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“Yes. Not bad for a giant fire-breathing lizard which one day will probably make a human its slave.”

Djibril frowned. "Vresth may or may not want to learn to fly one day, and it's his business. But he's not going to go take a slave while I'm around." she said dryly. "If he wants to be bound, he'll have to make it worth the prospective partner's while, I figure.. and I don't plan on him growing up to be one of those nasty fallen creeps. Yrch!"

“Although, at this age, he’s more fire-hiccupping than ‘breathing’.”

"....well, yes that's true. He has no control over when the flame comes and goes yet. I still think it's cute. Plus, it's handy for starting fires when I'm too lazy to get it started on my own."

...actually Dji rather liked having Vresth with her when she needed flame. It was like having a portable lighter or bunsen burner. even though those things didn't really exist here.

“I’ll just stick around here for a few more hours then and then shuffle off when I decide that Taariq is far away enough that he won’t bother trying to kill me.”

"Good luck with that then." Djibril said, amused. "Saves me the trouble of getting a guest room ready."

“What does… err… Vres eat?”

O.o? Why on earth was he asking?

...well, it couldn't possibly be any harm...

"Dragons are omnivorous so Vresth could probably try eating anything.... But Vresth happens to prefer sweet things. Like cake or pie...."
Dji said thoughtfully, slipping the squirming dragonling a cookie swiped from the table.

Vresth curled up in her arms, cookie in his forelegs, gnawing at it cheerfully, his actions oddly resembling an otter eating a fish.

"And he's a fast varmint when he's on a sugar high." The grumpy old man added morosely. "Many's the time I've had t' chase that silly creature out of places where he shouldn't be running through after the silly sod's broken one of them expensive vases or such."

“So long as he doesn’t eat my boots, I think I’ll be ok. And if he does eat my boots, you will pay for a new pair. I live on my boots, you know.”

Djibril's smile was wry. "Very well. I promise you he will NOT eat your boots. Drool on them is another matter. He is still too young to know boots are not tasty but I think he'll figure it out."

“Expensive vases? That’s a surprise. I didn’t expect that there were any here at all. No offense meant, of course; I just didn’t think that you would have any reason to play around with pretty pottery or anything. Thought you would be busier with your books or… or whatever it is that mages do. What do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?”

"Well, let's see... I DO collect pretty pots and glass artifacts and anything else I find shiny.. I'm rather fond of pretty clothes and shiny jewelry but since Vresth's come I can't normally wear them.. since he drools. And tries to hoard the shiny things. I've had to regularly dig around all over the place to find his little hoards.

I'm hoping he grows out of that stage, mind you...
As for other activities...
I paint, I read my books and try to learn new spells, and I try to find out if I can trade for more books, papers and inks. Storybooks, legends and magical books from the bigger cities are a favorite. As are sweets. I miss such things badly, but I can't exactly go back to the city to get them on my own since I ran afoul of some arrogant nobles awhile back. "

She looked most annoyed at this.

"I did not learn magic to cast stupid pretty illusion spells for lazy noblewomen who lack a decent diversion, nor to disguise them while they're trying to catch other silly nobles. Neither did I learn the art to go around casting lust spells to stroke the ego of complete IDIOTS. Apparently they expected this of me. and later, of course, one of the morons decided I would be a nice addition to his list of 'conquests' and started bothering me with his nonsense."

A frown.

"I set him on fire.
Next thing I know I'm being ordered to leave the city at swordpoint."

“Ah well, you know what they say about privilege. It’s just another name for private law, laws that everyone else has to follow but they don’t. Seems to me that he got off easy… or… what part of his anatomy did you set on fire? No, no. Never mind. I’d rather not know…”


Djibril smirked. "I set his cloak on fire and the flames spread to his pants. A moment later he began running around screaming bloody murder and I told him to stop, drop and roll. Alas he never bothered to listen to my sage advice and continued screaming until a maid put him out of his misery with a bucket of water."


“Why move out here though? Surely there would’ve been other cities. A rival city wouldn’t’ve given a damn that you set someone on fire at all. Unless… ah, I’m guessing that, while you were traveling to one of these rival cities, you came across the dragon-hunter. And then you couldn’t move into a real city. Even the most brain-dead and lust-blind noble would notice a small and scaly shiny-thing thief.”

"Well, that WOULD be true for the latest city, but as for those before that...
Let's see..
The first one was too close to the sea.
I despise the sea.
I can't swim worth crap.
I was NOT going to take a voyage all the way there just because those idiots wanted me off their land. So. I chose to go for the over-land route.

The second one, I pointed out some things to a noble he did not want to hear.... I believe it was the fact that I said he was 'as ugly as a warthog in heat with the color sense of a blind boar' after he questioned my art,
while sniffing some sort of tobacco product and poncing around like a supercilious a$s. He had the nerve to tell me magery was best left to men and women could not possibly understand the subtelities of the art.

And before I got to the third city... I got Vresth. and I wasn't about to leave the poor little one to die just because his er... relatives? are scaly, scary and in some cases, vengeful and possibly rabid."

“Pfft… see, I don’t know what he was complaining about then. Big deal, so his cloak caught on fire. It’s not like it spread to his skin or anything. At least not his crotch. Everybody’s making a fuss out of something so small.”

"It was 'small' alright." Dji agreed dryly. "Even if he didn't want to admit it. Pfeh. Idiots like that should never be given power."

“You know, there’s a funny story about that. I was in the military once. Don’t like to talk about it, on account of it not being worth much talking. But, one important thing I learned was don’t judge people. I was with the captain at the time, trying to keep him from killing himself and he took on an arrow near his crotch. I got his pants off and treated the wound, but made a damned important discovery. This man, this captain, the man who had single-handedly saved an entire platoon of soldiers weren’t a man. Unless the definition of man has been radically altered since I was young. Very surprising, really, since he was the guy who could shut up an entire bar by belching.”

THAT certainly made Djibril laugh. "Shut up a BAR? By BELCHING? Heh, I could never do anything like that.. and you say she saved an entire platoon of soldiers? Fascinating... She must've been brilliant. And you knew her for how long?" she asked, curious and morbidly fascinated with the dead captain.

“Just by belching. Even during Happy Hour. She was a… a very tough bar-fighter, you see.”

Tis caused Djibril to raise an eyebrow in curiousity. "I.. see."
Hm... interesting though extremely disturbing that a woman should be that.. different from the norm. however.. it was a brillant gambit. Dji knew she had no chance in hell of pulling that off.
"And she always acted like that ? Like a man? All the time?"

“She was one of the best captains I ever served under, woman or not. I knew her for… let’s see… two years, I believe. I only learned of her true sex after about a year though. Up until the moment when her pants were off, she had me pretty damned fooled.”

O.o = Dji. That must've been some piece of work.. either it had been an illusionary spell or the woman knew men well enough to fake almost all their habits. If the latter... Dji wasn't sure she wanted to think about that or think LIKE that but it WAs admirable.. in a demented way.

“After I found out, we got around to talking. As it turned out, she had followed her lover to the war, which was very romantic up until five minutes into battle. He died about six months after they had joined up, sadly. Got an arrow right through the brain.”

The part about following her lover into combat was romantic indeed... however the news that the woman's lover had died 6 months into the battle sobered Djibril and made her wince mentally. To love someone that well and then lose them... yet another thing she didn;'t want to imagine. It was only good to hear about starcsrossed lovers in myths... Djibril didn't like thinking about things like that happening in real life. Sadly it all too often did happen.

"That sounds terrible." she said, looking rather horrified. "and she went into battle to avenge him? Or carry on his cause?"

“Wasn’t the only woman in the army later. After that, I made a game of spotting them. Helped them out when I could with advice, a pair of socks, or whatever I felt they needed at the time. We needed every man we could get in that war, even those that were not, technically, men.”

O.O well THAT shocked Djibril thoroughly. "And how many of them WeRE there? I cannot imagine a war desperate enough that many womenfolk actually joined in the fighting...I thought warrior maids were only in legends."

“She continued fighting not to avenge her lover’s death. She fought to make sure that people didn’t kill the rest of her friends. That was why people in the army kill. Don’t do it to defend their country, least not all the times, or because someone on a horse tells ‘em to. They do it because they want to kill the other b*****d before that b*****d can kill their friends.”

Djibril raised an eyebrow at this. "All of them? I've heard rather nasty stories about people in armies killing for the booty, you know. I hardly think everyone in the army is that noble."

“Now, I’m guessing that maging is a slightly different profession than soldiering. I suppose some aspects are the same. In a bad battle---and a bad spell---things can still turn into a game of Find the Other Kidney. I suppose my point is that if someone tries to say that women----or that men aren’t, for that---- aren’t allowed to do something, then that person needs to get out more and actually think about the world.”

Djibril's smile was wry ."Yes, many spells do have the potential to get the caster killed or horribly mutated or mutilated. But most of the people who try to learn those tend to be either desperate or powerhungry bast@rds. Many are in the latter category.. and in general, they tend to practice the spells like that on other people or creatures."

She made a face of distaste.

"They're called 'chimaera'... the freaks of nature that those sorcerers create ....and generally they either go insane and attack people or they die really early in extreme pain.

I've never been stupid enough to dabble in that kind of bull, but I've had... I will not call them colleagues... perhaps a better term for them would be contemporaries... who have dabbled in that.
And other things that can be.. worse.

Pfeh, one of the reasons I never advanced highly enough in my classes. They said I lacked 'initiative.'" she snarled bitterly.
"but the truth of the matter is... Some things simply should never be done."

“Looters. Yeah, some of them do that, but they generally don’t last long. Before long they realize that it’s not so easy and they generally try to desert. Any military man has done his share of looting. Fact of life. If your boots are basically just a few strips of leather barely holding together and there’s a dead man in front of you with nice comfortable boots, well… it would be wasteful to leave them. He’s not gonna use them any more.”

"Well, I guess that's true.. about using something that the dead no longer need.." Djibril murmured thoughtfully. "Still I am not so comfortable with the idea of looking a dead body." She shrugged. "I guess I am lucky to not have to learn."


“There’re lots of things that should never be done, but people’ll go ahead and do them anyway. Take the dragons for example. Shouldn’t’ve tried stealing their power of flight or whatever, but people went ahead and did it anyway. Taariq shouldn’t’ve tried to plot on account of him being a horrible plotter, but he went ahead anyway.”

"Pfeh, the people who tried to steal the dragon's powers of flight were morons. If the gods had meant for man to fly, they'd have given us wings." Djibril said sourly. "I, for instance, HATE heights! That's why the windows are almost all stained glass and why the railings extend from the floor of the balcony to the roof...Looking down and seeing how high up I am gives me the creeps! Plus, it makes me woozy and I end up clinging to the railings...Vertigo is a horrible thing."

Mal’s back straightened a little as Dji mentioned ‘if the gods had meant’ blah, blah, blah. In his experience, people like that generally didn’t get along with him. Well, at least after they learned about him. “Personally, I don’t think that the gods exist,” he said flatly. “Or, if they do, then they don’t give a damn about what happens here. Not to mention, unnatural is sometimes better than natural. I know that I prefer my meat cooked, and that uncooked meat is bad for a human healthwise. Seems to me that the gods didn’t do well on that design.” Pfah. Gods. Faith was for those who hadn’t been in war. They hadn’t seen just what ‘gods’ had given humans the power to do.

Luckily for both Mal and Dji, Vresth started acting up at that moment, eliminating the need for talk of gods and faith and the like. Well, that was a relief. A little anyway. Mal, being the suspicious b*****d that he was, had trouble believing that it was just thunder and lightning freaking out the little dragon and immediately guessed darker intentions. Maybe some of Dji’s enemies had followed her? It seemed horribly possible. Some rich idiots with far too much time on their hands would do such a thing if it meant getting revenge on the mage for rubbing soup in their hair or whatever she had done.

Ah well, the little dragon was cute anyway. Sort of endearing when it was all scared and whimpering like that, anyway, if ‘cute’ wasn’t the right word for it.