Lack of Attack
For so long, a holiday in Oz had been a dream, but now Melia was finally here, happy to check off every tourist trap on the list.
Over a century after Dorothy Gale’s adventure in Oz, many of the places she’d visited were admired daily by streams of people both from Oz and from Melia’s world, celebrating how Dorothy had initiated open contact between both realms. The main attractions were the orchards and flower fields near the spot where Dorothy’s house had landed and the Great Wizard’s palace in the Emerald City, but Melia wanted to have an authentic experience first, and that was exactly what the Deadly Poppy Field offered. Here, both Dorothy and the Lion had fallen asleep, and they might never have woken up if it wasn’t for their friends the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, who’d been unaffected by the poppies’ somniferous scent because they weren’t made of flesh. These days, a team of synthetic staff was always on hand to carry the tourists out to safety, where they’d soon wake up from a refreshing nap.
Melia had been looking forward to that nap for years, and so she was skipping merrily amongst the rows of colourful poppies, waiting for sleep to catch her. She reached the other side of the poppy field and turned back, still waiting, while other humans and animals around her had dropped down fast asleep before they were even halfway through. When she arrived at the start of the track again, she wasn’t feeling sleepy in the slightest, and her skipping faltered. She held up her arm in the Ozian sunlight, studying the glittering of her skin, so similar to the synthetics’ polymer exoskeletons. In thirty-five years she’d never been made aware that she wasn’t an organic life form, so what else was she going to discover about herself during this trip?
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[Image description: Statue of a naked person reaching up with their right arm and leaning their left elbow onto a Corinthian column about half as tall as the person. Large pink, yellow, and orange poppies surround the statue, set up from round, metal disks on the floor. Behind it, a glass structure is set up, marking a large, wooden door as the exit of the museum. The white walls are decorated with elegant black writing resembling Persian script: the artwork Written Room by Parastou Forouhar.]
