Tea Leaf Dragon (Bancha)

Physical Description

The bancha tea leaf dragon is a true dragon no larger than a pseudodragon, its serpentine body barely two feet from snout to tail-tip. Where other dragons wear glittering scales, this little creature is shingled from head to tail in cured bancha leaves, coarse and late-harvested, in muted shades of olive, khaki, and toasted brown. The leaves overlap like roof thatch, rustling faintly with papery whispers whenever the dragon shifts. Its wing membranes are thin as dried tea leaves held to the light, veined with amber, and its belly is a soft, matte green like a leaf before roasting. In sunlight the whole dragon smells faintly of a warm kettle: toasted grain, dry grass, and a whisper of smoke.

Its eyes are the color of properly brewed bancha, a clear golden-amber, and they brighten when it is curious (which is nearly always). A crest of larger leaves runs from its brow to the base of its neck, flaring when it is pleased or alarmed. Its claws and the ridges of its tail are the deep umber of heavily roasted leaves, and when it curls up to sleep it does so in a tight spiral, exactly like a rolled leaf, tucking its snout beneath one wing.

The Magic Within

Like all tea leaf dragons, the bancha dragon can regulate its internal temperature with astonishing precision: it can bring a gallon of water to a rolling boil in a minute, or freeze an ice-cube tray's worth of water in fifteen seconds. This suits the bancha dragon's temperament perfectly, for bancha must be brewed in water well off the boil, and the dragon takes visible offense at tea scalded by careless hands. This same inner heat and cold wards it; poison runs off it like water off a leaf, and it cannot be charmed, frightened, or sickened, its simple, honest nature too grounded to be unsettled.

The dragon's most remarkable gift is its Tea Leaf Body. Sit it in any drinkable liquid and that liquid slowly steeps into tea, the type of the dragon's choosing, though a bancha dragon almost always chooses bancha. Potions left in its care grow stronger and more discreet; poisons, toxins, and foul brews gradually lose their bite, steeping down into nothing but a mild, toasty cup. Its spittle and breath carry this magic as weapons: a glob of scalding or freezing tea hurled at a foe, or a full 30-foot spew of it, a defense that has left more than one magical-creature smuggler soaked, steaming, and unconscious.

Temperament

Bancha dragons embody their tea. Bancha is the everyday tea of the common household, humble, hardy, unpretentious, and so the bancha dragon is unglamorous, endlessly practical, and generous to a fault. It delights in small kindnesses, detecting poison in a noble's cup, strengthening an alchemist friend's tonics, turning a cruel joke's tankard of ale into gentle tea, and it treasures the sort of friendship that asks for no ceremony. Those who mistake its plainness for weakness rarely make the mistake twice. A bancha dragon bonds as a familiar only through a contract of equals, friend and partner, never pet or property, and it keeps those terms faithfully, the way bancha itself keeps nothing back: what you see is exactly what you drink.