Circles

Cora puttered around her kitchen, searching for her last box of brownie bites. Then she paused, fingers tapping on a cupboard door. She vaguely remembered Nate stopping by and having a muffled conversation with her. At the time, she'd been busy reading the instruction manual for her new game pod so she hadn't been paying that much attention to him.

She distinctly remembered the guilty look. She always remembered his guilty looks because they usually involved something of hers disappearing when he left. Cora frowned and glanced down the short hallway towards her front door. Sure enough, there was a faint trail of brownie crumbs leading from her neat kitchen to her front door.

Her phone chose that moment to ring. The giant display lit up, showing "Nate the Devourer." A slight smile tugged her lips at the sight. It was no sense crying over spilt milk, or in this case, eaten brownies. Even as she picked up the call she opened her refrigerator to check that she even had milk left for a quick bowl of cereal.

"So, what did you do to the Astral B?" Nate asked after her greeting.

"What?" Cora muttered as she pulled down a bowl and picked up her second favorite container of cereal.

"You don't read the forums at all, do you?" Nate complained. There was a rustle at his end. "Her little team is complaining that you not only stole a high end kill from them, you also set them up to be eaten and demoted." He chuckled. "Serves Astral B right."

"Why are you calling someone a B?" Cora interrupted as she poured milk, "and why aren't you playing?"

"Game kicked everyone out. Doing an update." There came distinct crunching noises.

"Ew! Not in my ear!" Cora said, pulling the receiver away from her. She shook her head as Nate's voice started ringing tinnily from it.

"Aw, come on! I'm starving! I was in that pod for twelve hours before I got kicked," Nate's crunching diminished a bit. "How long did you play?"

"Just a couple hours. Long enough to run about a bit."

"Long enough to get into serious trouble, you mean," Nate interjected. "Really, though, what happened?"

"They were beating up a baby and I stopped them," Cora said. She chuckled. "It's not like it was a fair battle either way. At least the baby got away."

"You and your rescue kick. Well, as long as you book it out of the beginner's area ASAP, you'll be fine. Astral B carries grudges and she's not nice to be polite."

"None of your words about her have been polite."

"Politer than they should be," Nate responded. "Me and my team are about to reach level 12 and head off to Feinheim Town in the northwest. When you're ready, look for us there. I'll tell you if we change bases."

"Okay," Cora said with an eyeroll. "I will look out for that evil baby-battering group and follow after as soon as I can."

"Good! I worry about you, even with all that security," Nate said. "Love ya! Bye!"

"Love ya! Bye!" Cora grinned as she hung up the phone and carried her bowl of cereal back towards the spare bedroom that housed her game pod.

Nate had won a contest that granted him two game pods and he'd given one of them to her, worried that she was going to become a shut-in for the rest of her life. Since neither of them really needed to work, it had been a valid worry.

While not fabulously wealthy, they had possessed a great-grandmother who'd taken advantage of general weirdness during a national tragedy and bought seriously undervalued stocks for pennies on the dollar. With the stocks came dividends when they bounced back. As the grand dame had said while chuckling more than once, she'd lived on rice and prayers until those first dividends came in and had sold a few of the stocks once they bounced back.

Their great-grandmother had had a knack for stocks and bonds and had turned her initial small investment into a rather large fortune that she'd granted to her two grandchildren rather than their parents. Blithely unconcerned about familial discord, she'd also hidden away a decent sum for her great-grandkids. As she'd told the two ten-year-olds on her deathbed, she'd watched money that should have gone to her in her youth disappear in her family's loving hands and wanted better for her favorite descendants.

When Mr. Weatherbee had descended with the iron clad will and steely nature, neither their parents or grandparents had been able to pry their inheritances or the executor rights to them out of his grasp. It was probably the only reason why either one of them still had money.

He'd followed the advice of various stock analysts and while their little fortune didn't grow by much, it'd stuck to the original goal of earning dividends that were deposited into accounts used for Nate and Cora's education, aside from a generous weekly allowance and eventually granted to them upon graduation.

The first thing both of them had done was decamp from their parents' houses. Their parents were paid quarterly and always looked for them whenever they started running low. What seemed very pride-worthy as children struck the young adult them as very wasteful. Even Cora had no idea of how much of her monthly allowance had fallen into her parents' pockets.

Now Cora lived in a secure high-end condo with strict instructions that her parents weren't allowed inside. Her previous residence hadn't been so cautious and she'd come home to a virtually stripped home one day. They'd taken almost everything, only disdaining the game cards framed on the wall. Ironically those had been worth thousands whereas the little art pieces were only worth hundreds at best. Her mother had said airily that she was helping her redecorate and get rid of useless things.

Cora knew that her mother had lost big in Vegas and had been anxious to recoup her losses so she wouldn't lose face in front of her friends. While Cora didn't mind gambling, she never lost more than half a week's allowance.

Cora sat on the little daybed next to the pod and stared at the framed cards on the wall. After pondering, she decided to ignore Nate's words and log into the game.

The first words she saw as the darkness started to lighten were:

"Welcome to the New World Update."

While Cora was still pondering those words, she became aware of wind whistling past her ears. When she craned her head around, she found that she was laying on a softly rounded surface, cradled between two giant red sails. Then the sails descended to either side, revealing a vast expanse of land and water.

Even as her mind processed that she was laying on a dragon rather than the meadow or even the graveyard of the Beginner's Area, a small scaly head appeared above her, golden eyes worriedly scanning her face.

"Are you sure it's okay? It's opened its eyes and hasn't moved," the scaly head said, looking upwards.

"Silly ember. It's merely stunned by our beauty," this came from the larger version. This one had faint lines of green starting to emerge from its scales instead of the muted greys and blacks of the smaller one. "Or perhaps the spell. Somesuch whatever."

'Ember' blinked golden eyes at Cora.

"I'm okay," Cora managed even as her mind processed that the weird red sails were wings rather than silk.

"See? It was probably doing that weird thing that they do when permissions are being reset." The larger version had a distinctly smug look. It reminded her of when Nate was trying to mansplain something to her.

"Permissions?" the younger one asked, turning its attention to its bigger sibling.

"The Elder Council will explain once you've gone through primary schooling," the bigger one said, glancing away as something suspiciously like a growl rumbled under their feet.

Cora sat up, neatly dislodging the little dragon who tumbled into her lap. It giggled, twisting about until it oriented itself properly. Even as it did the other dragon huffed and rolled its eyes.

"I'm Sycamore! What's your name?" the baby dragon asked, eyes sparkling.

"Cora."

"Just Cora?" the larger one looked doubtful. "You don't have some sort of family or clan affiliation? Not even one of those guild things some of the two-leggers have been going on and on about?"

"What two-leggers?" Cora asked, bewildered.

"Y'know…the two-leggers!" the larger one shrugged bonelessly even as Sycamore nodded its tiny head.

"You're one of the weird two-leggers, though. The non-weird ones have been chatting how they have to say the same thing to y'all until certain things have been done." Sycamore giggled again and then raised herself onto her hindlegs and peered into Cora's eyes. "If I hadn't wanted to go get some things from that pond near Orwewalt Village, I wouldn't have been picked on by those weird ones!"

"Thank you for saving my little sister. My name's Dewalt and this is our babysitter, Germaine." There was an answering rumble from their transportation. "You saved our skins. If anything were to happen to Sycamore before she's my rank…" Dewalt's voice trailed off. It swiped a long stick of something from a bag by its feet and crunched down on it with sharp, shiny teeth.

"Where are we going?" Cora asked, deciding to ignore that last part. None of the conversation was actually making any sense to her.

"We're going to see the Elder Council so you can get a proper reward. The weird ones are very fierce and some so vicious! Imagine attacking a baby," reverberated through their feet.

Cora and the little dragons exchanged looks and decided to wait on further discussions as faint plumes of smoke trailed over them.

*****

The journey took well over an hour. The dragon they were riding on winged towards a flat plain with a circle picked out in white stones at one end. There was a small house before the circle and a barracks of soldiers who only glanced up once at the descending dragon before going back to their daily duties.

"Off," the red dragon huffed, the faint golden lines on its body flaring ever so slightly.

The little dragons and Cora hastily tumbled off. The red dragon stretched its neck, rotating its head from side to side.

A soldier hurried up to them, closely followed by two others. From her scant memory of the forums, Cora identified the leader as a captain from the weird tangle of symbols and lines on their sleeve. He jerked to a halt in front of the dragon and snapped out a salute, his subordinates doing the same.

"Well met, good dragoness! How may we be of service?" He asked in a booming voice.

"We need teleport to the Elders' Conclave," the red dragon said with a puff of black smoke.

"Excellent! We will calculate the coordinates immediately," the captain said, turning and plowing back to the barracks.

"Teleport?" Cora repeated, bewildered. There was nothing in the manuals or forums about teleportation.

"Oh, poor, weak, weird two-legger, let me enlighten your feeble mind," Dewalt said with a proud arch of its black neck. The faint golden markings gleamed faintly in the afternoon light. "Teleportation circles are everywhere! Practically everywhere!"

He gesticulated with both forelegs and stubby wings. Sycamore sighed and laid down next to Cora.

"He's such a show-off," Sycamore groused irritably.

"Hush," Cora said, sitting down next to her. "Learning things is always interesting."

She missed Germaine's approving nod as she turned her attention to Dewalt's posturing. Dewalt wobbled a little as he balanced on his hind legs, wings gently waving to keep him stabilized.

"There are circles in nearly every village, but most are small, barely able to contain just one person and their backpack. The bigger ones like this one are rarer, and those that can go to the Conclaves are the rarest which is why there's soldiers to protect them." Dewalt glanced at the barracks which was now boiling with energy.

"Conclave requests are rare, though," Dewalt continued. "Not because it takes that much energy to run the circles, but because you have to know which symbols stand for where. You can't just operate them willy-nilly or you'll wind up in Limbo or worse!"

"What's worse that Limbo?" Sycamore asked.

"The preparations are made," Germaine interrupted, black smoke wafting out of her mouth. "I hate using fire. It takes so long for it to dissipate," she complained as she herded them towards the large circle.

"But Dewalt didn't say," Sycamore began.

"Later, little one, later," Germaine soothed as she swept them all into the circle with a swoop of her wings.

Cora blinked as she tumbled past the stone circle's borders. She looked up to see the soldiers crowding around to watch, some of them wide-eyed. From the looks of it, using the circle to go to this 'Conclave' was a special thing that didn't happen that often. She watched as the captain solemnly paced forward and took off the medallion around his neck.

He carefully set it on a stone pillar by the circle. Obligingly, the circle's stone lit up in a blinding white light that cycled through the colors of the rainbow.

"I love teleportation circles," Dewalt crowed as the light suddenly intensified.

Cora opened her mouth to ask more when the world simply went away.