Rise of Venus

Dragon shifter

The two instructors looked at each other with knowing looks in their eyes before turning back to face everyone.

"Stay here. don't move" the Instructor in black said sternly. "Someone else will be out to look after you shortly."

They both took off towards the building no more than thirty seconds later, he watched them shift into their dragon forms to fly over faster when they got far enough from the group. This obviously led to a bunch of whispering about how cool it was and that they had no idea the two were dragon shifters. A couple of the other riders with their dragons also took off towards the building. Flos grabbed onto his arm and leaned in a bit closer to whisper in his ear,
"Hey, what's going on?" Venus looked down at her, he knew he shouldn't mention the smell of the smoke, he didn't know if she could smell it or not. So he went with the safer answer.

"No? I don't think anyone does."

After being alone for a minute people started to whisper, asking the usual 'what happened?' and 'what are we supposed to do?' even though the latter had already been answered.

Not too long after Floss got Venus' attention once again, she was pointing at a large puff of black smoke coming up from the castle in the distance.

"I'm sure it smells nasty overthere, hope everyone's alright."

"They're dragon riders, they'll probably be fine."

"Well if I was recently accepted into the academy I wouldn't know what to do."

"I'm sure they've had at least one fire safety training session in their lives. They probably remember it."

"Haha. very funny." He had not been telling a joke, but he wasn't going to tell her that.

Venus sat down on the grass and rested his head on one of his hands, he used the other to pick at some of the grass, the academy wouldn't notice but it felt nice destroying a part of their property no matter how small. This was certainly an eventful trial, he hadn't ever heard of a fire breaking out at one of these things before. But there were many dragons, and in the Day Kingdom specifically, dragons meant fire so it was bound to happen at some point. They also had a lot of money to keep people's mouths shut that was more than likely part of it as well. He's sure they wished some of the dragons from the other kingdoms survived so they wouldn't have this high of a fire risk. At Least none of their castles was wooden, at least on the outside.

After a few minutes the majority of the group had joined Venus in sitting on the grass. Everyone was talking to someone Flos had weasled her way into a small group who mentioned they also wanted to be Cloud Tamers they'd been talking to for awhile, she could probably start a conversation with any of the people here and fit right in, though Venus mostly tuned everyone out in favour of focusing on destroying his small patch of grass. Eventually some more people wearing the standard light grey staff uniform with all the ugly badges came out and introduced themselves. They said that they would be taking over the supervision of the trials as the head of scouts and the battle division person were helping to deal with the issue that was going on. No mention of the fact it was a fire, but with the black smoke still lingering above the castle everyone already knew what they were busy with. Everyone there seemed to think this was a good explanation and chose not to question it any further despite them being vague and doing a very bad job of not looking stressed out.

The first test was simple enough, it was just running around their large field,there was only a small trail of dirt along the outer rim presumably from all the times they've done the tests on different groups. They were nowhere near as nice as the track fields they saw coming in on the bus. Which he supposed is normal, why waste the actual students' time with a bunch of newbies running on their field. But the unevenness of the dirt was practically begging for someone to sprain their ankles, not him, he didn't think he could sprain them, but he wasn't about to try. And since the new instructors weren't dragon shifters he wouldn't have to worry about looking suspicious by going too slow, and he wouldn't have to act very tired after. He came twentieth of the fifty students there which was better than what he was hoping for but he would take it. Flos on the other hand was laughing at how slow he was in between her gasps for air, Flos came in the top ten which was a good place to be in if she really wanted to become a Cloud Tamer.