Splash of Antimatter (For Le Tally)

[Anonymous]

Just because he was called a Mad Scientist didn’t mean he was actually mad. Not insane, not angry, nothing like that. No no, he was just called that because his science was a little more...advanced you could call it. Though, someone might call him insane considering what he was working on. After their little fun time in space with the dragons, not to mention what he heard had happened to one of the dragons, now he was going to go find himself a few dragons and approach them. This crazed fellow was one of the military scientists that inhabited the ATC. He was tired too. Very tired of having to deal with things like “theories” and “research grants” not being able to actually test his stuff out.

Well, that was a bit of a lie actually.

He was able to run small scale experiments. After a small mix up between Plasma and Anti-matter, he worked with small scale experiments. Those were so boring. They were contained in force-fields and they weren’t dangerous at all. It was getting to be boring. Besides, there was only so much the Lab AI could run a simulation for as well. He needed real subjects. Real dragons. That was the biggest thing he wanted to get done. Granted that it required actually talking to the dragons.

The big secretive creatures.

Now nothing really illegal had been done when getting the scans. He wasn’t allowed to do the very in-depth scans that he would have liked. The full multi-phasic scans with deep tissue and of the devices hooked into the creatures. However, they would have ate him if he managed to do that. And really, becoming dragon droppings was...that wasn’t his ideal version of death. A grand explosion that destroyed half the eastern seaboard though, that was the way to go down.

Ahem. That probably wouldn’t come to be but the dream was still there.

This would give him the perfect opportunity as well to test out his new device as well. Getting the attention of a dragon was a difficult thing. It was a dragon. They hung out at the citadel granted, but he worked a lot in the ATC. However, he could get access to the roof of the ATC.  The scientist was of average height, though he looked like he enjoyed sweets a little much, considering the bit of paunch he had.  His hair was orangey-brown, it was hard to tell. In dimmer light, it looked brown, but it had that gleam of orange to it. Though his hair is a bit shaggy at the front, it seems to work for him. Currently he was wearing a rather sleek pair of sunglasses. These were special of course, they allowed him to do small scans, see in different lights, thermal visions, all that fun stuff. Personally invented by himself of course, as he couldn’t trust any company to do such a good job.

He had on a long white lab coat, his legs covered with black pants and a simple pair of shoes. He was however lugging something in his arms. Alright...that was a lie. He didn’t lug anything. Not when he had the power of anti-gravity. So he was more or less pushing a large object. It looked like at first it started out with a cylinder and then he started adding things to it. Spires, antennae, different things oscillating around, spinning devices, different wires and cables. And of course it all rested on a pad that was hovering about the ground. He pushed his way into an elevator and hit for the roof. Sure the marines and what not were giving him strange looks but he just straightened his tie and tried to groom his hair.

Once his stop finally came he pushed outside and went for a wide open spot, or mostly wide open spot. Something at least the dragons could land on. This looked good enough really. He slowly turned a dial down, the large device setting itself down on the ground. He began to flick switches, press buttons, and adjust knobs and dials. The device was soon humming, and he was grinning to himself. He started to search the skies, hoping this would do the trick. Using a special light, he would shine it up toward the sky, this would then release a frequency that would, he hoped, be audible to dragons.  It worked sort of like a dog whistle but...he didn’t really want to think of it like that. It’s not like it would annoy them, cause them to come down upon him like angry...death breathing creatures.

No, this would be his dragon beacon. It would just let dragons know where he was. Hah. It was just like a super modern bat signal. Not that they would know what that was but ahem. It'll be between us.

[Tally]

Scheherazade yawned.

Six thousand years, centuries of advanced technology integrated into her very body, ancient magic coursing through her veins and she still had no cure for boredom.

She was spending the afternoon as she had spent the morning, sweeping over the city and monitoring the Network.  Roman was at that moment playing on Gabriel Tierney's bed, and the procession of Pilots through the Axis Point was going smoothly, as it always did.  As she expected it always would.  The traitors, she knew, would not be caught by procedure but by their own mistakes.

It was while she was making a loop around the Citadel that a ripple went through the collective mind, the upper tier of the Network comprised of the dragons themselves.

There was a disturbance at the ATC.

Hm, not so much a disturbance as a peculiarity.  The data came to her from other dragons close enough to the ATC to see the man standing upon its roof.  In seconds she had his name, his face, and his entire history from birth to present.

As she was possessed of a greater patience with the little creatures than most dragons, the mutual decision of the collective was that she should be the one to fly down and ascertain just what he was doing down there.  Her natural curiosity being a powerful force in itself, she didn't much mind the task.  Humans were quick-thinking, mercurial things.  They continually surprised her with their fancies, which she humored as much as was possible.

Sometimes though, they forgot just how low they were.  Sometimes they neglected to show the respect due a being of her age and power.  Those times, she was just as capable of putting them down as encouraging them. Ultimately, both courses of action left her feeling as though good work had been done.

Scheherazade banked, turning back around to the ATC, approaching in a wide arc and in no particular rush to answer the man's beacon.  She circled, dropping lower and lower in the sky until the rush of wind of her passage could be felt by those upon the roof.  At last she came to a graceful landing, touching down daintily a few dragon's paces away from the scientist.

Though Scheherazade was small as dragons went, she still towered over the tallest human.  Making no effort to set the scientist at ease or make him feel comfortable with her presence, she strode around him, examining both the man and the device with cold, unliving eyes that gave off a faint yellow glow.  She was all gray, scarred metal with bits of her original green scales gleaming here and there.

"You have succeeded in getting our attention," she informed him, claws clicking upon the roof as the paced in a slow circle around him, tail swinging back and forth.  A sweep of that tail could have crushed his bones and broken his whole body.

"I do hope you have a good reason for it."