OOC:canon excerpt: Primavera chooses clothes for herself and Iggy.

[missprimavera]

'Close your eyes,' I said. 'Sleep.'

'No!' She staggered to the dressing table. 'I have to see Kito. I have to get her help. I won't tell her too much. I won't betray Titania.' She picked up the dismay of my thoughts. 'You stay here. Human boys can be such. . . such scaredy cats. '

'Let me get you to a hospital.'

'Don't mention the word "hospital" to me.'

'I just thought-'

'Don't be a pin.'

She took a hypodermic from the dresser and filled it with Virgin Mar­tyr. Hypo and scent bottle -- the bottle, black and engraved with the image of a crucified girl -- trembled in her hands, like the sceptre and orb of an olfactory queen with delirium tremens. She injected, and her eyes re­volved, white as two boiled eggs.  'Ahh,' she sighed, 'that smells so good.' The hit subsided and she began to comb her hair. 'If Kito won't cooperate,' she said, 'I'll kill her. It's sim­ple. But it won't come to that.'

'Why...' I said; a dying fall. Why had I come back, why was I her slave? I knew the answer. So, it seemed, did the photo-mechanical above the bed. She laughed, mockingly. They were like that, those starlets. A hacker had introduced a bug into their two-dimensional world that was designed to make you feel small. Human melancholy activated it. Some prank. I took the poster from its hook. Wafer thin, it tore easily; the paper dolly ducked. I tore again, and she retreated to the poster's margin.

Ignatz the slave. Ignatz always back returning. Why? Why? Because a junkie always runs away; always comes back. That's the way it is with junkies.

Primavera giggled in triumph. 'Because I'm the dolliest. Isn't that right,' she said addressing the mirror, 'aren't I just the dolliest of them all?'

The photo-mechanical, with the aid of a half-torn mechanical octopus that had been her 2-D friend, switched her pose from soft to hardcore, pouting with sexual defiance. I tore her in two; what was left of the poster fibrillated with her scream.

'Leave that poor photo-mechanical alone,' said Primavera. 'Hooligan. You're as bad as Mr Jinx.'

'Then it's true what they say ... ?' I scrunched up the poster, tossed it l!l the trashcan, and knelt down to inspect Primavera's purchases. Clothes slithered through my hands, their fibres insinuating themselves into my pores with sartorial flirtatiousness.

'Dermaplastic,' I said, extricating a soggy pair of trousers. 'Why couldn't you get me something normal? Something ordinary?'

'If you are coming,' she said, 'here. . .' She handed me an aerosol. 'Spray me. I can collect the other stuff when we're through with Madame.'

She moved to the centre of the room and held her arms and legs in a St Andrew's cross. I shook the can. When I had finished, her body, with the exception of the ghost-white face, was coated in a patina of glossy black gelatine.

'How soon will that dry?' I said.

'Almost ready. It's the latest. Oo! There -- its nerve endings are coming alive!'

To complete her ensemble she stepped into crippling stilettos and clipped gold rings to her nipples and clitoris. I took longer to dress, queasy at wrapping myself in what felt like someone else's skin.

We pigged out on TV until late evening (Primavera almost won a dreamscaper); then, leaving behind a chaos of half-eaten food, used ban­dages, broken glass, cigarette butts, syringes, blood-stained sheets and teeth, we slipped out, ready to retake the night.

CHAPTER SIX
Going to A-Go-Go

'Like I said, what's Kito got to do with the doll-plague?'

We were on the sky train, Nana-bound. I had my panama pulled over my eyes, fearful of recognition (we were only two stops from Kito's lair); but Primavera bathed in the furtive glances of every voyeur aboard.

'Don't you know what they're thinking? Another dermatoid junkie, that's what, another "skinny" addicted to artificial flesh.'

'Of course I know what they're thinking, stupid!' Her broadcast jammed my amateur wavelength. 'What do I care? They're all robofuck­ers anyway. Bipedal phalloi, Madame calls them. And you're a fine one to call me junkie.'

'Yeah, well what if someone in this crowd identifies us?'

As a concession she reached into her shoulder bag and donned a pair of widow-black shades. Then, shaking out her hair (a weekly investment in a bottle of hair dye had, for three years, provided her sole disguise; con­tact lenses? no, no, not her), she turned her back on the sky train's throng and gazed out into the night. Her feral teeth worried at a hunk of gum.

(Richard Calder, Dead Girls, pp.41-42)