Summoning Ocellus

Taking care of the hatchlings was both a tiring, never-ending slog and an extremely boring routine. Little dragon babies were surprisingly self-sufficient, and normally a pair of little dragons would mind a clutch of twenty to forty hatchlings. This meant that most of the time Ocellus had nothing to do, with only three to keep an eye on, but at the same time she couldn’t ever leave or allow herself to get distracted. There was a cage she could lock them in where they couldn’t get into any trouble, if she really had to go do something else, but they hated it and it seemed fairly cruel. In theory she could also have some time to herself when they were all asleep, but that rarely happened simultaneously and never for long. Tixi had to come spell her for a few hours a day so that she could get some sleep herself.

In general, this left her exhausted both mentally and physically, and the days blended together without her paying much attention to anything but the hatchlings. Duxi, at least, was the opposite of miserable – she was always running around, happily pouncing on siblings or toys or Ocellus and wrestling with anything she could get her claws on. The others were more sedate, although Tini had a disturbing fascination with breaking things into pieces and then carefully chewing the pieces into smaller pieces. Ek was just kind of there and it was easy to forget he was even around.

The wizard returned one day, Tixi and third apprentice, Lucien, in tow. Lucien stepped forwards, and cast a dazzling pattern of moving lights and colors that had all three hatchlings – and Ocellus herself – staring in fascination. The wizard went to each of them in turn – Ocellus last – and touched them on the forehead, closing his eyes and concentrating briefly. Ocellus could feel the distinct tickle of a mental connection, but it must have been a one-way reading since there were no thoughts placed into her mind. It was enough to break her out of her trance, though.

“Just reading surface thoughts,” the wizard explained. “It’s how I assess a young creature’s aptitude. Lucien, cast Detect Thoughts on each of the kobolds, and we can compare notes.”

“Of course, master,” he said in a strangely accented, high-pitched voice. Ocellus took a closer look at him, and it was obvious that he wasn’t fully human, although she hadn’t had the chance to study this worlds’ many, many human-like species to hazard a guess at what he might be.

“As for you, you have a love of focused study and abstract concepts,” he said to Ocellus. “Suitable for a wizard. It’s almost a shame that you’re bound as a familiar.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Familiars can’t learn magic,” he said, simply, as if it was self-evident. She certainly hadn’t had any luck back in the storm drain lair when she’d tried to parse Tixi’s spells, but she also hadn’t spent the multiple years that it was supposed to take to make progress.

“As for our little gremlins,” he said, turning to the still-fascinated hatchlings. “What do you think, Lucien?”

“Are we sure they gave us the right eggs?” he asked. “Only the purple one has any talent for magic whatsoever.”

The wizard nodded. “It’s a bit perplexing, but I’m certain they didn’t send us the wrong eggs on purpose. A quick divination could tell us whether some mistake was made.”

“They’re not good at magic?” Tixi asked, disappointed.

The wizard shrugged. “Ek should be trainable, but he isn’t even as talented as you are, and they were all meant to surpass you.” He paused. “Tini is smart enough to learn, but his interest is more in crafting. Duxi is… more on the physical side.”

“I’m sure they were my eggs!” Tixi said. “I remembered what they looked like when I laid them, and made sure they gave me the same ones back! I double-checked even though we kept them separate the whole time!”

“Regardless,” the wizard said, “let us make sure, shall we? Nethys, he who sees all, send us a servant to answer our questions!” The last sentence was in the language of magic, of course – a rather powerful spell, if Ocellus was any judge.

The air shimmered. “Ask your questions,” said a dry voice in yet another language Ocellus had never heard before.

The wizard had no trouble understanding it at least. “Are these three baby kobolds the children of the older kobold, Tixi, there?” He pointed.

“Yes,” the voice intoned.

“Were their eggs fertilized by the father I selected, as instructed?”

“Yes,” the voice intoned again.

“Did anything else interfere with the experiment, leading to these unexpected results?”

“Yes,” the voice said a third time.

“What was it?” the wizard asked.

There was a pause. “Chaos,” the voice said at last.

“Do you mean a demon, or some other chaotic entity?”

“No,” the voice said immediately.

The wizard paced back and forth in front of the shimmer. Eventually, he asked, “What is the most important thing I could do to improve this experiment?”

“Numbers,” the voice replied.

“What is the second most important thing,” the wizard asked, muttering under his breath, “I hate being restricted to one-word answers.”

“Baseline,” the voice replied.

“What is –“ the wizard started, but the shimmer was already gone. “Ah, never mind. It was going nowhere. I suspect the last few answers were random.”

“I think it was describing the scientific method,” Ocellus suggested. “A larger sample size, and a control group to compare against.”

Everyone stared at her, including the three baby dragons, since the hypnotic pattern had faded during the creepy divination.

“It’s a mundane technique for developing technology,” she explained. “But that’s what you’re doing, right? You’re trying to breed better dragons using animal husbandry. ‘Aptitude for magic’ is obviously more complicated than you thought, so if you want to see if your methods are working you need a statistically significant sample so that instead of ‘1 in 3’ you can get results like ‘25 in 100’, and a baseline to compare against where you didn’t take any action, so you can say ‘25 in 100 is better than 10 in 100’.”

“More like one in one hundred,” Tixi remarked. “Most of our magical dragons are dragon-casters.”

“So one or possibly two in three seems like an overwhelming success, doesn’t it?” Ocellus asked.

“You don’t understand,” the wizard said. “This wasn’t merely a whim where I picked a talented wizard and had them breed with another who had nearly as much talent. Both sides of the family tree have been carefully controlled for seven generations. This was to be the culmination of decades of work.”

“Perhaps the talent you expected is merely latent?” Anastasia suggested. “I could change my focus towards awakening hidden talents.”

The wizard glanced at her, then at Tixi, then at Ocellus and his failed experiment. “Do nothing drastic, for now,” he said, at last. “I must meditate on these results at length.”

===

After that debacle, a pall lay over the wizard’s tower. Ocellus tried to shield the hatchlings from it, but she’d never been good at masking anxiety, and Tixi had anxiety in spades. So did the real apprentices, when they stopped by – which they all did, often, with one excuse or another as to how playing games with – sorry, ‘studying’ the hatchlings was vital for their research.

Well, except for Marcus, who just thought they were cute and wanted a break from his spell formula work… and to get Ocellus back into his bed. “I studied the booklet you gave me cover to cover,” he said, while spinning around to give Duxi a griffon ride. “I’d really like to try it out and make sure I’ve got everything right.”

Ocellus couldn’t have been less in the mood to humor such feelings, between exhaustion from taking care of the babies, Tixi’s anxiety assaulting her constantly, and the general tense atmosphere. Marcus’ obliviousness to all of that did not speak well of his ability to actually put her sexual suggestions into practice. “Well, what’s stopping you?” Ocellus asked, then leapt back as that somehow prompted him to take a swipe at her. “From going outside! From finding another human who shares your interests!”

“Um,” Marcus said, having recoiled when she dodged his attempt at a hug. “I’d have to go outside?”

Duxi took advantage of his distraction to clamber up onto his head and start eating his hair.

“I get it, you don’t want to do it for free,” he said. “I’ll give you anything you want – I mean, within reason. If you want a magic item or something it’d have to be more of a –”

“Tixi is *not* in the mood,” Ocellus attempted to explain. “She’s been really scared ever since the wizard rejected her babies. And could we maybe not discuss this in front of the kids?”

“Oh please,” Marcus said, tugging on Duxi and eventually getting her out of his hair. “You’re so cute!” he said, wiggling her in front of his face, making her giggle. He set her down. “They’re far too young to understand anything we’re saying, let along care about sex.”

“Sex!” said Ek, from across the room.

“Congratulations,” Ocellus said. “His first word.”

“Fuck,” Marcus huffed under his breath.

“Fuck!” said Duxi energetically, running around in circles.

“Alright, I think I’d better –” he started to say, then froze as turning around left him eye to eye with the wizard, who’d crept into the room with an uncharacteristic lack of fanfare.

“Stay here and watch the kobolds,” the wizard said to him. “And I can’t believe I have to say this, but do *not* have sex with them.”

Marcus looked horrified at the thought.

“Ocellus,” the wizard said, turning to leave. “With me. We have much to discuss.”

===

“Is this about the hatchlings?” Ocellus asked, as they wound their way up the stairs to the wizard’s personal lab, on the very highest floor of the tower.

“In a way, I suppose,” the wizard replied. “But for the most part, no. I will not make a decision on that matter in haste. Rather, with my schedule unexpectedly free, and my mood unexpectedly dire, I have decided that it is time that I helped you with that little problem of yours.”

Ocellus was a bit confused. Surely he didn’t mean Marcus.

“That is, it’s time we located your home,” the wizard explained, as they passed through a set of wards powerful enough to make Ocellus’ horn tingle. “This should be a rather straightforward operation, and I could do with something succeeding for once.”

“Oh!” Ocellus said. “I thought you were going to let Tixi do that.”

“I was, but it will take her months or years to increase her skill to sufficient levels purely through library study.” The wizard took a heavy, leather-bound book from a shelf and placed it on a stand before a rune-lined circle. He flipped through the pages, then back a few, until he located the spell he was looking for. “This isn’t one of the spells I normally prepare, so it will take me a few minutes to refresh my memory. In the meantime, can you describe this friend of yours Tixi has been trying to summon? In as much detail as possible.”

Ocellus shifted into a copy of Smoulder, since that was the easiest way to show her physical form in detail. “She’s a young female dragon – not a ‘kobold’, a true dragon, or at least the equivalent from my world. In a few hundred years she’ll be a massive beast guarding a hoard in a cave. She’s already nearly indestructible and capable of breathing fire that can melt steel.”

“What color is she?” the wizard asked, not looking up from his book.

“Orange,” Ocellus said. “With purple frills.”

That at least got the wizard to glance at her. “Hmm. Certainly not a true dragon from our world. What are her favorite things?”

Ocellus hesitated, but this was certainly important enough to reveal her friend’s open secret. “Frilly dresses.”

“That seems… unfortunate,” the wizard said.

“Dragon society is extremely unfortunate,” Ocellus replied.

In the end, they went ahead without tailoring a dress as a lure. The wizard was confident that his magic would be strong enough to drag her here against her will, if it could target her at all, and Ocellus didn’t think Smoulder would take much convincing since she’d always complained about not being summoned.

And sure enough, Smoulder appeared in the circle, large and garishly colored as life.

Ocellus leapt into the circle and embraced her. “It worked!”

“Oh, hi Ocellus,” Smoulder said, a bit absently, patting her on the head but otherwise extracting herself from the hug. “I think I’m supposed to fight somebody. Is it you?”

“What? No,” Ocellus said. “We’re trying to locate my home plane so that we can open a proper portal there.”

“Yeah, I don’t know anything about that kind of nerd stuff.”

“Well… how are things back home?” Ocellus asked.

“Same as always. Dragonlands never change,” Smoulder said, turning in a circle but still not finding anyone to fight.

“I mean, back at school?”

Smoulder grinned. “It’s nice to have a private room.”

“Enough,” the wizard said. He cast a quick spell, and levitated a metal tuning fork over to Smoulder, who grabbed it out of the air and looked about to eat it when the wizard gave further orders. “Take that back with you when the spell ends. Place it onto the bedrock of your world, and ring it loudly for at least thirty seconds. Then bring it back to me. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Smoulder said. “Ring the thing, then bring the bling.”

“Do not forget,” the wizard scolded her.

“Whatever you say, king.” Smoulder saluted sarcastically, then disappeared.

“She wasn’t very lucid,” Ocellus said.

“No, she wasn’t,” the wizard said. “We may have to try this multiple times before the instructions stick. Go back to your kobolds, and we can check again tomorrow.”

===

Smoulder did indeed forget about the tuning fork.

“Oh right, that thing. Sandbar said it was for making music, but it was broken or something, so I ate it.”

“You… ate it,” the wizard said, flatly.

Smoulder nodded. “Yeah, it tasted weird.”

“Maybe we could send her back with a note?” Ocellus suggested.

“My magic allows me to understand her and speak to her, but not to write in her language,” the wizard replied.

“I can write it,” Ocellus said. “I really should have written a whole letter for her, shouldn’t I? But I can get a quick note down before the spell wears off.”

“No,” the wizard snapped, then quickly softened his expression. “Let’s try this, instead.” He waved his hands, and the replacement tuning fork started to glow brightly. “Take this back with you when the spell ends. Place it onto the bedrock of your world, and ring it loudly for at least thirty seconds. Then bring it back to me.”

“Sure thing,” Smoulder said, taking the tuning fork and peering at it, then vanished in a puff of smoke.

“I think a note would have worked better,” Ocellus said.

“Then prepare this letter you want to send, and give it to me ahead of time so I can verify its contents,” the wizard replied. “I need to make sure you aren’t telling any of my secrets.”

“I’m not sure I even know any of your secrets,” Ocellus responded. “Mostly I’d be telling Tixi’s secrets.”

“Regardless,” the wizard said.

===

Ocellus spent the rest of the day writing, while watching the little dragons play. They kept interrupting her by wanting to involve her in their games, or for her to read them a story, or sit as judge when Ek had a problem with how the others were treating him. Still, the toys the wizard had supplied were many and varied and very, very distracting, so by nightfall she’d managed to put down a detailed explanation of her situation and of everything that had happened since she’d disappeared – and especially detailed, salacious renditions of her various sexual encounters, since she knew Smoulder would love reading about them. She’d probably read them out loud in public just to see the others’ reactions. Ocellus smiled at the thought.

The instructions for using the tuning fork were at the end, but just in case it didn’t work as well as the wizard hoped, she copied a part of an astral map from the library which pinpointed the plane she was currently on.

Once Tixi was back in the nursery to take the night shift – which mostly just involved sleeping, since the little dragons were getting old enough to be children instead of hatchlings at this point – Ocellus headed up to the wizard’s chambers and knocked on his door.

After a minute or so, the door cracked open, and a giant toad stared at her wordlessly.

“The wizard wanted to review the note I planned to send back before our summoning tomorrow,” she told it, and held out the large, bulging envelope with her letter inside.

The toad stared at it, at her, then at it again, and after she set it down on the ground, grabbed hold of it with its mouth and slowly dragged it back into the room, then closed the door again with a click.

The wizard woke her up in the morning, stomping into the nursery and waking up all the little dragons. “What is this?” he asked, angrily, shaking the envelope at her.

“It’s the letter I wanted to send,” Ocellus said uncertainly, cringing back from the looming glower.

The wizard thundered, “It’s fifty pages long! You expect me to read all of this?”

“You can skim the parts that obviously aren’t about you or your secrets?” Ocellus suggested.

“Half of it is… disgusting smut!”

“The only parts you should care about are the last two pages,” Ocellus said, narrowing her eyes.

“And I’m supposed to trust you on that?” the wizard asked, as if that was the most insane thing that anyone had ever asked him. “Fine. If those are the only important pages, then…” he took the sheaf of pages out of the envelope, peeled off the last two pages, and scattered the rest across the nursery floor. Looking them over, he crumpled up her rendition of the astral map and then set it on fire with a spell. “This will do,” he said, heading back upstairs with the remaining page.

Tixi peered around the corner of a toy chest, where she’d been hiding with her children. “What did you do?” she asked.

“I don’t know!” Ocellus complained. “I don’t like this. We should leave.”

“Leave?” Tixi asked, blinking and looking around at the wonderful room full of wonderful toys, with a glance down towards the library.

“Bark bark bark,” Ocellus responded.

“He’s not crazy,” Tixi said, shaking her head. “He’s just feeling stressed because his experiment didn’t work out exactly like he wanted. Have you tried sleeping with him?”

“What?” Ocellus asked.

“Have sex with him! That’s supposed to reduce stress, right?”

“I don’t think –” Ocellus started, before a scenario began to play itself out in her head, entirely against her will. One of the standard practice scenarios. Calming an angry pony by starting with subtle flirtation and flattery, working gradually up to seduction and capture. It was dangerous, but if she was careful…

“No,” she said firmly, to Tixi and herself.

“It could work!” Tixi insisted.

“If we want to have any chance of staying here, I have to be honest with him,” Ocellus replied. “I’ll see if I can calm him down by apologizing; maybe I can figure out what made him so angry.”

“And if it turns out to be lack of sex?” Tixi asked.

Ocellus rolled her eyes and headed upstairs.

===

The summoning was already in progress when she arrived, so she lurked quietly in a corner until Smoulder appeared and waved to her.

“I see you don’t have the tuning fork with you,” the wizard replied, not seeming to notice.

“Oh right, that,” Smoulder said. “It was glowing, so Starlight confiscated it for study. She thinks it might be the breakthrough they need to finish their mirror.”

“What? That’s nonsense,” the wizard replied. “Arcane magic isn’t specific to a particular plane.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” Smoulder replied.

“This could be a good thing,” Ocellus said, stepping forward to make herself known. “If they finish their mirror portal we’ll have a stable way to travel back and forth.”

“A good thing?” the wizard said, incredulously. “A stable portal to an outer plane is a *good thing*?”

“Isn’t it?” Ocellus replied. “I could visit home, reassure everyone that I was okay, then come back to Tixi so she wouldn’t have to find another familiar.” She paused. “You could send someone with me to make sure I wasn’t giving away your secrets?”

“Let me pose a hypothetical situation for you,” the wizard said, glowering at her. “Let us assume that a mysterious portal opened in the middle of one of your cities. How would people react?”

“Do you mean in the middle of my hive, or in the middle of a pony city?” Ocellus asked, then immediately answered herself, “A pony city, of course, since this is an analogy. They’d… probably call in their heroes to investigate, and have the guards set up a cordon around it in case something nasty came through.”

“And what would they do to the person who caused the portal to be opened?” the wizard prompted.

“She’d probably have some explaining to do…” Ocellus admitted. “So you’re worried the city will get hold of the portal, and blame you for it?”

“It would be an immense blow to my prestige,” the wizard said. “Or, perhaps, things would go badly, and I’d be forced to flee the city, while every kobold was put to the sword by frightened angry mobs. Interplanar travel is tolerated when it’s transient, and under the control of a responsible caster.”

“Maybe you should add that to the note, then,” Ocellus said. “Because the ponies aren’t going to stop until they get me back. King Thorax threatened to start a war the last time I went missing.”

“And a sample of my magic might be enough for them to finish their portal?” the wizard asked.

“That’s what Starlight seemed to think,” Smoulder said. “Something about homing in on its signature from astral space? It’s all unicorn nonsense.”

“Then I suppose we have no choice. We’ll have to send you back now,” the wizard replied. “Come here.”

Ocellus obediently approached him. “Send me back? How?”

“We’ll have Smoulder carry you,” the wizard explained, kneeling down and taking her head in his hands.

“That only works on non-living objects,” Ocellus said.

“Flashing Claws of the Storm,” the wizard intoned. Ocellus had enough time to recognize it as a spell, but his grip was surprisingly firm, and she failed to pull free in the half-second before the spell completed. There was a flash of pain –