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I

“Rock Bottom,” the name of a seafood restaurant a quarter-mile under the sea’s surface, snags the eye of Volkan, who’s reading a news article called, “Ten Oceanic Sites to See Before you Die.” He leaps off the couch and races across the house to the kitchen, where Sini’s setting tomatoes on a sub sandwich. The wolf says, “Hey Sini, check this out!”

Sini washes the juice off his paws then puts on his spectacles and takes the newspaper and skims it. “Huh.” He and the wolf go to the computer, google the restaurant’s address, and decide the distance is doable. A trip is planned for the afternoon.

At precisely one o’clock, Sini wings them off the precipice of their home and across a dazzling sea. Cloudless blue canvas blares richly behind Sini’s resplendent wing membranes.

He alights on a tropical beach warmly greeting his toes. Ahead lay a cave. Nailed adjacent to the door, a sign hangs and reads, “1170 Peninsula Drive.” Just the place.

The sounds of seagulls and waves become hushed as the two embark through the dark threshold, spelunking down a dark, spiraling tunnel of sapphire-fired torches. Descending below sea-level, they hear their ears pop.

As they continue down, they see a spellbinding cyan hue sashaying across the walls—just the way the light that plays on a shallow seafloor does.

They step onto the limestone balcony of a limestone cave, the atmosphere expanding. Somewhere below, casual voices coalesce.

Sini and Volkan awe. They draw up to the railing of the balcony, gazes fixed at twelve o’clock: fixed on the glowing, cyan seafloor of the ocean: on schools of striped fish zipping through holed rocks and effervescent tangles of coral reef: on sinuously streaming dolphins, and, behind the dolphins, hawksbill sea turtles taking their sweet time.

If what we’re lookin’ at here’s the ocean, then how come we’re not drownded yet? Sini wonders. The perfect cube of seawater lies before the cave’s expansive mouth, like an aquarium tank. But no glass could withstand the pressure of gazillions of gallons like that. Could it?

Volkan’s the first to peer below. Two sapphire eyes twinkle at the sight of customers forking into smoked oysters and seasoned yellowfin. Mouth-watering steam rises, carrying the scents to his flaring nostrils. His belly fusses impatiently. “Sini, I think we’re in Rock Bottom.”

“Yeah,” says Sini, drooling at the abundant ocean, though it’s the smell of seafood beguiling his salivary glands. “This place makes me wanna rock my bottom.”

“Hello, darlings!” comes a blubbery voice reminiscent of a multi-chinned queen’s.

The two of them wheel towards a waiter. The waiter’s an oiyig: an anthropomorphic orca with a stingray-looking-thing attached to her head and a bellied, fluke-less tail. That second belly proves handy on her lunch breaks.

“Hey!” Volkan grins.

“Hi!” Sini licks his lips.

The beady-eyed, derpy-looking oiyig misses that second descriptor. She says blithely, “Follow me!” then gestures the guests toward a set of stairs. She carries a couple of menus down them, the wolf and dragon hop-scotching after her giddily.

She seats them in the Tube, a transparent force-field tunnel thirty feet in diameter projecting from either corner of the cave’s mouth and making a horseshoe shape in the ocean. Here it’s neat because you get to eat with the seafloor sand and the seashell shells on your feet. And links of sunlight sunken down from the sea’s surface are always in motion, doing the luau on top of you.

Sini sprawls lazily, yawning a dragon's yawn. Sticky sand flecks his plated amethyst belly. He doesn’t sit in the vacant vinyl seat next to Volkan because he’s a 13,200-pound dragon. Entertained as a child with a coloring book, he leafs through the pages of his relatively teensy menu.

“Hey, check this out.” The wolf fingers an illustration on his own.

Sini gasps excitedly then pitches his neck, trying to peep what Volkan’s peeping. But it’s upside down, so he flips to the same page of his menu to see. “Oh.” His chin-whiskers wilt. “It’s just some fucking curry prawns.”

Thus Sini and Volkan, until the oiyig waitress returns to ask them have they decided.

Volkan orders a kajillion things. The oiyig’s writing hand whips up a storm.

Then Sini says, “Lemme get a sunfish, a whole one. And a whole octopus. And, oh, and the raw eel, please.”

A boat must be passing overhead, I reckon; the light leaves the waiter’s face. “Raw . . . eel?”

Sini’s chin-whiskers zigzag backward. He frowns and says sullenly, “Yeah. Eel. Here it is on the menu. Y’all out of eel?”

The waitress explains that the eel needs to be fried, because raw eel contains “bloody poison.” Health-safety policy. Keeps the inspectors happy.

Seeming puzzled, the poison dragon explains to her, “I’m gonna eat you if you don’t.”

Her heart rate spikes. Sini can smell the fear secreted by her greasy pheromones. Rows of sharp whites shine in his scything smile.

The oiyig drops her pen from her spasming hand. Her smile quivers then cramps up, collapsing, adding to her facial limbo of faux pleasantry and prophesied doom. “Raw eel it is.” Sweating, she tramps off.

II

“Glorrrrrrk,” grumbles the wolf's belly. The smells of hot, buttered bread and scallop chowder wing themselves to his restless sniffer. Looking up, he sees the waitress’ arms lower a large tray of heaping bread-loaves and soup-bowls to the table. He’s about to say “thanks” when a snarl from the dragon rattles the silverware. With a startled blast of her blow-hole and a wail, the waiter runs off and swears to them that the raw eel’s en route their way.

Blowing on a spoonful of smoking chowder, the wolf slowly lifts his eyes to the scowling dragon. “Aren’t you gonna get any appetizers, Sini?”

Sini says, “She’s plotting against us. She wants us to get full before we eat what we ordered. But I know what you’re up to, you and her, Scallop Chowder.” He aims two talons at his eyes, then one at the bowl.

“I doubt a few breadsticks could fill you up, big guy. More for me, though!” Volkan palms a whole loaf of bread down his throat. Another one. Then another one. Then, pursing his lips on the rim of his chowder bowl, he noisily vacuums down the meat and the broth. His fluffy white belly balloons to thrust around the edges of the table. Giving the gut a gurgle-greeted clap, the wolf then leans across the table with a crafty smirk. “Psst. Sini. Guess what?”

Dimples draw up the dragon's cheeks. Pressing his ear close, “Yes?” Sini asks shrewdly.

A moist brrraaa-a-a-a-a-a-ap blasts the dragon’s face. It blows his chin-whiskers awry. His right ear sirening, Sini sighs dreamily. The wolf laughs. He shovels the dragon’s share of the appetizers down his esophagus. A steady stream of chowder is channeled to the sphincter, forcing the wolf to scoot back in his seat, so as to not to tip the table with his bloating midriff. “Buraarp. Braaarp!” Resting his chin on intertwined talons, the crescent-eyed wolf launches a string of burps at the dragon. The dragon giggles the way hatchlings giggle. He shifts vigorously and lashes his tail this way and thataway.

Thus Volkan and Sini, when a double-decker food cart parks close by. The drivers—four oiyig chefs and the queen-voiced waitress—are red as lobsters in the face, huffing, and puffing. Clearly, they haven’t driven anything that weighs more than themselves before.

The wolf and dragon, seeing the mounds of seafood atop the hot plates, go “Squee!” at once. Steaming hot buttered lobster, Dungeness crab, zesty oysters, smoked sturgeon, curry prawns, savory sunfish, tenderized octopus tentacles, crisped eel . . .

But, seeing the waitress, the dragon scrunches his muzzle in spite. “Bout time y’all mufuckas came through with the food! I was worried the staff was held hostage by sea-dogs, or some kraken captured them all, or that maybe a starfish molested the stove-top, and they couldn’t get ‘em off.”

“The first two have happened,” the eldest of the chefs says. “Not the starfish one, not yet.”

Cholesterol-laden juices smoke from a chunk of oyster Volkan ferries on a fork down the hatch. Swallowing that, he progresses to the caridea, and then to the saccostrea, and then to the metacarcinus magister. Because the food’s as richly garnished as the names, the grease catalyzes great growls and groans behind his abdomen. Groaning himself, Volkan bugles a belch as deep as the big blue itself, turning heads all down the Tube.

“You have our sincerest apologies, d-dragon, sir.” The oiyig chef who spoke tugs at his clavicle, sweating sweat margarine-thick. “It’s a lot of food to feed you two, so, you have to figure, to get it out of the kitchen . . .”

Sini snatches in his jaws one of the eels from the hot plates. He takes one chew, then spits it out. “Bleh. You cooked it!”

“Pardon?” “We cooked the eel?” “Not me, did you cook the eel?” “Mezrey’yal, oh, sir . . .” The four chefs erupt into a sobbing, red-faced chaos, hurling subliminal accusations at each other.

The waitress bursts into waterworks. “Oh! Wretched me! I told them, ‘Can’t be serving her raw now, can we!’ Oh! But we were meant to! Oh! Mezrey’yal and her children oh Rodd!” She does a dervish spin, tumbling to the seafloor suddenly.

Obliged shouts of concern boomerang around her. Two of the chefs, seizing this opportunity to get the fuck back to the kitchen, each take her by an arm, dragging her heels over sand, then limestone, then kitchen tiles.

Sini’s muscles relax. He eyes the quivering two chefs still there. “I mean, c’mon, you guys. The octopus is dead and not live, and the eel is—I could tolerate if it were dead and poisonous, but—it’s dead and poison-less.”

“Food’s getting cold babe,” Volkan mumbles, wasting no time to pack his jowls with sturgeon. Rivulets of grease stain a napkin tied to his neck. He gulps and gulps. His distended tum dilates to the size of a tire, gurgling and glorrup-ing. “Might wanna . . . get to it.”

The poison dragon sighs a purple sigh. “Right then, back to the meal.” He dismisses the chefs with a friendly RAWR—sending them sailing for the kitchen—then delicately nips up a prawn from the wolf’s curry sauce bowl.

With a snatch of his neck, he fetches a twelve-pound slab of lobster and he splashes it through a bowl of liquid butter as if it were a paintbrush, spraying butter eastward, and when he sees it’s not buttering his slab quickly enough, he flails his muzzle. Butter ejaculates everywhere. Then Sini slurps up the soaked slab of lobster meat and he gets his chin-whiskers all drenched and sticky. Thereon, he inhales the calamari, gobbles up the sunfish, scarfs up the eel, and whatever else Volkan failed to consume swiftly enough Sini acquaints with his black-hole of a maw.

“Hey!” Volkan lunges for the tail-fins of a hijacked sturgeon.

Sini whips his head away, happily slurping the fish—the last entree left—with a schluuuuuuuuuuuuurk. “Hey you?”

“I only ate this much of that stuff, and then you stuffed it all into your stomach. That’s not fair.”

The dragon laughs a rascally laugh. Rising onto his haunches, he holds the wolf’s head against his churning, doming purple belly. “Hear that? That’s it, and it’s there. I can send you there if you want, to fish it out?”

Volkan turns his blushing cheek. “I . . . I think I’ll just ask for more fresh food, now that it’s there.”

“That’s the problem—that it’s there? Then why don’t I let it up?” Before Volkan can protest, the dragon pins him on the force-field warmed sand and opens his jaws cave-mouth-wide. A bulge crawls up the purple belly plates, up the purple craw, and up comes a monstrous belch that trembles the force-field and reroutes a sea-shark who’d been serpentining towards it; buraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaooooooowrrrrrrurp! Momentarily the wolf turns blurple: blue from blushing, and purple from absorbing the dragon's poison. Sini gives no pause, slinging at him another round of deathly purple belches, his delivery both punctual and staccato.

The two giggle and giggle, and by and by they get up and wipe their eyes and civilize themselves to the sound of footsteps.

Having heard the gassy cacophony, one waiter had remembered that the wolf-and-dragon duo’s waiter was sent to the office due to heat exhaustion. He now approaches the duo’s table, asks if the food satisfies and if they need anything. Volkan says the food’s great and then says they need everything. The waiter squeaks obediently, scurrying off, enlisting the strength of four chefs before returning with them to wheel off the plundered cart.

III

“I think this time a starfish is molesting their stove,” Sini complains.

Volkan tends to his back-canines with a complimentary tooth-pick, gazing out to the sea. A seal appears. The seal pecks the tunnel, restoring starry amusement to Volkan’s eyes, purple or cyan depending on the angle.

The dragon struts to his feet. He barks at the seal—three good, dragon-sized labrador ones. In alarm, the seal careers into the coral reefs. Sini transitions into more dragon-like rawrs while stalking towards the seal, his nose pushing through the force-field . . .

Now, why exactly dragons can clear the ‘field and why seals can’t does not concern us. Just know that this infringes upon restaurant policy, and the sight of this—this dragon breaking the rules—petrifies the eldest chef when he and the three other chefs of earlier drive up with the cart.

“MEZREY’YAL! OH! OH!” he cries. Health-safety policies liabilities have been hammered into his head so many times, he may as well be a hammerhead. An unauthorized dragon clearing the field, to him, is worse than the sea-dogs, the krakens and the starfish altogether. “HALP! Suh-care-ity, suh-care-ity! YALP!” Customers shriek sharply as chalk. They spike out of their seats. They storm the stairs. They clog the balcony, banging on the chests of two orca security guards walling the door and begging them to let up, or let off: whichever they might fancy.

Presently, killer whales somersault out from under the vacated sitting areas and ghostly corners of the cave, ganging up on dragon and wolf. Anchors and oil tankers and other masculine things tattoo their corded biceps.

Sini glimpses the killer whales and the stationary chefs. He turns to face them, yawning a poisonous yawn. “It’s about time. You sirs, with the tats, can you ask the staff what’s the hold-up back there?”

“Sir, we ask you kindly to step away from the field. We don’t want to make things difficult for you OR us.”

After a silence, Sini laughs a wily laugh. “Sooner you’ll make things difficult for yourselves.” He stomps forward. He swings his devilish head and bares his devilish fangs. A gout of poisonous flames spurts from his nose. “You all combined don’t weigh a third of me. Little ones, I will EAT you.”

The words carry chills, like an open-door breeze. The oiyigs, now shivering, all perfunctorily withdraw. For they’d never been trained to close doors—only taught to look like they could close doors. The craven in them devalues their tats; and with haste they scatter cave-ward. Sini gifts them a head-start, waiting till a few of their feet fall over limestone. Then he springs after them, achieving a lithe, tromping gallop.

The oiyigs fumble up the stairs, some of them pitching flat onto their faces from not having any railing to steady them. The succeeding oiyigs use the backs of their fallen brethren’s bouncy skulls to leapfrog past two steps, awarding them additional escape time. Behind them, tables and chairs clatter to the cave floor, the dragon careening past them. Vintage wines on shelves behind the bar between the two staircases decide suddenly to commit suicide, conducting a bloody choir of shattering glass. An oiyig straggler who’d been stamping for the staircase claps his hands to his ears, and yells; it steers him off course until a photo-quick glance of the dragon bounding towards him squeezes out from his fat gut a “YAP!” Arms spreading crane-style, the oiyig makes a leap of faith for the first step. But then, then a generous fraction of the 13,200-pound dragon hammers him to the staircase. There’s a blundering gasp. Fear animates his blubbery fat in the form of oily waves. Guttural delight sighs out of the predator serpentining his head, at profile-view meeting his prey’s eye. His tongue and the tensing black-and-white body become acquainted; but the black-and-white body seems to want to disengage, to wish they’d never crossed paths; yes, Sini’s tongue, being part of the poison dragon, catches keenly onto the language of pheromones. Though a dunce could have told you if an oiyig were afraid, there’s no taste sweeter than the taste of an afraid someone.

Meanwhile, the wolf makes his round to a higher step, crouching and facing predator and prey. Fishy pleas. “You want me to help?” Volkan asks. Head-banging nods. “Gee. Should I help him, Sini?” A brisk half-shake of the head. Only half, because Sini trusts Volkan; curious, when the wolf offers the fatty his paws then pulls, Sini softens the pressure of his foot. Sini then grasps the oiyig and sets him on his knees, letting go, so as to let Volkan do the heavy lifting. But Sini’s paw remains a spotter.

Thus Volkan, exerting great strength: he beds the oiyig backward onto the dragon’s big-budded tongue. Which rewards him, from the dragon, a satisfied prum. Now, the oiyig himself wars with shock. He tries to lean up, but too late: the dragon’s head jolts up. Both jaws connect. There’s a loud slurp. Flipper feet bid freedom farewell.

Leathery wings streamline backward and flap, flap, flap. The dragon’s throat-song engulfs Rock Bottom. A weakly punching, tail-batting, blow-hole-spitting fight is put up by the oiyig. “Chewing” motions of the esophagus encourage the fat boulder-bulge down, one assertive shove at a time. The most slimy, most lewd pair of hands (the sphincter) strokes over the creature’s skull before meeting its doming belly. At which point, the hands find themselves past the point of playing gentle; they consider the creature the slimiest, lewdest, greasiest thing they’ve ever grasped in decades. At which point, the hands return to being what they truly are: one single sphincter; and, quite bothered, it coughs the creature up into the digestion chamber.

Upon impact, the fish creates such a roar of bubbling, frothing juices the likes of ten Jacuzzis and their brothers and sisters could not even whip up. All that blubbery grease, upsetting, or, perhaps, riling up Sini’s gut, and how Sini gaily growls! The thrashing oiyig makes the gut wobble. And, all the while, the gas production soaring from all this makes the purple gut swell and swell. And, well, with the seafood, the poison build-up, and this fatass inside it, the stomach stretches its own plate barricades, revealing slivers of leathery black hide. “Ohh, Rodd, yes. Keep going, little one. Roll yourself around in there. Just jacket yourself in my digestive acids, swear, you’re just making everything go that much faster, become that much more potent . . . hur-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-p!” Fishy essence billows out from the filthy maw in the form of freshly-fumed poison.

Sprawled comfortably on his flank, Sini notices the wolf kneading into his gut. He grins backward-fangèdly, closes his eyes. Buraaaaaaarrrrp! Eerie echoes ricochet off the cavern walls, multiplying, overlapping. “BRAAAP, ugh. BUR-R-R-R-R-R-P. Ngh! Right there, between the plates. The black slivers. You see ‘em? See ‘em?—ooh—ahh—Volkan—yeahhhhhh buddy, yaw.”

Volkan concentrates on the texture of the belly. It’s smooth as freshly blown glass. Warm as oven mitts beneath a cast-iron pot. Supple yet steely. Magma-like, mayhaps. Yes. If anyone lived to tell the tale of the touch of magma, they’d say it were as dense and resolved as the stuff behind these plates.

Purple gleam Volkan’s eyes. He grows bigger. Magic kisses the air; and larger paws shove into Sini’s gut. Sini croons, his crooning both tranquil and mystique. The wolf says, “You like that, don’t you?” and caps at 9.08247 feet in height. Nod nod. “I was noticing. I notice something else, too.” Soon as Volkan stops rubbing him, Sini hauls onto all fours, and sees a canine finger point up the stairs, where dozens of customers (oiyigs, orcas, dolphins, sea lions and seals) still cluster en masse. “Whatever the holdup is, it’s keeping those guys right where we want them. Why don’t we go see?” And so he leads the way up the stairs. And so Sini galumphs after him, his gurgling belly weighing him down, a great lead-laden oval.

Meanwhile, in the exit’s proximity: “Oh Rodd! OH!” “Fishing rod?” “No, Rodd like scald!” “Scalding water?” “No, like the deity!” “Oh Mezrey’yal! Not that Rodd!” “Yes, Roddscald!” “THEY’RE COMING!” “LET US PASS!”

Meanwhile, the two security guards barring them passage remain unconvinced by their pleas and hell-bent upon obeying restaurant policy: “As we’ve repeated ten times, now: show us your receipts. No receipts, no passage.” “No one’s getting a free meal on my watch.”

But all the waiters who can charge them are hidden in the kitchen or part of the mob itself. And why should the customers pay when most of them couldn’t eat half as much as they wanted to?

Thus the masses, when wolf and dragon reach the balcony. When the 9.08247-foot wolf finishes that last step, people throw curses like sailors and scream like the ones in the Jaws movies. Once the dragon climbs that last step, great wailing the likes of no harpoon have ever bragged about spears through the crowd. The voracious, bestial, backward-fangèd brute launches into the scattering flock. Some oiyigs Geronimo over the railing (fluttering to safety with the wings of their stingray hats). Two dozen avalanche down the staircase opposite Sini. Sini captures a flailing dolphin and seal, rising onto his haunches, his trophies aloft in each paw. They almost writhe out of Sini’s paws like soap, but he redoubles his grip-efforts.

Throwing the wolf’s way a roguish look, “Room for more, Volk?” the dragon asks.

The wolf claps his clam-stuffed belly agreeably. “I guess I have room for another—” Flippered feet fly into his mouth. Volkan’s arms fly back, and he forms a wide-eyed letter T. The dragon, snickering, retrieves his paw and leaves Volkan to do his work on the seal.

The 9.08247-foot Volkan moans loud, goes slack-jawed. Imbalance slings him across the balcony’s railing. He uses the rails as support to hold himself up while he swallows repeatedly. The seal barks and barks. Its terror-stricken face vanishes with one craw-stuffing glurk. We watch now, with an X-ray of the wolf’s esophagus, the seal seals its fate a little more with every hip-throw, torso-twist, and shoulder-jerk. The prey slips through the lubricated throat, enveloping a squeezing chamber of bumpy, fleshy walls. On the outside, the stomach makes “chewing” motions, and Volkan moans and loses his tongue to the air. Blubbery goodness seeps into his laddering pool of acids. The wolf lets go of a cheeky burp and smacks his lips, the taste of seal on his tongue.

Back on Sini’s end: the captive dolphin makes an ah-ah-ah-aow! before Sini feeds himself her beak. Getting feisty, the dolphin buckles his head from a scalding blast of her blowhole. Sini sounds off a sonorous croon. His heart flutters at the thought of claiming her, and his belly throbs with throes of thrill. He throws the rest of her down, her flukes disappearing. Euphoria rips through his throat and tackles nerve-clusters all down to the tip of his tail: a hot, tickling sensation of arousal like a long gout of dragon’s breath traveling through him. Loud gulp after gulp after gulp after gulp, the dragon claims his prey, disregarding her distressed, echolocating chirps. All of a sudden, Sini stops swallowing. There’s a pregnant pause, wherein he just rumbles. Rumbles with a draconic, echolocating timbre that smothers the dolphin’s own cries. The purple plates of his craw buckle, buckle, buckle again and again with the lewd squelches and sporadic distortions of the parked bulge. One effortless gulp seals the deal.

An ovular shape sinks from the Sini’s neck to his belly. When his prey drops down, the purple stomach expands like a ready cocoon. The moaning dragon thwomps onto his stomach no softer than would a beached whale. And in his croaking midriff, big, froggish bubbles swell and pop above the once-simmering, now-burbling and -boiling soup of poison juices. As the dolphin cries and chirps and sounds in just about every other way its echolocation, Sini burps his toxic burps, draining her life force. The cauldron boils over. Sini seems to exclaim! Though, no sound comes out. He tries again, and he bellows his triumph just like this: BELARRRRRRR-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-CH! More gas crawls under his shifting neck plates. Belaaaaaaaaaach! Braaaaaaaaaap! Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup! Putrid gurgles and groans sound off as the stomach shrinks per burp. The dragon's chamber squeezes her like a shrinking straight-jacket, molding over her shape so you can see her clearly struggling hard as she can, hard as possibly can, so hard that maybe she—BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP.

Or not.

Padding toward the pot-bellied wolf comes Sini, poison gases still chimneying up from his jaw. The wolf grins a cheesy grin, gliding a paw across the labored purple belly as Sini strides past. Says Sini, looking around the balcony, empty save for the security guards, “Seems they either got away or went away while we were busy. Let’s”—planting a toxic bra-r-r-r-r-r-p in the 9.08247-foot wolf’s face—“check the premises, shall we?”

Face going hot from the dizzying toxin, Volkan blushes blue and sets a paw on Sini’s foreleg. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, it seems. We’ll have to speed up if we want to get all the bang for our buck before this place closes.”

Thus wolf and dragon, determined to eat every last guest and security guard of the seafood restaurant Rock Bottom.

IV

Back on the bottom floor, the guests have all gathered by the force-field. But they haven’t mastered the courage to cross through. All that talk of policy has rubbed off on them; they’re convinced that stepping through this thing without being authorized, or without paying for their food, truly is an unthinkable travesty. Though they egg one another on to step through the damn thing, no one has gotten to it yet. Some, seeing how not much is going on, return to their tables to finish their meals, if their tables are nearby.

Then along come wolf and dragon, stepping into the Tube.

The first one to be eaten down here, an oiyig bloke: he looks up from his dinner plate, sees them prowling towards him, then screams for the rest of his life outside of a predator’s gut. Sini’s heart quivers with adrenaline; you can see his claws tense up and everything about his stance tighten. Thus Sini, before leaping like a voracious, scaled, winged lion, and swallowing whole his prey before his fore-paws alight on the seafloor.

Sini cleans up the rest of the Tube with this brisk efficiency. He catches; he swallows; he catches; he swallows. Whoever weasels away, Volkan rounds up with wolfish agility. Together, wolf and dragon work as a pair of herders trapping the flock, which inevitably fills the dragon’s dragging gut. By and by, one end of the loop’s cleared up; and Sini struts with a clumsy gait, due to his wobbling gut dragging across the sand. Belching up some of his poison to rid himself of excess weight, the dragon presses with the 9.08247-foot Volkan throughout the loop, passing a disheveled mess of strewn chairs and scattered utensils and fish carcasses on lukewarm plates. The thumps of heavy feet carom around the corner and the guests and guards hear it. Deciding to give the balcony exit another go, they dash into the cave and back up the stairs.

Again, the security guards ask for receipts.

The sound of thunder storms up both staircases. All the gathered guests and guards go bleached with horror as, from either side, the predators rise to the top and then narrow the gap, one step at a time. And Sini and the 9.08247-foot Volkan exchange winks. And they assume predatory stance. And they pitch forward, slamming down on oiyigs, dolphins, orcas, sea lions, seals, and so on and so forth.

The last of Sini’s prey becomes a morbidly obese oiyig. This oiyig shows Sini he has a backbone. Even when the sea creature’s sight plunges past the swinging uvula and the hungry gullet fills his peripherals, he fights like an ill-tempered buccaneer. A venomous barb gleams on the erecting tail of his stingray hat; and, right as Sini’s about to swallow his thighs, two consecutive jabs of deadly sea-poisons peck either side of his gullet.

This old buccaneer—this guy we’ll call Roberto for old name’s sake—he has wriggled free from the carcasses of predators he has poisoned time and time again, sometimes digging himself out of them for two days and two nights, even. In fact, he waited to be eaten, to ensure he could pull the same stunt; for he's not sure whether he can pull it outside a predator.

Orgasmic pleasure arrows down the dragon’s throat: the same kind he gets when he outs a toxic belch. “Ahhhh. Yesss, yesss, more, MORE poison! Yasss!” You may as well have fed him crawfish, yellowfin, catfish, caviar, salmon, and sushi. Happily, he gulps. The juice rolling off the oiyig’s rolls of fat dribble through the crevices of the sphincter into the poisonous pool. The sphincter opens. The oiyig lands in the belly. A purple tidal wave ripples over Sini’s underbelly, the bottom of it flattening on the floor, the sides of it pressing Sini’s legs outward. “Ohh. My tummy’s getting queasy . . .”

Slivers of black thicken behind rattling, pressed-to-the-limit purple plates. Just the saturated fat of this creature causes glurks and glorks and lewd churning noises. Hot grease smokes up from the bubbling lake of acids. Think of the sheen this guy’ll put on my scales. Sini makes a shawled moan. Prey assimilating. Stomach expanding with pleasurably discomforting gases. The wobbling, egg-shaped stomach shudders the balcony as it digests its meals.

Meanwhile, the 9.08247-foot Volkan finishes swallowing a sea lion, sailing onto his butt with a sigh. The crowd tries to escape the balcony; but he guards the westmost stairs leading down, hounding anyone who tries to get by. One oiyig tries. Volkan grabs him. Volkan eats him. Echoes of the frantic prey bounce through his gullet. Feet slip through his lips. His jaws shut. He sighs. Finally, he’s stretched the belly of his 9.08247-foot form to its largest comfortable capacity. He removes the napkin from his neck and dots his lips with it, then lets loose a rattly, eye-opening BURP. The bones and skull of his first prey, the seal, clatter to the floor. Clear fluids cover the corroded things. “Better out than in, little guy,” says Volkan cheerily.

BRA-A-A-A-A-AHP. The perfectly intact carcass of the sea lion joins his buddy. Last of all, the skull hits the floor with a loud clack.

With all his waning strength, the oiyig tackles the stomach walls. The walls give for 0.1485 seconds before snapping back on him just as tight; only, now he’s stuck in a less spherical, more vertical position. Which doesn’t keep the ale-colored acids from climbing up his ankles, knees, thighs . . . “HALP!” . . . crotch, pot-belly, man-tits . . . “HAAAAAALP, I beg of you!” . . . neck, head . . . And the next time our fat fellow tries to cry HAAAAAALP, all it does is spew oxygen bubbles, bloating the wolf’s paunch even worse until “BRAAAAAALP!” the dot-eyed predator answers. He didn’t mean to taunt his prey by mimicking him; it’s just that the gas was composed of that particular cry.

V

Sini and Volkan lay sprawled over the balcony with their tongues hanging out of their mouths and their bellies jutting toward the ceiling, and the sounds of sweet, moderated gluttony coming from their throats. Volkan—for some reason, the restaurant staff cross his mind, and he wonders of their whereabouts. Thinking about it only makes his belly feel more sore. He rubs his belly some, and suddenly becomes aware of a stockpiled pressure. Sini, seeing him so, rolls onto his flank so he can reach over and treat the wolf. After all, Volkan treated him rather kingly with those supple paws of his, earlier; and plus Sini likes getting his talons lost in that soft, furry mound. So Volkan feels those tender claws and hears the scritch-scritch-scritch, and moans. The sensations, so sweet they’re sickening. He leans up, and something claims possession of his facial muscles; already happening once he realizes it, out from his mouth roars a belch that makes the ocean fizz, dwarfing some of the dragon's belches. The entire skeleton of the oiyig joins the bony pile of seal and sea lion. Watching steam billow from the corroded marrow, Sini smirks and starts to clap. “That’s some digestive system you’ve got there, dear. Glad I’m not on the menu.”

“Well, not tonight you’re not.” Volkan winks.

“Fair enough.”

Not long afterward, Sini unhinges his lower jaw to let loose a slamming belch. The cave quakes. Stalactites shake free, toppling, crashing to the floor. Slobbery skeletons shower out from the filthy maw, clacking, crackling smoking to the balcony in one great rattling cacophony: Volkan counts twenty-eight bony carcasses total.

With the remains of their prey still billowing steam—so much as to surpass the health-safety food temp requirement—by and by, Sini and Volkan rise to their feet on the clear balcony and start for the exit. The security guards bar both of them passage till Sini takes from his neck pocket a pawful of gold coins, shoving half into each of the guards’ hands, and says there’s their informal receipt; and if they want to argue, he and his friend here have room for more. Sussing it out in whispers, the guards begin to roll their shoulders with some agitation. Finally they disband, and step aside from the door, and say they haven’t seen a thing if you haven’t, and then verily pocket the cash. Where exactly two orcas pocket cash, I haven’t a clue. For that, I recommend you consult Mari’s Anatomical and Cultural Guide to Anthropomorphic Orcas 2nd Ed. by Calvin Mari, not included herewith.

On their way up the tunnel, the wolf and the dragon become increasingly aware of their itus.

When the dragon emerges in the light of evening and feels the cooling breeze on his scales, the first thing he thinks is, I dunno if I’m gonna be able to wing us back to the house. But staying at a local inn would exceed his budget, because he’s already spent half of his funds bribing the security guards.

A paw pats his foreleg. “I had fun today, Sini. We should do this again sometime!” Volkan looks out to the sunset, stretches and sighs. “I can’t wait to get home and relax.”

“Well hold on just one second, mister,” Sini says, flapping his wings to no avail. “Because my wings might not be able to carry our fat asses back . . .”