𝙰𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚜 (𝙹.𝙶.) [𝟷]

1.10

MONOCLE MOTORS

Leo wished the dragon hadn't landed on the toilets.

Of all the places to crash, a line of Porta-Potties would not have been his first choice. A dozen of the blue plastic boxes had been set up in the factory yard, and Festus had flattened them all. 

Fortunately, they hadn't been used in a long time, and the fireball from the crash incinerated most of the contents; but still, there were some pretty gross chemicals leaking out of the wreckage. Leo had to pick his way through and try not to breathe through his nose. Heavy snow was coming down, but the dragon's hide was still steaming hot. Of course, that didn't bother Leo.

After a few minutes climbing over Festus's inanimate body, Leo started to get irritated. The dragon looked perfectly fine. Yes, it had fallen out of the sky and landed with a big ka-boom, but its body wasn't even dented. The fireball had apparently come from built up gasses inside the toilet units, not from the dragon itself. Festus's wings were intact. Nothing seemed broken. There was no reason it should have stopped.

"Not my fault," he muttered. "Festus, you're making me look bad."

Then he opened the control panel on the dragon's head, and Leo's heart sank. "Oh, Festus, what the heck?" he muttered, staring at the icy mess inside. The wiring had completely frozen over. Leo knew it had been fine yesterday.

He'd spent hours repairing the corroded lines, but now a flash freeze had occurred inside the dragon's skull. How was that even possible? It should've been way too hot in there for ice to form. The frost had caused the wiring to overload and char the control disk. Leo couldn't figure out why this would happen. Sure, the dragon was old, but this was ridiculous. 

He sighed. Replacing the wires wasn't the issue. But the charred control disk? That was a whole other beast. The Greek letters and pictures carved around the edges, probably brimming with all kinds of magic, were now blurred and blackened. 

Leo thought of Mae, his best friend, partner-in-crime. Maybe she could help him decipher those weird symbols. He remembered her mentioning that she was dyslexic during their time at Wilderness School. She never told him why, but it made sense now that she'd revealed she was half-Greek. She was way more fluent in that stuff than he was.

And of course, the one piece of hardware he couldn't replace was damaged. Again.

He could almost hear his mom's voice in his head: Most problems look worse than they are, mijo. Nothing is unfixable. 

His mom could repair just about anything, but Leo was pretty sure she'd never worked on a fifty-year-old magic metal dragon. 

He clenched his teeth and decided he had to try. There was no way he was walking from Detroit to Chicago in a snowstorm, and he certainly wasn't going to be responsible for stranding his friends.