Work Text:
“What is that,” asks Cleo.
“She’s my new pet, man,” says Doc casually. He’s holding in his arms a large black mass that Cleo has just discerned is, in fact, a juvenile Ender Dragon. The dragon is fast asleep, her head over Doc’s shoulder, clinging to his torso like a marsupial, or a bat, maybe.
The presence of a dragon is only slightly outmatched by the presence of a baby dragon - there’s a whole convoluted magic business involved in ethical dragon-farming and the presence of juveniles is both not necessary and generally frowned upon (Cleo knows this namely from her time in the End post Season-Eight-disaster), so unless Doc is about to be very patient, and Doc is not a patient man, he’s probably not raising a dragon to farm breath or experience from.
Which means that it actually is his new pet.
…Okay. Doc is making up for the time he lost in Empires by raising the insane-things-to-do bar so high that Cleo assumes it’s past height limit by now.
“...Cool,” she says after a moment. “What’s her name?”
“Eh, Goat,” says Doc.
“Goat? Aren’t you the G.O.A.T., though? Won’t that get confusing?”
“She can be Goat Junior,” Doc acquiesces.
“Goat Junior,” snorts Cleo good-naturedly. “Well, okay. Tell Goat Junior I said hi when she wakes up.”
Doc nods very solemnly.
—
“See, this is a comparator,” Doc says, pointing out the object to Goat Junior. “It, eh, compares the different signal strengths it recieves, and if the back is stronger than the sides it will come through to the front. Or, if you do this - '' he presses the front switch on the comparator, lighting up the redstone, “It goes into ‘subtraction mode’. That means it subtracts the side signals from the back signal. So, eh, if the signal at the back is eight, and the side is three, then the front will be five.” He pauses. “Does that make sense?”
Goat Junior yawns widely at him, exposing the bright purple back of her throat.
After a moment, Doc laughs softly. “Maybe we’ll pick this one back up tomorrow.”
He scoops her up off the table she had been sitting on into his arms, waiting until she settles down with her head on his shoulder before carrying her out of the workroom and down to the elevator, at which she perks her head up curiously as he punches in the correct floor button. He had expected her to be afraid of the elevator, he thinks, but she doesn’t seem to mind it at all. If anything, he’s had to watch her carefully, lest she hop up on her hind legs to start scratching at the control panel.
He’s very proud of her, in that regard. She displays a clear and voracious appetite for learning new things that he’s been eager to feed. He’s missed this, this kind of teaching - not since the creation of Goatman, his biomechanical protector construct (and unexpected protegé) back in Season Seven, has he really had a reason to slow things down, make it back to the simple basics for a few moments just to impart them upon another. It helps him relearn things he hardly has reason to think about on his own, just to take them apart in explanation.
He sets her down in her bed (a glorified nest of blankets and pillows, really, but he understands the sacred nature of Blanket Nests, and it’s only the best for his Goat Junior) and presses a kiss to the top of her head. She gurgles a small happy noise and shifts in her sleep.
He smiles to himself, a warm glow lodged in his chest. She is going to grow up big and strong and lethal and beautiful and perfect.
He really did miss this.
—
An Ender Dragon’s early lifecycle, Doc quickly discovers, is actually not all that well-documented. Oh, there are texts and texts on adult dragons, sure, but as far as the (literate) denizens of the End seem to be concerned, baby dragons might as well be ghost stories.
He brushes several black scales off of the worktable and puts down a new stack of books. Maybe these ones will serve him better. Sequestered in the corner of the room, Goat Junior scratches behind her neck with a hind leg and knocks loose a small shower of fresh scales to the floor. Doc grumbles inwardly. He’s going to have to vacuum later.
He cracks the first book open, skimming it for mentions of juvenile scale-shedding. Or growth timelines, maybe. Or anything relevant.
Nothing. Predictable. Goat Junior sneezes and a couple more scales fall off. Doc rubs his temple.
Sighing in admitted defeat, he picks up the next book - a general scale-care handbook Doc had borrowed from a very amused Cleo. It’s aimed at a first-person audience, but the advice seems to be fairly universal: warm baths, humidity, don’t pick at it but gentle brushing can help with any stubborn patches. Okay. Doc has built machines that have taken him weeks, months to puzzle through. Surely he can figure this out. It can’t be that much harder than cleaning fur?
Doc looks down at his forearm, which is lightly matted with grime and redstone dust. Well. Okay, sue him, he gets distracted. But the fur maintenance is fairly simple when he does actually remember to do it.
He puts the book down. Warm baths, huh? Maybe he should hose himself down while he’s at it. His lab coat could certainly use a cleaning. Efficiency is the name of the game, and all that.
—-
“Doc, do – Ahck!” Squawks Grian loudly.
“The floor is wet,” says Doc helpfully.
“I noticed.” Grian carefully sits up from where he had fallen flat on his back. “Eugh. why is it soapy?”
Doc shrugs. “I’m cleaning?”
“What, everything?”
“...Yeah?” Doc holds up the hose nozzle. “Do you want a rinse?”
Grian gives him a very long, flat look, and then sighs and folds his arms and wings open. “Yeah, sure, hit me. I don’t want to fly back all covered in soap.”
Doc sprays him down with little fanfare, which Grian stands gamely still for until about halfway through, when he opens his eyes briefly to rake water out of his face and says, very loudly, “UM.”
Doc looks over his shoulder, following Grian’s gaze. Goat Junior is flapping around in the corner, chasing soap bubbles around the room.
“Doc,” says Grian. “Is that an Ender Dragon?”
“Yeah!” Doc says happily. “That’s Goat Junior. She’s my new pet. I’m giving her a bath to help her shed her scales, and, eh, I thought I’d wash everything else while I was at it.”
“Goat Junior,” echoes Grian. “Okay. This is fine. Yeah. Why not! Just find a baby dragon and – ” he sputters incredulously, “Yeah, why not! Okay!”
Doc laughs. “It’s good to have a pet around, man. She can do all sorts of tricks. Here, watch this. Goat! Hey, girl!”
Goat Junior perks her head up, shaking water off her patchy half-shed scales.
“Go fetch me a shulker,” says Doc, enunciating each word carefully. “Shulker-Kiste.”
Goat Junior licks water off of her eyeball and skitters towards the elevator, nosing at the control panel until she confidently reaches up with her front paw and hits the ‘down’ button.
“Why does your dragon know how to use the elevator,” says Grian, aghast.
“Isn’t she so clever?” says Doc fondly. “She, eh, figured it out by watching me.”
“That’s - Yeah, that’s - that’s horrifying,” says Grian.
Doc sprays him with the hose again.
“ACK!”
Doc laughs. “Get used to her, man. She’ll be around here from now on.”
“Oh, brilliant,” says Grian, shaking out his wings. “That’s brilliant. You better not let her eat my sheep.”
“Well,” considers Doc, “I don’t think she’s big enough to eat sheep yet. I’ve just been feeding her rabbits and stuff. And GigaPies. But not too much, you know. I don’t want her to get hooked on the sugar.”
“Well, I’m glad all of those leftover GigaPies are going to some kind of use,” says Grian. “I never want to see another one of those if I can help it.”
“Yeah,” Doc agrees regretfully. He does still like the GigaPies, honestly, but he also hadn’t been forced to eat a diet consisting entirely of them for a while, so he can understand where Grian must be coming from. “So why did you come here, man? What’s up?”
“I,” says Grian, and pauses for a minute, “You know, Doc, I actually can’t even remember.”
Doc laughs again.
—
Mumbo, honestly, really does not like the Perimeter very much.
It’s not that it’s bad - it’s a very impressive feat, actually, and Doc put a lot of time and effort into it, which Mumbo respects, it’s just. It’s so. …Big. and empty. And there are so many slimy mutated things down there. Every time Mumbo goes down there he sees something new and worrying that Doc reassures him is perfectly fine and part of the plan, or an expected side effect, or something of that general type.
Which, of course, is being proven correct right now, as there is something very large and growling and dripping red and full of teeth in front of Mumbo that he is curled up on the ground trying not to look at.
“Doc!” He warbles desperately. “Doc, I have those pistons you wanted! I’m about to die!”
“Hold on, man!” comes a distant call back, and Mumbo nearly wilts in relief. At least Doc will be here to pick his stuff up after whatever this thing is gets it over with and kills him.
Through the growling and the panicked fuzz in his ears, he hears the faint sounds of Doc’s clopping footsteps. “Hey, hey,” Doc soothes, and Mumbo realizes belatedly he’s talking to… the creature?
“Hey, It’s just Mumbo,” Doc continues gently. “Don’t scare him, sweetheart.”
Mumbo opens his eyes. The creature - and Mumbo really did process what it was before this point, he just hadn’t been ready to admit it - but the Ender Dragon lets out a low keening noise, huffing an exhale.
“What,” says Mumbo very weakly.
“Come on, girl, say hi,” says Doc. Mumbo is about to open his mouth to say that actually, no, he’s fine, not offended at all, no greetings necessary, when suddenly he has a face full of very large, curiously sniffing dragon. He has the sudden irrational thought that she might be able to somehow smell all the dragons he had slain in his life before this point on him, like some sort of built-in past-sin detector.
“Um,” Mumbo squeaks. “Pleasure. Ma’am. My, er, my name’s Mumbo? Pleased. Oh, I said that already. Oh, dear.”
“This is Goat Junior,” Doc says, stepping up to Mumbo’s side as Goat Junior retracts her head and offering him a hand up off the ground, which Mumbo takes gratefully. “She’s, eh, my pet. I brought her here from the End a while ago. I forgot you’ve been gone lately, so you haven’t seen her before.”
“She’s very…” Mumbo pauses to think of a word, “Large.”
“She is,” says Doc proudly. “Isn’t she glorious?”
“Glorious is… Yeah, that’s good,” says Mumbo, trying very hard not to be rude. “She’s very, um. Red. Right now.”
“Oh, yeah, she likes to chase down the tomatoes, hah. It’s good pest control. I have to hose all the juice off of her at the end of the day.”
“Oh, yes, it’s tomato juice,” says Mumbo. “I knew that.”
“Well, what else would it be?” asks Doc bemusedly.
“Er,” says Mumbo, “Anyway, I got those pistons you wanted,” and pulls out the loaded shulker he had come there to deliver.
Doc thanks him for the pistons and opens the shulker to take stock of them while Mumbo eyes Goat Junior nervously. She’s licking tomato juice from her chops, her tail swishing idly behind her.
“So does she, erm, eat… the tomatoes?” asks Mumbo.
“Oh, no, she eats meat, mostly. From the grasslands around here, you know. But she’s an omnivore. Ender Dragons and all, since the End is so scarce, they’ll digest anything. It’s pretty cool. Here, eh, watch.”
Doc picks a single piston out of the shulker and holds it up, tossing it to Goat Junior once she’s locked eyes on it. She snaps the entire thing up in her mouth, making some impressively loud crunching noises as she shears straight through the metal and stone, swallowing it down in splintered chunks. Mumbo can hear the faint sound of sizzling as her saliva breaks the material down.
Mumbo stares, horrified and fascinated. He swallows. “That’s, uh. That’s. Wow.”
“The glory of evolution!” Doc proclaims, a little too enthusiastic.
“Yep. Yep. Gotta love evolution. Yep.” Mumbo feels a little dizzy. “Well. I’ll just be going, then. Have fun with the shulkers. The pistons, I mean. Bye!”
“Take care, man,” Doc calls after him as he veers off unsteadily into the sky.
As he clears the rim of the pit, Mumbo catches a glance of Scarland in the hazy distance, and fleetingly wonders what Scar thinks of the dragon’s… feeding grounds.
He shakes it off. Not any of his business! He is not paid to think about dragons for longer than he has to. (Well, he doesn’t get paid at all, for anything, currently, but the sentiment is there.)
—
“Doc!” calls out Scar. He’s in full Hotguy getup, which is never a good sign.
“Yeah?” asks Doc, shifting a shield into his offhand preemptively.
“Doc, I need to have words with you,” says Scar as he lands. “About your Goat - Goat - What was her name? Goat Jellie. Goat Jimmy?”
“Goat Junior?”
“Goat Junior! Doc, she’s eating animals from my fields,” Scar hisses in almost a conspiratory tone, leaning in. “What am I going to say to the Scarland guests, Doc? I can’t play the morning announcements over the sounds of some poor sheep’s bones getting crunched up! That doesn’t inspire majesty and wonder!”
“Eh…” starts Doc, “I mean, I think she’s majestic and wonderful…”
“Well, maybe she is, sure,” says Scar, “But - but those poor sheep! Those poor cows! We have sheep in the petting zoo, Doc! How would you feel if you went to pet a cute bunny and then five minutes later its cousin got chewed to bits by some huge scaly monster?”
“Hey, it’s the cycle of life, man,” shrugs Doc, “It happens to everyone eventually. Well, not to me. That wouldn’t be G.O.A.T. standards. But everyone else. Look, there’s not enough protein in the Perimeter for her, dude. And if I let her eat Pesky Bird’s sheep, he’s going to get mad at me.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” says Scar. “You go and tell her to eat Grian’s sheep, and if he bothers you about it, I’ll Hotguy him for you. Deal?”
“Alright,” Doc agrees warily, and they shake on it.
Doc watches Scar take off again, scratching the side of his head. Surely this won’t go wrong, right?
—-
“Doc,” says Grian.
“I wish people would knock,” sighs Doc, putting his project blueprints down.
“You don’t have a door,” Grian points out fairly. “Your dragon is eating my sheep, Doc. Also, how big is she going to get, anyway? I swear, every time I see her, she’s a block taller.”
“Where is Scar?” Doc asks. “He was supposed to Hotguy you about it, or something.”
“He did,” says Grian. “Three times! Look, I need those sheep, okay. Unless you want me to start peeling your animals for wool.”
“I don’t have any sheep.”
“Could peel you for wool,” Grian mumbles under his breath, and then, louder: “Well, maybe you should get some! Aren’t you all about automation? You can’t even feed your own dragon! Actually, why don’t you just have her eat from Scar’s fields? He’s not doing anything with them outside of Scarland, I don’t think.”
“She was eating from Scar’s fields,” snaps Doc. “He came here and told me to have her stop. He said it ruined the park atmosphere. It’s not my fault his guests don’t appreciate the glory of nature.”
Grian considers that. “Well, how about this,” he says finally. “You get Goat Junior to stop eating my sheep, and if Scar complains about it again, I’ll prank his base to distract him.”
Doc squints at him. “...Alright.”
They shake on it.
—-
Doc receives a chat message from Mumbo.
> …Did your dragon eat my slime farm? it reads.
Doc sighs. He wings over to Mumbo’s base. Mumbo is parked in the middle of his blueprints, staring at the space where his slime farm used to be.
“No, Goat Junior did not eat your slime farm,” he says.
Mumbo screams. …Oops. Doc guesses he didn’t hear him come up.
“Some warning!” warbles Mumbo, straightening his tie.
“Sorry, sorry,” says Doc awkwardly. “But, no, I took apart your farm while you were gone, since it was in the way of the Hall of Goat floorplans. I, eh, figured you wouldn’t mind, since it wasn’t… producing anything. If you need slime, I have a way better farm.”
“Oh, no, I’m alright on slime,” says Mumbo. “What’d you do with the materials from the farm?”
Doc pauses. He scratches his cheek. “Uh. Well. Fed them to Goat Junior,” Doc says.
Mumbo gives him a look. “She didn’t eat it!” protests Doc.
“Look, farm-eating or not-farm-eating aside,” says Mumbo, “Does Goat Junior, uh, does she eat… sheep?”
Doc sighs. “I will tell her not to eat your sheep,” he says long-sufferingly.
“No, no! That’s, uh – that’s actually the opposite of the problem,” says Mumbo quickly. “See, there’s a bunch of them spawning around here, and they’re kind of getting in the way of my building, but until my walls are done they’ll keep spawning in the grass, and I was wondering if I could arrange some kind of. Dragon. Eating. …Service?”
“You want her to eat your sheep?” says Doc. “I mean, okay. That’s - Yeah, I can do that. I’m sure Pesky Bird and Elf Boy will be pleased to hear about it, hah.”
“Well, I’m glad for them,” says Mumbo. “Did I ever tell you? Grian came here all covered in blood and sheep guts the other day. He said he had caught Goat Junior with one of them still in her mouth and tried to pull it away from her before she could get away, and the thing just ripped clean in two.” Mumbo shudders. “I had to put in a new vault rule. No sheep blood in the vault.”
Doc finds that the mental picture of Grian covered head-to-toe in blood and viscera is… strangely fitting, somehow? Well, he’s always had a violent streak. “That’s hilarious,” he says.
“Is it?” asks Mumbo long-sufferingly. “Is it really?”
“Well, it’s hilarious to me,” amends Doc. “I wouldn’t want to clean too much sheep blood off the Perimeter. Maybe a little. But not too much.”
“Well, count your blessings,” says Mumbo.
After Doc has bid him goodbye, he flies back to the Perimeter, happy that this whole debacle is finally being resolved. Maybe Scar and Grian will finally –
– Ah.
Doc stares at his workshop.
Doc stares at Goat Junior.
Goat Junior is currently wolfing down one of the many, many white-frosted cakes lining the floor of the workshop. There’s a sign in the middle of them that reads Heard you had trouble feeding your dragon. Here’s some help! :P -PB and EB.
“Hey!” Doc calls after Goat Junior. “Don’t eat all of those! You’ll make yourself sick to your stomach!”
Goat Junior makes a warbling laugh-noise and continues wolfing down cakes at a voracious speed.
Grian, Doc thinks vehemently. Oh, he’ll get him back for this.
He turns back to his blueprints and clears the table, his brain already filling with ideas. Sheep’s blood… Vault traps… The possibilities are endless, aren’t they?
He smiles. Maybe it isn’t so bad after all.