Oh that makes sense. Oh what if she shows up later and get better really quickly so the prisoner feels bad about not getting better as fast!

 Or does that not fit in with the ominiousness?

She's not slated to show up.

Oh well.

While the prisoner is sleeping on the second night Bonesaw asks the director whether he has any ideas on how to prompt them to talk with her for a bit. 

"Oh, this one scarcely ever talks," he says. "She's been here a long time."

"Huh, why does that keep her from talking?"

"Over time prisoners lose interest in trying to interact with anyone or anything since we make sure it's invariably torture, even though not doing anything else is also eventually invariably torture. I could probably get this one to talk but it'd require something more immersive and longer-term, or for a lot of her memories to be erased first."

She supposes the director has to work with the tools he has.

"Is the reason they do that primarily because they think talking will make them hurt more, because they think that talking doesn't matter, because they aren't really engaging with reality, or other?"

"That's a great question but my work to date hasn't really touched on teasing out detailed motives like that!"

"I guess that it makes sense you'd stick with things that didn't require interacting with it so much if it took you a while to get anywhere with it - I've had a a few Friends who became less talkative than I liked and I spent a while trying to figure out different solutions to different reasons they might have. But if you get it wrong you can break someone's personality in a way that isn't very interesting and I wouldn't want to mess with your writing, which is really neat by the way!"

"It's not usually a priority of the department to keep the prisoners' personalities intact, or even interesting," he says, furrowing his brow in puzzlement.

"Oh I mean uh, I think you can easily get a person who isn't anything like the original person and just sorta says nonsense words or whatever all the time and I don't particularly think that's interesting art?"

"I usually think of the prisoners as a sort of central armature on which the art rests rather than the product of it, but we work in very different media," he replies agreeably.

"Hmm... who is your audience then?"

"Melkor and his Maiar, by and large."

Reasonable enough. Bonesaw chats for a bit more before going on set for her third day.

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.

"What do you think of my art project Mommy?"

"Oh, it's coming along nicely! You let me know if that chisel needs sharpening, all right?"

"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."

"Huh, it sounds sort of boring when you describe it like that?"