Suddenly Ketz pulls you down behind a bush, and you realize that the forest has started to thin. About 50 feet from you is a clearing filled with blackened bushes and what looks like enormous versions of what happens when your father is at the grill. You presume these are logs, just like you usually assume he’s been making sausages. Some of the logs are as wide around as your car, and the blackened area stretches about a football field away from a rock wall. There’s a great cavern in the grey stone, black as pitch and undoubtedly deep and cold. It’s probably about fifty feet tall, at least.
“Holy crap,” you whisper. “I thought you said it wasn’t big?”
“It wasn’t,” he says. “It may have grown. It’s been a century.”
“Great,” you say. “Just great. Maybe plan A would have been better.”
Ketz sighs. He seems to do this a lot. You’re not sure if that means he hasn’t completed adolescence or if you’re just that irritating. “If the dragon looks at all aggressive, I will distract it and lead it away from here. Meet me back at the campsite if something goes wrong.” He pushes you and the food into the clearing and gives you what you assume is the Feathered equivalent of a thumbs up, spreading his wings wide and grinning goofily.
“You look like an idiot,” you hiss.
“Says the woman about to feed a dragon,” he replies. “Go on, we are wasting daylight.”
Inhaling deeply but not at all calmly, you take a cautious step towards the cave. You’re not certain at what point you went completely insane, but you’re hoping it was recently to avoid great embarrassment. You also wonder whether you should just go into the cave and look for it, or wait for it to come to you. Since venturing into someplace dark and scary sounds like less than appealing, you decide to wait for it.
Charcoal crunches into powder beneath your feet as you walk into the center of the field, farther and farther away from safety. If the dragon is that big, after all, it probably won’t be able to chase you through the jungle. Probably, anyhow. And wet things don’t burn that well. Usually.
I’m so going to die, you think, faintly nauseous. Pressing your eyelids together so tightly a rainbow of what you’ve always assumed were dying cells dance in front of your eyes, you open your mouth. “Here, dragon dragon dragon!” You wait a few seconds before tentatively opening your eyes again. Nothing. “Here, drag-“
There’s a loud roar from the cave that cuts your words off, turning them into a high pitched squeak. “Shit, shit, shit, shitty shit fuck,” you spit, scrambling backwards and looking around desperately for shelter before remembering you’re in the middle of a field and that dragons don’t even have to say ‘flame on’ before you’re incinerated, regardless of what bush you hide behind. So instead you stand there, nervous and about to be fried, and watch as a burst of flame comes out of the cave, bright and orange and actually? Not all that large.
Then the dragon emerges, and your first thought is, huh. Well, that’s not too bad.
It’s still easily big enough to crush you, about the size a Ford F150, though not nearly as flamboyantly colored. It’s brown with mottled green patches, making it look both camouflaged and slightly diseased. The body is long and kind of fat and wide, skin folding into ridges along the outermost edges of its torso and limbs. Short legs jut out from the side, stocky and ending in large, mostly broken black claws. The tail drags on the ground behind it, long and useless, striped with brown instead of patched. No ostentatious wings or spikes – it basically looks like a big lizard.
A big lizard that can breathe fire. And has large claws and large teeth and really large eyes that – oh fantastic, just fan-fucking-tastic – are staring right at you. Despite the fact that it looks like an overgrown iguana that had a haircut, this thing can definitely eat you. And it looks like it’s thinking pretty hard about it.
Gulping, you reach numbly for the bag at your side. As the dragon opens its mouth, a blood red gape rimmed with yellow fangs, you hurry the fuck up, grabbing a disgusting chunk of meat – ugh, slimy – and lob it at the dragon.
You’ve never been a good shot, and apparently times of stress do not improve this any. It goes far wide, but the dragon gets distracted from your immediate incineration and turns to face it, giving you another opportunity. This one hits it in the face, miracles of all miracles. Of course, you were aiming for a few feet in front of it, but you’ll take what you can get.
It freezes, and a long, pink, tri-forked tongue comes out. It flicks up, then down, slowly and contemplatively, and the dragon looks down. A chunk of meat approximately the size of your fist is resting at its feet, and it noses it around a bit before grabbing it with its jaws, tossing it upwards and swallowing it whole. Snack finished, the dark and somewhat beady eyes focus in on you again, and the dragon takes a step forward. You toss another chunk of meat at it, and it moves forward even more, swallowing it with far less hesitation than the first one. A third, and then a fourth, and suddenly the truck-sized alien lizard is about its own length away, and how did that happen without you hyperventilating?
It finishes its last chunk and looks at you, gaze unerring and unnerving.

(C.2.1.1) – Lure it back into the bushes and away from the cave.
(C.2.1.2) – Give it the rest of the meat and try to sneak past it.
(C.2.1.3) – Pet it.