xxxxx Someone she didn’t know sat on a chair in front of her. Presley’s hands, in white surgical gloves, tugged, pulled and examined the stranger’s lip. “Does it hurt?” he asked her. Presley tried not to give him the It’s a needle, what do you think, look, but after a certain number of irritating encounters while she was an apprentice it was getting tedious. She was just lucky that she had enough money to pay to apprentice, as it cost quite a sum. Thanks to her family, she could afford it easily; not that they knew that’s what she was using their money for.

xxxxx The room smelled like antiseptic and some soft perfume, maybe lavender and rose. Presley hadn’t gotten rid of all her habits, yet; she had, while in Crystal’s dormitories, developed the habit of making her living space smell “ladylike;” as such, in her apprenticeship, the room where she pierced had started to smell like some pretty thing or another. On the set of drawers to the right, which climbed up the wall as a series of shelves, there were jars, books, notes, even a collection of game-related bobbleheads. And Star Wars bobbleheads. The piercer who worked out of this room full-time put up with the weird smell because Presley agreed to leave him alone about the Bobblehead collection; well, that’s what he had told her, anyway. In truth, he didn’t really have a sense of smell, due to some kind of malformed bit in his nose. Or something. Even he didn’t really understand it.

xxxxx She was being trained to replace him, because he was leaving to become a paramedic. A respectable, solid, consistent profession. But not what Presley wanted to be. She wasn’t part of that world, and even if—well, her parents seemed like they wouldn’t leave her be until she did go get her higher education taken care of. Perhaps she could take a leaf from the piercer, whose name was Chris, and try to take medical classes around her piercing. She would have absolutely no time, though—how could she balance class, work and being a sailor scout?

xxxxx ”Are you… stuck?” the guy asked, disturbing her from her thoughts. ”What do you think?” she asked, pulling his lip up one last time. She swabbed it down, marked it with a sharpie, and showed him the markings in a handheld mirror. He had no idea what she was showing him, so she added, ”Placement okay?” He nodded, and so she clamped the lip down to hold the skin taught and then raised a needle to his skin. A clean, new needle; he’d seen her take it out of the package. She told him she would count to three, and then he would need to take a deep breath.
xxxxx As soon as the needle was in his lip, he started to tear up, and to babble. Some just weren’t made to take the pain. She had, at least, learned how to prevent herself from laughing at them. She squeezed his arm with her still-clean gloved hand to reassure him, flashing him a pretty smile in her best Crystal manners. ”Here, take this stress Earth and squeeze it while I thread the jewellery through,” she told him, handing it over. He held it tight, squeezed, and she put the jewellery in. At least he didn’t burst into outright tears.

xxxxx And somehow, this was what she really liked doing. Chris, who had been overseeing the process, sat in the corner silently. He nodded his approval. And it looked like she would be just fine when he left.