fandomhighdorms | First Floor Parlor [Saturday evening]

Celia had grown tired of the strange coldness of the room she shared with Eleanor -- it came and went, in patches and bursts, and something about the room made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. As much as she loved the architecture and design of the house, and as much as it was almost a relic of home...perhaps it had been left too long on its own.

Still, there wasn't much she could do about it, so Saturday night found Celia wandering out to the parlor and tucking herself onto a couch to watch the television. She flipped through channels, since that was really all she knew to do, yet, until she stumbled across some sort of bizarre medical show, in which people conducted interviews about something called a botched plastic surgery.

Celia paused as a woman described how her nose had turned out completely wrong, and how new doctors would be correcting the prior doctor's mistake. Celia only had long enough to realize that they were going to show the surgery before the channel abruptly changed to some sort of advertisement.

Without her doing so.

The advertisement was not nearly as interesting as the surgery -- there was a man telling her, in a very extended sort of way, why she ought to own something called a Ninja Blender. But she'd leave it, for just now. She wasn't messing with the remote again, for the moment. Either the television was acting on its own (bad) or there was something else at work (also bad.)

[open, omg! hat tip to

nobloodymessiah for Botched, which sounds like a horrifying/awesome show.]

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Celia blushed bright red, because Victorian, but she was more puzzled than anything else. "Is there no longer any dignity in just aging gracefully?" she wondered indignantly. "People age. Just because science can answer vanity's call doesn't mean it should."

Edited 2014-07-06 04:17 (UTC)

"There's plenty of dignity in aging gracefully," Joker replied. "The problem is, most people don't have any dignity. I mean, the only new part here is the medical science. Ponce de Leon didn't get lost in a swamp looking for a fountain of soothing bubbles, you know."

"Oh, certainly," Celia agreed. "There's plenty of potions on the market to help ladies keep their looks even in my time. But just -- to have it be so commonplace. To openly tell the world, 'I don't like what nature assigned me or how it altered with time, so I'm going to surgically change it.' It's...crass."

"People are a lot less worried about being crass, these days," Joker pointed out. "And surgeons are always willing to take advantage of their insecurities. It's crazy, is what it is."

"It is," Celia agreed soberly. "And...disgusting, that they should profit off mental illness." She shook her head. "Do the...augmented features usually look natural, when someone's had such a procedure?"

She had to wonder. Science couldn't replicate nature perfectly, surely.

"If the surgeon's good, they'll try to make it look natural," Joker replied. "But most of them don't bother to try. Most of the time, you can tell if a woman's got fake breasts from all the way across the room."

Celia knew she didn't, technically, need to know the answer to the question that immediately popped into her head. She knew that she'd probably be able to go the rest of her life blissfully without it, and that she'd probably regret it if she did ask him.

But she still did it anyway.

"...how?"

Joker gave her a cocky shrug. "Well, it involves having stared at enough women's breasts to know what they're supposed to look like," he explained. "The fake ones just hang differently. If they're done well, then maybe there's just a tiny bit of weird bulge around the edges when the woman leans over. If they're done badly -- and really, most of them are -- then they really can look like two big melons attached to the front of her chest."

"And now I have something to include in my list when I'm people-watching in this strange world," Celia said with a smile, though she was slowly shaking her head. "You'll have to point out such a specimen if you ever spot one."

She'd be looking, now.

"I am just full of helpful tips!" Joker told her. "Especially where good-looking women are concerned. Or when good-looking women are asking. It's hard to say 'no' to a pretty face."

Celia rolled her eyes, blushing. "Careful, there. I might start using those pretty-face powers of mine for evil instead of good one day, with comments like that to guide me."

It was a proven and effective technique of getting her own way in her own time, at least. Here things were a little trickier.

First Floor Parlor [Saturday evening]

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