My initial reaction to the Emerald City was that the glasses didn’t work for shit, because I was damn near blinded by the sheer gaudiness of it all. It was all marble columns and sparkly curtains, and there were emeralds embedded into EVERYTHING. Someone had Bedazzled THE FUCK out of that place. Like, if Elvis Presley and Liberace had a same-sex-marriage love baby, and sent it off to Donald Fucking Trump for style tips, the poor son of a bitch STILL would have been fired from his job decorating this place for being too understated.

I assumed that everything was painted green as well, although it was impossible to tell, considering that even the sun, the sky, and the skin on the back of my own hand looked green through my—

Sunglasses. Oh my god. That was the whole point of them. The goddamned Wizard must have said he was casting a spell to make the city green, then locked tinted lenses on everyone’s faces so they wouldn’t know he was full of shit. I mean, that was way worse than the mildly roguish snake oil salesman/balloon enthusiast from the movie.

The Wizard of Oz in this version was a fucking dick.

The Guardian of the Gates led us through the streets until we came to a huge palace dead in the center of town, which was somehow even more garish than the rest of the City. The door was guarded by a soldier with a green uniform and a green beard (or possibly not, because who could even fucking tell).

“Here are strangers,” said the Gate Guardian, “and they demand to see the Great Oz.”

“Step inside,” the soldier answered, “and I will carry your message to him.”

Well, that went better than I expected. He led us to a big waiting room (I’m not even going to bother describing the decor), made us wipe our feet, and politely excused himself to go announce our presence to his boss.

He took forever to return. “I spoke to the Great and Powerful Oz through the door and gave him your message,” the soldier said when he finally showed up. “He said he will grant you an audience, if you so desire. But each one of you must enter his presence alone, and he will admit but one each day. Therefore, you must remain in the palace for several days. I will have you shown to rooms where you may rest in comfort after your journey.”

“Ugh, fine,” I said, and turned to the Cowardly Lion. “The good news is, this guy definitely has social anxiety meds.”

The soldier blew a whistle, and a girl about my age in a silk gown entered. “Follow me and I will show you your room,” she said.

She had separate rooms for all of us, and mine was as tacky as you’d expect—velvet curtains, flowers in all the windows, and an honest-to-God marble fountain right in the middle of the room. There was a shelf of books (I secretly hoped one would be titled The Mall in Calabasas, but no dice) and a closet full of dresses that would probably fit the ten-year-old Dorothy just right.

“Make yourself perfectly at home,” the girl said, “and if you wish for anything ring the bell.”

“Ring, ring,” I said. “I’m going to tell you straight-up that my clothes need to be washed at least twice. Also, send food—meat pies, if you have them. All the meat pies.”

“Of course,” she said with a smile that actually seemed genuine. “You’ll be fed at once, and your clothes laundered while you rest. Oz will send for you tomorrow morning.”

The bed, at least, was plush as hell. After my pie feast I collapsed into it, but even with Toto curled up at my feet, I felt weirdly alone. It seemed I was actually growing accustomed to falling asleep with the Scarecrow staring creepily down at me, the Woodsman chopping away endlessly through the night, and the big, stinky Lion purring like a leaf blower.

Whatever. I was almost at the end of this stupid voyage through literature, anyway.

After breakfast the next morning (fancy toast and delicate poached eggs on a sparkling, hideous platter), the girl returned for me. She brought my freshly washed laundry, which seemed to look like olden-time little-girl clothes to her, even as she folded them into perfect squares—the physical logistics of the whole Dorothy disguise business continued to baffle me. Also, she really, really wanted to dress me up in stuff from the closet, but I refused. I finally let her tie a ribbon around Toto’s neck, which seemed to satisfy her.

The hall outside Oz’s throne room was full of women and men decked out in elaborate gowns and waistcoats, who evidently showed up to hang out with each other every day even though they were never let in to see the Wizard.

“Are you really going to look upon the face of Oz the Terrible?” one woman whispered breathlessly.

“Yup.”

She turned to the soldier who had let us in yesterday. “Will he see her?”

“Oh, he will,” the soldier said. “Although he does not like to have people ask to see him. Indeed, at first he was angry and said I should send her back where she came from. Then he asked me what she looked like.”

“Okay,” I said. “Creepy.”

Now he addressed me directly. “When I mentioned your silver shoes he was very much interested. At last I told him about the mark upon your forehead, and he decided he would admit you to his presence.”

Ah, so my witch connections were the ticket. That made sense. A bell rang, and everyone in the hall tittered nervously. “That is the signal,” the soldier said. “You must go into the throne room alone.”

He opened a door and I marched inside to a big, round, high-arched chamber. I’m going to go ahead and let you guess what every surface was embedded with. There was a big, green throne right in the middle of it, and floating about a foot above it was a giant, bald head. It wasn’t even a particularly scary head. I mean, it was probably six feet across, but other than its size it just looked like a regular bald guy.

Its mouth moved. “I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Who are you, and why do you seek me?”

The voice was loud, but not overly threatening. And I couldn’t really tell if it was supposed to be coming from the giant head or from a speaker somewhere. I decided I should probably just play this one straight.

“I’m Arabella, although people around here mostly call me Dorothy. It’s kind of a long story. I’m here to ask for a favor.”

The head stared at me silently for at least a minute. Several wise-ass comments sprung to mind while I waited for him to get on with it, but I managed to hold my tongue.

“Where did you get the silver shoes?” he asked at last.

“From the Wicked Witch of the East, when my house fell on her and killed her,” I replied. “By accident.”

“Where did you get the mark upon your forehead?”

“A super-old witch kissed me there. From the North, I think? Then she told me to come see you.”

Word on the street was that the Wizard could tell just by looking whether or not I was speaking the truth, and he stared at me like he was certainly trying. “What do you wish me to do?” he finally asked.

“Send me back to Kansas,” I said. “And by ‘Kansas,’ I mean the mall in Calabasas, California. At the exact same moment I left, if at all possible. I mean, no offense or anything, but the Land of Oz kind of sucks.”

I didn’t actually expect him to grant my wish at this stage—in the movie he sends Dorothy to kill the Wicked Witch first, and then after she does he admits that he pretty much thought he was sending her to her doom, and that he’s a phony who can’t grant wishes anyway. But then he does grant wishes. Kind of. There’s a hot air balloon involved, and Glinda the Good Witch has to swoop in and actually get Dorothy out of there. But I had already tried to skip ahead to the end once without any success, so I figured my best bet was to play along with the story as best I could.

His eyes blinked three times, then looked up and down and started rolling around independently of each other. To be honest, it was kind of freaking me out. Eventually, they focused back on me.

“And why should I do this for you?”

Because if you don’t I’ll expose your fraudulent ass to the entire, hideous green city? Blackmail probably wasn’t the best opening move, I decided. And it was definitely WAY off script—if he felt like I was threatening him, shit could probably go real bad, real fast.

“Because I’m just a helpless, meek little girl,” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice and failing miserably. “And you’re an all-powerful, super-manly Wizard Head who can grant wishes if he wants.”

“But you were strong enough to kill the Wicked Witch of the East,” he said.

“That wasn’t on purpose, and you know it.”

“Well,” he said, “I will give you my answer. You have no right to expect me to send you back to Kansas unless you do something for me in return. In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.”

Awesome. He was a Libertarian. Also, he was full of shit. I hadn’t paid for a goddamn thing since I’d been there.

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“If you wish me to use my magic power to send you home again, you must do something for me first,” he continued. “Help me and I will help you.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Kill the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Kill the Wicked Witch of the West,” he agreed.

“Yeah, I’m not sure I can do that.”

“You killed the Witch of the East and you wear the silver shoes, which bear a powerful charm. There is now but one Wicked Witch left in all this land, and when you can tell me she is dead I will send you back to Kansas. But not before.”

“If you want her dead so bad, you kill her,” I said. “Unless, of course, you’re asking me to do something that you’re not powerful enough to do yourself.”

“You have my answer,” Oz said, “and until the Wicked Witch dies you will not see your home again. Remember that the Witch is Wicked—tremendously Wicked—and ought to be killed. Now go, and do not ask to see me again until you have done your task.”

And that was that. Whether he wanted me out of the way and assumed the Witch would do his dirty work for him, or was just part of my KGB brainwashing (or, for that matter, he genuinely hoped to save his loyal subjects from the potential wrath of an old woman in green pancake makeup and a pointy hat), I had my marching orders. It was probably good that he was making us wait around a whole day between individual interviews, because I needed some time to figure out how I was going to play this.

I was led back to the sitting room, where the Scarecrow, Woodsman, and Lion were waiting eagerly. “He won’t help me unless I murder another witch,” I said. It turned out they hadn’t all heard the story about the first witch murder, so I had to explain that a little bit, at which point they were properly mortified about the Wizard’s unfair demands, and did their best to comfort me.

Then I went back to my room to eat meat pies, flick green flower petals into the fountain, and think.

There was too much I didn’t know about my situation—did I need to complete the book’s plot to get out? If I went wildly off script, would I break the simulation? Would that be good or bad? And most importantly, if I died in the Oz Matrix, would I die in real life? I was still a little concerned about the whole brainwashing angle, but if that was their plan—“they” being the curvy, middle-aged librarian in the mall shop, I guess?—I was pretty sure it wasn’t working. I wasn’t going to kill anybody just because I was ordered to, and if they set up some shitty scenario where I had no choice but to do it, that wasn’t on me, it was on them.

After breakfast the following morning, I was escorted to the sitting room again, where the Lion and Woodsman were already waiting. It was the Scarecrow’s turn to see Oz, and apparently he had already been in there a good half hour by the time I had finished eating. When he returned from his audience, he looked a bit shaken.

“How was the big, giant head?” I asked.

“He appeared to me not as the floating face you described,” the Scarecrow said, “but as a most lovely Lady, dressed in green silk gauze, and wore upon her flowing green locks a crown of jewels. Growing from her shoulders were wings, gorgeous in color and so light that they fluttered if the slightest breath of air reached them.”

Okay, that was new.

“She spoke to me very sweetly, but insisted that she was Oz, the Great and Terrible, and demanded to know my name and my purpose.”

“And I assume she told you to kill the witch too?”

“She told me that if I did, she would bestow upon me a great many brains, and such good brains that I would be the wisest man in all the Land of Oz. I was surprised that she required of me the very same task she did of you, but she said she didn’t care who killed the Witch, as long as she was dead. And that once she was, I would have my wish.”

The Scarecrow seemed even more bent out of shape about the prospect of witch killing than I was. By this point I had grown pretty bored of my room—posh-ass bed and all—so I spent the rest of the day poking around the city. I half expected to find some dark undercurrent beneath the glittering green façades, but none emerged. The people all seemed genuinely chipper, and thoroughly enamored of life in the Emerald City. So I swung by the gatehouse to make sure I wasn’t technically a prisoner during my stay, but the Gate Guardian said he’d be perfectly content to take my tinted sunglasses back and send me on my way. If anything, he seemed like he’d be glad to be rid of me.

There was nothing to do but wait. The following morning it was the Woodsman’s turn.

“I do not know if I shall find Oz a lovely Lady or a Head, but I hope it will be the lovely Lady,” he said. “For if it is the Head, I am sure I shall not be given a heart, since a head has no heart of its own and therefore cannot feel for me. But if it is the lovely Lady I shall beg hard for a heart, for all ladies are themselves said to be kindly hearted.”

“Dude, really? How did you lose your ENTIRE BODY in the first place?” I shot him tiny knives with my glare. “Shut up and go see the stupid Wizard.”

Tin Woodsman did both, which gave me time to ponder the current state of my inappropriate robot crush. Well, inappropriate from his side, anyway—I wasn’t about to apologize for the places my mind went when I gazed at his gleaming, mechanical hips. But I had to keep reminding myself that when he looked at me, he saw the same ten-year-old Dorothy Gale who was in the mirror every time I checked.

Obviously it had been lust at first sight from the moment I’d seen his rusted ass immobilized over that stump in the woods. And the endless pining for his lost heart—not to mention the almost eager way he was prepared to see his friends come to a poetically tragic end—still struck me as endearing rather than pathetic. Which was how I knew I had it bad. But something about the wildcat incident had thrown me for a loop, and I was trying to figure out what it was. I mean, he saved a helpless mouse (mouse royalty, no less) from being literally devoured. That sort of thing should have seemed straight-up heroic, right?

The thing was, any amount of cat-beheading, especially from a guy who cried his face shut when he stepped on a freaking bug, was a giant, flashing, neon-red flag. I decided that my misgivings came from the fact that I hadn’t been awake to see him do it. Was he saddened by the horrible action the predator had forced him to take? Or had he done it with a little gleam in his eye, like cutting the heads off stuff was his whole deal, and he was excited that he finally had the opportunity?

When the Woodsman eventually returned, he looked shaken. “It was neither Head nor Lady,” he said. “Oz took the shape of a most terrible Beast! It was nearly as big as an elephant, and the throne seemed hardly strong enough to hold its weight. The Beast had a head like that of a rhinoceros, only there were five eyes in its face.”

“Yikes,” I said. “Did he ask you to—”

“And five long arms growing out of its body! And five long, slim legs. Thick, woolly hair covered every part of it. A more dreadful-looking monster could not be imagined! Being only tin, I was not at all afraid, although I was much disappointed.”

“Because you were hoping for the hot girl.”

“I was, yes.”

“And when he asked you to kill the Wicked Witch—”

“In a voice that was one great roar!”

“Right. Did he say you had to do it alone? I mean, is he pitting us against each other? Or did he say we could do it together, and have all our wishes granted?”

The Woodsman stopped to think for a moment. “No, he specifically stated that if I helped you kill the Wicked Witch of the West, he would then give me the biggest and kindest and most loving heart in all the Land of Oz.”

Good to know. Now it was back to the waiting game. After one more PAINFULLY boring day, made bearable only by meaty, saucy goodness on demand, it was the Lion’s turn at last. He had spent most of his downtime with the Scarecrow and Woodsman, trying to guess what form the wizard would take today.

“If he is a Beast when I go to see him,” the Lion said, “I shall roar my loudest, and so frighten him that he will grant all I ask. If he is the lovely Lady, I shall pretend to spring upon her, and so compel her to do my bidding. And if he is the great Head, he will be at my mercy; for I will roll this head all about the room until he promises to give us what we desire. So be of good cheer, my friends, for all will yet be well.”

“Cowardly.” Uh huh.

About half an hour later, when he returned from the throne room, I was engaged in what had become my favorite pastime over the last few days—attempting in vain to teach the Scarecrow how to curse.

“Okay, repeat after me,” I said. “Two tears in a bucket.”

“Two tears in a bucket.”

“Motherfuck it.”

“Futher mucket.”

The Lion burst into the room. “He was neither Head, Lady, nor Beast!” he said.

“You guys owe me five bucks each,” I said to the Woodsman and Scarecrow.

“He was a Ball of Fire, so fierce and glowing I could scarcely bear to gaze upon it. The heat was so intense that I singed my whiskers!”

“And?”

“He said that if I brought him proof that the Wicked Witch was dead, at that moment he would give me courage. But as long as the Witch lives, I must remain a coward.”

I had very much seen this coming, but I guess the others had been holding out hope for better news. “What shall we do now?” the Woodsman asked.

“There is only one thing we can do,” the Lion said somberly. “And that is to go to the land of the Winkies, seek out the Wicked Witch, and destroy her.”

My first thought was to ask what the hell a Winkie was, but I put a pin in it. The truth was, I’d had plenty of time to consider my options while loitering in the Emerald City, and I had come to the conclusion that there was no avoiding the Wicked Witch of the West. Of course, I wasn’t in any way committed to assassinating the woman—if she was just some ugly old bat who the patriarchy had labeled “wicked” because she was tired of putting up with their shit, then more power to her. Maybe she would be willing to bargain with me for a ticket out of this dump.

But if she really was as horrible as everyone said—enslaving Winkies, bringing death and destruction with her everywhere she went, yadda yadda—well, then I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. The thing was, I had genuinely grown to like the Lion, Woodsman, and Scarecrow during our travels together. And, a little casual mauling and the occasional beheaded wildcat aside, they were three of the bravest, gentlest, kindest souls I had ever met. If the whole Witch thing went pear-shaped, I wasn’t sure I could live with myself if I made a murderer out of any of them.

“I’ve decided to go and see this Witch for myself, and to make up my own mind as to whether she needs destroying,” I said. “If any of you don’t want to be a part of this, you don’t have to come. When I return,”—when, I corrected myself at the last second, not if—“I’ll tell the Wizard you all helped, and that he should grant each of you your wish.”

“I will go with you,” the Lion said without hesitation. “But I’m too much of a coward to kill the Witch.”

“I will go too,” declared the Scarecrow, “but I shall not be of much help to you, I am such a fool.”

“I haven’t the heart to harm even a Witch,” Tin Woodsman said. “but if you go, I certainly shall go with you.”

My own, stupid heart swelled up, and I got some kind of stupid emerald dust or something in my eye. “Then it’s decided,” I said. “We leave at dawn to the domain of the Wicked Witch, on the orders of some guy we barely know, who in all honesty, seems like kind of an ass.”

There was a long pause.

“Futhermucking wizard,” the Scarecrow said.

“Futhermucking wizard,” I agreed.