Digging through my WIP folder and I found notes for a story idea I had about a dragon adopting a human.
Not on accident, mind you, the dragon doesn’t just stumble across a human infant and adopts it. The dragon decides it wants to adopt a human.
The dragon explains this to its lich friend: “I want someone to take care of me in my old age! A human would be great! Imagine how easily it could talk the other humans into leaving me alone! And– and it might decide to grow up and become a goldsmith, right? Some humans become goldsmiths. My human might decide to go into goldsmithing too!”
“I think you’re overestimating the percentage of humans who become goldsmiths,” replies the lich friend, who is not terribly discouraging of the idea, but also not particularly invested in it at this point. It seems like a plan with a lot of potential points of failure.
The dragon is undeterred, mostly because it has a whole hoard of gold coins and goblets and jewelry and trinkets that seem to indicate to it that there must, in fact, be a great number of humans who know goldsmithing to have produced all that.
Anyway, the dragon decides to shapeshift into a humanoid form, go into a city, and adopt a human child. It needs the lich’s help, because it doesn’t know anything about human fashion. The lich’s knowledge on the subject is a few centuries outdated, but they attack a few fancy carriage on the road and reverse-engineer an outfit from what the humans inside them were wearing. (Those humans were nobles, it’s fine, it’s a victimless crime)
The lich fusses a lot with the humanoid appearance of the dragon until everything looks just so.
(“Am I actually doing it wrong, or are you just making me shapeshift into something you find more attractive?” the dragon asks.
“If you want me to pose as your husband, this is the price to pay,” the lich replies.)
They go into the city, anyway, and they find an orphanage on the shady side of town, where the tired, overworked and underpaid matron clearly sees there’s something not right about these two, but not in any obvious way she can put her finger on. She’s just happy to have one less mouth to feed.
She comes along quietly, and doesn’t even comment when she’s taken to a dragon lair.
The dragon is ecstatic with its new acquisition.
(“Does it know any commands?” the dragon wonders. “Sit! Stay! Roll over?”
“You may be thinking of dogs,” the lich points out. “Children do not perform tricks.”
They both looked at the human child, trying to figure out how to approach her.
“So, what scam are you running here?” the little girl asked suddenly, startling both the dragon and the lich.
“I was wrong,” the lich says, “they’ve definitely been teaching children new tricks since I was alive.”)
