Xochitl stood in front of the bathroom mirror, with Novelyne behind her, and painted a thick coating of Goth white makeup over her face and breasts. Then she took out her eyebrow stencils and painted dark upswept anime brows punctuated by tiny stars. She had replaced her combat boots with black seven and a half inch fetish knee-highs. Her fishnets didn’t quite reach the bottom of her black leather pleated mini skirt, revealing the two tattooed names written in script across her right thigh. The black lamb skin corset was laced up tight in the back, squeezing her waist to six inches smaller than her natural form and pressing her pale breasts up over the top. She had already arranged the dread falls in her hair.
“I’m not sure what you’re supposed to be,” said Novelyne.
“A Gothic slut.”
“Oh, well, mission accomplished then.”
Making her way down the alley, Xochitl entered the back door of Robot Slut Tattoo to find Sid’s friend Terry had turned the back room into a photo studio. He was no slouch either, with a big Hasselblad set up on a tripod, surrounded by flash umbrellas. His white backdrop was arranged against the wall, and just in front of that, a large white wing back chair.
Terry was a tall and very skinny man in his early thirties, with short cropped hair just going grey and a John Waters mustache. For the next two hours he used his sweaty hands to place Xochitl in a variety poses draped across the white chair. Halfway through, the miniskirt was discarded, leaving her in a vinyl microbikini, and several minutes later the corset followed the skirt, leaving her naked above the waist except for two pieces of electrical tape forming an X over each nipple.
“You are awesome,” said Terry as he snapped away. “We could make some serious scratch from fetish magazines, if you’re into that.”
“The pictures are for Sid.”
“It’s not like nobody’s going to see them. You know he’s putting them on his sign… probably a billboard too.”
“That’s Sid’s business.”
As Xochitl was shimmying back into her skirt, the tattoo artist came back from the front of the store where he had been etching a fairy and mushroom on a redhead’s left breast in between games of Angry Birds on his laptop.
“Are feeling alright, Xochitl? I can see your ribs.”
“You’re not looking at my ribs.”
“When did you last eat something?” he asked.
“I honestly don’t remember.” She slipped the corset around her and zipped it up the front. “Why don’t you take me out to lunch?”
“Really?”
She laughed at his eagerness. “Sure.”
“Do you want to go change?”
“No. Come on. We can hit Food Factory.”
“Hell no. If I’m taking somebody that looks like you to lunch, then it’s going to be someplace nice and hopefully someplace where a lot of people see me.”
City of Amathar 