Scales

Chapter Sixteen

Jack arrived literally milliseconds after I'd passed out. However, the room was so dark and his body was so tired that all he saw was just a large oddly shaped lump on the floor near the window, yawned, and went back to sleep, thinking I'd simply moved the sofa and chairs and made a sort of "tent" with the blanket he'd given me.

I regained consciousness as the sun rose, still not fully aware of what I'd just turned into. I knew it would be a transformation as Jack had said, but not as crazy, painful, and dramatic as what I'd just experienced in the matter of a mere thirty minutes in the dead of the night.

"What in the world?" was the first thing I asked myself as I blinked awake. I turned and looked out the window. The city skyline looked wide and colorful as usual, but something was off.

Ignoring the gut feeling, I took a light breath, and instantly noticed a difference in the way my lungs and my chest felt.

Next I tried sitting upright, like a human, only to fall forward again, my arms extending out to stabilize and support me like secondary legs.

So I'm a quadruped now, I thought, trying again to push myself upright. After a few more failed attempts I realized I could stand upright, but not fully. My back legs could move independently in that posture, but slowly, kind of like a bird-hipped dinosaur.

I got back down on all fours and curled back up, only to feel another, rather large and flexible, voluntary muscle between my hips. My tail.

With caution, I spent a few minutes flexing it up and down a bit before attempting to swing it around slightly. After more flexing I found that the fins at the tail's tip I could self-adjust slightly, pointing them up, down, and sideways in various ways.

My body was still aching from the night's ordeal, so I lay back down and fell asleep in the rising sun's light.

I was later awoken by another yelp, but not from my own mouth. So then it must be...

"Jack!" I whispered barely audibly, suddenly realizing that my voice still sounded the same.

"The beast...it talks!" I heard him say, my eyes still shut.

I popped my eyes open, which was enough to make him leap a meter backwards in fright.

I kept my voice low and started vocalizing in the most non-frightening tone possible. "It's probably best I just vanish to the ends of the earth where no one knows of me, since you're not ever going to believe me when I tell you you're looking at Maverick Johnson."

"H-h-how else would I be able to?" Jack replied, still shaken by the fact that there was a living, breathing, speaking dragon in his family's living room.

"Because I recognized you the instant you showed up in the room," I replied, still keeping my voice low. "And because I love you as a friend, no matter what."

"And," I went on, before he could stutter another argument point, "If I really was a so-called 'beast', everything would be turned upside down and be engulfed in flames. But it isn't."

"But it could've," Jack countered.

"But it didn't," I shot back.

Jack's face fell. I rose to my feet and walked over to him. Balancing myself up onto my hind legs, I curled my front right leg around him, holding him close to my big scaly chest.

"Don't let me go, Jack," I pleaded, his fearful soul shaking like a vibrating phone in my dragon grasp. "You're the only one I have who can understand me, who knows me, whom I can trust and depend on."

Jack looked up at me, and I smiled, flashing my new set of white sharp dragon teeth.

"Whoa, bro!" His eyes bulged in shock for a second but soon calmed down. "Okay, Mav...yeah. Things are a lot different. My theory is 100 percent true – because look! You're a dragon now."