"The father of Ravens! Father of lies!" Cousin spouted happily. Minx paid it no mind, he hadn't spoken the one line that meant his mind had cleared yet. Some people believed that cousins babble was a result of his somewhat broken thought processes. Minx, who was a bit closer to the truth, believed that cousin was simply sorting through other people's horoscopes.
She was busy thinking. Thinking about that bastard William D Wannamaker who'd made her the way she was now. A state she wasn't sure if she should thank him for, or kick his balls into his throat for. Her boyfriend back when the cataclysm was still a new thing had loved the weirder stuff in life. While out on one of what he called a "trip trip," he'd wandered into some lab and come back to the little concrete shelter they had holed themselves up in with an armload of glass vials and a needle. The stuff had looked dangerous, but he'd insisted on having her try it out.
"It'll make you beautiful babe!" He told her. Well, it had. At first. The first three had in fact. Each shot more painful than the last, but Minx had once heard that being pretty was painful. Those first three shots had turned her into a bombshell though, and like some bombs, she had also become lightly radioactive. To remove it, Willy suggested they try one of the vials marked "purifier," and that fourth shot knocked Minx out cold.
As she lay passed out on the floor of the evac shelter, William had decided to do a little experimenting of his own, though not on himself. He injected her unconscious form with needle after needle of liquid animalia, then tried to fix it with three straight doses of purifier. In the morning, he was gone. The only evidence of his existence was the empty baggy he'd kept the last of his LSD in and an illegible note. She woke that morning, hideous as sin from the shoulders up, radioactive, and possessing the ability to change the color of her skin at will.
The short of it after that was that she was thrown out of a lot of places as she traveled. Even the Cor thought she was just too horrible to behold. In the end, she wound up in pricetown on the operating table of a misling cyberneticist. He'd given her his experimental facial distortion CBM to test, and in exchange all she had to do was become his wife's debt slave. She agreed at once. Later, he'd come to her at night. He loved his wife and she him, but that woman just couldn't do what he wanted of her anymore. The first face Minx ever took, was that of her mistress.
He gave her a place to stay and any face she wanted, she gave him a year of faithful service both in and out of bed, and the doctors wife gave him and herself about four hundred CC's of nihil at the end of a needle when she found out. Then, just like that, Minx's contract was the cities property and she was up on the block where King found her.
She was just thinking about that doctor, the cyberneticist who's death had been in the papers for a month after the fact and who had instilled in her a bit of a thing for men of science, when cousin snapped her back to the here and now with a single line.
"I see a field of roses in bloom."
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