When she woke up, Stephine’s first thought was ‘I must stop the burritos from killing the president.’ Her second thought was, ‘The dragon thing was real. Shit.’ She stretched, and though she couldn’t see it herself, it looked very much like a cat stretching. As she blinked to adjust herself to the dim morning light, she paused. She blinked again. ‘Do I have two sets of eyelids?’ She blinked. ‘Yep. Definitely two. There’s the outer pair, and what seems like a clear pair.’ As she jumped down from the pillow, she took the opportunity to inspect her wings. They were still largely bare, but they were covered with what looked like small hairs. She didn’t know if they were there yesterday, and she had just missed them, or they were new. Regardless, her stomach rumbled, and she was hungry.

She remembered there was a kitchen on the first floor, and wondered if there was food there. She padded down the stairs, surprised how natural walking on four legs was feeling. She debated trying to use her wings, but they didn’t feel right when she spread them, and didn’t want to be remembered as “The dragon that fell down a hole and died because she didn’t know how to fly.” As she reached the first floor, she followed the kobold paintings to the kitchen. She sniffed, and she could smell food coming from cabinets. Cabinets that were closed. She could try to claw them open, but if Lawrence came downstairs to her trying to open the cabinets like a cat who wanted food, she would die of embarrassment.

She thought back to her evolution. ‘They use their [Telekinesis] to manipulate their surroundings, allowing a more dextrous touch than most dragons can manage.’ If she could figure out how to open the cabinets with [Telekinesis], she could eat all the food she wanted. She tried thinking about the cabinets opening, but they didn’t move. She tried saying, “Telelineeshish”, but nothing around her twitched. She was debating giving in and clawing the cabinets open, when she remembered gaining the skill [Language Acquisition] the day before. ‘Maybe if I can figure out how I used that skill, I can figure out [Telekinesis].’

She looked at the wall, and saw that some of the kobolds had characters written around them. The characters were largely straight lines, and they looked like they had been carved out with a claw. One symbol, that looked like three horizontal scratches with two much shorter vertical slashes on either end, appeared only next to kobolds carrying bread. ‘Maybe it’s bread?’ But something in her felt that was wrong. ‘Baker! It means baker!’ The definition came unbidden to her mind, and she realized the skill might have helped it. She focused on the feeling that had told her bread was not the definition. As she followed that feeling to its source, she felt what felt like little glowing spots in the back of her mind. As she felt those lights with her mind, she felt like she could pull on some of them. She tried doing just that.

The first one she tried felt like there was something holding it back. When she tried pulling harder, her wings itched, and she thought back to the small hairs. ‘Maybe my wings haven’t fully grown in yet.’ She looked in the main hall and, sure enough, the dragons painted at the end had wings covered in what looked like feathers. ‘Maybe that skill is [Gliding]. Can’t glide without wings, after all.’ She tried pulling on the next one, and rapidly opened her mouth as fire shot out of it. That marked [Dragonfire]. She pulled on the last one, and she could suddenly feel everything around her. She did a little dance and padded her way back to the kitchen.

She activated [Telekinesis] again and pulled open the cabinet door. The inside of the cabinet was covered in runes, and was entirely filled with what looked like fish. She could feel herself salivating as she lifted several of the fish onto a nearby table, dedicated with numerous kobolds making a fishing net. She jumped up onto the table and was about to bite into the fish when she realized that she probably shouldn’t eat raw fish. Maybe she could use dragonbreath to cook it? That seemed like a bad idea. She looked around the kitchen, but she couldn’t see anything for heating food.

‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ She tried pulling on the [Dragonfire] skill, but rather than unleashing a torrent like she had accidentally before, she tried to limit it. She tried to limit the speed. At first she had very little control, but she felt around the skill and could feel a ‘flow’ of something into it. If she blocked that flow, the fire dimmed down. She tried cooking the fish. She burnt her first few attempts, but she got it on her fourth try. She cooked the rest of the fish, and prepared to dig in.

[You have limited the flow of mana to Dragonsbreath. The skill has leveled up! Dragonsbreath → Dragonsbreath (1/10)]

Her teeth weren’t very good at tearing, but her instincts told her to try to swallow it whole if possible. She also discovered she could unhinge her jaw. She discovered this fact as Lawrence was entering the kitchen. She also discovered there is no casual way to swallow a fish whole.

“” She tried to explain using her broken Kobold. He shrugged and grabbed a fish from her pile. She almost hissed at him, but she realized she was being possessive. She had always been possessive, and evidently becoming a dragon hadn’t improved that. As she finished devouring her fish pile, she used her [Telekinesis] to close the cabinet.

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She didn’t want to spend her whole day trapped in the “holy cave” or whatever it was called, so she was planning on heading into the village to explore that. “” The grammar of Kobold was weird. It liked attaching words to each other, and it didn’t really care about word order. There was very little inflection, if it was relevant to the sentence, you’d just staple it to the word. As she re-hinged her jaw, she jumped off the table and headed towards the door.

“” Lawrence followed her towards the door. He prepared to push the door open, but she beat him to it with her [Telekinesis]. “” She nodded. “ Laresh.”

She followed Lawrence across the path until they reached the temple where she had hatched. At some point in the previous night, someone had encased her egg in some sort of glass case covered in runes. “ mashik?” She inquires of Lawrence. He nods, and corrects her with the correct words. As soon as they leave the temple, Karaxia, the purple-robed high priest sneaks up behind them. “”

Stephine nodded. The priest seemed to be long-winded, but she evidently loved to talk, and would provide a good tour. “” The constant praise was tiring, though, and didn’t feel earned. The high priest began to bow, then stopped, then nodded. She talked with Lawrence in fast Kobold that Steph can’t catch, evidently catching up on what happened over night. She laughed when Lawrence mentioned something about fish, and Steph looked around awkwardly. “” she tries to explain, and they laugh. She huffs and a little smoke jets out her nose.

The distance from the temple to the village is about the same from the temple to the cliff, and it takes nearly half an hour to walk the distance. But once they arrived, Stephine was blown away. Much like the temple and cave, everything was absolutely covered in art and carvings. However, unlike the temple, where everything was very planned and careful, and the cave which made Stephine feel like she was living in a vanity project, the town felt alive. It was very clear people drew whatever they wanted, and once something was drawn, no-one drew over it. This left a form of patchwork art that covered the village. There were kobolds dancing, kobolds singing, kobolds knitting, kobolds riding small animals, and even a few kobolds making out. The latter were the only thing that was obviously painted over.

That was nothing next to the people. The village was crowded. There were people running everywhere. Stephine supposed this was the “business” section of the city, as opposed to where people lived, because most of the buildings were covered in pictures of kobolds doing things such as blacksmithing and carving wood. This focus meant that there were kobolds running everywhere, carrying wood, metals, and fabrics left and right. The big surprise to Stephine was the way they were running. Rather than running on two feet like humans did, the kobolds put whatever they were carrying on some sort of backpack, and ran on four legs. The overall effect was like a town of hyperactive parkourists.

As she walked into town, that constant motion suddenly stopped, and every single kobold stopped, turned, and stood up to look at her like a meerkat. “” She attempted to look nonchalant, but she didn’t feel like it worked. One thing she noticed, as every single kobold was standing up and looking at her, was that kobolds weren’t the only race here. They were the most common, by far, but there were a couple others. There were a few very tall lizards that didn’t have the snout of a kobold with much shorter tails. While each individual kobold had one scale color, the tall ones’ scales formed a gradient from a vibrant green on their heads and hands, to a dark brown on their chests. There was even what looked like a very tall human, nearly double the size of the Kobolds, with moose antlers. Stephine did a double take on the horned human, then realized that the human wasn’t tall, the Kobolds were short. Really short. The tallest kobold was maybe three and a half feet tall. She hadn’t noticed before because she was about shoulder height to a kobold, which also meant she was

She leaned over to Lawrence and asked what the non-kobolds were called. “” he said the last word in English as well, as she hadn’t seen much wildlife, and didn’t know the Kobold word for elk. “” He turned around and faced Karaxia. “”

Karaxia nodded and yelled something about “ and “”. Evidently she wasn’t as respectful to the rest of the kobolds as she was to Stephine. The kobolds grumbled and returned to the “parkouring meerkats with their rear on fire” hustle-and-bustle from before. However, Stephine still spotted a few eyes on her at any given time, and she got the feeling that wouldn’t change any time soon. Karaxia flagged down Sweffton, who wandered over, dodging and weaving his way through the flurry of scales and color.

As he arrived, he prepared to bow, but Karaxia shook her head. He stood up and turned to Stephine. “” Lawrence explained that she wanted to see the village where she would be spending much of her time for the next few years of her life. Sweffton nodded, “”

Sweffton was clearly holding back honorifics, which made Stephine think, ‘If everyone here is convinced I need this much praise, I’m going to have an ego the size of Jupiter in a few years. Hopefully, Doc Lawrence can keep me down to Earth. Or down to Laxia, I suppose.’