(no subject)

[anewlanguage]

[PRIVATE to DEAN and IRIS]

Bring me up to date on these murders. I was assuming they're like all the other slash and run numbers we get when it's too quiet, but sounds like people are all on edge about this one.

[PUBLIC]

Hey, kitchen staff, I say we get a little festive.

As a globe trotter, I don't really put much meaning to seasons; one hemisphere's fall is another one's scorcher, and all. But hell, maybe it'd help calm down the psychopaths if they had something regimented to focus on. They had some bullshit program like that in the prison I landed myself in back home.

Comments

[private]

[routemistress]

No. This is a different kettle of cats. Dissected very careful, and they weren't dead when it 'appened. And bits missing from each of 'em. This is... summat a bit special.

[spam. later]

[routemistress]

[It's ridiculous, Iris tells herself sourly, that any grown woman should be sitting in her room wondering whether or not to text a man. More ridiculous still at her age; and yet that's exactly what's happening.

If he's not here, it's surely only because he's getting Ned settled in. Ned, whose need is greater than hers, if not the same need, and she's being selfish to consider herself next to that horror.

...That doesn't convince her either. Finally, she tells herself she's being an idiot, and goes and fetches some tools and a Lassiebot skeleton from the laboratory. If she's going to sit around being an emotional fuckwit, at least she can do something useful while she's fuckwitting.

Ned's Lassiebot is going to be a honeybee, symbolic both of his beekeeping lover at home and of Ned himself, working tirelessly to bring sweetness into others' lives. She can see it already: the body banded in gold and ...onyx or black enamel? She decides on enamel, both shinier and more practical, and the wings will be tiny panes of toughened glass with an opalescent finish burnished onto them.

The work is, as she knew it would be, a perfect distraction. By the time she's settled at her desk, a slightly scorched and stained labcoat pulled on over her scarlet silk babydoll nightie, peering through her protective goggles at the sliver of glass she's soldering into place on the tiny wing, she's almost forgotten what she was setting out to distract herself from.

Well, no, she hasn't. But she's doing a fairly good impression of it.]