“No!”

  “Come on, it doesn’t hurt! I’ve even heard it feels quite good for bipeds.”

  “Absolutely not! I hate snakes!” Jessica said, rearing her leg back to kick the snake if she came any closer.

  “I am not a sssnake, I am a lamia. Sssnakes do not have a human half.”

  “Well then I hate half of you and that’s enough!”

  The lamia grinned. “Ah, but you have hardly even met my other half. What will you do if you like it?”

  “Not a damn thing cuz it’s not happening!”

  The lamia huffed and flit her tongue as her fists placed themselves on non-existent hips. “How bigoted! Unlike your nicer-looking captors, I mean you no harm.”

  “Why should I believe you?” Jessica asked.

  “Because I am a three-thousand-pound sssnake monster, and if I meant you harm there would be nothing you could do to ssstop me.”

  “So you admit you’re a snake!”

  “That was your term. I call myssself a lamia. Ssso let us progressss beyond our primal fears and move on to sssomething more productive, like names. Mine is Nagakanya, but you may call me Naga.”

  Jessica lowered her leg but kept her hands braced against the cell wall. She was still repulsed by the lamia and her slithering pile of coils, but her amygdala was willing to make concessions for the sake of learning about the threat.

  “Jessica,” she said.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Jessssica,” Naga replied with far too many s’s for Jessica’s comfort.

  “Great. I’m still not letting you coil around me!”

  “But it doesn’t hurt!”

  “I don’t care! You’re lucky I’m not crashing out harder. But you are absolutely, one hundred percent, not coming anywhere near me. And you are five thousand percent not touching me. Are we clear on that?”

  Naga pouted and turned her head. “You’d like it if you tried it. Persssonally, I think you’re wasssting perfectly good body heat. Think how much more comfortable we’d both be if I helped insssulate you and you helped keep my blood warm.”

  Despite being the height of summer, the stone walls of the dungeon kept the air as chilly as any refrigerator with the added discomfort of clammy seawater seeping through the walls. It felt not unlike the wall-length air conditioning units in old hotel rooms. But given the choice between biting cold and being wrapped in snake coils, Jessica would rather her fingers and toes snap off.

  “No,” Jessica said, “and stop asking. You’d better stay on your side of the cell while I’m asleep.”

  Naga rolled her eyes. “I have no interessst in that ssside of the room. Over near the bars you can get at leassst sssome of the torch heat.”

  Jessica shimmied toward the beds. These were beds in form more than function, being no more than pallets of straw with no blankets or pillows. Their sole comfort was keeping skin off heat-leeching stone. It was also the one place untouched by Naga and her slimy scales.

  Jessica curled up in one for all of a minute before the shivering started. The thin gown Mystiferia put her in was not cutting it. She threw straw on top of herself which helped the cold only by giving her brain a bunch of itching to contend with instead.

  After an hour of tossing and turning she was just as cold and twice as itchy. With growing dread, Jessica realized what she had to do.

  “Naga…”

  Nagakanya shot straight up through the middle of her coils as though Jessica had just played a flute.

  “Yesss? You have come to your sssenssses?”

  That level of hissing was almost enough to make Jessica reconsider.

  “You can…” for some reason it felt taboo to say it aloud, “coil me… But! Only if you agree to make it very loose, to keep your fangs nowhere near me, and to minimize the… slithering.”

  “The ssslithering?” Naga said.

  Jessica shuddered. “The slithering.”

  “Ssso you want me to sssit here, without moving, and without sssqueezing?”

  “Yes.”

  “That sssounds ssso boring!”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “Boring is how I like my sleep,” Jessica replied.

  “How about jussst a little sssqueeze?”

  “No! That’s my compromise, take it or leave it.”

  With a huff, Naga unspooled herself enough to leave a gap for Jessica to crawl over. On first touch, Jessica’s hand recoiled from the uncomfortably smooth texture of the scales. It felt like a cross between nylon rope and a bratwurst. Naga was also cool to the touch. Almost as cold as the room.

  “A-Actually, I don’t know if—”

  “It’sss not getting any warmer. Trussst me, once you crawl in we’ll both warm up. It’sss jussst cold at the start.”

  Like a pool, Jessica thought. Not that that made it any easier to crawl inside a snake puddle. A pit full of hissing cockroaches genuinely would’ve been preferable if it was warm. However, that wasn’t what she had in front of her. What she had was a snake puddle.

  “Come. Enter my coils.”

  “Please don’t say that,” Jessica said as she stepped onto Naga.

  Even knowing the sensation was coming, Jessica shuddered when her foot touched the icy-cold scale. Adjusting herself, she reclined into Naga’s coils like a bean bag chair. All of a sudden Naga closed in around her. The spike of adrenaline from that would have launched her straight up except for the weight of Naga’s body keeping her immobile.

  “Wait! I said no squeezing! Let me out!” Jessica screamed.

  “I’m not sssqueezing.”

  “What do you call this!?”

  “Wrapping. Thisss is sssqueezing…”

  Naga constricted around her like a full-body blood pressure cuff. Air jettisoned from her lungs. A moment later, pops exploded across her body like eight chiropractors had just drawn and quartered her. The afterglow was the most conflicting feeling of pleasure and terror she’d ever experienced.

  Having demonstrated her point, Naga loosened her grip.

  “And thisss is a sssimply a wrap. If you wish to ssstay warm, we have to keep heat trapped. There’s no way around it.”

  “H-Huh? O-Oh. I guess I don’t mind…” Jessica said, her face heating up already.

  True to Naga’s word, the feedback mechanism of Jessica’s trapped body heat warming up Naga’s scales turned the little compartment into a very heavy, very smooth oven. The warmth sank Jessica into a state of drowsiness where she was neither fully awake nor fully asleep.

  “Do you know Morkal?”

  It took Jessica a moment to realize this question had come from Naga and not her half-dreaming mind.

  “Uh… yeah. How’d you know?”

  “I heard you down the hall as you and that vile little elf were coming here.”

  “I guess you know her too then?”

  “I’ve only heard ssstories. I am a fairly young sssnake, you sssee. A mere thirty-sssix. I never knew the world before the Demon King’s fall. Not that that ssstopped adventurers from capturing me and throwing me in here.”

  “What kind of stories have you heard?” Jessica asked.

  “A mix. I am sssurprised you’ve met her, my warm-blooded adventurer,” Naga replied.

  It was probably the complete lack of any other positive attention lately, but Jessica took ‘warm-blooded adventurer’ as a strange kind of praise. Then her neurons caught up.

  “Wait, how did you know I’m an adventurer?”

  “You were not confused when I told you I was a lamia. Adventurers always ssseem to know everything about monsssters before they even come here.”

  For reasons she couldn’t fathom, Jessica felt embarrassed at being outed as knowing what a lamia was. like she’d been caught watching a movie she wasn’t supposed to.

  “Technically I’m an adventurer, but I can’t interact with the Tapestry. I guess you could say I’m a broken one,” Jessica said.

  “The tapessstry? I don’t know what that is.”

  “Oh. I thought all monsters did. Basically it’s like a… um… I don’t really know what it is. A field, I guess? That—”

  “A grassssy field?” Naga asked.

  “No, like an electromagnetic— nevermind. It’s just a thing that works and gives adventurers magic and power over the world. Emperor Magnus Tampa-guy can do all that stuff because of the Tapestry. But I got disconnected from it so I can’t,” Jessica explained.

  Despite being told not to, Naga slithered ever so slightly, her smooth, nubbly scales running across Jessica’s skin. Jessica was no longer scared, though it did inadvertently tickle.

  “How did you lose your connection?” Naga asked.

  “Er, Morkal stole it from me.”

  “You were imprisoned because of thisss?”

  “Not directly. I got thrown in jail cuz some asshole knight keeps insisting I’m not an adventurer because I don’t have magic to show him. Apparently you can’t be reincarnated without a number-based progression system or people will call you a fraud. Although I think he does know and just has it in for me. He keeps going out of his way to make sure I can’t prove I was isek— reincarnated. I had a plan to send medicine to the queen and prove myself that way but I was arrested before I could.”

  “How unfortunate,” Naga said. “Do you have sssomeone who could do it for you?”

  Jessica thought about it. Morkal had no reason to help her and John wasn’t smart enough, either to make the morphine or to cross hundreds of miles to deliver it. Unfortunately, just like in real life, she only had herself to rely on.

  “Not unless you can isolate opium alkaloids and sneak out to deliver them to the queen,” she said.

  Naga made a staccato hissing noise like a malfunctioning sprinkler. Laughter, Jessica realized.

  “That I cannot do. Not for lack of desire. I do ssso like to help when I can. But alasss…”

  Jessica wasn’t entirely over her fear of snakes, but was coming around to Naga as a person. That the lamia had been imprisoned solely to be dangled like a worm on a hook for bloodthirsty adventurers made Jessica livid. If or when she escaped, Jessica was going to do whatever she could to see Naga freed.

  “I hope I did not make you angry,” Naga said. “Thisss is sssimply how things are.”

  “Huh? Oh, that’s not— that’s not what I was thinking about. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “You know what might help? A little sssqueeze.”

  Jessica flushed. “I— I said that I… that you’re not allowed to—”

  Naga tightened around Jessica until she felt the same straining pressure from before. Right as she thought Naga might really kill her, the lamia turned in a way that pulled Jessica’s torso in a different direction from her legs and a sound like a steamroller driving over bubble-wrap erupted along her spine as she died and got isekai’d into a realm of pure bliss. When Naga unclenched her coils, Jessica puddled deeper until her toe brushed against something distinctly blanket-like in texture.

  “Naga, are you laying on the blankets for the beds?” Jessica asked.

  “Hehehe, I forgot those were down there. Sssilly me!”