How to be Megnificent – book 2 of girldragongizzard

I’m thinking of a title for a book I’m going to write someday. Hey, maybe you’re reading it right now! 

If you are, please know that that title is supposed to be ironic and sarcastically self deprecating.

Because, instead of magnificent, I’m Megnificent. And that totally changes the meaning of the word, and this is totally the most teenager thing I’ve thought to myself in decades.

I’m utterly Megnificent, and I’m stuck in the mountains, and I don’t have survival skills.

I’m watching the tiny speck of a helicopter recede over what I assume is the western horizon. From the birdsong I’ve heard, I’m guessing it’s morning, and the sun is behind me. But also, I just know. I can feel North and South as if they are slopes in the fabric of spacetime, and I feel like I have a sense of which is which. 

And that helicopter, which I hope to one day destroy, almost certainly brought me here.

The sky that it’s flying through is mostly clear, except for a sickly brown haze, and a column of billowing smoke coming from the south side of a mountain the vehicle is flying past, off near the horizon. One of the Summer's forest fires.

The mountain I’m on is basically a big grassy dome surrounded by taller, pointier mountains. I’m on the western slope of it, and I’m looking out over a valley full of grasses and flowers. And I don’t see any wildlife around me except for the bugs that are flying around everywhere. The bugs aren’t very thick, though. Not like how I remember them the last time I went camping in a place like this, way back in high school. The birds I heard must be laying low or around the curve of the mountain and out of sight.

They’re especially laying low after I shouted my challenging cry at that helicopter in rage.

And now I’m alone.

And I’m hungry.

The only experience I have with this kind of situation is a survival unit I had in third grade, three camping trips up into the Pasayten Wilderness with my extended family when I wasn’t much older, and two episodes of Man v.s. Wild that I watched ten years ago.

And all of that was geared toward educating and accommodating human beings. Not a dragon.

I’m a dragon.

A city dragon.

I don’t do this sort of thing.

I need to get back home.

The advice I got in third grade was find shelter as close to where you got lost as possible, find water, stay put, and make yourself as visible as possible. But the advice I got from TV was to find water, find food, and keep moving toward civilization. But those two bits of contradictory advice were given to a human child and an audience of human adults, and humans are endurance hunters, evolved to out endure their prey.

Also, humans can’t fly.

I am, I’m guessing, an ambush predator that flies. I digest my food slowly, and I need to rest right after eating to get it started well. I need to conserve my energy for short bursts that I use, mostly, to catch seagulls to eat and to scare away other dragons. Though, I’ve decided to work on preventing the need for that second one, and there are no seagulls out here.

And the last thing I ate was three pounds of minced chuck on Monday night. It digested fast and gave me a lot of energy, and didn’t result in me puking up a ball of indigestible material I couldn’t recognize.

And now I’m hungry again, and I think I need to find something to eat and then fly west.

I can’t afford to exert myself much while hungry, and no one is going to be looking for me.

On the other hand, I have this fucking tracker threaded through a damn hole in my left horn, and so I’m being watched. So, if I do follow that helicopter, whoever did this will turn around and intercept me.

On the gripping hand? I don’t have a gripping hand and that’s a weird reference most people aren’t going to get.

In my mouth, then – the third consideration that I’m really focused on – most mountains within a day’s car drive of where I live are all generally to the East, and that helicopter is going to land somewhere where there is fuel. I don’t know its range and I don’t know mine. But I can guess that my home is westward, and that following the helicopter will get me closer. However, in this day and age, if I’m still in Washington State, I can’t be more than a day or two of flight away from a restaurant or convenience store or gas station that I might be able to see from the air. I think.

Considering the lack of snow, I’m probably not in Alaska or Canada, I’m guessing. And the area looks vaguely familiar.

I think that I might actually be back in the Pasayten Wilderness.

If they wanted to rehome me but keep me in a climate that is close to what I’m used to so as not to kill me, but in a wilderness area away from people, staying at the same latitude makes a certain amount of sense. So they probably just took me directly east.

Ridiculous.

There is so much that is ridiculous about this.

To review. On the one claw, I need to eat and get back home. On the other, they’re tracking me. In my mouth, though, I’m pretty sure I know just where they dropped me and how to find food I can eat.

It’s mid morning, and to get food I need to fly, and I’m on a mountain. What a great place to start!

I’m way more down on myself than I sound like, I’m sure. I’m leaving out my worst thoughts because I’m actively ignoring them. Partly because I know those kinds of thoughts can be deadly out here. Partly because I’m a fucking dragon, and while I might be domesticated or something like that, I know

I can hunt. I’ve done it.

And largely because those assholes drilled a hole through my horn without my consent, and I’m more angry at them than at myself.

I’m still Megnificent, though, for all that means.

Let’s take off and maybe change the meaning of that word a little.

I’m flying higher than I’ve ever been and I’m having a crisis.

Below me is the mountain I woke up on. I’ve discovered that it is sort of a crescent ridge, with a shallow slope on the west and south sides of it, and three deep depressions in the middle northeast of it, each with some water at the bottom. One pool of which is large enough I’m going to call it a lake instead of a pond. It’s the southernmost one.

And flying around that lake on the east side of the ridge I woke up on, in the morning sun, is a freaking bald eagle.

I’m pretty sure it’s looking for fish in the lake.

I’m higher than it and it has not noticed me. I’ve been up here for a while, nice and quiet, riding thermals, and it took off from a roost and started circling that lake, looking delicious to my instincts.

But it’s a bald eagle.

Last time I checked, I’m a citizen of the United States and I am not allowed, by law, to eat that.

I think.

I am so hungry, but I really shouldn’t eat the bald eagle.

Once I’m soaring, flying around feels a lot like resting, to be honest. It’s almost like my wing-joints can lock into place, and the effort to keep them extended is minimal. And the summer sun keeps me alert and ready to dive at any prey I deem worthy of eating.

If I go too high, there’s a wind that blows me eastward, which I do not want. So, every time I start getting buffeted by that, I drop and head a little further West. But I’m mostly circling right now looking for food and thinking.

I’ve allowed myself to do this into the mid-afternoon, hoping to catch better thermals and also to maybe find some wild food I can eat to sustain me. But, it’s looking like I’m going to have to get some water soon instead.

I can backtrack a little to my mountain and the lake there.

Or, I’ve gotten high enough I caught glimpses through the western mountains of a huge, long lake running north and south, with the south end right at the base of the mountain that's on fire. And I’m guessing that’s Ross Lake, and there might be people camping there.

I mean, there might be people camping anywhere around here. It’s early September and not a bad time for it if you don’t have kids. But Ross Lake is more dense with campsites, and has roads going to it.

If course, that fire makes it less likely.

On the northwest side of the burning mountain, there’ll be Ross dam, and campsites on the roads, and higher likelihood of finding a tool that can be used to get this tracking tag off of me. If I’m remembering and guessing correctly. If the rangers let anyone camp there right now.

And I think I can make that by the end of the day.

The fire looks like it’s spreading south, not north, and there's the whole bulk of the mountain between it and the lake.

It's worth a shot 

I’m starting to think, based on my flying time and circling, that I maybe could have made it all the way back home if I’d started out that direction first thing.

But I think I want this tracker off before I do that.

It’s getting near dusk when I make it to the southern tip of the big long lake, and there’s a dam, and a couple campsites with lights in them. A fire and a camper, I think.

And my eye catches a large, squat looking bird flying between trees below me.

Without thinking or planning, I drop.

It’s not a bald eagle.

The startled and anguished cry of a great horned owl followed by the furious flapping of dragon trying to avoid an abrupt landing must be an odd thing to human ears. I cannot imagine a time in my life before my metamorphosis that I’ve heard anything like it.

The owl’s neck is broken an instant after I slam into it mid air, and I’m not going to bother to describe my process of eating it, because you don’t need to know how awful it is. There are plenty of nature documentaries out there with video footage of crocodiles, alligators, and birds eating other birds, and that’s close enough.

I’m saving my memories of the sensations of it for when I need to appall and horrify someone I don’t like much.

And I’m really hoping there aren’t any three or four year olds camping with mommy and daddy around to have heard or even seen me do that.

I expect that in the half dark of dusk in the wooded mountains, that that would be beyond nightmare inducing.

I’m sorry, let’s review.

I was born in 1974, and nothing seemed to fit me. I didn’t like who or what I was, and I was confused about life until at nine years old I saw a movie about cartoon dragons and realized that I must be a dragon stuck in the body of a human boy. Only, I wasn’t a boy, either.

And up until a week and a half ago, I thought that that was my lot in life, regardless of what happened. I didn’t grow out of it. I just buckled down and tried to learn everything I could about dragons while attempting to survive in the ways of my local humans.

And that took its toll, and I was never really able to work, and I ended up on SSI with a couple of disabilities, chronic fatigue and C-PTSD. And then I managed to land a HUD sponsored living situation in the Magnolia Apartments in my home town of Fairport, Washington.

Which is where I was when I awoke on the morning of Saturday, August 24, to find my body mysteriously transformed into the visage of my dreams. Literally. Every detail of it has been familiar to me, if somehow also new, because it matches who and what I am.

And the people I knew, acquaintances who I’d hoped to one day call friends, all bafflingly recognized me even more easily and accepted me into their lives.

It was quite lovely, if bewildering, for three days, until, after my Tuesday counseling appointment, I was attacked in my own apartment, through the wall, by Joel.

Joel is a dragon who I was calling Whitman for a while, because he makes a sound that I’d describe as a “yawp”. And he looks like a cross between a vampire bat, a hippo, and a velociraptor, with the mouth of the hippo, the ears and wings of the bat, and the tail of the raptor. He’s actually a sympathetic guy, but it took us a while to iron that out.

We’re still not on friendly terms.

But, in fighting Joel, I found my challenge cry, which I then started using in the morning like a bird. And the other dragons of Fairport, one or two in each neighborhood surrounding me, answered back!

And that’s how I found out that I wasn’t remotely alone in my metamorphosis.

Somewhere in there, I met and befriended a delightful autistic enby named Chapman with a special interest in dragons and a surprising secret. Chapman almost immediately teamed up with my lovely neighbor, Rhoda, to support me in navigating my new social life as a city dragon amongst other city dragons.

But despite their help, it became a serious mess really quick. Probably because I kept screwing up and making a bloody, violent, and extremely loud nuisance of myself and my neighboring dragons.

I was trying to do things right. I was following my intuition, or instincts, and aiming for a draconic diplomacy. But that doesn’t go over very well with a hundred thousand neighboring humans.

And even though I seemed to have made inroads and plans with Mayor Lynn Chisholm, who’s daughter turned out to be a dragon, too, I also got the attention of the richest land owner in the county, Daniel Säure. And it’s old Dan who is the one that I’m sure owns that surplus Coast Guard helicopter, and the company that runs it.

The last time I encountered the police on poor terms, just after interviewing the mayor, they were armed with tranquilizer darts and working with that chopper, which has Wildlife Management markings on it. A company called Equisetum Wildlife.

And it was they who tranqued me in my sleep and flew me out here, I’m sure of it.

And I’m pretty sure that drilling a fucking hole through my horn is not best practices when it comes to tagging wild animals.

For one, I’m not a wild animal. I’m a domesticated dragon with a social security number and a disability case file. I live in a symbiotic relationship with humans and many of them treat me like one of their own. I even use AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) on a tablet to talk to them. I drink coffee that I buy with my money.

But also, that weakens the horn, and I use that horn. It increases the chance that it will break, right through that hole, and I’ll lose the tracker then. Though that’s not how I want it to go.

I like my horns.

I’m pretty sure they put it there because they didn’t know what else to do, though. I can get to any part of my body with my teeth, except for the back of my head. And I can get to the back of my head with two sets of claws (my foreclaws and my wing claws). They improvised, and I hate it.

So that probably gives you an idea of why I’m in the mood I’m in while I’m swallowing that owl whole.

Did I ever mention that I can breath and even make noise while I’ve got something halfway swallowed?

I don’t think I did.

Well, I can.

I don’t bother with the sounds, because it comes out muffled and unimpressive. But it’s really handy to be able to breathe that way.

Probably not a good idea to try to breath fire, though. Fire doesn’t come out my nose, ever. It’s always a mouth thing for me.

This seems like an oversight in evolutionary design, but no one’s actually overseeing draconic evolution that we know of. Except maybe us dragons ourselves.

And that's yet another thing.

Chapman’s secret, which I’ve promised not to tell anyone, is that sie awoke and went through hir own kind of invisible metamorphosis years before us dragons did. And, along with anyone like hir, sie can perform something that sie calls hir “art”. Which is basically magic, as far as I’m concerned. And I can sense it whenever sie does it near enough to me.

And one of the things that Chapman’s art revealed is that I’m parthenogenetic. I can harvest and store DNA from a variety of donor vertebrates, usually from their spermatozoa but maybe even from their ovum if I can get them safely, and then mix and match without a single mate of my own bioform if I don’t want one. And in that process, I can bear a clutch of eggs full of baby egg producing dragons of various and varying chimerical traits.

And that’s presumably why every dragon is so wildly different.

Out there, somewhere, is probably a dragon who can breathe fire, or something, through their nose. But it’s not me.

Fortunately, no one interrupts my meal.

Owl and a couple small river rocks in my crop, I approach the camper. It’s most likely to have the tools I want, and its lights are still on.

To make sure I’m not startling its occupants, I’m occasionally saying the most soothing words I know, of the thirteen I’ve learned to imitate with my syrinx. I don’t have my tablet, so communication is going to be a bear.

“Meg,” my name. And then, “Okay,” and “Peace.” And I repeat those in alternating patterns as I near the vehicle.

In immediate retrospect I probably should have just exclaimed, “Shit,” which I learned in the voice of a young man named Caleb. It might have garnered more sympathy, instead of sounding unbelievably creepy.

Have you ever seen that Farside comic with the deer dressed up as a hunter and saying, “Howdy! The vacuum bag is hot today! Howdy!”? Yeah. That.

The door of the camper slams open and I find myself staring down the double barrels of a gun right into the eyes of a grizzled man who suddenly finds he can’t move a muscle, not even his trigger finger, because he’s locked eyes with a dragon.

And then I say, “Shit.”

“Harold?” I hear from inside the camper. “Are you OK? What is it?”