The looming visage of the industrial warehouse juxtaposed against the mountainscape made for an odd viewing. Ominous might have even been the right word for the rusting structure with metal clad roofing and some foggy window panes that obscured anything inside. The drizzle coming down and soaking Julia from head to foot isn't doing any favors for her mood. She wrings the water from her hair, the little good it’ll do.

“This is going to end in a fight, Drenar. You know that.” Unfortunately for Julia, she knows that if there’s anyone who can compete for being as headstrong as her, it’s him, and that is not always advantageous.

“Maybe it doesn’t have to.”

“No, I know how these things work out. This is going to go full blown shounen,” she says with a huff. She hated how he always thought violence wasn’t a foregone conclusion, given how badly the day had been going.

Still, having restraint wasn’t necessarily a weakness. “Alright, fine, let’s talk contingencies, quickly. Our host might get mighty sus if we take too long.”

“I grab the guy, beat him to within an inch of his life, you coach Drenar through the baby dragon phase in the meantime,” Julia responds back. Angela is rather nonplussed at this sardonic response. Drenar’s already passed the threshold of the hanger door, and she’s grateful that it’s dry, and even somewhat warm here. It looks like it took a massive endeavor to convert this place to something liveable. Julia kept the autobow low, and she’s finally taken a long, solid look at it. This machine…perplexes her.

It’s a fully automatic crossbow, with a lower trigger group almost identical to an AR-style firearm. There’s also the box style magazine which looks like she could almost fit a .50 BMG round in it. Maybe twenty of them, but it’s made up for the fact that the bolts are slimmer for a proportional round, due to lacking a primer and gunpowder. The bow portions curve back, and it works on a pulley system, with some flexing of the metal beams–it’s surprisingly compact for what it is.

What’s more worrying is that she still doesn’t know how it works just yet–the design is clearly inspired by modern firearms accessories and interchangeable sights, scopes, and aiming modules, but there is no gas piston or means to return the bow to the primed state. The bolts did have a slight purple glow on the contacting end. Perhaps it’s an activated telekinesis to push the bow back to the primed state? Like a recoil operated firearm, in essence. The weapon itself is light, easily maneuverable, and the detachable box magazine is simple, but effective. That still didn’t make much sense. Why bother with the bow limbs, when you could use a buffer tube or a spring to force the bolt back into battery?

With only ten rounds left in the magazine, she isn’t exactly going to be holding much of a firefight, if that’s what it came down to. At least her mastery of hand-to-hand and judo would make her the reigning threat of close-range fighting. And Drenar is truly deadly with a sword, when she thinks of his practices she tagged along with Angela at times. He had spent more than a little time training with her.

Crosomer however, is an unknown factor. He is most certainly a mage, and her knowledge of magic is woefully limited. But all the magic she’d witnessed seems to have a projectile component. Some are faster than others. But her plasma—that was an on-contact ability. If she got close enough, enemies were going down without a fight.

Her bigger problem is that she knows Drenar is in serious pain. The injury on his wing was taxing on him, even with the makeshift bandaging. He is also losing his human form at a steady pace–his face and hair have started being replaced by more scales and feathers, and the wings have grown in length a little–and even more feathers have emerged. He looks like a drowned bird at the moment.

She’d probably appreciate the newfound look more once they were out of danger, with that regal feather crest, smooth scales, those brilliant green eyes that seemed even brighter than usual–wait wait wait. Am I legit getting the hots for Drenar as a dragon? Does sexy even belong in my adjective list for him? She dares a look to her right. She pictures it again, and feels a warm sensation in her cheeks.

Oh. Dear. Fates. No Julia, bad! Lifelong friend, not friend with exclusive benefits! Her fingers curl reflexively into the foregrip of the autobow. Sort out weird cross-wired feelings later, danger first! Wait, does this mean I get to lose virginity twice, once as a human, and once as a dragon–WHY AM I STILL THINKING ABOUT THIS?!

Angela throws her a confused look on the other side, and fortunately, Drenar doesn’t notice. She grits her teeth and pretends everything is perfectly normal, and focuses on the task at hand.

She takes note of everything in the warehouse–a large recreational area, set up with a TV, some chairs, and a table. Someone has left a card game unfinished. There is also a small kitchen area set up. She smells a familiar, tantalizing smell.

Someone had been cooking ramen. Real ramen, not the starving college student ration, and she guiltily feels a pang of hunger for a tasty meal right about now.

Villains aren't supposed to be good cooks!

The bulk of the warehouse is set up like a laboratory. Some of the chemical labels she doesn’t recognize. There are microscopes, other machines of an unknown nature, sample boxes, and arrays of computers–all sitting idle right now. The server racks they’d be connected to have all been stripped of their components, and probably shipped elsewhere. A smaller version of that metal and crystal battery, heavily encased and protected by steel banding, was powering the warehouse, lighting up one corner of the warehouse with blue and purple crackling light. Their mysterious visitor was nowhere to be seen.

“This laboratory–it’s a scientist’s dream,” Julia points out while they walk steadily across the length of the facility. Drenar winces and falls to one knee, rubbing at his boot and interrupts her thought. “You alright?”

He doesn’t respond. He cuts the laces with his dagger and struggles to get it off. Julia is mildly shocked to see that his lower leg is reforming even before her eyes. His foot has reformed to elongated toes with dull silver talons at the end, and the big toe now looks like a dewclaw. He glances back over his shoulder, looking distinctly unhappy. “Julia, toss these in your bag. I’m not about to destroy these.”

“Drenar, you do not sound alright,” Angela says, and helps him get his other boot off with a little assistance. She traces the scales on his arm, almost fascinated by this spectacle. “How are you still functional?” He winces and leans back a little while wiggling his new limb structure, and the talons click against the concrete floor with sharp tap sounds.

“I’ll manage.” He gently hands over his pair of boots, still intact, and she slings them into a compartment. After another quick swipe, he cuts the fabric so his jeans aren’t restricting his movement. It certainly isn’t fashionable, but it’s enough for now. He wobbles on the new limb structure, and Angela puts out an arm to steady him. Julia scans the room for their mysterious host.

Still nowhere to be found. What was he doing? Lulling them into a false sense of safety?

Drenar finds his balance and spreads his toes widely, and holds out his hands and wings. Under better circumstances, it would have been almost comical, but this was truly dire. “Hey, Robespierre. I thought you wanted to talk?” Clearly he’s thinking to just go straight to dialogue–something Julia knows isn’t the answer to their current predicament.

“Forgive me for not having a kettle of tea out–it’s good form to always be able to accept guests, even as spartan as this abode is.” Julia hears a male voice identical to the one on the radio, and her gaze lifts upwards. There is a second floor to the warehouse where there are some doorways–offices and workspaces, presumably. There is a wide staircase erected intricately with the existing structure. The hooded man is leaning on the safety railing, gloved hands tapping on the metal rods in a light tempo of a beat.

She starts to raise the autobow, then thinks better of it–those mages in the mine had been able to withstand multiple hits from these bolts, and this man was likely a mage of a much higher caliber to be regarded so infamously in history. Drenar, with no training, had stopped roughly half a dozen rounds before getting injured. “Ah, but my manners precede me. I am Robespierre Crosomer, the ex-chancellor of the Conclave of the Arcane, exiled and imprisoned for the crimes of trying to be on the right side of history.”

“Cliff notes version please, I’m kind of in some level of pain and I really cannot take a dramatic villain speech at the moment,” Drenar interrupts. Julia swears she can hear the crackle of an undercurrent of energy emanating from him. Or the crackle as bone is twisting, elongating and otherwise reforming in his body, which sounds immensely unpleasant. Her own reckoning with this process is likely not that far behind him, because she can feel her own heart rate picking up in her chest. Crosomer is mildly imposing–he’s close to two meters tall. Maybe 180 centimeters, by her estimate. That stupid hoodie isn’t helping, either.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Just like Drenar, his limb structure seemed to be off. The ankle came upwards and away from his foot. She swore she caught a glimpse of bright citrus eyes from under the hood. “I’m Drenar. This is Julia, and this is Angela,” he introduced them in turn. Julia would have scolded him for giving out their names, but Crosomer likely knew a hell of a lot more than that already.

“Yes. I’m familiar with your dossiers. I cannot say that my…partner in this endeavor has even bothered to read up on any of the subjects that have been part of this unprecedented arcanist discovery.” There’s a deep resentment towards this other person. Who are they, and why are they not getting along? Maybe he’s referring to this enigmatic ‘Val’ they had talked about earlier. “But enough about that. I think we need to…clear the air. Your treatment was not in alignment with expectations. Just how did you get here, anyways?”

“We’re teenagers with attitude. So, just a fair warning.” Julia rolls her eyes, it’s like the greater the level of danger they’re in, the more sardonic he gets! “Okay, before my organs start twisting themselves in knots, care to tell me what that artifact you teleported out of here was, why you deemed it really cool to be irresponsible with magic beyond your comprehension, and why someone thought it would be fun to toss you into a prison in the world for seven hundred years?”

“Oh, now you want answers? After collapsing half the mine?” he snaps. Julia found mild amusement at his extremely patronizing tone. He walks down the stairwell, and she sees the limb structure almost matches Drenar’s. Just what is he? “Alright, it’s only partially your fault. Val’s men were careless, and then she rang the ‘burn it all down’ bell before you got here.” He glances at Julia, and doesn’t even blink when he sees her autobow. “Could you please lower the automatic lawn dart launcher?”

"Not that I want to side with the guy, but you'd need to land several rounds on target before his barrier pops, Julia," Drenar points out. He winces and rubs at his wing again.

She hates it when he makes a good point like that.

“Fine. Let’s be civil. Weapons on the table, everyone plays nice,” she offers calmly. He laughs softly at this.

“You know something, you three are quite a refreshing breath of fresh air. The exile and temporary residence in a mine has been rather dull.” She swears she sees a smile under the cowl, and the flash of teeth are, unsurprisingly, not very human looking and very sharp, and numerous. Crosomer gently unbelts a longsword tucked away on his back, a pistol-like crossbow in a compact state, several more of those red, orb-like grenades that Drenar had nearly toasted all of them with, and a few glowing vials filled with blue fluid–regen potions.

He had clearly been prepared for a fight. And even more surprising, he deposits all of this on the table, then takes a few steps back.

She nods, and unloads the box magazine from the autobow while he’s doing all this, and unprimes the string. She sets it aside on one of the laboratory tables. “Ah, how honorable. Glad to see they still teach that in your educational institutions,” he adds with calm veneer. Angela has also done the same. Drenar still has the broadsword belted, and his dagger, and neither escapes Crosomer’s gaze.

“Quite an armament, Crosomer. Were you expecting a fight?” Drenar asks warily.

“With you? Not necessarily. You can keep that, if it makes you feel safer,” he points to Drenar’s hunting dagger.

“Thanks, I guess? It is a personal item for me.” Drenar never takes his intense looking eyes off of Crosomer, and relaxes his claws away from the dagger, but does place the sword on the table. He had cut through armor like it was nothing with the dagger, was that his sheer strength, or was there more to it?

Crosomer doesn’t waste time. “So, let’s start with the beginning. You’re clearly new to the Veil, or so one of my…partners in this endeavor has reported. But it appears you may have made some discoveries on your own.”

“You could say it's been an abrupt Awakening,” Drenar offers as a pun, and Julia rolls her eyes. “We know human history’s garbage. We know that magic’s a thing, and that dragons should have been the dominant species on the planet, and that there were a lot of bad things that happened over the course of several thousand years that made their rise as spectacular as their fall. Ergath did give a bit of an incomplete history of mage-kind. You were the last domino before the dragons went and Darwin awarded almost all of themselves off the planet.” Drenar’s leaving out big chunks, and she doesn’t blame him. There is going to be a delicate dance on how much to reveal.

“Not bad. What else do you have?”

“You were the one they trapped down there. In that obsidian sphere. Question is, why?” Julia signs to him silently to keep going. “What’d you do to piss off the Conclave so badly that death was too good for you? And what did they do to you, that you decided you were going to burn them to the ground?”

“Let’s take a journey then. Back to the beginning,” Crosomer walks calmly to a small library, stuffed with books on every bit of shelf space, but neatly organized. He reaches up with a gloved hand, and pulls out an ancient book of a massive scale. It barely fits in both his hands, even as large an individual as he was. He lays it out, and she notes the hide of some otherworldly creature formed by the backing–the pages themselves, thick, and perhaps a little crinkled, but remarkably intact. “Magic’s an integral force to our universe. It’s as fundamental as gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces. And all of it undocumented by the mainstream scientists of this world. You’ll forgive me if I get a few terms wrong–I had a lot to catch up on with my hiatus.”

He sifts through the pages, and she can see those citrus colored eyes again. “With magic come beings that live, breathe, and exude it. The dragons, the other Kin, countless magical creatures, and humans. The dragons came first–arguably–and were integrated into the world on our best guess, sometime around a few hundred thousand years ago. Not unlike the dragons you see in some of the compendiums that now document them, but more primitive. Incapable of speech, but they still grasped magic within their very essence. You’ve seen some of it already.”

“Yeah, dragons just…dropped onto the planet. Okay. That's terrifying on a lot of levels. How exactly are they genetically related to humans?”

“Common ancestor. Just several links down the chain of evolution, some links diverging, others converging towards common features.”

“Or you could just shortcut this and say, someone decided to play with evolution and put it on a speedrun,” Drenar states edgily. Crossomer notably stays silent. “You know what, too much for me to unpack. I’ll do my research later, assuming the experts actually have any good theories on this craziness.”

“Correct. Insofar as your primitive depiction of evolution and history stands,” he states calmly.

“Dragons built their little fiefdom somewhere just before the last ice age ended, up to about 2000 BC, give or take a few years. And in the process, they created whole other races, built cities that stretched to the heavens, colonized several other worlds by use of planar gate travel, and mastered their arcana over their bodies and developed a complex clan-based society that endured for twenty-thousand years. Up until the point they started arguing on the future of the fledgling humanity–us, I mean–and then things went badly. I’ll spare you the long story, but there was a global conflict.”

“No, let’s hear about this epic war no one in this room besides you knows about, it sounds cool,” Angela said mockingly. Julia can hear the barely audible sigh from Crosomer when he looks up, his head and face still draped in shadow. If anything, he looked a little annoyed.

“Short version, a civil war between dragons. So, you remember how I mentioned that dragons went and created entire races?” It’s like Crosomer is trying to drum up drama. Like a professor. Everyone slowly nods. “The experiments started out benign enough for enslaved and imprisoned humans that the dragons didn’t have much use for, or had fallen afoul of the wrong clan. They started with dwarves and elves. Then we had the fey and the wargen, and a number of others. Then we got to the kitsune, and then everyone lost their collective minds.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why?” It's bold of Angela to ask first.

“A few thousand years of building resentment from the slaves, and from the dragons raised to enlightenment who believed all Kin were worth protecting, and that the dragon race should instill guidance and raise them to greatness. Versus everyone else who loved having their pets or throwaway slaves, soldiers, or…” he looks down and sighs. “Look, I’ll keep this short. The dragon highlords–those that led the empire, the richest and most influential clans, liked their ability to play their hand at being gods. So the rebels and freed slaves vowed to free the rest, and make them stop with the experiments and depravity. The rebellion was well organized, and put the highlords in a tight spot. So they did what everyone who’s about to lose power does: something desperate and stupid, all to ensure a dark horse win, or a pyrrhic victory.”

“Wow. Dragons sound more human than humans,” Julia whistles. “So what did they do?”

“Tried to find allies via the astral gates and uncharted corners of the universe, in a decidedly bad idea of rolling the cosmic dice that they’d find someone that would actually help them. They found the Outsiders. And nearly doomed us all.”

“Let me guess. Like, demons. Or devils. Or daemons,” Julia inputs.

“Well, I don’t know what you hatchlings call it in that absurd fantasy literature that is so prevalent of late,” he sneers. “But it took several years, a chunk of all living dragons, and a lot of fledgling mages and Kin being thrown at the problem to get rid of that existential crisis. No joke, we almost lost the planet to those ravenous eldritch monstrosities. That's based on the few records I have been able to verify as dating to the era. The empire didn’t recover, and dissolved into a few more stable factions of dragon clans. And nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum.

“The Conclave became the eventual monster that filled that void.”