That's enough for my portrait. I reckon I can't draw it that well.

Hm. I'm not Marra, so I won't beat around the bush till all the rabid bats are thrashing about the place. But it really is kind of hard to decide where to begin . . .

Okay. I think I got it.

I'm presuming you know about our homecoming. Me and Aar and See. And a mortal Marra (now I can kill him for baking my ears with his god-awful poetry). And a two-armed Mr. Om. And an Es who can touch and breathe. And eat. Unfortunately for us, because she's always hungry.

No kidding, she legit chased a rodent around (quite a lot of them in the world, Rodentia is after all the single largest group of mammals) because ostensibly it looked 'scrumdiddlyumptious, deliciosum, katikaroproposa.'

Those are Es and Marra's words, not mine. Pay attention to the quoting apostrophes.

Sigh. What to do with these two?

In any case, I went to my home, Aar went to his. For all our respective parents knew, we'd been on a trip to Disneyland with Mr. Om. Needless to say, there were questions of all varieties. A full bazaar, inquiries old and new. Why didn't you take any pictures and why did it take so long and why do you have cavities in your teeth and who's that girl your new friend bought with him and so forth.

We were prepared, owing, mostly, to myself. Now, I'm not a good liar, but I'm a good thinker. Conversely, Aar is a good actor, which I believe automatically makes him a good liar.

Thinker, eh, not so much.

So me and Aar rehearsed our answers on the jet before it landed in {Undisclosed}.

Like: Oh, Momma, you know how Mr. Om is such a big-league businessman. We didn't take any pics because he didn't want to attract any attention to himself. Good news, though: we got V.V.I.P tickets for every ride!

(Aar: 'This is making me wish we'd really gone to Disneyland.')

And: Oh, Pops, we stayed a couple more days for sightseeing the city after we were done with Disneyland. We went everywhere in a limousine! And it's a great city, bunch of interesting cultural heritage!

(Aar: 'Why didn't we actually go to Disneyland again?')

And: Well, we ate a lot of sweets. Sorry. Will take care next time.

(This one wasn't even a lie. We did eat a lot of tooth-degrading food at MR. CELLOMANN'S SWEET SWEETSHOP! after Rasthrum took care of the skunk.)

And: Oh, are you talking about Es? She's Marra's first cousin! She mostly stays indoors because, well, she has problems. Autism and an anti-social syndrome and, uhm, you get the idea. She's been living international because of her ongoing treatment. At any rate, she's much better now! And she's the sweetest thing you've ever seen!

(Marra: 'She's not my cousin! I don't have a cousin! She can't possibly be my cousin! Why're you making her my cousin?)

As for Mr. Om's magically fabricated arm, now that was what we were most worried about. We sat and argued and deliberated - and I might have hurled another book, this time an Encyclopedia, at Aar, for being preposterously daft - on the airplane, but in the end, none of that factored to much.

You see, apparently, no one remembered Mr. Om's handicap. To them he'd always been an ambi-arm-dexterous guy. Which we thought was extremely strange. Thus we looked up old newspapers and magazine articles with his mining-company logo - it's a raven, and now we know what inspired it - and his posing photographs. But even those photographs showed him with two arms.

Magic.

Evidently what happens in Lakoswanion stays in Lakoswanion.

Except my cavities.

Or the cut on my arm (I told them I scraped it against a statue Captain Jack Sparrow's lance-sword on a ride. They bought it.)

Or Es's transformation.

Thank the cowboy-skies for small favors. Pew pew.

(That's a reference to our time in the City Of A Hundred Haunts. It's alright if you don't get it.)

Sadly my Momma did take me to this young orthodontist, which is a fancy name for a dentist, in case you're unaware. Listen, I'm not normally afraid of dentists. They help our teeth stay clean, just like showers help our bodies stay groomed.

But . . . when they ask you to open your mouth and those shiny, scary dental instruments move closer to your face, decimeter by decimeter, and your teeth start tingling with unease and trepidation - that is bona fide frightening.

(Fun fact: do you know "bona fide" is actually Latin for "in good faith"? I really want to learn pig Latin. Maybe in my afterlife. )

Couple that with the embarrassment of showing your out of order teeth to a stranger, and you've got a real situation there.

And you know what's worse? When your young orthodontist tells you he's a novice, that he's fresh got out of med school and yours are some of the first dentures he's probing around at, right before putting those metal scalpels and whatnot to use.

Forget we ever faced the Grahi Witch. This man I'll stay away from.

I was going to scream, I didn't want my teeth touched by a newbie! What if he accidentally made all my teeth fall off? I don't want to be toothless! How'll I eat my Thai food then? How'll I feel the chill-burn on them when I eat my vanilla ice-cream?

(Another fun fact: I will marry vanilla ice-cream when I come of age. Wait, but I'll already be dead . . . )

I did say I'm generally rational.

You should look 'generally' up in the Thesaurus.

But by then the dental introspection was on, and the certainty that I was doomed to rot in some Japanese hell was strong. Each time the metal made contact with my enamel - enamel is the hardest tissue in your body and it covers the crown of each tooth, by the way, you should know - the lower half of my body shuddered like you won't believe it. Almost as vigorously as Es had during her miraculous transformation.

But the dentist did okay. Two of my canines needed filling and one molar needed capping. For a couple of days my mouth felt like a cave blocked by a boulder, but eventually that came to pass.

Nevertheless, no more Cellomann brand chocolates. That was my New Year's Resolution a few weeks later.

I wish I had chosen "don't be impulsive" instead. Welps, too late now.

Get the name of the chappie? Play on a common phrase.

"Lying" Through My "Teeth"

Cuz, she's lying. And her teeth have cavities.

Okay, maybe that wasn't so smart (+_+)