Training at WarWings is dangerous. Colonizing exoplanets is serious business.
But somehow within minutes of the executions on Wednesday morning, word of what happened leaked to the media on the mainland. And the news satellites instantly started rolling out stories about how those poor cadet dragons had been executed.
So late that morning the WarWings PR machine leapt into action. They spun the story the best way they could. They deployed our most esteemed professors, who hit the Wednesday late-morning news outlets and said the three cadets had died honorably in the line of duty.
Suddenly on every outlet you turned to there was a WarWings professor decked out in their distinguished cloak and robe and being interviewed. And these professors kept explaining how those three cadets had died heroically in the line of duty while performing reconnaissance on a planet five million light years away.
But then after a sophomore cadet named Gleeg saw these false reports on TV, Gleeg sat down and penned a blistering opinion piece for the WarWings central datastream, The Digital Fire-Breather. And early Wednesday afternoon this dragon Gleeg’s piece was posted on our school’s datastream, and the headline read:
LINE OF DUTY? HA!
MORE LIKE LINE OF FIRE
YOU BIG FAT LIARS!
Now this dragon Gleeg who wrote the op-ed was known to be some kind of mega hotshot fiend in his sophomore class. And plus Gleeg descended from something like a hundred generations of WarWings alums. So on campus that Wednesday afternoon there’d been a real sense in the air that Gleeg’s article posted on The Digital Fire-Breather could deal a devastating blow to Dean Floop and the Council of the Elders and their entire regime.
Well Dean Floop and the WarWings Council of the Elders called an emergency meeting and determined the dragon Gleeg who’d written the op-ed posed a serious security risk and so he too was sentenced to death by firestream.
So early Wednesday afternoon, Gleeg was yanked out of class and then marched out to the middle of the campus quad and blindfolded. And his talons and wings were shackled to prevent flight. Dean Floop stood thirty yards in front of Gleeg and took his mark.
The blindfolded dragon Gleeg defiantly snorted firebolts out his nostrils and puffed out his chest and cried: “The truth will set me free! Because the pen is mightier than the firestream!”
Then Dean Floop blasted that poor bastard Gleeg with a mega firestream, and the cadet was instantly reduced to a neat little pile of ash. The rest of us cadet fiends standing in formation were made to click our talons together in applause and flap our wings and lash our tails against the ground. And then we all simultaneously gave the WarWings victory salute.
Then the pile of ash was collected and placed in a WarWings Honorable Remains Container and delivered to Gleeg’s parents, along with a posthumous WarWings citation for bravery in the line of duty.
But Gleeg’s execution had a galvanizing effect on us WarWings cadets. That afternoon you could feel the tension in the air all over the island. And by this point there were already whispers and rumblings that some of the senior cadets were plotting an uprising against Dean Floop and his nasty regime.
And that night MediaPods flew around above Scale Island, shining their insidious spotlights here and there. They were aiming to fetch some incriminating evidence and maybe score some interviews about Gleeg’s execution.
I remember at one point strolling out of the Library and cutting across campus and suddenly I was hit with a MediaPod’s giant spotlight from overhead. And I’m sure not proud to have to be telling you this, but when that fiendish spotlight lit up all around me, well I just dropped my books on the ground and flapped my wings—thwack-thwack—and flew like a bastard all the way back to my lair.
And so with the swarm of MediaPods choking the airspace over the island, things quickly escalated and spiraled out of control. Because that night an urgent security alert from the Dean’s office was blasted out to us cadets by powerstaff, instructing us that under no uncertain terms were we cadets to speak to the putrid media. Dean Floop had placed the entire island on a media blackout.
And then Dean Floop took command of the WarWings cadets’ communications satellite and went on the airwaves and declared the airspace above the island a no-fly zone. And within seconds of announcing the no-fly order over the airwaves, the swarming MediaPods were shot down out of the night sky and went crashing in a streak of bright flames straight into the ocean.
But the next morning—which was yesterday morning, Thursday—an indignant and rowdy group of thirteen cadet protesters stormed the Council of the Elders building on campus. These cadets had their tails raised in Threat Displays and were chanting tributes to their recently fallen comrades.
“No more lies! Not one more dragon dies!”
And:
“Our fallen cadets are heroes! The killers are zeros!”
Then Dean Floop and the Council of the Elders determined that these rowdy protesting cadets now posed a serious security risk.
So the thirteen cadets were detained in mid-protest and marched out to the middle of the campus quad and blindfolded. Dean Floop stood thirty yards in front of the dragons and took his mark.
And one of the blindfolded cadets puffed out his chest and growled, “Judge not lest you—” But then another blindfolded cadet cut him off and blurted out some nugget of wisdom and instantly they were all blurting stuff out and talking over each other so that you couldn’t understand anything that was being said.
Then Dean Floop blasted each of the thirteen cadets with a mega firestream and each of them was reduced to a neat little pile out there on the campus quad. And each pile of ash was collected and placed in a WarWings Honorable Remains Container and delivered to the parents along with a posthumous WarWings citation for bravery in the line of duty.
But Dean Floop’s hardline approach backfired. Because yesterday by late morning the public outcry on the mainland over the deaths of all those WarWings cadets had grown so loud and raucous that you could practically feel the entire planet vibrating. And the dragons on the mainland weren’t just demanding answers anymore.
They were calling for Dean Floop’s skull on a platter.
Now apparently it was then, it was yesterday morning—the day before Crown Day—that the demented and dangerous Dean Floop decided to put my scaly grandpa directly in the line of fire and use him as a scapegoat for the past couple days of horror at WarWings. And that’s what led to the RageFest, and that’s what—
Thwack-thwack.
My thoughts are interrupted: savage bursts of air are exploding all around me, and the sound of dozens of psychotic dragons’ leathery wings thwacking next to my earholes. Then a ruthless flying cadet bastard smashes into the side of my scaly green head—boom!—and bounces off.