Despite the dragons' complaints, they took time to try to ensure some amount of safety for those involved, human or otherwise. They cooked up special sleeves to be worn over sharp claws and gnashing teeth that would reduce it to being gummed and gently brushed with nerf toys, but leave ink all over wherever the contact was made, to clearly mark a mortally wounded soldier as taken out, despite no actual injury being received.

With the consent of a few dragons eager to prove how tough they were, they were able to calibrate the marking ammunition to keep the risk of injury as low as possible, while leaving bright marks where they could easily be seen on a variety of scale colors to note a defeated dragon in much the same way.

Because standard munitions appeared to be more painful than immediately life threatening to draconic combatants if not aimed at the right places, the dragons were all given face masks and and chest covering directly over their more exposed organs. If they were marked outside of those places, the dragon could continue to battle, but if they were marked there, they were out.

The exception were explosives. They threw a different color ink, and anyone caught in one of those, human or dragon, would be out if they got sprayed with that ink. Dragons had shown no specific resistance to pressure waves, just impact and shrapnel. A sizable advantage, but not an insurmountable one.

The war game, er, fight for dragon's honor, was almost ready.

"(Is this necessary?)" Mobile was laying across a medical examination bed. "(Everything is fine.)"

"(Your child is larger now. We just want to keep up to date with its development.)" The female doctor gently smeared the ultrasound goop all over Mobile Coral's tummy, preparing for the scan. "(You are a special mother, with a special child. You are both making history, and we want to keep a very close eye on it the entire way.)"

"(I'm right here.)" Tim was holding one of her talons, his fingers gently woven with her claws. "(I'm kind of excited.)"

"(Oh?)"

"(It's my child too, and I never got a peek.)"

She smiled at that, upturning her beak in a way normal birds could not do. "(Let's not keep him in suspense then, Doc.)"

"(As the mother requests.)" She pressed the rounded end of the device against the prepared belly, slowly scanning about. "(And... a face.)"

On the screen was the infant, still developing, face of what seemed to be a human child at first blush, if one entirely ignored the ears. Those were long and positioned incorrectly. It had sea pony ears. The child moved, the image lost. "(Ooops, where did they go...?)" The doctor swept across just a little, bringing in a new image.

"(Ah, a spine. Your child is already showing her disapproval, flashing their back at us.)" The doctor was smiling at the attempt at humor.

The spine was fairly standard, as spines went, until one went far enough down that it seemed to get a little confusing. Mobile pointed a talon. "(Is that a tail?!)" It didn't have two legs, but one tail. "(I'm making a mer-human!)"

Tim's hand clenched softly at hers. "(Can you... tell if it's a he or a she, by chance?)"

"(If they will cooperate with me.)" The doctor did her best, trying to get a better peek at the forming hybrid's genitals. "(They appear to... be in good health, but... I can only say that they are moving and nothing appears to be...)" She paused, looking to the parents instead of the belly or the screen produced. "(Your child is not human, so judging it by a human child's usual tells would be unfair. If a human child had... no legs and a tail like that, I would be deeply concerned.)"

"(But they aren't that,)" echoed Mobile. "(I wonder if... they have a tail because it's wet in there... Maybe they will have legs when it's dry?)"

Tim became confused at the idea, his face broadcasting it guilelessly. "(Uh, don't you need your crystal to do that?)"

"(So? I have a crystal right here.)" She reached with her free talon to feel the dangling fragment of their crystal. "(Children are more clever than people think. I bet they used it.)"

Tim did not look confident, but he squeezed her talon gently, remaining at her side.

"Finally!" Ember landed atop a small boulder to raise her just a little against the elevation of the rest of the dragons she had brought. "We are going to show those humans--" She had learned what they called themselves, all the better to talk about them. "how much better we are. Everyone got their stuff on?" She raised her claws into view, all their sharp points covered in the painted foam. "Don't go scratching any itches with this on."

Torch loomed tall over the rest of the assembled army of dragons. When he spoke, his teeth looked absurd in his mouth, capped as they were, "is there a reason for this? This is hardly a comfortable way of fighting."

"Yeah," complained a younger dragon near the front. "You can't really hurt someone like this." He wriggled his covered claws at Ember.

"Because we aren't hurting anything, but their pride." She flashed a grin. "They think they're so tough, let's take them down a few pegs."

A female dragon raised a hand, waving it wildly.

"Yes?"

"Oh, um..." She glanced left and right nervously. "I was just wondering... do we get something if we win?"

"Ooo." The previous male perked at that. "Yeah, now we're talking. What do we get for winning?"

Ember let out her breath in an annoyed sigh. "We're going to beat them up and show we're better. Have some pride!" She grabbed her scepter and turned towards the battlefield. "I'm going to signal we're ready." She lifted the scepter into clear view, thrust at her unseen opponents.

A flash caught her eye. "They're ready. Let's get started. No going past the borders of the battlefield, not that we need to. Let's mop up some humans."

With a great roar, the dragons scattered, each hunting eagerly for human soldiers. They had no cohesion or order, just a want to win, mobility, and natural weapons.

The humans did not gather in plain sight. They did not scatter haphazardly. Small teams stuck together as they spread in specifically planned motions. They could see the dragons, many of them flying above. The ability to fly was not always a boon. It's hard to not be seen.

A sharp crack echoed from the forest below.

"The hell?!" cursed Garble, feeling a stinging blow on his chest. He reached for it and his hand came back covered in ink. A sniper had shot him right at the heart. "They're cheating!" Despite his accusation, he diverted away, flying off the field with a string of grumbles.

Torch landed. For most dragons, that would be a casual event, and not itself a thing that changed the battlefield. Trees snapped and fell as his massive bulk came down close to where the shot had come from. "Where are you hiding?" Little specks of paint began to cover him from all directions, but none landed on the critical points, one of which was buried under his bulk. "I can hear your little cannons." He held up a claw to cover his eyes, the weak points that they were, but that left him with plenty of strength in his other hand.

The humans yelped and screamed as he casually swatted an entire copse of trees aside, sending them flying.

The attempts to take down Torch were giving signs to the other dragons, sweeping in from the sky to attack the humans that had tried to take out their largest.

Despite the attempt of the human soldiers to keep things organized, it fell apart as the lines clashed. Soldiers were sent to the ground with ink splotches as dragons reeled back, unable to see out of their ink-stained visors or cursing their ink-splattered chests.

It was a bloody massacre, on both sides.

By the time the dust settled, they started to count casualties, both real and simulated.

Ember was smiling victoriously, the ink splatters she got not landing on any 'kill' zones. "We won, right? C'mon, tell us!" She was facing a human that was busy scribbling things, tabulating the results.

"(25 actual casualties. Fatalities unconfirmed, we'll have to hope for--)"

"In Ponish," she grunted, tapping a foot on the ground impatiently.

He turned in place before flagging down another soldier and whispering to them quietly a moment. The second nodded and moved between him and Ember. "(I will translate.)"

"Fantastic, so did we win?" She waved her scepter idly. "They wanna know."

The second soldier listened to the first. "25 people were hurt. We don't know how many were killed."

She cocked a brow. "Yeah? That all of 'em, or just your side?"

The two exchanged words before the second replied, "Those are human numbers. How many are hurt on your side? Real hurt, not fake hurt."

Ember rolled her eyes as she turned back towards her people, all waiting at the rocky clearing they started at. "Hey! Anyone hurt over there?" she bellowed in their direction.

Replies came back, but most of them were variations of 'no', with one dragon complaining that he had landed badly. Ember held up a single finger. "One hurt, but I think he's being a little crybaby. Don't see anyone missing, so zero kills. You'll have to try harder than that to take one of us out." She turned back to the soldiers with a cocky smile. "So we won on that, but what about the fake stuff? I didn't get splattered with paint to not hear the results."

"Comparing the total fieldable army of both sides, we had one thousand soldiers against your fifty. Of your fifty, thirty-five were hit. Of our thousand, three hundred and sixty two were hit." The first soldier slapped shut his clipboard, the second nodded lightly. "As conflicts go, that is an embarrassingly high casualty ratio on our part. It took ten american casualties to inflict one dragon casualty."

"So we won!" She pumped a fist, an action that prompted wild cheering from the dragons behind her. "Yeah! I knew--"

"--Don't be too fast. In the end, we had more than enough soldiers to defeat what you had left. You won the battle--"

"--Yeah!" Her outburst prompted a fresh round of cheering from the dragons.

"--but lost the war."

She frowned at that, working the numbers in her mind. "Huh... There are too many of you."

"Basically," he agreed with a little smile. "If it helps, I wouldn't want to fight you."

The intel gathered from the battle was sent off for analysis as quickly as it was assembled. Many people would lose sleep sifting through it all and making conclusions.

The dragon 'conflict' had been resolved peacefully. Despite the logistics of it, injuries to American soldiers had been kept to a relative minimum. Crane tapped the folder against his desk. "(We have plenty of other concerns.)" He picked up his pen and started scribbling. "(There are things congress needs to answer before the end of the year. Get this to the VP and have him present it.)"

"(Of course, Sir.)" The aide took up the written letter, folding it precisely. "(What are you hoping they'll do?)"

"(Our laws are terribly out of date. They assume we live on Earth, which we no longer do. To start, immigration and emigration channels need to be completely reworked. We have people leaving, and others wanting to get in. The legal definition of a 'person' has to be redefined. Technically, Seaquestrians and everything else don't qualify. They're not--)"

"(--Not technically true,)" interrupted the aide. "(Queen Novo incorporated her nation, filled out all the paperwork. All of her people are considered board members and are sheltered under that legal personage.)"

Crane laughed, slapping the desk. "(She's the CEO of her nation? Fantastic. That doesn't absolve us of the need to fix that.)" He made a quiet note to look up how that had been filed.

Author's Notes:

Time is speeding up a bit here, if you didn't notice. The active conflict fading, allowing us to skip around a bit while peace reigns, which isn't a bad thing, right? The dragons got their honor fight, rawr!

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