>>2634677Were it not for her declaring as such, you would have no idea that you had reached your destination. What stands before you is a perfectly normal suburban house, completely unremarkable except for being of above average size. She motions you up the driveway and walks on ahead up the steps as you follow. Looking down at her feet as she approaches the entrance, she wipes her shoes on a welcome mat outside. She is about to open the door when she seems to notice a light on somewhere inside. She hisses something to herself about "they were supposed to be asleep" before turning to face you.
"We'll need to go in through the second floor window. The…warding is weak at this entrance, it could break if we cross it. Allow me."
Without warning, she reaches to her back and suddenly several long, elaborately patterned tentacles stretch out from behind her. One wraps around your torso and she uses the rest to scale the house, eventually finding a window. She opens it by hand, has the tentacle usher you inside, and then slips in herself. By the time you turn around to face her, the tentacles have already disappeared, perhaps returning from whence they came.
Looking around, you seem to be in some kind of eccentric studio. Beautiful paintings line the wall, in varying stages of completion. Most of them feature beautiful girls, but others seem exotic and strange, depicting alien landscapes or multi-limbed monstrosities. She smiles smugly in your direction as you glance between them. A few seem to glow with a distinctive orange light that matches the shade at the tips of her tentacled bangs, and she gestures to them as you turn to her.
"Do you like the lights? My hair might be a little strange, but it produces some wonderful paints, don't you 'ink?"
She then attempts to supress a laugh at her own joke and fails spectacularly, covering her mouth with both hands.
"Here, before I head out to deal with those monsters, I'll do a little art. Let me take a quick look at you, 'kay?"
She steps forward, and without hesitation gets incredibly close to your face. As she does the purplish blue of her eyes seems to swirl with specks of light, as if it was a pool reflecting the night's sky. Satisfied, she blushes slightly as her proximity to you lingers a bit longer than seems necessary for whatever she was doing.
"Wow, you…I um, I know I did that mostly without asking, but I just wanted to thank you. I can't ever release these pieces publicly, but one of the things I love drawing the most is human souls. When I take a look at them I see them as colors and shapes. I don't get to know too many people well enough for them to let me see into them like that, but whenever I do it's incredible. They're the most beautiful things in the world to me, so much so that I can sometimes spend days without sleep trying to finish a drawing of one. We don't have that much time, so I'll just get the linework down and do the coloring later."
She grabs a canvas and sits down on the floor with it in her lap, sketching away with a pencil drawing incredibly complex geometrical shapes. The steady sounds of the pencil scratching against the texture of the canvas is punctuated occasionally by slight gasps or a "humu". Occasionally she'll look over to you quizzically, as if intrigued that whatever she's sketching out came from within you. After a while she starts humming to herself and just as you feel like you're about to fall asleep from her sweet melody she finishes her sketch and stands up.
"The monsters should be where I want them by now. I'll take care of them, you wait here. Do NOT leave this room, okay? I'll bonk you if you do." Without waiting for a reply, she hops through the window and disappears.
