This was why Hueroc never trusted bipeds.

He'd been polite as could be the night before. No threatening, no growling, he hadn't even bared his teeth, and he'd even paid for the room they offered him! He had been perfectly civil with them, and yet still they had insisted on tying him up, just to put their minds at ease about having a dragon in their midst; even that, he'd agreed to with only a little fuss, letting himself trust them, assuming the little creatures who seemed reasonable could be relied on not to deceive him...

And now he was paying for it. He'd awoken to discover every buckle of the restraints they'd put him now featured a padlock, rendering them impossible to remove, and worse still they had added a chastity belt while he slept, evidently to keep him 'decent' by their own standards! Trying to protest through the muzzle, all attempts to stay polite gone, they had ignored one muffled, unintelligible objection after another, only describing how they would put him to work for a while to make sure he and every other dragon knew to keep out of their town, and just how they disliked the power and danger dragons represented, only heaping fuel on his indignation.

Then they had either decided to give him a sporting chance, or just played a cruel, teasing game with him: turning to leave, they had told him they'd be back in an hour to start making him work, but if he freed himself before then he could go. It had taken 20 minutes of fighting the cuffs and chains to dig through the straw and locate the key, but now he was stymied: the key was sized for an anthro's smaller more dexterous hands, of course, and not only were his paws clumsy at the best of times, they were locked up in those tough leather mittens! He could poke the key, he could push it around a little on the floor, but he didn't have a claw free to hook under it or pinch together to get it off the ground, and even if he could, he had no idea how he'd fit it into one of the locks, or turn it, or even get the strap unbuckled once the lock came off! Not to mention that his chastity belt seemed to have a different-sized lock that probably required a second key...

But he could wait to solve those problems once he managed to actually get this key into his paw. Tail twitching nervously, he tried to squeeze it between his forepaws, but that went even more poorly than expected, barely touching the key at all, certainly not feeling the metal through the leather wrapped over his claws! Hunched over the key, alternately pulling on the short hobble-chains and trying to wedge his paws together, he kept trying, kept uselessly nudging the key, time ticking away as he struggled against the mitts and the rest of his bondage to find the dexterity the restraints had been put on him specifically to deny him...

 TheOwlette drew this, as a sequel to this! Really like how it came out, the secure detailed gear, the setting, the look of anxiety and frustration on poor Hueroc's face~ He's really in a pickle this time!