Pre-Season

Adelie

As soon as she stepped into the barn and out of the wind, Adelie could smell that something was wrong. The warm air was laden with a rancid, fleshy smell, strong enough that she gagged. Her eyes watered. She knew the smell – carnivore vomit. She'd treated food-poisoned pet lizards before and they sometimes threw up fresh meals like this.

Sure enough, just at the leading edge of the sand drifts that covered most of the barn's floor was a puddle of grey-brown slurry, half-digested chunks of once-red meat scattered through it. A big puddle, spreading almost to the corner where Soot's litter tray was. It looked like he'd tried to get to his toilet and come up just short. He was so smart.

She looked down the length of the barn to where the drake huddled. Somehow, today, he didn't look so imposing. He slumped on a low rise of sand, wings folded, tail curled around his flank. His neck lay along the ground, chin pushing up a little bow wave. The eye she could see was half-open and, to the extent that he had facial expressions at all, redolent with misery.

Forcing herself to ignore the smell – she'd have to clean it up soon but she knew what the priority was – she walked over to the dragon. She couldn't see any other vomit on the sand, which was a good sign. As she approached, he lifted his head an inch and huffed mournfully.

Adelie knelt by where he lay, placing her knees by his snout. Cautiously, because he had to be hungry and her hand was tiny next to the space between his narrow nostrils, she ran her fingers over the ridge of his nose. Up close, his scales weren't actually the matte night-indigo that they looked from a distance; tiny shimmers trickled across their fine texture. The violet orb of his eye stared up at her, turning the arch of his folded outer eyelid plaintive.

"You had a bad night, huh, Soot?" She said, gently. "Have you been drinking at least?"

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She stroked his snout again, then bent down, head close to his jaws, sniffing for his breath. He sighed at her, a long, deep sound, and she winced at the scent. It was the usual, though, with only a faint hint of bile added to the normal meat stink. That was promising.

Standing, she turned to the wall where Soot's water supply was mounted. It was basically a mains-fed fire hose with a fancy nozzle that the dragon could open by mouth pressure. For exactly this kind of situation, there was a small digital gauge on the wall fixture, but she couldn't read it from here.

Soot whuffled miserably as she stood up again, and she murmured to him as she backed towards the wall. Phoebe had insisted on the importance of not turning her back on the dragon, and Adelie had assumed it was for her own safety, but looking at Soot flat out in the sand, maybe it wasn't? Maybe it was about courtesy.

And presumably before this, he'd known other dragons, instead of being alone in this big empty barn. He still had three weeks before the official weigh-ins, the next time he'd see another drake. The limpid reflections of the room's light in his crystalline eyes looked like a hint of tears, even though she knew he had nothing like human tear ducts.

It was a little hard to pull her attention away to check the gauge. She didn't have the exact maths memorised yet – and with only four days of data so far on Soot, there was lots of fine-tuning still to do – but the numbers didn't look too bad. Worth seeing if he'd like a top-up.

The hose could be unreeled to twenty metres if necessary, though the mechanism was new enough to be stiff. Adelie had to put all her weight into it, and it dragged at her as she brought it over to Soot. The dragon lifted his head and took the offered nozzle, his throat making an ugly glottal noise as he drank.

Carefully, she stroked along the top of his snout, holding the hose steady for him even when he took a break from drinking. It was hard to imagine the stiff crests of scale that would form over his gently curved lines through the next half-century. He brought his mouth back to the nozzle and Adelie made a mental note to up her estimates of how much water he'd take. She'd need to call Phoebe soon as well and let her know what had happened.

Even if it was just one bad batch of food, Soot would need close monitoring for the next few days. If it wasn't that… well, allergies, maybe? Hopefully nothing more serious than that. There wasn't a lot of time to get him well again if he was actually sick.