House of Dolls 3

by Harmon Cooper

“It wasn’t too different from the way it is now,” Coma finally said. “I was just there in his home. And that was it. And then we got into some things, and then we got Celia.”

  “I’m glad you got me,” Celia said. “I like being alive.”

  Roman stopped for a moment and looked at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing, it’s just interesting to hear you say something like that. Yes, all three of you are alive, and I apologize in advance for the next time I have to take your powers away. Just know that it’s temporary.”

  “It’s not so temporary with me,” Casper lamented. “You take my power away all the time. It’s like you’re punishing me or something.”

  “That’s because you’re loud and obnoxious, and you are in my pocket. I don’t want people staring.”

  “You walk around with two scantily clad women, one who is fawning over you and the other who looks like she could kick your ass and still have enough energy left to give out a couple of rapid-fire hand jobs. You’re already getting the attention you deserve.”

  “Rapid-fire hand jobs?” Coma asked.

  “And she’s gone,” Roman said, taking Casper’s power away.

  “It’s much quieter when she’s not around,” Coma noted as they turned down the street, coming to the cosplay café.

  There was a menu outside of various rooms that were available, ranging from exemplar-themed “hero spaces” to larger areas that allowed you to participate in some of the famous battles that had taken place in their world.

  “Which one do you want?” Roman asked Celia.

  “I don’t know yet; let’s just go inside and see what’s available.”

  “We can see what’s available here,” he reminded her, tapping his finger on the menu’s glass surface.

  “Okay,” she said, taking a look at the menu. “In that case, Unholy Matrimony. I want that room.”

  “Excuse me?” Roman asked.

  “Is that a problem?” Celia’s purple eyes went wide.

  “No, let’s just…” Roman shrugged. “No, it’s not a problem.”

  They entered the establishment to find a greasy man with hairy forearms behind the counter, his nametag telling anyone who gave a shit that his name was Bobby.

  He looked disgruntled as ever, mostly grunting and wheezing as he gave them the key to the Unholy Matrimony room after briefly going over the rules of what they could and could not do, saying several times that their location banned consummation.

  “No funny business,” he said, licking his whisker-laden lips as he glanced between Celia’s and Coma’s bosoms.

  Once they entered the room, Roman went along with it, putting on a tuxedo that zipped up the back like a pair of pajamas, Celia slipping into a white wedding dress one size too large, and Coma going for the best-man look in a zip-up tuxedo.

  After they were dressed, they entered the Unholy Matrimony room and walked over to a bored-looking employee, who went over some of the rights traditionally reserved for Centralian weddings.

  They were offered wedding cake that looked a day old, sparkling apple juice instead of apple wine, and were encouraged to mental message any of their friends to teleport there and take part in the ceremony.

  Roman enjoyed seeing Celia look so happy, and he tried to push memories of his actual wedding away in that moment, real-life Celia coming down the aisle on her father’s arm, the white flower petals lining the aisle, a cloudless sky overhead, their wedding taking place in a meadow in Mystery Hills State Park, a female exemplar playing an instrument she had invented.

  It had been a perfect day, a moment Roman would never forget.

  And he tried to mirror this excitement as he roleplayed for Celia the doll, her cheeks red as she looked at him with loving eyes, more love than he could remember ever seeing from any woman aside from the real Celia.

  And for a second, he questioned whether she was even real or not, and if it mattered.

  What if he just always kept her alive? What if he actually married Celia the doll? It would be easy to forge any paperwork necessary with his power…

  Roman shook the idea away for a moment, realizing it was a fantasy, that he had bigger issues at the moment. Maybe there was a day in the future when all this would come together and he could do something like that, but for now, it was best to keep these things a fantasy.

  His real life had a way of doing that, stripping situations down to their core, revealing the inner truth—the painful, ugly inner truth.

  “You may now kiss the bride,” the man said.

  Roman brought Celia into his arms and gave her a kiss unlike any he had ever given her before. His hands came around the small of her back and he brought her in even closer, the doll practically going limp in his arms.

  Finally he pulled her away, their hands joining.

  “Thank you,” Celia whispered as they turned away from the fake priest, eventually shuffling down the aisle to the sound of beautiful matrimony music meant to celebrate a lifetime together, however short.

  Chapter Sixteen: A Safe and Quiet House

  “Do you really want to watch this too?” Lisa Painstake asked Nadine and Oscar, all three of whom stood in the Unholy Matrimony room, in front of the first row of pews, attached to their real bodies via umbilical cords of light.

  “I suppose we have seen enough for today,” said Oscar, the well-dressed handler running his hand along his jawline. They had been watching Roman since his meeting with Ava and were already fully aware of how Centralia wanted to use them.

  “So if Roman is a double agent, and you guys know it but you’re not going to tell him, and you will utilize him with this knowledge in mind, does that make you a triple agent? Or is he the triple agent? Or how would that work?” Lisa asked.

  The nineteen-year-old exemplar with pink hair had been growing more annoying over the course of the last few hours, likely bored with the tedious nature of certain spy work.

  Nadine only wished she had a power like Lisa’s; it would make her job much easier, and she would probably be able to utilize it better as well.

  But Lisa did have a point, even if she was trying to be a smart ass—the fact that they now knew Roman would be spying on them in the future allowed them to manipulate Roman in ways not yet realized.

  Nadine didn’t like this, but she knew that now wasn’t the time to test the waters; she was already on thin ice with her government.

  “Well, at least watching his training was interesting,” said Lisa with a yawn.

  Of course, no one could see their astral forms in the room, Roman and Celia now dancing while Coma watched on, a happy smile on the masked doll’s face.

  “He’s going to need much more training than that if he ever hopes to beat Margo,” said Oscar. Nadine’s handler had told them both some information about the Western Province killer, the one who had survived the Western Plague, all of what he’d said centering around the fact that she was an incredibly difficult opponent to best.

  “Maybe Plume and her team will take Margo out,” Nadine suggested.

  “I don’t even think they could do it. Well, they do have a telepath and she’s quite strong, so depending on her range, they may be able to do something through that medium. But as I told you before, Margo’s powers are much more advanced than Roman’s. The objects she animates can retain the consciousness she gives them if her power is stripped away, or if she passes out. Think about that. I don’t know how long she can do that, but we have a source who has seen her utilize this attack. So even if MindLenz were able to do something, the corpses she’s animated wouldn’t be going down with her.”

  “What about her face? You never said anything about that,” said Lisa. “All those black tattoos covering her mouth area. What a creepy look.”

  “She’s lucky to be alive after a vampire attack like the one she received, and from what I’ve been able to uncover, she had to have most of her jaw reconstructed.”

  “Why didn’t she turn?”
Lisa asked Oscar.

  “The exemplar infection that turns someone into a vampire has to be done through blood. The vampire must first make a connection, then start sucking some of the person’s blood only to put it back into their body with a mixture of their own saliva. This can take a little time, and the vampire that attacked Margo simply tried to bite her face off, not transfer his power. Maybe if he had latched on longer, things would have been different. So it takes time, and then there’s the willingness to actually wait through the process. Or so I’ve been told. To be honest, while all that was going on in the West, I was here, and I never really had to deal with it.”

  “And so she got the black tattoos on her face to hide the scars.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Does anyone else think it strange that she and Roman share the same power and they both have white hair?” Lisa asked.

  “Lots of people have white hair,” Nadine said as she watched Roman walk down the aisle with Celia.

  “It seems strange to me.”

  “There are more important connections to make right now,” Oscar said, “one of them being the man fake-marrying a plastic doll.”

  Lisa chuckled. “So even though he has worked with you, you’re just going to use him?”

  “I know you haven’t been at this for very long, but what we are doing is subtler than that. We all use each other,” Oscar informed her, Nadine familiar with this lesson. “Roman is currently using us to hide from Margo, you used him to help you get your body back, he used you to see who was in his home. The list goes on and on. But knowledge is power, which I’m sure you have heard before, and knowing that Centralia wants to use him in some way gives us the upper hand.”

  “Hold on,” said Nadine, “he is saying something about me. Quiet.”

  The three moved just a bit closer to Roman and his dolls.

  “…Yeah,” said Roman, answering one of Coma’s questions. “We should probably meet with Nadine after this. And no, I don’t know yet if she’s found a place for us. Hopefully.”

  “Or you could just deanimate us and sleep with her again,” said Celia, a hint of jealousy to her voice.

  “That was just temporary,” Roman said, “until we have better accommodations. I’ll send Nadine a message now and see what’s going on. Unless you want to get married again?” he asked with that charming smile of his that made Nadine grin. She glanced at Oscar to make sure he hadn’t seen her reaction to Roman’s last line.

  Luckily, he hadn’t.

  “I think getting married once is enough,” Celia said, also playing along. “Oops, we forgot to invite Casper.”

  “No, we did not forget to invite her,” Roman said to Coma’s laughter.

  “We’d better go back,” Oscar told Nadine and Lisa, their forms floating just a few feet away from Roman and his dolls, umbilical cords of light taut in the air. “We don’t need him to figure out that we’ve been watching him all day.”

  Roman waited outside for the unlicensed teleporter to arrive. He was feeling good, not quite jovial, but happy to have been able to make up for lost time with the dolls.

  He stood outside the cosplay café with Celia and Coma, the wind turbine overhead making a clicking noise as if it needed to be repaired. Roman watched it for a moment, wondering if he would be able to use his power to fix whatever was wrong with it.

  By the time he realized this would be a terrible idea, the teleporter had appeared, this one a tall woman in a tube top with perky breasts, her belly button showing even though she was wearing a jacket. Roman couldn’t help but smile at her as she stepped forward, hula hoops of multifarious light looping around her arms.

  “Thanks,” Roman said as the woman lifted her chin to him, offering him a short but cute smile.

  “No problem, mister,” she said, and she let her arms go, her fingers flaring out, the hoops of light moving around Roman and his dolls before their bodies reformed behind the Eastern Province safehouse.

  Nadine stood at the back entrance waiting for Roman, dressed in a pencil skirt, her hair in a ponytail that hung over her left shoulder.

  “Bye,” Roman started to tell the teleporter, but she was gone.

  Flirting with a teleporter was a useless endeavor. Roman had definitely tried before, but since they considered him a non-exemplar, none of them ever bit.

  And he couldn’t really blame them, which was why he didn’t try very hard.

  There were some non-exemplars, male and female, who were banned from teleportation services for doing things like slapping the teleporter’s ass or grabbing his junk, trying to squeeze a titty, that sort of thing.

  There had been a few Roman felt connections with. Teleporters appeared and disappeared from his life so quickly that he was never able to pursue it. And he had thought about it before, what it would actually be like to date a teleporter. It would probably be pretty interesting, and they definitely could go anywhere they wanted to go, but most also worked pretty intense hours.

  He’d also read about having sex with a teleporter, but he didn’t know how many of those stories were true. Stories about fucking in the air while falling from great heights, one particular story about an older gentleman having a heart attack while a prostitute teleporter screwed him above the clouds—that teleporter also facing prison times afterward—and a ton of voyeuristic stuff.

  It was hard to separate fact from fiction.

  “Glad to see you guys made it,” Nadine said. “How did today go?”

  “It went better than I thought it would,” Roman said, registering the concern in her eyes. “I’m here, aren’t I? And don’t worry, I didn’t tell them your name or anything, not that they wouldn’t be able to get that out of me.”

  “Thank you, although I think it’s safe to say this leaves you in a strange position. Me too, for that matter. But I’m sure we’ll be able to address that in a way that satisfies both parties. Are they still going to put you on a risk management team? How did it go?”

  “They’re still debating, but they’re going to approve my exemplar status, which came as quite the shock.” Roman said as Nadine let him in.

  “I’ll bet. Also, regarding where you’ll be staying, Oscar arranged to have one of the back rooms cleaned out and a bed put in. They were storing some miscellaneous equipment there and have since moved it to another location, so at least now you’ll have your own bedroom,” she explained as she led him to the kitchen table, ushering for him to sit down, his dolls to his right.

  Nadine retrieved a pitcher of cucumber water and brought it to the table, then poured Roman a glass.

  “I appreciate it,” he told her, toasting her by lifting his glass in the air as she sat.

  “You never answered my risk management question,” Nadine said.

  “That’s still up for debate. First, they’ll approve my exemplar status, and I guess we’ll go from there,” he said, without making eye contact with her. “Have there been any updates about my apartment?”

  “No. From what we can tell, Margo has been in there since yesterday and shows no signs of leaving. We also noticed that others are watching the place, people from your government.”

  “I expected as much,” Roman said after taking a sip of his water. “I didn’t know how long it would take Ava and her people to get on it, but I knew they would do something. So I guess that’s good, right? Two countries spying on a single apartment?”

  Nadine laughed. “There is probably more spying than that,” she said. “I’m sure her own country has gotten a whiff of what she’s done and is also watching her. The North and the South too—well, maybe not the North. They don’t normally get involved in these types of things. I’m going to be frank with you, Roman.”

  “Please,” he said, sipping from his water.

  “I don’t see Margo getting out of this alive, but I do see her leaving a trail of bodies in her wake. She will die in the end. She has committed too many crimes in a foreign country not to eventually get caught up in he
r own mess. There will be deaths, and it is important for us to keep far enough away that we don’t get caught in the crossfire.”

  “I can’t guarantee that I won’t make my move if I see an opening,” Roman said, watching the cucumber slices settle in his glass. “This damn woman is trying to kill me, she’s in my home, and she has disrespected my wife by playing god with her corpse. Margo is a threat to me, to my country, and to anyone she comes in contact with.”

  Nadine looked up as Oscar came down the stairs, yawning like he was just about to lie down for bed.

  “Roman, glad you could make it. We have prepared a room for you upstairs, all the way back on the right.”

  “Nadine was just telling me,” said Roman.

  “Good, I encourage you to get some rest then. It’s a good thing, you know, sleep,” he said as he went for his own glass of cucumber water. Nadine instantly rose from the table to take the glass from him and serve her handler. “Please, Nadine, keep your seat. I’m an old man, but I’m not that old.”

  “You don’t seem that old to me,” Celia said, a smile forming on her face.

  Oscar chuckled. “I can tell why he keeps you around,” he said as he made his way back to the stairs, glass in hand. “I’ll see everyone in the morning. Try not to stay up too late, and keep your voices down if you do. This is a safehouse, but it’s also a quiet house. Don’t forget that.”

  Celia came into Roman’s arms, her skin a deep tone of blue from the small amount of moonlight coming through the window. Everything was a shade of blue; even the black edges around the bed had an indigo tone to them.

  Roman held her in his arms for a moment, their lips meeting, his eyes open for just a second longer as he saw Coma sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room, Casper in her lap, both dolls lifeless.

  “I’m so glad we can finally be alone,” he told Celia, his attention returning to the doll who had now wrapped her legs around him, her lower half grinding against his waist.

  “Me too.” She bit her lip for a moment as she looked at him, and Roman felt overwhelmed by her beauty. The twilight blue cast on her face gave her power over him, like she was orchestrating all of this, like she was pure magic.