Dellinger

Story

Dellinger doesn't remember his parents or a birth clan. His first memories are of huddling in the concave of a sand dune, using his own wings to shelter himself from a mighty thunderstorm. As a child he looked for dangerous electrical work in lightning-flight communities few would risk their own clanmates for, using the meager pay for necessities such as food and rent and the occasional medical care. His lonely existence has left him pessimistic and jaded after seeing the worst parts of dragonkind at the hands of unsympathetic dragons, highway robbers, and cruel bosses. It was this misanthropic attitude that kept him from exalting himself to the Stormcatcher (and from making any friends).

He didn't expect to see adulthood due to his dangerous work and doesn't quite know how to feel about it other than a vague existential dread. It was around this time that he met Nobody. The amnesiac Nobody, afflicted with a strange condition that would cause him to "glitch out" of reality, was looking for a home he couldn't remember.

Dellinger went on with his normal prickly attitude, but the insults seemed to roll right off Nobody's back. The skydancer didn't care that Dellinger was moody or short with him. In fact, Nobody seemed to... enjoy his presence?

Nobody had ever done that for Dellinger before, except for Nobody.

The pearlcatcher


Personality



Likes



Dislikes



Clan
Job



Relationships
Queerplatonic partner:
https://www1.flightrising.com/dragon/53791261


Quotes

"..."

Theme Songs

This is the story I wrote to get this dragon

Nobody flew in a thunderstorm. Well, nobody except for lightning-flight dragons, who, when struck by the force of nature that was their namesake, described it as "a hug from Boss himself... before the tingling hits."

The particular dragon flying today didn't think of that, though, despite his cyan eyes. He just didn't know any better. He searched without knowing what he was looking for, waiting for something familiar to tickle his brain, examining the few and far between buildings on the fringes of lightning territory. Rain soaked his skydancer feathers, making his flapping clumsy, but he wasn't about to sacrifice his bird's eye view due to some small inconvenience. Occasionally a piece of his body would pixelate and shiver, as though shocked, but the skydancer either didn't feel it or was so used to it that it no longer mattered.

"Perhaps I should land," he said out loud to himself after falling a few feet due to his klutzy flapping. He was shivering from the cold, soaked beyond his light pink bones on the surface to the actual, real ones beneath his skin.

At that moment, a pearlcatcher looked up. This was not by chance. He looked everywhere, all the time, and upon seeing an idiot dragon flapping like a chicken in a thunderstorm, focused all his eyes on the spectacle, half-delighted, half-horrified.

Nobody should have landed earlier, as he soon found out. Being the highest in the sky, it was almost inevitable.

The light came first.

"Yeowch," the pearlcatcher said before the deafening boom. The chicken was fried. "Should I help them? I should help them."

The pearlcatcher rolled all thirty-eight of his eyes before shooting up into the sky, wings flapping in tight hurried snaps, arms outstretched to catch the idiot dragon, but--

"What the --?"

The pearlcatcher's sentence was cut off in his shock. The lightning-ified stranger had turned into a pixelated mess, screaming in pain as they fell, gray and then back to normal and then covered in squares--

Thwack.

The two collided midair, and now they were both screaming before the pearlcatcher, who wasn't riddled with electric shocks, righted himself mid-air and huffed.

"Use your wings, you stupid...!"

Reality-glitching or no, he wasn't going to let a dragon fall to their death, so he sped forward and grappled with his talons, catching the stranger's forearms, flapping hard. It was fortunate, he thought, that the stupid dragon was smaller than him, and heaved, losing altitude slowly enough to eventually toss the stranger on the ground without injury.

The stranger -- a skydancer, the pearlcatcher noticed -- wasn't glitching much anymore, and simply lay gasping in the thick mud. The pearlcatcher took a moment to notice them -- him, he saw, judging by the subtle visual cues. Circling the injured body, he noted the pearl-colored bones and strange, glitchy skin. Those black feathers would be a pain to clean later, he thought.

Noticing the shivering, he sat close to the skydancer and outstretched a large azure wing, shielding him from the cold rain.

"Wake up, idiot."

One cyan eye opened -- common eyes, the pearlcatcher noted. The idiot had stopped gasping for breath and was now shivering violently. His gaze was tangible, a weight on the pearlcatcher's body and wings and eyes, and yet rather vacant, unsurprising for someone who'd just been struck by lightning. One of his eyes pixelated, but it was gone fast as he could blink.

You're imagining it, the pearlcatcher thought.

The skydancer rolled onto his back, exposing his underbelly to a stranger, and pawed the pearlcatcher's cheek, stroking the mane there.

"Pretty," he murmured.

"Off me, idiot," the pearlcatcher ordered, leaning into the touch before it obediently went away. "Why'd you do it? Obviously you know, 'cause you're lightning. You wanted to get buzzed?"

"Huhnnh?"

"Never mind," the pearlcatcher sighed. "What's your name?"

"Nobody. I'm Nobody."

"That's not even a name, idiot. Was it worth it? Look at you. Hopefully, you resume normal brain function soon."

The skydancer looked like he was about to say something. Then he sneezed. The pearlcatcher's wing shivered in the cold rain, but he refused to move it.

"My name's Dellinger. Can you stand?"

"Dellinger," the skydancer repeated, before rolling over in the mud again (ew) and attempting to get to his feet. His legs shook like leaves, and just as he began to slip, Dellinger grabbed him with a paw.

"Lean on me, idiot. I'll take you home."