Dragon and Chameleon

Super Sculpey, painted and coated in Sculpey satin glaze.



"What the...?" the young dragon woke with a start.

He craned his long neck this way and that, looking ahead of him and behind him and to each side. Something... something was different, but he couldn't put his claw on it. Uneasy, he tried to drift back to sleep.

There it was again, a sort of... tickle. That was it, a tickle. At the very edge of his consciousness. Eyes now wide, he stood up, whipped his body around, and again, glaring at his forested surroundings. He didn't see anything that would have been touching him - he'd made sure to clear a round path in the bushes and trees before he'd curled up exhausted on the ground.

Curse this blasted land, he thought. I hate the forest. It's hot and close and noisy and there's too much stuff moving around in it. Not at all like my mountain, the dragon whined to himself. But he had been waylaid by a passing storm during a flight to his great-auntie's, and decided to rest and wait out the storm before he tried to continue. The forest was the only place that had made itself immediately available that would keep the rain off. It'd stopped raining now, but for some reason the forest sounded even more noisy even though the raindrops had stopped pattering and the thunder had stopped thundering.

He was just about to continue on his way, shaking the sleep out of his head, when he felt the tickle again. And this time his reptilian brain was able to pinpoint the source. It was on the very tip of his short tail. With some wiggling and twisting, he managed to turn his sinuous neck around to point at his back half. Slowly, his tail came into focus (dragons have wonderful long-distance vision - all the better for scoping out livestock lunches from 5,000 feet up - but they're rather slow at focusing on close distances). Something was odd. He seemed to have an extra spike on the end of his tail, where there wasn't one before.

"Huh, what's this?" he mused. "Have I hit puberty or something? Dad warned me that I might start growing odd scales here and there once it happened. Oh, yuck, I suppose that means I'm going to have to act like an adult now, kissing girls and sharing and-"

The spike blinked.

The dragon blinked.

The spike blinked once more before the dragon figured out that it was not a spike at all. Spikes definitely do not blink, not even puberty-induced spikes.

"What are you?" the dragon rumbled, a bit fearfully. He was unfamiliar with forests, but he'd heard tales of poisonous spiders and scorpions and snakes that were strong enough even to sicken a full-sized dragon, nevermind a youth like himself. You just didn't get horrible things like that in mountains.

The not-a-spike blinked once more, cocked what was apparently its head (that's where most of the blinking was happening, after all), and... turned reddish-pink. At least, around its head.

"Oh, dear," it said in a tiny, embarrassed voice. "I seem to have done it again. Last month it was the monkey, last week it was the panther, and two days ago it was a parrot."

The dragon scrunched his eyebrows, confused. "I... I'm sorry? Seem to have done what again?"

"I am in search of a good tree to call my home," the little thing explained. "But I keep picking not-trees instead, on accident. Let me tell you, it was quite a surprise when my first tree got up and started going 'ook eek eek' and eating bananas. It was an honest mistake, I mean, the monkey was brownish grey, kind of like tree bark. I really should have known about the parrot, though. You simply don't see many red and blue trees."

"Well, I'm not a tree either," the dragon grumped. "I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? Wings, claws, fangs... I mean, I'm blue and purple and I even have gold on my spikes!" He was quite put out. The dragon knew that it was not exactly a compliment to be confused with a boring tree.

"No, you're not a tree, that much is clear," the little thing nodded. "You know, I think I have a problem. I'm an overachiever."

"Never heard of 'em," the dragon said. "I guess we don't get those in the mountains."

Not-spike blinked again. "...no, I mean, I'm a chameleon, see? We're supposed to live in trees and be happy blending in with the browns and the greens. But that's so boring. I can do brown and green, but we come out of the egg brown and green! I want a challenge! I want to try to reproduce the fur pattern in monkeys. I want to be jet-black like the panther. I want to be beautiful! Like you," the chameleon said, tapping the dragon's nearest golden-tipped tail spike. "Being your colors, now that's a challenge. I suppose I just got overexcited about finally finding a wonderful tree."

The dragon had the decency to blush. "Well, that's quite a lot nicer than being confused for a regular boring tree," he admitted. "But I can't stay, I'm afraid. I'm going to my great-auntie's. As soon as I find my way out of this stupid forest."

If the chameleon had had external ears, they would have perked up. As it was, all he could do was blink more frequently. "You mean you're going out in the world? Exploring new colorful places? How exciting!"

"If you call my great-auntie's quartz sofa exciting, then yes." The dragon tilted his head at the tiny lizard. "You know, you could probably come with me. It might be a bit of a challenge for you to try blending into quartz, now that I think about it. And after that, if you want, you can come to the mountains with me. We have any number of veins in our rock that shine and sparkle - you'd never be bored for colors to challenge you." And I would be the first dragon in the mountain range to have a piece of body jewelry that matches me completely, the dragon thought. (Don't fault him for that - he was, after all, a dragon. They love jewelry more than anything else. A chameleon used as a piece of dragon jewelry would be the best-treated chameleon in the world.)

The chameleon agreed that it sounded like a grand time, and so the dragon and the lizard left the forest together for the dragon's great-auntie's. The dragon had to hide a snicker when the chameleon sprained his brain trying to turn the color of quartz.

After that the chameleon learned not to overdo it. When he wasn't running through the jewel-imbued caves of the dragons, the tiny lizard happily made his home on the tail of the dragon - all purple and gold just like one of the dragon's spikes. And all of the other dragons were envious of our dragon. And everyone knows that an envied dragon is a very happy dragon indeed.