Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Pool had never been inside Nila’s home before. He could not be sure this was a ‘home’, but it was closer than he had ever been. While Nila paled in comparison to the Baroness–he felt his heart clench–the former was still his friend, and a licentious enticement if there ever were one.
The apartment flat was a simple one. He could see the approximations between his time and hers. An entryway. Hers had an unused hook by the door, whereas his, in the distant past, had an actual coatrack.
The dim hall lead a few short meters (past what would turn out to be the lavatory) into a combined living and sleeping area, literally no more than 3 meters by three meters. A meagre kitchen was hollowed out of the grimy plastic wall boards; what might have been an oven was a rectangular inset with a door and a shallow dial. No table, no chair. No clothes that he could use.
He did discover an inset closet, between the entrance and the lavatory, that, when pressed, popped open revealing, a hoard of Nila’s wardrobe.
It smelled strongly of her. He stood their with the door half open. Pretending to himself that he was looking for something to wear. There was a single thirty centimeter electric blue hair clinging to one of the jackets, if they could be called that. It was longer than he had ever seen her hair. Black at the roots, but a centimeter out it was such a vivid blue that it defied, 19th century color synthesis…even indigo.
There might be a black raincoat he could believably wear, one that was long and hooded, that would make him look like a sekr-crow. It had a cowl and an oily-black surface, that was slick to the touch, more than anything his fingers had before encountered.
Upon finding himself in a small mirror, held to the wall, between hooks and an empty holster hanging on a nail, he saw himself.
Pool was a distinctive, if plain, man. His face was what one of his least favorite colleagues deemed, “Swedish farmer”, referring to the peasants and unsophisticated peoples of the Scandian archipelago, up where the ice sings in the winter and the sky alights….
Pool didn’t know what that was meant to convey, but the context was hostile, and he knew his parentage. His father, early to pass, was Londbridge through and through, and his mother was a Muskovite, by birth and by temperament.
His face was gaunt, not a face he had seen in a mirror ever before. He had always had prominent cheekbones and full lips, which perhaps resulted in this ‘Swedish farmer’ look, that he resented. His hair was distinctly brown in the Londbridge piss, but grew blond as his skin reddened in the sun.
Pool had always been proud of his mustache, now it like his hair had been replaced by a dark stubble, grey at his temples and on his chin. Why the mechanical men had shaved his head–his entire body, for that matter–was well beyond his comprehension. One more violation of his bodily sovereignty that he would have to swallow like the muck of a N’Aurelian bayou.
Someone, he knew it wasn’t just someone–it had been Etelka–convinced him to grow a beard for a while. He just couldn’t handle the texture of rough on his neck, and the distraction from his nearly famous mustache. If it had been anyone else, he never would have done it, despite his bulbous lips.
Looking at himself in the fragmentary mirror, though, Pool saw himself as a skeletal remain, like those boat fragments in the mire of the Thames. His bones showed. His ribs looked like those of those lost boats. He looked like an animated roll of unbaked dough, one that had sat in the damp air too long and had become moldy.
The lavatory….
Ion Fyr 