When the mist settled, the Dwarf guards were staring into space, holding their weapons loosely as they twitched randomly. I giggled at the sight.

I raised one paw at them, shaking with barely contained laughter. “You look like zombies!”

They looked down at me, their faces contorting with confusion and something a little like fear. But that was wrong! There wasn’t anything to be afraid of, after all! We’re just gonna be friends!

I strode forward between them, pausing at the door to look back at the perplexed midgets. “Come on, y’all! Let’s get on outta here and sing!”

I burped loudly, chuckled, and started singing Wagon Wheel. “Heading down south to the land of the pines; I’m thumbing way into North Carolina-” I grunt in between lyrics, trying to push open the heavy metal doors.

I hear a rough, scratchy voice join me in singing as the second Dwarf pushes open the door with the butt of her spear. I look back and see she has this dazed look in her eyes and the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. I return it and start singing again as I walk out of the dungeon and into the hall.

“Staring up the road and pray to God I see headlights; I made it down the coast in seventeen hours; Picking me a bouquet of dogwood flowers.”

A third voice joins us shortly after and we sing in melodious harmony. The two Dwarves stand on either side of me, slapping the shafts of their spears to mimic the beat of the song. We were having a ground ol’ time until we came up across a crossroad.

“I declare,” I shouted with a grandiose swing of my head, “that we go left!’

My friends eagerly agree and we turn down the left path, only to see a small group of male Dwarves tromping down the hallway towards us. When the lead midget saw us, he cries out and points his ridiculously large hammer. He says something in that weird language I can’t understand and they all charge.

I squint my eyes at the oncoming traffic. Turning my head to the lady midget on my right, I address her suspiciously. “Say, Betsy, you think they wanna be friends or not?”

She babbled down at me in her strange tongue, not makin’ a lick of sense but I nodded along anyway. There wasn’t any need to be rude.

A bomb popped into existence, floating just behind Betsy. She jumped at the sudden sound but I reassured her that everything was gonna be just fine. “We’re makin’ new karaoke buddies,” I said, maneuvering the glass ball so it wouldn’t impact her elbow when I threw it at the oncoming Dwarves. “And they’re gonna love drinkin’ some of my friendship juice.”

They were ten feet away now. I tensed, waiting for the right moment to throw the bomb. My Dwarf friends were getting antsy but I told them to be patient. We’d have new friends in three, two, one!

The bomb hit the lead midget right in the face, spraying the friendship juice onto him and the rest of his motley crew of stunted warriors.

Thrakdruk Hillbuster was not impartial to the mental changes intensive drinking brought. Beards above, it was a wonder his liver hadn’t busted a long time ago with all the beer he’d been chugging these past few days.

Ever since he got assigned to guard duty, he’d taken to drowning the miseries of life into the only thing that loved him: Pineapple Rum. He craved the burning buzz of the sweet liquor sliding down his throat; he guzzled bottles by the dozen just to get that familiar acidic feeling in his gut.

But nothing could’ve prepared him for this.

He’d taken an involuntary gulp of the orange mist fogging up his field of vision. As soon as it touched his tongue, everything went haywire inside his noggin. Suddenly, the failures of the past and the pressure of tomorrow drifted out of his mind; the burden of paying for a daughter he never sees and nagging superior officers lifted off of his shoulder.

His muddled mind couldn’t process what happened next. Everything was slow and murky in his watery vision. He felt...off like something was missing. Shouldn’t he be doing something right now? He felt like...he’d been searching for something…

Right?

He rubbed at his eyes, coughing as the mist cleared from the air. As his vision cleared, he heard a voice start to sing. It was disturbingly off-key, had no concept of pitch. A frogkin could sing better than that voice, which was saying something with their rough and patchy vocal cords.

Then the hall was clear and the singer was revealed: a small, green juvenile hill dragon. It hadn’t even started growing scales yet, although he could see the scale lines forming just beneath the thin green skin stretched across its bony body.

It stopped singing when it saw him and tilted its head to the side. He watched in a mix of wonder and confusion as its maw split into a gruesome imitation. He found himself smiling back at it.

It spoke, gracing his ears with a surprisingly feminine voice with a slight twang to it. “Howdy, partner. Wanna be friends?”