During the centuries she’d lived as
rakshasi, Janya had witnessed war, famine, and pestilence.
She’d even survived the occasional monster-hunter. Yet she
had never encountered anything worse than the dentist’s office.
Still, she recognized the importance of
oral hygiene, and she faithfully scheduled biannual cleanings.
These events invariably played out the same way.
Supine in the dentist’s chair, wracked by
anxiety, Janya instinctively changed shapes, hoping to avoid
criticisms about her blackened, fetid maw. She appeared as a
giant hirsute man, then a dwarfish woman, next a towheaded Swedish
lad or a frail old lady.
Yet the changes were merely illusions;
the inside of her mouth remained unchanged. As the
technicians probed, they found the sore spots.
And when the dentists arrived, the
question was easy to predict: What have you been eating?
Janya’s stock answer helped explain why,
despite her regular visits, she had such an awful mouth:
Dentists.
