John hunkered down further into a prone position, within his fire shelter with his quart of rapidly heating water and his shovel that he had forgotten to drop (a decision he was regretting more and more as the metal head grew hotter). The day had started out so normally, hiking through burned parts of this particular national forest in a line with other firefighters, testing the ash pits with the wooden handle of his shovel, and turning the ashes if it came back hot, you know, the usual. Then he was told to go gridding in the green instead of the black, and a huge windstorm blew the fire in faster than anyone expected. As all things go, this was rather serendipitous, as it meant that a rainstorm was likely on its way. However, it was becoming more and more difficult for him to look on the bright side as he huddled and roasted. He had set up in a dry creek bed, with no burnable fuel around and set lower than the surrounding land, which was an ideal place to set up one of the fire shelters if you were interested in not dying. But the shelters weren't intended to survive direct flames, they were designed to barely keep you alive by keeping out the noxious fumes and keeping the oxygen within the shelter at 'scorching, but breathable' rather than 'so hot it will literally melt your lungs'. John sipped on some more 112-degree water while trying to breathe as slow as possible, trying to not pass out from heat stroke and trying to not die of dehydration. He was failing pretty badly. for every sip of too-hot water he took, his body was dumping out 200 sips worth of sweat in a futile attempt to keep itself at a survivable temperature. So, when a green flash suddenly erupted all around him, he thought it was simply the first of many hallucinations brought on by dehydration and the onset of heatstroke. When the temperature began rapidly cooling to livable levels, he figured it was simply the next stage of heat stroke. When he remained lucid and the temperature remained stable, he decided that maybe the fire had simply passed and, looking at his watch, he waited for five full minutes before risking it all on leaving. It took him another ten minutes to work up the courage to leave the fire shelter and risk the instantaneous ignition of his lungs. He opened the shelter with his eyes closed (he'd probably open them reactively upon the introduction of burning oxygen to his respiratory system, but better to limit the inevitable pain as much as possible by letting the body's most sensitive organ have as little exposure to noxious, flaming gases as possible) and used his shovel to help him stand. When his skin didn't slough off his body immediately, he took three deep, cleansing breaths of cool, crisp air. After the final deep breath, he really did open his eyes in shock, but only because the air was fresher than anything in California, even in the mountains and forests there was always a hint of pollution produced by the big cities (and blowing in from across the Pacific Ocean). After opening in shock, his eyes further widened to the point of nearly popping right out his skull; to his left was a grassy field littered with pink and purple flowers that lead into the base of a ring of majestic mountains; to his right lay a pristine lake, of a richer blue than he had ever seen, and it, too, appeared to extend all the way to the base of the mountain ring; the center of his view, however, was taken up by a shimmering, golden dragon so massive that it also (you guessed it) appeared to extend to the base of a distant mountain ring, but that was just forced perspective.
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The dragon stared at him with slitted eyes as golden as its scales. John stared back with non-slitted brown eyes that felt like they'd grown bigger than his head. After a second of consideration, the dragon released a roar so loud that John fell to his knees and felt the blood trickling out of his ears as his ear drums were ruptured. Squinting up at the dragon through teary eyes, he saw as it lung at him with its mouth open so wide that John knew he'd be a bite, at most. So, he did the only thing he could do in this situation; he used his shovel as a spear and shoved it through the roof of the dragon’s mouth with both hands. Had the thrust been off by a centimeter or more, he would have succeeded only in making the dragon very, very angry; as dragons, in this world, have a very high regeneration rate and 99.999% of their brain is responsible for doing mundane things like breathing or blinking (which the dragon can easily use magic to compensate for), John would only have pained it and inconvenienced it mildly for about two weeks (the average time it takes for a dragon to heal part of its brain), and then John would have promptly been eaten while the dragon went on with its day. But John just so happened to strike precisely through that .001% section that was responsible for the dragon's magic. Dragons, being inherently magical creatures, cannot survive without access to their magic; and while their magic can literally keep them alive even if 99.999% of their brain is destroyed, that 99.999% can't keep them alive if their magic is inaccessible. So, the dragon died instantly, but that didn't stop its momentum. John was launched back by the full force of a muscular multi-ton beast transferred through the wooden handle of his shovel, which shattered under the impact. John came to an indeterminable amount of time later; all he knew was that it was now dark out, his hands were throbbing from the multitude of large wooden splinters that used to be his trusty shovel, his body was throbbing from its impact with the ground (which had apparently made a deep, long furrow in the once beautiful field), and that he had somehow, magically, survived. He slowly and painfully hoisted himself to his feet while listening to the accompanying creaks, groans, pops and cracks that he'd grown accustomed to; contemplating, once again, how ill-suited a 36 year old man was to being in such a physically demanding field as firefighting and also, he thought for the first time, to getting slammed into the earth by a freaking dragon. He looked around under the light of the three moons... Three moons. Not one. Either he was having optical hallucinations caused by the rather large conk to his noggin when the dragon decided to introduce him to the ground, or the moon had been watching way too much of a certain ninja anime. Probably the first thing, since the moon couldn't watch anime. It didn't have any eyes. He saw a cave off in the distance, which was probably the dragon’s old home, and since he hadn't been eaten during his recent bout of unconsciousness, it was a safe bet that the dragon didn't have a mate. So that would probably be a relatively safe place to sleep off the post-ground-slam hangover before setting out to find civilization tomorrow. Probably. He began trudging that way while pinching out the multiple splinters in his hands. Upon reaching the cave, he saw the usual mounds of gold, silver, gems, books, rare beanie babies, et cetera, et cetera. But there, in pride of place, was a shimmering egg slightly bigger than he was, one that could only have been laid by the dragon he had stabbed in the brain.
"Whelp, looks like I killed a hardworking single mother. Now I just feel guilty. And in pain. These splinters are huge."