Lyra, the draconology apprentice

While Grizzly's stoicism would probably be more tolerable than Lyra's babbling or Daxon's awkward advances, I would have felt guilty leaving Lyra and Daxon together. Setting aside the fact that those two are probably the weak links in this party, Daxon could be well be too distracted by Lyra's body to properly deal with any dragon attacks. And Lyra was probably just too distracted in general.

Between the two, I ultimately had to go with Lyra. For one thing, I didn't really trust Grizzly to babysit her - given the chance, he might feed her to the dragon just to shut her up. For another, despite my complaining, her endless prattle was likely to contain the occasional useful piece of information. She was, at least relatively speaking, an expert on dragons. Ultimately, though, she was just more interesting to me than Daxon, who I could read like a book - a book with very few words.

Lyra surprised me by taking the lead as we first set out. I had been expecting her to slow me down on the densely forested mountainside, but in the end, I was the one who wound up stumbling over rocks and tree roots, distracted by the view, as it were. When I finally gave up and insisted on going in front of her Lyra flashed me a knowing grin. For all of her apparent obliviousness, she clearly wasn't naive. I found myself adjusting my clothing, fearing a similar exposure to what had happened at the recruitment event.

Of course, she did keep talking incessantly, regardless of the terrain. I tried my best, when I could get a word in, to steer her away from topics like the academy instructors or the things she missed most about Theria. I quickly found that it was never difficult to get her to talk about dragons instead. She was quite passionate about her field, and despite myself I began to share in her excitement to discern the age and sex of the particular dragon we were searching for. Unfortunately, she didn't have much of an answer to my most pressing question: would the dragon really keep a human woman alive, and if so, why?

I began to notice signs that the dragon had been in the area, mostly in the form of trees broken by the dragon's descent and occasional blood splatters in the areas where it had caught a deer or some other wild animal. Of course, Lyra also eagerly pointed these signs out to me, and I couldn't bring myself to tell her I had already noticed. I had to physically restrain her at one point from diving into a heap of what was apparently dragon scat in order to determine the dragon's diet. It seemed we were on the right track, but...