A/N: A sequel to the story of "Puff the Magic Dragon". If you don't know the song, listen to it first before reading or you are going to be lost. You do NOT need to watch the three movies that were made, based loosely on the characters from the tune.

Sorry, that was rather brusque. Please feel free to sit down and relax, and then enjoy listening to the song which will give you valuable insight into the following story.

There, that was better.

Honalee's Best

Tick tock.

The clock on the wall sounded out the advancement of time as its gears clicked regularly at one second intervals. The office was otherwise quiet as Dr. Thawt sat at his desk, his eyes closed in meditation. Opening his eyes would have made little difference, for this doctor of psychology was blind and had been his whole life. The fact that his eyes were of no use to him made his other senses keener; some said he could smell the problems of his patients, although he would always dismiss the notion as balderdash.

Tick tock.

He kept the room normally lit, not for his sake of course but for the comfort of his patients. Many breakthroughs had occurred when the patients, no longer worried about appearance or in some cases unable to deceive because of it, came to grips with the complex problems that plagued their lives. The doctor chuckled when he thought about it; often it wasn't the problem itself that was complex, it was the digging and searching for the root of the issue that comprised the bulk of his efforts. And the efforts of his patients too, he was quick to add; for some struggled mightily before a sudden epiphany opened the floodgates of self-awareness. He may be Honalee's best psychologist, but there were no overnight cures.

Tick tock.

The clock chimed out two o'clock, which meant the last of the ten minute break he allowed himself between appointments. Dr. Thawt reached over and pressed a button on the right corner of his desk. "Mrs. Dervish, see the next patient in please" he spoke in a clear voice, knowing the microphone would relay his request to his secretary outside. While he waited, he cleared his mind as he always did before meeting a new patient for the first time. His first impression was of heavy footsteps approaching the door before it opened.

"Dr. Thawt?" The voice, compared to the footsteps, was not very loud and a little timid. But that might be awkwardness from experiencing their first session.

"Come on in, come on in. What shall I call you while we're together?"

"Excuse me?"

"Sorry, I thought my secretary would have covered that - allow me to explain. I don't want to know my patient's real names; we often get our names and reputations mixed up with who we really are. So I take new patients without knowing their real name and let them pick one for themselves. If there comes a day when your real name is necessary then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. So, what would you like your session name to be?" Dr. Thawt then waited for the response, knowing that sometimes the answer could say a great deal about a patient.

Tick tock.

"I don't know...how about...Daryl?"

Not much to go on there. "Okay, Daryl it is. Make yourself comfortable and we'll start, shall we? Sit on the chair, lay on the couch, or pace the floor; it's all the same to me." But not the same to the patient; some felt so uncomfortable that they couldn't remain still, while others almost collapsed from the weight of problems they perceived. The doctor listened and heard a loud 'thump'. This one wasn't going to be a pacer.

"Thank you, Daryl. Did you come here looking for answers?"

"No. Well, maybe I guess. Maybe there aren't any answers, I dunno."

"I'm sure you feel that way, and to be honest sometimes there aren't any answers to some questions. But some questions DO have answers, and during our time together today and in the days to come we'll figure out some of the questions first and then see about those answers afterward. And the way we discover those things is by asking questions and listening to the answers - and it goes both ways. We both will learn something each time. Four years ago I knew I wanted to help people but didn't know how, but thanks to asking questions I know a lot more things now. Let me ask you a simple question first: what did you do yesterday?"

Tick tock.

Daryl considered. "Nothing. I stayed at home."

"I see, but we don't always have to go outside every day do we. If that was the case we wouldn't even need homes, now would we? So you stayed at home - alone?"

"Yeah."

"What did you eat?"

"Nothing."

"Not eating isn't good for you in the long run, but some of my patients don't eat on purpose for a day just to reset their body - it's called fasting."

"I've lost some weight, yeah. But I don't really feel like eating sometimes."

"We shouldn't eat if it makes us feel worse, and it can be a problem if you eat too much but we'll come back to that later. Did you read?"

"No."

"I think I might understand. Are you saying that you basically stayed inside yourself all day? Is that a good way of saying it?"

Daryl brightened just slightly. "That's kind of how it feels, yeah."

"That happens with some of my patients. They feel really down and don't want to do anything, almost like they're glued to the bed."

"That's the way how I felt. I feel that way a lot. I look in the mirror with all those spots where my green scales are missing and I think 'What difference does it make?' even though I know I should care I just don't really sometimes. A lot of times."

"That's called depression, and it can be like a huge weight on you. Are you a dragon, Daryl?"

Daryl stared at the doctor, then waved one of his front feet towards the doctor and got no reaction. He then remembered being told by Mrs. Dervish that the doctor was blind. "Yes" he answered, happy the doctor couldn't see his embarrassment.

"I've never met one before, at least I don't think so - sometimes it's kind of hard to tell for me." The doctor chuckled at his own joke, and Daryl smiled for the first time in ages. "Have you been this way long Daryl, or do you know?"

"Why wouldn't I know?" the dragon asked, suddenly curious.

"Well, for some patients it happens suddenly, while with others it kind of grows over time."

"Oh. I know. It happened when I lost my best friend I've known all my life."

"I'm sorry to hear that. What was your friend like, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Jackie was the best ever. I can't remember a time when I didn't know him. My earliest memory is of me sitting on the grass on Cherry Lane about four years ago when I saw this boy walk up..."

"Boy? What's a boy?" the doctor asked.

"It's what Jackie was. A boy is a man but only about as tall as a dwarf maybe when I first saw him."

"When you first saw him? Did he shrink?"

"No, just the opposite. As we became friends he started to...change. He slowly got taller, and he also got stronger but he didn't get any bigger around. He was changing slowly, less and less like a boy as time went on."

Delusional, thought the doctor. But imaginary friends didn't have to be real like dwarves or elves or centaurs and anything like that; they could be imaginary creatures too even if it was a bit unusual. "So this Jackie boy creature got bigger the longer you knew him and..."

"Grew. I asked him one time and he said boys grew and got taller and stronger and faster. So do the girls, too."

"Gurls? What are those? Like Gargurls?"

"No, they're like boys but females. They both start out as boys and girls and grow as they get older."

"They don't stay the same size? But everybody stays the same size! We're not plants...sorry, I got carried away. You were saying?"

Tick tock.

Daryl had to think for a moment to get back on track. "So Jackie and I became friends. He always brought strange things with him when he came to play like ceiling wax and kite string and an arrowhead and something called a zipper and lots of really fancy stuff."

The doctor looked up, forgetting himself for the moment until he blushed when he realized he couldn't see. "Ceiling wax? In case the roof leaks? I've never heard of such a thing." This Daryl had quite the imagination. Who knew what those other things were, although he had heard of string of course but nothing called a kite.

"I don't know, we used it to pour into shapes in the sand to make things."

Dr. Thawt didn't want to confront Daryl yet on some of his imaginary constructions, but he ventured a question. "What part of Honalee did this Jackie come from?"

"He didn't. He said he came from somewhere else where where there lots of kinds of doctors and boys and girls and men and women and a place you had to go to learn called skool. He said if you hurt your foot you went to a foot doctor, if you ate the wrong thing you went to a stomach doctor, and if you couldn't think you went to a psychiatrist. But it wasn't here."

"Not here? There is nowhere else...Honalee is all there is!" escaped from the doctor's lips before he calmed himself. "So he didn't come from..." he started to say before almost choking on the words "...I mean he wasn't...so he came from far away." The concept boggled the imagination. "And then you two would play."

"Yeah, but he pretended he was Captain Ten Eels when we'd go sailing on my ship...it was a raft with a sail, really...and I would be Daryl the Dragon; Jackie seemed to know lots of things he would tell me about his world. They have pirates and kings and queens there too; and over the years there would be new kings and queens..."

"New ones? What happened to the ones they had before?"

"They had boys and girls who grew and became the new kings and queens" Daryl explained.

"Did the previous ones just keep getting bigger and bigger until they blew up? It makes no sense."

"No, they stopped getting bigger and then they got all wrinkled like a prune and went away. But it didn't happen right away, it happened over a long time; Jackie said hundreds of years."

Tick tock.

The doctor used breathing exercises to get himself under control. This patient was going to be a major undertaking. "So let me see if I understand what you've told me. For your whole life you've been friends with something called a boy who doesn't stay the same size but actually grows like a plant and changes as he gets taller but not bigger around until he finally becomes a grownup. He comes from some place far away" the doctor still couldn't bring himself to say the words 'not in Honalee' yet "where there are others like him. Except for those who aren't like him, because they got bigger until they didn't want to anymore and then wanted to be wrinkled instead, and everyone lives longer than the world has been around. He brought you lots of things that haven't been invented except maybe in skool and then one day he suddenly stopped coming and you got depressed and didn't know what to do because suddenly the world was normal again and everything stayed the same and nobody 'grew' and there were no boys in it, just boring grownups and gnomes and elves and giants that have been in a world that's only four years old because everything is four years old. You are, I am, Mrs. Dervish and even our unwrinkled pirates and kings and queens!"

The doctor was starting to hyperventilate now. "You've constructed a creature out of your own mind to help you escape the reality of a world you feel like you don't fit in and as a result you have become co-dependent on your creation. You've then garnished this creature with a fantastic folklore made up to give your fantasy credence. Daryl, somewhere inside of you I think there is an individual who needs normality and is crying out for it. The sooner we can come to grips with it, the sooner we can make you a normal member of society again." Thawt let out a deep sigh and wiped his brow.

Tick tock.

A chime went off as the clock hit 2:50. "Well," the doctor said as he loosened his tie "that was some session! I expect our future meetings will be a little less raucous, but I felt it was important to get a few things out in the open even if it sounded more than a bit confrontational. Please see Mrs. Dervish on the way out to set up your next appointment; I look forward to our next talk, Daryl. Good day."

Daryl muttered his goodbyes, vowing to himself to never make another appointment again. Maybe he needed to get out into the world again, but Jackie WAS real. He placed an item on the doctor's desk and left the office to make his way home again, then decided to stop by a park and take in the nice weather. No more Daryl; his name was Puff and Puff it would remain.

Back in the office, the doctor took a drink of water and calmed himself again; what an imagination that Daryl had! He reached for a pen and his fingers found something that didn't belong. His expert fingers felt over the object, which seemed to be two pieces of material with a row of teeth in the middle and a metal tongue sticking out. He tugged on the tongue and it made a "zzziipppp" sound as he pulled down, then "zzziiiippp" as he pulled it up again.

"What could this thing possibly be?" he muttered to himself.

Tick tock.

The End

A/N: When I was a child, I told my mother after hearing the song for the zillionth time that it had a sad ending. My mother assured me that there was more to the song and Jackie had a son who returned to Honalee; the song we had just listened to was not the right version.

She lied, but I'll let her off the hook because A) she's Mom and B) she meant well, even if no such recording existed at that time. However, one of the things I got wrong was thinking that it was "sealing wax" and not "ceiling wax"; I couldn't figure out why a ceiling would need wax either.

A friend and I used my story cubes a few years ago to come up with a sequel to the song (sans singing) that involved Jack Paper, his son John, and among other things Euell Gibbons telling us to eat a Christmas tree while walking through a tunnel. Don't ask me why, blame the cubes.

This is not that story either.

Instead, I turned it sideways. A world was created when Jackie Paper dreamed up Honalee, a world that persisted even after he stopped imagining it. What would happen to Puff when he tried to relay Jackie's explanation of his world to a citizen of Honalee?

Thanks to reviewer Qoheleth for pointing out the contradiction of having a kid's fun play land with a psychiatrist in it. It only made sense if you remember the movie I said to ignore.