Some of the most important parts of Draconic legend are these: their eyes can hypnotise, and although very hard to slay, they have but one vital spot…
- Enter the Dragon
It was a few years ago when one morning Amanda Scott entered our lives. I remember the old office manager: he was a sweet, kindly old soul, but really not up to the job in these difficult times. I suppose we needed a hard-driving ass-kicker, and that is certainly what we got in no uncertain terms. I was invited into the Boss’s office one morning and there she was, sat in front of his desk.
Amanda was of above average height, and quite slim and elegant, in her short dark dress which clung persistently to her curves. As we later learned, she was actually around fifty years old, but in general her looks belied her age: she looked to be in perhaps her late thirties, if I was being a little generous. She had shoulder length near-black hair, which she wore in a curt businesslike bob style. At the same time I took in her glasses: from the side, enormous chunks of refraction and sunlight, around ¾ inch thick. She wore them in big plastic frames, sort of square at the top and generally speaking round at the bottom. She turned to face me, and her eyes seemed to have virtually vanished behind those thick plano fronted lenses long ago. Two tiny dark eyes peered at me, narrowed, then appeared to give up. Nothing I had ever seen could compare to this sight! She got up and offered me a handshake in a firm, businesslike manner, then the Boss introduced us. I sat down next to Amanda, and, of course, I could not take my eyes off her!
After some rather boring chit chat, we ensconced Amanda in her new office. The Boss and I spent some time showing her where things were: her vision wasn’t mentioned at all, but I soon gathered that it wasn’t what it should be. After a while the Boss had to go somewhere else, leaving me to help Amanda. She seemed quite pleasant enough at first: I suppose that was because I was helping her find her feet. Interestingly, I noticed, after another of her hypnotic gazes, that her left lens seemed slightly less strong than her right. It all became clear soon after: Amanda picked up a report and held it close to her face, favouring her left eye. Obviously it was her reading eye… I wondered how well she saw things in the distance: I soon found out, when she asked me what something said on the calendar, to me it seemed like she’d something around the 20/100 mark.
- The Dragon Stirs
Amanda soon showed herself to be very easily the grumpiest and most unrelenting boss I’ve ever had, before or since. Once she got her teeth into something, or someone, they got chewed badly and she didn’t let them go. But it seemed to me, and my co-workers, that she aimed most of her ire at men. It was generally agreed around the office that she’d had big man-trouble before, either she couldn’t get one, or she’d had one and things had gone spectacularly wrong. That led me into dangerous waters, I suppose: I started to feel sorry for her. But I didn’t have much time for that while at work. I cherished every gaze she cast my way, despite the coldness they often showed, even considering the hard work she had seeing things.
One day we were all busy at work when a new job came in. Amanda could spare no-one from other tasks to do it, so to her credit she ploughed straight into it herself. Basically what needed doing was some data capture of competition entries, to be turned into lists of names, addresses and answers. Simple, but there was a lot of them. I was busy doing nothing, something I’d got really quite good at whilst working under the old office manager. Then my phone rang and Amanda asked me, with surprising softness,
‘Puffin, can you come through here for a minute?’
I obediently went through and found her sitting at her desk with one of the forms to be captured in front of her. She was peering closely at it with her magnifying glass. She hissed,
’these people are stupid! Getting people to write with blue ink on a yellow background! What does that look like to you?’
I took it from her and examined it: reading it was pretty hard, but I’m one of those people blessed with good vision, and more importantly a brain that sees and recognises patterns very easily, no matter how well hidden. I took in her expectant look, then looked again.
I could see pretty easily what it was, but decided that I wanted to put on a show. I asked her,
‘can I borrow your magnifying glass please?’
She hesitated just a moment, then handed it over. I thought perhaps she depended on it more than she thought. Anyway, I had a good look, then told her what I thought it said. She responded,
‘are you sure?’
In reply, I nodded. I don’t know whether what I did made any difference to her at that time, but hoped it would make her think she was less blind than she thought. She commented irritably,
‘damn these old eyes of mine. I really am blind as a bat!’
Diplomatically, I made no comment about that.
I suggested that I help her with it, and that went down well enough: it is usually no bad thing to suck up to a boss occasionally, it helps one’s position, at least to an extent. Alas, this was not true for the unfortunate warehouse manager: he’d managed to create an almighty botch with something, to most of the rest us not that important, to Amanda, well, it was like the end of the world thrice over. Having seen how grouchy and generally horrid she could be if you’d happened to get on the wrong end of her, usually by doing something wrong, I endeavoured to raise my stock with her before something went wrong in my area.
Well, you can imagine what happened: luck only lasts so long, and in due course mine ran out. I did something fairly minor wrong, and thus I was in line for a roasting, such as the poor warehouse manager had received: I had managed to put an mistake on a letter. Not that bad, you might think, but I’d then printed at least four thousand copies of it. I will say that Amanda always checked what I did, peering at it through her magnifying glass. She really had a go at me, saying that I was careless and shouldn’t leave it up to her to proof read. Oh dear, that wasn’t a good day for me. And then the fire was gone. She was back to her normal level of grouchiness instead of burning my hide off.
- A Dagger to the Heart
One day some weeks later, during which I’d been flamed at for some minor, silly things I’d done wrong, Amanda called me into her office and told me,
‘I won’t be here tomorrow. I’m going to the optician.’
She wore an uncomfortable expression, mixed with her usual grumpiness. Then she told me briefly about what was planned to happen there tomorrow, and that was that. As soon as everyone else found out they invariably laughed and cheered, albeit out of her hearing. As for myself, I was fascinated to know what she was going to the optician for. During the whole of the relaxed next day, I was wondering what was going to happen. Would she be getting new glasses? I hoped so, and I also hoped they would be interesting to look at. They ought to be with her sort of vision.
They next day came, and I was in my office, looking out across the wide open area from the main stairs. I heard footsteps on the staircase, slow and uncertain. That certainly didn’t sound like Amanda, her style was more a determined stomp-stomp-stomp. Then I heard a stumble, and a curse: that was Amanda. Surely she could climb the stairs? I walked over to look, and as I did so, I heard her restart her ascent, ever more slowly and carefully. When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw her on the third step up, her right hand on the rail, gripping it with white knuckles. She looked rather scared and uncertain as she looked up at me. Without any ado, she demanded,
‘who’s there?’
What a sight! She gazed up at me through her new glasses: oval black metal frames, and in each side a lovely thick myodisk lens, shimmering in the morning light, her eyes glaring and then narrowing uselessly at me, the unused expanse of lens ground to translucence. It took me a moment to gather myself at this sight.
I admitted to her it was me. She peremptorily told me to come and help her up the stairs. I went down to her, and she told me to take her hand and lead her up… I was in some sort of heaven. We reached the top of the stairs and onto the main open area. She clung less uncertainly to me, saying
‘I’ll have to learn to do this on my own!’
She spared time to glance around a little, and remarked,
’everything seems so small… but a little clearer.’
We went into her office and she sat, her hands groping for the arm rests of her office char, and then settled with a sigh.
‘Puffin, I can see a little further now, but these glasses are so hard to use. And… thanks for helping me up the stairs.’
She pulled a mirror out of her purse, and looked at herself. Her displeasure was plain to see, etched on her face in the lines of anger and bad times. Unhappily she commented
‘I don’t suppose I’ve much chance of pulling now, have I? Not that I had much chance before!’
Without thinking, I blurted out,
‘oh, don’t be so hard on yourself. You look very attractive.’
She looked at me in sharp disbelief. That splendid moment was broken by a phone call: Amanda shooed me away, and I could hear her voice, full of concern and apology. Had something gone wrong again? I could only sit in office next door and wait, hoping it wasn’t my turn to be incinerated.
Amanda came stomping through into my office about ten minutes later. Her face showed a rather conflicted expression as she came up to the empty chair beside me and gripped its back. She spat out angrily,
‘you’re a bloody idiot! You’ve got the date wrong on those letters - again! How many times have I told you to be more careful!
I was being burned alive again! But then… her face softened slightly. For her, not grumpy was pretty good. She then smiled! Good heavens above!
She stood facing me, her eyes fixed on me. Sharply, she asked,
‘what did you mean when you said “very attractive”?’
That was Amanda: she never forgot a thing.
I could have told her I was joking, or that I hadn’t meant it. But I wasn’t joking, and had meant it. I told her so too. She fumbled slightly as she sat on the chair beside me, then sat back in it with a sigh of exasperation. I asked,
‘what’s wrong?’
She swiveled the chair to face me, and stared me in the eye. Then she shook her head, as if trying to get some sense into it. For a long moment she seemed to examine me, and then shook her head again. She said rather wistfully,
‘do you know when the last man said something like that to me? Thirty years ago!’
A tear ran down from her left eye and onto her cheek. She brushed it away, then got up, cleared her throat and told me
‘I’ll take the blame for this one, dear. But please don’t keep making mistakes.’
- Chasing the Dragon
Amanda was as good as her word: alas, the mistake I’d made cost forced the Boss to dismiss her, because of the size of the print run: if it had been just a few hundred copies, she’d have got away with it. But as it was much larger than that, and cost us so much in reprint costs, the Boss had no choice. I felt very guilty about that, despite all the hard times she’d given me and my colleagues, who were quite evidently delighted to see the back of her. Thankfully Amanda soon found a new job in a town some miles away without much difficulty.
I moved away a couple of years later and found a new job, as it turned out, in the same company where Amanda was working: it was a much larger business, so unsurprisingly I was there some months before our paths crossed again. One morning I was walking down one of the many corridors in the building, when I saw a familiar figure walking towards me. She wore her usual style of business suit, and really looked fabulous: of course, her appearance was much enhanced by the thick myodisk glasses. As before, it was quite obvious that she couldn’t see that well. She wasn’t holding onto the wall as before: at that point obviously used to myodisks. Her facial expression wasn’t as grumpy as it had been when last I’d seen her, although she was obviously a little more care and timeworn, but not enough to detract from her stern beauty and obvious femaleness.
I drew closer, to within ten feet, when she slowed down and addressed me, asking,
’excuse me, can you tell me where the resources section is?’
She’d walked right past the door for it, so I told her. Instantly she seemed to twitch. She walked closer to me, with a curious expression on her face and a mighty squint behind each lens, and demanded in her typically rather haughty way,
‘don’t I know you somewhere?’
She had to get closer to me in order to see me properly: in fact, about as close as she did with her old glasses, before I noticed signs of recognition on her face, followed by something resembling delight, after which she said hopefully,
‘it’s you! Is it you? Puffin?’
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘Why didn’t you say something before?’
‘I didn’t recognise you.’
She replied, with a hint of reproach,
’that’s my excuse. Never mind… How are you getting on?’
Amanda surprised me: in the subsequent few minutes she was friendlier than she’d ever been before to me or anyone else of the male persuasion. I guided her back to the resources section, and when we got there, I suggested we meet for lunch. She agreed with the nicest smile I’d ever seen on her face. Actually, it was just about the only one I could remember until then.
Well, lunch was a far less boring affair than usual: gazing into this woman’s amazing eyes and discussing old times. She still said accusingly that I was a bit stupid for the mistakes I’d made, for which I apologised. She forgave me with more grace than I’d ever known from her. I thanked my stars I’d found her again, and even more so that she wasn’t my boss anymore. She spoke about her vision briefly: apparently, she’d fought long and hard to avoid myodisks, and my telling her what I thought about how she looked, well that had gone down really well. She’d worn glasses from the age of three, had a difficult upbringing, and bad times at school long ago. She’d failed miserably to get the boys interested; by the time she was able to try for contacts, her eyes had dried out. The last time she saw the world clearly was years and years ago: she didn’t really want to reflect on it.
So that was that. I sat at my desk after lunch , feeling rather satisfied. I felt even more satisfied when I’d dug up her internal email address, whereby I sent a note to her saying “thanks for lunch today. You’re still an attractive lady. Can we do this regularly?” The reply was rather less than I’d hoped for: she was polite, gracious even, but noncommittal in the extreme. I gently suggested that maybe she might be interested in something more than just lunch: that bought the reply “but I’m twenty years older than you!” I tried a bit more flattery: I’m not sure that I wholly believed what I said, but despite what I said, she clammed up on me. I thought that was it.
Over a week went by with nothing more, then out of the blue came a message on my email. It was “hi Puffin. I’ve been thinking. Perhaps I was a little hasty in turning you down. You’re always so kind to me, and I appreciate that. If you’re still interested, can we meet up for dinner tonight? Regards, Amanda.”
I began to realise that Dragon wasn’t so scary!