Snippet #1212019

(Ophelia Evans, First District, Melody's Residence)

Ophelia sat heavily onto the chair placed in front of the easel, eyes fixed on the blank canvas. She'd almost had it, nearly been struck with something powerful enough to paint, but it had disappeared, a wisp of ephemeral smoke in a breeze. Sometimes, the muse was like that, fickle thing that it was. Still, occasionally if she stared at a blank slate for long enough, she would begin to see shapes and colors forming upon it, and as she would move to seize upon it, the blurs would resolve into something more solid. All she needed to contribute to the equation was a measure of reality, and not even a complete one at that.

She could hear the slight modulation of voices from beyond her shelter. There was Melody's musical soprano, the other woman's slightly huskier tones, and Mr. Crawford's tone, too, a good deal raspier than the others, though perhaps it had not always been so. Even Nightstalker's low baritone sounded once. She wondered what had moved the most silent of them all to speak, but speculation on this would be useless.

Her eyes wandered to her paints once again. She'd chosen a number of colors that weren't intuitively coherent. Most of them were dark, but there were also bright yellows, reds, and even a purple. The artist fingered the jaggedly-cut ends of her inky hair, trimmed just recently with an ordinary pair of scissors. She hadn't wanted to use her art supplies for something as inconsequential as hair, after all. She probably looked a right wreck at the moment; she doubted many people came out of her day's experiences looking fresh anyway, so it mattered little.

"Hmm..." she muttered aloud. The room, oddly enough, had not contained a proper palette, so she laid a piece of dropcloth over the table and squeezed the colors directly onto that instead, organized by shade. Tilting her head to the side a bit, Ophelia ran her eyes over each color in sequence, images that each evoked flashing across her mind. Truly, though she could call to mind a hundred things to paint, nothing seemed quite right. Her mind moved instead to the gallery outside, and how each of the paintings was of the same subject, but in a fundamentally different way. Well, why not? She might as well contribute, but perhaps with something of a twist.

She spent a few more minutes laying out the image in her head, and then grabbed a pencil from the pile of supplies beside her. She'd have to sketch this one out first, just to make sure it came out perfectly.