I wanted the compass to feel like a tool of trade, not an artifact. This is a woman whose job requires it — she catalogs the dead, and somewhere in her tradition, a tooth-needle compass became the instrument for determining which bones go where, which family line claims what. The Sorbian tradition of decorated ancestral skulls fused with Ryukyuan veneration of remains gave me a world where handling the dead is clerical work, sacred but quotidian. The persimmon under the lab coat keeps her alive against all that bone.