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Serpent Child woke up with a backache. This was normal- or rather, it had become his normal. When your entire body is largely spine, sometimes things go wrong. Added to the indignity was his brush-and-grow hair. Merphonies usually used levitation devices to get from place to place, but his length made the hovering extremely ungainly. Either he had to stay coiled up or he had to use two of them daisy-chained together... or he slithered. Slithering, however, put pressure on the hair... and the hair grew in response to pressure. Then it grew more when he brushed it, so the result- though personally very aesthetically pleasing- wasn't the most ergonomic thing in the world. The hair weighed so much, and sometimes it put too much pressure on his neck as well.

But what could he do about it? Groaning, he flopped out of bed and and groggily slithered his way to the kitchen, where he poured himself a cup of orange juice and knocked back some aspirin. "Acetylsalicylic acid, my sweetest friend," he said, grumbling as he fumbled with the bottle, trying to get it back in the cupboard. He moved around the kitchen, his hair piled in a loose coil on top of his head- he was trying hard not to pull at it as he fixed breakfast. A twinge in his tail made him wince.

Surely there were doctors for this, right? Surely there was somebody who could do something. He checked through the kitchen cabinets- he'd received a Phonyland Phone Directory at some point. Who even used the white pages anymore?

Well, him. For now. Flipping through the pages, he found a name under "Chiropractor." The same name appeared under "Acupuncture," so he figured if one thing didn't work, he might be able to try the other. What time was it, 9:30? That was business hours. Picking up the phone, he fiddled with the numbers. Phone calls were always so awkward.

"Hello? Is this Spellbound? Spellbound the, uh, the lady who fixes backs? I'm calling about an appointment?"

Should he have said his name? Shoot. How were you supposed to do this??

"Oh good, that's- that's wonderful. You see, I have a very unusual problem. So, uh, I'm a merphony. But that's only a technicality- I don't have the fish fins. I'm really mostly all spine. And ribs. Lots of vertebrae. And I'm... well, it might be easier to explain in person. But I can come down this afternoon, I'd like that a lot." He paused, glad that she was able to see him on such short notice. "The name's Serpent Child, by the way. What time do you want me to come down?" The address was in the book. He found himself feeling a little better already; just knowing that maybe there was an answer to his problems was soothing, and she had a very nice voice. Hopefully this would work!

Serpent Child hemmed and hawed for a moment, trying to think about how best to describe it. "It's kind of a lot of things, really. My neck's a big part of it, but so's my... I'm not sure if you'd call it my lower back. I, uh. I know that's usually defined by the lumbar vertebrae and where they meet the pelvis, but I don't have a pelvis. Or well-defined lumbar vertebrae. See, I was manufactured to some really exacting specifications. My, uh. My human patron... really likes snakes. So that's kind of what I am. I'm as much snake as I am phony, the results of which are that I often find myself slithering to get around- my tail keeps falling off the little merphony levitation device- and I spend a lot of my day coiled up- which is super comfy while it lasts but then my shoulders are all sore when I stretch out and it's kind of driving me up the wall." Which- actually, he'd tried that a few times, getting as far up the wall as he could, then leaning back to try and stretch out his shoulders. He imagined that actual snakes didn't have this problem, seeing as how they didn't have shoulders- but he wasn't an actual snake and he did have front legs. He liked the way he looked, but sometimes he wondered if his human patron had really thought things through. "So really, it's several problems that all compound into one bigger problem, which is this chronic back and tail ache that I'd really like to get worked out. Does that make any sense?" He felt a piece of his hair slipping; there was a tiny clink as a bobby pin fell to the floor. Cradling the phone between shoulder and ear, he took his mane down and began the process of re-piling it. He'd brush it out and trim it before going to see Spellbound; it would take him the rest of the morning to get it functional.