A Change in the Weather

I'd never seen a dragon up close before. I'd never seen a dragon at all before. In fact, I'd rather believed that dragons were mythological creatures, only available for fantasies and daydreams. But Tumalatt was all set to force a change in reality.

I was the Chief Meteorologist for the local television station. I pointed at the map, caused dopplers to dopple and graphics to animate, and spoke at length on isobars and cloud formations. I appeared on the screen in the middle of popular programs and warned about tornadoes three counties away. That was me. That was my job. My house was the first to get lobbed with snowballs when the possibility of snow got somehow modified by the fates into six inches of the white stuff. I didn't say I was good at my job.

It was my habit to scan the sky every evening to try and make sense of it all. It had come to my attention that clouds sometimes produce rain, but not always. My dog Lucy had a little limp when the weather was going to turn really bad, for which I blessed her every day. I was glad her little limp didn't pain her overmuch, because then I'd have felt obligated to have it treated with a miracle drug, and then where would I have been?

So there I was, pacing my back yard, watching clouds scud across the sky, and then there was this dragon. Lucy was doing her nighttime business, and she seemed to notice something was happening, and came to stand beside me. Then she started barking and running in circles. No limp, though. That was good. I could confidently predict vague possibilities that night on the weather segment.

The dragon slowed and glided to a halt in the field behind my house. Since he didn't seem to be rampaging or breathing fire or engaging in any other hostile activity, I walked toward him. Lucy kept pace with me, and I didn't try to make her stay behind. If I were to be consumed, she may as well be, too. No use leaving a limping weatherdog behind to mourn my loss.

The dragon was looking about, turning his massive head this way and that, his elongated neck snaking about sinuously. I love that word. Sinuously. It sounds just like what it is. I should have been a writer instead of a meteorologist, but they needed a weather person a lot more than they did a writer the day I applied at the station. They didn't need a janitor, for which I was also qualified, though I wondered at the time why they didn't promote their current janitor to weather person and let me push brooms and ride the big buffing machine until it was my turn. Then I learned that Rick the Janitor had already done his stint as weatherguy and was enjoying a well-earned retirement shoveling six inches of possible snow out of the executive parking lot. He used a snowblade attached to a little tractor to do that. I was jealous.

The dragon stood in the field behind my house, shivering and shaking. Then, to my surprise, he began to change into a man-looking creature of normal size. Shimmering and glowing, finally solidifying into total nakedness, and looking even colder.

He saw me and called out. "I say," he said. "I say, could I bother you for some hot coffee and perhaps a blanket to wrap myself in. I'm freezing, you see, and though it's bad manners to presume on someone's hospitality before even introducing oneself, I fear I must."

I stared stupidly at the naked man who had just been an enormous dragon. Then I shook myself. "You're cold?" Of course, he was cold. He was fairly blue with cold, whereas he had been a rather Stygian hue before his transformation. "Yes, yes, of course, come with me," I said, turning about and walking back toward my house. "Watch your step. There are gopher holes in the ground."

A crash and the sound of foreign oaths sounded behind me. Lots of gopher holes. He was extracting a leg from one as I turned to look back at him. "Be careful. I doubt I could carry you inside."

There were no more incidents until we got into the house. The floor creaked ominously under his weight, and I cringed. The furniture did no better as he settled down onto my grandmother's antique couch. Springs sproinged and groaned, but there was nothing for it. I started up the coffee maker and headed for the bedroom to fetch a robe and blankets. Modern woman or not, a naked man sitting in my living room without immediate romantic intentions was not to be borne.

I dropped a robe left by a best-forgotten boyfriend next to him on the couch. He obligingly put it on and tied the belt tight around his waist. I relaxed. Then he sat back down and covered himself further with the two blankets I'd left there.

I fetched coffee in two large mugs and gave one to him. He clutched it for a moment to warm his hands, then drank it down in a couple of gulps. It was hot. I was amazed, and handed him the mug I had brought out for myself.

"Thank you, dear lady," he said. "Allow me to introduce myself. Tumalatt, of the DragonClan Percheus. From the future, I'm afraid. Don't let that bother you. I'm here only to recover Grandmama's emerald brooch, and then I'll be on my way."

"Grandmama's brooch?" Sometimes repetition is an adequate way of filling time while one is desperately questioning one's own sanity.

"Let me explain. Great-Grandfather Roxfeldt gave his daughter Amethyst an emerald brooch on her wedding day. That would be approximately six hundreds years ago now. Since that time, Grand-Grandfather Roxfeldt has retired to the clan caverns, and Grandmother Amethyst has become rather sentimental and maudlin of late. She admits most freely that she spent some time as a lady in a fancy house in the here-and-now while she and her third husband were fighting through a most unpleasant divorce."

Tumalatt drank down his cup of coffee, and I fetched more. "My thanks. During this time, a client took the brooch from her chiffonier after a most exhausting passage d'amour, and she didn't notice until later. He was gone, and she was unable to recover it."

"And?" I was able to add that much to the conversation, anyway.

"And now she wants it back in her current time, and I've been sent on a mission to retrieve it." He sipped at his cup delicately, hesitantly. "With your help."

"My help?"

"The agents of Questours Interdimensional, Incorporated have been most helpful in determining the whereabouts of the brooch, and in devising a plan to retrieve it. Your assistance is required for successful completion of my mission, and you will receive my clan's most fervent gratitude, and my own, of course."

"Questours...huh? My help? How?" I walked back into the kitchen and poured myself a tall gin and tonic. Then poured it down the drain. I still had a weather show to do that night, and I couldn't go in sloshed. Someone might notice. I might get a forecast right for once. I returned to the living room where Tumalatt was waiting patiently.

"Questours Interdimensional is a service catering to the arcanely talented and the innately arcane, magical creatures, if you will, and providing travel and tourism services around the cosmos and specializing in cross-time holidays."

"What?"

"Questours sent me here. It's a kind of magic. And you're the person most likely to make a success of my mission." Plain words are sometimes the best words.

"How?"

"You know the thief. You work with the thief. The thief likes you. You distract him. I retrieve the brooch. You collect your reward. I go away. Your life improves immeasurably."

"Reward?"

"Of course." He muttered a few words, a spell I suppose, reached into nowhere and retrieved a set of paperback books. "Your reward for assisting in a successful mission to retrieve Grandmama's brooch."

I looked at the books. A Meteorological History of the United States, Volumes 1 through 6. Oh my. And they were in ten-year increments, beginning two years before the present day. I did the math in my head. If I had those books, I could predict with absolute accuracy the weather for anywhere in the country for the next fifty-eight years. I would be a weather prophet. Riches beyond the dreams of avarice would be mine. "Who stole the brooch?"

"Harold Webster Joseph, Junior."

Oh my. Junior. Son of the station owner. Yes, he liked me. I remembered his staring down my cleavage at the last station cocktail party. I was supposed to be shmoozing the advertisers, but Junior was busy describing his latest corporate conquest as his glasses misted from his heated gaze into my bosom. I remembered talking to Rick the Janitor about it the next day, and he had told me that Junior had occasionally steamed up his glasses looking at him, as well. A weather-fetish, we guessed. Since that night, he had been a regular, and unwelcome, visitor to my cubicle at the station.

"You want me to distract him?"

"He keeps the brooch in the safe in his office, along with pornographic pictures and other mementos."

Probably has rude doppler photos, as well, I thought. Perhaps a couple of suggestive graphics. "I'll do it." Network, here I come!

That night I left Tumalatt at my house while I went over to pull my shift at the station. I studied the charts, looked at the graphs, planned the graphics and basically did everything I knew to do. Thanks to Lucy, I knew nothing immensely unfortunate was in the offing, so I felt comfortable with my possibles and probables. I had a small moment of terror as I realized I hadn't confirmed with Tumalatt that he wouldn't make a meal of my dog, but reason prevailed. Consummately polite, Tumalatt would never eat another person's pet without asking permission first.

When Junior stopped in my cubicle to stare down my cleavage, I was friendly to him. Very friendly. Friendly enough that he asked me to meet him for drinks the following night after the broadcast. I told him that would be unwise. A single, female chief meteorologist meeting a married television executive in public. What gossip would occur? What would his father say? A cozy meeting in his office was planned instead. A couple of drinks and who knew what might happen on that big leather couch? The mist on his glasses fairly formed a fog as he left my cubicle.

I did the weather with no glitches. The graphics marched across the screen as I foretold the probabilities for the next forty-eight hours and on into the weekend. A nice weekend was the outlook, I told the anchor team glibly as they caught the ball for the next segment. They smiled. They always smile. On camera.

Lucy was waiting at the door when I got home, which relieved me greatly. Tumalatt had dressed in his own clothing, pulled from that magical hole in the air. I grilled steaks for dinner. Tumalatt preferred his almost raw with a lot of raw garlic chopped on top. That night,Tumalatt slept on my couch, and I cringed whenever I heard it groaning under Tumalatt's shifting mass.

Next day, I showed Tumalatt the town, we did the evening skywatch, and I went in early to the station.

I was jittery in the extreme, something that Junior took note of with some satisfaction when he visited my cubicle. "Sweet anticipation," he smiled slyly. I told him I had to get back to work, and bent over my computer.

After the broadcast, I removed the jacket I had worn over my shortest, sexiest dress and slipped into some sincerely sexy heels. Spritzed on some perfume, and headed off to improve my future.

Over martinis in Junior's office, I admitted shyly that I really loved good jewelry, especially the antique kind, and most especially large emeralds.

Mission accomplished. Two more drinks, of which I poured mine into a very sad-looking potted plant, and he was turning the combination lock on his safe. He missed that final number a couple of times and had to start over again, but when he seemed about to give up, I did the cross/uncross my legs routine a couple of times and he attacked the combination with renewed, if drunken, vigor.

The door opened, and there it was. Exactly how Tumalatt had described it. Set in massive gold and surrounded by pearls, that emerald shone with a rare, green fire in its depths. I took it reverently into my hands.

"You creep!" I yelled. "You stole this from my sister Amethyst at Coco's Whorehouse three weeks ago!" I continued yelling, calling him every name I could think of and a few I made up just for the occasion. I didn't fear discovery. The news team was gone for the night. It was just me and Junior, and Junior was sweating bullets. And besides, I was telling the truth. Amethyst was not my sister, of course, but he had stolen it from her.

He protested his innocence, and called me a few names in return. But he ran out of steam quickly when I picked up the phone to call his wife and actually got four digits into his home phone number.

I promised to return the brooch to Amethyst, and he promised to treat whores with the respect they deserved from that day forward.

I returned home to Lucy and Tumalatt, and we had a small celebration. A Meteorological History of the United States, Volumes 1 through 6 was handed over to me. For a lark, I checked the current forecast/history and discovered I hadn't done too badly in my latest weather show. Not at all badly.

I accompanied Tumalatt to the field behind my house, with Lucy trotting along happily beside me. Then we watched as he changed back into dragonform, and began running through the field, his wings gathering wind and lifting him into the sky. He looked groundward and waved just before finally disappearing with a thunderous POP! as the Questours spell kicked in to take him home.

I couldn't have predicted that.