Result of tweaking thin character
EIGHT MILLION GODS
3: In the Kitchen, With a Blender
Nikki liked pens. She took some comfort knowing that most writers did. Only her obsession for ink-based writing instruments was on the same level as a wino's fixation on wine. The only things she had ever stolen in her life were pens, usually cheap ones off people's desks. The only new pen was a six hundred dollar Cartier Diabolo fountain pen with an 18K gold nib. (One couldn't really blame her; her mother had dragged her down Rodeo Drive in some vain attempt to make Nikki presentable during an election campaign and triggered a writing fit in Neiman Marcus. She had locked herself in a bathroom stall and wrote out a vivisection on a fist-full of paper towels.)
What "worked" best for her hypergraphia were cheap retractable ballpoint pens supplied by pharmaceutical companies to hospital staffs to promote their products. It was her special brew in a brown paperbag. She could hold the compulsion off sometimes by just gripping one tight and clicking it repeatedly.
Since arriving in Osaka, she fallen in love with Zebra Surari emulsion ink pens with 0.05 points in five colors. She bought them like some people bought cigarettes. She had a dozen in her backpack, mostly black, her favorite weapon, but at least one of the other four colors. She paired them with a plain notebook sold at FamilyMart, stunningly cheap yet superior in paper quality. God, the Japanese understood writing by hand.
Handcuffed in the back of tiny police squad car, she really wished she could think of anything except pens. And how much she needed one in her hand. With paper. And both were within her backpack beside her.
Maybe if she used her teeth…
Then again, perhaps thinking about pens was better than thinking about the mess she was in. This wasn't the United States. The police could and would hold suspects as long as they wanted. There was one case where they arrested a man and held him for questioning for three days. He was suspected of nothing more than groping women on the train. When his parents reported him missing to the very police station that was holding him, they weren’t told that he was just down the hall. In the end, the police realized that they had the wrong man and released him without apology despite media outcry.
And they suspected her of murder!
She bit down on a whimper as the need to write grew a little more desperate. She closed her eyes, took deep cleansing breaths, and tried to focus only on her happy place. Pristine white sand. Water so blue that it defied description.
The car pulled to a stop and they were at the Osaka Prefectural Police Headquarters next to the sprawling gardens of the Osaka Castle.
God, she would kill for a pen.
#
The police department looked much like its American counterpart – desks crowded with computers, office supplies, and paper files threatening to overrun everything. Luckily they paused her by a desk with pens in a coffee mug. She eased around so the cup was behind her and in reach of her handcuffed hands.
"Watashi no nihongo wa heta desu," she said while running her fingers blindly over the pens. It meant -- hopefully – that her Japanese was bad. "Wakarimasen." Which meant "I don't understand." She found a retractable pen. She gripped it tightly, and carefully, silently, clicked it. She took a deep breath and relaxed as she breathed it out. "Please. Does anyone speak English?"
The policemen were talking to each other, ignoring her. She silently clicked the pen a few more times, trying to decide what to do. If this was the American police, she would ask for a lawyer and refuse to talk to the police until someone showed up, probably from the public defender office. All the antidotal evidence, though, seemed to suggest that Japanese citizen didn't automatically have the right to an attorney. If she asked for someone from the American consultant, would they call the embassy for her? Did she want someone?
No. And definitely not. She clicked the pen again.
3: In the Kitchen, With a Blender
Nikki liked pens. She took some comfort knowing that most writers did. Only her obsession for ink-based writing instruments was on the same level as a wino's fixation on wine. The only things she had ever stolen in her life were pens, usually cheap ones off people's desks. The only new pen was a six hundred dollar Cartier Diabolo fountain pen with an 18K gold nib. (One couldn't really blame her; her mother had dragged her down Rodeo Drive in some vain attempt to make Nikki presentable during an election campaign and triggered a writing fit in Neiman Marcus. She had locked herself in a bathroom stall and wrote out a vivisection on a fist-full of paper towels.)
What "worked" best for her hypergraphia were cheap retractable ballpoint pens supplied by pharmaceutical companies to hospital staffs to promote their products. It was her special brew in a brown paperbag. She could hold the compulsion off sometimes by just gripping one tight and clicking it repeatedly.
Since arriving in Osaka, she fallen in love with Zebra Surari emulsion ink pens with 0.05 points in five colors. She bought them like some people bought cigarettes. She had a dozen in her backpack, mostly black, her favorite weapon, but at least one of the other four colors. She paired them with a plain notebook sold at FamilyMart, stunningly cheap yet superior in paper quality. God, the Japanese understood writing by hand.
Handcuffed in the back of tiny police squad car, she really wished she could think of anything except pens. And how much she needed one in her hand. With paper. And both were within her backpack beside her.
Maybe if she used her teeth…
Then again, perhaps thinking about pens was better than thinking about the mess she was in. This wasn't the United States. The police could and would hold suspects as long as they wanted. There was one case where they arrested a man and held him for questioning for three days. He was suspected of nothing more than groping women on the train. When his parents reported him missing to the very police station that was holding him, they weren’t told that he was just down the hall. In the end, the police realized that they had the wrong man and released him without apology despite media outcry.
And they suspected her of murder!
She bit down on a whimper as the need to write grew a little more desperate. She closed her eyes, took deep cleansing breaths, and tried to focus only on her happy place. Pristine white sand. Water so blue that it defied description.
The car pulled to a stop and they were at the Osaka Prefectural Police Headquarters next to the sprawling gardens of the Osaka Castle.
God, she would kill for a pen.
#
The police department looked much like its American counterpart – desks crowded with computers, office supplies, and paper files threatening to overrun everything. Luckily they paused her by a desk with pens in a coffee mug. She eased around so the cup was behind her and in reach of her handcuffed hands.
"Watashi no nihongo wa heta desu," she said while running her fingers blindly over the pens. It meant -- hopefully – that her Japanese was bad. "Wakarimasen." Which meant "I don't understand." She found a retractable pen. She gripped it tightly, and carefully, silently, clicked it. She took a deep breath and relaxed as she breathed it out. "Please. Does anyone speak English?"
The policemen were talking to each other, ignoring her. She silently clicked the pen a few more times, trying to decide what to do. If this was the American police, she would ask for a lawyer and refuse to talk to the police until someone showed up, probably from the public defender office. All the antidotal evidence, though, seemed to suggest that Japanese citizen didn't automatically have the right to an attorney. If she asked for someone from the American consultant, would they call the embassy for her? Did she want someone?
No. And definitely not. She clicked the pen again.
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