Flowers That Won't Fade (solo)

Katrina closed her bedroom door behind her and sighed. She was alone at last! It's not that she wasn't used to living in a place filled to the brim with mutants of all ages bustling around. The difference was that back at the Mondragon Labs she didn't have someone constantly checking to see if she needed anything, checking to see if she was okay, checking to see if she was lonely, or checking to see if she was hungry. At the moment, Katrina was glad for every mother-free moment she could get and practicing her oboe guaranteed her at least an hour of time to herself.

Katrina started towards her makeshift nightstand (a folding tray table) to get Othello out of his oboe case when she noticed something odd. Her hairbrush lay on the table where she had left it, but it was also a rose. Half rose and half hairbrush, half illusion and half reality. Such a dual image was usual for Katrina when she viewed her own illusions, except that this time she wasn't thinking about making a rose illusion. How was it still a rose then?


(1 day earlier)
Katrina concentrated on the music in front of her. Barret's 40 Etudes for Oboes were not the most exciting music ever, but they were good for her. Or so she kept telling herself. They build technique, Katrina told herself for the tenth time. Fat lot of good it'll do if I die of boredom.

To relieve the monotony of the repetitious exercises for her fingers, Katrina began to imagine how she would decorate her room once the renovations were finished. The room was still very bare, but she finally had a bed again, as well as a folding tray table for a night stand, and a chair. She had also borrowed a music stand from the music classroom so she wouldn't have to disrupt any actual music classes by practicing there. The old carpet had been pulled up to reveal a nice wood floor that had only needed a light sanding and a coat of varnish to finish it off.

The hard wood floor made for a fairly echo filled practice room, but it also made it more easy to sweep up the orange, black, and white fur that seemed determined to replace the old carpet. The only thing left to fix was the window, which still had plastic covering the opening instead of glass. It probably meant that everyone outside could hear her playing the same etude over and over again. Oh well, Katrina thought to herself, there are worse songs for everyone to have stuck in their heads.

What Katrina really wanted to do was personalize the room. It needed some color other than white to spice it up. As she played, Katrina imagined her bed spread covered in a pattern of big yellow sunflowers. When she reached the trill she had already played five times, the sunflowers tumbled off of the bedspread and onto the floor, now three dimensional. From there, the flowers spread across the floor, which was now a thick bed of purple pansies. The flood of flora reached the walls ad ivy started to climb upwards in twisting dancing designs. Daffodils and gladiolas peeked out from behind the unfurling fronds of ferns. A rosebush sprouted under the folding tray table that was Katrina's night stand and curled it's thorny way up the legs to the table top where her toothbrush, toothpaste, and hairbrush sprouted to become crimson roses, blooming in the late afternoon sun that filtered in through the makeshift plastic window covering.


Katrina picked up the hairbrush and the toothbrush and considered both carefully. The toothbrush was as it seemed, a toothbrush. The hairbrush was doing it's best to convince the world that it was really a rose. What was the difference? What made the illusion stick to the hairbrush so that it didn't fade like every other illusion Katrina had ever created, right after she stopped thinking about it?

“Knock, knock!” came her mother's voice from the doorway. Katrina spun toward the door, hiding the rose brush behind her back.

“Are you okay up here?” her mother, Claire, continued, “I didn't hear any oboe music drifting down, so I thought something must be wrong.”

“I was just going to go brush my teeth first,” Katrina held up the toothbrush to prove her point.

“Well, if you're sure you're okay?”

“Fine. I'm fine mother. Don't worry so much. I can take care of myself now.” Claire looked uncertain, so Katrina further emphasized, “I'm okay. Perfect. I'm going to start practicing now.”

“Oh all right. You know if you need anything, I'll be right downstairs.” With that, Claire pulled the bedroom door closed behind her again.

Katrina shoved the rose-brush under the bed and pulled out both her oboe and Barret's etudes. She'd figure out the mystery later.

(Continued a few days later in A Dandelion By Any Other Name)