Mech Pilot who’s still listening to that 8-track you gave them.
The studio door opened with its telltale squeak, audible even through the frayed drums and guitar blasting over the speaker. "Torus?" Marcus's voice called. "You in? I brought a visitor."
"Yeah, I'm here," they called back, carefully setting their pencil down before grabbing their cane. "Feel free to turn on lights, it's not like I need them." The light switch clicked, and a pair of heavy boots walked into the main studio space – the visitor, presumably, their agent was too fancy for those. "You another buyer?" they asked, turning down the music with a remote before hobbling over to offer a hand.
"Potentially," a feminine voice replied, completing the handshake. It was cool and clipped, an I-don't-care-about-relating-to-you-just-your-story type, but something about it tugged at a memory. "Got a shpiel to sell me on it?"
Torus chuckled. "Down to business, huh? Well, feel free to walk around, see if there're any you like. I'll keep working on my next piece, if you don't mind?"
"Not at all." It was going to bother them if they couldn't place the voice. They forged on ahead as the visitor's boots started slowly walking past finished pieces.
"So, story goes like this," they began, making their way back to their stool. "Dirt poor family on a dirt poor rock, only way out was military service, I happened to be all right on a drum set so they threw me into the pilot's chair. Never thought my days listening to punk music'd wind up with me being the picture of the Man, but that's life for ya." They paused a moment, trying to remember where they'd left off as they picked up their pencil again. "So I'm made a pilot, learning to turn 40 tons of metal into all-terrain death and destruction, and one night I think back to my old punk days and say 'damn, I miss art.' The Man may have me on the posters, but that don't mean I gotta be the Man, y'know? So I requisition some art supplies, make a hobby of dinkin' around with a pencil and paper.
"Halfway through my second tour of duty, there're enough casualties on an op that some squadrons get rearranged, and I meet a girl. Call her Camilla, call her Suzy, whatever, she kept her name close and I ain't gonna breach her trust by giving you her real one. She's hot, ace on the control sticks, knows just how to toe the line with the COs so you can fuck off, the best kind of squaddie. She spots me drawin' one day, says she likes it, and fool that I am I get it in my head that I'm gonna impress her.
"Now, I'm a dumbass, so when I decide I'm gonna impress her, I'm not satisfied with simply drawing her all nice and pretty or whatever. I decide I gotta be able to draw her with my eyes closed, get the proportions all memorized and such and get something that looks about right just from feel alone. This is, I repeat, the dumbest idea I've ever had in my life. Unfortunately, I'm also a stubborn dumbass, so eventually I get it down."
The slow tromp of boots continued circling the studio. "Fast forward about two months," Torus continues, "and me and an enemy chucklefuck are stuck trading fire while we both hope to gods our squaddies can flank. Unfortunately for me, their squaddies are faster, and I'm caught across the cockpit by three one-fifty millimeter jacketed bullets. Everything around me's fucked, my reactor's pierced and going critical, I barely manage to find the ejection lever and bail out before I'm cooked. My face is slashed up so I can't see shit and I make the worst touchdown a drill sergeant could imagine. It's all I can do to feel around for something resembling a hidey-hole and activate my emergency transponder.
"As you can probably guess by my presence here, medivac eventually locates me and gets me out of the hot zone. My former cockpit's busted both of my eyes and left shrapnel throughout my legs, enough the surgeons told me afterwards that they coulda made a scale model outta what they pulled out. I'm patched up, put through PT, and then honorably discharged, which is to say dumped on the street. No surprise, I end up homeless and begging, 'cuz the military's money doesn't get all that far when you're blind and crippled. Still, if there's one thing I can do without sight, it's draw my old squaddie, so that's how I try to get people's attention.
"At this point you can probably put together the rest of the story. Marcus spots me on his walk to work, thinks there's a good story to a blind artist like me, works his agent magic, and now I'm working in a proper studio getting to see what happens when I use a paintbrush instead of a pencil for my squaddie's face." Torus shrugged, letting the fuzzed vocals of their music fill the space for a moment. "That's about it. Whatcha think?"
The boots came to a stop back where they started. "I think if I'd known I'd leave such an impression on you, I would've picked better songs for the 8-track."
Torus froze, then rapidly set the pencil down to whirl atop their stool. "Fuck off."
"Yep."
"Fuck off!" They leapt down, forgoing their cane to instead barrel into their visitor. They knew whose voice it was now. "You absolute asshole!"
"Hey, Torus," she laughed, wrapping her arms around them.
"Fuck you. You let me monologue about you!" They squeezed her tight, and dropped their voice just for her to hear. "I missed you, Ricky."
"I missed you too."
