“So what is all this for?” I asked as I looked over my body. We were all standing together in the virtual cargo bay with the Leva egg laying in the center. All of the cargo we had picked up, the book, modules, and nest material were being held behind a wall of cr under our feet in reality. I didn’t want the hatchling to have anything to ram itself into once it was hatched. Tutor had modeled my body into a Leva/human hybrid using the obsidian cr as a base with gold cr mix in for accents.

To be honest, I looked scary. I had willed a mirror in front of myself and was busy looking over her designs. My body was a pitch-black bony and emaciated-looking humanoid creature with a wide mouth that held a staggering amount of teeth. My head was eyeless and resembled the dragon-like head of the Leva that I had seen leaving the Core. I truly felt like I was inside the body of a monster as I looked down at my thin arms and legs.

White orbs dotted the sides of my body down to my ankles. They were supposed to serve in place of the Leva’s photon bulbs.

“Well, from all the data that I could gather about Leva hatchlings, the main point that stood out was the need for the parent to always be in control for the first few years of the hatchling’s life. It is not uncommon for a Leva mother to kill the most unruly of her offspring as an example to the others.” Tutor said as she fussed over perfecting the avatar that she had formed for me to wear. Dark reflective scales spouted all down the length of my body.

“Wait, where are all the tutorials on raising a Leva hatchling and the step-by-step guides on taming them?” I asked.

“Well, it is true that the Tela did tame adult Leva during the early stages of our advancement into the stars, either by force or peaceful methods,” She started to say before I interjected.

“By force, you mean using their babies against them? As collateral for cooperation?” I asked angrily.

“Yes, that method was used by some Tela,” Tutor said sadly.

“Sorry Tutor, Regeth told me about it on our long flight when we were escaping and it has stuck in my brain since then. Please continue.” I said as I tried to clear my mind and listen.

“Well, documentation about how the parents will kill and mulch the Queiie, teaching them how to kill before letting them hunt their first prey, that is all available. We have plenty of videos about how the hatchlings act when they are first born, how they have no fear and will challenge anything and everything to try to prove their dominance.” She said as I began to get a sinking feeling in my gut. This wasn’t going to be like taming a stray cat. The egg was the size of a family van. We had yet to see the size of the baby Leva held within. Not only that, it looked like I would have to be the one to teach it how to dispatch a Queiie once we bought some from the Core that we were heading towards. Tutor and George both advised me that during the first week the hatchling wouldn't need food. It would mainly focus on learning its environment and finding its place in the brood. Leva were always hatched far away from food to protect them from being eaten by said food.

“Are you sure you don’t want one of us to do this task?” George asked as he climbed down from the cradle of hands that held the massive egg. He would become the cradle once I left VR and was in charge of regulating and finding the right amount of pressure and force to hatch the egg.

“No, it is ok, I am adopting this Leva,” I said as I stared at the egg. It was suspended in mid pulse, its thick veins glowing brightly from its cycling of energy inside the dark shell. Tutor had explained to me that the hatchling would imprint with whomever it saw first. Yes, my AI could do this and I could step in from time to time and play ‘dad’ but that didn’t fit well with me. I had seen parents do this while growing up. They would never truly be there for their children, choosing to let maids or guardians take their place. This would create a child who was unsure about their place in the world, always feeling like they were unworthy.

Who was I kidding? I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that I felt the burden of responsibility to give this Leva a fighting chance at an amazing life.

“So, why was Magus the 2nd trying to tame the brood and not the mother?” I asked as I remembered that detestable Tela.

“It would seem, based on the information that I gleaned from Silver on the subject, that Magus was trying to forge a third path. There is only one other record of someone taming hatchlings like this. The tamer was a reclusive Tela female who detested living in VR. She only left records on the Core Archives so that her family wouldn’t come looking for her. Of those records, she stated that she had found a lost brood of Leva and adopted them. How she did so will remain a mystery unless we can find her and ask her. I don’t see that happening anytime soon though since she went dark ages ago.”

“And Magus was trying to copy her?” I asked as I gathered where she was going with this.

“In a way, yes. He just lacked the secret to win their trust. He would feed them, bring them Queiie to hunt, and even provide entertainment in the form of mazes with… um… live prey inside.”

“So he wasn’t harming them to control the mother? That is good I suppose. But what about that last bit? I thought you said that the Leva were quite benevolent and just hunted Queiie.”

“Well, yes, but you have to remember that Magus stole them as eggs. They hadn’t been trained or brought up by their mother. Leva mothers train their hatchlings harshly to only hunt Queiie. We have a common belief that it was from an earlier encounter that the Leva had with an older spacefaring race which taught them this rule.”

“So that mother Leva is going to have her hands full reeducating her brood,” I muttered as I looked down at my scary Leva-hybrid avatar again. It just didn’t feel right.

“I am sorry Tutor, but I don’t think that I will be able to use this form. I can just imagine that for the rest of my life I will have to look like this whenever I am around the hatchling. I would rather be something that I felt was strong and capable of protecting it.” I said as I projected an image of myself in front of me to work on.

The tales that I had grown up with about heroes fighting dragons always contained a plate-clad giant. I knew my six-foot-tall frame would not impose any fear or respect into the heart of this massive hatchling so I had to draw deep from my imagination. I morphed the thin alien body into a tall and broad armored guardian, drawing heavily on all the fantasy books that I had read as a child. The figures' muscles kept growing and his height increased causing my creation to tower above me. This beast of a man’s fearsome visage looked condescendingly down at me as I strained to imagine the perfect dragon slayer. In a matter of moments, a ten-foot-tall titan of a man stood before me clad entirely in jagged plate armor. His shoulders were at least five feet wide and they looked like he could carry a car atop them with ease.

“Whoa,” I uttered as I looked at what I imagined would be imposing enough to start with. It was something else to imagine an image and another to see the physical giant standing in front of you. I was lost in thought imagining how powerful I would feel if I was that huge and muscular when Invicta flew in front of my eyes. Out of all my AI, she had no problem getting in my face.

Her arms were crossed in front of her chest in disapproval as she hovered a foot away from my eyes, blocking my vision of the powerful titan before me.

“What is power to you, Kevin?” She asked me, throwing my train of thought off the rails.

“Hmm? What do you mean?” I asked as I focused on her. I could sense my other AI standing just outside of the edge of my vision. They were both smiling at me and Invicta and probably already knew what she was going to try to teach me.

I thought about her question for a second and what I had been trying to create. Instinctively I knew that the size and image of my body wouldn’t matter since my body would be made out of cr. I had solely been trying to create the illusion of power with the size and appearance of strength.

“Do you think that size is power? Or that cr makes you powerful?” She asked me.

“Cr is the most powerful thing that I know of that exists in the cosmos, so yes, I think it is powerful,” I answered as she was already shaking her head as though she had said this a dozen times before. Was she rehashing a script?

“Wrong. There is always something more powerful. Take the existence of the Skism as an example. We have no way of influencing or harming it, so if it could be used as a weapon, it would trump our cr technology in an instant.”

“So what? What are you trying to teach me?” I asked.

“The Tela might be near the top of the cosmos food chain now because they maintain a grip on the use of cr… but they know that this state won’t last forever. There will come an enemy someday with the knowledge of how to defeat cr and the Tela’s advantage with ease. It is the same throughout time on your planet as well. The first people to develop swords made of metal rose in power and dominated the lands. It wasn’t until someone discovered gunpowder that everything changed and the balance of power shifted. At that point, a child could kill a master swordsman with just a finger pulling a trigger.” She said as she made little guns with her fingers.

“Where is all this coming from?” I asked suddenly, trying to get to the bottom of her questions.

“What?” She asked in surprise, her train of thought derailed for once.

“I would have expected Tutor to try to teach me this, not you. Where did this come from?”

“Well… The Last Engineer would berate the younglings a lot and I thought that if I did it to you you would see what you were doing wrong. He used to challenge the younglings to try to defeat their enemies with just 50 cr.”

“Just 50? Holy toledo! He must have been awesome!”

“Ha! He got killed all the time when he did that.” She said, “But that didn’t stop him from trying to teach the younglings.”

“And what was his point?”

“Points. There were three of them. Imagination, flexibility, and knowledge.” She said as I remembered the Last Engineers book and the fact that I had obtained his helm through Invicta.

I smiled at Invicta as I reached out and gently held my hand underneath her small feet.

“Change of plans Invicta. You are coming with me.” I said as I formed an image in my head of her becoming the gloves and sunglasses while I was attempting to train the Leva.

“Yay! I get to go too! I knew you would need me!” She cried as her form changed into the items that I requested her to become.

I turned to Tutor and George and found Tutor waiting for me to finish talking to Invicta. She stepped closer, walking up to me to stand within a couple of inches.

“This is all new territory. Just go in there and be you. You adopted this creature and you have decided to become its parent and guardian. I know you will do alright.” She said as she smiled up at me. She always had a way of just making me relax and feel at ease.

Yes, I had been looking at the baby Leva in the wrong way. It couldn’t harm me or overpower me regardless of how large it was. In essence, it was no different than a baby kitten.

“Oh heavens, we are all doomed.” I heard George mutter when he read the contents of my thoughts.

Tutor chuckled and stepped back. “I know it is a mental pep talk. Just be careful not to swing the needle too far in the other direction.” She said as I finally took the plunge and willed myself into the real cargo bay. I willed my body to be made out of gold and obsidian cr, choosing to remain as my true unimposing human self. I was wearing normal clothes, shoes, jeans, and a t-shirt. If I was to become this Leva's guardian, it would be so just as I naturally was. Invicta materialized the Last Tunneler's gloves and the Last Engineer's helm a second later. I could feel her riding comfortably at the edge of my mind.

“Ok, guys let's do this,” I told my AI as I stepped closer to the egg and observed as George became the cr cradle and took over the process to hatch the egg.

The cradle hands clamped down tightly on the egg and began to exert incredible pressure and force in two directions at once. The pulsing of the egg, upon feeling the pressure greatly increase, began to quicken in response the more George squeezed.

To my untrained eye, it seemed as though the massive egg was fighting George. It shuddered and pulsed with increasing brightness the more George carefully calibrated the required force needed to sheer the sides of the egg apart.

A sharp and very high-pitched sound erupted from the egg, totally startling me. “What the heck is that Invicta? I thought sound couldn’t travel in a vacuum.” I asked her as I mentally turned down the volume in my helm.

“That isn’t sound, your helm is picking up other higher frequency waves.” She said as we both observed a tear quickly forming around the edge of the egg. The moment the shell experienced a fault along its surface little parts of the egg were fired away as though it was releasing pressure contained inside. In a quick and practiced motion, the cradle divided the egg into two parts and pulled them apart, revealing the tightly coiled hatchling within.

It was beautiful. In a very deadly and mesmerising way.

Dark reflective scales covered the coils, making the hatchling sparkle in the bright lights of the cargo hold. The coil twitched, shuddering as it seemed to slowly wake up. I watched in fascination as a head pushed its way out from between the mass of coils. The head of the baby Leva was as big as a stove and adorned in smaller, more intricately overlapped dark scales. There was a fascinating pattern to the scales on the head.

The head of a blind dragon.

Its mouth opened and its head tilted upwards and for a few moments, I swore that it was roaring silently into the vacuum of space. Its open mouth revealed row upon row of small sharp tentacle teeth.

Slowly it uncoiled its body, revealing indigo ovals dotting its length like gems embedded in black stone. Slowly it weaved back and forth in the space above where the cradle had been. It was as though it was just learning how to move, slowly working out the kinks.

“Wait for it…” I heard Invicta say as though she was sitting on the edge of her seat.

As though Invicta’s words were a trigger the cargo hold was suddenly flooded with an eye blasting light. In rapid succession, all down the length of its body, the Leva strobed the cargo hold with its indigo photon bulbs. It almost blinded me as a deep blue light flooded everything.

“Oh wow,” Invicta said as she observed the intensity of the light pulses. “She is going to be a killer.” She said as a little graph popped up in my vision. It displayed the common recorded power of an adult Leva’s pulse. Our hatchling’s pulse spiked well beyond recorded parameters.

“Wait… did you say she?” I asked.