Paddy Neil - Pot of the Dragons - Book One

Chapter One - The World Needed A Hero

     This whole thing with the world needing a hero as soon as possible was really stressing me out. I felt like I had no say in if this is what I want, or if this is just what the world wants. Or even worse, they might not even want me, instead they just need me. I was just a regular leprechaun trying to survive in the human world, in a human school, with only human friends. Ok, maybe it was not normal for them seeing a leprechaun that randomly came one day to their classroom and introduced themselves by saying that they are a leprechaun who's supposedly only fourteen, even though he had a beard and a mustache as big as their eyebrows connected. It wasn't easy for me either, but it was either this or the school from my tiny village far away from here which, trust me, was not better at all. It was very old and rust started to form all around the metal bars from the garden and inside it. I always wondered why nobody tried to fix it or how did it became like that, but nobody ever gave me a full answer. All they said was that it was no longer needed because of current traditions and beliefs, but I never bought that lie, I knew there definitely was a piece of puzzle missing from that story which would make it finally make sense. My father used to tell me bedtime stories about little "incidents" he had in that old school and how he sometimes misses it and wishes he could learn how to build a time machine to be able to travel back to those years and experience that part of his life for at least five more minutes. He always described the school as the most modern building in the whole entire village, with wooden frames surrounding the freshly placed windows that gave him a view over the Rhymt river that was always shining with a blueish color as beautiful as entire oceans.
     All of the classes smelled like fresh paint applied on wood and it had benches and chairs with a space for their name to be engraved on. He told me that their first class was actually learning how to carve on wood using different types of sharp objects. First they used a knife since it was the easiest and most accurate object that was there, then they used an axe, then a screwdriver with a hammer and finally they were given just a toothpick and were told to use their imagination to figure out a way to carve their name into their chairs and desks. He told me that he struggled for some time to carve his first letter on the chair, but when he realised that it will take several hours to do his entire name, he tried to find another way. After minutes of constant thinking, he decided to just use some leftover paint that he found outside the school and paint his name. He received the most unique method award, but he also embarrassingly failed that class. The teacher told him that if he doesn't even understand what carving means, then he has no chance of graduating. And now, you may be wondering, did he graduate? Well, no, but that is a story that he never told me to this day. Is it because the school was abandoned? Was it because he just dropped out? Nobody knows besides him, not even my mom, but she was never interested in finding out why, so I thought it would be a good idea if I stop asking too.
     As I was saying, this school definitely wasn't the best thing in the world considering the fact that I was a leprechaun, but I had no problem choosing this over an abandoned school who doesn't have teachers or students anymore.
     The day I learned that I, supposedly, needed to become a hero urgently I was going to school like I always did, by foot. When the first year of school started, sometimes I took the bus. It was exactly like the ones you would see in human movies, a big yellow rectangle with wheels and some black lines painted across it. It had almost fifty seats and they all required to sit with at least one more person. Something which at first I thought would be okay. But then, problems started to appear. Some of the kids there were laughing at the fact that I had a beard and a mustache at only fourteen years. I never understood this because in my village, we were born with them. Yes, not as big as mine are currently, but a hint of them always exists. By the age of six, you would already pass as an adult judging by the amount of body hair you would have. Well, at least an adult with dwarfism. Because that's another thing that the other kids made fun of. They were all so tall, I could only see their face if I looked up or, sometimes, even jumping with all my force to get a glimpse of their bottom lip. My mother tried lying to me by telling me that most humans are just born with a genetic problem called "Giganticularism" and that made them so tall. Thinking back, I always thought that the name was absolutely ridiculous and there was no way that was real. Because it obviously wasn't.
     In just my first day of school, after needing to go through the subtle bullying that happened on the yellow rectangle called "bus", a kid who was probably almost six feet tall came to me and started doing a motion on his face that looked similar to a massage. I asked him what was he trying to do and he just started laughing and calling me "Mustache kid". I tried to stay calm, so curiosity got the better of me and I decided to ask him if he, like all the other humans, suffered from giganticularism. He looked directly into my eyes. His expression completely changed from laughing to dead serious. I thought I made him uncomfortable with that question, but the first thing I know is that I wake up with a punch that had my name written on each finger. I was knocked out and only woke up after lunch ended. Because of my size, nobody even noticed me laying unconsciously on the ground, with imaginary starts floating and dancing in a circle around my tiny head. That hurt me inside even though I knew that it wasn't their fault they didn't see me.
     I always tried to see the good in each person, even if they were human or a leprechaun. Deep down I knew that even the troubled persons were just a hurt version of a normal one. Maybe I also had this mentality because I was always taught by my parents that leprechauns need to respect humans, because they agreed to let us live on the same planet as them. They told me that most of the leprechauns are physically weak and could never fight a human and win or even get a tie against them. So everytime a human picked on me, I tried to resist the urge to explode in anger and just suffered the consequences of being born a ginger little guy.
     Coming back to the day I learned that the world needed a hero, I arrived at school like usual and sat on my chair which, unlike my father's, did not have a name engraved on it. When I told the teachers about what my father did, they all just laughed at me and continued teaching like I wasn't even there. I got a letter from my dad sent with our little messager bird called Fley which read: