"Aw, thanks!"

"What's your name?"

"Bonesaw!"

"This is my Friend uh. Hapless." she says, gesturing.

She titters softly. "So you have a noun but no adjective, and he has an adjective but no noun?" 

"Mhm? What do you have?"

"I'm the Silvered Aesthete. These are the Jam-Spackled Artist, and the Spider-Stricken Seamstress." 

The man with the mushroom vest gives her a look. "The Cremini Artist, thank you." 

"As you like." 

Oh, so they do have capes here? Maybe?

"What do you all do?"

"I go into Parabola for rare and dangerous art materials," the Silvered Aesthete says. 

"I paint," the Jam-Spackled Cremini Artist says. 

"With cremini jam," the Aesthete specifies. 

"Yes, I paint with cremini jam. It's an underrated medium!" 

"I sew," the Spider-Stricken Seamstress says softly. 

Oh WOW this place is so great.

"Oh oh, what sort of things are dangerous art materials?"

"Well, any unadulturated sources of Viric, of course. Anything to do with the Fingerkings. Parts of dangerous Parabolan animals...whole Parabolan animals." She strokes the bird on her shoulder. 

"What's Viric?"

She smooths her hand over her dress. "Why, this color, of course." 

"Oh! Can I have a bit of it? Pretty Please?"

Bonesaw makes her best Pleading Face - her eyes actually inflate slightly and her muscles execute pre-programmed and carefully optimized routines.

She's slightly taken aback, but rallies. "Alright," she says, taking out a pair of delicate fabric scissors and snipping a loose thread from the inside of one sleeve. 

Bonesaw licks it. Tongues are very good at detecting the composition of things, especially her tongue. 

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. 

Bonesaw loves this color!

"Thank you!"

"You're welcome!" Small children licking bits of thread aren't remotely in the top half of weird things the Aesthete has seen today, and she's so enthusiastic, it's endearing. "What do you do?" Probably something involving body parts of some kind, if she calls herself Bonesaw. 

"I make Art."

"Hm, I guess that's not very specific here, it was enough to just say that where I'm from."

"Really? Even on the surface, they have," she gestures expansively, "sculpture, and painting, and music, and embroidery, and literature..." 

"Oh I mostly do... sort of performance art?"

"Like flower arrangements but with other things."

"Oh! Like femurs?" she guesses. Femurs seem like a body part you could do flower arranging with. 

"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.

"Sneeze at people? Were they eyes, or just something sort of like eyes?"

"She didn't say they were human eyes," the Seamstress murmurs. 

"Oh, that's true--I've never heard of something with eyes that sneeze, but that doesn't mean much."

"They were human eyes that sneezed acid! At first they cried acid but that wasn't as shocking as I wanted it to be so I made the little sneeze instead of cry."