can't fix everything with dental floss

[notmymom]

WHO:Jaime Reyes and Connie Springer
WHERE:the dentist
WHEN:June 29th
WHAT:two imports meet when one loses a tooth and the other works for a dentist
WARNINGS:some blood and a missing tooth, probably nothing else? they're pretty good kids.


The bells tinkle brightly when Connie walks through the door. He glances around at the walls that look like parchment but feel like warm, soft stone. There are people sitting anxiously in rows of chairs along the walls, so Connie takes a seat, too. He drops down next to an old lady who is fast asleep. They must have a long wait.

A few drops of bright red blood splash down to the floor tiles with a 'pat pat pat' sound. His face is bleeding above one eyebrow and from the end of his nose, but the worst of it keeps dribbling out of his mouth. It's no good to swallow blood, but the floors here are too clean to spit it on so he tries anyway.

The old woman stirs in her sleep and blinks her eyes open, but when she sees Connie she stares in horror. He smiles, trying to say something reassuring, but a bubble of blood and saliva burst from the empty socket where the tooth he's gripping loosely in one palm used to be.

The old lady screams.

Comments

[khajidont]

On the whole, dentistry is shaping up to be a very, very boring career path, but luckily for Jaime, he's just fine with that; if he's looking for excitement, he has to look no further than what he does with the rest of the time. Most of his afternoons are spent in relative silence, dealing with the paperwork, the supplies, and some of the easier preliminary work. He's in the middle of meticulously disinfecting one of the tiny hooks - a dental scaler, one of the hygienists had patiently explained to him - when he hears a scream.

His body responds before his mind does, and he ends up leaping up from his station and booking it into the waiting room, wielding the dental scaler before him. In theory, brandishing a metal hook is an intimidating gesture, but considering the scale of the thing and the fact that he's still holding onto a dainty polishing cloth with his other hand, he's lost some major intimidation points.

"What's going on? What's wrong?" He asks, looking around the waiting room. With their luck, the wall's going to have been completely smashed through, and they'll be infested with giant man-eating spiders, or werewolves, or sentient dolls, or...

Or some guy will be bleeding all over the floor, having had a really bad day. "Oh, geez! You sure you shouldn't have gone to the hospital instead?" He asks, though he's not really expecting an answer, what with the guy's mouth being filled with blood and all.

"Come on," he says, ushering him into one of the rooms, "I've made the executive decision that people bleeding out of their face get bumped up on the waiting list."

[notmymom]

Now, that's a surprise! It's a minor injury (definitely not worth a hospital stay, this guy must be new) but Connie still gets shown to a back room right away. And he's alone in there! Wow. How come none of the people out front were brought in yet? He glances around appreciatively. Maybe the hero papers get you the good deals here. Maybe this is an interior city.

Connie holds out the hand with the tooth and opens his fingers to show the other man. See? It's just one tooth. No big deal. Definitely not a reason to lock him away in here. It came from his own mouth and he can prove it!

"Duh zahyn 'ad a doob oddit."

The sign out front that is. He's just here to sell it. It's still pretty new, he only got this one a few years ago. That should be worth something, right?

[khajidont]

"Okay," Jaime says cheerfully, "I didn't understand a word of that, but it's good that you saved your tooth."

He reaches out, then thinks better of it as he remembers one of the more lengthy lectures from his boss, and tears off the gloves he was wearing before and replaces them with a new pair before grabbing the tooth. He places it in a dish before grabbing a basin and handing it over to Connie.

"Here, spit and try saying that again."

[notmymom]

Connie watches the swapping out of gloves with interest. What's that about? Last he checked teeth weren't very delicate. It took a particularly rude carriage to wriggle that one loose, after all. But he spits where he's told, and that definitely helps.

He grins at the young man who must be a dentist's apprentice. His teeth are young and only a few years in his mouth for the most part, but it's clear he's never seen an orthodontist in his life. They're crowded and awkwardly distributed and a few are even a little off center. There's some build up around his him lines, too, though it isn't very bad yet given his age and diet.]

The sign. There's a tooth on it. So I brought it here.

[khajidont]

Connie seems to have followed a simple line of logic, though it's not a faulty one by any means. There is indeed a tooth on their sign, and it does indeed mean that they broadly deal with teeth.

"Well," he says, amused, "the sign didn't steer you wrong. You've gotta be an imPort, right? Not a lot of dentists where you're from?"

[notmymom]

"Not in my village. But I know a guy who can knock a tooth out if it hurts you."

Connie answers. He seems to be a pretty energetic guy in spite of the missing tooth. Actually he's discovered he can make a whistling noise through the empty socket. Which seems to be keeping him amused at the moment.

"Hey, what district did you come from?" He asks curiously. He can't help it, the guy has coloration and manner that isn't familiar to him at all. He seems friendly and pretty attractive...not that Connie is looking. But if he tells the story to anyone besides Sasha they might ask. And he's definitely going to tell the story. This day is too interesting to keep to himself.

[khajidont]

That answers that question. Jaime has a funny feeling that once he gets the dentist in here to take a good look at Connie's missing tooth, his boss is going to have a lot more to concern himself with than the obvious.

He absently answers Connie's question with one of his own as he peers outside of the room, checking to see whether or not his boss is finished with the latest check-up. "What d'you mean by district?"

[notmymom]

"That's not a word here?" Connie spits in the basin again and mulls over a good way to explain what a district is. It's something everyone at home just understands. Hmm.

Finally, he comes up with something that might be useful. "Well, how does your queen divide up her land?" He means political boundaries, but the term doesn't come to him as naturally as the question.

[khajidont]

"Sure it's a word, but I don't think we split up our cities the same way you do. We've got a whole different ballpark when it comes to land and leaders and all that - where I'm from, we have a president, not a queen, and we've got our land separated into states."

And then those states are separated into cities, and those cities are separated into all sorts of different things, but it's best to start big and work their way down. Connie must be new here, he figures - he's gotten lucky that this world works very much the same as his own, at least when it comes to the way most of its political inner workings function.