Bureaucratic Fantasy
Dragon Hoard
submitted · 5k words
Benjamin hoards electronics. That's what dragons do. He needs a damsel to properly be a dragon, so he kidnaps Alice Huang, a Denver repair technician. Alice is furious until she realizes his cavern of broken machines is an opportunity. Weekdays she works in the city. Weekends she wires jukeboxes and turntables into Benjamin's battery grid. They build something that looks like a life. Then Alice tells her therapist the truth about where she spends her weekends, and the response isn't curiosity — it's psychiatric intervention, forced medication, and a diagnosis that reduces everything real about her life to a symptom.