Jamilla remembered when she had first seen the end of the hobbit movie, and Smaug had been destroyed. Everyone else seemed to think this was a happy ending, but it seemed so mean of everyone--hobbits, humans, and dwarves to gang up on poor Smaug, who just wanted to be left alone with his gold.
For years, Jamilla read fantasy story after fantasy story, as long as it had dragons in it. And she didn't prefer stories about kind dragons or wise dragons or silly dragons, but what she came to think of as the real thing--cruel, treasure-hoarding, princess-kidnapping dragons who were usually the enemy of the heroes. Every time the hero killed or outwitted the dragon she was disappointed, but she savored the rare stories where the dragon won.
She got a name as a geek. She was shunned and mocked in junior high and high school, and increasingly took refuge in fantasies of revenge, as a fire-breathing dragon swooped down on her school and on her unsympathetic family, and burned them to ashes. And since most of the cruel and mighty dragons she read about were male, she fantasized about herself as a male dragon.
Then she heard about the man with the machine.