Jeremy Bayer, Dragon Layer Pt. 03

Beowulf St. George was the most feared dragonhunter in existence. The fact there weren't that many dragonhunters and most people who were alive didn't know that dragonhunters existed did make that qualifier slightly less impressive, but...it remained true.

He had slain dragons on five continents -- from pale whites in Antarctica, to smug silvers and golds lurking in the depths of the Chinese megacities, to greens that slithered in the shrinking rain-forests of South America.

He had done it all to keep humanity safe from the deprivations of the scaled beasts. The wyrms, born of Satan, which existed only to sin.

The other dragon hunters at the table with him should have bowed to his plan.

Instead?

"Are you sure waiting is the best idea?" Samson asked. He was the man who had failed in his task to smash the eggs in the first place -- if Samson hadn't failed, then this whole conclave wouldn't be required. "We should attack, now, while they're still weak, while their protector remains pathetic."

Before Beowulf could respond, one of the other hunters cut in. Gideon Hunter wasn't the best of the dragonhunters, but he was quite possibly the finest swordsman that Beowulf knew. He was a broad shouldered, muscular man that made even Beowulf look like a scrawny twig by comparison, and his bland features concealed an almost psychopathic glee when it came to cutting, slashing, stabbing and cleaving into scaled flesh.

"I say we use the mundanes against them," he said. "They stole from a bank. They're vulnerable to the federal government. It would be...amusing...to see this Bayers child sent to prison for theft, leaving his dragons open for our righteous fury."

Soft murmuring came from the other dragon hunters. Beowulf sighed, and shook his head.

"Gentlemen," he said, quietly. "You don't understand the situation we're in. We've never before seen this kind of formation of dragons before -- normally, a clutch is attuned to the chromatica of the mother. But instead? This is the most diverse clutch of dragons we have seen in nearly a thousand years. We have two chromatics, two metallics, and the rarest of all breeds: A stellar dragon." He shook his head, slightly. "Need I remind you all of what almost happened in the 50s, with the solar dragon that was hatched in New Mexico?

The others nodded, Samson looking grim.

"And more, Jeremy Bayer is an enigma. His life has more unanswered questions than I trust -- what kind of a teenager can hold down two jobs after school? Who is this mysterious father of his, vanished without a trace a few years hence?" Beowulf stood and began to pace back and forth. "And his mother? She is hiding something -- I can tell it. We may be looking at members of the Lineage."

"You can't be serious!" Samson said, springing to his feet. "The Lineage of Dragons was destroyed in the 12^th century." He shook his head. "I think-" He cut himself off as Beowulf narrowed his eyes, glaring at him.

"What do you think, exactly, Samson?" Beowulf asked, as the other dragonhunters froze, their eyes widening.

Samson looked like he was weighing options in his head. He sighed. "Nothing. Nevermind, Beowulf." He stepped backwards and sat down, while Beowulf glared after him. He turned back to the rest of the dragonhunters, his hands clasped behind his back.

"We must be cautious. Careful. For in that mansion of theirs lurks not merely a red dragon. Not merely a silver dragon. Not merely a copper and a blue. No. There exists all four, with a cosmic dragon at their head." Beowulf let the words hang in the air, slowly looking each of the dragonhunters in their eyes. "We cannot know the depths of her depravity. The complexity of her plans. The schemes ontop of schemes ontop of schemes that she has already begun to devise. Against such a terrible foe, we have but one strike and that strike must be true...for no one could begin to imagine what evil Nova Cosmos could wreak if she is not stopped..."

***

Penny sprayed popcorn out of her mouth, practically choking as she laughed so hard that she rolled off the couch. Jeremy clutched the popcorn bowl to keep it from being knocked over, while Cinder giggled into her hand, and Skye let out her booming belly laugh. Rayne looked confused.

"I don't get it, they want to eat bugs?" she asked as, on the big screen, Paul Bettany looked deeply wounded, as if he could hear Rayne not getting the joke.

Nova, who had been looking at the space just above the TV for the past half hour, blinked slowly. "Oh, they're on a boat," she said, as Master and Commander: Far Side of the World continued to play. "I get it now."

Everyone slowly turned to look at Nova, who looked back at them.

Jeremy shook his head as the movie continued to play and tried to relax. That was what this Saturday -- the third day of his life with dragons -- was supposed to be all about. The first day had involved robbing a bank. The second day had involved stealing a mansion and turning the former owners into aid workers using hypnosis. But this day? This day was all about relaxing.

And...well...

The Clark's former mansion, now the Bayer's mansion, was perfect for relaxing. There was a game room with pool tables and snookers and billiards and all the other things that rich people pretended were better than video games. There was the entertainment lounge, which had a massive TV and huge booming speakers that made the cannons in Master and Commander sound as if they were really in the room, really going off. There was the massive pool out back, with two hot tubs in orbits around it, and a titanic hedge maze contained in the golf park suitable back yard that the house had claimed for its own.

In short, it was every fantasy that Jeremy had ever had.

Right down to...

"More soda for everyone!" Morgan said, cheerfully, as she sauntered in.

Dressed, of course, in a frilly french maid outfit that had a skirt that ended right at the point where if she bent forward, she'd flash her panties, with a font that clung to her generous breasts, and with the little...head thingy that french maid outfits had. It had a name. Jeremy had no idea what it was, but it complimented Morgan's brand new cat ears, in the same way that her skirt was hugely benefited by her having a flexible, living tail that...

Ah...

"Y-You, uh, know..." Jeremy said, trying to look up and above Morgan's head as she walked past him, holding out the tray of soft drinks to the dragons. "You, uh, don't have to wear the maid outfit."

"Funny, that's not what your boner says," Morgan said, grinning at him.

"Eyyy, got him!" Skye said, leaning forward to smack her palm against Morgan's -- the catgirl maid holding her hand out down low for the silver dragon.

Jeremy made a face. He was still processing the fact that Morgan B. Clark, one time world's worst bully and hugest jerk in Jeremy's life, had actually been a closeted trans-girl who had had a major crush on him and was externalizing internalized transphobia and mistaken internalized homophobia by dunking his head repeatedly in a toilet. And that she was now a catgirl. A catgirl who lived in his house. A catgirl that none of his relations found particularly odd thanks to draconic magic. Nova had described the spell as 'it's fine, don't worry about it' and, thus far, that had been how it had worked.

If his sisters, Jess and Jen, were wondering where their former boyfriend (dating them had been part of pre-catgirlification Morgan trying to vent her feelings about Jeremy without catching 'the gays') had gone, neither of them had seemed particularly worried about it. Nor were they confused by the fact that they had a catgirl maid living in the house. Same with his Mom!

"I am serious, though," Jeremy said as Morgan handed him a new cup.

"And I'm serious," Morgan said, holding her now empty tray against her belly. Her grin was shy, and her canines were sharp. "I like being a maid! I get to make up for everything I used to do, wear pretty outfits. Get oggled by the hottest boy in school..." She licked her lips subtly, her heterochromic eyes glittering playfully. Jeremy squirmed under her expression. "And the really shitty chores are all done by magic! It's basically win, win, win, win!"

Nova gasped.

Everyone looked at her.

"The twins are heading for the lockers," she said, her voice faintly distracted.

Jeremy tried to get out of the way -- but he was too slow to stop Penny and Skye from scrambling over his lap, knocking the popcorn bowl from his hands, and leave him sprawled on his back as the door to the room creaked open and closed, disturbed by the momentum of four dragon girls sprinting out as fast as they could. Morgan had leaped backwards with...well, with catlike reflexes and ended up poised, one footed, on the rim of a vase that was on a little decorative plinth by the door, seemingly put there purely out of spite. The vase wobbled under her weight, but Morgan kept her balance for the few seconds it took for the door to swing shut, before backflipping off and landing with her arms spread, as if to say 'tada.'

The only dragon girl who hadn't left was Nova, who blinked as she looked around herself. "Oh, are we not watching the movie anymore?" She asked as, behind her, cannons roared with deafening volume. Jeremy snatched up his controller and paused the film, then shook his head.

"I wish they'd stop doing that," he said.

"Turning into kittens so they can run into the locker room and oggle your sisters taking showers?" Morgan asked. "Watching their supple, nubile bodies glisten and glimmer under hot water, while they take turns soaping up one another's backs?"

Jeremy narrowed his eyes, turning his head to face Morgan, who looked at him as cute and innocent as she could imagine.

"Is that what you wish they'd stop doing?" she asked, then actually fluttered her eyelashes at him.

"I think so, yeah," Nova said, nodding as she did so, standing up. "Come on, Jeremy." She took his hand and started to drag him towards the door -- and while Nova may have looked like a willowy Ethiopian girl covered in glitter and dressed in a white shift, she had the strength to bend steel. So, Jeremy was dragged along his heels towards the door, while he pointed at his eyes, then pointed at Morgan. I'm watching you, catgirl, that gesture said.

Morgan waved after him. "Have fun you two!"

Once they were in the corridor, Jeremy did look at Nova as she dragged him away from his room -- forcing him to start walking. He breathed a huge sigh of relief when they didn't head for the stairs and the locker room, but instead started to walk to the eastern wing of the place. "So, uh, what's up, Nova?" He asked, curiously, walking with her so she'd stop almost dislocating his arm.

Nova looked at him as if she had forgotten him. "Oh! Right! You're going to make love to me," she said, casually, as she came to a wall that had a window on it looking out at the gentle rolling suburbs beyond. She walked through the wall as if it was made of smoke, and when Jeremy tried to draw himself back, he found himself pulled into the wall and, together, they emerged out somewhere very bright and very cold. The freezing, stabbing feeling of a thousand tiny needles slammed into Jeremy as his eyes went blurry. He opened his mouth to choke something out, but instead all the air rushed out of his lungs as if the oxygen molecules owed him money.

He clutched at his neck with his hand, while Nova's voice seemed to come from a distance. "This shall do. Oh, are you okay?" She paused. "Oh! Right!"

A glowing flare of white light flared around Jeremy and he fell to his knees, his knees digging into soft, sandy stuff that puffed up into the air. He coughed, gasped, and blinked away the strange blurriness in his eyes as Nova sat down next to him, looking at him with faint concern. Not that he noticed. Not that Jeremy noticed anything, because he was looking out at the beautiful, blue and white orb that was the entire Earth.

Jeremy blinked.

Then he blinked again.

Then he blinked a third time. He tore his eyes from the Earth to the landscape around him. Or should he say the moonscape? No, he shouldn't, because that sounded fucking stupid. But it was accurate. He was kneeling in the pale white dust of the surface of the moon, lit from overhead by the blazing light of the sun. With whatever Nova had done to him, it felt as warm and pleasant as a balmy day in the tropics, rather than murderously cold.

Nova sat down next to him, smiling the first full on genuine smile that he had ever seen her smile in his life.

"That's better," she said.

"...Nova..." Jeremy said, experimentally. He had expected to hear nothing at all -- since, well, he was in space and everything. But instead, he sounded normal. He looked down at his hands and saw he didn't even have the bruising and burst capillaries that he'd have expected from a short exposure to vacuum. He started to wriggle a bit, to see if the lunar gravity was as light and bouncy as he expected.

It was. He drifted upwards, then drifted downwards.

Nova's smile grew even brighter. "This seemed good," she said, nodding. "Though it is a mite austere."

Jeremy laughed. "Nova! We're on the moon!"

"Is that impressive?" Nova asked.

"NOVA!" Jeremy practically screamed. His voice broke and squealed together as he put his hands on his head. "WE'RE ON THE FUCKING MOON!"

Nova nodded. "Yeah," she said. "This is too austere." She took his hand, then reached upwards. Her hand grabbed onto something -- and then Jeremy felt his perspectives shift and twitch as the stars of Orion's Belt moved out of alignment, spooling outwards into fine threads of glittering fire, which Nova gripped in her hand as she swept her arm around his side, drew him close, then leaped upwards and swung forward.

The moon was no longer below them and they were no longer standing on the surface.

Instead, they were pushing off from the edge, and down was the vast, infinite blackness beneath the Earth, the Earth which swung past them as Nova angled herself to the side -- curving through space like Spiderman on a fuckton of LSD. The stars wheeled and spun and Jeremy clung to Nova as she swept forward, then released the starfire she held. She sailed up, then dropped down towards an orb of shimmering orange and crackling lightning. They dropped through it all and landed on rocky ground, with an oppressively low ceiling of thick clouds. Rain pattered along Nova's skin and shift, soaking it immediately, causing it to cling to her ebony black body.

The fact that the shift then turned into slurries of liquid goop before bursting into flames, leaving her completely naked as acid rain hissed along her body, did reduce the sexiness slightly.

Nova shook her head. "Wasn't this jungle?" She asked, looking around herself. "And where did all the crystal spheres go?"

She turned to Jeremy.

Jeremy was a pile of pitted, blackened bones, his skull looking up at the uncaring heavens with a faintly shocked expression. Well, as shocked as it was possible to be, considering he was just a skeleton now.

Nova put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips. "Huh."

She gathered up Jeremy's bones, then grew wings from her shoulder-blades. She beat them once, shot into the void above Venus, and then soared over to the sun, which had always seemed quite nice. She dove into the crackling photosphere, but found that the sun was both far too large and far too hot for Jeremy's bones -- which dissolved into a fine dusting of atoms and subatomic particles as he was torn apart by the sun's fierce radiance. She snatched the particles up and held them close as she beat her wings again, spreading them to catch the sun's winds.

Mars was too dusty.

Jupiter was not nearly as small as it had looked, and it had far, far, far too many moons, the prettiest of which was just covered in ice.

Glaring around herself at the ice of Europa, Nova turned to find that Jeremy had been reconstituted -- the Working bringing him back to life as easily as it would have if Nova had turned her cosmic breath on him. Jeremy was looking around himself with wide eyes. "WHAT!?" he exclaimed.

"What is going on?" Nova asked, and for the first time in her life, she actually sounded concerned and focused. "Everything's all wrong."

Jeremy blinked at her.

"WHAT!?" he asked. "I WAS...BONES!?"

Nova started ticking the things off. "Venus isn't a jungle. The sun is huge instead of small, there's no crystal spheres anywhere, Jupiter has more than four moons -- in fact...don't tell him I said this..." She leaned forward, and whispered, softly. "But it's getting a little gaudy? Sixty moons? Really?"

Jeremy gaped at her. "Nova! There are no crystal spheres!"

"What about the luminiferous aether?" she asked, her brow furrowing in confusion.

"Doesn't exist," Jeremy said, shaking his head.

She frowned, her eyes drifting down to her feet. "...well...I was wondering why the Earth was so round..." She rubbed her hand along her cheek. "And is it just me, or the sun the thing everything is orbiting around?"

"Yes! The sun...heliocentrism is...that...did you think the Earth was flat?"

Nova cocked her head. "It's not?"

"No!"

Nova looked even more confused. "Then...why doesn't the water all drain out of the bottom?"

Jeremy put his hands on his face. "The water is held in by gravity, which is a function of mass. The Earth's massive, so it holds everything to it from all directions. The sun's even more massive, so everything orbits around it. There are no crystal spheres, everything just goes on forever and ever and ever." He pointed upwards. "Each of those stars? That's another sun, with more planets orbiting around them. And it just goes on like that forever!"

"Forever?" Nova's eyes widened.

"...well, until we hit our light cone, yeah," Jeremy said.

"Oooh! I see...a light cone..." Nova said, nodding, clearly not understanding thing one about what a light cone was. Jeremy sighed, then knelt down on Europa. He drew a circle, then a pair of cones sliding off it.

"Okay, so, this is us." He pointed at the circle. "Light travels too us and bounces away from us at the speed of light, something like three hundred million meters per second, give or take a few meters." He looked up at Nova, who was nodding slowly. "Because light can't get everywhere instantly, and light is what transmits information, everything beyond the furthest distance light could have gone since the beginning of the universe -- which is, uh, almost twenty billion years give or take a few billion -- is beyond our reach in any normal cosmological model."

"Oooh," Nova said. "The cone's an idea of a cone. Not a physical one." She nodded, before frowning. "Wait, light has a speed? And you humans measured it? That must be very powerful magic."

"We actually just used mirrors," Jeremy said, smiling ruefully. "Like how we landed on the moon with a rocket."

"Ro...cket..." Nova said the word slowly, like it was foreign to her. Which...it was. No shit, Jeremy, you dumbass. "Is the rocket magic?" At his shake of his head, she frowned. "Huh. Well, what about the jungles on Venus?"

"There were never jungles on Venus, it's been a greenhouse cookbox for millions of years!" Jeremy said.

"Well, my mother imparted to me psychic memories in the egg of there being jungles on Venus," Nova said. "And the dune kings of Mars, and the pleasant resort of the sun, which is on the inside of a crystal sphere." She frowned slightly, then crossed her arms over her chest. "My mother didn't lie to me."

Jeremy sat back, his rump resting against the ice of Europa. His bare rump. His clothes...he supposed were way back on Venus, a molten wreck. He wondered how much of that was because of the Working and how much of that was because Nova hadn't bothered to grab the clothes too. He figured he'd worry about it later, even as he said: "Well, maybe things were different. Penny said that the world worked differently before the Working. Maybe, uh...over time, humanity worked more magics. Maybe without even meaning to?"