This story is scheduled for publication on Brok3n Engines Creations Monday, 16-Nov-2026. I will be giving it a final proof and edit Sunday, 15-Nov, so comments will be most helpful if they reach me on or before 15-Oct. You may comment directly on this post or by direct messages to me.
Comments on this Beta post will not appear on the eventual Brok3n Engines Creations post.
Many thanks for your help!
If You Make Florence Cry
Florence rolled out of bed with a thump, landing on her wings.
Ouchie.
Damn wings—they were useless. Pitiful, even. Dragonhood, dragonity, BEING A GODDAMN DRAGON—whatever the Hell you called it, might have been worth it, if the perqs were better.
Like how cool would it be to fly? No such luck.
She hit the ground, and breath huffed out of her. Of course she let loose a gout of flame. And of course her legs flew up when she fell and she flamed her left pinky toe. Again. A proper dragon ought to be covered with fire-resistant scales. She was, mostly, but not that GODDAMN TOE.
She stomped into the bathroom to put lotion on it.
Her alarm sounded.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” said Florence, remembering. “It’s Monday.” She had slept through her 7:30 alarm. This was her 8:00 emergency backup alarm. She had to be at the office at 8:30.
She took a two-minute shower, threw on her office clothes, and dashed out to her car (no hair or make-up—dragonity did have its perqs), and was in her reserved parking spot at 8:25.
#
Elves and orcs and fairies (THEY could fly, the little excrescences) scattered as she stormed through the halls to her office. No one wanted to be in front of Florence when she was in a mood.
“She’s terrifying since she turned into a dragon.”
“Oh, young feller me lad, she was even more terrifying when we were all human.”
Florence pretended not to hear. Dragons hear better than bats. Florence pretended to be a little deaf. Florence heard a lot of secrets.
She slammed into her office and woke up her computer. Well, when the virus hit, it had turned into a magic mirror, but Florence still thought of it as a computer. It no longer had a keyboard—input was voice only. That is, it was voice only until Florence roared at one of the wizards in Tech Support.
They were really wizards now, staffs and pointy hats and hooked noses and long gray beards or tangled witchy hair according to gender. They weren’t afraid of Florence. They knew they were just as scary as she was. So, she roared at Fladnag the Sketchy. (He used to be plain old Peter Higgs, but Tech Support had really gotten into the thing and had chosen wizard names for themselves.)
“Fladnag!” she roared. “I’m an accountant. I need my GODDAMN NUMERIC KEYPAD!”
Fladnag roared right back, “SIDDOWN AND SHUT UP, FLO!” He opened a drawer, pulled out a squarish flat rock. With a small brush he painted the digits from 0 through 9 on it, adding /*-+ Del Enter, then tapped it with his staff.
She looked suspiciously at it. “Is there a Num Lock key?”
“Just tell it ‘lock’ and ‘unlock.’”
“Lock,” Florence said, and the labels on the rock changed. “Unlock,” and they changed back.
“Pete—sorry, I mean Fladnag, you’re a life-saver. I owe you my first-born child, or a favor, at your option.”
#
Florence woke up her mirror and said, “Messages, please.”
An utterly adorable fairy face appeared in the mirror. “Stop that!” said Florence. “Do I look like a fairy?”
The face changed to that of a dragon, childlike and still unbearably cute. It began to recite, “From: Horn, Einhard. To: Spark, Florence. Subject: Strategic Directions—”
“Just show me the headers. And go away.”
The little dragon in the mirror pouted adorably. It flipped Florence off and vanished.
It was replaced with a page of illegible blackletter calligraphy. Impatiently Florence said, “10-point Arial,” and the typeface changed. About 50 messages. She waved away the messages about HR (Hobbit Recruitment) required training, and savagely deleted every message in a nasty passive-aggressive interdepartmental pissing contest. That left her with a few newsletters that she could read later, and one message she could not ignore.
It was from Einhard Horn, unicorn and CEO. She opened it. The mirror demon briefly appeared. “Hate to say ‘I told you so.’ No,wait! I LOVE it.” It repeated the flip off and vanish maneuver.
The subject of Horn’s message was, as foreshadowed, “Strategic Directions.” It was the usual corporate bullshit. Horn wanted to realign this and readjust our focus to t’other and operationalize and actualize some third thing. Florence didn’t know what it all meant. She’d bet a month’s salary Horn didn’t either.
Oh, but wait. There was something in there. Horn was calling a meeting of all the senior staff. At ten o-clock this morning. What horseshit was this?
She fired off a reply to say she wouldn’t be there, claiming a prior commitment.
Within seconds, a raven flew into her office. It squawked at her, in a passable imitation of Horn’s voice, “Florence. This meeting is mandatory. Whoever you thought you were meeting with at ten will be there, too. Respond to this raven.”
“What the Hell!” Florence yelled.
The raven said, “The only acceptable response is ‘Yes.’ Sorry, Ms Spark”
“If I refuse?” she asked.
“I am instructed to bring Mr Horn here in person. But first I am to tell you that he will be extremely unhappy if forced to come.”
“Why is this meeting so goddamn important?”
“Mr Horn did not confide in me.”
“All right. Tell him I said, ‘This had better be good.’ Is that close enough to ‘Yes?’”
“It’ll do. See you at ten.”
#
Florence arrived a few minutes early. The meeting was in the large boardroom. On the table in front of each seat stood a grubby-looking imp holding a name card. OK, that was new.
She called, “Florence Spark?” An imp on the opposite side of the table called “Here, Ms Spark.”
At just this moment a cart entered the room through the door Florence was standing just inside. The cart carried bottles of some sparkly green translucent liquid. Florence stepped out of the way and put on her best oblivious- deaf-dragon act.
“Some of these are special.” That was one of the fairies who’d buzzed in with the cart.
“This one’s for her,” said the orc who was pushing the cart.
“Who?” asked the fairy. Florence caught a glimpse of the Orc gesturing towards her, Florence. “Oh, her!” said the fairy.
“What’s special about it?”
“Extra-strong, or so I hear.”
“So, THAT’s the game,” she thought. “Dinner with the Borgias.”
Florence made her way around the table to her assigned seat. On the way she dragged a potted carnivorous Biter Plant next to her seat. It didn’t want to come and snapped at her, but she breathed a lick of flame at it and it subsided.
Horn walked in through the door at the front of the board room. Before Horn became one, Florence had always thought of unicorns as beautiful, awe-inspiring magical beasts. But Horn, looked like a small roly-poly pony, his horn a mere nubbin of ivory in the center of his forehead.
“Colleagues!” he called. “I have called this meeting to propose a new direction for our company. Do you remember when we used to praise humanity as the highest of virtues?. Are you, like me, tired of these absurd fantasy creatures we have become?”
Florence doubted Horn had known the meaning of the word “humanity” before he became a unicorn.
“The new direction in which I wish to take us in backward!” Horn enthused.
“Oh, yeah, that’s inspiring,” Florence grumbled, soto voce. She was not alone.
Shouting over the swelling murmur of disapproval, Horn cried, “Let us all raise a bottle to humanity!” He picked up a bottle like those that had been placed around the table, opened it, and raised it to his lips.
“All join me now!” It was unmistakably a command.
Each of the staff members around the table lifted his/her/its bottle. Florence did the same, but first she surreptitiously poured the contents down the throat of her kidnapped Biter Plant. It promptly turned into a Sansevieria.
All present drank down their bottles.
Horn was the first to change. He reared up on his hind legs. His roly-poly pony body became the body of a pudgy little man, just as Florence remembered him from the before times. His forelegs retracted and became arms. His horn vanished, leaving only a shiny, sweaty forehead.
All around her, Florence saw elves and fairies and orcs and talking animals morphing into humans. Pointed ears became rounded. Cat-eye pupils became rounder. Fur retreated. From noses and arms. Not all of them, and not all to the same extent.
Horn strode—waddled, actually—to Florence. “Not with the program, Spark? Something against humanity?”
“What can I say? Seems to affect some more than others,” she deadpanned. “We done here, Horn?”
He flounced off, clearly unhappy with Florence. Fair enough. It was mutual.
#
Florence sought out Fladnag. She told him how the meeting had gone.
“Did you folks here in Tech Support have a meeting like that with him?” she asked.
“Scheduled for tomorrow.”
She handed him the bottle she had brought back. Although she had dumped most of the tents into the Biter Plant, a few drops of sparkly green fluid remained in the bottom. “Can you figure out what this is?”
“Give it my best shot,” Fladnag promised.
#
“Need to talk to you.” Fladnag’s raven told her.
“So talk,” she said.
“In person,” the raven responded. “Now would be good.”
Florence groaned, got to her feet, and stomped down to Tech Support.
“Did you find out what he gave us?” she asked Fladnag.
“Got a question for you, before I answer that.”
Florence just waggled her eyebrows—no, she no loner had eyebrows. She waggled her supraorbital ridges at him.
“Let say I make more of that stuff. Let’s say it will turn you back into the woman you were before the change. Do you drink it?”
“Well, of course,” she said. “I never volunteered for this. Being a dragon is a GODDAMN pain in the tuckus.”
“Let’s say it’s irreversible. You drink this, and nothing will ever make you a dragon again. You still drinking it?”
“Yeah, of course,” she said, smoke rising from her nostrils, always a bad sign. “Why wouldn’t I?” she added, because she was beginning to understand what Fladnag was getting at. Would she miss dragonity? Would she, as an ordinary woman, ever look back with regret to what she had had?
“Let me tell you something, Florence,” he answered. “I often feel I am more me as Fladnag the Sketchy than I ever was as Pete Higgs, IT Technician.”
She gave him a penetrating look. They had never had this kind of personal conversation. Theirs was a professional relationship. She hadn’t really thought about what he wanted.
“What’s more, Florence,” he continued, “since the change I have often thought that might be true of you, too.”
She looked severely at him “Give me break, Pete. I’m not like you. I’m not into this mystical self-actualization crap.”
“No, you care about getting things done. You are direct, you expect people to listen when you talk to them, because GODDAMNIT, you don’t talk to hear yourself talk. You tell people things because you know what you’re talking about. And you have the subtlety of a flamethrower.”
OK, Florence had to admit that was fair. “So?” she asked.
“You are a goddamn DRAGON, Florence. You always have been.”
OK, maybe he had a point. Fladnag, and Pete Higgs for that matter, were also people who knew what they were talking about.
“So what was in that bottle?”
“It started as water, but Horn converted it with unicorn magic. A unicorn’s horn is magic. If you dip it in a drink, it can get rid of poison.”
“But that’s not what he did,” Florence said, shaking her head. “It’s the OPPOSITE of what he did!”
“Yes,” said Fladnag. “In magic the words and the gestures don’t matter. The spell is in the intention. Horn thought that we were changed to fantasy creatures by some kind of poison. He charged the water he converted to change us back. That’s what’s in the bottles.”
“Can we fix it?”
“YOU can,” Fladnag said. “There’s an antidote. Dragon tears.”
“So what are you gonna do? Have me watch a lifetime movie marathon?”
“I had something more direct in mind,” Fladnag said. He stomped violently on her left pinky toe.
“Ow, ow, OW,” she bellowed. “That HURT! That’s my bad toe.”
“I know,” Fladnag replied. “Every dragon has a weak spot, and that’s yours. Kind of thing a wizard needs to know, that is.”
He pulled a tissue out of his sleeve and wicked away the tears that had sprung to her eyes. She snapped at him, but he dodged deftly.
She glared at him. “Hope you don’t think you can get away with that again.”
“It’s like homeopathy. There’s no limit to the amount of antidote I can make.”
“What are we going to do with it?” Florence asked him.
“Strategy session!” Fladnag called to all the technicians.
#
An elf sat behind the table on the sidewalk just outside the main door. An orc stood in front. Above loomed a large sign, bearing one word in large letters, “INHUMANITY!” Humans came out and crowded around.
The orc called, “Were you humanized without your consent? Do you want to go back?”
A small red-haired man said, “Yeah! I never agreed to this.”
The orc reached under the table. He raised his hand, which now held a tiny phial. “This will return you to your true nature.”
The red-haired man reached for it. The orc held it out of his reach and told him, “Be sure. If you drink this, and there is no going back.”
The red-haired man gestured. “Give it to me.”
“Give us your name,” the orc said. “We need to a record of your consent.”
“Kit Reynard,” said the man.
The fairy behind the table waved her wand at a stone, inscribing the man’s name on it.
The orc gave Reynard the phial. The red-haired man popped the cap and threw the contents down his throat. His nose lengthened into a snout. Red fur sprang out all over his body. His hands and feet changed to paws. He lowered to all fours, a fox, saying to the orc, “Thanks, brother.” Somehow this all happened without his ever becoming embarrassingly half-naked, yet when the transformation was done, his clothes and shoes had vanished.
The people behind Reynard clamored. The fairy and orc continued taking names and handing out phials. A steady stream of orcs, fairies, elves, and talking animals flowed away.
The door opened again. Out waddled Horn. “You can’t do this!” he shouted.
Suddenly, Florence was there. “Why not?”
“You’re distributing drugs on company premises!” Horn cried.
“Like you did?” Florence said.
Florence looked bigger. Somehow more dragon. She spread her wings to their full wingspan, now easily 30 meters.
“I know what you want!” squeaked Horn. “You want to take over.”
“Horn, I don’t want your GODDAMN company.”
“I will not let you change me!”
“Fine, boss. You’d rather be a chubby little man than a magnificent unicorn—it’s up to you.”
“He’ll change his mind,” said Fladnag’s raven in her ear.
“And will he be magnificent?”
“Maybe,” said Fladnag’s voice. “Look what the dragon’s tears potion did to you. Can you fly?”
“Haven’t tried yet,” she answered.
“But you feel sure the answer will be yes, don’t you?”
She did.
Afterword
The inspiration for this story came when substacker Matthew Holvey on posted this note:
Woke up, decided to start a novel. Drafted a few notes on a napkin. Figure I’m ready. What’s the best opening word for a manuscript? I’ve got “The”.
I responded with
The dragon got out of bed Monday morning, coughed violently, burning her left pinky toe, then stomped angrily into the bathroom to put lotion on it.
Now, obviously I was trying to be funny. But at the same time, I tried to write something that would make me want to keep reading.
Thus, I decided to write that story.
The cover is a cycle graph of the cyclic group Z14.
…where florence and horn are the centers of the corresponding vertexes (the biggest and second-biggest in the image).