Let me digress a bit about accelerated learning. In a purely virtual scenario, with a low fidelity environment and sensorium, we can experience time approximately ten times faster, which we mostly use to teach our kids. By the time our eggs hatch, they’ve learned two languages (Yipyip and Common) and the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with object permanence and not to bite and even how to control their bowels because despite virtual reality being a very bad fit for that sort of thing, nobody wants to deal with that shit in real life.

For the next two years, it’s half accelerated virtual reality to learn socialization and all kinds of academic subjects, and half actual reality to get comfortable with their growing bodies. So, two years after hatching, they’re physically adult and mentally… mostly adult. Adult enough to make choices, like finalizing their icon and picking a specialty to train in.

In an ordinary, established collective, that would be the end of systematic acceleration (although we still use it for things like avatar design, computer programming, and complicated strategy games) but in a new colony like ours where we need a bunch of missing specialties filled out yesterday, the plan was to do another year of half and half and have them ready to work full-time by the age of three.

Three standard years. Somewhere between four and ten local years. Thirty moons. Twenty one standard years subjectively, because that’s how long it takes to get a kobold fully trained.

Star and Fire and I grew up in an established collective, so chronologically, at this point in the story, we were not quite eight years old, but subjectively I was somewhere around twenty three or twenty four because I do a lot of avatar design.

And yeah, it would be really nice to be able to just snap your fingers and go into accelerated time in a crisis, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way – you need to be fully virtual and give a series of three commands, in order, with about fifteen seconds between each one or else you get error messages and it doesn’t work. If you have a few minutes to think you can turn it into half an hour to think, though.

Oh, and this isn’t purely a property of virtual reality – kobold brains are designed to work with it. Aliens *can* use accelerated time but the results vary. It worked perfectly for the Nyx, but the parrots’ thoughts got really sluggish and it was more of a mind-altering drug than a useful tool.

At any rate, it was going to be a long time before our eggs turned into useful members of the collective.

A few months passed uneventfully. Star and Fire added their own eggs to the hatchery (I impregnated Star, and Star fertilized Fire, for what variety we could eke out of three people). I continued to train the warp crystal on the more esoteric prerequisites for a proper ‘dungeon mode’. Star started building up our fabricator, one piece at a time. Fire wandered all over the island, stealthily placing hidden cameras so that we could detect visitors before they were at our doorstep.

The three of us made a day trip out to the old diamond dog lair, since the giant ants made it dangerous, even if the dogs weren’t back. We did get attacked by ants a few times, but Fire and I could handle them, and doing a super-jump to interrupt our scent trail kept us from getting swarmed.

The tunnel had collapsed again, and we had to do some actual digging because we hadn’t brought the matter compressor. Eventually we came to the start of the diamond dog’s maze, and remembered the traps that we hadn’t set off, thanks to Pareto’s perceptiveness. So we took it really slowly and carefully, roped together so that we’d have a chance of pulling someone out of a pit before they landed on the spikes.

Conveniently, all the traps had been set off, probably by giant ants given the green bloodstains on the floor and walls. The bodies were gone, though… and when we reached the ancient diamond dog settlement the ant trainers had been using as a base, those bodies were gone too. The ants had been thorough.

Since we’d already stripped it of everything valuable the first time, we set up some cameras and left.

“What’s eating you?” Star asked, on the way back. I guess my faceplate was displaying my emotions, exactly like it was designed to.

“Why did he shoot Polly?” I asked. “He knew I was the dangerous one.”

“Are you complaining that you’re still alive?” Fire asked.

“It wasn’t even a barbed bolt,” I said. “I would have been mostly myself again, eventually.”

Star shook their head. “We’re *still* not built up enough to do brain surgery, and even when we are it won’t be a good idea until we’ve trained up a doctor. We’re lucky it turned out the way it did.”

I sighed. “That whole battle was stupid.”

“They usually are,” Fire agreed.

Four months in, we had our first visitor. A parrot-sized dragon flapped their way down from the sky and landed on the volcano. After carefully looking around for any monsters, they jumped in the lava and stretched out like it was a hot spring.

“We’ve got company,” was Fire’s summary, before he shared the video with us.

“We should invite them over,” I said. “We don’t get many visitors, and it’d be a shame to let them move on without even noticing we’re here.”

“Please tell me you don’t want to have sex with him,” Star said.

My mouth went *very* jaggy. “That wasn’t what I was thinking about, but now that you mention it, I kind of do.”

“I can’t really blame you,” Star said, grinning. “Look at those adorable horns!”

“I’ll send a drone to talk to him,” Fire said. “I don’t want to get anywhere near that lava with a potential hostile present.”

I perked up “We have drones?”

“We have one drone,” Star said. “Please don’t break it.”

The drone was a sort of mechanical dragonfly with rotors in the wings. Star carefully inspected it from camera-eyes to stabilizer-tail before releasing it into Fire’s control. “Whatever you do don’t bump the wings into anything!” they said, fidgeting as he held up his hand to guide it into the air.

“Can you disable the traps, please?” Fire said, sounding a bit zoned out as he piloted the drone towards our labyrinth.

I went over and pulled the big lever to the ‘off’ position. It was traditional to practice trap evasion by sneaking in and out past your own traps, but with no doctor it was reckless to risk the lethal traps and it was a huge pain for somebody else to go free you from the nonlethal ones if you screwed up, so we installed a massive security hole. It also had a setting for ‘friendly traps only’, in case we wanted to have friends over and didn’t want to try to reset the entire maze for them with just the three of us.

I pulled it back to ‘on’ as soon as the drone was outside. It was nerve-wracking to have our lair exposed like that.

We had repeaters all over the island, to keep connected to the cameras, so there was no trouble flying it over to the skull volcano. Star and I connected to the feed from the drone so we could watch its progress, and both of us yelped as the dragon spotted it and breathed a gout of fire right at it.

Fire dodged easily, though, and activated its speaker. “Stop that! We’re not here to fight you.”

“What the heck are you?” the dragon asked, standing up in the lava and spreading their wings warily. “Some sort of bug?”

“It’s just a way for us to talk to you without getting too close,” Fire said. “If you’re willing to be friendly, you can come visit us in person.”

“Why would I want to do that?” the dragon asked.

“Because you’re the most interesting thing that’s landed on the island since we came here,” I said, and was a little surprised when the speaker projected my voice as well. “We wouldn’t want you to move on without, um, admiring you in person?”

“Ha, I can see that,” the dragon said. “But why would *I* want to do that? What’s in it for me?”

“Fuzzy cuddles?” Star suggested. “Good conversation?”

The dragon snorted. “Got any gems?”

“We could have gems,” Star said. “What kind would you want?”

The dragon shrugged. “I like Labradorite.”

Star winced. “I… don’t even know what that is.”

“So you’re not diamond dogs, then. How about rubies? Quartz?”

“Easy peasy,” Star said. “I’ll make a big bag of each.”

The dragon stretched, and flapped their impossibly small wings to start hovering in midair. “You’d better. I know this is trap, but if there’s no rubies waiting for me after I spring it, I’ll eat you instead.”

“Of course there’s traps!” I said. “Do you want the friendly traps or the fun traps?”

The dragon grinned. “Do your worst.”

Fire started leading the dragon back to our lair with the drone. Star ran for the fabricator to whip up some rubies, presumably.

“Hide the warp crystal,” Fire said, after muting the speaker. “He wants gems, and I don’t want him tempted to steal it.”

I grabbed my amulet and frowned. Without the crystal on me, I wouldn’t be much use in a fight… but avoiding the fight in the first place was always better. “I’ll hide it in the hatchery,” I said. “We shouldn’t have any reason to go in there while he’s around.”

“Hide it,” Fire said, for emphasis. “Don’t just throw it in a corner and rely on no one going in the room.”

“I will, I will!” I said.

And I did. I softened a bit of wall and shoved the warp crystal inside it, so it was completely surrounded by cake. I couldn’t uncake the wall without touching it but I thought it blended in pretty well. I made sure to mark its location in my trap overlay so that I could find it later.

Fire parked the drone outside our labyrinth, since we had plenty of cameras inside to watch people trying to run the traps. The dragon went inside, and proceeded to *destroy* our traps.

They didn’t detect them or dodge them. They managed to spring every single one. It was just…

Dragon steps on a pressure plate. Spears spring out of the wall to impale them. Dragon is already jumping back before the trap finishes triggering, and breathes fire over all the spears, incinerating them. Yes, even the metal.

Dragon steps on a pit trap. Pit opens under dragon. Dragon hovers in midair over the pit, and laughs, then tears the doors of the pit trap off and uses them as shields to block the next three spear traps. And by ‘block’ I mean ‘bash hard enough to snap the hafts clean off’.

Dragon triggers a motion sensor and proceeds to claw one of the vacuum traps to pieces and breathe fire on the other one before either one can attach to them, not that they would have done anything since the dragon wasn’t a Nyx.

Dragon steps onto the slippery slope and quickly tosses down the pit door they hadn’t managed to break yet and uses it to *surf* past the razor traps, and somehow makes it jump over the spikes at the bottom by shifting their weight.

The dragon was laughing as they surfed the rest of the way into our central lounge, posing and flexing as Fire and l stared wide-eye-spotted at them. “You’re right, that was kind of fun,” they said, stomping over to the largest couch and planting themself on it. “Now make with the rubies!”

“Coming! Coming!” Star shouted from another room, rushing in with a large plate covered in small red gems.

The dragon took a handful and popped them into their mouth, crunching noisily. “A little bland. And small.”

“I’m cooking some larger ones, but they’re not ready yet,” Star assured them. “The formula for those was pure ruby – I can try doping them with some common contaminants?”

“Does that mean ‘adding spices’?” the dragon asked.

“Basically?” Star said, their faceplate a spinning spiral. “Be right back!”

“That was amazing!” I said, staring up at the dragon. “We really need to step up our trap game if we’re going to have more dragons stopping by.” I’m pretty sure my eye-spots were literally stars.

The dragon looked down at me. “What’s with the creepy masks?”

My mouth went all jaggy. “Trust me, we’re creepier with them off.”

The dragon glommed their clawed hand onto my faceplate, and lifted me up in the air by it, obviously trying to strip it off. I wiggled my legs a bit in panic, then reached up and detached it properly, dropping heavily onto my butt, my snarly ugly face exposed for everyone to see.

“Huh,” the dragon said, staring at my fang-filled lips, scruffy brown fur, and jet black eyes. “Metal.”

“Yip yip?” I yipped.

“She’s asking incredulously if you like it,” Fire translated.

“Take the rest of it off,” the dragon said, dropping my faceplate and leaning back on the couch with his arms spread to either side. “I want to see what you really look like.”

It was an odd request, but honestly the faceplate was the only truly embarrassing part to remove. I reached back and undid the clasp holding my chestplate on, and slowly wiggled out of it, setting it down next to me along with my shoulder-plates. Then I sat back facing the dragon, and lifted my right leg into the air to work the hip-plate down my leg and set it to the side. The dragon looked expectantly at me, but that was it… except for the impeller, right. I rolled onto my belly, sat up on my hands and knees, then twisted my tail up over my back so that I could reach the bands of the personal impeller and stripped it off, too.

“Her other hip-plate doesn’t come off,” Fire explained, since I couldn’t. “She lost her leg a while back.”

“Very metal,” the dragon said, then reached down and grabbed me around the waist, lifting me into their lap.

Fuzzy cuddles ensued. Fire joined in, although the dragon didn’t make him strip, and we clung to either side of their chest pressing our fluff up against the scaly warmth, licking and biting and stroking while the dragon sat back and basked in our attention.

I may have stroked in some rather lewd areas, but the dragon didn’t seem to mind me coaxing their cock out into the air, to stroke further.

“Yip?” I asked.

“She’s asking if you’re a guy,” Fire translated.

The dragon snorted, a puff of smoke washing out over Fire’s faceplate and my still-bare face, making me squint and try not to sneeze. “What do you think?” they asked glancing down at their penis.

“He says yes, he is,” Fire translated. “Seriously, Wave, how are you so bad at this?”

The dragon – Ash – stayed with us for a while. Yes, we had a lot of sex, and by ‘we’ I mean ‘me specifically and him’. He was like Spots, and only interested in girls, but unlike Spots he was willing to overlook my penis. He’d even play with it sometimes.

“I thought you only liked girls?” I asked, when he pushed me down on the floor and started stroking my cock.

“You’re a girl, right?” he said.

I nodded, because I was perfectly willing to be a girl for him.

He licked my shaft, with his ridiculously long and snaky tongue. “I always wondered what it was like to suck a dick, and when am I going to find another dick-girl?”

Usually we did the ordinary ‘boy and girl’ stuff, though – he’d come up behind me, yank on my tail to pull me off my feet, then shove himself inside me while pressing my chest and face into the ground. Other times he’d have me do a ‘strip tease’ – apparently the poses I tended to take when removing my rig were kind of sexy or something? – and then have me suck his dick with my faceplate off. It was probably a good thing that I was so bad at sex because he didn’t even *try* to win.

After a few days, the novelty had completely worn off. Star and Fire went back to their normal lives, with only the occasional conversation with the dragon in the lounge when he was feeling chatty. Since it had been my idea to invite the dragon over – and since I couldn’t do my actual job with the warp crystal hidden away – I was now a full-time Ash wrangler. If I hadn’t been able to sneak a few days of virtual, accelerated privacy every time he took one of his ten-hour naps, I might have been really miserable. But I was able to do that, and a full day of Ash wrangling was a lot more tolerable with a three day vacation afterwards.

“How long is he planning to stay?” Star asked me, while training me on the finer points of gem production, so that they could shed themselves of the last bit of dragon-related duties.

“He normally only stops on the island for one night, to use the lava baths,” I said. “So, anywhere between negative four more days and forever.”

Star gave a jaggy scowl. “Well, if he ever gets to be too much for you, let me know and I’ll get rid of him.”

I tilted my head. “How?”

“I’ll think of something!”

Fire didn’t wait for me to ask to try to get rid of Ash.

“Finally finished,” he said, loudly, in the dragon’s presence – Ash had me bent naked over a couch and was fucking me slowly, laughing at the way I squealed every time he slapped my butt.

Ash dug his claws into my sides, just hard enough to draw blood, then jerked and shot off inside me when I squirmed in pain. I slid out of his grip and curled up on the couch, waiting for the pain from the scratches and his too-hot semen to subside. If this sounds like I wasn’t getting any pleasure from it… there’s a certain amount of pleasure in pleasing someone else through painful effort, you know?

“Finished with what?” Ash asked.

“Fixing all the traps you broke,” Fire said. “Our labyrinth is officially back in business.”

“Is it,” Ash asked, interested. “It was kind of fun. I could go for another run.”

“You probably shouldn’t,” Fire said. “It’s harder to do in reverse, and I improved all the traps. You could get hurt.”

“Ha!” the dragon snorted. He grabbed me by the tail and tossed me over his shoulder. “Come on, Wave. Let’s go have some fun!”

I squirmed out of his grip and turned around to ride on his back. “Yip yipyip?” I yipped because I didn’t have my faceplate on.

Fire suddenly looked terrified – but scrambled and tossed my faceplate to me. I fastened it in place so that I could at least talk to him. “I suppose it would be cheating if I turned on my trap overlay,” I said, as Ash marched into the bottom of the labyrinth.

“Turn on your trap overlay!” Fire sent me.

“But then I can’t help him spot the traps!” I sent back.

“Yeah, no cheating,” Ash said, cracking his knuckles. “Let’s see what he’s cooked up.”

It started out relatively tame. Some tripwire traps that filled the hall with spears for six meters in both directions – impossible to dodge, even for the dragon, but the ones that hit him snapped off against his scales. He held up his wings to protect me, and even the fragile-looking membranes were impervious.

“Ha. You’ll have to do better than that,” the dragon boasted, shoving his way through the rest of the spears, which hadn’t retracted. My faceplate bleeped a warning about poisonous gas seeping from the broken hafts, but Ash didn’t even notice.

“Why did you set it off?” I asked. “I told you to jump.”

“I don’t take orders from you,” he said.

“I wasn’t trying to mess with you, I just didn’t have time to tell you why!”

“Yeah yeah…”

The next notable trap was a pit – I spotted the faint outline, and strangely a matching outline in the ceiling. “Wait,” I told Ash, and he paused long enough for me to describe what I saw. Then flew past it, not setting off a trap for the first time in his life.

But the third trap… the third trap was nasty. Fire sent me a message as we came to a large octagonal room, but I minimized it so I wouldn’t be tempted to cheat.

As soon as we stepped inside, a loud ‘ticking’ noise started, and portcullises slammed shut behind and in front of us. There were six more doorways on the other faces, but portcullises started sliding down to cover those as well. “Run!” I said, dropping off the dragon’s back and heading for what I guessed would be the second to last gate, in case he didn’t follow.

He did follow, kind of. Lazily, unhurriedly, slow enough for the portcullis to slam shut between us. “And now you’re trapped,” he said, folding his arms.

I was pressed up against the bars, because the ‘escape’ tunnel I’d picked had a greased, sloping floor, and that was never a good sign. Sure enough, a massive stone rolling pin dropped out of the ceiling about a meter past the gate, and rolled down the hall, to crush anyone who’d tried to take shelter.

“Or else I got past stage one, and just dodged stage two,” I said. “How many exits are there from where you’re standing?”

“Plenty,” Ash replied, grabbing hold of the bars. “Come on, let me get you out.”

I took a step back, careful not to slide down the slippery slope, as he yanked on the bars to try to pull the portcullis off, and it probably saved my life. The floor and ceiling in the octagonal room slammed together, pinning Ash between them, and there was a buzz of electricity as they became the terminals of a massive circuit hooked up to what I found out later was our entire energy reserve. Lightning crackled over and through the dragon’s body, and a stray side-bolt snapped from the bars to my faceplate, knocking me unconscious.

I came to at the bottom of the slope, nestled into the gap near the floor between two stone rolling pins. I wasn’t hurt, aside from some electrical burns, but I wasn’t about to roll a multi-ton crusher back up a greased slope either. I opened Fire’s message, which was just ‘run, now!!!!!!!!!!!’. I sent back a message to let him know I was alive.

Fire and Ash had to work together to winch the stupid roller back up into the trap room to get me out. Ash was a bit disgruntled – even that insanely over-the-top trap hadn’t actually injured him, but he hadn’t been able to get past the room despite setting it off three more times, and Fire declared him a loser.

Later, I sat on his lap, spread out around his cock but going at my own pace for once, since he was too down in the dumps to fuck me with his usual enthusiasm. “I think you were right, jumping into the side corridor was a mistake,” I said. He hadn’t even bothered to make me strip.

Ash grunted, thrusting up a little into me, just a twitch really but enough to send a shiver up my spine. “I don’t think it mattered, that trap was rigged.”

“It didn’t go off until you pulled on the bars, right?” I asked, rubbing my hands across his sleek chest-scales.

“Yeah, but it went off again every time.”

“I think you just needed to wait it out,” I said, sinking all the way onto him and clenching around him in a sort of mini-orgasm – the sort of warning that I never got because I usually just came. “The ticking was…” I lifted myself up, and dropped down rapidly. “A hiiii --- aaarghhhh! Yes!” I shivered and squirmed around him for a few seconds, pressing my belly against him so that when my cock spurted it mostly got into my own fur. “A hint.” I said, resting my faceplate against him, silly orgasm face and all.

“What, like just stand there and do nothing?” He asked.

“Yeah,” I said, basking in his warmth. “For five minutes, probably. That’s a traditional time.”

Ash dug his claws into my back, but in the afterglow that just made me squirm some more, still impaled on his rock-hard shaft. “That’s fucking bullshit,” he said. “I knew it was rigged.”

He took a nice long nap after that, and I spent a couple of days planning some trap ideas in the low-fi accelerated virtual world – friendly traps, since Fire seemed to have the lethal side covered. One issue was that there was a distinct lack of strong, fireproof materials – almost everything was made out of plastic or ceramic and the first tended to burn and the second to be brittle and easily snapped in half by, oh I don’t know, an angry dragon.

After far too long setting up various configurations and then testing them in a dragon avatar, I woke myself up to go talk to Star about it. I was a bit surprised to wake up on Ash’s chest – he’d dragged me with him to fuck him to sleep, but subjectively days had passed since then for me. He’d gone soft, but I still had a little shiver as slid him the rest of the way out, and I carefully set his arms on his chest as I slowly squirmed out of his embrace. I was a little sore, but mostly in a good way – sleeping dragons were surprisingly comfy.

After a quick dust-bath, I knocked on the secret door to the fabricator. Star welcomed me inside, looking worried.

“Are you okay?” they asked. “I can’t believe Fire almost got you killed like that.”

“I’m pretty sure I failed the trap on my own,” I said, smiling sheepishly and scratching the back of my head. Then I noticed how quiet the fabricator was – most of the machines were dark, with only the one machine Star was working on in operation.

They noticed my confusion. “We’re in low-power mode, ever since Fire rerouted our entire energy reserve through his stupid trap.”

“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t think energy was a problem anymore.”

“It wasn’t,” Star said, curtly, “until someone rerouted our entire energy reserve through his stupid trap. Talk about overkill!”

I smirked. “Not exactly overkill. It didn’t even end up being ‘kill’.” I imitated Ash’s voice. “It’ll take more than a little lightning to stop a dragon!”

“It wasn’t a little lightning, it was our *entire energy reserve*!” Star snapped, their faceplate a swirling star made out of swirling sticks, more agitated than I’d seen them in a while.

“Compared to an atmospheric lightning bolt, though?” I asked. “That’s probably what he evolved to survive.”

Star looked thoughtful. “I’m not actually sure how they compare. But anyway, you’re not here to complain about the dragon. Are you?” Their faceplate showed a question mark, which waggled back and forth expectantly.

“Kind of?” I said. “I was wondering how I could deal with dragon fire. All our fireproof stuff is so brittle.”

“A fire extinguisher maybe?” Star suggested. “I’ll print one up for you.” They pushed a few buttons, and one of the other machines lit up, starting a job.

The fire extinguisher turned out to be pretty big – half a meter long, and several kilograms. Awkward to carry around, but not the largest thing I’d ever built into a trap. I stashed it in the common room so I wouldn’t forget it.

Ash woke me up from my next trap design session by poking me in the chest. That was more or less how he always did it, and it was effective enough. My faceplate lit back up as I returned to consciousness in the real world.

“What were you dreaming about this time?” he asked. I’d once mentioned that Princess Luna and her dream spirits were able to access the virtual world through their dream magic, and he’d locked on to that explanation and refused to listen to anything else we’d said about it – he certainly hadn’t been at all interested in visiting himself.

(“But you could put on a female avatar and see what it’s like from the other side!” “That sounds super-gay.”)

“Some new traps for the labyrinth,” I said. “I want something that can beat you without cheating.”

“Ha, good luck with that,” he said, chuckling. “Why do you call it a labyrinth, anyway? It’s more of an obstacle course than a maze.”

“It’s supposed to be a maze, but we’re not set up to do a lot of digging right now,” I said, neglecting to mention why.

“You’ve got me,” Ash said, flexing his arms. “Maybe that could be my job in your little collective. Although I was thinking ‘chief gem taster’…”

“Your what?” I asked.

“My job,” He said. “’Everyone chips in’, right? Star makes things, Fire sets traps, you… what *do* you do?”

At the moment my job was ‘dragon wrangler’. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to tell him that.

He laughed, and slapped me on the butt with his tail. “Don’t worry, I know. You don’t have to say it.”

“I mean –” I said. “Are you planning to stay? Permanently?”

“Why would I leave?” he said. “I’ve got comfy cushions, all the gems I can eat, and a lava bath a quick flight away. What more could a dragon ask for?”

“Adventure? Exploration?” I suggested. “The freedom to wander the world, seeing the sights and meeting new people?”

“Heh, kid’s stuff,” he said, flopping onto a couch. “I think it’s time I settled down, had some kids…”

“Other dragons! Dragonesses!” I said, waving my hands in the air.

“Fuck ‘em,” he said. “I’ve got a mate.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be laying any of your eggs,” I said, a chill running down my spine. “We’re not even the same species.”

He laughed. “Like a dragon would let a little thing like that stop them.”

I checked my biometrics, just to make sure.

Oh.

Fuck.

(“HOW AM I PREGNANT!?!” I sent to Fire and Star.)

“Oh, fuck,” I said, turning to flop to the ground, leaning back against Ash’s couch. “I’m carrying your eggs.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what you get when you fuck like bunnies for a week,” he said, reaching down to pet my ears. “Wonder what they’ll turn out to be. Fuzzy dragons? Fireproof kobolds?”

(“I didn’t do it!” Star sent back.

“Neither did I,” Fire added.

“FIREPROOF KOBOLDS!?!!” I sent back to both of them.)

“Fireproof kobolds?” I said out loud. “Actually that sounds pretty cool.” I patted my belly, imagining the eggs growing inside. Biometrics said there were only two of them, which was weird, but not as weird as them existing at all.

(“You think the dragon did it?” Fire asked. “Genetics don’t work that way. We’re not even fertile with humans.”

“It was definitely the dragon,” I sent back. “Unless one of you fucked me in my sleep.”)

“So yeah,” Ash said. “I’m staying.” He stood up over me, draping his tail in my lap as he set his hands on his hips. “First thing I need is to dig a lair.”

He walked over to one wall of the lounge and stared at the rock. After a few seconds, he lashed out with his claw and scraped it down the surface. There was a terrible screeching noise, and sparks flew, but the stone wasn’t even scratched – I’d reinforced it with the warp crystal, one of the standard parts of the defense mode that I was still working towards, and nothing should have been able to break through.

But Ash was barely slowed. He took a step back and let loose a massive plume of fire, and just kept going and going until the wall started to glow, then dug his claws into the semi-molten rock and scooped it out like mud. The reinforced layer was only a few centimeters thick, and the rock behind it had melted long before it started to weaken, so as soon as he pierced the layer a flow of lava started spreading across the floor, setting a couple of chairs and a table on fire as it passed. I danced back, then danced back further when I realized that even getting close to the lava was dangerous.

Ash didn’t notice – lava was nothing to him after all. He breathed more fire to soften more of the wall, digging out a nice big hole while the pool of liquid lava he was standing in got deeper and wider. I kept backing up until I was standing on the big couch in the middle of the room with the lava getting closer and closer… and spotted the fire extinguisher sitting against one of the armrests. I grabbed it and sprayed it at the lava.

Massive clouds of chilly vapor filled the air, and when they cleared that section of lava was dark and solid, the flow splitting to either side instead. I walked along the edge, spraying more of the cold mist to solidify the entire perimeter, then doing it again when the lava began to well up and overflow. Eventually there was a meter-deep pool filling about a third of the room, and beyond it Ash had a cozy little cave dug out in the wall. Well, not little little – it was five meters across and deeper than that.

“Wave? Ash? What’s going on out there?” Star asked, running in from the hallway, and staring at the crusty orange pool.

“The floor is lava,” I said, standing on a couch to see over the retaining wall. “Oh, and Ash is staying with us, apparently.”

Their faceplate flickered and went blank. “What.”

“Yeah, he wants to settle down and raise his kids,” I explained. “Decided to dig himself a lair to show how useful he can be.”

“Ha, no way,” Ash said. “You can raise the kids, I’ll just make them. All three of you can get pregnant, right? Dragon eggs for everyone.” He grinned.

Star, faceplate still blank, backed into the hallway and then into the fabricator, and let the door slide shut behind them.

I spent some time spraying extinguisher to help the lava cool off faster. It ended up leaving a nice smooth floor in the otherwise rough cave Ash had dug out for himself, and he was willing to break the massive flow that had destroyed half the lounge into small pieces I could feed into the matter compressor we’d been using for rock dust – more raw materials to turn into gems.

“It’s a good workout,” he said, shattering more of the lava rock with a barefoot kick.

“Very impressive!” I said. I wasn’t accelerated, or even fully virtual, because this dragon very much needed wrangling, but I was spending most of my attention on my new labyrinth design.

“Come on, you give it a try,” he said, standing aside.

I stared at him, then at the solid rock that crumbled like chalk under his blows, but would tear my poor feet to shreds if I tried to replicate it. “Be right back!” I said.

A minute later I was back with a sledgehammer so heavy I could barely lift, it, and with a loud “HI-YA!” I slammed it into the rock, shattering off a few chips.

“Yeah, that’s it!” he said. “Build those muscles!”

So that was it. It was a workout. We worked out for hours and hours, and then took a break in his new cave to break in his new cave, and then spent a few more hours breaking rocks before he got sick of it and told me to do the rest while he took a nap.

I took a peek at my stats:

Wave – lv 5 warp magician
Kobold – 6% cybernetic
STR 10 AGI 7 CON 15 INT 13 WIS 8 CHA 17
ATK 35 DEF 12 HP 45 REP 0
Weapon: sledgehammer
Armor: none
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: Personal Impeller Mk 1
Titles Earned: Shark Bait, Pirate Bitch, Mother of Dragons

Bah. Hours of work and zero muscles built. Not that I expected much, it always took forever to improve yourself in real life.

Then I narrowed my eyes at those titles -- there was no way that last one was automatically assigned.

I sighed and changed my class to ‘dragon wrangler’, since with the way things were going I wasn’t about to be using the warp crystal anytime soon.

A few days later, Fire was done setting up my traps. My entire setup was nonlethal in case Ash dragged me in with him again. That didn’t mean they were *fair* in any normal sense – I’m not sure I would have been able to make it through – but they played to Ash’s strengths in ways that I hoped would be satisfying, even if he lost.

“Even if he loses, this isn’t going to get rid of him,” he grumbled. “And we’re running out of time. The eggs are going to hatch any day now.”

I tilted my head at him. “And? Do you really think he’d hurt the kids?”

“I’m more worried about them taking after him,” he said, then poked me in the belly – I was just starting to show. “Especially those two.”

I sighed. “Look, in the long term we can move the lair around so that his cave isn’t right off the main room. I’ll probably have to resign as warp technician, but the crystal’s trained enough to power the generators and that’s all we *really* need, at least in the next few years until we have a replacement for me. I can focus on keeping the dragon under control and… breeding fireproof kobolds and we can keep each others’ company in the virtual world which he still doesn’t give a crap about.” This was not my ideal future, but, “It’ll be fine.”

Fire gave me a blank look. Not literally blank like Star, but a carefully flat mouth with only a single set of jaggy fangs. “One last touch,” he said, and hung a sign up on the wall by the entrance.

WARNING: FIRE SUPPRESSION DEVICES IN PLACE. AVOID OPEN FLAMES.

“I thought you said not to put up signs?” I asked him, pouting. “But it’s okay when you do it?”

Fire’s mouth curled up a little at the corners. “I know when to do it.”

Ash jumped at the chance to run another ‘obstacle course’. “Maybe this time you’ll actually hurt me,” he scoffed. “Right, let’s do this.”

He paused by the entrance to read the sign, then snorted out a puff of smoke.

The first trap was meant as a warm up – one of the spear traps with a wide enough area so as to be undodgeable, but with gripping teeth on the end of the spears to hold him in place instead of points to futilely try to injure him. Six of them latched onto his body and limbs, and when he flexed to snap the hafts, the inner hafts were stretchy and flexible and wouldn’t break. They were also cut-resistant but I had no illusions about them resisting Ash’s claws…

He didn’t try to cut them, though. He opened his mouth and breathed out a huge gout of flames to try to burn them away. That wasn’t going to work! The fire suppression turned on instantly, heat sensors triggering the array of extinguishers set in the ceiling and floor. Less than a second after the fire emerged from the dragon’s mouth, he was bathed in chill mist that put an end to *that*.

When the mist cleared, Ash stood there motionless, covered in a layer of ice. We stared at him for a bit, but he remained still. The rubbery ‘spears’, frozen brittle, cracked and shattered, and with a ‘tink’ the frozen dragon fell to the floor, stiff as a statue. I ran into the labyrinth and dragged him back to the lounge, since he was only a few meters in.

Fire picked up an extinguisher from its sconce on the wall – we’d put them up all over the place since the 'floor is lava’ incident – and started spraying Ash some more.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Do you want him to wake up?” Fire asked right back. “Serious question. If you really want to keep him around, we can deal with him. You don’t need to exile yourself to the Shame Cave with him, we can… let him join our collective, like he wants.” His mouth was *so* jaggy saying that last bit.

I pulled another extinguisher off the wall and sprayed it on Ash’s legs and tail. “I don’t think we can keep doing this forever.”

Fire laughed. “Not forever, Star’s working on something.”

A few minutes later they came out of the fabricator dragging an honest-to-goodness cryopod, of the sort that kobolds have never needed… but we didn’t design the fabricator and the item libraries have a lot of stuff we don’t generally use. We loaded Ash inside, and watched as it filled up with some sort of cryo-gel and various indicators lit up in various colors that we weren’t sure meant if he was dead or not.

“How long should we keep him frozen?” Star asked, poking at the control panel. “Forever isn’t an option.”

“A thousand years?” I suggested. That was a number that had come up in a few of the Nyx’s stories.

The cryopod had some sort of null-friction thing on the bottom to make it easy to move around, but it still took all three of us to push it up the ramp to Ash’s cave.

“We should put up a sign,” I said, once he was set in place in the middle of his lair, surrounded by the gems he hadn’t gotten around to eating yet. “’Sleeping Dragon, Do Not Wake.’”

“No sign,” Fire insisted.

I threw up my hands and walked away. So unfair!

Two days later, the eggs started to hatch. All three of us gathered in the nursery, excited to watch the miracle of life – we’d missed the hatching up on the moon, and before that we’d been part of a large enough collective that we didn’t have to deal with kids at all, so the last hatching we’d been to was our own and none of us remembered it well.

There was a crack from one of the eggs, and the eggshell fell away to reveal the cutest little… sort of cat-looking thing, actually. So fuzzy! Such big ears! Even their face was cute somehow!

And then they started to cry. Across the room, another egg hatched, and the kobold inside immediately started to cry. Soon they were all hatching, eighteen eggs turning into eighteen little kobolds, all wailing at the top of their lungs! Wailing and flailing their little limbs and yipping in a high pitched version of yipyip, “Where am I?” “Menu menu menu menu” “Ahhhh what’s going on”

The three of us rushed around, comforting them the best we could, cuddling them to warm them up and stroking their ears and faces to give them some good sensations to associate with the real world. Up until that point, their life had been spent in accelerated virtual learning, an existence of sight and sound but no touch or taste or smell or pain or, we finally realized, *hunger*.

Fire and I sat next to each other, swarmed by nine little kobolds each, while Star ran off to make some baby food. We started putting their baby faceplates on so that they could access their menus, and they probably tried to go virtual right away but the virtual reality cycle was locked to 12 hours on, 12 hours off, starting with the off cycle since they’d just spent six months ‘on’. Babies didn’t get to decide that sort of thing. Then we had to teach them how to crack their faceplates to eat, and they all started giggling at how silly it looked and throwing food at each other and Star ran off to get another batch of food because most of this one was going on the floor apparently.

The next few days were a stress test for how well we’d managed to childproof our lair, which it turned out was ‘basically not at all’. We had kids wandering into the fabricator and trying to climb into the feed hoppers for the machines, kids trying to put their eggsets back on to get back to the virtual world off-schedule, kids getting lost under furniture playing hide and seek, and it’s a good thing we hadn’t cleaned up the labyrinth because the frozen grabby-spears were a harmless barrier to curious exploration. I turned the traps off anyway; there was nothing on the island to threaten us except for the ants, and all sorts of cameras to give us warning that I assumed Fire was keeping an eye on because the kids were taking up all my time and then some.

We’d finally gotten all the kids – all eighteen, I counted – to sit still in a circle and listen as Star told the story of the Very Grumpy Dragon, when a loud thumping sound came from Ash’s tomb. Thump. Thump. THUMP. CRASH!

“Oh no!” Star cried, “The grumpy dragon is awake, kids, go hide!”

The kids piled up behind us, hiding in our shadows and peeking around the edges to see what was going on.

Ash stumbled out of his cave, yawning and stretching. “Ember’s tits, that was cold,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Did you guys put me in a coffin?”

“We thought you were dead,” Fire said, frozen in… tactical concern.

I had a bit of tactical concern of my own, since I was wearing the warp crystal as an amulet again. I grabbed it and covered it with my hand so that it wouldn’t be a big shiny ‘eat me’ beacon.

“Ha! It’ll take more than a little cold to keep a dragon down,” he said, grinning at us blearily. “Not a whole lot more, though. I think that put my fire out.” He looked up at the ceiling, and breathed out a cloud of smoke, coughing and choking. On his second try he got fire.

The baby kobolds snuck out from behind us, staring in fascination.

“There it goes,” Ash said. “All better.” He looked down at us, and saw the three dozen tiny eye-spots fixated on him, and froze in place.

“He doesn’t look that grumpy,” one of the babies said.

“More fire! More fire!”

“Do the smoke!”

“Is that our daddy?”

“Daddy daddy daddy!” all of them started to chant.

Ash turned a paler gray, then leapt into the air, swooped over our heads, and dove into the labyrinth. There was some cursing and shattering as he pushed his way through the spears… we ran after the babies who were running after him and hauled them back away from the labyrinth, which had a meter-high barrier now to make it at least a little hard for them to get into.

“That was… a thing,” Star said.

“He didn’t stop when he left the cave,” Fire said, watching the cameras. “He’s… wow. I think he’s leaving.”

“I guess he really didn’t want to take care of the kids,” I said, stunned but not especially disappointed.

Fire’s mouth went all jaggy. “Of course he didn’t. Fucking deadbeat.”