FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

This story is self-contained and can be read alone. (4,775 words)

Standing at her bedroom's window, Jarzyl spread her wings and savoured the wind as it swept into her room. "Dragons are masters of the sky! And now that we're finally fledglings, we can go anywhere and do anything!" she proudly declared.

Right beside her, a green-scaled fledgling named Caden was sitting back on her haunches and staring at her own paw. "Mm hm. Yes, good for you, Jarz... Do you have a claw file? My claws are getting long and I don't want them to break."

Jarzyl was busy feeling epic, and she wasn't going to be distracted by such petty concerns as broken claws. "The afternoon is ours to conquer, and the sky is open! What are we doing today?"

Caden opened and closed her forepaw, repeatedly extending and retracting her claws. "Trimming claws?" she suggested. Putting down her paw, she glanced over Jarzyl's side. "And possibly also polishing scales. Have you even polished your scales this week?"

Jarzyl glanced down at her own amber-orange scales. "No? I've only ever tried polishing my scales once or twice in my whole life, let alone this week. The world is out there ready to be explored. Polishing scales is boring."

"Huuh..." Caden made a slightly dramatic, adolescent-sounding sigh. "Grooming and self-care are relaxing, calming activities. You could certainly use some calming down. Also it would make you look less scruffy."

"I'm not scruffy!" A brief tinge of self-consciousness made Jarzyl shuffle her wings to cover her sides, and she shot an annoyed glare at Caden. "I'm not scruffy," she repeated, "Or if I am scruffy, it's a trade-off necessary for adventure!"

"And is _adventure_a requirement for every day, civilized life?" Caden countered.

Jarzyl nodded enthusiastically. "It absolutely is. Come on--let's go do something fun. Oh, hey! Look!" Sitting back on her haunches, Jarzyl pointed out her window and at the sky. "Look! It's that owl that lives near my house. See? Even an owl is out and about because it's such a good day to be outside. We can't just stay indoors and do nothing but boring things all day! School was boring enough this morning."

Caden stared at the large brown owl which was slowly circling about in the sky. "Everything's boring to you, isn't it, Jarz?"

"Absolutely!" Spreading her wings wide, Jarzyl threw herself out the window and awkwardly flapped her way into the open sky. "Let's go! Raaawrr!" Her proud, daring yell still didn't sound like a proper, adult dragon's roar yet, but at least it didn't sound as squeaky as it used to be.

"Huuuh. Why don't we ever do anything relaxing instead?" After a second, further prolonged sigh, Caden opened her wings and followed after her friend.

---

Jarzyl flapped her wings hard, trying to quickly gain altitude and fly near to that owl she'd spotted, but the large bird was faster than her and it flew off before she could get a good look. Tilting her wings, Jarzyl instead decided to change course and she flew out of the residential area where her home was and headed towards the denser city core.

"I wish Atlas was here. He's the only one who ever seems able to talk you out of your absurd schemes," Caden muttered as the two dragon fledglings flew side by side.

Jarzyl bobbed her head in agreement. She did miss their mutual friend, even if she disagreed that Atlas ever managed to dissuade her from the call of adventure. "He's busy working at the library or something. Boring stuff."

"And so what non-boring stuff are we going to be doing today?" Caden asked.

"I don't know. Let me think about it," Jarzyl said.

"Why are we even flying if we don't know where we're flying to?"

"Uh... Because life is about the journey, not the destination." A sudden gust of wind forced Jarzyl to flap her wings extra hard to keep flying straight and level. She had only very recently passed the fledgling growth spurt and learned how to fly, and so her ability in the air was barely even a casual competence rather than any true mastery. Nevertheless, she made up with clumsy enthusiasm what she lacked in skill or strength. "Ooh, flying is tiring. But it's so fun!"

Jarzyl glanced around, looking down at the broad, gleaming cityscape that she and Caden were flying over. Filled with spires and countless skyscrapers, the City of Wings was busy as always, with dozens of other dragons visibly flying around at different headings and altitudes in the airspace all around. Though it was difficult to tell because of the distance, all of these other dragons were much larger than the two young fledglings, but Jarzyl didn't let that dissuade her. She could fly, so she had every right to fly wherever she wanted. Growing up was terrifyingly uncertain, but also very exciting.

Suddenly Jarzyl spotted something--again there was movement in the skies, but this time it wasn't an adult drakken or even another dragon fledgling. Instead it was a flock of some sort of white-feathered birds. Jarzyl squinted at the birds as they fluttered from the roof of one building to another. The birds weren't big ones like the owl, but instead smaller ones--possibly some sort of gull, or pigeons. This was no surprise as small wild animals could sometimes be found even in a dragon city, but it did give her a new idea. "Oh, oh! Caden, look! Birds! Small ones! Let's hunt them!"

Caden didn't seem quite as enthusiastic. "Why... would we want to do that?" she asked hesitantly, even as the two fledglings kept flying side by side.

"Because we're apex predators! And masters of the sky!" Jarzyl kicked her four legs, pretending to slash and maul with her claws. "That's what dragons do. We fly and we hunt and we do magic and we rule the skies! And now we can fly, but we can't do magic yet till we're older, so let's do the hunting part."

Caden resolutely shook her head. "If you're really so desperate for action, school will be starting the training hunts next month. You can just... go out into the wilderness in all its uncivilized dirtiness then, if you want."

"I know! That's what gave me the idea. I bet training hunts are going to be so much fun." Jarzyl went into a glide, circling around as she peered at the perched flock of white birds. In addition to flight school and regular school, dragon fledglings like her and Caden were expected to attend training hunts, where they would be led by a master hunter out of the city and into the wilderness to learn basic survival skills. Once in the distant past, these skills would have been essential for a dragon to catch their own prey, but nowadays in modern civilized drakken society, training hunts were more about exercise, discipline, and possibly just fun. The very thought of being a hunter made Jarzyl excited, but she didn't want to wait until next month. "Let's hunt those birds! How hard can it be? They're just dumb birds."

Caden let out another soft sigh, or perhaps that was just the wind gusting. "Huh. But... why? Who cares about birds? If you're hungry, we can just get something to eat from a café or a store somewhere."

"It's not about hunger! It's about muuurdddeeer!" Jarzyl declared, proudly raising her neck frill, which made it flutter in the wind. "Actually it isn't even murder. It's just killing prey. I mean hunting prey. Hunt those birds! I want to get them! Exciting!"

"I'm not even going to bother trying to talk you out of this..." Caden decided.

"It's decided then! Attttack!" Letting her left wing drop, Jarzyl rolled into a steep dive towards the tiled rooftop where the flock of birds was perching. She had never actually hunted a proper prey animal before, but hopefully natural hunting instinct would suffice to catch some dumb birds. The air rushed past her partially closed wings as she picked up speed.

Admittedly this wasn't quite as simple as Jarzyl had hoped it would be. She had to concentrate hard to stay in control of her dive instead of going into an aimless tumble, and she was also slightly nervous about being about to slow down just in time to pounce on one of those birds for a perfect aerial hunt. She needed to dive fast... but not too fast.

In a scant few seconds the young dragon had lost most of her altitude and she was almost on top of the flock of perching birds, just about to pounce on one of them... And then all of a sudden the birds took flight. Perhaps they had seen her coming, or perhaps the flock had just decided that now was a good time to change perching location.

Jarzyl hurriedly tried to change course as all the birds abruptly flapped into the air, but she pulled up too sharply and stalled her wings. She had neither the altitude nor the time to recover, and all she managed to do was let out a panicked scream as she spun through the air. "Ahhhh noooo!!"

If there was one good thing about being a young dragon fledgling, it was that being small made crashes less dangerous. Jarzyl smacked against the angled rooftop and rolled across the tiles before falling even further into an alleyway between two buildings. "Ooh!" With a pained grunt she hit the wall of the opposite building, then crashed down onto the ground. "Ow. Ow. Ohh..."

Shifting a wing, Jarzyl pushed herself off the wall and rolled onto her back. Staring upwards, she caught sight of her friend making a slow, leisurely descent into the alleyway in sharp contrast to her uncontrolled crash landing. Touching down gently on all four paws, Caden furled up her wings and strolled over to Jarzyl's prone form.

"Are you dead?" Caden casually asked.

An incoherent groan escaped Jarzyl's mouth before she managed to shake her head. "Aaiihhh-neerrr... No, I'm not dead. I'm fine. Totally fine. In fact, I meant to do that."

"Of course you did. Are you injured?"

Jarzyl tried to move all her limbs and found that to her pleasant surprise, all her bones, muscles, and joints appeared to be working as expected. Some places felt a bit sore, but she could live with being sore. "I'm good. I've had... I've had worse crashes," she replied, and this was true. All things considered, this hadn't been the worst possible first attempt for a hunt, Jarzyl decided. Surely her next attempt would go better.

Caden walked over to the middle of the alleyway and snatched up a small, flat, hexagonal plate that was amber orange in colour and thin enough to be partially translucent--it was one of Jarzyl's scales, that had come dislodged in her crash. Walking back to Jarzyl, who was still lying on her back, Caden tossed the scale plate onto Jarzyl's belly. "Where'd this come from?"

Using her paws, Jarzyl felt around her body. "I think... uh... Probably my left flank." She grabbed the scale and tossed it aside. Then pushing herself back to all four feet, Jarzyl glanced back and stared at her side. Near her ribcage, there was now a small spot where her bare skin was exposed instead of the neat lines of hexagonal, tessellating scales which normally covered her all over her body. "Well that's... Eh. That scale was going to be shed anyway." It was normal for dragons to shed scales, and the small rigid plates were always in a continuous state of growing before eventually dropping off, though physical damage could also dislodge a scale. Jarzyl certainly was no stranger to taking scrapes and bumps.

Caden used her tail to poke Jarzyl's side, right where the scale had come loose. "In addition to losing a scale, now you've gone and scratched up your whole side with that crash landing. You really need some scale polishing now. You also need a bath. And some common sense."

Jarzyl used her wing to slap away Caden's tail tip. "No time for baths! The hunt must continue. I'm not stopping till I hunt down one of those dumb birds! This time it's personal..."

Caden just shook her head, as Jarzyl scampered down the alleyway.

---

"This is never going to work," Caden muttered.

"It absolutely is!" Jarzyl whispered back. Her neck frill was perked straight up off her head from excitement, as the two fledglings crouched next to each other behind a pile of cardboard boxes that had been discarded behind a shop.

After leaving the alleyway, the two fledglings had spotted a nearby market square that was filled with stores and merchant carts selling food, produce, and various wares--Caden had suggested they give up on "hunting" and just go look at the shops instead, but Jarzyl had been determined to stick to her self-assigned goal. Giving up on trying to hunt from the air, the two fledglings were now in an empty part of the market that had stores that would only open later in the evening for the night-time crowd.

Aerial assault had been unsuccessful, so Jarzyl had decided to change strategies. She had spotted a large pile of discarded cardboard boxes, and that had been the inspiration for her next tactic--ambush. The orange-scaled fledgling had found some old bread (at least, it was probably bread) in a trash container, and then she'd laid a trap in the open. The slice of bread was next to the wall of a shop, and Jarzyl had balanced a large cardboard box so that part of the bread slice was underneath the box's side. The idea was that the cardboard box would tip and drop over any unsuspecting bird which came to peck at the bread.

Jarzyl thought it was a brilliant plan. Caden thought it was an idiotic plan. And now they were hidden behind the pile of cardboard boxes a short distance away, waiting to see if any birds would take the bait. Jarzyl was so worked up that she could hardly keep still, and her tail tip flicked from side to side, tapping against Caden. In response, Caden shifted her hindleg and stepped on Jarzyl's tail to stop it from slapping her.

"We're literally sitting in trash, trying to hunt some miserable scavenging pest birds that no one cares about. I never thought I would descend to such a low, but I'm not really surprised anymore," Caden muttered.

Jarzyl just giggled. "Hehehe... Shhh!"

"You owe me for this. We're going to spend our next free afternoon polishing each other's scales instead."

"Shhh! We have to hunt our prey first!"

"And I think one of my claws is starting to crack. I should have filed it down..."

Those white birds--where they gulls? Or pigeons? Or perhaps some other common urban species? Jarzyl wasn't fully sure, but she decided they were gulls. The gulls were relatively common around the market square, loitering around and watching for any available food. Drakken shopkeepers would scare of any gull which came too close to their shops, but the birds picked at any small scrap of food which fell to the floor and was left behind.

Soon enough, one gull lazily flapped its way over and seemed to notice the bread. Jarzyl's neck frill perked up even further, and even Caden fell silent. The two young dragons stared at the bird to see how it would react as it landed in the square and approached.

The gull pecked at the slice of bread, then it pecked again, enough that it disrupted the balance of the cardboard box. Jarzyl's breath caught in her throat as the box toppled over... and then just landed on its side. Instead of falling over the bird and capturing it, the box fell aside. The gull didn't even seem bothered by this movement--it kept pecking at the bread.

"No...!" Jarzyl hissed quietly. She extended her claws out of her paws and shifted forward--could she just lunge at the bird and catch it? It was so close! It was also actually much bigger than she'd realized and about a third of her (admittedly fledgling small) size, but it was a dumb bird, and she was a dragon. The gull pecked at the bread, then it picked it up in its beak--Jarzyl's prey was about to fly away, and she was not going to let that happen.

Caden apparently could tell what Jarzyl was thinking. "Don't do it," she warned.

"I'm going to do it," Jarzyl replied.

"Don't do it."

"I'm doing it. I'm doing it! Rawwr!!!"

Letting out a ferocious battle cry, Jarzyl burst out from behind the pile of cardboard boxes and dashed across the short distance towards the dumb bird. She dug her claws into the ground to get as much traction as she could, and she frantically flapped her wings to try and speed up her sprint. The gull was slow to react, but it did let out an annoyed squawk and it hurriedly began to flap its wings and take to the air.

Fuelled by adolescent adrenaline but no actual hunting skill, Jarzyl smashed into the gull and tried to grab at it with her paws. A split second later she realized she ought to be using her claws or teeth, but the gull had already started fighting back. Flailing its wings about, it smacked Jarzyl's side and tried to peck at her.

"Ahhh! Ahhh!" Jarzyl screamed, entirely from excitement and not from fear. "Die! Die, dumb bird! I got it! Caden, I got it! Looook!" Just like the bird she was grappling with, Jarzyl flailed her wings about as she tried to pin it down. It wasn't anything at all like when she'd play wrestled with Caden, Atlas, or other young dragons--the bird was smaller than her, but it was aggressive and fighting to escape. It didn't bite like another dragon would, but it did peck with its beak.

"Hhn! Stop it! Stop... Just... You're hunted! Stop fighting!" Jarzyl yelled, but unsurprisingly the bird didn't listen. The amber-coloured dragon fledgling had to shield her head with a wing as the gull pecked at her eyes. "Caden! What are you doing?! Help me!"

Caden had been standing by the side, watching the entire encounter go down. Now at Jarzyl's call she sprung forward. "What do I do? Is the bird beating you? You suck at hunting!"

Despite being actively engaged in combat, Jarzyl managed to feel offended at that observation. "I don't suck at hunting! You suck at hunting! Help me! Just... Just get the box! Box this bird!"

"Ok, ok!" Caden scrambled over towards the large cardboard box and snatched it up with her forepaws, awkwardly balancing on her hindlegs to do so. Without any hesitation, she leapt forward and slammed the whole box down over the bird... and also over Jarzyl.

"HEY!" Jarzyl screamed, as everything went dark around her. She was now trapped inside a cardboard box, with a panicked gull which was trying to break free from her grip. "CADEN! What are you doing!?"

"I don't know! Why couldn't we just have waited for the training hunts where they teach us how to hunt?" Caden retorted, sounding muffled from outside the box.

Fortunately, the cardboard box wasn't big enough to entirely cover Jarzyl. Her tail had been caught outside the box, and she quickly flicked the appendage up to life the box, just enough for her to hurriedly scramble backwards. Simultaneously she shoved the gull away and forward into the box, before leaping forwards to jump atop the box and slam it back down against the ground. "Don't let it escape!"

"Ok!" Caden leapt up beside her, and the two young dragons sat atop the box, pinning it down and keeping the gull trapped within.

"Ho! Yes! Did we do it? I think we did it!" Jarzyl declared. She spread her wings proudly, then had to hurriedly flap them to maintain her balance as the gull tried to push free from the improvised trap.

"Wow. Ok. Just... I didn't think this would actually work," Caden admitted. The two fledglings both turned to stare at each other, then they broke out into giggles. "Hehehahah! This is madness," Caden said.

"This is hunting! We're hunting masters!" Jarzyl decided. "Ahahahah... Yes! Victory!"

For a good few minutes the two young dragons sat atop the box, laughing uncontrolledly.

"So... what now?" Caden asked, when they finally stopped laughing.

---

After some thinking and excitement, they managed to fold the cardboard box shut so it was sealed on all sides, with their captured (and irate) gull still trapped inside. Jarzyl then carried it back to her home balanced on her back between her wings, with Caden carefully watching to make sure the box wasn't coming open.

Now the two fledglings were back in Jarzyl's bedroom. Using a large, pointy metal stick tool that was probably meant for some sort of home improvement work, Jarzyl was jabbing air holes into the cardboard box. It was a good thing her parents weren't home, Jarzyl decided. While it would be nice to show off to them how she was a hunter, she wasn't sure if they would approve of her bringing in a large, somewhat dusty box she'd found in a street, especially if that box was filled with a dumb, squawking bird.

Meanwhile Caden was using a claw file to trim and buff her claws. "Ugh, my claw broke. That's going to look uneven..."

Jarzyl ignored Caden and tried to peer in through the holes she'd poked in the box. She could vaguely make out the gull inside the box, and the bird would occasionally let out an angry squawk. "Now what? We've hunted the bird, so now what do we do with it?"

Caden looked up from her claw filing. "Eat it? Isn't that why dragons normally hunt things? To eat them?"

"Oh. But I'm not hungry. How would we even cook a bird? We'd have to pluck all the feathers, I suppose? Seems like a lot of effort," Jarzyl replied. Using a wing, she smacked the cardboard box threateningly. "But that doesn't mean you're getting out of this. You're our prisoner now! I decide whether you live or die!!"

Caden snorted and went back to filing her claws. "You're so dramatic, Jarz. You just live in your own little world, don't you?"

"There's nothing little about my world. Or me," Jarzyl retorted. "And I'm not dramatic! I could be way more dramatic if I wanted to be."

"I bet you could," Caden agreed. "Your imagination is completely unrestrained and unchecked."

Jarzyl nodded. "Yep. Last week, Atlas lent me one of his books--it was about a fledgling who gets kidnapped by criminal gang elements and abducted away to the Outer Colonies."

Caden transferred the claw file from one paw to the other and started working on her other claws. "I bet you'd love it if you were kidnapped and abducted away to the Outer Colonies."

"I would be _so_heroic."

"Wait, so if we imagine that the bird is supposed to be a captured fledgling, does that make us child abductors?"

"Possibly, but not necessarily. There was also a part where the enforcers manage to capture one of the criminal gang members and he's their prisoner."

"Squawk!" went the gull.

Jarzyl flattened her neck frill and shouted at the cardboard box. "Shut up! Shut up! I wasn't talking to you! No one is talking to you! Dumb bird!" Jarzyl then lowered her voice, pretending to growl and snarl. "Grrr! WHO DO YOU WORK FOR?!!? WHERE DID YOU TAKE THE CHILD??! Criminal scuuuum! You're going to jail, filth!"

Caden managed to keep a straight face for a few seconds, then she burst out into chuckles. "Hahaha... Never change, Jarz. Never change."

Jarzyl nudged Caden's side and nodded towards the box. "You're supposed to be the nice enforcer. I'm the mean one who threatens the suspect, then you're the nice one who seems friendly, and we make him confess." She turned back to the box and put on her fake deep voice. "Confess, you filthy criminal lowlife, or be destroyed by the law!! I AM THE LAW!"

Caden had to tuck her head under her wing because she was laughing so hard. When she finally caught her breath, she nodded at the box. "Listen up... ahaha... bird brain! You'd better cooperate or my insane colleague will... hehe... she's going to... Hahahah... I can't do this. This is too silly."

"Grrr--rrr!?" Jarzyl tried to growl threateningly at the bird, but making that low-pitched sound made her voice crack awkwardly.

Caden broke out into unrestrained giggling again. "Pahahehehe!"

"Filthy, stupid bird! I wish I had firebreath. Then I'd cook you! Phaowr!" Opening her jaws, Jarzyl pretended to breathe magical fire on the box with its feathered prisoner. She was barely just a fledgling, and it would be many years before she matured into an adult drakken with the ability to use magic, but she could always dream.

Caden took deep breaths to control her laughter. "Alright, alright. We've done the hunting. Now can we do something more calming and relaxing?"

Jarzyl used her wing to slap at the cardboard box one last time, then she relented. "Fine, fine. We can do the... whatever it was you wanted. Scale polishing? But first, what should we do with the prisoner?"

"Just let it go? If you're not going to eat it, there's no reason to keep torturing that poor bird," Caden replied.

Jarzyl felt her neck frill droop. "But we worked so hard to hunt it! We're just going to let it go?"

"It wouldn't make for good eating, and I don't think it's a good trophy. There's... not much else you can do with it?"

After a moment's consideration, Jarzyl had to concede that her friend was probably right. "Fine... I guess you live on and keep being a pest, dumb bird!" Standing up, she used her shoulder to push the box across the floor and towards the window balcony's ledge. "Say goodbye to the dumb bird, Caden."

Caden smirked, but she obligingly waved a wing at the bird in the box. "Goodbye, dumb bird! I hope you fly off and have a nice life, and don't get captured by a mad dragon fledgling with too much imagination and not enough sense again! Fly free and have a good life!"

"Well said. Now it's time to release the prisoner..." Jarzyl opened up the top of the cardboard box, then she quickly turned around and used her hindlimbs to kick the entire box, bird and all, out of the window. "Goodbye, birdy!"

"Squawk!" went the white gull, as it tumbled into open space.

"Oh!" Caden jumped in surprise, then she giggled again. "Hehe. Jarz! You didn't have to kick it! That's littering. It's also possibly animal abuse."

Both fledglings moved forward to the balcony ledge and looked over, just in time to see the gull flapping away into the air as the box tumbled down towards the distant ground. "Eh. Dumb bird made it out just fine," Jarzyl concluded.

"Ahh. All's well that ends well." Caden turned around and walked back into Jarzyl's bedroom, then she picked up the claw file and began working on the claws of her hindpaws. "Let me just file down my claws, then we can get on with the scale polishing. Actually, you probably need a bath first. I do too, in fact. We can have a relaxing bath, then polish our scales together."

Jarzyl was still standing at her window balcony, looking over the broad expanse of open space that was outside her home. Something else caught her eye. "Hmm. Oh, look at that!" Jarzyl waved a wing, beckoning to Caden. "Oh! Hey, hey! Caden, look. It's the owl again! Remember that owl from earlier? Who lives in near here? It's back!"

Caden resolutely did _not_look up from her claw filing. "Nope. I'm not looking. Dumb bird flew away and was free, and that's all I need to know."

Jarzyl let out a impressed gasp, then a slight wince. "Oo. Woah! Now that was an aerial dive!! Oh wow, that owl knows how to hunt. Well, gull is owl dinner now. That's high quality murrrder! I wish I could do that."

Caden let out a final, prolonged sigh. Walking over, she grabbed Jarzyl's tail and pulled her friend indoors. "Enough murder for today, Jarz. Time for something more relaxing."

---

END