Teaching My Dragon Boyfriend To Use An A.I. Art Program

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,” Balmethestus said, curling his tail around my back so that I could sit comfortably. His internal heat helped soothe my sore muscles after hefting heavy boxes all day at work.

He was a very considerate boyfriend. Humans should be so thoughtful!

“Yes, I know,” I replied. “You’ve told me that story many times.”

Many, many, many times. Even after eight hundred years of existence, his storytelling was pretty limited. That was something you didn’t expect when you get involved with an immortal creature, am I right? You kind of think they’ll have a wider range of experiences to share. I mean, Balmy should be a master storyteller by his age!

I can only hope maybe my storying abilities will rub off on him. It could still happen. We haven’t been dating that long.

“Let’s get going on this,” I said, trying to get my boyfriend to focus. He was running his claws through my long red hair affectionately, preening me as he liked to do when kicking back after a long day of counting his hoard. “My laptop battery won’t last all night.”

“Hrrummph!” Balmy snorted, a tiny wisp of smoke rising from his enormous nostrils to hover somewhere beneath the cavern’s ceiling.

“What?! You were the one who wanted to learn how to do this!”

He had the good grace to look somewhat abashed, rearranging his coils to rest his head over my shoulder so that both he and I had an unobstructed view of my laptop’s screen. I pulled up the DREAM by Wombo.art AI program and the plain black background filled the screen.

“Okay, then. This is how you do it.” I clicked on the START CREATING button and went to the second screen. “Now, the beauty of this is that you don’t have to have an account. You enter your prompt here,” I clicked the cursor in the text bar at the top of the screen. “Whatever you want. You can get really crazy with a whole long string, or just use a few words for the prompt. Since you want to use these images for your website, let’s start simple.”

Yes, my dragon boyfriend was about to start his own website. Stands to reason, really. After eight hundred years of existence, a person dragon needs to move with the times. Besides, it wasn’t like Balmy had a lot to do, hanging here in his cavern all day. For safety’s sake, he never went outside during daylight hours. And I was going to need to speak to him about his night flights.

There had been another report of a mysterious object in the night sky on the TV news over the weekend. Luckily, they were putting it down to UFOs. If the folks in town knew there was a dragon living among them, well…

Let’s say it probably wouldn’t work out all that well for Balmy. Or for me. I hadn’t had such an attentive, supportive boyfriend in quite a while. And I wasn’t ready to move on just yet.

“So, what do you want to use for keywords?” I asked, looking around the hoard of junk Balmy had accumulated here in his new home in just a few short months. “Dragon, of course. That’s a given,” I said, reaching up to scratch his scaled forehead affectionately. He began to purr. Well, to rumble, actually, deep in his chest.

“Books,” Balmy said. “That’s important. That’s how we met.”

I smiled, remembering our first encounter behind the Billions’o’Books store where I still worked part-time. Balmy was hiding behind the big green dumpster out back of the store. I had just wheeled out a cart of stripped paperbacks (“stripped” is when you tear off the front covers and send them back to the distributor for a refund, and throw away the rest of the book). Balmy had been committing the cardinal sin, as I soon discovered. I spotted the tip of his tail sticking out from behind the metal container and—being unnaturally curious—circled the dumpster to see what that scaly thing was.

My first sight of Balmy was him crouched back there, tail curled around a pile of stripped mass market paperbacks, with a sheepish look on his face. *Note to self: Maybe “sheepish” isn’t such a good adjective, considering Balmy’s history.* He’d been stealing the books to add to his hoard. When my initial shock passed I was able to process the facts that 1) There was a dragon behind the bookstore, and 2) He was stealing books, my own most treasured possession in the world (although not some of the dreck he’d pulled out from beneath the flattened cardboard boxes and packing peanuts). Right away I knew that we were a matched pair, Balmy and me.

“Books,” I agreed. “And what’s your favorite color?”

“Purple. No, blue!” Balmy was really getting into this now. “No, purple.”

“We’ll do purple first and see what it gets us,” I said, typing quickly. “And we can change it up. Let’s see how the art looks first. Now, we need to choose from one of these,” I pointed to the scroll of little icons below the text box, each one labeled with a different style of art. “And again, we can change it at any time.”

The text bar now read Dragon Book Purple, and I clicked on the icon for LOVE. That was a new style, one I hadn’t seen last time I was on the Wombo.art site. Call me sentimental. I own that. Within seconds, the first piece of art was generated from random images found across the Internet.

Over the next half-hour, I clicked while Balmy oohed and aahed over the depictions of computer-generated dragons and books, first in purple, then in blue and magenta and emerald green. Some were pretty wild-looking, barely resembling an actual, recognizable dragon at all, while others were pretty lifelike. Finally, I changed the style to STEAMPUNK.

“That’s it!” The end of Balmy’s spade-tipped tail began to thump the floor of the cavern in his excitement. “That’s me! It kind of looks like that painting I sat for, you know the one. The Tintoretto. But mechanical. Boy, if Tintoretto knew about Steampunk, he'd have had a field day! Although I had to pretend to be dead. But that’s what it reminds me of, I swear!”

I burst out laughing. My dragon boyfriend got so excited when he remembered the good old days in Italy, back in the Renaissance. Someday maybe these would be the good old days, to him. The days when we created his first website in a hidden cavern in the foothills of North Carolina. The days when we curled up together and read the same book, his head over my shoulder as I turned the pages slowly. Then I remembered…

Balmethestus would long outlive me. I’d be just a fond memory for him. If I could immortalize our relationship in a story, then in some small way I would live on. But I was getting maudlin now.

“So, how does this one look,” I asked after clicking GENERATE AGAIN about fifteen times. “I think that captures the essence of the real you.”

“For my cover photo, you mean?” he asked, peering closer at the screen. He’d been reading a lot in the cavern’s low light. He was going to need glasses pretty soon. One of these days I’d have to suggest that, but it had to be approached circuitously. My dragon boyfriend could be a little vain sometimes. “Yes,” he said slowly, reaching up with a single six-inch claw to tap the screen. “I like it. Let’s do it.”

I pulled up the website builder I’d been using to create his free site (free until he started to see some return, then he could buy the domain), an insider's view of European history from the 13th through the 21st centuries. I clicked through to the editor, inserted the A.I. generated artwork, and clicked on VISIT SITE. And there it was.

My dragon boyfriend’s first website, ready to publish and share with the world.

“You know, Balmy,” I said, my mind filled with the possibilities, “I can add a blog to your website. You have so many personal stories to tell about your life. Not just the historical perspective, but what you, yourself, experienced. That would be a real selling point. I bet you’d have a huge following in no time. And someday you could collect your blog posts into a book. Start a newsletter. Maybe shoot a few videos…”

The sky was the limit to where this could go.

Literally.

Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, and pledges are always cherished, like a dragon treasures a cavern filled with gold. And books.

Author's Note: This story was inspired by a Vocal story by Kathryn Milewski, titled How I've Earned Over $4,000 from Vocal Challenges. In the section "Use of Rich Media," the writer advises that , "...using a variety of pictures, videos, and links can help your Challenge entry stand out amongst others." This made me think about how using the Wombo.art Dream app inspired me to outline several plots for potential future novels. So, naturally, I wondered how a dragon would use the app, and this story just grew. I really hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it!

I have challenged myself to write twenty-seven dragon prologues/stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue Challenge, one for each day the challenge runs. Here's a link to the sequel to this prologue: