Chapter 2

For a while, an awkward silence reigned over the duo and their guest. It wasn't hard to understand why. To learn you were stuck inside of a crystal for so long would be quite the shock to anyone, especially when you learn that what you thought was your reality was only nothing but a shared fantasy between all of them.

How much had things changed? Well, a lot apparently. Already, the things around them caught their attention. The bucket which had been brought to them was neither metal nor ceramic, but instead was made of a material that Sierra called plastic.

Another point of interest to the two dragons was the source of all of the lights in the cavernous room. They were not torches or glowing crystals. Some of them were arranged in strips of glowing bars, while others appeared to be one-off sources. Confusion filled their faces when the sandy dragoness told them that the source of the lights were something called an Ell-ee-dee lightbulb.

Everything was a confusing mess.

While the dragons sat there, still in a bit of an existential crisis, something else came to life amid the shards of the yellow crystal. Blending in a bit with the shards, a little dragonfly began to buzz back to life. Shifting out from under some small shards came Spyro's dragonfly brother, Sparx. He groaned a little bit and rubbed his head, before he slowly began to right himself and prepped his wings to take flight. Well… that would have been the case had the bright lights not blinded him, causing him to groan and grumble a little louder.

It was thanks to the louder groaning that caught the attention of the purple dragon, pulling him out of his melancholic mindset. Slowly, he ambled over to the little insect as he recovered from the containment. "Hey, Sparx… are you alright bud?"

"No! My head hurts, and why is everything so bright?" he answered back, most notably with the voice that the purple dragon remembered from before their sealing away in the crystal.

I guess your voice doesn't keep changing, huh? Spyro thought to himself. "Good to see you still around, bud…"

"Yeah, same here." The dragonfly attempted to open his eyes once more, and the harshness of the light was not as noticeable as before. Slowly, his eyes fluttered open and adjusted to the light levels in the room. Right away, Sparx began noticing all of the things that Spyro and Cynder took note of. "Woah… Where are we?"

Sierra perked up a little as she heard that question, and was more than willing to break the silence to answer the dragonfly's question. Spyro, however, beat her to it. "Well… You're not going to believe this, but… we're still in the mountain of Malefor…"

No sooner than the purple dragon detailed their location, Sparx raised a skeptical brow. "That spooky place? Nah, this place looks much different!" he retorted sardonically. "Besides, you and Cynder got hitched and wanted some 'alone time' at the reception hall." The purple dragon rolled his eyes at the underlying suggestion.

Still, it brought Spyro pain to remember it. Ten years, nothing more than an illusion, a shared illusion. The dragonfly's words reached the ears of the black dragoness in the room, who curled up tighter than she already was. As for the sand dragoness in the room, it brought her more questions that, had she not been considerate of the three prisoners of the crystal, would have been asked in rapid fire succession.

"Well… it's complicated…" Spyro said, falling into a somewhat distrodden mood. His dragonfly brother picked up on the queues and didn't push it further.

For a while, they all kinda just sat there. Neither Spyro, Cynder, or Sparx had nothing much to say. What could one even say? It all felt like this was supposed to be a fantasy, not what they had lived for ten years.

They had been sitting there for a while before something finally changed. From an access hallway, the green antlered dragon returned from wherever he had gone before, accompanied by other creatures. All of them were familiar sights to the trio: a feminine feline, but not a cheetah, instead appearing to be of a more tamed nature, resembling a bobtail house cat; a fox with orange fur; and perhaps the most odd among all of them, was a deep-blue dragon that had the body shape and type of the feline and fox, standing tall on two legs. All of them were wearing formal attire, suits and ties, and kept their distance from the trio on the floor

All three of the suited individuals were in shock at the sight they saw. They were the site supervisors, and they were aware of the dragons and the dragonfly stuck in the crystal. What they were not expecting was that the crystal would break, and that its occupants would be released back into the world.

"S-so Fraisure was not lying when he said…" the dark blue dragon stuttered, in awe at the sight before him. "They really have been released…"

"The implications of this are extraordinary!" the fox whooped. "Do you know what knowledge of the past these two have? Their way of life, their customs, everything! Together, they can provide such great insight!"

While the dragon was still in a state of shock and the fox was excited, the feline crossed her arms and shook her head. She gave off a studious yet stern aura. "Sierra, did you come into contact with them, or go within six or less feet of them?" she asked with a sternness that got her a reply almost instantly.

"No ma'am."

The feline's eyes locked onto the buckets of water that had been given to them. "Who gave them the water?"

"Fraisure did, but he slid it to them."

Her hands went up and palmed her face as her expression soured. "Damnit, we could have contaminated them with modern germs that they have no immunity to…" she lamented, then looked at the dragons and the dragonfly. "We'll have to keep them isolated for weeks, and give them all of the necessary immunizations before they do anything… And Sierra, can you procure masks for all of us, please?"

"Yes ma'am." The sand dragoness got up and quickly rushed off out of the chamber.

Spyro perked up at all of the things that the feline was saying. Germs? Immunizations? What were those? The feline continued to go on and one with her cohorts, continuing to speak about things that he, his girlfriend, nor the dragonfly understood. It didn't seem like they would be informed of what they were talking about either, and it would be a while before they eventually were.

Among the other oddities and natural inconsistencies that they began to take note of, the air around them always seemed to be fresh and clean, and it always maintained a constant temperature as well. His memory of this place was rather vivid, and he recalled the interior of the Mountain of Malefor had a stifling, musty stench which assaulted one's senses. With the wind element, he was sure that Cynder could easily figure out what it was exactly that gave this place its hospitable atmosphere.

Indeed she did feel it. Passively, there was a noticeable air flow throughout the entire complex, near imperceptible to those without an affinity to the air. It was this constant flow of fresh air that kept the entire complex's air filtered and conditioned to the comfort to those inside. Closing her eyes and focusing her powers, which were weaker given their overall weaker health, the dragoness was able to determine that there were fans which circulated the air and drew it into some kind of machine, which then somehow cooled it, then distributed it back out into the facility with the help of air ducts. And, she felt, that the entire system of air distribution ran throughout the entire ruins of the Mountain of Malefor, even to places that she had not known to exist during her time of corruption.

And Sparx... well, he was more or less lazing about, waiting for the soreness which had engulfed them all to relieve itself. Yet, the implications of what all this meant had yet to fully hit him. He was in a different age, of course; the slow realization slowly began to come to him as he pondered over it. Everyone that they had ever known was long dead, reduced to nothing but bones, if not dust. A similar realization began to wash over Spyro and Cynder. Flash and Nina would be long dead, and any biological parents that they did have would be nothing but dust.

It did nothing to solve their melancholy.

A minute or two after the three began to swim in those gloomy thoughts, Sierra returned with the masks in paw, and with one already over her face. The three suited individuals took theirs respectively. They then turned and faced the three still lying on the ground. They couldn't help but pity them for what they must have been feeling, because their shared expressions gave it all away.

"Your names... they are Spyro, Cynder, and Sparx, correct?" the blue dragon asked them with a curious, yet official sounding inflection. All three of them nodded to the question. "I'm sure none of you are eager to be here, but we're going to need your cooperation."

"Cooperation with what...?" Cynder replied back distantly, one of her claws dragging along the stone flood in a circle. Neither of the other males of the group were all that eager either.

"Well, we are going to have to quarantine all three of you for a minimum of twenty-one days."

"Why?" she answered back.

"Yeah, it's not like we are the ones that are sick," Sparx noted in his usually snarkiness. "And that isn't the best hospitality given the fact that, oh, I don't know, we're in the far future where everyone we have ever known is dead and long gone?"

"It's not us that we are concerned about, it's you," the dragon deadpanned.

Next, the fox raised his voice and added, "Yes. You have been trapped in that crystal for thousands of years; the diseases that you had to fend off back then either no longer exist or are hardly like the strains that you experienced. If we were to let out into the world as you are right now, you would all be dead within the first week."

Cynder and Sparx didn't have much to add.

"So how does keeping us in isolation for… three weeks keep us from getting sick? We'll just get sick when we are released," the purple dragon pointed out, curious behind that logic when it didn't seem to make any sense.

This time, it was the feline who spoke up. "We will have to get you vaccinated for all of the diseases that are likely to affect you. Since you don't know what that is, it is basically a way for someone to be granted immunity to a disease without having to be afflicted by the disease itself. Considering you all have no immunity to any of the modern viral threats that you would encounter, there will be a lot of shots each of you will have to get if you stand a chance of surviving out in the open world."

"And that isolation is to make sure we do not catch those diseases before we build up our immunity, if I am understanding all of this correctly." It was a confusing subject for the purple dragon to understand, but his thinking was in the right direction.

"Indeed you are, Spyro," the feline replied with a smile from under her mask. "Conversely, it will help us, too, as you may carry diseases that you have immunity for, but we do not. While it might be easy for us to develop treatments for them swiftly, we'd rather not take the risk."

Now things were starting to make some sense, at least to why they had to stay isolated for so long. Still, though, there was a lot more they had to learn. The three or more weeks of isolation they would be spending there would give them more than enough time to get a grip on this foreign world.