The dragon from the night before was no longer in the ticket booth. She had been replaced by a more familiar, less friendly face: Istas, who was sitting calmly behind the glass, stitching another layer of lace onto the edge of her parasol as she waited for a paying customer to demand her attention. Verity rapped on the edge of the booth. She lifted her head and frowned, eyes narrowing.

( Why are you on the ground? )

[Continuing on the adaptation of Midnight, Blue-Light Special by Seanan McGuire. Preplayed and coded with firstofitskind, who is a dreamboat. NFI, NFB.]

Tooth fairy dust was meant to be administered to sleeping children to make sure they stay asleep while the Tooth Fairy fed. (The specific dietary needs of Tooth Fairies were irrelevant and a little bit disgusting and really not what Verity needed to be thinking about right now.) The standard dose, according to Grandpa Thomas’ Field Guide to Pixies, Sprites, and Other Household Pests, was a small pinch. A small pinch, as measured against the hand of something a little bit bigger than a Barbie doll. Dave had blown two full handfuls on them. At that kind of dosage, it was no wonder that when Verity finally stumbled back toward consciousness, ( she felt like she'd been shot full of curare, chloroform, and cockatrice venom. )

[Adapted from Chapters 24 of Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon, preplayed with and coded by the darling firstofitskind, who also sends me candy so, like, BEAT THAT. First post | Previous post | Next Post. NFI, NFB, OOC is love]

After saving her from the Sleestacks--pardon, the servitors--Candy had first dragged Verity onto the Metro and then back off not far from the warehouse district. The dragon princess had informed Verity that she was being brought home with her; there were too many unanswered questions that they needed to discuss before Verity hared off and got herself killed. Verity would have liked to protest that, but considering Candy had just saved her ass from what would probably have been a very gruesome murder by Sleestack, she was willing to let it go.

Going through a maze of blind alleys and sudden turns--and even through a cramped and dirty bodega run by another dragon princess named Priscilla who'd looked at Verity like she held the last hope of the world in her hands--they ended up in front of a squat, ugly building. The building had started life as a slaughterhouse, and didn't appear to have changed much since. The alley door led into what had once been the holding pen for sheep or cattle; the floor was concrete, with spilled-wine bloodstains worked deep into the stone. A few of the low holding walls were gone, replaced by empty space. Overhead, the walkways and management offices hung in the gloom like spiderwebs, gray and sterile. ( The light was uniformly low, and an air of decay hung over the entire place, like no one had been there for years. )

[Adapted from Chapter 19 of Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon with wonderful coding help from my fave, firstofitskind. WARNING FOR NPC DEATH. First post is here, and here is the previous post. NFI, NFB, OOC is love]

Between the fight and then taking care of Liam while he had been...indisposed, yesterday had been a something of a whirlwind, giving Verity little time to think. But after a good night's sleep, a phone call home to her family, and a fair bit of reading, she was starting to come to terms with the possibility that there really was a dragon hibernating under Baltimore. A dragon. If this were true, this was probably the only dragon in existence; common knowledge was that they'd gone extinct before the Revolutionary War.

And yet, here she was, flipping through all the documentation her dad could email, possibly about to discover a no-shit-for-reals dragon. And with her family convinced to stay in Oregon for the time being, she had a no-shit-for-reals dragon all to herself.

Verity paused in the act of plugging her phone into the charger. She had the possible dragon all to herself. Perversely appealing as that thought was, it also wasn't fair. If there was even the slightest chance that the dragons weren't extinct, there were some people who needed to know about it.

The dragon princesses.

This was an exciting discovery for cryptozoologists, the kind that would go down in history. But for dragon princesses, this was the whole reason for their existence. No one knew exactly what ecological niche the dragon princesses had filled for the great dragons of old, but whatever it was, they sure weren't filling it now. Someone should let them know that there was a chance they would get to do so again.

( Time for another trip to Dave's. Goody. )

[Adapted from Chapter 15 of Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon with coding help from firstofitskind, who high-fives angels on the daily. First post is here, the previous post is here, and the next post is here. NFI, NFB, OOC is love]