Sourisette & the Tooth Fairy
Sourisette & the Tooth Fairy
A mouse the size of a thumb and a fairy with a lantern, working the same night shift on two continents. Every tooth a child loses becomes a piece of the palace they are building, and a page in a book that family keeps.
Who they are
Sourisette
the little mouse, the eastern half of the night
A mouse the size of a thumb, and the reason French children never needed a fairy. She works from France outward, carries a notebook and a belt of keys — one for every child in a circle — and she has never once knocked anything over. She leaves the place where the tooth was tidier than she found it, and she has never in her life woken anybody up.
The Tooth Fairy
the western half of the night
She works from the Americas westward, with a lantern that only lights over a room where a tooth is waiting. She will not take a tooth that was left by mistake, which is why a tooth sometimes stays one extra night.
The masons
they never sleep
Nobody knows how many there are. They build with whatever the two of them bring back, they never ask where a tooth came from, and they are the ones who invented the promised piece: build around the gap, and leave the shape waiting.
Why they started this
Losing your teeth is strange. Your face changes, it wobbles for days, sometimes it bleeds, and the grown-ups are far too cheerful about it. So Sourisette and the fairy made a deal a long time ago: nobody goes through that alone, and nobody goes through it for nothing. Every tooth is collected, written in the notebook, and put to use.
Together, never against
The palace goes up faster than any one child could build it, because a circle builds it together. There is no best tooth and no league table: the grade describes the tooth, never the child, and what was left in exchange is never written down anywhere. That is Sourisette's oldest rule, and this app keeps it: there is nowhere in it to record such a thing.
So it is remembered
A wobbly tooth is a week. A photo of the gap, the date, which tooth it was, where it was left and the story of that night is forever. Parents keep the account, children keep the magic, and the book grows one page at a time until the whole set is gone.
Where it happens
The Palace of Enamel
built out of milk teeth, and nothing else
An incisor becomes a pane of glass, because you can see through it. A canine becomes a key, because it opens something. A molar becomes a step, because you can stand on it. Every child in a circle is building the same palace, which is why it grows faster than any one of them could.
The Bridge of Teeth
where the two of them meet
It takes twenty-five teeth to finish. At dawn Sourisette comes from one end and the fairy from the other, and in the middle they tell each other about the night.
The notebook
one line per tooth
Every tooth gets a line: mint, near mint, well lived, adventurer. A swallowed tooth gets a line too, and the line says only: gone.
The three rules
Every tooth counts
including the swallowed ones
A tooth that went the inside way is still a tooth. Its place in the wall is kept open until it arrives, and it always arrives.
No tooth outranks another
the masons do not keep a league table
The grade describes the tooth, never the child. There is no best. There is only what the circle has built so far, and it only ever goes up.
What was left in exchange is never written down
not in the notebook, not anywhere
Sourisette and the fairy have never once compared what they leave. It is the oldest rule they have, and this app keeps it: there is nowhere in it to record such a thing.
No amount of money is recorded anywhere in this app. That is deliberate.