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Save Point: The Dragon Comes Down to Georgia

Age of Black Steel

The Dragon was rampaging through Georgia in the aftermath of an earlier incident, throwing terror into the souls of all that saw it, when it was distracted by the sound of music as it tore through a remote crossroads sometime around midnight. Despite having Georgia on its mind, it stopped to listen, and found two young men and a large dalmatian dog, spotted like the tao of harmony, sitting next to a fire playing a beat-up guitar and banjo, respectively. Spirits were lingering around the crossroads, unseen except by the Dragon, and some of them seemed to be playing along as well. Intrigued despite itself, the Dragon decided to join in the jam session, and challenged the young man with the banjo to outplay it. Having got rid of much of its rage earlier in the day by convincing a small child that it was the Devil himself, and could only be placated by being fed large quantities of free catfish, it decided to complete the day in similar style by threatening the eternal souls of these gullible young men, whilst offering large quantities of unspecified cash and prizes.

To play it needed a suitable instrument, and so a small manipulation of causality turned the guitar into a very different version of itself. This terrified the banjo player, who had, it seemed, not quite been taking things as seriously as he should have. Being promised the guitar as a prize if he won got his attention back. The Dragon even provided an audience by making the accompanying spirits visible. (Many, many years later, he was to discover that some of the spirits had retained the ability to appear at relevant moments, including one who was the banjo players father, and it had been widely assumed that he had won back the mans soul.)

There is no reason to detail the outcome of the challenge, which firmly embedded itself in local myth. The Dragon was of course a superlative player, and had the only electric guitar in the world at the time, but an appreciation of music is a very subjective and, more importantly, very human thing, which the Dragon most decidedly was not. The banjo player won, and got the guitar back as a prize, but it was only electric whilst the Dragon was playing it, and reverted to a quite impressive but very conventional metal-stringed instrument once returned. This was profoundly to the relief of the banjo player, who had realized earlier that even if he won, he still might not be able to play his prize.

After playing all night until almost dawn, the Dragon found that it had reverted almost to sanity, and whilst it was still lucid-dreaming the reality around it, it decided to head out towards the lands of the West.