My family was always a little different. I was a straight-A, 4.0 student who never got into trouble. I was seventeen, had hazel eyes, brown hair, and I was about five foot ten inches tall. My mom was five eight, had blue eyes, and almost never lost her temper. But when she did, you did not want to be in the same room as her.

Every family has that one person that doesn't really fit in with everyone else. Well, in our family, that person was my dad. He was a kind of crazy scientist who, let's say… "specialized", in genetics. He was six one, balding, but very nice at the same time. Or, at least I thought so, until the fall of my senior year….

See, the thing is, my dad always loved doing weird science experiments. Usually, though, they didn't work. This one, however, happened to be different.

I walked down to my dad's lab one Saturday, and he looked like I couldn't have come at a better time.

"Hey, Jason!" he said to me. "Come look at this!"

"Ummmm… okay," I replied.

He led me into the back room of his lab and all that I saw was a huge metal box. It had some blinking buttons on the side and a hole in it.

"Eh?" my dad said. "Isn't it cool?"

"Umm… I don't mean to be rude, but what is it?" I said to him.

"Oh, right. Well, this machine allows humans to speak Draconic by injecting them with a tiny amount of dragon DNA."

"Huh," I said, thinking about how badly this could go wrong. "Where'd you get the DNA?"

"Oh…. ummm…," my dad said, clearly avoiding the question. "I have my suppliers. Just don't tell your mother." This usually meant that he had gotten whatever he was using illegally.

"Have you tested it yet?" I said, changing the subject.

"Oh, yeah," he replied. "It worked wonders, but the effects wore off, so if you want to see it, you'll have to test it yourself."

"Okay, I guess I could—"

"Wait! Don't do it now. Come with me to the science convention in Sacramento tomorrow. That way I have someone to test the machine, and you get your answers."

"I…..well…..I guess I could go…," I said, trying to think of any excuse I could to get out of it, and, of course, finding none.

"Great! I'll let your mother know that you're going to come along."

As he went to go and talk to my mom, I thought about what this could actually be used for. Why would Dad need a machine like this? Dragons didn't actually exist, did they?