(3rd Person POV)
The house landed hard in a world that was not their own, and when the dust settled, a pair of striped stockings poked out from beneath the wreckage. The Wicked Witch of the East was no more. Dorothy's journey had begun.
She was met by Glinda — a witch, but a good one.
The audience stirred at that. Witches existed in this world, but they were the kind of thing that showed up in old warnings and hushed stories, never in theatre plays, barely even in books. To see one portrayed with warmth and grace was strange enough to notice.
But the story didn't wait for them to settle on an opinion, and they found themselves moving with it.
Dorothy followed the Yellow Brick Road. Along the way she picked up the Scarecrow — an odd, straw-stuffed thing with a mind of its own that wanted, of all things, a brain.
"Have you ever seen anything like that? A puppet walking around on its own?"
"Never. In all my years as an adventurer — never once. That thing is A-Rank at the least, I'd stake money on it."
"It can already think and speak clearly enough. Why does it even want a brain? You think it means it collects them?"
"...I hadn't thought of that. That's troubling."
Afterwards came the Tin Man, and then — to the crowd's sharp unease — a lion. A talking one. Several people gripped their armrests when it appeared on screen. Then it opened its mouth and whimpered, and Dorothy scolded it to its face, and the theatre burst out laughing.
Arthur's illusion work gave all three a convincing solidity. They moved and breathed like real things. Nobody was questioning them anymore.
What nobody was laughing at was the Wicked Witch of the West.
She wanted Dorothy's ruby slippers and she sent wave after wave of subordinates to get them. The crowd watched each pursuit with held breath, exhaling only when Dorothy scraped through.
Nobody said much during those parts. They were too busy watching.
Master Delly sat with his arms crossed in the dark and told himself he was evaluating the production.
'She's going to get cornered,' he thought, watching Dorothy pick her way through yet another trap. 'There's no way out of this one, she has no magic, she has nothing— wait, there- yes, go there, you clever girl--'
He uncrossed his arms without noticing.
Somewhere between the second and third act, the mood in the theatre had shifted entirely. The crowd that had spent the opening jeering at the magicless girl was now completely, silently invested in her. Nobody remarked on it. Nobody needed to. It had simply happened.
When Dorothy and her companions finally stood before the Wizard of Oz, the theatre felt his presence.
"That entrance alone... the way the whole room shook just from his voice."
"He rules an entire realm. You don't do that without power that most people can't even put a number on."
"I wouldn't want to be standing where Dorothy is standing right now."
His terms were delivered and the crowd reacted immediately.
"He's sending Dorothy to fight the witch herself!?"
"After everything she's already been through — why doesn't he just deal with it himself!?"
"A being like that probably doesn't even see the witch as worth his time."
Dorothy went anyway. The crowd watched in tense silence as she worked her way into the witch's castle, learned the witch's one weakness, and ended her with a bucket of water.
They cheered. Reluctantly, a little baffled, but they cheered.
"Water," someone said flatly. "Just water?"
"That magicless girl killed a powerful witch with a bucket and barely flinched doing it."
"I don't know whether to cheer or feel sorry for the witch."
Dorothy returned to the Wizard victorious. His voice boomed through the hall as he began to speak — and then the Lion sneezed.
It was a tremendous sneeze. The curtain billowed, tore partway from its rail, and a small, ordinary man was suddenly very visible to everyone in the room.
The crowd burst out.
"What — who is that!?"
"Is that the Wizard!? That little man behind the curtain!?"
The man fumbled with the curtain, realised it was hopeless, and stepped out from behind it with the defeated expression of someone who had run out of options. He confessed readily enough once cornered — he was no great wizard, no ruler by power or birthright.
He was a low-ranked apprentice mage with a talent for trickery and illusion arrays, a former theatre worker who had stumbled into Oz and talked his way into legend one trick at a time.
The silence lasted one second.
"He's a fraud!?"
"All that — the booming voice, the fire, the presence — illusion magic! He's a theatre mage hiding behind a curtain!"
"Dorothy nearly got herself killed a dozen times over and this man couldn't have sent her home regardless!"
"He built his whole legend off spell arrays and nerve. That's it!"
"I want to reach through that wall."
And then it came out that he was from Dorothy's own world. The outrage found a second wind and didn't slow down.
Her companions received what they came for. But Dorothy was left with nothing. No way home. The Wizard had none to offer.
Glinda returned.
She told Dorothy what she had known from the very beginning: the ruby slippers were never decoration. They had chosen Dorothy for a reason. The power inside them had always been real — but it was not the kind that could be borrowed, granted, or cast by someone else's hand. It lived in Dorothy herself, coiled and waiting, and it had been waiting since the moment the slippers touched her feet.
All Dorothy had to do was stop believing she had nothing.
She was magicless.
She had always been told that meant something was missing from her.
But Glinda looked at her and said it plainly: the slippers did not choose someone with nothing. They chose her. And if she could stand in a world full of magic, face a witch that armies feared, and find her way through every door that was slammed in front of her — then she already knew what she was made of.
She only had to believe it herself.
The theatre went quiet.
Dorothy closed her eyes. The slippers began to glow.
She was home.
[The End.]
The screen went dark. The house lamps came back up. For a moment the audience just sat there.
Then the applause hit — loud, messy, genuine. Most people were on their feet.
"I did not expect that. Any of it."
"She had the power the whole time. Since the very beginning."
"Do you think there's truth in it? That if someone magicless truly believed in themselves — could something actually awaken in them?"
"That's a fairytale."
"Maybe. But I haven't stopped thinking about it since those slippers lit up."
"It's just a story--"
"I know it's a story. I also know I walked in here ready to demand a refund and spent the last hour holding my breath over a magicless village girl. So what do I know."
Master Delly had not stood up. He sat in his seat while the room celebrated around him, staring at the blank white wall with an expression his butler had never seen on him in eleven years of service.
After a long moment, quietly, he said: "What in the world did I just watch."
What none of them knew was that this was not simply an ending.
The idea of a magicless girl who carried power she never knew she had — who only needed to believe in herself — had just been placed into the minds of hundreds. And ideas, once planted in the right soil, do not stay quiet.
In the days to come, it would reach those who had never once been told they were capable of anything. The ones the world had written off before they were old enough to argue.
For them, Dorothy's story would not feel like fiction.
It would feel like a question no one had ever thought to ask them before.