This choice: Replace Chelsea with a golem • Go Back...Chapter #46Compromising Positions by: Seuzz   "Now wait a minute," you'd said, and Gordon is still looking at you. "Don't go running off half-cocked," you stammer. "You said you can't stand being away from Chelsea, and Eastman is a long way away." He grunts. "Just break Javits and Cindy up. That's easy. Chelsea'll love you for that. See what happens next."
"I still want a vacation," he mutters. "My dad—"
"I told you this afternoon, you can do that after hours. And if you wanna make a bigger change, well, you can be someone else inside Westside, too, so you can stay close to Chelsea." You get a little half-smile. "Hell, you can step in for Maria or Kendra, be one of Chelsea's girl friends."
That provokes a look from him.
"Or take over for Javits and get him a new girlfriend. Or, I dunno. You got so many possibilities."
"I don't wanna be someone else—"
"You just said you wanted a vacation!"
"Oh, God damn it! I want what I've got! I just want it to fucking work!"
"Then you gotta fix Chelsea." His head jerks sharply as he looks at you. "I mean fix things with her," you correct yourself. "Break up Javits and Cindy. After that, maybe you'll be happy with what you've got again."
"Alright." He sighs heavily. "You tell ... whatsisnuts ... that the party is over for him. Handle that the way you wanna handle it, I don't even wanna know about it."
"I will. Now, can I go back upstairs? Can you leave? Or do you wanna go up and take a turn?"
Gordon rubs his arm and stares at the floor. "I don't wanna go home."
"So spend the night here. Lotsa company you can keep. Except, no, you'd have to send that copy of yourself home." He swears. "Then let's get Johansson out here with that Javits mask. You can go home as Seth. Have his last session with Cindy."
"I said I don't wanna deal with— Oh, fuck it!" He hurls the ball he's been holding to the far end of the gym and stalks out. You curse long and loudly to yourself after he's gone.
You'd really like to get back upstairs to Umeko, but Gordon has totally blown your concentration for that. You need to think. So when you go back upstairs you just rip the mask off the golem and jam it into the cabinet for later use.
And then you do a lot of thinking. It helps to have something to do while you plot, so you spend the next two hours making up a batch of blank masks. You still have nearly ten left over from the first batch you made after acquiring the book, but between "Nurse Shaffer" and the new Eastman franchise you can tell you will need a bunch more. When you're done you put a new mask onto the golem—Laurent Delacroix's; it amuses you to have the captain of the wrestling team under your thumb—and hand it the power buffer. That's the secret of mass mask production: it only takes a little less than an hour to get a mask polished to a perfect sheen with that thing. You order the golem to get the new set polished up by morning.
And then you go home.
* * * * *
"You're gonna wanna change situations, Johansson," you tell Javits the next morning. You're in the changing room after practice, having asked him to stay late.
"I like where I am," he replies with a frown.
"Yeah, well, Javits's life is about to go into the shitter. Him and Cindy are about to have a bad bust up. You won't want to be around for the aftermath."
"Who's says they're gonna bust up?" he retorts.
"Chelsea does. She doesn't want them dating anymore, and she's told Gordon to put the screws to Javits to break them apart."
His eyes flash and his cheeks flush.
"Is she on this team? Why doesn't Gordon tell her to go fuck herself? And I'm a senior member, right? Or did that promotion turn out to be a lot of bullshit?"
"We all have to compromise to keep each other happy," you tell him in a flat but steely tone.
"Fucking cunt," he mutters.
"You won't get any argument from me on that," you allow. "But we're not fucking with you. We're fucking with Javits. If you wanna stick around and suffer along with him—" He curses, but winds up nodding his head. "Good. You have your pick of where to go. After you help with the bust up."
"Whaddaya mean?"
You outline your plan, and he groans long and loud. "We do it that way to make it stick, for after we let Javits back out. You can stick around here, or— Well, maybe you won't wanna deal with me and Gordon's shit any more. You can move out to Eastman to be with Prescott and Tilley."
"That sounds good," he mutters. You nod; you spoke to ... the other Patterson ... last night, and he agreed to take Johansson on if he wanted to move. "When are we gonna do it? Tonight?"
"Yeah. Hang around the loft, have things ready. Make it Kendra. She's enough of a bitch that she'll be believable."
"What about the real Kendra? When all this breaks open—"
"Leave that to me."
* * * * *
"I'm doing you a huge favor, Chelsea. You and Gordon both. Do me a favor, okay?" She gives you a narrow glance from the passenger-side of your car. "Don't mention me, don't tell them I'm downstairs. Just stick to the story, that you went up there to set up a surprise for Gordon. After Seth leaves, call me and I'll come up."
"This doesn't sound like something Kendra would do," Chelsea says, her voice dripping with suspicion.
"It doesn't? Well, I set it up with her, too. I told her you'd owe her big time if she did this."
"I don't like people minding my business for me," she snaps.
"Then don't make me and Gordon do your dirty work," you retort. "This is the way to make it permanent. And if you don't like owing Kendra, well, astonish her afterward with your ingratitude."
She snorts. "All you had to do was tell Seth he was off the team if he didn't break up with Cindy."
"And they'd just pretend. You want the break up to be for pretend, or for real?"
"You're an asshole, Steve."
"And you're a cunt." You blast your horn at the car ahead, which isn't moving despite the green light. "It's amazing what Gordon will do for you, and it's amazing what I'll do for him."
"Well, maybe I'll amaze you with my ... my being not grateful."
Yeah, I'd like to see you try, after I've got the mask on you, you think to yourself.
Once inside the gym, you go into the changing rooms while Chelsea goes upstairs, to surprise a supposedly oblivious Seth who has been lured into a compromising position. You dig around inside your locker while waiting, making sure you have all the stuff you'll need. It's not a long wait, and Javits is very white in the face when he stalks in. "Well, that went off about like you'd expect," he growls.
"She get a picture?"
"I think she got three. One of them of me swinging my fist at her."
"Did you connect?" you chortle. He shakes his head. "It'll look good anyway, and I bet it felt good. Now beat it. You're not supposed to know I'm here."
"What about Cindy?"
"Ignore her. Let the fireworks go off tomorrow. We'll let Javits out after school. Gonna suck to be him."
You let him leave, then go up to the fuck room yourself. There you find Chelsea standing with hands on her hips. She and the golem-Kendra are both looking very bewildered. "Will you talk to this girl," Chelsea says, turning on you in exasperation. "She's not making any sense."
"That's because she's not real," you calmly tell her. Kendra is still naked, and still sprawled on the mat. You bend over and pull the mask off her, and the bare golem appears.
Chelsea just blinks, like she's been surprised with a conjuring trick. She stares at the pile of mud, then takes a step forward to peer at it. "What the—?" she starts. "Kendra?" she asks in a puzzled tone, as though expecting the slab of inert material to reply.
"I told you you're a cunt, Chelsea," you say quietly. "And it stops now. You're going to start being a hell of a lot nicer to Gordon." And with that you shove the blank mask you were carrying onto her face. She topples forward into your arms, and you let her drop hard onto the floor.
And then you pause, for it has come to the point where you have to make up your mind exactly what to do.
The easiest thing is to golemize her mask when it comes out, to set it under your control. Order her to act normal, but to not fight with Gordon any more. But that could be tricky, for what if Gordon got suspicious? His one unbreakable rule, he told you when you got the book, was that Chelsea couldn't be a victim. If he finds out you've double-crossed him ...
The alternative is much less palatable: to don Chelsea's mask yourself and take over her part, at least for a little while. You could more carefully calibrate "her" behavior around Gordon, to keep him from being suspicious. And if he caught on? Well, there'd be an angle there.
For if he did pull her mask off you, he'd find "Will Prescott" beneath. A "Will Prescott" who would claim to be the bewildered victim of the Steve Patterson over at Eastman. A bust-up between Gordon and the erstwhile "original" might be a useful situation for manipulation, if you moved quickly and deftly enough.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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