"Wait, you believe me that easily?" Stanley asked, utterly surprised.

  "No, I'm quite skeptical, but I don't want to do paperwork, and you effectively just volunteered," he chuckled.

  Stanley cursed internally as the man, who he figured must be some low-level manager despite not being able to see an ID badge anywhere on him for some reason, smirked as he made a VoIP call to some other office on the ship.

  "Hello, sir, I regret to infor-- Oh, right. I forgot you had a live video feed of it too... No, no, I understand you don't need me to explain what you just saw... I just forgot you had a live feed over there... Okay... Well, the report will be made by a..." He turned to Stanley. "I'm sorry, what's your name again?"

  Okay, Stanley, you can lie about your name and get out--

  "I'm Stanley Salazar from Information Systems."

  Damn you, mouth, moving before I finish thinking!

  Wait, they'd be able to find my name anyway... and then they'd make me do even more paperwork... plus I'm wearing a nametag... Okay, it was a bad idea, but still, for the love of all that is holy, stop talking before the thinking is done, dammit!

  "A Mr. Salazar'll make it. He-- No, I said Salazar... Yeah. Anyway, he's going to be writing the report because he believes he's figured out our situation from this... Yeah, he believes we're in some silly book series called Wings of Fire. Can you ima-- What do you mean they've already figured that out? Only a--" He quickly shut up. "The CEO and CIO both said it? Just, uhh... No, no... never mind what I was going to say. It's not important now. Anyway, how do we know... Oh, the three moons also just happen to be a thing there... And those were the kinds that live in the rainforest--"

  "Hey, is there any chance I can, like, not write that report then?" Stanley interrupted.

  The man sighed and rolled his eyes. "Who do you want the report from, then?... You want it from me? Are you sure that... Okay." He hung up the phone before saying "Son of a bitch."

  Stanley, on the other hand, silently celebrated.

  === Several Hours Later ===

  Devan listened to the radio traffic as the company prepared to send a team to investigate the edge of the rainforest on foot.

  At this point, they had decided that there probably wasn't anything too dangerous in this immediate area--at least not too dangerous for the team consisting mostly of professional rednecks that were the first to volunteer to go in there. Of course, redneck or not, they were ordered to take guns--granted, everyone on the team was already planning to, but management still explicitly ordered it. Devan figured it was either as a formality or because most of the compliance officers, as few as the fleet had in the first place, were more bored out of their minds than anyone else with the sudden lack of any governments to deal with and were searching desperately for a reason to do anything.

  At this point, if the fact that dragons had been seen during the drone flight--well, crash--was supposed to be kept a secret, that objective clearly failed. Pretty much everyone who wasn't asleep had heard.

  Despite this being one of the more interesting things that have happened in the last couple of weeks, Devan still found himself zoning out and not paying attention to the string of radio chatter occasionally interrupted by serious, but still benign, information.

  It wasn't until he saw a few tenders heading toward the shore that he realized he hadn't been paying attention to the radio when the team was given the order to go ahead.

  "Now, y'all, this ain't D-Day. We're investigating some damn trees and shit. Stop pretending." He heard a faint voice as the boats neared the shore.

  "Boat C, your transmitter is depressed," whatever officer was in charge of this operation stated dryly, annoyance seeping into his voice.

  "W- you're sittin' on my radio. Get--" He heard the voice faintly again before it returned more clearly, "Sorry, sir. We had a... radio positioning issue."

  The boats soon landed on the shore, and Devan watched through his binoculars as some of them clearly were still pretending it was D-Day. However, the "radio positioning issue" and grown men pretending they were taking a hostile beach, unfortunately, ended up being the most interesting parts of this operation to observe, as far as he could tell.

  The biggest deal seemed to be that they found some abnormally large fruit. They had already seen that the trees were quite large, and everything else they found--poisonous frogs and such--was what you'd expect to find in a normal rainforest. He leaned back in his chair.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Ugh, why did I think this would end up being anything interesting?

  "Hey! Who launched that boat?" He then heard the officer suddenly bark over the radio.

  Devan snapped back upright in his seat. There was another boat speeding towards the shore.

  "Unidentified boat crew, you are not authorized to be in the water at present. Please identify yourselves."

  Silence followed the officer's words. Devan grabbed his binoculars again.

  "Someone identify who's on that boat and try to figure out what, if any, frequency they're on," Devan heard as he tried to focus his binoculars on the new boat as it headed towards the shore. "If the occupants of that boat are on this frequency, do not approach the shore. Adjust course and return to the ship you launched from immediately."

  The officer's words had little effect as the small boat rammed into the coastline rather roughly just moments later. Two figures stumbled out onto the beach. It was then that Devan could tell who it was.

  Doofus and Dork. Who could have guessed?

  === About an Hour Earlier ===

  "Doofus and Dork," as they were commonly known on the Presidential, were about to hit the jackpot.

  Doofus and Dork were two individuals that few people knew the real names of, let alone cared to remember. They were technically fired months prior, but an error at the Department of Personnel Management for the subsidiary they worked for resulted in them never being notified, still receiving their paychecks, and never having their employee accounts and keycards deactivated. Their manager and direct coworkers had been transferred somewhere else in the company, laid off, or successfully fired themselves, and since they rarely interacted with anyone outside of that department, nobody on the ship knew exactly who they worked for or what they did.

  Speculation ranged between everything from facilities services or procurement to classified projects--which became a more and more popular theory, as nobody knew why they were there. Management had planned to intercept them--they darted off as soon as anyone started asking questions--to inquire who their manager and department were the next time the fleet was near a port. That way, if they had to take action, they could simply drop them off there instead of having to prepare their brig, which was temporarily being used as extra storage space that would have to be cleared out. Anything important they could potentially get into was locked away, guarded, or both, anyway.

  That, of course, never happened.

  Today, however, they had managed to find a bar left over from the Presidential's time as a cruise ship that had been converted into, again, extra storage space. The important part? The bottles hadn't been removed.

  "Free booze!"

  === Back on the Beach ===

  "What the hell?" Several people interrupted their work of grabbing everything that caught their eyes and putting it in a plastic bag to look up at the new arrivals.

  "Oh, Doofus and Dork. What a surprise," the team supervisor stepped closer to them. "You up to your classified shit?" He asked with a slightly mocking tone.

  "Yesssu-- Yesss sssir!" Doofus (or Dork--nobody differentiates between the two) responded, mustering all of his energy to still drunkenly slur his speech.

  "Mhm, and are you aware you're not authorized to be her?"

  "No, y-yyou're no-- not authorizzed t-to be here. I--" He looked between himself and his companion. "We're authorsed-- sorized to be here."

  "No, you're not."

  Doofus and Dork looked at each other with as much seriousness as they could before making a drunken run into the forest.

  They wouldn't have gotten far if it weren't for hesitation by the company team.

  "Uhh, are we supposed to go after them?"

  "Maybe," the supervisor responded before radioing in that same question. "Sir, it turned out to be Doofus and Dork. They're drunk and ran into the rainforest. Should we go after them?"

  There was a pause on the other end before a simple reply of "stand by" came back.

  A few minutes later, the radio came back to life. "Did they have anything with them?"

  "Yes, one of them was wearing a backpack."

  After another pause and sigh, the officer responded, "Yes, if it's possible, try to find and arrest them."

  With that, the hunt began--the hunt for two drunk idiots hiding in a damned rainforest.

  === Meanwhile Deeper in the Rainforest ===

  Deathbringer was on the case.

  To him, he was conducting an investigation to protect the kingdom and Queen Glory from a potential threat. To Glory, it was also a chance to not be constantly exhausted by his bodyguarding.

  Everyone had been quite skeptical of the dragonets' story, but it still had to be investigated nonetheless. Deathbringer was the first to... he was the one to volunteer.

  He followed the two dragonets' to where they claimed to have encountered the so-called "monster," a satchel of scrolls hung around his neck. The regular guards patrolling the rainforest were simultaneously distributed orders to be on high alert for any more abnormal activity.

  He was supposed to be investigating the creature only--particularly whether it even existed or not--and then reporting back to Glory. Those were his orders, anyway. He slowly began forgetting those orders after they arrived at the clearing, though.

  "So, what sound did it make in the air?" He had been sitting on the ground asking the dragonets questions while shuffling through the scrolls he had brought while occasionally glancing up at the crumpled husk of the creature, trying to find anything like it in the scrolls.

  "I-it was a big, scary buzzing," Wonder replied, shivering at the thought of the experience.

  Deathbringer went on with his questioning and scroll-skimming for a good while--even poking the carcass with a claw, during which Leopard and Wonder took cover behind a tree on the opposite side of the clearing--but he never found any relevant information in any of the scrolls.

  Nothing.

  Finally, he asked, "What direction did it come from?"

  "T-that way." Leopard pointed in the direction it had initially flown in from earlier that day. "Wait, why? Weren't we going to go back to the village now?"

  "You two do that. I'm investigating further." He began gathering up his scrolls. "Just hurry back. The route we took is safe enough now. Tell Queen Glory that her kingdom's finest is investigating further," he said, turning to fly in the direction Leopard had indicated.