The Artist and the Canvas [Pyper]

[Pyper]

--The following transcript was a live chat roleplay--

<Jesse Fforde> It’s normal for people to be tense. There have been plenty of people in Jesse’s years of working as a tattoo artist who hadn’t been able to handle it. They’d come in with grand schemes of getting sleeves done, only to wuss out very near the beginning. Unable to handle the constant burn of the needle against their skin, they’d tell Jesse to stop. They’d leave, with a partly done tattoo, and they’d never come back. Although Jesse’ll do the same with Pyper as he does with all his first timers – start on a small part of the design that could stand alone if the whole design isn’t finished – he has a feeling that Pyper won’t be a runner. Call it gut instinct.

Still, regardless of whether she’ll run or not, it’s normal for her to be tense. Without any further words, he pulls up a stool. The first gun that he uses is electromagnetic; best used for the lining and shading. There’s a peddle on the floor that Jesse adjusts to the right position. As soon as his foot applies pressure to the peddle, the humming buzz of the gun fills the atmosphere. He dips the needles into the black pigment for a few seconds, before finally leaning over Pyper; he starts with a single leaf on her shoulder, his focus now primed upon his work. He spares only a small amount of concentration to make sure that Pyper is handling the pain alright.


<Pyper> It's nothing like the sound of a low flying plane. Or the holler of a train. Yet it's the only thing her ears were picking up; why was it shaking her skull? The metal point dives into a container of black, sleek liquid - it looked almost like a semi-solid - and the gun hovered over a specific point. Watching the contact eliminated any shock factor, so the nerves never made her jump out of genuine surprise. If asked to describe the way a tattoo felt once the tip of the needle bit into the superificial layers of skin, Pyper would say similar to a light coating of paints that Paige had in her disposal. That same blanket of tingling spread from the site of the transformation of her skin to the surrounding strings of muscle.

Like having a heavy dosage of a paralytic, the involuntary fidgeting and the spasmodic physical shaking cease to be a problem. It's the same sensation of euphoria as the acid had been during that first painting session. Coupling with the consistent whirring noise, Pyper's lulled into a hypnotic state, wondering whether people have ever fallen asleep in these chairs while Jesse's tattooed them.


<Jesse Fforde> If she had asked, Jesse would have told Pyper that no, no one had ever fallen asleep. Those who are practiced, whose skins are covered in tattoos, are perhaps a little more relaxed. They know what’s coming, but even they still tense, sometimes. Even they sweat. Even Jesse himself had always succumbed to the body’s innate desire to protect itself from pain. The constantly jarred nerves caused the blood to go haywire, to drain from the face and the extremities, for sweat to pepper the brow, the upper lip, the underarms.

Jesse doesn’t enjoy being tattooed because it’s relaxing. He likes it because of the pain, because of the way it makes him feel. It’s not a pleasure. Not a pleasure at all. Maybe a punishment for something. A punishment that his subconscious thinks he needs. Or perhaps he simply believes in suffering for one’s own art, and he respects those who seek tattoos from him because they, too, are willing to suffer for some reason or other.

Sleep? No. Especially those under the needle for the first time.

As soon as he realises that Pyper is not suffering any adverse reactions, he hunkers down and continues, sparing no focus for the body beneath the art except on the canvas, on covering the pearlescent skin with stark imagery. He sinks into his work, brows furrowed, the world around him slipping out of focus, blurring, the only sound that of the whirring tattoo machine.

[Pyper]

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of white noise is as follows -

White Noise noun
: a heterogeneous mixture of sound waves extending over a wide frequency range.
____

Judith's Facility for the Mentally Ill. The patients more fondly remember it as Judas' Head House. Time bled together, and Lucretia couldn't decipher whether she only imagined life outside of the hospital. If she ever had any sort of existence beyond the familiar, paling, sea green walls. Days went by, the same routine check-up at six. The nurses came in, and they took your temperature, and blood pressure. Some times, depending on the individual, they took blood. They were looking for improvements. It was one theory she mulled over, laying awake during the peak hours of the night. At seven, everyone woke up. Most had to have their doors unlocked. Hers was one of them. Breakfast had to be finished no later than eight o'clock. Then there was a series of group sessions. It was a sadistic idea, to teach people skills to utilize in a general populous while never intending on signing them out.

In a day, Pyper pictured the throats of every employee to have been swollen and raw from the amount of talking done. Most of the patients didn't contribute to the conversations. The ones that did, became too excited and had to be escorted into cell block, isolation units. She heard everything though, every single annunciated syllable. Listening taught a lot of things. Certain pitches betrayed the use of lying, the inflection to distinguish a statement from a question. At times, they were harder to grasp. Some people - employees and patients alike - could fake their emotions. Get away with sounding convincing, to gain what they wanted/needed, and have it all vanish. It was like a game, to catch a liar.

It's not until ten o'clock at night, that the lights were turned off. Music that they played to soothe the conscious patients was shut off as well. Most rooms weren't allowed books, or lights of any sort. Limitations on distractions that took away from sleep were abundant, and they were strict. The only thing that never had been handled was the screaming. Pyper had experienced a fair amount of night terrors that ended with her yelling and jarring herself awake. The sounds of every room carried into the halls and the walls themselves were thin. No one ever shrieked distinct words. It's a disturbing sound; someone shouting just to make noise, and be heard. Some of them probably dreamt of their families hearing their voices and coming to check them out. Take them home. These were the sounds Lucretia often needed in order to fall asleep.

Now, entranced by the steady hum of the gun, the Telepath's reminded of white noise. She forgot to watch the progression of the outline. Perfection was a warped concept to her. Practice on an art should take up days. Doing flawless work meant that you'd forget to eat, because it had been the center of your focus. With a fixed stare, Pyper structured a series of invasive questions to ask Jesse later, after the tattoo was finished.

[Jesse Fforde]

There are no memories, when Jesse works. Not really. He had to be in a pretty bad state of mind to allow his thoughts or emotions or memories to distract him from his work. More often than not, it is his work that he uses as a distraction. Almost as if he has a split personality; the one when he’s got a tattoo machine in his hand—or a pencil, paintbrush, piece of charcoal—and the one where he hasn’t. No, maybe not like a split personality, but more like a drug injected directly into the mind. A numbing drug. Something that eradicates every other nagging prickle in his brain and allows him just this one thing.

Even his thirst takes a backseat. It’s still there, but it’s not a distraction. Even when working on human canvases; the blood that is spilled because of the constant puncture of needle through skin fails to arouse the clawing ******** of a demon thirst that he has been saddled with. Or, though it is aroused, he fails to even think about acting upon it. Instead, the scent of blood mixes with the scent of ink and becomes part and parcel of the drug; inhaling it only helps Jesse to focus more upon his art.

One might think that it would be dull, to focus only on outlines and shading. But it’s not. It’s infinitely beautiful, especially now. Especially with his preternatural senses. And especially when working on an immortal canvas.

Time slows down. The needles aren’t moving too fast for his eyes to see. His eyes become cameras, shutter speed allowing him to see every tiny little movement. To see the skin react to the sudden violent attack to its surface; to see it resist and then give way, over and over again. To see the ink lodge beneath, to spread through the tiny, miniscule atoms of skin. To see it become permanent. Eternal.

The focus upon Pyper’s tattoo is tripled. It is a large piece, and he wants to get as much done of it as possible – if not all. He has given them the entire night. They have hours and hours ahead of them. Humans cannot handle such prolonged distances of pain, and tattoo artists need breaks. In the past, he’d have split this job up between several different sessions, two to three hours long each time. But neither of them is human. Neither of them will need a break, per se, unless Pyper asks him to stop. And there’s no need to slow down, to act human. To keep up the façade. Jesse can work that tiny bit faster with these heightened senses, with his increased stamina. And so he continues to work. He pauses to swipe away ink and blood; to re-dip the needles in the ink. He moves around Pyper like a bee around a flower, complete with the whirring buzz. He pauses to change the needles over, to pull out the colours; to shade, the brilliant greens and yellows, reds, blending with darker hues.

Until there’s nothing left. Not on the front of the design, anyway. When he steps back, finally, because there’s no more he can do, he blinks. The world swims into focus.

“We can keep going. You’ll need to change positions, so I can work on your back. Or we can continue tomorrow night,” he says, voice a little huskier than usual due to hours of disuse. “Up to you.”

[Pyper]

Ivy vines climbed along the forefront of her person, like the outter walls of the hospital unit. Unlike the edifice, the repetitive swipe of the juddering metal tip put in place a state of relaxation. This sensation normally only came when Pyper practiced her stitching patterns - and since coming to Harper Rock - the computer terminals introduced her to specific (and professional) techniques. Her mind needed the challenge, and both tremoring hands required exercises to limit their consistent quaking. On the internet - and after much frustration in understanding that medical practitioners referred to her 'stitching' as suturing - professionals and current medical students erected websites dedicated to teaching basic suture patterns. Discovering a credible source (Boston Hospital, in the States), the Telepath morphed and for hours, became a semi-permanent growth on the chair stationed at that particular Internet Cafe.

Lock stitch sutures, horizontal and vertical mattress sutures, cruciate sutures, subcuticular sutures, Lembert sutures, Halsted sutures, Cushing sutures, Connell and Shemieden sutures.

It may have been an assumption that this unconventional hobby had been gained after Phoenix sired her. In truth, the original gateway developed with the hospital walls. Several months of good behavior was expected, if not outright required, for her to obtain the use of crochet needles and cylindrical balls of yarn. To create identical patterns, to eliminate any superficial (and it was all superficial) defects, came to soothe even the deeper states of psychosis. She never went beyond making lengthy stretched of blankets. There were never any hats, or sweaters being woven or given out. Any flaw in the octagonal mesh, the project would be thrown to the floor and without skipping any minute beat, she would begin again.

Progression in this art came into fruition after one patient used a sharp edged piece of metal from their bed to harm an orderlie. Pyper watched them drag the dead weighted individual, after a round of heavy sedatives, to the isolation room. Then they removed the metal framing from their room and left the mattress on the floor on its own. A doctor used a needle and thread to close up the torn through section of skin; it was by chance that Pyper passed the nurse's station to see. With both palms pressed into the plexi glass (real glass proved to be a problem several years prior), as well as the very point of her nose, the leap from yarn to flesh was deeply embedded and bloomed into a theory. One that had to be tested for its validity.

Lucretia lost her crocheting privileges in the days following the violent altercation. After being left unmonitored, one of the hospital's employees found her hunched over in a corner. The needle didn't cut through as easily as a jagged piece of metal work. She got hold of a syringe and tried to tie the yarn to the end. It wouldn't stay and the amount of blood it soaked up unwound the braids and eventually it broke apart.

Part of Lucretia - now in the parlor - wanted to know the experimentation it took to lead up to his profession. One that he excelled in. One that -

“We can keep going. You’ll need to change positions, so I can work on your back. Or we can continue tomorrow night.”

"We can, continue." A larger part of her wanted to see what there was so far. What other people would see when they looked at her but it would be incomplete. With that in mind, she utilized a little self restraint and sat up. Turning at her abdomen, her form slowly flipped over and presented her back.

She began to go over her suture list again; Lock stitch sutures, horizontal and vertical mattress sutures, cruciate sutures, subcuticular sutures, Lembert sutures, Halsted sutures, Cushing sutures, Connell and Shemieden sutures.

[Jesse Fforde]

Jesse nods. The girl wants to continue, and is showing no outward sign of distress or strain. There’s no reason why he should deny her, when he himself is the one who suggested they continue to begin with. He himself is anxious to see the final product – though he’s always been that way. Overall, he is a patient man regarding normal every-day things. If he orders a package online, he forgets about it until it arrives. If he’s waiting for someone to make up their mind about something, he lets them. He doesn’t pressure them. Time is not something that needs to be rushed, and he has always been of that opinion – even before he was gifted all the time in eternity.

When it comes to his artwork, however, he can be a little impatient. He can be impatient with himself when things don’t go right, or when he’s taking too long to complete a commission – which is often. He’s too much of a perfectionist and when the buyer tells him that what he’s drawn isn’t right, he gets furious. It’s never good to work when one is furious with one’s own art.

When the larger commissions come in, he likes to get them all done as quickly as possible because the one thing that he loves nearly as much as the application of the art, is the finished product. To see the way that it brightens a person’s body; to see their reaction, and their pride in something that they will now have forever. It’s the same now, with Pyper – he wants her to be happy. He wants his art to be perfect. So when he settles back down over her, he does not work with haste. He works at the same steady pace as before, careful and precise.

By the time he has finished, it’s got to be near dawn. There’s that prickling at the back of his skull—the warning that the sun is soon to rise. It doesn’t bother him; he doesn’t pass out during the sunlight hours anymore. He has the ability to resist. And he’ll make sure that Pyper knows that she is more than welcome to use one of the bunks if she can’t make it somewhere safe in time. It would not do to have the newly etched artwork all burnt away by the sun’s rays.

The gloves come off with a snap, and he tosses them in the bin. He has wiped over her skin with cleaning solution, sterile and alcoholic. He then gently dabs lotion over the design; scabs have already started to fall away. That’s the magic in vampiric healing. It doesn’t take long for the tattoos to reach the quality that they would be after two weeks on a human. After he has finished the care of the back tattoos, he gestures for Pyper to sit up so that he can apply the lotion to the front, too. Just in case.

[Pyper]

Before the gun is turned back on, as they were talking, her skull rattles. The buzzing continued even when power wasn't being supplied to the tool he implemented to permanently etch her vision onto her skin. She wanted it to stay. With these things, things that were normal for people to do, she didn't know how her body would react. Neglect at the hospital, the desensatization of the patience from things people took for granted, made even looking at the sunlight streaming through the trees on her trek across the Canadian border startling. Every movement in the brush had her full attention, but being that the woods held so many noises, her neck hurt from being pivoted so often. Add that to vampirism - her bodies ability to heal miraculously without ever subjecting itself to a hospital facility - and she worried about the tattoo fading away. If she willed it, if she wished hard enough, maybe it would stay.

She only uncertain whether she's hearing Jesse turn the gun back on, or whether its just its delayed echo in her head until the end of the metal tip strikes a particularly sensitive bundle of nerve endings on her back. Near the shoulder blades, the edges of each bone, the sting magnifies and pulled her back into a state of self-willed rigidity. To interrupt another person's art bordered the closest to sacrilege as Pyper's mind could comprehend. Religiousness was something in this life that she wanted to shed but it was a slow acting inner activity. Many of the teachings stayed with her but they contradicted the rules set to her by Phoenix. The ones she had to live by now. At times, their combative tendencies in her mind made her grow irate and the mood clung to her until one teaching was chosen over the other.

Hours passed without her ever realizing it. But the steady heavy draw on her eyelids was an indicator that she should go home soon. Pyper already made her choice in whether the ink should be finished tonight, if her limbs felt too heavy, she should speak up. Being away from Phoenix's apartment for too long made her nervous. It was safe there, no one visited. No one came in that she didn't know. Risking the burns of the sun wouldn't make Phoenix pleased with her either. In the past few months, she had had several. Those nights, she wore longer shirts and mismatching bottoms to conceal the flakes of skin that she could pull off in great sheets. High collars, and turtlenecks blanketed raw second and third degree burnt patches of skin. If her face had been marked, she'd not come out of the Tower at all.

Does the gun stop? Jesse's away from her back and the glove - like the second skin of a snake - was peeled off and cast out to let his hand breath. Pyper wondered whether the flesh needed that oxygen, or could it be deprived now and still continue its tasks with full range of motion. Or whether it would shade itself with deeper colors, and the joints would become harder to move. The solution chased away her struggles with attention on the tattoo itself. It made her focus and not allow herself to divulge in the meandering pathways of her scattered train of thought. Jesse's hand made the motion of getting up. Pyper's always been a more compliant patient on her good days, so the wordless command never provoked a reaction out of her.

"Will," she had to clear her throat, "I, be able to see?" In the time she's waited, an anxiety built up. Now, sitting up and waiting to have the liquids seep into her pores - she would have to ask why another time - Pyper found the question of Jesse's final piece to be nerve racking. The blonde was a bundle of inward excitement.

[Jesse Fforde]

Perhaps Jesse hasn’t been a vampire long enough to see the effect that death would have on vampire skin; on the tattoos that he etches therein. He knows that on his own skin, upon the patches that he had experimented or the new pieces that he’d asked Micah to do for him, they’d not shifted. They remain as bright now as the day they were injected. It makes sense, to Jesse. He’d thought about it quite a lot; the main reasons why tattoos fade from human skin is due either to a skin’s rejection of the ink, or due to time. One of the biggest causes of dust in this world is dead human skin; the build up of it on bathroom floors. The skin dies and flakes away, very very slowly. Like a snake shedding skin, and new layers come into being. As the top layers flake, it takes the ink with them. And thus, a fading tattoo.

But this is not something that vampires have to contend with. Sure, skin could still reject ink. If caught in the sun and burnt to a crisp, the new skin that grows back won’t have ink attached. If one loses a limb, which grows back, that limb won’t have ink either. Though, Jesse has found, his own regrown limbs are just as they were when he was turned. The ink comes back. He supposes it had something to do with what state one is in on the day of their death. But the skin does not flake away. Vampire skin is dead. If one takes care of it, if they don’t get their limbs hacked off and if they stay out of the sun – if they don’t die – by all accounts the ink should stay. Bright and fresh and always new.

As soon as Jesse finishes rubbing lotion gently across all inked areas of Pyper’s skin – that flawless canvas that she had offered to him, had given to him to use – he smiles and nods.

“Of course,” he says. It’s what he had intended to do next – to take photos of the work and show Pyper the finished product. He supposes, at least with vampires, it might be easier to re-do tattoos if they are not liked. It might be painful, but one has only to remove a few layers of skin, and it’ll grow back within days. And then they could start all over again.

Jesse wipes his hands and again retrieves the camera. He circles Pyper and takes quite a few photos, after which he hands Pyper the camera.

“I’m not sure if you’re one of those who can see yourself in a mirror,” he says. If not, I can organise to have these sent to you. So you can look at them whenever you want,” he says, his hands on his hips as he waits for the latest assessment from his newest customer.

[Pyper]

Identity defines a person, it's an inner acceptance of characteristics learned over time. Through struggles, an individual becomes unique with their bounty of experiences. Not every infant that derives from a set of biological donors claims their identity. Some go their entire lives without cognizant of their own identities. They second guess their every choice, down to whether or not to rinse their plates counter clockwise, or clockwise that day. They are ghouls, in a state of personal limbo; they are stuck. They themselves are haunted by questions. Who am I? Did I make the right choice? How will this effect me later? Can I change it? Pyper may have not been fully aware of who she was but this decisive course of action didn't bury her in an incalculable number of inquiries.

Pyper was waiting to see the tattoo in its completion, radiating energy from her pores. It made her restless but she didn't move. She tried not to move. No matter how it came out, Pyper knew that she'd love the artistry. She'd love it because it served as a lasting commemoration of where she had started in this world. History had bearing on the present, it was important. Whether it was good or bad. The goal of keeping the past close was to prevent further - and similar - mistakes. To learn what worked, and what hadn't. The past was a lingering incorporeal entity that shaped everything around it. It bleeds through the present, staining the future with its events. It locked its knowledge in other realities. It was final, it was fact.

The human - birth name Lucretia Mercy Thisben - would be preserved through the duration of time in the strokes of ink. The shadows of the vines that scaled up the side of the ward. They framed the ledges and nestled in the crooks of the windows. Some of them snaked around the bars on the windows. The sun that shone its harsh rays through dirty windows. In the ward, it always looked like late afternoon until sunset. Lucretia haunted herself in that building. Her mind kept her up during the night, telling an army of untruths. It injected distortions in her reality, it stole baser functions in her limbs for hours. It made her irrational, it made her unpredictable.

Pyper recalled one of the first few excursions she had been permitted to participate in. The can held ten people, she had to sit in the passenger seat. Her requested destination had been denied. She truly believed (at the time) that there would have been no alternative option. Her grip on the steering wheel had been unyielding from the moment her fingers clawed around the leather. Flipping the vehicle - Pyper Made Altaire­ will later come to conclude - was not as Hollywood painted for their audience. The van had never made it back onto its four, bald tires. Her window was faced into the pavement, crushing gravel into the windows. They cracks spider webbed, and her blood molded into the minute crevices. Three people, not including herself, had to be hospitalized under critical conditions. It was written in her file.

Lucretia was Pyper's foundation, what she had started from. Her relapses in lucid periods, her flaws; those were things that may never go away. It was something she was slowly accepting, though not without a rigorous effort to re-establish basic human behavior. Jesse certainly wouldn't have an inkling as to how much this picture meant to her. Chances that she would have been able to verbalize it were poor. Aside from that, no words would accurately convey the magnitude of her pride in it. Her appreciativeness for it.

So when Jesse handed her the camera, Pyper Formerly Lucretia knew she'd love it. And she did. She exuded a smile, it brightened up her adolescent features. A daydreamer's smile. A genuinely joyful expression. Not wanting to rub off the picture (of course there was a part of her that knew she wouldn't), hugging was refrained from. Instead a hand reached out, squeezed Jesse's wrist. It was a brief touch, something to outwardly express her gratitude in his time, and his work.

"Jesse, this. This is . . . perfect. Thank you, so, much.
Can, I have them, sent anyways?"

She could tuck them in her journal. They were memories, too.

[Jesse Fforde]

Jesse doesn’t even ponder printing the photographs. In this day and age, printing is a thing of the past. He doesn’t even have to transfer them to his computer, he realises; the camera that he has bought is one of those that can connect to the internet via wifi. He can send the files via email, or even to a mobile phone. He already has Pyper’s number.

The smile that rests on his features is one of a proud man. Of someone who has received the compliments given to him and stashed them away for a rainy day. Whatever other mistakes that he might make, he can at least console himself that his artistry isn’t the worst. That if there’s nothing else that people might appreciate him for, they can at least appreciate his artwork. He will always have his paper and his pencils, his watercolours and his canvases. And the world is a bounty of models and subjects; of things that are beautiful, even if they are savage or dark. Even the bad things in life are beautiful. The dead things. The broken things. It’s all part of the circle.

With the camera held in one hand, Jesse reaches with the other for the discarded items of clothing – the ones that Pyper can put back on, now. The work is finished and there’s no reason for her to remain topless in front of him; now that she has said that the finished product is perfect, Jesse doesn’t have to make any changes. He can start packing up, in preparation for a day of sleeping. So he can wake up to a clean house. So that he’s not getting in anyone else’s way.

He glances up at the time in the corner of the camera’s screen; the sun will rise, soon. He selects all of the photos that he’d taken of Pyper, and shoots them to her phone number. They should come through as a text.

“I’ve sent the photos to your phone. You can do what you’d like with them,” he says. As soon as the technology has finished what it needs to do, he glances up.

“It’s nearly dawn. Are you going to be able to get home alright? There are bunks, through there,” he says, glancing down the hallway to the room just beyond. “You are welcome to sleep in one, if you want to. They’re safe,” he says, as if that’s something that needs to be said. Sure, the place isn’t as safe as he’d like it to be, just yet. He’s working on it – there are plans for renovations, and he’d talked to Velveteen about the logistics. There are ways to make a place safe without having to install super expensive private elevators. It just takes a little more planning, is all.

[Pyper]

Sunlight damned her; sunburns covered more of her body than unmarred flesh. The sweltering air that hugs the muscles made them more limber. She didn't know why the affinity transpired in her. The gravitational pull of self mutating circumstances worried too many people. Phoenix especially. Pyper couldn't leave, the peak hours of nightfall will retreat to the other side of the world. Sunrise was too soon to chance. Jesse's opinions of her private excursions into the sewers, baiting hunters to bestow the wounds believed to clear out the disease that puts its limitations on her thought process were unknown. Having experienced a newly introduced abstraction of what freedom really meant, Pyper wasn't as receptive to criticism. These were things spent dissecting. For a greater understanding of herself. Pyper didn't know what being herself entailed. So far, it meant coveting certain slivers of one's personality that were not widely accepted.

Her arms slithered through their assigned arm holes, the fabric sticking to her face like the film of a cramped placenta. The cotton membrane relieved it's blinding effect once her bushy head popped out of the top. Her phone purred. There was a setting she discovered on it. She was able to set the vibrate to imitate the steady heartbeat of a relaxed human. It had reminded her to purchase the blood packs at gift shops. Live feeding only offered trickling increments of frustration. She'd end up on the bounty list she discovered at the computer station inside the walls of the Flats. Being a danger meant people would add her name to the obituaries. The Shadow Realm was still an imaginary place, like Hell to the Altaire. A place people spoke about when they returned. At least they returned.

"I should stay, here," she decided. People would be anxious with regards to her well being. It had been a general necessity that nagged most that had she was introduced to. They never could comprehend that every wound, every mistake taught something new. The misinterpretations that embodied verbalization were opposed. She felt the need to honor them. To a point. It didn't mean she couldn't meander through the underground corridors and bait the hunters. At this point, she had discovered that things could be called accidents and as long as a person was genuinely apologetic that the accident would be forgiven. This was also true of mistakes but those correlated with the magnitude of damage it caused other person. If she stayed off of the bounty list, a rare binge of gouges and cuts didn't register as a high priority concern. Their effect was a self infliction.

Eyes that filtered their surroundings through a warped glass scope veered in their orbital sockets to stare at the door. Her ears were still adjusting to the absence of the tattoo gun's whine. A ringing replaced it, a white noise. She's had a perpherated eardrum, before. Someone had inserted their straw into the left of the two. The intent had been to obtain information by sucking out pieces of her brain matter. Reports stated four and a half months were required prior to regaining the full range of her hearing.

"Will you, be here tomorrow?"

Waking up here will likely disorient a half conscious substitute of herself. Falling under the spell of a body's natural hibernation period was more prone to happen now. The sun rising planted an unseen sedative into her modified systems. That may change; it had never come to her like that so urgently before. If Jesse wasn't here, if she overslept, there could be certain instructions to follow. Simple ones, such as locking the doors when she left. If Jesse said no, she'll query about procedures.