Acclimatization

(Brother)

Spoiler :

Ha ha ha it is still today technically because clock says 11 still so yay!

My apologies for the wait. Beside the usual shameful reasons there was also the understandable excuse of a power outage at my house today which prevented me from accessing the internet and even my computer.

It might satisfy your Schadenfreude to know that sadly right before the power outage I ran out of battery on several of my mobile devices so I had to go on electronic cold turkey...so painful ;)

As on update on the contest rewards (which probably almost none of you care about) I have just finished drawing them and am soon going to use the scans I made of them as materials for photo shopping which will hopefully result in somewhat palpable art. And I will even more hopefully get to post said art in a few days or so...

I also have one more chapter which I will post tomorrow and this is one of my rare guarantees :) .

It was not long after the first time that we first succeeded in using my sight that I was able to completely acclimatize to the use of the new organ and my vision greatly cleared.

As the majority of you who read or hear this are probably human or at least humanoid might curious to know, I will mention here that dragons grow up fairly quickly for such a long lived species, or rather at least our physical bodies especially.

To make a comparison between a just hatched dragon of almost any species and a human baby: while a dragon will develop from helpless infant to the stumble crawling equivalent of a toddler after only a few days, from what I understand for the human to get to that point would take months if not years.

Regrettably for many dragon species the human will usually catch up after that time and then quickly exceed the hatchling in the mental department. For some especially slow to developed dragons they will have the mind of an infant still after 5 to maybe even hundreds of years.

Thankfully I am not boasting when I say that gem dragons are happily not of one of those sad kinds. Even if we hadn’t stayed in the egg for over 50 years and developed almost completely mentally before we hatched, the majority of us would have still reached the age of reason after around 1 year and as I think you might have heard before the time of Gem Dragon adolescence takes place from 30-50 years with full adulthood at around 100 years.

Okay maybe I was boasting a little bit, but the point is that Gem Dragons are quite superior in some ways even for dragons, and though I didn’t know the reason I was born one I was quite thankful to be one. Especially as I got to meet my sister.

I of course was somewhat on the higher side of the superior spectrum as indicated from my hatching first, in fact by the time they started hatching not only was I able to see clearly I was also able to almost without mistake move around on my own legs. Thus it ended up that I got to see the rest of my siblings with the exception of sister hatch.

I wasn’t able to understand all that I bore witness to at first , being as I could only see what was happening on the outside, which for the majority of that time wasn’t much but with sister’s commentary I was able to know enough of what was happening to become concerned.

However to my relief Sister assured me that though the hatching process was even more difficult for them then it was for me she was monitoring them and lending her strength when needed so it was almost close to a guarantee that they would be fine.

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My sense of time hadn’t quite settled into a more measurable trait so I didn’t really feel that it was a long time or short time later when first Door and Hinge almost at the same time and then Peeper made their way out of their shells and into the experience of clumsy weakness that I had just gone through and wasn’t fully out of if I need to be honest.

But I do know that with the exception of around at least 5 or 6 more meal times, I no longer bothered with my observations of the room and instead watched them. I could only watch as like me they were probably having trouble connecting to the mental web.

I would have moved closer to them but Sister had quickly warned me not too. It seems that the servant dragons would have stopped me because they would worry about me harming them. With some dragon races just after hatching the hatchlings would have an instinct to fight to the death.

While Gem Dragons did not share this unfortunate trait, there supposedly had been cases where an over exuberant older hatchling accidently or otherwise knocked over a much weaker and comparatively more fragile just hatched and injured them.

Now that I know that it was a danger I wouldn’t have hurt them, but as Sister wryly pointed out the servants didn’t know that, and as I was yet unable to use my physical voice for anything other than a sharp yelping chirping sound, I wasn’t able to tell them either.

Also even if I disregarded my oath to my Sister about keeping our uniqueness which she referred to as ‘treasure’ secret, especially now that I had hatched I was simply not strong enough in my psychic powers to ‘reach’ them anyway.

Luckily Peeper was comparatively much quicker in reconnecting to the web then I had been due to her talent in that area, and thus it wasn’t long before I was able to talk with her again.

Although I was far less talented I had been practicing for longer and thus had more mental stamina, so the amount of time that we were able to talk unassisted was for a decent amount of time and each time we spoke the next time we would be able to speak longer.

Though currently I had an advantage gained through time in my mental stamina, I had a not unsupported feeling that Peeper would quickly be able to surpass me.

Of course both before after and during the times that we rested from the struggle of mental communion Sister was easily able to talk to us regardless of our individual states. She could also upon request lend us her strength in order to make the conversation longer, but most of the time we refrained, as both I and Peeper agreed because of our shared experience it was better to practice without her help.

We both wanted to become strong for our Big Light Sister how could we ever ‘prepare the way’ enough to convince her to hatch if she had to continually help us out with everything?

The conversations the three of us shared weren’t that interesting, though they seemed riveting to me at the time. They were mainly about our thoughts of what the ‘outside world was like’ and 8 times out of 10 the conversation topic would be focused around food and how good it tasted.

This repetitive commentary that at the time never got old was increased to 9 out of 10, when my brothers managed to finally connect to the web, and I was satisfied to note that they took a while longer then I had to do so.