Bonesaw's favorite part about being on the run is that she never has to clean her room - she can make a big mess and then move on to a different clean room. Sadly, this means sometimes she looses things in the mess and has to find them in a hurry. This means she is distracted by searching for her lucky wish bones when a piece of stolen tinkertech malfunctions. Still, she would have been able to hear it, were it not for the screaming sounds coming from the pile of discarded dolls she was searching under. Her scalp tingles and a blinding flash of green fills her vision before she can react at all.
Her immediate surroundings are dark.
Not totally dark. There are street lamps a little ways off, and stars? overhead.
The architecture of the buildings she can see in the same direction as the streetlamps is vaguely antiquated.
A spider the size of a dinner-plate and holding a human eye in its chelicerae scuttles over her foot.
The spider is mostly a soft green, a few shades too light to be pine-green. A complementary red forms three triangles at the beginning of its abdomen, almost like a skirt or a crown, and the eyes are a red of the same shade. It chitters agitatedly around the eyeball but doesn't drop it.
That's not any sort of spider she's seen before - also she's pretty sure that normal spiders don't carry around eyeballs, even if that is obviously a really cool thing to do.
So she's probably far away from her Uncle Jack and the rest of her family - so she should find a nearby adult. She idly puts the spider in one her fluffy coats zippered pockets and goes searching for someone to make a friend with.
The spider wriggles around for a bit then settles down sulkily.
The lamp-lit streets are bustling with figures the height of human adults, not all of whom are. A fellow with a squid face in a suit walks past. A woman with gold eyes doesn't shed heat the way a human being would. One lumbering figure is either covered with or made of unfired clay.
Below adult human eye height, a pack of rats scurries past on their hind legs, holding little rat-sized tools.
Bonesaw looks around wide eyed at all the exciting people! This city is sort of like someone was trying to make art but was scared of doing things that were really exciting. She's sure she can help them go the extra mile. but for now she needs to study more. She keeps looking for someone she can corner in an alleyway or an otherwise empty shop.
There aren't really empty shops, at least not in the immediate vicinity. The streets, though dark with a night not fully chased off by the antiquated streetlamps, are bustling with activity. People exchange odd pearls with light and dark parts for fabric, and ingots of metal for pots of honey, and wine for artwork, and all sorts of other things.
There are plenty of alleys. Some of them aren't even being watched by anyone she can see right away.
Bonesaw returns to her paralyzed friend, carrying a silver spoon, a weirdly warm cup, and as many knives as she can carry. She dumps the cutlery next to his head.
"Now, I don't have time for anything really complicated, but I can just add a few connections between your amygdala and your olfactory nerves so I can use scents to make sure you know when you're doing a bad job at being helpful."
She sits on his chest and hefts the largest knife she brought.
"You should probably be worried, this is going to hurt a bunch."
Bonesaw chatters throughout the impromptu surgery, informing him why she makes each cut and why this bit of the silver spoon was inserted in that place and how she always carries a bit of clear thread to stitch back wounds so they don't show when she doesn't want them to.
After she's finished he looks the same as he did before, at least on the outside.
"There, that wasn't so hard now was it?"
Bonesaw looks pensive for a second, trying to remember - she can get sort of engrossed in surgery sometimes.
"Oh, it was because this way you'll be a very polite and helpful Friend for me here. I'm just getting my bearings and it's important for me to have someone who knows the basics."
"I don't care what some other artist thinks of art, I want to be original. I need to know what sort of thing speaks to people here - back home if I turned a bunch of people into squid faces it would have been art, but here it would probably be everyday samesies. You can help me figure out what would be different and new for this world!"
"Hm, just so you know - I don't really expect you to give me suggestions about what's different and original - I'll be able to tell by your reactions. Like how I could tell earlier that brain surgery was different and original for you!"
"But also now I want to know, what's the Correspondence?"
"People say a lot of things about her, too. She's...powerful, and beautiful, and she glows with the Mountain's own light when she wants to, or at least people mostly say it's the Mountain's light and it seems plausible. They say she walked out of the Prickfinger Wastes and declared war on the Masters. They say she walked out of the Prickfinger Wastes and declared war on Hell. They say she's blackmailing the Bazaar. They say she's a sorceress of the First City. They say she speaks with the Duchess's cats and the Fingerkings without taking sides. They say the Tiger Keeper defers to her. They say she's the Mountain's own daughter. What I know for sure is that she keeps a residence in the Prickfinger Wastes and has a laboratory at the University that her brother keeps when she isn't there."
"Some of them? I don't think the Devils like her very much. The Rubbery Men mostly like her, she chases people off if she catches them trying to stone one, and she got one into the University. She's on good terms with the Urchins, I think, and at least some of the Bohemians--it's not that hard to be on good terms with the Bohemians, though, if you can afford to buy them wine and honey."
Literally nothing about this went the way he expected it to but, like, whatever, sometimes shit like that happens.
She's a cute kid. Too knife-happy for his preferences, but hey, she didn't leave him a tomb-colonist, so as long as he manages to avoid this "aversion training" thing it could definitely be worse.
It takes him less time to fall into a more peaceful sleep than you would expect from one of Bonesaw's Friends.
Her nightmares that night are different from usual.
The dream takes place back in her original family home, before the Nine killed everyone and took them away. But something's wrong. Her parents aren't there, and a strange silvery light illuminates everything, and everywhere there should be text of any kind is only the word NORTH.
Bonesaw gets a full but restless night of sleep.
When she wakes up, she remembers the dream. She could have made it so she would never dream, or even made all her dreams good ones. But the only change she made to how she she dreams is lucid recall. Every detail of every nightmare remains in her mind as if she experienced it while awake.
Her nightmares are the only place where she sees her mother.
She shakes her Friend awake.
"I had a weird dream during the night."
On the outside, it resembles a perfectly normal earth spider except for its size. On the inside, it...doesn't. Its organ systems are far more complex. It has spinerettes in about the right place, but they're far bulkier and more productive than any normal spider's, and that...and that...it looks as though the spider was designed to hook up to and agglomerate with other organisms, albeit not usually human hands. Its oxygen-processing systems are far more efficient, allowing it to grow much, much bigger than the square-cube law would usually allow.
"I don't know, but probably not something human, and as far as I know the Parliamentarian is human. I suppose she could be a Snuffer."
Bonesaw will definitely hold his hand! It makes it easier to discreetly perfect the improvements she made to it earlier - this vein should really be twisted a bit to manage blood flow and this bit of leg should be tucked in here and the fangs should be retractable but she can't actually do that discreetly while holding his hand so she'll wait till later for that.
He gives himself a moment to stop shaking, and then follows her.
In contrast to London's foggy gloom, the inside of the Singing Mandrake is bright, lit with many, many candles, of varying sizes and kinds of wax. In one corner someone is singing; in another someone is telling jokes. At tables scattered across the floor, people are drinking, discussing their latest oeuvres, heckling the performers, flirting, and playing dice.
Sure, why not, a handful of Bohemians will join this kid's tea party.
One of them is a man in his late twenties with flyaway hair, wearing a waistcoat with mushrooms embroidered on it; instead of being a repeating pattern, no two mushrooms are of the same species.
One of them is a woman wearing a green dress that makes Bonesaw feel sleepy if she looks at it too long, with a bird with seven heads perched on her hat.
One of them is a woman with no eyes wearing an outfit that would be quite nice, except that those colors do not go together.
Well, it's...
Yeah it's nothing she's ever tasted before. It's more like linen than anything else--it's definitely got some kind of phytocellular structure, dried and processed as flax tends to be--but it's still not a whole like linen, in chemical composition or...yeah, it doesn't actually have DNA? It has something else instead of DNA, something her tongue isn't capable of reading.
"Sometimes! I once did a flower arrangement sort of thing with eyes. They'd blink and sort of sneeze at people. It was an early thing of mine actually."
Bonesaw likes this place, but can also tell she's going to have to try really hard to stand out. Still, Uncle Jack always said her best work came out when things were hardest.
"Hmm...if it were me, I think I would have left it at crying?" the Aesthete muses. "An expression of pain that only increases it...there isn't really any interesting juxtaposition between acid and sneezing, I think."
"How did you make eyes sneeze? Did the acid come out of the tear ducts, or, I don't know, the pupils? Could you make eyes that sneezed jam?" the Cremini Artist wants to know.
"I agree that just crying would have been better, but I was still new and wanted it to hurt the viewer and not just the subject, which was hard to figure out with crying. Probably now I would have made the tears sticky and let the eyes move so they left a trail, and make the tears do something more interesting then just be acid."
"The acid came out of the tear ducks and I bet I could make yours sneeze or cry jam - your pick!"
Bonesaw licks a lollipop she has in one of her pockets and swirls it around in the jar real fast, to add some extra fun, and then starts pushing the candy infused jelly into his eye socket with the hand that isn't holding the eye. She has to peel back some bits of skin near the corner to properly get into the tear duct but her fingernails are very sharp so she can do that sort of thing.
After a minute of this she pauses and produces a fork from her pocket.
"Okay one last bit - it's very important that you don't move, or else it'll feel much worse and your eye might come out. So no moving."
And then, before he gets a chance to respond, she rams the fork into the back of his eye socket at full speed.
The Aesthete watches, her chin propped up in the palm of one hand.
"Are you going to put his eyes back in the sockets, after?" she wonders aloud. "I think it would be more interesting to leave them out, like that, if you had some way of making it so he could move them about on those red cord things...of course, just removing eyes in general is a bit declassee. No offense."
"None taken," the Seamstress says softly.
"Hmmmm..." She really likes these people!
"I'd need to figure out a way to leave them out that doesn't make accessing the tear ducts easier since that would ruin how he'll want to make himself cry a bunch to get at the jam cause of all the sweetness I added."
She thinks on the idea some more - she doesn't want to ruin how addictive her lollipop's sweetness will make the tears but it feels rude to ignore such a good idea.
"Maybe I could make it so they retract if he tries to poke at them like turtles do, but go out and explore the rest of the time? Though I would probably need more time and tools for that."