Zing.
Now Runcita’s tongue is flying too fast to track but you can just make out the red blur of it. And you can tell by how Runcita is crouched there on her haunches, with her leathery wings spread wide and her green tail lifted high, that she’s trained in the art of tongue-fu. Meanwhile Bruggert is zooming right at her like a missile. Runcita’s tongue smashes Bruggert’s beak and he goes soaring up into the air and lands with his ass stuck inside a slave-catching barrel mounted up on the wall. Bruggert’s monsterish scaly head is lolling off at a weird angle and it looks like his long green neck is probably broken. And all the cadets crowd around and start whooping and snorting and whistling.
Zing.
Runcita retracts her long red tongue back into her beak. Then she strolls over and looks up at that scaly green bastard Bruggert wedged there in the slave-catching barrel.
“Told you not to call me Run Run,” she says. “I even said please.”
Bruggert looks at Runcita with googly eyes, and then he moans.
Now Runcita starts to make her way to the exit. And all the other cadets in the gym instantly revert back to their regular hoopla.
Nearby a couple dragon fools are milling around and laughing. One of them leaps backward, doing an impression of Bruggert getting his ass knocked out.
Making her way to the gym exit, Runcita just so happens to be coming my way.
“Pardon me,” says Runcita. “Coming through.”
She is walking straight toward me. So I quickly raise the little silver canister to my dome and spritz my horns with GrowGrow? gel. Suddenly there’s a white hot flash in my brain and I can feel some sort of machine crank up inside my skull. Then without really knowing why I am doing it, I tilt my scaly green head back and snort flames out my nostrils and start singing a WILL TO POWER poem:
“Oh why oh why, you ask,
is Gork so great?
Well by and by you’ll see it’s cuz
I’m the fiend who seals your fate!
Cuz I’m the one that decides who’ll
be living and dying,
And my foes are foolish if escape is something
they’re thinking about trying
Cuz my will’s like iron
and it don’t matter if you running, swimming, or flying!
Now where’s all them luscious chicks
who keep begging me to mate?
All y’all dragonettes got to get in line,
cuz I’m so great!”
As soon as I finish singing, I remember.
The CTD-2000.
And when I finish belting out the poem here in the gym, I feel the poem jacking me up with blasts of MATING MAGNETISM juice.
My nostrils flare.
I can hear all the cadets behind me start snorting and roaring with laughter after hearing me sing the poem out loud. And then they start chanting: “Weak Sauce! Weak Sauce! Weak Sauce!”
But I don’t care. Let these dragon fools make a racket. I’m near the end of my Queen Quest and that’s all that matters.
Because Runcita is standing right here in front of me looking up with a pleasant smile on her beak, patiently waiting for me to step aside.
And I know exactly what I have to do.
I’ve already practiced asking Runcita to be my Queen in front of the Talking Mirror at least a hundred times over the past couple days. So as I stand here in the gym I can feel my speech perched on the tip of my tongue like a missile, ready to be deployed.
And I reach for my crown where it’s fastened to my utility belt. This is the opportunity I’ve been waiting for.
“Hey Runcita,” I say. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
[ 42 ]
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL TOE CLAWS YOU COULD EVER HOPE TO SEE
I won’t give you the gory details.
It’s hard for me to talk about even now.
I must be suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder from my recent horrorshow visit to Dean Floop’s lair. Because as I stand in the gym with Runcita right here in front of me, I can suddenly hear the Dean’s voice shouting in my skull: “Take my word for it, if you so much as even glance at my daughter Runcita I will have you marched out to the campus quad and I will blast you with a firestream and reduce your sorry tail to a pile of ash!” So let’s just say that Dean Floop’s threat is reverberating inside my skull and it’s definitely doing a bang-up job of psyching me the heck out.
Runcita is standing right here in front of me, waiting for me to speak.
“I I I I I I…”
But for the life of me I can’t make my black beak move and say what I want it to say. I look down and stare at Runcita’s scaly green webbed feet and see her toe claws with the bright red polish on them and oh my God are they ever luscious and mesmerizing. At that moment I feel like I would be happy if things could just stay like this forever and I could squat here studying her beautiful red toe claws. I would die a happy fiend.
Look at those gorgeous toe claws.
I want to weep with joy just looking at them.
I wonder if it’d be weird for me to get down and start kissing them with my beak?
Now on some level, everything seems so unreal. I can’t believe this is the same chick whose lair I infiltrated with a micro-drone. The chick I’ve spent the whole morning questing after.
Don’t be a wussy.
Gotta get a chick whose tail is thick.
I lift my gaze so I am staring into her eyes.
Runcita looks up at me with her big green eyes. “Yes? What is it, Weak Sauce?” And then she giggles. “I mean, Gork.”
My heart is pounding like a bastard.
“Um, Runcita,” I say. “I’ve been looking for you all morning. Because I wanted to ask you—”
And that’s when I black out.
[ 43 ]
A CRY FOR HELP
A few minutes later, I’m alone in the bathroom near the Dining Hall.
I am repeatedly smashing my forehead against the mirror above the sink. In between forehead smashes, I look at my stupid reflection in the mirror and shout: “Why!”
Smash.
“Are you!”
Smash.
“Such a!”
Smash.
“Wussy?!”
Smash.
But the truth is, deep down I already know the answer to my question. It’s because of my puny horns. That’s why I’m such a wussy. I don’t have any WILL TO POWER. Because if I had a big pair of horns on my scaly head, then I’d right now be swiping my crown over the EggHarvest Module and registering Runcita as my Queen for EggHarvest.
Now my powerstaff starts vibrating like crazy. I yank the powerstaff off my utility belt and see it’s a message from Fribby:
I cut my leg here in the spaceship! There’s a lot of blood!
I think I need a doctor. Please come quick. Hurry!
And if you think I was flying fast when I was zooming around WarWings before, why that was nothing compared to the extreme speeds which I’m about to fly at.
Who cuts their leg in a spaceship? What is she talking about?
I have no idea what’s going on, but I don’t care. Because Fribby has saved my tail more times than I can count, and like I told you before, she is my best friend in the entire universe.