Manya’s Meyhem – Dragons On Strike

There was a wild uproar last night in the Warriors Guild as the Blue Dragons of the Lantanti Volcano northwest the Isaffdar forest announced to the public that they were going on strike from usual daily activities, usually the ones involving dragon-slaying adventurers and their means of profit.

The strike, which goes by the name Non-Aggression Rights for Dragons Strike (NARDS), is an organized group of blue dragons that apparently disapprove of the laws and rules currently in place concerning the relationship between their faces and an adventurer’s battle-axe.

To express the strike in an effecting manner, the dragons forced Mage Gower to remove their “attack” options while they themselves went about ignoring any dragon-slayer hoping to get a supply of dragon bones that evening.

“It’s stupid, that’s what it is!” said Cheema34, a short-time member of the warriors guild, “I mean, they are only mindless creatures, after all. Why should they be part of the game if you can’t fight them?”

The dragons held a major protest against Cheemto34 and a number of agreeing adventurers by pushing them into the lava lakes nearby.

“We want an opportunity in this world,” said Monator, mother dragon of 3, “Where we can raise our young, make a living, and actually be what Zamorak made us to be – fierce and dangerous! We can’t do that if the inferior humans kill us all the time so easily!”

The main concern that the dragons are striking against is to either ban or overcome the over-used anti-dragonbreath shields and the rangers that hide behind skeletons and small mushrooms while they shoot dragons to death whilst the dragons are unable to do anything about them.

“Those metallic dragons have all the luck against rangers because of their long-ranged attacks. If the King Black Dragon wasn’t inaccessible by us, we would definitely ask him how to do that.” said Monator in regards to rangers.

An interview with Owithurt (Trust me, it did), leader of the campaign, was conducted in Falador yesterday (under a truce treaty, of course) to hear out the dragons’ demands and reason for striking. Alex 43, Gia, Dex, and myself asked her for the reason of the uprising of NARDS.

Alex 43: So what’s wrong with the humans fighting you? What possessed you to go on strike?

Owithurt: Our biggest concern are those anti-fire shields. Any human who faces off against us usually has one, and it’s the only thing preventing us from having a roasted meal. The way they wave the same shield in our faces, over and over, and us not being able to do something about them … it makes you go nuts, you know?

Dex: It’s merely a natural reaction. A human wishes to feel powerful by defeating monsters a hundred times more powerful then it without dying.

Owithurt: I’m sure we all have our different strengths as different species of the world. Humans were given the gift of resource and the ability to make these kinds of tools and we were given the gift of dragon scale armor and fiery breath.

Manya: Which lots of us took a first-hand experience of.

Gia: What’s your concern about the rangers?

Owithurts: They’re cowards; all of them! At least let us pit these two against each other and see which is the more superior being instead of standing behind one of those mushrooms that we are highly allergic to and shooting us while we are frozen trying to overcome our allergies enough to get away.

Manya: You’re allergic to mushrooms?

Alex 43: That’s beside the point, Manya.

Gia: What would you like to have done, then?

Owithurt: At least do something about the dragonbreath shields. I know that there would be a major uproar and more rangers would come at us instead to replace them if we forced the humans to got rid of them. So we’re not going to worry too much about removing those. At least we can still deal SOME damage, usually with our claws. However, if there’s anyone out there with a heart, would you please at least change the colors and shapes of those things sometimes? Seeing the same square orange sword shape floating around us haunts our nightmares and we hardly get any sleep anymore. Instead of an orange sword, we wouldn’t mind someone painting theirs with a pink fairy, or a green toad (with nice big eyes), or even perhaps a tic-tac-toe grid so that when our fates are inevitable, at least we can enjoy ourselves one last time before we die.

We thanked him for his time, and even put some of his ideas to the test right then and there. The result:

At the moment, a healthy number of the blue dragons support the color changing of the anti-dragonbreath shields, with the rest asking to get rid of them altogether and “face us like the humans you are”. However, suffice to say, nearly all of them wish to learn the long-ranged fireball technique so they would be more evenly matched against rangers, even if they do use the “protect from magic” ability to defend themselves.

A few of them even demand better pay and up keeping. The conditions they are living in, a large rocky mass in the middle of a lava lake is, in their words: “horrible”.

“I don’t know how long it’s been,” said Blue Dragon Lafragh, pronounced ‘Afro’ (that’s how she told me to spell it), “Since we’ve had a good breath of fresh air. We have been breathing this sooty and foul carbon dioxide for years, since our only supply of oxygen is a hole in the roof big enough to, you guessed it, fit an adventurer and its dragon breath shield.”

When we asked about the powerful anti-fire potion that some adventurers drink to avoid their fiery powers altogether, they just laughed.

“That potion is really only a 5-minute pain-killer.” replied Lafragh, “They drink it, and they don’t feel their skin melting, which is actually quite enjoyable because they don’t run when we do get a lucky shot, and when they teleport, their faces are fixed so we can start again from scratch when they come back. We even sometimes have contests to see who can make the funniest adventurer face when clans visit us. So no, don’t worry about the anti-fires. We can handle those.”

So, in a basic summary and a list they drew us on the side of the White Knights castle (Details on page 7), these are the demands of the blue dragons up to date:

– No more rangers and mages OR permission to learn the long rang fireball ability from the metal dragons or King Black.

– Change colors and varieties of anti-fire shields OR get rid of them altogether.

– Baby Dragons become non-fightable (Not just the mothers agreed on that one).

– More and larger holes in the ceiling for oxygen circulation.

– Peaceful adventurers who would tell them stories and teach them games, as they get quite bored (Juna’s twin sister Luna visits sometimes and gave them the idea).

– Cave-keepers to help keep their cavern nice and tidy from bones, fungi, and pieces of runite armor.

– Tea and cookies at ten each day, served by the servants guild (preferably by the Lumbridge cook).

Some even want to be relocated to the mole caverns underneath Falador park, saying that not only is it refreshingly cooler down there, but moles are in fact a delicacy to dragons alike. A number of gardeners have already agreed to this, but the Falador public is still a bit concerned of what effect having dragons living underneath their national park would have on the economy. So far, the best they could come up with was the noise the dragons would make during the night, and it was challenged by NARDS who said that during the night, there was nothing that they liked better to do then to sing (or rather roar) a loud chorus of traditional songs, and that the people of Falador never really had a taste for music. Debate on the topic will occur next Sunday, during the night.

Today, the dragons are still on strike and probably will remain on strike for a while. A counsel meeting tomorrow will discuss the event at hand, but at the moment, people are trying to negotiate with other dragons and try to prevent them from joining the NARDS as well. The Falador White Knights also wish to keep this striking a secret to the other species all around Runescape to prevent additional strikes and uprisings.