Chapter 5

Mortis had called Artha and his friends to the Dragon Temple. They were all assembled in one of the chambers with their dragons behind them. Mortis entered the room with staff in hand and walked over to the others, serious as always.

"I called you all here to tell you of some disturbing news that has come to my attention." Mortis turned, waved his hand and a vid screen unfolded from the ceiling. Photographs of many dragons and text to accompany them scrolled by on the screen. "Dragon City Security has reported a sharp increase in the number of missing dragons lately."

"Missing dragons?" Artha said with a bit of anger as the four dragons looked at each other. "It's got to the Moordryd and Word again. That's why Moordryd wasn't at the race today."

"So it would seem. Apparently, Word's still trying to create a formidable wraith dragon army."

Mortis paused while the teenagers and their dragons exchanged glances. None were pleased at the prospect of battling wraith dragons again. Under Word's control, they were ruthless and incapable of mercy. They would blindly fight to the death if instructed to do so.

"But there's more," Mortis said ominously. He waved his hand again and the display changed. This time it showed photos of humans and text to match. Many images scrolled by. "There has also been a sudden increase in the number of missing person reports as well."

"Missing persons?" asked Kitt skeptically. "Do you think Moordryd and Word have something to do with this, too?"

"I don't know," said Mortis, "but we must find out."

Parmon pulled out his hand held computer and began punching buttons. "Let's analyze the data from the missing person reports and see if there are any correlations," he said. He punched buttons and studied the screen intensely. "Perhaps they're all from a certain section of the city." He keyed the query into the computer. It emitted a short error tone indicating no correlation. "Hmm, OK. Perhaps something else..." Another error tone. "OK, not that. Let's try..."

Parmon, completely lost in thought, paced while he worked and tried various ways to analyze the data, each of which resulted in the computer emitting the error tone. After numerous tries, the computer finally chimed to indicate a successful match had been found. Parmon's eyes widened as he stared at the screen. "That can't be a coincidence!"

"What did you find, professor?" asked Kitt showing concern.

"Well, you see, I downloaded the data on the missing person reports from city central computer and loaded it into a relational database so the reports could be aggregated and compared using tuple-based content addressable queries. Then I --"

He was cut off at that point as Artha, Kitt and Lance exchanged glances, shook their heads and said, "Ah-Hem" practically in unison. The dragons cleared their throats as well.

Artha continued, "Can you just get to the point?" This was accompanied with nods from the dragons pleading for Parmon to get on with it themselves.

"Oh. Yes," stammered Parmon a little self consciously. "Almost all the recent missing person reports have one thing in common." The humans and dragons looked on with expectation. "They are nearly all people who don't have a dragon."

The others exchanged puzzled glances.

"That's odd," said Artha. "Almost everyone in Dragon City has a dragon, except for the few humans who live on their own. But there's nothing else special about that."

"Yeah," continued Kitt. "It's not as if they don't like dragons. It's just that having a dragon and caring for it is a considerable expense, with food, of course, being the largest expense."

"Boy, do I know that!" said Artha who cast a smirking glance at Beau. Beau, feeling slightly embarrassed, looked around with a "who me?" expression and then smiled at Artha innocently. Artha let his expression change to a smile to indicate he was just kidding, to which Beau grunted a "humph!" and gave Artha a friendly shove with his snout, nearly knocking Artha over, as retribution for teasing him. Lance and Fracshun both looked at each other and snickered at this exchange, even though they had seen those two having similar exchanges many times before.

Kitt smiled too and continued, "And, add to that the cost of shelter and medical attention, plus the large commitment of time, and some people prefer to be independent."

"These people usually live near where they work," said Artha, "and taxi-dragons are readily available and inexpensive within the city whenever they need to cover longer distances."

"So what happened to them all?" asked a puzzled Lance.

"Artha, you and the others will have to find out," said Mortis. "It can't be a coincidence that dragons and humans would disappear at the same time."

A look of concern fell upon all the faces in the room.