Borne of Caution - Act 1: Chapter 24.1

Clair Blackthorn sighs and checks the clock on the wall of her office once more, annoyance and doubt beginning to simmer inside her.

Dragon Tamers are a rare breed of trainer as few have the nerve, the knowledge, and the determination to raise arguably the most volatile pokemon type in the world. Dragons are synonymous with power, prestige, and in the worst cases, terrible ruin. Not just anyone can be a Dragon Tamer, as the Dragon-types themselves would never respect a weak trainer. Ha! Humans in their entirety are a speedbump for dragons. Only the most worthy can command them.

That’s why when her cousin Lance called her all in a tizzy about some trainer with “The most magnificent dragon I’ve ever seen!”, Clair was a bit skeptical.

Some Hoenn-native named Lee Henson apparently owns some undiscovered Dragon-type, and impressed Drake of Hoenn’s Elite 4 so much that he contacted Lance. Lance, the red-headed goofball, was beside himself and called Claire asking if she could take the time to meet this Lee Henson and discuss his dragon. If not for some Champion conference in Unova, Lance would have done it himself, he said.

Humoring her cousin, Clair sent Lee an email asking if he could spare the time to meet her. Lee proved to be rather pleasant in personality if technology illiterate. After several attempts to send a video of his dragon, he gave up and sheepishly asked if he could just fly to Blackthorn City and show her.

The Blackthorn Gym Leader jiggles the mouse of her computer and opens the last email from Lee, cheerfully saying “I’m on my way!”

He’s over an hour late.

Knock knock knock!

Clair looks up sharply to her office door. “Come in!”

The door is cracked open and one of her newer Gym trainers pokes his head in. Clair tries to recall his name, as her assistant normally deals with the gym trainers, but comes up with nothing. “Ma’am?” He asks with nerves unbecoming of a Dragon Tamer. “I think your 3 o’clock is circling overhead. He’s starting to alarm the townspeople…”

The blue-headed Gym Leader stands and palms her Dragonair’s pokeball from her belt. “Thank you, Kyle. I’ll take care of it. Back to what you were doing,” she orders as she steps around her desk and past him with long strides.

“Erm, it’s Carter, ma’am…” the young man corrects, going ignored.

Clair walks through her Gym and throws open the front doors imperiously. Shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand, she uses the other to press the button on Dragonair’s pokeball as she scans the skies.

Snap-hiss!

Dragonair, her blue serpentine Dragon-type materializes on a flash of light next to her, and Dragonair needs no prompting to inspect the blue expanse above her like her trainer.

There!

“I see them,” Clair squints at a black, vaguely reptilian shape circling above the town. The silhouette certainly looks like a dragon. “Dragonair, be a dear and tell them to land before they really earn a piece of my mind.”

Dragonair is up into the air in a flash, flying through the wind in graceful a serpentine S like an Ekans might swim through water. She soars up to the figure flying around, circles it… then turns and dive bombs back at the ground so fast Clair swears she sees the beginnings of a sonic cone.

With a squeak of utter terror, Dragonair wraps herself around Clair and tries to pull her trainer back inside the Gym.

“Dragonair?! What’s gotten into you?!” Clair plants her heels into the earth and resists her ace’s incredible strength as long as she can. She grits her teeth. “Did they do something to you? Answer me!”

The serpentine dragon just shakes her head frantically, making her wing-like ears flap, but she goes deathly still when a huge shadow passes overhead. An odd, unpleasant feeling begins to niggle in the back of Clair’s brain, jabbing at her atrophied human instincts.

Something is wrong.

Several people in the street gasp.

A baby begins to cry from a home across the street.

A Tyranatar walking past with his trainer begins to visibly sweat.

THUD!

The entire city block rattles as something lands behind her. Slowly, Clair turns around, and all at once, she understands why Lance freaked out.

Standing just a few yards away from her is the living spawn of needles and hate.

Yellow, slitted eyes above a short muzzle of lipless jaws bristling with teeth regard her coldly, looking down at her despite the beast’s hunched posture. She’s just barely tall enough that the top of her head would touch its spiny chin. On its head are white horns of ridiculous size and girth, looking more like battering rams than tools to gore, and beyond its head…

Thorns, thorns, and yet more thorns.

The upper sides of its forelegs, its wings, its back, its tail, and the upper side of its hindlegs are covered in black, curved spikes that gleam in the sun. They’re as large as her fist at the base and taper to a razor-sharp point, ending about as long as her whole arm, and those are the medium-sized ones. The larger ones are thicker and longer than her legs. The only place where there aren’t spikes is the dragon’s underbelly, which is a medley of orange and purple scales. Without spikes on the underbelly, it gives Clair a perfect view of just how hilariously built this pokemon is. Its skin almost seems too small for all of its rippling muscles. Standing thirteen feet high easily and probably fifty feet from muzzle to tail, this dragon must weigh literal tons.

“Oh, draco ancestors above…” Clair gulps. Still coiled around her, Dragonair whimpers. Then in a cowardly move Clair would have never seen coming from any pokemon she’s raised, Dragonair recalls herself to her ball in a flash of red light, leaving her trainer alone.

“Heya down there! Don’t let Nergi-chan’s glare get to ya! She’s a real sweetheart under the spines, I promise!”

The cheery voice is so out of place that it breaks the Dragon Tamer out of her spiraling thoughts and forces her to look up.

Sitting on ‘Nergi-chan’s’ back in a gap between the forest of black spikes, a visage marred by a trio of claw-mark scars smiles back down at her. “Lee’s the name! You must be Clair Blackthorn?”

Numbly, Clair nods back. Then she composes herself and clears her throat. “Yes. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.”

The man on the back of the spiny pokemon rises and clambers down, using spikes as hand and footholds to dismount off the dragon’s side. Halfway down, Nergi (Because Clair refuses to add -chan to this beast’s name like she is a Jigglypuff or something) raises a foreleg and turns one of her massive hand-like paws to the sky, letting Lee step off of it and drop the last few feet to the grass.

The man before her is rough, in a word. His sleeveless shirt exposes his muscular arms crisscrossed with scars, and his unkempt hair is pulled back in ponyta-tail. His pants are worn with patches on the knees, and his work boots are covered in scuffs. At the small of his back and hooked onto his belt, a large knife in a leather sheath sits. On the right of his belt, six pokeballs hang, clipped on via magnets.

He certainly has the Dragon Tamer look.

Lee smiles and waves a hand. “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am. Always nice to meet someone who appreciates the finer things in life… Like big lizards.”

Clair sucks in a breath and turns her eyes to Lee’s dragon.

Rather than turn Lee into a stain on the ground for the blatant disrespect, the massive dragon huffs, buffeting the pair of humans with hot air as she gives Lee a dry look.

Not even Lance would dare openly slight his pokemon… Doing so is asking for trouble.

“So, I understand that you and your pals are curious about Nergi-chan, here,” He reaches out and rubs his hand over Nergi’s muzzle, making the massive dragon rumble and lean into the touch. The dry scales rasp against his calloused hand. “Lance, was it? He offered me quite a bit in a bid to trade for Nergi-chan, but I had to turn him down. We did agree to a little lesson and an egg if Nergi-chan ever finds a mate with the grit to handle her. How about the basics then we can get into the scientific stuff you pawn off on apprentices, yeah?”

Without waiting for a reply, Lee clears his throat and begins. “So! Nergi-chan here is a Nergigante, a dragon so rare to my homeland that she’s more or less unique here. In my youth, I happened upon a nest with mama clearly out of the picture, so I took Nergi’s egg before the cold could claim her. I hatched her and raised her as my own, and man oh man how did those ten years fly.” The man smiles fondly and moves his hand under Nergi’s chin, scratching at the scales there. “So let’s start off with morphology.”

He pulls away and walks to one of Nergigante’s tree-trunk-like forelegs. “The spines on her body are striking, no? They’re both an incredible offense and defense, and work in tandem with her high-speed regeneration to make her a flying tank. They’re hard enough to stop slashing attacks and springy enough to deflect blunt strikes that aren’t bearing down on the point. With enough force, they can come free and are in fact designed to come free. Watch.”

Lee grips a spike on Nergi’s leg and tugs with all his might. He grunts as his arms strain, but after a second the spine pops out. He takes a moment to admire the shiny thorn before holding it up. “Nergigante fling these spines with enough force to pierce dragon-hide, and micro-barbs on the shaft of the spine prevent easy removal. You want them out? It’s gonna hurt. Now, take a look at this!” He taps the spot he just took a spine from, and Clair can’t help but blink in astonishment.

A new, white-colored spine is growing in so fast that she can see the progress!

“With their high-speed regeneration, a Nergigante can shed their spines in an attack, either by ramming prey or ramming themselves into the ground to force the spines to explode off everywhere, and be no worse for wear!” Lee beams. “The spines contain a special chemical that forms a hard enamel when exposed to oxygen, making the black color you see on grown spines. With her powerful limbs…” Lee drops the spine in his hand and ducks under the Nergigante’s left foreleg. He takes the smooth underside of her leg on his shoulders and lifts it up. It takes a moment for Clair to realize that the dragon isn’t leaning to the side to help Lee lift the limb, he’s just shifting her entire bulk alone. “She’s got enough power to drive her foreleg into the ground like an impact driver, letting all her spines sheer off and nail everything around her. Nifty, eh?” He says as if he didn’t just lift a fourth of a multi-ton dragon. He lets the limb drop back to the ground and moves toward Nergigante’s face.

“Her horns actually evolved to let her batter prey with defenses like her own. They’re heavy, continually growing, and are great sacrificial weapons for volatile armor solutions like spikes or superheavy rocky armor that needs blunt force above all else. In the wild, a Nergigante will shave them on rock formations or the bark of ironwood trees by rubbing, but I take care of Nergi-chan beautification,” Lee almost glows with pride as he runs a hand over the dragon’s horns.

Nergi actually rolls her eyes.

“What about her teeth, Mister Lee? They look specialized too.”

Clair slowly turns her head, keeping the huge dragon in her peripheral vision as she looks to see who asked the question.

On her right, a few of her gym trainers are nervously sending Nergi looks, but they hold notebooks in their hands. The one who found her in her office, Conner(?) steps back after speaking.

When did they get here?

“Good observation!” Lee points to the boy with a wide smile. “Next, the mouth!” He slides up Nergi’s side and fearlessly opens her jaws, not minding the razor teeth as thick as his wrist.

Again, the dragon just appears bored and lets her trainer molest her with impunity.

“Nergigante, being mono-Dragon, aren’t ones for breath attacks. It’s not that they can’t learn, they just don’t need them.” He opens the dragon’s maw wide, easily enough to snap him in half. “Look at her cheeks and notice the jaw muscles. Nergigante can exert a whopping sixty-thousand PSI worth of bite force! She can crunch through steel and barely feel it. When she’s taken down her prey, this lets her chow down through thick hide and pry off armor easily. The short muzzle on a Nergigante means that biting isn’t a go-to attack, but with how wide they can open their jaws…”

Clair feels her mouth drop open and hears her trainers gasp when Lee opens Nergi’s jaws nearly a hundred-and-ten degrees, then lays himself in her mouth back first!

“Take a look at that!” The madman has the nerve to raise his head and smirk at them. “She can get her mouth open wide enough to bite down on six men at once. Isn’t that something?”

One of the gym trainers, a younger girl in her teens, begins to look green in the face at the thought.

Lee pulls himself from the dragon’s mouth, and she shuts her jaws with a click before leveling her trainer with an impatient look. “Aw, I know you don’t like being gaped at, honey. Lemme show them one more thing, okay?”

Nergigante growls. Her jaws shiver, and out comes a sound that would be right at home coming from a creature that popped out of a nightmare, not a pokemon.

Someone squeaks.

“Please?” Lee laces his fingers together and gives the Dragon-type a piteous, begging look.

‘This is it.’ Clair thinks, preparing herself to be coated in gore. ‘This time he messed up. Showing that much weakness to a dragon?’

Nergi’s caustic yellow eyes finally look away after a long minute, then the monstrous reptile lets out a sound like a booming groan before raising a foreleg, giving them a view of her underbelly.

Lee’s grin is blinding. “You all are in for a rare treat! Take a peek at this!” He steps under Nergi, almost not needing to duck his head, then he stops and looks back at them. “Well? C’mon. My baby girl is very patient, but it has limits. Don’t make her wait all day,” he says beckoning them to join him under the hulk of scales and agony.

For a second, Clair and her trainers are frozen, wondering just what the hell is wrong with this man, then Nergi growls again and shocks them into moving. As a group, they shuffle under Nergi and duck their heads despite having plenty of clearance.

‘What am I doing?’ Clair wonders to herself, slowly feeling her nerves fray. ‘What the fuck am I doing?!’

“Notice the beauuuutiful sunset-colored scales on her belly. I know I should start on something academic, but by the Star Sapphire…” Lee runs a hand on Nergi’s smooth underside. “These scales are why ancient people thought Nergigante were agents of ruin and renewal. These fantastic colors reminded them of the setting sun, then thus the end of an era when seen from the ground. Considering the preferred prey of these gorgeous dragons, I totally understand.” The wildman reaches up and stands on the tips of his toes, pressing his face and arms to the orange and red scaly belly with a look of contentment. Clair has to still her heart when Nergi jumps from the unexpected hug.

“While the belly is the least armored part, it can still shrug off anything short of full-power rifle rounds. Not that it matters much, considering the whole regeneration thing. Males have harder scales and even a few spines under here, but females?” Lee sighs dreamily. “Nergigante don’t do anything by half, motherhood included. These scales are soft enough to cradle an egg and kept at a constant temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38.8 celsius to insure good incubation. Lifemated pairs of Nergigante will sleep cuddled belly-to-belly, both for bonding and to keep an egg warm in a subpar nest. Touching these scales is a privilege few ever get in their lives, and cuddling a Nergigante is unheard of in most parts.” He pulls away from his dragon and points up. “Go ahead and give them a feel. You may not ever get the chance again.”

No one moves.

Finally, Clair grits her teeth and refuses to let fear of a dragon, her specialty, stop her before one of her trainees proves themselves braver than her. She pulls the glove off of her left hand and raises it, slowly touching…

…The softest scales she’s ever felt. Oh Arceus above, it’s not right for a creature this fierce to be this incredible to touch. The warmth is divine. Not too hot, but just enough to set her nerves at ease. For a moment, she envies the man before her for having this all to himself whenever he wants.

‘Draco ancestors…’ She gulps. ‘What enraptured Lance? This dragon’s power, or feeling this?’

“Erm, Mister Lee?”

Clair reluctantly pulls her hand away from Nergigante, turning to see… Kenny was his name? Kenny raise his hand as if he was in a classroom. “I noticed that you keep referencing Nergi’s prey, but one thing seems odd,” He looks down at the notebook in his hand.

“Go on?” Lee nods.

“What do Nergigante hunt if they need so many overwhelming attack methods?”

“Ah? I didn’t say?” Lee blinks. “Nergigante are consummate carnivores. They can eat just about any other creature, but in the wild?” His smile is deceptively gentle. “They hunt other dragons.”

Clair feels her frayed nerves unravel in one fell swoop. “Damn it all, Lance…”