Minnie blinked, and her whole affect changed, her free hand going to push her glasses up on her nose, her eyes lighting animatedly. Its not a superhuman change - she's still shaky and the pain is still there, and she doesn't quite smile. But it IS a change.
"Oh... oh yes, yes, its my specialty, miss. I've been studying 'er most on my life." a little hint of the 'trashier' parts of the city crawls into her accent, giving it a nasal burr. "I've studied the circumnavigation and the Wright family, and the... I've studied most of it. You haven't read it? Yer a medical person, there is a deep description of the plague of the Northern lands in it, summat strange, summat strange. When I writ the guide to the circumnavigation, I even met a traveller or two who had been s'far as that, one of my students even, later! And then, in the manifests, there's been significant work done, 'round the provisions they brought, which rightly becomes a medical concern as well, p'ticularly in a seafaring city, for you know the best minds of the time were rallied roond the journey, and had some theories... well, much o'er my head, I dinny study the ways of the body in my time at university..."
She rattles on, the words clatter out in a ramshackle way, less the practiced cant of the lecturer finding their home turf, and more the way that, perhaps, one might hear a child-like devotee of the opera swooning over a diva's performance. Her eyes glitter and grow distant and her voice, between the shakiness of her state, the thickness of her accent, and the perambulations of her excitement, grows nigh incomprehensible at times.
Additionally to this, the gesturing, and her general disarray, disarrange her clothing, so that one of the shoulders of her gown works its way off. IT is a flash of sight, because the revelation of her skin startles her back immediately into the present. But in that flash, on the skin of her shoulder, the upper chest where her neckline should cover it, and shadows that go down into what the little slip does not reveal - breast, belly, and hip - is visible dark, black strokes. IT is not tattoos - the sweat of her skin has smeared some of it - but rather ink or paint, and it is figured into neat, dark letters, running back and forht in lines along her skin.
She blanches and her injured hand jerks, as she rushes to pull the dress back into place, and her voice stops immediately. Her eyes are rabbit-frightened.
//Ah, there you dun have done it now, little gutterslut. I hope you're proud, you, rattling off about your petch and blather, and this is what comes of it.//
Her voice, now comes, tiny, fragile. Her free hand lies in her lap - a discerning eye might notice her digging the middle fingernail into her palm - hard, actually, quite hard, the knuckles whitening, the skin straining against the sharp nail.
"T... terrible sorry, Goody. I'm... I'm sorry..."
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