Shock

Shock was born with a different name, into a large and busy clan inhabiting a massive lair in the Shifting Expanse. As a hatchling, her squabbles with her siblings often turned into sparring matches, and once she grew up, she started venturing outside of dragon territory, where she encountered and battled all manner of foes. There, she discovered that she enjoyed combat, especially claw-to-claw, and she was soon helping with the defense of her clan.

One night while on patrol, Shock spotted a Shade-possessed centaur far below her, who had somehow breached her lair's perimeter defences and was now opening a hatch into the lair's water supply with one hand and holding a vial of a strangely glowing liquid with the other. Having little magical ability to speak of, and too far from the centaur to be able to get to it in time, Shock stopped it with the one reliable thing she had to hand: her pearl. Heavy from much diligent tending, the pearl crushed the centaur and the vial it was holding, then smashed into pieces on the ground below. Shock's clan was saved, but her pearl, her essence, was destroyed.

Her clan were deeply appreciative of her sacrifice, and none shamed her for her loss, but Shock nevertheless felt unable to face them without that most tangible and important piece of her soul. So she hugged her family and friends goodbye, buried the shards of her pearl at the edge of her old clan's territory, abandoned her old name, and left.

Shock took on her new name as she wandered the wilds of Sornieth, scavenging for food and shelter, and fighting the many hostile creatures there. While making her way through a thick forest one day, she came across a small group of young dragons who were being set upon by a pack of basilisks. Shock immediately charged at the basilisks, throwing them off the hurt and frightened dragons, and soon defeated them.

She accompanied the dragons back to their small cliffside lair to ensure they arrived safely, and after tending to their wounds, they insisted she stay for dinner. On learning that Shock had nowhere to spend the night, the clan leader Parsnip offered for her to stay with them. "We've just excavated a new room in this cave," he said, "but we weren't sure what it would be for. Perhaps it was meant to be a guest room, and you can be our first guest!"

Shock stayed for the night, and then for many more, teaching the younger dragons how to fight and better defend themselves, and finding herself enjoying having a solid roof over her head again after much time wandering under the open sky. One evening, while helping tidy up around the lair, she spotted a large glass orb on the clan alchemist Pneumonia's workbench. Smooth and clear, it was utterly unlike the iridescent pearls of her kind, yet she found herself transfixed by it.

"Do you like it?" asked Pneumonia, who had snuck up behind Shock while she was staring at the orb. "I crafted it for the reactor upgrade project," Pneumonia continued, "but management changed their plans at the last minute and now it's the wrong size for their new design and they were going to just throw it out but it took me ages to get it perfectly round like that and can you believe they would just toss it in the bin? Honestly!" She fumed. "I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it though, unless Parsnip decides he wants an enormous reactor for his dinky hydroponic garden. Which isn't entirely out of the question but..." Pneumonia paused and, not for the first time, glanced down at the empty space between Shock's hands. None of them ever mentioned it outright, but the absence of her pearl was still so palpable to Shock that she couldn't really blame the others for their occasional curious look.

With uncharacteristic hesitation, Pneumonia walked slowly over to her workbench, carefully gathered the glass orb into her arms, and then held it out towards Shock. "Would you like it? It's designed to contain and focus electrical and magical energies. It's also pretty good at getting a barbeque started, in a pinch!"

Shock took the orb into her hands and gazed down at it. As she did, she felt a power flowing from her and into the orb, transmuting it from clear to milky white. Somewhere deep within her, a jagged wound began to heal. "Yes," said Shock, with a slowly brightening smile. "I would like it, thank you." Shock hugged the orb to herself and thought for a moment. "I'll look after it well and, for as long as you'll all continue to have me, I'll look after you all well too."

"Of course!" Pneumonia replied immediately. "Parsnip's been trying to figure out how to ask you to join us permanently, and I know the others already think of you as one of the family." Pneumonia beamed at Shock and clapped her on the shoulder. "Right, I'm hungry; let's go see what's for dinner!"

And so the lair's guest room became Shock's room, and she found a new home, a new family, and a new purpose.

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