Forged By Fire Sporking: Part Ten

[epistler]

Part Ten: Mad Science

Well, we’re finally here. I’ve mentioned several times that Zarq meets a scientist with a laboratory in this book, and no doubt you’ve all been dying to see it. Wait no longer – this is the chapter where he finally shows up! Excited? I know I am!

The chapter opens with Jotan and Zarq being informed that the dragonmaster is in a coma and won’t be waking up again. I’m sure he’ll be dearly missed. As you’d expect neither of our Heroines on Heroin are the least bit upset.

Zarq is far more bothered by the fact that she gave in to the venom cravings so easily after swearing off the stuff earlier in the book, and hates herself for the previous night’s sex ‘n’ venom session. Jotan meanwhile says she’s wanted to crack someone over the head ever since that happened to her in prison (she was knocked unconscious during the escape, remember?). She adds that the dragonmaster attacked her because he could smell the venom on her. Zarq counters that the guy just hates women and had been on the knife-edge of losing his marbles for a while now, and that’s all there really is to it. Even so she privately thinks that Jotan is right – she can smell the venom on Jotan too, and wonders what she herself will be like after a lifetime of addiction. Oh man, she might become even more useless and ineffectual than she is now, and I’m not sure if that’s even possible.

As for the dragonmaster, he’s in a bad way. In fact he’s actively leaking brain fluid, which can’t be a good sign. Zarq is pissed because now she won’t have a dragonmaster to train her “neonate bulls”. Well darn. But I’m sure she can pull the ability to do it herself right out of nowhere the moment it suits her; it’s happened every other time, after all.

Meanwhile the doctor stitches up Jotan’s own injury, which she got when the dragonmaster bit her on the tit. Ouch! Afterwards Zarq asks her where Gen went – apparently he left Xxamer Zu to see Malaban again, and hasn’t been seen since. Jotan tells her he’s flown off to a different Clutch called Cuhan – the very same Clutch Kratt seized with Waivia’s help.

Zarq asks about Waivia, and learned that yup – she was indeed pregnant. That is until recently, when she gave birth to a son. Not only that, but she’s currently in Liru. Or Lirah. The author keeps jumping between calling Zarq’s present location Liru and Lirah, and it’s really confusing. (And in case you’re wondering, no this book does not have a map in the front. None of them do).

Zarq is shocked, and asks if Jotan can arrange a meeting between her and Waivia. Jotan asks why, and Zarq confesses that they’re sisters. Jotan is surprised, but agrees to help them meet up tomorrow. She then gets suspicious, pointing out that so far Zarq has basically been nothing but a liability who isn’t offering her anything of use. The two of them have a verbal sparring match I don’t really feel like recapping, but the gist of it is that Zarq realises Jotan was tortured by Kratt (surprise!) after being rescued from prison, and is scared of being driven mad by her venom addiction and losing all she has. Oh, and apparently Kratt is related to Christian Grey because he has a “play chamber” he uses for rapey funtimes.

Lovely.

The bickering ends with Zarq concluding that Gen isn’t her friend any more because now he knows she’s not the real Skykeeper’s Daughter, and that she can’t rely on Jotan. Basically all she has is the rebels back in Xxamer Zu.

Okay, enough politics. Instead of getting to meet Jotan’s mother, which turns out to have been a lie anyway, Zarq is taken to meet an “academician” who studies dragons and venom, which – oh, give me a break!

He studies “dragonscience”.

SERIOUSLY.

Dragonscience.

Seriously.

I can’t even – I mean seriously you guys. Dragonscience.

Dragonscience.

*flails*

After a couple of pages of description of the place they go to meet him, our scientist finally appears. He’s dressed like your typical Absent-Minded Genius in layers of mismatched patched clothing, and his name is Komikon Sak Chidil, or Sak Chidil for short. His lab features alembics, rubber pipes, pipettes and the like, and he asks Zarq how many times she’s done it with a dragon. She says she hasn’t kept count and he guesses by her eyes that it’s been about five times. He then shows her and Jotan to a room where there’s a dragon waiting. So now the two of them are going to have sex with a dragon – FOR SCIENCE!

Jotan gets to go first, and Science Guy – ugh – takes a scraping from her ladyparts first. Then he swabs the inside of her mouth and collects the saliva. He takes some other samples as well, and makes notes.

Honestly, I’m just reading this as a science-themed porno. Especially so as while Jotan does the deed with the dragon, Science Guy monitors her pulse and then afterwards takes more samples which he puts into some test tubes which he labels. Zarq meanwhile blocks her ears so she won’t have to listen to the dragon’s “wet snuffling” and Jotan’s orgasmic noises.

…I’m so, SO glad I’m an asexual. Because if I weren’t, I’m positive I’d start flashing back to this scene in the middle of sex and aaarrrgh.

Finally Science Guy says it’s Zarq’s turn, but she forces herself to say no. Instead she helps carry Jotan back to the lab, while Science Guy explains that Jotan is a “superior symbiont” because unlike the whores he usually relies on she’s not tainted by STDs.

Apparently you can’t get STDs from a dragon, even if you’re sharing it with a bunch of hookers.

Right.

For once Zarq, aka the woman who talks like a medical encyclopedia, doesn’t recognise a ridiculously out of place piece of scientific terminology when she hears it and asks what the hell a “symbiont” is.

Hold onto your hats, guys – it’s about to get stupid. And I mean REALLY stupid. Honestly, it was worth slogging through 600+ pages of bullshit just to get to this point.

Here’s Science Guy’s explanation:

“A symbiont. An organism living in close physical association with another, yes? Here, roll these between your palms. I don’t want the blood to coagulate yet.” He handed me two stoppered vials of blood. I obeyed, dazed, overwhelmed.

[snip]

“A symbiotic relationship is mutually advantageous to the two species involved,” he continued. “There is the gilli bird and the screwbuck lizard. The remora and the shark. And the dragon and the human, yes.”

Oh, it gets better. It gets WAY better. Science Guy starts using his centrifuge device to separate the blood (you see them on TV shows like CSI all the time). His is pedal-operated, though, so at least we didn’t randomly get electrical outlets added to the mix.

While he does this he talks about how some animals in the wild help each other out. Little fish who clean shark teeth, lizards who live in bird nests and eat predators, that sort of thing.

Well apparently it’s the same deal with humans and dragons.

YEAH RIGHT – AS IF!

Ahem – s’cuse me. Transcribe first, then rant.

The guy stops pumping and extracts the vials, and the plasma has no separated from the blood. Just like in a real laboratory!

Except this is the bronze age.

The explanation continues: “Now I ask myself, what purpose does it serve a dragon to sex a woman, hmm? So I look for answers. It’s easy to see how a woman is lured into the relationship [No. NO IT ISN’T]: She receives sexual gratification and is imbued with feelings of puissance from the dragon’s poison. Of course, if she’s not been gradually habituated to the poison, she suffers blisters, swelling, blood poisoning, skin sloughing, infection, erratic heartbeat, lowered blood pressure, eventual death. [WHAT] But as the poison makes for a fine hallucinogen and analgesic when diluted, a woman can readily be made tolerant of direct, undiluted doses of the dragon’s venom.”

What.

But it gets even better. Science Guy then smears the blood samples onto glass slides and uses a fucking microscope to examine the samples. Okay, it’s a lens sewn into a leather headpiece rather than a free-standing device, but even so!

He continues with his “scientific” explanation:

“We shall say that a woman is lured into the relationship with the dragon, even though the benefits are few and the risks are high. This is not an advantageous relationship for the human, but it is a compelling one. So perhaps the dragon is a parasite, yes? But why? What benefit is it to the dragon, all this?” [snip] “Let us now examine the hallucinations a woman experiences while she is under the influence of venom. She is filled with empathy for the dragon. She imagines herself as a hatchling, hunted by men [This NEVER HAPPENED to Zarq. EVER]. She experiences maternal fear for the dragon [this never happened either]. Now we are getting somewhere! [No, we’re really not]. Who is the main predator of dragons, hmm? Humankind. What greater way to neutralize an enemy than to make the enemy one’s advocate, one’s protector! So. Somehow, millennia and millennia ago, the ancestors of the Djimbi and the ancestors of the dragons began the peculiar symbiotic relationship we frown upon today. Fascinating, yes?” [Not quite the word I’d use. “absurd” and “ludicrous” would be closer to the mark]

Zarq assents by making a “breathy” noise, and the idiocy continues.

“Years ago, before I learned of the rite, I studied hatchlings.” [snip] “I was fascinated by the hatchlings’ apparent urge to attack the human face. I did experiments, took measurements, and made a discovery. It is not the human face the hatchling instinctively shoots it’s not-yet-venomous tongue at. It is the human mouth. A wet, gaping red hole. Much like the maw of a mother dragon, yes, only on a smaller scale. A food source! [snip] When I learned of the bestial rite, I could see how the instinct of a hatchling could easily be utilised to train a dragon to insert its tongue into a woman.”

No. Just no. Just no, no, no, no, no. I don’t even have words for this. Quite apart from the heaping pile of pseudoscientific nonsense I just had to wade through… why was this even necessary? It doesn’t add anything to the story, and only serves to break the setting even further.

Also this isn’t how symbiotic relationships work. For one thing, how on earth does the dragon persuade the woman to take her pants off and present herself for tonguing in the first place? What on earth would possess any sane person to do so? Much as I really don’t want to have to go into this, in real life bestiality pretty much always occurs with animals that are already domesticated. Humans, having tamed an animal for use as a companion, food or labour, then start wondering “maybe I can also use this creature to get my jollies off”. Because let’s face it – if it exists, sooner or later someone’s going to try to pleasure themselves with it. But even then you’re not going to find a lot of people prepared to risk getting bitten in half for the privilege, and especially not if the animal in question has deadly poison. Come on! And if it was the Djimbi who started it – the Djimbi aren’t farmers! They’re hunter-gatherers! When did they domesticate dragons? What motivated them to do so? Where do they keep them? How do they feed them?

You see what I’m getting at here? This whole scenario is beyond ridiculous.

Predictably, Zarq is most bothered by his implication that the dragons aren’t really “divine”. Science Guy asserts that no, they’re not; it’s all nonsense and they’re just animals, and so are people.

Zarq leaves his lab (and thankfully we won’t be seeing it or him again) and after a night of sex with Jotan she goes to bed and lies awake all night angsting. She can’t stand the idea that “dragonsong” is all just an illusion (again, what’s so special about “dragonsong” anyway? It’s not as if it gives you visions of Paradise or anything). She then moves on to worrying about the whole “hatching bull dragons” thing, because she’s still convinced they’ve missed something. But what?

Finally she gets up and decides to try a little scientific enquiry of her own, by writing down every detail of the Djimbi dance party. She goes over it again and again. Conveniently she remembers something Science Guy said, which made absolutely no sense in context: “We are no better than humping snakes”. Because snakes are known for their horniness, and also for using a “humping” motion during sex? Oh wait – no they’re not and no they don’t. He only said it at all so Zarq could oh-so-conveniently free-associate from that to the snake masks she saw during the dance. She then has another oh-so-convenient revelation… the kwano snake breeding cycle is synchronised with that of the dragons, and they’re attracted to dragon cocoons. OMGs, what if they’re not parasites… but symbionts???!!

And bam, the final piece of the puzzle falls into place.

Really. It was just that easy. And she found it before it ever actually became a problem.

Can I go now?