Dague didn’t seem surprised when Quinn said she’d never owned a formal dress. In fact, the only thing she seemed to hear at all was the note about her eye, at which point her demeanor changed entirely. She swiveled in front of Quinn, hunched, and stared deeply into that eye for what might have been the world’s longest moment.

“Gold,” she said, then she straightened and shuffled over to the front desk. “Methods change with the clients. Before I moved to Vienci, everything I made was by the mold—ah, there we are…” Producing a small glass wheel, she gave it a shake, and a screen on its front face blinked to life, upon which were slivers of just about every color Quinn could imagine, all arranged in a gradient order. She came back over and held the wheel up next to Quinn’s eye, where it spun until the selector came to rest on the exact matching hue. 

“Simple, but cheap, and dreadfully boring. I didn’t even know if I’d enjoy dressmaking until someone asked me for something ridiculous. Nowadays I tend to find a client’s fame is inversely proportional to their sense of fashion.” She paused, looked Quinn up and down, and giggled. “Not meant as an insult, of course. I prefer it, honestly. If everyone who walked in here knew exactly what they wanted, I might as well be back to using a mold.”

Twirling the wheel on her finger, she b-lined for the rack of last-season’s dresses and began to rifle through them. Odd. One would have thought the goal would have been to throw the highest-priced product at her and call it a day, but Dague pulled at least three dresses off the rack, held them up to the wheel, and then looked back at Quinn. They were all stunning, at least to an inexperienced eye, but in the end she settled for nothing. 

“Old for a reason,” she muttered, as she made for the other wall. “Gold is good. Yes. But not too much. Too much, and you’ll look like a butterscotch popsicle, or a honey statue, or a bumblebee—oh! Oh, yes, that could work.”

On the move again, she disappeared into the back, where there was more muted conversation, some rummaging, and at last she returned with three dresses in hand. One was white with embroidered gold vines climbing in a spiral up from the hem, all the way to the raised neck. The other two were black. One had a kaleidoscopic gold patterning along the ankle-height bottom and about the chest, where it cut off just below the collarbone. The last one had a close collar that went all the way up to the chin, like a pilot suit, and had no sleeves either, but the gold patterning rose up from the base like inverted rain, leaving haphazard trails of golden droplets leading all the way up. 

“These were going to go up in a few weeks. They’re current-season, but pastel is in vogue right now—imagine why—so I was going to hold off on the darker selections. But…” She set the dresses on hooks in the wall and stepped back so she could see them and Quinn together. “Yes, much stronger this way. Tell me, do any of [i]these[/i] catch your eye?”