Fair warning, I was very very drunk when I wrote this (surprise, I know). There were a few edits, of course, but apparently this is what happens when I drink. I should have been working on a different story, not starting a new one, but oh well.

Strange creatures live in the unexplored corners of the world. For years after the discovery of the platypus, anthropologists cried fake. After an okapi cadaver was brought back to England as a specimen, scientists thought it a stitched together prank. How can a creature possibly be half zebra, half horse, and half giraffe? That is clearly numerically impossible, but nonetheless, the okapi is real. The coelacanth was long thought extinct, until a fishing trawler accidentally proved otherwise, and new species are discovered each year, living in the hard to reach places of the globe.

Elsa is a dragon. She lives in a remote crag of the Galdhopiggen mountain in southern Norway. Not a snow-filled open to the elements sort of crag, but a very nice place, with flagstone floors, and marble walls. Frescoed ceilings, and enormous chandeliers made of gold and cut crystal. She is young by her race's standards, only a little over one-thirty, and only maybe a dozen feet long. She likes to fly when she thinks no one is watching, more because she was always told not to, than from any sort of enjoyment for its own sake, but also because… well, flying!

Anna is a human. A short, excitable, freckled, backpacker sort of human. After a certain point, the endeavor is too dangerous, too difficult, to be properly called "hiking." Hence, backpacking. Maybe mountain climbing. She was only nineteen when she succeeded in climbing Everest. Not the youngest by about six years, but still no mean feat. She lives in Jotunheimen, Norway, only a half hour drive from the base of Galdhoppigen, so it is only natural that she would hike it regularly, as training for her other, more technical, hikes.

That is precisely what she is doing when she meets Elsa. She is crossing the glacier, alone, despite the warnings. The snow crunches beneath her boots like a spoonful of cheerios. She wants cheerios now. She has a small ziploc bag of them, but she's saving them. The air is cold, but she wears a coat and good thick hiking pants, and she's used to it anyway. It's a routine sort of hike. A weekend hike. The sort of hike that you bring a tent for, just in case, but you don't really expect to need it.

Elsa is usually careful to avoid the trails when she's flying- there are people that would like nothing better than to hurt her- but there's a wind today. A slight, blowing from the west sort of gentle push. She likes the way the air caresses her long body. It's soothing. Like all those years ago, when her mother would lick her clean. The breeze seems to have a thousand cool tongues, brushing at her scales, tickling the sensitive side of her jaw, trickling through the tiny feathery scales in her wide wings. When the air is gentle and soothing like this, she sometimes closes her eyes- she's high enough that there's no risk of hitting anything, after all. And that's how she drifts over the mammals' territory.

Anna is about to give in, to stop and eat her cheerios, when, with a low whooshing noise, a large white shape flies overhead. She looks up out of reflex, and there, gliding serenely overhead, is a sleek white dragon. Anna had climbed Galdhoppigen many times before, is intimately familiar with the course, but even the easiest, best known trails can be treacherous if you don't watch your footing, and there isn't a single person alive who wouldn't be the least bit surprised by the sudden appearance of a dragon. Her booted feet slip out from under her, and she falls into a shallow crevice in the ice. She loses consciousness within minutes, either from a particularly hard knock, or from hypothermia, she doesn't know, and it doesn't really matter which. Both can be equally deadly.

Say what you will about dragons- they're greedy, armored, reptilian predators, but they aren't evil, and Elsa isn't heartless. She sees Anna slip, and knows she has to help. She had never interacted with a human before- not peacefully, at least- so there had been little reason to learn how to take care of them, but Elsa does remember- vaguely- that humans prefer to be warm, and this whole affair is her fault- kindof- so she's pretty sure that she's morally obligated to take the human back to her cave. She circles downwards, flares her wings a bit at the end like a parachute, and enjoys the way her steely muscles strain against gravity. Her claws crush the hard ice beneath her like so much chalk as she steps cautiously forward- it could be a humanist trick, but no. There's the human sprawled across the ice, shocking orange hair bright against the snow. That's how Elsa first noticed it, of course; that bright orange hair. She huffs, and wedges her sleek, scaled, body into the narrow crevasse. Elsa blinks once, twice, and decides to latch her powerful talons into the backpack (that's not part of the human, right?) It is moderately challenging to wriggle back out of the icy hole, but eventually, Elsa succeeds and lifts the human into the air with a massive heave of her powerful wing muscles.

Elsa is still young, so the human is a significant portion of her body mass, but dragons are absurdly over engineered, so she manages. When she lands in her massive atrium, she's only a little out of breath. Now it is a cross-species constant, that rest is an integral part of healing, but dragons don't use beds- not as fluff-filled mattresses and silken sheets, at least. Their sharp scales would shred their bedding every time they shift in their sleep, and dragons are of rugged enough construction that the comfort gained would be negligible to them anyway.

And that is how Anna finds herself waking up stop a massive pile of gold- Elsa's bed, as she would later learn. The room is vast and vaulted, and the walls are all of glittering black marble. The floor is completely obscured by the incomprehensible wealth around her, but a few feet above the rolling sea of gold is a small stone ledge, and a large steel-bound door.

Humans are insufferably curious. When they're in a situation they don't understand, when they are clearly meant to stay put, they start exploring, and the eternally adventurous Anna is no different. A few moments after waking, she's trying to stand- trying since the world sways alarmingly around her. It takes her several tries, but eventually, she manages to clamber up onto the ledge and tries the door. It's barred from the outside, but there is a gap between the door and its frame, and she still has her backpack.

Anna scowls when she see the wide rips in the tough nylon of her pack, and the shredded tent within, but her tough tungsten-carbide knife is undamaged. She uses the blunt back edge to lift the bar, and slips out. Maybe she should have slipped a handful of gold into her ruined pack, or barring that, her pockets, but it is too great an amount to really register as individual gold coins to her.

She wanders down twisting, maze-like stoney passages, until she hears a rhythmic clicking noise. Anna has always been prone to fantasy. Once, when she was in lower secondary school, her friend Kristoph had told her that trolls lived in the mountains nearby. She had gone looking for them that night, after her parents were asleep. She had gotten lost, of course, and the town had mounted a search when they found out in the morning. She was grounded for a month and a half. So when she saw that the corridors were much larger than normal, her first thought was "giants." In her head, she is Jack, and her little knife is a sword. The fantastic treasure she woke up on is the dungeon's loot table, and that tapping noise Is probably the giant chopping up his last meal. Speaking of meals… She fishes out her bag of Cheerios.

Anna is less surprised than perhaps she should be, when she discovers that her giant is a dragon, and the tapping noise? The snow white scales of the dragon's tail clicking against the flagstone floor. She appears to be reading an ancient human anatomy book.

"You weren't supposed to see me like this," the dragon says. "I'm pretty sure humans are more comfortable interacting with their own kind? I was going to change my appearance, once I finished figuring out what's wrong with you. You want to go back and we'll try again, or just go with it?"

Anna lets out a mighty battle cry, raises her knife, and charges.

AN: well, this got written because alcohol, but im actually quite taken with this absurd idea. there will probably be further chapters eventually... reviews help me do better in the future, follows and favorites tell me im doing something right now. follows/favorites/reviews will help more of the story come out faster, but more importantly, they earn you an imaginary smiley sticker.

Edit: the quality of this chapter was (and still is) much below my usual standard, on account of the conditions surrounding its creation... I have since gone back and done some additional edits, both to try to improve the quality to the point of the later chapters, and to get the lore a little bit more inline with the rest of the story.