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Nope.

Cue drum rolls and flashing lights as scales entwined Every’s body, which grows longer every second. Like bread dough being pulled longer to make pizza. He dragon-shifts, now looking like a loong, a creature from ancient Chinese mythology. Or a bright-red oversized bratwurst with tiny, clawed feet on the sides, a couple of whiskers on its face, and a continuously cursing girl on its back.

The creature swerves in the air, flying away from the violently whirling storm of grey cloud billows and flashing lightning. Away from the wreckage of steel and flesh that once was a chopper and its jolly pilot, its red body like a burning brand of fire in a gloomy lead-grey background. And now, though time has flown by, it is not even night, but twelve o’clock in the middle of the day.

A quite stormy midday, that is.

The dragon (that is actually Every the shifter) swiftly lands on an abandoned wasteland, the tips of its talons softly tapping onto the soggy ground. At once, his shape shifts back into the human form, naked as the day he was born, all scaleless tan skin, abs, and arms. And legs with two feet and five wiggling toes on each, let’s not forget that.

Lily-girl, probably the most ill-lucked young woman in the world, stares dumbly back at where the storm is still raging in the distance, now turned into a tornado, sucking into its eye what is left of the helicopter. She sighs, then looks back to Every, now taking some leaves he found out of nowhere to cover himself.

“But Grandad told me this could withstand a pterosaur attack,” he says as the withered leaves fall apart.

CHAPTER 5: A DUMP AT THE DUMP SITE

“Wow, bro, that’s so dope,” Lily Lilindalia Lindonella exclaims, suddenly realizing that her boyfriend had just shifted from his human form into a mile-long dragon, and then back. “And if I’m your fated mate, then am I a shifter too?”

He looks at her, forgetting his nakedness, thinking for a while before he answers. “No, you’re the mate, not the shifter, so you only get the ability to shift after the mating ritual.”

“And how do I do that?”

Every just stares at her.

Tick. Tock.

Oh, so awkward.

“Anyway, where the fuck are we?” Lily the Lame pipes up, as if all this time, she had been drowning in a confused haze all along, and had just remembered the state she is in. She then notices that she is standing on a crooked sheet of metal, about as wide as she is, with no idea of how she came upon it.

The ground around them must be uneven, if there even is a ground at all, that is. Thousands upon thousands of trinkets, some as small as sounds and others even bigger than silicone coil snakes, lay scattered all over, piling up into mountains upon mountains of random shit. The land is vast, yet even to the ends of her sight, all that Lily could see are old, forgotten goods.

A rusted Chevrolet sits broken in the distance, the once bright dodger-blue paint now faded into a sad shade of jean-blue. A half-torn sticker reading ‘best whore in town, biggest ass in the country’ is stuck on the windshield, and somehow, that ignites a sad, nostalgic feeling in Lily-girl’s soft heart. Three cracked wheels lie discarded on its hood, the fourth one nowhere to be found, only adding to the already gloomy atmosphere.

An air of doom and despair sweeps over the grounds, chilling her to the bone.

What a drama queen.

“We’re at the landfill, sugartits, a place where the land is filled with all the waste and unwanted trash,” Every answers her in what he must mean as comforting, but it comes off rather as an insult. He paces around, surveying the area with his keen dark gaze.

Lily, the emotional girl she is, starts to cry.

Her guy makes a face. “Stop crying, girly. Are you pregnant or something?”

She just stares at him. “Bro, most virgins can’t exactly get pregnant, you know.”

“Oh, yeah, my bad. I forgot that. Actually, I had no idea you are one until you randomly overshared just earlier. But you probably are, all right, not that it even came into my mind before now. With that whole naive, innocent virgin heroine trope going on and all that type shit.”

“And why are we here in this dumpster wasteland place anyway?”

“Because the helicopter fell, dumbass.”

“And why did that piece of shit fall? I told you, my man, it was fucking cursed.”

“Because of the lightning by the mouse king, controller of dramatic stage effects.”

“Wait, that’s a thing?”

“Yep,” Every answers, “and he, the mouse king, is actually the villain of our great love story.”