Game of Two Halves, Chapter Four

It was night, and the Mini-Flashes’ chalet deserted and unlit, when the counter-Juniper slipped into the living-room.

Having replicated her prototype’s Special Program properties, she mocked at locked doors. Now as the former might have done she stood smellingly in the living-room, suffusing that space with essence of cheesy-crackers. Her senses however assured her she was alone in this, as far as the chalet went anyway, and never mind that boy whose sweaty suit would have been detectable even to humans after such a day.

Despite it all, however, the counter-Juniper went stealthily on soft tippy-toes, her school shoes making no sound at all upon the living-room carpet.

Sneakiness was in her nature, and it wasn’t as if honest motives had brought her here.

Still it would have been remarkable though, to any observer who might have been present, just how like the original this facsimile appeared. Her full thighs were quivering minutely inside the blue stockings that wrapped them, just as Juniper’s were wont to do, and this was likewise setting the skirt-hem above them on a sustained shake. Her white hands were restless without being steady as she crossed from front room to passage, pointlessly smoothing her pleats down over the broadness behind, then as often pushing up fingers-first to pluck at her panties through the nylon. Mini-Flash Juniper had just such moments of fright and anxiety, for all that she struggled to never let them show, and her effect on others was generally that to know her was to be moved by her. The same hypothetical spectator, beholding the mingled determination and agitation on that pale physiognomy, would likelier than not have been wracked by tenderness very much misdirected.

Bedrooms. The counter-Juniper’s nostrils told her which was whose. She guessed that what she’d come for was in her smelly other self’s. Only…

One brushing palm maintained a back-and-forth underneath her skirt near the junction.

Something didn’t feel right. There were mixed signals.

She quickly flicked her cheeks this way and that, fearing a trap. It was on the second survey she saw it.

The bathroom door was standing ajar, and the cabinet above the sink open likewise.

There on the top shelf, under a shaft of light thrown from outside, sat in all its compact yellow roundness the very shape she lusted for.

Her hand thrust higher still and gripped in ecstasy.

No counter-Juniper could have been able to resist. On lightest tiptoes she flurried for the bathroom, stooping as if in awe and reverence before the elevated idol, that her blue-tinted Luttertons pointed back heedlessly into the passageway.

Breathing fast, and with a flush now rising on her ivory face, the counter-Juniper reached.

Zap!

Yellower than the precious pod was the light that emitted from inside it, slamming the thief back the way she’d come that her flat-soled feet left the floor.

She’d touched something which didn’t belong to her, or the other Mini-Flash Juniper.

The latter’s inner egg was still unopened, its contents yet to be discovered or assembled. And like everything else that Juniper wanted to hang onto for as long as possible, it was in a safe place where the only fingers that could get at it were hers.

On the bathroom cabinet shelf was Flashsatsumas’s empty one, into which Mini-Flash Juniper had put the sprig of oilseed which had been down her pants.

Their correlative, on the other hand, barely had time to bump to the linoleum before they and what they covered up were gone.

The arcade was gaudy and seemed to glow with gold when illumined for night-time. Mini-Flash Juniper and Flashsatsumas had been waiting outside it in the warm summer dusk.

There upon the love-tester machine, a missing cartoon girl was back in place, though no-one quite saw it happen. Her fair hair still suggested Juniper herself, but she wasn’t smirky or smug anymore. Rather, it was as if the jobbing artist who’d painted her had opted for a furious four-colour scowl fixed on the two Mini-Flashes.

“First day and already I’m barred from the roller-rink because of her,” complained Juniper. “There’d better not be any more frame-ups.”

“Let’s hope,” Flashsatsumas concurred. “Just the one of you’s more than enough.”

This seemed to both such a clever thing to say that they positively fell about, while children passing by on their way to the cartoon show looked at them.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR