There was only one locked stall in the women’s bathroom. Mikaela approached the door, and tapped out five knocks to the rhythm of ‘Shave and a Haircut.” After a moment, two knocks came back in reply. “Am I in there?” Mikaela asked.
The door unlatched, and her duplicate emerged. “That would have been a really weird question to ask if I wasn’t you,” Mikaela’s duplicate said. “I assume, from you being here, that the plan went awry.”
“Quite awry. I’m going to lunch. I… think their physicist might come to the school to continue his research.”
“That’s… not the plan as I remembered it.”
“No. It’s a new plan, or at least an additional embroidery to the old one, for which we’re going to need a little more help.” She opened the locket, and the bunny dupe climbed back out of it.
“I kind of expected she’d have changed by now,” the first duplicate said.
“I hoped she hadn’t. Because here’s the plan. We’re going to put up her bunny ear hood, and cake on makeup. Then she’s going to distract the guard. When he gives chase, you can sneak down the restricted hallway and give the technopaths access to the servers. Once Bunny gets far enough away, she ducks into a bathroom and climbs back into the locket,” she handed it over to the duplicate. “If possible, I’d like the locket back- so try to make it to that first bathroom. Otherwise I can probably pick it up later at the lost and found.”
“I’m not thrilled with being bait,” Bunny said.
“I would think of you more as a wascally wabbit,” Mikaela said.
“Which makes the guard Elmer Fudd,” she said, “okay, I’m sold.”
Mikaela put down a toilet seat cover, then guided her to sit down on the toilet. She handed her duplicate her foundation. Then she used some pins to conceal Bunny’s hair, while holding the hood and ears in place. “So what are we going for?” Mikaela’s duplicate asked. “On a scale from one to an extra in Rocky Horror?”
“Oh, we’re giving her the full Frank Furter.”
“Uh… is this the kind of thing you should be asking my consent for?” Bunny Mikaela asked.
The duplicate sighed. “Feety pajamas and blissfully unaware of Rocky Horror… it doesn’t feel like we’re even duplicates.”
“Well, not all duplicates are created equal; not all parallel earths, either. Our Rocky Horror was basically fascist propaganda, so I never saw it, just like I never saw Birth of a Nation.”
“That’s… weird.”
“Apparently otherwise just as transgressive, at least by reputation… but life’s too short.”
“Okay,” the duplicate said, “you need to stop talking. And it’s mostly so I don’t jab out your eye with this eyeliner pencil, and not just because I find your entire reality kind of depressing. Though it’s also that.”