24. Bertram
Bertram
Diana returned every few days or so, bringing new supplies as Bertram figured out what supplies he needed in order to build the best and most secure candler.
She always arrived with her cargo in tow, ready with a charming smile and a quip for Bertram, which he was eager to return, often with a wink.
Bertram wasn’t using Diana to make Helena jealous, of course.
First of all, Bertram wasn’t in the habit of using women.
Or men.
Anyone of any gender, really, including that one time in college, the tentacled void monster with no concept of gender at all.
So, his flirtation with Diana had absolutely nothing to do with anything other than looking for a bit of amusement in a desolate, snowy landscape.
Diana happened to be there, and Bertram happened to need to chase Helena from his thoughts, for important and practical reasons.
If his flirtation with Diana just happened to get under Helena’s skin just a little, that was a “her” problem.
And if it gave him the tiiiiniest bit of satisfaction that he could make her pine for him, even after the way she had so callously discarded him, well, he never claimed to be a perfect Person.
But he hoped he had built the perfect owl-bear egg-sized candler.
“Don’t drop the egg,” Helena cautioned for the thousandth time as Bertram prepared to move the egg from the incubator to the candler.
“Oh, don’t drop the egg?” Bertram asked. “I’m so sorry, I thought you’d been telling me I should drop the egg. With your extraordinary new take on the situation, I guess I’ll try not dropping the egg!”
“Sorry,” Helena mumbled. “I’m just nervous.”
“Really? I’m not. You’re putting me extremely at ease.”
Helena smiled guiltily. “I’ll bring it down a notch.”
“Or twelve,” Bertram suggested. He took a deep breath, brushed his hands off on his pants, and lifted the owl-bear egg.
Helena was right underneath him, arms out, ready to break the egg’s fall if Bertram should fumble.
To her credit, she did stay out of the way enough that Bertram was easily able to transfer the egg to the candler without her getting completely underfoot.
The egg seemed quite well-situated in the space Bertram had so carefully built for it, but he waited until Helena had her hands on the egg before he let go and stepped away. Just in case.
Helena blew out a few long, deep breaths, steadying herself.
Bertram tried to ignore Helena’s nervous energy as he grabbed the powerful flashlight. Tried to ignore the sudden pressure he felt, as if he had any control over the contents of the egg.
But the truth was, he didn’t want to disappoint Helena.
As a member of the scientific community, of course.
He couldn’t bear the thought of the scientific community’s face crumpling in despair if the scientific community had to weather one more loss after she endured so many already this year . . .
Bertram strode across the room and turned off the lights, praying to a long list of gods he had never believed in to let his candler work, and to let the news it revealed be good news.
Helena made one final check of the egg’s security in the wooden base. Then she cautiously backed away as Bertram approached with the 8000-lumen flashlight. He pressed it to the side of the egg’s shell and turned the flashlight on.
The egg glowed, revealing the contents within. The very top was a bright yellow, clear of anything but the light shining through. But the rest of the egg was a deep orange, and within the orange sat a dark red mass, with veins like a spiderweb throughout, and at the center of them all . . .
“That’s a heart!” Helena all but shrieked. “That’s a real-life goddamn heart and it’s beating! That’s a heartbeat!”
Bertram’s entire body relaxed, his feeling of relief even stronger than his feeling of excitement.
“I know things could still happen between now and the cub-chick hatching and we’re not out of the proverbial woods yet,” Helena gushed, “and, of course, we’re certainly not out of the literal woods, although that’s a good thing in this case—but oh my gosh I’m just so happy that there’s even a chance! There’s a chance!”
Bertram and Helena carefully returned the viable egg containing a living owl-bear cub-chick back to its makeshift nest of blankets inside the incubator, a process that was even more terrifying now that the existence of a developing owl-bear was confirmed.
But the egg was returned to the incubator safe and sound, with no disaster occurring, despite the worst of Helena’s fears.
“We’re going to have to prepare for hatching,” Bertram said, and Helena literally squealed with joy.
“We have to build the baby a real nest,” Helena said.
“And prepare a diet plan. But also, the best chance of V-2 being successfully reintroduced to the wild is to minimize interaction with humanoid beings. We need to interact enough to keep V-2 alive, though, and we don’t know yet how helpless V-2 will be—are baby owl-bears precocial?
Altricial? We may need to care for the baby around-the-clock while also trying to conceal ourselves.
So, my first instinct was puppets—you know, like with condors?
Humans brought condors back from the brink of extinction through breeding programs—I mean, obviously it was their fault that the condors almost went extinct in the first place, so they don’t get too many bonus points for that, but they fed condor chicks with hand puppets that looked like mama condor.
But an owl-bear is so big that I don’t think a hand-puppet would be very effective.
But what if we get you a full body mama owl-bear suit? ”
“Why me?” Bertram asked, since the idea of a full body owl-bear suit did not sound appealing.
“Because you’re closer to owl-bear size,” Helena said.
“I’m actually being super generous; some otherfolk—including flying otherfolk like dragons—imprint on the first being they see at hatching.
If owl-bears do imprint, and he imprints on a humanoid being, I feel like our chances of being able to successfully keep him away from humanoid society drop to almost zero.
So, we want the baby to imprint on an owl-bear shape.
So, if you’re the owl-bear shape, you get to experience all the joys of directly interacting with our focal animal!
And when otherfolk imprint, it’s not like regular mundane animal imprinting, either.
A magical imprinting bond is super intense and unbreakable—”
“I’m aware, Helena. This is my career, after all. And has been consistently. I just don’t know how I feel about being essentially turned into a costumed mascot—”
“How is that the part you’re stuck on?!” Helena cried. “If owl-bears magically imprint, then the so-called ‘costumed mascot’ will become the first ever humanoid being to be imprinted on by an owl-bear! That would be so cool!”
Bertram looked at Helena’s wide, pleading eyes, the excitement and joy she had at the prospect clearly shining through.
As had been the case for over a decade of his life, Bertram was utterly helpless in the face of Helena’s genuine and unbridled enthusiasm.
Bertram huffed. “I’ll do it. Of course.”
“Yay!” Helena said and quickly hugged Bertram. “I just figure I like taking notes more than you do anyway, so between the size difference and the skillset, it makes sense. But I will definitely be super jealous if the baby does imprint on you. But ‘jealous’ in a still-supportive-colleague way.”
“Mm,” said Bertram. He was still thinking about the hug she had just given him. He wondered if he should have hugged her back. He wondered if he should have stepped away faster so she couldn’t hug him in the first place.
He wondered if he should be wondering so much about a two-second hug between supportive colleagues.
“We’ll also have to define ‘imprint’ very clearly in our term set.” Helena grimaced.
Bertram nodded and made a face. He knew exactly to what Helena alluded.
For hundreds of years, “imprinting” had been used as a scientific term. It described the attachment formed by baby birds to the first moving target they encountered after hatching. It was a mechanism developed via evolution to enhance survival rates by making sure they were following their parent.
Unfortunately, a particular pack of werewolves had co-opted the term “imprinting” as justification for their weird and unethical matchmaking proclivities, stating that they could tell who their true love was from the moment of that Person’s birth.
It was fucking weird as shit and made Bertram extremely uncomfortable. He didn’t like to think about anybody thinking about newborn infants as their future mates.
“In addition to condor conservation, we should look at the work of Angelo d’Arrigo to see how filial imprinting was used to reintroduce threatened species of birds,” Helena added.
Then she sighed. “I really wish that was the narrative that humans associated with the word ‘imprint.’ D’Arrigo’s work was deeply wholesome, adorable, and productive. ”
“You promise you won’t be too jealous if the baby owl-bear does imprint on me?” Bertram asked. “And if you are jealous, you’ll cope in ways other than making up dragons for attention?”
Helena rolled her eyes. “I did not ‘make up’ the dragon. I saw a dragon. And if you can’t accept that, I think you’re the jealous one.”
“What kind of dragon did you imagine seeing?” Bertram asked.
Helena suddenly blushed. “I don’t remember,” she mumbled.
Bertram’s eyes lit up. If this was something Helena didn’t want to discuss, then it was definitely worth digging deeper. “Bullshit. You know.”
“Just—just a dragon . . .”
“Hel. Please. You know the scientific name of the subspecies of the subspecies of whatever the fuck we talk about. There’s no way you don’t have at least a hypothesis for the genus of the dragon you saw.”
“Well . . .”
“You have to tell me,” Bertram insisted. “Tell me what kind of dragon you thought you saw, and I’ll agree to wear the mama owl-bear suit.”
“You already agreed!” Helena said. “You can’t just take it back!”
Bertram waited patiently.
Helena raised her eyes to the ceiling. “An ivory-snouted dragon.”
Bertram cackled and Helena glowered in response.
“So,” Bertram said, “to start with, even if you did see a dragon, you definitely saw a pileated dragon—”
“First of all,” Helena said, “you cannot definitively prove that the ivory-snouted dragon is extinct, especially considering how reclusive all dragon species are—as you yourself pointed out when you were explaining how I couldn’t have seen a dragon, thank you.
Second of all, you’re setting up a no-win scenario by jumping to the extinction of the Draconis ovuphilus principalis simply because there have been no official sightings of it, and therefore dismissing all reported sightings as mis-categorization of Draconis pileatus—”
“Using scientific names makes you sound more pretentious, but it does not make you correct.” Bertram flashed Helena his most condescending smile.
Helena rolled her eyes. “When you get eaten by an ivory-snouted dragon, I won’t even be sad about it.”
“Fine by me. Just make sure my tombstone reads ‘Here lies Bertram, devoured by a pileated dragon.’”
Helena tried and failed to suppress a laugh, and Bertram winked at her.
Probably he shouldn’t have winked at her. He just loved how passionate she got when defending her scientific ideals, and the cute way her nose wrinkled when she knew he was needling her on purpose.
And if he had to battle a hundred pileated dragons to bring forth that adorable little annoyed half-smile that accompanied Helena’s eye roll . . .
Well, he wouldn’t do it, because he was a magizoologist and had aspirations of saving otherfolk, not hurting them.
But if Bertram could challenge a dragon to a game of cards, maybe, or feats of mild athleticism, he would do it in a heartbeat, just for Helena’s smirk.