Fiction: The return of Chelsea the social worker!

 It's time for the mid-week post, and I'm still writing up gratuitous backstory for Chelsea the social worker. This is the opening chapter in a story that goes way downhill from here, also featuring a location I had in mind for the Arcostate universe. By the way, if it seems like I do a lot with whirlwind romances, I suppose a major reason is that anything changing seems fast to me. So, here goes...

It had been a Friday night, after a day dealing with the murder of one of her clients. Chelsea had exited the central administrative center and made her way to the Bert I. Gordon Arts And Heritage Center, otherwise known as the BIG. It was in the shape of a star with two dozen points, almost but not quite filled in by another set of arms. The majority of its interior was set up as part café, part shopping plaza and part museum, with tables, serving counters, and numerous posters and exhibits all dedicated to the movies of the glorious Century of Progress. She was looking at an immaculately preserved puppet of King Kong when she glimpsed him on the other side of the case. He was a handsome man with red hair and blue-green eyes, dressed in a Valley of Gwangi T-shirt and a sky-blue jacket. One glance made her shiver. She gazed back at him. He smiled and circled around, and by then, she had already decided his fate.

“Hi, I’m Shad,” he said. “I’ve seen you around the office. We talked once…”

She absolutely didn’t remember seeing him before, but she felt a sense of familiarity that she didn’t question. Even without it, she would have nodded just as eagerly. “Well, I stand out,” she said. “It’s the hair.” She ran a finger through her hair. Every lock was blue-gray, with shading that went from steely gunmetal to something close to platinum blonde.

“They say the same thing about me,” he said.

She looked deeper into his eyes. “How about we get a few things out of the way,” she said. “Do you want to go on a date with me?”

“Ah… sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”

They ordered a dessert to share and sat down at a table. Chelsea saw and quickly wrangled a pair of coworkers named Kloe and Diane, the latter the one person she considered a close friend. Diane promptly mentioned that Kloe had just completed a petition for a domestic partner, which got thinly veiled disbelief from Chelsea. Things grew more  awkward as Diane kept giving both of them pointed glances. They made small talk neither of  them would ever remember, except for an off-hand comment about the center’s main attraction, the Victory Theater. 

“You know the story about it, right?” Shad said.

“No,” Chelsea had lied.

“They opened 72 years ago, to celebrate the victory against the Invaders,” he said. “Since then, they’ve been open 24 hours, 7 days a week. In that time, they say they’ve never shown a movie to an empty house… and they’ve never shown the same movie twice.”

“Really,” Diane said. “How do they do that? That’s like, 12 movies a day, for over 70 years… 300,000, at least…”

“A bit more,” Shad said with a grin. “They get their stock directly from Customs and Immigration. They have access to whole archives, with films that were lost or never made in other timelines. I hear they have first dibs on every new film that’s discovered, once they’re cleared for Moral Contraband, of course. There’s lots of films that are classics now that first showed right here… just once.”

Not long after, the coworkers excused themselves. Chelsea traded one last glance with Diane as they disappeared. “If you don’t mind my asking,” Shad said, “is there something with you and Kloe?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Chelsea said. “It’s just, she’s not what you’d think of as the marrying kind. In fact, she’s one of our physical therapeutics… instructors.”

It took just a moment for the truth to dawn on Shad. “I thought that was a rumor,” he said.

“Well, we don’t exactly advertise it, even within the Department,” Chelsea said. “It’s not quite what you might think. They usually get assigned to help clients who are already partnered, and then usually to deal with physical disabilities, psychological trauma, that kind of thing. They do good work.”

She took another look into Shad’s eyes. “If you don’t mind my asking, have you ever petitioned for a state assignment?” she said. He just looked back at her uneasily. “Don’t worry, I won’t talk, half my case work is applications. Lots of people in the Department do it, same as anyone. Not the ones you’d expect, either…”

“I have a petition,” Shad said. “It’s been a while; I haven’t been sure whether I want to keep it open. How about you… if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Nope, never,” she said. “Really, they’ve been leaning on me to do it, just for PR. The clients aren’t supposed to know, but people still talk. Thing is, I already had a partner, once. It was good, but it didn’t last; it couldn’t have. If I get out there again, it’ll be different. Like, less talk, more therapy, maybe a few pretty babies.” She laughed.

“Listen, I have another question for you,” she said. “How’d you like this date to end in some therapy?”

“Ah, that does lay things out,” he said. He looked in the direction of a booth that showed cartoons. As they ducked inside, he said, “Yes. I mean, we can see where it goes. Does… just hypothetically… matter if I’ve had therapy before?”

She looked at him more thoughtfully. “Now that you mention it, I thought I’d be able to tell by now,” she said. “In some ways, you act like it, in other ways, you don’t. You act shy, but you’re still confident about yourself. That’s different.”

For the first and last time, Shad looked hesitant. “So you can usually tell?”

She gave him a look that was just a little puzzled. “Come on, it’s what we do for work,” she said. “It almost always shows, especially if a guy knows we know. But not you. Not even now.”

“That… makes sense,” Shad said. “So. Do… do you, well, want to go to a movie first?”

“We can see where it goes,” she said.

 

They would never remember who first suggested staying for a double feature that started at midnight. The theater auditorium would have held about 600 in a 120 degree fan, a fact which had often been commented on when many times that number had claimed to have gone to the first showing of certain beloved films. For the reduced crowd, only an upper tier of the theater was open, which was clearly intended to allow closer supervision. There were still only a fraction of the seats filled, allowing a dozen or so couples like themselves to fan out. On the main floor, mechs of various shapes could be seen performing cleaning and maintenance. They scored seats on a bank that jutted out from one edge, for some sense of privacy.

The double feature, like most, consisted of one long film and a shorter one, buffered by a cartoon. The first proved to be a mythological tale in a foreign language that seemed to be a strange, truncated version of Hamlet, in which the prince’s father was openly overthrown and murdered by an underling who married his queen. “It’s the story of Orestes,” Shad explained to her. “From the Greek myths. If anything, Shakespeare ripped it off.”

As it turned out, the prince killed the usurper well before the halfway mark. That was  when he was first haunted by the grisly Furies, portrayed with a combination of threadbare makeup and jerky stop-motion. Still, Shad and Chelsea pressed together as the leering specters terrorized the prince. The court soon fled his presence, except his mother and his sister Elektra, but he stabbed his sister as she tried to stop him from falling on his sword. Finally, he confronted his mother, who revealed that he was not the son of the old king, but the usurper he had killed. Then she threw herself from the castle tower. As Orestes stared up at the gloating Furies, he shouted, “If the gods will not forgive men’s ignorance, then the gods are not gods!” Even as he spoke, the spirits disappeared in an instant, and the final frame faded to black.

The intermediate feature proved to be a cartoon with two characters named Bucky and Pepito. It went for 15 minutes, and even that length was clearly assembled from several short. The pair were two boys in the Southwest desert, one of whom had his face constantly covered by a sombrero. In the midst of the supposedly lovable boys’ misadventures, Shad took Chelsea’s hand. She promptly placed it on her bare knee. She giggled as they kissed.  “There’s something I should tell you,” she said. “I’m quiet, I mean freak-guys-out quiet. My ex used to say, I’m quiet as a shark. Remember that, later; there’s still going to be a later. You can talk to me, but please don’t try to make me talk, because I just don’t.”

That was when an arachnoid mech suddenly clambered over the railing. “Please observe State guidelines for appropriate public behavior,” it said in a low hum. “We thought you would like to know, there is a private Health And Therapeutics facility very close to the Center.”

It was enough for them to withdraw by mutual agreement, in time for the second feature. It was a monster movie, set in perhaps 1970. It showed a child who made a prank call, then started to make another when the dial tone grew louder. The child dropped the phone in fear as a strange, scaly monster burst from the earpiece, again portrayed with stop-motion. As it unfolded, Chelsea glanced sidelong at Shad.

She took his left hand in her right, clasping openly and innocently on the rest between their seats. He quickly laid his jacket across her lap. For a moment, the mech reappeared in the corner of Shad’s vision, but withdrew. He quickly learned just how quiet she could be. The monster had cornered the child, when she gave his hand a squeeze. That was when a second, larger monster emerge, and take what proved to be its wayward offspring home.

They emerged from the center at 3:40 AM. Any exhaustion had long since given way to euphoria. He carried a replica of the King Kong puppet. “Listen,” he said, “there’s one more thing I need to know… have you done this before?” She gave him a look that was coldly neutral. In her mind, his fate remained unchanged, but the paths to it became much more likely to be painful. “What I mean is,” he said quickly, “is this what you’d do with any guy? What you’d want to do again?”

She nodded. In her mind, she decided he would suffer only a little. “That’s fair,” she said. “You deserve to know, if we’re going to do this. So… The fact is, I haven’t done anything in a while. In fact, hardly ever, since I was partnered. If this goes how I think it will, I won’t need to do it again. As long as you’re still in.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Shad said. “It wouldn’t have. But lady… you are the freakiest chick I ever met.” Then he kissed her.