“Hey, big brother,” I said, somewhere in the middle of my daily ten minutes, “just realized I’ve been calling you ‘big brother’ this whole time and never actually asked your name.
Kind of rude of me, in hindsight.” Took you eight days to think of that.
I was starting to wonder if you’d just settled on calling me ‘big brother’ forever out of laziness.
Little bit, yeah.
So?
Name?
Placidusax.
…Placidusax.
Don’t wear it out.
No, no, it’s a good name, very dragon-y, very ancient-and-powerful sounding.
Just — kind of a mouthful for daily use, is all.
What element are you, anyway?
Figure that’ll help me get a mental picture going.
None.
None?
No element.
No attribute at all, if we’re being precise about it.
What I’ve got instead is raw magic — more of it than just about anything else you’ll ever meet, attribute or not.
Element’s a flavor.
I skipped the flavor and went straight for volume.
Huh.
Okay.
So what do you actually look like, then?
Big scaly wyrm?
Rob-fighting-with-his-bare-hands kind of wyvern, except real?
There was a pause.
A distinctly smug pause, the kind that told me I wasn’t going to like whatever came next.
Nine tails.
Fox.
Very large fox.
I sat with that for a solid five seconds in complete internal silence.
…I’m sorry, come again?
Fox.
Nine tails.
Large.
Do you need me to draw a picture, or is the mental block on your end just refusing to process it?
No, no, I heard you, I just — okay.
Okay.
That’s fine.
That’s totally fine.
Not suspicious at all.
Definitely not a specific and extremely familiar shape for a giant mana-battery sealed inside a kid to happen to take.
Nope.
Coincidence.
Love that for me.
…You’re being strange again.
The residue thing?
The residue thing.
Yep.
Definitely the residue thing.
Anyway!
Placidusax!
Great name!
Cool fox!
Moving on!
Hm.
I decided that was a conversation for a different day, filed it under “things to never explain to a dragon, ever, for any reason,” and let my ten minutes run out on a much safer note about mana density instead.
The rest of the evening was, for once, blissfully dragon-free.
It started, as these things tended to, with Millianna announcing — completely out of nowhere, mouth full of bread — that she had figured out how we were all going to escape.
“Okay so,” she said, “we tie the bedsheets together, and then Simon boosts me up to the window, and I climb up really quiet like a cat, and then I sneak around and steal the keys, and then we’re free!” “There’s no window in this cell, Millianna,” Jellal pointed out.
“Details.” “And you don’t move quiet like a cat.
You move like a cat that’s on fire.” “I resent that.” Sho, still the newest addition to the group, had apparently been thinking about this too, because he piped up with, “What if we just…
asked really nicely?” Everyone looked at him.
“Like — really, really nicely,” he added, shrinking a little under the attention.
“Maybe they don’t know we’re not bad people.” “They know,” Rob said gently, not unkindly.
“That’s sort of the whole problem, lad.” “Oh.” Erza, arms crossed, had clearly been chewing on the problem more seriously than either Millianna or Sho, because she cut in with, “We’d need a distraction.
Something big enough that all the guards go to deal with it at once.
Then whoever’s fastest slips out during the chaos.” “And how exactly do we make a distraction?” Jellal asked.
“…I don’t know yet.
I’m still working on that part.” “So the plan is: unspecified distraction, then run.” “It’s a start.” Considering the alternative plans on the table involve bedsheet ropes and asking politely, “unspecified distraction, then run” is honestly not the worst one I’ve heard tonight.
I didn’t say that part out loud.
Didn’t need everyone knowing exactly how low my bar had gotten for what counted as a good plan around here.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said instead.
“We’ve got time.
Just — let’s not tell the guards about the bedsheet rope idea in the meantime, yeah, Millianna?” “No promises.” Rob just laughed, the warm, easy kind of laugh that made the whole cell feel a little smaller and safer than it actually was, and launched into a story about the time he’d apparently escaped a bandit camp using nothing but a well-timed sneeze — a story that, like all his stories, got visibly less believable with every sentence, and that, like all his stories, nobody in the cell had the heart to interrupt.
Seven kids — well, six kids and one very patient old man — one very smug fox-dragon, and a plan that currently amounts to “make something happen, then run really fast.” Fairy Tail’s power scaling problems are looking downright reasonable compared to whatever mess I’ve walked into.
Still.
Could be worse.
Could be a lot worse.