He was lucky. A thousand times lucky, blessed, or perhaps he was just a cold hearted, intelligent, and opportunistic man.

He personally did not discount the existence of luck, even if on some atomic level it eventually turned out that luck was some perfectly controlled and measurable force like gravity. There were too many factors and too many inexplicable things in the world for luck to be entirely superstition. Those who claimed that he made his own luck didn't know how many times life had surprised him.

He eyed the notification list that had replaced the stacks of paper that would have confronted one of his predecessors and stifled a sigh. Breathing out your luck was definitely a superstition, unless you were one of the unfortunate portion of the population infected with the virus that kept refusing to be easily classified. It was the mushroom of viri, neither plant nor animal, neither cold, nor flu, nor neurotoxin, and yet presenting attributes of all of them.

A smile lifted the corner of his mouth as he sorted through the reports. It wasn't the virus that had stirred up the world that had risen to the top, it was the dragons.

He skimmed the report from the research team. It was littered with wild speculations that made him want to laugh. The sudden reappearance of dragons in the world at this time seemed to be pure luck, but he was grasping at that golden straw and hoping to spin it into a lifeline. He did not rise from his seat and run to where the dragon was housed, safely immersed in her studies, but he opened a document and added questions to it.

The security team's anxious speculations that the dragons were actually aliens, who might be controlling his mind were just as amusing as the research team's speculations that the 'strings' the dragons could see, and claimed to manipulate through what was essentially landscaping, were visualizations of magnetism.

Hard science had already quite easily proven that the dragons were earthlings, through simple genetic testing. To begin with, they shared the same basic DNA structure that every living thing in the world carried. It was the same reasoning that could be used to prove that the new virus was not some alien plague released from an asteroid. Like all of the others, it targeted them through their own DNA.

Compared to a spider with only a sixty percent similarity to humans, the dragons were practically their cousins. Like the frogs who seemed to have descended from some common ancestor, the dragons shared almost a ninety percent similarity with human DNA sequences. No one could yet explain how they could display scales and wings from other more distant families, or even reshape themselves so completely that they could actually mimic humans, but on a cellular level they were actually quite ordinary and reassuringly unchanging no matter their surface appearance.

As for the inexplicable 'strings', the researchers seemed to have forgotten that the dragons regarded them as food sources. Their froggy cousins might be even more magnetically sensitive than fish or fowl, who knew, but magnetism wasn't an energy source, it was an alignment. Which of course did not mean that the two were entirely separate. He certainly wasn't going to discount the possibility that the 'life energy' the dragons spoke of was running along magnetically aligned channels.

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He returned praises and reassurances to each group as he worked his way through the most 'urgent' reports. He needed them to keep throwing out their wild ideas and chasing every detail until someone could catch hold of just how a species seemingly so similar could consciously manipulate their bodies on a cellular level. A species of magicians that had been lurking in the legends of every society from one end of the globe to another had just walked, or flown, out into the light. A species that could, as a few rather risky tests had proven, stop an infection by paying attention to it.

A dragon's blood could be infected with a virus. It couldn't yet be infected with the one that was currently sweeping the world, despite the fact that the new virus was proving that it could jump from one species to another with terrifying speed compared to previously known limitations. But the dragon who had been infected with the virus that had happily infected her blood had shown no trace of it, not even on a cellular level, and that… was frightening and wonderful.

It was easy enough to prove that the dragons weren't aliens feeding off the Earth's magnetic fields. The timing of their appearance was like a thousand strokes of good fortune. The real difficulty was that for all of their technology, for all of his rationality, it was far too easy to look at a dragon and see a god.

The dragon herself had easily denied such an idea. She had explained quite cheerfully that dragons were no different from any other species in the world. She insisted that dragons had developed control over themselves, and could not control the tides and the sun. She had also quite reasonably explained how one might be able to create a tornado, if such a ridiculous waste of energy were attempted.

--

Anne sat on the couch and watched Chris meditating thoughtfully. He was trying to learn his 'pattern' without being able to see it as the others of his kind apparently could. The fact that it might take him hundreds of years, or more, didn't seem to bother him. She could quite literally see his concentration, as the ripples of light that were usually a faint wavering brightened.

The dragon who was teaching him, and who had taught her just what it was she'd been seeing her whole life, Amaru, had told her dismissively that humans did not live long enough to learn their own patterns even if they were able to see clearly. Ironically she could actually see more than Chris could, but she knew that she could not see with the clarity and detail that Amaru described.

Anne looked at her own hands, and flexed her fingers. They were ordinary looking hands, and even though she was quite familiar with their shape, she wasn't certain that she could even recognize her own hands out of a photo lineup of similar hands. She couldn't even imagine knowing your own structure well enough to reassemble it with your mind, the way the two dragons could.

Even the bodhisattva of that religion that had the Budda, who had ascended from the mortal world by surmounting the desires of the flesh, weren't described as having such an incredible understanding of themselves. On the other hand, what she'd read about them since meeting the dragons had emphasized that the god-like beings had once been completely human, unlike the gods of other religions.

She closed her eyes so that she could see the life force that moved through her own hands more clearly, and focused on the ripples that moved like water, the darker branches of stillness that lay beneath, and tried to imprint the patterns that were moving as she watched into her memory. She might not be a saint or a dragon, and she might not succeed in changing anything before she died, but with proof of the possibilities before her, wasn't it worth trying.