A/N: Welcome back to my hunting grounds, where you never know what you might find!
Where'd the -slayer come from?
Inspired by Darkfire1220's Dragonearth. If you haven't read it, go. Now. I'll wait. It's in my favorites so you can easily get to it. It was recently adopted by Blacksoundwave and I am anxiously waiting for more. It is one of the best Fairy Tail stories out there, if not the best.
Anyway you know the rules with my plot bunnies. Please use it for a story, make up your own title, and tell me it exists so I can read it.
Central Fiore, X777,
A blur of warm colors shot through the forest, disturbing birds and deer and drawing the attention of a few forest vulcans. It stayed just below the canopy, dodging branches and staying out of range of any serious threat besides high-speed collision. It wove and weft between limbs and vines, never slowing, as if escaping some unseen danger.
After an hour, or maybe more, of flight deep into the forest, the reddish blur saw fit to slow down, danger apparently gone. It came to a halt like a derailed freight train, throwing up grass, dirt, smoke, and whatever unlucky creatures were in its way as it tumbled through the leaf litter before meeting a tree with a particularly solid thunk!
Temporarily dazed and half-buried in displaced earth afforded the first good look at the creature. Rough scales faded from rosewood to a flamingo pink from its shoulders to the tip of its long tail, like a technicolor alligator. Its head formed a vaguely pyramidal shape, tapering from the back of its skull to the end of its jaw. It had the long, angular snout of a crocodile with the built-upward cranium of an iguana, but a better analogy would probably be an Albertosaurus, all covered in pale pinks. From the back of its head sprouted two night-black main horns, around three inches long and half an inch thick, with a slight twist towards their ends. A multitude of smaller spikes decorated the trailing and bottom edges of the reptile's skull, each black projection half covered in a scale sheath. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this reptile, though, were the wings that sprouted above and behind its shoulders. Scales protected the leading edge and a fleshy membrane provided lift, that left no doubts as to what the creature was.
It was a dragon in Fiore, hundreds of years after the Great Dragon War and the last sighting of a winged reptile across Earthland. It was young— pale and small— just under thirteen feet from the end of its snout to the tip of its tail.
The young dragon shifted, curling into a protective ball as it shook off a collision that would have killed any human. Its eyes, placed high towards the back of its head to allow an unrivaled scope of vision, flashed open. Onyx irises and thin, slitted pupils of the darkest black stared out at the foliage.
The young dragon surveyed the forest around it, unaware that it was the deadliest thing in eighty miles. It closed its eyes and opened its mouth, an action that a foolish human would mistake for a yawn as it let the air drift across the scent receptors in the roof of its mouth and it listened for the rustle of leaves and the faint whoosh of breathing.
The pink dragon stiffened and its eyes shot open, for it had found something.
The reptile reared and, with a flap of its wings and a push from his powerful hind legs, burst through the canopy to be an island of vibrant pink in the azure sea overhead. He flew due west, and, unable to help himself, embraced the full freedom that a dragon's flight was. He felt the wind rushing past his scales and heard the roar of speed in his earholes. He dove, he looped-the-loop, he corkscrewed, he snapped at the birds foolish enough to venture near a drake, and he performed all the other aerial tricks that dragons new to flight are wont to do.
All too soon, he came to his destination. Far below where the pink drake hovered was a clearing in the endless forest, and the only clues that anything special was happening in this particular place were only detectable to a dragon at 2,000 feet.
The pink drake tucked in his wings and dove, accelerating towards the canopy far below him. In a matter of seconds, he was fifty feet above the forest canopy, and opened his wings to pull up.
But he was still a young dragon, unused to flying long distances and far from mastery of flight.
He crashed into the trees, shearing off their limbs and scattering flocks of birds.
Meanwhile, in the clearing,
The massive form of a gorian towered in the center of the clearing, its pointed head grinning a disgusting grin. A crash! followed by the snapping of wood breaking drew his attention from the two beings before him.
The first of the beings was a boy, no older than twelve, with blue hair. Bandages covered his limbs and a red tattoo stretched across the right side of his face. A bag of wooden staves, topped with things from a fan to a hook, hung across his back.
The second being was even more intriguing than the first. For starters, she was a dragon. She was covered in pale blue scales, ranging from cerulean to baby blue. Her skull was far less saurian than the pink dragon's, being broader and flatter, in closer resemblance to a giant tadpole. Her closed eyes were situated forward on her head, above the midpoint of her jaw. A small pair of wings nestled against her back and she was tightly curled into a tiny protective ball as tears ran down her face.
"You would be wise to leave this place," the blue-haired boy warned the gigantic gorian before him.
The massive ape turned to look back at the human before him. "Are you trying to threaten Greg? In his own forest?" the gorian shot back with a poorly concealed chuckle. "No one threatens Greg in his own forest."
"I'm not sure how much longer this will be your forest," the boy said, gesturing behind him, "Because I have magic and this is a dragon."
"Overgrown newts that cry do not scare Greg," the ape grunted, "And neither do mummies."
Confusion etched across the boy's face in the moment before a gigantic simian fist barreled towards him and knocked him to the ground. The gorian advanced, laughing at the prone child before him.
"No one threatens Greg," the green ape declared as he raised a fist to knock the winded boy's lights out.
Out of the blue, 500 pounds of pink scale and muscle slammed into Greg, sending the pair rolling over each other. They came to a stop after two rotations with the dragon on top, who pulled his head back as his pale underbelly began to glow a reddish orange. The gorian, taken by surprise and trapped under the dragon's bulk, was unable to do anything but cringe away before the drake exhaled a plume of fire into his face.
The pink dragon flapped off of Greg, who ran off in a panic shrieking, "You can have Greg's forest!" as smoke billowed off his burning fur.
He gave a triumphant snort, smoke spilling from his nostrils, as his opponent crashed through the forest in fear. His smoking trail intensified, as the flaming monkey set the forest on fire.
The snapping of a twig brought his scaled skull back around to face the duo he had just saved, and the blue-haired boy had risen and approached him, but now stood frozen where his foot had broken the twig.
"H-hello," the boy offered nervously, his hands in the air to show he meant no harm. "I wish to know who I must thank for saving my life."
The pink drake tilted his head, considering, before rumbling out, "Natsu Dragneel, Crown Prince of the Fire Dragons."
The blue haired boy bowed to Natsu, but his eyes widened as he came back up, "Did you say dragons, plural?"
Natsu elected to ignore him, as the smaller blue dragon had raised her head and barreled into him with a joyous cry of "Natsu!" from where she had cowered. "I'm so glad you're okay! I tried to follow you, but the gate sent us all over and I got lost."
With the two dragons next to each other, it was much easier to estimate the blue one's length, around four feet from muzzle to tail-tip and standing at rest, her head came to the pink one's shoulder.
A deep rumble escaped Natsu, which the boy took to be a draconic chuckle, and replied, "It's good to see you, too, Wendy. Know where Gajeel went?"
The smaller dragon looked down, scratching a claw into the dirt with apparent embarrassment as she muttered, "You know you're still the better tracker." She also muttered something else that the boy couldn't catch.
Natsu murmured, "Yeah, I miss them, too," before opening his toothy jaws to scent the air again. "All I'm picking up is food, no metalhead. Speaking of eating," the drake paused, giving the boy a sly look, "Who's the blueberry?"
The human blanched, backing away and reaching into his bag of staves.
"Natsu!" Wendy whined, "We can't eat Jellal! He was helping me find you!"
"Fine. I'll bag that boar, then," and with that, Natsu rocketed over the canopy and out of sight.
With the more dangerous drake gone, some of the color returned to the blue-haired boy's tattooed face. He cautiously approached Wendy, asking, "Would he really eat me?"
The blue dragoness tilted her broad head, considering, and what color Jellal had regained drained away again. "No," she eventually surmised, "Not after you helped me." The color slowly returned.
"You said he's older than you, but never how much,"Jellal started, "What is he, five years older? Ten?"
Wendy shook her broad head, answering, "A year and a half."
The boy's eyes bugged out of his head at that. "He's quadruple your size, at least. How much does he eat?"
Wendy laughed, her mirth light and airy, "He's also a fire dragon, they're on the larger end, and sky dragons like me are on the smaller side. He'll eat a whole cow for breakfast and have room for another at dinner. Don't touch his boar, but I can share with you."
The boy sat down hard. "I don't think we'll be able to escape detection long, with an appetite like that." He rubbed his chin, considering. "I heard the humans have mages' guilds that do hard jobs. Think you could join one?"
Wendy frowned at that, or as close as a sky dragon could get. "I don't know. Natsu isn't good with humans."
Jellal paled again, "As in he'll eat us all?"
Wendy shook her head, "He says he doesn't like the taste of human. And they don't like it when he takes cattle. He also tends to destroy things." She waved her tail at the vulcan's path, which was emitting more smoke and a flickering orange light.
The boy nodded, "I'm hoping to rectify the taking-cattle problem. You see, most farmers will sell you their cows if you give them enough money."
"Give us cows? What is money? And how do we get it?" the blue dragoness asked, looking up at him in curiosity.
"I'm not sure what they use here, but the guilds take requests, and the mages get paid when they fix people's problems. Natsu seared that vulcan, he can probably take combat jobs."
"So we try to join a mage guild and remove vulcans for money, which we buy food with?" the little dragon surmised.
"That's the idea. Now that you're taken care of, I should probably go," the bandaged boy said, rising and turning away.
"Wait," Wendy cried, running around to his front, "At least eat with us first!" She sat and looked up at him, doing a remarkable impression of puppy-dog eyes.
"Okay, fine."
Several minutes later
The flap of wings overhead brought their attention to a returning Natsu, with a massive blackened shape and a doe in his talons. He cleared the treeline and flapped slowly to the ground, tossing the deer at Wendy.
As soon as he landed, he ripped into his food, tearing great chunks of cooked flesh from the blackened corpse beneath him and swallowed them whole, before he started crunching bones.
Wendy's table manners were better, taking little bits of flesh and avoiding the skeleton. She paused and looked at the human, before ripping a rear leg from the deer and offering it to him, still bleeding and furred.
"Uh, thanks," Jellal said, taking the limb and dragging it towards the burning trail the vulcan had made.
His movement caught the eye of Natsu, whose head snapped to him after swallowing another hunk of flesh. He looked at the boy, satisfaction in his voice as he asked, "You want it cooked?"
Jellal nodded, "Yes, thank you."
Natsu looked at Wendy to say, "Two to one, eveything's cooked now!" before he turned to Jellal and spat a ball of fire at the hunk of deer he was dragging. The boy dragged it out of the way, and Natsu's fire set alight a tree.
"I can't eat it charred," the boy said, taking his deer over by the fire to cook, and the pink dragon deflated a little before he turned back to his sooty boar.
Wendy tittered, a light sound of happiness, before she returned to her deer.
Several days later
"Well, this is Magnolia. Any more human questions before we enter the city?" Jellal asked, turning to the pair of dragons as he exited the forest onto a hill overlooking the city.
"Why haven't we found a cave yet? I'm getting tired of the forest," the pink one grumbled, emerging from the trees after him.
The boy smacked his hand to his face, giving an exasperated, "You need to know where the guild you'll join is before you start looking for a cave."
"Should we walk through the streets or fly?" Wendy asked, bringing up the rear.
"A dragon prowling the streets will probably cause mass panic, and we might get lost." He turned to Natsu, "Can we ride you?"
"Let's see if I can carry you both first," he returned, hooking his forelimbs around his companions' bellies. He hugged them to his chest and flapped his wings, rearing up on his powerful hind legs before he pushed off, flapping his wings to rise.
His ascent was much feebler than normal, shaky and slow, but nonetheless his pink-scaled wings carried them up over the city.
"There!" Jellal pointed down at a tall wooden building decorated with the Fairy Tail guildmark. Natsu craned his neck, searching for exactly where the blue-haired one pointed, before swooping down towards it.
Natsu's descents were always violent, but the added weight of passengers took him by surprise.
He roared and his passengers screamed, and a series of screams returned from below as people fled from the road outside the guild, his chosen crash site.
His wings snapped out towards the end of his dive, trying to slow down, and he managed to lift up, arcing just feet from the ground. He dropped his passengers at the bottom and cut his twenty-foot rise by folding his wings in. He tumbled back down, leaving a trench in the cobblestone street before he crashed into a nearby building with a resounding thump and a spray of dust.
Jellal and Wendy heard shouts as the hall's front doors burst open and a stream of people burst out, carrying weapons or holding spells at the ready. "What happened?" a young blonde boy with a pair of earphones in his hand asked a small old man who began to grow.
And grow.
And grow.
The blue-haired boy had to crane his neck up to see the face of the old man, who now towered stories above them, and the little blue dragon cowered behind him.
The now-gigantic man growled at them, his voice brooking no resistance as he demanded answers, "Why is your dragon blasting buildings in my city?"
Jellal shrunk some himself, and raised his hands in the air. "We don't mean any harm—"
"Bullshit!" came a shout from a dark-haired older teenager in a poncho, his six-shooter trained on the child in the street. A blue-haired man in a white jacket stepped up next to him, a purple flame coming alive in his hands. A third man stepped up, about the same age as the second, his brown hair styled into a cylinder jutting forward. He puffed smoke from his cigar which morphed into fists.
Others in the crowd muttered, questions, all sharing the same word, "… dragon…?"
"Silence, Alzack!" the titan shouted, glaring at the gunslinger before turning back to the pair in the street.
"Our flight crashed," the blue-haired boy declared, gesturing to where Natsu was emerging from the settling cloud of dust. The pink dragon shook his head and sneezed, fire spraying from his nostrils in a wide, weak cone.
A collective gasp ran through the assembled mages, jaws falling open at the sight before them, one no earthlander had seen in four hundred years.
A pink dragon, his reptilian skull five feet in the air as he shook off the collision and ruffled his wings to clear the dust from them. He sneezed again, giving another spray of embers, and looked at the cluster of humans who all had magic or weapons trained on Wendy and Jellal.
Natsu growled, low and threatening, and the mages turned their means of combat to him as one. He stalked forward, the rumble never ceasing, and the Fairy Tail mages tightened their grips and narrowed their eyes.
"Wait!" came a shout from the blue-haired boy and the humans froze, "I brought them here to join your guild!"
All eyes shot to the massive old man, who began to laugh as he shrunk down to normal size.
"New recruits!" he shouted, back to normal size, "Everybody, back to the hall! And somebody bring me the documents for new mages!" The old man turned to his new arrivals as the guild mages began to stream back through the doors, followed by their mutters about a pink dragon. "Dragons might make the paperwork a little difficult, but we never really cared about it, anyway," he shot with a wide smile.
A small blue-haired girl emerged from the crowd in an orange dress, a binder in her arms, closely followed by two white-haired kids, one a boy in a blue suit, and the other a smaller girl in a pink dress. She ran over to the old man, offering him the binder with a "Here, Master Makarov."
"Thank you, Levy," the little man said, opening the binder as Natsu strolled up and sat down. Wendy abandoned Jellal to take shelter between the pink drake's right forelimb and much greater bulk.
The man skimmed through the papers as the trio of kids clustered behind him, joined by a brown-haired girl and a shirtless boy with jet-black hair. The master took out a pen and said, "I'll need your names, birthdays, and for you to sign these."
"Natsu Dragneel, I'm two, and my hatching was June 10th," the pink one stated, before nudging the light blue one.
"Just two weeks ago? Happy belated birthday," the old man said, writing while the boys behind him snickered.
"You find something funny?" Natsu snarled at them, leaning forward.
"Yeah," the dark-haired boy said, "You're a giant pink toddler,"
"And you're in your underwear," the dragon said, and the boy turned bright red, trying to conceal his tighty-whities while he searched for his shorts.
The old man dutifully ignored them, turning to Wendy expectantly. She blinked confusedly at the exchange between Natsu and the boy, before finally noticing the man looking at her. "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Wendy Marvell, and I hatched January first of this year."
The guildmaster wrote that down before saying, "And where do you think you're going, young man?" without looking up.
Jellal froze and turned back, "I'm not here to join a guild and have some things to attend to, from back home." When the man just stared at him he added, "And I'm not one for crowds. I'd better go before they return."
"Okay," the Dreyar replied, "But when you do go looking for a guild, Fairy Tail better be at the top of the list!"
Wendy dashed over, throwing her forelimbs around the boy's torso in a hug. "Goodbye, Jellal," she said, squeezing tightly.
"Goodbye, Wendy. I'll see you sometime," he said, peeling her away as Natsu waved. Then he felt something wet on his chest, and he looked down to see her crying. He set her on all fours and knelt so that their eyes were level. "No Wendy, don't cry. I'll be back."
The young dragoness sniveled, holding back more tears. "I don't want anyone else to leave me! I've been left all alone by everyone. Please don't go!" She went to hug him again, but the boy put a hand on her head, softly pushing her back.
"Wendy, Natsu is still here, you know him better than you know me. And besides, there's a whole guild of people for you to meet. I must leave."
The little blue dragon looked down, threading her talons together. "They scare me."
Jellal patted her head, "Wendy, you're a dragon. There is absolutely nothing in this town that poses a threat to either of you, and soon enough you will be intimidating other things. And look at Natsu. Look." He pulled her head up, pointing to where the children were with Natsu. The white-haired boy wrestled with his foreleg while his sister ran a hand over his scales, a look of concentration on her face as some appeared on her own skin in puffs of pink magic. The dark-haired boy made various objects out of ice, which Natsu spat fireballs at before the boy could clobber him with any. The blonde boy from before had also returned, toting a bag of popcorn, and he picked out the charred ones as he ate to throw at the dragon. The two other girls were giggling at them, the brunette throwing the occasional card that would explode in any of the boys' faces. She threw another card at Natsu, who chomped down on it. He sent her a smug look, before an electrical zap went off in his mouth and an icy hammer broke over his head, breaking his concentration and letting the other boy win his match with the leg.
The dragon toppled over, flinging the boy into the air with a "Woah!" and the girl who had been leaning against him followed to the ground. A trio of thumps followed, the first by far the loudest, and they all got up, laughing. The boy landed next to the blonde one, who took his popcorn and quickly turned it over and slammed on his head, giving the white-haired boy a popcorn-filled hat.
"Go meet them, and have fun."
Wendy gave his leg a parting hug and scampered over to Natsu.
The blue-haired boy smiled, turned, and left. He could hear the pink dragon giving introductions.
"Hey, guys, this is Wendy. She's a sky dragon."
"She's so cute!" a high voice said.
"That's Lisanna," the dragon's voice returned, "And her brother is Elfman. He's got a mean right hook. The brown one is Cana, the yellow one is Laxus, the blue one is Levy, and the naked one is Ice Princess." He could see that dragon's smirk with his back turned.
"Not again!" the black-haired boy shouted, and Jellal heard a scuffling before he turned a corner and could not hear any of them anymore.
Some time later
Natsu was seated before the job board, glaring at the pieces of paper tacked to it, while Wendy watched him from her spot curled up on a tabletop, accompanied by Lisanna, Levy, and Cana.
"You pick what we'll do for our first job?" the little dragon called.
"Not yet," came the growled reply, as he squinted even harder at the board.
His head whirled around at a shout of, "Hey Natsu!" from Macao. The fire mage strolled up with a large stamp in his hand. "The master says you and Wendy are cleared for your guildmark and first mission."
"The council finally approved our papers?" Wendy asked, her head rising from rest.
The older man shrugged. "They wanted to see you, but saw that was a bad idea when the master described just how irritated our fire-breathing dragon had become. Gotta say, I've never seen a bureaucrat move that fast. Anyway, where do you want 'em?" Macao asked, holding up the stamp and fiddling with a dial on it.
"Red, right shoulder," Natsu said, his voice rough but significantly less irritated as he squinted at the job board once again. Macao stopped his fiddling to press the stamp on his shoulder, leaving a crimson mark on the vibrant pink scales. "Thanks."
"No problem. How about you, Wendy?" the man asked, returning to fiddling with the dial.
"I want mine on my right shoulder, too," she stated, uncurling and stretching like a large cat.
"What color?" Macao asked as he reached the table.
"Dark blue, please," came the reply, and the fire mage dutifully stamped her guildmark there.
"Looks like you're all set. You planning on going solo, or can I tag along, Natsu?" Macao asked, placing the stamp in his coat pocket.
"You should probably come. I don't want to drop or melt our money."
Macao looked at him funny. "We use paper money. The large denominations would catch on fire."
Natsu sent him a similar look, "That's stupid. Why would you trust anything other than gold and silver?"
The fire mage shrugged. "I think the treasury ran out of bullion during the last war with Alvarez, so started issuing IOUs. Now we have jewel," he said, producing a 50 jewel bill from his wallet. "Anyway, you pick what we'll be taking?"
"This one," the dragon replied, plucking a sheet from the board and handing it to the man.
"You want two fire users to fight a sea serpent?"
"Not that one, this one," Natsu replied, pointing to another job on the board.
Macao walked over to look at it. "Taking out vulcans, eh? Seems a little low to split, especially if you eat as much as they say."
"We live in a cave, we don't have 'rent' or 'utilities' to pay. Would that make up for it? And can I eat them?" the dragon asked.
Macao looked down at the number across the bottom of the job poster before nodding and saying, "Yeah, I guess. You going to fly us?"
"I can't carry you both. You'll have to take the 'train'."
Macao nodded, taking the poster over to the counter. "I'll register this, then go buy a ticket. Meet me outside the station in thirty minutes so I can tell you which train to follow."
"We will, Mr. Conbolt," Wendy said, butting Natsu to get him to stop glowering at the job board.
Lisanna followed the little blue dragon over to the larger pink one to ask a question. "Can you read?"
"Yes," Natsu hissed, "Just not this," he jabbed a claw at the papers.
"You go do your job, we'll find you a tutor," the little white-haired girl offered, gazing up with those big, blue eyes into his slitted ones.
The pink dragon gave a tiny nod, and the little girl scampered off, closely followed by her human friends.
This one spiraled a little. I kept getting ideas, and I am always up for having dragons as the main characters. I found it written to where the vulcan runs away on my old flash drive, and since I lost all I'd written of WDR chapter 12, I figured I'd publish this.