[b]Mosaic![/b]

The Gemini - that name suits the hound - indulges in gold. Gold and glitter, a grid of the earth's secret treasures. She has chosen a rare material indeed to dress herself in, matter that responds to movement. A shrug or a stretch of her arms turns patterns of gold into rubies and sapphires as they clink and strike each other. If she runs or moves suddenly then the gold becomes transparent diamonds, revealing the hidden shape of her body. This sweeping, shoulderless dress is bound with a sequence of blue ribbons running up along her back, with a crown of jasper on her head. But for all its plutonic wealth she does not appear rich or regal. This is a performer's radiance, a performer's tackiness. Synthetics and sequins designed to dazzle from afar rather than impress up close. When the light is wrong it looks fake, and cheap, and hardly eye catching at all. But in the right light she can outshine anything. She is delighted with it, with the adaptability, with the mundanity, with how she can use it to make something fake appear more real than reality.

Vesper is besotted with the coat, but she uses grav-pins to lock it into an appearance of continual flutter, soaring off her body as though it is about to be carried away at any moment by a strong wind. In red and white it frames her shoulders and back in high drama, so the subdued lavender-greys of her feathers and steel-greys of her triangle-themed suit fade away. Here focus is drawn to the green-gold chain of her pocketwatch, the green-blue chain of a cravat, and the brilliant light of her eyes. 

Neither of these are dresses for assassins. The word hardly seems to fit either of them any more.

[b]The Knight![/b]

The princess takes her kerchief and drys your eyes. Softly. Delicately. She then folds that sacred cloth and ties it into your hair as a ribbon, in a complex braid that her fingers know as certainly as a handmaiden's. Something holy; a lady's favour, an essential part of being a Knight.

Before you is the sea.

Bright white sand that fades into scrubby, vined and tangled grass. Bitter, deep-rooted things with tripping tendrils. Tall trees from jurassic eras, unliving fossils. Huge and broken rocks and tangled rock pools as the world of memories is ground down into this powdering dust. The infinite blue. Oceanus. The sea that surrounds the world. 

This is it. This is the end of the world. The place sought, and ultimately found, by Alexander. The barrier between the worlds of life and death, the greatest of the rivers of the underworld. The ancients knew that all the world was suspended upon water, the continents floating above this vast subterranean ocean. For all they would subsequently learn about lava, plate tectonics, planetary travel and quantum mechanics they had it right the first time. This is the sea that the galaxy floats upon.

You've made it. The end of the universe. 

[b]Dolce![/b]

"Hah," laughed the Ancient Craftsman. "Yes. It's Zeus, I think. I think a lot of people don't understand her, now that we've gone into the void, now that we can move the clouds, now that we can move the [i]stars[/i]. I think she seems... abstract, like a concept of power, not the literal sky. But there's something indescribably beautiful, something erotic, something intimate about the sky. Mathematically it's a thin layer of atmosphere, but... how can you not fall in love with it?"

[b]Dyssia![/b]

You didn't know they made foxes in this colour. 

A radiant, scandalous, stolen Blue. Shining like a goddess, like sunlight just breaking through the surface of the waves. The glittering wings extend in the flying-fish frills and fins that an Azura angel might wear. There are so many ways that this could be wrong, that it could fall on the wrong side of taste, on the wrong side of the uncanny valley, but this Pix has done her research and has sculpted her appearance with the precision of a marketing guru to be the most beautiful sea fox that could ever be.

She smiles. Beacons. Flicks her legs and tails together like it's mermay. On some level your senses are aware of danger, perhaps seeing the shimmer of the paralyzing nigh-invisible jellyfish surrounding her in a defensive aura, but she's doing an amazing job of displacing that discomfort onto the fact that she's holding a riding crop and is biting her lip [i]just [/i]so. The ocean ripples with her siren's song as she draws you closer. Isn't she [i]worth [/i]the danger?