Lucky Rabbit

The dragon took Pandy with him to the library. This worked out, since she had nothing else to do, but she was a bit miffed that no one bothered to ask. The dragon just scooped her up – his skin felt like completely normal human skin, not scaly at all – and carried her off to his lair, where he completely ignored her while reading and answering random questions posed by small children.

When the dinner bell rang, Pandy – who had been sitting under the circulation desk, possibly pouting – hopped out to find Professor Beeswick poring over a book that had just been returned, while an older student shifted anxiously from foot to foot. The student definitely didn’t look happy about the delay, but they weren’t exactly frustrated. More…guilty, and ready to run?

Indeed, halfway through the book, the professor paused, placing a clawed finger on the page, careful not to damage it. “And what, exactly, is this, James?” He lifted purplish brows, and James seemed to shrink.

“I didn’t mean to, sir,” the boy muttered. “It’s just a habit.”

Professor Beeswick held up the book, smoothing down a corner that had obviously been dog-eared. “A habit that we will break, starting today,” he said. “You shall report to me for chores, today and for the rest of the week.”

James looked slightly rebellious. “It’s our turn to work in the garden, and Mr. Farrier doesn’t mind if-”

This time only one eyebrow was lifted, but it was enough to cow the boy. “Then the rest of your group will have to work a little harder. And perhaps Chef Farrier will have more strawberries left for the rest of the students. I will see you at seven-thirty.” When James still hesitated, the dragon waved him off, and the boy finally left, dragging his feet.

Pandy was impressed. Clearly, this was a dragon who knew how to handle children. Though she thought that a whole week of chores was a bit excessive for one dog-eared page. She had certainly folded down her fair share, at least before she realized that anything could be a bookmark, given a sufficient amount of determination and ingenuity.

Once even the student helpers had gone, Professor Beeswick turned to Pandy. “Do you eat?” he asked. She was certain he already knew the answer to that, especially if the little air elemental really had been watching her for the last two days, but she nodded nonetheless.

“Hmm,” the dragon said, before picking Pandy up again. His clothing was made of some lustrous material, definitely not the cotton or linen worn by almost everyone else Pandy had met since arriving in this world. He also felt a little warmer than other people, but that might have been Pandy’s imagination, or a function of the slippery fabric beneath her paws.

To Pandy’s surprise, rather than heading for the dining hall, he carried her up a staircase at the back of the large library. The school building was only two stories tall, but the library somehow had three levels. Each floor was open in the center, with a walkway all around the sides, allowing someone on the ground floor to look up through the center and see the ceiling some twenty-five or thirty feet above.

No one else ever seemed to question how a thirty-foot space fit into a twenty-foot building, so Pandy had just chalked it up to magical shenanigans. Now, she saw that while she’d been right, whatever was happening in the library was far more impressive than she’d imagined.

In spite of the fact that the library was – or at least should be – at the southeast corner of the school, with two outside walls, there were no windows on either the first or second floors. Soft, indirect light came down from the third floor, but none of that light ever seemed to fall directly on the books, no doubt in order to protect them from damage.

When they arrived on the third floor, Pandy could finally see that there were actually very few shelves there. Instead, recessed windows allowed in the light that could be seen from below, and in the gaps between windows sat narrow, floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The books on these shelves were thick, with richly embossed titles like The Breath of the World: Working with Air Elementals, and Voices in the Wind: The Subtle Art of Communication.

Glancing around, Pandy counted nine shelves spaced among ten windows, and guessed at the organizational method when she realized that the next shelf contained books like Stonebound: The Enduring Path of Earth Magic. There were ten forms of elemental magic in Gacha Love – though honestly, some of them were redundant, as far as she could tell – and if you subtracted Dark, then you ended up with nine. Nine shelves for nine respectable magics – plus one hidden shelf for one restricted element?

Professor Beeswick moved slowly around the walkway, almost as if he was giving Pandy time to examine the books, and she took advantage of every second of it. Gacha Love had excerpts from a lot of books, and there was no way for Pandy to remember all of them, no matter how many times she’d read them. But she did recognize a few that had made her laugh, like Clouded Judgement: Working with Fog Elementals. The author of that one had a particularly dry sense of humor, which was ironic, given the subject.

“Here we are,” the dragon said, settling Pandy down onto a hard surface. She blinked, not having realized that they had stopped walking. She looked down and saw that she sat on a lacquered table, with some kind of colorful mosaic that was partially obscured by her own fuzzy bunny bits.

Tilting her head, Pandy gave Professor Beeswick a questioning look, wondering why they were here, rather than in the dining room, or wherever off-duty teachers went. He’d asked if she ate, which implied that he intended to feed her, but not only was there no food here, he specifically had a no-food-in-the-library rule, and she didn’t think he was the type to break his own rules. Not the little ones, anyway.

The dragon librarian laid his finger over his lips, pale eyes glittering with some secret amusement. Rather than explaining, he pressed his hand flat on the table beside her, the brush of his fingers against her fur somehow more intimate than when he’d actually been carrying her. She was used to being carried, even petted and snuggled, but this was…awkward? Uncomfortable? Pandy leaned away, and the professor chuckled, revealing teeth that were a little sharper than they had any right to be, at least in such a human-seeming mouth.

Still without speaking a word, Professor Beeswick leaned forward, and Pandy shrank back even further, but he wasn’t trying to bite her. Did dragons bother eating creatures as small as rabbits? Instead, part of the mosaic that made up the tabletop sank down beneath her, making Pandy scramble backwards. As she did, she suddenly found herself bathed in light, and looked up.

The ceiling had opened. Not only opened, but gaped. The table shifted, Pandy’s claws instinctively dug into the surface, and they rose up, passing through the ceiling and into the open air. It only stopped when they were completely out of the library, and, greatly daring, Pandy peered down over the edge of the table.

The floor on which Professor Beeswick and the table stood now filled a round section of roof, a small wooden island surrounded by an ocean of fired clay tiles. Their table was a singular palm tree, protruding up into the air, with a dragon standing next to it, a grin on his face.

“Welcome to my home,” the professor said, snapping his fingers. A small winged creature that had been flying lazily through the cloudless sky came plummeting down toward them. It started to land on the table, but banked abruptly as it saw Pandy, instead curving off to the side, somehow managing to look confused.

“Fetch us a meal,” Professor Beeswick said. Glancing at Pandy, he asked, “Is there anything you can’t eat?”

Was there? She didn’t think so. She still wasn’t certain you could actually call what she did eating. Yes, food entered her mouth, where she tasted, chewed, and swallowed it, but once it was gone, that was it. She shook her head.

“Bring the usual, then,” the human-shaped dragon told the miniature-dragon-shaped lizard that was circling them. The creature really looked like someone had thrown a normal-sized dragon into the clothes dryer on high, and when it came out, it was roughly one-tenth its original size. That is, it was about three feet long from nose to tail, and about the same from wingtip to wingtip, but a great deal of its length was neck and tail, so it seemed smaller.

With a bob of its head, the little thing flew off, and Pandy stared after it. As if sensing her astonishment and curiosity, Professor Beeswick said, “Skyrils. Humans would call them tier three Air elementals. They prefer to live near my kind, and in return for my favor, they perform small errands for me.”

Pandy sat back on her haunches, staring up at the sky. Now that she was trying, she could pick out more and more of the Skyrils, dark specks against an impossibly blue sky. There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred or more, many of them gathered together in a sort of flock on the eastern horizon…which was in the wrong place.

Closing her eyes, Pandy tried to figure out where she’d gotten turned around. They entered the library from the hall, and went up the stairs against the far wall. She knew the sun set behind the school, but now it was growing close to the horizon off to her left, which would be the front of the school. Had the table turned as it rose? She didn’t think so, but she’d been so surprised that it was possible she hadn’t noticed.

Air tickled her ear as Professor Beeswick spoke into it. “We’re not at Falconet any more. In fact, we’re not at any of the schools.” Pandy whipped around, smacking him in the face with an ear, and he laughed as he rubbed his nose. “I told you, Pandora Boxx, we’re at my home, and I don’t live among humans.”

Pandy turned her head from side to side, trying to see if there were any landmarks that might help her place their location. The Gacha Love website had several maps, but they were of places like Condor, Clara’s home, and various dungeons. There was a map of West Altheric, but only places mentioned in the game were marked on it, and the area beyond its borders was mostly obscured by a haze bearing the classic phrase, ‘Here Be Monsters’.

In any case, no looming mountains pierced the sky, no great trees stood in defiance of the laws of physics, and all Pandy could see was sky, roof, table, and dragon. She looked down at the roof tiles consideringly, but remembered how slippery the ones at Thaniel’s home had been. Somehow she doubted these would be any better, and she didn’t really want to end up splattered on the ground in some unknown location, with no young Dark mage to put her back together.

As she eyed the tiles with some trepidation, Professor Beeswick chuckled again. It was a sort of growly sound, not particularly human, and Pandy felt a ripple of instinctive dread run down her back. She might be undead, but she still knew to fear a predator in its den.

“Here he is,” the dragon said, and she turned to look up again, trying to pretend like she’d never heard the monster behind the facade. Indeed, the Skyril had returned – or at least she assumed it was the same one, because the patterns of its dark gray scales looked familiar – and it had been joined by three more of its kind. Each of them clutched one corner of a bright yellow square of fabric, somehow held taut even as the center sagged with the weight of its contents.

Professor Beeswick lifted Pandy from the table, making room. Slowly, the four small faux-dragons lowered their burden, circling around and around until they deposited it in exactly the right spot. A silken tablecloth settled across the tabletop, revealing two plates, a cup that could better have been called a chalice, and a shallow bowl. Something that looked very meaty sat on the plates, covered in a rich reddish-brown sauce that smelled a little like wine, and a lot like spices Pandy had no name for. Steamed vegetables sat beside the central object, and some kind of golden liquid shimmered in the chalice and the bowl.

The dragon placed Pandy back down on the table, then lifted a separate square of fabric and tied it politely around her neck, creating a very fine bunny-bib. Gesturing for her to go ahead, he delicately plucked a chunk of tender meat from the mound with his taloned fingers and began to eat.