Waking to Another Sky Ch4 bit – Owned by a Dragon

~ crossovercreativechaos

Teal’c glanced at the vet. “Rob Flint. I believe it would be useful to show Colonel O’Neill the door.”

“The door?” Flint said blankly. Followed Teal’c’s gaze to the aviary, and almost whistled. “Oh. That door. Yeah. Good idea. Colonel? You want a look at Exhibit A.”

Uh-huh. It was probably fifty-fifty odds that Kazuto would split while his back was turned. But if Teal’c thought he should see it, he’d catch the kids later- whoa.

Scarring inside the door. Some of the glass was scored with long, pale scratches. A long strip of insulation was dangling loose, serving as other dragons’ new tug-toy. “I thought this place was built to hold them,” Jack stated, deliberately calm.

“It was.” Flint pointed to empty cages along the far wall, near a kennel that held wolfish shadows with bright amber eyes. “Pina was one of the animals in NervGear.”

What did that have to do with- Oh. Oh, hell.

“I can’t hold her here,” Flint said emphatically, voice low. “Not without a few layers of sheet steel, which currently I do not have, thank you. You’ve never been down here, I know you don’t know this – but these dragons live in flocks. Like dogs, in packs. Pina thinks Silica is her flock, okay? She is not going to stay locked up somewhere else. If we make her break out of somewhere, she could hurt herself. Nobody wants that, right?” He nodded toward the kids. “C’mon, be honest. They’re not going anywhere until you figure this whole NervGear stuff out. You know it. I know it. They know it. So let Silica give me a hand. It’ll be good for them.”

35 thoughts on “Waking to Another Sky Ch4 bit – Owned by a Dragon”

    1. Well, why would the dragons want out? The flock is there and food comes to them. Life is good. Pina says her flock is not here, so she’s going to find her flock because the last time they split up bad things happened. Also, keep Pina and Rosalia apart, I have a feeling our feathery friend holds grudges.

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  4. Yep, there’s a big difference between “designed to house a critter without escape” and designed to be escape proof to a critter that is constantly testing every vulnerability.

    One of my cats found a small hole around the water piping inside a safety latched under-sink cabinet and ended up stuck between the floor and ceiling of a room 15 feet away. And he probably wasn’t nearly as bright as Pina.

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  5. And Silica isn’t the only helper that’s going to be trying to move into the basement level, is she? There’s no canonical number given to the SAO idea of beast tamer, only Silica is demonstrated as having one, but the wiki implies that there are enough to get a label and the basic requirements are known. Also, her wiki page says she’s the first, not the only, Tamer of feathered dragons.

    Dunno if we’re doing anything with that here, but it is an interesting thought.

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      1. >🙂>
        Of course one has to wonder if some of the tamed beasts are a little more…..dangerous looking then Pina. *EG*

        “Why are you people so nervous around Scruffy?”

        “That thing is an overgrown lizard that can spray acid, has razor-edged teeth longer then my hand and can bite straight through sheet steel without slowing down.”

        “Nonsense, Scruffy’s perfectly safe. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

        -Player kisses the animal on the nose then hugs him. Scruffy rumbles, bumps her affectionately with his snout then stretches over her shoulder to give the SGC personnel a smile that is filled with far too many teeth-

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      4. >Are you a professional comedy writer? Because that was hilarious.>
        Far from it. If I tried writing in any form as a profession I’d starve to death.

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      6. >Why? Sporadic output?>
        Sporadic and slow writing, issues with constructing original material (all of my writing ideas so far are fanfic/crossovers), forming cohesive storylines with a proper beginning, middle and end etc etc,….

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      8. Making a living in creative writing is a particularly challenging endeavor. (Check out the reports at authorearnings dot com. They do not paint a picture of a particularly healthy industry with less need to innovate to meet the demands of changing circumstances.)

        In general, making a living is challenging. Other fields may still have a clearer relationship between reward and effort, more profit per effort, more people who can teach you how to make the effort, fewer fundamental changes in ways to sell your effort, or larger organizations where you can have specialists take care of guessing what fundamental changes need to be made in order to stay in business.

        I’m not the worst expository writer in the world, and I think I still have a lot of practice and learning to do before I could make money, much less a living. (I don’t know the markets, I need to significantly improve my salesmanship, and I need more practice routinely producing.)

        Comedy is probably not the easiest form of creative writing.

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      9. >I don’t think Kayaba would have let something like that be a pet? Eep.>
        Well it depends on what criteria he was using for creatures with the potential for taming. Because the role of said animals in SAO would presumably be closer to animal companions in older societies (hunting, herding, guarding etc) then the ones we have today whose primary purpose is for affection and companionship, not a truly functional role.

        There are several that required aspects that come to mind:

        1. Intelligence/cognitive capability. The animal needs to be able to comprehend and act on (through training etc) what the human is attempting to convey.

        2. Natural social structure. The animal needs to have some form of communal social behavior where it lives and works alongside other members of it’s species which the human can insert themselves into. If the animal is naturally solitary (or doesn’t have the concept of teamwork) then getting it to work alongside a human is going to be tricky.

        3. It needs to be fairly adaptive to different environments since humans can go all over the place. If it can only feed/breed/live in very particular conditions etc that is an issue.

        If we look at Pina, her species is presumably an arboreal generalist species something like a raccoon feeding on smaller animals/insects, fruit, nuts etc. Explains why she goes after peanuts, flight is far from the cheapest form of movement energy-wise.

        Combined with the high intelligence and flock/pack mentality, she’s a perfect fit. Sure she might not be able to play the same roles dogs (humanity’s oldest companion) traditionally have, but humans are nothing if not inventive.

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      13. Given that one of the requirements to tame a beast is not slaughtering too many of the species, Laughing Coffin is assuredly out any Beast Tamers. If they’re willing to torture humans ‘because it’s just a game,’ NPC animals are doomed.

        And how sick and twisted were the LC to NPCs, given how they acted toward people?

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      17. With Java off, in theory you just edit the address you get for making any reply with the appropriate comment ID number, load that address, and post from that.

        To test this, I started a reply to 18770, and redirected it to 18801.

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      18. These are wild animals, and a player effectively would need to be capable of domesticating them through personality alone. (Which might not be humanly possible, suggesting things about the relevant modification. Which may explain some of Silica’s issues prior to retrieving Pina.) Plus, there may be a software lock that restricts whether one of the animals in NervGear is made available.

        Kayaba might not have anything big enough that roughhousing could be a necessary part of the bonding experience.

        The necessary patience, observation, and imagination isn’t really all compatible with murdering folks for kicks and giggles.

        Laughing Coffin might’ve been able to recruit a basilisk handler through force and mind breakage, but that isn’t necessarily the kind of story this is.

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  6. And I’m now wondering if Kirito figured out all that stuff about Teal’c and Jack out by conventional hacking or becasue he’s really good at using Scan. ‘Cause if it’s the later… goodbye security…

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