How to be Megnificent – book 2 of girldragongizzard

Saturday isn’t the best day to start work on your own name change, but it’s the seventh of September and I have a fresh SSI deposit in my bank and no rent I need to pay. So, after the morning song, which I manage to initiate by starting just a smidge early, I settle down in the coffee shop with my tablet to learn about how to do it, and maybe pay the fees to get it started.

It looks like the procedure is pretty easy in Washington state, but there are two little snags.

It’s expensive. I can afford it, because I’m not paying rent. Kind of. That money is ideally going to go toward food now, though. But I can supplement my diet with seagulls if I have to.

And, I need more identification than just my enhanced state ID. Like, my birth certificate. And that’s in the stuff that’s supposedly been boxed up and sent to Nathan’s place to put in his garage. When Joel crashed through my apartment wall and trashed the place, I got evicted and trespassed. So, we’d arranged for that, and Nathan says it all seems to have arrived safely, but I haven’t had a chance to go through it all because he lives in another dragon’s territory.

I double check my Discord server for whose it is.

Ah, the individual I’d nicknamed Godzilla, who on my server is going by gronk_lizard.

I shoot him a DM asking if I may have permission to visit Nathan’s garage and look through my stuff that’s stored there. And then fret about the response, which doesn’t come immediately, or for a while.

OK, there’s a third and fourth snag in the name change process, but I’ve already talked about those, and plan to just deal with them when they come up. If I have to, I can send a human emissary to get permission from Waits to enter their territory to go to court. And there’s got to be some kind of concession for altered appearances with a photo ID, especially since other trans folk exist and go through this in their own way. Maybe that’s what the birth certificate is for.

I’m really hoping that asking permission with other dragons is going to work for visiting their areas of the city. This is so new, and I don’t think we’ve really tested this before. But, I think I’d be pretty reasonably chill myself if another dragon asked me, especially after my encounter with Astraia.

Gotta try it someday, why not today?

And I did. And I’m fretting, because gronk_lizard isn’t returning my message yet. He’s not even online, though.

As I take a moment drink my coffee, I realize that I’m hyperfocusing on this because maybe I feel the need to get back into, or establish, a mundane daily routine. I’m trying to ground myself in my identity, which is fair. But now that I’ve done what I can for the day and hit a hurry-up-and-wait snag, it kind of hurts.

The events of the last week, finishing off with that conversation yesterday, have been a bit much.

Especially that conversation. Especially the idea that I might be an Artist.

The idea feels absurd to me.

I don’t have an Art. Not that I know of. I don’t draw or write. Though I’m definitely thinking about writing! But I have no practice in it. I don’t do music. I don’t program. All I’ve ever really done is watch movies, read books, and daydream about being a dragon.

A lot of daydreaming about that. Especially as my chronic fatigue set in and I couldn’t do much else. Which.

I don’t have chronic fatigue anymore and it turns out I’m actually a dragon. So, what do I do?

I fucking go flying, eat seagulls, fight other dragons, and get in a turf war with the biggest, richest wizard in town, apparently!

Or, am I?

Is David Säure an Artist?

Or, did I misunderstand what Ptarmigan was saying?

I think about the main points of yesterday’s conversation, and realize that so much of what was said by both Ptarmigan and Chapman could be interpreted several different ways. And Chapman’s been talking like that since I met hir.

When Kimberly asked Ptarmigan her age, and Ptarmigan responded with “forty-nine”, she didn’t specific of what. Forty-nine years? Seconds? Eons? Heck, she didn’t even say, “I am”, so it might not even have been an answer. Just, “Forty-nine, I think.” Like, “I’m thinking of the number forty-nine.”

And, the reason this sticks with me is because I caught when Kimberly asked more directly if Ptarmigan was forty-nine years old, and Ptarmigan said, “No.”

I take a glance around the coffee shop and the street outside through the windows, and don’t see anyone I know well besides Nathan and Cerce behind the counter.

For some reason, my thoughts feel more private knowing I’m basically alone, and I continue puzzling this.

Maybe Ptarmigan was just saying that Daniel Säure’s involvement in local dragon politics is due to the work of an Artist, not that he was one.

I don’t want to give a billionaire any benefit of the doubt, but I’ve gotta concede I don’t know anything about him. Not even why he’s gone personally reclusive lately. And he could just be this hapless human being with way too much money and way too much interest in local politics.

The part where Ptarmigan was painfully honest and transparent, though, was when she admitted that she didn’t know if I was an Artist, only that it was a guess, and that she’d used divination to find the center of the global metamorphosis and it was apparently me.

Either she was outright lying there, or I was the center of it for some reason.

So, like, we’ve got this pair of immortal beings, supposedly. Or people pretending to be immortal beings, but they can definitely do magic of some sort. And they both have this habit of telling partial truths, or phrases that might as well be partial truths, to mislead or hide the actual truth. It creates this precedent of communication where I guess I expect them to keep up that habit.

So, when one of them then goes, “I don’t actually know. That was a guess. But what I found is that you’re at the center of this dragon event,” well, it stands out. It’s not the same pattern of communication.

What does that mean?

This is going to give me main character syndrome if I think about it too much.

If I take Ptarmigan’s report at face value, does that mean that my dream that night, in which I tore off my human disguise, was indicative of something bigger?

If I’m an Artist and don’t know about it, would that have been me subconsciously practicing my Art? Does dreaming count as an Art?

Or, maybe it’s transformation that’s the Art, but dreaming was my expression of it at the time.

If I had paper and could write this down, I feel like it would make sense on it. But, emotionally, it’s not clicking with me. I just feel numb and disconnected with it when I think about the idea that my own transformation, my own personal desires made manifest, actually affected the entire rest of the planet.

It’s just too much.

But I lift my chin and tilt my head like that one meme, and think that transformation would be a pretty fucking fantastic Art to have. Phenomenally powerful.

If I could somehow do that, transform myself or other people or things, I could use that Art to smooth out so many problems the, uh, global dracomorphosis is causing. At least locally, I think.

And trying it would either confirm or debunk Ptarmigan’s claims.

I could maybe get into that.

I’m honestly at a loss for what else to do, besides to continue networking with my new friends and trying to build a local coalition of dragons while some billionaire tries to ship us one by one out of the county.

There’s been no helicopter for the past two nights, though, that I know of, so it seems like we’ve got a bit of a reprieve. And I should probably take advantage of that.

Networking should only take a couple hours each day, at most, ideally. So the rest of the day I can use for planning, scheming, processing the idea of being somehow immortal or something myself, and experimenting.

Doing that might even keep me out of trouble with my neighboring dragons. You know, by mostly keeping to myself.

Except, I do want to move forward on this name change thing, and that is going to take some leg work. Or wing work.

Well.

I drink some more coffee, and focus on the process of doing that. Like eating, it's also pleasant, if nothing like what I used to do with a human mouth.

The best part of it for me, now, is tasting the air above the coffee before drinking it. There’s just so much detail to the aroma of the steam, so many volatiles lifting away in it. Each one is a different note of flavor. It's almost like I can taste each individual molecule as it alights on my tongue.

But, then, bathing my tongue in the liquid is a totally different beautiful experience, too. There's even more flavor there, but it all blends and swirls around my taste buds as I immerse my chin deep enough into the bowl to function as kind of a ladle, and lick.

Three licks and swallows with snout in bowl gives me a sense of drinking sips kind of like before. And then I lift my head up and back to swallow the gulp of fluid in the bottom of my mouth.

A huff and my tongue is swathed in the warmth of coffee breath and a whole other set of flavors, and I feel like I’ve permeated myself with the myriad of fascinating chemicals that make up the hot extract of coffee beans. Head high, eyes closing, I allow myself to float on the sensations and the memories they bring of doing this almost every morning since I awoke to my true self.

I hear the front door bell chime and jingle and have to stop myself from imitating the noise in response. I close my eyes tighter to distance myself from it.

After a couple of seconds, I hear Ptarmigan speaking to me her desert thunder of a voice.

“We should go for a walk,” she says. “Or, if you know some place private, that would be better. I want to work with you on something, if you’re up for it.”

I open my eyes and look at her in the collarbone. She’s dressed in exactly the same clothes as yesterday.

I’m not done with my coffee yet, so then I look at it, and then look back up at her.

“I’m sorry. You can take your time. I mean, I would like to meet with you some time today, if possible,” she says. “Can you? Will you? Do you have a good place for that?”

“Yes. Okay. Stay,” I say, without pulling out my tablet. Then I go for another mouthful of coffee and make a demonstration of it.

I don’t exactly dislike Ptarmigan. I’m intrigued by her. But I feel like she has disrupted my life just as thoroughly as Joel did when he crashed through my wall. And I do not trust her.

That lack of trust seems more important than anything.

And what she’s revealed to me has damaged my trust in Chapman, too, and I am not grateful for that.

I find that I don’t really want to do anything with Ptarmigan without Rhoda by my side. But she does have her own life, and she’s not here right now.

After sitting with the fumes of my last gulp of coffee for long enough that I feel I’ve made my point, I pull out my tablet and ask a simple question with it.

“What?” I inquire.

“I want to help you explore what I talked about yesterday,” Ptarmigan says. “Privacy would be good so that you don’t feel so self conscious about it. I like going for walks, but I understand your territory is smaller these days. Maybe your roof would work?”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I’m in the mood for doing right now. I’m so anxious today, I think I’m done with my coffee, despite how I’ve been trying to wallow in it.

I may not trust Ptarmigan, and I’m not exactly confident in my own decision making skills lately. But I’ve been really great at learning new stuff from my mistakes, and I’m desperate to be doing something productive and new.

I put my tablet away again and stand up, saying, “Okay. Go.” And then I walk out the door and lead the way to the fire escape.

It’s got one of those sets of stairs that only lower when weight is put on them, but I can reach that easily and pull it down, which I do. I climb partway up that and then wait for Ptarmigan to follow. And then we both climb to the top floor.

Leaping up to grab the roof from there is much easier than the last time I did it, and I’m sure I’ve grown a bit in length now.

Once up and in my new home, the rooftop, I turn around and watch Ptarmigan to see if she has any manner of getting up here herself.

She just watches me back, passively.

OK.

My haunches and tail are heavier than my front, so I figure I can help her up while using my hips as a fulcrum. I keep my wings folded and held as far back as possible while I walk to place my hind claws near the edge of the roof. Then I crouch and lean down and offer Ptarmigan my foreclaws, my tail rising in the air and arching behind me.

Then, when she grabs my foreclaws, I flap my wings furiously and lift with my legs to pull us both back up.

She walks up the side of the building with her feet and it all works pretty well.

I allow myself to be pleased with my feat of balance and strength.

Then we make our way to the center of the roof. And as I flap my wings a few times to stretch them again after working them for our ascent, her duster billows.

I find that I wish she was wearing a pair of dark black rimmed wrap around sunglasses, but she’s not.

“OK,” she says. “We can go about this a couple of different ways. We should try both. What are your hobbies? Do you do anything creative?”

“No,” I say. I hesitate for a moment to let that sink in, but then I pull out my tablet, and she watches me as I turn it on and make sure my app is open. “I used to read,” I take the time to say. “I used to daydream.”

“What do you do now?” she asks.

“Know Artists. Fight. Be dragon. Eat seagull. And fly,” I say, completely deadpan as usual. 

I’m being subtly funny, but it’s also basically the truth. Ever since my metamorphosis, I’ve been so content in a way I’ve never been before, despite all the stressors, that my usual coping mechanisms haven’t had any draw to me.

“Huh. OK,” my oblique reference to a meme seems to go right over her head. “What were you doing the night of the metamorphosis?”

“Dreaming,” I reply. “Woke up dragon.”

“Right. What was your dream about?”

“Removing human disguise.”

She points at me.

I figured as much.

“That’s it.” Then she sits down on the black tar roof, and says, “Now, describe that dream in detail, please. I’ll wait.”

I huff and look at the sky.

Then I oblige. This dream has stuck with me strongly since that night. I remember it as if I lived it while awake. And I’ve described it before, but it’s worth reviewing it.

I dreamt that I was back in school, college specifically, and it was one of those naked dreams. I spent about half the day interacting with professors and classmates before I really noticed, and I was in just my tighty whities, which is better than being completely naked, but not by much. What I hated more, in the dream as in real life, was my hairy chest and arms, the stubble of my beard, and the obvious bulge in my underwear. These were things that had been plaguing me since puberty, but I never felt like I could do anything about them. If I’d been willing to upend my whole life by admitting that I was a trans woman, which I absolutely never wanted to be (thank you internalized transmisogyny), I wouldn’t have been able to afford transition anyway.

Of course, with the Affordable Care Act, Washington State made it so that Medicaid and Medicare would cover transitional healthcare, including surgery if I’d wanted it. But, for some reason, I just couldn’t bring myself to come out. Not even after I’d lost the last attempt at a job I’d ever had, and settled into the Magnolia apartments friendless and hopeless and exhausted beyond belief. I didn’t have anything to lose anymore, but I couldn’t see how embarrassing myself by publicly transitioning would make my life any better. I was doing everything I needed by living as a woman online, I thought.

That history followed me into my dream, of course. And it colored everything and made me feel even worse and more desperate. I couldn’t believe I was back in school when I had such severe chronic fatigue, and I couldn’t even answer emails or voice messages anymore due to my C-PTSD.

And then, in the dream, one of my classmates, someone I’d made the mistake of considering a friend at the time, asked me why I’d decided not to wear any clothes.

And I turned to him and said, “Because dragons don’t need clothes.”

And then I ripped off my human disguise and woke up.

I simplify this considerably for Ptarmigan, condensing my personal history down to, “I’m trans. Was male in dream. Am female.”

She nods, and scratches at the stubble on her chin.

“Yeah, that shit sucks,” she says. “I’ve dealt with my own dysphoria in some terrible ways. I wish I could have done what you did.”

“You are Artist. You incarnate. Don’t you choose?” I ask.

“I’m not the Poet,” she says. “Sometimes I use words badly. But also, my existence is contradictory. I suspect yours is, too, if you look close or deep enough.”

“Explain.” I’ve decided I’m not putting up with any more vague bullshit from Artists. “Make me understand.”

“Yeah,” she says. Then she walks over to the southern edge of the building and looks out over the sound. “Being trans is part of my nature when I live as a human. I can’t stop from being it. All Artists are queer or neurodivergent or deviant in some way. This is one of my ways. It comes with the Art. In my case, I’ll choose one sex or another, and end up being a different gender from it. Kids these days would say that my sex is defined by my gender, and I like that. But I can’t explain what happens to me with those words because I’m not exactly born. So I’m not assigned the wrong sex at birth.” She looks back at me. “I choose, but then my choice is taken from me, by my own nature. But it’s even more absurd to me, because the whole gender thing as it is today is a construct of white supremacy. It should be irrelevant.”

That last comment seems like a confirmation to me that she’s Indigenous. But I don’t really know. The right thing to do is wait for her to share that information directly. And, she’s an Artist, not a human. Ethnicity may be irrelevant to her, too. There are more important things to consider at the moment.

“What’s your Art?” I ask.

She grins for the first time I’ve seen yet. It’s an awkward thing, full of ruefulness and stilted self consciousness, but her eyes twinkle.

“Nightmares,” she says.

I think about that for a moment, and she lets me, so I ask, “Did you cause mine?”

“No, I don’t cause nightmares,” she says. “Well. Not all nightmares. I navigate them. I find them. I dig into them. I pull them apart. And I learn from them. Or try. The world is full of so many of them, I’ll never read them all. Ever. But, similar to how Chapman’s Art works, it also turns out to be a pretty good way for making divinations. Which is how I found you.”

“What’s Chapman’s Art?”

“Physics,” she replies. “Sie is the Physicist. I’m the Nightmarist. And I’m trying to figure out what you are.”

“What if not Artist?” I ask.

“Then I’m thinking you’re something even more interesting, and I think you’ll want to know that as much as I do,” she says. “Your dream is definitely a big huge clue, too.”

“What is Säure?”

“A billionaire and an asshole who hides behind his carbon offset credits and social clout,” Ptarmigan says. “But I haven’t really taken a good look at him yet. I don’t know more than that. We’re going to have to find out. Chances are pretty good he’s just human, though. Most people are.”

“Yes,” I agree.

“Humans aren’t to be underestimated, though. They make tempting playthings for us Artists. And probably look tasty to you dragons sometimes. But they collectively control everything right now. And their short lives make some of them really bloody minded and rash.”

I don’t say anything to that. I’m not sure what to make of it. I agree with a lot of the words, but the sentiments are weird to me. A little off.

When it comes to my humans, at least, I just can’t bring myself to be that cynical.

“OK,” she says. “I think I want you to try daydreaming first. That will probably be the easiest test. I expect nothing from it, except maybe to be able to do a divination off of it if you daydream the right thing. But it’s the least amount of effort right off the bat. Are you up for it?”

“What about?” I ask.

“If my hypothesis that you’re the Artist of Transformations, or something like that, is correct, then that’s what you should daydream about. Try to recreate something like that dream you had, but while you’re awake.” She nods. “The next step is to put you to sleep and have you dream a nightmare like that for real, but that’s more invasive and more work. I’d rather not do it. Maybe if I learn the right things from this, we can try something else.”

“Okay,” I say, and then start pacing around the roof, looking at things, and thinking about what I should daydream about. What kind of transformation I should envision. And maybe what kind of nightmare scenario that transformation would solve.

Well, I’ve got a ready made scenario, at least. Säure’s next attack.

And my immediate emotional response is that I want to be bigger and tougher and able to withstand bullets. And to breathe fire indefinitely.

So, sure. I sit on my haunches near where Ptarmigan is standing and daydream about what that battle would be like. And about what it would be like to change my body into that greater draconic form.

While I do this, Ptarmigan pulls out a tiny sketchbook and a pen and starts scribbling in it while occasionally looking up at me. She sits down cross legged beside me after a few moments, and really gets lost in her work, flipping pages to work on new ones when the old one becomes too full of ink. And as she’s doing this, I feel a constant soft hum in the fabric of reality that has a harmonic in one of my nerves, like a slowed down and quieter version of the shift I get from Chapman when sie uses hir art.

In my mind, I’m taking to the sky and flying so high that it’s almost like I’m in orbit. And I’m so big and so impervious to everything that I can’t help but imagine that as being a form of intangible existence, like a spirit or a celestial being of some sort. A dragon made of starlight and lightning.

Bullets of any caliber are useless and helicopters go down in flames.

“Yeah. No. That would have been too easy,” the Artist of Nightmares says.

I break my revery and look over at my tablet before walking to it and tapping the screen for a bit, “Not work?”

“Oh, I read you just fine. You’re just not the Artist of Transformation,” she reports. “From what I can see, you’re just a dragon. It’s bewildering, frankly.”

“Told you,” I say.

“Sure,” she says. “Good solid nightmare visions, though. Thank you.”

I don’t have anything else to say to her at the moment. I’m once again at a loss myself. But, as I watch her, her eyes narrow.

“What?” I ask.

“Yeah, I’m definitely not done with you,” she says.

Whatever, I think to myself. At least I’ve made some personal psychological progress today. I now have something I can reliably daydream about when I want to relax.

“Done today,” I say. “Please go.”

“Sure,” she says again. “I need to think about this, anyway. Thank you for working with me.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Take care,” she says, then wanders over to where the fire escape is and lowers herself onto it carefully and disappears down the stairs.

I huff and look out over the water again. I have some more thinking to do of my own.