When They Came to My Hometown

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. But it's honestly surprising they weren't here sooner.

I've lived in Simi Valley for most of my life. The city is a dull place that you live in to be close to more exciting places. Our most notable landmark is Ronald Reagan's corpse, buried behind his library.

Yet I know Simi as a key green corridor, where wild native animals travel through the many protected and undeveloped areas. You can take two steps out of your front door in a cul-de-sac neighborhood and find yourself face to face with a bobcat. Coyotes will wander through apartment complexes, hawks circle over Costco, and shining a light in a storm drain at the right time will reveal a family of chubby raccoons scrambling to squeeze inside. There are several neighborhoods known to have packs of roaming peacocks which will wander the streets or survey the area from concrete walls.

With a city like this, it always surprised me how locals will approach wildlife with the same bumbling inexperience as someone in a more "walled in" place. There are always people who don't think twice about throwing rocks at a group of Canadian geese until they're on the wrong end of several sharp beaks. And of course, people will think any snake they come across is a dangerous rattlesnake.

So it shouldn't come as a shock that the first human encounters with dragons in Simi Valley did not go well.

I first heard about it through our local area's NextDoor, a website I frequented for cheap furniture. Scrolling through the feed, I saw someone had uploaded footage from their security camera.

"Caught this on my security camera in the early morning hours (2-3 AM). Anyone know what this is?"

The grainy footage revealed a gray shape moving across a driveway, light catching off the creature's eyes to reveal them as tiny white pinpricks. Usually, these posters are simply alarmed and confused by a raccoon without a tail, but there was something about this one...

I remember clicking the video back and forth, trying to look through low-quality frames. It looked like a large lizard, bigger than any I'd ever seen. Larger lizards lived deep in the hiking trails, rarely found this close to people. But this lizard was different in size and stance. It moved more like a possum or some other animal that was only partially quadrupedal. There was also a mass on its back.

Commenters made their guesses, which included "bear," "small mountain lion," "Bigfoot, drunk," and "something up from Rocketdyne." All guesses proven wrong only a few days later.

This post, taken on a much fancier camera, showed the torso and legs of a man wearing the uniform of faded band tee shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals prescribed to all local men upon reaching 40. Gripped in this man's hairy hand was one of those "as seen on TV" grabbers, and gripped on the end of that was the neck of a small dragon.

I'd heard about these creatures before, ever since the Great Reveal of 2025. But I never thought I'd ever have the chance to actually see one. As far as I knew, they tended to stay in their own lands, places we still didn't fully understand which were collectively referred to as Farther Than Far. But now, here on video was one, about the size of a full grown monitor lizard, its mouth agape and hissing as it was held in the air.

The local media took notice, and I saw all types of warnings spring up everywhere. This wasn't just the first time these creatures had been seen in Simi. This was one of the first times they'd been seen anywhere outside of Farther Than Far. Most previous sightings were one-offs, and the dragons would usually retreat home. But reports were coming in of locals finding these creatures in backyards and trash cans, fighting with local cats and sleeping under trucks.

Soon, local people started showing up at the hospital with nasty bites and burns. Many continued to post videos of their encounters on NextDoor and similar platforms. In one, a dog-sized dragon jumped the fence in a backyard, and the owner responded by spraying it with the garden hose. To her credit, it did leave, but not before setting fire to her bordering bushes on the way out. Another man wasn't so lucky when he attempted to scare a small one off the hood of his car by throwing a rock at it. Not only did it miss, flying into his windshield, but the dragon sprang off the car and clawed the man's back as he fled.

The safety advice given was vague. There was no existing plan of action for keeping oneself safe from a dragon. Yet, one thing was clear - we had to figure out something, fast. Of all the reported encounters thus far, every single one involved baby or juvenile dragons.

What would happen if Simi had to deal with an adult?

The answer to that question came a month after the sightings first started. I remember the day my roommate ran down the hall, frantically knocking on my door at four in the morning.

"We're being evacuated. There's a dragon on the Reagan."