"Boo!"
Charise jerked forward in her chair, bumped from behind. Startled, she sputtered and spat up her ginger-ale, spritzing it on her desk and legs. Gawking at the mess on her lap, she snapped, "Dunlop! You asshole!"
"Apologies, Charise," the professor chuckled. The white-haired, wrinkled kook backed up in his wheelchair. "This thing has a life of its own."
Swatting the soda spray off her jeans, she smacked him with a side-eye frown and grumbled, "Why are you in a wheelchair? Your legs work better than your head."
"Because it's fun!" He spun around in a circle. "Look! I'm a roulette wheel. WEE-ooh!"
"Your brain is a roulette wheel, and it's missing its marble," she groused. "You're too frail to have fun. You'd sprain your lips just whistling."
"My dear, you will be surprised to know I am still quite limber," he said, stopping in mid-spin to flash a grin and twinkle his eye at her. "So are my lips."
He demonstrated by throwing a few puckered kisses at her like a guppy.
Charise removed her glasses to wipe them on her shirt and rolled her eyes up. "Yeah, jerking off to porn in your office keeps you very limber, I'm sure. You're gonna break your arm."
"You can always do it for me," he suggested with a chortle and a hopeful bounce of his powder-white brows.
She smirked, picked up her empty soda can, held it up in his face and crushed it with her hand.
Dunlop shuddered.
"I'm not that type of lab assistant," she grumbled, turning back to her desk. She waved her hands over a mess of papers and at her computer monitor. "I'm not any type of assistant. All I do is this bullshit 'data' entry, uploading your nonsense."
Her elderly employer, a self-identified inventor, bounced his head side-to-side and sighed. "You're right," he said, sounding surprisingly remorseful. "You deserve more productive endeavours."
"Yeah? Like what?" she scoffed, flipping her cherry red locks of hair back dismissively.
"Well, to be honest, we could use some cash," he said.
Charise paused, confused, then turned, eyeing him. "What do you mean?"
He shrugged. "I've run out of funds."
"What?" She frowned and shook her head. "You're out of money?"
Dunlop smiled and nodded. "I'm afraid so. Totally broke."
Charise blinked at him. His wistful expression did not jibe with the apparent urgency of the matter at all. While struggling to absorb the information, she glanced around their surroundings: a decrepit warehouse full of Dunlop's "inventions" and tonnes of other electronic hardware castoffs he had collected for years. Even though it was all junk, it must have cost him something to gather all of it plus fees for the warehouse, electricity, water...
And he had never sold any of his invention ideas or patents as far as she knew.
Suddenly, it started to make sense that he was broke.
"So... what does that mean?" she asked.
"Well, I'll probably start stocking up on cat food and then look for a cozy spot in the park by the public washrooms to set up a tarp tent," he said thoughtfully. "Hopefully with a view of the lake."
"Oh," Charise remarked.
"Then, I'll wither away and die, I suppose," he mused while stroking the white and grey stubble on his wrinkled chin as if contemplating the breakfast menu at Denny's.
"Sounds like a plan," she mumbled, looking off to the side, distracted.
"And, of course, we'd have to part ways," he added.
Still turned aside, she grimaced with mild concern. Despite all her griping, it was a good-paying job for pretty basic work. Not too demanding aside from fending off the professor's feeble attempts at sexual harassment.
"But, I do have an idea for getting a fresh infusion of cash," Dunlop said.
Charise chuckled at him dismissively, then jeered, "I'm not becoming a stripper."
"Oh..." He paused, blinking. "Well, then we can just use the time machine."
"Oh, God!" she groaned, throwing her eyes upward. "I told you I'm not doing that again."
A month ago, she and Dunlop completed their first successful attempt to send her back in time to 1985. True, the intent was to send her to 1984, but the fact that she went anywhere at all was astounding. After meandering around the era of hairspray, spandex and shoulder pads for a few hours and getting into some naughty mischief by accidentally walking into a guerilla porn video shoot, she returned with the unexpected Holy Grail of the incredible quest: chicken balls from a defunct Chinese take-out joint. She was not amused.
"It'd be a simple errand, Charise."
"Fuck off."
"A milk run, practically," he suggested.
"Go get your own frigging milk. I'm done going back in time."
"You would just need to find Barry..."
Charise paused, her mind suddenly alert. "Barry?"
'Barry' was also known to her as 'Apollo Cream', a hunky, dreamy porn star she just met during her 80's sojourn. Well, 'just met' was an understatement. She fucked him... under an hour of meeting him, too... in front of a goddamn video camera and film crew. She tried to convince herself that she had been coerced into doing so, but the word 'LIAR' crackled in her brain like a neon sign whenever she did.
"Barry has money?" she asked. She closed her eyes and shook her head, agitated. "Wait a minute. Who the hell is this Barry guy to you, anyway?"
Dunlop turned in his wheelchair, shrugging. "Just a person I knew, once," he said as he wheeled away through a maze of cluttered shelves and junk. "He's a means to an end to provide funds to sustain our little operation here."
Charise remained in her chair, her lower lip protruding and shifted aside as she thought. It wasn't as if meeting with Barry again would be an altogether bad thing. God, the way he could twist his tongue like an auger, not to mention his delicious cock...
"Stupid! Stupid!" she berated herself, suddenly, banging the heels of her palms against her temples. "You can't possibly be thinking of agreeing to do this again!"
Oh, she was, indeed.
"If this works," Dunlop called out from somewhere in the warehouse, "I'll double your salary!"
She shook her head again and sighed with self-dismay. "Double and a half!" she shouted back and stood up to shuffle after him. She had some pride, afterall.
