smash_logs | So You Think You're Turning Into a Chayzard: An Instructive Guide for Proper Living as a Burn Lizard

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So You Think You're Turning Into a Chayzard: An Instructive Guide for Proper Living as a Burn Lizard

Who: Max and... probably some other charizards
What: Max is turning into some sort of fireman lizard
Where: Max's Forge and Sundry Other Locations
When: June 29th and beyond
Warnings: Swears. Lots of swears. Violence. Some (Lots of?) violence.

Persons wishing to interact with one (1) Maxizard are welcome to do so once he's finished blossoming into a new man.

Other Persons Turning Into Chayzards Are Welcome To Use This Post As Well. We'll get together a regular Conflagration of Charizards (Is that the collective noun? It seems as if it should be.).

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Max had been going at this for some time now. And he'd yet to snap. He thought that maybe (just maybe) it might be a good time to reach out to Char, just a little bit.

So, Max wrote him up a letter and left it taped to his door. It read as follows:

I thought that you might want to make something for Green to, uh, commemorate this week. It's sort of a special deal thing for you. So, if you want to help make him something worthy of a charizard, I'll forge it if you want to provide the fire. I'm at my forge every morning from dawn to noon. Come find me if you want to talk about it.

Assuming that Green had not, in fact, gotten totally #rekt, Char had not immediately thrown the letter away. Nor, however, did he immediately jump at the chance: he'd spent some time thinking it over, caught between the idea of lending some amount of permanence to the week he'd shared soul-flames with his trainer and his bitter urge to stay far, far away from Max forever.

Eventually, though, he made his choice: That afternoon, he stood at the entrance to Max's forge -- he knew Charizard instincts well enough to know that just barging into a place important to Max wouldn't exactly start things on the right foot, so he settled for calling out, the letter held tightly in one fist.

"Max!"

Max was banging away at God-knows-what. Something bright orange-white and being handled with bare hands because, while he was a charizard, he could do that. And it was kind of fun to do it that way.

Max felt a tickling at the back of his neck, similar to that which he'd felt when Green had visited earlier; he turned around when he heard his name yelled, and he saw Char standing in ye olde doorwaye holding a letter. Oh good. This was probably... okay possibly... maybe... not going to end with someone getting punched in the dick. His neck and back muscles tensed slightly at the thought of the other chayzard, but he pushed through the fight-or-~~flight~~fight feeling.

"Yeah!" he said from the anvil. "You can come in if you want. Sort of in the middle of somethin', but I can talk."

He stepped inside with his head held pointedly high and his arms folded; it would have been more polite and deferential to relax his body language a degree or two, but he really did not have it in him to show Max any remotely submissive body language. He kept a bit of a distance -- enough to let Max have enough space to work, and enough to not be inherently threatening.

"Got your letter," he explained, even if that was already obvious by the crinkled paper in his hand.

"I see," said Max, as he hammered at the glowing lump of metal.

"So, what are your plans about that?" he asked, as the sparks flew.

"...I'll do it," he answered, though not without a note of hesitance. Char was still not wholeheartedly convinced he wanted to commit to hours of hanging around Max's turf when he was still a dragon, let alone taking steps down the potentially-slippery slope of doing whatever Max instructed, but... well... he'd already said yes, so there it was.

Max... grinned.

Oh sweet baby Arceus, it looked... not right on his face.

"That means a lot, Char. You got any idea of what sorta thing you want to make?"

Truly, this was a day of weird and unanticipated things.

Char shrugged, that air of hesitance still hanging over him. "I dunno. Something he could use if he needed to, I guess. A trainer ain't got much need for platemail or whatever, y'know?" Maybe he ought to have planned something specific to make, but most of his thoughts about this had been centered more on the "doing something Max wants to do" aspect of taking up this invitation than on what he might be capable of forging.

"I can do rings or bracers or bracelets if you want somethin' ornamental. If you want somethin' more useful I can do little things - a dagger, a pair of scissors, a shovel, a chain, a bunch of nails. I could do little charizards in enamel on the dagger or a bracelet or the shovel or scissors, I guess."

He was still hammering away at the lump, folding it over and smashing it down further.

A dagger would probably be too impractical for a trainer to carry around -- that'd likely end up more ornamental than useful back in Kanto. Stuff like nails or scissors or shovels went the opposite way: they were a bit too practical. They'd probably just end up shut away in a shed or a drawer. The enamel offer was a little interesting, he guessed, but if Char wanted that, then that narrowed his choice down to just one thing.

"Let's do the bracelet, then. Something he can keep with him if he wants to that won't look outta place back home."

"Alright," said Max, eying the squashed down metal carefully, and finding it sufficiently smashed. He picked it up with his hands (this was the nicest part about being a charizard by far, it was still hot and it hurt but it couldn't do any lasting damage) and set it into the furnace to keep hot. He turned back to Char.

"I ain't much of a silversmith, but I can handle this. We've got two options here. The first is, you help me melt the silver down to get it into a sheet of the right size and thickness, then I bang at it with a hammer for a couple of hours, no heat needed, 'cause it's silver, then I polish it, put the enamel on, and you give me a small, bright flame to melt the glass without meltin' the silver. Second option is we make it outta steel, and do the same thing, only we start with a steel bar and shape it out all with hammer blows, and 'cause it's steel, I gotta have it hot the entire time. Less worry about meltin' the steel than meltin' the silver to set the enamel."

"Second option's got you doin' more the entire time; it's probably a little more interestin' for you, a little more difficult for me the second way, but I'm fine with that if you're fine with that."

"I'm fine with that," Char answered. Silver was the fancier of the two metals, for sure, but pretty, soft, and easier to work with were all not qualities that he felt were especially Charizardlike. He'd much rather the option that didn't have him hanging around doing nothing for hours while Max did all the work, anyway.

"Alright," Max said. "Let's get started then. This is gonna take a few hours to shape it, then it's gotta cool down to where I can paint on it, then we gotta set the enamel. Might have to come back tomorrow to set the enamel. Takes me a long time to do enamel work to make it look good. I'll sketch out some charizard designs, let you pick the one you like best."

Max walked over to an area with several bins, and fished around in one of them until he found a bar of steel. He walked over to an unused forge (of course he had more than one, sometimes he had to have multiple temperatures going on at once) and set it down inside. "I need you to heat that up until it's white-hot. Don't melt it, though. If you let it melt, we gotta start over. I'm gonna get the right hammers and vise for this."

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So You Think You're Turning Into a Chayzard: An Instructive Guide for Proper Living as a Burn Lizard

AFTER GREEN

A MILLION YEARS LATER wow i'm the worst

A PROMPT RESPONSE - to make you feel bad about yourself

truly i am a garbage human being

Your beloved turtles are far swifter than you

no mere human could measure up to a perfect being like a turtle

You're just jealous that you cannot be a hero on the halfshell

Isn't everyone?

What are you talking about, I had a ninja turtle halloween costume as a child

Doesn't count

I was in a costume contest. I didn't win.

first place is reserved only for real turtles

I keep reading about turtles in the books I'm reading for the class I'm teaching.