And this flap goes there, and this other bit gets peeled off here and then a pin and....
"Yay! All done with the setup. How's it feel?" Bonesaw asks her patient.
And this flap goes there, and this other bit gets peeled off here and then a pin and....
"Yay! All done with the setup. How's it feel?" Bonesaw asks her patient.
It's much like the previous days. Mell is supposed to be practicing sculpture and has some actual sharp objects and a block of wood to practice on.
Bonesaw is getting a bit bored and so while she's practicing sculpture she shows the prisoner what she's doing, placing the block of wood in the prisoner's lap and sculpting it with her tools until her tools slip past the block of wood and onto the prisoner, cutting into their flesh. She apologizes and bandages them up before going back to sculpting the block of wood, but when it happens a second time she doesn't bother bandaging it and after the third she just continues, sculpting their body into the same wavy abstract lines she was trying to sculpt into the block of wood.
If she were being honest her heart isn't really in it, but it'd be rude to just leave the whole simulation hanging without a proper ending so she does her best.
This is an expected part of the hallucination. The orf pretends nothing's out of the ordinary to the point of at one point trying to feed the prisoner broth while Bonesaw works.
"Okeydokes!"
And eventually there isn't anything much left of the prisoner that hasn't been sculpted or shaped or chiselled, though Bonesaw was careful to avoid any arteries and the prisoner is doing remarkably well considering everything, which is to say extremely badly but not actively about to die.
Beka knows a healing song and sings it to keep her stable. And then they can hand her back in to her usual handlers.
Overall Bonesaw is happy she tried that but she thinks it's not her thing - too much going on in that one medium and not enough of an audience for her. Maybe if there were something extra special about the prisoner or the plot line or something. While chattering about this afterwards she asks the orf if there's a sort of simulation she likes best.
"My favorite was one for His Lordship's boyfriend, where everything had to look really normal and nice for a long, long time and he'd check on everybody's public thoughts a lot even before he was well enough to walk around and look at us. I learned a lot of the songs I know in that one."
"Maybe - you are a really good singer after all."
"Why was there a lot of singing in the simulation for Sauron's boyfriend?"
"It pretends that his family got him out of Angband, so there's a whole host of Elves around. Elves sing a lot."
"Yeah, sometimes, when he's pretending to be his Elf boyfriend or one of his brothers or something."
"That's nice of him," she says, not entirely sure whether it's true.
"I'm antsy from the not tinkering for so many days so I'm going to go do that now and probably through the night so no sleepover this time." says Bonesaw.
"Sing!"
Bonesaw will fidget through it and mutter some ideas under her breath because she in fact really wants to tinker but her friend offered to sing for her and she can't exactly say no to that.
Goody! And Bonesaw is going to do so much experimenting and she has so many ideas for her big project. She goes into a fugue and barely sleeps for the next several days as she works, not calling on Beka at all.
And then, very early one morning, there is a Bonesaw in Beka's dorm, crouched on Beka's bed, yelling excitedly: "Orf! Wakeuuuuuuup!" and bouncing up and down slightly.
The orf wakes up. (So do her siblings, who clear out of the room as quickly as is politely possible.)
"I'm up!" says the orf. "What is it?"
"Smell this!" she says, shoving a not quite blooming flower at her face.
"But not too much! Smell it a normal amount!"
Nothing happens immediately.
Bonesaw impatiently waits a moment and then asks "How does this sound?" in an incredibly melodious fashion.