SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

twenty-one ━ in too deep

"Shut up," she mumbled to herself, placing the supplies back on the easel margin, then coming down down to reach under the coffee table for the last tube barely sticking out from under the shadow of the furniture. Much to her surprise though, as soon as her hand wrapped around the item, she could tell it wasn't a paint tube at all. She pulled that thin flaslight out and while she sat back on her heels, wondering what that would do amongst art supplies on an easel's margin, a single click shone bright purple light in her eyes.

UV, she grimaced, moving the light away. Doesn't make it less out of place.

A single second separated that underwhelming conclusion from an actual idea that had Mia back up on her feet almost fast enough to knock over that darn easel and its stupid painting again. She caught its edge and shone the UV light over it though, holding it close enough such that her shadow alone could confer some shade for it to work.

And then she saw it: 'rA9', written in his transparent paint shinning bright blue under the glow of the UV light.

"That's...," Mia tried to control herself not to smile too early. "Something," she ended up nodding instead. After all, there was only one marked painting, one she didn't even quite grasp the meaning off. It seemed to be broadly depicting some sort of liquid dish trying to be eaten by several hands grasping at it without a single spoon in sight. It was weird, that much she could tell. Perhaps a nudge at gluttony, she considered before deciding it was for the beyter to leave the analysis of a rather disgusting painting for after she confirmed there were no other such marked art pieces.

There were a little over fifty painted canvases in thay art studio, but after finding a second one marked with 'rA9' laying on the floor, Mia decided ro rule out any of the marked paintings being hung on the walls. Sticking with searching through the newer paintings on the ground cut a good chunk of her work and in just another minute, she turned off the UV light, standing before three canvases: the gluttony metaphor, a portrait of a woman looking into a distorted mirror of some sort and a painting of an industrial staircase. The last of the three looked vaguely familiar to Mia, and it was the only one which instead of having 'rA9' written on it, it had a small drawing of a matrix-like maze, similar to the patterns of scrambled raw data terminals detect off of a deviant's mind.

However, she could see no connection between the three paintings and while she had had the idea to lock the doors of the art studio before starting to move the paintings from their places to have them all on the ground before her eyes, she doubted she had much time left before the gallerist came back with the documents.

"Come on," she urged herself with a desperate whisper. "Think, Mia."

The painting depicting that familiar staircase took priority, but she was quick to realize her memory was failing her when she needed it most. Unavoidably, she ended up thinking of how fast Connor might have spotted the connection between those paintings, if there was one at all.

Before she could take that unfair comparison tangled into just how much she missed him too far, she moved her attention to the strange portrait. There was some strange ornament on its margins, around which the image of the woman she thought was being depicted got distorted beyond recognition. Overall, the image itself had a silvery tone to it, sticking to black and white tones.

Gluttony, a fucked up mirror and a dark staircase, she recounted all her analysis gathered. A whole bunch of nothing, that's what this is.