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Description
Rex 2.0 , a fresh change of scales for the New Year.

An OC reference development sheet

---------------------------------------------

Setting: Russty's Flying School for Dragons, hidden somewhere in the Southwestern USA

Perspective: Terry, Rex's trusted sidekick and assistant

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Always liked the holidays gap in our schedule, but soon enough the day for next class arrival has come. The last few days getting ready for their arrival on the 14th and cleanup after the last graduation party which combined with Christmas. Rex was taking spare time here and there on a new secret project, yeah- you getting worried too? Not another school site blown up, please. A phone call informing us that the class plane was going to be late by several hours, snow back East. Normally Rex would be climbing the walls or skipping fireballs over the desert but this time he seemed delighted and disappeared into his lab. I sighed resigned to it- whatever will be will be...

Not long after this a painful yell, instinctively recognized as the pain of either a transformation or extreme shape-shifting, always brutal on the first proto' Nonetheless, best to run over there and see what had happened.

The dragon was larger, a quad with huge long wings and very short tail. He righted himself and stood, cracking that familiar grin, we had a new version of Rex to start the semester.

After a few minutes rest he strapped on a Dravicom and a pair of deep orange sunglasses, and taking off with a huge rush of air as the long wings scooped their first atmosphere. A bit of wobble, quickly caught and upwards. In minutes I was reaching for a pair of 30x binoculars which only gave a few more minutes of the shrinking dot in the sky.

An hour passed, then a second. Sooner or later it would be the call to National Center, ATC to see if his Dravi' was showing up. First, lets see what he was up to, though. There in his lab' were the drawings, titled as: high performance Dragon variant. Rex likes to combine and blur specs and even appearances of aircraft dynamics with Draconian. Two line drawings, one of a "Avro Vulcan" a delta with short tail and an ogive shaped wing and a second page showing an "RB-57D" a long straight wing. So it was extreme altitude and returning speed he was after, or very long range. I was returning to the main office when ... Crrrrump! Crrummmmp! Crummmmmpppp! Triple sonic boom.

So much for the call to ATC, now an apology call to NORAD is needed. After assuring them that Arizona was not starting a space program, or under missile attack, heard a heavy landing outside. Rex was covered in ice, teeth chattering, glasses broken and groaning but happy. I pulled four empty oil drums over to him and surrounded his core' area and loaded fire into each. After a few minutes the water started pouring from the wings and Margh joined us, chuckling and asking why we were defrosting a jumbo Turkey, Thanksgiving was over with a few weeks ago! Rex tried for a finger gesture reply, but his new paws only were 3 digits each.

Then Rex smiled and stood and did what any dog would do after coming in from the rain, and we had to dodge the frigid shower. Wet dragon is more easy on the nose than wet-dog fortunately. After his warming up we got the full story, 120,000' MSL, viewing the Earth curvature, Staring into space then cold, colder, icing up and falling, fighting off falling unconscious. Finally hitting the denser air in the delta wing form and passing through mach 3 before figuring out how to slow down carefully.

With a smile Rex said "I even know what went wrong, the scales are the wrong color for this". He concentrated and the Teal Green/Cyan scale/scute colors we knew so well were gone, replaced by Silver and white respectively. "Now I'll retain heat and not pass it off into space, these scales will work like that mylar foil NASA uses to blanket satellites," he said, also noting that silver scales were the lightest in weight physically of all the scale types and that should gain another 10,000' height.

"I'm gonna go with finned ears too, the alpacca ears were the first things to freeze," he noted.

Margh suggested he pigment the scales around his eyes dark grey or black to not dazzle his view on the silver areas. Another was that Rex pigment wingtips and nose and tail to a safety warning red to increase his visibility up there, as most anything else up that high would be drones with limited vision. Soon all the colors were in place. Quite something to see. Downloading the pictures from the Dravicom camera included a stunning image of the moon and a crescent planet Venus hovering over the horizon.

Soon the sound of the arriving class and Rex relaxed and shifted back to his Teal/Cyan Anthro Digigrade self. Playtime over, back to work- including things like discouraging students from doing crazy flight experiments!

Description
Rex 2.0 , a fresh change of scales for the New Year.

An OC reference development sheet

---------------------------------------------

Setting: Russty's Flying School for Dragons, hidden somewhere in the Southwestern USA

Perspective: Terry, Rex's trusted sidekick and assistant

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Always liked the holidays gap in our schedule, but soon enough the day for next class arrival has come. The last few days getting ready for their arrival on the 14th and cleanup after the last graduation party which combined with Christmas. Rex was taking spare time here and there on a new secret project, yeah- you getting worried too? Not another school site blown up, please. A phone call informing us that the class plane was going to be late by several hours, snow back East. Normally Rex would be climbing the walls or skipping fireballs over the desert but this time he seemed delighted and disappeared into his lab. I sighed resigned to it- whatever will be will be...

Not long after this a painful yell, instinctively recognized as the pain of either a transformation or extreme shape-shifting, always brutal on the first proto' Nonetheless, best to run over there and see what had happened.

The dragon was larger, a quad with huge long wings and very short tail. He righted himself and stood, cracking that familiar grin, we had a new version of Rex to start the semester.

After a few minutes rest he strapped on a Dravicom and a pair of deep orange sunglasses, and taking off with a huge rush of air as the long wings scooped their first atmosphere. A bit of wobble, quickly caught and upwards. In minutes I was reaching for a pair of 30x binoculars which only gave a few more minutes of the shrinking dot in the sky.

An hour passed, then a second. Sooner or later it would be the call to National Center, ATC to see if his Dravi' was showing up. First, lets see what he was up to, though. There in his lab' were the drawings, titled as: high performance Dragon variant. Rex likes to combine and blur specs and even appearances of aircraft dynamics with Draconian. Two line drawings, one of a "Avro Vulcan" a delta with short tail and an ogive shaped wing and a second page showing an "RB-57D" a long straight wing. So it was extreme altitude and returning speed he was after, or very long range. I was returning to the main office when ... Crrrrump! Crrummmmp! Crummmmmpppp! Triple sonic boom.

So much for the call to ATC, now an apology call to NORAD is needed. After assuring them that Arizona was not starting a space program, or under missile attack, heard a heavy landing outside. Rex was covered in ice, teeth chattering, glasses broken and groaning but happy. I pulled four empty oil drums over to him and surrounded his core' area and loaded fire into each. After a few minutes the water started pouring from the wings and Margh joined us, chuckling and asking why we were defrosting a jumbo Turkey, Thanksgiving was over with a few weeks ago! Rex tried for a finger gesture reply, but his new paws only were 3 digits each.

Then Rex smiled and stood and did what any dog would do after coming in from the rain, and we had to dodge the frigid shower. Wet dragon is more easy on the nose than wet-dog fortunately. After his warming up we got the full story, 120,000' MSL, viewing the Earth curvature, Staring into space then cold, colder, icing up and falling, fighting off falling unconscious. Finally hitting the denser air in the delta wing form and passing through mach 3 before figuring out how to slow down carefully.

With a smile Rex said "I even know what went wrong, the scales are the wrong color for this". He concentrated and the Teal Green/Cyan scale/scute colors we knew so well were gone, replaced by Silver and white respectively. "Now I'll retain heat and not pass it off into space, these scales will work like that mylar foil NASA uses to blanket satellites," he said, also noting that silver scales were the lightest in weight physically of all the scale types and that should gain another 10,000' height.

"I'm gonna go with finned ears too, the alpacca ears were the first things to freeze," he noted.

Margh suggested he pigment the scales around his eyes dark grey or black to not dazzle his view on the silver areas. Another was that Rex pigment wingtips and nose and tail to a safety warning red to increase his visibility up there, as most anything else up that high would be drones with limited vision. Soon all the colors were in place. Quite something to see. Downloading the pictures from the Dravicom camera included a stunning image of the moon and a crescent planet Venus hovering over the horizon.

Soon the sound of the arriving class and Rex relaxed and shifted back to his Teal/Cyan Anthro Digigrade self. Playtime over, back to work- including things like discouraging students from doing crazy flight experiments!