"We gotta clean your teeth." The orc gestured to the chair and the restraints. He was wearing a Space Force uniform, indicating that he had become a member of Camp Acheron's permanent staff. He was a Master Healer, and Max wondered what deal he'd cut in order to end up living on a military base rather than return to his own planet. Max had agreed to go fight the monsters over there, but there had always been the implicit promise that he was going to come back. He was going to see his family during the winter break and again in the summer break, and eventually his tour of duty would be over and he could return to Earth permanently. The simple fact that his dentist was from another world was a stark reminder that Max himself might never come home.
"OK," Max looked at the chair, "why does the chair look like a medieval torture device?" Max had
described
dentistry as torture in the past, but that had been hyperbole. This time, it seemed strangely literal.
The dentist smiled, showing his tusks all the way to gum. It was proof of his naturalization into human culture, as most orcish societies considered such displays to be threatening. North American humans considered smiling with bared teeth to be welcoming and joyful, and that was apparently fairly weird from a galactic perspective. "The restraints are there to protect me from you. We're gonna remove anything foreign from your mouth and then heal it back with new tooth using magic. But the first part is very painful. I don't want you blasting me out of instinct." He gestured at the seat again. "You'll thank me later."
The dentist's assistant was a guardian who looked to have no particular medical training, but since her job was make sure Max was properly incapable of fighting back, that wasn't much of an issue. "Why take my fillings out at all? And why not put me to sleep? And whyy aghh waah aahh?" The last part of his question became rather hard to understand as his mouth was held open with a block.
Looking into Max's mouth, the dentist shrugged. He'd definitely seen worse. "When you go through the dungeon gates, anything that isn't
you
won't go. It's why we put a tarp down before activating the portal. And why we give everyone an acid reducer and some sports drinks an hour before sendoff. Your stomach will be the emptiest it's ever been, and if we leave any fillings in your teeth you'll show up with holes in your enamel." He picked up a drill. "That can be distracting and painful. This is gonna be painful too." The gave some experimental spins, confirming that it was functioning properly.
Ancient magics obliged the Alliance to play by the rules, but nothing could make humans play fair. Max realized that if he could smuggle a grenade into the dungeons by swallowing it, he would absolutely do that. And so would every other hunter. He hadn't really thought about it before, but the same unbreakable laws that kept him from smuggling in swallowed cameras and weaponry also forbade him from smuggling in last night's broccoli and chicken nuggets. He didn't envy the person who had to clean the tarp after a group of hunters entered the dungeon. It was an interesting question
when
a sandwich or a glass of water stopped being non-dungeon material in the belly and became part of a hunter's blood and flesh that would travel through the gate. Max had never really thought about that aspect of the dungeons, but apparently the folks in the Space Force had investigated it enough that there was a dungeon-day sports drink hydration protocol.
The dentist placed the drill, not into Max's mouth, but on his forearm. "Your magical resiliency is going to try to prevent me from doing my job, so I have to run you out of durability before the real surgery begins. We don't want to overshoot and cut your arm off, so we'll be gradually grinding your durability away with the drill rather than chopping into you with a blade." Hunters had a reserve of magical durability that expended itself to preserve life and limb. The more deadly or disfiguring an attack was, the more of it would be absorbed by the hunter's durability. The more of an attack was absorbed, the more durability would be expended. Veteran hunters were purportedly more worried about blows that
didn't
hurt than ones that did. It stood to reason that surgery would be difficult or impossible as long as Max's durability wasn't completely used up beforehand.
The method of expending all of Max's durability was simply to run the power drill against his body until his reserves were empty. Max had never undergone flesh drilling prior to his class developing, so he couldn't honestly say how much the durability was absorbing. What was coming through was absolutely excruciating, and he certainly
hoped
that represented his durability softening the injury by a small percentage. After what felt like forever, the drill drew blood, and the real dental work was ready to begin. It was done with a small hammer and a smaller chisel, and it pounded agony into his jaw and into his skull. Tears streamed down his face. Blood and tooth shards frothed in his mouth. He wailed plaintively. He struggled in vain against the bonds, if he could have ripped his hand off to escape, he would have. Knowing this about himself added a slight admixture of shame to the physical torment he was experiencing.
Once every tooth he had ever had a filling in was reduced to a shattered post, it was time for his mouth to be repaired. Healing magic was rare enough to be only used on the fantastically wealthy, the critically injured, and the strategically important. Until this moment, Max had never been any of those things. Yet now he was a hunter, someone given the all important task of fighting the monsters over there. He was to go into the dungeon and risk his life in battle so that those battles did not take place in old folks homes or shopping centers. Now, Max was important enough that a Master Healer could be spared to knit his enamel over the exposed nerve endings in his mouth. The soft glow replaced his agony with a serene sense of stability. He could well imagine how front line hunters would throw themselves into the claws and spears of monsters again and again, knowing that this feeling of magical healing awaited them once they had earned it through triumph.
His flesh and durability restored, Max was released to wash his mouth out. The sink claimed the fragments of his mouth that were no longer his. Shards that had been smashed out of his body, and had now made the irreversible journey from being part of his body and self to being other. He still felt an odd jangliness where his teeth had been shattered, but he was also reassured that the new material felt like part of him. Idly he wondered what it was about the rules of the dungeon that would allow him to benefit from the fluoride rinse and would forbid him from taking in fillings, but he supposed that the Space Force had probably spent much more brain power on this problem than he had to spare.
###
"I was so worried!" Sophie looked like she'd been crying. Or perhaps cutting onions and then rubbing her eyes. "I got a message that said
Master Unavailable
