Tsundere Travels

Ember awoke to her head pounding, like her brain was demanding to be let out and go for a walk. The throbbing pain was really intense, but it wasn’t the worst pain she had felt. That honor literally fell to the time when she was very young and had fallen down a mountain. On that day, she had flown to the top of that same mountain and had misjudged her landing. Her left wing broke when she slammed into the mountain face, instead of the cave entrance she had been aiming for. And it had been a very long way down.

The dragoness took a deep breath, then groaned aloud. Remembering that childhood mistake wasn’t going to help her wake up. She realized that her throat felt really dry for some reason, and she couldn’t remember when she had gone to bed. Wherever she was, it certainly wasn’t her cave in the Dragon Lands. She was lying on her back on a hard surface, with what felt like a rough pillow under her head. And she had somehow tangled herself up in her blanket.

Before opening her eyes, Ember instinctively sniffed the air. Immediately, she got a whiff of something really nasty. Unwashed animals and the strong scent of urine hit her sensitive nose, so she immediately reached up to cover her muzzle with her hands. But for some reason, her arms were stuck. She struggled and rolled around, but her arms were pinned to her chest and crossed over each other.

The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a gray ceiling. There was a wall directly to her right, and open space to her left. She guessed that she was lying on the floor, and her first thought was to get up and look around. So she rolled over onto her left side so she could stand up. But when she rolled onto her side, she rolled off whatever she was lying on and began to fall. In her panic, she imagined that she was falling off that childhood mountain again. An instant later, she landed face first on a cold surface. Relief flooded her mind as she realized she wasn’t falling off a mountain, but then her muzzle started to ache. Ember tried to get her arms under herself so she could push off the ground and stand up, but her arms were still pinned to her body. And she realized, her wings were also pinned.

The Dragon Lord realized that she was going to have to stand up the hard way. So she twisted and wiggled her body until she got her knees up under her. A quick shift of her weight back towards her heels, and with a grunt of effort she lifted her body to sit back on her heels. A little more effort, and the dragoness was standing on her knees. Ember paused for a moment to take a breath, then shifted her weight to her left knee. In a quick motion. she pulled her right leg out from under her body and placed that foot on the ground. A shift of weight to her right leg, then a lean forward, and one final push of her leg muscles got the dragoness to her feet. Ember breathed a sigh of relief, then took a look around.

She discovered she was in a small room, and was facing a gray wall. The wall looked like it was made of rock, but it was too smooth and the color was too even. Maybe it was carved out with magic? To her left was a similar wall, with a low shelf maybe two feet off of the ground. On the shelf was a pillow. Ember quickly realized that the shelf was where she had been sleeping. To her right was another smooth, bare wall. A stray thought told her that the room was barely big enough for her to spread her wings open wide. The dragoness rotated in place and expected to see another smooth wall. But instead, she saw metal bars. Imprisoned! She, the Dragon Lord, had been put in a prison!

“Hey!”

No one was visible outside of the bars, just a blank wall and a narrow hallway that went left and right. She could see the end of the hallway on her left, but the hallway continued out of her sight to her right. Ember reached out to grab the bars, but yet again she couldn’t. Her frustration spiked, and she was determined to find out why she couldn’t move her arms.

For the first time since she woke up, Ember looked down at her body. She was surprised to see that she was wearing a white shirt of some sort. As she wiggled around in the shirt, she noted that the fabric felt rough and stiff against her scales. The sleeves of the shirt were really long, and she could feel that they wrapped around to her back when she tugged on them.

Intuition struck: it was no mere shirt, she had been RESTRAINED. Her temper instantly boiled over, and she flexed her powerful dragon muscles against the stiff fabric. With a loud ROAR, she yanked her arms outwards and tore them free from the straitjacket’s embrace! Still raging, the Dragon Lord grabbed the fabric over her chest in her claws and tore it to shreds. The ruined straitjacket fell to the floor, and the dragoness stretched her wings open wide. Oh, it felt so good to close her eyes and stretch everything out!

The dragoness had heard the sound of a door opening in the middle of her invigorating stretch. She opened her eyes to see one of those bald monkeys standing outside of her prison cell. It was dressed in some sort of dark blue clothing. The outfit looked kind of formal, like a uniform. But what did she know about clothes? The only thing she ever wore was armor. The guard had slipped a long stick between the bars, and was trying to poke her with it. Ember knew that a simple stick couldn’t hurt her, but curiosity made her look down at its point anyway. Something was tied to the end, and she saw the electrical arc just before it jabbed into her chest.

A sudden sensation of bees crawling over her scales hit her, and her entire body cramped up. Ember’s legs collapsed from under her, and she fell hard to the floor. The dragoness realized that the feeling was very familiar just as the blackness overtook her mind, and she fell unconscious.