About an hour had passed, and Rain had spent it moping in a corner and drinking. Unfortunately, she had been drinking as though she was still a man, and the quantity of alcohol her new body could take, taking into account how thin she was, paled in comparison. As such, she was drunk. Extremely drunk. Her fingers were presently groping around inside her handbag, idly and absent-mindedly stroking the Chronivac, while bobbing her head maliciously with the music.
Somebody tapped her on the shoulder and she spun around.
"Bored of the facade?" he asked.
"It sylmaltaniously punctuates my life and elevates my despair. It's like the perfect rainstorm, a million souls intertwined in pretense," she replied.
"But drifting with these souls only serves to make ours seem more solitary. We are pariahs, together," he said.
"Rain," she said, extending her hand in an accidentally masculine gesture.
"Archdemon," he said, taking her hand and kissing it.
In his mind she was trying to go over things rationally. Trying to work out what was going on, why she felt so drunk, why she couldn't stop talking like this, why she was responding to this person when normally he was the sort of person to avoid, and why she wasn't just taking the Chronivac and changing herself back into the man she used to be, because she had tested it, and it had worked, which was origianlly all he'd intended. He tried to think these things, and think them through, but what came out was not what she had intended the ideas to sound like.
"On this uncontrollable train called earth
I have found a semblance of truth, though the
truth is only a different kind of deception.
Is my deception a more honest deception than another's?
I hear words and see eyes but the brain hides,
and inside there is a sanctuary nobody can touch.
What I was once and what I once was going to be
have all blurred with the speed of perception,
and what I am is relative."
All the while her hand still caressed the Chronivac inside her handbag.
"Can I get you another drink?" asked Archdemon.