Although her many notebooks provided her with an almost endless catalog of colors, after several months of indiscriminate use, Celeste had no new colors to use and despite being almost certain that Venus would not notice if a pair of colors get repeated, Celeste was not willing to take that risk. Therefore she needed to hunt new colors. In her experience Crafting Heaven was the perfect place to start.
The modest store was far from being like the other stores of the same type, but despite its relatively small size, it always enjoyed an incredible variety of materials to use in various artistic activities. In that bohemian paradise she could find different fabrics that were what interested her most but also different paints, metals, stones and everything necessary to build almost everything. The store lived according to its name.

With skillful lies and a few bribes, Celeste escaped from her bodyguards without them suspecting where she was going. She even gave her driver the day off to prevent any information from leaking between her different employees, so the girl must travel like any other mortal. The taxi driver was not friendly or elegant, and his driving skills were dubious, and as if that were not enough the air conditioning did not work properly but still, all these things were a small price she was willing to pay to hide her not so lawful activities.

Once inside the store, she found the place familiarly static, as if someone had frozen the time in that area at the very moment she had left the store. Of course none of that was possible, but still she could not avoid the suspicion that nothing in the store had moved in years, not even the old man behind the counter who greeted everyone with an odd toothless smile. Celeste could almost swear that the man was covered by a thin layer of dust as many of the things on the top shelves but she discarded that idea as a product of her imagination.
Without paying too much attention to the other artists, Celeste walked distractedly around the store taking mental notes of the different colors that caught her attention. After the first watch, she started the arduous task of stealing the colors.

The first color of her imaginary list was in a delicate fabric of bright purple located in a corner of the big room. Although she was minimally hidden from prying eyes, she did not dare to remove all the color from the fabric so she needed to create a limit to accelerate the extraction. With silent movements, she extracted a small scissors that she used to cut one of the corners of that vast rectangular fabric. After hiding the scissors again, Celeste placed the nail of her index finger on the small piece of cloth and then said its name aloud to help her focus. "Purple." The verbal and mental pulses merged into one to form a single thought that displaced all others.
Following her mental commands, the color of that small triangle of cloth left its prison to enter her nail. Under her gaze, that color no longer existed, and was replaced by gray as if that object had somehow ceased to have color.

Celeste hated that annoying side effect of her powers, and though she loved the possibilities her witch powers offered her, she still could not overcome the shock and fear of losing part of her vision of colors, so she produced her new notebook from her purse without losing any more time.
After opening the book on the first page, Celeste deposited her nail carefully between the lines separating the first row from the next. Then she pronounced the name of the color one more time. "Purple." And with that order, the color spilled from her nail in the thick line until it reached the edges forming a long line of purple with the appearance of fabric.
Then, all of a sudden she was able to see that shade of purple again. That color looked even more beautiful in her notebook because it was impossible, unrealistic, but mostly because she did it.

Blake did not, strictly speaking, have to go to a craft store. He enjoyed all kinds of art, but was primarily good at drawing, with occasional accents of paper, foil, pressed leaves, or similarly small and flat objects. When not drawing, he generally entertained himself by carving wood, painting the finished pieces with simple acrylics and a few glued on stones. Everything he used could be easily found at any art store; he did not need to go to a craft store with fabric, yarn, thread, rope, beads, buttons, styrofoam, sticks, models, rocket fuel--really, rocket fuel? In tiny cardboard tubes for model rockets, but still, why was a craft store--or any store--allowed to sell anything that could be called rocket fuel? That had to be illegal somehow or other.

Seeing as nobody seemed to care, though, Blake didn’t hesitate to add a few packages of rocket fuel to the basket that already contained a tie dye kit, three bags of assorted rocks that included something shiny and eye catching, two bags of scrap bits of specialty papers, a sketchbook, a pack of metallic colored pencils, and five glow in the dark sharpies. And oh look, were those pinecones over there?

Half an hour later Blake had added several pinecones, a bag of broken glass for stepping stones, and an X-acto knife, because the five he already had at home clearly weren’t enough. He spotted a particularly interesting color of fabric and veered toward it; the texture was unusual enough to be worth trying to reproduce. Despite the fact that Blake never actually used fabric in his artwork, the stack of fabric pieces in his room were actually more useful than many of the stones, specialty markers and other assorted bits he picked up on the chance of someday using them.

The fabric was not, as Ace liked to suggest, because Blake was secretly dreaming of being a fashion designer. Even if he was far more fashionable than Ace could comprehend. Instead, the fabric was for drawing; draped over a corner, chair, stack of boxes or other objects, or sometimes simply thrown in the air and left wherever it fell, it was a wonderful source of practice. The more variety of textures and, to a lesser degree, colors Blake had to practice with, the more practice he could do, and the faster he improved. He did, however, still restrict his fabric collection to pieces that were either interesting or pretty--some patterns were just obnoxious, and Blake had no interest in them.

The fabric that had caught Blake’s attention was acid green crackling through black, and interesting enough that he was almost there before his mind totally comprehended that there was another person there. He paused for an instant, then took the last few steps over to examine the fabric, edging around the girl that was in the way. Until, at least, he noticed the bit of fabric in her hand. “What’re you doing?”

Blake wasn’t that interested, really. But he was curious and, well, she was in the way. It would have been difficult to ignore her completely.

Thanks to her extraordinary magic, Celeste achieved to push that cool violet away from its original container making it descends gracefully to the first line of the sheet. Since it was compressed between the other lines of dull white, the color seemed to glow brightly alerting everyone of its supernatural origin. But still, not even the fear of being discovered achieved to put an end at the contemplation of her wonderful work, since each of her acts of witchcraft were wonders that needed to be contemplated.

It was while she was completely immersed in that silent meditation that the girl heard a voice, at first distant and unclear, but then as real and impossible to ignore as the very color she was staring at. The question pronounced by the adolescent destroyed her fantasy world, forcing her to descend back to the real world where a question was waiting for her.

In her opinion, the question was totally irrelevant because it was obvious that she was doing art, an artistic transformation beyond the limits of physics but then Celeste remembered which what kind of people she was dealing, simple commoners, so she prepared herself to give him a polite and serious answer. Just when her lips parted to utter her response, Celeste noted with despair that the boy was staring at her hands, she instinctively moved her gaze despite knowing what she was going to find. The small triangle of fabric still hung between her fingers. Immediately the girl rushed to hide the evidence of the crime, interposing her notebook in front of the object to prevent the boy to analyze the fabric. Hopefully he would not have noticed the unusual gray tone of that triangle.

When she finally found her voice after a few seconds that seemed to last for hours, she achieved to pronounced a shy "Nothing." that needed of all her courage to escape her lips. The girl then remained still without anything good to say or any way to get out of there; she just let the silence surround them. But then when it seemed that she was never going to be able to speak again, she found the strength she needed to return the acte d'accusation to the boy in a tone of disgust. "Are you spying me?"

The girl’s sudden movement was, really, much more interesting than the girl was herself. Blake could recognize a guilty reaction, and that seemed very much like one. Though what she had to feel guilty over, he wasn’t sure; he hadn’t gotten a good look at whatever she was hiding, but it looked like a piece of fabric. So she was in the wrong aisle for the fabric she was looking for; that one had looked like a dull gray, and nearby fabrics were bright colors and patterns. Why that should make her guilty, though, Blake had no idea. Maybe embarrassed?

The delayed answer seemed to support that theory, and Blake shrugged, shifting the various things in his hands so he could point. “Whatever. I think gray fabric’s over there, if you’re looking for it.” Over there, and most importantly, not in Blake’s way.

The following accusation earned a look of complete bewilderment. “Why would I be spying on you? You’re not anything special as far as I can see, you’re just in my way.”

She waited in silence, her heart beating wildly inside her tiny chest while she tried to stay still. Celeste was expecting him to ask about the unnatural color in the fabric or to accuse her of performing acts of witchcraft but luckily the human seemed to be oblivious of what really happened with that small colorless triangle. He pointed Celeste in the direction of the gray fabric, as if she needed another source of lifeless gray objects aside from her powers; she nodded slowly preparing herself to move away from that boy before he could discover what she really did with the color of the fabric...

But before she could move away from that place, he insulted her in the most hideous way possible. The blood rushed to her cheeks immediately to paint them with crimson as the anger in her chest grew bigger; she could feel the heat of her own blood irradiating from her skin to the point it was unbearable. The girl wanted to scream at him for saying that, to scream with enough fury to tear his eardrums and drown his brain in blood. Instead, she stomped away while repeating mentally the mean phrase he dared to pronounce. “So I am not anything special...” All the while murmuring with fury how wrong he was and how sorry he will be. ”I will show how special I am”. The words echoed in her mind accompanying her all the way to the “grey corridor”. Almost at the end of the corridor where the grey started to melt into different shades of darker colors, she found was she was looking for. A nasty shade of brown that looked exactly the way mug would look like.

Blake gave a last confused look to the girl as she stomped away, then turned to examine the crackling green fabric. Why the girl was that upset Blake had no idea; sure most people didn’t like to hear how insignificant they were, but most yelled or something instead of stomping away like little children. Or they were even deeper in denial than most and laughed at the truth instead of believing it. Whatever; as long as the girl wasn’t bothering him, Blake didn’t particularly care why. The fabric was much more interesting.

Unfortunately, the crackling fabric didn’t look quite as cool up close as it did from farther away. It wasn’t bad at all, of course, but it wasn’t as detailed or bright as Blake had thought at first, so he eyed it for a moment before moving on, looking for something else interesting. He didn’t really need more fabric, but having more wouldn’t be bad either, and since he was already there, there was no reason not to look.

It was a very bad day. Not bad enough to be compared with the time she was attacked by an octopus woman, or that other time when she was bitten by a vampire… hell, it was not even bad enough to be compared with that horrible Valentine auction were no one bid for her but it was still a very bad day.
So far she had to take a cab with a broken heating system, no TV and no mini bar… she was thirsty and freezing to death all the way to the store, and there was nothing to amuse her during the heavy traffic they encountered... yet she arrived in one piece against all odds.
She hoped her luck to change once inside the store but someone was enjoying making her suffer. A boy almost caught her using her powers and later the very same boy insulted her by saying she was “not anything special” . The words were still bouncing inside her head, fueling her anger to the point she did not even care if someone else discovered her powers. She just needed to get revenge on that boy and set the world in the right path again.

Once her weapon of mass destruction was ready, she moved back to the corridor where she met the boy the first time. He was moving away from the beautiful purple fabric that caught her attention, so she darted behind him until she was close enough. She then moved in front of him to interrupt his walking and to block any attempt to escape. So far it was all going according to her plan.
Once in front of him, the girl lifted her right hand and pressed her index finger against his shirt. "You got something... right there..." There was nothing wrong with the fabric, not even the slightest stain but she kept staring at the point where her fingernail was touching the shirt. She gave him enough time to lower his gaze and confirm that there was nothing there. She wanted him to look what it was going to happen to his beloved shirt.
When each of her thoughts were focused on that particular color, the muddy brown spilt from her fingernail forming a perfect circle that devoured the original color and texture of a big chunk of his shirt. Her ability to see that shade of brown returned immediately, rewarding her with a very pleasant sight.
“Not anything special, huh?” She crossed her arms over her chest to let him know she was not joking, she was very serious about her revenge and she was not going to let him counter attack but all the same she was already celebrating her victory over him with a big bright smile.

Blake stopped abruptly as the girl appeared in front of him, his expression shifting to a mix of confusion and exasperation. “What do you….” The question trailed off at her comment and Blake glanced down in confusion. He’d been carrying a few things, and it was a craft store; having something on his shirt was entirely plausible. Why the girl was that determined to point it out, he wasn’t sure, but girls were weird. Blake didn’t think girls normally hallucinated things on peoples’ shirts, though, and there was nothing on his, but then girls seemed to always hallucinate things on their own shirts…. And then brown appeared and started spreading.

Blake blinked, reached up to touch the spot and make sure there wasn’t something (misleadingly) weird going on, then grinned. “That was awesome! Can you do that to everything? Is it just brown? What about tan? Or yellow? Could you put color on paper? That is the coolest thing ever. Does it wear off? What about in the sun?” Blake wasn’t actually bouncing in place, but from his expression, he may as well have been.

His reaction caught her completely off guard. In just an instant, it carved an expression of utter bewilderment on her face that she could not erase for the rest of the day.
He was supposed to yell at her with fury, to cry in disconsolation for the ruined shirt or even better, he could do both at the same time and look very pathetic but what he did instead was to ask her a bunch of questions about her powers.
Without even noticing, he took the victory from her in the last second by not letting her enjoy his despair. She was furious. Even more than before, but she was also pleased that he found her powers so interesting. What should she do? Should she punch the boy and run or should she stay there and answer his questions politely? The first option was not ladylike and she was not trained in the art of making people suffer with her bare fist… so she decided it was time to talk. She did not know what pushed her to reply these questions; maybe it was the fact that he kept repeating how awesome she was … or maybe she just wanted someone to appreciate her abilities aside from Venus.

Since it never occurred to her that the boy could ask her these kinds of questions, she needed a moment to gather her thoughts and start replying. She had trained a lot with her powers to discover the limitations and possibilities for each of her abilities so it was just a matter of recompiling the information. “Yes, I can do it with any solid object.” It needed to be solid enough for her to touch it with her fingernail and it also needed to have a solid color, nothing of crystal like surfaces, so precious stones or frozen water were out of the equation… “I can pick any color and texture…” It was necessary to pick up the color previously and she needed to extract it all in one pulse but since he did not asked that, she did not say it aloud. “… and put it anywhere I like.” The new object needed to follow the same guideline as for extracting the colors and she could only paint it if there were no stripes or changes of color that could act as limits, otherwise she would need to paint each different area separately. “It does not wear off and the sun has nothing to do with it… why would the sun have any effect on it?” It was her turn to ask but she did not have more question of her own since she was still extremely puzzled by his strange reaction, flattered but puzzled, so she just keep staring at him with a new beautiful smile. Her powers could be awesome and cool but better than that was the fact that she has a fan.

“What about paint? What if it’s dry?” Being able to use paint that would actually have the texture of fabric or metal would be the coolest thing Blake had ever heard of. Technically people had attempted that, of course… metallic and pearlescent paints weren’t too bad, but any other textures were either nonexistent or mockeries, probably since paint got mixed. Well, there was always glitter, but that only sort of counted. And special effects coats, but those weren’t really anything on their own…. “You can do textures too?”

“The sun fades colors. Some more quickly than others. And, well, some just fade on their own.” Blake brushed his hair back absently at the reminder. The dye wasn’t too visibly faded yet, but it was getting close. “Like… if you put a paining and a photograph out in the sun, the photo would fade faster.” He was pretty sure, anyway, and either way it made the point. “If you copied the photo onto the paint, would it fade like a photo or like paint? Or not at all?” And why she didn’t seem to know how the sun worked Blake wasn’t sure, but then he didn’t really care, either.

It was usual for people to envy her innate beauty, expensive clothes or limousine, so she was used to the envious stares and murmurs she provoked but being in an interview with a stranger that was very interested in the extend and limitations of her powers was something totally new. It made her feel like a famous star, talking about her life and her talents. It was like one of those popular TV shows where they invited famous people and asked tons of questions. It felt great, so she kept replying with a professional smile despite the weirdness of the questions or the fact that had answered some of them already. "If it is dry, it is solid enough." Maybe it was because she had used her powers a lot of times (once she learned to love them instead of hating its source) but some of the questions were too easy, too obvious for her. Still, since no matter how many times she met Katrina while she was invisible, she could not understand how her abilities worked. So to some degree she could understand his confusion.

So, with that memory in mind, she tried to explain it as well as she could while keeping it simple. "Once you paint something, the texture and the color became one. So my powers extract both at the same time." It took her some time to make that assumption and some more time to learn the limitations of her witch-like abilities so she knew very well all that could be tricky to understand.
She was still trying to come with a better way to explain that when he explained her how the sun normally fades the color of things and then asked a few more questions regarding her mutation. "My colors do not fade." She replied, with a certain hint of pride in her voice and then she extracted one of her old notebooks from her purse. She handed it to him. Each line in each page was painted with a different color linked to a different texture, so it gave the impression that each line was made of a different material, yet touching the pages revealed that it was still paper. "These colors are one year old." She was very fond of that colorful compendium since it was the first one she made and the colors were still as beautiful as the first time she pasted them.

“That’s awesome.” It was a little disappointing that she couldn’t copy textures by themselves, being able to change the textures of colors would have been fun, but the permanence of the colors more than made up for it. Blake could think of plenty of things to do with that. “If you paint a color on something, and then take it off, does it go back to its normal color? What if you scrape off the surface?”

Blake really need to examine the notebook she showed him, he was quite impressed and his head was spinning with ideas already. He looked anyway, though, since she seemed to want him to. Not all colors he would have picked, but there were plenty of them, and what they represented…. “…Would you paint things for me? I will seriously do, like, anything if you do. That’s the best power I’ve ever heard of.” Why she would ever refuse Blake couldn’t think, but he was tense with anticipation anyway.

She already knew how awesome her powers could be but instead of scolding him for pointing the obvious, she just accepted the compliment showing a big smile on her lips. Normally she would had choose the scolding but she was in such a good mood thanks to the endless questions, the attention and the praises that she let the boy continue with his questionnaire without interrupting until it was time for her to reply.
"When I extract the color, the object becomes gray." Losing sight of the copied color was a huge drawback but those by-products of her magic were more irritating since the gray produced by the extracting processes was unnatural and lifeless and could easily be noted as something a mutant could do. "If I paint the color in paper and then fragment it, I can use one piece to extract the color and introduce it again on the gray object. And I will still have a extra copy of the color." It was a neat trick that she learned while experimenting with her witchcraft but it always produced at least one gray colored object. She hated those cursed things but luckily, paper and fabric could be easily burn to get rid of the evidence.
The next question was trickier but she had an answer for that too since she experimented a lot to determine in which moment her powers descended from the surface of the objects to affect the core... her investigation was not conclusive but she guessed that the her magic paint extended in all directions at once, painting not only the surface but everything else too. "If you scrape a painted object, you will find the same colors beneath the surface... the same happens with the gray objects." She was so familiar with those gray things that she almost forgot that he was witnessing her powers for the first time, so she searched inside her purse one more time to produce a moment later a triangle of fabric sporting that awful, lifeless shade of gray. She handed it to him too.

Aside from her inflated ego and the pleasant feeling of her work being recognized as something good, she was curious about the boy that all of a sudden changed from distant and apathetic to energetic and chatty. Of course, since she was the center of attention, she did not care for the unexpected change of character but she still regretted that he did not explode in an outburst of anger and tears. At least she had to admit that her mood improved a lot since she tried to ruin his shirt so her "worst day of the year" was slowly to change into a "somewhat enjoyable day".

All of a sudden she had an admirer that was asking her to paint things for him. He was a stranger to her, why would she waste time "painting" for him? She was about to refuse and maybe slap him in vengeance for not caring about his ruined shirt when she heard the rest of the sentence. As her lips silently repeated his words, a devilish smile started to took over her face until she was widely grinning. "Anything, huh?" The day was just getting better and better. "Where do I sign?"

“What if it was attached to another object? Like, clay on a stone, or wood? Would the color get on both of them?” It was a little disappointing that the color didn’t stay on the surface, but oh well; Blake would just have to be a bit more creative, in that case. It still opened up a whole world of art that no one else could reach. Well, except for… um.

…He should probably learn the girl’s name at some point.

In the meantime, there was art to plan. Blake accepted the piece of fabric, holding it up to examine it. The color was… flat. Cold, and dull; like stone in he Arctic. He could think of things that that would be useful for, too. “Is it always the same gray? Is it ever lighter or darker?”

Blake had been worried when she didn’t answer immediately. Not that a refusal would stop him; there had to be something that would convince her, and Blake would find it. That turned out to be necessary, though, and Blake grinned back. “Sign? Uh, I dunno. Just shake hands, I guess?” He held his out. “…Um, I’m Blake, by the way.”

As he started to catch the drift of her powers, his questions started to become more complicated yet she still knew each answer despite the apparent added difficulty. "I can only paint one object or color at a time." His question also became more annoying as he focused more on exposing her weaknesses than discovering the advantages of her powers but since his interest on her seemed to be sincere, she discarded that thought as simple paranoia. Still it was not easy to get rid of the idea that she was giving him the impression that her abilities were extremely complicated and not that useful but it was just the way her powers worked. There were a lot of unspoken rules that limited her magic but also, there were a lot of creative ways to bypass a lot of her limitations. So with that in mind, she added the next line with a little more confidence. "If the object has more than one color or it is composed by several parts, I need to paint one by one."

Her mind drifted away from a second; to the few weeks it took her to understand her abilities. At that moment she was still conflicted by the source of her magic. She was still hiding her abilities as much as she can but at least she had started to accept that she was a mutant, or at least a Primus. It sounded better that way.
When she glanced back at him, he was examining the dead triangle of cloth that she cut earlier to extract the color from the fabric for sale. "It is always the same disgusting tone of gray. It looks so dead..." Why would he be interested in that dull color? It was so boring, muffled, lacking any sign of life. Staring at it for so long was very depressing.

Despite her father will never approve of the use of a verbal contract, she extended her hand to close the deal while pronouncing her heavenly name. "I am Celeste." Meaning sky blue as the color of the sky but also celestial or heavenly. "Nice to meet you."