Dorothy was haggard and hungry.

She had faced death multiple times in the past few days.

First from the Kalidas, where she escaped leaping across a cliff on the

back of the lion, then they nearly lost scarecrow to a rushing river. Passing through a poppy field,

both Dorothy and the lion, the only party members with mungs, nearly slept until they starved

death. Dorothy was dragged from the field by the tinwoodman and the lion by a thousand talking field mice,

which Dorothy learned was a thing.

Maybe that had happened.

Maybe it had been in the poppy-induced haze that the scarecrow talked to the queen of the field mice,

though Dorothy feared that it wasn't.

Still drugged and famished, her silver shoes found the road of yellow

brick up ahead. On the horizon, in the distance, loomed the Emerald City. Dorothy took two

steps and collapsed on the road. With the commotion around her, at first she thought she was back

in Kansas. It wasn't that she loved Kansas.

It was that she didn't know how she could live in a land with poisonous fields and talking mice

and a man made out of tin, but who evidently still had some human parts because how could he cry,

where there's still human tear ducks in her brain in there, and he just didn't realize it?

She opened her eyes and saw the green roof, and the tin didn't realize it, she opened her eyes and saw

the green roof, and the tin man, and the scarecrow pacing around her. She sighed and sat up.

The drudgery in the hard, gray ground of Kansas was preferable to whatever land this was, and she

knew that she had to get home.

She learned that they had made it, not to the Emerald City, but to the land of Oz proper.

...