The now-awake dragon stared at us with its red eyes, moving very little apart from its swaying tail.

"Is...is it going to help us?" asked Cleetus with a hint of nervousness.

"It isn't connected to the other dragons," offered Laurence half-heartedly, "presumably it won't attack out right..."

"But it was programmed to protect Mars," Cleetus added, "and we aren't Martians. What if it sees us as the enemy and attacks?"

"A bit late for us to be worrying about this, isn't it?" said Detective LaLouf, equally concerned.

The dragon, however, simply blinked and shifted its head over to me. The skitterers still on me seemed to shake in fear and scream louder as its gaze intensified.

"Get off," I exclaimed, not as concerned with the metal dragon's stare as I was with shaking a few skitterers loose. They fell to the ground and started, well, skittering about. The dragon seem to look to me a moment, then looked down at the skitterers. In a cough, flames came out and incinerated the little creatures in an instant.

We all stepped back, not wishing to be burned. But the dragon merely looked to me again.

"It...seems to...like you?" Cleetus had picked up on the behavior.

I scratched the back of my head. "I...I mean, I did just restart its core. And designate myself as its master. You know-"

"-wait, you're its master? Can you make it do anything else besides burn...uh. whatever those white things were?"

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I looked at the dragon who stared back at me.

"Um..." I glanced about the room. "Can you...um...scratch my name into the ground?"

The dragon blinked. Then, as instructed, held out a claw and began scraping.

"It knows your name?" asked LaLouf, an eyebrow raised.

"I...I give it to the core, so..."

"And how to spell it?"

"...no."

The dragon rested in claw. We all looked to see a messy "MASTER" scrawled at our feet.

"...works for me." I said.

LaLouf clapped her hands together. "Great! Can you get it to fly to the polar ice caps? And melt them? And harvest water to fight its mecha dragon brethren?"

I shrugged.

"Well...he kind of...really needs to," Detective LaLouf sighed, "or else New World One..."

"Well, let's try first with getting out of here." I looked at the dragon. "Can you get us out of here?"

The dragon blinked. He turned and lowered his back. And then...waited.

"Does...does it want us to climb on its back?" Asked Laurence. I didn't wait to ponder that; damn right that dragon wanted us on its back. I shimmied up its legs.

"Come on up, guys!" I called.

"Already here," replied Cleetus from behind me, much to my surprise. "I climbed on two minutes ago when it seemed friendly."

"Are you two coming-" I began to ask but before anything further could be said, the dragon had already started running, leaving both LaLoufs behind. It charged at a wall but before we slammed into it had blown a wave a fire that melted said aforementioned wall in mere seconds.

"This is both terrifying and awesome," confessed Cleetus.

We held on to a piece of metal for dear life as, after a couple minutes of this, we finally emerged into the sunlight of the surface. We must have made a new lair exit point than where had entered; in the distance I could make out the jeep still unexpectedly parked where we had left it. In the back of my mind, I had assumed the waking mecha dragons would have destroyed the vehicle; that it was still there gave me hope in another matter.

"Dragon," I instructed, "go over there and find the cat."

Did the dragon understand what a cat was? Fuck if I knew. But it did know directions and started off the correct way. I had left Boom-Boom alone long enough; time to make sure my feline friend was still safe.