Star Harbor Nights

All of the apartment buildings in the neighborhood of Twistville had the same apartment manager. Though she was rarely in her office, it didn't take Echo long to find one of the more than a dozen places where she was.

"Hey, stranger!" Daisy Chain said as Echo came up the stairs. Daisy had been at work on the ailing radiator in the building's stairwell. "I thought you were going to do that reality show thing again."

"Didn't work out," Echo said.

"Oh... what happened?"

"They'd told me they'd reworked the show, but they didn't tell me what they reworked it into," Echo said. "I got out there and they'd put a plastic banner up over the American Hero sign. It said 'Who Wants To Be A Sidekick?'"

"You're shitting me."

"I'm not," Echo said. "I took one look at it, said 'not me', and here I am... and I already sublet my apartment for the next three months, so..."

"I feel your pain," Daisy said. "I had a big job offer fall through... got recruited out of the blue to work for this research company. They said they needed a number of research assistants who could work together and collate data from multiple projects at once, and somehow they heard about me and my 'power'... if you can call it that... but they thought it made me perfect. Gave me a big signing bonus if I said I'd start right away."

"So why aren't you there now?" Echo asked.

"I don't know, really," Daisy said. "They flew me... all of me... out to California, first class, and then... well, I went for orientation, and then things just kind of fell apart. I'm not very clear on the details."

"You mean you don't remember what happened?" Echo asked, suspiciously.

"Well... of course I do," Daisy said, frowning slightly. "I'm just not sure how it happened. The company got bought out, and there was some kind of reorganization, and my contract wasn't good any more. I got to keep the bonus, at least, though split between thirteen bodies it's not that much. Thirteen times as much food, clothes, medical care, living space... it adds up, you know?"

"I'd say 'at least you can work thirteen jobs', but that doesn't really sound like much consolation."

"Yeah, no shit. If I could file my taxes as thirteen people with one income each, things wouldn't be so bad... but as far as the IRS is concerned, I'm all one person," Daisy said. "I'm working several dozen knuckles to the bone and I've barely got anything to show for it. I never get enough sleep in any of my bodies because I have to keep all these shitty buildings from falling down on top of my other jobs and... and I keep going on about this when I know you've got your own problems. Sorry."

"It's okay," Echo said. "Anyway, do you have any apartments open right now?"

"Well, things are kind of tight around here," Daisy said. "I do have a studio available immediately. It's kind of small, but since it'd only be for a few months..."

"I need something bigger," Echo said. "I kind of brought back.. a souvenir."

"What kind of souvenir?"

"The kind that's circling the block looking for a place to park the car," Echo said. "You sure there's nothing but a studio?"

"Not at the moment," Daisy said. "You might have to look outside the 'ville, if you want something bigger."

"This place is kind of at the optimum intersection of price and probability of getting murdered in one's sleep," Echo said. "No offense."

"None taken," Daisy said. "That's how I ended up here."

"I guess I might be able to stand living on top of Slam until I can get my own apartment back," Echo said. "And if I can't, I can always kick his ass out, right?"

"Slam? The Slam?" Daisy asked, stifling what sounded like a giggle.

"Yeah, 'The' Slam. The one from the show. The one I got caught on camera with in the closet. Why?"

"I can't believe... well, never mind," Daisy said. "It's none of my business."

"Damn skippy it isn't," Echo said. "But I can't believe it either. In my defense, though, his power lets him manipulate anything that comes into contact with any part of his body as if he were psychokinetic."

"How's that... oh," Daisy said, her eyes widening. "Oh."

"Yeah, my reaction, too," Echo said. "Not that he was terribly creative at first, but he's good at following instructions."

"Well, whatever makes you happy."

"I don't know if he makes me happy, but he gets the job done," Echo said.

"C'est la vie, honey," Daisy said. "I don't dig too deep into tenants' sex lives, and it's not like I haven't pulled some stupid shit in the pursuit of a penis."

"So, what did you think of The Pursuit of A Penys?" Allison asked Holly as another movie in their marathon came to a close.

"I don't know," he said with a shrug. "It was kind of depressing... he spent the whole movie trying to have sex, but never quite finished."

They both were on the bed in the guest bedroom of Allison and Amy's beachfront condo... Holly laying, propped up against a stack of pillows, and Allison sitting at the head of the bed beside him. There were stacks of movies all around the room, from open boxes that Allison had levitated in over the course of the evening as she thought of more movies for them to watch.

"But he did finally get off in the end," Allison said. "The fact that he struggled so hard only makes it more rewarding."

"Maybe it would have been more satisfying to me if they'd actually shown us some sort of climax instead of just having a title card telling us that he did right before the end credits," Holly said. "I mean, don't they say that what you show the audience is always more powerful than what you tell them?"

"Well, maybe that's the point... maybe the director felt that showing the payoff would weaken the earlier scenes," Allison said. "Or maybe they kept messing up the money shot and decided to ship it as is. Anyway, what do you want to watch next... we've got Forty Twenty-Year-Old Virgins... Because of Winn's Dicksey... Memoirs of a Gay-sha..."

"How about one that you actually recommend as opposed to just really want to say the name of out loud?" Holly asked.

"Fine, you pick," Allison said, waving her hand airily. She set the stacks of DVD and VHS boxes floating slowly through the air past Holly's eyes in the fashion of a carousel vending machine. She almost screwed it up when she realized how little effort it took her to handle so many objects at once with individual attention. She was wearing her psi-mesh jacket, as she'd taken to doing around the house... it still caught her off guard how much easier her powers worked with the suit's enhancements.

"Whoa, whoa... Schoolgirl Passions?" Holly said, snatching a videotape box out of the air. "School girls? Plural? You? And after you spent all that time this morning convincing me that you and Amphie aren't..."
 
"We're not," Allison said. "I just went through a period of my life where I had a hard time looking at men, sexually. It didn't make me attracted to women... it did make me wonder for a while, though... but I still felt 'the itch', you know? Anyway... that's how it started. I've picked up a couple of les titles since then, partly because I've sort of become a porn completist and partly because I acquired a bit of an aesthetic appreciation for them. Not all the time, but every once in a while. I'm especially fond of the actress in that one, Yuri Sakura... it seems like she did a bunch of these movies years back and then disappeared off the face of the earth. They're all out of print, but I snap them up when I see one on uBuy."

"She was probably a real student, paying her bills," Holly said. "And once she graduated she got a real job."

"Well, whatever, she was really good," Allison said. "Physically beautiful, very graceful... and all of her movies were fairly tasteful, considering. I like a good deal of raunch in guy-girl or guy-guy movies... like I said, though, it's an aesthetic attraction, not a sexual one."

"Normally, I'd be tempted to call bullshit when I hear someone say something like that," Holly said. "But having just watched you watching... um... twelve... thirteen hours... of hardcore sex with nary a vagina in sight, I'm willing to accept that you like cock purely on the face of things."

"Well, not purely on the face," Allison said, raising her eyebrows. "Nobody wants to be the bukkake bitch all the time, right?"

"Touché."

"Never really tried it in the touché, either," Allison said.

"Smart ass..."

"For a gay man, you're feeding me an awful lot of straight lines," Allison said with a smirk.

"So what's so special about this Yuri girl?" Holly asked.

"I guess I saw in her somebody soft, feminine... and open to the possibilities of love," Allison said. "Things I had a real hard time seeing in myself. You know how sometimes you go into the porn store and you tell everybody, including yourself, that you're buying something just for laughs when deep down you know you really do want it, because you're to embarrassed to admit it?"

"I'm familiar with the concept," Holly said with a grin. "Though I'm happily immune. My parents felt enough shame on my behalf that I never really felt the need to have any myself."

"Well, that's kind of how it started," Allison said. "After... well, after I lost interest in men, I still kept going into the same stores, but all the stuff I used to buy was turning me off, so I wandered around. Curiosity was my excuse the first time, but when I kept coming back... and especially when I found myself looking for more Yuri Sakura... I finally had to admit that it was doing something for me. Not, like, the usual something... but in a way, I was fantasizing about her."

"Sounds like you were really fantasizing about being her," Holly said.

"Maybe," Allison said. "I haven't watched any of that stuff in ages, but I still find myself thinking about it sometimes. When I got this big project at work for Genevieve's..."

"Oh, I just love their warming face mask line," Holly said. "I don't normally bother with much of a skin care regime, since, you know, my skin looks however I want it to look... but it just feels sooo... um, continue."

"Anyway, it's all about 'The New Woman', whatever the hell that means... but it's basically a big overblown celebration of what some fifty-year-old prune thinks femininity means," Allison said. "But I'm trying to bring some of what those Schoolgirl movies made me feel to the project... just with little things, like getting Bertha to be one of the models, to show that beauty isn't limited to WASP women with wasp waists... or even incorporating stylized cherry blossoms into the borders of the layouts."

"Cherry blossoms?" Holly asked.

"'Sakura' is Japanese for 'cherry blossom'."

"I thought it was that place in the mall that sells teriyaki chicken."

"Sakura, not Sarku," Allison said. Almost absent-mindedly, she drifted the floating movies away from the bed and back on the floor and started mentally gathering up the piles to put them back in their boxes. The mood had changed... it just felt like their marathon was over. "Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this... considering how little I know you. Maybe it's just that I usually talk about personal stuff with Amy, but she gets all stiff... uh, all awkward when I talk about porn."

"Well, I'm a moderately effeminate gay man," Holly said. "Studies show we're very non-threatening."

"Really."

"Serious, big-time scientific studies," Holly said. "I think they've got a whole branch of DELPHI devoted to studying us, in order to harness the technology as a non-lethal means of pacifying enemy populations in wartime."

Allison snorted.

"Yeah, we're also funny," Holly added. "Statistically speaking."