Hm... I don't like this chapter as much as the others, but I think it has its good points. (Meaning I'm too lazy to rewrite it a dozen times.)

Chapter 6: The Emo Tin Man

"Follow the Yellow Brick Road! Follow the Yellow Brick Road!" chorused Colette and Lloyd the Scarecrow, as they skipped down said road, still arm in arm. They were very much kindred spirits, Noishe discovered, his poor ears almost bleeding.

On this particular part of the journey, nothing interesting happened until they crossed a small patch of trees. There they saw a figure standing among the trees, immobile. When the three walked closer, they realized it was a man made of metal... a tin man. Someone had glued a mass of spiky red yarn to the tin man's head.

The Lloyd the Scarecrow gasped. "Dad!"

The Tin Man made a distressed sort of noise.

"He's rusted up!" Lloyd the Scarecrow said. "He can't move!"

"How do we help him?" Colette asked.

"There should be a can of oil around here somewhere..." Lloyd said, searching the nearby undergrowth.

"Does it look like this?" Colette asked, holding something up.

"Yeah, that's it!" said Lloyd.

Colette looked down at the glass bottle in her hand and read the label.

"Why vegetable oil?" Colette asked.

"Because real oil costs too much," Lloyd explained.

Somewhere, a Spork knew she was going to hell for including a real-world joke.

The Tin Man tried to speak again, but the sound come out as an angry muffled "Mrmm!"

"Go ahead and dump it on him," Lloyd said. "And he'll un-rust."

Colette wasn't sure about this, but unscrewed the bottle cap and did as Lloyd instructed.

The Tin Man twitched.

"It's working!" cried Lloyd, in order to obey the law of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Tin Man, now covered in vegetable oil, spoke clearly for the first time. "Was it truly necessary for you to use the entire bottle?"

Lloyd and Colette cheered.

It took the Tin Man several minutes to finally get all the oil off himself and out of his hair, thanks to a mysteriously acquired towel, which had been hiding under the same bush as the oil.

Then the Tin Man introduced himself.

"My name is Kratos," said the Tin Man to Colette. "I believe you have already met my son."

Kratos the Tin Man looked at Lloyd.

"It has been a long time..." said the Tin Man.

Lloyd beamed.

"DA-DAY!"

Lloyd the Scarecrow hugged Kratos the Tin Man, who looked embarrassed, and did not hug back.

"Aww..." aw'd Colette, who did not notice this latter fact. All she saw was the hugging.

Had Colette possessed any accurate understanding of biology, she probably would have wondered how and why a tin man had a scarecrow son, or what the mother could have possibly been. As things stood, she didn't have to worry about the horrifying possibilities.

Noishe, as the ignored dog of the group, wandered off to find something interesting to sniff or pee on.

Once the hugging was over, Kratos the Tin Man asked, "Where were you two going before you found me?"

"We were going to go see the Wizard of Cruxis!" said Colette. "A deadly swirly tornado of DEATH picked up my house and dumped me here, and a witch said that if I went to the Wizard, he could send me home!"

"And I was going with her to go see the Wizard, because I wanted a brain!" Lloyd added. "Dad, you know how thick I can be."

"...Indeed," acknowledged the Tin Man.

Lloyd the Scarecrow sniffed.

"May I accompany you on your journey?" Kratos asked. "I would also like to ask the Wizard for something."

Colette blinked. "What do you need?"

"A heart," said Kratos the Tin Man. "I am made of metal, so I lack a heart. I am incapable of human emotions. All I can do is stare blankly into the distance."

"He's right," said Lloyd. "Let's let him come, Colette! Then maybe, one day, he'll hug me too and we can act like we're related, and maybe he'll decide not to strand himself on... say... a giant comet because of his massive guilt complex."

This seemed to set something off in Kratos the Tin Man's head.

"IT'S TRUE!" wailed the Tin Man. "I'M A TERRIBLE FATHER! ANGST!!"

This strange behavior ceased as quickly as it stared, and Kratos returned to his default blank stare and stoic manner.

"This is why I need to see the Wizard," said Kratos, in his normal tone of voice. "So that I can have emotions."

Then that weird Law of This Universe kicked in again:

"I'd be more of a dad, and less of a rock... If I only had a heart!"

Colette frowned. "But just a moment ago, you were - "

"...A completely emotionless hunk of metal?" Kratos the Tin Man suggested in a flat monotone. A large segment of the general female population would at least agree on the 'hunk' part. Synonyms are great and terrible things.

"Um..." Colette hesitated. "...Okay."

"It's okay," Lloyd sniffed, hugging his unresponsive father again. "We'll get you a heart!"

It was around then that Noishe wandered back to find that nothing had changed.

A/N: Ugh... not a good chapter, overall. The next one, with the Cowardly Lion equivalent, should be awesome though.

Please review.