Vell Harlan and the Doomsday Dorms

Vell put his pencil down as he saw a shadow pass by the window. The shadow of something large. Class carried on in spite of the unknown entity passing overhead. Vell kept his eye on the window, but the only thing he saw was a faint orange glow. He also felt the room start to get warmer.

“Everybody should probably duck,” Vell shouted. He punctuated his sentence by grabbing Joan out of the seat next to him and diving to the floor. The classroom reacted to his announcement by pausing briefly and looking around the room. One random student across the room actually took the advice and ducked. The rest of the class got their heads incinerated as a wall of fire crashed through the window and surged overhead. Vell and Joan crawled out of the burning room, as did the mystery student who’d been smart enough to duck. They dashed away, leaving Vell to send Joan on her way in turn and head towards the source of the fire.

He made it around the corner of the building and stopped in his tracks. The sight in front of him briefly overwhelmed Vell’s brain, and he only managed to spit out a single word.

“Dragon.”

The serpentine horror turned towards the sound of its name. Scales like tarnished copper glinted in the sunlight as two gemstone eyes of deep-set crimson stared Vell down. A wingspan as wide as a passenger jet shifted as the beast turned to focus on him alone. Finally, a low rumble and a surge of heat formed the prelude to another burst of all-consuming fire.

Vell considered his odds, and decided to embrace death. Leanne had other plans.

She snatched Vell out of the path of fire and jumped to the next building. Vell watched the rolling surge of dragonfire pass under his feet, and then regained his bearing and his will to live. Apparently he was going to be a dragon slayer today.

Leanne’s veins already surged black with the strength-enhancing nanomachines. She jumped down from the roof top, behind the dragon, and put Vell back on solid ground before smacking him on the back and pointing toward one of the nearby buildings. Vell took the hint and headed that way while Leanne ripped a large tree out of the ground and smacked the dragon in the head with it. The sounds of dragon-on-tree violence continued in the background as Vell headed towards the building. Harley and Lee welcomed him inside.

“Hi, Vell,” Harley said. “Having a little dragon-shock, I see.”

“It’s- that’s a- a fucking dragon, Harley!”

“Yeah yeah, everybody gets a little freaked out the first time, it’s fine,” Harley said. “You’ve lost your dragon virginity, Vell, congratulations.”

“Please don’t say it like that,” Lee pleaded.

“Why is a dragon here?” Vell demanded.

“Well, dear, they are irrevocably drawn to wealth, and tragically also irrevocably incapable of understanding that anywhere between ninety-two to ninety-five percent of global wealth exists digitally.”

The resurgence of magic had drawn a lot of creatures into a world they weren’t well suited for. No less than ninety-two trolls had to work together to patrol the Golden Gate bridge, and dragons were consistently stymied in their attempts to hoard Bitcoins. This particular dragon seemed especially frustrated -even more so now that Leanne was repeatedly whacking it in the head with a tree.

“If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it is after me,” Lee admitted. “I am the heir to a large fortune, and I am relatively undefended, after all.”

“The dragon could also be after a wealth of knowledge,” Harley said. “Some of these scaly fuckers are getting desperate to be hoarding something.”

“What a shame,” Vell said calmly. After that, he started shouting. “Now what do we do to stop it from killing people?”

“Easy, Vell, dealing with dragons is a simple two-step process,” Harley said. “Step one, don’t get incinerated.”

The dragon bellowed a wave of white-hot flames. Lee used her water magic to burst open a nearby pipe and cover their team with a thick shield of water. The aquatic dome boiled around them, but the humans inside were unharmed.

“Step one successful,” Harley noted. “Step two: identify a weakness.”

Lee reached into her purse and drew her whip, just to have it on hand. Vell matched her gesture by grabbing a summoning rune from his pocket and using it to call his cursed six-shooters to his hand. He fastened the gun belt around his waist and kept his fingers on the triggers as Harley appraised the dragon.

“Magical creatures all tap into the collective subconscious that exists within mana, so they’re partially influenced by public perception,” Harley explained. “So thanks to notable author JRR Tolkien, and more recently notable transphobe JK Rowling, everybody thinks dragons have easily exploitable weaknesses.”

“Thanks, but, uh, I knew literally all of that,” Vell said.

“Exposition often helps the ideas get flowing, dear, don’t mind her,” Lee said. She paused briefly as the loud “bonk” of a tree hitting a dragon drowned out other sounds. “We need to find out what this dragon’s specific weakness is. Judging from Leanne’s current lack of success, we can rule out ‘being hit with a tree’.”

“Well she’s only tried the Bald Cypress,” Harley said. A loud tearing sound was soon followed by another loud bonk. “Oh, nope, she just tried the Florida Maple too, we can rule that one out.”

“Vell, perhaps you could give the dragon a once-over with your glasses while Leanne continues to weaponize the local flora?”

“Might as well,” Vell agreed. He wasn’t optimistic about his glasses’ odds of scanning a live dragon, and for once he was right. After a long scan of the dragon, the glasses runic software helpfully pinged his phone with the Wikipedia page for “Dragon”.

“Well that was useless,” Vell said. “Maybe we can do a blood test.”

“Ah yes, in case the legendary dragon’s weakness is hypoglycemia,” Harley said.

“Dragons can get diabetes too,” Vell said. He leaned out from cover and tried to raise his voice over the roar of the dragon. “Hey Leanne! Can you bring the dragon over here, we want to get some blood.”

The dragon got smacked in their direction, so Vell assumed he had been heard. He drew his guns and braced his shoulder against the wall.

“Alright, I’m going to go make the dragon bleed and, well, probably die in the process,” Vell said. “Lee, I assume you can handle collecting the blood and getting it tested?”

“I will do my best,” Lee said. “Do try not to get incinerated.”

“Of course. I’ll probably fail, but I’ll try.”

Vell gave his revolvers a quick spin before stepping out and firing. Leanne bashed the dragon in his direction, giving Vell a good angle on the dragon’s face. He fired a quick salvo of shots at the eyes, nose, mouth, and anywhere else that wasn’t coated in thick copper scales. The bullets didn’t do much damage, but they did prompt small spurts of blood. Lee ducked out of cover and used hydrokinesis to manipulate the blood into a single orb of crimson.

The dragon roared again, and the furnace in it’s chest started to light again. Vell took the hint and started running for cover while Leanne went in for another blow. The uber athlete got below the dragons head and threw a fist upwards, slamming her knuckles into the dragon’s spiny chin. Vell, still too far to take cover in a building, hit the deck and hoped for the best. As it belched out the fireball, Leanne’s punch sent the dragon’s head flying upwards, and the fire flew into the sky. Ash rained down on a surprisingly still-alive Vell.

With a sigh of relief, Vell lifted his head and enjoyed the moment of being pleasantly surprised. It lasted for all of two seconds before the shadow of the tail swung down towards him.

“Technically, you didn’t get incinerated,” Harley told him. “Mission accomplished.”

“I’ll take it,” Vell said. “Getting smushed is less painful than getting burnt to death. You guys figure out anything useful after I died?”

“Yes, actually,” Lee said. “Our solution should be arriving shortly.”

As if on queue, a man appeared, dragging an obscenely large pallet behind him -followed by another man with another pallet, and then a third man and a third pallet. The first man in the trinity lifted a tablet and looked up at Lee.

“You the gal who ordered nine-hundred pounds of peanuts?”

“Yes.” Lee said. To her credit, she kept a straight face.

“Lee really loves nuts,” Harley said, also with a straight face. Lee gave her a gentle slap on the back of the head. The lead deliveryman stared at them silently for a moment and then pushed the tablet towards Lee. She signed off on the order and the deliverymen began to unload the hundreds of bags of peanuts. The entire dining hall was staring in their direction now. Harley popped open one of the nearest bags and helped herself to some peanuts.

“So,” Vell said. “The dragon has a peanut allergy?”

“Very much so,” Lee said. “The poor thing practically exploded when we launched peanuts at it.”

“We don’t kill anything sapient if we can avoid it, so we’re sort of hoping having this many peanuts around will scare the dragon off. Prevention beats a cure and all that.”

The smell of peanuts already hung thick in the air. Vell would wager any dragon with a peanut allergy flying towards the island would catch a whiff of the peanut hoard and turn the other way.

“Vell, would you be a dear and ask Renard if he knows several hundred recipes for peanuts?” Lee asked. “I’d hate for these to go to waste.”

“I’ll see what he can do,” Vell said. He took one more look at the pile of peanuts and already began to dread the dozens of peanut butter sandwiches in his future.

“Yeah I can do stuff with peanuts,” Renard said. “There’s a whole bunch of chili sauces, and salads, and some stir fries. How many peanuts you got?”

“Nine hundred pounds,” Vell said. He paused briefly and tilted his head to the side. “Minus however many Harley has eaten by now.”

“I’m no mathemagician, but I don’t think Harley can eat too many,” Renard said. “I better get cooking.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” Vell said. He stopped to check the time on his phone. “Later. There’s something I need to check up on first.”

The dragon was going to be making its approach any minute now. Vell hurried outside to keep an eye on the sky. He could see Leanne across the quad, also staring up at the sky, and hurried to her side. In case the peanut-based dragon repellent didn’t work, he wanted to be standing near their best fighter. She acknowledged him with a nod and offered him a small bag of peanuts.

“Thanks,” he said. “So how’d the dragon fight go after I died?”

Leanne held up five fingers, made a chomping motion with her hands, then sighed.

“Hey, five minutes solo against a dragon is pretty good,” Vell said. He took a small handful of peanuts and popped them into his mouth, figuring he might as well get a few more out of the way. Leanne gave him a befuddled look.

“What?”

She grabbed a peanut and mimed the action of throwing it, then pointed at the sky.

“Oh, shit, right,” Vell said. “These are for dragon fighting. Sorry.”

Leanne shrugged.

“It’s just, you know, when I see a peanut my first instinct is not to kill something with it.”

He had a point, but Leanne had neither the desire nor the time to address it. She tapped Vell on the shoulder and pointed at the sky. This time she pointed out a small figure on the horizon that was rapidly growing larger. Vell readied his peanuts.

The dragon raced towards the island, wings pounding in the breeze, bearing down at some unknown prey. The shape -and sheer size- of the beast became more clear as it approached. Some students started to run for cover as it became clear a dragon was headed for their island, while other stood to gawk at the impressive beast, proving in the process that you could still find morons on an island of geniuses. Vell and Leanne kept close to the wall and kept an eye on the dragon.

The dragon landed in the middle of the quad and sniffed the air to get its bearings. It took two massive breaths and froze in place. Then it began to squirm. It’s legs flailed and it’s tail swung from side to side as the scaled chest of the dragon heaved. The mighty jaws of the massive dragon parted, and the guttural rumble of incoming flamebreath emanated forth.

But no fire spewed forth from the jaws of the dragon. Instead, the immediate area was bathed in a thick spray of dragon vomit. The dragon immediately turned and began to flee from the sickening miasma of peanuts that hung about the island, leaving behind an island -and two loopers- covered in vomit that smelled of fish oil and napalm.

Leanne looked down at her hands, and the mess that covered them. She made no sound, but Vell could tell she was screaming on the inside. He knew because he was screaming too.

“You want to use my shower again?” Vell asked, barely opening his mouth as he spoke. Leanne nodded.

“Great. You go first, and I’ll get something prepped to burn our clothes.”

Leanne nodded again, and the two vomit-bathed loopers waddled off towards the nearby shower, silently vowing to never speak of this again.