After the closing of their favorite haunt, Katerina found a job as an administrative assistant to a attorney who specialized in "fashion accidents." She had also taken the lead among her friends and gotten an apartment in the City. Driving in from the suburbs, Juliette Oubliette and Count Valcour slept on her couchbed on the weekends. They would all go out exploring and attempting to break into the local BDSM scenes. Kahto, as she now preferred, had become very enterprising, taking extra work sewing for white collar goths. She capitalized on her position to score lucrative mending jobs from the fashion victims.
She had been up for several days on crystal, which forced her lips into a permanent smile. She enhanced this cute deathlike grin with a carefully applied gashlike application of lipstick, which made her face like a ragdoll's. With a little blue shadow under the eyes and perky red pigtails, she thought it wasn't such a bad look.
She was sewing up a ripped bodice when she had a most fortuitous accident. She had noticed that she was stitching part of her leg into the cloth. The speed and sleep deprivation kept her numb and humming right along to some vintage Dead Can Dance, which was about as great a musical challenge as she could mount these days. This incorporation of flesh to fabric was nothing new. She had sewn people into their clothes before. Sometimes they would request that a little skin be a binding part of the deal. When she was bored, she sewed all her fingers together. But this time, her head rang like the very bell of serendipity. "Needlepoint!" Yes, needlepoint.
She ran out of the apartment yelling "Needlepoint!" She stumbled into the cafe downstairs and two doors over, the bodice hanging off her thigh, screaming with glee, "Needlepoint!"
Darrah Flambe looked back at Katerina with that queasy poopypants look reserved for people losing their shit on acid. "You want a coffee or something, Kaht?"
K laughed at him and jabbed the needle in his direction as if to poke him lovingly in the eye. "No," she chirped, punctuating each word with the needle. "You are looking at the newest trendsetter in self-mutilation."
"How's that?"
"I'm going to sew designs directly onto people's bodies!"
"That's new?"
"The way I'm going to do it!"
She got on the phone to Lady Camille Hysteria, dominatrix. "I've got the best idea ever, ever, ever."
"Such enthusiasm. Any more evers and I'll be forced to charge you by the hour, dear. Go ahead."
"One: it involves pain."
"I adore that. You've captured my ear."
"Two: it is not permanent."
"Whatever it is, the weekend types will appreciate. Continue."
"Three: um, it involves thread. I really love thread."
"What is it, Kat?"
"I'm going to embroider on people. Can you believe no one has done that before?"
"Oh, surely someone has."
"Well, not around here. I'll put together a little booth at a club and charge people for the treatment. Then, we can make enough money to open the Salad Bar again."
"I love you! Come over this instant and embellish me for practice. I demand brocade and Rococco bric-a-brac."
"Oh, I can't, mon cher, you must come here. I am far, far too busy."
"Ok, I'll do as you say this once, but don't go blabbing and ruin my reputation."
When the Count and Juliette showed up, Kat and Camille showed them their arms crusted with blood and designer stitches.
"You look like a couple of Louis Quatorze chairs!" Juliette exclaimed. "After the Revolution, of course."
Katerina stretched her ornamented arms, "Doctor Frankenstein should have been an uphostlerer."
"Could you sew some batwings to my arms?" The Count asked, flapping.
Lady Camille spoke up for the body artist. "What you want is a tailor, darling. This fine creature is a tattooiste of the filament."
Suffused with pride, Kat's smile almost wrapped around her head.