Two minutes earlier…

“Julia, that is the most batshit crazy thing I have ever heard you say, and that’s saying a lot!” James expresses his disbelief in blunt terms after she tells him that wizards and dragons exist. Angela and Julia are both glaring daggers at him. “A magical creature bestiary? A world-spanning conspiracy of wizards, dragons, and who knows what else, who live among us in some secret society? And it bears repetition, dragons?! Are you two out of your mind?!”

Julia lets out a frustrated growl, and pulls him by the collar to force him to look at the page. The looming specter of the Siberian Hellkite is inches from his nose. It isn’t any less disturbing up this close. “Ow, okay, I can see you’re disappointed that I don’t buy into this–”

“Read it, Skeletor!” she snarls. Angela looks perturbed by the spectacle, but Julia is not backing down on this. “Tell me that this isn’t an extremely uncanny coincidence. How did no one see how this graffiti got here? How do you heal from gruesome wounds in a matter of a couple hours? How else could I fry a microwave out of nowhere?”

“Julia, you are the destroyer of worlds and a man’s pride, and the former of those two is trivial to the destruction of the latter,” James replied sarcastically. He examines the image, then back to the graffiti. He frowns when he realizes the image is a bit uncanny in terms of similarity. “Did you two put this up? Wait. You walked into the school at the same time as us. There’s no way you could do this. Angie, maybe, she’s the art talent here–”

“James, this mural took probably a couple of hours, and no one even noticed it till five minutes ago. In the span of a couple of minutes, someone put this up, walked out, and had time to play a round of sudoku,” Angela replies unhappily. “Julia, please don’t damage him more than necessary, I’m going to get a round of grief from my mom again if you injure him like the last time at the training center.” Julia relaxes her grip on James, and he recomposes himself hastily. The crowd around them is paying them exactly zero attention for the time being. “I mean are you sure you’re not fooling yourself, Evan could have been injured and the wounds would have scabbed over–”

“He grew claws, Angie. Drenar has a patch of scales on his arm growing at a geometric rate, you want to test me on this one?!” James is firmly convinced Julia has finally lost her mind, but Angela simply gasps.

“Um, James, let’s pretend for a moment this is not a big joke, and more like a ‘holy crap they weren't kidding, and we’re terrible friends for not believing them’ kind of thing,” Angela says very quietly.

“No, I’m just convinced these two have lost their mind,” he snaps at her.

“You know, maybe we should ask the other person with skin in the game? Alright, Drenar, maybe you can–where’d he go?” she asks when she turns around to realize Drenar had taken off–pushing past the crowd and following Nick to the bathroom on the far side of the hall. “What is he doing?” she asks pointedly.

“Probably having bowel troubles with all the party drugs those two have been doing to come up with this,” James snarks. He can almost hear Julia’s tensed muscles creak from restraint. “Fine. I’ll go check on him,” James relents and pushes past the crowd. Julia is a bit of a fey spirit at times, but Drenar reserves his sheer nonsense for tabletop gaming only, and the occasional sardonic wit. James hopes his only respectable rival is not losing his mind when he edges past the thinning crowd down the hall.

It has to be a joke, right? An elaborate joke by those two. Except, he’s at a loss how they could have pulled this off. He can hear someone talking in the bathroom distantly. He throws the door open, and Drenar is leaning on the wall, his neck craned, and he is focused on listening. Was that Nick talking to someone on his cell phone?

“Hey Drenar, reality is calling you back,” he says, but Drenar completely ignores him. He also looked slightly pale. “Drenar, why are you lurking in–” Drenar shoots him a panicked look, and James is taken aback slightly. His eyes are green–not green in the normal sense, but bright green, and the whites of his eyes seemed to have melted into that greenery. James opens his mouth to say something, but then, his eyes are–they’re the way they always were.

“Shh.” Drenar tries to convince him to be silent, but Nick hears James enter and announce his presence. After a terse exchange with Nick that left James even more befuddled, he’s left to deal with his best rival, who now looks like he’s one stiff breeze from falling over. “Hey uh, you kind of look like crap right now.”

“I’m…fine,” Drenar manages to blurt out before staggering over to the sink. James watches this spectacle with Drenar clutching his chest with one hand. Then, James sees something that finally shuts him up.

Drenar’s right hand is covered in a patchwork of silver and blue. James wants to say something, but shock only furthers his silence. He takes a few cautious steps while Drenar is leaning over the sink. James peers closer, and realizes that Drenar hasn’t gotten a new tattoo. Scales are growing on his hand and creeping up his arm, beneath his sleeve.

Ah crap, what do I do? Has my best friend become a monster? Is he cursed? Is this some kind of diabolical prank that I’m about to murder him over? James' train of thought is derailed when Drenar slumps and collapses on the floor in a heap, gasping for breath. His fingers on his right hand are longer, and the nails have elongated into dark blue talons about an inch long each.

James does what everyone else would do in the face of something bizarre and impossible and grips his head like he can't comprehend this and lets out a sound of restrained panic. “Ah, shit. Drenar, we need a little less body transformation!” Drenar is out cold, and James kneels over his friend and drags him to the nearest stall.

James deduces a few things in an instant. Drenar is clearly out for the count, and this is a spectacle that is not only completely and utterly beyond his understanding but that Julia is completely validated in everything she just said a few minutes prior. “Gah…you ain’t anything but lean muscle, but you're still heavy as all sin,” James pants as he finally flings the door shut, and props up him on the wall. If anyone walks in on this, questions about his masculinity are going to be the least of his problems. Worst case, he ends up dissected by some government scientist looking to understand why a teenage male has scales on his arm. And that is just not a scenario that he is going to allow.

The slanderous scrawls on the wall do nothing to break the mood, and Drenar still hasn’t quite woken up. James grabs his phone and takes a couple of pictures of his arm. He only has a few seconds before the talons seemingly soften at the edges, and revert to normal fingernails. His skin is smooth and pale, like before. And his breathing seems to have returned to normal. Great. The twin soul troublemakers have done it. They have opened the seventh seal and real magic just crawled into the world. He sends a text to Julia that he grimaces at even as he presses the ‘send’ button.

[You were right.]

[This is Drenar’s fault, isn’t it?]

Her response back is as biting as it is deserved.

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

[Baka. You didn't listen.]

[Man the eff up, we got existential problems.]

[Get him moving, haul ass NAO!]

Drenar looks like he's coming to, and he's got no time to deconstruct this unbelievable turn of events. “Hey you, you're finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right?” he asks impatiently while snapping his fingers, and shakes Drenar’s shoulder. His eyes snap open and he looks at James, confused and disoriented.

“What just happened?” is the first thing he gasps. Then he cranes his neck around to look down at himself, then at the stall. “Also, why are you here with me? This is not how I do first dates, just saying. Ow.” James lightly smacks him on the shoulder, and his incensed expression instantly curbs Drenar's urge to snark further.

“Okay Drenar, I’m gonna level with you. You grew scales, your hands turned into claws, and then you blacked out for a good thirty seconds." James shows him the photo and Drenar peers at it, utterly stunned. "Care to explain how that happens? Or how that doesn't violate several laws of physics, biology, conservation of energy, and more?"

"Magic. Look man, I'm still not over the existential shock just yet, unlike Julia, who is utterly delighted about this screwy turn of events,” Drenar replies quietly. He’s examining his hand, and rubbing it like it aches. “Hey, all the scales are gone! That’s…that's super.” He slumps back and rests his head on the chipped wall tiles, and grimaces like some awful spectacle has occurred. “Oh, that could have been bad, James. Dragons tend to keep on the down-low.”

“Are you seriously this chill after partially transforming into a mythical creature?” James demands before kneeling. Drenar peers at him and shrugs softly, like he doesn’t even want to argue. “Okay. So the first question is, if you go full dragon mode, are you going to eat people, and am I going to be living my last fleeting moments on this Earth in a B-movie horror flick, or are you in complete control of yourself?”

“James, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m fighting a skull-splitting headache the likes of which I can’t even describe, so if you sass me, I will bite your head off," Drenar states with a vein of anger. "Also, no. Dragons are sentient. They’re as smart or smarter than us, and for reasons I haven’t been able to read into yet. They built an empire that peaked and vanished about a thousand years ago. Something about some kind of Ascension event. The author was kinda vague.” James almost gets lost in those green eyes of Drenar, who tilts his head at James. “Yo, am I transforming again? You might want to clue me in because I don’t have full control of this yet. Or at all, until I hit my first real transformation.”

“I find my disturbing acceptance of this reality is coming too readily,” James sighs after realizing he’d been staring for a spell too long. Drenar shrugs.

“Kinda have to. Because I don’t want a magical lobotomy by what passes for the Cowled Wizards in this mage world we stumbled into.” He tries to rise, but James firmly puts a hand on his shoulder to slow him down.

“So, a couple of things to get out of the way. First, I am not going to cut bait and run because my best rival can transform into a mythical creature the likes of which no one I know has ever seen. Second thing, I’m starting a bingo card for all future weird shit that happens, and when I fill it, your whole Magic trading card collection is mine."

"Are we making a competition on this?" he asks, his mouth agape for a second. His expression then hardens into a grim smile. "Fine. I'm game.” James wears a lopsided grin when he grips Drenar's hand ,and hauls him back to a standing position.

"So, you and Julia need to fill us in on a lot of stuff. And are we keeping this to ourselves for now?"

Drenar thinks about this for a minute, still rubbing his wrist as if the scales will come back. "Yeah. For now. Until we can find someone we trust to talk to about this, plus Evan, who is a dragon now. Nick's not who he says he is. He sounds like an investigator, camping out in a high school."

“Evan is a dragon.” James’ eye practically twitches at this declaration.

“Yep. He grew scales and claws when Julia yanked a broken tooth out of his shoulder. Julia should never go into the medical profession,” Drenar laughs nervously.

“He’s a dragon.”

“Well, half. Did I mention the funky part where half-dragons don’t get to transform until they’re in their teens?” James just gives up. This insanity is going to take medication of a potency he doesn’t have access to at the moment. He focuses on the other dangling item.

"Alright, fine. But on that note, Nick's alright, he's just kinda reserved. So I'm guessing your whole mighty morphing dragon ranger vibe is part of something going screwy." Once James broke past the illogic of magic being a real thing, his deductive processes went into overdrive.

"Somethings’ going wrong. That's all we’ve been able to figure out, we aren't the only people this has been affecting, and has been happening all at once." Drenar points to his phone, still sitting in his hand. “Don't put anything online. Save any photos you take to your phone's local SD card. If you ever get detained for anything, smash the SD card and lock the phone. If you have to text Julia or me, use an encrypted messenger. Or talk to us in person. I have a lead on where I think we can find more on this secret mage world. The Sherman Zylandra memorial library, at the other end of town.”

“Huh?” James tilts his head and frowns. “How do you even know there’s anything of value there?”

“The place reeks of absurdly gross monetary negligence. Supposedly, the story goes, the guy who built it had the place relocated, brick by brick, from some land he inherited in Britain about thirty years ago. Anyhow, I did a cursory search of any and every other author or reference that was in the bestiary, I came up with nada. But I have one reference. Hanna Celestine.”

“Where’d you get that one from?” James asked curiously. Drenar takes a deep breath as if dreading what he’s about to say.

“There uh…may be a living manifestation of a soul lurking inside me that isn’t me and he kind of bleeds over into my dreamscape, or he has a few times this past week. And I'm pretty sure he is a dragon."

Why did I even ask? James groans internally. Despite his urge to call Drenar insane, he decides a more measured approach is needed. "So when did he pop up? I mean imaginary friends are so ten years ago–"

"Look, this one is gonna take a while to explain," Drenar states, and he's appears to be restraining himself form shouting. "I don't know all the answers, James. I wish I did, but we're flying blind. Well, so to speak,” he shrugs.

“Alright. I’m sold. I mean it's not like you would lie about everything else after what I just witnessed, and you suck at lying anyway.” James straightens his posture and opens the stall door–he can hear the bell warning before class. “You’re sitting down with us and going over every detail, Drenar. No matter how crazy it sounds. And uh, is this also happening to Julia?” Drenar grins wildly, and for the first time, James feels truly intimidated.

“Oh yeah. Turn and face the strange, buddy." Instead, James smiles evilly. A thought had occurred to him.

“You do know Angela likes dragons, right?”

“Yeeeessss,” Drenar answers in a drawn-out way.

“She's gonna have you eating out of the palm of her hand by the end of the week. Food for thought.” Drenar narrows his eyes.

“I'm not sure I'd ship with that kind of relationship. Wait. Wouldn't it be the other way around? Is giving a girl her first flight on a dragon kinda something special? I have so many questions I have to figure out now.” James scowls at this hopeless childlike naivety.

Or, it's Drenar just being Drenar. He seriously wonders how they became friends, he could be so strange at times. “So, about Julia…I feel like I missed some existential dread.”

“Yeah, Julia's threat factor as an MMA champion dragon with magical plasma should make the world shudder.” It's terrifying that Drenar deadpans the statement. “I don't know if they make dragon-sized guns, but if they do, Armageddon is nigh.”

“The badass goth chick gets draconic superpowers. I physically felt my lifespan shorten just now.” James heads out the hallway where no one even notices their presence.