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“Look, Bahdia—another little beasty!”

The big magenta dragon Bahdia swished her head toward where her demon friend Dedran had pointed: one of the low-hanging branches of an emerald canopy, whose greenery teemed with harmoniously random chirps and chitters of birds and other critters. Along the wooden highway scuttled a gingerbread red squirrel back and forth. The enticing waves of his bushy tail tempted thick, buttery slather down from the dragon’s mouth. Her posture devolved, and she dashed toward the squirrel and sent Dedran paddling clumsily, and he landed his butt into a thornbush. What followed was a roar of such unbridled joy—such that no forested mountain region had ever beforehand been privileged to hear, not even the ones where Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman used to live. A second roar echoed it—not a Bahdia roar, but a roar of wood and of leaf being cacophonously bulldozed down. After the earthquake, Dedran blinked. Bahdia lay upon a wreckage of poor oaks, beached on her beach colored belly. She gulped down the squirrel, slurped her chops and smiled.

“Burrrooowwhp …”

Dedran recovered then walked to her, scratching twigs off his rump. “Did you get him, Bahdia?”

“I think so,” she said slowly. “But there’s a sharp thing poking into my belly. I don’t know what, but I feel kind of …”

She groaned before belching crudely and lethargically. What erupted through her throat was a magical crystal. The quake of her belch shook the crystal like a soda can. Do you know what happens to shaken soda cans? They ejaculate all their fizz. Hey, you might say, this crystal had not fizz! You would be absolutely god fucking right, shrewd reader. It had magic, which grew Bahdia as she belched the crystal up her gullet. The flesh of the dragon’s tubby flanks fluttered as she pulsated bigger and bigger, and she ploughed down two rows of adjacent trees with galloping thumps of growth. That took her from her original 18’ tall size to 36’ tall. Yet, the giganticness of the belch itself kept her eyes closed for its duration, so she hadn’t a clue she’d been double sized.

When the burp finally said bye, Bahdia found a sloppy crystal. Just like a politician on the telly, it was lying in front of her. There it was, just chillaxing in a pool of steamy tummy juices.

“Heh, lazy thing, you!”

It was hunting time, after all—not chillaxing time. She lapped off the sloppy saliva that had blanketed the chillaxin’ crystal because, slothful thing, it hadn’t hygiene enough to clean itself! She then sniffed every edge of it but she was unsatisfied with her janitorial work; the crystal still smelled of sour, meaty dragon paunch.

Those gargantuan nostrils turned into maelstroms of furious, gyring nose hair, and a tiny voice squeaked, “Where am I? Ahh! What’s happening?” The voice belonged to Dedran, who had been walloped by the crystal when it was belched out of Bahdia. Being walloped by it had cursed Dedran with the converse effect that Bahdia had received by shrinking him from his original 6’ tall size to 3’ tall.

The alpha nostril jerked Dedran out of the vacuum of the beta nostril just the way a powerful wolf steals a slab of freshly caught moose from the mouth of a beta male. Screaming went Dedran down an unhygienic olfactory tunnel. This tunnel gleamed with resources but seethed with hostile baddies. Through the tunnel lay hundreds of unmined booger nodes protected by bitchy, serpentine nose hairs. Thinking the demon being inhaled by the nostril had purposefully dived into the nasal gust to slip speedily into the depths where lay their richest, most prized booger deposits, the bitchy nose hair serpents lashed out at Dedran to defend the hive, howling and gnashing boogery fangs of hair follicles at him.

Believe me when I say the demon Dedran belted up a scream of anxiety louder than Henry David Thoreau would at a Ford assembly line plant. Using his stress as rocket fuel to power his punches, he uppercutted the snot out of the first few nose hairs that tried to fuck with him (colloquial slang for “assail”), during his first few fits of sobs and wails. Though, I am afeard to say that this did nothing to quash ingrained prejudices against demons. Once Dedran travelled too far into the hair hive, seventy-five nose hair snakes used teamwork to tangle his limbs up.

One nose hair said, “Unwrap yourself from his left leg—this is my left leg!”

“Will you war with me for it, brother?”

“I will rub mucus on you if you try to start beef,” replied the first nose hair.

“The both of you, stop, stop!” said a third.

A great debacle broke out. The bantering gang of nose hairs resembled peasants who were badly oppressed and indoctrinated by a tyrannical ruler so that they would war with themselves instead of the tyrannical ruler. If they had been caring and empathetic rather than hateful and self-destructive, they might have been able to prepare themselves before the tyrannical owner of the nostril stopped sucking, only to start sucking with a more vicious/more vehement gust. Such strength this gust had! which is normally reserved for the likes of farmhands and carpenters and crackheads promised an ounce if they can lift a 1,000 pound dumbbell. Nose hairs got ripped apart by this brawny gust. Thousands of wailing nose hairs wailed with Dedran as they went bulleting into the nasal abyss, some of the dying hairs still flailing from his arms and legs like snakes in a downdraft.

However, these dying nose hairs had knowledge of Guild Wars 2’s “fight to survive” concept and tried to get as many strikes on Dedran as they could, that they might be revived. If you’re an empath like me you might be saddened to learn Dedran punched them in the schnoz every time their uncomely fangs disturbed his vicinity, spraying boogers instead of blood. He was very dramatic and heroic with his punches. Watching them would save you the $15 you would’ve spent to see lesser punches in Avengers: Infinity War.

Soon the musky atmosphere of the alpha nostril faded completely; and in its place was kindled a sweltering, spicy atmosphere. By and by the atmosphere ignited the heat-sensitive nose hairs, so that they moved like sun rays registered in dance class and having an epileptic attack.

“Hooray!” said Dedran. But then he realized, instead of being preyed upon by snakes of black fur, he was now being conflagrated to his doom by snakes of smoking fire. He screamed! Where were the fire extinguishers?

Outside, Bahdia began to cough with smoke snaking out of both of her nose holes. She yelled for Dedran to lend her his water canteen, but Dedran was too tiny to lend himself the canteen and couldn’t reach it anyway because it had stayed normal size and was buried under piney rubble. Anyway, she didn’t see Dedran nowhere and as such deserted her old dream of staying hydrated in favor of breathing fire. But she did not desert her dream of preventing forest fires, so before she breathed fire she galloped to the nearest stream, where no trees lingered and faced the danger of being immolated, then she belched a smelly stream of fire all across the stream’s surface, evaporating that portion of the stream entirely until the waters from the east replenished it.

“BurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRrrrrrroooooooohhwwwwwwp! Ahh, the burning in my lungs is gone, I think. I’ll be alright without the canteen, Dedran. Dedran? Are you there, Dedran? Halloo, Dedran! Oh no! Where did you go?”

Time is relative, or so Albert Einstein wrote on a chalkboard. But we needn’t heed the squealing chalk numbers of some dead man who failed fourth grade mathematics. We can see it with our very imaginative eye—the third eye! Bahdia’s belch of fire lasted no longer than eight seconds, yet within her lungs this hellish expulsion lasted about eight minutes.

Within the lung Dedran had fallen inside of, before the ghoulish firestorm had even turned into a ghoulish firestorm, it emerged as just a few lava-falls (the lava equivalent of waterfalls); and they spilled down from the slippery pink plateaus of the spacious lung and produced a pool of magma below. Red blood cells that had been taken hostage by the currents of lava, before they had arrived in the lungs, now splashed down into the pool of magma as it steadily ascended in height. The pool chased Dedran with belches of flamethrowers from its molten skin. Distressed, Dedran fluttered to the top of the lung and moaned:

“Bahdia. Where are you? Bahdia! Maybe you can hear me? If you can, give me your loudest ‘RAWR’ so that I can hear you too.”

Only viscous boiling, sizzling and popping noises responded to Dedran. Both heat and stress brought sweat to his brow. Within his gut the instinctual demon stirred restlessly in its slumber, snarling houndishly, demanding that Dedran unlock the cage to his primal self. “No, you stay caged and let me think!” Dedran surveyed his throbbing pink prison, figuring out how he would defy death. Then Dedran saw the two mechanisms he’d been searching for: the lever for an air conditioner, and a thermostat.

“Even the wilderness has gotten with the times,” he remarked. “Next thing you know, pigeons and porcupines will be using Alexa.” Dedran wasn’t bitter toward technology; he was simply wowed by how much he had underestimated the speed at which it could conquer the planet.

But the air conditioner lever and the thermostat wanted to make life hard for Dedran. Attached to opposite walls of the lung, they had situated themselves about two yards above the lava pool’s current peak. Five more seconds, Dedran reckoned, and that treacherous lava would be engulfing both the air conditioner lever and the thermostat and the two would be saying sayonara.

“You know what they say,” said Dedran; “you can’t have your cake and eat it too. I suppose the air conditioner is the cake, and the thermostat is eating the cake. But you can’t even eat the cake until you have it,” he rationalized, “so the thermostat isn’t even a choice for me, is it?”

Look where logical thoughts get a demon who suppresses his primal demon urges! At least now Dedran took action (by flapping towards the air conditioner lever) I suppose. But before he could thrust that son of a bitch, the lava was like “nope” and submerged it. Now if he reached down for it his hand would burn off, which is what some Catholics teach their children on the subject of masturbation.

“Rah!” ranted Dedran, for the School of Logic had taught him some impractical propaganda; “look where thought’s got me! Look what happens when I neglect my gut!” So infuriated Dedran became. The inner demon in his gut hurrahed and howled, Let it all out! like a sadist psychiatrist. But fate had a more holy route for him; and he remembered that everyone has friends who can help them out of a “doozie.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, looking at the red blood cells; “you guys know the ancient art of diving, don’t you?”

He hovered as close to one of the red blood cells as he dared, so as not to touch the lava and die, then said, “Hey. Could you do me a favor and hit the lever that’s down there in the lava? It’s rather hot in here, getting congested with lava, and people like me are 60% water.” The last part of his point was implicit: if his body dropped too far below 60%, he’d be a dead nobody like Walt Whitman.

That red blood cell—we’ll call him Reddy—he was rather rude. He reacted like a deaf person to Dedran’s question and kept drifting uselessly. This trend would have continued had Dedran not known that the universal language was Money. Dedran threw a green Andrew Jackson at Reddy, and it landed on his semi translucent skin and he absorbed it into his gelatinous center. That’s when he got all uppity and inspired like Popeye when you feed him a spinach can, and dived down eagerly.

The air conditioner lever got flogged on fast. Unluckily, the air conditioner had three settings: “exhale calmly,” “exhale casually,” and “expunge the lungs of oxygen”; of course the blood cell with all that Popeye in him cudgeled the lever down to that last option when he had intended to only cudgel it to the middle one—see, those who have money have power in a capitalistic society and Reddy simply didn’t know his own strength. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he’d’ve been gentler, had he warmed up to his monetary steroid beforehand, but there’s no sense nor dollars in dwelling.

So now instead of a stream of dragonbreath, a screaming hurricane bludgeoned open Bahdia’s maw. The hurricane caused twisters of magma to whirl at Dedran within the lung, so that he had to use his aeronautic skills so as to avoid them as they fired up at him, so as not to die. And Dedran was a virtuoso in the aeronautic ways, so he avoided the fiery winds of hell as they ejaculated toward him. While this expulsion of the lung could have very well sent him flying out of Bahdia so that Bahdia and Dedran would reunite and live happily ever after, it did not.

Here’s why: Dedran was a person. When I expound on that, I say that Dedran had the fears of a person. Dedran feared the unknown. And being so afeard, he forgot that UP would take him out of whatever system of caverns he had entered and as such he chose to fight the current.

The savvy blood cells squished flat against the walls of the lungs to buffer themselves against the AC storm, clinging onto the inside of the lungs while magma erupted out of them in the form of gusty swirls of dragonbreath. Outside, the kickback of her windy dragonbreath caused Bahdia to dance without control in circles, her breath battering and splintering forestry for acres and acres. And the forestry was ignited by her fires before being extinguished into smoke by her winds, so that it lay as a barbecued heap for acres and acres.

At the rate that Bahdia exhaled, Death had her slated to keel over from oxygen deprivation within seven seconds or so. Good thing that Reddy the blood cell remembered the Andrew Jackson Dedran gave him and his servitude that it granted the demon. When Dedran hollered “STOP IT, STOP IT!” at the top of his own lungs, Reddy obeyed and reversed his ill deed.

Immediately, a zen silence and post-orgasm relief ensorceled the perimeter. Dedran’s wings suddenly had no upwards draft to beat vigilantly against, and by overestimating the force he needed for each flappy-flap of his wings, he slammed into the pit of the lung nose-first, dealing himself an annoying toothache. I am heartened to say that no greater damage happened to him.

Many blood cells looked upon the downed demon and worried for his health, though. Would he draw breath again? They had curiosities the size of Kentucky Fried Chicken 32-pc. Bucket recipients. And so they poked and prodded their rounded edges at him to see if ‘twas alright. To their relief he giggled to their ticklish probes then rose to his feet, confirming that ‘twas alright!

One generous bloke—not the one with Andrew Jackson in ‘em, but another gentle-cell—gestured for Dedran to climb onto his back. Why did he do this without an Andrew Jackson in ‘em? You must unlearn capitalism and learn Buddha to truly understand this. He wished to be a good denizen; he sympathized for foreigners of the lung, since he was a foreigner of the lung too. Since he wanted to leave the lung he wanted to give a fellow foreigner a lift to wherever ‘twas the foreigner was going.

They did not speak with each other since they lacked a common language. But because this red blood cell had all the skill of a ‘body fresh out of UC with their communications Master’s, Dedran did not need to speak with him to know the kindness that he intended, and happily climbed onto his back. The crowd of blood cells gurgled cheerily at the Hallmark moment; oh, would some have them wept tears if they could! Then the cell ridden by Dedran bounded up, and into some fleshy little tunnel they vanished; and the crowd of blood cells warbled as a simulation of sobbing.

Journeying away from the alveoli of the lungs, the cell ridden by Dedran swam through a squiggly freeway of flesh, weaving through a traffic of awful drivers: the drivers happened to be driving themselves, and happened to be red blood cells like HIM, but he was a MUCH better driver than those miscreants! All drivers tell themselves this in their heads, anyway. Reality involved him going at such amoral speeds, a group of extra-large white blood cells (The Police) started flashing and shuddering in disgust as he zoomed by, and then started with haste on his tail.

Although great traffic they encountered, your boy The Red Blood Cell Ridden By Dedran was great at cutting people off and ducking The Police. And so he weaved away from other blood cells and outsped the bacterial police who sought to deal him a speeding ticket. While this was going on your boy Dedran was describing to The Driver his dragon friend that he wished to see again (“She is this tall, with purple scales and a little bit of red”). But a misunderstanding occurred between them, you see—The Driver thought Dedran was saying “Take me to the heart”—which is understandable, once you understand Freud’s Theory of Projection.

So they drove into the heart via a tunnel lit by heat. When Dedran was driven inside of the pulsating artery, he seemed pretty confused. He wanted to know why the heck he had been taken here and not to safety, but The Driver could not answer him. Dedran was beginning to suspect that he wasn’t in the woods anymore when, suddenly, scary packs of white blood cells swarmed toward him and his Driver the way K9 Units swarm in when The Police are raiding contraband. Dedran did not have any drugs or want to battle the White Blood Cells Like K9 Units; he just wanted to get the heck out of this place (The Heart That He Knew Not Was The Heart). When they came at him, The Driver did a gnarly feint, leaving the White Blood Cells with the looks of fellows who have reached out for a “high-five” but you’ve left them hanging. The Driver chauffeured Dedran to the top of the heart, where Dedran thought it’d be easiest to yell “Bahdia!” and be heard. Alas, he had no better luck than an insect yelling “Stop!” at an incoming shoe.

Outside, Bahdia had resumed breathing regularly. But now that she had oxygen enough to think, she had thought enough to worry, and she worried at length about Dedran being absent in her life. As such her worries had leaned her into her voracious tendencies, and she stole through the less smoky areas of the woodlands, gobbling down game and causing her belly to rumble from downpours of food. This helped her to cope with her worries. It also created quakes throughout her interior which knocked Dedran off of The Driver—which, in turn, knocked Dedran off his “rocker.”

He had been trying to keep his inner demon “under wraps” “for a minute,” but now he “could not even.” The inner demon exploded through his body, possessing it. And Dedran howled a cathartic noise that chilled and demoralized the white blood cells chasing him. And as the K9 Blood Cells strove to recuperate from emotional trauma, he came through and slashed them into oblivion with a barbaric demon twister. And he himself turned into an irrational blur—thank the Lord no stop lights had been erected in Bahdia’s heart or he would have disobeyed them. When he approached the walls of the heart he did not even stop then. He just kept demon twistering and tore a gouge through the heart which transported him into the bloodstream of the dragon. With a flurry of claws, he twisted his way through blankets of flesh into the belly of the dragon, where big food showers still happened.

Back in my day, the only thing you had to worry about in stomachs were the stomach acids. Here there rained from above giant raccoons and porcupines and rabbits, etcetera. They could each ram into Dedran with the force of a falling Disney Resort, so you must understand that they could murder somebody much swifter than stomach acids could. Dedran understood this so he screamed and flapped his flappers with all the haste he could manage to dodge the deadly animal hail. PLAP! PLAP PLAP! Into the belly sea below big beasties they began to plash and to send up giant mortars of belly juices at Dedran so that he suffered a two-front assault on his corporeal body. Dedran tried to scream, but he could not hear his own vociferations of fear beneath the mad concert of young meese going “MURRH!” and racoons going “REEH!” as belly juices combusted around their cannonballing bodies. Dedran soon got tired of flapping his wings and so, in order to rest his wings, he alighted on the back of a rabbit floating in the acid lake.

“I’ve come this far downward,” Dedran said. “So the only way out of here is farther down.”

How would Dedran go farther down without drowning, though? Dedran utilized the supplies at hand. All he had was the fur of his new vessel the Rabbit Ship to use. So Dedran grabbed a bunch of fur off of the rabbit’s back, ripped it off then wove it into a diving suit of rabbit fur, which included a good mask. This would protect him from the scary acid sea, at least until he swam to the bottom of it.

Putting on the suit, “Time to go swimming!” said Dedran.

He put on his diving mask then dove into the acid sea. Dedran swam deeper and deeper. Where was the exit? Where was Bahdia?

There, at the bottom of the sea, he discovered some star-shaped, eldritch monster of fleshiness. It opened and closed and puffed up bubble clouds every time. Surely, this Chthonic creature would take him to Bahdia if sacrificed his body to its mouth hole?

He had no time to think it over: the acids were gobbling up his protectant rabbit scuba diving suit! So Dedran swum farther down and got permitted through by the Acid-Dweller Cthulhu’s mouth hole. “I’m coming, Bahdia!” he said. A sloppy squelch shut the portal that separated belly from intestines, and the undigested bits of his rabbit suit fell off of his unharmed body as he went rocketing through Bahdia’s intestines with bolstered confidence. “I’m close to you, Bahdia; I can feel it … Soon, we’ll be together again.”

After having eaten so much, Bahdia panted, like a great big dog in the woods. Too tired to eat anymore and too tired to search for Dedran any longer, she voted to retire to her cave for the night. Yet when she walked through the threshold of her cave, the cave got a hold of her bloated flanks. Oh no, she had eaten too much!

“What’s going on? I’m not fitting! N-gyah!”

Little did Bahdia know she had also grown to twice her size. But that is okay. Let a dragoness overestimate how much slimmer she needs to be.

As she cried for help, she felt a tickle around her tail vent. “Hey, stop that you!” she cried to whomever might have been tickling her tail vent. Suddenly, out plopped an object between her glutes. She did not recall sticking an object up her tail vent, so that was odd, but she could not look around to see what had come out due to her obesity issue. “What happened? What’s happening?”

“Bahdia! I hear you!” cheered Dedran. “Calm down, I’m closeby.”

“Where are you Dedran?” Bahdia cried, relieved. “I’ve been worried sick to my tummy! Oh, and I ate so much …”

“Well, where I’ve been is right behind me—and I’m turning around now, and—”

“Oh.”

“Oh what?”

“I’m facing you.”

The two of them connected the dots and blushed bright red.

Bahdia opened her mouth to speak but decided she would rather not know what Dedran had been doing up there.

Bahdia had brought the crystal along with her, as she had been curious as to what the crystal was exactly. Later, they would be able to tamper with their sizes later and bring themselves back to normal. But the two of them still did not know that the crystal had magical powers or that they had been changed in size. Dedran’s escape from Bahdia’s insides had been one adventure. Returning himself and Bahdia to regular size and harnessing the power of the newfound crystal, however, would be a whole ‘nother one.

FIN

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