C1 A DRAGON AT THE END OF THE WORLD

At first, only a point of darkness appeared, and I thought it was an anomaly, so I exited the shuttle to check the probe for malfunction, but the darkness grew and spread to consume all the light within its circumference until eventually the entire Solar System experienced an absence of light and disappeared from my sight.

Suddenly a huge nova blinded my sensors and swept across the entire Star System, but the lights were slowly refracted back into the point of darkness.

I thought I would drift into the darkness just as everything else did but instead, my trajectory was suddenly changed, as I was pulled, not into the darkness, but toward the comet I was inspecting as it instantly exploded in a shower of rays, the moment I lost all consciousness.

When I awoke, I wasn't in space but in a strange place.

"Am I dead?" I asked Sara, but she did not immediately reply to me as my sensors and functions just returned and she needed to reboot.

When Sara came online, she checked my vitals and functions and told me I wasn't dead, at least according to her diagnostics, and neither was I in a dream nor suffered from some hallucination.

The reality was I woke up in the middle of a large tent decorated with taxidermy mounts of lion and elephant heads and surrounded by spear-wielding natives, with their faces painted in markings of yellow and red.

A bearded man who wore a feathery headdress and colorful garb said something to me which I couldn't comprehend, so Sara analyzed his words and gestures and compared them to a database, but there were too little data to generate a meaningful interpretation or translation, so I listened to these strange people for some time, as Sara studied their language.

As I grasped the villager's speech, I started to communicate with them, which enhanced my linguistics of this place and helped me recognize my predicament.

The man who kept my company was the leader of this tribe, and his name was Kawi, and the village was Kamini, and this strange new world had a name, Ouamua.

It seemed that I literally fell from the skies as Kawi prayed for a savior to rid a creature that was plaguing their village, and naturally, he concluded that I was the savior he summoned.

Suddenly the villagers roamed the village frantically, with their spears and shields in their hands, as if they anticipated a fierce battle.

I went to investigate what was the commotion and found a long pole in the middle of a raised wooden platform recently assembled in the middle of the village, with a woman tied to it.

The woman cried and pleaded for my help so instinctively I went to release her from her inhumane treatment, but as I walked toward her, Sara sounded a warning, "Unknown object incoming", and I noticed a small flying ship approaching me.

No, it wasn't a vehicle that came but a winged animal about 30-meters in width, with bright red eyes and scaly skins and a head that resembled an alligator, that pumped smoky flames out from its nostrils and large opened mouth.

As it flew toward me, Sara detected a heat signature built up inside the creature's mouth, as a fiery flame soon blasted out of its mouth.

Instinctively I held out my hand to activate a Force field, but my generators were gone, so I had to elude it.

During my fall from the skies, it was my Force field that absorbed most of the heat and shock which probably saved my life but as a result, the generator was damaged beyond my capability to repair it.

So, Sara calculated the motion of the incoming flame and its momentum and determined the appropriate maneuvers I should take, as I jumped to avoid the flame.

However, I couldn't evade the flame completely, but I procured the most positive of outcomes and avoided the most intense portion of the heat, but the fiery blast did cover part of my shoulder in flames.

Fortunately, the little flame that seared me did little to my skins which were non-flammable and resistant to fire, so I simply brushed it off.

Sara made more calculations to counter the creature, but it wasn't necessary after all, as it soon became apparent that the target of the creature wasn't me, as the creature swooped down from the air to grapple the woman tied to the pillar which I planned to rescue and took her away.

There were no precedents where a creature could breathe flames from its mouth but from Sara's observations, the creature had lungs filled with compressed gases such as methane or hydrogen, which were probably instrumental to its ability for flight.

When the compressed gases mixed with organic napalm stored in a unique gland, were propelled through its mouth, that acted as a furnace of some sort, which ignited the mixture, to project an intense jet of flame.

Sara documented the creature's images and scans and reported her summary in her logs, and she found the closest comparable records from her database to the creature, was a resemblance to the Dragons from mythological past.