Warning: spoilers for the Drakonia Saga.
Note: read “Dragon Quest” Part II first.
blip
Erwin Stahlberg appears outside the Faucheuse Foundation.
You know what he’s here to do, so let’s get straight to the point, shall we?
Incidentally, Project Goodfellow is nearing completion, much to Asimov and Hershey’s delight.
Prometheus still hasn’t decided if he wants one of those, but the other ChaotiX-affiliated robots have all been helping the Nerd Squad out, by providing input on Project Goodfellow’s design.
All of their input has been taken into account, except Gamma’s. Being a robot teenager, his ideas are exactly what you’d expect from a teenage boy.
Valerie firmly refused his request to replace his forearms with extra large Goodfellows.
Just as Erwin enters his examination room, Chaos appears, in his milkman form, carefully holding a sobbing pastel pink and blue earthie mare.
“Huu… Pas-tew wan babbehs back… huu…”
Chaos places the mare on a table, stroking gently.
“What happened to her, Chaos?”
Chaos replies, his cheerful, flamboyant voice tinged with restrained fury.
“Pastel’s owner made the poor thing watch as he put her foals in the freezer. To punish her for running off and having them. Unfortunately, I was too late to save the litter.”
Erwin sighs.
“That’s horrible. Let’s get her on the Stahlskanner.”
Chaos carefully moves her onto the scanner.
ping!
“She’s healthy, Chaos. All she needs is the Standard Package.”
That’s a bath, a meal, and lots of love.
“Oh, that’s good.”
“I have to ask, Chaos: what happened to the owner?”
“Let me put it like this, Erwin: right now, he’s wishing I didn’t strip him naked before sending him to his current location.”
That location is the Infinite Plane of Ice and Snow.
Chaos felt it was a fitting punishment for the bastard.
As Pastel is moved by Achmed to get a bath, Chaos departs, promising, as always, to check in later.
Another Chaos, across town, just walked in on another bastard, cooking his stallion’s special friend alive in an oven.
Yes, Chaos can be in multiple places at once.
A third Chaos is currently in New Quezon City, playing the statue game with Alpha.
Chaos once tormented one particularly abhorrent abuser by taking the place of everything in his house (except the toilet, because Chaos draws the line at people defecating in him) and terrorising the abuser relentlessly.
That abuser quickly figured out that the toilet was the one place in his house that was safe.
He sat on the toilet until he starved to death.
After the mechanical arms disinfect everything Pastel touched, Erwin’s next patient is brought in.
A man brings in his fluffy, a black and white pegasus stallion with dark brown eyes, currently keeping his mouth closed.
When the stallion is placed on the Stahlskanner, Erwin is confused.
ping!
“I don’t understand, he seems perfectly healthy.”
“Demon, open your mouth.”
Demon, the stallion, does so.
And his tongue, currently several feet longer than a fluffy’s tongue should be, unrolls out of his mouth.
“Mein Gott! I don’t know what-- hang on.”
Erwin extracts a strange bronze device from a desk drawer.
When he points it at Demon, a light on it glows green.
“Ah. This is magic, sir. I’m afraid I can’t do anything about magic.”
“So is this permanent?”
“Mmm Dmm-mmm gmmm bmmm smmm wmmm dmmm fmmm?”
Demon’s overly long tongue is making it difficult for him to speak.
Erwin reassures them.
“They can probably fix this at Saint Alice’s, don’t worry, they’ve dealt with this before. Sir, have you perhaps antagonized any mages?”
Saint Alice’s is a hospital specialising in maladies of an arcane nature, in the Magical Quarter, the city’s magical neighborhood. Since the public reveal of magic three years ago, normos are welcome in the Magical Quarter too.
“I think this is my ex’s doing. I heard from a friend of mine that she enrolled at Corey University, she’s been wanting to get back at me since I dumped her.”
And Corey University is a magical college.
No, the staircases don’t move around at random, and no, there aren’t any ghosts haunting the place.
If a poltergeist shows up and starts wreaking havoc, the Dean has a crossbow and bolts tipped with multidimensional metal at the ready. Multidimensional metal, existing in multiple dimensional frequencies, is solid even to beings that can phase through solid matter. Only beings like the Deaths can pass through it.
“I’ll tell Deston to warn Dean Ackland, then. Neither of them tolerates people using magic like this.”
“Why couldn’t she just steal my Blu-ray player, man?”
After Erwin and Demon’s owner get Demon’s tongue back in his mouth, the duo leaves for the Magical Quarter, and Erwin gets his examination room ready for his next patient.
Sir Calvin Korkea brings in a weeping, filthy dark green feral pegasus mare, Marley following him inside.
“What happened, Cal?”
“This poor girl’s from Primal Earth. Her entire herd got eaten by a T-Rex, Erwin. We were in the area, I was spending the day with Ronnie.”
“An den dis shit happund.”
“Oh my. Get her on the scanner, Cal.”
Calvin does so.
bzzz
“Ah. A mild case of constipation, but we’ve got a good laxative for that. Other than that, another Standard Package, and, uh, do you have a name, sweetheart?”
“N-nu, fwuffy nu haf namesie.”
“We’ll have to do something about that, too. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe here.”
“Dewe nu am anee munstahs hewe, wite?”
Erwin, Calvin and Marley all assure the mare that there aren’t any monsters at the Foundation.
After the mare is taken away by Gilda, for a much-needed bath, Calvin and Marley depart, and Erwin gets his examination room ready again.
Ten minutes later, Andre and Roland bring in a badly battered, unconscious afro fluffy stallion, and both men look furious.
Roland, gently carrying the fluffy, mutters angrily, as Erwin directs him to the regeneration room.
“Fucking racist asshole…”
“What happened, gentlemen?”
Andre explains while Erwin puts the fluffy in a vat, and Andre sounds uncharacteristically serious.
“Some white supremacist piece of shit fluffynapped Darnell while he and his owner were at the park. Guess what the piece of shit did to Darnell.”
Erwin doesn’t need to guess.
“Absolut ekelhaft.”
Roland sighs.
“I don’t speak German, but I assume that means fuck that guy, and if it does, I agree. Andre squeezed in through the keyhole, let me in, and then I buried the bastard alive in his back garden. Up to the neck, of course. He can’t go to prison if he suffocates.”
Andre tries to cackle, but right now, his heart’s not in it.
“Well, he can, and he’d be a model prisoner. A corpse can’t start no fights. But he’ll be staying put until 5-0 shows up. They gonna have to dig him out first, though. Erwin, we gotta go talk to Darnell’s owner. Let him know Darnell’s gonna be alright. Nigga’s been a nervous wreck since Darnell went missing.”
Erwin nods, as the vat fills with regeneration fluid.
“He can pick Darnell up in a couple of hours.”
Andre manages a grin.
“Gotta love Lumixian tech, huh?”
“Das sollten sie glauben.”
After Andre and Roland leave, Erwin decides to take a break.
He’s the boss at this branch of the Foundation. He can take breaks when he wants to.
As he enters the nearby Starbucks, he runs into Edward, with Nadia, Princess of Drakonia.
“Eddy? What are you doing here?”
“Introducing Nadia to some more of what Earth has to offer.”
“We’ve got coffee on Magicca, but we don’t have this many kinds of coffee.”
Erwin sits down at a table with the duo, and Edward fills Erwin in on current events in Drakonia.
“We’re planning an expedition to Dragon Roost Mountain. Hopefully, Mom will be there…”
“Eddy, Father will search the entire kingdom if he has to.”
Nadia’s been gifted with some Earth street clothes, and is currently wearing them. A T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a black coat. And an Omnitongue Ring, known as a Ring of Allspeak on Earth, as she doesn’t actually speak English. She’s learning, though.
Nadia spent ten years in hiding, under the false identity of Meryl. She’s not used to wearing fancy clothes again.
Erdrick and Aurelia are currently at Dragonheart Palace, playing huggy tag in the gardens, as Lorik, Panthera and Nocturne watch them.
Just as fluffy abuse is illegal here, woolly abuse is illegal in Drakonia.
If we were witnessing events on Drakonia at the moment, you would immediately be made aware of one interesting fact.
That is, that fluffies and woollies can have foals together.
Fluffies were created with science, and woollies were created with magic…
But they’re not that different.