Challenge #01654-D193: Puppet Power
Ventriloquist dummies, Muppets, they allow their handlers to be someone quite different. Some of the more famous being Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Topo Giglio the Mouse and charlie McCarthy and his handler Edgar Bergan, (the puppet is now in the smithsonian)... -- Anon Guest
They say, If you want to find the truth of a man, give him a mask to wear. And this is, to a degree, true. But if you want to weigh the nature of a soul, give them a puppet. Sometimes, the aesthetic clues of the puppet lend character, but one that lacks such cues can show you the unpublic side of the individual manipulating it.
A puppet is an avatar. A mouthpiece for the thoughts that don't make it out of a fleshy mouth without such assistance. And they are distanced from the real mouth by virtue of being a thing with no more soul than that which is given to them. It's a mouthpiece. A tool to say the things that are otherwise bottled up.
Therapist Valance found it very useful for her more... culturally restricted... patients. A puppet was just a thing, true, but her patients could make it say or do anything. Her other tool, for those not inclined to harm living things by accident or design, either a cat or a dog. Both highly trained. Animals didn't judge and, in the case of cats, didn't care. But they were soft and warm and friendly in a world that could be cold and cruel.
Today's patient was Doe Barrow, nee Jacobs. An adopted niece of the itinerant trader and nigh-permanent drunk, Hwell Barrow. She was a refugee from one of the more misogynistic Greater Deregulations, and still finding out who she was. The puppet was a blank, onto which patients could add features and clothing as they so wished.
In Doe's hands, the puppet became an incarnation of her former self. When she was assumed male. The puppet was called Buck, and formally dressed. Neat as a pin, except for the hair. The hair Doe had chosen was seedy-looking and in desperate need of some replacement, but it also looked... shell shocked. It was the hair of a terrified child. The eyes were google-eyes, but the pupils were tiny in relation to the plastic sclera.
"I'm scared all the time," complained Buck. "Like they can see what I am just by looking. They know. I know they know. I'm not real. Not yet."
And since Valance was speaking to an avatar for Doe's childhood, she said, "You seem real enough to me."
"But I'm not a real boy. She has it right," The felt hand pointed to Doe. "Nearly. If I was her back home... They do awful things to girls at home. I saw it. Dad worked in a Bawd factory. There were new girls every day. The ones that weren't sold to the Betters. I saw what they did."
Non-elective surgery, Valance recalled. Lobotomised, devocalised, intubated, and quadruple amputated. And then raped to obliterate any trace of a hymen. "It's natural to be scared of that. I'm scared of that, and I'll never visit your home."
"He took me with him whenever I got sick, after the carer left. I never wanted to be sick, because I knew... It was awful."
"Yes," agreed Valance. "It was. It is awful. The Galactic Alliance is working on making sure that those things don't happen any more. That the girls aren't hurt any more. Isn't that good?"
Doe was crying, but the puppet sobbed. "What about the Bawds down there already?"
"The women who are prisoners are being freed. In small groups, I'm afraid. Some surgeries can't be corrected, but we can help them in other ways. New vox boxes. Stem cells injected into the surgical cuts. Prosthetics with neural interfaces. We're doing everything we can."
"Are they happy?" asked Doe. She'd taken to hugging Buck. Comforting her younger self.
"It's difficult to tell. The first thing they do when they have a new voice is to scream. Therapy for them is... slow. Very slow. They've been through hell."
"I think that's what we're going to call it, instead of home," Doe decided. "Hell. It was never home. It was just a place to survive."
"It wasn't all bad," insisted Buck. "The rest of it was okay. I just hate the Bawd factories. And the Bawd houses. And the Candy Girls."
"I haven't heard about the Candy Girls," said Valance.
"Rich man candy. Eye candy. Arm candy. Something sweet for ten years and then they're garbage." Both Buck and Doe withdrew. She curled up on herself. "They were the only times there were women. Whole women, anyway."
Greater Deregulation could not compete with witness testimony. They were still, rather desperately, trying to justify their actions as no big deal. Emphasising their rights and laws and their right to defend them against what they viewed as corruption from the outside.
Therapist Valance had to wonder when they'd finally give up that idea as a bad joke, and the practice as an atrocity.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / saiyoodsrikamon]
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