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The Alchemical Properties of Hydrochloric Acid

SecretJWorld/Jakros

BlueSky: HERE

Furaffinity: HERE

SoFurry: [HERE](../u/SecretJWorldHERE)

CW for: Oral Vore, Size Difference, 2nd Person POV

‘-and so, because of its nature both real and imagined as a pure and orderly substance, the alchemical fascination with gold is often a misunderstanding, and implicative of some distasteful beliefs. In truth, gold’s symbolic meaning in alchemy would be better understood as the defiance of entropy. And, um, actually are you still listening?’

You are not in fact listening. At least you aren’t until those last few words. A direct address gives you the hint needed to jolt to alertness, and blink yourself back into focus. When the dragon Jakryos looks down at you, he only sees the change in your expression, all answering his own question. Admittedly, no matter how much he might enjoy talking about the world of alchemy, the details of Jakryos’ lesson remain hard to follow. When you lose track for even a moment, the whole train of thought suddenly disintegrates into white noise.

You apologize, briefly and without giving away that you have no idea just how much of the lecture you missed. Adjusting your posture on the lone chair where you sit, you gather your bearings to reconstruct the impression of attentiveness. It’s a matter of hoping that you can keep it up for the rest of the day…unlikely as it is.

You’re seated among haphazard tables and shelves overflowing with mechanical gizmos, books, and bottled substances of dubious safety. Paper stacks mixing scratched notes and formal documents are strewn about with no apparent system of organization in place. It’s the lab which Jakryos has been using for his work, and he certainly hasn’t been keeping it in ideal condition. Was it his lab or was it someone else’s from whom he was simply borrowing it? You couldn’t really remember and aren’t sure which is better. But seated opposite from you is the dragon himself; something of a looming presence under the low ceiling, with his wings draped around him like a fluffy, feathery robe. Between the two of you is a huge, spherical bottle, dislodged from its normal place balancing on the end of Jakryos’ tail. Within the glass sphere is a cloudy red-gold mixture, saturated with tiny bubbles hissing as they breach the surface.

Jakryos’ expression turns into a gentle smile, ‘alright, if you lost some of what I said, I’ll come back to it later. Here, you’re not gonna want to sleep through this,’ he explains. His scaled paw reaches up to his neck, poking through the mess of goods attached to the collars around his neck. Hanging from the three loops of leather are dozens of glass bottles, bundles of plants, and even some writing tools. There’s no telling how he finds the bottle he needs without looking, but when his paw drifts over the shaped glass it is immediately recognized, and a quick motion unhooks it from position. ‘Now, you can do some fun stuff just mixing up chemicals, but it’s the introduction of magic which defines modern alchemy.’ He presents the glass tube to you, a digit covering the rubber stopper. Within is an array of ruby red spines clattering against the walls of their container. They look rather pretty all bundled together, like some kind of spiky gemstone, but you reckon they are much safer bottled up than as a part of whatever organism they grew on.

‘These spines hold an animal curse that reacts to iron in liquids. Add one in, like so-’ He uncorks and readjusts the bottle in his paw, tapping at the back until one of the spines starts to slip out from the open end. One more tap and it comes free, landing flat atop the liquid surface. It’s rather underwhelming watching it float there until you start to notice how the mixture is reacting. The cloudy red starts to condense toward the liquid surface, which seems to bulge and strain to contain itself. To your surprise, the red material breaches the surface and begins to release itself as thousands of sparkling bubbles. Those beads of red simply float up and out through the bottle’s neck, a gorgeous crimson nebula. Jakryos makes haste to cap the bottle with a funnel and tubing leading to a much smaller container which has to be held upside-down. You get to enjoy the show for a long while, the flow of bubbles growing intense, then thinning out, and eventually cutting off completely. Once the last has found its new home, the new bottle is sealed with a metal latch and set aside. With the demonstration done, Jakryos sets his paws back down on the big bottle and looks down at you, his expression rather proud.

‘There we are. In this case we were able to pull the iron out of the mixture on a water film, leaving everything else undisturbed. It ends up being both useful and pretty, just be sure not to accidentally prick yourself on one of the spines.’ Pulling a pair of metal tweezers from a nearby table, Jakryos has to reach his whole arm down the neck of the bottle to fish out the original needle. ‘Of course now that it’s been used, this one here isn’t a threat to anyone. What did you think of that?’

His visual lessons are definitely far more captivating than the spoken ones, and you nod and agree. Looking into the big bottle now, the liquid has an opaque golden color to it, with bubbles that are restricted to the solution itself, as you’d expect. You ask Jakryos what other curses are used for alchemy, a question which makes his face positively light up.

‘Any that you can get your hands on!’ he exclaims, ‘the great thing about animal curses is that they are extremely consistent. They go against rational chemistry, but once the curse runs out of energy, things tend to snap back into place and make sense again. Usually that means accomplishing something which would normally take a lengthy chemical process. Eventually, the bubbles we collected will pop and we’ll have all those impurities extracted. From there, I’ve got a few root cuttings which attract specific metals, letting us get some mostly-purified materials to reuse later on. But not every material gets purified in the same way, and some magic effects bring you through a few weird intermediate steps which can bring all their own complications. Really that’s what my studies in alchemy are all about. If you can figure out what all these different biological magics do, you’ll have a toolkit for any sort of problem.’

Having explained all that came to mind, and with his face positively beaming with excitement, Jakryos twists himself around to find some other material to demonstrate with. His paws leave his bottle to shove through the devices stacked high against the wall behind him. Without something holding the bottle upright, you see it teeter off of its balance but for only a moment before the alchemist’s tail snaps outward, with its broad end fanned out to catch and cushion the glass. When explaining how to responsibly perform alchemy at the beginning of the lesson, the dragon’s opinion was brief but stern. ‘I don’t know a practice where it’s more important to be aware of your surroundings,’ he told you. You didn’t realize it, but you started holding your breath when you saw the bottle tip. It comes out with a draining sigh. Small missteps have big consequences in this practice, and neither of you want to see them firsthand. Those are discoveries best made only by someone who came before you.

But you’re watching alchemy, not performing it, so you have plenty of spare time and attention to spend on whatever curious thing catches your interest. Your focus travels along the notes carpeting the floor, and the technical equipment Jakryos is struggling to sort through. All of it pulls at your curiosity, but your focus continues to wander until it ends up fixed on the dragon himself, or at least a distorted, upside-down profile of him when you look through that huge bottle between the two of you. You lean in and the angle of the glass directs your sight under his drooping wings. What you see is Jakryos carrying a handsome amount of stomach around, like he swallowed something that weighed down his midsection and pushed apart his legs. At first you think it must be some diffraction trick, but it soon becomes apparent that the light is only slightly exaggerating what is already there. You watch, and you form some unusual feelings at the sight, forcing you to pause to wonder where your thoughts are going. Dragons come in all shapes, and he’s certainly not the only one carrying a belly like that. But you can’t help but stare a while longer. It’s weird, certainly not a bad sort of weird, but simply something off, something noticeable in you. It’s a feeling which you can’t place, so instead of trying to identify it, you keep watching while the dragon shuffles through his things.

Without warning Jakryos turns back to you, wings sweeping around and once again hiding his lower half. For all his awareness in maintaining his equipment, he doesn’t seem to realize that you’ve been staring at his stomach for the past couple minutes. Instead he’s simply happy to continue on with the lecture, and does so with all his enthusiasm intact. He announces his next topic with some pride. ‘Alright, let’s keep going. This little thing here crystallizes light, which can then be used for all kinds of weird little projects.’

Jakryos goes on to give his explanation into some new concept of physical magic, something that surely would have kept your attention had it not been completely robbed by the memory of what you saw before. Loaded thoughts masquerading as questions and curiosities nag at your head. How heavy could a stomach like that be? Is it easy to carry it around? He hops around the lab making it look easy for sure. You get the impression it must be awfully soft too; can something that’s scaled be soft? Your attention looks down between the dragon’s dropped wings, watching for any moment where they might raise enough for you to glimpse at his stomach again. For whatever reason, you just feel that just one more good look will get you your answers and put all those nagging thoughts to rest.

‘And…you’re zoning out again, you’re sure everything is alright?’ Jakryos’ voice reaches through your imagination. When you come to, the focus of your attention is…right in front of you. The dragon now stands only a few paces away, and he looks down at you with a sunken brow. When you fail to come up with an answer, he lowers his head down to your level, looking straight into you. ‘You know, there is a lot of stuff in this room you could be staring at, but it’s a little weird to see you staring at me instead. What’s that all about? What’s on your mind?’ Asking for other’s thoughts was a friendly and usually beneficial habit; right here, right now, that was exactly the sort of question you did not want to answer, not aloud, not in front of him. Your mind raced, but your tongue failed to find purchase in your mouth. There was no good excuse for losing focus a second time.

With his head still hovering close, Jakryos surprised you with a light smile, washing away any indication of being upset having had his lesson ignored. ‘So you really were staring at me, that’s cute. Pretty flattering, honestly. You didn’t come in here asking to learn about alchemy just so you could gawk at me did you?’

You fidget and say “um” and try to piece together some excuse to save face for this situation which was clearly going south. Only, your tangled words get halted in your throat when a paw rests on your shoulder. ‘Come on, focus, tell me what you were looking at. No excuses, just the truth,’ Jakryos instructs you. Heeding his advice, your words fall in single file. Only a few need to be said to get a smile on the dragon’s face. The only thing you were staring at was his stomach, that’s it. Nothing more and that was the truth.

‘You don’t say,’ he thinks to you, lip twisting just a smidge. At first you wonder if he thinks you’re lying, it’s a pretty dumb thing to admit after all. Instead, you see the dragon raise himself up, feathered wings receding to his back and allowing you to see him in full, now settled on his haunches. It’s no special sight to most, but to you, there are little details that stand out in your mind. His stomach hangs forward with its weight, though it’s held firm enough to stay raised from the ground. Wide scales extend from one end to the other, pushing the dragon’s legs aside. And while you watch, Jakryos lets a paw settle atop the curve of his stomach, digits lightly drumming on his scales.

Your request is asked before you can think of it, ‘you’d like to come feel it wouldn’t you? No need to be embarrassed, but let’s not waste any time hesitating, alright?’ Jakryos suggests to you. He watches you patiently, but with expectation, like he already knows your desires, knows them better than you do. And still he taps at his stomach, patient, and not so subtly keeping the attention on the object of your focus. Not bearing his gaze for long, you swallow your restraint and trudge up towards the dragon. You plan on stopping, but a paw on your back guides you the full distance, and a little more. Before you know it you’re being pressed up against Jakryos’ belly, closer than you ever thought possible. You’re not sure if it’s the heat of that belly or the firm smoothness of the scales that you notice first. It’s a surface like iron that’s been left out in the sun. It only takes a few moments, moments that feel like ages, for you to feel warmed up to your core; but that might be more than the dragon’s body heat.

It’s only once the paw on your back relieves some of its pressure that you realize how heavy your breathing has gotten. Silently you hope that it wasn’t heard, but the dragon grinning down at you suggests otherwise. You step forward and bury your head against his scales just so he won’t see that same expression mirrored on your face.

‘You’re very sweet, I was worried you were just teasing me,’ he thinks to you. Slowly he leans forward in a motion that makes everything but the ground seem to tilt and bear on you. It forces you back a step and a half while his stomach begins to hover overhead, now weighing down on top of you. You can’t quite stand upright. ‘-’course I wouldn’t feel as friendly if you were. You could find yourself on the other side of these scales doing that.’ It’s an idea that makes your heart pound in your chest, but no words can give voice to that feeling.

You get comfortable with the dragon’s stomach a while longer, thoughts electrifying your mind and blood heating your face. Every now and then you press your ear to Jakryos’ scales, and from somewhere deep within, that great belly whispers a gentle greeting. You wait, feel and listen, steadily settling down, heartbeat slowing. It’s easy not to notice the dragon reaching his paws forward to let his presence take up more and more of your vision, or the feathered wings blocking out the light like a great shroud. What you do notice is the paw on your back once again sandwiching you against the warm scales, firm enough that your feet fly from the ground when Jakryos rolls onto his back, bringing you with him to rest atop that mound of a belly. Your whole body feels warm, and despite the dreaminess of this strange new position, you could not feel more awake.

A small beam of light disturbs your peace. Looking forward, you see Jakryos peering down at you through a break in his wings. ‘I’ll be honest, I didn’t think you’d be enjoying this for this long. Thought I’d have lost your attention by now,’ he jokes. His wings part to rest at his sides; as much as the cluttered room will allow at least. With one paw resting on your back and another gently kneading at his belly scales, he continues to look down at you, just smiling, entertained by your smaller form laying there on top of him. Every now and then his paw squishes you down against his scales. Sometimes it’s enough to squeeze the breath out of you, but it never feels like something to complain about, not to you.

‘This is cute, I could play with you like this all day,’ he thinks, peeling his paw from your back. He stops shy of completely releasing you, though. Instead, a digit hooks under your shoulder to yank you upright and rigid. Immediately you feel wobbly just trying to stand in place. The scales beneath you don’t feel nearly as stable as the layered plates appear. They move with the dragon’s breathing and slide against each other when each step puts your weight down, constantly threatening to slip your feet out from under you. You wonder if Jakryos is just making it tough to stand so you’ll hold onto his paw for balance, which of course, you do. You hold it tight against your chest and don’t let go.

‘You know,’ Jakryos starts, with the paw you’re holding starting to drift up, ‘since you’re so obviously into this there is a lot the two of us could get up to while you’re here…’ You’re led by your moving support to step over the other paw and up the dragon’s chest. You stop before the base of his neck, which has curled forward for the dragon to meet your gaze a couple heads above eye level. ‘You haven’t said a whole lot. That’s all alright. I’ll guide you through this. You want to see what it’s like getting a bit more personal with a larger dragon?’

There isn’t a lot he could mean by that. You see the tip of a broad tongue escape the corner of the dragon’s mouth, flicking along his lip before disappearing in a show that’s anything but subtle. You swallow and think, but Jakryos tilts his head when he catches onto your indecision. ‘You only need to nod if you want. Unless you have some other activities in mind.’ A twist of his paw twirls you around to look in the other direction, across the dragon’s stomach to where the broad end of his tail has left the bottle behind, and now rests curled between his hind legs.

You can almost feel his grin burning into your back, ‘now normally I’d say that that’s being a little too forward, but since you’ve been fun I thought I’d offer.’ Before you can stare long enough to actually see anything, his paw twirls you back around again to face him and his glistening grin, letting you teeter off balance only for a moment before the paw catches by the sides and supports you again. ‘Now if you want to lay down and rub my stomach all night that’s just fine by me, but it’s fun to have some variety.’ There’s a tap at your back pushing you a step forward and into the heat of a long exhale.

Now with two options presented to you, and a dragon offering much more patience than you’d expect from such a beast; more than he ought to give you, you find yourself a little overwhelmed. That makes it all the more surprising when an answer bubbles up your throat faster than you can stop yourself.

You tell him, in no uncertain terms, that you want him to swallow you whole.

The grin stays, and Jakryos’ lip curls just a bit higher so you can see that mouthful of teeth. ‘I’d be surprised, but I can’t imagine the look you’ve been giving me means anything else.’ His paw releases you to stumble in place for a moment, but you can feel a digit still firmly against your back. It’s a comforting weight, but if it rested any heavier it would simply be shoving you forward. ‘Alright, come closer. Lucky you asked me cause I know how to do this right.’ From one of the smallest pouches on the back of his neck, he pulls something. He reveals it to you, pinched carefully between his claws, but still you have to step forward to get a good look. It’s shaped like an oblong seed, bright red, barely the size of a grape.

‘Bite hard on that until it cracks, then swallow it. You won’t have to worry about acid eating into you if you do. I’m a dragon and my stomach works the same as any other, so we have to accommodate. This is all assuming you want a pleasant experience, that is.’ It’s an obvious danger, but one that was far from your mind when you first asked. It’s only now that the absurdity of your request actually settles in. Trying not to appear too surprised you quickly do as told. When cracked, the seed spikes your mouth with a bitter, unpleasant taste. You swallow the thing which gets rid of the worst of the flavor, but regrettably not all of it. You wish you had a bit of warning on that front. Jakryos just nods, ‘that takes care of that. And now we can get started.’

You feel your heart like it’s a rock slamming the inside of your chest when the paw comes around to hold you under the arms, lifting you with ease from the scales of the dragon’s chest. Standing on a soft belly was strange enough, but now you’re completely in the air, nothing to hold your weight except the wide fingers around your sides. You’re suddenly struck with unrelated questions, like how far a person can safely fall, but things progress too fast for such worries to linger. Jakryos is very intent on moving forward with your request, leaning his head forward to greet you with another hot wave of air.

‘Last chance to change your mind,’ he warns you, but when you look down at him, you feel like you’ve already long since passed that point of no return. You silently nod, no more words need to be said. Happy with your affirmation, the dragon opens his maw once again, now rolling out his tongue under you, a luxurious royal red curled between vicious, carnivorous teeth.

You worry that he’s going to simply drop you, a quick dive into darkness and oblivion. He seems to consider this option for a moment while you hover above, his grip becoming light enough to let you slip a heart-stopping snap before he regains his hold. Instinctively you curl around and grip his paw tight enough to make your arms ache. It’s a thrilling sort of fear: piercing, needle-like, cold as ice. ‘Not interested in going fast? I can make it slow then, we can go very slow.’ His next move is to instead lower you down while you still clutch at his paw, though it feels more like that tongue is rising up to meet you. The whole rest of the world seems to fade away as you come near.

When the surface of the tongue first brushes you, that same flash of cold bursts through your spine, you tense up and pull your leg away for the last free moment you’ll get before you’re brought back down, nearly pressed into the surface. You find it to be just as warm as the breath that rushes over you, just as damp, too. The paw pushes you up along that tongue, laying you down, letting saliva welcome you by clinging to your body. If you try to move, you find yourself restrained by the same paw on your back. Head-first, you’re led under the shadow of the dragon’s jaws, and are able to gaze down to where his mouth connects to a cavernous throat, just waiting for you to come inside. There’s nothing to find back there except the path you’ve already chosen to take, and the pressure on your back starts to let up. ‘I think you know the way from here,’ Jakryos thinks to you, giving one last little push before letting go and beginning to tilt his head back, and you with it. There’s no need for you to act, because as soon as gravity starts to shift, the whole world starts to slide beneath you, and without a surface to grip, you slide down farther under the shadow of the dragon’s jaws. You come to a sudden halt when the walls around become tight. You were damp before, but now you’re properly soaked with spit. When the walls come in to constrict around you, there’s nothing to stop the first motions that push you into the dragon’s throat. A slow and powerful swallow. Once, it cuts off the last of the light, twice, and the soft walls can be felt across every inch of you, on all sides, showing you the only way you can go. Down.

Entombed by wet walls grasping you, you can feel the dragon’s paw through his throat, rubbing the place where you lie, where you subtly bulge out the space. He presses down firm so you can feel his paw through the scales, and so he can playfully push around the bump in his neck, inching you down just a little deeper before another strong swallow sends you gliding further along. ‘Almost there,’ his thoughts echo in your head. ‘If I swallow again, you’ll be sent down to my stomach. But maybe you’d like to spend more time in my throat. I know I like having you where I can feel you,’ he supplements the comment with his kneading paw. ‘You’re oh so comfortably settled at the base of my throat. If I were to let you sink just a little more, I wouldn’t be able to stop you from going the rest of the way. You’ll be a nice weight for my stomach, but having you here feels even nicer.’

He keeps you there for a while, on a precipice you can’t see or feel. Has the dragon moved since he swallowed you? You find yourself unable to orient. The only direction is down, and every feeling is wet. Even the air you breathe is heavy and humid, and you have to take deep breaths to resist the constricting throat. The soft all around you seems to tremble. You can tell that the dragon’s body is anxious to have you the rest of the way. You can only imagine what kind of willpower it’s taking not to let you drop.

You soon get the sense you shouldn’t have questioned the dragon’s will. As soon as the last thought crosses you, the pressure gives way for just long enough for the walls to release their grip, and the whole world goes into motion as you’re squeezed past the base of the dragon’s neck. The little sensations seem to fall away in the dark in those few seconds of plunging downward.

The break from the tight esophagus to the dragon’s spacious stomach comes as a surprise. The sudden release of pressure is a foreign feeling, but it’s all that greets you when you slide inside. That, and the digestive fluid that coats every ridged surface of this place. Reacting to your presence, the stomach doesn’t give you a chance to readjust yourself. You feel it clamp down on you, much more firm than the soft throat was. Limbs get squeezed between the ridges wherever they’ll fit, and once again you feel some of the air squeezed out of you as a body designed to break down a small creature like you gets on with its work.

‘Comfortable in there?’ Jakryos asks from outside. You can’t feel his paw contentedly rubbing at his gut, but he can certainly feel every movement and twitch from you. ‘I’ve heard good things, that it’s relaxing, pleasurable, all that good sort of stuff. You’ll have to tell me what you think if you decide to come out.’

If.

There’s a peculiar feeling that makes your chest feel tight and your heartbeat palpable. It’s not the tightening grasp of the stomach, or Jakryos’ thinly veiled offer for a long-term stay, though those are certainly contributors to this third, more engaging feeling. In that dark and constricting space there’s a permeating feeling of being wanted, an indescribable release from any other stresses, being buried within the gut of a dragon and wanted there. Jakryos, who wants to comfort you, and the powerful body that wants to digest you; all lead toward the same warm feeling.

So in that space you try and get your bearings to relax. It’s a task which proves not so straightforward. Direction seems to be constantly shifting, you squeeze yourself around to lie on your back for a while, and soon it feels like you’re on your stomach instead. The walls seem to be constantly moving, kneading into you and pushing you about, while Jakryos’ movements jostle you in place. It’s disorienting at first, but as you start to get accustomed to the way the stomach works over you, how it squeezes and turns you about like a stress ball, it becomes much easier to settle down and simply allow it to happen.

‘Now, are you still listening in there?’ The dragon’s voice cut through your rest. ‘Now that we’ve gotten past you staring at my belly, we can pick up from where we left off. Now, what I had you bite was a pod that normally grows on the back of a little mouse-looking critter that tends to get swallowed whole by snakes and other larger predators. Keep the tissue inside preserved and that little pod has a biomagic that activates when it’s cracked, keeping acid and digestive enzymes from reacting with your body, more or less. What it really does is slow down the reaction to become almost negligible, but the specifics get kinda complicated and that’s not what I’m here to teach you about…’

As it turned out, receiving a lesson on alchemy from within a dragon’s stomach was not in the slightest bit easier than from outside. Without the ability to give demonstrations, Jakryos instead had to rely on hard description to tell you the effects of various natural magics. While it was met with limited success, you could hear the little bit of giddiness in his voice continuing to instruct. He was enjoying this as much as you were. You couldn’t see it but you could swear that once Jakryos was standing up again, he walked with an exaggerated sway to his step, just to feel you tossing around inside of him.

So like that it continued, one hour leading into the next, a dragon and the curious occupant of his belly. In there you’re squeezed and kneaded and rubbed at by your contented captor, all until the hour drew late and his most memorable lesson reached its conclusion. You knew the lesson was over when your world was spun around one last time. Jakryos flopped down onto his side, bringing you down with him, though very pleasantly cushioned by omnipresent belly fat. ‘Alright, time’s up. That spell isn’t going to protect you for much longer so it’s time to find a pleasant way to get you out of there.’

At this point you had half a mind to object. You could ask him to simply swallow down one of those little capsules for you to use again. Something to let you continue enjoying the warmth of the dragon’s belly uninterrupted. Perhaps you wouldn’t need even that. Letting the dragon’s body get its wish, the one it’s been kneading into you with every rhythmic roll of stomach motions; that wouldn’t be so bad either. You’d fit right in, a welcome addition to the dragon, s little more for curious onlookers like you to stare at. But that will have to be another time.

There’s a short pause, some shuffling coming from outside, and then you start to hear the wet sound of Jakryos swallowing something. You hear him gulp a few times before you actually feel something that isn’t soft brushing against your arm. Grabbing hold before you lose track in the cramped space, you find it to be a dense but profoundly slimy cord of rope.

‘Did you find it?’ the dragon asks. ‘This is the easiest way but really uncomfortable. Hurry and get a good hold of it, or wrap it around your arm or something, and I’ll pull you out.’ His stomach seems to shift around you, clamping just a little tighter with an apparent mind of its own. It’s like it knows your plan, and like any friend it doesnt want to see you leave.

You do as he suggests, wrapping the rope around your arm and under your elbow before holding it tight to yourself as Jakryos begins to draw it back. The line retracts back up the way it came, and brings you with it, gently squeezed through the tight stomach entrance. The firm muscle of the stomach is left behind, and you are brought back into the soft but constricting throat. It welcomes you back with a hug, and you can hear Jakryos hum as he enjoys the feeling of you stretching out the space once again. It really does seem to be his favorite part of the process. It’s a slow ascent for you though, and every now and then you feel the walls clamp down for an instinctive swallow, staving off your freedom for just a little while longer every time the muscle catches you and sucks you back down. Far ahead, you start to see light on the pink flesh heralding your exit. When your head pokes up through the entrance of the dragon’s throat, you can get a quick glimpse of the lab, and the paws wrestling to pull you free, all through a mouth of teeth which you never expected to see from this side. It’s at that same moment that you realize how fresh the outside air is. It’s almost a divine feeling.

Pulling you the rest of the way out is simple, with Jakryos extending his tongue for you to slide right off, depositing you onto the cool floorboards. You find your legs to be awfully weak after laying so comfortably for so long, but with your arm still wrapped up, and under his control, the dragon pulls you upright. ‘No lying on my floor for you,’ He states. You turn to find his familiar grin, tongue playfully wedged between his teeth. ‘You’re still covered in acid so first things first we’re gonna get you washed up. Then you can lay down wherever you like. Outside my stomach that is.’ You wonder quietly to yourself just how far that offer can still extend, but instead you just mumble a shy “thank you” and allow him to lead you along to get rinsed off.

It’s fortunate for you that the laboratory has facilities for that express purpose. The odorless, clear water is refreshing, if frigid. While getting washed, you have to tolerate the dragon listing off the uses and applications of hydrochloric acid, the acid you were previously bathing in. But you honestly don’t end up remembering a lick of it. Instead, you remember using that time trying to find the best way to ask how Jakryos would feel about letting you lie down beside him for the night.

You would remember how happy you felt when he grinned and said yes.