…or, Draconian Tactics

“You know, I like a spinach quiche as much as the next man who’s totally secure in his masculinity, but I usually just have a burger and fries for lunch,” I told Iason as we left the cafe.

“On campus, you must make do with what is available,” Iason said. “But with me, your options multiply. In any event, I’m sure I saw hamburgers offered on the menu in there.”

“Well, the quiche sounded good, and I thought, you know, since we were here I’d give it a try,” I said. “But I just wanted you to know that for future reference, fast food is fine. I don’t need to go some place with cloth napkins for every meal.”

“If you want a hamburger, we can go back and get you one,” he said.

“I don’t want a damn burger, I’m just telling you for future reference. If we keep going on dates, they don’t all have to be big productions. We can just go out for burgers and milkshakes some time. We could go bowling. I don’t want you thinking you have to take me out for fine dining and dragons all the time.”

“It’s worrying that you feel the need to tell me you do not expect to be taken to see dragons every night,” Iason said. He didn’t look worried. “It makes me think you may be accustomed to a higher class of suitor than I can match.”

“No, I just mean that not every date has to be a big production,” I said. “We can just go out.”

“It sounds as though you expect to have a lot more of these dates,” Iason said.

“Oh, stop,” I said. “Yesterday you were talking about marrying me. Don’t act like I’m the desperate clingy one here just because I mention the possibility of future outings.”

“You seem to be making quite a bit out of the fact that I mentioned the possibility of a future event,” Iason said.

“There’s a difference between thinking we might keep going out based on one date and thinking we might get married,” I said.

“You always have a reason why it’s different when you do something,” Iason said, ruffling my hair. “You know, I think you are right about the heels.”

“It bugs you that I’m taller than you are,” I said.

“Are you? I had not noticed.”

Iason summoned a cab and we headed down, across the canal where the river now ran, and into the market district in the lower city. In the stores around the marketplace, the clerks’ attention to Iason became a lot more direct and obvious in its intent. He gave up his quest to find the perfect pair of boots for me and decided to focus instead on finding body mod places.

We went to three different tattoo parlors before Iason even deigned to go inside one. I couldn’t see what was wrong with the others and he wouldn’t say. He finally settled on a place called “Skinchanger’s”. Its windows were covered with big pieces of leather—whole sides of a cow, it looked like—with sample designs on them. One of them was a flying dragon, curled in a crescent shape.

“That!” I said to Iason when I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I grabbed his hand and pulled him back towards it. “That’s what I want. On my left shoulder, facing my spine.”

“A hundred people must have that exact tattoo,” Iason said. “We’ll use that pose, but you’re getting a custom design.”

“Won’t that take longer?”

“You said you weren’t in a hurry.”

There was a guy in a muscle shirt behind the counter. His forearms had three bands of knotwork tattooed on them, and he had a piercing under his lip. He looked up from a battered novel as we came in. He carefully marked his place, and set it aside.

“Hey, guys, how’s it going?” he said.

“Quite well,” Iason said. He draped his arm over my shoulder. “I want to give him a tattoo to commemorate our first date, and I want you to make it for him.”

“Ah, cool,” he said, coming from around the counter. “Well, my name’s Jeff. We have some catalogues you can look at, or if you have a design—”

“We have an idea,” Iason said.

“Okay, cool,” Jeff said. “I do original designs for a small fee. If it’s—”

“We don’t need to talk about the fees,” Iason said. “Iamie, take off your shirt and turn around.”

I did, and Iason traced a square on my back.

“He wants a dragon, similar in pose to the one on your window display,” he said, moving his finger in a semi-circle. “But the design must be unique and original.”

“Alright, I can do that,” Jeff said. “I am going to need to see his ID.”

“Yeah, I got that,” I said. I dug it out and showed it to him.

“Right. Any particulars?”

“Try to make it look not completely unlike this in color and style,” he said, taking off his shirt to show off his own tattoos.

“Wow,” Jeff said. “That is some serious ink.”

“Yes,” Iason said.

“But a darker blue, with some purple,” I said. “You know what an Imperial Blue dragon looks like?”

“I think so. They’ve got the crown frills, right? You want the whole flower thing, too?”

“No,” I said. “Just a dragon.”

“Clutching a blue rose in its forepaws,” Iason said.

The guy looked at me and after a moment I nodded.

“Alright, guys,” he said. “Let me get a sketchpad and we’ll see what we can do.”

I put my shirt back on, but Iason handed his to me and we followed Jeff over to the counter. He grabbed a pad of paper, a pencil, and a stool and sat down. He started roughing out the dragon, and Iason and I gave corrections to make it look more like Vera had. The image in my head had been incredibly detailed, probably overly so. He kept it simple and stylized, but it definitely stood out.

“So, this is the basic design,” Jeff said when he’d finished to our satisfaction. “Do you want big, bold lines or thinner ones, like your friend’s?”

“Thinner,” Iason answered. “They have to match.”

“Okay, yeah,” I said.

“How do you want to do this?” he asked. “We can do it with the needle or with a transfer, if you’re shy.”

“I think I can take a little needle,” I said.

“He can take a lot more than that,” Iason said. “I am not certain that the transfer, as you call it, would give Iamie the full experience of getting a tattoo.”

“Yeah, I like having the needle in my hand,” Jeff said. “It takes longer, and it’s harder to fix mistakes—which is why I do my damnedest to not make any—but I just don’t feel like it’s a real, authentic tattoo if it isn’t done with ink and needle. Course, it doesn’t hurt anything that it’s much cheaper than a transfer.”

“Cheaper?” Iason repeated.

“Yeah, a lot cheaper,” he said. “I mean, you pay for the labor, which is four silver an hour for a custom design, and I have to say that a big design like what you’re asking for is going to take some time, but even that doesn’t approach what a scroll of image transference will run you.”

“I see,” Iason said.

“Of course, for more of a middle range, we’ve got magic needles,” Jeff said. “They move by themselves, but they’re animated under my will. They’re a little faster than doing it by hand, and a lot faster when you want colors, because they can work at the same time.”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” Iason said. “I think we will do the transference.”

“Uh, you sure?”

“Yes, unless you have something even higher,” he said. “Money is no object.”

“Uh, right,” Jeff said. “Well, we do have some different enchanted inks. You can do animated, living, projectable, summonable, soulbound—”

“Soulbound?” I repeated.

“Yeah, that’s where the ink bonds to your astral body,” Jeff said. “Makes it a permanent part of you. Like, if you had a tattoo on your arm and the arm got cut off, it would heal back with the tattoo on it. Your, uh, friend probably used soulbound ink in his, if he expects them to last as long as he does.”

“Of course,” Iason said.

“So, what if you get a soulbound tattoo and change your mind?” I asked.

“You’re fucked?” Jeff said. “I’ve heard that a necromancer can rip it off of you, but, uh, I don’t know how safe that actually is. The official script we have to read and the thing you have to sign says it’s permanent.”

“Explain the other options you enumerated,” Iason said.

“Animated just means it moves,” Jeff said. “A simple pre-plotted sequence, like flapping its wings or spitting lightning. Living is animated ink with a personality.”

“Personality?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s probably easier to show you,” Jeff said. He turned around and called towards the back of the shop. “Hey, Rosalie! Come show these guys your pussy.”

“Uh, that’s not necessary,” I said.

A girl with bright pink hair in pigtails came out from behind the curtain across the back of the shop. She was wearing a black blouse with short sleeves that were laced up the sides and a miniskirt with striped leggings.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“They want to see what a live tat looks like,” Jeff said.

“Oh, okay,” she said. She turned her left arm over and started looking around the upper arm. “She’s a little shy, sometimes. Let me dig her out for you.”

I got a bit of movement at the edge of the sleeve. She took one bright pink fingernail and speared her own skin, catching the edge of a tiny striped gray cat. She dragged it out into the “open”, while its miniscule paws tried to latch onto her sleeve without success. A flick of her finger flipped it over onto its back, and she proceeded to tickle its stomach with her pinky finger.

“We want that!” Iason said, his face lighting up. “We want that!”

“I don’t know, having a big ass dragon running all over my body might get a little distracting,” I said. “Also, I want it on my back so I can cover it up with a shirt. I don’t want it popping its head up on my neck when I’m talking to my mom.”

“You eighteen, dude?” Rosalie asked.

“According to my ID and the Imperium,” I said. “But I don’t know if that’s good enough for my mom.”

“Oh, well, you can deactivate them,” Rosalie said. “I just like to let her run free, unless I’m having sex. Then she’s very distracting. You turn them off and they just sort of flow back to their original position, which for her is on my ankle.”

“We want that!” Iason said again.

“Okay, for the size you were talking about, that’s going to be running into five or six gold,” Jeff said. “You’ll probably want it smaller, like hers.”

“Yeah, most live tats we do are only an inch or two,” Rosalie said. She was waving her fingertip in circles over her forearm, where the tiny kitten frolicked and leaped after it in two dimensions. “And they’re still not cheap. I was saving for my itty bitty kitty before I even started working here.”

“No, it’s fine,” Iason said to Jeff. “We will do it full-sized.”

“Hold on, I haven’t decided if I want this,” I said.

“Why do you have to decide anything?” Iason asked.

“Uh, because it’s my body and not yours?” I said.

“Yes, but this is the design you want,” Iason said. “Whether you get it with this level of animation or not, you will have what you want. Even if I choose to pay for the special ink, you still have to activate it. So why not let me do this? The final decision to invoke it or not is in your hands already.”

“Do you really expect me to have a tattoo that can come to life and never use it?” I asked.

“No,” Iason said. “Because you know as well as I do that it will be the most awesome thing you will ever own, and you’re simply being difficult.”

“Okay, but will a dragon that size even be able to fit on my arm or whatever?” I asked. “It’s not going to do me much good to have a dragon that’s stuck running around on my back where I can’t see it.”

“Dragons are sinuous,” Iason said. He looked at Jeff. “It will be able to fold its wings like a real dragon, yes?”

“Yeah, it should be able to do anything the real one can do, within reason,” he said. “If you want it to breathe lightning, we’ll have to work that into the base pose somehow.”

“Do that,” Iason said.

“Alright, like this?” Jeff asked, erasing part of the dragon’s mouth and redrawing it open with a tiny fork of lightning.

“You know,” Rosalie said, “if you’ve got money to burn and you really want to play with a dragon, you could get it—”

“Don’t talk to me,” Iason said. “And we want it soulbound, too.”

“Dude, not cool,” Jeff said as Rosalie gave me a “what the fuck?” look.

“What?” Iason asked. “Can you not mix the soulbound ink with the animation magic?”

“You don’t talk to people like that,” Rosalie said.

“Not when I can avoid it, but they keep coming up to me,” Iason said.

Jeff closed his sketchpad and put it down.

“Okay, guy, you can either knock it off and apologize to my fellow artist or you can hit the road,” he said. “We don’t have to work on anybody we don’t want to and honestly, the only reason I’m not tossing you out right now is that you’re doing this for your little buddy who at least has the grace to look like he wants to die.”

“I’m actually taller than he is,” I said. “It’s the boots.”

“You’ve already spent the time doing the sketch,” Iason said. “If you don’t complete the work, you won’t be paid for that.”

“Yeah, well, that’s my problem,” Jeff said. “Apologize.”

“Oh, forget it, Jeff,” Rosalie said, turning and heading back towards the curtained-off area. “Money’s money and we’ve been dead.”

“No,” Jeff said. “‘Money’s money’ is why people think they can get away with this shit.”

“Apologize, Iason, or I’m leaving,” I said.

“Well, it seems we’ll have to find a more suitable establishment, anyway,” Iason said. “Come, Iamie.”

“I don’t mean I’m leaving the store,” I said. “I mean you.”

“I try to give you a very personal gift and it turns into another ultimatum,” Iason said. “How does that happen?”

“You know how it happened,” I said. “So knock it off.”

“Very well,” Iason said. He turned towards Jeff. “I am sorry I insulted your co-worker.”

Jeff just stared at him. Rosalie said, “Oh, take it.”

“Alright,” Jeff said. “But just so you know, there is no way in hell I would ever work on your body.” He looked at me. “Live and soulbound? It’s your skin, dude?”

Getting me tattooed had been Iason’s idea but it had been my decision. The dragon was what I wanted. If I ever did acquiesce to having Iason’s mark or name inked onto my body, he’d better believe it would be removable.

“All but the rose,” I said. “Can you do that? Make the rose separate and only use the special inks for the rest?”

“Yeah, you probably don’t want it dragging the rose all over the place, anyway. How about I just put a rose border around the dragon?” Jeff suggested. He pointed to one of the lines on Iason’s body. “Like this, but with purple highlights. It would stay there like a home base when the draggy’s on the prowl, and it wouldn’t have to be soulbound.”

I looked at Iason. His expression was calculating, but then he nodded. I think he was willing to accept the fact that his contribution to the design would be removable in exchange for a stronger link between his tattoos and mine.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

“Alright,” Jeff said, adjusting the sketch. He took out the rose and put the curving dragon inside a triangular frame of roses with their stems twined together. “How’s that look, guys?”

“Good,” I said.

“Excellent,” Iason said.

“It’ll take me about forty-five minutes to an hour to get this painted up on a scroll,” he said. “Wait, better make that an hour and a half, since I’ll have to let the border dry before I do the rest. Once you approve that, it won’t take a minute to get it in place. Sound good?”

“Very good,” Iason said.

“How much is this going to cost, altogether?” I asked.

“Well, when you include the cost of the scroll and the animation and initiative spells, and then I have to charge for the design, and the soulbounding is—”

“It’s fine,” Iason said, putting his hands on my shoulders and pulling me back away from the tattoo artist. “We don’t need to discuss price.” He dug in the pouch on his belt and pulled out a handful of gold coins, which he set on the counter. “If it’s more than that, I will pay the balance. If it’s less, you may split the remainder with your, ah, colleague.”

He managed to make that word sound like a serious insult, but there had to be a dozen gold coins in the stack. Rosalie and Jeff exchanged wary looks, then Jeff swept the coins off the counter.

“Alright, guys, rock on,” Jeff said. He held out his hand kind of in between us, and Iason took it and shook it.

“Iason, that was way too much money to drop on me, all at once,” I said once we were outside.

“You don’t need to worry about how much money I spend,” Iason said. “Though if you’re so concerned, you could let me do my own thing in restaurants. Now, let’s go find your earrings.”

“There’s a piercing place right there,” I said, pointing to the next store over. “Actually, they’re all over the place here.”

“No,” Iason said, shaking his head. “We have time, and if you are not going to let me get your nipples and cockhead done, I want a jeweler’s. You’re getting diamonds.”

“You’re spending too much money.”

“I’m investing,” he said.

“Well, I’m not letting you buy me diamonds unless you promise to apologize to Rosalie herself when we go back,” I said.

“You have an interesting style of negotiation, Iamie.”