Monica said "But Dr Cavart,surely the fact we can transform people into dragons for thirty seconds counts for something"
Dr Colin shook his head in the negative
to the military mind 30 seconds was not enough to deliver the
nuclear payloads the admiral wanted to deliver to the Enemy's
fleets.
That would have required the transformation last for at least
an hour,and with the current transfiguration portal prototype
he and his students had built the most they could fetch was
30 seconds.
The worry for Dr Cavart and most of his students was that because Air Fleet Thule had financed the experiment,the
military would claim the device and send it to some black ops
operation and likely Colin and his team as well,never to be
seen again.
Cavart and Monica went to the Inner Chamber where the rest of the research team stood gathered around the huge three storey
tall stone circle that was the Transfiguration Portal Prototype.
The actual process itself was simple enough
you flipped the gizmo on.walked into the wormhole
that was the ingress ring and a dragon came out of the wormhole that formed in the egress ring.
None of the researchers or the very few additional test subjects
who'd tried the device actually knew what happened inside
the wormhole
just that a human came in and a dragon came out,well for
30 seconds anyway.
And so,since it seemed likely the military would make its move
in the next few hours,now that the secret was out,Cavart asked the team if they wanted to have one last go at being
dragons,even if only for half a minute.
The team all agreed and so Cavart went to the control console
and setting his full cup of coffee near the keyboard,began punching in
the command code to activate the wormhole.
Then he went to join the rest of his team and as the crackling
green energies of the wormhole appeared
on the surface of the ingress ring
the team stepped one at a time into the wormhole and vanished.
From earlier timings of the device Cavart and the others
knew there was a ninety nine minute time lapse before the
wormhole appeared at the surface of the egress ring and their transformed dragon alter egos stepped out.
However in previous times there hadn't been a full cup of coffee
sitting near the keyboard to the control console.
It tipped over and sprayed coffee on the keys and suddenly new
commands appeared in the monitor.
However the machine did not shut down but instead
99 minutes after Colin Cavart had stepped into the wormhole
as a human he stepped out of it as a dragon.
Swiftly the confused beast that had once been Cavart
rushed down the ramp from the egress ring as the other
dragons began exiting the wormhole behind him.