It's several months since Cordelia emerged from the cacoon and ran off doing who knows what. I've managed to learn a lot about her in the months that I've known her. The first and foremost thing I've learned is that she is an idiot. Not the I mean that she is completely stupid. On the contrary, she is rather smart when it involves fighting others. This is something I experienced first hand when I accompanied her out on a few of her excursions. She is really good at learning the best way to kill a target. But in her daily life... I can't help but call her an idiot.
The word idiot may not be the best word, perhaps foolish or reckless could work. When she isn't out fighting something she just lazes around the base taking all of our alcohol. Like, leave some for the rest of us! On top of taking all the alcohol, she goes crazy when she gets too drunk. I've had to limit the amount of alcohol we keep in the base just to make sure the uninhibited Dragon doesn't destroy the mountain at some point.
I've heard from her that the humanoid form she can take can only last a total of 24 hours and she has to wait a month before using it again, but then she goes and uses it on some ridiculous problem she created herself. A couple of months ago Cordelia was experimenting with her skills, according to her, and she messed with the weather somehow and it stormclouds had gathered, causing a lighting storm to appear around the base. Without any hesitation at all the transformed into her humanoid form and ran into my residence then refused to leave. I have no idea why, but for some reason, she is unreasonably afraid of lightning. Of the main eight elements, lightning is certainly the most damage oriented, but even as her transformation was nearing its end she still wouldn't leave my room. I did manage to forcefully move her out of my room and to a different building by the time her transformation ended. If any room is getting destroyed I refuse to let it be mine. But even with rubble and debris on top of her she still wouldn't move. No, that's not exactly accurate, she did move, just not away from the collapsed building on top of her. Instead, she was digging into the ground, creating a massive hole that concealed her whole body. Since then she has continuously used this hole whenever a lightning storm is nearby. She could have just done this from the beginning instead of wasting a valuable cooldown. But when I brought this up with her she just avoided the topic and continuously tried to shift the conversation... she clearly didn't think about this.
Something I had also noticed was that Cordelia's intelligence is unusually skewed. I don't mean her idiocy in regards to her daily life, but her general knowledge. At times she can explain how many things work, like the exact process of how to create fire and how to increase the intensity. It's at times like these that she sounds like a scholar, but at other times she is as clueless as a child. Until I had Lia teach her about well pretty much everything, from the names of the continents to the defined territory and politics of each country. Perhaps this could be attributed to her lack of interaction with other people, but even when accounting for this, she barely knew anything. Although through the stuff she does know, I have been able to increase the efficiency of my fire and earth magic, I've was even able to learn some ice magic through her teachings.
On that topic, Cordelia is strangely good at teaching other people. Many of my subordinates have actually sought her out to learn after they saw the improvement in my elemental abilities. After attending just a couple of her lessons, some people saw an immediate improvement in their elemental magic. If she could maintain her humanoid form for long periods of time then she could probably make a living out of teaching others.
Speaking of making a living, there have been a few problems in regards to her becoming an adventurer. Her way of completing quests is incredibly unethical. She is seriously way more of a bandit than I am. I went with Cordelia to town to do some quests since I'm also technically an adventurer, and we came across a rather interesting quest. To investigate a recent string of robberies regarding adventurers who are returning from their quests. I had gone to go accept it but Cordelia wanted nothing to do with it. Recently Cordelia had gotten a lot of new stuff but I had just assumed that she bought them from the money she earned as an adventurer together with the allowance I give her... I couldn't have been more wrong. It wasn't until a month later that I caught her in the act. She was waiting around the outskirts of one of the towns and as soon as she noticed some new adventurers coming back from the Guild issued gathering quest, she went and hid herself. As the adventurers drew close she jumped them, creating a heavy fog to hide her appearance, she knocked them unconscious and dragged them into a bush and proceeded to strip them of everything they had, clothes, money, weapons, armour, and the gathering objectives. Eating everything else, she only took the quest objective back with her as she returned to the Guild and handed them in. When I saw this I completely understood why she didn't want anything to do with the investigation quest from the prior month, she was the damn culprit!
Later on back in the base, I found the rest of the stuff she looted from those adventurers, including the stuff she ate that same day. Since when could she store things in her stomach like that? When I went to question her about her recent exploits of mugging adventurers and her storage stomach, she freely admitted to robbing them and that it's not against the rules as long as no one finds out it's her. I think that there's something wrong with that logic... but I won't condemn her either since I have admittedly done similar things in the past, at the end of the day I am the leader of a group of bandits. But the interesting thing I learned is about the way Elite Monsters are. Apparently they can improve certain qualities of themselves after meeting certain requirements, and the Cordelia did so and got something called Extreme Stomach, allowing her to keep things stored in her stomach without dissolving and digesting so she can use them later. She is essentially a walking bag now, although if you ask me it's kinda disgusting.
One of the other things I've noticed is that several of the other Dragonoids and I have this strange feeling of reverence towards Cordelia. We can't seem to actively do anything dangerous to her, not that most of us would do so to begin with. But we also have this strange feeling that she needs to be protected. My take on this is the influence that a Spirit Dragon has on their descendants. I've seen Celestial Dragons before and haven't felt this feeling before so if this is the case then it is either limited to Spirit Dragons or it's just the Dragonoids with Spirit Dragon ancestry, as I've noticed the Dragonoids that don't have Spirit Dragon ancestors don't share this compelling feeling. But another possible cause for this is that as their descendants we are compelled to preserve the last remaining Spirit Dragon.
Well, regardless of this feeling, in addition to our initial business relationship, I think of her as a friend after the time I've spent with her these past several months. And over these months she has managed to get a couple of more levels, so it's about time for the preparations I've been making to bear fruit. At long last our System Quests can porogress.