"You said you'd done this before!"
"No, okay, I said I'd heard of somebody who'd done this before!" Warp hissed to his companion.
The two Designer spirits snaked through the penumbra. "It'll be fine, I've done stuff mostly like this before," he affirmed, mostly to himself. The twilight sky dropped away as they descended in to the quiet realm of the haven. A small structure sat near the heart. The spirits were spindly affairs with small beady eyes and numerous delicate segmented limbs for sorting, untangling and weaving. They hustled together guiltily. The pair wove themselves through the entrances and made their way to the resting chamber of their prey.
"She doesn't look like much," Weft commented.
"That's the point, you cottonbrain," Warp replied. "She's got loads of untapped power. We can take it with no consequence to the Pattern at all."
Weft gave a little sniff. This venture seemed too good to be true. The designer knew he had streaks of deviser defining his existence, but he was wary of being corrupted with dissolver taint. This bargain seemed to skirt the slope of dissolver activity, but he trusted his companion. The Fabric of reality would remain intact.
Below them, in the small bedroom, a dark skinned woman lay in a single bed under a mass of blankets. Kate slept peacefully without stirring, completely unaware of the two spirits.
Weft followed Warp through the spectrum of reality until they reach the Fabric. He was slightly stunned at the sheer vastness of the woman's Pattern. "She's got a lot of makeup," he remarked.
"That's why she's the ideal candidate," Warp replied. "There's not many like her around. Look carefully, she's got a lot of basic patterns making her up. With most things, if you thin the pattern and take the excess, they unravel or become too weak to exist. But every now and then there's one that can bear to shed some weight." Warp began weaving some of the woman's pattern out of her fabric and in to his.
Weft examined the weave. Warp was right, it was a highly complicated Pattern, not to mention massive. There was a lot to it, Weft noticed. Small lose pulls and gives. Almost like she was somehow convertible, he thought. "You're taking her strength!?" Weft asked his companion.
"That's why we're here!" Warp reminded him. "Look at the Fabric. She's got reams to spare. She doesn't even know she's got it, she's not going to notice it gone. Trust me." Warp fed some of the Strength Pattern in to Weft's weave.
"Ooh..." Weft gave a little shudder. Her Pattern was exquisite, and he could immediately feel her strength bolstering him.
The two spirits gorged, leaching as much as they dared. The Pattern drained and dissipated, revealing the underlying base pattern. "We should go," Warp declared.
"Wait," Weft insisted. He checked the Fabric to make sure that no permanent damage had been done. The woman still seemed to be a lot of what she had always been. The actual amount of fabric had barely declined at all. He was pleased to notice that all the lose threads seemed to have been locked up snugly. Maybe this had been a good thing after all. There were definitely some signs of tampering, though. Her Pattern was intact but it seemed somehow disorganized. "We should tidy this up a bit," he suggested.
Warp gave an impatient little shrug. "Fine. Uh..." He scanned around the environment and found the pattern of a structure. "Here." With a master's skill he hastily arranged the woman's Pattern neatly around the prop. "There. Let's go."
The two spirits stole away in to the Umbra.