Chromium

9.1

First part of the chapter. I'll post the rest on Sunday.

Unedited/first draft

This must be Reyes' revenge. There is no other explanation. Otherwise, why would he subject me to this kind of torture?

The "torture" in reality was nothing but a simple "beauty session" to take care of her skin, hair, clothes and made her look as close as possible to Karniek's woman, Katrina.

Well, maybe "simple" was a bit of an understatement considering there were two make up artists, a hairstylist, three professional shoppers, and including Selene, six maids.

Theoretically, they were taking care of her, but really it seemed they took great pleasure in making her suffer. The makeup artists were using her so-called dead skin as an excuse to rub some cream on her body and the professional shoppers manhandling her as they took her measures with such concentration Dia almost felt like they were preparing her wedding dress.

Dia wasn't exactly the marriage type, not after the few and very bad experiences she had with men. But when she saw what kind of dresses the personal shoppers prepared for her, she understood she was wrong.

Maybe a wedding dress wasn't so bad after all. 

The attires they showed her consisted in a variety of leather and latex costumes, or worse, see-through fishnet dresses so revealing that maybe even a pornstar or a hooker would have refused to wear them. In the end, she began to wonder what kind of woman this Katrina was, or if Karniek had some kind of weird fetish and forced his lover to wear these things.

After more than an hour of complete agony, Dia couldn't take it anymore. She started shouting at the personal shoppers, demanding for something that actually covered her "assets". In the end, she settled for a black leather mini dress. It was still too low cut, way too tight---at least a size smaller than necessary---and she really didn't like the zipper running through the middle of it. If someone pulled it, she would be completely naked.

And probably that's the point.

But since the sexy horrors the wardrobe was filled with were more suited to a pornstar on crack, or worse, a nutjob with a fetish for cosplay, Dia took it as the lesser evil. Besides, she felt pity for the poor maids who were panting and sweating as they ran around like headless chickens.

Speaking of maids, Suzanne was waiting near the entrance for her turn. She looked even less happy than her, her arms crossed and her lips pursed as she glared at Dia like the entire situation was her fault.

She was tall, just an inch or two taller than Dia, and very pretty though she looked a bit stern, or as Jenkins would have called her self-important attitude, "bitchy". In other times, before one of past emperors decided that fashion was a social scourge, and a woman showing her legs on TV a whore, Suzanne might have been a model, though looking at her generous bosom and her full and sensual lips, Dia believed another profession was more suited to her peculiar talents. Well, probably she was just jealous.

Suzanne and Dia weren't the only two people who looked unhappy about being here. As the only male in the room, Omen was showing what it really meant to be stoic, staring into the void with such concentration that Dia began to wonder if he was a new kind of cyborg and could melt the walls with his laser eyes. 

But among a good line-up of unhappy people,  it was the hairstylist who drew the short straw. She was at her wit's end, as she tried to coax, or beg, Dia to let her do her job.