Chapter 1 #3
“This is it,” she said to herself, wishing she had a better soundbite, even for herself.
Something along the lines of one small step for man…
or something like that. She was nervous.
Her stomach was fluttering and her heart was pounding in her chest. That really was another world she was looking at. A world in which dragons lived.
“Don’t think about it,” she told herself. “Just do it.”
With a corporate slogan on her lips, Kate stepped through the portal, and into another world.
The grass was soft beneath her sneakers, and when she turned around she saw the portal behind her, a doorway to a dingy kitchen standing in the middle of some of the most beautiful wild landscape she had ever laid eyes on.
It looked small and ugly, standing in direct opposition to this brilliant land that was bright and seemed to go on forever.
Standing less than an arm’s length from the portal, Kate turned back around and simply looked, letting her eyes feast on this new world.
The most eye-catching element was a mountain rising in the distance.
It was a singular feature, not part of a range as she’d usually expect to see on Earth, and surrounded by water that could have been an ocean or a large lake.
Once again, that was strange. What kind of geological process could create a single mountain in an otherwise relatively flat plain?
There were some rolling hills behind her that obscured her view of the land in the other direction, but none at all near the mountain.
“Either the laws of tectonics are different here too, or that mountain is up to something,” she muttered to herself. It was silly, of course, to think of a mountain as being suspicious, but Kate was given to occasional bouts of silliness—such as the kind that had brought her across realms.
Movement at the corner of her eye distracted her from the suspicious mountain and she lifted and turned her head to see something flying in the skies not too far from the peak.
At first she thought it was a bird, but as it swung lower and the shape of it became more apparent, she realized that it was not a small bird relatively close, but a very large, not-at-all-a-bird, quite far away.
Silhouetted against the sky were arched wings, a powerful body lined with ridges and scales, a long tail against which the back legs were stretched, creating an aerodynamic figure, and front legs too. The head of the creature was large, set upon a powerful and sinuous neck.
Kate clapped her hands over her mouth and let out a little squeal of excitement. This was the culmination of years of dreaming and dedicated study. She was actually looking at a dragon in flight. They were real, and she truly had found the realm in which they reigned.
Part of her had always been a little skeptical, even when she was working with the dragon tissue.
It was hard to believe that the flesh she was handling belonged to a mythical creature.
Plenty of people thought the dragons had been a hoax from the beginning, that it was all some government psy-ops or cover-up or something.
The video evidence had only heightened their suspicions—after all, in a world where you could make anything look real, everything could be fake.
A second dragon entered her field of vision, heading toward the first. Kate watched as they flew into a circling pattern around one another, a beautiful dance of flight that left her awed as they began to dart and swirl and fly back and forth almost as if they were dog fighting like a pair of fighter planes.
She watched, enthralled with the way they moved.
They lost a lot of height during several of their maneuvers, bringing their powerful, mystical bodies closer to her.
They moved through the air in a similar way to dolphins moving through water, with a natural alacrity that was astonishing and beautiful to behold. She was stuck there, just staring at them, not even caring that the angle was giving her a serious crick in the neck.
Time passed without her noticing, but she suddenly saw that the dragons were growing bigger, drawing closer as they dipped through the sky. They didn’t seem to be as interested in one another anymore. They seemed to be checking out a target on the ground.
“Oh, shit.”
Kate suddenly realized that she was not just watching them. They were watching her. She had been spotted from thousands of feet in the air, like a rabbit by a hawk, and they were coming for her, wings back, tails straight, necks extended in a fast dive.
Elation turned to fear. Would they be hostile?
They were more than capable of killing on sight, of that she had no doubt.
What if they mistook her for food, or what if she became prey?
She bolted for the portal, her feet almost failing to carry her across the short distance as fast as the dragons covered vertical miles.
She threw herself back into her kitchen and killed the power just as the ground beyond her world shuddered with the impact of two heavy creatures making a hard landing, great dragon heads and slitted eyes rolling in the direction of the glowing aperture.
The portal shut down a millisecond later, leaving her panting, elated, and covered in a sheen of sweat.
“Holy…” She stared at the wall where the dragon world had once been. Now it was nothing but a grease-spattered, yellow-painted wall. It was almost a shock to see it, as if her typical reality had just asserted itself even more violently than the dragons that had come for her.
For a few minutes, she had walked in another world—and she couldn’t wait to do it again.
Her little kitchen victory dance knocked the dish soap into the sink and made grumpy Mrs. Morris downstairs bang on the ceiling with her broom, but even the thudding disapproval of the world’s touchiest neighbor couldn’t impinge on Kate’s pure triumph.
“I did it! I really did it!”
There was a whole world waiting for her at the flick of a switch, and she could go there any time she pleased.
Of course, she would have to plan a longer expedition, but there was no reason why she couldn’t go back sooner for a little while, just to look…
she already missed the world, which seemed brighter and so much bigger than the one she inhabited.
“That’s because your world is this apartment and the lab,” she lectured herself. “Or, it was, at least.”
It took some time for her pulse and breathing rates to return to normal.
When they did, and she was able to think a little more clearly, she took a shower and checked herself carefully.
She monitored herself carefully for any signs of radiation exposure.
Welts, burns, rashes. Nothing seemed to be present, though it could take some hours for any symptoms to show.
She was confident though. The dragon compounds provided protection on a cellular level, and at the rate of radiation exposure in the dragon realm, the effects would have been more or less immediate, she was fairly sure.