The men don't seem so amused. The thin man is approaching him again.

He looks up at the thin man with a surprisingly threatening smile for someone so thoroughly helpless.

“Are you simple?”

He stops right in front of him.

“We will torture you, and the scholars will dissect you, and you will someday die a very painful death or be left alone to starve. That is your story.”

He leans down with the blade again.

"You're ... not," he says, with the air of someone struggling to articulate a concept he doesn't yet fully understand himself.

He stops, looks at him impatiently.

“Not what?”

He laughs and shakes his head.

He shakes his own head in exasperation and repeats his last cut.

He makes a choked noise of pain, but keeps laughing.

He can't properly articulate what he's thinking, even to himself. But it feels like he just discovered something crucially important.

And then he abruptly turns into a forty-foot-long mythical reptile. The chains shatter off his body. He bites the thin man's head off with a snap of his jaws and lunges forward to wrap himself protectively around his girl.

The thin man’s body crumples to the ground, gushing blood from the stump of its neck.

The other two men do not waste time in running.

(And the mechanics of transformation have become much more clear.)

The agony of missing limbs just starting to seal becomes abruptly unimportant.

“...well, fuck, I guess it was.”

He nuzzles her and coils his serpentine body around her and pets her hair with his surprisingly humanlike hands.

She leans up into his hand and laughs.

“...I don’t think I ever told you my name, huh? I’m Z.”

She gives the end of his snout the smallest of kisses—

—and then she is gone, and the cell is gone, and the bar is there instead.

It takes him a moment to even recognize what has happened, and then he hisses and lashes his tail furiously, doing incidental damage to some nearby furniture.

She looks up from watering the decorative plant in the corner.

—oh, that’s not an ideal response.

She approaches with her hands held out.

“It’s all right, hon.”

"It is not," he hisses. "She's important and I don't even know if she was real."

But he does at least stop bludgeoning the decor to death, and coil himself up into a tidy pile again.

Oh. That would make sense.

(She’s glad he can speak, now. It makes this much easier.)

“Tell me about her, sugar.”

"She said her name was Z. She..." He trails off, struggling with words, trying to find some way to communicate how good she was. "...She smiled."

...that’s very cute.

“Did she ever talk about being in a dream, honey?”

He frowns (an odd look on a dragon), thinks back, and then nods.

“Then she’s a dreamer. She’s out there somewhere.”

"I want her."

...well, she has to admit that the phrasing is a little concerning,

but she can tell the feelings are all right.

“Well, honey, we might be looking a while, but I’ll see if we can help you out with that.”