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There is a Noriko in the bar, seated at a table by herself, surrounded by piles of tee-shirts and small studs and lengths of thread--and a pair of very sharp scissors.

She can't really sew; the closest she gets to that is tying thread into knots. But she can make interesting designs with scissors, at least.

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That is a lot of fabric. Do you mind if Ellen stares at it for a bit?

(Don't mind her. Clothing modification is a bit different when you own more suits of armor than changes of actual fabric clothes.)

After a minute of feeling watched, Noriko stops cutting long strips into the fabric of one shirt and looks up.

"Uh. Hi?" she guesses, shoving her messy hair out of her face.

"Oh-" Ellen jumps a little. "I'm sorry. I was just- I don't normally see a whole lot of people working with fabric around here. Or at home, for that matter. Mostly it's just repairs, not making new stuff or anything."

Nori quickly sets down the scissors when Ellen jumps, and looks at the pile of stuff on her table.

"Um. Well. It's not really repairs, to be truthful? I just get bored with having plain tee shirts and thought I'd see if they could be...more interesting. Or something." The one she's working on now is practically backless, made into a racerback that's essentially the width of a braid and covers nothing. She's still experimenting, but that one might be okay.

"It's still pretty neat," Ellen says. "About all I can do with fabric design is braid scraps into rugs."

"I would have so little patience for a project that big it's almost funny," Noriko admits.

She's gone through a couple shirts already, some with simple designs cut into them; a star patterned in thin strips cut on the diagonal, the backless one, one with a wide braided neck and shortened, braided sleeves and hem. None of the projects are particularly radical yet. That'll come later, when she's truly bored.

"You're welcome to come watch? Or try it out, it's not like I don't have more shirts than I know what to do with."

"I'm not sure where I'd start," Ellen admits, but she does come sit down. "Mostly I just stitch up ripped places. How did you do this with the hem, here?"

"Oh, that one's easy. You cut a bunch of slits and pull the loops through each other," she says.

And proceeds to parse that again, realizing it makes little sense. "Um. Here, grab a shirt--we're pretty close size, you can keep it if you like it--and take the scissors. I'll show you."

"Okay," says Ellen readily, and picks through the pile until she finds one. "How big do the slits need to be?"

"About...two inches, maybe? An inch apart," she says, eyeballing her own shirt. "Make the first one about half that, though. It'll stretch."

"All right," says Ellen, and starts in with the scissors. "I'm assuming this is the simple part? Things always seem to get tougher later on."

"This one's all pretty simple, really. It's just the same step over and over once you're done cutting."

"I can live with that," Ellen says. "Doesn't sound too different from working all the rags, honestly. At least the part before you sew the braids up."

"Yeah, it's the sewing I suck at," Noriko says with a shrug, picking up another pair of scissors and considering a different tee shirt. "I can never make it work for me."

"I can try to help you with that, if you like," Ellen offers. "I mean, I can't do anything decorative or fancy, but I spent a lot of time learning just basic repair stitching in vault 101. That and how to piece together shoe leather, which is a different kind of sewing but still."

"That'd be cool. Learning to stitch something ought to be pretty useful, if nothing else," she says. "How'd you learn to work with shoe leather?"

"We had to keep all of our things in the best condition possible in Vault 101, so they could be passed on to later generations," Ellen says matter-of-factly. "There were only so many spare pairs of boots left after all that time, so it was better to find what leather you could spare from somewhere or something else and patch worn boots than to try and get a new set."

Naruto stops on his way to the gym.

"What are you doing?" he asks.

She looks at the pile of shirts, and at the kid with the spiky hair. (She doesn't disdain the hair; her own is cause enough to be surprised, according to seventy-five percent of the people she meets.)

"Tee-shirt reconstruction. Trying to make them more interesting."

"It looks hard," he said.

He came from a world with strange hair, he was used to it. He thought she was pretty.

"It's...really not," she says with a shrug. "It's essentially just cutting and tying until you're happy with the end product."

She's cutting open the shoulder panels of this particular shirt to make it look like an expanded metal pattern, each intersection fastened with a tiny pyramid stud.

Naruto really isn't creative like that. He can however modify jutsu to suite his own needs.

"I'm Uzamaki Naruto!"

She blinks at that.

"O...kay," she says. "I'm Noriko. Nice to meet you?"

"This place is the best, isn't it?" asked Naruto, loving Milliways.

"I mean, it's great! You can train here, or eat, or make cool things. Oh, and the bar makes good Ramen."

Edited 2014-04-09 03:53 (UTC)

"It's definitely something," she says dryly. "It'd be better if, I don't know, it let you go back home once in a while. Without getting you stuck first."

"You're stuck? It can do that?" asked Naruto. He had never even thought of the idea that some of the people here couldn't go home.

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