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ENTER MY SECRET WEAPON, WHICH WILL HELP ME GET ON WITH THE BUSINESS OF HAVING RUNCITA LAY MY EGGS

I whiz in among the crowds of other flying cadets and I keep casting my green snout back and forth, hoping to catch a whiff of Runcita’s juicy scent.

Now the wind cutting across my black beak is screaming for mercy.

I flap my leathery wings like a maniac. I zoom past the Lava Pools and see naked cadets laughing and horsing around and splashing each other and shooting lava out their nostrils and using their tails to throw lavaballs. On any other day I would stop for a good soak. Because there’s nothing to boost your CORE FLAME TEMP and your MATING MAGNETISM and your overall WILL TO POWER like submerging your scaly green ass in a lava pool and holding your breath for an hour or so.

Well according to Dr. Terrible, the only other thing that’s better than lava baths for boosting your WTP is swordupuncture.

And Dr. Terrible would always make a point to say, “And when it comes to swordupuncture, I’m talking about someone who really knows how to use a blade. Not one of these bozos they got on the mainland who just because they took a fencing class, now they think they can call themselves a swordupuncturist!”

Out at the Institute, my scaly grandpa promised me that if he wasn’t able to cure my WILL TO POWER before the EggHarvest, then he’d introduce me to his personal swordupuncturist. This chick he was forever raving about, named Metheldra. But since we aren’t on speaking terms anymore, and because he’s gone and vanished, well I guess there’s no chance of that happening. Though what I wouldn’t give right now for a session with Metheldra the swordupuncturist. Dr. Terrible promised me that after one session with this dragon chick Metheldra my THRASH OPTIMIZATION score and my MATING MAGNETISM score and my STRATEGIC DESTRUCTION COMBAT READINESS score would skyrocket and that my horns would grow as a result.

A legit swordupuncture session would definitely hit the spot right about now. I guess I’m starting to feel a little desperate and all.

But then I tell myself to stop getting so downhearted about the fact that there won’t be any swordupuncturist rescuing my scaly green ass today. And so I better just focus on the things that I can control.

Thwack-thwack.

Now I flap my wings and swerve and bank and hook a sharp left down a dark fiery corridor. I keep casting my snout back and forth, hoping to catch a whiff of Runcita’s juicy scent.

Where is my Queen?

I fly by the Firing Range, where dragons are squatting at their posts and shooting their tongues fifty yards downrange and trying to impale or lasso the furry humanoid creatures scurrying around in the Target Zone.

Thwack-thwack.

There are dozens of fiendish nasties whizzing off to my left and my right and there are deranged cadets zooming straight at me, flying in the opposite direction. The cadets’ flight patterns are so jerky and hyper that you have to keep a close eye on everything going on around you there in the air, or you can easily wind up as a dead splat on the wall.

I fly by the Egg Hatchery and see Professor Pruck lecturing a group of female cadets on caring for their eggs. And ways to fend off the father dragon who typically will try to eat his mate’s eggs when she’s not looking. Now Professor Pruck appears to be demonstrating an extreme combat maneuver that involves slicing the neck with her powerstaff. And I know it’s not uncommon for a female dragon to kill and eat kill her mate if she catches him trying to scarf her eggs.

Thwack-thwack.

But my Queen-to-Be, Runcita, is nowhere to be found and I start to panic because it feels like I’m running out of time. The dark fiery corridor is now overflowing with flying cadets and I’m busy trying to keep from getting knocked unconscious by all the leathery wings beating around my scaly green head. Seems like no matter which way I turn, somebody’s nasty toe claw is dangling right in front of my face.

Then I whip out my powerstaff and tap the screen and pull up something I’d really hoped I wouldn’t be forced to use. Something to help me close the deal on my Queen Quest. Just a little something to tilt the odds in my favor. The extra edge I need.

So I can get on with the business of having Runcita lay my eggs.

The wind blasting across my beak makes a whistling noise.

It’s definitely time to use my Secret Weapon.

Now as I shoot down the dark corridor I feel cadets knocking into me and dinging me and of course none of them say excuse me or sorry. Because here at WarWings it’s illegal to apologize, and any dragon caught using the S-word is instantly sentenced to death by firestream. Per Dean Floop’s orders.

Thwack-thwack.

Now as to my Secret Weapon. The device which will enable me to move on to the real business of the day.

The nanotracker. Now don’t judge my scaly green ass when you hear this, but last night I stuck this nanotracker on Runcita’s left wingjoint while she was asleep in her lair.

Now before you go jumping to conclusions, let me make it clear I didn’t personally sneak in and stick this tracking device on Runcita’s left wingjoint while she slumbered in her lair.

I mean, what kind of monster do you take me for, anyway?

No, what I did was I used one of my tiny little micro-drones to delicately fasten the tracking device onto Runcita’s left wingjoint while she was asleep in her lair. I felt really bad and guilty about doing it, if you want to know the truth. That’s why I called it my Secret Weapon.

Now as I fly along in the dark fiery corridor I hold the powerstaff screen out in front of me and see the entire WarWings campus laid out on the screen. And then I see it.

The blinking red dot that’s Runcita.

Yes! It’s working! Holy crap. I can see Runcita right now on the screen. God I feel a little guilty about this. Using a tracking device and all. But hey, not so guilty that I’m not going to use it.

The tracker is alive and well. Thank goodness for my micro-drone. Let me come right out and say it: a micro-drone is the best friend a dragon could ever hope to have.

Now I tap the screen with my index claw to triangulate Runcita’s location and watch the blinking dot as it processes all the data.

Then Runcita’s location shows up on the screen in big block letters: COLISEUM OF HEROES.

Ah, so that’s where my little Queen is hiding! The Coliseum of Heroes. Hold tight, my dearest Runcita. I am on my way! It won’t be long now!

So I flap my wings and hook a left down a dark fiery corridor. I am on my way to the Coliseum of Heroes. I flap my wings and swerve and bank and then take a sharp right. I fly by the WarWings Museum of Natural History. Which is full of strange creatures that have been captured from foreign planets over the centuries and then killed and stuffed and put on display.

When I was growing up as a young dragon here on the island, my grandpa Dr. Terrible used to bring me to the Museum of Natural History on the weekends. We’d go to the special wing of the museum dedicated to just the creatures Dr. Terrible had caught and killed and brought back from his fiendish adventures as an Intergalactic Conqueror. Those were good times. Walking talon in talon through the museum with Dr. Terrible as we strolled through the hushed environs of the museum and gazed at the stuffed creatures in their glass cases. Our hearts filled with a sense of awe and the miracle of existence.

Every so often my scaly grandpa would use the tip of his spiked tail to whap me affectionately on the back of my head and say, “Hold up. I want to show you this guy here. Now he may not look it, but this bastard was difficult to catch!”

We’d spend the entire Saturday afternoon in WarWings’s Museum of Natural History. Dr. Terrible would point out the different psychotic creatures and he’d explain to me how he caught them and how much of a fight they’d put up in their death throes.

And my favorite creature in the Dr. Terrible wing of the museum is this repulsive species called a Prete. Now this Prete is a small hairy manbird creature who, according to my grandpa, speaks nothing but declarations and opinions, but whose brain is so small that it is invisible to the naked eye.

Dr. Terrible discovered this degenerate Prete species on the planet Kroo. And my grandpa explained to me that the Prete is a flightless manbird species that purposefully makes their little beak putrid and revolting by letting their fangs get rotten and fall out.

And when I asked Dr. Terrible how the Prete made his beak so heinous, he said, “By eating other creatures’ poo. Eventually all their fangs rot and fall out of their beak. And when the Prete creature breathes he makes a strange whistling sound.”

What was ironic, my grandpa said, is this Prete creature showed so much disregard for its own beak but then expected other creatures to pay attention to its beak, or to the opinions that came out of it, anyway.

I remember, as a little dragon squatting before the stuffed Prete in the glass case, I looked up at my grandpa and whispered, “But why would this vile Prete creature make himself so heinous like that, Dr. Terrible?”

“Because the Prete has such a tiny brain,” said Dr. Terrible.

“How small is the Prete’s brain, Dr. Terrible?”

“Here,” he said, “let’s go look at it under a microscope.”

And lo, there in the Museum of Natural History they even had a Prete’s brain on display. And you could stick your eye up to a microscope and just make out the brain, which when magnified looked like a peach pit.

Now according to my grandpa, the only time the other creatures on planet Kroo paid attention to the Prete was when the manbird jumped off of a cliff in an attempt to fly but instead plummeted to the ground and broke its hind legs. Or gave itself whiplash. Then all the different creatures on planet Kroo would gather around the Prete where it lay on the ground and they’d laugh at the Prete for being so stupid and vile.

Thwack-thwack.

I flap my wings and fly past the Arctic Laboratory where a scaly green dragonette is blasting an icestream out her beak and neutralizing a firestream that one of her classmates is shooting at her.

Glance down at powerstaff. See my FLIGHT SPEED at 137 MPH.

I can feel my scaly green ass relax and go into pure flight mode.

My reaction time faster.

My vision sharper.

You become one with the air.

At this speed, you are a weapon.

I speed, I eradicate.

Velocitas Eradico.

Everything is a blur, but you see it perfectly.

I zoom past the Creative Evolution Lab and see Professor Newg blast a chrome-flex dragon robot with a mega firestream until the scalebot melts into a pool of silver on the floor.

What the heck did that poor robot do to get the melt treatment from Professor Newg like that?

Probably the Datalizard violated the Third Law of Robotics, which is that there is no Third Law of Robotics. Basically, Professor Newg invented this oxymoronic law so he can have carte blanche to melt robots whenever he feels like it.

I know Fribby and her other Dragodroid pals hate Professor Newg, and at one point they were considering sending a hit squad to assassinate him in his lair. Fribby was always snarling, “Why did Newg become a professor of robotics if he’s so darn terrified of the Rise of the Machines?”

Thwack-thwack.

I flap my wings and shoot past the Urban Warfare Center where Professor Bluce is teaching cadets how to take control of a planet and turn its citizens into your personal slaves. Professor Bluce’s method involves secretly amping the gravity levels to the point where all the structures collapse and the citizens can’t even get up off the ground, because the gravity is so dense.

This is Professor Bluce’s big academic theory, Escalating Gs.

Now I took Professor Bluce’s course my sophomore year and I reckoned his whole concept of Escalating Gs was pure flapdoodle. I mean just because you max out a planet’s gravity levels to the point where the citizens can’t even stand up, that doesn’t mean these creatures are your slaves.

I figured Professor Bluce’s whole Escalating Gs strategy was one of those hifalutin conquer tactics which sounds good in the classroom but as soon as you try to apply it to the real world the whole thing just collapses. And what made Professor Bluce’s class even more of a sham is the fact that all of us cadets knew the professor had never even conquered a single planet himself.

Thwack-thwack.

So in the span of about ten minutes, I fly all the way from the west wing of the Main Building to the Coliseum of Heroes. Now the coliseum is really something to see. And it never fails to take your breath away when you first fly in here under the great domed roof, which is constructed of gold and white marble and is at least a thousand feet high.

The marble floors of the coliseum are stained red with blood. From all the cadets who’ve fought each other to the death there in violent wing-to-wing combat affairs through the centuries.

Just being here makes you feel more radiant.

And as I flap my wings up here in the air I quickly scope out the six or seven white marble observation decks mounted up high on thick gold columns. These observation decks are designed so that cadets can hang out up there and get a panoramic view of the bloody wing-to-wing combat affairs that take place below.

I look around and see clusters of nasty-horned cadets lounging around on all the observation decks. Except one. There’s one empty observation deck, thank goodness. I flap my wings even harder and rocket toward the empty observation deck.

Now as I come up on it I grab the marble edge with my toe claws and for a split second there I am hanging upside down.

And then I gently flap my wings and hoist myself upright so that now I am standing on the observation deck.

Thank goodness. My wings are exhausted!

Now where the heck is my Queen?