Once upon a time, a boy went for a walk through town after dark.
As he passed the library, he thought for sure he heard something — a guttering, grumbling sort of sound — but he reasoned that it must be his own stomach, and he headed home for a snack.
But the next day, he heard it again. This time, the sun was out, and other people were walking around as well. But neither the baker nor the funny hat maker, nor the investment banker, seemed to have heard the noise. He decided it must have been his own stomach again, and went home for dinner.
When it happened a third time, though, he had just eaten.
That night, he returned to the library and sat outside in the dark, waiting pateintly for the nosie to begin again. When finally he did, he crawled to the doorway of the library, where the sound was loudest, and spoke as loud as he could:
“Who’s there?”
But all that followed was more grumbling.
The boy was left to assume one thing: there was a sad dragon imprisoned beneath the library, and he had to help the noble creature get free.
How he would do so, of course, did not immediately occur to him. He started out practically: requesting city planning documents, searching the town for any abandoned caves or doorways leading to nowhere, knocking on all the bookcases to see if any were hollow.
But after much searching, he came up with nothing. At that point, it occurred to him that heroes didn’t usually become so through research and analytical thinking–they simply followed their gut. And so, he began to spend nights simply laying on his stomach in front of the library, just waiting for an idea.
And one night, he simply walked into the library, opened the trap door in front of the reference desk, and waited.
But a dragon didn’t come out.
At first, nothing came out. The boy waited for a good fifteen minutes before not a dragon, but a velociraptor emerged, and promptly began to chase him.
He was so busy running from that first velociraptor, in fact, that he hardly noticed the other two dozen or so emerging from the trap door.
The following day, he stayed locked in his room as the velociraptors terrorized his town, made loud dirty jokes at old ladies, and left their candy wrappers everywhere.
But that was no way for a hero to act.
And so that night, he bravely broke into the library, and searched in vain for a book entitled “How to Make A Velociraptor Your Bitch.” He was disappointed when he came up with nothing, but he did find a book with instructions on how to enchant inanimate objects and food, and took it with him, figuring it might be useful.
Outside, he could hear the footsteps of the velociraptors, as well as their terrible off tune drunken singing. Nearby, he found only a pie resting on someone’s window, and a roasted chicken on another. He enchanted both items to the best of his ability, and watched from a nearby alley as his creations went stumbling out into the night.
And then the velociraptors gave chase, and followed the animated pie and roasted chicken from the town. The boy didn’t know what happened to them after that, but he did his research and bided his time, knowing that one day it would be his duty to send the velociraptors back where they had come from.
The End.
© Beatrix Cottonpants Original
