Prince Baiyu, who was already up and standing beside my bed, smiled and kissed my cheek.
“Did you see him turn into his dragon form and crawl into my bed?” I whispered into his ear.
He shook his head.
I gingerly swung my legs over the side of the bed, trying to disturb my baby as little as I could, but my efforts were useless since he woke up anyway. He uncurled and flew up to my shoulder, his little claws digging into my robe. Prince Baiyu carefully lifted Eggy and placed a cloth cling on my shoulder to support the dragon’s weight.
“Oh, so you’re a shoulder dragon, huh?” I said to my child. “Hang on, I have to wash my face.”
I got up and walked to the bathroom, with my husband following behind us, where I washed my face and hands. Prince Baiyu did the same on the sink to my left. Eggy slid out from under the sling and perched himself on the marble countertop beside the sink, to my left, away from the splash zone. I was brushing my teeth when three things happened simultaneously.
First, Eggy’s form blurred, and where a dragon had been, a toddler appeared and started laughing while pointing at me. “Mom, you look funny!”
Second, this startled my husband so much that he stepped back too fast and tripped over his own feet, landing on his backside with a loud thudding sound.
Third, I tried to speak while brushing my teeth, which made me choke on the toothpaste.
Eggy was still laughing. “Mommy, why are you foaming your mouth?”
Prince Baiyu picked himself up and stared wide-eyed at him while I spat out the toothpaste and washed my mouth out. I rinsed and put away my pink Bambi-themed [Perfect Pearly Whites] toothbrush and said, “I was brushing my teeth clean. Do you want to try it?”
“No, thank you,” said Eggy.
I picked him up and carried him back to the bed, where Prince Baiyu looked on as I inspected the giggling Eggy from head to toe.
“Wait, let Mom look at you. Ten fingers, ten toes, no horns, bellybutton, pointed ears, baby teeth…” He looked exactly as he did in my dreams, a toddler around two years old with short, silky blue hair and blue eyes. His skin was fair and soft. I couldn’t help but rub the tender skin on his arms again and again. Then I kissed him again and again on his cheeks. “Who’s mommy’s little baby?”
“I am!” He flung his arms around me and kissed me back.
We cuddled for a time. I helped him into a soft cotton T-shirt and shorts, and then, settling onto the bed, I pulled him into a sitting position facing me. “Eggy, how did you get here? Weren’t you a baby? How did you turn big all of a sudden?”
He slapped his forehead and rolled his eyes dramatically. “Mom! Some spirits came to me and asked me if I wanted to be born. I said, ‘What is that?’ and they said, ‘You’ll stay with your mother all the time.’ And I said, ‘Whaaaaaat?’ And they said, ‘Always, even when she’s not sleeping.’ So I said, ‘Yeeeeeeees!’ And then a biiiig wave came. Water went like this!”
He grinned up at me and used both his arms to make a big circle and then a wave motion.
Prince Baiyu and I were listening to his story, spellbound.
He continued. “I was washed away by the water, and I was floating and floating and floating. Then you know what I saw, Mom?”
“What did you see?” I obliged him by asking.
“An egg!”
“An egg?”
Eggy continued his story. “Yes, there was a hole in it. I went inside the egg and fell asleep. When I woke up, I couldn’t do anything.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
Eggy lay down on his back and curled up with arms and knees bent. “I was like this! I couldn’t talk, and I was too small, mommy, very small!”
“Was this inside the egg?”
“No, I was here!” He pointed at his cradle. “Then I made myself big like this.”
He slowly unbent his arms and legs while making grunting noises until his arms and legs were extended like a starfish. “And now I am a big boy, and I can talk.”
I picked him up and kissed him again. “What, you made yourself big by stretching? What are you, a balloon boy?”
He frowned cutely. “What’s a balloon boy?”
I took out a rubber balloon and a manual air pump from the Cash Shop.
“Like this.” Using a marker, I drew an egg on one side of the balloon and a stick boy on the other. Then I used the pump to inflate it. “I can make it bigger!”
Once it was the right size, I said, “This is a balloon boy.”
Then I let go of the end and let the air out so that it deflated with a funny farting sound and laughed at Eggy’s expression. “What about you? Are you made of air inside?”
I bent and put my ear on Eggy’s belly and pretended to check for air by tapping it with my fingers.
“Mommy! I’m not a balloon boy. I’m a dragon boy!”
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I straightened up. “Does my dragon boy want a balloon?”
“Yes, I want a balloon, but what is that?”
He was pointing at Prince Baiyu, but I pretended to misunderstand.
“That is a wall.” I made a subtle gesture, and my husband moved out of the way of Eggy’s pointing finger.
“No, not that!” Eggy pointed at Prince Baiyu again, and once again, he moved out of the way.
“That’s a curtain.”
“Argh!” My boy got frustrated and grabbed Prince Baiyu by the sleeve. “This!”
“Oh.” I grinned and waved at my husband to bend down. Taking Eggy’s hands, I placed Prince Baiyu’s face between them. “Take a close look.”
Eggy and Prince Baiyu’s faces moved closer to each other.
After staring at Prince Baiyu’s face for a while, Eggy’s eyes went wide. He let go of the prince and turned to me. “Mom, this face is very good.”
I had to give them both two thumbs up, even though it was a rude gesture in this world. “That’s my boy! I knew you would like it. You know, all the members of our family have a weakness for beautiful faces.”
Prince Baiyu sat beside me and put his arms around my shoulders.
“But, Mom, what is that?” Eggy asked again.
“That, my dear, is your father.”
He tilted his head to one side. “What’s a father?”
“I’m your mother, and you call me ‘mom’ or ‘mommy.’ A father is like a mother, but he is a boy like you, not a girl like me. You can call him ‘dad’ or ‘daddy.’ Mothers and fathers are the same thing. We’re called parents.”
I could tell from Eggy’s expression that this explanation went totally above his head.
“He’s your dad…” I remembered that I had prepared something for this. “Come sit with me, and I’ll tell you a story.”
I plumped the pillows up and put them against the headboard. I put my back on them and pulled Eggy into my lap. Prince Baiyu sat beside me as I took out the storybook that Muchen, Yinuo’s husband, who was an artist, had illustrated for us via my detailed instructions. The cover was red leather embossed with an intricate pattern of gold flowers and grape vines.
I held it up for Eggy to see. “Do you like this book?”
He stroked the surface with his hands. “I like it!”
“Okay, there’s a story inside that I will read to you.” I opened the cover, showing the title page, which had both English letters and the characters of this world’s language. The English was my work, but the other calligraphy was Prince Baiyu’s work. “Look, this is in English, and this is in this world’s language. It says ‘The story of my family’ right here.”
I touched the letters and characters. Suddenly, a thought struck me, and I turned to my husband in dismay. “Dear, have I been talking in English all this time?”
He nodded, a smile playing on his lips.
“My goodness!” No wonder he hadn’t said a word. “Eggy, can you understand me?”
I asked it in this world’s language, of course.
Eggy giggled. “Yes, I know all languages!”
“Oh, my baby is so smart!” I turned back to the book. “Continue?”
Both of them nodded.
I turned the page. The new page had an ink drawing of a chibi girl with long brown hair and purple eyes wearing a pink dress. “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Violet.”
“That’s mommy!” Eggy put a finger on the drawing. “Hello, mommy!”
The next page showed the same girl lying down on the ground in the middle of a forest. Her eyes had turned into X’s, and her soul, depicted as the outline of a ghost, was coming out of her mouth.
Eggy let out a soft, sympathetic murmur, then said, “Poor mommy!”
I read the text out loud. “The girl wandered in the forest for days and days and days, and she grew faint from hunger.”
“Poor mommy,” Eggy repeated. He kissed the drawing. “Wake up, mommy.”
I turned the page again. This time, it showed the girl standing up, with an egg rolling around her. Behind them was a volcano spewing fire. “But she was saved when an egg came rolling down the volcano.”
“Yes!” said Eggy. “That’s me.”
The next page showed Violet putting the egg in a hot spring full of boiling and steaming water. “She tried to cook the egg because she was hungry, but do you know what happened next?”
“I know! I know!” said Eggy. “The egg hatched into a dragon.”
I didn’t turn the page.”Yes, then she cooked the dragon and ate him. The end.”
Eggy covered my mouth and turned to Prince Baiyu. “Mommy is just joking. She didn’t eat the dragon.”
Prince Baiyu smiled and said, “I know.”
I continued the story. “But when she put the egg in the hot water, it exploded!”
This time, the page showed pieces of eggshell flying out from the center where a chibi boy with blue eyes, blue hair, and pointed ears was poised with both arms up, one foot up, and the knee bent, in the crane pose.
“What!” Eggy stood up on the bed and did the same pose, but he lost his balance and fell forward. He got up and sat back on my lap. “That’s me, right, mommy?”
“Yes, this is the famous dragon. Violet named him Eggy because he came from an egg.” On the next page of the storybook, Eggy and Violet were frolicking in the woods where birds had come to drop off fruit at their feet. “They found some food, and Violet was saved.”
“The end?” asked Eggy.
“Look.” I held the book up for him to see. “There are more pages. What do you think happens next?”
“They go playing.”
“Nope.” I showed him the next page where Violet was asleep in bed. Above her head was a thought bubble showing the previous scenes in miniature. “It turns out, it was all a dream!”
“Yes, it was!” Eggy pounded his chest with his fist. “I found Mom in a dream.”
We continued to the next page, which showed Violet waking up in and going out into the forest, where she found a cave. Inside the cave was a huge white tiger, also drawn in chibi style, that towered above her.
Eggy laughed and pointed at Prince Baiyu. “That’s you! You look so funny.”
My husband and I exchanged a look of deep satisfaction.
Eggy slid out of my lap and lay down on the bed on his back, his legs and arms up. “You look like this!”
“Nope,” I said. “You forgot the eyes and tongue.”
My son crawled back into my lap and looked at the image again. The white tiger’s rigid limbs stuck straight up from his body like four fence posts, and a long, comical tongue hung limp from the side of his mouth. His eyes were crossed, too.
Eggy burst into laughter again. “You look so funny!”
He turned into this dragon form and copied the drawing’s pose. I made sure to sneak a lot of pictures of him using the System camera.
“Yes,” said Prince Baiyu. “I was lying on my bed, almost dead, and a beautiful lady came and saved my life.”
Eggy turned back into his human form and said, “You mean mom?”
I giggled. “Turn the page, and you’ll see.’
Prince Baiyu took over the story from me. He showed Eggy the drawings of our courtship, with scenes of me pouring a large bottle of medicine on him, going on a walk in a flower garden, sitting on a bench looking at the moon together, and then the final scene of our wedding. The last few pages showed Prince Baiyu and me sleeping in bed together, and then chibi Violet reaching up and taking the dragon egg from the dream bubble drawn above her head.
“And that’s how you were born,” said Prince Baiyu.
The last page was simply a drawing of the three of us together.
“And they lived happily ever after. The end,” I said.
“Did you like it?” Prince Baiyu asked our son.
“I like it. I want to see the tiger again!” said Eggy. He turned the pages himself and laughed at the drawing. “How do you make your eyes like that?”
Prince Baiyu smiled and crossed his eyes, making both Eggy and me laugh.
I put the book away, and we went outside to the courtyard. Since I was supposed to avoid getting cold, this time the open space was covered by a glass ceiling to keep the temperature comfortably warm using the System.
“Your father isn’t just a dying tiger I found in a cave; he’s very strong, and he can fly, too!” I said to Eggy.
Prince Baiyu was about to demonstrate when there was the gentle chiming of the doorbell.
“Someone is at the door. Who could it be?” I asked no one in particular.
Eggy hugged my legs. “Mom, don’t open it!”
“Huh? Why not?” My poor husband was totally clueless.
Eggy and I exchanged knowing looks.
My son let go of me and took Prince Baiyu’s hand. “You have to be veeeeery careful when you open the door.”
He then took my hand, too, and we slowly walked to the door. After many whispered warnings, Prince Baiyu opened it while Eggy and I hid behind a pillar.
“Run!” Eggy screamed when he saw what was behind the door. “It’s a monster!”
*****
Author's Note:
- I hope you like Eggy as much as I do! ?????????
- Advanced chapters on my Patreon!
- Thank you very much for reading.
- Please let me know if there are any errors.