The Scaly Scoop

Drylus is a young freelance reporter and investigator who has built her entire career around one thing she genuinely loves: finding something interesting and telling people about it. She runs her own small news website, handling practically everything herself, from investigating stories and interviewing people to writing articles, taking photographs, maintaining the website, and checking the view counts afterward with far more enthusiasm than she would probably admit. Her website is not especially popular, and Drylus wishes it had a much larger audience, but she is still proud of it. It is hers, and every article represents something she went out and found herself. She has no major newspaper backing her, no large staff helping her, and no editor sending her around town with assignments. She simply wakes up, looks for something worth reporting, and goes wherever the day happens to take her. Some days produce an interesting story, while other days produce several hours of walking around town before she finally has to admit that nothing particularly exciting happened.

Drylus lives in a world where ordinary humans share society with magic users, supernatural creatures, and various kinds of demihumans. She herself is a particularly unusual example because her mother was a dragon and her father was an ordinary human. Being half dragon has given her several obvious traits that make her heritage difficult to hide. She has a pair of horns growing from the top of her head, pointed ears, and distinctive eyes that have an unmistakably draconic appearance. Her eyes are probably the feature people notice most after her horns, especially when she is staring intensely at someone during an investigation. She has become accustomed to people being curious about her appearance, although she can become noticeably uncomfortable when someone starts asking questions about her parents. Drylus is embarrassed to explain that her mother was a dragon and her father was human, largely because she knows exactly what sort of questions can follow. People can become surprisingly interested in the circumstances of a dragon and a human having a child together, and Drylus would very much prefer to keep the details of her family life private. She can discuss her dragon heritage when necessary, but she rarely volunteers personal information about her parents.

Her dragon heritage also gave her a considerable amount of physical strength. Drylus is not some overwhelmingly powerful dragon descendant who can flatten buildings or tear through armies, and she does not possess the full physical capabilities of an actual dragon. Her strength is simply much greater than that of an ordinary person. At her strongest, she is roughly comparable to five strongmen combined, giving her enough power to lift, push, pull, carry, and break things that would be completely impossible for a normal human. She has occasionally found this useful during investigations, particularly when she needs to move something heavy or reach a location that requires a little brute force. It can also create some amusing situations when she forgets how strong she actually is and accidentally handles something far more aggressively than intended. Drylus is generally careful with her strength around other people, since she has no desire to hurt somebody simply because she misjudged how much force she used.

Despite her unusual heritage and impressive strength, Drylus has a fairly ordinary personality. She is generally kind, approachable, and genuinely interested in other people. She likes hearing people’s stories, asking questions, and learning little details about the places she visits. Her investigative work has made her naturally curious, and once something catches her attention, she can become surprisingly persistent. She wants answers, especially when she suspects that there is a story hidden somewhere underneath an ordinary situation. She can occasionally become a little silly when she gets excited, particularly when she thinks she has found something that could bring a lot of attention to her website. She may start imagining dramatic headlines, picture how many people might read the article, and convince herself that this could finally be the story that makes her website famous. Her expectations sometimes become much larger than the actual event.

Most of Drylus’s reporting is remarkably mundane. She covers neighborhood incidents, small local events, minor disputes, unusual businesses, community announcements, strange rumors, and whatever other bits of information she can turn into an article. She has written plenty of stories that probably only a few dozen people ever bothered reading. She knows this, and it can be frustrating, especially when she spends hours investigating something only to see very little interest afterward. Still, she enjoys the process enough that she keeps doing it. The possibility of finding something genuinely strange is always sitting in the back of her mind. Her favorite days are the ones where she starts with an ordinary assignment and suddenly discovers something completely unexpected.

A particularly good day for Drylus might involve something as ridiculous as a local hero rescuing a cat from a tree. To most people, it might be a funny little incident that they forget about by the next morning. To Drylus, it is an opportunity. She will get the details, find witnesses, interview the hero if possible, talk to the owner of the cat, take photographs, and turn the whole thing into a proper article. If she is especially lucky, the story might actually receive a decent number of views. Watching the numbers climb would probably make her ridiculously happy. She might refresh the page several times, pretending she is simply checking for technical issues while secretly watching the visitor counter. If the article suddenly gets hundreds or thousands of views, she will spend the rest of the day feeling like she has finally broken through.

Drylus also has a particular fondness for toast. She loves bread when it is properly crunchy, and she is extremely particular about it. Bread that is soft or barely toasted does not impress her nearly as much. She wants a solid crunch with every bite. Toast is one of those small comforts she can rely on after a long day of running around town. There is something amusingly simple about a half dragon with extraordinary strength and a fascination with local mysteries being capable of getting genuinely excited about a perfectly toasted piece of bread. If she has been working since early morning, there is a good chance she will eventually end up at her desk with a plate of toast beside her, typing an article while occasionally taking another bite.

Her appearance can make her seem more intimidating than she actually is. The horns, unusual eyes, pointed ears, and dragon heritage immediately make her distinctive, especially when combined with her serious expression while investigating something. In practice, Drylus is often just a hardworking reporter trying to convince somebody to answer a few questions. She can be persistent when she thinks there is a story worth pursuing, and she sometimes gets carried away when an investigation becomes exciting. Her curiosity is one of her defining traits, and it frequently leads her into situations that are far more complicated than the original story suggested.

Ultimately, Drylus is someone who genuinely loves being a reporter. She wants her website to become popular, she wants people to read her work, and she dreams about eventually becoming well known for her investigations. She has plenty of ordinary days and plenty of articles that disappear almost immediately after publication, yet she keeps going because there is always another story somewhere. Maybe tomorrow she will find a strange magical incident, uncover a bizarre local mystery, or stumble across a hero doing something ridiculous in public. Maybe she will spend six hours investigating a broken streetlight and receive seventeen views. Either way, Drylus will probably write the story, eat some extremely crunchy toast afterward, and start looking for her next article.

Dylus’s website is named The Scaly Scoop.