Alba & Maurice

 

“Alba & Maurice”

By

Story Surgeon

For Iron Age Media’s Jan. 24, 2024 Prompt - “The Mechanic”

“As you can see,” said Alba, “The reaction is not only stable, but produces an output of nearly five times that of a normal engine, without the coal residue or similar byproducts.”

The top-hatted figures said nothing.

“I’m glad you asked!” He said, pointing to another of the top-hatted figures who stood beside him.  Dutifully, it lowered a large lamp-like apparatus from the ceiling, which leaked purplish smoke.  Alba lifted his enormous scaly head and took a deep, strong breath, drawing in the smoke and blowing it back out his mouth.

“As you can see, the crystalline center releases only aetheric gasses, which are completely neutral and do not interact with biological systems.  If left to themselves, they simply…” He gestured with one claw to the smoke, which seemed to just vanish in sparkles.  “...Vanish, leaving no environmental impact, even in the largest quantities, and providing a much safer environment for workers.”

The figures weren’t impressed, but clapped anyway, as he had ordered them to.

“Thank you.  Now, ladies and gentlemen, I offer you this chance to pave a way into the future, a future full of wondrous advancement, free of the limitations of both fossil fuels and the dangers of nuclear energy!”  He spread his magnificent wings as the engine beneath him hummed and churned.

“Dragon Power!  It’s the way of the future!”

CLUNK-SH-SSHPEEEEEEEEEEEW!

The dragon took a breath…

THUNK!

“Uuuummm, one moment, please!” said the dragon, smiling sheepishly, before ducking his large head under the chassis, his neck undulating as he twisted his snout throughout the machine as much as he could reach.  On the other side, his tail wrapped around, darting back and forth in the nooks and crannies.

“I thought I had this fixed!  I bet it’s the drive cylinder, no, wait, that’s not it.”

“Uncle Alba?” a voice called out.  Padding into the large workshop, the short thirteen-year-old boy tossed his jacket at one of the figures, who caught it without looking and dutifully walked off to hang it on the appropriate hook–something he could have done himself, but, one, he was lazy, and, two, he liked watching the “assistants” do things like that.

“Oh, so that’s where I left that!”

“Uncle Alba?” he said, louder, rolling his eyes.

“Wh–where did that come from?  I’m ninety–eighty-five percent sure I’ve never had sheep in here.”

Time for extreme measures, then.

“Uncle Alba!” he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth.  “SOME KNIGHTS ARE TRYING TO STEAL YOUR TREASURE!”

“WHAT?!  WHERE?!”

GONG!  “OW!” Alba popped his large head back, rubbing his crown, as he glared at the smaller figure.  “...If you weren’t my godson, I’d eat you.”

“You don’t eat people, Alba,” the boy said, with the assurance of someone who had heard this many times before.

The dragon gave him a toothy grin.  “Maurice…I believe we’ve talked about you sneaking up on me while I’m working…have we not?”

Maurice gave the dragon a flat look.  “You call that sneaking?”

“And about the little-boy-who-cried-knight routine?”

“And the dragon who keeps falling for it, yes.”

There aren’t many people who would be caught dead sassing a dragon…actually, no, most people would be, but for some reason, this particular tyke had never been afraid to mouth off at him.  Alba blamed the hair, which perpetually looked like he’d touched a Van de Graff generator.  He had his mother’s hair, and she was the same way.

“So!” said Maurice, “Ready for the big day?”

Alba growled.  “I would be if this contraption would cooperate!” he said, reaching a claw into another part Maurice couldn’t see and fiddling with it, tilting his head to listen.  “I…have my speech perfected, if I do say so, myself.  I have all the details finished: the venue, the refreshments, the invitations–but, on the very cusp of my debut, I am besot by–”

PHWEEEEEEET!

“...technical…difficulties,” he ground out, as Maurice doubled over, holding both hands over his mouth.  Alba gave a slight frown (dragons do not “pout”) at his giggling godson, but his head tilted as he caught sight of the long slip of paper which fell out of Maurice’s pocket.  He nodded to one of his attendants, which snatched up the paper before the boy could stop him.

Maurice slumped as the masked automaton dutifully held it up for its master to see.  After looking it over for a few moments, he waved the assistant away, taking the report card carefully in between two of his claws.  “Alright, all of you, give the machine a once-over.  I want every issued fixed tonight.”

The assistants all gave a mute nod (as they had no mouths), and got back to work, while he climbed down and swept around his godson, curing in a circle.  Automatically, Maurice leaned against the dragon’s large, warm flanks.

“...Go ahead and say it,” he mumbled, resignedly.

“No need to point out the obvious,” said Alba.  “What it doesn’t tell me is why you’re slipping.”

He shrugged.

“I know it can’t be the teachers, or the principal” he said, glancing at the academy’s logo.  “I vetted them, myself.”

He shrugged, again.

“And, surely it can’t be your friends or classmates.  So…just having trouble with the material?”

“...’S too hard,” he said.

“Most things are if you don’t study them, putting them off until the last minute.”

“I do fine on the tests, its just those stupid essays.”

“Yes, I see that in the notes, here.  You have a habit of turning them in late or with barely enough information, practically writing down the textbook facts without anything of you in them.”

“They’re boring.”

“I know that’s not true!” he said, huffing.  “I vetted the material, too.  Factual and well-written.”

“I just don’t get why I should care.  I’m never gonna use half of this stuff.”  He folded his arms.  “You know what I wanna do.  Why can’t I just do music?  I’m good at that.”

Alba drummed his fingers on the edges of his machine.

“Why?  Hmm…I suppose you have a point.  Why not spend all your time pursuing your passion, right?  It’s a very…dragonish idea.”

Maurice perked up.  Alba turned his head, so he had one eye fully on his godson’s face.

“Do you know why there aren’t many dragons left, Maurice?”

Maurice raised an eyebrow.

“You got hunted down by white people in armor?”

“Don’t be a twirp.  Everyone hunted us.  But, no, it wasn’t hunters.  It was ennui.  You know what that means?”

Slowly, Maurice shook his head.

“It’s a fancy word for ‘boredom’...specifially, ‘bored with life’.”  

Reading a dragon’s expression was difficult, and not just for the fact that looking at a dragon’s face for any length of time is a rare experience.  Even for Maurice, who’d seen Alba he couldn’t quite place the expression.  It was a thousand mile stare atop a perfectly neutral face.

“I’m old, Maurice,” he said.  “Far, far older than you know.  I was here, watching from the edges as empires rose and fell, ships sailed the oceans, men with great or terrible ideas spoke in public squares–rinse and repeat.”

“Our coming here was a mistake…an accident.  This world…it’s so young, so fragile, so unready for us.  I was a…mechanic, back in our world.  Another was a soldier, and Cathus was a meteorologist–a very prominent and dangerous position in our world, no lie!  Ulbran…his old job has no equivalent here.  Earth doesn’t even have the right materials for it.”

“For so many, their livelihoods, their passions, their training, their dreams…it meant nothing, here.  There was no infrastructure, no audience, no real way to pursue their passions.  And passion is everything to a dragon.”

He shook his head.  “You know why so many started raiding?  Because gold was something we knew, something real, something with value.”  He looked back at Maurice.  “And…It’s because they had nothing else to do.”

He snorted.  “That didn’t help for long.  They had mountains of gold and jewels and vast territories, but nothing to show for it…without the humans destroying their work.  They just ate, counted their treasures, over and over.”

“One day, many just…curled up in their caves, went to sleep, and never woke up.”

Maurice shivered at that.  His godfather looked so lost for a moment, so old, and tired, he couldn’t help but hug his flank (another thing few could experience, and live).  Alba let out a puff of multicolored aetheric smoke.

“It wasn’t much better for me.  I was a mechanic with no machines to fix, and this world didn’t have the structure needed to support my craft.”  He turned and grinned at Maurice.

“But, I saw that, one day, they would get there.  One small step at a time, every day, making a new bit or bob or whatever.  I watched as humans went from bronze to iron…cheered when they reached steel, and from there it was just a waiting game.”

He spread out a claw across his massive glass warehouse.

“But!  I didn’t just wait, I worked.  I learned.  I learned how cook, even though I find it tedious.  I learned how to swim, thought the ocean scares the purple out of me.  I learned how to deal with people, something I never wanted to do, even back home.  I learned how to deal with my fellow dragons, and humans, even though most of them just wanted my gold.  I even learned how to file taxes…”  He glared, his scales rippling.  “Even though the IRS will get one coin over my cold, lance-ridden corpse.”

““Don’t you have enough gold?” asked Maurice, giggling.

“You can never have enough gold,” Alba replied.  He shook himself.  “The point, Maurice, is that I absorbed everything, learned everything I could, and experimented where I could, even in fields I would never before had an interest.”

He pondered, tapping his chin.

“I think I might have invented the corkscrew…and a few types of cheese…and, possibly potpourri.  I’m serious!   You think I liked the natural cave smell?  I just let the humans have the credit. ”  He tapped fondly on the massive machine.  “This, however, is all mine.  The best analogue for a dragonite crucible engine this world can muster.”

“It’s a little piece of home.”  He smiled fondly at his godson, and brought his chin up, delicately with one claw, to look directly into his eyes.  “The reason I’m here right now, succeeding, when so many others gave up?  It’s because I learned early that no knowledge is useless.  Each little thing I tried, fun, boring, and fluff–from corkscrews to cheeses–was a stone fit into the road which led me to this machine…my dream.”

He grinned a wide, toothy grin, looking every bit the cunning, viscous dragon he was.  “Even if I had to make it fit.”

Behind him, the machine roared to life with a steady hum.

“Thanks, Uncle Alba,” he said, watching as the automatons all gave a thumbs up in their stations.  “Algebra still sucks.”

“OH! Don’t I know it!” said the dragon.  “I almost ate the human who first taught it to me because I thought he was pulling my tail!”

“You don’t eat people, Uncle Alba,” he repeated, looking around at the assistants.  “Say, Uncle Alba, why don’t you just sell people the robots?  You know they work, already.”

Alba froze, looking up, then down, tilting his head this way and that.

That day, Maurice added another unique experience, as he became the first person in history to witness a dragon facepalm.

The End