With that terrifying look on her beak the robot swivels her scaly silver head and glares at my tail as it thrashes around, and then she turns back and stares out the window.
Through bared fangs, Fribby snarls, “Maybe you should conserve some of that energy for when you offer your crown to Runcita. You might need it to dodge all the firebolts she’s gonna blast you with!”
Well the problem with Fribby is she doesn’t just know how to push my buttons, she finds buttons you didn’t even know you had. And considering she’s a machine, you’d expect it to be the other way around.
So now I start swinging my tail even harder, signaling my annoyance at the robot’s chatter. I’m hoping by smacking my tail around like this it will keep the Datalizard from shooting off her beak even more. My tail is nine feet long and the tail muscle is easily the strongest muscle in a dragon’s body. Which makes it one helluva whipping machine.
Whap. Whap. Whap.
You start smacking your tail around real fast and hard and it starts to sound like the rotary blades on a helicopter.
Whap. Whap. Whap.
Among us dragons there’s a term for what I’m doing right now.
We call it “tail talk.”
Tail talk is when you let your tail do your talking for you.
Then I crack my tail in the air right next to her, close enough so she feels an ominous breeze snoutside. I’m sure.
“You can quit smacking your tail around any day now, tough guy,” growls Fribby. “Besides, you keep swinging that big tail of yours around, I’m liable to accidentally step on it. You remember last semester when I stepped on your tail and it broke off? How many months did it take for your new tail to grow in?”
Before I even have time to think my tail abruptly comes to a halt on the floor. I reckon you could say my tail is talking back to me.
“That’s what I thought,” says Fribby, smirking.
But I can’t really blame my tail for playing dead right now. Because I still remember those months of humiliation when my tail was slowly growing back and I had to go around with a ridiculous-looking nubbin on my backside. Then, when my fool tail finally did grow in a couple inches, I had to wear this little splint on it no bigger than a twig. Shoot, I couldn’t even wag the dang thing, let alone arch it up in a hideous Threat Display.
Fribby’s powerstaff buzzes.
The robot whips her powerstaff off her utility belt and eyeballs it for a second.
“Well well well. This just in.” She reads something on her staff and snorts, “OK, so get this. Already this morning twenty-three dragons have asked Runcita to be their Queen. And Runcita put all twenty-three of those dragon fools in the Medical Center!”
Then Fribby flicks her powerstaff and a holophoto appears in the air, and in the holophoto you can see all twenty-three cadets that Runcita has laid up in the Medical Center this morning. They are a sorry-looking bunch of broken-ass dragons. You can see their green hind legs raised up in casts, their wings in splints, and heads wrapped in bandages. They have burnt, charred patches on their scales, and there’s smoke coming up off their fresh wounds. One of them has a horn broken off. A couple of them appear to be in full body casts.
As I study the holophoto it suddenly dawns on me where Ms. Cyber Scales is going with this little presentation. She may be organic but she’s still a robot, and there’s not a robot in the galaxy that doesn’t love metrics and analytics. And so, like I always do when I can feel Fribby building a case against me, I play dumb.
“And your point is?” I say, snorting firebolts out of my nostrils.
Fribby points a metal index claw at the floating holophoto. “What makes you so different from those twenty-three fools?”
“Well, for one thing I’m not in the Medical Center.”
“Not yet, Weak Sauce.” The holophoto floats over to Fribby and transforms into blacksmoke and then flies into her powerstaff.
“And I don’t plan on going to no Medical Center,” I growl.
“Give it time, Weak Sauce. Unless your BIOCON LEVS have somehow magically skyrocketed, you’ll be in the Medical Center before you know it. It’s still early.”
Then the robot points her powerstaff at me. And I can feel the blood rush to my scales because I know she’s pulling down my Cadet Profile.
Fribby taps her powerstaff and a small floating screen pops up right there in front of us, with all my data splayed out there in the air. My tail slinks between my hind legs. I tell her please don’t do this. She ignores me and peers closely at my data on the floating screen and moves her silver beak as if she’s quietly reading out loud to herself:
CADET NAME: Gork The Terrible
NICKNAME: Weak Sauce
CONQUER & RULE SCORE: 6 out of 1000
RANK: MildFuriosity
MATING MAGNETISM SCORE: 1 out of 1000
RANK: RatherGoEggless
HEART MASS INDEX SCORE: 2 out of 1000
RANK: DangerouslyJumbo
CLASS RANK: 2357th out of 2358
WILL TO POWER SCORE: 6 out of 1000
STATUS: Snacklicious
When Fribby is done she turns from the floating screen and glares at me. “Nope,” she says innocently. “No magical skyrocketing of your BIOCON LEVS. So I’d say there’s a better than great chance of Runcita sending you to the Medical Center this morning. Especially considering your WTP score is holding steady at six points. Snacklicious.”
The arrogance in the robot’s voice is so cutting I’m surprised my earholes don’t start bleeding.
“You sure do know how to lift a fella’s spirits,” I growl. “If things don’t work out today, you should definitely consider a career in cheerleading.”
Now as soon as those words fly out of my beak, I think:
Fribby’s going to slug you now.
You know she’ll never let you get away with talking to her like that.
So I’m bracing myself for the blow.
Because for a robot, Fribby’s got an incredibly short fuse. And my smart-ass jab is sure to have struck a nerve. Because like all the other Datalizards at the Academy, once Fribby gets her diploma then the WarWings Council of the Elders will assign her to a slave role on a foreign planet with a budding dragon Colony. And as a slave she’ll have zero choice what position she’s assigned or what foreign planet she has to serve on.
Unless of course some senior cybernetic dragon asks Fribby to be his Queen for EggHarvest. That’s the only way she can dodge a career in slavery. But the chances of that happening are zero. Because even though by Dragobot standards Fribby’s kind of luscious in her own way and has a juicy silver booty, she’s got enough personality “quirks” to ensure that no chrome Datalizard dude would ever ask her to lay his eggs.
Like Fribby is completely obsessed with dying. She’s one of the first organic robots that was hatched in an artificial egg, and she’s one of the first machines that can technically die. So Fribby is forever talking about dying, asking other cadets what they think it’ll feel like when they croak, and how painful it will be, etc.
And she’s always spitting out these statistics.
On the day they died, 96% of dragons polled said it would be impossible for them to die that day.