Unidentified Funny Objects 7, page 2
A few moments passed while Gavin took in this knowledge. He was not a stupid man, so he did not need to waste time on asked-and-answered questions to confirm what the dragon had just told him. The beast was real, here, and able to control who could and could not see him. That was settled. What did need further clarification was: “What obligation?”
The dragon lacked the shoulders to pull off a decent shrug but still managed to communicate the sense of that gesture. “I am a being whose very nature is magical. Magic has rules and sets a price on everything I do. I disregard this at my peril. Section 6V#Strongpassword, subparagraph Chocolate, clearly states that when a dragon answers a summoning he cannot return home until he has done the summoner whatever service which said summoning stated, requested, and/or required.” He set the point of one talon to Gavin’s lips with remarkable gentleness. “And don’t protest that you didn’t intend to summon me. It doesn’t matter; you did it. So!” The beast steepled his claws in a manner worthy of a cartoon supervillain. “Let’s go dick-hunting.”
Gavin blanched. “You mean—you mean—you mean kill Mr. Pendleton?”
“Kill him?” The dragon returned his horrified expression with added interest. “By the Desolation of Foofums, no! What manner of barbaric wyrm do you take me for? Killing costs extra, and I don’t think you have enough blood in you to meet my going rate, even if I gave you the wizard’s discount. The most I am obliged to do for you is enable the accomplishment of the wish uppermost in your heart at the time you initiated my summons.”
“You’ll do who the what now?” Gavin asked, his comprehension entangled in the kudzu patch of the dragon’s diction.
The beast regarded him with barely suppressed condescension. “I’m going to make him sorry for trying to take away your toy.”
On the following Monday, Gavin Crane arrived at work with the drone in a small paper shopping bag dangling from one hand and a curly-haired, bright-eyed moppet who looked no more than four years old clinging to the other. The child’s rosy lips formed a perfect O of wonder as she glanced here, there, and everywhere about her at the marvels of the office. Gray desks! Ecru walls! Beige window blinds! Was there no end to the faerie enchantments of this place?
Thus proving that the dragon was not merely a master of disguise but a consummately talented actor.
Gavin’s fellow workers swarmed the darling tot, who was introduced as the offspring of a visiting cousin who was doing the divorce-relo-job hunt cha-cha-cha. Questions abounded, some out of simple curiosity, some from the eternal desire to find any excuse for delaying work. “Uncle” Gavin explained that he’d offered to mind wee Emilia for a short time—no more than an hour, tops!—while her mother made some important phone calls in peace and undistracted. The working moms on staff nodded knowingly and slathered him with blessings.
Only one person among all those gathered around the pair seemed less interested in the supposed kidlet and more in the object partially protruding from the shopping bag. Nora Wellfleet lingered while the other workers ambled back to their desks. She was one of the younger captives of Mr. Pendleton’s regime, a pleasant if unremarkable woman barely hatched from the chrysalis of internship.
“That’s your Secret Santa gift, isn’t it?” she asked. Her tone made it clear that she sought not information but confirmation.
Gavin allowed that this was so. Nora’s mouth turned down sharply. “Didn’t you like it?”
“Of course I did. Heck, I loved it. I tried it out and it’s a lot of fun.”
“So you brought it in to work because you couldn’t stand to be parted from it?” She smiled.
Before Gavin could reply, the little girl piped up: “He loves it, but he’s gonna give it to his boss. He said so!”
“Ohhhh. I see.” Nora might have been relatively new to the office, but she’d been there long enough to grasp the power politics at work on the premises. “Well, then I guess there’s no harm in telling you now that, um, spoiler alert: I’m your Secret Santa. I was happy when I drew your name. Ever since I got hired, I’ve been wanting to do something nice for you.”
“For me?” Gavin was mystified. For a giddy moment he dared to wonder if perhaps—just perhaps!—Ms. Wellfleet were on the point of confessing a schoolgirl-style crush on him. Surely the age difference was no impediment if love were—
“You were super patient with me when I was just an intern. I mean, you were always ready to help me and you never once rolled your eyes or got snarky when I made a mistake.”
Ah, so that’s it. He made a wry grimace, here-and-gone. He was too much of a pragmatist to be devastated, but he couldn’t help hosting a flicker of disappointment.
“What I should have done is warn you to find work elsewhere,” he said. “You know those old movies where the monster’s chasing a bunch of people and one guy takes a header? ‘It’s too late for me, but save yourselves!’ That should’ve been my line.” He gave a dry, brittle laugh.
Her answering chuckle was the same. “It’s too late for all of us, in this economy.”
“What’s a ’conomy?” the disguised dragon piped up with a show of innocence worthy of Foofums. “It sounds like a big, icky swamp.”
“That’s about it, honey.” Nora’s inherent sparkle faded a bit with that admission.
“I hate swamps,” the dragon said with a perfectly precious stamp of one tiny, black patent leather-shod foot. “They’re stinky. I don’t want Uncle Gavin to be stuck in one forever. I don’t want him to hafta give away his toy. I don’t, don’t, don’t!” The dragon’s voice rose to a piercing shriek that culminated in a full-out, flat-on-the-floor, fist-pounding, kicking, wailing tantrum.
“What’s going on out here?” Mr. Pendleton burst from his office, angry enough to chew nails and spit BBs. While the dragon continued to bring the house down with Brat: The Musical, Gavin explained the situation.
Mr. Pendleton was the sort of boss who pounced on any reason or excuse for dragging his employees over the coals. The only thing that stayed him now was the sight of what peeked out of Gavin’s shopping bag. A smile of buttery benevolence smeared itself across his face. “And what have you got there, Mr. Crane?” he asked coyly.
“No fair! No fair!” The ultimate childish protest burst from “Emilia’s” lips. “You can’t have it. Uncle Gavin said he was gonna give it to me.” She leaped up and threw herself at Mr. Pendleton battering him with tiny fists until Nora intervened. Even as she was being gently pulled away from her target, the little girl continued to shout protests. She had quite the voice, a natural instrument so powerful that it made more than a few of Gavin’s co-workers wonder how one so small could produce a volume of sound that by rights should have come from a much larger being.
Pendleton began to sweat. This juvenile hellspawn was making a fuss loud enough to reach out of the Sales office and down the hall, all the way to the terrifying lair of Human Resources. If he didn’t initiate some damage control right quick, the odds were that one of those interfering busybodies would show up to find out what the racket was about. Pendleton didn’t care to have HR taking too close an interest in how things were being done in his comfortable fief.
“Why don’t we all go into my office, sweetheart,” he cajoled. “We can clear up this whole silly misunderstanding. I’ve got a big candy jar on my desk, and I can have someone” —he gave Ms. Wellfleet a meaningful look—“bring you a nice, big glass of chocolate milk. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He strove to conjure an endearing twinkle to his eye, but only succeeded in squinting.
The dragon in disguise wriggled out of Nora’s hands and accompanied Gavin and Mr. Pendleton into the latter’s office, sulking dramatically all the while. With the door safely shut, to muffle any further outbreaks of infantile indignation, Mr. Pendleton relaxed to the point of offering Gavin a glass of scotch and allowing “Emilia” unfettered access to the candy dish. The dragon devoured the sweets at a fantastic rate. If Mr. Pendleton had been as observant as he was unscrupulous, he might have picked up on how suspicious it was that Gavin wasn’t even trying to dissuade the child from getting herself all sugared up to cartoon Tasmanian Devil levels of destructive energy. Ms. Wellfleet arrived with the chocolate milk, which the disguised dragon downed in one gulp, thus pouring further chlorine trifluoride on the potential sugar rush inferno.
“Now honey, I know you’re upset,” Pendleton began. “But your Uncle Gavin really couldn’t give you that drone. You’re much too young to use it.”
“Am not,” said the dragon. “You’re just saying that ’cause you want it. I’ll bet you can’t use it either!”
Mr. Pendleton chortled indulgently. It was like listening to the auditory equivalent of congealed chicken fat. “Well, precious, if it weren’t the middle of the work day and if your Uncle Gavin and Ms. Wellfleet didn’t have to get back to doing the jobs they’re paid for, maybe we could all go down to the park and I’d prove to you that you couldn’t possibly—“
“Mister?” the supposed child cut in.
“Yyyyyyes, dear?” Mr. Pendleton visibly braced himself for a fresh tantrum. He gave Gavin and Ms. Wellfleet a stern sideways glance that as good as growled, You had better stop whatever she starts. Or else.
But there was no need for anyone to intervene. Instead of raging anew, the fake tot whispered a miserable, “Okay.” Her lower lip quivered. Tears dripped from those bright, blue eyes. “Emilia” turned to go, the picture of a broken spirit, a defeated soul, a figure embodying a tragedy that ranked somewhere between the Little Match Girl and the death of Old Yeller. One hand on the office doorknob, she looked back at Mr. Pendleton and choked out: “You’re a meanie. You win.”
Pendleton had not ascended through the levels of the company sales force by ignoring the Great Truth: Emotion trumps Fact. He knew that if this darling child left his office looking like that, everyone who saw her would blame him, hate him, and privately pledge to champion that poor, unhappy cherub. They would remember her tears and seek ways to undermine the man who’d caused them. Yes, they needed their jobs, but he knew his control over them was not infinite. They would find plenty of ploys, short of outright rebellion, to bring down his hegemony. A charging elephant could wreck a house, but termites did it better, more often, and more thoroughly.
“Now just a minute, angel,” he said in haste. “How about if I let you have one turn at playing with this?” He took the bag from Gavin and pulled out the drone. “Maybe then you’ll see that I’m not lying when I say you’re too small to be able to work the controls. As soon as it’s lunch time we can go outside and—”
“Wow, really?” Oh, what a joyful expression graced a face that in its normal state was huge, green, scaly, and burgeoning with fangs! “Gee, thanks, Mister!”
And with an eruption of anarchy any real four-year-old would be proud to own, “Emilia” sprang forward to snatch the drone and its controls from Mr. Pendleton’s hands.
“Stop! Stop it!” he cried. “You can’t fly that in here!”
“I know,” the child replied, letting the drone itself drop to the floor. She set her hands to the controls and laughed. It was not the laughter of a child. She turned on the power.
It wasn’t a big office, as offices go, but it was big enough to suit the dragon’s purpose. Gavin and Nora gawked as their boss rose swiftly to the ceiling, hovered there bug-eyed for a moment, then began to swoop, roll, soar, and execute all sorts of airborne maneuvers. He circled the light fixture, snapped the top from the fake ficus, ricocheted off a framed photo of the 2017 inauguration, shattered the scotch bottle and glasses, and sent his desktop computer monitor crashing to the floor. His face was scarlet and his mouth distended as he screamed for help—
—without a single sound emerging. “Emilia” grinned.
Then the window opened. It wasn’t designed to do that. It opened anyway.
“Let’s see what this baby can really do,” the dragon said gleefully, aiming Mr. Pendleton straight for the wide-open spaces thirty-seven stories up. “Wow, I really hope the battery holds out. That’s a loooong way to fall. Well, if you do, I promise I’ll let you scream then.”
Pendleton’s eyes rolled back in his head, which dropped forward as he fainted in midair. The dragon snorted. “Lightweight. He wouldn’t last two seconds in my realm.” The beast in kid’s clothing set the unconscious man down gently in his desk chair. Then he repacked the drone and its controller in the paper shopping bag.
“Wh—who are you?” Nora faltered, shivering. “I mean, who are you really?”
“Emilia” gave the former intern the full brunt of a guileless gaze. “No one you’ll remember.” One pudgy, pink hand made a gesture so complex and finger-wiggly that it simply had to be mystical. Nora blinked and left the room in a daze, carrying the empty chocolate milk glass.
Paper-faced, Gavin stared at Mr. Pendleton’s limp body. “Is he dead?”
“Do you want him to be?” The dragon’s arch question was even more horrifying when coming from the lips of a child.
“Good Lord, no! What you just did—God, how am I going to explain this when he wakes up?”
“You won’t have to. I’ll see to it that he doesn’t remember anything about this little . . . interview except that he changed his mind and wants you to keep the drone. I took care to adjust the mind of the female who just left so that her memory of what happened here confirms his. And as a special two-for-one deal, if he even thinks of giving you a bad performance review, he’ll break out in brain hives until he banishes the very idea.”
“You can do that?”
“With weaker, more malleable minds than mine? Easy-peasey. The beings of this world pose no challenges for me, in that respect, unless . . .” An apprehensive look shadowed “Emilia’s” face. “You don’t have cats here, do you?”
Gavin ignored the question. “Wait a minute. If you can use human minds like play dough, why’d you put Pendleton through all this?” He flung his arms wide to include the open window, the wrecked monitor, and the general disorder. “And Nora! And me! Why didn’t you just zap Pendleton with that whole fuhgeddaboudit/brain hives thing—spell—Jedi mind trick—in the first place?”
“Tsk. Where’s the fun in that? Besides, I did all this for your entertainment. If you were an honest man, you’d admit that you enjoyed seeing him squirm.”
“I guess it was kind of funny,” Gavin admitted. “Um . . .” He scratched the back of his head and glanced around the topsy-turvy office. “Now what?”
The dragon’s true face materialized over the Emilia mask. “My obligation to you is fulfilled. Gather up your toy and go in peace. I have already taken the precaution of touching the minds of everyone who saw me here at your workplace and erasing all recollection of my presence in any form.”
“Are you going to do that to me, too?”
“No.”
“But I still remember—”
“And whom might you want to tell? Keep the drone, keep the memory, and keep your mouth shut unless you want to be deemed a madman.” A faint moan from Mr. Pendleton attracted the dragon’s attention. “He’ll wake soon. Leave us. I have to tidy up in here.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
This offer amused the dragon. “You might try not letting cowardice eat away at your lifetime, for a change. Grow a pair. Grow several.” The little girl vanished. The dragon was himself again, though in a more compact size, suitable to the available floor space. “Now get back to work.”
With a mumble of gratitude, Gavin obeyed.
Alone with the still comatose Mr. Pendleton, the dragon spoke a few words of power and restored the office to its status quo ante magicae. When all was properly in order, the great wyrm grumbled, “I wonder if he’ll actually manage to change anything about his life, dental or no dental? I can’t believe anyone could be so—”
And I can’t believe you took this long to deal with his problems! A thunderous, disembodied voice filled the dragon’s mind. Although perhaps I can. You’ve got a history of padding your time sheet. You dragged this out on purpose . . . if you were even supposed to be here in the first place! I suspect that you engineered this entire incident in an effort to slither out of tackling the real jobs on your assignment scroll.
“I never!” Every one of the dragon’s scales thrummed with righteous indignation. “How can you claim—?”
How can you claim that an ordinary, magicless mortal managed to zap anything through the portal between his realm and ours? I think what happened is that you were lollygagging and daydreaming instead of taking care of your allotted tasks. Your mind’s eye wandered into this pathetic world, you saw that man playing with his toy, and you sent a fetch spell to yank it into your clutches. Then you presented yourself to him with some cockatrice-and-minotaur tale about how he was the one who’d done it.
“You can’t prove that.”
Not at the moment, but I have a reliable scrying mirror and a bit of free time between now and your next performance review. An inarticulate exhalation of disgust filled Pendleton’s office. By the powers of Pilyx the Dawnstar, I swear that my sentence, serving as your manager to expiate my misdeeds makes me wish he’d used the Cosmic Spray Bottle of Chastisement on me instead and been done with it. The image of a giant kitten appeared, looming over the unhappy dragon. You’re a slothful disgrace. I’m docking your pay to one biweekly virgin and sending a memo about your time-wasting hijinks to our Chief Enchantment Officer. Other than that, I’ll let this slide, and you’d better appreciate my leniency.
The dragon lowered his eyes and capitulated to the inevitable. “Yes, Master Foofums.”
All right. Now get back to work. The kitten disappeared, pausing only to eat Mr. Pendleton.
The dragon scowled. “What a duck.”
Nebula Award winner Esther Friesner is the author of over forty novels and almost two hundred short stories. She is also a poet, a playwright, and the editor of several anthologies. The best known of these is the Chicks in Chainmail series that she created and edits for Baen Books. The sixth book, Chicks and Balances, appeared in July 2015. Deception's Pawn, the latest title in her popular Princesses of Myth series of Young Adult novels from Random House, was published in April 2015.
