Bear With Me: The Adventures of Blueberry and Aeglos, Part One: Homecoming

     Late one night, most of the wizard’s household was awakened by sudden cries of

    “Hey! Wait! Slow down! Brake!! No!!! AAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”
    *plop*

    “AEGLOS!”

    *chuckles* “Oh, c’mon Blueb, you know that's fun.”

    “If you warn me first!”

    “But what would be the fun in that? Besides, considering you do handstands on my back while I’m flying, you’d think you wouldn’t mind a little dive-bomb every now and then.”

    “Yeah, but it’s dark!”

    "You know dragons have excellent night vision.”
    “But teddy bears don’t!”
    “Oh, right, sorry about that.”
    “Oh, never mind, but do you really have to call me Blueb?”

    “Yes. Blueberry Ice takes entirely too long to say. My mouth just gets tired before I even get halfway through it.”

    *sigh* “Fine, where’s Flicker?”

    “Right here,” said another voice, which sounded as though it was trying not to laugh.

    “Good, so you survived the flight too, then? Can we go inside now?”

    “Sure, I wonder if they all still sleep in the same place as before.”

    A light suddenly flickered in the window of the wizard’s workshop.

    “Yup, looks like one of them just lit a candle for us. C’mon Flicker, time to meet everyone!”

    “...and time for bed,” muttered Blueberry.

    On coming inside, the three travelers were greeted with cries of:

   “Blueberry!”
   “Aeglos!”
   “Haven’t seen you in forever, how are you!”
   “Hi! I’m Lucas. We’ve heard all about you; it’s great to meet you!”
   “How was the trip?”
   “Who’s your friend?”  
    Eventually, the general hubbub subsided, after the travelers had met those who had hatched after they left and caught up a little with the ones they’d known before. Eustace was finally able to ask, “So, where exactly did you two go when you went off exploring?”
     Aeglos yawned and said, “Well, I’m tired, so we should tell you the whole story later, but the basic gist is that we flew straight down to Antarctica and-“
     Blueberry muttered, “Sure, let’s just leave out all the times we almost died...or that incident with the water buffalo, or the-“
     “Right, like I was saying, we’ll tell you all that later. Mainly, we wanted to see Antarctica, so we flew more or less straight down, all the way over Africa”
      “Remember meeting the crocodile?”
      “I still say it’s too bad he didn’t eat your guitar. Anyway, Africa was way too hot, so we tried to get over it as quickly as possible, and we did fairly well. Antarctica was awesome. We’ll really have to tell you about that one later – it really needs a long time to tell you how cool it really was, and I want to tell you guys where Hobbes came from. We met him on the way back. We decided to tour around some other parts of the world before coming back here, so we went up the coast of Africa and over to Asia. We were debating whether or not to go all the way up north through the Arctic Circle before coming home when Flicker just appeared out of nowhere.”
      “In other words, I came and sat down and watched them because I’d heard a lot of sudden noise, and I was wondering why there was a blue and white ball of fur and skin rolling around the jungle floor and shouting at itself.”
      “Okay, so the debate might’ve been more of a wrestling match...you’d think a teddy bear would be easier to beat. You want to finish the story, Flicker?”
      “Sure. When they finally noticed me, they stopped fighting and we all just sort of stared at each other. I’d never seen anything like them, especially Aeglos, and all of you guys here are different to me, too. My tribe of dragons all look more or less like me – we’re tiger dragons, mostly orange with black stripes, and we have ears. I’ve heard tiger dragons are sometimes white with black stripes, but that’s usually not good because it makes it harder for them to hide. I guess we look like this because we all hatch near tiger dens, but I never knew that until Aeglos told me about how you guys get your colors. These two really stood out in the jungle. If Aeglos had been bigger, I might have been afraid of him. But we’ll have to tell you the whole story later. Pretty soon, curiosity got the better of us, and I wound up inviting them back to stay with my family. We usually all live together in a big cave network. When Blueberry and Aeglos decided they wanted to come back here, I asked if I could come with them. I wanted to see what your land is like, and I’ve never seen so many different dragons!”
      Soon, as it was quite late at night by this point, the questions and stories were saved for the coming days and everyone got some well-needed sleep.

(Author’s note: Stay tuned for more short stories detailing The Adventures of Blueberry and Aeglos (aka Bear With Me))