Komura here is the patriarch of the Baroclinic Runners Lightning subspecies, so he's got a special place in my heart! When I was working on creating the subspecies, I really wanted to lean into what makes Lightning Lightning on FR, and that includes highlighting our often underappreciated modern, the Ridgeback. He really shows off the genes well, so I'm super happy with him being part of the original pair of Runners on the site <3
Lore:
Baroclinic Runners have made a name for themselves by chasing down areas of high baroclinicity to track potential storm development. They prize fulgurite, especially when freshly-formed and still warm to the touch. Their pursuit of the lightning-formed mineraloid demands that these dragons track developing storms all throughout the Shifting Expanse. Their frequent dives below the sand to excavate fresh fulgurite leave their scales constantly charged with electricity and the smell of ozone in their wake. Over time, Baroclinic Runners become covered in molten streaks of metal and silica from their expeditions, giving them their distinctive flecked, metallic appearance.
Now, why these dragons are so dedicated to the collection of what is admittedly a very cool, but also a pretty objectively useless not-quite-rock is a matter of debate. Outside observers theorize that it may be a way to honor the Stormcatcher, though rival scholars counter that these after-effects of a lightning strike have little bearing on productivity, so why would the Stormcatcher care for such a collection? There are several increasingly snippy academic rebuttals on the subject under peer review.
Recently, a curious hatchling took the path of least resistance and simply asked a Baroclinic Runner why they like fresh fulgurite so much, and the clever Spiral dragon simply smiled and said one word, "Tingly." Though it should be noted that they said it with a wink and a grin before taking off laughing, so how truthful this explanation is remains controversial.
Regardless, no one can deny these dragons' expertise in tracking storms from initiation through their eventual dissipation. Baroclinic Runners are hardly the only dragons with such meteorological expertise in the Shifting Expanse, but they do have the particular honor of being the most precise in predicting which storms are most likely to produce cloud-to-ground lightning strikes and when.
