After Shannon and I finished our paper, Shannon called up Jess and Alex (I feel bad for Jess, writing her paper with Alex) for some two-on-two soccer. Shannon was pretty tired by the time they showed up at the university field—thanks to booting the ball at a wall and then pumping it back up to pressure—but we still had a fun time. And Shannon and I got an A.
Christmas break is coming up in the next few weeks, so of course all the classes are giving us loads of homework to do over break. I miss last year. At least I can ask Al for help if I really need it. He might not like school, but he still doesn’t do poorly. He just procrastinates to the last moment and complains the whole time.
Mrs. Williams moves to the front of the room beside her computer after handing out the assignment for her class. From a brief skim, it looks like details for our next research paper. “If you look over the handout I just gave you,” Mrs. Williams announces, “you’ll notice that this is an individual research paper. By that, I mean that although you may perform research in groups, you must each write your own report.” Alex, Jess, Shannon and I look at each other. We’re definitely visiting the library together.
Mrs. Williams continues after a short pause. “The subject for this project is created monsters. What are they, how are they made, how do they survive, and what are their strengths and weaknesses? These are the sorts of questions I expect you to address. Each of you will pick a single species of monster to write about, and if you perform your research as a group, you must each select a different monster.”
With the relevant section of the textbook read (or re-read, in my case), Jess, Alex, Shannon and I head to the library after school. The school’s library is the second-best in town, behind only the university’s. After all, you want the important stuff in well-protected places, and both of the building sets have their own inner walls around them. Mr. Chesbrough offered to drive us home afterwards.
“So, where are we starting?” Shannon asks.
“I was thinking of watching fight records and picking something interesting,” Alex responds, her arms behind her head. I don’t think she’s all that stressed over school, but not in the same way as Al. Maybe it’s because she can rely on her siblings the same way I rely on Al.
Jess walks backwards in front of Alex. “You don’t need to do a beast. There’s a bunch that are nice.”
“Yeah, but those are boring. You see them everywhere,” Alex fires back.
“Not necessarily,” Shannon says quietly.
Jess nods in response to Shannon. “Did you hear about the giant Siberian chimeras? There’s one that’s been there for decades, and apparently has even driven off Dragons to protect the town nearest to its den. And they say two more were recently spotted.”
“When was this?” I ask.
“The report just came in a month ago,” Jess answers.
I nod and roll my eyes. “So, like, five or ten years ago.” Anything not immediately relevant to defense has to wait on messengers and mail, and news from other continents can take months if not longer. “I thought chimeras were bad?”
Jess shakes her head. “Most, yeah. Not these.”
Alex raises her eyebrows. “Maybe I’ll just do chimeras.”
“Uh…” I frown. “Isn’t that too broad of a category? ‘Chimera’ just means the monster is too uncommon to get a category name.” I think most are probably bad because they’re lonely, which stinks, but we can’t really do anything about that.
“Better than too narrow! I can select down later if I have to. What are you doing, anyway?”
Jess wouldn’t even have to ask. I’ve already spent a bunch of time looking into the subject. “Dragons, of course!” I answer, a proud grin plastered across my face.
Maybe I should’ve picked something with more available information. Information that answers the questions, anyway: there’s tons of stuff if I want fight records, but nobody seems to know what they eat, where they live, or anything like we do with most animals and monsters. There might be enough for a report in the school library, maybe, but I’ll ask Mom if she can take me to the university library tomorrow morning. It’s a Saturday so it’ll be packed, but I won’t have school getting in the way.
“Did you find enough on gryphons, Jess?” Alex asks. She had a huge stack of references for chimeras, but like I told her, that’s about a third of all created monsters. There’s no way Mrs. Williams will let her confirm that as her topic.
“Yeah,” Jess nods. “People have tried to make them for hundreds of years, so there’s a lot of info.”
“Why?”
Jess looks back at a book she’s holding. “‘The Gryphon Project was started based on a legend about a shield creature—one with a strong sense of honor and protection. It is unknown when exactly the project started, but it seems that they have fought with true dragons for the entire history of their existence.’” Oh. “What about you, Shannon?”
“I haven’t picked yet.” She looks out the window. “Wisps seemed alright? They’re not violent, at least.” That does seem to be a rare quality in a wild monster.
Jess turns around so much her backpack falls off her lap. She picks it back up before talking to Shannon. “What are wisps, anyway?”
“‘Spells bound to a gas.’ Some people use them as messengers, and some help with illusions, and sometimes you just play with them.”
From Alex’s enthusiastically shared research (and my own from my free time over the past several years) it’s pretty clear that while summoned monsters can have a wide variety of forms, created monsters tend to be a combination of natural forms. Dragons especially, though wisps are one of the types called “amorphous.” (I had to look that word up. It means that they don’t really have a shape of their own.) And nobody knows who made the first of the true dragons. I bet it was a whole bunch of Wizards, because those things are super tough and have a lot of magic. And from looking at the ones that have died, we can’t even figure out how they eat. Or how we keep getting more of them.
Agenda for tomorrow: a day of research and reading on Dragons!
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