Little Jackie Paper loved the rascally Puff. But as time went on, painted wings and giant rings made way for other toys, and he had to abandon his lifelong friend and the fertile world of his boyhood imagination. These “toys” came in the form of Matilda Murdock, his marijuana-smoking triple-amputee girlfriend. She was a sweet girl, if a bit clueless. Her legs were nice, especially the right one, which she hopped around with since it still actually had the foot attached. She fancied herself a shrewd individual for learning how to use her remaining appendage to fulfill the functions of the lost three, like a blind man who develops an exceptional sense of hearing or a computer programmer who makes up for his lack of sex-life by cloning himself. The main difference between these cases and Matilda was that Matilda only thought she could compensate for her disability.

Still, her good qualities more than balanced this out. She was a dreamer by nature (or by virtue of the cloud of marijuana smoke she seemed to be constantly surrounded by), which appealed to that part of him that still missed his old draconic friend. If nothing else, he felt as if he was deeply in love with her. Long nights of hopping on the beach, rubbing elbows, and talking for hours on end about how nice it would be to go dancing without a pogo stick were Jack’s bread and butter.

It was during one such night on the beach that they found themselves embracing and tumbling to the ground ecstatically in a wild tangle of 6-and-a-half limbs. Matilda nearly choked on her joint as they did so, and in vengeance Jackie chased down the dog that had knocked her over and gave it a sound punting. His boots stained and reeking of dead canine, Jackie took them off and knelt down next to his monopodal lover to help her up. Instead she coaxed him to lie down next to her. Or at least, he was fairly sure she did, he was having difficulty telling amidst her brain-fried giggles and murmurings about internal bleeding from the violence of the fall.

“Mati, I truly do love you.” Jackie said, inching closer. He spoke in the soft, sincere tones of a true romantic who really wanted to get laid. With that, he moved his lips along her neck, leaving a trail of wet kisses across her throat like a hopping vampire slug. She tittered slightly in enjoyment, and within moments Jackie felt a foreign influence making its way near his crotch. Jackie closed his eyes in joy, feeling utterly at ease until moments later when his lover opened her mouth and he realized that something was very, very wrong.

“Yeah baby, you’re liking that, right? You’re having a good time? Goooood… Just relax baby, it’s all right. Mattie’s gonna try and give you one of her patented Daredevil monkey-love foot jobs, alright? Alright, good…”

“Excuse me… Excuse me, Mati, sweetheart, my love, am I to understand that you’re currently pleasuring me with your foot?”

“You know it baby. Doesn’t that turn you on? Oh no, don’t tense up, relaaaax… Yeah, that’s right. Calm down a bit. Gooood. You know how good I am with my feet, righ- I said relax!” Jackie gulped and with a mental effort that would impress Stephen Hawking, managed to relax himself. “Good boy. See? No trouble yet. Having fun, aren’t you? Oh baby, I just wanna squeeze your hickory farms summer sausage and slap your cheese spread all over my crackers. I want to open up your tube full of Crest with Whitening and brush myself minty. Mmmmm…”

“You’re as good with metaphors as you are with your toes, my…” running out of new terms of endearment and not wanting to say ‘sweetheart’ again, Jackie stalled momentarily before sputtering out “…aspartame-nugget.”

Matilda smiled as her foot continued to gyrate. “Awww, you always manage to say the sweetest things. Honestly, this is really great, I’m glad we managed to- oh golly, I’m sorry honey, my leg twitched! Are you alright?”

Jackie let out a what sounded like Fran Drescher in a blender (though not nearly as much fun) as his eyes rolled into the back of his head and his nerve centers let him know just how disgruntled they were with him. Meanwhile, completely different (though adjacent) nerve centers were not only quite gruntled, but actually having a very pleasant time of things now that they had chosen a very unlikely moment to orgasm. His head filled with two very conflicting sensations in his groin, as well as enough ambient marijuana smoke to fuck up a blue whale.

All of these different sensations sent a ripple through Jackie’s imagination, lifting his spirit up and dragging it through the starry sky until his consciousness was up in the air and free. Below him, he saw his body, sprawled on the ground and twitching in a very strange sort of pleasurable agony. Also below him he saw Matilda, trying to massage his injured member back to health with what little tenderness her toes could confer. But above him, and all around him, he saw and felt tremendous, scaly beasts with massive, leathery beating wings. They were majestic in a sense that no mundane creature could ever hope to be, with muscles that could bend the earth and teeth like ivory scythes. When they exhaled, plumes of scarlet flame left their lips with intense heat. Their every movement was one of magic, and when he floated with them Jackie briefly felt as if his world was as lovely as theirs again.

Jackie let out a laugh, as the true fantasy of the situation struck him. This wasn’t real, and if the world wanted to even pretend to make sense, there was no possible way it ever WOULD be real. And as he saw this, as he believed once again that the world had to at least attempt to be rational, he felt himself fall rather ungracefully back into reality again. He blinked several times, remembering the soreness in his pelvis and the grit of sand in his boxers, and for a moment he was saddened by the loss of his world that was too good to be true. Matilda saw this in his eyes, and looked at him concernedly, before he smiled.

His situation struck him, then. He was on the beach, at night, being gently kicked in the groin by a high amputee. His smile turned to a laugh as the sheer unlikelihood of the situation struck him, and he spoke to Matilda. “You know what you remind me of sometimes?” He asked.

“What?” She asked, carefully wiping her foot off. There were some things she didn’t want mingling with her toe-jam.

“Dragons, man. Dragons.”