FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

This story is self-contained and can be read alone. (2,104 words)

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"1) Provide two examples each for the three different categories of magical affinity: Breath-class, Element-class, and Arcane-class."

Atlas carefully dipped the tip of his tail in the ink pot, and then he dextrously began writing on the sheet of paper placed in front of him. Along with most of his scales, his tail was already a jet-black colour, but now the black ink let him smoothly add his written answer to the paper. "Breath: firebreathing, frostbreathing. Element: rockshifting, sparkcasting. Arcane: healing, displacing."

Atlas reread the question to make sure he'd answered it correctly, and then the dragon fledgling nodded to himself and moved on to the next question. Even while focused on his sheet of homework, he could see movement in his peripheral vision.

There was a second dragon fledgling in the room--Jarzyl--and unlike Atlas she was not doing her homework. She ought to have been, but wasn't. Instead Jarzyl had been rifling around through one of the storage chests in her bedroom, with only her tail sticking up past the lid of the wooden box. Now she finally hopped out of the chest, carrying some sort of device or contraption with her jaws. "Found it!" she said, her voice muffled by that thing she was carrying.

Atlas wasn't quite sure what his friend had been looking for, which she had just found, but he refused to be distracted. "This assignment is due tomorrow," he casually said without looking up. "It's quite simple. You should get started."

Jarzyl trotted over to the middle of her bedroom and put down whatever toy or device she'd just found, and then she scampered over to Atlas's side and leaned against him to glance over his papers. "Homework is boring. What's this assignment even about?"

Atlas slid his homework paper to the side so that Jarzyl could look it over. "Simple questions about magical classifications and all the different affinities a dragon can have."

Jarzyl's neck frill twitched once as she quickly glanced over the homework sheet. "Huh. I thought just the other day you were talking about how the classifications were all made up, and magic is just a messy blend of everything?"

"I... yes? But that doesn't mean you don't have to do homework?" Atlas replied.

"I'll do it later. I've got a, uh, a practical experiment I want to try first." Hopping to her feet, Jarzyl ran over to the side of her bedroom and started pulling the full-length curtains across the balcony window. Jarzyl was grinning--Atlas still hadn't looked up from his homework, but he could just hear the sneaky grin in his friend's playful tone. "Aren't you going to ask me about my experiment?" she teasingly said to him.

Atlas didn't reply. Even though he was definitely curious about what Jarzyl was trying to do, he felt like it was some sort of minor moral defeat to get distracted from homework. It was both their responsibilities as students to learn and study, even if Jarzyl certainly didn't care for that.

Jarzyl giggled, sounding like she was definitely up to something mischievous. "Mmh! Hehehehehh..." With one final motion, she yanked the pair of curtains together so that they met in the middle. The curtains were completely opaque, so with the window completely covered, her bedroom was plunged into darkness.

Finally this action was enough to get Atlas distracted, and he glanced up from his homework. "Alright, fine. I'll ask--what are you doing?"

"Oh, hmm. I can't see!" Jarzyl muttered, as if she had only just realized this was the obvious effect of her actions. "Whoops. Anyway, I already told you--I'm running an experiment!"

Atlas shook his head, not that Jarzyl could see this action anyway, because her bedroom was now all dark. "What's your experiment? What are you hoping to achieve by this?"

"You'll find out soon! Don't worry. Heheheheahah..." Jarzyl giggled again in an even more suspicious tone, then she stumbled blindly through her room until she walked headfirst into the bookshelf beside her window. Sitting back on her haunches, she clutched her snout and winced. "Ooh! Ow... my face! My lovely face. Oww. Is my nose bleeding? I can't even tell. I don't think it's bleeding."

Despite Jarzyl's self-inflicted blindness, Atlas could still see around the room. Both of them were young dragon fledglings, but they weren't quite the same. Atlas had scales of a dark sooty black, while Jarzyl's colouration was a warm amber-orange, yet their differences ran deeper than just superficial scale colouration.

Atlas was a nocturnal dragon--besides his darker, stealthier scales, he had wings which were silent in flight, and also sensitive eyes which could operate with nothing but starlight to go by. Jarzyl's darkened bedroom was hardly dark at all for him, as there was still some sunlight leaking in through gaps between the curtains and the wall beside the window.

In comparison, Jarzyl was a diurnal dragon. Her eyes could easily tolerate the full illumination of day which would have totally blinded Atlas, yet this meant that she couldn't see now that she had drawn the curtains of her bedroom. Both of them were young dragons and their eyes had the immense optical resolving capabilities which came with being flying apex predators, just optimized to different times of day.

"Ouch. Nose... But I'm fine. I meant to do that," Jarzyl insisted. "Science must go on! The experiment continues."

Slowly extending one paw after the other, Jarzyl felt her way forward, making sure that she wasn't going to walk snout-first into some other furniture. She carefully made her way back towards the middle of the room, then she started feeling around on the floor to try and find that contraption she'd been looking for earlier.

Atlas wasn't sure if he ought to laugh or sigh. "To your left. Left some more. Yes. Right next to your hindleg."

Jarzyl snatched up that contraption, which was a vertical cylinder of glass and metal with a carrying handle. "Ah, ha! Thank you. Wait, you can still see?"

"Yes. I'm a nocturnal. Of course I can still see," Atlas replied.

Jarzyl sat back on her haunches, still holding her little contraption in her forepaws. "Hmm. Ok, but I need your advice then. Is my room as dark as night time? It needs to be as dark for the experiment to work."

Atlas briefly glanced around. "I suppose? It's hard to directly compare light levels. I can see during the night time, and I can also see in your dark room?"

"Well that's good. Ok, look here and check this out." Jarzyl put her contraption down on the floor, and she fiddled with it. The cylinder had a middle made from glass, with sections of metal at the top and bottom ends, and in width it was just about too big to be held in a single paw. Jarzyl ran her paw over the cylindrical contraption until she found something. "Are you looking?" she asked, raising her head and turning to stare in the vague direction of Atlas.

"Yes...?" Atlas replied. On hearing his voice, Jarzyl turned her head slightly as she recalculated where her friend was sitting.

"Ok. Watch this!" Then Jarzyl did something with the contraption, and it exploded with light.

Blinding illumination filled the room like a small sun had suddenly come alive. Atlas instinctively snapped a wing open to cover his eyes, and for a split-second he felt the strain in his eyes as his pupils reflexively contracted, adjusting to this sudden outpouring of light.

Then Jarzyl sprung to her feet and charged right at him, yelling out an attack. "On guard! Yaaaah!"

It took less than a second for her to close the gap, but Atlas stepped smoothly to the side, easily dodging Jarzyl's attack charge. The orange-scaled fledgling charged right past him and crashed into the wall, though she at least managed to turn aside so she didn't smash her nose this time.

"...ahhh--oof!" Jarzyl exclaimed, as she knocked the breath out of herself. She crumpled to the ground in a heap.

After blinking a few times, Atlas neatly furled his wing back up. He glanced at the glowing contraption and ascertained that it was a portable lantern, powered by a small enchanted crystal which was now glowing brightly and lighting up the whole room. Then Atlas turned his gaze back at Jarzyl, who had her limbs tangled up in a mess. "Ok then. Shall I ask again--what are you trying to do, Jarz?"

"Arrgh. Science. I guess that's a negative result." Jarzyl slowly untangled her limbs and pushed herself back to her feet. "Aww, it didn't work. What a shame."

"Explain?" Atlas prompted.

"Ok, ok. Listen! Hear me out--I was reading an encyclopaedia that talked about animals. There was this entry which talked about deer and that made me curious," Jarzyl explained, raising her paws to her head and gesturing as if she had horns.

Atlas sat back on his haunches. "Please do explain how what you just did has even the _slightest_relation to deer."

Slowly walking over to the centre of the room, Jarzyl curled her tail around the lantern's carrying handle and tugged it behind her. "Well you see, deer are prey animals, right? The encyclopaedia mentioned an old special hunting technique which sounded interesting. At night, apparently deer just completely freeze up if you shine a really bright light at them. They get paralyzed and don't run away, making it easy to just hunt them. You can shine a bright light and then just charge at them."

Atlas made a vaguely affirmative, still very confused noise. "Uh... huh...?"

Walking over to her bed, Jarzyl slumped down on the mattress. "It's because the sudden bright light makes them all confused. Or because it overloads their brain, or something, because their eyes are used to the night and don't know how to react when it's suddenly so bright." Rolling onto her back, Jarzyl dangled her head off the bed and stared at Atlas upside down. "So obviously I decided I wanted to test that. And I didn't know where to find deer, but I did know where to find a nocturnal dragon fledgling..."

After giving the most sceptical look he could muster, Atlas sighed. "So you decided to try blinding me with a lantern to see if that would paralyze me? And you... really thought that this might work?"

Lying upside down, Jarzyl neck frill was already pulled up off her head by gravity, but now it twitched. "Uh, maybe? It seemed possible."

"You know, I suspect that there's a difference between a nocturnal dragon and a deer. Just a faint suspicion, mind you," Atlas muttered drily. "Deer don't fly, deer don't live in a city... Oh! And deer don't do homework. Last I checked, I'm not some dumb prey animal."

Throwing open her wings, Jarzyl waved them about. "Science! We don't know until we try. You have to admit that it sounds vaguely plausible. If a deer can be paralyzed by light that overloads its night eyes, why not a nocturnal dragon?"

"Just... no."

"Hey, it does make some sense. You do have night eyes." Grabbing her lantern, Jarzyl fiddled around with it and closed the metal cover so that only a narrow beam of light was shining out. "Another thing I learned from reading is that dragons doing a hunt at night would sometimes use a really bright light and shine it around the forest to find animals, because the eyes of nocturnal animals have this... this weird shine which makes them easy to see if you have a bright light." Jarzyl turned her lantern so that the beam of light was aimed right at Atlas. "And your eyes do shine! I've used to think I was imagining it, but no! Your eyes glow! Or reflect. Whatever. It's all interesting! It doesn't work so well in sunlight or normal light, but if there's a light pointing right at your eyes, they shine that light back out--did you know that?"

"Of course I know that." Atlas glanced away, now feeling faintly self-conscious about his eyes and his appearance. "How is it possible you are always so curious about exploring thing or reading books, but then you get so bored with school or doing homework?"

"I don't know. It's just different. Learning is fun. Studying is boring." Jarzyl stretched out all her limbs and yawned, then she rolled over and hopped off her bed. "Ok, ok. Homework then. We can be boring." Strolling over to the window, she pulled the curtains open back again.

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END