"I'm trying not to think about that?"

"Oh sorry, I can show you in a mirror? There's one hanging around here somewhere." 

Ah here - she holds up a piece of mirrored glass so Beka can see all the neat stuff the skin on her chest normally hides.

Beka is very talented in some ways and one way is that she can in fact look at the mirror and not think more than she was already about those being her insides.

Some people just don't appreciate art.

Bonesaw exchanges the mirror for her notes.

"Okay what's up next, gotta go down the checklist ... Oh I forgot to do your inpatient interview!"

"Uh, what's your name?"

"I haven't earned a name, milady."

"Oh, your parents don't give you one?"

Bonesaw hasn't really spent much time around orc culture yet, except for the sort of culture she can grow in her work room.

"Most people just call me 'the orf' but if you want what nicknames my parents call me it's 'firstling' and 'tender'."

"It's really neat how you're an orf and I'm sure it'll be very fun to learn about but it doesn't really seem like a name - what do the other two mean?"

"I'm their first child and I'm squishy, or at least I was when I was a baby."

Poke poke.

"Well, you're still squishy on the inside at least. Did you get less squishy as you got older?"

Sharp breath. "Uh, some. Scars and stuff."

Bonesaw makes a note.

"Did you get more orc-like as you grew up in general?"

"I think all the torture was more of a maintenance thing."

"How do you mean?" asks Bonesaw as she looks through a drawer for some tools.

"I am pretty sure I was born an orf just because of how much my birth mom got tortured, and then my parents did some more to me to keep me that way in case I'd regress."

"Oh, neat!" She has so many questions.

"Were your parents orcs or elves or something else? Also what torture did they do - Melkor wasn't very good at communicating that bit at all."

Ah, here's the mallet and nail she was looking for.

"Uh." She closes her eyes. "My birth parents were Elves, my mother was pregnant when she got captured, but I was raised in an orc family. They mostly favored things like shaving off my hair and tying strings really tight around my legs and stuff?"

"Oh huh, I got left by my birth family too."

She positions the nail over the place where one of her patients ribs meets her sternum, being careful to avoid putting it over nerves so that she won't be distracted from answering.

"Do you still have do that to keep being an orf?" she asks, raising the mallet up reallllly high.

Thwack!

She's gonna switch to osanwë at this point. I dunno. Probably not.

Bonesaw can be gentler if it's making it hard for her to talk. 

"Are there any differences between you and Elves that aren't physical?" she's asks as she moves on to another rib.

I don't die of being confined, does that count?

"Yeah, it's really weird how elves can do that! Do you like it better this way?"

Tap tap tap.

I don't want to be dead and don't especially want to be in a hallucination either?

"Okay but if you could be an elf without being either of those?"

Tap tap tap, now for the other side.

Like, an Elf not in Angband at all?

"Yeah."

Tappity tap tap thwack - she sort of has a rhythm going at this point.

Yeah I think that's a pretty nice thing to be.

"What about if you could be an orc outside of angband? Or a human like me? Or an orc with three arms and skin that burns people who touch it and can scream really really loud? Or oooh, a dragon!"

As Bonesaw asks she gets out her bone saw (giggle) and climbs up onto the operating table to start sawing at the last bits of bone connecting the sternum to the rest of the skeleton.

I think being an orc outside Angband is sometimes nice but not as often? I dunno what it's like to be you.

"Hmmm... Probably it'd take a while to show you. I could make some sort of empathy drug but I think that'd be boring... oh but if I used it on a whole bunch of people and then one of them got hurt and they all copied each other then maybe -"

Bonesaw will chatter for a few minutes about ideas for projects and her past work if not interrupted, not really focused on anything about Beka except for how she's sawing at Beka while doing it. The sawing isn't really painful perse, unless one particularly objects to the sensation of their bones being sawed clean through.

It's not her favorite but she can mostly focus on listening to Bonesaw monologueing.

Eventually she puts the saw down, though it takes her a minute or two to stop talking about her ideas for elf neurochemistry projects.

"- Oh uh, sorry, I was rambling. Did you have anything to say?" asks Bonesaw, all polite as she takes the patient's now detached sternum and puts it on the table next to her.

Am I gonna get that back later?

"Oh yeah, I guess? Unless you want something better."

Better how?

" I dunno, I have something that could grow spines out of the front and I could probably hook it up right? Or maybe I could make it so you can open up your chest and put stuff inside for safe keeping, and also have teeth there, that'd be neat I think."

I guess a pocket could be cool if it didn't make it too hard to talk or sing.

"Oh you sing?? I could make a neat pocket for you that would let you keep doing that, though I'm going to take a look around inside first to take some measurements to compare with the ones I took of some elves and orcs yesterdaty."

Bonesaw has a tub of murky grey liquid to help with this, apparently.

Also I'm probably gonna hit up my tattoo guy after this and he likes consistent lines to work with, like they don't have to be straight or smooth but it's best if they're all about the same as each other.

"Well I hope he does something pretty with it... could I go with something spirally you think, so long as it's regular?"

I think that could look cool, yeah.

"Neato!" 

And now it's time for organ exploring! Bonesaw can fit her whole arm into her friend's chest cavity apparently and is taking full advantage. Sometimes she picks something out of the tub that looks a bit like an organ and plops it into her chest, and sometimes Bonesaw removes an organ from the chest and plops into the tub. Occasionally, she makes a measurement after doing this and writes it down in her notes.

Beka is brainstorming about spiral tats.

Bonesaw comments on some of the organs as she goes - "Oh wow this is so satisfying to squish! See?" she asks, putting the organ into one of Beka's hands. 

Squish. "Huh," she exhales. What is it?

"It's uh - " Bonesaw gestures to indicate a concept that really only holds together inside her head "- wait give me a second I'll get the name...." She licks it to see if that helps her remember.

 "Ooh, ah! The Thymus Gland!" she announces, using the English term, beaming with pride.

I didn't even know I had that!

"It's really cool how people can find surprises in their own bodies that way!"

Beka can hold onto it for a bit if she wants while Bonesaw gets back to work, but eventually Bonesaw will need it so it can be returned to roughly where it came from.

She yields it without complaint.

"Okay I'm going to put in some muscles for the pocket bit now and it'd help me make sure it didn't squish your lungs or anything if um you could sing while I do it?" asks Bonesaw very nicely, as if she's requesting an extra dessert before bedtime. 

I can try but it's sort of hard to breathe right when my ribs hurt like this?

"Oh, I can fix that." Bonesaw reaches in and fiddles around for a bit and then Beka can't feel her torso much at all - a couple of seconds and a further adjustment by Bonesaw and feeling returns to everything except for her ribs.

"There!" The pleading eyes are back.

"Oh much better." She takes a breath and croons a song she learned from a prisoner once, taking osanwe-diictation when rewarding him for killing everybody in his hallucination.

Missing a sternum is still somewhat impairing even when her ribs don't hurt, but she has a lovely tone, and she practices a lot, whenever she can get a minute alone. If she had all her parts where they'd belong she'd be an exceptional singer among humans.

She pauses for a moment, listening.

When she resumes working she does so quietly, with a smile that fits her face better than it did before. 

If you want me to come sing to you sometime when you aren't planning to take me apart I'd do that!

You would? she thinks, genuinely surprised. 

Sure, my family doesn't like it so it can be hard to find practice time.

I'd like it, yeah.

You seem real important so you can probably get me assigned whenever you want.

Usually if people see her more it's not good for them, she thinks within the privacy of her own mind - because if she thinks it in public the orf might change her mind.

Yeah, I'll do that sometime I think.

Singing singing singing.

Eventually the muscles are installed and the ribs are back - there's some claylike substance and pins through the bone to keep the pieces together while they heal, though Bonesaw anesthetises the ribs while doing this so it won't hurt. 

And finally the skin flaps are unpinned from the table and she applies a a salve before stretching and sewing and folding the skin into place. When it's all done there's a spiral* of lines on her upperchest that when tensed with muscles that weren't there before move outwards to reveal a pocket the size of two fists. 

"If you tense it it should be able to open and close it. You can also overfill it and it'll expand to hold the extra stuff but it'll push at your other organs and if you do it too long it'll start trying to spit the stuff back out."

*A similar mechanism to the iris diaphrams used by camera lenses, though Bonesaw isn't aware of this.

"Neat!" She tries this.

It works, skin sections tensing and sliding around each other without much effort at all. 

"Cool! Thank you for the pocket."

"Hope you have fun with it!" 

And Bonesaw has her work to get back to - she has so many ideas for exciting things based on today! Uncle JackSauron will be so proud. 

Off trots the orf.

A week and a half later Bonesaw has been having troubling sleeping and asks a nearby orc if he can find Beka and ask her to come sing her something.

Presuming Bonesaw asks for "the orf", since nobody knows Beka's name, that will work fine! In lopes Beka. She's got a fresh tat on her chest incorporating the spiral, sort of like a top-down view of an aloe plant except it's in rose and tan. "Hello milady."

"Hi," says sleepy Bonesaw. "Do you know any lullabies?" 

"Do you want a magic one or a regular one?"

"Regular I think,"

She's not surprised a magic one exists, but she still feels like she needs to be on guard against hostile Masters hunting her, even in Angband where she's safe.

"Yes ma'am."

She finds a spot to stand and sings about sleepiness and dreaming, rocking and quiet and comfort.

And eventually Bonesaw will fall asleep, curled up around the fleshy pillow she made to keep her warm at night.

It's kind of clever.

She is not really sure if she's supposed to stay or go now and there's nobody to ask. Is there... a place in here where she could fall asleep herself, where she isn't hiding but also isn't intruding?

It's not a very large bedroom, but there's a small table and stool next to it she could sit on. Aside from that there's a pile of clothing and blankets, a cauldron with a purple liquid, and a mirror on the wall. On the table there's what would look to someone from Earth like a toothbrush, a glass bottle of milk, a jar of cereal, and a single bowl and spoon.

She'll curl up on the pile of blankets. It's cozy.

It is! There's even an extra fleshy pillow there. 

Bonesaw wakes up early, groggy for all of half a second before her implants kick in (though she still appears groggy by default since that's how you're supposed to look in the morning).

Oh! She has a sleepover. That's nice actually. 

... She only has one bowl and spoon but she can be very very quiet* and make another one using some things from under her bed and in the cauldron. 

*She can in fact be quieter if she were trying to be.

If she's quiet she's not going to wake a sleepy orf who normally sleeps in a room with dozens of other people.

As she's finishing carving the spoon she can get progressively less quiet with setting out breakfast until she accidentally wakes up the sleepy orf.

Yawn. "- hello milady. I'm so sorry I forgot to ask if you wanted me to stay or go."

"Good morning sleepy head!" Bonesaw says in the cheery rehearsed voice of someone who knows that's what your supposed to say to guests who sleep in.

"Well right now you should stay and have breakfast with me - it's the most important meal of the day."

"- yes milady." What is for breakfast here?

Cereal and milk and a glass of orange juice! The milk tastes the same as milk normally does back on Earth and the cereal is as close as Bonesaw can get to lucky charms which isn't that close but tastes sort of right. 

The juice is orange and opaque and definitely not from any fruit but she made it in a hurry when she realized she had a guest. She made it sweeter until it tasted good enough for her (which is really rather sweet).

The extra bowl is pretty clearly the top half of a skull with a bottom that's been carved to be more flat, and the spoon was definitely made from another bone, though it's unclear which.

"Wow, this is delicious!" says the orf.

"Oh thank you! I made it myself!"

"Do you just make food out of nothing like Melkor does?"

"Oh no I didn't know he can do the - that sounds like cheating. I got the milk with some organs in the lab and made the healthy part of the cereal in a broth of bran and bone meal that I germinated with ..." she can go on for a while about how she made all the different bits  - in particular she seems to have several different processes to get the different sorts of marshmallows.

"Wow, these are all so complicated! How long did it take you to come up with them?"

"I've been improving on the marshmallows and making more types since not too long after I got here, but they still aren't as good as the ones Lucky Charms has back home."

"So they're... less lucky?"

"Lucky Charms is the name of the cereal where I'm from - they aren't really lucky."

"The cereal? Which part of it is the cereal?"

"The cereal is what people call the thing I poured the milk on top of," she says, gesturing towards the jar of cereal. "It's part of a balanced breakfast." she says in the same fixed tone of voice she had when she called Beka a sleepy head.

"Balanced against what?"

"Well, it's important to have all sorts of different nutrients if you want to grow up right, so you have to balance all the parts of the breakfast. Like how the milk has calcium and the cereal has fiber and the orange juice has iodine. If you only had one of them all the time you wouldn't grow up Big and Strong."

Bonesaw frowns contemplatively.

"Well, maybe if you only had the 'orange juice'. But that would have it's own problems." Really interesting ones now that she thinks about...

"Wow. Are orcs and me like that too?"

"Yup! Well, I think you can make do with less than humans but it's still not ideal for you. Maia are different though - Sauron does a bunch of his biology himself which is really cool but lets him cheat at nutrients."

"I'm not sure his lordship even eats!"

"Yeah, I think it's pretty boring to be honest - is you don't eat you can't have a balanced breakfast or snacks or birthday cake."

"Maybe he tried it once a million years ago and didn't like it."

"Maybe."

She's finished with her breakfast at this point and is going to brush her teeth, using the liquid from the purple cauldron as both water and toothpaste. 

Beka has also finished eating but has never brushed her teeth in her life and is not sure what's going on. It doesn't seem conducive to having a conversation, at least. She busies herself by collecting all the bone dishes together.

"Oh how thoughtfull of you!" Bonesaw says in the fixed voice. Her mind is on her projects for the day.

"I should run along now or I'll be late for work." 

"I'll get out of your way. Thank you so much for breakfast!"

"Have fun!" 

And Bonesaw is back to working on her projects - a bunch of them are really interesting and she gets to make so many Friends and improve them when they get broken and her long term project is coming along really well. Still, she asks for the orf to come over and sing her to sleep multiple times a week, with the blankets set up as a nestlike bed for her guest. Once, on a particularly sleepless night, she slips up and asks for the Siberian instead, before correcting herself.

The orf shows up to sing her nonmagical lullabies whenever she is asked, and sleeps in the nest when it is clear it's for her.

It's for her each time, and if she does try to leave without sleeping Bonesaw will snap awake and grab the orf's sleeve and give her such a pleading look.

And a few weeks in Bonesaw hits an issue with her major project after discovering that magic songs can do wind and now she needs to redo a bunch of details of the delivery system and it's four days of feverish working down the drain. She's frustrated and she's having trouble both working and not working on it, until she remembers the advice from her Uncle Jack on how, if she needed to calm down, she should find easy but pretty art projects to do and do it well.

So Bonesaw goes to one of the mess halls in Angband and selects a neat looking orc to take apart and put back together inside out. She doesn't even use her lab, operating with whatever she has on hand in the middle of the busy hall - that way there's an audience. And when she's done that she cleans out any grime and puts her art project back together rightside in again. And then repeats the whole cycle again and again until she's lost in a blur of repositioning and cleaning and she has no idea how long it's been but she feels better. She skips out of the mess hall afterwards and returns to her lab to take another look at the major project before getting one of the most restful nights of sleep she's had in weeks - she doesn't even need her orf friend.

(While Bonesaw doesn't notice it herself the orc does end up right side in, though his brain doesn't seem to be quite aware of this and he's barely able to string together syllables or even scream.)

Her orf friend does eventually get called in by the right-side-in orc's wife to find out if he's doing better or worse in there than the estimated Being Tortured By The Elf Gods Forever state.

Beka goes and reads his mind, what's left of it, and determines that while it's possible the Elf gods do worse, he's not going to be able to eat or work. His wife kisses him and snaps his neck.

And a couple of nights later Bonesaw would like to have another sleepover with her orf friend!

In she comes when called.

She's in an unusually good mood and even though it's late she was wondering if Beka could teach her a bit of one of the songs?

"I could try. I don't know if I'm good at teaching."

"Don't worry, I'll be good at learning."

Her voice is actually flexible enough that she could in theory be an excellent (by human standard's) singer.

Beka will sing bits of one of the nonmagical lullabies in sections suitable for Bonesaw to memorize them, and then she falls silent and "sings" by osanwë to let Bonesaw sing "along" without covering awkward twinges in her voice that she can smooth out.

She's not that great at memorization as it turns out but is eager to try, and can mimic sounds with surprisingly little correction.

If you read I could write down the lyrics for you.

"That would be great! I can read some orcish and my language learning neural implant is still working so as long as you read it while you write it I'll be fine."

"The lyrics're in Thindarin." She writes it out, reading each word as she does.

"Oh, thindarin is really pretty." says Bonesaw after seeing it written out.

"Yeah! I don't get a chance to read or write a lot but it's nice."

"Why don't orcs use it instead of orcish?"

"They mostly don't speak it. And also mostly can't read."

"Hm, I could fix that. For a few of them, but not a lot of them. Unless I made them all into a single aggregate entity first but that might take a while."

"A few already do, or I couldn't've learned it myself, but only if they need it for something or hang around someone who does a lot."

"What do you need it for?"

"Acting! I do parts in hallucinations sometimes."

"Oh neat! That sounds really fun."

"I'm pretty good at it and I get to learn lots of things that I wouldn't otherwise."

"So far the only times I've really hung out with elves there haven't been any hallucinations going on - I think I'd find them distracting from my work."

"Prisoners, or did you meet some before you came here?"

"Just prisoners - there aren't elves where I'm from."

"Yeah, it does seem like it might be hard to do your thing if actors were running around all the time. I think sometimes His Lordship does smaller ones but obviously I'm not in them so I don't know as much."

"What sort of things do you do in them?"

"When I was little I'd sometimes be an Elf kid in them, like the prisoner's daughter or niece or whatever. Now I'm usually just background, though in the long run I might wind up learning enough about somebody's mom or something that I'm always cast as her."

"How do you play a mom?"

"Like an Elf mom? I mostly just mimic what my mom did except without the torture, so like she was for my brothers and sisters. And with more singing, because Elves are like that."

"Oh."

"I don't really remember much about what my mom did."

"I can't tell how old you are 'cause you're the only one of you I know."

"Twelve."

"Oh. I'm sorry about whatever happened with your mom."

"I wasn't good enough for her so I left to live with my uncle Jack."

"I used to worry about turning into an Elf so my parents wouldn't love me any more."

"They don't like elves?"

"Well, they can't, standard orc oaths make them swear to hate Elves."

"Oh."

Bonesaw pauses for a moment, thinking.

"I think it's good your parents didn't have to hate you."

"Yeah! It helped a little when I didn't like being tortured that there was a good reason."

Bonesaw is going to give the orf a hug now.

Aww! Hug.

Bonesaw gets a worse night of sleep than normal that night, but she's oddly okay with that.

A few days later Bonesaw asks to play a part in a hallucination.

She is directed to an orc named Kamog who writes scripts for them sometimes! There is not already one in progress that needs her but he can write something.

Can there be a part for the orf too? Ideally one where they can play family together.

Sure, what parts in the family does she want them to have?

The orf can be the mommy and she can be the daughter.

Okay! He will have a draft script ready to pitch to her in a couple of days if that's all right?

She can be patient, so long as he isn't slow about it.

A couple of days later he comes by with his pitch! The orf and Bonesaw can be mother and daughter living in a cute treehouse in the woods who "found" the prisoner, "escaped" and unconscious with dehydration and general being in terrible shape. The one he has in mind won't do much, probably just lie in bed, but Bonesaw and the orf can nurse her back to health. Here's a brief on what a random Avari child of Bonesaw's approximate size might act like, but for this one he's going for a creeping ominousness - the orf has her own character notes on that but will be mostly improvising around anything Bonesaw says since this is Bonesaw's first time and he wants her to have fun with it. Here is a character sketch of what she will be pretending to look like, and one for the orf. Their names in the hallucination are to be Lalwen and Mell. Then, whenever Bonesaw's bored, she can start harvesting the prisoner's bones or whatever, though His Lordship would like to receive her back alive.

This sounds like it will be an extremely fun game of pretend!

Though how long is it going to be for? She's not going to stop tinkering for weeks no matter how fun it is.

He's designed it to be of flexible duration! She can break the immersion and harvest bones or whatever and wind down the simulation at any time.

"Huh! Won't it take a while to get to the creeping ominousness bit?"

"Yes, but this prisoner isn't in the middle of any complicated meta-emotional-arc, so it's all right if this one doesn't hit the exact tone I wrote for it."

"I wouldn't want to mess up your art! How long were you thinking it would ideally go for?"

"I think ideally the material I have would last for three to five weeks."

"Hm, okay - I think I'll only be able to do a few days but I have an idea for a drug that would mess with someone's perception of time that could definitely give them the experience of it being weeks."

"I'll trim out some excess detail to slim it down for your timeframe, since that'd affect the prisoner but not you, presumably, but that will mostly affect the orf's briefing; yours will be the same."

"Do I have to make my costume myself?"

"You don't need a costume at all, His Lordship provides the appropriate visuals for the prisoner. Actors are there to supply personality and body language that are more difficult for a single controller, even His Lordship, to manage with convincing diversity."

"Neat! I'm excited to collaborating with you!"

It takes her under an hour to whip up the time dilator injection - there's plenty extra for any other hallucinations that could benefit from it. So long as the prisoner gets one injection each day it should work fine, giving them the impression of many days passing of vaguely similar feeling events without altering their impression of time on a minute-to-minute scale. Higher doses are fine but she doesn't recommend they give more than a thousand times the amount she's using since when she did that her subject started assuming everything outside of themselves was fake and an illusion and she thinks that would drain all the fun out of Angband. She doubt's it will have that effect if they keep it under a few years of subjective time per real day.

She goes to bed early that night so in the morning she can be well rested for her first big day of being an actor!

Beka arrives to do a little workshopping in the morning! "Hi! Do you want to practice answering to 'Mell'? And having a conversation out loud while clarifying what we're doing over osanwë?"

"Sure!"

The orf starts miming serving something into bowls. "Mell, breakfast is ready!" It's berry compote.

"Oh, berries! My favorite."

"Mm-hm, eat up while they're hot. I'll go see if our guest wants any this morning." Mime mime. "Looks like a no today. Well, one day maybe she'll be ready to get her strength back up enough that she can go meet her son." Her son's our neighbor who doesn't want to see her till she's not visibly Angbandy.

"I bet he'll be so excited when that happens."

"No sense rushing, though. It'll be a joyous occasion now or in a hundred years." She mimes washing the dishes.

Bonesaw can mime helping wash the dishes.

Eventually it's time to go! They have a bit of a set, so they can do things like sit down and retrieve objects without His Lordship having to patch too much inconsistency in the mime. There's their prisoner, very authentically beaten up and in no condition to go have a joyous reunion with her son at all. The orf maintains a very solemn affect about their "guest" in character, smiling at "Mell" and the extras who stop in occasionally but treating the prisoner with appropriate gravity except for the prescribed frequency of concerning smirks.

Bonesaw LOVES the simulation. She has a bunch of fun playing house with the orfLalwen and helps tend to the prisoner, setting a challenge to herself to help her get better without looking like she's doing anything much and occasionally hurting her in ways that seem like accidents.

Towards the end of the first day she turns to her acting partner and whispers loud enough for the prisoner to hear: "Mommy, what do you think happened to our guest to hurt them so much?"

"Monsters got her, sweetheart. This is why you must never go out into the woods by yourself and always need somebody with you. Monsters catch anybody they can and take them back to the Enemy's stronghold."

"And what happens there?" Mell asks innocently.

"Maybe one day our guest will tell us all about it." She reaches out to adjust a bit of the prisoner's clothing. "If I'd ever been there myself, I don't think we'd be here right now!"

"Well, I'm happy you've always been here with me!" says Mell, giving her Mommy the biggest of hugs.

"And I'm so happy to have you, my darling Mell." Hug.

"Will you tell me a story before bed tonight?" she asks, sitting on the edge of the bed with the prisoner and 'accidentally' leaning against a particularly sensitive bruise.

"Of course, honey. Do you want one about the Valar, or one about regular people?"

"About the Valar!"

"Once upon a time, the Vala Aulë was inspired by Eru Illuvatar's creation of the Elves - that's us! - and decided to make a species of his own, the Dwarves. He sculpted them out of rocks just how he wanted them, short and with hair growing right out of their cheeks like whiskers, and breathed life into them. They breathed, because he commanded them to breathe, and they blinked, because he asked them to blink, but they couldn't do anything more; they wouldn't speak or walk or do any of the things he wanted his children to do, because he couldn't give them souls. Heartbroken, he asked Eru for help, and what do you think Eru said?"

"Yes?"

"Not at first! Eru was angry that Aulë had tried to make a people on his own. Only Eru is supposed to do that! Anyone else making a new kind of person is breaking Eru's rules. Aulë was a loyal Vala who never wanted to break Eru's rules, though, and once he realized what he'd done he was very sorry and begged Eru's forgiveness. And Eru saw that he hadn't meant to do anything wrong, or to go against Eru's will. So he had mercy on Aulë, and when Aulë begged for his creations to be imbued with true life because he loved them so, Eru granted his wish. But of course the Dwarves are not as well-made as Elves are. When they die they don't go to the halls of Mandos to be granted new bodies, and they don't have our beauty or our osanwë, because they're short and squat and their minds are as impenetrable as rocks. They might hope that Aulë has some plan for them, but no one knows better than Eru how a people should be, immortal and beautiful like us." She dabs a bit of blood off the corner of the prisoner's eye; she's still not crying straight tears.

"And dance and sing and talk forever and ever?"

"That's right. Even if our guest needs a long rest she'll one day be able to try all that again because she'll exist forever and that's long enough for everything."

"Does that mean I'll get to play with her someday?"

"Someday, of course! But not any time very soon."

Bonesaw heads to bed not long after that, surreptitously topping off the time dilator dosage before she leaves. 

Beka sings her to sleep. She sings a lot when she's pretending to be an Elf.

She's such a good singer and Bonesaw falls asleep with a smile on her face.

What a nice cozy hallucination this is.

Gradually incorporating ominous content continues. There's "oh no, one of your hairs fell out" accompanied by a hairpluck. There's keeping the room hot and remarking on how it's an unusual heat wave and insisting on keeping the prisoner wrapped up anyway because they may have a fever. At one point they are supposed to give her a bed bath to make her presentable for her sister-in-law who might visit, and the bath is unpleasant enough but then the sister-in-law doesn't show up and they are not supposed to explain why out loud.

Bonesaw helps, making an almost implauisbly appetizing meal for the prisoner that taste vile the more they eat, as Bonesaw sits by them and encourages them again and again to take just one more bite they were doing so well earlier. She also enjoys the bathing bit but is a bit confused with what's up with the sister-in-law, and asks Beka about it over osanwë.

Oh, we're implying that she got captured and that we aren't saying so to avoid upsetting our guest.

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?"

"Maybe I like singing more than you do."

"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."

"Does Sauron sing to his boyfriend in it?"

"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. 

"Okay. Do you want me to sing and then go or have you had enough of singing?"

"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.

She can make it short, and then she shoos.

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!"

Sniff?

Nothing happens immediately.

Bonesaw impatiently waits a moment and then asks "How does this sound?" in an incredibly melodious fashion. 

"Oh that sounds nice have you been practic- oh wow," she says, because her own voice sounds different too. "Wow! That's so cool!"

"Do re mi fa so la ti do!" Bonesaw sings proudly - all the notes sound as they should except somehow it sounds exquisitely pretty in a way it wouldn't normally.

"That's gorgeous! The flower is doing it?"

"Yeah! It actually makes everything prettier, not just sounds. Like if you look at one of your tattoos it should also look much nicer?"

She looks. "WOW. I love it! What would have happened if I'd smelled it too much?"

"Lasted longer - like a bunch of hours - and been a lot more distracting while it was active and maybe a bit too sweet sort of? I don't think one that isn't blooming could get that intense from just one try - if you smelled a bouquet of blooming ones all your senses and even your thoughts can start seeming really really pretty in a way that's too distracting to do much else even though on a deeper level you know it's not really actually pretty and it'll feel artificial and unsatisfying."

"Really the neat part is if you smell them at lower doses then that all the time for weeks. Then everything will seem unsatisfyingly artificially pretty but without them everything will feel dull and drab."

"Huh, I guess I better watch out then, that sounds sad."

"Oh I don't think we're going to plant them in Angband and I can give you immunity if you want - though partial immunity would be harder and at lower doses they're just plain nice."

"They are!! I just meant I might run into them in your lab and shouldn't smell them there too much."

"Yeah," says Bonesaw while nodding, "Some guests in my lab should smell them too much but definitely not you."

"Oh oh also! When it blossoms fully the petals are narrow and pink and tan colored and it looks like your pocket tattoo!"

"Oh, cool, did you do that on purpose?"

"Yeah! Your singing was a lot of my inspiration for making this in the first place."

"I don't have a song that makes everything else prettier... I could try to write one though, that seems like the sort of thing a song could do."

"Oh wow! You can write your own magic songs?'

"Yeah, that's where new ones come from! It takes a long time, though, so I haven't done it much."

"How do you write them so that they are magic?"

"You kinda feel how they tug on the music of reality and adjust it draft by draft till it does what you want."

"Huh. Could you teach me a magic song? And also how to write my own?"

"I can try but it can be hard to make them work right, you've gotta sing very precisely. There's one for walking on water, is that good?"

"Sounds great!"

And Bonesaw can try learning it! 

Yup! Nobody else will try to use this room all day if it's where Bonesaw wants her singing lesson.

Bonesaw is not going to want a singing lesson all day! She wants to do so many things, which include learning to sing, up until the cocktail of drugs and tinker fugue that's been keeping her up for most of the last few days wears off, and than what she wants to do is sleep on the orf's bed.

Gosh. Okay. Then no one will be trying to use the room tonight either, except the orf.

Bonesaw sleeps in but will eventually rouse.

"Mmmm?" Bonesaw is confused for a second, before sitting bolt upright and scanning her surroundings for signs of danger. 

"You fell asleep. Should I have woken you up?"

"Oh."

"I don't know? Usually I only fall asleep when I know it's safe to sleep."

"I think this is pretty safe? All my dormmates left to give you privacy even."

"I guess I'm not used to it being safe to fall asleep without thinking about it first? It used to be that my family would only be able to sleep when we'd made sure no one was going to find us before we woke up, and even then someone stayed awake just in case. When I was really tired like last night it usually meant it was extra important not to fall asleep."

"Huh. I mean, you're still in Angband, nobody in Angband is allowed to hurt you."

"Yeah it's nice.'

"Back home some people on my team would hurt me sometimes but then the Siberian would stop them or I would and I'd make them do something else. Everyone else tried to hurt me though, and stopping them was harder."

"Well, you're here now. How did you get here? Your home sounds so different from everything else I've heard of whenever you mention it."

"I had a piece of tech from a tinker who specialized in things that had random and unpredictable effects and I thought it disabled it but I was in a hurry and I guess I was wrong since it exploded and sent me here."

"I'm pretty certain this is an entirely different would from mine - where I'm from almost everyone is human like me and some of them have powers that let them do a really wide variety of things - mine let me invent and understand biotechnology."

"Oh, you didn't just - learn all that stuff?"

"No, not really. There's something in my head that will explain things and can help me think about them and figure out how to use them to do other things and it's not me? I think it's not me, but it's hard to tell sometimes."

"Weird! Do you like it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Having the thing that isn't you telling you how to do stuff?"

Bonesaw's face moves into a broad grin but then stops, falling back into the same uncertain expression she had on before.

"I don't really remember not having it. If I lost it I expect things would be a lot worse?" 

Nod, nod.

Bonesaw cuddles the orf, thinking for a moment.

"If I stopped having my powers would you still want to sing to me?"

"I don't see why not! But it might be harder to get me assigned to that, I might wind up with something else I was supposed to do if his lordship weren't trying to make sure you're comfy here."

"That makes sense."

She doesn't really want to think about this anymore and the only way she knows how to distract herself is to make art. The orf's hand is right there and her power is telling her how she can take out the fingernails and soak them in some liquids and make them pearlescent and sharp and as hard as diamonds and.... the orf might not want that and she doesn't want her power to get it's way here? Or something? She's not really sure what's going on inside her own head if she's being honest.

She stares at the fingernails as she thinks.

"Is there something on my hand?"

"I want to distract myself and I don't know how to except my power is suggesting how I could improve your fingernails. But I don't know if I want to do that for some reason?"

"Oh. Improve them how?"

"I'd take them off and dip them in biopolymer base that would make them stronger and harder and then add an enzyme based finishing agent that would bond and make them look shiny and like -" she sends the image of a pearl so white it seems to glow.

" - and then reattach them."

"That does sound pretty but it'd be impossible to use my hands while it was happening."

"It wouldn't take very long but yeah, they wouldn't be usable until it was done."

Staring continues.

"So do we need to go to your lab for it?"

"Yeah?"

The orf gets up.

"You want me to change your nails?"

"- I mean, you can if you want?"

"I don't know if I want to!" Bonesaw says with a note of distress in her voice.

...the orf is going to hug her. "Well, my fingernails aren't going anywhere if you want to think it over more?"

Bonesaw clings! She starts to feel her eyes welling up with tears and quickly grabs a nearby bit of bedding to dab at them before they touch the orf. The blanket sizzles and melts where the tears touch it. 

"Whoa, I didn't know you had acid eyes."

"Yeah. Uncle Jack suggested it as a defense mechanism in case anyone hurts me in a way that gets past my nerve blockers."

"Huh. And it's not inconvenient the rest of the time?"

"They don't effect me."

"Like how being on fire doesn't hurt balrogs? Cool."

Bonesaw smiles.

"Yeah!"

"Neat! Songs can be a little like that too, you can make them so they don't affect the singer, but you have to kind of do it separately from all the other things the song does, so like if I sing a magic lullaby it'll put me to sleep a lot of the time too."

"The tears are neutralized by ... actually I think just the normal oil my skin makes - if you rubbed my arm and then touched the tears you'd be fine. Normally I'd have made them dependent on some of the modifcations I've made to my skin so that wouldn't work, but I think the tears were one of the first things that got changed about me when I joined the Nine."

"Huh, I would not have guessed that'd be first but I guess I don't know what humans are like before you change stuff."

Bonesaw giggles for some reason.

"What would you have guessed?"

"Being stronger 'n faster? Seeing more colors?"

"Back then Uncle Jack said that being stronger and faster wasn't important for me since him and the rest of the Nine were already stronger and faster. Though he wasn't as insistent about that later. I think he was just worried about me being too much of a handful if I could run very fast when he first got me."

"More colors I sort of did later? It traded off with being able to have my eyes adapt quickly to flashbang grenades -" concept sent osanwë "- so I only installed something that let me see if anything weird was going on with other colors but not actually see the colors themselves."

"Huh. Warmth is pretty. Elves can see ultraviolet, too, though I can't, and it's neat looking." Here is what Bonesaw looks like with warmth as a color!

"That is really pretty! I can see the way my secondary circulatory system is cooling the organs right below the epidermis!" 

"Oh! I have some elf eyes in the lab and I could go and give you and me ultraviolet vision!"

"Whoa. I guess his lordship can heal the Elves if he wants them to be able to see later... how come you took them if you didn't already have plans for them?"

"Oh it's just useful to have some spare parts around."

"And they don't rot? I guess probably you have stuff for that."

"Yeah, I keep the parts alive."

"Seeing ultraviolet would be neat. Though I think there isn't very much of it to see in Angband."

"I could probably whip up some paints pretty easily?"

"Ooh, paint!"

And Bonesaw and the orf can go back to her lab together and she can start boiling the paint bases while removing some of the spare elf eyes and transplanting bits of them into the orf eyes (which is surprisingly painless for the orf). 

"Can you help with mine?" she asks, laying back on the operating table.

"- I wouldn't know how! I could try if you osanwë me what to do??"

"Yup! The hard parts already done, you just need to place them in and I can send you where!"

There's some tweezers and a small cup which Bonesaw has added sliver of elf iris too, among other things. The slivers wriggle when picked up.

With enough osanwë direction the orf can assist with this step.

Goody! That way Bonesaw can fiddle with some spare gristle with her hands during thee procedure so she has paint brushes ready by the end of it.

And now there are paints and new ocular implants and... ah, some eye drops as the final touch to activate them.

"Ta-da!"

"And paint? Ultraviolet paint? And other colors?"

Right over here! 

"And brushes!" says Bonesaw holding up a set.

"Eee can I try them? Where would be good to paint?"

"The wall of my bedroom?"

"I probably won't be very good at first, are you sure you want practice on your wall? I guess I can paint over it later if it's awful."

"I'm sure you'll do great!"

"I'm not sure of that at all but I will try to improve on the stone wall!"

And the orf goes and paints till she runs out or Bonesaw wants her for something else. She paints flowers, although she has limited data on the concept and the petals are green; she paints crickets, and stars, and swirly abstracts in crazy experimental color combinations; she spends a long time trying to make a nice ultraviolet-through-blue gradient come out smoothly; she paints a double row of teeth with sharp fangs; she paints a complicated braid, like Elves wear when they have the option; she paints silhouettes of people, Elves and orcs and humans like Bonesaw, dancing along the baseboard.

Bonesaw spends some time setting up a large hydroponics bunker for the Beauty Flowers before returning to her room.

"Woah." she says, her eyes as wide as they can naturally go as she looks at each painting in turn. 

"Do you like it? It's so much fun!"

"They're amazing!"

"Thank youuuuu!"

Bonesaw's eyes trace the curves of the braid for a moment.

"How did the brushes and paints and eyes work out?"

"They're so great! Look, I did a gradient into the ultraviolet, there, I wouldn't've been able to see that before. And it didn't hurt as much as I was expecting either!"

"Oh yeah it's a great gradient! Also yeah, eyes don't feel much if you're careful about it."

"Do you want more paints or different brushes or better eyes or something?"

"I don't know what kinds of brushes there could be but with more paint I could do more paintings!"

"Yeah! I have a bunch more walls on my room to! And a floor and a ceiling but I'd probably need different paints for those."

"I could do some smaller brushes and some larger ones maybe?"

"Sounds awesome!"

Here are a bunch more painting supplies so the orf can paint to her hearts content - or at least till Bonesaw needs to sleep.

Paint paint paint paint paaaaaint

Bonesaw is delighted to have her bedroom so painted! The orf is welcome to come by and paint more anytime she wants. 

She will not get tired of it in the next several weeks, though of course she'll cut it out while Bonesaw's doing anything that paint might distract her from, like sleeping.

Bonesaw enjoys the paintings and the additional time the orf spends around her due to making them.

Her work for the next few weeks is scaling up the Flowers, which means setting up hydroponics bunkers so orcs can grow the Flowers in accelerated conditions and harvest the seeds to be used for planting giant fields near Elf encampments. It's annoying to setup but once it's done there isn't much she needs to do - orcs are effected by the flowers way less than elves (or orfs or humans for that matter) and can get by on plugging their noses and wearing gloves while tending to them.

She can have as many orcs assigned to her as she wants and they get underway on tending the flowers for her.

One early morning in Bonesaw's bedroom the orf is woken up by the feeling of a scalpel cutting into her midsection.

"- nf."

"Nf to you too!"

"Now hold still, I gotta get this bit in soon or it'll shrivel up and become toxic," she says, easing what looks like a sliced open blue pomegranate the size of a plum directly underneath where the orf's bellybutton is. Well, where her bellybutton was - if she looked to the side she can see her bellybutton is lying on the ground a few feet from her body instead.

She does her best!

The mysterious pod goes in and Bonesaw can sew up all the skin around it and... 

"Hm. This is gonna need more skin than you have here, silly me."

Still, Bonesaw can shave off a bit of her own arm skin and then scrunch it up and use it form the orf's new extremely innie bellybutton - about an inch deep and sloping a bit downwards, right around where the mouth of the pod was located.

"What... is it?"