Iris had spent most of her time alone tending to her repairing wounds and studying the materials generally given to Kedrick’s new house staff. It was appropriate in some sense, as she was part of that number if unconventionally so. Tomorrow, the other attendants would return. Among that number would be the real Manon, which Iris could not decide was pleasing or displeasing. To avoid thinking too much on it, she reveled in the praise she’d received for her morning’s work. She had smiled to herself the entire time she’d cleaned up the kitchen.<br/><br/>She was aware he was home before he’d walked up the drive, the little tug in her veins and the flare in her heart swelling at the nearness of her master. When he would find her, she was wearing borrowed clothes again. An old smock dress of Naella’s, one strap haphazardly slung across her shoulder.  She was sitting beneath the window on which her branch antlers were perched. Green coils seemed to have grown longer over the course of the day, spilling like some outrageous waterfall from her scalp to pool around her and tangle across her legs. She was still golden, like toasted sands on some distant beach, and when she glanced over her shoulder at him it was with those huge, pitch eyes.<br/><br/>When she was not pretending to be a delight of his memories, she was deeply inhuman. “Welcome home, Master.” She said. Iris unfolded her legs to stand, little horn-like nubs nearly flat on her forehead. They looked a little like ornamentation rather than a part of her physiology and had been smoothed with a file. It had hurt her when he’d snapped a twig from those branches.<br/><br/>“How was work?” she asked. It was a bit like playing house wife, when she crossed the floor to press her palm over his heart. “I missed you here.” Pet. “Shall prepare you supper? Or help you bathe?” she asked, blinking at him with a concerted eagerness in her expression. “I studied your instructions for everyone else.” She pointed back to where her glass tablet lay on the floor by the window. “But I don’t know what jobs are for me.” She admitted. “What are the things that only I can do?” It was a selfish sort of question, but, really, what else was to be expected? He had not spent a small fortune to have a common servant grown from the ground. His other staff did not shuttle his blood through microscopic vines. Iris nibbled at her lip. There were little ghosts in the back of her head. The men and women he dreamed of subjugating. The various and nuanced pleasures he’d not been able to test on another body. She could offer those things, but none had been hoisted onto her like a duty. She seemed to want a job of her own. He could have given her any task then, and the nymph would have taken it as a treasure.<br/><br/>It was, perhaps, telling that she’d not worn another face for him, this afternoon.