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They don't say much to each other the day Meelia takes off. There's nothing they can do about it. They hold hands, go for a walk through the orchard, go to bed early.
Tish, Haemi, and Meelia have family therapy
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"You make an appointment with your therapist in person, typically at the end of your session. If for some reason there's an issue with this the Agency will help find a solution."
"So long as you are sleeping during the night of a given session you'll find yourself on time, regardless of when the session is scheduled on the therapist's end."
"If that's everything you can get to your first session through there," Gerty says, nodding towards the door.
Tish is having an entire face journey about it but she will take her wife's hand and go through the door.
Ramona looks at her schedule to see what's coming up after lunch.
Oh, interesting, a family therapy intake scheduled by the Astral Therapy Agency. Ramona just signed up with these folks recently. It's sort of like an Employee Assistance Plan on Earth; the clients get free sessions that are paid for by -- well, not their employer in this case. To be honest, Ramona's not really sure exactly who's paying, but the reimbursement schedule is excellent. Ramona has the impression they've had a hard time finding therapists qualified for interdimensional work and so they're willing to pay top dollar for it. She hopes the clients aren't especially gnarly.
The file doesn't say anything other than "family therapy" so she'll just have to see who shows up.
Meanwhile she slurps up her dandan noodles and watches a cheesy dating show on Netflix.
And now it's time for the appointment! Will the clients walk in the door? Just materialize on her couch? How does this work?
Here's a lesbian couple with blue hair and slightly too many teeth. They are sharply dressed to some alien standard and holding hands.
And following them in through the front door is a young girl with short hair and oddly tired eyes.
"Welcome, thank you for coming. Please make yourselves comfortable anywhere in the room that you like."
There's a big comfy couch with blankets and pillows, definitely large enough for all three of them, as well as a few comfy chairs. Ramona stays standing while the others sort themselves out. It's always interesting to see how they choose to arrange themselves.
The blues - they're slightly older women, though how old they are exactly is not necessarily going to be obvious to an Earthling - sit on the couch together.
And Ramona will take the remaining chair, pull her feet up under her, and get cozy with a blanket.
"Good! Is this everyone?"
"My name is Ramona. My understanding is that you're here for family therapy. Can you start by telling me your names and how you're related to each other?"
"My name is Tish Ahtemik and this is my wife Haemi Fanu. We - briefly fostered Meelia when she visited our planet, until - she was deported."
"I'm Meelia. I stayed with Haemi and Tish when I was visiting their planet and they were nice to me and things."
"Nice to meet you, Tish, Haemi, and Meelia."
"I'm going to ask you more about yourselves in a few minutes but first I need to tell you a few things about how therapy works."
"My job is to listen to each of you and find out what you want to be different in your family and help you work together on your goals."
"If you want to, you can tell me private things. The rules of my job say that I'm not allowed to tell your secrets to other people. I'm not even allowed to tell anyone that you're in therapy."
"There's an exception, though, if I'm worried that someone is in really big trouble, like they might get hurt very badly or die. Then I might have to ask other people for help with that, and I might end up having to tell some of your secrets. I really try hard not to do that, though, because I know that privacy is important."
"Do you have any questions about any of that?"
Ramona's taken the standard disclosure speech and made it kid-friendly, though she was only guessing how to pitch it. She hasn't been able to guess yet how mature this kid is in human terms.
"I don't know! I don't know anything about your world. Usually I can only help the people who are actually doing therapy with me, and I can't always even help them, but I try. Are you worried about the people in your world?"
"Is there some kind of - dream police - and if so what are the laws we need to be complying with?" asks Tish.
"We, uh, don't currently live together and can't because she is no longer welcome in our country," says Haemi. "I'm not opposed to getting therapy but I'm not sure what kind of - goals we could set here."
"To answer Tish's question first, there's no dream police. Back when I just worked with clients on my own world, I was beholden to local law about what I needed to report to whom. Now that I work interdimensionally, I have to be a lot more creative. I don't usually have any way of contacting agencies that could enforce rules, and anyway the rules are different all over the place. I mostly go by my own sense of what's right, but I try to be humble about it. People organize themselves all kinds of different ways and just because I don't like something doesn't make it bad."
"And to address Haemi's question about goal setting, we'll get to that very soon. Sometimes it's hard, but if we go through your situation step by step we might find something worth doing, or at least something worth understanding better."
"Before we do that, do you have any other questions about the rules here? Or anything you wonder about family therapy in general? People come in with all kinds of different ideas about what it is. Many people have never heard of it before and need to start from the beginning."