Bugtown is a plane of reality where dead things regrow, and where certain people are gifted with the ability to 'shift' between reality levels at will. Some folks who do this can alter themselves to appear appropriate to the area, such as if they go to an all-deep-space realm they might show up as a gas giant planet. If they arrive to an all water-world, they'd be a fish. At Carramba, there are dozens of Bugtowners that flip between here and their home, sometimes they choose to completely blend in with other Humans and lose their exotic appearances if they have any, but others don't care.

This is a group who just don't care.

They really don't share too many classes, but they do all enjoy shooting their guns at afternoon target practice sessions. (Given to folks like this just to keep them from bothering anyone else around town.) As expected, Stenton is the best shot. And on occasion, Geither becomes the moving target - because they all know he can handle the pain and not really get hurt.

Besides, all of them can just shift away and back all healed up. Reality shifting is a darn handy power.

It got them into trouble, it can get them out. By accident (... yyeeaaaaah. accident.) they entered the Admin-only section of the Torus after school one night, late, and found themselves in a records room which contained test results and answer sheets - from past, present and future classes. Natually they didn't want to take any of these answers. Really. They didn't. Yet somehow they wound up with handfulls of them stuffed into pockets and under shirts, some even popped back to their home dimension for safe keeping. You know, just in case any other kids of ... less valliant goals were to come across them!

They were suitably surprised when several ranking Carramba Admin cornered them the next day, all blustery and angry. Well, of course they'd give everything back! How were they to know that the very papers they'd taken for safe keeping were next-weeks exams? The Admin discussed things and came up with a very strange punishment indeed.

They needed to learn "responsibility". That their actions impacted everyone and everything around them. But they already knew this. They were in fact painfully aware that their actions had repercussions around town or in other dimensions.

But that wasn't what Professor Hollis and Dean Luger decided was good enough. No, they had to leave this dimension for a while and study off-world without leaving it until they came back with ... dragons.

Why dragons! Why not!? Put a small life form in the hands of these kids and ... well, too small and they might squish it just to see what color its guts are. That's how people from Bugtown are. But a big enough pet - or companion - or mount ... Maybe they'd start learning to do better things with themselves than swipe test scores and cheat their way through high school.

Or, they might come away from it all with a very big group of even harder to control dragons...

Who knows? Well, let's head out to Black Sheep Weyr and find out what happens.

NEXT!