"I can't believe this," Amy grumbled.

"I can," Victoria replied. "Ames, mom caught you sneaking out of the house at night to go to the hospital. That's… honestly kind of worrying."

She shrugged. "Besides, it's not like it's for long, right?"

"That's not the point," Amy replied. "The point is… what do I do until Wednesday?"

"What you do, Ames, is enjoy yourself," Victoria suggested. "Like… it's the holidays, you're ungrounded from healing for a couple of days… just do something fun instead?"

Amy didn't reply, and Victoria snorted.

"Yeah, I'm sure you'll think of something," she said. "I'd love to take you out shopping, or something, but I have a hot date – we're going to that fancy Italian restaurant on the Broadwalk!"

Amy tried not to make a face at the reminder of Victoria's boyfriend, but then she paused.

"...aren't you on a diet?" she asked.

"Yeah?" Victoria replied, shrugging. "It's a cheat day."

"Those don't work," Amy said. "And you should take that from me, I'm a healer. They just… aren't a thing."

"They are too a thing," Victoria defended herself. "Look, the idea is… a cheat day is when you relax your rules a bit. You pay for it later in more dieting, sure, I know that intellectually, but it's also a way of making it so that the diet isn't this endless parade of low calorie meals and rabbit food."

That made Amy laugh, and her sister winked at her.

"Cheat days might not make sense from a dietary point of view," she said. "But morally, they're superior."

"Right, sure," Amy said, shaking her head. "You go on your cheat date, then."

"Hey!" Victoria protested. "Don't combine those words like that!"

"I will if I want to," Amy replied, sticking her tongue out. "Anyway, when is Dean picking you up?"

"Oh, not long," Victoria shrugged, then looked a bit contrite. "That… does mean you'll have to entertain yourself, though."

"Yeah, I guess," Amy said, now thinking hard. "Though, uh… yeah, now I think about it, there is something I could do."

Emily Piggot answered the phone.

"Piggot, PRT Director ENE," she said, then listened to what the caller was saying.

She blinked.

"What?"

Another pause.

"This had better not be a joke," she said, fervently, picking up her mobile phone and tapping out a text to Armsmaster – asking him to come immediately.

If not sooner.

"I have Dragon on a call, Commander," Armsmaster said, after an extremely long two and a half minutes. "She's spent the time it took me to arrive checking her own sources."

He paused. "Since she's more familiar-"

"Go ahead," Piggot invited, and Armsmaster hit the remote for the big monitor on the wall. It lit up, and displayed a smoking crater with the remains of a wall around it.

Dragon's image appeared in the corner of the screen.

"This footage is live," she said. "I've confirmed that from a satellite, though this is from a recon drone."

Ellisburg had been… destroyed.

Completely.

Actually, now that Emily looked, the best term for it was probably that Ellisburg had been glassed. The entire town had been melted, and based on her memory of the geography it looked like it had gone down at least as far as the bedrock.

"...so," the Director began. "Not that I'm complaining, but what happened?"

"Well," Dragon replied. "I'm still collating reports, but based on the available information… some kind of flying dinosaur thing turned up and… exhaled a beam of red light that melted Ellisburg down to the bedrock."

Emily blinked.

"...flying dinosaur thing," she repeated, dubiously.

"There's no footage," Dragon said, sounding apologetic. "If there had been, then I'd be able to give you more, but I can only tell you what I know. And what I know is what the reports were… hold on, please."

The pause let Emily try to work out what kind of emotions she was feeling, but she still hadn't actually decided before Dragon coughed to get her attention again.

"I just checked a satellite feed," the Canadian Tinker reported. "It's got a bad angle, but there was a big flash of red light at about the time that lines up with the reports…"

"Thanks," Amy said, patting a wing. "That was great. I feel so much better now."

The flying dinosaur thing chirped at her.

"It's up to you what you do now," Amy added. "I'm surprised how well that worked out, honestly…"

Her feathered, scaled, smart creation made a sort of croon, then shimmered as it went transparent.

It took off straight up without needing to actually flap its wings, and Amy lost track of it a moment later.

That had gone even better than she'd hoped. Sure, it did technically count as doing brains to install a gemma in a raven… and the fact that she'd copied a mixture of Victoria's one, Eric's one and Crystal's one might have had something to do with the result… but she hadn't done anything to a human brain. And she hadn't done anything to make the raven like her more, even though she could see how to do it… which was exactly how she knew she hadn't.

And it was a cheat day, anyway.

AN:

DESTINATION.

AGREEMENT.

KRONK.

...yeah.

Plus side, a black-winged invisible flying dragon-thing with a beak that shoots beams of obliteration in 2011 is a pretty good candidate to be called "Toothless".