Snillek had retained enough sense to take the side nearer the tent door before they'd gone to sleep. When her bladder woke her the next morning, crawling out of the tent without waking Gruyère was much easier. Someday I have to find out how much bigger human bladders are than mine. My parents could've thought of that when they did the DNA combos.
Demanding bladder taken care of, dismay hit her at the state of their campsite. She'd forgotten to stow her gear the night before, something she never did. Granted, she'd been distracted, but she knew better. The contents of her pack lay strewn across the rocks, and Mortimer, the little miscreant, was pawing through her things.
A growl rumbled in her throat, but she choked it off. Her mistake wasn't his fault, and berating herself gave her a moment to understand. Mortimer wasn't aimlessly pawing through her things in animal curiosity, though it was a stretch for her just-awake brain to believe what she was seeing.
The bumblebee dragon had dragged everything out of her pack and had put things in… groups. Some of the groups were obvious—all the food containers in one pile, her armor in another. Others defied easy explanation, with the extra solar chips stacked beside her toothpaste and her scale oil set neatly atop her thermals.
"Huh." Snillek poked the tent with her foot to shake it. "Gruyère. Hey. You might want to see this."
"Mmmfg."
"Yes, I've always thought that, too, whatever that was. Just trust me. You need to get your human-scientist butt out here."
"Blmfg." Despite the incoherent grumbling, rustling indicated that at least Gruyère was moving. She crawled out a moment later, still fastening her shirt, and managed to ask through a jaw-cracking yawn, "What?"
Rather than answer, Snillek pointed to Mortimer, who now appeared to be sorting the food containers by color. For a moment, Gruyère blinked, frowning in bleary concentration. Then her eyes widened, and her jaw dropped.
"He's… classifying." She gripped Snillek's arm and shook it. "Classifying! That's an E-4 designate on the Huplemeyer Sentience Rubric. Oh my dear gods. Classifying…" Gruyère's hands flew to her mouth. "And I'm missing it! Where're my recorders?"
Gruyère dove for the hover platform, nearly climbing in before the cargo compartment had fully opened. Frantic scrabbling and cursing rose from the belly of the vehicle until she reemerged with a triumphant cry and scurry-crawled over to where Mortimer was sorting.
Cautiously, she reached out and moved two of the containers out of their groupings, then had to snatch her hand back when Mortimer snorted a tiny flame in her direction.
"That was rude." Snillek nearly succeeded in not snickering.
"He's just being his dragon self," Gruyère said softly as Mortimer replaced the errant containers with barely disguised impatience.
"Not him. You. Moving his things."
The glare Gruyère shot her way was half-distracted. She was too busy documenting every one of Mortimer's re-sorting adjustments. The scientist in her natural habitat. Snillek found a good rock to sit on and observed for a good twenty minutes more. Finally, she cleared her throat.
"As fun as it is to watch you two try to out-investigate each other, I would like breakfast sometime this morning."
"Of course." Gruyère waved a hand at her without turning her attention from her instruments. "Don't wait on us."
Snillek didn't bother gracing that with a reply. Instead, she reached over and snagged a container from Mortimer's closest pile, the blue one. Fekra yeast crickets. Not a bad choice for breakfast. Mortimer warbled at her in obvious offense but reverted to curiosity again once Snillek had popped open the container. The little dragon abandoned his neat piles and crept closer, his golden eyes wide and fastened on Snillek's motions from container to mouth.
Still recording, Gruyère's dark brows tried to collide above her nose. "I don't think you should—"
But Snillek had already offered a cricket, and Mortimer had snatched it from her claws.
"—feed the wildlife," Gruyère finished with an exasperated sigh.
"One cricket won't hurt anything."
With Gruyère's continued side-eyes, one cricket turned into three, and Mortimer's wariness dissolved enough for him to be comfortable sitting right beside Snillek's foot. She didn't see the problem. The little guy was adorable and well behaved, mostly. Sorting compulsion aside. Also— not that Snillek would admit it out loud—Gruyère's glowers were just as adorable, and there might have been a smidge of eliciting them on purpose. Maybe.
Once they'd dressed for traveling, repacked camp, and climbed back onto their hover platform, Snillek felt lighter than she had in some time. Maybe she could even go as far as happier, in company she actually enjoyed. She even entertained the notion of not going back. Staying out here with Gruyère—they could go back to the spaceport for supplies now and then, and Gruyère could file her reports with the university from there...
Of course she wouldn't. Responsibility was too ingrained in every fiber of her being. Tempting, yes, but only in her daydreams.
Gruyère sighed as she glanced at the display on her controls that showed what was behind them. "This is why you don't feed the wildlife."
"What?"
"Just look back."
"At...oh."
Sunlight flashing sapphire off his scales, Mortimer followed no more than ten meters behind them, flapping his translucent bee wings full speed to keep up with the platform. Oops.
"He'll get tired and bored soon, right? Not like he'll follow us out of his territory."
"Uh-huh. Sure." Gruyère turned her head to squint at Snillek. "You keep telling yourself that. And maybe next time actually listen to the biologist."
A snide comment about scientists nearly made the transfer from Snillek's brain to her mouth. She rerouted the impulse just in time. Gruyère wasn't one of those We’ll do it just because we can scientists. She had lots of responsible fibers of her own. "Right. Sorry."
"They're just going to have to let me come back now, properly funded." Gruyère gave a sharp nod as if that resolved the matter. "I'll...the university will have to make sure the bumblebee dragon population is stable."
"Hmm." Snillek fought the urge to say more. Diplomatic. Right. In her mind, Gruyère was doing the work, braving the wilds, actually gathering the data that the rest of her colleagues were too cowardly to do in person. There shouldn't have been any question about whether she got funding and support for more research. They should be hurling money at her.
Snillek added human academics to the list of groups she wasn't fond of.
"Is he still back there?" Gruyère whispered half an hour later.
Her helmet still registered the moving blip behind them, but Snillek turned her head to check, just to be sure something else wasn't following them. Blue dragon. Aerodynamically ridiculous wings. "Yep. Still there."
A human would probably have missed Gruyère's stifled sigh, though it made Snillek wince. Having a strange little dragon decide to follow them was not something she should feel guilty about. Mortimer might have made the decision—as a dragon scientist—to follow them without a cricket incentive. But the guilt squatted in her chest just the same, claiming residence and daring her to try to evict it. Realizing she hated disappointing someone outside the family was a new experience.
And if she sees you playing princess? Hiding behind layers of lies? How's she going to feel about you then?
Depressing line of thinking and not one she wanted to examine too closely yet.
The distant mountains were no longer distant—looming in front of them at first, blue-gray giants with their caps of snow and clouds pulled tight around their ears, then hemming them in on both sides as Gruyère navigated through a craggy, shale-strewn pass. Not a place to worry about a scorparach ambush, though. She assured Snillek that they couldn't survive in higher altitudes. Probably.
So far, it had been true. Snillek only picked up the scents of stone and ice peppered with occasional notes of green scents from the moss and low-growing mountain vegetation. Not even a hint of vinegar or rotten lettuce. The air smelled clean up there, familiar—a lot like home. Maybe they were getting close.
Gruyère knew what she was looking for. She just wasn't sure how to find it. From archival aerial footage from early explorations, she'd gotten the impression the types of biomes they needed for dragon spotting were something they would easily stumble across in the mountains. Now she became less certain with each passing kilometer.
Maybe the environment had changed enough that they no longer existed. Maybe they were only in one specific part of the range. She really needed to get better at thinking these things through if she was going to propose expeditions in the future.
Anxiety ate away at her—thoughts veering off in adjacent tangents, especially since Snillek had gone silent again. They'd been doing so well communicating, even teasing each other, and now? Nothing. Was she annoyed that Gruyère had scolded her about feeding Mortimer? Probably a dumb thing to do. Paladin Snillek traveled the stars and didn't need some inexperienced, planet-bound idiot telling her how to live her life. Yep. Ruined things before they even had a chance to get started again.
She'd concluded that Snillek was never speaking to her again when the paladin said, "Hey."
As conversation starters went, not a great one, but when Gruyère turned her head, Snillek went on. "Do you know where you're going?"
"Yes. I mean, more or less." Gruyère swallowed hard. Truth. Sometimes truth was hard, too. "Not as such."
"I'd wondered." Snillek nodded and pointed to the left. "I'm only asking 'cause I think he does."
A flash of blue caught the edge of Gruyère's vision. She stopped the hover platform so she could turn to where Snillek pointed without smashing them into the side of a mountain. Mortimer, who had been following all morning, had darted away to the right of the platform. He stopped, his wings shimmering as he hovered, staring back at them. Then he zipped back to the platform, described several circles in the air, and flew off to the right again, snorting at them as if to say, You two are complete idiots.
"So, my dear cheese," Snillek said at her driest. "Do we bumble around some more or follow the wildlife, who's probably smarter than both of us?"
Being called someone's cheese threw her for a moment as she waffled between warm fuzzies at the endearment and offense that Snillek was making fun. After a few stammering false starts, she grasped onto the most important piece like a woman drowning in caramel. "We follow Dr. Mortimer McSciencepants. Even if he doesn't know what we're looking for, I have a hunch he's looking for the place we might find it."
"Ah. I followed about half of that. But let's go before poor Morty has an aneurysm."
As soon as Gruyère turned the platform, Mortimer shot off to the east, a blue streak against the patchy ice fields. She fought the controls, trying to keep up and to keep them level through narrow crevasses where Snillek had to duck or risk losing her helmet on overhanging rocks. The passageway between the cliff faces kept narrowing, and Gruyère was just about to abort and turn back when Mortimer zipped around a formation and vanished. The hover platform barely squeaked through, scraping the rock along its left side, before the passage ended and an astonishing vista opened in front of them.
Green assaulted them on all sides, forcing Gruyère to blink back tears against the bright colors after all the white and gray. An enormous caldera spread out on either side, nearly a perfect bowl from what Gruyère could see so far, with lush grasses and wildflowers blanketing the ground and angular trees dotting the floor of the valley.
"That's...different," Snillek muttered, her gaze glued to the readouts on her right gauntlet. "Those trees are all twenty meters from each other." They passed two more. "Exactly twenty meters. Is that...normal for this planet?"
"It's not something I've heard of, but it could be? Maybe it's a specific seedling-dispersal strategy for this tree species." Gruyère frowned as she tried and failed to keep an open mind. The disturbingly even spacing kept insisting it wasn't natural.
Mortimer wasn't visibly disturbed in any way. He buzzed from tree to tree, snatching up bugs to eat and examining what were most likely seed-delivery systems—feathery tufts of pink and yellow atop spiky, blue-striped ovoids. What she had first perceived as a valley of green was on closer examination a riot of colors to rival any of the fancy gardens in the capital. She needed to record some of the vegetation while they were here. The botanists at the university would have fits of academic delight.
This...this was what she'd been looking for, an isolated high-altitude valley warmed by some geological or meteorological quirks she didn't yet understand. Because there be dragons, according to all the old records. If any populations of large dragon species still existed, they would be here. That was the theory.
She had her own theories about where the greater dragons had lived before humans came to the planet, but she kept those largely to herself. The department disapproved.
"This is what you were looking for, isn't it?" Snillek murmured close to her ear.
"Yeah. One of them, anyway."
"The big dragons are here?"
"If they're anywhere still, they would be here."
Snillek nodded. "We need to set down."
"But…" Gruyère fidgeted with the controls. "What if we need to get away fast?"
Even from behind the helmet, she could feel Snillek giving her a look. "You said they could outfly surveillance drones. You really think our poor little hover platform's gonna do better?"
"It's a really good hover platform…" Gruyère trailed off as the look continued. "Um, yeah. Setting down."
She picked her spot carefully, in a stony section where the plants struggled to take root, so the platform would do as little damage as possible. The magnetic hum cut off when the craft settled, and they were left in all the silence of a closely populated biome—that is to say, no silence at all. Insects, avians, and possibly small reptiles chirped, warbled, squeaked, and shrilled. Even in the forests of Southern Tarribotia, it would've been difficult to match this level of teeming life.
A dragon can't possibly live here… or if it does, it's hibernating.
"Snillek, are you picking up anything draconic?"
"Since I have no idea what your larger dragons sound or smell like, that's a little hard to answer right now." Still Snillek's helmet swiveled, sensors testing and evaluating their surroundings.
"Do you think it—aahhh!"
Gruyère clutched her head as something screamed through her brain, a thing so large—a vibration, a colossal image, a thunderous roar—so consuming, overriding thought and senses, all she could do was drop to her knees and shriek. Somewhere above her, Snillek might have been calling to her.
Gruyère twisted her head. Snillek was there beside her, helmet off, concern and puzzlement on her face.
"Don't you hear that?" Gruyère tried to yell above the noise. She concentrated on a single image, and it quieted to the level of a loud argument.
"Hear…?" A bit of confusion cleared from Snillek's expression. "I'm getting images. Someone's sending thought communication. But apparently not the shouting kind." She stroked Gruyère's hair and gathered her close. "What are you getting?"
"Two legs… bipedal beings. Fire. Screaming. Screaming… screaming!"
"All right. Shh. Let me see if I can send or say something back." Snillek closed her eyes, brow furrowed in concentration. "This two-legs is not one of those. Not the ones who came with columns of fire. She won't harm you or your home."
Enough must've gotten through, since the roaring images quieted to little flames licking around the edges of Gruyère's brain—bipedal beings with humped backs and misshapen arms, unwavering beams of fire, burning trees.
Snillek rose slowly, hands held out to her sides. "Elder sister, show yourself. Please. I'd like to talk to you."
For a moment, there was utter silence both inside and outside Gruyère's head. All of the wildlife had fallen still. Even Mortimer had ceased his peeping running bug commentary and sat alert and still in front of Snillek's boots.
A rustling of leaves came from the left, small at first, then growing until it sounded as if a hundred birds were taking flight from the valley floor. The branches of nearby trees trembled. Tiny lizards took flight from the bushes. Gruyère had always thought the notion of deafening silence was ridiculous, but she suddenly had a strong urge to cover her ears.
Instead, she stood and slipped her hand into Snillek's, grateful when those strong fingers closed around hers. "I don't see—"
Snillek's sharp inhale interrupted her, and she followed her paladin's gaze to the treetops. A glint of red sparked through the leaves. The glint grew to a shimmer, then a hump of shining orange-red rose above the treetop—and rose, and kept rising. Spikes appeared, followed by an eye the size of Gruyère's clothes chest.
The dragon had decided to join them.