Starship Cherry Cream
Errin and Cara visit Cathair Fionabhainn for the Braethas Raug Hatching!
.
Errin
Cara
The bright aurora around the sun seemed to add feeling to the landing party. Caledrus hung in the sky with a grace that only such a big, beautiful ship could have. The pair of young technicians stood on one of the landing flats and watched as huge, brilliantly colored dragons flew overhead.
"They're even better than I thought they'd be," Cara said. Her bright yellow hair bounced in the breeze created by one of the dragons, who landed nearby.
Woodstock bid them farewell and punched the tport recall button on her comm unit. She vanished, and then Caledrus climbed back into the upper atmosphere, then vanished itself.
The rider of the dragon watched this with some amount of wonder, as it wasn't often that starships visited this place. "So you're... Errin and Cara?"
The pair nodded, bouyantly. The rider had a hard time watching their hair.
"We heard about the Braethas Raug," Cara said, pushing back her hair and standing closer to the rider, "and it sounded like great fun."
"I especially liked the spiritual connection that everyone has to their dragon in the air..." Errin said, trying to duplicate her friend's move and succeeding only in tossing her feathered red hair back over momentarily, before it flopped into her eyes again.
They seemed to be making the rider a little uncomfortable, but that soon ended when his dragon trumpeted a little and lowered his body to the ground. "Ah, yes, we should get you to the Cathair proper, it's over that way," he indicated a cliffside area, "and you can see some of the participants in the flight, as well as their lovely eggs."
The girls thought this was the most marvelous thing ever spoken. Clinging on to the rider's sides, he escorted them to the dragon, whose brilliant blue hide shone in the strange starlight.
"Isn't there day and night here?" Asked Cara, as she looked at the sky.
"Not really," the man announced as he helped her up onto the dragon's shoulder, "Danach is tilted and the heat of the day side is too great to withstand, while the chill and darkness of the night side seem to attract the darker and sinister. We stay clear of those places, and stick with the twilight."
Errin purred at him, "it's nice, you can always see the stars, and yet there's just enough light to know what you're doing under them..."
"... Yeah." He said. He tucked his arm under hers and lifted her up, she was a little heavier than she looked.
"Now, off to see the Cathairte and the sands, if you're lucky."
The dragon lifted off and the girls immediately clung to the rider's shoulders - they were both behind him, so Cara was being squished. She seemed to enjoy it. But they were only joking: both of them were quite confident with heights and motion, so they soon gave him a break and started looking around at the wonderful landscape.
They were kind of surprised when the dragon swooped into the opening on the edge of the cliffside, and directly into the cavernous interior. Sudden darkness was replaced by the soft light from perhaps torches, candles, electric light or whatever else was available in this world.
"This is amazing," Cara whispered. "I can hardly believe it..."
"I can," Errin said, "and look! There are a bunch more dragons." True to form they flew into the dragon quarters so the rider could dismount and lead the girls into the rest of the Cathair.
They clung to him like ... the clingy girls they were.
"Show us where we're going to live," Cara suggested. "I hope it's bigger than our quarters on the ship -- but not too much bigger, because close is nice."
"Intimate," Errin said, closing in on the rider's opposite side. "It's nice to have comfy quarters."
"Uh, yeah..." The rider squirmed, but headed down toward the bonder barracks. He thankfully got to unload the girls onto their more permanent trainers - the flight trainers of the Cathair who didn't much put up with the silliness that the girls were exhibiting.
Their stern gazes left Cara and Errin hoping that they would be able to use their 'thumbs earlier than when their dragons became adults... If they were even allowed to see the eggs. At this point they hardly could hope to get a cot in a cold part of the Cathair far away from the dragons.
"Well, you're those space cadets we've been warned about," said one of the trainers. She looked a bit... stiff-necked. Cara's first impulse was to offer her a massage but held her tongue.
"Well, I guess we are," Errin said, trying to keep the tone lighter. "What have you heard about us, anyway?"
The other trainer, an older bearded man said, "Only that you're pretty well devoted to your tasks, and you seem to have a grip on something called ... 'abrupt deceleration technology'. I don't pretend to know what that is, but you'd have to learn how to decelerate on the back of a dragon instead. Do you think the system is similar?"
Between the two of them, Cara and Errin had had their share of memories of spreading the landing foam on the dome of the Cherry Cream. It was effective only when the ship landed top-down on something (usually a building), but it was far from a last resort. Of course, they used the foam just as much indoors as a source of entertainment.
The young women looked at each other, and wide eyed, said, "um.... not really..."