Tekante's Various Doodles/Sketches/Etc.

Chelle and her boyfriend, Coal.





Trying a new pose. Very anatomically flawed. =/






Last one for today. Didn't bother to line it.

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“(Gasp)”, Amaria gulped in her first breath of air since the operation ended a few seconds ago. Her sweaty hand clenched mine. I leaned closer to her as she feebly opened her one emerald eye. “Terrace…” She said my name with a faint smile. “How do you feel?” I rustled her disheveled golden hair with my fingertips. “Refreshed,” she said with a moan. She had to go through this every three months. Although the Life Support Steam Core kept her alive and well as a replacement for her heart, it gradually lost minuscule amounts of pressure after every cycle and the core had to be re-pressurized every three months. “You know, I’ve been having strange dreams ever since I got this core.” She rubbed the outer shell of the core that was implanted on her chest, just above her left breast. “What kind of dreams?” She let go of my hand and wiped off the sweat with her blanket. “I always find myself sitting at an airport. I always have an airline ticket in my hand, but it never shows the flight number or any destination; just a blank ticket with my name on it. And then after a while, an announcement says that my flight has been canceled. I don’t feel disappointed or happy or anything and just leave. And then I see you when I wake up.” She glanced at me with a lovely eye. “How do you feel when you see me?” I didn’t give her a chance to answer as I leaned closer to her face and closed her lips with mine. We pulled apart to catch some air, our faces only inches apart. “You piss me off all the time,” she said coarsely. She pulled my head in and our lips met again, “But somehow you make me happy at the same time.” She contorted as our lips parted again.

The sound of a doorknob turning came from behind me. The door swung open as a tall man in a worn gray overcoat walked over to Amaria’s bed. It was the Boss, Falo Vapora; the one who invented and implanted the steam core into Amaria. “How are my Bonnie and Clyde doing?” He asked. Amaria and I smiled at each other. “Just fine, Boss; are you going to give her a check up?” I asked. He nodded. “Alright, I’ll get back to work then.” Before I left, I leaned over to Amaria one more time and kissed the leather eye patch on her right eye; the one I gave her five years ago so she would stop complaining about how ugly her scar was. She still complained about the eye patch, but I honestly thought it was cute, so she stopped complaining afterwards. Done with reminiscing, I walked out of the room and over to my dorm a few floors up.

The room seemed quite large for only holding two people. On one side was a neat and organized oak desk, a bookshelf filled with various reference sources, and a large well-made bed. That was my side. On the other side, there was another desk. Unlike mine, it was made of stainless steel and stripped down to the frame for extra room. The top of the desk was littered with tiny parts and circuits and technical manuals opened up. The bookshelf next to the desk wasn’t as organized as mine, there were just books piled up in there; most of them were filled with stickered bookmarks. And finally the bed; it was just a mattress on the floor. A single blanket unevenly covered it. The pillow was on the floor next to it. That was Amaria’s side of the room.

I sat down in Amaria’s desk chair. I preferred to be on her side of the room, it felt more comfortable for some reason. I looked upon the mess on her desktop. A large handmade manual caught my interest. It was a technical book for making explosives and detonators. It was filled with mechanical jargon that seemed to me as an entirely different language. Only someone like Amaria could understand it. After losing her cousin five years ago to the hands of the Mizuendo Family, she devoted herself into making the very things that had undone her past life, mostly for payback reasons.

There was another book on her desk. It was her personal journal. Usually, things like those would be kept private by most people, but Amaria was one to leave it open for everyone to see. I picked it up and flipped through its pages. Most of her entries were more like schedules and to do lists. I spotted an entry that didn’t look like a list or a reminder. It was dated three months ago, just after her re-pressurization. A detailed description of a quick dream about being in an airport; as she had explained to me before, she held a ticket in her hand with no flight number or destination, just her name. Not thinking much of it, I closed her journal and set it aside.

I got up and walked over to my desk. My chair felt cold as though it hasn’t been used in a long while. My desk was much neater, though I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. A single large piece of paper lay on the desk, almost covering the entire surface area. It was the architectural schematics of the Ruby Casino; pencil-etched marks were scribbled over several places. They were all fault points of the building, where a few well-placed explosives would bring the entire edifice crashing down in a magnificent explosion. My job was to find fault points in buildings, and Amaria’s job was to make the explosives to blow them up. We were called the Demolition Couple by our peers.

Most of the hard work was done. I had already planned on how to destroy the Ruby Casino weeks ago. Amaria just needed to finish wiring the detonators, which was scattered on her desk. All I needed to do was prepare. The job was to be done in a few days, after Amaria recovered. I’m not sure how much of a toll having your heart re-pressurized was, but it seemed heavy for Amaria. Even Falo was uncertain it would work, saying that the core was practically improvised on the spot. I was thankful that it worked now, but I couldn’t get the feeling out that the core would wear out eventually. The feeling made my heart sink. I forgot about preparing and laid on my bed thinking about the future. Would Amaria live long enough so that I could propose to her? That we could settle down and have a family some day? The lingering thoughts made me more and more uncertain by the minute. And then I laughed at myself on how a Mafioso such as I could ponder such innocent dreams. Me, the one who made a living planning on blowing stuff up as a father, and Amaria, the one who actually blows stuff up as a mother. Our children would probably be called Flash and Bang. I kept on laughing to myself on my ridiculous dreams. Yet I still yearned for it. We were hardly the model parent, but neither were my parents. Amaria told me that she didn’t even know if her parents were alive or dead, but they weren’t there, so they were pretty much good as dead. I rolled over onto my belly. The feeling of drowsiness overwhelmed me and I nodded off to sleep.