I blinked and looked around me. I was situated on what appeared to be a flat slab of rock. A plateau of sorts, roughly circular and maybe twenty meters in diameter. I rotated in place and did a quick review of my surroundings, seeing only mountain on all sides.

I looked at the surface of the plateau, seeing only the shape of mountains in the distance in every direction. I wasn't sure that my location bode well for my future, but at least being in a position of relative isolation here in the mountains meant I was probably safe from any threats. I couldn't see any creatures around me, not even any birds in the sky above.

I cautiously moved to the edge of the plateau, peeking over the edge. It was a steep incline downward, but not a sheer drop; I could probably slide down if I had to. I moved around the edge of the plateau, eventually finding the part that seemed like it offered the most gradual descent downward, which was still pretty steep -- probably too steep for me to climb back up.

I moved back to the center of the plateau to consider my surroundings; I saw no need to be in any hurry to get on the move. It was only as I laid down to think that I realized my pacing had been been crawling on four claws, moving as a dog or cat might have. Despite the fact that I had been crawling on all fours, a position that my human body would have considered pretty unusual and unfamiliar, I had moved effortlessly in this way, not even registering until after the fact that I was crawling. The thought briefly occurred to me that out of all of the things that I could observe at the moment, my new body might be the most interesting thing, and yet it was only now that I found myself consciously realizing how oddly comfortable I felt inside of my new body. This must be how babies of any species operate: more preoccupied with examining their surroundings than with examining their own body. I guess that made sense -- all creatures seemed to be born with a sort of instinctive ability to control their own body without consciously thinking about it. But that didn't mean I knew everything that my new dragon body had to offer.

I studied what I guess I might consider my front limbs and feet, the analog of a human arm and hand. I didn't exactly have opposable thumbs, per se, but I could sort of manipulate my claws into a pincer-like grip that could probably allow me to grasp small objects if I needed to. The claws were sharp, curved nails -- actually, curvature aside, they looked more like a carpenter's nails than a human fingernail. The claws protruded from the end of gray, scaly legs. I briefly considered scratching myself to test the hardness of my own scales, but after looking at my sharp claws, thought better of the idea and instead settled for dragging my scaly skin against the rock surface of the plateau. I was able to put a lot of pressure on the rock before I got to the point where it felt like my scaly skin might break; these scales weren't impenetrable armor, but they at least afforded more protection than the human skin I was used to.

I tried whipping my tail around to examine it, but I couldn't turn my head very much, and the tail wasn't very long, so I could barely make out the shape of the tail's tip when I tried to bend it. The tail wasn't flexible enough to curl around, but I could sort of bend it enough to make out the fact that it was covered with the same gray leathery scales as the rest of my body.

I checked my stat sheet -- it felt weird to say that, as though the stat sheet were just another part of my body, but I was somehow able to call it into my field of view. Moving the stat sheet felt just as natural as moving my tail, despite the fact that I'd never had one until now.

Claws: level 1

Scales: level 1

Mouth: level 1

Wings: level 0

Level 0 wings, huh? That probably meant no wings -- I couldn't feel any, not even any little nubs where wings might be. Still, having a 'level' attached to my wings implied that I might one day be able to level them and acquire level 1 wings.

Level 1 mouth...that seemed worth checking into. I opened my mouth and closed it, and I started feeling the inside of my cheeks and mouth with my tongue, trying to get a feel for the shape of my teeth. I didn't have many teeth, and none of them were long enough to really be considered fangs, but they were sharp, like the teeth of a carnivore meant for ripping and tearing flesh, not the flattened teeth of an herbivore suited to grinding plant life.

For a brief moment, I considered what I knew about dragons: dragons could fly, provided they had wings, but I apparently had none -- not yet, at least. Dragons could also breathe fire -- well, that seemed to be a skill that I lacked for the moment, but then again I hadn't exactly tried. I opened my mouth, and tried to exhale in a menacing way, but nothing came out apart from warm air, and exhaling warm air was a feat that most mammals back on earth were capable of. Then again, maybe accomplishing a mammalian feat like exhaling warm air was notable -- I didn't know much about biology, but I was pretty sure that cold-blooded reptiles didn't breathe like that.

[Breath skills not yet learned! Mouth level insufficient to learn breath skills.]

Ah, so perhaps I could one day breathe fire, if my mouth became strong enough. In the meantime, my teeth seemed useful enough, presuming I found anything that looked worth eating.

I opened my mouth again, this time trying to call out, but a small squawk that could barely be considered a cry was all that came out. Evidently I didn't yet have much of a voice, either. I guess dragons don't come out of the egg with the ability to roar.

Having taken inventory of my body and the various appendages available to me, I now considered my next course of action. I looked at the white flakes scattered about the plateau, the remnants of the egg I had just hatched from. If I had hatched from an egg, then that meant I had to have a mother dragon, right? That might explain why I was here on this plateau. I was in a position that would be difficult to climb to, protecting me from predators, a good place to hide from predators.

However, I considered my conversation with Athena, who claimed to have created this world. This world was not one of "emergent order." It operated by Athena's rules, not Darwin's. That meant that I couldn't take it as an assumption that I was here as the result of some matronly dragon choosing to lay her eggs here -- it could be that in this world, dragon eggs just randomly spawned in fixed locations. Come to think of it, Athena did say that this world was based on the myths of Earth cultures, which meant that if I wanted to figure out how things worked here, I might be better off considering what I had read in Lord of the Rings rather than Origin of Species. Well, maybe Tolkien's novels weren't the best example; I couldn't recall anything about Smaug's origins, or if he even had a mother. Come to think of it, most fantasy stories about dragons didn't really focus on the early lifecycle of dragons. Apart from a few dragons that I'd seen in cartoons, the only infant dragons came to mind were Daenerys Targaryen's dragons, and even then, I couldn't recall anything about how the dragon eggs that she had custody of came into existence -- Daenerys might be the 'Mother of Dragons,' but she probably wasn't the sort of mother I was looking for. Looking at the mountain peaks around me, there didn't seem to be any people here eager to adopt a dragon -- or many people, period.

The absence of people might be a good thing. I knew a lot of stories about heroes going into the mountains to slay a dragon, and significantly fewer stories about heroes going into the mountains to befriend a dragon. Perhaps this world was home to a few people who dreamed of peacefully co-existing with dragons and sharing some sort of mutual relationship where they got to enjoy dragon rides, but Athena had introduced me to this world saying that "This world is not always nice." It also occurred to me that even among people who did seek to co-exist with dragons, one of their chief motivations might be to cultivate dragons as an instrument of war, and being ridden into battle didn't strike me as a particularly strong survival strategy. Dragons maybe had it better than war horses, but war tended to be a zero sum proposition of the sort that I had spent most of my previous life avoiding.

It was probably best to avoid people, at least until I understood this world better.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

I pointed my snout above, sniffing the air. I smelled an odor that I recognized as sulfurous, though oddly I didn't find the odor unpleasant. Perhaps dragons were used to smelling things that humans might consider noxious. That made sense, if "noxiousness" was supposed to be a warning sign of toxicity; it seemed like odds were pretty good that some odors and gases which might be poisonous to humans could be perfectly safe for dragons. I briefly took the time to sniff the scales of my front feet, hoping to get a feel for my own odor -- if I did have a mother nearby, there was a good chance that her scent might be close to my own. I smelled like...well, myself; I didn't really have anything to compare myself to, but it at least gave me a reference point for what another dragon might smell like.

[MONSTER TRAIT: Kin sensitive. Naturally detect when members of your species are nearby.]

I blinked the notification out of my vision. It was odd -- I didn't feel any difference in my senses the moment the notification had appeared. Had I just learned a new ability? Perhaps, but it seemed just as likely as I was realizing an ability that was already there. Perhaps I was a bit like a human baby learning how to walk -- walking was mostly a test of motor skill and balance; babies had the leg muscles to walk before they mastered whatever brain-body connection it was that gave them the ability to balance long enough to take a few teetering steps. It could be that this 'monster trait' was something that was always part of my body, and in trying to look for other dragons, I was now only discovering that I had that ability.

Perhaps I was now experiencing what all infants experienced. I was, after all, a "baby dragon," and like most babies, it would probably take awhile for me to learn what my body was capable of. What other abilities might I have, not yet manifest? Trying to breathe fire had gotten me confirmation that I didn't yet have any 'breath skills,' so it was probably best for me to experiment. Even if I didn't discover any new abilities, I could also discover the absence of certain abilities, which was informative in its own way. In addition to informing me about my current capabilities, testing my skills now could provide some illuminating information about the body I might one day grow into.

Using my newfound-yet-innate ability, I scanned the area for other dragons, and found nothing. Perhaps that meant I was an orphan, perhaps it meant I was the offspring of one or more negligent parents, or perhaps it simply meant that any potential caretakers were further than my 'dragon-sense' could detect, out gathering food for their newly-hatched youngster. That being said, I wasn't going to hold out on the prospect of a parent coming back; the fact that my body seemed capable of moving about on its own without any guidance from a more mature dragon to teach it the ways of the world seemed to be evidence enough that whoever had designed me had intended for me to be independent.

My knowledge of biology was somewhat limited, but I recalled that many egg-laying species sat on their eggs during an "incubation" period. The fact that there was no parent present at the moment I'd hatched seemed a big indicator that I had somehow incubated on my own -- if a dragon egg could be left to fend for itself, then it seemed all the more likely that a dragon infant could be expected to do the same.

Still, the plateau seemed like a good place to experiment with my own abilities and see what else my body was capable of. If this was a safe place for a dragon egg to incubate, it seemed like a safe place for a baby dragon trying to get comfortable in his own body.

I tried 'standing up' on my hind legs, and found that I could sort of balance myself by placing my weight on my rump and using my tail to stabilize, which left my front legs up to claw at the air. However, I couldn't really move like this; it was clear that I wasn't a biped, and I found it difficult to conceive of a scenario where I'd rather have half of my limbs raised up flailing about. I pushed off my tail, launching myself a few inches into the air before landing on all four legs.

I tried swinging my tail around. As I stood on all four legs, swinging my tail, it suddenly became clear to me that my tail was quite a bit longer than my neck, meaning that my center of mass was closer to my hind legs than my front legs. That was interesting -- it meant that my tail was critical to maintaining my balance. In fact, I now realized that as I had walked around the plateau earlier, I had been instinctively swinging my tail with each step I took. I tried walking again, this time keeping my tail rigid, and found that it wasn't so easy to lift my feet without swinging the tail. Apparently the tail served an important function as a counterbalance with even the most basic of movements. Perhaps that weightiness might also lend it some usefulness in a combat scenario...

I tried spinning around, swinging my tail, and after several spins, I found that I could pretty easily determine how quickly my tail would whip around and what height it traveled at. My legs were short and I was low to the ground, but that was probably a good thing. A tail-spin maneuver might be useful if I ever encounter a cyclops and needed to take a swipe at its legs to knock it off balance long enough to get away.

After several minutes of swinging my tail, practicing my spins and getting comfortable with the motion, I found myself a bit disappointed that the notification interface seemed conspicuously absent. No notification to tell me I had achieved mastery of the 'tail-whip' skill, or anything to tell me that my 'tail' had leveled up. In fact, as far as I could tell, my tail wasn't even something that had a level, unlike my scales, claws, mouth, and (lack of) wings. Still, experimenting like this wasn't a waste of my time -- learning more about my 'stat sheet' was important if it was going to be a measure of my capabilities, but learning how to get comfortable in my own body was equally important. I had played enough action games to know that the hero's ability to survive combat was often dependent on his ability to control his movements as well as the abstract numbers that dictated his power level, and having powers didn't mean much if you didn't know how to use them.

I briefly pondered which part of my body I would try to master next. Perhaps my claws were worth testing. I tried digging at the hardened dirt surface of the plateau, which was baked hard like the red desert rocks that it resembled. A bit of clawing at the ground left a few scratch marks. Most importantly, my claws didn't seem to be at risk of breaking, even as I scratched at the hard surface. Unlike human fingernails, which often seemed like a liability, there seemed to be no risk of me tearing off a claw by accident.

I sat up and scratched at the air. These swipes and slashes ended up being more a test of my front legs than the claws at the end of them. It was a bit tricky, because I was using all four legs for balance, so raising a claw up to swipe meant shifting my balance to one side. There was also the fact that my front legs were short, so short that they didn't even reach out as far as my snout. If I was close enough to something to swipe at it with my claws, I would probably be close enough to bite it, leaving me to question the usefulness of my front claws. Perhaps they were meant more for gripping the ground than swiping.

The idea that my front claws' greatest use might be gripping the ground gave me an idea. I tried spinning again, much like I had when swinging my tail, but this time, I dug my front claws into the ground for a moment as I raised my rear legs. I succeeded in performing a kicking motion just as my front claws lost their grip on the ground, and I felt my inertia carry me through the air several feet until I landed on my side, sliding along the ground and stopping just several inches short of the edge of the plateau. I carefully got up and took several steps back before peering over the edge of the plateau. I wasn't sure I was ready to leave the safety of this dirt and rock platform just yet, and even if I was, an accidental tumble certainly wasn't how I wanted to do it. Just as I walked back to the center of the plateau to consider my next course of action, I felt a notification blinked up.

[You are hungry! Satiety: 90%]

I glanced around the surface of plateau, seeing hard and barren ground. Well, perhaps I'll be leaving the nest sooner than I expected.