Emptying Pockets : A Musebox

It's rare that there's any sort of real privacy in Liminal Space, so when it decides to temporarily become a maze of run-down hotel corridors with rooms to match, Toshi actually feels almost cheerful for once. The rooms look clean, too, if old and careworn. There's a bland painting of a vase of flowers over the bed, although Toshi had to draw the curtains on the one window, because the almost cartoonish landscape outside with a purple sun and sky blue trees was making him feel motion sick. His jacket is already draped over the one chair in the room, and once the 'outside' is dealt with, he undoes the tie and shirt, too, leaving them on one edge of the bed. The lines of accumulated scars, new and old, are a pale web against his tanner skin. He's lucky - he doesn't scar badly, and he caught the worst of that explosion all those years ago with the arm shielding his face rather than his face itself.

Still, his line of work, past and present - it leaves marks. The newest is the clean line across his right bicep, still pinkish-red despite the magical healing, though he knows it will fade. The oldest is an almost-invisible patch of paler skin on one elbow, care of a sidewalk and childhood. Others, perhaps, were more obvious. His left shoulder was the worst of it, and probably always would be - a patchwork of surgical scars, skin grafts, and shrapnel pockmarks. The latter speckled his chest and face, too, though not nearly as badly. Then there were the ones he didn't like dwelling on - the thin, clean lines of the precise incisions he'd woken up with on Mobeius.