgarth worked on boarding up the window that Zideo had come crashing through, holding up two-by-fours for the pengoons to hammer into place, which they achieved by standing on one another’s shoulders. The directed the work with single word sentences, like “Up” or “Nail” or “Ouch.” I noticed Peligrosa carrying a lumber plank that was much too large for her, and took one end in my teeth as she paused to wipe her forehead. We hauled it the rest of the way and dropped it before it was swiped up by Helmgarth’s team, although nobody made as big a deal as I had expected about a dog helping with construction.

Gobo was ushering Helmgarth into the town hall, which was also the mayor’s house, and urging him to take off “that dad burn thang,” meaning his backpack. “Come on in and have Hamburger… I mean, supper. We need to talk, you and I.”

I followed them inside and darkness fall through one of the unbroken windows, and wondered what Lisa was doing at that exact moment.