Izola made a murmur of agreement, not fully listening to what her client was saying as she put the finishing touches on what promised to be a wonderful dye job, even by Izola's standards. The colours were all wrong, but if she changed them she might consider it for herself. Laughing at the end of the anecdote, she produced a mirror and handed it to the young witch, "all finished!"

A few minutes later, the customer was leaving the salon with a satisfied smile, while Izola smiled in content, glad of the extra weight in the till. While business wasn't doing badly, Izola needed to restock a number of ingredients, which meant that buying moss green robes last week at vast expense hadn't been especially wise. But they had been the most wonderful green, and they had been worth every knut.

Izola found it difficult to want more customers, she preferred it when there were enough for her employees to all be occupied while she relaxed, with the occasional interesting client to prevent herself from getting bored. Unfortunately, Lucy was well aware of her employer's reluctance where boring, unattractive people were concerned, and always managed to ensure that Izola did her share of the work. Izola would have fired Lucy, but she liked her, and she was very good at her job.

Even with Lucy masterminding the appointment schedule, Izola had some free time, so she retreated to the tiny staff rest room, rolling her eyes when she saw the lack of alcohol, and instead preparing a mug of coffee. She had hardly taken a sip when a bell began to ring, and, rolling her eyes, Izola put the cup down before heading into the shop proper, wondering why Lucy had seen fit to summon her.

The shop door slammed open and shut, punctuated by a bell dingle. The body of one Anadotti Squiggs had her back to the door. Then she slid down her back, knees bending out at odd angles from under her skirt as her head sunk below the window. Then, after a moment, she contorted in such an amazing way to peek out a nearby window as her entire body slanted with her feet still anchored in the same positions.

All quiet on the western street. Which meant she was in the clear. Lay low for half an hour or so and then she was a bus ride out of here with the loot. Heh heh heh...

Chuckle both thought and audible in a wispy laugh.

It was getting up from the floor that made Dotty realize that she was in a hair salon of some kind. Her head turned to look at the eyes staring back at her as the utter mangrove that was her wealth of raven locks unstuck from the door. Of course diving into the mud was all part of her escape plan and not just an accident of not seeing where she was going that luckily got her out of sight of her persuers.

Izola almost winced at the appearance of what looked like a very grubby girl. Her mind, used to analysing appearance, scrabbled for something to start with and ended up with mud. A meaningful stare at Lucy was met with an apologetic one- what, had Lucy not realised that maybe she should repel such an individual before they got mud on the floor?

The mud monster scraped itself off the floor, watched by Izola, Lucy, and a growing number of customers. The word reminded Izola that she was supposed to be doing something, and she motioned at Lucy. Get ye gone, hideous apparition, she thought with satisfaction, waiting for Lucy to dismiss her. "Would you like a standard haircut, or perhaps a dye job as well, madam?" Lucy asked the girl instead, and Izola cursed her again. She was sure that Lucy hated her and wanted the business to fail.

Izola stepped forwards, a falsely cheerful smile in place. "Good morning," she said to the young witch, silently wondering if they could pay her to leave, and if so, how much they should pay. Unfortunately, Lucy took the moment to shut the till, reminding Izola that they were supposed to serve those who came into their shop if they wanted to make money. "I'm Izola, is there any way we can help?" The look that accompanied the line suggested that Izola could think of many, many ways in which to do so. Closer inspection had revealed that the girl was terribly unkempt, probably putting no effort at all into her appearance. Well, mud monsters were not renowned for good hair.

Standard haircut or dye jobs? It might have been the mud in her ears but Dotty had to make sure that was what she heard, it was too easy to hear something incorrect. Even better, though, she smelled alibi! And no, it smelled nothing like dirt. Nothing said occupied time like getting your hair cut and in case anyone noticed too soon this salon was probably big enough to have its own mudworks spa however-it-worked. Dotty had heard of them but had never been in one.

Come to think of it, she couldn't think of the last time she had been to a hair service spot and that had always been a blast when she was a kid. As a little girl her black lengths could grow inches in a week. On cuts with her mom and sister mom would trade raunchy gossip with the other ladies under the hair dryers, talking loud to be heard of the din.

"Yes!" Dotty said to Izola although she didn't know why the name was important even though she had seen 'Izola's Hair and Beauty Salon' on the sign outside. "Haircut and dye. Like, the whole head or can you do streaks?"

Izola stared at the girl, slightly surprised by her sudden enthusiasm. Surely mud monsters were not supposed to want hair cuts? Let alone be enthused by them, although of course Izola could understand that anyone would be happy to be rid of such dour tresses and have more interesting ones- it was a sentiment she shared. Black was for people who couldn't be bothered to co-ordinate, or wanted to pass unnoticed. It was such a lazy colour.

"Streaks?" she repeated, with a faintly insulted air, "at the very least, I can do streaks," she said, stressing the word with a mixture of amusement and contempt. It was nice to have some admiration for a change, because nobody around her seemed to appreciate just how fabulous what she did was, apart from herself.

"What kind of colour? I can do permanent, a year, month, week, or one wash," Izola rattled off, "Oh, and there's glitter, tone changing, thermochromatic, and glow in the dark, although for now glow in the dark is green-only." She gestured to an empty chair, scanning the girl with more care now that she was a client and not just an aberration. "Facials are also available," she added, unable to resist.

"In any case, would you like to sit down?" she asked, far too conscious of Lucy sitting right by her, and gestured to an empty chair.

The variety of options overwhelmed Dotty. Loads of awesomeness of why hadn't she done something like this more often? She rarely had the patience to do anything with her own hair so this was like throwing a buffet in front of a starving man or a wall of paint chips in front of a starving artist that ate paint chips.

"Sparkly, wait, thermochrome, no maybe the glow in the dark." Growing up with two girls and a boy in the same kids bedroom meant it had cramped mixed decor like the varieties of hair color offered. "Heck, I've got enough hair, each side should be different!"

She sat in the chair with a squelch. "Then maybe something facially."

Izola, warming to the girl, smiled with a little more cheer at the promise of an interesting dye job. Hair dye was not meant to hide the fact that you were going grey from the world. Her smile evaporated at the noise made by the girl sitting down, and it was only with supreme effort that she held back from saying, "maybe?" in her most derisory tone.

Or maybe she hadn't. Well, it served the girl right for wrecking her chair. Nobody would sit in a mud-stained chair, and upholstery was expensive. Deciding that denial was by far the easiest method, Izola trilled, "So, green if you're having glow in the dark, but what would you like for your other colour?"

She picked up a strand of  her client's hair, looking at it and finding that her early opinion of little maintenance would have to be revised to minimal maintenance. "Perhaps I could give you something to make sure that the colour stays better?" Izola asked, pleased with her tact. She released the hair, scrutinising the girl in the mirror to try and work out if she would need to dilute the dye. Some people just didn't have the complexions for vivid colour.

Dotty rubbed the muck off her face with a mud stained sleeve, doing little more than sculpting the mud around her face rather than cleaning off her skin. "Sparkly pi--purple!"

That was fitting, just like her sister's favorite pony toy that Dotty had lopped the mane off of with a pair of scissors once. In the hands of the young child Squiggs 'safety shears' was truly an oxymoron.

"Whatevers gets it to fit. You don't know any hair spells that just give you one tap and wham! your hair's set in the morning?" Of course, for Dotty morning was frequently some time in the afternoon. "I've got a friend whose hair is almost as long as mine," she said, referring to Dazmond Weidman "and she sometimes has the back curl up into a pleasant snarl like a fluffy furby. Or little beads and stuff in there too. But not all the time. After a hard night of boozing it often sticks out like a shark fin on whatever side of her head she passed out on."

"But my sister would shoot me death glares because she was jealous of my hair..." Dotty was really getting into her animated chatter now. "...but she was a dull brown and had split ends like nobodies business, whereas my hair was always past my butt before it got cut. My brother said that was proof I was adopted but that's bull, mom had photos of my delivery, which she said was for 'insurance purposes' or whatever she meant when she wanted to trump dad in an arguement. But then we all had to use this cheap yellow shampoo, it just smelled like yellow, and when my sister was twelve she really got big into personal fragrances and hated the same yellow smell, so we would hit up the casino resorts when dad was hitting the slots and lift the hotel sized shampoo and body wash samples..." And onwards and onwards.

Izola was quietly relieved that she hadn't chosen pink, and she let the girl's hair fall with a smile, "an excellent choice." The colours she used were mostly brewed to look good together, but pink and green was never a good idea.

The prattling of customers was far more familiar than the childish colour selection, and she pulled a hairbrush out, tugging it once through the unkempt hair to get it to start before leaving it to continue. "Unfortunately not- and anyway, too much magic isn't good for your hair, you get all sorts of problems- I had a friend whose hair was always trying to eat chips." Izola smiled into the mirror, before returning to Dotty's hair, fingers manipulating it into different shapes.

She listened to the girl's chatter with half an ear, biting her lip in amusement. "Very sensible," she said, sweeping the lion's share to the side of her face before moving it back, "My parents used tea tree shampoo which smelled very… intense," Izola settled for, giving the hairbrush a tap with her wand to encourage it through a tangle. She knew that the girl would continue to chatter forever if she wasn't diverted, and Izola was more interested in having a conversation than listening to a monologue.

"So, you've got two siblings? Are you the oldest?" she asked instead, her interest unfeigned. Izola had never wanted siblings, the idea horrified her, but she found other people's siblings intriguing.

"Nope, youngest. They used to call me runt---ERRAAGGH!!" Even with a magic hairbrush tugging at her hair it hurt like the Charles Dickens as her hair was being un-snarled. "Don't pull it out!"

She rubbed her head where it smarted, all train of thought derailed like the time she tried to flatten a stapler on the tracks. "Older brother and then my sister was above me. But I was the only one who was special and didn't let them forget it." The sibling rivalry power struggle sure had shifted when Dotty found out she was a witch.

Her stomach rumbled in a delayed response to chips. Oh that's right, nothing to eat today but mud sandwich from having her mouth open when she dived into the pit.

"The easiest way to get chips out of my sister was to tell her she'd get fat by eating them. She was so looks crazed since middle school, I never saw that much of a point to image as everything, though I do like getting prettied up every once in a while." Said the girl who was comfortable wearing ten pounds of muck like a second skin.

Izola sighed at the girl's theatrics, tapping the hairbrush with her wand and administering a few, more controlled, strokes before leaving it to continue. "You were the runt," she prompted, uncapping a bottle and sniffing at it while the tale was continued. Wincing, she re-corked it, shaking it vigorously, before reaching over to check the progress of the hairbrush.
 
"Having siblings sounds violent," she muttered disapprovingly, flicking the breaks off and tugging the chair over to the sinks. The brush followed, and the witch sighed heavily, placing a hand gingerly on the girl's head before tugging, hard, to get rid of a particularly stubborn tangle. "Sorry, there was a tangle," she explained, sounding unrepentant, "it was the last one."

"I'm going to try and wash the mud out of your hair, please lean back," Izola instructed, placing a supporting hand beneath the girl's head and planning a manicure. "Your sister sounds a little gullible, I would never give up chips for such a silly reason," she said, not entirely truthfully, "did that work for chocolate, too?"

"Violent, pah! There was a reason mom never wanted Dad watching wrestling in the house where we could see." Rug burns and flying haymakers had be common Squiggs kids afflictions in her day. That floor lamp never stood a chance.

Dotty's neck undulated as her head leaned back. Mud was already sagging from her cheeks. Her eyes rolled back to see the (pick one: Miss Ms Mz Mdm Mr) Bellamane. Whatever shoddy joint was she running to inflict pain on costumers? Mom could get pretty livid at her hairdressers. Though Dotty conveniently forgot that she had not a means to pay for all this service so customer she was not really.

She smiled, tongue caught in her teeth in the happy memories of getting back at her sister in variously horrid fashions. "Oh, I got her really good once before swimsuit season..." Dotty began a story that, under the scrutiny of someone who didn't expend every availability to waste her conscious with creative concoctions of chemicals, would be an early warning sign of her magic manifesting. "I got her favorite pink paisley and red shorts and pink belt, this leather one with double rows of stud holes, all to shrink on her. Not, on her but before the next time she put them on. Even guilted her with extra Sunday breakfast donuts the day before to make her think she had gotten huge. Oh the sobbing when she couldn't button or buckle anything up!"

She brought a hand to her face with fingers curled in examination of dirty, slightly jagged fingernails. "Though the joke fell flat when she found that her other pants were still the same size." The ensuring brawl had gotten her sister to sleep on the living room couch for a week for not wanting to share a room with Dotty.

Izola kept her laugh quiet out of respect for her customers, and fear that Lucy would decapitate her if she was too loud. "Merlin, you were horrible to her," she said cheerfully, sounding more than a little admiring. The more she heard about siblings, the more she became convinced that they were inherently evil, because the level of viciousness that passed as normal between them was of a magnitude that would make Izola fear for her life.

Izola measured out double-quantities of small yellow crystals, tipping them into the water and stirring, "When I was in primary school- I think I was eight- there was a problem with nits, and one girl said that I was the one who had nits." The witch sighed, adding a few more crystals to the water, "I made her turn bald, so of course everyone else thought she had nits." Of course, her mother had been upset about it, but she couldn't force her to return the hair, because Izola hadn't known how. The resulting punishment gad been well worth it, especially when the girl, convinced Izola had done it, and tried to prove as much to their teacher.

"Not quite as impressive as your scheme, however- did your sister manage to get her own back?" From what Izola had learnt about siblings, if they weren't getting their own back, they were plotting pre-emptive strikes. It all sounded like an awful lot of bother to Izola, not that she would have slacked if she'd had siblings.

Dotty had to rub a knuckle in her ear to make sure all the muck was out of it. Knits? What the blazing bloodybaloo caused knits to be a schoolwide pandemic? Everyone's grammy and aunt getting a subspriction to Spinsters Weekly? Knitted clothing accosting children in hallways? Snowcaps for early onset child baldness?

Since the story didn't make any sense at all with 'knits' Dotty considered that another word entirely was meant instead. That was something Dotty was always jealous about, being rather flat chested all her life. But damn earlier developers for getting them at eight. In Dotty's troll level of revenge scheme logic making a girl go bald to distract from her set of 'nits' was a very suitable solution.

"She got really annoying after mom rented Thoroughly Modern Millie, it was supposed to cheer me up or something. She would always quip 'boys like jazz babies with fronts' whenever she snagged a boy." Outdated musicals about flapper fashions did not make a child of the new millennia feel better about lacking in the puberty department.

Izola didn't know Thoroughly Modern Millie, or how it linked to nits, but she did understand "boys like jazz babies with fronts." Izola laughed, "The kind of boy who only likes jazz babies with fronts is not the kind of boy worth snagging." It was more than a little cliché, but it was also true- relationships founded on looks didn't last, and, as a general rule, neither did relationships begun so early. Of course, good looks were desirable in a prospective partner, and those who were attractive had the advantage that, even if they were terribly dull, she could appreciate their looks instead of listening, but it wasn't a very large advantage.

Rifling through a draw, the witch drummed her fingers, "You wanted purple glitter, and green glow in the dark, am I correct?" They were a little low on purple glitter, which might have had something to do with Izola's failed dye job last week, one which she'd dyed out after three hours of magnificently purple hair, which had clashed magnificently with her yellow jumper.

"Is there a boy you like?" Izola asked distractedly, "one with more taste than those your sister, ah, snagged?"