Dragon Bound

Chapter 5

If she is becoming a dragon, or if she is already a dragon, shouldn’t there be a sign in her body or mind or something? Shouldn’t there be a switch or something that she can flip on and off to be able to use that part of her?

Ryoka kept thinking and contemplating different things, she as well thought that it might have all been in her mind after all, maybe all these has been one huge delirium after all.

But she peeped out through the bushes again and still saw the van and the men in white suit there, and this time around they looked as if they were getting agitated or something, the more she watched them the more it actually got apparent that they were now uneasy.

‘’It is now or never” Ryoka said to herself, and remembering how her father and the other odd looking guy had transformed, she started to have an idea.

She took a deep breath and stepped out in front of the van albeit a bit of a distance away, at first the men did not notice her so she used that opportunity to try her first option.

She clapped her hands together as she had seen both her father and the odd looking man dragon do and then she formed the same hand seal that the odd looking man had formed.

From deep within her guts she felt a pull but it wasn’t that strong so all she got was a loud whooshing sound followed by a bit of heat wave that surrounded just her, scorching the road around her in a bit of a circle.

She gasped as couldn’t believe it had actually worked, she was just giving it a desperate try and voilà, it actually did work, but then her actions had called the attention of the men in the van and they had sprung into action, carrying dart guns and heading for her.

And as soon as she saw that, she desperately tried option two and once again she clasped her hand together but this time she made the hand seal her father had formed.

The whoosh and heat wave was a lot more intense this time around as was the pull in her guts, she strained hard and held the pull to her gut in place, which as well held the heat wave which kept spreading till it got to the men and did to them the very same thing it did to the others before.

The smell of burning flesh seared her nose and stung her eyes, and when the heat wave rolled to the van, the van actually exploded.

The shockwave disrupted Ryoka and she released her hand seal without meaning to, stopping the heat wave in the process, one of the men had still been conscious and active with his gun still pointed at her though, so at the release of the heat wave, he pulled the trigger even though it was entirely unintentional.

The dart hit Ryoka at her thigh even as the shooter crumbled on the floor and passed out and immediately she started to feel its effect, she looked at the dart before her vision started to get blurry and from what she saw, her thought was, 'this is definitely meant for dragons’ as discovered that the contents in the dart was enough to take down two elephants.

Before she got unconscious, Ryoka struggled to get away from the road and landed back into the bushes, she rolled away uncontrollably for a while before stopping at a tree stump and then she drifted off into unconsciousness after being completely paralyzed.

*

Ryoka opened her eyes slowly, they hurt as bright light rays streamed into her eyes, so she squinted till her eyes adjusted to the light.

As feeling returned to her, she felt that she was on something soft, a bed she thought suddenly realizing that she might have been captured, she sprung up into a sitting position and looked widely about.

First thing she noticed was that the setting of the place did not look like a place where those people might take someone who had been captured by them, it looked a bit too luxurious for that, she was fairly sure this had to be a room in a motel.

Then she noticed the man by the window, he just stood there with his side to her and one of his hand slightly holding the curtain open as if he had been peeping outside before.

“Where am I? Who are you?” Ryoka asked a bit panicked, she would have actually been more panicked if the guy had been in a white suit.

But rather he looked pretty good in the deep green turtleneck sweatshirt he wore and a tightly fitted pants, but there was something a bit odd about his eyes even though they were on nearly perfect facial features.

His irises were red, brilliant red and his cornea were black rather than white, these gave him somewhat of a reptilian look.

He left the window side after one last look outside and then came closer to the bed where Ryoka was, Ryoka shifted a bit away as he came closer but the guy only drew a chair to him to sit facing her rather than going for the bed.

“Hello Ryoka, I believe it is, first of all I’m sorry it took later than anticipated to find you, you shouldn’t have gone through that experience you had” he said, apologizing calmly in a lovely slightly deep voice.

“My name is Damien, I’m a freelance agent and I work only to help the Dn mutated, victims of the WIC Inc., I help with relocation, new identities and new lives, and I am your father’s handler handpicked by himself” he explained ever so calm and collected.

“Your father informed me about the need for relocation at about two nights ago, he just suddenly called me up about the need for another sudden change, so we had set up a couple of things in place, but then I received his red alert SOS after, I came as fast as I could but on getting to the scene, it all had been cleared out and cleaned by WIC, the only thing I got was the encrypted message of your father to find you” he said, and then Ryoka decided he was cool.

“Uhm, I guess that makes you the person dad said he’d send to me” Ryoka asked trying to free herself up since it seemed all is well for the time being.

“Well, yes, that would be me, I am his handler, that makes me your handler as well so it’s only right that I take you under my wings prior to the time that we would hear anything else from him, although the WIC Inc. are still hot on our trail as it is” he said and as he did, he went by the window to check again.

Ryoka could almost laugh at the ‘under my wings’ expression he had used, it could be literal for all she knew, and she was itching to ask about his eyes.

“I’m guessing you know right? About his uhm, being a… dragon?” she asked skeptically, she didn’t know if to trust him enough yet, and with right questions she knew she would be able to know if to or not eventually.

He looked away from the window and at her, his expression was asking her if she was really serious about that question.

“Uhm, Yes, I know he is a Dn mutant” he answered as if the question was a trick question, Ryoka figured at that point that the term he had used was the right one.

“Dn mutant?” she asked while scratching her head, she didn’t want to look ignorant, but then she knew next to nothing about this new world.

“Wait, just how much did your father tell you about your heritage?” Damien asked now realizing that she wasn’t trying to trap him with an intentional wrong question.

“Uhm, next to nothing, yesterday was the first time I would ever see a dragon, two in fact, but before that, I had absolutely no idea of their existence” Ryoka answered honestly.

Damien left the window once more and sat back on his chair, he pinched his nose together and shook his head, “oh Dante, Dante, typical Dante!” He said a bit exasperated.

Ryoka hardly heard her father’s name being mentioned, in fact she never hears it if not when he enrolls her in a new school –and that is the only time he ever shows up in her school- and maybe he got called by the teacher or principal besides this had happened only just four times that she could remember.

Now hearing this one man saying it as if that is all he ever calls him by really came as a refreshing shock to her, she wondered just how well he knew her father and just how much he can tell her about him and the days before she entered the picture, she was sure he couldn’t have spent all his life on the move like it had been with them both, somewhere in her mind she wondered if he even knew about her mother.

“Ok listen Ryoka, from what I saw back in the jungle, you already know you are not ordinary, you are not an ordinary human being, and that is because you are a special generation of the descendants of the Eldrians, also know as Elder races, also called dragons, the actual originals” he started explaining to her.

“The originals have been around for a really long time, living in peace on their own continent, hidden from the rest of the world with exceptional technology, then thanks to the glitch, a powerful cooperation called the WIC Inc. discovered them and went to them as allies only to betray the trust that the Eldrians had in them by freezing them all up on their continent” he said, adding a bitter expression around the part of the betrayal.

“The WIC Inc. didn’t stop there though, they started to conduct series of experiments on them especially after discovering that some of them lived normal lives amongst humans and had also been around for long, so much so that some humans are descended from them and have the Eldrian genes in them as well” he continued.

“So since they couldn’t do anything to the frozen over continent, the WIC Inc. focused on the ones amongst the humans, taking them from their homes and lives and locking them up for experimentation, and so also, they searched for humans who have the Eldrian gene -which we call Dn gene- abundant in them and from them they got the first set of new generation dragons, the Dn mutants” he kept on going, trying to cover much of the things she need to know.

“Then an unprecedented result came forth when some of the victims came together in unions, the old generation (original Eldrians) mixed with the new generation (Dn mutants) and they produced the first set of special generation Eldrians, the likes of you Ryoka” he explained.

He seemed to be rushing through his explanation because he was in a state of unrest, Ryoka noticed this as he got up again to go to the window and peep some more.

Ryoka felt she could tell which was which with her parents, her mother must have been an original, hence why she was so absent from her life she guessed, while her father had to be a Dn mutant.

“How does one tell the difference between dragons, besides how do you know if someone is a dragon even” Ryoka asked, she had an idea how it is, especially for identification of dragons amongst humans.

“One of the most common means of identification, and that can be found on all the three generations of Eldrians, that’s the hair, the color of the scales reflect on the hair” Damien said still peeping.

Ryoka had rightly suspected this, and from this confirmation she knew her scales color already then, she had been born a redhead, with highlights of white.

“Come Ryoka, we have to leave now, we have a window of an opportunity to escape, the WIC’s net had been closing in on us since” Damien said and lifted a backpack from the corner out of two that was there and passed it to Ryoka while he took the second one.

As they moved out in a rush headed towards a car in the motel’s park, Ryoka couldn’t help but think if running is all that her life is going to be about.