Code Purple

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. And every night a dragon, or two, or three would spread their wings and fly into the clouds, never to be seen again.

There weren't many dragons left after the Great Exctinction of the '22, caused by the flareup of the dragon flu. The Big Three have been promising high-speed cloning breakthrough "any day now" for the last three years. In the meantime, every government on the planet was jealously protecting and busily breeding their remaining stock, for after the Mordor disaster there was no room left for doubt - a country with no dragons will not stand.

Protective spells, force fields, laser drones and swarms of nanogoblin sentries kept the dragon facilities safe, moon farms were pumping out thousands of barrels of starmilk, and for a while it seemed that the united efforts of scientists, magicians and elves were paying off. And then the clouds came.

The problem was - the dragons needed to fly. Fly high, fly fast, fly to the edge of the troposphere and dive back with wings folded, dragon flames and superheated air combining into superheated plasma that kept the iridiscent scales growth in check. Neither technology nor magic were able to do the trick - the dragon scales were heat-, spell-, scratch- and everything-proof, and they became thicker and bigger fast, so the dragons that, for whatever reason, were unable to fly, quickly turned into huge rocks that were beautiful, shiny, indestructible - and dead. Top scientists and wizards kept arguing if the fast scale growth evolved back in the prehistoric days as a sort of regenerative protection that kept the dragons alive in the clan battles of old - to this day, the dragons were fiercely territorial - or went back even further, to the early days of the Universe when the dragons travelled between the stars.

In any case, the dragons needed to fly. Cages were out of the questions, and several attemps to simylate flight in wind tunnels resulted in spectacular fireballs and very upset dragons. So the dragons flew up, and dove back to earth and flew up and came down again, and, like carrier pigeons, always came back to their home nests. Not a single dragon got lost in the years since the Great Extinction. Until the purple clouds came.

***

John Maxwell never thought he would work with the dragons. He got his doctorate in computer science from a solid but decidedly non-Ivy League Mid-Atlantic school, almost married his grad school classmate (who wisely decided, at the last minute, that two geeks were a bit too much for one young family,) almost joined RMI - Reusable Magic, Inc before the company's expolsive growth catapulted its stock price to the stratosphere, almost made a breakthrough discovery and was almost content as an assistant professor at a school that was, if anything, even more non-Ivy Leagues than his alma mater.

He was almost ready to accept a tenior position in a school two states and two notches down from his current employer, when, on a dare, he took the Magic Aptitude Test. Maxwell's results were the first perfect score ever recorded for the MAT, which made him a minor celebrity for a short time and landed him a position of the Granger Sciezard Fellow at - unbelievably - RMI, which has just become the third of the Big Three and was busy solidifying its lead on the razor-sharp and just as comfortable intersection of science and magic. It was at a project meeting on HyperSpell Checker that he met Jane and, after a short while, realized that, for the first time in his life he was not almost happy - he was simply happy.

And then the clouds came.