Elaine Blackwell, Dragonhunter

There hadn’t always been dragons in the valley. They had been imported to Raptur from Avalon.

Avalon was a nice colonizable planet if it weren’t for the damn dragons that took a liking to eating colonists’ cattle and children. Sadly because dragon eggshells were a mix of tungsten and gold most colonists stole them even with the dragonlings still in them. They would dump the resulting baby dragon to fend for itself on another planet entirely.

Dragons being the resilient bastards that they were, survived without a mother. The young dragons acclimated to Raptur’s higher gravity surprisingly quickly. They even taught themselves to fly. Sadly without a mother they didn’t know how to hunt, so these orphan dragons primarily went after humans.

Which made dragons problem number one for Elaine Blackwell, new chief of the Raptur colonization effort. Elaine was promised she could revive the old Blackwell super soldier program if she could handle running a colony for five years. Elaine was sure this was because her father couldn’t handle responsibility and only a well placed mercenary attack had put her in control of the family fortune.

The mercenary captain had put her in contact with Jack Malone who hoped their warring families could forge an alliance, now that he’d killed its patriarch. Elaine was unperturbed by the death of her neglectful and weak father. She had earnestly expected this alliance to end in a political marriage but she was pleasantly surprised to learn Jack was a confirmed bachelor.

It was Jack who bargained with the council to let Elaine have this chance. The previous chief had fallen to drink and let the colony go to hell in a handbasket. He was more than happy to pass the reins to Elaine. Many people were sniggering about how Elaine would never make it as a chief and she suspected it wasn’t just her noble family’s tarnished reputation but because she was so young.

Elaine stood in the mountains wearing an expensive uniform perfect for the cold and dry climate of Raptur. She huffed an annoyed breath through her mask, she was tired of waiting. Suddenly she heard the sweeping sound of dragon wings. Why didn’t these damn flying lizards freeze to death? – Elaine thought bitterly.

She unpacked the plasma gun and assembled it in seconds as she had done this since she was a teenager. By the time she put in the clips that the gun’s reactor would turn to honest to god plasma, the dragon was directly overhead. She only had one chance to make her shot because the lizards were fast.

She pulled the trigger and listened to the satisfying whine of the superheated plasma through the air. Then she noticed the dragon's right wing burn away. It keeled over instantly and fell into the valley. The vehicles and people on foot began to surround it.

Elaine cursed herself for not killing the dragon outright but was proud of the initiative of her colonists. She would make a grand speech thanking them for finishing her hunt. Her Grandfather Mortimer Blackwell had done the same when he and his district had hunted the alien life forms native to Elaine’s home planet of Ustinan.

Thankfully these dragons were much dumber than the tunnel making life forms. Those knew how to take human form. Even worse, they would trick people into trusting them before killing them to assume their form. Elaine knew little about those beings besides that they liked to make art and her grandfather liked said art enough to collect it.

The problem wasn’t like some humans claimed that the Ustinan aliens were savages, nor that Avalon dragons were vermin. It was that in both instances coexistence with humans was impossible.

Then Elaine heard a hum of a spaceship jumping into the atmosphere. She signaled to the ship to explain itself in semaphore. The blinking lights at the front of the ship told her all normal parameters but in the cargo slot they simply signaled Tungsten and Gold in bars.

A likely story Elaine sniggered. Even pirates preferred gold and aluminum. Tungsten was never kept nor made in bars. Aluminum was often made into bars covertly by the residents of the rainy planet Urdan to circumvent the high tax Ustinan placed on it. Meanwhile tungsten wasn't a particularly hot commodity so nobody but dragon egg smugglers made them into bars to avert suspicion of poaching.

She yearned to shoot the ship down like she did the dragon but the council frowned on needlessly killing humans. In the end she did what her grandfather would do.

Signaling the ship to land on a plateau in sprinting distance she raced the ship down to the landing point and was surprised to see a young man her age coming down the gangplank.

Elaine pointed the gun at him and barked: “Give me the dragon egg.”

The man raised a blond eyebrow and said: “Outbid my buyer and I just might…”

“One Thousand Marks in gold bars”, Elaine offered, she’d put it on her expense report and let the council make ends meet. Most likely with higher taxes - she noted bitterly.

“Deal!” The blond man said, then after a pause added: “they call me Atmosphere.”

Elaine lowered the gun, “I am Elaine Blackwell, dragonslayer.”

Atmosphere merely smirked unimpressed, “I might give you an egg but we ain’t friends, republic swine.”

What Elaine said to him, the riches and power she offered, the bargaining and threats to kill one another are forever lost to time. We can only suspect that she offered to create the great and terrible works they later wrought. But one way or another after hours of screaming, threatening and bargaining they finally formed a tenuous alliance. So began the immortal partnership of Atmosphere and Elaine Blackwell.