How to Survive a Draconic Business Takeover
By Chase Anderson
Chase is a weird, queer, digital storyteller who writes weird, queer stories full of magic and monsters. He dropped out of chemical engineering to pursue a journalism degree and escape calculus. He draws inspiration from biology, chemistry, history, and whatever his neurochemicals are doing today. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he wrangles spreadsheets and identifies his coworkers’ backyard birds. Find his writing and more at chasej.xyz
Morning standup began with a firing, the smoke acrid in Alberdeen’s snout. It had become part of the daily ritual ever since the print shop had been bought out by Smaragdine The Exceptional. Alberdeen nervously eyed the stacks of paper around the cave, hoping nothing else would alight, but making plans if they did. Kobolds such as him, despite looking like little wingless, bipedal dragons, were not fireproof.
“We don’t need all thossse racksss,” the dragon had roared. “We don’t need all thessse pigeonsss!”
Today’s victims were countless doves, now broiling in the cages an apprentice had so neatly stacked and maintained. The apprentice was also gone. Alberdeen forced himself to stop feeling hurt or surprised. So many kobolds had been “let go,” the defined outlines of ash on the cave floor had begun overlapping, any individuality lost under the weight of numbers. And yet, his scales still prickled as if it was the first time.
Smaragdine snarled, smoke spiraling from his nostrils. “What’sss the ssstatusss of the calotype project?” The question was to the room, but no one moved to speak.
You’re supposed to be their leader, Alberdeen reminded himself. You’re still shop manager, your job hasn’t changed. Just your dragon. The claws of his feet dug into the floor and sent the reverberations of the machinery up his spine, grounding him to the present moment. “It’s—”
A discordant rumble shook the room, and then the cracking of wood broke through the silence. A pointed snout poked out between the boards that had been covering a hole in the floor.
“Is the Head Collier here?” it asked.
“Why do you interrupt me?” Smaragdine shot back.
The giant badger clawed its way out of the re-opened hole. “We need you to finish this spell, Sire.”
“And thisss one isss?” The dragon snapped his talons. “I need my ink.” One of the kobolds scurried off to fetch it.
“The hydrophobic sleeve for the tunnel to Pompano Glade, Sire,” the badger explained.
“Right, right.” Smaragdine picked up the proffered scroll and his eyes skimmed it. “Yesss, everything isss correct.” He glanced down at the trembling kobold standing on tiptoes holding the ink jar above their head. “Do not ssspill a drop,” he growled. “It’sss worth more than your weight in gold.”
“Y-yes, Sire! Of course, Sire.”
The dragon dipped a talon into the brilliant green ink and scratched a few lines onto the scroll. His throat expanded with the intake of air and compressed with the exhalation; the fire flowing over the scroll was subtle, near-invisible, and bestowed the magic needed to activate and maintain the spell. Only dragons were powerful enough for such a task.
“Ssso,” Smaragdine’s eyes slid over to Alberdeen, “the calotypesss.”
“Yes, yes, the photographic plates should be ready for tonight,” Alberdeen said. His lungs seized, threatening to become a cough, as the dragon’s musky breath rolled over him. It was hard to look Smaragdine in the glassy eyes while avoiding searching his teeth for whatever dead thing was rotting between them. Alberdeen didn’t want to risk recognizing anyone.
“Did you sssay, ‘ssshould?’” The single word carried so much: doubt, impatience, the hiss of flame building in a throat, aching to be released.
“We—we’re putting the finishing touches on the spells, Sire.” Alberdeen glanced behind and locked eyes with one of the engineers. She understood and ran off to get the scrolls. “We need magic to reproduce the images at the required speed, and—”
“Of courssse you do,” Smaragdine snapped, tail slamming into the ground. “You’d ssstill be sssending out that ussselesss drivel without my magic, my visssion.”
“Yes, Sire,” Alberdeen mumbled. He had liked the shop’s founder, a dragon that dabbled in veganism and magical methods of treasure transfer. They had been very claws-on when Alberdeen began his apprenticeship as a platemaker, but by the time he had risen to shop manager, the pet project of utilizing ley lines for transporting gold had taken precedence over the plain language of the missives.
The words of freedom fighters and brilliant alchemists and poets had made their way through each station of the shop and onto the legs of doves to be delivered across the kingdoms. By reading what he printed on the missives, Alberdeen had caught glimpses of the lives of creatures he’d never met, common people describing their struggles and loves and mystifying in-jokes, which made him feel like he knew them the same way he knew the end of his snout. It was a unique and humbling experience to connect such disparate creatures, to further peace and understanding.
But all that had burned to ash the moment Smaragdine The Exceptional took over, named himself Head Prognosticator, and began making “improvements.” He was one of the bigger, smarter, and magical forebearers of all kobold-kind, deemed superior in all ways, so he knew the business better than they ever could. Yes, kobolds were good with their claws and small enough to fit into any hole you put them, but they were hopeless without a dragon’s direction. The business needed a draconic owner to survive. Everyone knew that.
“The king’sss jousssting tournament isss tonight,” the dragon said. “I will be in attendance, of courssse, ssso I expect no isssuesss here.”
“The users will love the calotypes,” said Alberdeen. “It’s the perfect event to introduce them.” Of course, it meant there would be countless images to be filtered, processed, and reproduced. Images that took up much more space on a page that still needed to be carried by a dove, of which there was now a deficit.
Alberdeen nibbled a claw, brain churning to find a solution to satisfy both the dragon and the calotype users. It was difficult to concentrate, as several more creatures had popped into the cave asking Smaragdine to finish spells for his other businesses. As the Head Magiteknician—and Head Artificer, and Head Psionicist, and Head Who Knew What Else—it was his duty to meet all magical demands.
“Has he said when he’ll return to Ætherex?” the dexter of a double-headed eagle asked. Alberdeen returned the weighty scroll concerning the bending of physics for catapults to their pack, and shook his head.
“He’ll return once everything is sorted out here,” Alberdeen answered, repeating the dragon’s words. They implied there was something out-of-sorts with the shop in the first place, though Alberdeen thought everything was working like clockwork, though now they were short several gears. But he was only a kobold. Perhaps he was too small and nearsighted to appreciate the bigger picture. Being elbows deep in the presses wasn’t good enough to manage them. At least according to Smaragdine.
The sinister eagle head snorted. “Like you’ll ever be able to manage yourselves.”
“Moons above, you can’t say that!” the dexter head whispered. E tipped eir beak down to Alberdeen. “Just hang in there. Once Smaragdine is satisfied with the state of this business, he’ll come back to Ætherex. Your new orders will come through pigeon, probably. Remote management should be good enough for only some presses, yeah?”
“Not so much for aerodynamic calculus,” the sinister head grumbled.
“Perhaps.” Alberdeen knew it was a non-committal answer, but what could he say? Even before the buyout, Smaragdine had been posting “suggestions” on improving the business. When he was one dragon of many offering his unprompted thoughts, he was easy to ignore. But now, each new missive from the boss had to be studied for instructions; awaiting explicit confirmation or explanation risked another firing.
Smaragdine finally departed that afternoon, but not before leaving them with one more reminder of the importance of that night’s feature launch. He then slithered out of the cave, pale belly dragging along the ground between splayed legs. An emerald popped out from between his scales and clattered to the ground. Every kobold tracked the shiny, but none moved. The first time an emerald had fallen from his hide, Laurel had picked it up to return it. Xe hadn’t a single greedy scale on xyr body, but Smaragdine didn’t know—or perhaps didn’t care—and now xe was gone, like so many others.
#
An endless stream of birds landed in the cave with messages to be re-shared: updated jousting scores, well wishes for a favored knight, the despair of the hometown hero’s loss. The kobolds walked a razor’s edge with their barebones crew, one mistake away from the entire missive process snowballing into disaster.
Somehow, they made it work. Alberdeen had used the afternoon to devise new ways to adjust the kerning and whitespace to fit more missives per page to work within their newfound limitations. By the time the inbox had trickled down to the drunken thoughts of celebrants, Alberdeen allowed himself to rest.
There were plenty of nooks in the cave suitable for sleep. Most were stuffed with shredded paper and furs for the overworked kobolds who had to pull long nights or early morning starts during this new era of the business. Alberdeen found an empty one, crawled in, and tried to empty his mind of the madness.
The all-too-familiar thundering gait resounding up the mountain shook him awake. Good thing Smaragdine is too paranoid to fly anymore, Alberdeen stewed. Otherwise, we wouldn’t hear him coming. Smaragdine feared some human hero would shoot him out of the sky and plunder his emerald mines. His efforts to make an autonomous floating litter had yet to work for anyone dragon-sized.
Alberdeen scrambled out of his nook to get ready for the boss. He had just enough time to throw on his shop apron and stand at the ready, awaiting his dragon like a good kobold should. He saw the greying sky outside the cave mouth, the rising sun chasing away the dark. Feels like I had just gone to bed. Did I even get any sleep?
Smaragdine’s pace slowed as he made it up the last ledge of the mountain. His sides heaved, the dusty brown of a waterlogged strip mine.
“How can I help, Sire?” Alberdeen asked, dreading what the answer would be. Usually these early morning visits were to announce a brilliant idea to win back the alchemists and poets who had fled once their missives were combined with the crude posts of bugbears, gnollish “jokes,” and the incomprehensible rambling of ghouls. More than once, a ghoul had suggested a bizarre idea Smraragdine ordered them to enact, and it was on Alberdeen and his staff to puzzle out how to implement it.
“How many…how many birdsss had the king’sss misssive?” the dragon wheezed.
“I, uh …,” the cogs were turning in Alberdeen’s head, and they all foretold a fiery doom. “I would have to check the records, Sire. We sent so many last night that I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head.”
“Wasss it more than mine?”
“Well—”
“I ssshould be the mossst read,” the dragon snarled. “People are using thessse damn birdsss for my thoughtsss!”
But they aren’t, Alberdeen would say if he had a death wish. Their customers wanted to read what people like themselves had to say, not ghouls and dragons. And neither were known for being comedians or exceptionally wise. Smaragdine was not the exception.
The dragon growled. “Every misssive, from now on, mussst include my messsagesss.”
Alberdeen must be half-asleep. Surely Smaragdine didn’t suggest—
“Every. Sssingle. One.”
Something inside Alberdeen snapped. “No, I won’t do it!”
A pause. The other kobolds began creeping out to watch the exchange “Excuuuuussse me?” the dragon hissed. “Wasss that a ‘no’ I jusst heard?”
“That’s right—you did.” Alberdeen squared his shoulders. “I‘m not going to work what’s left of my staff to death just to spread the words of some egomaniac.” Doing so would threaten any last bit of good the missives brought to everyone across the kingdoms, and he needed to protect that.
“Do you realizzze who you’re talking to?” Smaragdine asked, rising onto his hind legs.
“Yeah, I’m talking to the jerk who’s destroying the business!”
“Big missstake, you insssolent little kobold,” were the last words Alberdeen heard before being bathed in dragonfire.
#
Alberdeen hadn’t known what death would feel like. Something unpleasant, he would have guessed. Instead, it was more of a tickle and a warmth on his scales, but also a little stinky. Nothing one would associate with eternal suffering.
He peeked open an eye to see Smaragdine standing dumbfounded in front of him. Alberdeen looked down and saw he was still wearing his apron. Shouldn’t that have burned up, too, in his firing?
Now the other kobolds were whispering and stepping closer. “Are you okay?” one asked.
“I think so.” Alberdeen checked himself over, from horns to tail, and all was as it should be. Not a part of him was even singed.
“Why aren’t you dead?” Smaragdine roared. “How dare you defy me by not dying!” He lunged to grab the kobold, but Alberdeen scurried out of the way. “You mussst have had a protection ssspell. Who gave it to you?”
“No one.” Alberdeen skidded to a halt and pointed at Smaragdine. “You used up all your magic! You can’t make fire without it.”
“I am a dragon,” Smaragdine hissed. “My power is limitlesss!”
How many spells had he cast today? And how many would inevitably fail? Everyone had heard about the litters that ran over livestock, the catapults that exploded moments after firing. And every kobold had experienced how the magical “improvements” would quickly break down and require a work around. The burden was on them to devise and execute solutions to every problem Smaragdine spawned, without a lick of draconic oversight or intervention.
“Do you even like being here?” Alberdeen asked.
The dragon took a moment to respond as his tail lashed against the stones. “No,” he growled. “Out of my entire portfolio, thisss isss the mossst mind-numbingly boring busssinesss that I’ve ever had the disssgraccce to own.”
There was no way that digging tunnels to nowhere was more interesting than spreading news and joy to countless people, but Alberdeen wasn’t going to say so. “Then you should go work on your exciting projects and leave the presses to us,” he said.
The dragon glanced around the cave. “But you’re koboldsss! You won’t know what to do without me.”
“Aren’t there kobolds at your other businesses? The ones you’re not managing when you’re here?”
Smaragdine closed his eyes for several moments. Finally, he exhaled, creating wisps of pale smoke. “Fine. But I ssstill expect you to turn a profit.”
Alberdeen ducked his head. “Of course. I want this business to succeed as much as anyone else.”
It took several hours to negotiate a reporting process that satisfied the dragon. By the time Smaragdine slithered out of the cave, the first wave of doves started arriving, carrying images of the morning’s sunrise. They were blurry and out of focus, taken with amateur paws and claws and hands, and Alberdeen thought they were the most beautiful things he’d ever seen.
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