Is the Tooth Faerie Made of Teeth?

      A​​ shaggy Lupe's head emerged from behind a horrid pastel Ona-shaped chair. Beneath his bushy eyebrows, his yellow eyes flicked left and right, glowing in the gloom of the dimly lit room. He took in the other plastic seats with grinning Petpet faces, the table laden with decades-old issues of Bobblehead the Magazine, the activity panels for children to paw at on the walls, the play table with the wooden beads to push across a maze of wires.

      Balthazar slunk from his hiding place to the doorway, sidestepping soft toys, lest they squeak under his paws. He peered down the corridor. There was the thud of a bag of rubbish hitting the bottom of a container, and the back door opened. Balthazar hid inside the doorway and listened as the assistant washed her hands, took her coat, locked the front door and walked out of earshot. The coast was clear.

      The gangly teenage Lupe crept out of the waiting room and into the lobby. Hardened by his lonely life in the Woods and surviving by the seat of his pants, he had slowly filled out and grown into an imposing form. He enjoyed his menacing build. He relished the fear in the eyes of smaller creatures as they leapt in fright and scurried away from him the moment he prowled out of the shadows.

      Now he loomed over a peach linoleum floor, decals of Petpets grinning toothily from the walls and posters about Brushing Up. His tall shadow flickered in the bluish light of the screens which, at this late hour, no longer showed the day's appointments, but kept replaying the same message in a loop: "The Tooth Faerie wishes you a super yummy day!"

      At last, he had the place to himself. All he had to do was find the labs. Earlier, he had noticed drowsy patients coming out of several examination rooms in the left-hand corridor after the lobby. The labs and storage must be further down that path.

      "Hi there Mister!"

      Balthazar jumped and dived under the broad, curved lime green front desk. Pests and vermin, the clinic should have been empty at this hour! Save for him. And for her, but that was the point.

      Squatting under the desk, Balthazar was about to peer up, when he turned and was faced by a pair of eyes inches from his face. He shot out from under the desk like a pellet from a pea shooter. The intruder let out a giggle and stood up, revealing themself to be a tiny red Poogle.

      "Did you get your teeth pulled out today Mister? You have so many! Did you get more added in? When is your mummy coming to fetch you? My mummy said to wait right here and I thought for sure she'd be the last to come but you were the only one to find me! I'm Marlene. Do you think the Tooth Faerie is made of teeth?"

      The rest of the kid's words were stifled by Balthazar's big paws as he grabbed them with such force they were lifted off the floor. Even so, they kept on rambling muffled words within his palm.

      "Shut up!" he growled, "you'll have us found!"

      Now the kid just grinned up at him. His paw covered their mouth, but he could tell they had a dopey smile just from their eyes.

      Balthazar set them down. "You're going to hunker down here and be really quiet. Or the Tooth Faerie will getcha!"

      The Lupe's brain cogs whirred; it would not do for the kid to follow him. He gave them a push in the direction opposite where he was headed. "You wait in there, that's what the waiting room is for!"

      The sound of Marlene's stifled giggling echoed behind him. Now, where was Balthazar again?

      "The Tooth Faerie reminds you to brush up after every meal!" the crackling loudspeakers reminded him.

      That's right. He was in the Tooth Faerie's clinic. It had been easy to find under Faerieland - you see, dear reader, back in those days, Faerieland used to float in the sky, so all one had to do to be under it was find its shadow.

      Balthazar skulked past the reception desk and into the dimly-lit corridor that led to the examination rooms. Neopets on posters flaunted their excellent gleaming smiles. Balthazar sharpened his teeth daily on a piece of bark.

      The furthest room was open. The recliner was immobile in the centre. Over it, the dental unit loomed from the ceiling, the shadows of its cables reaching across the room, the many prongs of its accessories gleaming in the light from the corridor.

      Balthazar found his target at the back of this room: a door marked "Storage".

      There, he would find the Tooth Faerie's magical anaesthetic. He was starting his revenge with the easiest and weakest of the faeries, and it would only improve from there. The products that could knock out even faeries would be all his for the taking. Balthazar was already a master hunter and more than capable of catching these pests, but this equipment would give him an edge. Then, they would see. They would rue the day they tormented him in the woods!

      He listened out carefully and opened the door. There, he found another pastel corridor. It was very much like the one he had come from, the difference being its vastness. Balthazar was sure that the clinic did not look so large from the outside. Those faeries never missed an opportunity to trick you.

      There were more doors, most of them unlabeled. Balthazar picked one at random. It led into another corridor, minty green, lit by flickering neons, with frolicking Faellies on the walls.

      "... yummy day!" the speakers still said.

      Another door, another corridor, powder pink with gambolling Babaas, dimly lit. Balthazar went down to a shadowy corner and listened out again. A vaguely minty smell lingered in the air.

      Something shuffled against the floor. Something large and heavy. There was a tapping of legs. Many, many legs. The sound was muffled as though by carpet.

      The muscles of Balthazar's legs seized. He had to refrain from bolting, and crept backwards as fast as he could instead, neck tingling with the urge to check behind him.

      He groped on his right for a door. The shadow around the corner moved and writhed over the linoleum. The floor had no carpet.

      Balthazar found the handle and toppled through the door. He barely had time to read the sign on it: "Do not eat door."

      Another corridor. It was a peachy colour, but not pastel. The Angelpi on the walls grinned with huge teeth. They seemed to move ahead with each flicker of the neons.

      Balthazar stepped towards the nearest door. The floor was soft and pliable under him, not enough for him to sink, just enough to cling to his feet. Most of these doors were Petpet-shaped. Balthazar opened the first.

      Across a square room, he saw another door, with the back of a blue Lupe opening it to peer through. Balthazar's arm shook so hard he nearly lost his grip on the handle. The Lupe ahead moved in the same way. He had to back away before something terrible happened, but he was being drawn irresistibly ahead as if the room was tilting forward to meet him, to swallow him up. He had to throw himself bodily backwards across the corridor to escape.

      Frantically, he tried the next door, which opened into darkness. It was neither shadow nor night. It was an expanse of nothingness, the silence pressing into his ears. Balthazar peered into the darkness. He could see no end to it. No steps leading down. Ages and ages away, several eyes opened and peered back at him. Balthazar slammed the door shut.

      "Where have you run to?" The whisper fell right into his ear. Balthazar leapt away, only seeing a Tooth Faerie poster on the wall behind him. Another trick.

      He crept up to a door that had light shining from under it. There were voices coming through. He recognised that kid. They at least seemed to have the Tooth Faerie distracted.

      "Wowie Miss Tooth Faerie! What a big tooth you have!"

      There was an insufferably sweet giggle. "You can look at it all day, you silly daisy! No need to stay up past your bedtime! Let's give you some nice stickers while you wait for your poor delayed mum."

      "Miss Tooth Faerie are you made of teeth?"

      "No, silly! You are."

      "I am?"

      "Are too!"

      "Miss Tooth Faerie! How come there are earth faeries and then air faeries and then water faeries and then the other ones like that, but you are just one tooth faerie?"

      "That is very easy, little one! The earth and the fire and the others are faeries of the elements, because Neopia is made of elements! Even the Space Faerie is a faerie of some elements."

      "That means you're not a faerie of Neopian elements?"

      "Nope! There's only four of us, you know."

      Balthazar must have gone in a loop. He had to backtrack. He walked as silently as he could down the other side of the corridor, shaking his feet from the clingy floor every now and then. He sniffed the air. It smelled fresh, all of a sudden. Minty.

      Balthazar hurried to the next door. Already he could hear the shuffling thing with too many legs.

      "I can smell your bones," came another whisper in his ear.

      The door did not budge. He squinted to read its sign in the gloom: "Eat door."

      Balthazar kept pushing on the handle. "Eat door!" the sign repeated itself in his mind without him reading it. Eat door!

      Another heave and he tumbled through. He fell on the floor with a squelch. He looked around in a daze. The walls were pulsing in a sickening way. He rose shakily to his feet, and the room seemed to extend into the distance until it was no longer a room at all. It only was.

      In the shadows of what had been the corners, he saw something stir, writhe, knit itself and creep towards him, something in shades of midnight and royal blue. The tendrils grew into a huge web around him. The minty smell was thick.

      Balthazar's head was throbbing. His eyes could make no sense of this space, he might have been minuscule or a giant. He rubbed his eyes and blinked hard, trying to push the shadows and flickering dots of colour to the edge of his vision. He charged right through it all, slammed headfirst into another door and fell with all his weight.

      He landed on a firm, excessively comfortable curved surface. He chanced a look above. The ceiling was back to normal, solid and pastel. The lights came on and revealed the dental unit by his side.

      Balthazar tried to jump off the recliner. He was not strapped to it, but his legs could not come off. Much like the floor earlier, it clung to him.

      "You really are an opener of doors!"

      The Tooth Faerie circled the dental unit to face him, bringing the minty fresh scent with her. Her electric blue hair and white and pink outfit gleamed brightly under the neons.

      She may have been just as bright and pretty as on the posters, but Balthazar's head still pounded, and the walls flickered and unfurled around him again, the angles of the room multiplying in ways that could not fit into the building, and in this mind-crushing expanse, Balthazar saw the blue crawling thing with the tendrils. Its tentacles reached and held the Tooth Faerie from behind like a friendly puppet, and Balthazar could swear that the blue tendrils were woven into her hair and fuzzy boots.

      The Tooth Faerie shook her head, snapping the room back into place. "But you really should learn to pick your doors correctly and only go through those meant for you. Your head is only equipped to deal with four dimensions! Now you are going to see so many things you should not see."

      "What are you going to do," he growled, "hit me with that stupid tooth you carry?"

      "This tooth?" She held up the tooth she carried by her side. It was the one that she brought to events, the one that she posed with for pictures, in case her title was not clear enough to onlookers. It was almost as tall as she was. She grinned. "You want to know where I got this tooth?"

      Balthazar paused. He had not considered the implications of a very large tooth, and he wished that he had.

      Before he could convince himself to admit his error and backtrack, the Tooth Faerie grabbed something out of thin air and pulled until it ripped apart, smiling gleefully. "Here we go!"

      Balthazar struggled fruitlessly on the recliner as a gaping maw opened overhead with an ear-shattering roar. He tried to cry out, but all the air seemed to have been drained from his lungs, his sounds devoured by the thing from outside space with thousands of teeth. The Tooth Faerie closed this as quickly as she had opened it, and he was left panting in his icy sweat.

      Balthazar focused all his anger on this creature and, with tremendous effort, managed to speak through his shivers. "What you really do back here has nothing to do with teeth," he growled. "Why do they even call you the Tooth Faerie? It's all a big lie, a trap!"

      "No, silly! Tooth Faerie is how I am known here in Neopia. It is better for me to be in Neopia than elsewhere, so I work in the clinic of the Tooth Faerie. I am called the Tooth Faerie. I use my power to help with teeth. It is the best thing I can do. Now, I really like this job, big fellow, but sometimes I have to do difficult things, or the clinic won't be happy with me. Like your teeth. It would be so unprofessional to let you walk out of here with your teeth in this state."

      Balthazar watched the dental unit loom over his head. "What even are you?" he said limply. In the corner of his eye, he could see the blue fuzz of the boots writhing and grabbing at the air, and the room split into a thousand pieces again.

      "Me? I hold power over openings." Thousands of mouths spoke together in the folds of space. Thousands of voices quavered with excitement. "And your meat... is made of... so, so many openings."

      She leaned over him. Balthazar's nose was filled with the numb coolness of mint. He had nary a thought left in his head at the sight of the enormous blue mass of intricate twists and coils that puppeteered the faerie.

      "I don't think you will be up for any dental work for a while after this," she said gently, "so let's make the most of this. Now, say 'Aaaaah'."

      He did.

     The End.