Most of the children ran inside the mountainous building, but a few staid and started shooting at me like dragons! One could shoot ice, another some kind of fire rings, and the third... wait, where did he go? I suddenly felt a wait on top of me, instantly driving me down and off balance. I growled and started barrel-rolling, hoping to throw him off or at least convince him this was a bad idea. He started shouting more of the babble, but I could only catch a few words, "stop... what... help." I shook my head, trying to understand him while also trying to catch my balance. I sensed a thermal to my right and immediately banked into it, my claws barely a foot off the ground. The human started sliding back, hitting all of my softer night fury spines along the way. He tried to land just behind me head, but with my upward momentum, he ended up just below me instead. He teleported to the ground as I tried to continue dodging the attacks until I reached cloud clover. I sighed in relief, just then registering that the human had been blue. Well, that's one more weird thing about this place, I rolled my eyes. At least this high the air was closer to Berk's sea-level air. I sensed someone approaching, so I softly banked up above the clouds to keep them from gaining the high stance.
I looked around, wondering where the creature was, and the clouds started to dissipate, replaced by clear skies and a woman with wet-dirt skin, snow-white hair, and all-white eyes. Startled, I backed up, "How are you controlling the clouds?" I realized she couldn't understand me so tried again, How are you controlling the clouds? and where am I? Her eyes returned to a dark brown, almost black, and she motioned for me to follow her. Hesitantly, I flapped behind her, gradually getting used to the strange air. We landed on the strong roof of the massive building, and I circle her, trying to see how she flew. The woman had no wings to speak of, and her cape was too billowy to support her weight. Maybe it has something to do with her controlling weather, I thought to myself.
I felt a mind try to slip into mine and instinctively lashed out, spearing the man with a barbed probe. I scanned his mind for information on this place and the language the people spoke when I realized that this was my host. I sensed his confusion and his attempted communication earlier, Hello, my name is Professor Charles Xavier, and this is my school for gifted children and people like yourself. It hit me like a hurricane that he had no intention to invade my mind, just to communicate. I respectfully withdrew from his mind and transformed into a human with stormcutter wings.
"My apologies for the probe; where I come, from when people touch my mind without warning, it usually indicates an attack," English, as the language seemed to be called, felt strange and thick on my tongue. Its words were more flowing than in Norse, but not nearly as much as in Dragontongue. Charles, who was evidently in a chair with wheels, rolled over and seemed more relaxed.
"Where you come from? and what language do you speak?" he asked, curious.
"Malaria. It's an island far to the north of here in the Barbaric Archipeligo, also known as the Dreamworks Isles. Berk is... What?"
"Berk? That's an island from a children's book and movie series!" the woman called Storm exclaimed.
"What's a movie? and I can assure you that it is a very real island," I wasn't sure what denoted children's books from regular books, but it sounded like the former were typically not true.
"Let's go inside and continue this over a cup of tea," Charles suggested. We descended several flights of stairs, and I marveled at the sheer weight of the building. I began asking questions about the different styles of paintings and replicas, called "photographs," of different people and places. Down a particularly long hallway, I stopped in front of a painting of a man clad in shiny, silver armor holding a sword against a monstrous nightmare-like dragon. It was bipedal and walked on its wings, but the patterns were very different, and the dragon looked far more malicious. I asked Charles about it and he replied, "Why, that is Saint George slaying the dragon! This is a replica of a quite famous painting." We continued to the office, but I had a feeling this was a world more different than I could have imagined.
We entered a spacious room with light wood paneling along the walls, an ornate desk, a sphere with some kind of colored map on it, and a huge window large enough for a night fury to fly through. A thick, soft carpet of red and gold stretched across most of the room, a nice change from the hard earth and cold wooden floors. A sharp, mead-like scent pierced my senses, causing me to turn back to Charles. He was pouring an amber liquid into a flask as he started to explain, "We've been answering distress calls from all across the world about huge, scaly creatures with two to four wings appearing out of nowhere. A few days later, they disappear again. Most even leave before we can arrive, but we've never been able to communicate very well with them anyways." I nodded; most of us were used to humans speaking Norse, and his mind had indicated only a handful of people still spoke it.
"That lines up with what we've been experiencing. Groups of dragons just disappear mid-flight or in their sleep, and no one knows where they have gone. In fact, I think I heard a skrill go through before I ran into the portal. Have you received any reports of such a creature?" he looked shocked and glanced at Storm. "What?"
"A black bipedal dragon with red teardrops on its wings came through shooting lightning two weeks ago in China," I blinked, utterly confused. Such a time difference had been hinted at in our collective story, but most just dismissed it as confusion after going through a portal. And where... I glanced at the sphere and spotted China, half-way across the world! "It disappeared two days later, leaving a large wake of destruction."
"That would make sense; skrills are highly temperamental and extremely dangerous if you don't know how to act around them. The time difference is strange, but to my knowledge, portals haven't been used in centuries. It could just be a side effect of them opening after such a long period of rest," a new thought struck me. "If dragons are disappearing shortly after arriving, this clearly isn't our final destination. If my world is described in books and movies in yours, perhaps our next destination will be as well." Charles spent the next couple hours showing me how to use a "tablet," a thin, metal device that could access books, moving pictures, and something called the internet. He showed me where to get more books and even some comics, the most interesting of which seemed to be owned by D.C., whoever that was.