Now,though genetically you had lots of dragoness-kin potential,thanks to those dragon black blood cells that had done you a big favour,mentally you were still
Frank Dillinger,a rat of a human who'd had a wife-beater of a father,a sister who plied the red-light districts selling her body to the Johns
and a brother who'd robbed banks till the day he and you had pulled
the final job and your brother Clyde had pulled his Glock on some
old gent who'd just strolled into a holdup going horribly wrong.
Clyde had already herded the staff and customers into the bank vault
and fired a round through the openning just before the vault door slammed shut.
So here was this old gent( Mr Ebeneezer Tadross you later learned) and
Clyde's Glock was about to take down the snivelling old fart.
So you,Frankie the Rat as you were known in the community,could see
the cop cars with flashing red lights already pulling up to seal
your escape route off.
This province had the death penalty,,by hanging.
So you'd leapt forward and knocked aside the Glock as it fired,more
for your own preservation then any genuine concern for Tadross.
You'd both been captured and Clyde had been hung ,for the bullet he'd fired into the sealing bank vault
had struck and killed the bank managers daughter.
You would have joined your brother on the gallows ,but Mr Tadross,founder of Tadross Universitty,figured he owed you
one and so you'd done a quarter century in Kingston before they let
you out into respectable society again.
After a quarter century of making licence plates,you were no
spring chicken,but a grey haired ex-con whose only skills,besides snitching,holding a gun and robbing banks,
was metal work.
Though Tadross had long since died whilst you rotted in a prison cell,
the Tadross family had kept track of you and pulled their connections
to get you a security guard job at the abandoned and soon to be demolished
Echelson Tunnel.
So that fateful night you'd entered the darkened control room to find a
nine foot tall lizardwoman in a lab coat playing with the
Echelon computers.
Amber had spun around and started babbling at you in the dragon-kin language,
( which though you didn't know it at the time,was a variant
of Old English)
You'd got the creatures general drift< Don't shoot)
but since she was nine feet tall and was clearly something Tadross's
Special Biology Department would pay you,Franke the Rat,good
money to obtain.
So you'd fired the Glock with intent-to-kill.
Unluckily for your continied humanity and certainly your bank account,
Amber had been wearing a electro-magnetic bolt gun dampener under her lab coat and over her chest.
So though the 22millimetre Gock bullets hadn't killed her,they'd certainly slammed her hard against the wall and broken a rib or two.
She'd just lain there stunned as you put another clip in the Glock and advanced on her,prepared to finish her off if necessary.
Groggily Amber pushed herself up part way off the floor
and stared dully at you and your Glock.
You'd finally got it in your head that aliens tend to be bug eyed monsters that feed on brains and the like,so your gun hand was shaking when you
fired at a spot between her glowing flickering orange eyes.
You missed
You never got a second chance as Amber's dormant dragon dna finally
did something useful.
Her lab coat,slide rule,brassiere,panties and electro-magnetic dampener
blew apart !
Which was the last memory you had before you awakened in the
colony 's medical cave operating table.
Though you didn't remember anything after Ambers eyes had glowed and her dragoness-kin outfit had blwn up in Frank Dillingers
face,clearly she'd revealed her alien 'super powers' to him before she'd killed him in
that Echelon Tunnel room.
So you looked at the Jump-Slip tunnels that were starting to whine louder and louder as the seven tubes spun faster and faster as the very
ground itself
began to shake.
You were a nine foot tall lizard woman with some alien superpower that
a 22 milimetre Glock,the most powerful gun on your Earth,
had been no match for.
Frankie the Rat ,and his brother the dear departed Clyde,would have taken
over the entire Earth criminal underworld with powers like that.
Or,you looked back toward Amber,Pitch,Indizo and the rest filing in
through the leadway,
stay with the colonists,for a little longer anyways.