There is a quiet ruffling sound, a sudden darkness, and an iron-hard hand closes around her waist to snatch her off the ground.

She yelps in surprise, looks up, realizes what the fuck is going on, and starts assessing the scales to see if she could pry one off to make the dragon drop her.

The scales are beautiful, a vivid shimmering orange-red like some kind of solid embodiment of fire, and they have absolutely no give whatsoever. Also, in only a few wingbeats they have already ascended to a height where if she succeeded in getting dropped she would probably not like the result very much.

Fuck.

"Hey, what gives?" she demands.

"I'm kidnapping you. I do that sometimes," says the dragon, sounding amused.

"Why?"

"I'll give you a hint, I usually only kidnap pretty girls."

"How does that even work, anatomically speaking?"

Cheerfully: "Well, now, telling you would ruin the surprise."

"And what if I don't like surprises?"

"Then I guess you're out of luck."

"You know, people are into all kinds of things, I'm sure you could find someone who kinks on whatever you've got going on down there if you try hard and believe in yourself."

"Do you actually think that? Because I don't. If there's somebody out there who wants to fuck a dragon that badly, it's not like they don't know where I live."

"There's a difference between 'wants to fuck a dragon' and 'would perform the arduous physical activity of climbing a mountain to seek out a dragon who might want to fuck them but also might want to eat them'. Also it's hard to tell if you want to fuck a dragon when you don't even know what their genitals are like."

"Well, true enough. But how exactly are you proposing I find this person?"

"Well, you could put me back and let me advertise, I have resources with which to do this."

"Sounds like something a person trying to get un-kidnapped would say."

"I admit that I would prefer not to be kidnapped! But, uh, lying about this so as to get un-kidnapped sounds like a good way to get kidnapped again when I failed to make any progress, and 'kidnapped again later only now you're more pissed off' is not actually as much of an improvement as it might seem if you don't stop to think about it."

"If I put you down and you run away I actually don't have a convenient way to find you again," he says.

"I live in a fucking castle."

"...and you'd just sit in it and wait for me to come back?"

"Well, no, but 'where is Lady-such-and-such' is usually easier to find out than 'where is Random Peasant Chick You Have No Reason To Have Heard Of'."

"Not to me. If I stick around long enough to have a conversation anywhere in sight of more than ten people, they panic and start a riot. Or try to kill me, and when that doesn't work, panic and start a riot."

"It can't be that hard to find less than ten people, can it?"

"...are you serious?"