CHAPTER 4

Byron

“He’s coming!” I said eagerly.“He’s coming!”

I kept my eyes fixed on the live feed streaming onto my mirror.Next to me, Cade and Jenna did the same, while on the beach all around us, people watched their own mirrors or trained their eyes on the ridge just above where we stood.The sense of anticipation in the air was tangible.A murmur of voices mixed with the sound of the waves slowly rolling in.Between the crowd and the ridge, on a cleared and roped-off area of the beach, a flag waved on a pole that stood in the sand.

In a moment, someone would be claiming that flag.I had a good idea who it would be, which I was sure my friends shared.

On the feed on my mirror, nine winged figures soared through the sky; seven of them in rainbow colors, red to violet, one in black, one in white.The one in black held my sharpest attention.He was in the lead.Elliot was in top form, beating his wings and slashing his tail, then soaring fast ahead on pure momentum.He almost made me think of a scaly, horned missile, shooting through the air towards its target.A few others were close behind him, flying furiously to close the gap between themselves and Elliot.But the way Elliot was cutting the air, no one was going to catch him.

“He’s got this,” I murmured, grinning widely with pride at my friend.Taking a second to glance over at Cade and Jenna, I nodded confidently, “He’s got this for sure.”

”Oh yeah,” said Cade.“It’s his.”

Jenna said nothing.She just watched her screen and let out a little squeal and did a little hop on the sand.Then she looked up at the ridge where the tall grass swayed as if it shared everyone’s anticipation.When our black-garbed friend came shooting up over the ridge with wings spread wide, she called out, “There he is!There he is!”

The murmuring voices on the beach grew louder than the sound of the waves.People lowered their mirrors and fixed their eyes up above as, behind Elliot, the racers in red, green, and white appeared.In a few seconds, the remaining competitors would rise up into view, but it wouldn’t matter.Even as the others soared up at his flank, Elliot was already descending into a fast, strong dive for the beach, and the spot where the flagpole stood.The voices of the people around us turned to shouts and screams at the sight of Elliot swooping down over the sand, pulling slightly up—and flying like a javelin at the flagpole.With one final, decisive pass through the air, he beat his wings one last time, reached out, and snatched up the pole and flag.He screeched out his triumph, pulled up over the beach, gave one last mighty beat of his wings, and lowered himself onto the sand, holding up the flag amid the screams and whoops of the crowd.Behind him, the other competitors came in for landings of their own, flapping their wings, curling their tails, and screeching to the crowd in the wake of Elliot’s victory.

Elliot had won, as we’d seen him do so many times.With the race won, they all morphed back to human shape as the media people came out of the crowd to interview Elliot on his performance and get comments from the others.High overhead, the drones that had captured the race and fed out the event for public viewing now circled the beach, recording these final moments of the competition.My friends and I stood on the sidelines, letting Elliot enjoy his latest win, patiently waiting our turn.I divided my attention between Elliot and Jenna, watching her grin widely and proudly, sensing her desire to throw her arms around him for a personal congratulation.I could well imagine the way she’d be congratulating him later on.

Slowly, the crowd dispersed and the racers all went their separate ways, and Elliot handed off the flag to a racing manager.Then he came over to us, laughing, and went directly to Jenna.He swept her up in his arms and whirled her around on the sand.They laughed together, and he set Jenna down and pulled her into a hard, hot kiss.He then embraced Cade and me and accepted our compliments on a race well flown.Then we all walked together down the beach for a bit.

Jenna said, “This beach is so nice.This whole day is so nice.It reminds me of home.I had so many afternoons just like this back in Malibu.”

“I think it’s about time we had a look at this Malibu of yours for ourselves,” said Elliot.“I’d really like to go through the space domain and pay a little visit to Earth, and see where you live and what it’s like over there.”

”It’s a lot like this in a lot of ways,” said Jenna.“But it’s so very different too.If we went over, we’d have to be very careful.”

”So?We can be careful,” I said with assurance.“Being in a political family, I know how to be discreet.We can definitely do that.Right, Cade?”

Nodding, Cade said, “Yeah.Discreet?We can handle that.Nobody has to know we’re anything but three regular guys.”

Jenna laughed a bit at that.“Three guys.Three fantastically hot-looking guys.Actually California is the perfect place for guys like you—at least the way you are now.”

”No one has to know there’s anything else about us,” I said.“I can get away for a little while.Elliot doesn’t have any races or wrestling bouts scheduled immediately, and Cade is at liberty.”

”Which is a nice way of saying I’ve got nothing else to do and I’m getting by on public allotments,” said Cade.

I continued, “So we’ve all got some time on our hands.What would you say to making a little visit over there, Jenna?”

Jenna gazed at the three of us, one at a time.“I’d love to show you guys a little bit of where I live.It’d be so much fun, getting back home for a while and having you there.”She grinned a little mischievously at that last part.I could imagine she had more than one meaning in mind for “having” us there.That was something we could all appreciate.The idea of being with Jenna on Earth, being in bed with her in another world, got my heart racing a bit, as I was sure it did for my friends.It just had to happen.

“So then, it’s a plan?” I said.

She took Elliot’s hand and again looked happily from one of us to the other.“I think it’s a plan.”

And off we went down the beach, anticipating the adventure.

_______________

We all retired to Elliot’s apartment for dinner and what quickly followed dinner in Elliot’s bedroom.The clothes came off; Jenna blew the three of us and we ate her out and fucked her with our usual enthusiasm.Late at night, we settled into a very contented sleep.

Next morning, the guys and I were horny as usual, and Jenna helped herself to us.After that, we were about as ravenous as it’s possible for three dragon guys and a very sexed-up young woman to get.Together we raided Elliot’s kitchen to whip up a huge breakfast for four.There was a monitor on the wall in Elliot’s dining room where we sat devouring what we’d prepared.What came on the monitor was about enough to put all of us off our appetites.

The report on the local media included a speech given the previous day while we were all at the race.We were all stunned at who was being given the most public forum possible for his words.

As we looked on, the media recording showed a large gathering in Fafnir Park, where Elliot not long ago had won the Pendrake Circle Prize Race.Everyone in the crowd was a Scaler, and every one was in dragon form.They were all gathered and crowding around a podium that had been put up not far from where Elliot had come in for his winning landing.Standing at the podium was a very large, black-scaled, dark violet-winged, scary-looking dragon man.My blood froze and I could swear I felt the same thing happening to my friends as we realized whom we were looking at.It was Jenna, in a chilled and hushed tone, who put the name into the air while instinctively reaching for Elliot’s hand.Clasping fingers with Elliot, she spoke: “Nidaag…!”

”Yeah,” Elliot said, his own voice coming as a low growl.“Nidaag.”

We didn’t know what he looked like in human form.I couldn’t recall whether anyone had ever gotten a scan of him when he wasn’t a big, evil-looking black dragon and no one seemed to know this dragon’s real name.The only name by which he was known was that of a half-mythical king out of Tellus’s ancient history.Nidaag, the warrior tyrant monarch.Nidaag, who in legends that were a mixture of folklore and fact, was the most powerful and feared of all conquering rulers, who once held a whole continent of both humans and Scalers under his talons.He looked like this ancient, storied figure reincarnated, and it was probably easy enough for some people, especially Scalers who remembered the old religions, to believe that was exactly who and what he was.

Addressing the crowd, Nidaag spread his wings and his arms and talked into the microphone drone floating near him, letting his voice boom out into the park.“My friends, my faithful,” he intoned.“We come to a critical moment in history, a moment when we remember the glory of the past and look forward to the rebirth of that glory in the future and there were glorious times, were there not, in an age long, long before any of us were born:times when dragons knew who they were and what was theirs.Times when we recognized ourselves as the rightful lords and masters of the air, land, and sea; of the forests and the mountains and the clouds.Times when we knew whom great Gorgonos made us to be.Some of the dragon-bodied never forgot those times.They passed on the memories to their children, and their children passed them on to their own children, on through the ages into the present day.That’s how we know those times now and that is how some of us yearn to be who our ancestors were.”

Elliot frowned at the monitor so hard that I thought his face would crack.“How can this be allowed?How can anyone let him stand there talking that way?”

”Oh, Elliot,” said Jenna, sounding pained.“This is one of those ways that your world is so much like mine.There are some things about Earth…,” she trailed off for a moment.“This is so familiar.So, so familiar…”

Meanwhile, on the screen, Nidaag continued his blood-chilling speech.“There are those who will hear the words I now say to you, and say that I am truly a font of hatred.They’ll say that I’m spewing words of hate that threaten violence.They’ll say that all beings are equal, whether they possess two bodies or one; that those who are only men are the same as we who are men and dragons, and that no race was meant to live above another.They call us hateful and denounce what we know to be the plain truth of our heritage and is our heritage not a thing of beauty, the greatest beauty in all the world?Is it not the most glorious of things to be the grandest, most powerful of all living beings?Are we not dragons in flesh and heart and soul?”

And from the crowd in the recording, a response welled up—a resounding, screeching, roaring cheer of enthused dragons in the grip of a black-scaled orator who knew exactly what to say and exactly how to say it, to inflame a mass of Scalers who felt cheated by history; a history that had been for their benefit as much as for humans.The equality that Nidaag railed against was exactly what had created a desirable quality of life for everyone.But it was Jenna who put it into the best words.

“On Earth, there are some people who have it better than others, but that’s not enough for them,” she said.“There are some people who think, I’ve got mine; now I want yours and there are some humans who know how to use people who think like them to get what they want.Guys, I’m feeling right at home right now.”

I listened to Jenna say that, and I remembered how keen I was to visit Earth.Perhaps we needn’t even bother going there, even keeping our dragon selves secret.How truly different, I wondered, would we find Earth when we got over there?

Nidaag on the screen bellowed on, “I call upon us to be the dragons that our lord Gorgonos made us!I call upon us to be his children, blood of his blood, scales of his scales!Are we not dragons?”

And from the crowd, his enraptured listeners and followers roared back, “We are dragons!”

”Are we not dragons?” Nidaag bellowed again.

The crowd answered resoundingly, “We are dragons!”

”Hail Gorgonos!” Nidaag shouted.

And the crowd shouted back, “Hail Gorgonos!”

Nidaag repeated at the top of his dragon lungs, “Hail Gorgonos!”

The crowd repeated in booming tones, “Hail Gorgonos!”

And then Cade, sounding sick and angry next to me at the table, said, “Turn that damn thing off!”

”I agree,” said Elliot.“I’ve had enough of that filth.”And he picked up the remote, which lay on the table near him, and shut off the monitor.Looking as sick and angry as Cade sounded, he said, “I have members of my own family who think that way; people I’m related to who actually believe that kind of sick filth.How can they?How can anyone think things like that?”Jenna put her arms around him, kissed his shoulder, and stroked his arm soothingly.“How does anyone get that way?”

”It comes from a lot of things,” she said.“Thinking life has been unfair to you, or thinking life has been more fair to someone else than you.Or just not liking to have to live with what’s not like yourself.It isn’t right, but it goes on.The people in that recording were in dragon bodies, but they were totally human.They might as well have been from Earth.”She let go of Elliot and addressed all of us.“What we just saw was just like my world.Do you really still want to go over there?”

I said, nodding at the monitor, “I think we could all use a break from that and besides, no matter what else there is about Earth, I think we can all agree there’s one good thing about it.Earth is where you come from, Jenna and any world that can produce someone like you can’t be all bad.”

There was a moment of silence that felt as if dark clouds were parting.Elliot and Cade and I all looked to each other, and my friends’ smiles told me they were in total agreement with me.Jenna just softly smiled at all of us.In a room that had been filled with sounds of hate a moment ago, there was now a warm glow of love.

“Okay, then,” said Jenna.“If we’re all agreed, let’s go.Next stop:Malibu, California—Earth!”

_______________

After we cleaned up from breakfast, Jenna excused herself into Elliot’s bedroom while the guys and I went to the living room.She had told us that we’d need some extra space for what we were about to do, so we decided to move his living room sofa further away from the big panoramic picture window.As we lifted the big long piece of suede furniture and walked it towards the dining room, I couldn’t help imagining what this sofa might say if it could talk; what a story it might tell of Elliot taking Jenna’s virginity on it.I smiled a bit enviously at the thought of him on top of her, on top of these suede cushions; of Elliot’s dick being the very first one to slide into Jenna’s pussy, popping her cherry and making our visitor from Earth a virgin no more.It was an exaggeration, I knew, but in some way I felt as if we were carrying an artifact of history.

Or was it an exaggeration?I had the whimsical and very unlikely image in my head now.If some contact eventually took place between Tellus and Earth, this sofa might one day be on display in the Pendrake Museum of History.Some tour guide might lead visitors to a place where this couch would sit behind velvet ropes and say, “And it was on this sofa that one of the first visitors from a parallel universe had her first sexual experience with a champion Scaler athlete.On this sofa Jenna Callaway was fucked for the first time by Elliot Ladon.”

As we set Elliot’s sofa back down on the floor at the edge of the living room, I straightened up and softly laughed, shaking my head at my absurd but funny little idea.Cade and Elliot looked curiously at me.“What's so funny?” Cade asked.

Shaking my head and ruffling my hair with my fingers, I only grinned and said, “Nothing, really.Just a ridiculous stray thought I had.Don’t pay it any attention.”And I looked at the sofa, then at Elliot, and chuckled a little more.

Before Elliot or Cade could say anything else, Jenna returned from Elliot’s bedroom with her mirror in one hand and the domain ring in the other.“I just left a message with my Uncle Neal,” she said, “telling him not to worry if he can’t reach me for a few days.”She slipped the mirror into her pocket and held up the ring.“Ready to go?”

We all answered, “Ready.”

Looking at the slight rearrangement of the room, she said, “This should do all right.When I activate the ring, we’ll all have to stand a bit away from it while it starts working.When the access point is stable, we’ll be good to go.”

”To Earth,” I said.

Jenna nodded and stepped to the center of the room.“To Earth.”

“So, there’s nothing else we need to do?” I asked.

”Nothing,” she said.“Once I get it started, the ring will do it all.”She knelt down on one knee, holding the ring by its rim against the floor, and said, “Just stay right there and watch.”

Elliot, Cade, and I stayed on the side of the room where we were and did as she said.Jade nimbly used her fingers to turn the metallic hoop about 180 degrees on the floor, then did a twisting motion and set it to spinning.Immediately we heard a humming from the device, a sound that started low and quickly grew in pitch as Jenna stood up and came over to stand with us.By the time she reached us, the hum of the ring turned to a strange, electronic-sounding howl—and the circular device spinning on the floor started to give off a weird, purplish glow.

It was the most amazing thing any of us guys had ever seen.The howling of the device started to vibrate, sounding like some sort of ghost.At the same time, from the edges of the ring, the glow began to expand.The ring itself stayed erect and stationary and continued to spin as if driven by some inner source of power, which was what I guessed must be happening.At the same time, a circle of light spread out from where the ring was spinning.It shimmered, pulsating in time with the vibrations of howling sound and most amazingly of all, in the space inside that luminous circle, we couldn’t see Elliot’s living room any more.It was as if within that space, the room just disappeared, opening out into another space—one that we didn’t recognize.

”There’s Daddy’s lab and workshop,” said Jenna and looking inside the circle, we could make out the shapes of machines covered over with sheets and tarps. There were also tables, pillars, and brick walls.It was incredible to know we were actually looking from Elliot’s living room into some other, completely different place!

The sound from the ring ebbed and softened, while the glow of the circle of light just throbbed with a steady rhythm.The “hole” in space was complete.

”We can go on through now,” said Jenna.“And we’d better hurry; it won’t stay stable forever.In a few minutes the ring will power down and the opening will collapse.Let’s go.”

Each of us had packed a bag for the strange, amazing “trip,” and Jenna had prepared her backpack again.We’d left all our gear in one corner of the living room.Quickly we collected our stuff and approached the amazing gateway from one universe to another.

“Be careful,” said Jenna.“Don’t kick the ring over when you go through, or the opening will collapse on you.I don’t know what will happen if it does.”

The thought of being caught between one universe and another—or, worse, being cut in two by a closing aperture between the universes—wasn’t the least bit appealing.“Right,” I said.“Careful of the ring.”

”Ready?” Jenna said to Elliot.

Elliot took her by the hand and said, “Let’s do this.”

Jenna and Elliot stepped forward first.They paused for just a second at the threshold to Earth.Jenna allowed Elliot just that much time to take a deep breath—and then, with one step, taking care not to upset the ring, they moved forward through the opening, and Cade and I, to our amazement, saw them waving to us and motioning us to follow them into that other world.

Cade looked at me like an excited little boy and said, “Come on!Watch the ring; let’s go!”And he moved to the threshold, paused the way Elliot and Jenna had done, took a deep breath as if he were diving into a lake, and stepped around the spinning ring and into the place where our friends waited for us.

I was the last to go.Having seen that nothing happened to any of my companions, I marched confidently to the opening in the air and stepped around the ring as Cade did.There was a funny, sparkling sort of sensation as I went through—not unpleasant, just unusual; it felt as if I were sparkling inside and surrounded with sparkles outside and then, there I was, with Cade, Elliot, and Jenna—somewhere else.

While the three of us looked around at our new surroundings, Jenna went over, stooped down, and picked up the spinning ring from the floor.As soon as she grasped it and stopped its rotating, the rim of the threshold sparked and flickered, then contracted into nothing, cutting off our view of Elliot’s living room which we’d just left.

Jenna stood up again, holding the ring, and faced us.

”We’re here,” she said.

And just like that, we were all somewhere on a planet called Earth.