[Gift] 2024 Scavenger hunt - Floral Parasite

Spreading his wings, Kaysro gently landed in the orchard with a soft crunch of fallen leaves. The afternoon sun flashed in his eye for a second, forcing him to squint uncomfortably, but a change of posture soon fixed his issue. The sky was not only cloudless but quite windy, too, bringing with it a shower of orange leaves framing the silhouettes of migrating birds overhead. Fluffing his neck feathers up, Kaysro thought it was quite a nice day for an outing.

“Why is it so cold? It’s not even winter,” his rider, Feye, grumbled above him. She hugged her jacket tighter around herself before unclipping the harness that tied her to his saddle- ‘saddle’, she says, but in Kaysro’s personal opinion it’s literally just three straps fastened in a triangle fashion. But now’s not the time to start another debate about his own rider’s abysmal craft skills- they had a task at hand. That task, according to Feye, was to find a hatchling dragon that had gone missing in the orchard, and all they knew was that the dragon had flowers growing on it. Kaysro also suggested to Feye that they should pick some apples while they’re at it, but Feye said something about the orchard belonging to the entire Flight and Kaysro tuned out after that.

“It’s because you don’t have feathers,” Kaysro replied smoothly, snickering at the eyeroll that Feye gave him in return. He batted at her head with one wing, to which she ruffled up his wing feathers which made him grumble and start to preen. 

“Alright, focus, where can a dragon with flowers on its back hide?” Feye thought out loud. “Probably on the ground. Especially if it could blend into the ground, which I think there is a high chance this one might.” Kaysro agreed with her thinking, and the two of them started walking in opposite directions to search for the offending hatchling.

Scanning the ground, he still hasn’t found an inkling of where the dragon could be, and judging from the slightly irritated thoughts coming in from Feye, she hasn’t either. He did, however, grab quite a few apples along the way, and had now filled up the satchel tied to his saddle. Flowers… Where can a dragon with flowers hide? 

He was so preoccupied with his thoughts that he ran headfirst into a vine, startling him as it tangled around his horns. It was the same brownish colour as the apple trees themselves, and seemed to be a parasitic vine of some sort that lived with the trees. One of the vines even had an apple caught in it.

Wait…

Squinting some more, Kaysro saw movement in the vine that had the apple stuck in it. The moving appeared to be rhythmic, and there was a suspicious amount of strange white petals stuck to the back of the vine.

By now Feye had ran back to where he was, sensing that he had found something through their telepathic bond. She walked in, just in time to lock eyes with the large purple eyes of a gecko-looking dragon. Its browns blended almost perfectly with the vines that it had been sitting on, and were it not for the obvious white flowers on its back, she would’ve sworn this was just an eerily dragon-looking vine. She chirped- as informed by Kaysro, it was in fact a female dragon- and untangled from the vine just enough that the two could now see she was holding the apple that had been ‘stuck to the vine’, and was in fact munching a hole through the apple as Feye and Kaysro stood in shock.

“Hey,” the dragon invited. “Want some apple?”