3. Beep Test
The week of the moot came.
Strangely, at least for me personally, I wasn't all that anxious. We had done what we could to prepare. We had a venue, we had food, and Cynthia had confirmed through her backchannels that they all had temporary housing in the area. Whatever else needed to happen wasn't my responsibility, given that no one had deigned to tell me what this was all about. If they wanted juggling clowns and a live band, they'd have to procure them themselves.
I did unearth some information on the dragons who were coming, finally.
First, Arjun, the man who had actually called the moot (though, Cynthia assured me that someone would have, even if he hadn't): born in central India sometime before the Mughals swept down from the north to seize power in the area, either in the late 1400s or early 1500s. For someone so powerful and long-lived, the information was shockingly incomplete. That seemed to be by design, as Arjun seemed to have really not done much in his life. He owned a river shipping company during the Raj and played chess at a regional level after World War II, but not seriously. Nowadays, he owned things. A resort in Indonesia, a mine in Australia, several cruise ferries in the Philippines. The hotel he owned in Malaysia was where he spent most of his time nowadays, drinking on the beach (which surprised me by being legal, given the country's dominant religion) and playing cards with C-list celebrities in smoky back rooms (gambling, it turned out, was taken much more seriously than alcohol consumption).
It was all a bit underwhelming, really.
Clement, on paper, could be confused as being the same. He also appeared to simply own things. Cynthia told me that, unlike the hands-off nonchalance of Arjun and in contrast to Clements's unimposing personal presence, he was actually a shark in a boardroom. Or, I guess, he was a dragon. He owned a telecom company in Germany, several Swiss food manufacturers and a transport company for them, and a spread of vineyards in France and Italy. His most public-facing possession was an aggressive law firm based in London that specialized in corporate takeovers and acquisitions. Despite not being a native Briton, he had attended Oxford (in the late 1800s, after the reforms that transformed it into something that resembled a modern university). There were question marks between World War I and the late 80s, when he had stepped back into the public eye with his law firm and his wife.
Speaking of his wife, Eleanor had even less recorded about her than Arjun. She was a homemaker, despite the curiously absent children I would have expected to see listed after that title. Born in France in the late 1800s to wealthy parents (of which I could find no further record, and Antonin told me to stop asking unless I wanted problems), she seemed to have married Clement and then done nothing since.
Finally, Juliana and Adriana. They had a family estate in Santa Catarina. There were lots of reports of how they used to meddle in local and regional government, in Southern Brazil as well as Uruguay and Argentina, a hundred years ago. Nothing of note since the '60s. The most recent development was when they got their name on a hospital wing ten years ago.
It was all rather bizarre to internalize. None of them seemed to match what I had anticipated. None of them had the horror stories I was expecting, given how horribly everyone seemed to react to my existence. None of them came with obvious warning signs of malicious, controlling behavior -- most arguable was Clement, but that was only with his companies, not with the wider world. Frankly, they were all boring. While that went quite some ways to assuage my anxiety over the meeting, it only added more questions. They could have just done a great job of hiding their skeletons, but it sure didn't seem like it. It just seemed like they didn't have any in recent history, and everything about dragons before 1950 had been removed.
They just seemed to not really do much. Arjun and Clement had their mundane toys and investments, but that was it. There wasn't anything to warrant the reactions I had experienced. None of them had any bad news surrounding them.
And, more curiously, none of them had anything magical about them.
They all seemed to already have money. That made some sense -- the youngest of them, Juliana, would've been a teenager when Woodstock happened. Given that their parents were necessarily dragons (dragons who seemed to have been expunged from the records, or at least from the ones I had access to), they should have been born closer to the top than I was.
But there was nothing in the little snippets of information I found that suggested they utilized their draconic nature in any way. There was nothing to indicate that they used magic in any way. They had inherited wealth or created their own in the mundane means I was already familiar with so long ago that it now maintained itself.
Which felt conspicuous. It felt important. There was no way that every other dragon having either no involvement with their communities or only mundane interactions was a meaningless coincidence, right?
The other thing that confused me was that none of them had multiple partners. Clement and Eleanor were married but didn't seem to have children or any intent on changing that. There wasn't mention of a long-serving housekeeper that Clement kept around or a yoga instructor Eleanor enjoyed when Clement was away on business. The Brazilian sisters were single and insulated from everyone around them; Juliana seemingly actively rejected interaction with everyone, and Adriana was merely introverted and heavily limited her public appearances. Arjun was a confirmed bachelor, though he had children. None of them were dragons, and I listened to a confusing and ultimately incomprehensible sidebar explanation from Antonin about how draconic genetics worked -- the short of which was that the more powerful the mate magically, the more likely a child was to be a true dragon. A variety of other outcomes were possible, depending on the pair and their combined magical might and the location where the child was conceived. Apparently, a number of fae had their origin when a dragon mated a witch with an exhibitionist streak and enjoyed being taken on a ride into the countryside and then taken in the woods where anyone could theoretically stumble upon them.
Arjun only partied with mundanes, though, so there was no risk of any heirs. I noticed that draconic children were frequently called heirs in a way that suggested a different meaning than I was familiar with. Yes, Eleanor couldn't have Clement's child because of the risk of producing an heir and we wouldn't want that. He doesn't wish to have a bastard, so they remain a couple without children. Everyone I talked to danced around the issue in a way that was so goddamn frustrating and reminded me of exactly why I needed to figure all of this out -- deal with the dragons and send them home, get a job, get a house (with a mana grid connection), then start cracking eggs to get the answers I needed. Getting a level of systematic independence and insulating myself from most sources of leverage was the goal. A goal I wanted to have accomplished before Zoey and I brought a child into the world.
Thoughts about how I wanted to approach that problem were running through my mind Tuesday afternoon as I returned to the apartment. I had worked out alone, following Zoey's planned schedule for me without any deviation, excepting her conspicuous absence as she went to have her yearly physical exams. I had inquired about Beth and Sam coming to the gym I used and was politely told that it was limited to official staff and their VIPs, which I might be able to get around, but it would use some of my political capital. That was reasonably valuable for me, so I went alone without raising the question, the bond between the three of us scratching the itch of desire for their presence just barely enough.
I was now starting my third training block, and I had hoped it would come with fewer spectators. The second block had been done halfway transformed, my scales coming through and covering my body for everyone in the gym to see, marking me plainly as the new dragon for anyone who was otherwise uninformed. That, combined with the freakish capabilities the draconic body reveled in displaying when he was unleashed, meant that every workout garnered observers. Thankfully, the partial transformation didn't seem to be enough to cause any of the more intimate side effects in those around me.
In a show of solidarity, Zoey allowed some of her wolfish features to bleed through as well for the six weeks I was training my draconic form. While I enjoyed seeing her white ears wiggling and tail wagging as we worked out, in a way surprisingly more reminiscent of a domesticated pet than a wild predator, I'm not sure anyone else noticed. The red dragon took all of their attention, after all. Even now, as I lifted without my skin hardening into a reflective, glossy maroon spectacle, people continued keeping their eyes on me, and while they were less interested in my normal skin, they were braver because of Zoey's absence. That made me content with Beth and Sam going to their own gym -- I didn't want them caught up in this mess of publicity. Sam was already sensitive about her physique, as much as I loved her.
On Monday, when I was done working out and Zoey had concluded what she needed to do, she came to the apartment mentally and emotionally fatigued, looking to have dinner with us just to help her reset for the next day. She explained that the first day was mostly done by answering questions and having a physical check with a doctor to evaluate any current injuries so that they could make recommendations for alteration on the testing she was to do. She described feeling like a lab rat, stuck on the wrong side of the one-way mirrors she was used to, forced to go through the dance of having all of her shortcomings laid plain so that someone could look at her chart and say, "Ahh, yes. Lyon's VO2 max declined another 3% this year. Recommend her only for non-intensive actions on a maximum of 20 days per year with another evaluation in the spring."
Today, the lithe blonde came to the apartment after her tests were completed in a starkly different mood. She burst through the door to the apartment, not content with merely entering the abode, and marched through the entranceway confidently to plaster herself against me. I was sitting on the couch, and she was standing behind the back, leaning over me, pulling my head back to kiss me, and running her hand across my chest down toward my beltline. There was no subtlety in her approach. She wasn't sending a signal here; she was lighting the entire city on fire to get my attention.
"I need you," she whispered.
