Chapter 1: Welcome to Paraphilia

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I’ve been into braces since I was 11, when I learned that they stopped being used at all during the second half of the 21st century for being unnecessarily invasive. Nobody’s had to wear them for a long time now, and I’m sure everyone’s very glad about not having to undergo such an archaic treatment anymore, but I haven’t forgotten about it. Just the thought of forcing my teeth to endure those devious metal contraptions is very attractive to me. I’m 22 years old, and I've now officially spent over half of my life researching and revelling in the idea of braces, those fascinating machines that have populated my fantasies for so long. Well, as of today, those shall be fantasies no longer.

As the ship lands and its doors open, the warm sunlight falls upon my face, some of it reflecting off the kilometres-high buildings that scrape the sky of this world. Spaceships whiz across the morning sky above the city, bathed in golden sunshine all. Closer to me, a huge sign reading ‘Welcome to Paraphilia’ stands proud above the flowery promenade ahead. The other immigrants laugh and cheer, sharing wonder and excitement with their peers as they all parade towards the palatial spaceport that lies beyond. Carrying what little I cared to bring with me from my birthworld, I take the first steps towards the welcoming arms of my new home.

Paraphilia (both the world and its capital city of the same name, where I now arrive) was born out of the dream of a handful of visionaries. The planet was terraformed and developed half a century ago by the Pleaseful Collective, a group of entrepreneurial hedonists from across the cosmos, to serve as a refuge for the Empire’s fetishists, a place where we could live our unorthodox lives free from any judgement or discrimination. With a population having recently reached 100 billion, their project has been a rousing success. A utopia, one might call it; fully automated, its inhabitants are not expected to work to survive. Death, ageing, poverty and disease are merely faint nightmares, unwanted memories from a difficult past. This is a land of dreams and joy.

The spaceport is a bustling, diverse place. The main foyer’s gigantic floor and domed ceiling are both decorated with spectacular frescoes, which stand in contrast with its many holographic signs and service droids. The ground below as well as the countless mezzanines and walkways up above are all brimming with the inhabitants of this fine planet. From vampires to angels, furries to inflationists, exhibitionists to latex wearers, and even giants to tentacled monsters, the development of shapeshifting and materialisation technologies has allowed people of all kinds to live in the forms they are the most comfortable in. I'd never actually used a transformation chamber before since they're heavily regulated everywhere else, but here everyone gets to look the way they feel.

Now, one person’s beauty might be another’s body horror, and people are more attracted to what they find beautiful, so a degree of voluntary segregation was introduced through the creation of quarters dedicated to specific fetishes. People are not obligated to live in their own quarter, of course, but doing so gives them a community of like-minded people to interact with in their daily lives, so most find it beneficial. In the smaller cities of this world you’ll find well-demarcated quarters for the largest fetishes, and some towns are sometimes only dedicated to a single one, but here in the capital every fetish, no matter how small, has its own quarter. Still, movement between quarters is very common, be it to visit friends, partake in another fetish one might also have, simple curiosity, or any other reason. The spaceport is one of the only places where you’ll see every group represented and in close proximity to one another. Truly a cosmopolitan place, this.

I head first to the immigration office, where anti-gravity lifts move people to one of the dozens of floors that reach up into the sky, or what feels like it. I ride mine to what must be the 60th floor or so, where I’m met by a smiling android that asks for my information after a brief and irrelevant introduction. This process would’ve been infinitely faster on any other planet in the Empire by using our neural implants to communicate telepathically directly with the central computer system, but the Collective isn’t very fond of those. Too impersonal, they’ve decreed. With the interview finished, the android imprints my new ID onto the nanites in my bloodstream, which is used to identify me as an individual as well as to allow me to automate some tasks like unlocking my front door. Speaking of which, the android then beams the address to my flat onto my retinal display. I ride the lift back down and walk back out to the foyer, but there I get a bit lost. I know I’m supposed to take the hyperloop out of the spaceport, but the place is so immense I have a hard time finding anything. In hindsight I could’ve asked the android to send me a detailed map of the spaceport as well, but sometimes being lost is also an adventure.

I pace about for a bit before spotting a lad about my age hugging a girl wearing J-hooks, who then leaves for the spaceships. They both wave to each other as she disappears into the crowd. As soon as the lad turns around, I approach him.


“Hello there,” I say. “I’m Leon, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Um, can you help me out? I need to get to the Orthodontophilia quarter but can’t find the loop station.”

“Hey! Yeah, of course, I live there too. We can go together, if you don’t mind!” His tone and smile are sincere, not something particularly common in big cities where I’m from.

“That’d be great, thanks.”

“Alrighty then. Lucas, by the way!”


Lucas wears simple, traditional braces, with red ligatures and an inordinate amount of elastics. I counted at least 8 by watching him speak, with one of them connecting his bottom left canine to his top right one. We make our acquaintances on the way to the hyperloop, where Lucas tells me the lass he was hugging earlier was his sister, who left to visit family a few systems away. Apparently they immigrated together for their shared love of braces, and still live together in Paraphilia.

As we board the loop, Lucas says he’s from an industrial planet a couple dozen lightyears from here. He gets all excited when I reply that I’m from Jupiter, saying he’d never been to the Home System in his life. I spend the 5 minute trip on the loop telling him what Earth is like, with all its history and nature. He didn’t know Earth had been turned into a galactic heritage site, and that nobody lives there permanently anymore, which only piques his interest even further. We continue chatting whilst walking down the street, until we reach the address the droid gave to me. It’s an enormous tower, probably around a thousand storeys tall. It couldn’t have taken us longer than 15 minutes to travel from the spaceport foyer to my new place.

The flat is very spacious, I’ve got to give it that, especially considering the fact that I’m its sole inhabitant. Space is at a premium back home since there’s no solid ground and we have to build literally everything from scratch, so I end up having a bit of culture shock, if you can call it that. The walls and the decorative reliefs on them are a luxurious bronze colour, as are the window and door frames, and stripes of ambient light run across the walls, creating a refined yet cosy environment. Entering my bedroom, my attention is immediately drawn to my very own transformation chamber sitting between the bed and a wall-to-wall window; this is the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life.


“Okay,” Lucas says. “You know how orthodontics work in this world, right?”

Distracted by the chamber, I absentmindedly turn to him. “Pardon me?”

“There’s a guidebook on your bed. I’m sure you can figure out how the chamber works, but there is one very important rule you need to know. It’s on the very first page, but I’ll save you the time.”

“Go on.”

“Yeah, so, we have this thing called ‘official permanence’ in Paraphilia. A bunch of people early on who used the chamber were saying that they’d found their ideal shape or whatever, and wanted to be like that forever no matter what. There was a big debacle about it because the government says it’s unethical to allow people to be transformed permanently, but eventually the Senate gave in and allowed chambers in Paraphilia and a few other planets to do permanent transforms, with written consent by the user and periods of deliberation and all that. So now you have to get a document saying you agree to be transformed permanently and be in the transformed form for at least a month before they let you do it for good. And this also applies to braces and other external additions, somehow. They overwrite your DNA or something and you can never get it off at any chamber anywhere in the Empire. It actually becomes a part of your body and your nanites rebuild it if you get it off manually. The only way to get rid of it is to upload your mind into a robot, and your transformed body dies forever. It’s scary stuff. My point is, only get something permanent if you’re 100% sure you want it. I’ve met a few people who regret it and let me tell you, it’s not pretty. They’re all miserable and stuff.”

“I see… well, that does sound a bit scary.”

“Yeah, it really is. Just be careful, ok?”

“Don’t worry, I don’t think I want anything permanent anyway. Maybe just the braces, but that’s it. I’ll give it a try first, though.”

“Nice. So go ahead, I wanna see what you’re gonna get!”


I turn around to face the chamber. A few courage-building moments later, I step in and the door closes behind me. A cute girly voice greets me and a screen appears, where they have the options of shapeshifting or materialisation. I pick the second one, and a list of possible transformations appear, with the orthodontic category at the top. I select it, and a menu with a bunch of subcategories follows, featuring every orthodontic appliance ever conceived in all of human history. I feel a bit overwhelmed, and, not wanting to leave Lucas waiting too long, I just go for brackets to start with. I select fullbands, with hooks on every bracket, wire ligatures, and headgear tubes, and the chamber gets to work. I begin floating off the ground, and everything above my neck gets telekinetically immobilised. My cheeks expand and my lips get stretched out as a soft whir emanates from the top of the chamber. I feel all my teeth get separated by a couple of millimetres, and they slowly get tighter as the metal materialises around them. After no more than 30 seconds, it’s over, and I regain my movement.

A portion of the chamber wall in front of me becomes a mirror, and the cute voice says some nicety I don’t really pay attention to, as I’m too busy admiring how amazing it all looks. Good thing my nanites keep my teeth clean at all times, braces look like a pain to clean by hand. I step out and Lucas immediately asks to see what I got. I show him and he seems more excited about it than I am, making sure I know how ‘awesome’ I look.


“Well, I guess that makes you officially a member of our community!”

“I guess so,” I laugh. Brackets sure feel funny on the lips when you first get them on.

“How about we celebrate with a party? My friends and I are going to a club tonight, and I'd love for you to meet them!”

“That sounds great! Shall we meet there, then?”

“Sure thing. I’ve sent you the address. Is 10pm good for you?”

“Yep. I’ll see you then.”

“Awesome! I have to go to work now, see you tonight.”

“Work?”

“Yeah, I’m a volunteer. You should come down to volunteer as well some day! Anyway, gotta go. See ya!”


And just like that, he’s off, and I’m left alone in silence. There’s a lot of time until I have to leave, so I decide to do some online shopping for decor. That and enjoy my new braces, of course. I wonder what it’s like eating with them on. There’s a jar full of elastics on the bedside table, so I could play with those too. I could also take a stroll around the block and get to know the area better. There is, quite literally, a world of possibilities out there, and that fills my heart with joy. I'm finally home.

Interesting story.

Chapter 2: Thicker Than Blood

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Arriving at the club, I’m instantly greeted by the jolly metallic smiles of the party goers. Most wear regular braces, a large number have opted for retainers instead, and a few sport headgear and other such exotic appliances. I'm not the biggest enjoyer of parties, but I thought it’d be a good opportunity to meet new people. Strangely enough, though, I actually feel comfortable there, surrounded by my people. Best of all, not a single patron happens to be unattractive. No wonder, really, considering how wildly popular shapeshifting technology is on this planet; the furries must be in heaven, wherever it is they live in the city. I can see two braced lycanthropes dancing near the door, so their quarter mustn't be too far away.

After wandering around for a bit, I finally spot Lucas in the crowd, his silvery smile gleaming against the strobe lights. He's not wearing elastics anymore, quite unfortunately.


“There you are! I was starting to think you wu-weren't coming!” He yells. I know he’s a jolly fellow, but he looks and sounds a bit too happy. “Come here, I wan you to meet my friends!”


I follow him through a forest of bodies into a clearing around the bar, where a group of four chat in a relatively quiet corner. There’s one guy and three girls; one of the girls is wearing headgear, and another is covered in body braces. The conversation dies down as we arrive and they all prepare to greet me.


“Alright, so this ‘ere is my man Mark”, Lucas says with a pat on the boy’s back. Mark’s an average-looking but not ugly lad, and only greets me with a timid ‘sup, how’s it going?’ whilst nursing a cup of juice, seemingly embarrassed to show me his braces. Almost tripping up, Lucas puts his sweaty face between us; he’s hardly able to speak, he’s laughing so much.

“So, I actually met Mark a week after I moved here. Or was it two? Maybe it was like… a month. Anyway, we were at a rug-(burp) rugby game and dude was ogling my sister the entire time! Th… Then he came to talk to her, and he saw I was with her, and he got all embarrassed and stuff! It was… was only when…” Lucas couldn’t keep it straight, and Mark was getting red in the face. “Oh boy, I mean, it was only when I saidh I was her sister [sic] that we all started laughing about it. That was so d-damn funny, holy crap! We cool now tho, ain’t that right Marky boy?” Mark laughs politely and blurts out an awkward ‘yeah,’ and with that I can see that he wears a plastic twin-block with pelottes and a pair of telescopes.

“I’m doing fine, thanks. It’s nice to meet you,” I reply to Mark, completely ignoring what Lucas just said.


As soon as I say my last word to him, I feel a small paper ball hit the back of my neck. “So that’s the great Leon, huh? Lucas wouldn’t shut up about how cool you are,” one of the girls cheekily yells out. She’s tall and ginger, with curly hair falling down to her shoulders, and wears regular braces with only a pair of elastics added. She’s also wearing a glittery black dress (in contrast to everyone else’s more casual outfits) and holding a glass of something up to the body-braced girl’s mouth so she can drink from it using a straw.

I say a meek greeting before my attention is immediately drawn to the latter: she wears braces on her arms and legs that seem to immobilise her joints and force her to move like an old-timey robot, with her arms being locked into an L-shape and her legs made perfectly straight. Her limb braces are connected to an enormous body brace covering her torso from her hips up to her neck, locking her entire spine in place and preventing her head from moving at all. Only the arm and leg joints at the shoulders and hips are allowed to move, but even they are still limited in their range. All skin that’s not covered in metal is left exposed at all times, which neither she nor everyone else seem to mind at all. Her head is encased in a complex metal helmet-thing that connects to her body brace and has a gap in the back between two parallel plates to let her ponytail free. All her teeth are covered from root to tip by metal bands with brackets on them, and two incredibly thick pistons force her jaws to move in a specific motion and make all sideways movement impossible. A metal lip spreader attached to her helmet causes her teeth and braces to be permanently exposed as well, with huge metal pads reminiscent of a Fränkel appliance hovering some 4cm away from her teeth and shielding her braces from her cheeks. I find myself fascinated by how she can possibly be sucking on that straw without using her lips or cheeks.

The first girl, noticing my fascination with her friend, takes the glass away from her mouth, allowing her to speak. “Hi, I’ Cassandra, it’s wy hleasure!” The fully braced girl says in one of the sweetest voices I’d ever heard. It’s not easy to see it, but looking past all the metal warping her body reveals what must’ve been a very cute girl once upon a time. Not that she’s no longer cute, but her current beauty is much more of an acquired taste.


“Interested in extraoral hardware, are we?” Says the first girl without missing a beat. “Give me a call one of these days, I can set you up real nice. I'm Melissa, by the way. Call me Mel.” She grabs my arm, pulls me close, and puts my tongue on a chokehold with her own. “Good kisser too. I’m definitely going to put a couple pairs of facebows in that mouth to teach you some manners.” She shoves me away, and I, still trying to process what just happened, fall down onto Mark’s feet, who only apologises and moves out of the way. Watching from the bar, the third girl laughs at my misfortune.

“Don’t mind her, Leon, she’s just teasing. I’d listen to her, though. Mel’s actually really good with body braces. She’s the one who designed Cassandra’s and my boyfriend’s setups,” she advises. I can tell she’s also a bit happy by the unusual giggliness of her words. Mel must’ve been too, judging by the taste she left in my mouth.


Whilst Mel’s imposing presence intimidates me a little, this third girl is just sheer beauty. Ignoring how she’s laying back against the bar with her elbows on the counter like a cowboy, everything else about her is purely feminine. A brunette, her wavy hair extends to elbow height, and her manicured bangs partially cover the upper pad of her reverse-pull facemask. Her wide smile is the kind that effortlessly exposes all her teeth, and her silvery self-ligating braces shine a cheerful light at me. A few elastics wrap around her molars and premolars, and a few more stretch from her top and bottom teeth out to the middle bar of her headgear.


“Ah yeah, that’s Fiona! Don’t gho thinking she’s the sweet little pumpkin she wants everyone to think she is, tho. That girl’s straight up nasty!”

“Shut up, Lucas. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She rolls her eyes, shakes her head and points at him with her thumb. “It’s nice to know you, Leon. You seem like a level-headed guy, unlike some people I know. Mark, where’s Ari? He hasn’t met Leon yet.”

“Oh, he’s sitting there in the corner. Let me call him.”

“Thanks honey,” Fiona says before turning back to me. “Ari’s intolerant to strong sensory stimuli, so he turns his hearing and sight off whenever we come to these kinds of places. We only call on him if we want to talk to him specifically. It’s a shame this is the first time you’re meeting him, he’s much more proactive when we meet up pretty much anywhere else. Ah, there he is!”


A handsome man comes out from around the bar with a smile on his face and an outstretched hand to greet me. Well, as outstretched as he can get it, seeing how both his arms are encased in plaster casts. I immediately notice the many, many elastics and wires tying his braces together around the hooks on his brackets as well as the hooks and loops on his archwires. Some of the wires don’t make geometric sense to me, viewing them from afar, as they seem to appear from behind the mess of metal and rubber at the front of his mouth and disappear at the back. Two wires even seem to come out from inside his gums. Everything looks very tight, with no wire or elastic showing even the subtlest hint of looseness. I can barely even see his teeth behind it all.


“Hey, my name’s Ari, nice to meet you,” he exclaims. At least there’s nothing inside his mouth to obstruct his speech, but he does seem to have some difficulty wrapping his lips around that mass of metal and rubber. “Sorry I wasn’t here earlier, I didn’t see you coming. Lucas was talking about you before you came. You sure made an impression on him!”

“I suppose.” At this point I’m beginning to wonder what I did to deserve such a friendly reception. It’s a bit off-putting, even. Feels like I’m being introduced to a cult or something.

“You don’t have to do it if you think it’s too intimate, but could you show me what you got in terms of braces? Just curious, that’s all.”

I smile wide in response, and Ari seems satisfied with my choice.

“Nice. Did you get anything permanent?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t blame you. Gotta try everything first before you decide. That’s what I did, and I discovered I love the feeling of being wired shut, so I got wired permanently. Being restricted in general is very appealing to me, actually. What are you into?”

“I’m not sure, I’ve never worn braces before today. I like the idea of headgear a lot, but I’m still building up the courage to try it. Elastics feel really good too, I tried some on earlier. No offence, but it was a bit scary wearing so many that my jaw wouldn’t move.”

“Haha! Yeah, it was weird for me at first too, don’t worry about that. Just keep experimenting and you’ll eventually find your ‘thing’; trust me when I say there’s no better feeling than knowing that something you love is yours forever and nobody can take it away from you. I’ve been wired shut for almost a year and I’ve never looked back on it once.”

“Thanks for the advice, mate,” I say with a grin I hadn’t noticed forming on my face.

“No problem, friend. Hey guys, you wanna go to the game room and play some mancina?”


The next three or four hours, or however long it was, really flew by. I’d actually never played mancina before (it doesn’t tend to be a very popular game outside of Eridanus), but they were kind enough to teach me. Lucas insisted he be my teacher, but he couldn’t even tell his right hand from his left, let alone how to play a complex game of cards that incidentally requires the player to know which one is which. I was hoping to get closer to Fiona by asking her to teach me, to which she happily obliged, but by that point she couldn’t stop giggling for a second to get the instructions out. My instructor ended up being Mel, and I managed to win my third game because of it. That woman is a beast at mancina, as is Ari. Mark really opened himself up during the game, yelling and laughing without any mood enhancer in his system. The round we played when I got paired up with him was the most chaotic one of the entire session. The man kept slapping the table so hard, the people at the other tables couldn’t help but stare at us as if we were absolute lunatics.

Our night eventually drew to a close around midnight (which due to Paraphilia’s rotation is at 14am) as everyone was too tired to keep going, so when people started standing up to yawn and stretch I decided to excuse myself out. It was all a bit overwhelming for me, as I’d never really had many friends back where I was born, but the atmosphere was surprisingly jolly and welcoming. As I walk home, I can’t help but smile and be thankful for my life. A life without complication, without conflict. Just a grand old time all around.

Wow, this is great so far! Such a creative idea. Imagining Cassandra in my head gives me chills.

@velteau Great story! Really looking forward to reading more

Excellent find. Expect to read about some of those in future chapters.

Chapter 3: Loving Embraces

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The three days following my night at the club go by uneventfully, and I find myself stuck at home. Not because my door won’t open or anything, but because I don’t have anything to do outside, or so I think. I end up spending all my time playing videogames, watching videos and playing with my braces. I finally get to try wearing headgear; it doesn’t feel like I thought it would, but I find the feeling even better somehow. I wear a facebow the whole time I’m at home, and one of the days I have nothing to do I decide to wire myself shut to see what it’s all about. I spend the day wired up, but get it all off the next morning. Perhaps Ari is right and I just need to get used to it. The headgear, on the other hand, is way more attractive to me.

After loafing around the entirety of the fourth day, I start getting bored towards the evening. The outside represents the unknown and thus seems a little intimidating at first, but as if through some divine inspiration I manage to convince myself that staying home all day every day is not what I came here to do. And how right I am; It’s only now, with my mind clear from having settled down into my new life, that I’m able to appreciate the wondrous reality of this world. It’s quite impressive how much simply leaving the house can reinvigorate someone, especially in a place like this.
The skyscrapers — some being more akin to spacescrapers — that tower above me are architectural marvels, adorned with intricate Art Deco patterns of light on their façades. Glowing holographic billboards float in mid-air, projecting news about the latest innovations from across the Empire, as well as about local events. The streets are bustling with a diverse mix of people brought together by their love of braces; some are immersed in their own augmented reality, whilst others simply sit and enjoy the fire-red evening sky above, sharing moments of comradery and intimacy with friends and loved ones. The laughter and chatter of people fill the streets. I’d never lived in a friendlier city.

As I stroll through the neighbourhood, a small library a couple hundred metres away from my place grabs my attention for whatever reason. Maybe it’s the contrast in size with the enormous buildings around it, or the sheer anachronism of physical libraries still existing, but something about it is deeply intriguing to me. As I step inside, the first thing that strikes me is how traditional it looks. The interior is bathed in soft natural light coming down through large, transparent solar panels embedded in the ceiling. The shelves are filled with rows of physical books (something I hadn’t even ever seen in person until then), but also screens that offer a digital catalogue of the library’s extensive collection. As I browse those relics from my species’ past, an AI assistant, embodied in the form of a floating hologram, appears beside me to offer recommendations. I dismiss it, though, since I’m more interested in the papery nature of those books than in actually reading them. The act of reading has been obsolete since humankind figured out how to download the contents of entire books directly into the brain; nowadays the only people who read are those who actually enjoy the process of going through a story one page after another.

It seems the library has become more of a social space, seeing how about half of all patrons are just there to have a chat in a cosy environment. I decide to give it a try by sitting down next to a bloke who’s struggling not to drool all over his book with the pair of lip bumpers he’s wearing. I try starting a conversation, and he’s polite enough to humour me, bless his soul, but I can tell I’m just bothering his reading and excuse myself. He doesn’t insist I stay, but bids me a good night with an endearingly stretched smile around his bumpers. I don’t see many other people just sitting by themselves doing nothing, but I do spot a girl browsing the shelves on the other side of the room. I approach her, but, as soon as she turns around, I see she’s wearing some sort of metal contraption that covers her entire mouth and nose in metal, immobilising her jaws and rendering her completely mute. I greet her kindly, but when she only grunts and blinks in response I decide to wrap things up and leave. She did sound excited to have a conversation, but physically couldn’t, so there wasn’t much point in trying. As I stand there by myself, scanning the place for some other person I could try talking to and not finding any, I can’t help but feel a bit frustrated. I’m just about to give up and leave when, as if by some miracle, I spot her.

Now, I’d certainly met my share of pretty girls by this point, but I’ll never quite forget the moment I first laid my eyes on this one. Her chin is a fine work of art and her face is adorably round, from atop of which a black cascade of silky hair flows to cover her upper back. Her eyes are big and full of life, her cheeks rosy, and her slightly upturned nose delicately sculpted, but the pièce de résistence is, of course, her mouth. When at rest it resembles a doll’s, small and pouty, but when she smiles it opens wide as a certain English feline’s, putting all of her teeth on display. And what a display it is; her teeth are immaculately shaped and numerous, and upon each one lies a large, harsh metal bracket that covers almost its entire surface, with incredibly thick archwires connecting them. Her smile is so vast and captivating, and so unmistakably metallic all throughout, that not falling in love with it alone is all but impossible.

As soon as I snap out of my trance, I notice she’s talking to another lass at a coffee table. Judging by how conservative they’re being in their conversation, refraining from laughing too much, having excessively long pauses between sentences and looking around the room, I deduce that they don’t actually know each other and are just striking up a random conversation. I unassumingly lean against a pillar and watch their conversation whilst occasionally turning around to stare out the window so as not to raise too much suspicion. As soon as they run out of casual topics to discuss, the two fall silent for about a minute before the other lass says her farewells and leaves. My heart starts pounding against my ribcage, and I’m immediately thrown into fight or flight mode. I give myself a pep talk, take a few short breaths, and, however hesitantly, make my way to the table.

Now, I’d thought it impossible for such a monumentally beautiful creature to reciprocate the adoration I felt for her, but the moment our eyes meet, she gives as much pause as I had when first I saw her. My heart stops for a moment, surprised by the awe in her raven black eyes, but I’m soon thrust back to my senses when she opens a big smile to show her perfectly parallel rows of braces and says “Hi!” I instantly feel a deep and inexplicable connection with her as an otherworldly impulse takes over me; without thinking, I grab her head and kiss her. Although momentarily taken aback, she quickly gives way and throws her arms around my neck.

Our tongues dance together for a while, with mine occasionally sneaking in passionate licks of her braces across the elastics she wears. I also discover a thick metal plate on the roof of her mouth and another spreading across its floor around her tongue, which both make for a very small ballroom indeed. Soon after I begin feeling her braces, so does she begin exploring mine; her fascination is with my fullbands, and so she excitedly runs from the chunky brackets on the outside of the bands to the smooth metal sheen on the inside and back out again. We must’ve spent a good five minutes in this ever-adventurous first kiss, mesmerised by the metal in each other’s mouths and aroused by the paradoxical nature of the deep intimacy shared at that moment between two complete strangers.


After we bow to each other and leave the ballroom through opposite doors, our heads separate to meet each other’s gaze, both sporting the characteristically stupid smiles and fiery eyes of a young love. “My name ith Viowetta, what’th youwth?” The severe lisp caused by the enormous metal plate in her mouth almost melted my heart, which I must have expressed nonverbally since she giggled in response. “I’m Leon. You won't believe how much of a pleasure it is to meet you.”

“Tho, mind exthpwaining what that wath about?” She jokes.

“Oh, you know… just thought I might look inside you for my heart that you stole.”


She laughs. That gives me an opportunity to examine the metal plate on the roof of her mouth visually, and what a unit it is; the thing is smooth, as I had ascertained previously, and it fills her palate with solid metal all the way to the tips of her teeth on the inside, making it so there is literally no space for her to touch the insides of her teeth with her tongue at all. The same applies to her lower plate, but this is less impactful because of the vale carved out for her tongue. Still, there is no flesh to be seen anywhere on the inside of her mouth with the exception of her tongue. I didn’t think I could possibly become more fascinated than I was before noticing this, but I was proven wrong.


“I can thehtainwy be convinthed to show you wheh I’m keeping it.”

“Alright. What’ll it take?”

“That’th thomething youw have to find out,” she says nonchalantly whilst getting up from her seat. “I’m pwanning on having thome ithe cweam at the Hantha Park tomowow awound thwee. It’th a wovewy plathe.”


I just sit there, watching as she walks out the door.

So good, great idea