Building Dragons

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,” Miss Perserkin, the tour guide at the Royal Victoria Museum of Bio-Technology, said from her place at the front of the pack of new University students. They seemed to get younger every year. She tried not to hold their age against them, although it did mean that their attention spans weren’t all they could be. “As I’m sure your professor has told you,” she nodded towards the class’s instructor, Professor Abramowitz, standing off to one side, “the first dragon created in the Valley was an anomaly.” And this was where she always tossed in her little joke. “Barnabus Montheile was a very naughty little boy!”

Every child growing up in Great Britain knew about Lord Barnabus Montheile. How he pilfered his mother’s family jewels to use in his experiments. How he took apart every mechanical convenience on the entailed estate—from roboplows to servomaids to the autoflush in the twenty-seven commodes of the great house—and rebuilt them, better than before. Usually.

And how, once he’d found his late father’s medical textbooks, he began experimenting with bio-mechanical hybrids. Lord Barnie’s early attempts were a failure, but once he started crushing up his mother’s jewels and adding the powdered residue to his mixtures, he achieved astounding success.

Well, maybe not so astounding at first. The class moved on to the first glass display case, trailing behind Miss Perserkin like a flock of ducklings. Ducklings dressed in the black robes of Uni students, at least. Lord Montheile's early attempts at combining the biological material of dragons with mechanical components were rather…shoddy-looking, to say the least.

“Here we see one of Barnabus Montheile’s earliest works, created at the age of eleven, and donated along with the rest of his experimental prototypes to the Royal Victoria Museum of Bio-Technology after his…excuse me, her death. Please forgive my little slip of the tongue. We old people, you know.”

The students laughed dutifully at the tour guide’s faux pas. Unfortunately, it was still common for those born before the ability to transfer gender presentation to slip up, especially when referring to Historical Figures of Great Importance to the Realm. When speaking of someone in a particular time in their life, one used the pronoun which applied to their gender at that time. Old people still had difficulty with that.

At least Miss Perserkin was conscious enough to apologize.

“This is the first in a line of mechanical/dragon hybrid maidservants,” she went on, laying a kid-gloved hand on the side of the glass case in front of her. “Built when Barnabus’s mama’s lady’s maid retired and moved to Surrey, and he wanted to relieve Lady Montheile's distress at losing another valuable member of staff.”

Miss Perserkin picked up a brass boxlike device with several knobs on one side and pointed it at the glass case. She turned the first knob and the figure inside began to move jerkily. It reached over to pick up a comb from a small table and then turned toward a wig stand holding a red wig. It’s attempts to comb the artificial hair looked…painful, at best.

“Moving on, then,” Miss Perserkin said, waving her hand to indicate the students should continue on to the next display case. “Here we have One of Lord Barnabus’s earliest successes. The dragon-koi was created after the winter of 1851, a devastatingly cold year, when all of Lady Montheile’s golden Japanese koi froze solid in their pond. This was what originally gave Lord Barnabus the inspiration for using his mama’s jewels to augment the matériaux for his creations. He wanted to replicate the golden beauty of the biological koi fish, so he added the broken-up bits of the topaz necklace his mama wore for her presentation ball during her first London Season. These dragon-koi,” Miss Perserkin indicated the three mechanical dragon-fish swimming languidly in the six-foot-tall tank, “are all that remains of the original school of twenty, the remainder of which were eaten by Lord Barnie’s first dragon-hawk.”

“Now, then, if you’ll follow me into the Great Hall, we will see some of Lord Montheile’s later works.”

Miss Perserkin pulled open the twelve-foot-tall double doors emblazoned with a carved dragon head and stepped to one side, the ruffled skirts of her black taffeta gown rustling loudly in the stillness of the museum. As the professor followed the last of the students inside, she spoke in a low voice. “I think it’s going well, don’t you, Professor Abramowitz?”

“Hmm? What? Oh, yes…Yes. Very well indeed. Excellent as always, Miss Perserkin.”

Miss Perserkin had had her eye on the gray-whiskered older gentleman for several years now, since she was just an intern here at the Royal Victoria. She never missed an opportunity to approach the man as an equal, on a personal basis, but he had yet to pick up on her subtle cues.

As he wandered past into the Great Hall behind his class, she sighed, skirts rustling again as she pulled the doors closed behind them. Safety first was the rule here. One never knew when one of the more…unruly exhibits might take it into its head to try to make a break for it.

Catching up to the tour group, she took up her position beside a twelve-foot-deep pool of saltwater, set in the center of the Great Hall's marble-tiled floor. It was as long as five locomotives, and as wide as three. And resting on the bottom of the pool was—

“Here, Balthazar!” Miss Perserkin used a pair of brass tongs to grasp a squirming salmon from the bucket at the side of the pool and fling it into the center of the gently rippling water. For a long moment, there was no movement from the pool, but then, with a flick of its powerful tail, the sapphire dragon submersible exploded out from the surface, the hapless salmon in its powerful jaws. It gave a rather theatrical twist of shimmering sapphire-blue scales and coiled dragon-mech body, then plummeted back into the depths.

Oohs! and Ahhs! rose from the throats of the students clustered around the sides of the pool. Balthazar could always be relied on to put on a good show.

“Balthazar, as every schoolchild knows, was instrumental in helping the Royal British Navy to win the Fourth Napoleonic War,” Miss Perserkin said, “in the Battle of the Victoriana Islands. He served a long and distinguished career and was only retired when his mind began to go. Now he spends his days here with us at the museum, mostly swimming in circles. Something wrong with his tripartite navigational systems, I believe they said.”

The group moved next to an enormous cage that ran the entire length of the lefthand wall. The iron bars were two inches thick and extended from floor to ceiling. Within the cage, there were several living jacaranda trees, with plumeria vines twining through the overgrown branches.

Miss Perserkin picked up a long metal rod and ran it noisily across the bars, back and forth. “Ozymandias! Come out, come out! You naughty boy, where are y—”

With a screech, a hulking mass of ruby scales and brass gears launched itself from a cave set into the end wall of the cage. It flew towards the racket and skidded to a stop, fully-extended wings flapping wildly. Rearing back on its hind legs, the dragon-airship roared to shake the very roof above.

The tour guide stepped back hastily. Looking around for help, she spotted the dragon feeders, both young men in their early twenties, huddled behind a pile of wooden casks nearby.

“Some help here, if you please!” Miss Perserkin commanded, but the young men in blood-stained overalls waved frantically to hush her. “What is wrong with—”

Giving another enormous roar, the dragon-airship sprang at the bars, its reinforced snout denting them wildly. It pulled back and sprang at the bars again, this time smashing several of the brittle bars to splinters. Shards of metal flew through the air, one four-foot-long bar spearing a hapless student through the chest and pinning him to the floor.

Unbeknownst to the museum caretakers—although the investigation which followed the disaster revealed the specifics—Ozymandias the dragon airship had been breathing fire onto the iron bars every night for several weeks. The repeated annealing, heating and cooling the iron bars over and over again, had made the metal as brittle as glass. There was no way that the cage could stand against several thousand pounds of enraged dragon flinging itself against the bars.

Screams rang out as the student tour group, the professor, and Miss Perserkin, herself, all ran for cover. Some escaped successfully, but too many others, unfortunately, did not. When the Watch finally arrived to subdue the escaped beast, the floor was strewn with bloody body parts. Professor Abramowitz’s head was never located, and it was believed that—due to the proximity of his other remains—it had rolled into Balthazar’s pool and was eaten.

The Royal Victoria Museum was closed down permanently after the “incident.” Remaining exhibits were removed to the island of Malta, where they would be of no danger to anyone else, except for the few remaining human inhabitants. And they had been offered a generous stipend to relocate, so anything which happened in years to come was strictly by their own choice.

Miss Perserkin retired from her job as a tour guide, unable to face the trauma of losing her beloved (from afar) Professor Abramowitz. She now resides in a lovely thatch-roofed cottage in the Valley, not far from the ancestral estates of Lord Lady Barnella Montheile.

Several of the students present that sad day, however, went on to illustrious careers in the bio-mechanical fields, including two who made some promising strides forward in dragon-mechanical hybridization.

Their graves are among the most-visited at the Brookwood Cemetery, established in 1849 by the London Necropolis Company. Entry fee is £2.60.

Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, tips, and pledges are always cherished.

Author’s Note: This story was inspired by another which I wrote for the Fantasy Prologue challenge, Teaching My Dragon Boyfriend to Use an A.I. Art Program. In that story, I referenced the Wombo.art Dream app, which uses keywords to generate art in a range of different styles. I was partial to the STEAMPUNK style, since I got good results from it, and in the past had created some awesome pieces using different jewels as a starting point. So…

Dragons. Jewels. And Steampunk is all about things mechanical. It seemed a natural extension. But who was the inventor back in Queen Victoria’s time, who originally thought of combining dragon biological matter with jewels and gears to create a new kind of machine? It had to be someone from the upper classes, to have access to valuable precious stones, as well possessing the ability to spend his days building marvelous inventions. Or rather, her days…

I hope you enjoyed this flight of fancy!

I have challenged myself to write twenty-seven dragon prologues/stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue Challenge, one for each day the challenge runs. Here's a link to my next entry: