Bethany used her newfound knowledge to turn off the very exciting codpiece by pointing at it.

  "Thanks." Lucas said to Bethany, before addressing the whole building. "Bob's on latrine duty when we get back to the ship."

  "Whoa, maybe don't come get me then, Lucas." Bob said. But it was too late, the scout had already taken off at a jog, and he already knew the way.

  "Bob, the teleporters on the map still work, right?" Lucas asked.

  "Maybe. That depends, if... when you come get me are you going to use me to scrub a toilet or something?"

  "I was assuming you could do it with magic, what with how you picked up the thing, but otherwise... Sure I'd attach a scrub brush to your forehead and use you like a toilet wand."

  "Oh my!" The detached voice following Lucas said, dripping with erotic sarcasm. "I love a stern man to abuse me. Talk dirty be me Lucas, tell me what other filthy surfaces I'll get to wipe down."

  Lucas didn't respond verbally as he pushed the middle and fifth buttons of the seven button array to activated the the teleport circle, but he did roll his eyes a little. There was a flash and he was in the central portal chamber, underground. A soft white light glowed from the middle of the room and each corner of the pentagonal room. Five teleportation circles carved in the corners, and a final one spinning slowly in the middle of the room.

  "You're nasty Bob. I like you. I really hope you can clean the toilets with magic, because that would be amazing." Lucas jogged to the central portal and once inside the circle, he slapped the activator button. Just one for this one.

  The light flashed and Lucas found himself in a dark room with air that would have tasted stale if he weren't wrapped up in his own atmosphere inside an exosuit. He reached up and pressed the button on the outside of said suit that turned on his helmet lights.

  As he swept the light across the room he realized this room wasn't really all that large. He was at the end of a short hallway, at the end of which was a sort of recessed couch area. A small pedestal with a human skull set atop stood in the middle. The eye sockets reflected the light, like catching a cat with a camera flash, and then suddenly sprang to life. An orange light that looked like a tiny sun in each eye socket lit up.

  "Lucas my man! Welcome to my pad, pardon the mess."

  At the base of the pedestal, there were two large stone boulders.

  Lucas walked closer and realized. Those were no boulders.

  "Bob..." Those were dragon eggs. Pristine petrified dragon's eggs, at least as far as Lucas was concerned. "Are those what I think they are?"

  "I honestly have no idea what you think they are, you people don't know about ideablasts, and you can't work a wizard's child safety lock. Whatever you think they are, I'm ready to be disappointed."

  "Are those fucking space dragon eggs?"

  "I dunno that the language is necessary, but yeah, they are." Bob would have scratched his head in confusion, if he had hands, "It's not like they're extinct are they?"

  "Eeehhhhhh..." Lucas didn't know how to break it to him. The Space Dragons were dead. "There's few thousand petrified eggs in museums scattered across the galaxy. Most of them are whole. Like these two.... but that's all there is left of them, as far as I know."

  "These aren't petrified, they're waiting. By the way you realize that you're entirely undefended against mind magic attacks, right? I could just pluck all this information from your little noggin; it would be the fastest way for me to get caught up."

  "Whoa! No, Bob! We don't read people's memories without permission."

  "You're not my dad Lucas, you can't tell me what to do." Bob stuck out his lack of a tongue. It didn't have the effect he hoped it would. "But I am asking your permission. I promise it won't hurt. And I won't tell anyone about your crushes or the times you peed your pants."

  "Seriously? Are you already rooting around in there? You want me to trust you, but you snuck into my head?"

  "Yeah, a little. I asked your subconscious, since you're all intransigent up on the surface and he was cool with it. How else would I know how shocking it'll be for you to learn that there is a Space Dragon, and he's dropping out of warp in low orbit with the Dragon Scion in tow, right now."

  "WHAT!?" Lucas shouted, "Are you guys copying still?"

  "We heard him Lucas." Sheena said. They'd been listening in on comms the whole time. "What's the play Nuphidri?"

  "Collapse on Lucas. Defend and observe the eggs through whatever is about to happen. They're worth as much as the ship, each."

  "Dammit! I just finished dusting off this F-meat." Rex complained.

  "Stow it." The Nuphidri said. "In your bag. And then let's get moving. Whatever is coming, my relay to the ship says it is cruiser class in size. Couple hundred meters, at least. The Gizmometer is off the chart's too. Whatever it is, it's magical as all getout."

  Rex scooped up the camp stove and the remaining supplies scattered about and stuffed them haphazardly into his pack before running off along the path Lucas had left. Digital breadcrumbs on the augmented reality display inside their suits made it easy to follow your friends path, down to the foot placements and where they touched things with their fingers.

  Lucas' path lit up green when they were tracking it. Everyone had their own colors.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The Nuphidri was the last one into the chamber where Bob and the two eggs were.

  "Ahh the whole gang's here!" Bob chuckled, "Great. Hey you guys aren't gonna try to steal the eggs or something are you."

  Bethany, wheezing out of breath, staggered over to Bob's pedestal and snatched him off it. "You're... coming... with ME!"

  "Help Help! I'm being kidnapped!" Bob joked. Simultaneously he cast a spell on Bethany to help her get her breath.

  "But I..." Bethany abruptly steadied her breath. "Thought you wanted to come?"

  "Oh I do dear, and you're welcome for the fresh air spell. I'd be perfectly happy in the bag, but from in there I can't-" He was going to offer to project an illusion of what was happening up above, but the Nuphidri had beat him to it with a relay from the sensors on their ship, and the tactical hologram projector built into her suit.

  "Magic and technology work... together now, side by side. No burnouts... huh? I didn't see that coming."

  "Did they not in your time?" Bethany asked, ignoring the space dragon hologram descending from space.

  "Not so much. Magic and tech used to be like Mustard and Vanilla ice cream. Good change though, I say. As the ages change, so to do the laws of magic. Not so much laws as they are, amendable rules, really." Bob said. "I'm still waiting for someone to change them in such a way that it kills me. Wouldn't that be nice."

  "You can change the laws of magic?!" She completely ignored his quiet wish for oblivion.

  "Well I can't, not from here anyhow. But sure, you get me inside the brain of the Great Gigas, I can make them whatever we want. Why something wrong with the current laws?" Bob asked.

  Bethany just sat down in the recessed couch, eye's unfocused. Trying to understand all the implications of everything Bob just told her. The cushions were so soft, and that's about all she could actually focus on for the moment.

  Everyone else was busy looking at the gargantuan space dragon that was winding up what sure looked like one hell of a breath attack.

  He charged up. The runes in his scales started glowing first on his head, but then raced their way down his long dragon form, all two hundred meters of him. He pointed his face down toward the center of the pentagon, where some distance underground, the whole team was waiting, with Bob.

  Flux unleashed.

  "Should be we running, that's shooting right at us!" Lucas shouted over the roar of the world shaking around them.

  "HaHAha!" Bob laughed maniacally. "Way too late now, suckers! He's shooting. The teleporters ain't gonna be powered, nor safe if they were."

  The world shook as the surface above them was ablated away by the dragon based planetary mining laser. A second into the blast there and there was too much interference and noise for the Nuphidri's sensor linkage to stay online.

  This threw the room into darkness, which only cause Bob to laugh more maniacally. A few seconds of serious shaking later, the ceiling started to warm up, and then glow. It grew brighter for a moment, then the terrible shaking stopped. The glowing receded.

  Then there was a heavy thud against the roof, and a moment later, the roof... was gone.

  ____

  - A few minutes ago -

  "Oh... all the gods I've never believed in. My world is beautiful, Flux." Yorna had a telepathic channel continuously open with Flux. So they could communicate now that he was carrying her into space, and for no other reason.

  "Beautiful, indeed. It has been far too long since I flew this high."

  She felt his mind clearing as they rose further and further away from her little mountain. Just like her mother's had the hour before she passed. And her sister's... and her nephews, and their children too. And most of the elders she saw pass.

  "So Flux, old friend, anything you want to teach me while we're up here, anywhere we should go?"

  "Yorna... Little girl, teenage menace, ancient witch..." His mind was growing crisper, clearer than she'd ever known it. "Ha. Haha! I should have seen it sooner."

  "Seen what?"

  "You're the Dragon Scion! I feel a fool for not remembering it sooner. I know my final command."

  Flux sent a new, different kind of detection magic ping out into the universe. A subspace scanning wave. Bob, sensing the magic pass over him, answered, with 'Eggs still here.'

  "Pay close attention, this one might even throw you for a loop trying to replicate on the first try." The ancient dragon used the return information from his subspace ping to plot two warp jumps. One wouldn't do to get to Bob, and the eggs the bloody star was in the way of a direct line.

  After the first jump Flux Started to charge up again-

  "Wait! Give me a second to process that... Whoa."

  "Yorna, old friend... I think we both know there isn't much time left."

  "Okay okay, I'm ready." Yorna opened up her magical senses as wide as she could. She'd been less than fully prepared for the first jump, but if she wanted to travel the stars after Flux was gone, she needed to know this magic. One more try to get it. She sent out a continuous scan pulse, and another of that new type she'd just seen a few moments ago.

  They jumped, and arrived in low orbit around the third planet from her home star. One closer than she was used to, and a bit stronger gravity than she normally felt.

  "I will open the ground most of the way, but you will have to do the last bit. I fear my method won't have the precision required to ensure the eggs here remain unharmed."

  "Eggs?"

  But Flux didn't answer, he just started charging up his full power.

  One.

  Last.

  Time.

  As the beam ended he dropped her pod. A wing flap later, a heartbeat later, his gravity bladder sputtered, his magic all but spent, he started to fall from the sky. Slowly at first, as if gravity itself couldn't believe it would be allowed to take down such a fiercesome opponent after all this time.

  Yorna excused herself from the pod before it hit, and though she had to work 1.4 times harder than she was used to, she managed to fly with her spell that mimicked the gravity bladder giving out above her.

  She sent a ping to feel how deep to yank the earth up to get to the room the eggs were in. She could feel them down there. A whispered ebb of life, hidden in a thick casing of stone. The eggs were in a room with four others, humans, and a fifth person that felt like none other she'd ever sensed before, and... magical thing of great depth and power, like Flux, but in a far smaller package.

  She ripped the ground away with her magic, tearing through meters of molten stone before she found solid rock. She tore through that just the same. To make sure she didn't hit Flux as he fell, she fired the rocks she was pulling loose into space, accelerating them until they either came apart or left the atmosphere.

  She looked a round and saw the molten stone where her friend was about to land, and blasted a ring of wintry air out to cool his final resting place down from searing hot, to comfortably warm. Then she turned back to the hole, and the eggs.

  Seconds after she pulled away the final stones, Flux's body fell upon the hole they'd dug together. His face, down near the bottom of it, so he could see the eggs. Yorna flew down and landed next to them, along with the blinding light of day, which hadn't been in that room for over a thousand years.

  "Yorna. There is a friend of mine in that dark little hole we just opened, you can trust them, when I am gone."

  "I know Flux, old friend, I know you have to go soon, but-" The rains started, as they did on this part of the planet, often.

  "Pay attention to the Dag-ron now, Little Yorna. One more lesson." Flux rumbled, and the land rumbled with him.

  He cast his ultimate spell. Yorna copied him, through the tears streaming down her face, lost in the rain, she copied that spell, and cast it on the other egg.

  Flux closed his eyes, his mind clear in his last moments, his maker's final command... complete at last. Flux's flesh, but not his bones began to sizzle off into dust. The magic keeping him alive, all spent.

  'Train the Dragon Scion.' Heh, I finally did it old man.

  "Goodbye, Yorna. Thank you, and good luck with the dragonlings..."