Fishy Business

Greg felt more that a bit uneasy. Everything was strange. His anxiety was still soaring high and he was nervously slapping his thigh with his right hand as he looked about the place. The last time the green dragons had directed him to someone or somewhere, well, someone was being killed. Could he do something important here? Is there going to be some danger that he had to warn them about? Greg edged a bit closer to the boys playing ball but kept off the street itself. The sidewalks were lower here and in rather disrepair, but they were something.

He looked about for danger that the boys might otherwise miss.  It wasn't the boys that missed the danger but Greg.  There was a shout from one of the boys and one pointed at Greg, or behind him.  They scattered.  Their knowledge of the streets and ins and outs of the buildings in which and around which they play was extensive and well used.  Gregory realized that they weren't pointing at him very quickly when a heavy hand pushed Gregory from behind into the middle of the street.

"You thought you'd be clever taking a circular route? heh?"  The heavy hand belonged to quite a brute.  Not far behind the brute was Mr. DeMontague.  DeMontague tapped the brute on the shoulder and he moved to the side.

"Well, friend, here we find ourselves again, and should something befall you here, well, less of the world will care.  I'd like to discuss that business proposition again."  DeMontague slipped his hands in his pockets and smiled while the brute crossed his arms across his massive chest.

Greg had an urge to run.  As lost as he was already, he knew that would not be a good idea, but the urge was pretty strong.  He was not a fighter, at least he had never actually been in one before so he had to assume he was not a fighter.  Of course he assumed the definition of 'Fight' excluded simply being beat up, which had happened quite a bit during his school years.  So he immediately theorized that the normal, human fight-or-flight mechanism was trying to drive him in the right direction quite naturally.  But he quite literally had no destination to run towards...other than away from these guys.  But he also knew that was irrelevant...away from them, wherever that might take him, was indeed a destination suitable to fulfill the needs of that urge.

But Greg was not a runner.  Oh, he had run from conflict before, but also quite literally...he had not done much running in life.  But he has been riding his bike quite a lot over the last seven and a half years.  It was his only means of transportation.  But since he hated the feel and smell of his own perspiration he always started out early so he had enough time to walk his bike up any challenging hills. So, despite being able to claim regular bicycling as an exercise to and from work, the store, the library and anywhere else...he was still very short on endurance. 

Boston had been a great place to live.  Mild in the summer and cold in the winter...very little need to sweat, thank god.  And this place was already getting hot...damn!  He could smell his own sweat and he felt terrible.  Both fear and running had done him in!

He yanked his mind back to his situation.  He was left with very few options.  With no experience fighting, this brute might be able to take him down with little effort.  What did he have to work with?  He still could not think straight...the fear had gotten to him.  It had been the threatening presence of the brute that had nearly shut off his mind and tried to forced his body into action.  So, he focused instead on DeMontague. 

There had been a long pause, brief as it might be, between when DeMontague said he wanted to talk and when Greg spoke up.  It was a 'conversationally awkward pause' as his therapist had explained to him before.  The man had not actually asked him a question and so Greg was left waiting for him to ask something.  He had said he wanted to discuss something and yet he had not started discussing it.  Ah!  Greg figured it out.

"Ah!  That was one of those rhetorical statements, right?  Designed to elicit a response of some kind, right?  They are the opposite of rhetorical questions which, while phrased in the manner of actual questions, are not meant to elicit a response at all but are actually statements in and of themselves.  This is so confusing.  Ok, since you finished with a rhetorical statement, which is actually a question phrased in the manner of a statement, your question is whether or not I will do business with you."

Greg had relaxed a bit as he put his mind on the matter of the conversational puzzle DeMontague presented.

"And then there is the matter of you calling me "Friend" while at the same time intimating that something bad might happen to me here in this side-street.  And this, um, big fella here appears to have a threatening disposition, or at least that is my interpretation.  If I am wrong please let me know. I am no expert on body language and sometimes get my signals crossed.  The current, implied physical threat belies the word you used."

Greg liked the word 'belie'.  He had so little verbal ammunition to use in a conversation.  After being told time and time again that calling someone a liar is not acceptable, he had found another way to say it that most people either glossed over or simply did not understand. 

Greg was far more relaxed now as he considered DeMontague.  Greg was often missing what people meant by what they said.  Perhaps he was missing something here.  He did not feel that he was missing the ill intent of these two, but he had been wrong before.  And he considered that perhaps he had not rebuffed the good man's offer strong enough before.  That was probably it.  If first you do not succeed: try, try again.  And he knew for certain that he himself, after being refused on one occasion on a given issue, often asked a second time, possibly with a different conversational demeanor.

"I am sorry, Mr. DeMontague.  Perhaps I misunderstood you before.  It is not that I have a lack of interest in new and profitable enterprises.  But I had other, more personal reasons to refuse your initial offer.  However, I did cut you off before you had an opportunity to give me your full sales pitch, and you did offer me a cup of tea after all.  As your guest, I hope I did not offend you.  Could you fill in the more pertinent details of the business proposition?"

Greg considered himself as he finished his side of this leg of the discussion.  His shoes were scuffed and were probably a total loss.  His jacket was still ok, though he unbuttoned the front as he spoke.  He did not want to loose any buttons.  His t-shirt was damp from his own sweat and he wished he had thought to run out of the house with a fresh one to change into.  He knew his dress shirt was probably damp as well, not good.  And although it had come out of his pants a little he knew it would not be visible because of his jacket.

He refrained from tucking in his shirt since he had been told it was bad form to do so in front of others. He straightened and tightened his tie, which had come a bit loose.  He would certainly like to comb his hair, but he neither had a comb, a mirror, or privacy.  

Greg had to wonder what this fellow was really about.  Was he really going to ask Greg to smuggle for him?  Perhaps he had pegged the man all wrong.  He was actually starting to become a little interested in what he had to say.

DeMontague did not look happy and the longer Greg rambled the less happy he looked, "By the Gods, you talk way too much.  George shut him up for a bit and then take him to the warehouse by the temple."  George took a step forward and Gregory suddenly felt hands on him from behind.  Smaller hands and they covered his eyes.  Maybe Gregory didn't want to see what was coming anyways but as quickly as they appeared they were gone and Gregory was being dragged down to the ground by some boys.  "Quickly, this way, if you want to live."

George and DeMontague were stumbling around as if they were suddenly blinded.  Boys performed in two and three man teams to get behind the gentlemen and push them down harshly onto the ground.  George, as Gregory had seen had swung a hand right where Gregory's head had been.  He was flailing the most and went down the hardest.  The boy who spoke to him, beckoned him into a open apartment complex to lead him through a maze of buildings and rooms and streets to escape.

Gregory followed behind the boy, a greenish haze slowly building up around the boy as he ducked and weaved and stepped over small children and around old women hanging clothes.  A dragon hung in the air momentarily, ephemeral and steely eyes, it was almost like a will o the wisp but made of something other than light.  It dove into Gregory's body and another and another flowed from around the boy and into Gregory, one at a time as they maneuvered.

Finally the trek ended perhaps several blocks away in a small pet shop called Hush, Hush, Little Fish Aquarium where the silent hum of filter units on the backs of dozens of fish tanks.  There was a terrarium or two with turtles and snakes and lizards, but fish seemed to be the pet of choice.  A young woman, an older sister perhaps, of the boy as they resembled one another, looked up from behind a counter when they entered.  She spoke in Thai at a rapid pace.

Although they had stopped running, Greg's heart was still pounding a mile a minute.  Events had happened so terribly fast and his mind had just caught up with them.  'Shut him up for a bit...'  he thought to himself.  'That's what DeMontague had told George just before George tried to punch me'.  He started to file that away as yet another verbalized threat....no, not a threat...it was some sort of instruction to another to do him harm...hmmm, a new file.  Greg had never had that one before.

But the girl was talking... no, she was definitely a young woman, not a girl.  He focused on her.  Since he could not understand a word she said he tried to make sense of the dragons.  They had called him to the room downstairs, dragons appeared that were clearly visible to those in the room, and they flowed into Greg.   Then he was called to go see this boy.  The dragons rose from him and flowed into Greg.  He had seen no indication that others had seen those dragons.  So, was he being called from place to place to collect the dragons?  This was just so damn confusing.  Weren't there dragons closer to Boston than Bangkok?  Greg had to put that topic on hold.  He simply did not have enough information.  He did not feel any different and he had not had enough time to focus his mind on the problem.

What the hell was that horrible smell?!?  There was a reason Greg hated pets.  The hair, the mess, the excrement, the neediness, but most of all...the smell.  He always avoided pet shops like the plague, crossing the street or to the opposite side of the mall to keep away from the smell.  He hated the smell of sweat...but this...OMG, he thought in text....and he never thought in text.  This was really bad. 

What was that fool woman saying?!?    

"DeMontague!" a word that Gregory understood.  The young woman said it aloud in alarm.  Gregory could look over his shoulder, out of the pet shop and see the man and the brute that had been with him were stalking towards the shop.  Gregory looked back towards the boy who was standing near a fish tank, Zebra fish to be precise.  The boy looked at Gregory and shrugged, "I'm sorry, friend."  And he jumped backwards towards the tank.

It happened in an instance, the boy was a boy, then he was a fish, a zebra fish to be precise.  He had jumped only slightly and was instantly a fish and flopped into the tank.  The young woman rushed forward looking anxious about what to do with Gregory.  Gregory's cell phone buzzed in his hand.  He looked down and the dragons were there.  And suddenly, without warning, Gregory was a fish, a zebra fish to be precise.  The young woman quickly scooped him up and dumped into into the tank.

"You can change into a fish as well!" another zebra fish exclaimed.  It sounded like the boy.  "We thought we were the only ones.  It seems like a power is fairly unique, but maybe there are whole families of people who can do the same things.  How wonderful is that?!"  The fish swam in excited circles.  Outside the tank, DeMontague looked around while yelling at the young woman.  Gregory was certain that he should understand the words and know what they were saying but it was a garbled mess, unintelligable to his brain, even more so than the thai language that had been spoken around him for the past half hour at the most.  The young woman was screaming back at him and flailing her arms.  Outside an officer of the law was peering inside the store.

Greg stopped staring.  He was having an easier time of it than he would have thought.  But then he remembered how much he loved fish...not as pets, but as food.  He imagined that he should be feeling sick at the thought, but strangely he felt just fine.  

He swirled around the tank and tried to feel what it was like to be a fish....what was he breathing?  Water?  He looked around the tank.  There was more than just water in here.  The other fish used the same water that they breathed as a bathroom...worse than....hmmm, strange, the feeling was...not too stressful.  

"Is it just zebra fish, or can you turn into any type of fish?"  He asked the boy.  "By the way, what is your name?" 

"Any live fish that I come into contact with so long as my sister is around.  My name is Dok, my sister Noi and I run this fish shop for pet owners here in Bangkok.  We have a selection of tanks in the back of the shop for fish that you would eat.  It's safer to become one of these fish in the front though, so that you don't get lost in a crowd.  Cleaner too.  I think DeMontague is getting chased off."

Surely enough, the police officer was asking DeMontague to leave, though the language was not remotely understandable, the body language said enough.  Noi thanked the officer profusely and when he left, she closed the shop.  Dok swam back and forth under the filter for the tank, brushing off another couple of fish that were getting curious about the newcomers.  "We'll have to wait a little bit just to be sure that no one doubles back to cause any trouble.  So what's your name?  You're not from Bangkok obviously, what brings you to Thailand?"

"Well, Dok, my name is Gregory.  I'm from Boston and I have no idea what I am doing here, and even less of a clue concerning how I got to Bangkok.  My guess is that I'm here to find you.  I'm not sure what the heck is going on.  I see these green, misty dragons and they show me people are breaking into a nearby apartment.  I go there, catch a murder in progress, and the dragons just go into my body or something.  I then run when the bad guys chase me.  I see the dragons again and I suddenly find myself outside DeMontague's shop.  We talk, he is clearly a shady character, and then he tries to press me into some sort of service.  Then the green misty dragons show up again and show me a vision of you in the street playing with that ball and I get an idea of where you are.  I go to find you and then DeMontague and his henchman showed up.

You and your friends rescue me, thanks a whole bunch for that by the way.  I think I was about to learn a whole new meaning of the word Pain.   Oh yea, while I was following you these green misty dragons flew out of you and went into me, lots of them.  Now I'm a fish, talking to another fish named Dok.

One possible explanation is that I fell asleep in front of the television and I am having one hell of a dream.  Come on!  I'm a fish in Bangkok for crying out loud.  And I'm talking to a fish.  I never talk to fish.  I must be dreaming."

"This is no dream.  The dragons must be a manifestation of your powers.  Maybe you borrowed my ability!  I'm glad you didn't steal it, otherwise I wouldn't be a fish right now.  DeMontague must somehow know that you have an ability.  He has another couple people with abilities somewhere in Bangkok.  He's trying to use them for no good, I'm sure of it, but I don't know where he could be keeping them."  Dok the fish bobs up and down in the filter stream.  Noi fixes the front of the shop and a loud clang resonates with the shop.  Someone must have thrown something.  The woman grabs a green mesh net and starts fishing in the tank trying to catch Dok and Gregory.

Greg watches Dok to see what he does.  If he swims into the net Greg follows.  He certainly did not want to stay a fish forever.  Greg felt great though.  He was not liking the idea of being a fish, but somehow his mind seemed a little clearer.  Not that he could focus any easier, but...there was just something, what it was he had no idea.  Greg say Dok swim towards the net and followed suit.  Noi swept them up in the net and for a brief moment, Gregory was gasping for air or water as the case may have been. 

Lessons in Power
He was a little wet and sitting on the floor of the pet shop sucking oxygen with Dok almost instantly, "Well, we are all full of surprises today aren't we?" Noi said and helped Gregory to his feet.  Gregory was back to himself, wearing the clothes he had been wearing and clutching his cellphone in his hand.

"Um, hi!  Yes, I suppose we are full of surprises."  Greg said as he clumsily came to his feet.  He checked to be sure his phone was still working before putting it away.  "Did you really turn me into a fish?"  he asked her.

"Did I turn you into a... oh no, my friend, you turned yourself into a fish," Noi said wagging her finger and turning around to grab a bucket of cleaning supplies.

"It's true.  You said you had dragons and they pulled my power into you," Dok added and jumped from his sisters cleaning path.  "You can use the abilities of others.  You should pull our power of the light,  It could be really useful to you.  Just like I blinded DeMontague to get you through the alleys of Bangkok and here.  Though I probably should have known that he knew it was me."

Noi suddenly started yelling at Dok, the words were foreign, but the tone, Gregory had seen before.  It was a scolding, a 'you should have known better' type of scolding.

"Wait!" Said Greg.  "Hold on.  Even if I had, um, powers or whatever, how do I use them?  How do you use them?"

"I don't know how you use yours but it's kind of like flexing a muscle or forcing a burp," Dok said and Noi smacked him in the back of the head.  "Ow!" he rubbed the back of his head.

"You have to discover on your own how your abilities work.  You cannot tell a bird how to fly.  These are things that we must have been born with that are only now becoming manifest.  Something has happened this year.  The end of the world as the Mayans had predicted, a new age is upon us," Noi says philosophically as though it explains everything.

"You are on a quest!" Dok is excited and moved away from his sister.  "You brought yourself to Thailand to learn about yourself."

"I did?  I am?  On a quest?"  Greg said aloud.  He felt truly uncomfortable in his damp clothes.  He was about to asked Noi if there was a one-hour dry cleaners anywhere nearby, but he considered that he had no way to pay for said dry-cleaning.  An unknown muscle?

"Well, perhaps you can help then.  I mean help me some more, since you have done so much for me already.  Is there a back room where I can, I don't know, think for a bit?  Maybe I can discover this unknown and unused muscle.  Since I left my apartment in Boston, what...um, I think less than an hour ago...from my perspective anyway, I have been either running or trying to talk myself out of trouble."

"No back room to speak of.  I keep everything in the little cabinets all over the place.  There is not a lot of space available in Bangkok, you have to make the best of what's been given you.  You want to think though, you can just sit here and we can think.  Or  perhaps we can grab a taxi and move to another part of town where it should be safer," Noi talks while she cleans a little.  "Dok, go and check the street.  Make sure that DeMontague is not watching the place."

Dok slips out the back.  Noi provides a chair for Gregory to sit in and the exhaustion of the past hour and the fact that it was progressively getting closer to his bedtime in Boston was not lost on his body.  He might need to sleep in the next few hours. 

"Hmm, well, thank you.  Um, yes.  Thanks for the chair."  Greg said as he sat down.  'Think!'  he thought to himself.  "Ok, um.  I'm going to try this now.  But understand that what I really need to do is get back to Boston.  Though I'm going to try and work on connecting with those dragons...if that is the right way to put it."

He thought about the green dragons and focused his thoughts inward.  He tried hard to block out everything around him.  It was very difficult to do this, however.  The place simply stank!  Fish of all sorts were in tanks, doing their little fishy things, like pooping and peeing, drinking and eating, swimming and breathing, all in the same little space, in the same water.  It was truly disgusting.  And when he closed his eyes he could almost hear moving about.  He could clearly  hear the bubbling of the filters that he just knew did little but oxygenate the water.  It started to make his stomach turn.

But he knew this was the right time to battle that problem and win.  He relaxed and felt the damn, damp clothes on his body.  He probably smelled like fish food, or worse.  Focus!  Focus!  Relax.

He took his mind back to one of his sessions with Dr. Abrams.  He saw her in front of him and imagined he was sitting in her office, in that comfortable, cushioned sofa of hers.  He did not concern himself with the hard seat and back of the chair he was physically in at the moment.

He remembered her words and they came easily to him now.  He often repeated them to himself in times of stress to calm himself.  He started out mumbling them aloud, but as he went on he became silent before he finished.  "Ignore everything around you that is not important and prioritize your environment.  Remember that everything has its time and place, as do words and actions.  Consider what you are doing, what you are saying, and to whom you are interacting.  Remember personal space and the personal space of others.  Remember that words have less meaning than the way they are spoken.  Remember that our bodies speak with their very movement and have a language all their own.  This language goes hand in hand with the inflection, tone, volume, and tempo of the spoken word.  You must learn to read this language as a whole.  Relax.  Think on these things and what they mean to you."

Just repeating those words in his mind began to bring him peace.  He was able to ignore the smell and sounds of the pet shop around him.  He was able to ignore the damp, stinking clothes he wore.  And then he started imagining the green, ghostly dragons as he had seen them in the past.  He tried to remember what they looked like.  

He saw them on the television in his apartment.  He saw them in the room of his neighbor as they went into him.  He tried to remember what that felt like, the dragons entering his body.  Could he tell one dragon from the next?  He had an excellent memory.  He tried to bring out differences between the dragons in his mind.  Could he remember if the dragons came out of someone in his neighbors apartment?  Did they emerge from his neighbor, sitting down with someone's hands around his neck or from one of those who came in to kill him?

He tried to remember the dragons as he saw them on his cell phone.  The image of the scene from Bangkok and the dragons that he had followed into the image.  Could he remember what they looked like as being different from other green, smokey, ghostly dragons that he had seen?

Wait a minute.  What was the first time something strange occurred?  He had a feeling...a feeling he had to wait until a certain time to watch the television...to watch the news.  Then, then was when he saw his first green dragon.  It was on the television and showed him a vision of where he needed to go.  Could he recognize those dragons from others he has seen?

Were they the same that went into him in the apartment below?  Did they call out to him to come and get them?  Were they directing him to other dragons, and if Dok was right, other powers to borrow?  He searched his excellent memory for their shape, color, and any symbols or differences among them.

He thought about the images of the dragons in the coffee shop.  Were they the same as the dragons he saw in his apartment?  Could he tell the difference?  They directed him to find the boy.  The boy had powers.  Was that the key?  Someone in the apartment below had powers and his own power directed him to go there and borrow his or her power.  He did not simply take away someone's power or else Dok would not have been able to turn into a fish.  Did his own power allow him to mimic those of others?  How long could he keep them?  

He thought of the dragons that went from Dok into him as they ran.  There were so many of them.  There were only a few of them in the apartment.  Was the number of dragons an indication of the number of times he could use a power?  Or was it the number of powers the person had.  Were they usable one time only?

He focused on all of these things for a long time.  He had a lot to sort out, a lot of questions to answer.  But he had to take action.  If he could get back to Boston he could start really working on all of this.  And he really wanted to do something about DeMontague.  He was collecting people with powers.  If he could master his own, which seemed to get stronger among others with powers, or at least had some serious versatility, he could come back and do something serious about him.

Then a thought came to him.  He had the last episode of Fringe on his Netflix download list.  He had intended to watch it this weekend. He remembered that it was set in Boston and he could access it on his cell phone if he wanted, though he had never done that before.

Still with his eyes closed he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.  He focused his mind on the dragons that went into him while he was in the apartment.  How many were there?  There were definitely more than one.  They had appeared, materialized in front of the man who had ultimately chased him...but they did not come out of him like they did from Dok.

He opened his eyes long enough to turn on his phone.  He focused on those dragons while he plugged in his security code then opened the Netflix app.  He pulled up the download list and the first one was indeed Fringe.  He concentrated on the image of the fringe icon and thought about the dragons, the ones from the apartment.  He tried to get them to pull him to Boston.  Failing that he would start the download on his phone and continue concentrating while it started.

When he opened his eyes, the dragons were swimming in his vision and the feeling in his chest was present.  They were entering him.  His mind focused on the details of the little dragons and they were all as distinct as snowflakes but so similar in their multitude.  They cascaded into him and flowed into his phone as the power on the phone flickered to life showing first the service provider then the phone manufacturer then his home screen.  Gregory could perhaps feel the urge to draw the dragons into him, but it was difficult.  There was some strain that hadn't been there before. 

Netflix booted up and Gregory thought about Boston.  The surroundings didn't change in the least and he felt no different.  The download began and Gregory was nearly shaking with concentration.  Fringe began to play, Boston at night was on the tiny view screen.  There was a certain kind of strange reluctance dancing along his vertebre.  Gregory pushed with his mind and will and then inadvertently sneezed.  A blindingly brilliant blast of light erupted from the cellphone interface and bathed the room in a haze of white and the heat of it seemed to fill Gregory's nostrils and warm his skin.  The tickle on his spine was gone, the phone powered itself down, and Gregory couldn't see a thing, then he passed out.

Gregory found himself in a dream.  He knew it was a dream because he was working in some factory that he knew was his, the letterhead said Simmons Robotics.  There were order forms on the computer to his left, and schematics on the computer to his right.  The factory outside the glass windows to his office, operated with mass efficiency.  Workers in overalls were moving machines, welding, bolting, repairing, building, and more.  Gregory himself was holding a tiny screwdriver in one hand and a small machine of some kind in the other.  The small machine, built like a toy man was limp in his hands.  A man knocked on the glass door to Gregory's office and Gregory spun around in his chair.  The man looked like a truck driver, but was made of gold.  He set a box down on the post modern couch with a smile and waved as he left.  The dragons, also in overalls, chipped and scraped at the gold on the truckers hands and carried them back over to Gregory and tossed them in Gregory's glass of water.

It all seemed perfectly normal, as this was the nature of dreams.  Gregory set down the screwdriver and drank down the water.  It was cool and refreshing.  The gold that he swallowed attached itself to his tongue and he whispered to the toy humanoid robot in his hand.  It turned to gold with rose colored bolts and screws and then stood at attention.  Gregory set the robot on the desk and it moved of its own accord.  It tightened a lose screw on its leg and then jumped down and ran out of the room.

"Gregory from Boston!  Gregory from Boston!" The young woman's voice was in his ear.  The world was dark and Gregory was moaning.  The world seemed to rumble below him.  His eyes hurt, his head hurt a little.  Gregory was no longer in a dream, he was awake even though it may have seemed like a nightmare.  "Finally you are awake.  We are on a train out of Bangkok, it was not safe for you there. "

Greg continued to blink while he rubbed his face with a free hand and looked about his environment.  He was on a train, all right.  He tried to imagine how he might have gotten on the train.  He thought of trying to get a sleeping person on a train in Boston and the challenges that effort might pose, but then gave up.  Somehow Noi, Dok, and perhaps friends of theirs had done it.  He also considered why they might have done it.

"Noi?"  he said in the darkness.  Was it night time already?  Were they going through a tunnel?  "Thank you for everything.  Of all the many questions I have I will start with the three most basic.  How long have I been asleep? What is the date and time? And where are we headed?"

Greg hated trains.  They were loud and often crowded.  Several months ago he had seriously considered taking a trip to New York.  He wanted to take the train and had checked on safety statistics on travel by train and knew it was perfectly safe, well, statistically speaking anyway.  He thought of Thai trains and realized he knew nothing of them.  

While Noi replied, he tried to find that strange feeling in his chest or mind that he would use to pull dragons into him.  He fried to find it and flex it.  He also considered what happened prior to passing out and the dream he'd had.

"You've only been asleep for a few hours.  When I saw the flash I figured you had done as Dok had said and absorbed a power.  The flash of light comes from the skin.  We are heading towards my auntie's  It's a small village north of Bangkok.  Everyone knows everyone there, so you'll be safe.  DeMontague would have come back."  Greg felt a chill in his chest and along his skin as he tried to flex that muscle to summon the dragons.  Noi was moving around the rumbling car.  She pulled a blind and dim light flowed into the train car from the stars outside.

Noi sat opposite of Gregory and smiled politely at him.

"I cannot thank you enough for doing all of this."  Greg said, looking at Noi.  He realized that the two of them had the compartment all to themselves.  Girls had always been a big stumbling block for Greg.  He paused as he looked at her, unsure of what to say.  What do you say to a girl?  He ran several scenarios through his head but they all seemed ridiculous and ended badly.

He paused at that.  How could the scenarios in his imagination end badly?

But then he realized that he had been staring at her in the eyes and he felt something really strange.  How long had he been looking her in the eyes?  Was he creeping her out?  When he did that to other people they normally gave him a bad face and turned away.  'God!'  he thought to himself.  'I hope I don't creep her out!'  He turned away and looked around the compartment with visions of the Harry Potter movies with their Hogwarts Express suddenly running through his mind.

Uncomfortable, he fell back into his habit of rambling on.

"I know so little about your country.  I know I love the food.  Well, I've only had the Americanized version though.   And a song and some movies involving the city of Bangkok.  I've done a little reading about Thailand but none of the villages have ever been mentioned.  I've never heard of Myauntys but I'm sure its a great place.  Do you have family there?"  It was then that Greg recognized his semantic mistake.  And he stumbled in his normally lengthy rambling.

"My Auntie's,  as in...where your Aunt lives.  Oops,"  he knew that the probability of a small village north of Bangkok being called Myaunties was too remote to consider.  She had not been talking about the village itself but the village in which her aunt lived.  "Now I just feel stupid, well, more stupid than usual anyway.  I think I'm going to stop talking now.  Why don't you tell me about yourself and your brother?"

She keeps looking Greg in the eyes.  She has a patient smile.  "There is not much to tell about a could of Thailand street rats.  Even ones that rise a little out of the muck all around.  I think you have a more interesting tale to tell, or perhaps you will have a better tale to tell in the neat future.  You are going back to where you came from right?  You'll go back to the Americas?  Unless you go back the same way you came, which seems unlikely, then you will meet a lot of interesting people on the trip.  Will you fly, or take a boat?  Will you see some sights along the way?"

Someone walks past the outside of the train car.  They pause and knock.  Noi says something and stands and takes out two tickets.  Shows them through the window.  The person nods waves and continues on.  "Or will you form a network of people across the world?"

Greg had to smile at that.  "A network of people across the world?  My, that is a lofty goal.  But as in any endeavor we have to consider our resources and what can be done.  Since I have no resources whatsoever, I somehow doubt I will be taking a train or boat out of your country any time soon, much less forming networks of people.  I'm still struggling with how you got me on this train in the first place.  I believe my first goal will be to master whatever it is I am capable of doing.  Perhaps you can help me with that?"

He leaned back and thought about what it felt like before he passed out before.  The feeling in his chest.  The resistance...or strange reluctance he felt when he first saw the images of Boston on the small screen.  He remembered the urge to draw in the dragons and the effort, the strain of it.  He knew then that he had never consciously done it in the past, it had just happened.  But somehow he must have.  And that sneeze that turned into a burst of light and heat!  And...and then the dream.