Time to Start Flying
The transformation is a good thing, as you're still falling. Your chances as a human wouldn't have been good just now. As a dragon, they're better, but you're still tumbling straight down towards the surface of... wherever this is. It's time to use your new wings.
<br>
It takes you a few rather anxious seconds to separate your various flailing limbs; there are, after all, several more than you're used to. Once you do, though, moving them is surprisingly easy. Your new wings move as naturally as the rest of you - it's like using a second pair of arms, or wiggling your ears.
<br>
You can do that too, incidentally. You waste several seconds just flicking them back and forth before you realize you've lost another hundred feet. This is no time get distracted.
<br>
As soon as you spread your wings, the wind stops rushing past you and starts hitting you instead. The feeling is surprisingly pleasant. You keep your wings out, membranes taut against the wind, and gradually conquer it. Your fall slows. Before long, you're gliding along on thick pillows of air.
<br>
Now that you're no longer falling, you finally take a look at the ground. Most of it is an odd red-orange color. You're still too high to make out details, so you fold your wings and go into a dive. It's exhilarating when you know you're not falling to your death. You rush toward the ground like a torpedo. In your excitement, you let out a deafening roar, which you stop as soon as you realize it's coming from you.
<br>
You are definitely not human anymore.
<br>
You can think about that on the ground, though. Right now, you need to just concentrate on getting there.
<br>
The orange, it turns out, is rocks. Lots of rocks. The entire ground beneath you seems to be rocks - tall, narrow ones, peaks and ridges, pillars carved into strange shapes by the wind. They're pretty, but not the best surface for landing on. You open your wings again. You can't help but grin at the snap of the air caught under your new limbs. Your fall slows for a second time, and soon you're gliding again. The jagged rocks rush by beneath you. You move your head back and forth on your long neck, looking for any place flat enough to land. Your neck is flexible enough that you can even look directly behind you. There's still nothing but rocks. A more experienced dragon could probably land here, but you've been flying for all of five minutes. You'd break every bone in your reptilian body.
<br>
You glide on for a while, finding shapes in the rocks. That one looks like a chicken. That one looks like a monkey wrench. That one looks like... a rock...
<br>
After a few minutes of this, you start to get tired of gliding. Surely you can do better than that. Gliding is all very well, but it's not real flying. It's time to see what these wings can do.
<br>
You flap once, experimentally, and rise slightly. You do it again. You tip your wings - somehow, you know just the right angle - and swoop straight up, then curve over upside down and turn it into a loop. Then another loop. Before long, you're looping and twirling in patterns that would make fighter pilots jealous. You let out another exhilarated roar, and you don't stop this time. You're flying as a dragon; you might as well celebrate like a dragon...
Written by Chrysalis on 07 July 2009
