HOME | DD

Description
Another completed commission, this one of going all draconic after an incident at a renaissance fair involving golden treasure! The artwork was commissioned by from and favoriting the originals (one , two, three ) is just common courtesy.

If you'd like a story commission of your own, the details and terms are here. If you'd like a story commission of your own,
Phil was passing by a stall festooned with faulds, bedecked with besagews, covered in cuisses, and otherwise bearing every possibly part of an old-timey suit of armor for sale, barter, or trade in haberdashery. It was shiny stuff, and Phil's eyes widened at the array of mirrored metal laid out before him.

"I say there, guv'ner, you fancy a suit of armor?" The ironmonger-slash-armorsmith was a wiry older man with plenty of hair where it ought not to be and very little where it should have been. He spoke with a Cockney accent at least two hundred years younger than the styles of armor he sold, though Phil couldn't help but snicker as the put-on speech drooped from time to time to reveal a nasal Midwest twang.

"No, this looks…expensive," said Phil, gazing at the worked metal with some longing. It did, he had to admit, look really really cool. "I can always get a wooden sword and some pleather armor to scratch that itch."

"Ah, but there ain't no wooden sword nor pleather armor what'll get you first place in the Panzerkampf, is there, guv'ner?" said the salesman with a smile showing dental work far beyond the ken of anyone born before 1900.

"Panzerkampf?" said Phil, his mind momentarily filled with visions of classic tanks and blitzkrieg.

"Means 'armor fight' guv'ner," the salesman said. He seemed to think slathering his speech with more guv'ners than a presidential inauguration was the key to seeming old-timey, and Phil didn't have the heart to tell him otherwise.

"Like a joust?" asked Phil, drawing back. "I'm not sure I can ride well enough for that. Or, y'know, stab."

"Bah, s'not that kinda contest, guv'ner!" laughed the ironmonger. "Lawyers wouldn't allow it. Liability insurance is through the roof. No, the Panzerkampf is a contest for the best-looking armor. And the prize is in gold."

"Gold?" Phil's ears perked up and his eyes gleamed for a moment as if lit by reflected lucre. "Real gold? Not spray paint like that steampunk automaton over there?"

The armorer cast a contemptuous glance at Sir Steams-A-Lot, who had been outfitted by a competitor. "Real as it gets, guv'ner," he said. "And I have been saving a suit of armor that's all but guaranteed to win, so's I can show the stuck-up what runs it a thing or two." With a flourish, he opened the back flap of his tent to reveal a gleaming suit of plate mail, sparkling from armet to sabaton.

Phil's face was still lit with the first stirrings of gold lust, and his hand twitched toward his wallet. "And…you guarantee it will win the gold?"

""The prize is twenty times what the armor costs, and I all but guarantee a win," the armorer said quickly, clearly hoping that his use of qualifiers like "all but" slipped below Phil's radar.

Gold lust ensured that they did. "I'll take it!" Phil cried, brandishing his Visa card, which the ironmonger ran through a reader attached to a πPhone, something astonishing enough to someone from the 20th century let alone the 15th. Phil hoped that, with any luck, he could win the gold and cash it out at Philadelphia Pawn ("Every Pawn a King!") to have the cash in hand to pay down the charge…and more.

With the sale made, the armorer became much less attentive. He tossed the pieces, one at a time, unwrapped, at their new owner, and only grudgingly agreed to help Phil don them since the closest thing to armor the latter had ever worn was a cup and padding from his football days. The purchase included a padded gambeson and gambes-pants to go under the armor, and as the ironmonger hitched the breastplate closed he handed Phil the hinge-visored armet and a gladius from a sword pile near the forge.

"Best of luck to ye, guv'ner!" he cried merrily after Phil.

The Panzerkampf was held nearby, in the shadow of the park's forested canopy. Phil could see several other contestants lining up, including a samurai, a Roman centurion, a Turkic Janissary, and, of course, a high elf from the retinue of Gil-galad in the Siege of Barad-dûr.

A woman in a richly embroidered brigantine oversaw the contestants, and not long after Phil's arrival (and filling out of the required entry paperwork in triplicate), whistled sharply to get their attention.

"I am Lady Galahag," said she, who despite the name was not at all haggish. "I know my armor, I know my history, and I know that your armor is going to be a disgrace to both. The contest will consist of two parts: an initial inspection, a pause for you to correct any errors I have noted, and then a final judgment. Judgment is based on how true your armor is to your time period as well as its fit and finish. When you registered, you were given a list of instant disqualifiers; I hope for your sake that you read it. I take my armor seriously and I put my money where my mouthplate is: if you master the Panzerkampf, though, the golden rewards…will be great."

Gesturing to a pedestal with a locked cage upon it, the Lady Galahag swept off a velvet covering to reveal a pile of authentic golden treasure, the likes of which neither Phil nor the other contestants had ever seen: authentic pre-1970 South African Krugerrands, with Oom Paul Kruger bearded and impassive on one side and a prancing springbok antelope on the other. Kruger would have been -357 years old when Galahag's brigandine was in vogue, and springbok inhabited a land Renaissance Europe had been convinced was full of men with faces on their stomachs, but there was no denying the 1 troy ounce of fine gold in each.

Phil, filled with confidence in his new platemail, stood last in line, proudly beaming under the sunlight with his helmet under one arm and his gladius free in his right hand since the ironmonger had neglected to throw in a scabbard with the undercoating. His bravado, buttressed by greed, wasn't affected in the least at the sight of Lady Galahag moving up the line one by one and dishing out harsh criticism to each of his competitors. The samurai had been so provoked that he had drawn his sword in anger, bloodying it with a ketchup packet before sheathing it, while the elf had wept openly after the judge took issue with his "sylvan elf" sword wrap and "subpar Romulan" ears.

"What have we here?" she said, approaching Phil. "What's this subpar saucepot strutting about like he owns the green?"

"This armor is an authentic reproduction, and I got it for a great price," Phil crowed. "Go ahead; try to find an imperfection in it."

Lady Galahag tapped on the shoulder plate. "Modern spot-welded rivets. Minus ten."

"What? Wait-"

The judge felt one of the leather straps. "Improperly tanned leather from a breed of cow that originated in the 1800s. Minus ten."

Phil flushed. "Look, the salesman assured me-"

"Incorrect type of sword," Lady Galahag continued. "Gladius-pattern swords would never have been carried openly at the time period this armor is from. They are one thousand years older than that; you're carrying a spear to World War II. Minus ten."

His competitive nature bubbling to the fore, Phil started to broach an explanation, but he was cut off by a flood of other minor quibbles, which the judge noted in ballpoint pen on bleached paper. Her departure for the half-hour allotted for the contestants to fix any defects in their armor left Phil fuming and more determined than ever to make off with the golden trove so tantalizingly visible in plain sight before him.

There was no question of confronting the armorer; Phil was sure that he'd been sold the crusader equivalent of a lemon (and a quick perusal of the Faire revealed that the ironmonger had pulled up stakes and departed). There was also no question of repairing the defects in said lemon-armor, as it would have involved re-riveting and re-tanning authentic metals and leather. No, Phil vowed that the gold would still be his, by the only means available to him.

Sabotage.

With the xeroxed list of disqualifying offenses for inattention to period detail in hand, Phil crept around to each of the other contestants to make sure that they were disqualified with extreme prejudice, leaving him winner by default. Ordinarily it was not possibly to creep in full plate mail, but that weasely ironmonger had gotten at least one thing right: the armor was an excellent, glove-like, fit for Phil, and the padded gambeson beneath it was thick enough not only to prevent pinching but to cushion what would otherwise be a very rattletrap attempt at stealth.

The samurai, preoccupied with trying to buff out a "MADE IN VIET NAM" inscription on his helmet, failed to keep his eyes on his katana. Phil deftly pulled it out and removed the blade using a technique he'd seen once on Pawn Stars and replaced it with a 30¢ plastic katana blade from a Faire vendor over on Ninja Row.

The centurion, who was retying his Caligae sandals in proper 1st-century knots, had left his gleaming helmet on but removed the plume that had incurred Lady Galahag's wrath. This left a perfectly smooth dome for Phil to quietly slip a backwards "I WENT TO THE RENAISSANCE FAIRE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SALLET" baseball cap onto. It perched perfectly on the crown of the ersatz centurion's head, visible to everyone but him.

The janissary? His furred slippers, removed under the increasingly blazing summer heat, were swapped for a pair of Ugg-brand teenage female fashion boots. By choosing a pair of a similar size and consistency from the pile near the carny-operated Dueling Dragons temporary roller coaster, Phil was able to make the switch without notice.

Having overheard the Lady Galahag's dressing-down of the elf earlier, Phil acquired a set of Star Trek stickers and appliqués from the dueling science-fiction convention across the street and stuck them wherever he could get away with.

When the time came for the second inspection, Phil did his best to keep his eyes forward—on the glistening golden treasure—but stopped to snicker a bit at each of his competitors' failings.

"Don't forget to draw blood on that knickknack before you re-sheathe it; you'll be at it all day."

"I suppose you think that's funny, do you? Sallets were no laughing matter as medieval steel helmets go, baseball caps are a poor, poor substitute, and both were invented a thousand years after you died."

"Miley Cyrus called, she wants her footwear back from the warp in time and space which has seemingly deposited them before the gates of Constantinople in 1447."

Upon seeing the elf, standing next to Phil and inadvertently festooned with Trekkie stickers (including a commbadge on his breastplate), Lady Galahag simply shook her head and kept walking.

"So, it seems that you are the only one who has failed to manifest a precipitous drop in the quality of their armor over the last half hour," Lady Galahag said. "Very unsuspicious."

Phil's eyes were wide with gold-lust and he couldn't but keep a smile off his face. "So…I win?"

"The rules are clear," sighed Galahag. "Take your ill-gotten lucre. I hope you reflect on what greed has made you become."

Greedily shoving the coins into a small pouch, the only becoming that the winner saw going on was himself becoming richer. Singing a tune, he sauntered off toward home, cutting through the park's forest as he did so, helmet under one arm and sword jauntily leaning on one shoulder.

Though he dismissed it as the summer heat reaching its apogee, Phil started to feel the earlier fine fit of the armor slipping away as he walked. Despite the padded gambeson and gambes-pants, suddenly every step seemed to pinch and poke and prod, with an uncomfortable tightness especially about the breastplate and backplate, in his gauntlets and sabatons.

Nothing about that mattered, Phil told himself. All that mattered was the gold. But the figures following silently in the waiting wood? They were keenly interested what was beginning to transpire.

It had taken sabotage and skullduggery, but the Panzerkampf—and the gold coin prize—were Phil's, and his walk through the wood was occupied by those and other prideful, greedy thoughts. Visions of Krugerrands dancing before his eyes, the groaning of rivets went unnoticed. Those very welds that Lady Galahag had pointed out were flexing, in danger of popping—somehow, the flesh within was on the verge of breaking containment and pilling forth.

The next gap in the foliage above illuminated a curious rash across Phil's nose, like an allergic reaction to the trees in bloom. Something red, something scab-like, something scaly was there, and it wasn't content with its meager fiefdom across the nasal cavity.

There was a crusade brewing, a crusade against armor and against pink flesh, as the first sputtering flames flared within the deepest recesses of Phil's soul.

The breastplate and backplate were held together by a series of rivets, and they had been bearing more and more weight as Phil walked on obliviously. He was beginning to grow, and the formerly fine fit was now the metal's undoing as it warped around the surging form within. Like gradually opening eyes, gaps appeared in the steel as it deformed, revealing the padded gambeson beneath. But even that was beginning to struggle with the task of containment; its threads were drawing taut and stitches had begun popping one by one like miniature, inaudible gunshots.

"I think I'll buy some season tickets," Phil mused to himself, gold still on the brain, on the soul. "Maybe a new heater, it's suddenly freezing out here."

The cold he felt was being answered by warmth within, and tendrils of steam began to rise unnoticed from Phil's nose and mouth, now speckled with angry scales. His ears were drawing themselves up as well, like soldiers coming to sleepy attention, growing pointed and just flat-out growing to the stage of putting the elf's amateurish points to shame. With a headache that went unnoticed in Phil's gold-obsessed state of mind, two lumps swelled and hardened on the crown of his head, the pale flesh taking on the consistency of bone, of horn as it grew into nubs.

Something was pressing uncomfortably against the armor from within, too. Several somethings, in point of fact. The finely wrought if period-incorrect cuisses about Phil's thighs were threatening to pull themselves apart as something squirming near the base of his spine struggled for room to breathe. Phil disregarded it was a stray tendril of perspiration, but the same feeling was present at his shoulderblades, the metal actually groaning audibly as the steel began to bend outward under the strain of inexorable swelling. The seeming rash had become a contagion, spreading across the lower half of Phil's face with a burning itch that was half wildfire, half pulled scab.

It wasn't until the first rivet gave way, though, that Phil realized what was happening. That pop came not from his put-upon backplate but rather the fine gauntlets on his hands. The rings of metal enclosing each of his fingers had begun to fill out uncomfortably, and with a resounding plink the first one on his index finger gave way. Dozens more followed with a sound like a hailstorm as the metal began to disintegrate.

"H-huh…?" Phil said, looking at his aching hands with curiosity. Sword and helmet, gladius and armet, clattered to the ground as his rebellious hands lost their grip. In the shadows, the watchers were now observing very intently indeed.

One at a time, every last rivet in Phil's gauntlets gave way, leaving the remaining metal like gaudy rings on the hands of a nobleman. The leather gloves he'd worn beneath them were only slightly more pliant, and within a few seconds they gave way as well, the seams blowing out with an explosive shrrrrp. Flesh spilled out of the gaps in the leather, but not the flesh Phil had put into them; what was emerging, popping off each leftover ring of metal as they did so, was thick and scaly. Red armor was sealing off the last pink skin, thick pads were blossoming on each tip, and fingernails were already partway through their evolution into claws, shaking the last fragments free in the process.

The poor sabatons followed a similar pattern, though with no individual rings for each toe the metal bands warped much more easily, each giving off an almost musical note as it snapped open. The armorer's proffered woolen socks were no match for the swelling paws inside them, deflating seconds later to reveal an extreme version of what was happening to Phil's fingers: swelling, budding claws and pads and scales, scales, scales. His last two toes had already fused into a greater digit, and ligaments were rearranging themselves into a newly taut configuration, forcing the ersatz knight to a wobbly stance on the balls of his feet.

"What's…what's happening to me this time?" Phil choked, his words distorted by a nose and upper lip in the process of swelling out into the foundations of a snout.

He could barely hear himself over the shrieking of metal as the cuisses finally surrendered in a shower of shattered steel and bindings. The ruins of that thigh armor—and the seat of Phil's padded gambe-pants—parted to reveal a small but thick tail, not yet completely covered with crimson scales but rapidly becoming so, base to tip. Phil's backplate suffered the same fate moments later; the incorrect rivets that Lady Galahag had chastened him over actually held, while the metal at the back was twisted into Play-Doh shapes by the emerging shoulder-blade humps. They were held in by the gambeson beneath for a few moments, straining audibly against the fabric before birthing themselves through its caul with a cacophony of sharp crk sounds. A pair of small but fully scaled wings with dewclaws at their peaks were the result, flopping limply and wetly about as they inflated like butterfly wings, engorging themselves with every flap and flop.

"Gah! I'm…I'm changing into…into a…a dragon!" Phil's words were strangled still further by his lengthening muzzle but also by teeth dancing and busily sharpening themselves in their sockets around a tongue grown heavy and long but also pulling apart, snakelike, at the end. His eyes, darting over the extent of his rapidly changing form, flashed a Fremen blue-in-blue that dazzled all the light out of the world for a moment, while his pointed ears had reached their apogee next to horns that now jutted tall and strong like redwoods amid the unspoiled forests of Phil's hair.

What had begun with his hands and feet was now spreading inwards and upwards, aided by the soaring temperature of Phil's skin and body which softened the metal consierably. The leather straps holding the engraved couters to his elbows failed with a groan apiece and fell limply to the ground; around them, the vambraces were pulled apart like putty under the strain, revealing skin already wholly scaly and subsumed. Phil's pauldrons hung on a bit longer due to the sturdiness of their construction, but as his wings grew exponentially to the size needed to achieve flight, the musculature to support them developed too, and that was the end of the shoulder armor. More rivets popped merrily and they plummeted to join the growing pile of leavings at Phil's feet.

Those same feet were busily bulking up to support all the new weight in their new and improved digitigrade stance. Two more toes fused and the scales lightened and grew fine, grew sensitive—a process mirrored on Phil's hands, albeit on a smaller scale. The steel greaves above the annihilated sabatons were the next to go: the left toppled forward as its straps failed, taking the knee-protecting poleyn with it, while the right was thrown off with such vengeance, and such a vengeful pop, that it spun around a full 180 degrees.

"What…why…how?" Phil moaned through his nearly-finished dragon snout. It seemed clear enough in retrospect, he realized: what could be more dragon-like, more draconian, than greedy thoughts of gold and the underhanded acquisition of the same?

While his wings had been busily growing, Phil's new tail had not been lax. It had writhed about in its adolescence, messily shredding more of the gambeson and cuisses—and the unsung underoos beneath both—leaving a trail of tortured metal that had no choice but to fall uselessly away. A heart-shaped scute developed on its tip as it swung about to full growth, one little bit of natural armor to compensate for the artificial Phil was busily dispensing with.

Finally, the beleaguered breastplate and what was left of the backplate had their turn. Phil's deepening chest, bristling with flight muscles, pushed the breastplate up further and further, revealing that what had once been human abs were now the strongly corded muscles of a dragon, armored scales with a light greenish hue to protect against missile attacks from below—and far better at it than the flimsy breastplate. With a final spasm of wing and chest, the last rivets clinked off and the two plates clopped to the ground. With them fell the Krugerrands, which spilled from the small bag clipping them to Phil's ex-armor.

It took a few more moments of writhing and snapping to get the changes to completion, and Phil instinctively flexed his new muscles to pop or rip the last remaining bits of clothing off of his newly altered form. Standing there along the forest path—luckily far from any fellow travelers—Phil tottered as a crimson anthropomorphic dragon, unsure of how to move or what had just happened.

"I…I…gurk…GRAWR!" Phil, in trying to say something, felt the fresh-stoked fires in his core finally reach equilibrium. He belched forth a long and savage gout of flame, purely by instinct, which failed to alight a forest still wet from a recent rainstorm but burnt the shreds of his clothing to ash and reduced the armor in its path to molten slag.

"Well-done." The words were accompanied by slow, yet powerful, clapping from within the woods. A second set joined after a moment, and Phil tried to pivot to see who was speaking to him in such ominous tones. Unused to the balance of a draconic frame, he stumbled instead, landing on his new and still-sensitive tail with a roar.

A pair of fellow dragons was approaching through the shadow, one longer and sleeker and midnight blue, the other shorter and stockier and hairier with mottled green spots.

"Well done? Well done?" Phil cried. "I cheated those poor guys out of their gold just like dragon would have, and look what it did to me!"

"Of course it did," croaked the mottled dragon in a masculine voice. "It's a test."

"We run it every Renaissance Faire in one form or another," said the slim blue dragon—dragoness, judging by her rounded carapace and feminine voice. "Seeking out those with the greed we need to bring out the dragon in them."

"But why?" Phil cried with a fresh and inadvertent gout of flame.

"It's simple, of course, and quite fitting. In days of old, armored knights took dragons out. Now, we take dragons out of armored knights."

Description
Another completed commission, this one of going all draconic after an incident at a renaissance fair involving golden treasure! The artwork was commissioned by from and favoriting the originals (one , two, three ) is just common courtesy.

If you'd like a story commission of your own, the details and terms are here. If you'd like a story commission of your own,
Phil was passing by a stall festooned with faulds, bedecked with besagews, covered in cuisses, and otherwise bearing every possibly part of an old-timey suit of armor for sale, barter, or trade in haberdashery. It was shiny stuff, and Phil's eyes widened at the array of mirrored metal laid out before him.

"I say there, guv'ner, you fancy a suit of armor?" The ironmonger-slash-armorsmith was a wiry older man with plenty of hair where it ought not to be and very little where it should have been. He spoke with a Cockney accent at least two hundred years younger than the styles of armor he sold, though Phil couldn't help but snicker as the put-on speech drooped from time to time to reveal a nasal Midwest twang.

"No, this looks…expensive," said Phil, gazing at the worked metal with some longing. It did, he had to admit, look really really cool. "I can always get a wooden sword and some pleather armor to scratch that itch."

"Ah, but there ain't no wooden sword nor pleather armor what'll get you first place in the Panzerkampf, is there, guv'ner?" said the salesman with a smile showing dental work far beyond the ken of anyone born before 1900.

"Panzerkampf?" said Phil, his mind momentarily filled with visions of classic tanks and blitzkrieg.

"Means 'armor fight' guv'ner," the salesman said. He seemed to think slathering his speech with more guv'ners than a presidential inauguration was the key to seeming old-timey, and Phil didn't have the heart to tell him otherwise.

"Like a joust?" asked Phil, drawing back. "I'm not sure I can ride well enough for that. Or, y'know, stab."

"Bah, s'not that kinda contest, guv'ner!" laughed the ironmonger. "Lawyers wouldn't allow it. Liability insurance is through the roof. No, the Panzerkampf is a contest for the best-looking armor. And the prize is in gold."

"Gold?" Phil's ears perked up and his eyes gleamed for a moment as if lit by reflected lucre. "Real gold? Not spray paint like that steampunk automaton over there?"

The armorer cast a contemptuous glance at Sir Steams-A-Lot, who had been outfitted by a competitor. "Real as it gets, guv'ner," he said. "And I have been saving a suit of armor that's all but guaranteed to win, so's I can show the stuck-up what runs it a thing or two." With a flourish, he opened the back flap of his tent to reveal a gleaming suit of plate mail, sparkling from armet to sabaton.

Phil's face was still lit with the first stirrings of gold lust, and his hand twitched toward his wallet. "And…you guarantee it will win the gold?"

""The prize is twenty times what the armor costs, and I all but guarantee a win," the armorer said quickly, clearly hoping that his use of qualifiers like "all but" slipped below Phil's radar.

Gold lust ensured that they did. "I'll take it!" Phil cried, brandishing his Visa card, which the ironmonger ran through a reader attached to a πPhone, something astonishing enough to someone from the 20th century let alone the 15th. Phil hoped that, with any luck, he could win the gold and cash it out at Philadelphia Pawn ("Every Pawn a King!") to have the cash in hand to pay down the charge…and more.

With the sale made, the armorer became much less attentive. He tossed the pieces, one at a time, unwrapped, at their new owner, and only grudgingly agreed to help Phil don them since the closest thing to armor the latter had ever worn was a cup and padding from his football days. The purchase included a padded gambeson and gambes-pants to go under the armor, and as the ironmonger hitched the breastplate closed he handed Phil the hinge-visored armet and a gladius from a sword pile near the forge.

"Best of luck to ye, guv'ner!" he cried merrily after Phil.

The Panzerkampf was held nearby, in the shadow of the park's forested canopy. Phil could see several other contestants lining up, including a samurai, a Roman centurion, a Turkic Janissary, and, of course, a high elf from the retinue of Gil-galad in the Siege of Barad-dûr.

A woman in a richly embroidered brigantine oversaw the contestants, and not long after Phil's arrival (and filling out of the required entry paperwork in triplicate), whistled sharply to get their attention.

"I am Lady Galahag," said she, who despite the name was not at all haggish. "I know my armor, I know my history, and I know that your armor is going to be a disgrace to both. The contest will consist of two parts: an initial inspection, a pause for you to correct any errors I have noted, and then a final judgment. Judgment is based on how true your armor is to your time period as well as its fit and finish. When you registered, you were given a list of instant disqualifiers; I hope for your sake that you read it. I take my armor seriously and I put my money where my mouthplate is: if you master the Panzerkampf, though, the golden rewards…will be great."

Gesturing to a pedestal with a locked cage upon it, the Lady Galahag swept off a velvet covering to reveal a pile of authentic golden treasure, the likes of which neither Phil nor the other contestants had ever seen: authentic pre-1970 South African Krugerrands, with Oom Paul Kruger bearded and impassive on one side and a prancing springbok antelope on the other. Kruger would have been -357 years old when Galahag's brigandine was in vogue, and springbok inhabited a land Renaissance Europe had been convinced was full of men with faces on their stomachs, but there was no denying the 1 troy ounce of fine gold in each.

Phil, filled with confidence in his new platemail, stood last in line, proudly beaming under the sunlight with his helmet under one arm and his gladius free in his right hand since the ironmonger had neglected to throw in a scabbard with the undercoating. His bravado, buttressed by greed, wasn't affected in the least at the sight of Lady Galahag moving up the line one by one and dishing out harsh criticism to each of his competitors. The samurai had been so provoked that he had drawn his sword in anger, bloodying it with a ketchup packet before sheathing it, while the elf had wept openly after the judge took issue with his "sylvan elf" sword wrap and "subpar Romulan" ears.

"What have we here?" she said, approaching Phil. "What's this subpar saucepot strutting about like he owns the green?"

"This armor is an authentic reproduction, and I got it for a great price," Phil crowed. "Go ahead; try to find an imperfection in it."

Lady Galahag tapped on the shoulder plate. "Modern spot-welded rivets. Minus ten."

"What? Wait-"

The judge felt one of the leather straps. "Improperly tanned leather from a breed of cow that originated in the 1800s. Minus ten."

Phil flushed. "Look, the salesman assured me-"

"Incorrect type of sword," Lady Galahag continued. "Gladius-pattern swords would never have been carried openly at the time period this armor is from. They are one thousand years older than that; you're carrying a spear to World War II. Minus ten."

His competitive nature bubbling to the fore, Phil started to broach an explanation, but he was cut off by a flood of other minor quibbles, which the judge noted in ballpoint pen on bleached paper. Her departure for the half-hour allotted for the contestants to fix any defects in their armor left Phil fuming and more determined than ever to make off with the golden trove so tantalizingly visible in plain sight before him.

There was no question of confronting the armorer; Phil was sure that he'd been sold the crusader equivalent of a lemon (and a quick perusal of the Faire revealed that the ironmonger had pulled up stakes and departed). There was also no question of repairing the defects in said lemon-armor, as it would have involved re-riveting and re-tanning authentic metals and leather. No, Phil vowed that the gold would still be his, by the only means available to him.

Sabotage.

With the xeroxed list of disqualifying offenses for inattention to period detail in hand, Phil crept around to each of the other contestants to make sure that they were disqualified with extreme prejudice, leaving him winner by default. Ordinarily it was not possibly to creep in full plate mail, but that weasely ironmonger had gotten at least one thing right: the armor was an excellent, glove-like, fit for Phil, and the padded gambeson beneath it was thick enough not only to prevent pinching but to cushion what would otherwise be a very rattletrap attempt at stealth.

The samurai, preoccupied with trying to buff out a "MADE IN VIET NAM" inscription on his helmet, failed to keep his eyes on his katana. Phil deftly pulled it out and removed the blade using a technique he'd seen once on Pawn Stars and replaced it with a 30¢ plastic katana blade from a Faire vendor over on Ninja Row.

The centurion, who was retying his Caligae sandals in proper 1st-century knots, had left his gleaming helmet on but removed the plume that had incurred Lady Galahag's wrath. This left a perfectly smooth dome for Phil to quietly slip a backwards "I WENT TO THE RENAISSANCE FAIRE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SALLET" baseball cap onto. It perched perfectly on the crown of the ersatz centurion's head, visible to everyone but him.

The janissary? His furred slippers, removed under the increasingly blazing summer heat, were swapped for a pair of Ugg-brand teenage female fashion boots. By choosing a pair of a similar size and consistency from the pile near the carny-operated Dueling Dragons temporary roller coaster, Phil was able to make the switch without notice.

Having overheard the Lady Galahag's dressing-down of the elf earlier, Phil acquired a set of Star Trek stickers and appliqués from the dueling science-fiction convention across the street and stuck them wherever he could get away with.

When the time came for the second inspection, Phil did his best to keep his eyes forward—on the glistening golden treasure—but stopped to snicker a bit at each of his competitors' failings.

"Don't forget to draw blood on that knickknack before you re-sheathe it; you'll be at it all day."

"I suppose you think that's funny, do you? Sallets were no laughing matter as medieval steel helmets go, baseball caps are a poor, poor substitute, and both were invented a thousand years after you died."

"Miley Cyrus called, she wants her footwear back from the warp in time and space which has seemingly deposited them before the gates of Constantinople in 1447."

Upon seeing the elf, standing next to Phil and inadvertently festooned with Trekkie stickers (including a commbadge on his breastplate), Lady Galahag simply shook her head and kept walking.

"So, it seems that you are the only one who has failed to manifest a precipitous drop in the quality of their armor over the last half hour," Lady Galahag said. "Very unsuspicious."

Phil's eyes were wide with gold-lust and he couldn't but keep a smile off his face. "So…I win?"

"The rules are clear," sighed Galahag. "Take your ill-gotten lucre. I hope you reflect on what greed has made you become."

Greedily shoving the coins into a small pouch, the only becoming that the winner saw going on was himself becoming richer. Singing a tune, he sauntered off toward home, cutting through the park's forest as he did so, helmet under one arm and sword jauntily leaning on one shoulder.

Though he dismissed it as the summer heat reaching its apogee, Phil started to feel the earlier fine fit of the armor slipping away as he walked. Despite the padded gambeson and gambes-pants, suddenly every step seemed to pinch and poke and prod, with an uncomfortable tightness especially about the breastplate and backplate, in his gauntlets and sabatons.

Nothing about that mattered, Phil told himself. All that mattered was the gold. But the figures following silently in the waiting wood? They were keenly interested what was beginning to transpire.

It had taken sabotage and skullduggery, but the Panzerkampf—and the gold coin prize—were Phil's, and his walk through the wood was occupied by those and other prideful, greedy thoughts. Visions of Krugerrands dancing before his eyes, the groaning of rivets went unnoticed. Those very welds that Lady Galahag had pointed out were flexing, in danger of popping—somehow, the flesh within was on the verge of breaking containment and pilling forth.

The next gap in the foliage above illuminated a curious rash across Phil's nose, like an allergic reaction to the trees in bloom. Something red, something scab-like, something scaly was there, and it wasn't content with its meager fiefdom across the nasal cavity.

There was a crusade brewing, a crusade against armor and against pink flesh, as the first sputtering flames flared within the deepest recesses of Phil's soul.

The breastplate and backplate were held together by a series of rivets, and they had been bearing more and more weight as Phil walked on obliviously. He was beginning to grow, and the formerly fine fit was now the metal's undoing as it warped around the surging form within. Like gradually opening eyes, gaps appeared in the steel as it deformed, revealing the padded gambeson beneath. But even that was beginning to struggle with the task of containment; its threads were drawing taut and stitches had begun popping one by one like miniature, inaudible gunshots.

"I think I'll buy some season tickets," Phil mused to himself, gold still on the brain, on the soul. "Maybe a new heater, it's suddenly freezing out here."

The cold he felt was being answered by warmth within, and tendrils of steam began to rise unnoticed from Phil's nose and mouth, now speckled with angry scales. His ears were drawing themselves up as well, like soldiers coming to sleepy attention, growing pointed and just flat-out growing to the stage of putting the elf's amateurish points to shame. With a headache that went unnoticed in Phil's gold-obsessed state of mind, two lumps swelled and hardened on the crown of his head, the pale flesh taking on the consistency of bone, of horn as it grew into nubs.

Something was pressing uncomfortably against the armor from within, too. Several somethings, in point of fact. The finely wrought if period-incorrect cuisses about Phil's thighs were threatening to pull themselves apart as something squirming near the base of his spine struggled for room to breathe. Phil disregarded it was a stray tendril of perspiration, but the same feeling was present at his shoulderblades, the metal actually groaning audibly as the steel began to bend outward under the strain of inexorable swelling. The seeming rash had become a contagion, spreading across the lower half of Phil's face with a burning itch that was half wildfire, half pulled scab.

It wasn't until the first rivet gave way, though, that Phil realized what was happening. That pop came not from his put-upon backplate but rather the fine gauntlets on his hands. The rings of metal enclosing each of his fingers had begun to fill out uncomfortably, and with a resounding plink the first one on his index finger gave way. Dozens more followed with a sound like a hailstorm as the metal began to disintegrate.

"H-huh…?" Phil said, looking at his aching hands with curiosity. Sword and helmet, gladius and armet, clattered to the ground as his rebellious hands lost their grip. In the shadows, the watchers were now observing very intently indeed.

One at a time, every last rivet in Phil's gauntlets gave way, leaving the remaining metal like gaudy rings on the hands of a nobleman. The leather gloves he'd worn beneath them were only slightly more pliant, and within a few seconds they gave way as well, the seams blowing out with an explosive shrrrrp. Flesh spilled out of the gaps in the leather, but not the flesh Phil had put into them; what was emerging, popping off each leftover ring of metal as they did so, was thick and scaly. Red armor was sealing off the last pink skin, thick pads were blossoming on each tip, and fingernails were already partway through their evolution into claws, shaking the last fragments free in the process.

The poor sabatons followed a similar pattern, though with no individual rings for each toe the metal bands warped much more easily, each giving off an almost musical note as it snapped open. The armorer's proffered woolen socks were no match for the swelling paws inside them, deflating seconds later to reveal an extreme version of what was happening to Phil's fingers: swelling, budding claws and pads and scales, scales, scales. His last two toes had already fused into a greater digit, and ligaments were rearranging themselves into a newly taut configuration, forcing the ersatz knight to a wobbly stance on the balls of his feet.

"What's…what's happening to me this time?" Phil choked, his words distorted by a nose and upper lip in the process of swelling out into the foundations of a snout.

He could barely hear himself over the shrieking of metal as the cuisses finally surrendered in a shower of shattered steel and bindings. The ruins of that thigh armor—and the seat of Phil's padded gambe-pants—parted to reveal a small but thick tail, not yet completely covered with crimson scales but rapidly becoming so, base to tip. Phil's backplate suffered the same fate moments later; the incorrect rivets that Lady Galahag had chastened him over actually held, while the metal at the back was twisted into Play-Doh shapes by the emerging shoulder-blade humps. They were held in by the gambeson beneath for a few moments, straining audibly against the fabric before birthing themselves through its caul with a cacophony of sharp crk sounds. A pair of small but fully scaled wings with dewclaws at their peaks were the result, flopping limply and wetly about as they inflated like butterfly wings, engorging themselves with every flap and flop.

"Gah! I'm…I'm changing into…into a…a dragon!" Phil's words were strangled still further by his lengthening muzzle but also by teeth dancing and busily sharpening themselves in their sockets around a tongue grown heavy and long but also pulling apart, snakelike, at the end. His eyes, darting over the extent of his rapidly changing form, flashed a Fremen blue-in-blue that dazzled all the light out of the world for a moment, while his pointed ears had reached their apogee next to horns that now jutted tall and strong like redwoods amid the unspoiled forests of Phil's hair.

What had begun with his hands and feet was now spreading inwards and upwards, aided by the soaring temperature of Phil's skin and body which softened the metal consierably. The leather straps holding the engraved couters to his elbows failed with a groan apiece and fell limply to the ground; around them, the vambraces were pulled apart like putty under the strain, revealing skin already wholly scaly and subsumed. Phil's pauldrons hung on a bit longer due to the sturdiness of their construction, but as his wings grew exponentially to the size needed to achieve flight, the musculature to support them developed too, and that was the end of the shoulder armor. More rivets popped merrily and they plummeted to join the growing pile of leavings at Phil's feet.

Those same feet were busily bulking up to support all the new weight in their new and improved digitigrade stance. Two more toes fused and the scales lightened and grew fine, grew sensitive—a process mirrored on Phil's hands, albeit on a smaller scale. The steel greaves above the annihilated sabatons were the next to go: the left toppled forward as its straps failed, taking the knee-protecting poleyn with it, while the right was thrown off with such vengeance, and such a vengeful pop, that it spun around a full 180 degrees.

"What…why…how?" Phil moaned through his nearly-finished dragon snout. It seemed clear enough in retrospect, he realized: what could be more dragon-like, more draconian, than greedy thoughts of gold and the underhanded acquisition of the same?

While his wings had been busily growing, Phil's new tail had not been lax. It had writhed about in its adolescence, messily shredding more of the gambeson and cuisses—and the unsung underoos beneath both—leaving a trail of tortured metal that had no choice but to fall uselessly away. A heart-shaped scute developed on its tip as it swung about to full growth, one little bit of natural armor to compensate for the artificial Phil was busily dispensing with.

Finally, the beleaguered breastplate and what was left of the backplate had their turn. Phil's deepening chest, bristling with flight muscles, pushed the breastplate up further and further, revealing that what had once been human abs were now the strongly corded muscles of a dragon, armored scales with a light greenish hue to protect against missile attacks from below—and far better at it than the flimsy breastplate. With a final spasm of wing and chest, the last rivets clinked off and the two plates clopped to the ground. With them fell the Krugerrands, which spilled from the small bag clipping them to Phil's ex-armor.

It took a few more moments of writhing and snapping to get the changes to completion, and Phil instinctively flexed his new muscles to pop or rip the last remaining bits of clothing off of his newly altered form. Standing there along the forest path—luckily far from any fellow travelers—Phil tottered as a crimson anthropomorphic dragon, unsure of how to move or what had just happened.

"I…I…gurk…GRAWR!" Phil, in trying to say something, felt the fresh-stoked fires in his core finally reach equilibrium. He belched forth a long and savage gout of flame, purely by instinct, which failed to alight a forest still wet from a recent rainstorm but burnt the shreds of his clothing to ash and reduced the armor in its path to molten slag.

"Well-done." The words were accompanied by slow, yet powerful, clapping from within the woods. A second set joined after a moment, and Phil tried to pivot to see who was speaking to him in such ominous tones. Unused to the balance of a draconic frame, he stumbled instead, landing on his new and still-sensitive tail with a roar.

A pair of fellow dragons was approaching through the shadow, one longer and sleeker and midnight blue, the other shorter and stockier and hairier with mottled green spots.

"Well done? Well done?" Phil cried. "I cheated those poor guys out of their gold just like dragon would have, and look what it did to me!"

"Of course it did," croaked the mottled dragon in a masculine voice. "It's a test."

"We run it every Renaissance Faire in one form or another," said the slim blue dragon—dragoness, judging by her rounded carapace and feminine voice. "Seeking out those with the greed we need to bring out the dragon in them."

"But why?" Phil cried with a fresh and inadvertent gout of flame.

"It's simple, of course, and quite fitting. In days of old, armored knights took dragons out. Now, we take dragons out of armored knights."