A Tattered Page: Living Blade

"She was known as Scarlett. At that time she was selling arms, although it was beginning to lose its savor. She never stuck at one job for very long. Three, four hundred years at the outside. You didn't want to get in a rut.

Her hair was true auburn, neither ginger nor brown, but deep and burnished copper.. color, and it fell to her waist in tresses that men would kill for, and indeed often had. Her eyes were a startling orange. She looked twenty.. five, and always had."

We first meet Scarlett, one of the four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse in the book Good Omens (from whence all my quotes come), on the last days of her arms dealing with a broken down truck. She quickly shifts gears to become the most successful war correspondent in the world - she always seemed to arrive just as war was breaking out. She has peers, of a sort, spread out across the globe, each embroiled in their own concerns, waiting for a very particular day.

"She herself had short red hair and a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin. [...] There are only two ways a child can go with a name like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, and Pepper had chosen the other one: the three male Them had learned this on their first day of school, in the playground, at the age of four.

They had asked her her name, and, all innocent, she had told them.

Subsequently a bucket of water had been needed to separate Pippin Galadriel Moonchild's teeth from Adam's shoe. Wensleydale's first pair of spectacles had been broken, and Brian's sweater needed five stitches.

The Them were together from then on, and Pepper was Pepper forever, except to her mother, and (when they were feeling especially courageous, and the Them were almost out of earshot) Greasy Johnson and the Johnsonites, the village's only other gang."

We first meet Pepper in The Pit, hanging out with her partners in crime - more commonly known as the Them. Lead by Adam, the Them are a perfectly normal quartet of children running around Lower Tadfield and playing the kinds of games that children play. They are also waiting for a very particular day, but they don't know it yet.

Both of them are figures in Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's book Good Omens, a story about the last days of the world, this month's theme for A Tattered Page (slurl). While Pepper isn't as much of an inspiration for creations this time, Scarlett inspired a surprising number of dresses for a figure of the endless destruction of man at the hands of man. My dress by Luminary is one of those - a simple, ruched gown in black and red. It underplays the danger of Scarlett's beauty; the neckline is low but not unbelievable so, and the length offsets the armlessness nicely. It's well-rigged, the ruching making for smoother bends and the waist and knee, and the ruffles letting legs cross over legs relatively smoothly. The inside is invisible, but there are only a few angles where this becomes obvious. It's fitted mesh, which means it shapes itself to fit your body. The skirt ends at ground level with flat feet, and about mid-foot with the SLink high feet I'm wearing.

“The men in the room suddenly realized that they did not want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.

And she held her sword, and she smiled like a knife.” 

Accessories for this outfit were particularly challenging, as I wanted things which reinforced the Scarlett effect and also picked up a few hints from Pepper. So, I added freckles from my Izzie's skin and selected red and black cosmetics, reversing how they normally would be shaded to add to the unearthly effect. Lipstick, eyeshadow, and nailpolish are all from The Wicked Peach, and I took pictures at her new store, set on a fascinating crescent island. My hair is even called Pepper, a short style from Wasabi Pills with a hairband perfectly placed to land behind my ears, and tintable via a HUD to a bunch of different hues. Here I chose shades of gray to catch the crosshatch texturing of my dress. I kept the theme around wrath and darkness, choosing dark reds and smokey blacks, mixing them up so that the whole effect was alive.

The wings are an old favorite from Remarkable Oblivion - the black and dark gray a perfect balance to all of the red. I adore these wings, and felt they were a nice nod to the angels and demons of the story, at once theatrical and damned. My shoes took the longest to select, and I went through a couple different ones before settling on these amazing heels from Glamistry, which were released for Kustom9 and have now made it to the mainstore.What attracted me was the fishook heel with it's dangerous edges and cutting edge. They're platforms which give me significant height, and like all Glamistry heels they are recolorable via a HUD with colors cheaply purchasable as add-ons after buying the shoe for the initial high price. Once you add a color, you can mix and match on four different faces - the platform, the vamp, the quarter, and the heel. I went for red and black, like the rest of my look, adding just the barest light with a silver heel.

“Of course I have to take sides, said Pepper. Everyone has to take sides in something.”

( More pictures here. )

Credits: 

Skin: Izzie's, Irene
Tattoo: Fallen Gods, Ascension
Hair: Wasabi Pills, Pepper (Hair Faire)
Ears: .:Soul:., High Elf
Eyes: .:Soul:., RooMee
Eyelashes 1: SLink, Mesh Lashes
Eyelashes 2: Flugeln Brise, 05-A
Eyeshadow: The Wicked Peach, It's a Sin
Lipstick: The Wicked Peach, Pleasure Lip Stain
Wings: Remarkable Oblivion, Eternity Wings
Body: SLink, Hands & Feet
Nails: The Wicked Peach, Sparkling Wine
Bracelets: Tanoshi, Bullet Bracelets
Outfit: Luminary, Scarlett (A Tattered Page)
Shoes: Glamistry, Parrasana

Pose: Don't Freak Out

Location: Wicked Peach: Passionfruit Island
Light Settings: TOR, MIDDAY Azure
Water Settings: Phototools, Black Default

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping