Plasted! (part 2 of 2)

"Five years?!!" she was livid. "What do you mean 'five years'?!"

Henry thought about how beautiful she had looked a few moments ago. Her lips pursed, the corners upturned slightly in a smile. Her smooth legs adding power to her stance. She was wearing the outfit he had met her in all those years ago.

"Calm down," he said uselessly. "I know it's hard to believe. But I made a miscalculation five years ago and you had to pay for it. But it's not as bad as you think."

"How good could it be?" She sank back into the chair. "What about my apartment? My family? What am I going to do?"

"Now, let me tell you what happened so you can calm down." He sat next to her. "Look around. This isn't the same house you entered five years ago. A lot has happened. Did I mention that you're rich."

"Rich?"

"Here's how it happened."

Henry set his stopwatch and started making a few calculations. Beth had been standing there for just a minute when Henry's phone rang. He went upstairs to answer the phone.

A few hours later, he rushed down the stairs. He had forgotten about Beth. When he hit the bottom of the stairs he felt even worse. She was still immobile. The stopwatch read six hours, twenty-two minutes. His heart sank. What could he have done wrong? He went over his notes again and again. Days passed and still Beth was Plasted.

"Plasted?" she asked.

"Sorry, I'm ahead of myself," Henry replied. "I've turned the stuff into a product called Plasted. It's very popular."

She eyed him skeptically, prompting him to continue.

Henry spent a week in deep depression. He did nothing but watch the immobile Beth hoping she would come out of it soon. After a week, he came to his senses and realized he had actually kidnapped her. He had to do something about that. He found the purse she had been wearing and found out where she lived. Over the course of the next few weeks he arranged for her to "move out" of the apartment. He moved her things into storage. He had her address changed to one of those mailbox stores where he registered her box with just her first initial.

After a couple months, no one knew where she was and no one knew that he knew where she was. He spent as much time as he could conducting more experiments on mice and cats and dogs when he discovered his error. The set amount of the compound was needed to overcome the subject's weight. After that, additional quantity of the compound maintained duration on an exponential scale. He had given her a dose that would last for years, he figured. He needed to perfect the scale so he searched for another test subject. That test subject became his wife.

Smiling he continued, "I met my wife, Janet, where I met you. She was doing your old job at the mall. I thought how lovely she was and that I wanted to talk to her. I used the same photography scam that I used to meet you and it worked again. But instead of telling her about Plasted, I told her about myself. We started dating and by the end of the week we both knew it was serious. That weekend she finally asked me about photography and I told her the whole truth. When I showed her your immobile form she demanded that she help me find a way to help you. So she became my next test subject."

Janet shivered and stumbled. Then she felt fine. "How long was that time, Dear?"

Henry held her close, "Four hours, seventeen minutes." He shook his head. "This is not working the same way it does with the mice. I thought that would only be three hours. I don’t understand it."

"Calm down, Dear. It will come to you. Let's go to the bedroom. I'm not in the mood for your science talk and you need to be distracted by something else."

Over the course of a few months, Henry's calculations became more exact. One day Janet came home from work and found him on the sofa upstairs instead of in the basement where she usually found him.

"I've got it. All of the test data fits perfectly." He pointed to a print out. It held a long curved line drawn over a logarithmic scale.

"You know I don't know how to read that."

"I had been trying to find a line to represent the duration but it turns out there is an absorption rate as well. That makes the duration a polynomial function."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I used so much of the compound on Beth over there that she will be immobilized for four years, eleven months, six days and some hours. I didn't calculate it that exactly. There's no point to it since I don't know the exact time she was immobilized. What am I supposed to do for her? What will I say to her when she wakes up?"

Janet calmed him down that evening. The next day she gave him an idea.

Henry spent the next year perfecting the compound. He removed the weight requirement from the mixture so that it would work on anybody for the same duration no matter what their body weight was. He removed the ecstasy effect from it so that it could be used by living mannequins more readily. Finally, he made a time release version of it so that the living mannequin could pose for a while change pose and re-immobilize. With that enhancement, Janet became a highly demanded living mannequin. No one could believe she could hold a pose for a few hours and then change it slightly and hold another pose for another few hours.

Living mannequins were calling like crazy to get Plasted. It was making so much money that Janet and Henry had to move into a new place. They got married in their new house. Several Plasted guests attended, so that Beth could also attend without undue attention.

Henry came up with another version of the ecstasy-inducing version, Plastasy that only Plasted someone for five seconds. He marketed it as an aphrodisiac and made a killing overseas. He made sure that if someone tampered with the Plastasy pill, it became inert. He did not want to hear that people we being Plasted and robbed.

"Six months ago, Janet suggested that we take you along on her jobs. Some of the stores were intrigued by the model that always used the same pose and never appeared out of character," he continued. "You've earned nearly $120,000 this year."

"I have?"

"Yep, it's all in your own savings accounts and retirement funds. You are also part owner of Quinn Pharmaceuticals. And we had $30 million is earnings just last quarter."

"This is all hard to believe."

"I know." He stood up. "Come with me." They got into his car and the driver took them down to the mall. The same mall he had first met her in. As they walked through the mall, Beth could not believe how striking many of the mannequins in the various storefronts looked. "Just about all of them are living mannequins," he pointed out.

She got up closer to one of them and noticed the lines in the fingers and one the face. That plastic looking person was a living person.

"Come over this way. I'll introduce you to Janet." In the store she use to work stood a statuesque woman. Henry would have called her, obviously Plasted. The living mannequin held one arm on her hip and the other was in front of her and she appeared to be blowing something off of her hand. "Beth, this is Janet."