Chapter 85

Chapter 85: 85 Coral took her time running her fingers along the spines of the books as she searched for the right volume. The biology teacher had mentioned one particular book on bird behaviour and she was hoping the local library had a copy. "Hey, Coral, look at this!" Coral quickly looked around to see if anyone was now glaring angrily at her and Melody but thankfully that part of the library was void of life (other than the two of them) so she instead turned her attention to her... girlfriend. "What is it?" she asked in a whisper. Melody instantly clapped a hand to her own mouth and looked around beadily. Coral smiled and shook her head. "It’s fine," she added. Melody took one last look then turned her phone to let Coral see the video playing on it. It was a short clip cut from a much longer amateur video of some tech presentation going on in the city. Coral squinted and brought the phone closer. The shaky image showed a stage with two people on it, one older, one younger - nothing remarkable there - but then came the crazy bit: the younger guy suddenly sprouted wings of fire. "It’s computer generated," said Coral. "It’s not," whispered back Melody. "I checked. It’s real." Coral gave the phone back. "He looks kind of familiar," she said. "Right?!" Melody flicked through a few more videos of the same event to find one that better showed the younger guy. "Doesn’t it look like Bran?" The name sounded familiar to Coral but she couldn’t quite place it. "Who’s that?" "It’s, you know..." Melody tapped a finger on Coral’s bare arm in agitation as she tried to recall, making Coral flush. "You remember a guy who looked like this and a Chinese guy about the same age granting wishes? They have this box to put wishes in it-" "Oh!" "Shh!" Both Coral and Melody froze and bowed respectfully as a wizened librarian woman made her slow way down the aisle with a trolley full of books to be sorted. She looked formidable with a steel glint to her eyes so the pair of girls quickly grabbed their bags and, as one, went down the stairs to the children’s section. There was a read-aloud session going on in the main open area of the children’s section by all the beanbags but there was a second, smaller enclave to the side and it was there that Coral and Melody went. There were a few other not-quite-adult-but-not-really-children-anymore people also there but they managed to snag a pair of seats next to each other. As they sat, Coral happened to glance at the phone of the boy sitting on the chair a little further away from them. He was watching a recording of the firey-wings presentation. Coral rose again, tapped the boy on the shoulder and pointed at his phone. "Can you give me the link?" she asked. The boy pulled out one of his earbuds. "What?" "Can you give me the link to the video," she repeated, pointing again. The boy looked at his phone, then at her, clearly appraising her worth as a member of the more womanly kind. "Sure," he said with a grin that Coral knew was likely to lead to more than just a grin. Coral got the link from him then tugged at Melody’s arm and pulled her away from the sitting area. "Huh? Don’t you want to watch?" she asked as she glanced back and saw the annoyed look of the guy. "Wait, did he...?" she then began to ask. "Let’s go back to my place," said Coral, hoping to distract. but when she saw Melody’s expression she relented. "Yes, I think he wanted to hit on me, but..." she linked an arm through Melody’s, "I already have a girlfriend." Melody’s sour expression morphed into a sweet smile. "That’s right," she said with conviction. "And that girlfriend is looking forward to going back to your place," she added with a smile that bordered on naughty. Coral quickly looked away and quickened her pace. Some distance away, a woman stood under an awning, arms held up as she held a smartphone sideways. Despite the still warm weather, she had a shawl draped over her shoulders that gave her folded ’wings’ over her arms. She didn’t’ pay any attention to the pair of girls heading off for an intimate rendezvous. Instead, her lips pursed as she carefully watched the presentation from that morning, rewinding and rewatching the section showing the boy with the wings of fire. -- "Can’t you transform into a loong and fly us back to Cloud Flame Manor?" asked Zhan. He and I were making our slow way down the hilly mountain side where the cave was. With the teleport portal down, our only option was get out the old fashioned way. It was a pain, but I was glad that we still had options. I had no idea what had caused the portal to close, but I had a feeling it wasn’t good. And to answer the obvious, yes I could have transformed into a dragon and flown us back, but you hadn’t ridden me properly up till that point and I wasn’t going to give my virgin flight to some random kid. "No," I replied instead. "I don’t have the clothes to spare." "Clothes...? You mean..." Zhan cocked his head to one side. "Wait, you mean, you rip up your clothes each time you transform?" When he said it like that it somehow made it even more embarrassing. "Yeah, what’s the problem?" I said with a huff. Zhan got that bemused look in his eye and I, not for the first time, wondered how Morgan could stand him. "You should be able to store them magically with the rest of your human form." I’d seen Aunt Yeung transform from dragon form to human form before so I knew. "Why don’t you turn into a dragon," I muttered. Some people, like you, are good at making learners feel confident enough in themselves to expand their horizons, then there are some people like Zhan. The boy laughed. "Kids," he said with a sigh. "Don’t you know that loong aren’t dragons?" I stopped and actually turned back to look at him skeptically. Was this some new ploy to make fun of me? "What?" The boy’s expression told me he, while having fun, was also serious about this statement. "Loong and dragons are not the same thing," he repeated, passing me in our descent. The vegetation was dense but there was still enough room for us to walk easily under the greenery, crunching dead leaves and small stones under our feet. Far away I could just about make out the whine of traffic. We still had about half an hour of walking to go. "Zhan," I called out, quickening my pace to fall into step behind him. "Can you tell me more?" He seemed to sense my sincerity and didn’t shoot back with a sarcastic quip. We didn’t really get along, but we’d, by this point, gotten to know each other a little, or at least, I’d gotten to realise that while he looked like young, he really had walked the earth far longer than any one else I knew. "It’s simple," he said. "When Westerners came, they wanted to form comparisons to things they already knew. They thought they needed to do that in order to understand, but it was really just their own hubris. They assumed that all the knowledge of the world had already been discovered by them, thus making correspondences possible. They didn’t for one moment consider that there were things they had never seen before." "You mean the translator chose to use a preexisting word to translate loong instead of making up a new one or just using the word ’loong’ directly?" Zhan shrugged. "More or less. Loong became dragons, fenghuang became phoenixes, qilin became unicorns and so on." "Was it on purpose?" That same old icky revelation at discovering that something important had been tampered with rose in my throat. Zhan grinned at that. "What do you think?" I could tell that he had already made up his mind on that matter, so I took a moment to think it over. "I think..." I began, "I’m not sure, but I think it worked well for them to call loong dragons since dragons are seen as the bad guy usually." "Well said," replied Zhan. "And I think that’s why you look like that." "Look like what?" He raised an eyebrow. "Humans don’t normally have tails, you know." I gasped and turned back and saw that the charm that was usually on my tail to hide it was no longer there. You’d taken it off ages and ages ago and I’d never thought to put it back on. Actually, I didn’t even know where it was. "What do you mean?" I asked. "I mean, what do the words loong and ’dragon’ have to do with what I look like?" "The mind is a powerful thing, but it can only do so much," was Zhan’s cryptic reply. "Even if a human believes that they are a bird and makes wings for themselves, at some point, they will still crash to the ground. You cannot forever deny what you are. It will only break you, limit you."