She’s going to wear all six of her faces tonight, and needs something that’ll pull them together. The cloud that emerges from her little black bottle isn’t exactly a vapor. Thousands of tiny knots in space-time erupt from its nozzle, clinging to her skin and bending the light around her wrists. No physical matter is involved in the formula; it’s all a trick of subjective geometry. At this point it is nothing more than the empty fragrance of a hypercube: a hollow presence which the nostrils can experience, yet cannot understand.
Most citizens of the Violet City have to die before they can try on the extra lives that they’ve collected, and even then, they must do so one by one, never able to return to the previous. She holds up the first in her collection, a mask of living pixels that blinks as it gazes through her, preloaded with memories. She presses it through her own face, and her past doubles in width. She repeats this process until all five additional selves are present in superposition with her original body, contained in full by her newly-expanded interior.
The scent becomes something like an unstable isotope of atomic lavender. It’s rising from somewhere within her sixfold future, the flowers that will someday cover one of her many graves. Four adrenaline rushes break out across time, but two confident selves is all that she’ll need tonight, one to aim each of her revolvers. She takes one last deep breath, slides a jacket over her modified skin, and walks out the door.