No one in Alari MacDougall’s family thought it unusual when the tiny 16 year old barricaded herself in her bedroom with a bundle of fabric. The sewing muse took her captive regularly. However, what WAS unusual was that she was not threatening, cajoling or attempting to bribe her sister, Ume into modeling her creations. In fact, she was being downright secretive and guarding her work as if it were the Pink Panther and Inspector Clouseau was waiting just behind the corner to leap out at her. From the other side of the door, she could hear her family muttering about obsession and possible psychiatric help, but none of that mattered. What mattered was that she’d been given a week. Less than a week to figure out wedding presents for her Negaverse superiors. And besides, Ume lacked a certain… epicness in the region of the chest and thus would have been a terrible model for Nealite’s part of the present. Getting measurements had been no walk in the park either. Alairi had been forced to guesstimate in a few areas. Alairi HATED guesstimation. It made for sloppy work. However, given the patterns she’d put together, she thought that she’d made enough allowances to help hide those guesses and still produce something classy and beautiful.

Swearing under her breath as the slender wire she was so carefully threading through the front of the nightgown she was crafting jabbed her finger, she paused for a moment to cast an admiring eye on the finished half of the present. The black satin smoking jacket with its lining of deep purple satin and its trim of a slightly lighter shade of purple filled her corrupt heart with pride. Charonite would look damned classy in such a jacket. Especially when paired with the black-trimmed-with-purple fez that it had taken her nearly an entire day to put together. She already had one part of Nealite’s, or should she say Beryl’s?, gift finished. It had taken visiting every craft store in town to find, but the small, glossy black feather trimmed with strings of tiny, glittering orange crystals would look lovely against her Queen’s brilliant hair. Now if only this damned nightgown would stop being such a pain in the a**…

Swallowing down a stream of obscenity, Alairi began to work patiently at the wire. The basic shape of the nightgown was finished. The soft black satin trimmed with pale orange satin looked like something out of a 40s movie. The long, belled sleeves had been trimmed with fluffy, soft black feathers and a large, twinkling orange crystal that marked the end of the plunging neckline added a certain style that she thought the older woman would appreciate. And once she got the wire in, she could mold it into a basic shape and include a discreet note for Nealite’s eyes only explaining how to adjust the wire to create as little or as much cleavage as she liked. It was the little personal touches that made the gift, after all.

Though she was certain that the little personal touches she’d added to Charonite’s gift would get her killed if Nealite ever suspected the real reason behind them. A silver hipflask that until about 3 this morning had belonged to her father filled with… “doctored” GoldSchlagger and a bundle of 4 Cuban cigars. The cigars and booze had been obtained by virtue of tempting a passing dirty old man with the promise of hot, underage, premarital hanky-panky. She grinned to herself at the memory of his reward. How sad and pathetic to be left dead in some skeezy hotel room with no hanky panky, only an agonizing death as she’d stolen his starseed. Which had now been ground finely and mixed into the Goldschlagger. She had put a small note in the smoking jacket’s pocket with the cigars and hipflask letting Charonite know about that. However, what the note did not say was that she thought poor Charonite was going to need the booze and smokes just to get through the wedding night.

There! The wire was in. Now she could sew up the tiny hole and give the nightgown some shape. Why, Charonite and Nealite would look as if they belonged in some Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film when they put this stuff on! Only, she was pretty certain that Fred Astaire hadn’t had Charonite’s remarkably obscene vocabulary. And she didn’t think that Miss Rogers had been a nearly insufferable egomaniac. No matter. Her gifts were finished. Working quickly, she wrapped them up in a lovely shimmering white paper she’d found and topped them with equally shimmering bows. Purple for Charonite and Orange for Nealite.

Let that ridiculous wedding come now, she thought. I’m ready for it. Whether the rest of the Negaverse was however, remained to be seen.