Fragment 10

Kent let out a mild curse when the overhead lights flickered off, and power went out. The backups began to scream their warnings that the building was now operating on a time limit, but he delayed hitting the save for a moment and finished the line he was typing. He spat out a much sharper curse when the save failed a couple of minutes later, as the internet connection was down too.

He got up and went to check that someone hadn't unplugged the modem from the power supply again. It generally took a pretty major accident of some kind to shut both services down, but human error was quite common, especially now that they were running skeleton shifts and as many people as possible were working from home.

A flash of color drew his eye as he stepped into the sunlit hallway that seemed too bright after the dim office. He'd never understood why the hallway was on the outside with all the windows, while all the offices were windowless cubicles on the inside. Something bright and colorful, was moving through the scrubby 'park' below. After a moment he identified it as one of those chinese dragon costumes that came out every year for the winter parades downtown.

People were idiots. He couldn't understand what they found so difficult about staying inside and reducing contact with each other, but there were plenty of posts on the net and people wandering the cities in big costumes, as though the outfits would protect them. But those dragons usually had dozens of people inside to move them, so that thing was actually just the sort of gathering that was currently being prohibited.

It was quite cheerfully colorful, and probably they were having a lot of fun, he conceded a moment later as it wound through the playground area, and reached out an arm to spin the merry-go-round. It stopped as though watching with interest, and he frowned. Don't touch anything you didn't have to, it seemed like an obvious rule.

It turned and continued its progress, and as his viewing angle changed with the distance, he saw that instead of the dozens of feet he expected to see, this one only had two sets. Even odder, was that the arms that had spun the merry-go-round had no feet directly below them. The colorful sides seemed to heave suddenly, and then settled again, and he realized that there were folded wings laying along them.

Chinese dragons didn't have wings. Or at least, chinese dragon costumes didn't have wings, he was fairly certain. Its head was moving back and forth as though it was a tourist, and trying to examine everything at once.

Without taking his eyes off of the dragon, Kent began patting his pockets. Another curse whispered off his lips as he realized that he had probably left his phone at his desk.

He'd laughed at all of the over-excited posts about wild animals coming into the cities, and the massive drops in pollution with the world-wide closures of factories. He'd always thought that the conservationists, who screamed that thousands of kinds of animals were all on the verge of extinction, were exaggerating.

But at the same time, he'd always believed that dinosaurs were truly extinct. A lot of the recent research said that many of them had been feathered though, and while the thing in the park couldn't actually be a dragon, it was definitely colored as brightly as a tropical bird.

Conservationists were going to go nuts.

--

On the other side of the world, a custodian who took pride in his work, was quickly developing a splitting headache that he suspected meant that he had waited too long to retire. Being able to see the dragon certainly meant that he'd waited too long. Or maybe the headache and the dragon were signs that he'd been infected.

His strong desire to return home faded. If he had the disease, he did not want to return home. His first great grandchild was on the way, and he would not risk infecting his family. He would do as his wife had always accused him of, he would live at work. Normally he loved to learn about, and preserve, the history that he was lucky enough to be surrounded with on a daily basis, but it wasn't supposed to talk to you.

Dragons weren't supposed to walk into the ancient palace and declare themselves emperor. To be fair, it had asked who the current emperor was first, but when he had informed it that there was no longer an emperor, it had told him, in words so archaic that they were difficult for even a historian to parse, "I suppose that it is only to be expected after so much time has passed. It certainly isn't the first time I've returned to find that the empire is fragmenting. I will claim the seat again until a worthy candidate is found."

It had then transformed itself into a rather plump figure in traditional imperial robes, that seemed to be covered in images of itself, and demanded that large quantities of fruits be brought to it… him. The self proclaimed emperor's grumblings as he demanded that the custodian stop butchering words and simply speak in the modern dialect so that it could learn it, made him seem… real.

For some reason he was reminded of the recently discovered scrolls that had held evidence of the first emperor's ridiculous obsession with gaining eternal life. If you had actually been chosen by a dragon to become the first emperor, then believing that some magical substance existed that could make you live forever seemed more reasonable.

"How old are you?" he asked the dragon curiously, after informing him rather tartly that food was in extremely short supply because of a new plague.

The answer was impossible to believe. The dragon was claiming to be as old, or older than the human race, with its casual reply of, "I do not keep a count, but more than 10,000 of your generations."

--

The vampire stood in the shadows beside the library, and flicked through search results, occasionally stopping to read an article. The sun was setting, and the street lamps flickered on and off as they tried to decide if it was dark enough that they should be running.

The elderly tablet in his hands struggled to load many of the sites he selected. It was of a design that had been obsolete before he had 'died'. It was actually more surprising that it had held a charge than that someone had thrown it away.

He hadn't been sure what he was looking for. What could have woken him early. But the news article he was looking at now made him think that he'd found it, sort of. The news article had a tabloid headline, "World-wide sightings of Dragons!" He would have ignored it, but the news company that had published it had been quite respectable a handful of years ago.

Maybe he wasn't alone. Maybe many supernatural creatures had suddenly woken up all over the world. Maybe he would finally meet another of his kind, or at least, another who was neither human nor animal.

The other part of modern vampire legends that didn't match him, was the "turning". No one had ever become what he was after he'd bitten them. Or after drinking his blood. It was embarrassing to remember all of the things he'd tried, but nothing had worked.