This must be what it was like back when the whole world was nature and men were only prey. No wonder his caveman great-granddads stayed the fuck in their caves.
Ripple doesn’t know where Abby is, and he’s not counting on her to come find him with a pair of wire cutters. When Trank finally appears at the roof hatch sometime midmorning, Ripple doesn’t know if he should panic or feel relieved that at least something’s finally happening. Trank’s wearing bunker gear—slicker, boots, turnout pants—but the Tarnhelm is flipped back, and his expression is totally blank, as if that rubber skin was just peeled off the conveyor belt at the assembly line, freshly manufactured and never before used.
Great. That’s not creepy at all.
“Listen, I am legitimately sorry about earlier. I shouldn’t have gotten mad. It’s not like you killed them. Learned my lesson big-time, for serious.” Ripple decides to go into full apology mode, because who knows what this pro is capable of? As he speaks, though, he surprises himself by kind of meaning it. What the chief did was janked, but he’s a janked-up guy, inside and out. Ripple can’t help but sympathize with that, at least a little. They were buds just yesterday. Maybe there’s still something worth saving in the ruins of Trank, some Survivor of kindness or sanity, half-smothered and screaming HELP. “Now, you want to let me out of here?”
“Duncan, you have to understand that after what you said, I can’t possibly trust you with any intelligence I have concerning the movements of the dragons.”
“I one hundred percent swear that I will not do anything related to the dragons ever.” Ripple 100 percent doesn’t mean this. If the dragons are scary now, imagine them controlled by a bona fide zapmaster. Ripple glances skyward nervously. “I’ll be happy if I never see a dragon again.”
“And if I can’t trust you with that intelligence, we can’t work together.”
“I’m fired? OK, awesome, I’m fired. Thank you for firing me, sir.” Ripple rattles the cage’s wire door; the lock doesn’t budge. “So I should pack my things and go, right?”
“And if we can’t work together, that means we’re working separately. Which creates competition down the line. It makes a conflict inevitable. Do you understand that?”
“No need to pack, even.” Ripple is making a serious effort not to read the subtext here. “Me and Abby, we can just, like, jet. Where is Abby?”
“Downstairs. She’s still recovering, but she’ll be all right. I restrained her, for her own safety.”
“Restrained?” Ripple nods, determined to be chill with this. At least she’s not dead: major points for that. “Restrained is cool. Restrained is good.”
“I don’t consider her a threat.” Trank peers at him through the wires, those fake eyes zooming in for a close-up. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Duncan? You can tell me whatever pretty stories you like to get out of that detainment kennel, but we both know what’s in your heart.”
Ripple stares down at the ground. He’s still in the red long johns he had on earlier, the ones he sleeps in. They have feet, like a little boy’s pajamas. Is it possible that he’ll die without ever seeing his own toes again?
“I say there’s no time like the present,” says Trank. “Let’s settle this here and now.”
Trank takes not one but two hatchets off of his utility belt and holds one in each hand, the twin blades glinting. With a shing of metal on metal, he cuts through the lock on the cage door, and the hinge creaks ajar.
Trank stands in the open doorframe. His expression is losing its smoothness, acquiring worry lines and crinkles as, below, the animatronics shift. It’s human, but unreadable—the look of a man looking into the void.
“You wanted to be the greatest fireman in the world. Now here’s your chance.”
Trank holds out one of the hatchets to Ripple, keeping the other lowered at his side. It’s a loaded moment, a passing of the torch, totally nonviolent. Say what? Maybe this is a different part of the story than Ripple thought. Disbelieving, he grasps the handle. He looks from the sharpened blade to Trank, then back again.
“So this ax has…superpowers?”
“No.”
“Then how does it make me the world’s greatest fireman?”
Whatever intensity awakened Trank’s features collapses back into exasperation. “It doesn’t. But you can’t be the greatest while I’m still alive.”
“Whoa!” Ripple almost drops his weapon; he bumps into the wall of his cage and the whole thing jingles. “You want to kill each other?”
“One way or another, we’ll have to face off. There’s no way around it. You won’t let me fulfill my destiny, and so I can’t allow you to fulfill yours.”
“Pro, let’s just dial it way back here. I was going to be your princeling. What happened?”
“It would have been a fine thing to rule the city together. But it would never have worked out. I can see that now.” Trank wields his hatchet with both hands; beneath that heavy slicker, the muscles in his chest and shoulders visibly flex. “Do you want to die fighting, or in that cell?”
“I’m not going to fight you!”
“Then you’re going to die.”
Maybe Ripple can reason with him: “Listen, what if there is no command console? Or what if there is—and neither of us ever finds it? We might not have to fight ever. Can’t we just wait and see?”
Trank grimaces. “There’s no terror in dying when the alternative is to live without hope. You can’t let cowardice rule you, Duncan. You were right to think of greatness from the start.” Trank flips down his Tarnhelm, as if it’s a combat visor. “You have to rise above.”
Trank is blocking Ripple’s way out of the cage; the only way out is through him. Ripple raises the hatchet—there’s athletic tape wrapped around the handle. To help him get a grip.
Trank steps backward, and Ripple cautiously advances…
Now both men are on the roof of the Fire Museum, circling each other, while the dragons circle them from above, black-winged squiggles against the blinding white clouds. Ripple thinks of the first time he walked into the Fire Museum, the words BRING IT ON inscribed over his head like the logo at the start of an opening-credits sequence. Dragon Prince. What’s worse—a reality that’s over? Or one that never was?
Trank swings his ax first. Ripple ducks.
EXT. SCORCHED LOT—DAY
RIPPLE and TRANK scrounge through the smoldering rubble of a collapsed building. RIPPLE sees something in the wreckage and points.
RIPPLE
Sweet, check it out!
CLOSE on the command console, a wood-paneled unit bearing dials, joysticks, and sliders, with a faint but otherworldly lemon-lime glow.
Trank swings again. Ripple blocks him with his ax handle and pushes Trank backward with a strength both men find surprising.
EXT. BLUE SKY—DAY
RIPPLE, riding the yellow dragon, bursts out of a cloud bank, hooting and pumping his fist.
Trank stumbles. Ripple hesitates.