Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cover art by @riloyoy

This world is full of truly worthless things, and the most worthless of them all are goats.

There’s a lot of goats in this area. Theoretically. There’s evidence that they exist, that they existed, and that they’ll continue to exist. They sneak onto the rocky outcroppings and bleat outside my room at night, and sometimes they even dare to take a snack from our vegetable garden. All the other kids say they’ve seen them standing on the rugged mountainside, watching and evaluating the world through their stupid goaty eyes.

Despite that, I’ve never seen a goat. That’s what makes me hate them the most. Every time I leave the building, or even try to sneak a peek out of the windows, they disappear. It’s like they know I’m coming. All I’m left with are places where goats once were. It’s infuriating. It’s not like I’d do anything to them. Probably. I just want to actually see one for once in my life, but no. They don’t do it to the other kids, or even the adults. I’m being discriminated against. By goats.

I suppose it makes sense. Because even though goats are the most worthless things in the entire world, the next most worthless is me.

My house burned down when I was very young. I’ve been told that my parents survived, but they were left absolutely destitute. If they had family that could help them, none of them stepped in. They had no home, and no food; even one adult would have struggled in that situation, I’ve been told, never mind two with a baby. Something had to go, and it was me. They gave me up for adoption before I even knew their faces.

After that, I was passed around for a while between different adoption centres, group homes, and agencies – like a football that had to be fed, watered, clothed and cared for, contributing nothing. I don’t remember ever being particularly ill-treated – not actively, anyway. But looking back, I feel like the adults – just like the goats nowadays – kept a certain distance from me. If I took a step forward, they took a step back. Always at arm’s length. Not once would they ever look me in the eye. Ever.

The kids were the same. No matter how boisterous they were, or how much bigger or older they were, they always seemed afraid of me the first time we met. Even though I hadn’t done anything. It didn’t matter how much I smiled, how friendly or cheerful I tried to be; in the end, it went just the same as if I stared at them silently. I started doing that more and more the older I got. It was less effort for the same result.

Eventually they’d get used to me though, and we could talk or sometimes even play together. But it felt like every time that happened, either I would be moved to a different place or my new ‘friend’ would get adopted.

I started to dread being moved. I started to dread strangers coming into wherever my home was at the time, knowing that they’d be there to take me somewhere new where I’d have to go through the entire process of watching wary kids open up to me all over again. And if they didn’t do that, they were potential adopters, and I’d have to see people I already knew plucked away, one by one, until only I was left.

The one kid that never seemed to get adopted was me. Sometimes they’d consider it. Some of them would feel sorry for me, or comment about how much they loved the colours of my eyes. Most didn’t. Instead they wore stiff smiles, just as uncomfortable as the kids and the goats and everyone else. Wary of me for no reason I could understand. In the end, it didn’t matter. No matter how badly they wanted a child, or how philanthropic they were, not once did I ever get brought to a real home.

There must be something wrong with me. There must be. But I don’t know what it is. Nobody will tell me. If they told me, I could fix it. Or at least I could try. But they won’t.

I hate them. I hate them all.

I’m thirteen now. Almost thirteen and a half. When I turn sixteen, I’ll legally be an adult as far as the foster system is concerned, and I’ll have to leave this orphanage. I don’t know where I’m going to go, or what I’m going to do. I don’t even really know how to talk to people. How am I going to get a job, or a house? What am I meant to do?

All I know is that I don’t have much time. The world is closing in on me, but I’m not ready for it. And every day, it gets just a little bit closer.

We’re having a visitor today.

Every time we have a visitor, the whole orphanage gets noisy and giddy. The other kids almost trip over themselves to make sure they look clean, friendly, presentable. They pull out the nice set of clothes the orphanage gives us for visiting days, scrub down their rooms, and make a whole production about it.

I don’t bother. I used to, back when I actually got excited about the idea of new parents or a new home. But it’s never worked out before, so I don’t see why I should make an effort now. Instead, I usually find a quiet spot – the airing cupboard is good – and settle there until the visitors leave. Our matron says I shouldn’t, but she lets me get away with it because she knows as well as I do that I’m not going anywhere.

Today I’m just going to stay in the dorms and patch up some of the holes in my clothes. I got my last dress caught on a nail that was sticking out of the door frame, and ended up making a huge tear the day after I got it. That’s always how it is. If there’s a nail sticking up, I’ll find it. If there’s a rock in the way, I’ll trip on it. I don’t know if I’m clumsy or just unlucky, but I eventually got good at doing little repairs like that. I still don’t know how to actually make clothes, though, so I can’t fall back on that once I leave.

We’ve got an old rocking chair that one of the former matrons left behind, and since everyone is headed to the lobby to meet their new potential parents, it’s free for me to sit in while I work. There’s something about the creak of a rocking chair that I find relaxing. It’s rhythmic, like the ticking of a clock, but you’re in control of how fast or slow it goes. A clock ticks as fast as it ticks, whether you like it or not.

Once I’ve more or less patched the holes in my own clothes, I start working on my favourite doll. It’s not mine, I suppose, since the toys here are for all the children, but it’s my favourite and it irritates me when the other kids play with it. Sometimes the matron tells me I should try to give it up since I’ll be an adult soon, but I don’t care what she thinks. The doll is better company than most people, and it’s definitely better company than goats.

There’s not too much work to do, so it isn’t long before I’m bored. Hiding out on visitor days is always a drag. They take way too long. Hurry up and pick someone, or don’t. Just make it quick. I hate being strung along with false hope, and I hate being stuck in the dorms all day.

“Children, this is our visitor today!” I hear the matron say from somewhere outside the door. She’s got a fake, cheery voice she uses for visitors, like the host of one of those kid’s shows on TV. When she speaks to me, she just sounds tired. “Don’t be shy. Introduce yourselves.”

Even though I can’t see what’s going on, I already know what’s happening. A little parade to impress the visitors, with curtsies and handshakes and god knows what else. They really do treat us like pets. Bark. Wag your tail. Roll over. Maybe you’ll be the one taken home from the kennel this time. What a joke.

I listen closely as the visitor speaks up. The exact words are muffled by the door and the distance, but I can make out the tone: gentle, kind, almost apologetic. A ‘breaking bad news’ kind of tone. Seems like no-one’s getting lucky today.

I feel a sense of satisfaction from that. I know I shouldn’t. In my head, I know that I should be hoping every kid here gets a good home, with good people in it, as soon as possible. But in my heart, I’m sick of this whole routine. I don’t want these familiar faces to get replaced with new, wary ones. I don’t want to see them succeed where I always fail. I’m jealous, and it hurts more because I know it’s wrong. But I can’t control it.

Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m a bad person, deep down, and everyone can see it just by looking. I don’t know.

“It’s a shame, but it’s understandable,” I hear the matron say. “If you don’t feel that emotional connection it can be hard to give a child all the love and attention they need, and adoption isn’t for everyone. But if you’d like to help us in any other ways, any donations are welcome, however little – old clothes, toys, nothing ever goes to waste…”

I roll my eyes as she goes through her spiel. Every single word sounds rehearsed. I know she only does it for our benefit, but it’s tough to hear it five hundred times and not get sick of it.

“Sorry, but… Are you sure there aren’t any more children here?” the visitor asks sharply.

There’s a moment of quiet. In the reception, the kids are all probably looking at each other, and the matron. Wondering what to do. What’s going to happen. They know I’m not interested in this stuff.

But that bleeding heart matron… there’s no way she won’t drag me into this. I throw down the doll on the bed, determined not to be caught looking vulnerable with a kid’s toy, and stand up. I can feel my face tightening as a glower settles on my features.

“Well… there is one more girl, but she’s fallen through the cracks so many times that she’s become a bit of a problem child… As much as I hate to say it, I think it’d be difficult to rehome her at this age.”

‘Problem child’. Well thanks. I’m a child, and I’m a problem. Nice to hear it confirmed.

“Still… If I can, I wanna meet all the kids before I make any decisions. Would that be okay?”

“Well, I suppose that’s fine…”

Ugh.

Fine.

Fine! Even a tiny chance is better than no chance. It’s for my own good. I know that.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. As I hear the matron’s heels clacking on the wood floor, I grit my teeth and ball my fists.

I won’t smile. I’m done with fake smiles. I’m done with introductions and party tricks. If they don’t like me as I am, they can get lost, just like all the others. At least I’ll know why this time. At least it’s something I actually did, and not something that just happened to me.

The door creaks open.

When the matron sees my expression, her face falls. She’s an old woman – well, mid-forties, I think – with her hair tied up in a bun and one of those faces where all the fat collects on her cheeks. I can see her shake her head despairingly, her eyes flitting left and right as she tries to come up with an excuse.

The person behind her is different.

Maybe different isn’t the word. Weird is more like it. For one, she’s wearing a bright yellow duffel coat in the height of summer. It’s making me sweat just to look at her. She’s a deep blonde, too, with some weird sprout of hair sticking out from the top of her head. She’s got it tied in a ponytail, so chances are she does actually know what a comb is, but she left that one bit for some reason?

But most of all, it’s that she looks straight into my eyes without a moment of hesitation. Instead of stepping back, she steps forward.

This hasn’t happened before. It just doesn’t happen. Even the matron goes out of her way to avoid looking me in the eye, and that’s when I’m not glaring. But if this duffel coat weirdo is uncomfortable at all, I’m not seeing it. Something about that takes the wind right out of my sails. I was thinking of kicking up a fit just to get her to go away, but I don’t think that would even work.

“Good morning! What are you doing all holed up back here? I almost missed you!” she says.

Usually, when people talk to kids – especially to orphans like us – they use this particular voice. It’s always... simpering, I guess. Really quiet, really concerned, like you’re a cat hiding under a sofa and they’re trying to tempt you out with a treat. They talk down to you, but they don’t realise they’re doing it.

This lady… well, yeah, she’s speaking to me like she’s a kid’s TV presenter, but she doesn’t have that soft tone all the others use. Instead, it’s all cheer, no subtlety. And what’s with the mix between being polite and then casual at the same time? I don’t get it. My eyes narrow, but this time it’s more confusion than anything else.

“Sorry. She can be a little shy,” the matron cuts in.

“Aw, that’s alright.” The woman responds briefly to the matron, and then returns her attention right back to me. “Why don’t we introduce ourselves? I’m Saki, and I run a bakery in the next town over. What’s your name?”

A baker? Now that she mentions it, she does kind of smell like cookie dough. It’s that sugary-sweet, calorific kind of scent.

“Reika, please stop sniffing visitors. We’ve talked about this,” the matron whines.

Saki blinks slowly. “Reika? Is that your name?”

“...Yeah.” I stand up a little straighter, and push my chest out defiantly. “Hoshino Reika. That’s the name my parents left me.”

Her expression changes very slightly. She’s still smiling, but it’s not the high octane cheerful smile she had before. It’s a little softer, and it feels almost… worried, in a way. But much more genuine at the same time.

“I thought so,” she says to herself, so softly that I second-guess whether I heard her say anything at all. She claps her hands, and the broad smile flickers back to her face. “Well, Reika. You want a cookie?”

“You actually have cookies?” I ask, suspicious despite myself.

“Of course!” She winks, and with the motions of a magician pulling a rabbit from their hat, she takes a waxed brown paper package from one of her coat pockets. “What kind of baker shows up at an orphanage and doesn’t even bring cookies?! That’s like absolute the least I could do! The other kids got some already, so don’t be shy. Dig in!”

She tosses the package underarm toward me, and I I fumble with the catch before ripping it open. It’s been a while since I had cookies. I used to try baking them, but they stopped letting me because I’d burn them every time. Even though this whole meeting thing is a pain, getting cookies out of it already puts her in the top one percent of all the visitors I’ve met so far.

...Oh, no. They’re good. They’re really good. Sweet, with a soft, buttery texture and two different kinds of chocolate chip. It’s such an indulgent taste. These are the kind of thing you eat to cheer yourself up after a bad day. Before I know it, I’ve demolished half of the packet. I can feel myself grinning broadly, despite trying not to.

“Hee hee, They’re good, right?” she says, closing her eyes and smiling too brightly for me to even consider saying no out of spite. “And that’s not even a tenth of my power! Brownie bites, sugar snaps, yumyums, cinnamon whirls… I can make them all!”

With no more cookies left to eat, I crumple the paper in my hand. I can’t stop myself from asking the question burning inside me. “Miss Saki. You said you run a bakery, right? In the next town over? Where is it, exactly?”

When I leave this orphanage… When I’ve got a job and somewhere to live and my own money to spend, I’m definitely going to go to that bakery and buy as many cookies as I can. That’s what I want to say, but I don’t have a good way of saying it without making myself look like an idiot. More than I already do, anyway.

But even just thinking it makes me feel a bit better. This morning I had no idea what I’d do when I got away from this place. Now I’ve got one thing to cling to. I’m going to be an adult who can buy cookies without worrying about it. That’s what I want.

“Ahahah! You’re an eager one, huh? But there’s no need to rush into stuff,” she giggles. “Why don’t I come back in a few days and take you over to see it? You can see all the stuff I bake, poke around, and… y’know. Decide if it’s somewhere you want to live. We gotta make sure you’re comfortable with everything if we’re gonna do this whole adoption thing.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s–”

I blink as what she said registers properly, and my mouth falls open in the middle of my sentence.

“Y-you actually want to adopt me?!”

“I do. Right now I feel like you’re unhappy, but underneath that, I think there’s a very sweet girl.” She smiles, as if she’s made a little joke. “As a baker and an adult, I can’t help but want to bring that sweetness out of you and show it to the world. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, right? We can take it slow and figure out if that’s something you want.”

I… I genuinely have no idea how to respond to that. This hasn’t happened before. I didn’t think it would ever happen. I look to the matron for some sort of answer, but she seems just as surprised as I do.

Silence rules the room.

“So, uh, is Thursday okay with you, or…?” Saki asks, her smile weakening.

“Yes!” I burst out awkwardly, before catching myself. “I mean… yes, that would be nice.”

My cheeks are burning with embarrassment after getting so excited, but I have to calm myself down. I remind myself, sternly, that this doesn’t mean I’m actually getting adopted. Anything could change between now and Thursday. Or even after Thursday. Or maybe this lady’s actually some cruel witch and I’ll end up worse than I started.

Little by little, I rein myself in. Before I prepare myself for a trip to the bakery, first I should prepare myself for disappointment. Maybe the most I’m going to get out of this is the cookies I already ate.

But that’s more than I ever got before.

The matron takes over to handle the details, whisking Saki away to the office for some paperwork and questions about income, residence, and all that kind of thing. She looks back over her shoulder and gives me a sheepish grin as she’s carted away. I swallow my pride and wave at her as she disappears.

Please.

Please come back next Thursday. All I did was scowl at you and eat your cookies, so I don’t deserve it, but… Please. Let me just get that far.

The night after that is long and sleepless. But for once, I listen to the goats bleating by my window with a smile on my face.

Chapter Text

“Thank you very much for doing this for me, Iru. It’s a huge help.”

“Aw, don’t worry about it. I was free today anyway.”

Some things never change, and Iru was one of them. I was deeply grateful for that. After we got to Earth and everything went a little nuts for a while, having that pillar of stability was really comforting. Even when she got a new job or picked up new hobbies, you knew she was still the same boneheaded, infuriating, gloriously easygoing girl she’d been before. She loved the things she loved, she did the things she did, and she had your back no matter what. Nothing could ever change that.

For a while she’d worked as a member of a peacekeeping organisation in Suguri’s area, but apparently there had been some kind of issue. They’d been getting their info from a government intelligence department that got very swiftly disassembled after some misuse of power or another, and Iru’s organisation had started coming under scrutiny because of it. She’d decided that it was an appropriate time to get looking for a new job, preferably one that didn’t make her use as much brain power.

Then she’d seen her motorbike, and the rest was history. Iru the courier had been born.

“Still, can’t believe you’re looking at adopting, Saki,” she said as she checked the engine. She didn’t need to check the engine, as I understood things. She just liked to. “I never even pictured you having kids.”

I laughed and didn’t really say anything, which was enough for the topic to fall out of Iru’s attention span. Of course, I hadn’t really been expecting the whole adoption thing either, and I’d been scrambling for a little while to put all the necessary building blocks in place. It’d be worth it, in the end, but boy was it a lot of work.

I was a little sad that I couldn’t give Iru the whole story, though. I didn’t like lying to her, even if it was just omitting information. She’d always been the most sisterly of our sisters, at least in the sense that I both loved her and wanted to fire her into the sun; Kyoko could be a little distant, Nanako was a powder keg, and Kae was exhausting even when she was fun. Iru could be irritating when she put her stomach and her workout routine ahead of anything else, but she was always there for you. In some ways, she was the most reliable of all of us – discounting me, obviously.

“Saki, you want a helmet?” she asked, pulling open the motorbike’s seat to reveal a storage compartment. “We’re not gonna crash, and you’ve got your shield anyway, but it helps keeps bugs out of your mouth if you feel like yelling while you drive.”

“Why would I feel like yelling, though…?”

“Trust me. You get out on the open road, with the wind in your hair and a powerful machine beneath you, and you just feel like yelling,” she said matter-of-factly. “Also, I drive pretty fast.”

I immediately started panicking. “You’d better not! We’re going to have a kid with us on the way back. And she won’t have a shield at all! Normal humans are super delicate, you know!”

“I know, I know. That’s why I’m gonna get it out of my system on the way there,” she replied with an easy smile. “You riding pillion or in the sidecar?”

“I guess I’ll sit on the back. She’ll be going in the sidecar once we pick her up, so I need to get used to it.”

She flipped the storage compartment back down, climbed onto the bike and gave the engine a hard rev, exulting in the roar.

She’d always had a thing for impressive machinery. Weapons, mostly, but it seemed like the humans on Earth weren’t really that interested in making the crazy, over-the-top stuff that would usually grab her attention. It seemed like she’d decided motorbikes were the next best thing. I never really got the appeal myself, but then again, I owned a blender with fifteen different speed settings, so I couldn’t criticise her all that much for getting suckered in by the allure of technology.

What I could criticise her for was that she’d developed a weird obsession with showing off her midriff. Every time I’d seen her in the last year, she had at least an inch of belly showing. At first I thought she just didn’t really know how to buy clothes that fit her – Kyoko had usually handled things like that on the spaceship, and if she didn’t then Hime usually swooped in at the opportunity to dress us up in whatever she thought was cute – but no, it was actually a deliberate decision.

Who does that? Look, I get it. You’ve got abs. But that doesn’t mean you get to show them off twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week! And this planet is cold. I barely get by with my coat. What if you get frostbite on your navel? Bet you won’t feel very clever then. Put that six pack away!

When I was done mentally castigating her for her wardrobe choices, I climbed onto the bike and immediately ran into the problem again. When you ride pillion, you usually put your hands on the driver’s waist, right? There’s nowhere else to grab onto. But because of Iru’s belly button exhibitionism, I’d have been touching her bare tummy if I did that! How could we maintain a sisterly relationship after experiencing direct hand-to-belly contact?!

“Hey. You’re overthinking stuff again, aren’t you?” Iru asked. “You always get weird complexes when you do that.”

I blinked, suddenly alarmed at what a rude girl Iru had become. I mean, she was right. I do tend to get a teensy bit hung up on things, like other people stealing my character traits or the contest for maximum cuteness, but that doesn’t mean she has to say it!

“Look, I’m… just… what if my hand slips while we’re riding, and one of my fingers goes inside your belly button, huh?”

Iru considered this for a moment.

“Yeah, that’d be pretty gross. Don’t do that.”

“But what if I do?” I asked, pouting. It wasn’t like I wanted to experience full naval penetration with my adopted sister, but accidents are accidents.

“Just don’t,” she replied, shaking her head. “Anyway, we’d better get moving. We’ll be late otherwise.”

I grumbled, but curled my arms around her waist anyway. Fortunately, I soon stopped worrying about it at all.

Unfortunately, it was because I was too busy yelling and getting bugs caught in my mouth. Iru might have been a tummy exhibitionist, but she also drove like an absolute lunatic.

“You actually came back.”

Hoshino Reika. Thirteen years old and still in the kinda squishy period kids go through where their arms and legs don’t seem long enough for how big their head is, her voice felt almost like an accusation.

It wasn’t, of course. But according to the matron, she’d grown up as a somewhat gloomy child who had problems socialising, and gloomy people had a talent of seeming like they were upset even if they weren’t. Kyoko did something similar; she could be dancing in the streets and still seem grumpy.

“Of course I did,” I said, winking. “I still have to show you my super cute bakery and my amazing baking skills, right?”

It wasn’t a great joke, but her mouth twitched – as if she was going to smile, but couldn’t quite get there. I felt like that was a much better indication of how she really felt than her listless way of speaking.

“Oh! But speaking of cookies!”

I reached into my coat pocket and took out a pack of white chocolate and raspberry cookies, which personally I’m a fan of. Chocolate chips are classic, chocolate chips are love and life, but sometimes you have to branch out and get a bit of fruit involved before your cookies will pop off into the next dimension. I gave them to the matron, and asked her to distribute them among the other kids.

Reika’s eyes widened when she saw the packet, and then scrunched up into a slightly petulant scowl when she realised they weren’t for her. Well, she was a kid, after all. That kind of straightforward emotion was kind of charming. She was still restrained enough not to ask for one out loud.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “You’re getting yours straight for the oven.”

I didn’t get a reply. But her face brightened up considerably after that.

I would have liked to chat with her a little more to make sure she was comfortable, but Iru finally decided to join us. At first she’d stayed in the lobby, because the other orphanage kids had swarmed her immediately. Iru dealt with the situation by making them hang onto her biceps and lifting them up into the air. Thanks to our enhancements, I could have done the exact same thing with no sweat – but Iru was the only one of us that actively worked out, so she deserved to show off her guns from time to time.

As soon as Iru walked in Reika stepped back, watching her like a stray cat watches a strange human trespassing on its territory. I found myself frowning. I knew she wasn’t exactly social, but I was starting to worry that she wasn’t even socialised. Even standoffish people usually knew how they ought to interact, but Reika’s silence struck me as her scrambling for a way to proceed and not finding any.

That said, I was actually more interested in Iru’s reaction.

When you looked at Reika, you just knew – in some way that you couldn’t put your finger on – that she was bad juju. Something about her set off the warning siren in people’s heads, and gave their fight-or-flight response a bit of a jiggle. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know she was doing it, and she’d no doubt stop it if she could. But from what I’d gathered from the matron, a lot of her problems seemed to stem from it.

I was immune, for all sorts of reasons, but I was interested to see if it would affect Iru at all. My hunch was that it shouldn’t, but there was no way to know for sure. I kept a close eye on her face; Iru was usually pretty direct about stuff like this, so it’d almost certainly show up in her expression.

“...Yeah,” Iru said to herself, after several tense seconds. “I could totally lift her.”

I fought the urge to put my head in my hands and weep.

Of course Iru wasn’t affected. Nothing in the world could put a dent in a head that dense. Any bad vibes just went in, bounced around inside her skull without ever hitting her cute little stegosaurus brain, and came right out of the other side.

“Please don’t?” Reika said, her face contorted in obvious confusion. “Who… uh. Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Iru,” she replied, before belatedly realising that she’d come across as a weirdo to an innocent child and hastily trying to paper over it. “You’re cute.”

Very smooth, I thought to myself. Very cool. Totally didn’t sound like she was trying to abduct an orphan.

She was right, though. Reika was cute. Once you got past the sullen expression, you started to pick out the finer features: a button nose, just a few small freckles, that would disappear with age, her tiny fingers. Of course, the most eye-catching features were her hair – a shade of blue that bordered on silver, almost like the fur of an old cat breed I’d seen. And, of course, her eyes.

If there was anything that marked her out as not being normal, it was her eyes. They had the arresting, iridescent colours of oil floating on the surface of a puddle, a world away from any eye colour I’d seen on Earth. They were instantly recognisable – and if I was asked, they were what I was going to claim had attracted me to her in the first place.

“...Thank you. I think,” she replied uncertainly, before turning to me and wordlessly begging for some kind of explanation.

“Ahaha. This is Iru, my adopted sister,” I said, stepping in to clear the air. “She’s a bit of a meathead sometimes, but she doesn’t mean any harm. She’s also going to be our ride today.”

“Have you ever been on a motorbike before?” Iru asked.

The word ‘motorbike’, like ‘cookies’, had an instant effect. Whether it’s coolness or cuteness, you can’t resist us! That’s the true power of our Saki-Iru turbo tag team!

“I get to ride on a motorbike?” Reika repeated, as if in total disbelief. “I get to ride on a motorbike, and then we can have cookies afterwards?”

I nodded. At some point I had started grinning without even realising it. “That’s the plan! We gotta get you back here by evening, but there’ll be plenty of time to have fun before then. You wanna get going?”

“Yes!” she shouted, then clapped her hands over her mouth in embarrassment.

It was the first time I’d heard her raise her voice. The first time I’d seen her lose control and break that listless facade. All it took was the promise of a good day, and her face lit up with excitement like any other kid’s.

When you got to be an adult, it was harder to change. It was harder to set aside your cynicism, because you’d had it for years and it had protected you after a fashion. It was harder to be cheerful.

But she could still do it because she was a child. She was still growing, still changing. Another few years, and we’d have lost her. I would have never seen this smile.

That was the moment that set things in stone for me.

I’d come to the orphanage to adopt her, but I had my misgivings about the whole thing. Was I capable of caring for another human being the way she’d need to be cared for? Was I going to be a good guardian? A good mom? That kind of thing.

But when I saw her get so excited over little things like cookies and motorbike rides, I knew: All this girl needed was a fresh start. And come hell or high water, I was going to give it to her, the same way that coming to Earth had given a fresh start to my sisters and me. She deserved it.

But first, I was going to give her some cookies. She deserved those too. And Iru was probably going to give her a phobia of travelling by motorbike, which she didn’t deserve but she was probably going to get anyway. She didn’t know it yet, but her future was full of gifts.

That, and sugar. Lots and lots of sugar.

Chapter Text

The first thing I do when we get to the bakery is throw up.

“Whoa. I didn’t know you could get carsick on a motorbike.”

“Iru, that’s not helpful right now!”

I can feel somebody gently rubbing my back as I curl over the toilet and hurl. I think it’s Saki, but I’m a little bit too busy to check right now. She’s right, anyway. Iru’s not being helpful. She’s way too chilled out about the whole thing and she keeps saying dumb, funny stuff. If I laugh now I’m going to spew sick out of my nose, so I take deep breaths and try to ignore both of them.

I only just got here, and I’ve already ruined everything.

I’ve been carsick before, sometimes, when they used to ship me out to different foster homes and agencies before I landed with the one I’m at now. I always thought it was because the cars were stuffy. They always kept the windows rolled all the way up, and sometimes the whole car would smell of cigarette ash and I’d feel like I couldn’t breathe without being sick.

But it turns out it’s just something wrong with me. Who else could get carsick under the open sky, riding in the sidecar of a motorbike, down a road that wasn’t even bumpy? Only me.

The bitter taste in my mouth is from more than just carsickness.

“There, there… You get it all out? Here, take some tissue and wipe your mouth. I’ll go and grab you some mouthwash, too,” Saki’s voice says when everything subsides. The only response I can make is a groan.

After I’m sure there’s nothing left in my stomach, I grab the edge of the sink and haul myself up. I can see my hands trembling as I grip the rim, and my legs feel like they’re about to give out. Geez... I always forget how tiring it is to throw up. You lose your lunch, and all the energy in your body goes with it. I put the seat down on the toilet just in case I need to suddenly crash down on it, and take a look at my pale, drawn face in the mirror.

“Uwaaaa…” I can hear Saki say outside. “Iru, I told you that were going too fast. Didn’t you hear her screaming the whole way here?”

“Uh, yeah, but she was screaming ‘goat’ the whole time. I don’t think it was my driving…”

Hehe.

Kehehehe.

Pwahahahaha! That’s right. Even though I completely blew my chances of getting adopted and my stomach feels like it’s been through a spin cycle, today will still go down in history as the day I got one over on those damn goats! They thought they could evade me forever, didn’t they? But there’s no way they can scuttle out of sight quick enough when I’m driving by at significantly above the legal speed limit!

I saw you, you smelly, ugly goats. I always thought you’d be at least a little bit puffy like a sheep, but you’re just all scraggly and dirty. You think you’re so superior, looking down on me because you’ve got all your goaty friends, but this time, the last laugh belongs to me! I bet goats can’t even laugh in the first place. Pathetic. Learn to laugh at yourself before you try to laugh at others! You’ll get yours, goats!

...I think I might be getting a bit delirious. I should probably eat something. Maybe some blood sugar will help.

Thankfully it’s not too long before Saki reappears with some mouthwash, a bottle of mineral water, and some saltine crackers. I accept all of them gratefully.

“How are you feeling?” she asks, her face creasing with worry.

I bet she thinks I’m some fragile, high maintenance kid now. She’s wondering what she got herself into, and whether she’ll even be able to afford any medical bills I’ll bring with me. She’s just a baker, after all. Ironically, I don’t think bakers get that much in the way of bread.

“A lot better.” I give her my best fake smile. I don’t think it’ll work, but I’ve got to at least try.

“Haaaah… that’s a relief. Do you feel up to looking around the place, or shall we leave it for today?”

Considering that the other options involved being carted back to the orphanage on the same bike that had made be sick in the first place, I shake my head and tell her I’d love to look around the bakery. I’d rushed to the bathroom so quickly I hardly had any time to take it in.

She leads me back out into the storefront, where Iru is waiting for us and looking meaningfully at the donuts, which have pride of place in a revolving glass cabinet by the entrance. I thought those cabinets were usually used for jewellery, but I guess a lot of donuts are rings, so it checks out.

“Well, here we are. Welcome to Big Bang Bakery, where you’ll find taste explosions that’ll make you feel like you’re among the stars! ...Or, well, that’s the tagline, anyway,” Saki says, apparently feeling bashful halfway through. “But my baking really is pretty good, so we get plenty of customers.”

I can’t help but notice that none of those customers actually seem to be here, but I decide it’s probably smarter not to mention that. Apparently it shows on my face, though, because Saki gives a wry chuckle.

“I shut the bakery today so we could show you around and make you feel at home. I can lose a day of business here or there – I’m not worried about getting rich or anything.”

Isn’t getting rich the whole point of starting a business in the first place? If you’re just doing it for fun, it feels like it’d be a lot easier to just work at somebody else’s bakery. But that’s another thing to go in the ‘stuff I probably shouldn’t mention’ bucket.

Instead, I let my eyes drift around the room a bit. At one end there’s a big glass counter with little place settings for pastries and stuff to go, and a till register on one end with a little bell to ring for service. At one side there’s a coffee machine, and a couple of retro-looking circular tables laid out so people can sit down and munch on their pastries, but there are only a couple so it seems like that isn’t the main focus of the shop.

There are also a few framed pictures dotted around – mostly arty black-and-white photographs of food. I don’t really get it, honestly. Why do you need to look at a photo of a danish pastry when you can walk six feet to the counter and see a real one, that you can actually eat?

On the opposite wall there’s a couple of racks of wicker baskets, with little labels and doodled pictures of pastries. I guess the idea is that if you don’t know what something’s called – like, who knows what a cruller is? – you can just go by the pictures, but the art is… a little wild. The croissant looks like the last boss in an RPG or something.

There are also two taller baskets on the floor for baguettes and ‘baguettes (stale)’. If they’re stale, why keep them? I guess you could sword fight with them. Not that I would. But you definitely could, and I can’t think of a better way to use them.

Other than that, it seems like a normal bakery. Wood floors, big glass bay windows so people can see in from outside and salivate at the pastries, that kind of thing. Saki looks at me as if she’s expecting a review or something, but I don’t really know what to say about it.

“It seems like a nice place,” I say, hedging my bets.

“Right? We’ve only been open for about a month, so I haven’t settled on the decorating one hundred percent yet, but it’s definitely cosy!”

Wait, it’s only been open for a month? And the next thing you do after starting a bakery is try to adopt some kid? What kind of priority is that? Wouldn’t you normally wait until you see how the shop’s going to work out before jumping into that kind of thing?

I’ve been thinking this for a while, but there’s something fishy about this.

It’s weird. It’s totally weird. I’m a kid, and even I can tell it’s totally weird! But what am I supposed to do about it? If they’re here to kidnap me or something, I guess that would be just my luck. But if they were just looking for a random kid, they had the pick of the litter. I was hiding away in the back room – why go to all the effort, when all the others were cuter and came out to meet them?

I feel like this Saki lady was there specifically for me. Not for anybody else, but me. What I don’t get is why. I’m an orphan. My parents gave me away. I’ve failed at being adopted at every single opportunity so far. There’s no possible way of saying ‘nobody wants me’ more than that.

And it doesn’t feel like they’re just trying to abduct me. If they did, they got away with it already – we got here by bike, and it isn’t like I could run all the way back to the orphanage on foot without them catching me. I probably couldn’t win in a fight against Iru, either – not with those muscles. They don’t need to be nice, or show off their bakery. They could just throw me in the basement or whatever it is they wanted me for.

It’s just weird. I don’t get any of it. Does getting adopted normally feel like this? Do all the other kids who meet prospective parents sit there second-guessing it the whole time, or I am just being suspicious because I’ve never gotten this far before?

And even if I’m still feeling spooked, could I actually turn down the adoption anyway? Could I actually bring myself to say no, with the knowledge that I might never get a chance like this again?

“Are you okay? Still feeling sick?” Saki asks. She’s caught the look on my face, but not the thoughts behind it. “If you’re really not feeling well, we could take you home if you like, and you can come another day. That’d mean more road trips, though…”

I quickly put my expression back into something more neutral. Right now, whatever my choice, it’s mine to make. If they send me home, I might lose the opportunity. “N-no, I’m not feeling sick, I’m just… hungry. I threw up earlier, so my tummy is empty.”

“Ohh, I get it. Someone’s angling for some cookies, am I right?” She grins wryly. “At least you’re more polite about it than Iru is.”

As if summoned by the mere mention of cookies, Iru appears by her elbow. I’ve never seen another person move that fast. “Can I get the ones with macadamia nuts? Nut cookies means I can have sweets, carbs, fats and protein all at the same time. They’re good workout fuel.”

“Okay, okay! We can have some cookies later. First, we have to actually show off the house. You’re not gonna be sleeping on the shop floor, after all.” She turns to me and winks, smiling. “You wanna get started on the cookies first, or shall we check out your room?”

My world grinds to a screeching halt.

“My room?” I repeat.

“Well, of course! You didn’t think you’d be sleeping on the shop floor, right?” Saki laughs.

A sudden, irrational anger swells up in my chest. I can’t help it. I know that to her it’s nothing serious, but it is to me. I repeat myself again: “You’re saying I would have a room? All to myself?”

She pauses for a second. Maybe she’s realising that I’m not kidding around. “Yes. I’ve already got one all prepared for you. I haven’t really decorated it or added much furniture yet, so there’s not much to see. But we can take a look if you want.”

“Yes,” I say. “Please.”

“What about cookies?” Iru asks, looking at Saki with puppy-dog eyes.

“Cookies later. You can grab a donut from the cabinet,” Saki tells her, before turning to me. “Come on, Reika. Follow me and I’ll show you the living area.”

She leads me behind the counter and through the kitchen, past a row of industrial ovens that she warns me never to touch. The countertops are long, made of black marble with little white speckles like stars in the sky, and they’re gleamingly clean. There are braces of knives and even rolling pins stuck to the wall with magnets, ready for use.

At the end of the kitchen there’s a narrow set of stairs, leading up the rest of the house. Saki takes them two at a time, completely noiselessly, as if she weighed nothing. As someone who can and does fall down stairs for any variety of reasons, I cling resolutely to the bannister and go only as quickly as I feel comfortable. I feel safer than usual, since Iru is there to break my fall. I get the feeling that if I hit her, I’d bounce right off without leaving a mark.

After that, Saki quickly introduces us to the living space. She shows us the bathroom, in which lives an atrocious pink shaggy toilet cover that makes me long for the safe, bland customer toilet that I threw up in downstairs, and the living room, which has two cuckoo clocks. I repeat: two cuckoo clocks. Who needs more than one clock per room? Who needs all of their clocks to have clockwork birds in them? Was she trying to pit them against each other?

“And this will be your room,” she says at last, opening a door at the end of the hallway. “I know it’s nothing special, but…”

She carries on saying things, but I’ve stopped listening.

My room.

The walls are painted plain cream. The room isn’t a perfect square or rectangle; instead, one of the walls has a little hump from where the chimney would run up from the ground floor, before the ground floor was renovated into a bakery. In one of the little nooks created either side is a wardrobe, twice as tall as I am. Opposite that wall is a single bed, with plain white bedsheets and two fluffy-looking pillows stacked against the headboard. There’s nothing else. No decorations, no carpets, not even a lampshade over the bare bulb that hangs from the ceiling.

But it could be mine.

I’ve lived in orphanages, agencies, and group accommodations all my life. I don’t think I’ve ever not slept in a dorm with at least two other kids in it. I hated it. Because I’m me and I weird everyone out somehow, all my roommates would end up staring at me – or pretending not to stare, which was even worse.

I’ve always wanted some space to myself. Somewhere to hide away for a little while, and just not have to deal with people. Or goats. Somewhere to just be, without worrying about who I am and why everyone gets spooked when I’m around them.

I kneel by the bed, and lay my head on one of the pillows. It’s a lot softer than the pillows I’m used to. It feels like I might sink into it and never resurface.

I hate it.

This whole thing is the sketchiest thing that’s ever happened to me. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe there’s anybody out there who’d look at me, out of all the kids, and decide that I’m the one for them. There’s something weird going on for sure – some ulterior motive Saki and Iru aren’t telling me. I know that.

But even though I know that… the idea of having my own room means too much for me to let this opportunity go. I’ve never had a mom. I don’t know what a mom really is. They don’t matter to me. But this? A place that’s been picked out for me, a place that’s mine? I want it so badly I can’t breathe.

If Saki asks me if I want to be adopted by her, there’s no way I can say no any more.

For the first time since I was a little kid, I really care about being adopted again. This is my one chance. It’s not much of a chance, after I spent all that time being grumpy and throwing up, but it’s there.

I’m going to seize it, with everything I’ve got.

Chapter Text

The topic of the world’s oldest profession was one that didn’t come up very much in polite conversation, but it had mostly been agreed that being a geologist was not it. Maybe it was among the oldest professions – after all, cavemen and their relationships with rocks would go on to deep and lasting implications for all human culture that came after them – but not quite the oldest itself. It did, however, deal with the oldest things. Rocks were eternal. Rocks endured. Before the upstart animals and vegetables came to town, minerals were king, and anybody who’d been trapped under a boulder would inform you that they still were.

But if the long and storied history of geology could be distilled down into one pithy saying, it would be “the simplest things are often the hardest.” Rocks were very simple, generally speaking. They didn’t walk, they didn’t eat, they didn’t backchat when you complained to them night after night about your useless lab partners and your inability to understand the rules of cricket, and they definitely didn’t plot to kill you when your back was turned. They didn’t do very much of anything. They were rocks, and rocks were like that: inert, until introduced to something that made them less so.

As one might expect, the wisdom of geologists had been transplanted and applied in all sorts of situations. But the one that concerned Nath at that moment was the mysterious art of hula-hooping.

It had, of course, been Sham’s idea. She had burst into the house with Sora in tow, marched them both down to the local park, fitted them with one plastic hoop per person and told them to wiggle until something happened.

“Why would I want to do that?” Nath had asked. She had spent the morning holding a cat teaser between her toes and watching her furry adopted son turn into a ballistic missile of teeth and claws, so she was feeling quite pleased with herself. Pleased enough to entertain the possibility that there might, in some world, be some compelling reason that would move her to hula the hoop.

“It’s good exercise, and it’s great for rhythm and flexibility, which are the two stats you need most help with!” Sham argued. “Don’t give me that look. I bet you can’t even touch your toes!”

“I’ve never tried,” Nath sniffed. “I’ve never needed to.”

“That’s right,” Sora chimed in. “Nath’s a VIP. She’s got people to touch her toes for her.”

At that point Nath abandoned the conversation to chase Sora around the park for five minutes.

As Sora’s newly minted girlfriend, Nath had had to face some hard truths about the blonde-haired girl. One of these truths was that not everything Sora said was blithe and innocent nonsense, although most of it sounded like it was. She flirted. She occasionally played tricks. Sometimes she would even joke.

Of course, she took her jokes seriously, because Sora took everything seriously. In fact, she took telling jokes so seriously that it was impossible to tell if they were jokes in the first place. Together with Sham, the third member of the almighty Cuddle Puddle, Nath had reached the conclusion that if you thought Sora might be joking, she probably was.

After a few minutes more of playful chasing, during which Sora vaulted over two picnic tables and Nath did not, Sham collected them and reinstalled their hula hoops before treating them to a demonstration. With her hands held above her head and an artful sashay of her hips, she sent her hoop twirling for all to enjoy.

When Nath imitated her, suitably intrigued by the fact that it was one more activity she could do without her prosthetics, the results were not spectacular. She was missing the rolling hip motion that Sham had shown off so easily; her hoop, instead of orbiting her gracefully, circled around her like a coin rolling around the centre of a funnel before guttering at her feet.

She did not, she had decided, like hula hoops.

Meanwhile, Sora had taken to it like a duck to water, showing her usual intuitive grasp of any task that required use of her body without engaging her brain. One hula hoop had not been enough to contain her power, and to Sham’s consternation, did nothing to stop her from walking around and talking as usual. She kept it aloft with the bare minimum of movement necessary, and spent her time debating with Nath over the merits of squirrels. (She had seen no squirrels. Squirrels had not been mentioned in any way. They were simply what Sora had on the brain at that moment in time.)

In a desperate attempt to provoke the hip-wiggling she so desired, Sham made the executive decision to affix another hula hoop to her troublemaking girlfriend. And it stymied her, for a time; the second hoop was placed around her neck, and figuring out how to chat without hitting herself in the nose was a convenient outlet for Sora’s brainpower.

She could still walk, however, and was using the opportunity to circle her girlfriends, so as to find a more opportune angle to observe their hooping. Unfortunately, Sham was also trying to do this, and they ended up circling around in each other’s orbits as they rotated around Nath’s axis. As the only stable planet in their personal solar system, Nath gamely continued to get more than a rotation or two out of her hoop.

Eventually, Sham solved the problem by giving Sora a third and final hula hoop, which was enough to occupy her full concentration and stop her from drifting around the park like a lost balloon.

For a time, peace reigned.

“Hey, Nath,” Sham asked, her tone softening. “Are you having fun?”

To Nath’s own surprise, she was.

It wasn’t like she had anything against hula hooping. It was a perfectly fine pastime, if that was what you were into. But Nath wasn’t. She probably never would be, and that was fine. She’d tried it, and now she knew.

But it was something about Sora and Sham that made it fun, even when it shouldn’t be. If she had to describe it, she’d have said it was just like when a cat or a dog just wanted to sit in the same room as their human – not seeking attention, but just content to share the same space. To spend time together. That was how she felt. The activity didn’t matter; the company, by itself, was enough to make anything enjoyable.

But if she told them that they’d want to drag her out hula-hooping every other day, so she tempered her expression and gave Sham a deliberate shrug.

“It’s alright,” she admitted. “But I could be having more fun.”

“Uhihihi. Well, why don’t I provide some motivation for you? Sign up today for the Superb Sham Reward Program! Earn reward points for your hula hooping prowess! Trade them in for all kinds of exclusive prizes!”

“Ooh.” Sora’s interest had been piqued, and she ceased hooping to come closer. “What kinds of prizes can we win?”

Recently Sora had been persuaded to sign up for a loyalty card at the local grocery store, and had found an entirely new world opening up to her. There was something extremely appealing to her about the idea of diligently saving up points on every purchase, squirreling them away until they could be redeemed for any and all manner of trinkets she might find herself tempted by but couldn’t justify relinquishing her allowance to obtain. She liked points. She liked prizes. She especially liked the combination of the two. Sham knew this, and was not above leveraging it for devastating effect.

“How about this? If you can get ten full rotations without letting the hoop fall, I’ll give you a back rub.”

Nath bit her lip. Sham’s comprehensive knowledge of cosmetology and anything vaguely associated with it included a robust knowledge of massage. She could rub backs with the best of them, and a half-hour under her care was a half-hour in heaven.

“Deal,” she said.

Sora frowned. “I already did ten. Do I get a prize?”

“Ten was for Nath, since she’s a beginner. You’re already super good at this, so… if you give me a hundred on all three hoops, I’ll lend you my phone and let you look through the camera roll. Nath’s sent me some pretty spicy stuff, y’know.”

“If by ‘spicy’ you mean pictures of my cat, then yes,” Nath replied stiffly.

“You sent me that cute photo where you were making a kissy face that one time. And there was that early morning one where you had bed head. And what about the one where you accidentally put your thumb over the camera and didn’t check before you sent it?”

In Nath’s opinion, these pictures were not spicy but merely pleasantly piquant. There were spicy pictures – she had once been betrayed by her bath towel while fumbling with the touch screen – but there was nothing in them that Sora hadn’t seen before.

More than anything, they were memories. Little snapshots of a time she hoped she’d never forget. The fog of ages had dimmed so many of her memories, and she had let it. These ones she wanted to keep.

Sora, however, shook her head. “Let’s have a competition to see who can take the best selfies instead, then. That way Nath gets a bunch of cute photos, and you get them as well because they’re on your phone. Everybody wins.”

“Oh? What are you getting out of the deal?” Nath asked.

“I get,” she said, and looked at Nath very deliberately, “to flirt.”

Nath smiled ruefully. Sora, having struggled to successfully flirt in the run-up to their relationship becoming official, had decided to solve the problem by practising assiduously, and (from time to time, if she felt Nath was being particularly dense) warning her girlfriends in advance that flirting was going to happen to them and that they should be looking out for it. She appreciated the warning. Forewarned was forearmed, after all.

She had no doubt that it wouldn’t end with just Sham and Sora taking selfies, though. She’d be sucked into it, as it always was, and they’d gradually escalate in their confusing, roundabout way until it ended up being an adventure they could all giggle about later. That was how it happened – how it always happened. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Well, you two go for your selfies,” she said, hoisting the hoop that had fallen around her ankles. “I’m still planning on getting that back rub.”

“That’s what I wanna hear. Oh, Sora! If Nath wins her back rub, you wanna watch? I’ll teach you some tricks,” Sham said, wiggling her fingers ominously.

“That sounds good,” Sora nodded, and snapped a picture of Sham’s finger-wiggling for posterity. “But you have to let me practice them on you before I try them on Nath.”

Around and around they went – making sure every competition had something for everyone, that every adventure could be shared. That everyone was a winner. It was a talent, or perhaps a way of thinking, that Sora had been perfecting since the war that everybody lost. It was a circle where happiness passed from one hand to the next, never stopping.

Or maybe it wasn’t that deep, and Nath just had circles on the mind. Hula-hooping was a very contemplative business.

Another happy day was passing. She looked forward to the memories that it would leave.

Chapter Text

“Hi, this is Saki. I’m calling about Reika. We’ve got a little situation…. Oh, what? No, no! She didn’t do anything bad, and she’s not hurt! I just showed her the room I had prepared for her, and she, uh, got a little emotional and ended up crying herself out. She’s taking a snooze right now. I don’t want to wake her up, so do you think we could maybe keep her here for the night and bring her back in the morning?”

The orphanage lady sounded like she was pinching the bridge of her nose over the phone, but it still took another five minutes of questions before I convinced her to give me the okay. Even if Reika was probably more trouble than the average child under her care, she was still dedicated to keeping her safe. I appreciated that.

Honestly speaking, though, today had a bit of an education. I wasn’t expecting her to be this… busy. Yelling, throwing up, crying herself to sleep… it was like being on a rollercoaster, from start to finish. Was this normal for her, or was it just because it was a big day and she didn’t know how to deal with it? I wondered if I really had the energy to keep up with a kid like her.

“What’s the verdict?”

Iru, the other big kid I sometimes took care of, asked me that as she rifled through my pantry in search of snacks. I sat down at the kitchen table, and sighed.

“We can keep her here for the night, but we’ve got to have her back by nine o’ clock sharp tomorrow. Will you be okay to drive us back?”
“Do I get breakfast?”

“Of course. And I’ll bake you some cookies later tonight.”

“Score!”

Pleased with herself, she returned to rummaging through my cupboards, and I returned to worrying about the conversation we were about to have.

I loved Iru. Really, I did. She managed to be the least grumpy and least insane of all my sisters, and considering the sort of stuff we went through, that’s a lot more impressive than it sounds. Even if she got on my nerves from time to time, she was always there for me when I needed her. The fact that she’d taken days off work just to help me set Reika’s travel was just a tiny part of that.

Better than that, she was simple and honest in a way that a lot of people just aren’t. She liked what she liked, and she did what she wanted to do. You didn’t have to second-guess her. If she wanted anything, if she needed anything, she told you. And if the thing she wanted was dinner, she told you loudly.

But what I needed from her was the opposite of that. I needed her to be quiet. I needed her to be sneaky.

I needed her to keep a big, big secret.

“Hey, Iru,” I began, and smiled as hard as I could to try and trick myself into feeling comfortable. “You know this whole thing where I’m adopting a child?”

“Oh, yeah. I meant to ask about that. Why are you suddenly adopting a kid, anyway? She’s cute, but it’s kind of a wild thing to do just randomly,” Iru said. “It’s the kind of thing I’d expect from Hime, maybe, but not you.”

“It’s… complicated,” I said.

Telling Iru something was complicated was like throwing down a boss monster in a game of trading cards. ‘Complicated’ meant it was something big, annoying to deal with, and potentially a big problem. Complicated was exactly the kind of thing Iru had nothing to do with. If you told her something was complicated, she’d usually just nod and accept it, just to avoid thinking about it too much.

“Huh,” she said. And I expected her shrug and let it roll off her, but she didn’t. “Break it down for me.”

I froze.

‘Break it down for me’ was one of those things I never used to hear Iru say. But being on Earth and working with that peacekeeping agency had changed her, at least a little. She’d figured out that she could sometimes get people to do the thinking for her, and just handle the mission critical stuff herself.

“It’s an emotional thing, you know? And you said it yourself. She’s cute. I love cute things! Cute is justice!” I said, much more enthusiastically than I actually felt.

Iru’s eyes narrowed, but finally, she shrugged. It had passed the sniff test of being something vaguely like what I’d actually say, and she’d bought it. She hadn’t asked any of the questions normal people might, like ‘why a kid? Why not a cat or a dog?’ It was that lack of questioning that made me worry about people taking advantage of her.

“But anyway,” I carried on, immediately trying to take advantage of her, “I need you to do me a big, big favour.”

“Sure,” she said, without bothering to ask what the favour was. I adore this idiot sometimes. “As long as it’s not too heavy.”

I paused. “Too heavy?”

“You’re gonna need me to pick up some new furniture for her room, right? Leave it to me. You’d be surprised how much you can fit on the back of a bike. I once put a whole chest of drawers on there.”

“Uh, what? How? What if it falls off the back and totals the car behind you?! Wait, this wasn’t what I wanted to ask you about at all!”

Iru tilted her head, as if putting her brain at a slightly different angle might encourage it to function properly. “Then what was it?”

I took a deep breath.

“I need you to keep the fact that I’m adopting Reika a secret.”

For a few moments, Iru was silent.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s… complicated.”

She shook her head, as if to tell me that ‘it’s complicated’ wouldn’t save me this time. “Saki, adopting a kid isn’t the kind of thing you can keep a secret. Even I know that.”

“It doesn’t have to be a total secret!” I told her, flapping my hands in a panic. “I just, uh, need certain people to not know.”

Iru tapped her fingers on the table impatiently. “Which ones?”

I swallowed.

The answer – the real answer – was Suguri. And Suguri herself wasn’t even the problem. She was stern sometimes, but actually a huge sweetie and very reasonable. If she weren’t, none of us would be alive.

The problem was that in Suguri’s house, there were four people: Her, our big sister Hime, our little sister Sumika, and Sora – an ancient hero that they’d just kind of wandered into one day and then adopted. How does that even happen? How do you just run into a total stranger and then let them live in your house? I mean, I know I’m adopting a child, but that’s different. At least a little bit.

From the letters Hime had sent me, all I could tell about Sora was that she was erratic… and kind of violent. Apparently she was a sweet girl, but she also went around suplexing people, and had a fight with two other girls she knew from her past recently? Like, a full on, laser rifles and beam swords fight!

But more than that, Sora was the one person who I could never, ever allow Reika to meet. It would destroy everything I was trying to do in an instant.

Right now, she didn’t know Reika existed. But if Suguri heard I’d adopted a child, she might come and visit, and she’d almost certainly bring Sora with her. That was the one thing I couldn’t allow.

But if Hime found out, she’d definitely tell Suguri and force them to come. And if any of my sisters found out, they’d definitely tell Hime if I didn’t specifically tell them not to. If I spoke to them all individually, I could probably get them all to agree to keep quiet, at least for a while, but if they started gossiping among themselves , Hime would know about it within the day.

Honestly, though, all of this made me feel… guilty. I was (almost) an adoptive mom, and at that very moment, Reika was completely crashed out with drool running down her face. I should have been enjoying how mega cute and clumsy she was, not conspiring to keep secrets with Iru. I should have at least taken pictures to embarrass her with later. That was what moms did, right? I’m sure that’s a thing, probably.

I should have been bonding with her emotionally. But instead, I was worrying about how to keep her a secret, because everything would fall apart if I didn’t. That was how things had to be, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was already being a bad mom, or that I was being cheated out of some fundamental part of the mom experience.

“Just… I want to tell the family by myself, in my own time. I’m gonna be Reika’s mom, right? I should get to tell everyone about it, rather than them hearing it from somebody else,” I told Iru.

A long moment elapsed.

“Saki, I don’t like this.”

Urk.

“This isn’t like you. You don’t normally keep secrets from anybody. Or ask me to keep secrets for you.”

Urk.

“But also… It’s not like you to frown like that.” Iru’s voice softened. “You’re not happy about this. Come clean. Is there some kind of problem? Is there anything I can do to fix it?”

I sniffled to myself (cutely, of course). Iru really was amazing. She was like a big, dumb, happy dog. She wanted to play, she wanted to eat, and she wanted to keep her family safe and happy. I couldn’t have picked a better sister. And Reika couldn’t have picked a cooler aunt.

“It’s fine, Iru. If you just hold off on telling anybody, I can handle the rest. I promise.”

“Well… Alright. Just tell me if you need anything.”

I summoned up my cheerful energy and gave her a patented Saki wink. “I think what I need right now is to bake some cookies for my favourite sister. Maybe the smell of cookie dough will wake up our sleeping princess, too.”

Iru stood up so quickly that her chair hit the floor with a clatter. Back on the spaceship, we used to call that the Cookie Alarm. “Can I lick the spoon?”

“No way. I keep telling you, the batter’s got raw eggs in it.”

“Aw, c’mon. I eat raw eggs all the time.”

“Not in my kitchen you don’t!”

I still wasn’t sure how everything was going to work out. But a late night cookie party was a good first step. It was always a good first step.

As Iru helped (‘helped’) me with the dough, my kitchen filled with the scent of sweetness.

Chapter Text

There are two cuckoo clocks in Saki’s living room.

Sorry, but I just can’t get over how weird that is. How does that happen to a person? How do you not only find a cuckoo clock, but then, having found one, actually go out and get another? And then put it in the same room? It’s wild.

Before yesterday, I didn’t even know cuckoo clocks were a real thing. I mean, I knew they were a real thing, but I didn’t think they had carried on being a thing all the way into the modern age. I didn’t even think clocks were a real thing, to be honest. Almost everyone’s got a phone, and that tells the time just fine.

But when you really think about it, it’s just about right for this situation. A cuckoo is a bird that lays its eggs in somebody else’s nest, and has some other bird raise their child. In this case, I guess I’m the child somebody else has put in Saki’s nest. But two cuckoos in the same place? Do you think they just swap kids back and forth, over and over, trying to get each other to take responsibility?

This is the sort of stuff I think about at five thirty in the morning.

It’s five thirty in the morning, by the way. I know some people have to be awake at five thirty in the morning, but have you considered maybe not doing that? Then nobody would need to run anything, so we’d all get to have an extra hour’s sleep.

In front of me is a plate of buttered toast, which I think is there to stop me from falling asleep. If I fall asleep now, I’ll just faceplant into the toast and get butter on my face, and then I’ll feel all crusty for the rest of the day because of the crumbs. I wish I could untoast it back into bread. Bread’s at least soft and pillowy. Toast is too crunchy to be a good pillow.

“C’mon. Eat up, sleepyhead,” Saki tells me in a sing-song voice. “You know what they say: bread and bakers both rise at dawn. We’ve gotta have you back by nine, so this is the only way we’ll get to bake cookies together!”

I frown, and wonder if I should tell her about the ‘everything I try to cook bursts into flames’ thing that got me banned from meal duty at the orphanage. Even if I only help with the non-cooking parts, like chopping or stirring, something goes wrong. I can get away with microwaves, and toasters work, but that’s because I don’t have to do anything at all. The machine does it all for me, until the machine breaks.

But in the end, I decide to just keep my mouth shut and nod. If I’m going to get Saki to adopt me, I need to do more than just show my best face. I need to get to know her and do stuff with her, too. So far all I’ve really done is throw up, cry, and pass out, which is probably not the most flattering record.

I need to try harder, and show Saki that I deserve to get adopted by her.

“How did you sleep, anyway? I guess the bed was comfy enough since you zonked right out, but…”

Honestly? It was strange. I woke up a few times in the night, and every time, I was struck by how quiet it was. I’m so used to hearing the other kids snore that it felt kind of lonely without it.

But that’s another thing I probably shouldn’t say if I want to get adopted permanently, so I swallow it, make a non-answer, and turn to look at Iru.

I’ve never seen anybody eat the way Iru does. Saki gave her a plate that was piled high with pancakes, bacon and maple syrup, and she just demolished it. Then she started putting in more toast, because apparently she wasn’t done yet. She’s already gone through four glasses of orange juice! I’m pretty sure Iru eats enough for three of me.

But she’s so obviously having a great time that I can’t look away. I don’t know how she finds time to smile between piling food into her mouth and chewing, but she does and it’s infectious. It strikes me that Iru probably loves Saki’s cooking more than I love anything in the world.

“She’s something, isn’t she?” Saki whispers to me conspiratorially. “People like Iru are the best motivation when you’re learning to cook. I wouldn’t be half as good as I am if I hadn’t had to cook for her all the time when we were younger.”

…Is it me? She said it as though it was a complement, but when I think about what she actually said, it sounds more like she’s complaining about it…

Honestly, I think Iru is kind of motivational. She eats like this, but she still looks really trim and toned. I feel like if she can do it, anybody can.

“Does Iru live with you?” I asked.

“Oh, not at all. It’d be like feeding a family of five. She’s in the area, though, so you’ll probably see her stopping by for a snack from time to time.”

“That sounds nice.”

It sounds like polite small talk, but I actually do mean it. I don’t get the vibe that Iru is uncomfortable around me, just like I don’t get that vibe with Saki. Even though we haven’t really talked much since I’ve been too busy with everything going wrong, I like her just for that.

When breakfast is done, Saki leads us across the hall to a little kitchenette. At first I wonder why she’d bother having a kitchen upstairs in the living space, since there’s obviously a kitchen in the bakery, but she seems to guess what I’m thinking about and heads me off at the pass.

“Reika, the ovens downstairs are called deck ovens. They cook things a little differently to the ones you’re probably used to. It’s better to practice making things in a regular oven instead,” she tells me. “Oh, and the ones downstairs are industrial equipment, so you should never touch them without permission.”

Makes sense to me. I make a big enough mess with a regular oven. Who knows what I’d end up doing with an industrial one.

As far as kitchens go, the upstairs one is very small – just a stove and a sink, a countertop opposite them with cupboards and drawers built in, and some extra cupboards above the counter. There’s a skinny fridge-freezer tucked away in the corner as well. The space between the counters and the cooker is narrow enough that only one person could really fit in there comfortably, and two would be a squeeze. Fitting all three of us in there is almost a geometry puzzle. There’s at least a pantry just before the entrance, cordoned off with hanging beads; I don’t think you’d really fit in all the ingredients for food otherwise.

“For now, we’ll just go with some classic chocolate chip cookies. Iru, can I leave the mixing to you?” Saki asks, not bothering to wait for an answer before pulling a bowl out of the bottom cupboards and handing it to her. “Reika, you can stick with me and I’ll go through all the steps with you.”

She pulls me over to the pantry, which isn’t organised in any way that makes immediate sense, and starts pulling out clip-top jars of various ingredients – fine sugar, flour, and baking powder. They’re labelled in elegant but basically unreadable cursive handwriting that mostly just suggests what the word might be rather than spelling it out.

“For now, I’m just going to teach you an easy recipe,” she says, once she’s assembled a spread of ingredients that includes butter, vanilla, an egg, and a whole bunch of chocolate chips – half of which seem in danger of disappearing into Iru’s mouth before they make it anywhere near a cookie. “When you’re an experienced baker you can adjust all the quantities and have a good idea of what will happen, but when you’re just starting out, sticking with the measurements will get you the best results!”

I nod and try to keep up; one thing I’m noticing is that even though she goes through the recipe with me pretty slowly, the speed she actually does stuff is insanely fast. When she’s done talking and it’s time to measure or sift or whatever, her hands are an absolute blur.

“Hey, Saki. You’re doing it again,” Iru tells her reproachfully. “If you do stuff that fast, nobody can tell what you’re actually doing.”
“Ahahaha. Sorry, sorry. I have confidence in my cooking, but I’m not cut out to be a teacher.”

Even though she’s apologising, she doesn’t go any slower. She reaches for the ingredients, her hands flash and by some mad alchemy they combine, changing form and shape into dough. She didn’t even let Iru do the mixing, when she totally said she would! She did, right? I’m not going nuts?

I think about it while she shows us how to portion the dough into perfectly equal splodges on the baking tray, and eventually, I figure it out. She did tell Iru to mix, and she probably could be going a bit slower. I don’t even think she’s bad at teaching, since the steps she’s talking about make perfect sense when I follow along.

She’s just showing off. For me.

I don’t even know how to respond to that. It never occurred to me before now that this whole thing has been a two way street – it’s not just me trying (and failing) to look like a kid anybody would actually want to adopt. She’s trying to impress me, too. She actually wants me enough to try and look good in front of me. I don’t think that’s ever happened before.

Come to think of it, she’s been talking this whole time in the future tense. Like with the ovens. She said I should never touch them without permission, as if she thought I’d ever have the opportunity after today.

It finally hits me, all at once. This isn’t some kind of cosmic bureaucratic error. She’s not planning to pull the rug away under my feet. Saki actually, genuinely wants me. I have no idea why, considering how much I’ve been messing up, but she does.

My chest starts to ache.

I want to tell her that she doesn’t need to show off. That just by bringing me here and offering to take me into her home, she’s already one of the coolest adults I’ve ever met. Her and Iru. Sure, it’s sketchy, but nobody’s ever made me feel this welcome anywhere.

But I feel like saying that would be somehow ungrateful for the effort she’s putting in. So I listen quietly as she explains how long to put the cookies in the oven for, the importance of pre-heating, and her opinions on the various variety of chocolate chip. She can show off a little. I don’t mind. It’s all good.

“Oh! But there is one final thing we need to do before we put these bad boys in to bake. It’s not something any recipe book out there will teach you, either.”

Saki gives us a nod and a wink as she tells us that, before swearing me and Iru both to secrecy in a tone that might or might not be joking. I wasn’t counting on getting the secret arts of the Shaolin baking monks or whatever, and I know for sure that Iru’s just in it for the cookies, so we both just nod.

“Alright. This is a secret spell that guarantees your baked goods will come out moist and sweet! If they’re meant to be moist and sweet, anyway. Here we go!” she says, flourishing her hands dramatically, before singing:

“Roll out the dough with a pin, poi poi!

Shape it, and press it in a tin, shun shun!

Bake it until it goes ding, poi poi!

Save just a cookie for meeee!”

I blink. For a moment, I forget to breathe. She looks at us as if expecting a round of applause for her singing (and the impromptu dance routine that went with it).

Oh my god.

I look at Iru, who just shakes her head and gives me an apologetic shrug.

C...Could it be that Saki…

My potential adoptive mom…

The one person in this world who I truly believe wants to have me around…

...and who I just finished deciding was one of the coolest adults I’d ever met…

...is actually a super, mega dork?

Chapter Text

“Darling, how do you feel about booty shorts?”

Suguri furrowed her eyebrows and lowered her newspaper, which she had been contemplating for the last five minutes. Lately, life had been presenting her with a horrible problem: it turned out that the crossword puzzles for their local paper were, in fact, recycled. They had about ten years’ worth of them stockpiled, and just went through day by day until they reached the end before restarting.

She had discovered this because Sumika had taken to looking up what point in the rotation they were in and filling out the answers before Suguri got her hands on the paper. It was a new and maddening development in Sumika’s ongoing cold war against the woman who had supposedly seduced her sister, even though Suguri was very sure that Hime had been the one trying to seduce her.

“How do you think I feel about booty shorts?” she asked dryly.

Hime, sitting across the breakfast table and spooning honey into a cup of black tea, tilted her head coquettishly. “I think that you decided how you feel about booty shorts several hundred years ago at the very least, and your feelings on them would almost certainly change if you were to encounter them in a more modern setting.”

In other words, Hime didn’t actually care about how she felt about them. She was just giving her advanced warning that there would be a booty short related incident in the near future, and she should prepare herself for that eventuality.

“I’m not wearing them,” Suguri said flatly, and raised the newspaper again. The crossword was a bust, but there was always the letters page. There were some very interesting people in the local area, and they wrote very interesting letters. To call them unhinged would have been unkind, but not inaccurate.

“Why not? You have booty. You could make them work.”

“I do not,” Suguri replied, slightly distressed.

“Oh?” Hime replied, closing her eyes and smiling cheerfully. This was not a good sign. “I do believe there’s somebody at this table who often picks clothes out for you, and has an intricate knowledge of your dimensions. If I say you possess booty, you can take it as an objective fact.”

Everybody, Suguri wanted to reply, had booty; the number of humans who were not equipped with hips was very few. The issue was the amount they possessed, a scale on which she would have put herself rather low. (Lower, it could be argued, than she deserved.)

But going into that line of reasoning would just feed into whatever Hime was planning, so instead she said: “If Sumika hears you talking about this, she’ll throw a fit.”

“True. I could go without her installing hip upgrades to try and outdo you.” In any other household, this would have been a joke. In Suguri’s, it was a dystopian horror story compressed into a one-liner. “What about regular shorts, then? What do you think of those?”

“Why the sudden interest in shorts?”

“Well,” Hime began, her eyes glittering, “It’s getting hotter, is it not? And at about this time of year, I thought you might like to engage in some sort of, you know, strenuous exercise, and that you might like to wear shorts when doing so.”

“And you might like to watch,” Suguri finished.

“Oh, I would love to watch. I’m so glad you suggested it.” Like a bear trap snapping shut, Hime seized upon her opportunity. “Now, the only question remains the shorts.”

It was at this point that Sora drifted into the kitchen, seemingly summoned by the promise of hard exercise and women in skintight clothing. Appearances, however, were deceptive. She had actually been summoned by the unformed proto-sandwich that was currently living in their fridge, and that she was going to assemble. She took sandwiches very seriously, and this one was calling out to her.

“Oh, Sora, fantastic. I could use some sisterly advice,” Hime said, flagging her down en route to the counter.

As a rule, she didn’t flirt with Suguri while Sora or Sumika were within sight. She didn’t particularly care if they were in earshot – that was their own problem – but she was aware that Suguri liked to keep up a certain pretence of respectability.

Of course, sometimes they would – unintentionally in Sora’s case, and very intentionally in Sumika’s – blunder into a flirtation-in-progress. She’d taken to getting around this by immediately roping them into the conversation, on the grounds that it might be funny even if they didn’t get the hint and take themselves somewhere else.

Sora turned to her, blinking owlishly. Up until that point, she had been thinking of whether she could put ice cream in a sandwich. Obviously it was possible – you could put anything between two slices of bread if you put your mind to it – but was it ethical? She wasn’t sure, but she wanted to find out.

Upon hearing Hime’s plea, however, sandwiches became a secondary – although still quite pressing – priority. Her mind filled with nuggets of sisterly wisdom, all waiting to be dispensed. What were they? She had no idea, and wouldn’t know until after she’d said them. That was how wisdom worked.

“Sora, I’m trying to get Suguri to take some exercise, but I just can’t seem to convince her,” Hime explained. Every single part of this sentence was news to Suguri; she rather got the impression that the exercise was and always had been a means to an end, and she’d only put up token resistance so far anyway. “You’re good at these kinds of things. What do you do when you want Nath and Sham to take you out for a walk and such?”

If Sora caught the implied comparison to a dog, she didn’t protest. She liked dogs, and was open to the idea that they were a superior life form to a standard human. After all, dogs didn’t start wars. Mostly they just barked and tried to lick Nath’s eyebrows while their owners panicked. Sora didn’t know why they all wanted to lick Nath’s eyebrows, but she supposed somebody had to.

She deliberated over her answer for a while, during which Hime pretended to wait with baited breath.

“I ask them,” she said at last, “and they say yes.”

It sounded as though she might have been bragging, although with Sora it was simply impossible to tell. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; Sora had exactly one tone of voice, and applied it without exception.

“Oh, what a wonderful and applicable strategy. I wish I’d thought of it myself! But you see, the issue I’m having is the part where they say yes,” Hime said, rolling her eyes. “What do you do in the event they don’t?”

“We do something else, and I ask another day.”

Hime sighed, and lowered her forehead to the table. Of course. What had she been expecting? Sora was barely even persuasive at gunpoint, never mind in day to day life. There had been the hope, extremely faint and intangible, that the ex-soldier’s legendary stubbornness would lead her to not give up on things at the first refusal, but that apparently didn’t apply when it came to Sham and Nath.

Suguri gently pet the back of her head and made comforting Suguri noises, though, so the exercise wasn’t without at least some profit.

“If it’s such a big deal, I don’t mind humouring you… a little,” Suguri said, adding the last bit sternly. “...how short are we talking about?”

“How short can we go?” Hime asked, her eyes glinting. “Sumika’s going to be away fixing up that spaceship for another day or two yet. I’d like to take full advantage of this opportunity.”

“Knee length.”

“Knee length? You can’t be serious. That would make them long shorts, which are frankly an abomination. They’re an oxymoron and they shouldn’t exist, and they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to monopolise your legs before I’ve had the chance to do so myself. Excuse me, Sora, do you have something you’d like to say?” Hime finished, rounding on her sister after seeing a dubious smile cross her lips.

Sora, who had already had already experienced leg monopoly and was assiduously working on other assorted body parts, smiled placidly and pet her on the head much as Suguri had. “Try your best,” she advised, and turned back to the refrigerator and its store of potential sandwich material.

When Sora had gone, Suguri rejoined the conversation. After seeing Hime fail so spectacularly at roping Sora into her scheme, she couldn’t help but extend an olive branch. “For the record,” she said quietly, “I’m not opposed to exercise. Or shorts.” She paused, and lowered her voice even further. “Or… Um.”

“Yes?” Hime purred. She fluttered her eyelashes. Suguri wished she wouldn’t. She had discovered through long experience that Hime’s eyelashes were inextricably linked with her own heart, and when one fluttered, so did the other.

“Or… putting on a show,” she continued, very quietly indeed. “If that’s what you want. But I know you. If I don’t set limits, you’ll go overboard.”

Hime sighed dramatically. “True, true. It’s so very hard to control myself when it comes to you. And yet, that’s precisely the time that my self-control is most needed. I do try my best, but perhaps it’s wise not to tempt me too much.”

Suguri quirked an eyebrow. “Don’t blame it all on me. I heard from the others that you were just as bad before we met.”

“Well, it stands to reason. I try harder, but you make it harder, so altogether it’s what we’d call a net neutral.”

Or in other words, Suguri thought, she was just doing whatever she wanted anyway. That was the charm of her, though. That was Hime. A free spirit controlled only by chains she made herself. You could lock her up, but she was the one who kept the key. Having been imprisoned once, she never would be again.

“Why don’t we compromise? I know you like those,” Hime said, smiling graciously. “What if I just pick some shorts out for you now, and then, in the future, you might perhaps find yourself persuaded to wear them for me as a reward for good behaviour?”

“...Fine,” she conceded. “But that means it’s up to me whether I wear them or not. So keep that in mind when you’re choosing.”

It was, on the surface, a good trade. Hime got to put outlandish things in Suguri’s wardrobe in the present, and in exchange, she was going to hand Suguri a way to bargain with her later. A measure of control.

But things were rarely skin-deep. Any control Suguri had, she had because Hime had given it to her; who, then, really held the reins? Between people who deeply trusted each other, it could be enjoyable to lose control – provided you could take it back when your partner was done with it.

In any event, their pact had bought Suguri peace for the morning. Hime occupied herself by dreaming of which shorts she would pick – and how she would edge the very closest she could to the limits of Suguri’s bravery without stepping over them.

“So, just to confirm… I’m supposing that booty shorts are off the menu?” she asked.

“Yes. And short shorts,” Suguri added sternly. “And hot pants.”

Hime smiled, and kept her silence. The greatest plans were sometimes the subtle ones.

She had – with a few leading questions and Sora’s unwitting help in making her seem pitiable – deluded Suguri into focusing on the length of the shorts. But unlike skirts, the length of the shorts didn’t really matter. As anybody knew, what really mattered with the tightness.

Gym shorts, then, seemed to be the order of the day.. Specifically, the type of gym shorts that were very aerodynamic, made of spandex, and left so perilously little to an imagination as fertile as Hime’s. After all, what else would you wear for exercise? It stood to reason. Talking Suguri out of wearing a skirt on top of them would be the next great challenge, but it was a challenge Hime was determined to rise to.

Suguri carried on reading the paper, blissfully oblivious to what awaited her, as Hime retreated to receive some more ‘sisterly advice’ – this time, about where Sora bought her sportswear.

Chapter Text

So, one of the things I’ve figured out about myself is that I’m not great at knowing what to say. I guess I could blame that on not really getting much quality conversation with the other kids or on the goat conspiracy, but I think it’s just… me. I’ve got plenty of stuff I could say, but it’s way easier just to think it. My brain’s good, but when my tongue gets involved, things go south.

Even so, I at least make an attempt to talk like a normal person. I can do small talk fine, sometimes. I can do weather talk, anyway. Weather talk is great. You just look out of the window, you say ‘dang, it’s sure sunny or raining or throwing down massive golf-ball hailstones out there’, and then they agree with you because it would be literally lying not to, and then you’ve had a conversation and you can check it off your list of things to do today.

But every so often, I just get the urge to say stuff or do stuff I’m pretty sure a normal person wouldn’t. I usually manage not to, but sometimes I just find myself thinking: well, why not? I already know I’m weird. Might as well just go for it. People can’t avoid me any harder, right?

Like now, for instance. I’m pretty sure that for a normal person, if your mom comes into the room, sits you down and tells you that you’re adopted, your reaction is not supposed to yelling “Heck yeah!” and giving your mom a high-five. I’m pretty sure you’re meant to cry instead. Actually, I might be crying a little, but I don’t think it’s in quite the same way.

My new mom, meanwhile, is pretty much bouncing around the room. Where the heck is she getting all that energy? I feel like maybe our ages got reversed somehow. She’s already bunny-hopped a little circle around the matron, like some kind of pogo stick shark.

“Saki,” Iru calls. “Physics.”

She immediately stops and pulls down on the hem of her sweater, blushing furiously. Apparently she left her duffel coat at home today because they’re not very momlike, and just came in jeans and a chunky knit turtleneck. The sweater obscured it a bit, but yeah. There were definitely some physics happening when she was jumping around like that. It’s kind of a shame that being adopted by her doesn’t give me those genetics, but she’s already giving me a home, so I’ll get over it.

The matron, her arms full of complicated paperwork, shakes her head slowly. “Well, I must admit that I was concerned at how quickly you’ve been going through the proceedings, but it’s hard to argue with a display like that.”

The last few days have been a whirlwind, that’s for sure. After I realised that my prospective new mom was a huge dork, I started finding it way easier to relax around her. I’ve heard that for a lot of people, finding out that adults aren’t like these super powerful beings who can do anything is the moment they lose their childlike innocence or whatever, but I’ve never really thought of adults like that myself. I sure as heck don’t think people will think about me like that when I’m an adult. I kinda prefer the idea of having a mom who’s just a big goofball right from the start, instead of pretending that she’s some kind of flawless maternal god.

After I relaxed a bit, Aunt Iru showed me a special technique to avoid putting my foot in my mouth: making sure it was too full of other stuff to make the attempt. A week ago, I’d barely even seen a pastry. But now I can tell my crueller from my choux from a distance of one hundred meters!

“Welcome to the family, Reika,” Iru says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

“Thanks, Ir-” I pause, and correct myself. “I mean, Auntie. I never thought I’d get to have an aunt.”

“Ahaha. Well, technically, you don’t really have an aunt,” Saki jumps in, looking sheepish. “Actually, you’ve got… more like seven or eight, if you count the in-laws.”

I blink. In my mind, I’m trying to imagine seven or eight Irus. Then I try to imagine how much seven or eight Irus could eat. All I can picture is a horde of locusts descending on the bakery, stripping every last doughnut, danish and dacquoise from the shelves.

“Does Sumika count as an aunt, though? She’s younger, right?” Iru ponders. “I think aunthood would go to her head.”

“Like it hasn’t already gone to yours.”

Saki and Iru chat back and forth with each other, while I’m stuck here not knowing who or what a Sumika is. If it weren’t for the context, I’d have assumed she was some kind of biscuit or cake or something.

“Well, Reika. All the paperwork is handled, so now the only thing left to do is pack your things,” the matron says. She leans down and whispers to me gently. “I’m delighted for you. Please, treasure this opportunity. I mean this in the nicest way: I hope you and I never meet in this orphanage again.”

I can’t help but agree with her. I’m sick of foster homes and matrons and orphanages. Of having happiness dangled in front of me and then snatched away again. I’m going to grab this chance with both hands, and I won’t let go.

The only thing left to do is say goodbye to the other kids and grab my stuff. Most of the children in the orphanage at the moment are still in the ‘stare at me like I’m a live grenade’ kind of phase, but a couple of them are brave enough to come and wish me luck. I didn’t think I’d even get that. Saki helped me bake a few packages of cookies to give out when I left (with me not doing any of the actual oven stuff so they didn’t turn out as a disaster), so I give the brave ones first dibs on the triple choc cookies.

After that, we start to pack away my clothes. Normally they’d have been handed down to the other children, but because of how often I tore and repaired them, mine looked like patchwork quilts anyway, so they’re letting me keep them. Or what’s left of them.

“Hm. I can’t exactly take you out in these, huh… Well, I was planning on getting you some new outfits anyway,” Saki says brightly, folding up one of my tattier dresses. “These will still be fine for just hanging around the house in.”

“They’d make good pyjamas,” Iru weighs in. From the look on her face, comfy pyjamas are pretty high up on her priorities list.

“They would, but… There are a bunch of really cute onesies that came out recently…”

Hey, Iru… That look you just gave me… That was one of those looks that means ‘good luck’, isn’t it? What the heck kind of onesies is Saki thinking about?

“Haha… Y’know, Reika,” Saki says, changing the topic as soon as she meets my eye, “you’re actually really good at folding stuff for your age. I can’t pack half that well.”

“I’ve had to move a lot.” Yikes. I said it without thinking, but even I feel like my voice was a little too bleak there. I can feel the conversation start to die and gutter like a spinning top. I… might not be the best at taking complements. “Practice makes perfect and all that.”

“Maybe I’ll get you to teach Iru. She still doesn’t know how to fold her socks.”
Iru frowns. “It’s not a skill issue. It’s a lifestyle issue. I just think there’s more fun things to do with my time than fold socks all day.”

“Pfft. ‘All day’? You don’t even spend twenty seconds on it. Maybe if you did, you wouldn’t end up wearing odd socks all the time.”

I bristle a little when they start going back and forth, but even to me, it’s clear that Saki is only teasing. I see the other kids tease each other all the time. They never quite got the courage to do it to me, though.

Iru shifts uncomfortably, throwing a glance in my direction. “Hey. Don’t make me look uncool in front of my new niece.”

“There’s no such thing as cool in this household!” Saki declares loftily. “In my house, it’s cute or bust!”

Well… I’m not gonna disagree with the first part, especially after hearing that dorky baking song. As the two squabble a little more, I take a sneaky glance at Iru’s ankles. Sure enough, her socks don’t match. I know that matching socks doesn’t really matter at all – I mean, they’re socks – but I can’t help but think it’s somehow uncool to wear odd ones.

Also, Saki was lying through her teeth when she said she can’t fold clothes as fast as I can. She’s like an actual machine. I guess once you get good at folding filo pastry, everything else feels a lot easier.

When we’ve finished and all my stuff has been crammed into an overnight bag, I’m left… a bit empty, honestly.

I wonder sometimes if I’m actually feeling stuff. It sounds stupid, right? You either feel stuff or you don’t. But I feel almost like my brain’s tricking me. Like, I know what I’m expected to feel in a situation, and because I know that, my brain ends up making me feel that way. But I don’t know if I really organically feel that way, or if I’m just conforming to my own expectations.

Right now, I don’t know what to feel. I should be happy, because I’ve just been adopted. I should be sad, because I’m leaving a home and I’ll probably never see any of these kids or any of the staff again. There’s meant to be some kind of bittersweetness, but I don’t feel any of it.

I’ve just done this so many times. I’ve been passed around and left behind, and I’ve said more goodbyes than I can count. I’m… numb, I guess.

Just because I’ve been adopted, it doesn’t change who I am underneath. Just because Saki thinks I’m cute enough to offer me her home, it doesn’t fix whatever’s wrong with me. I’m just being given a chance to work on it myself. I need to keep telling myself that. I need to remind myself.

It sucks that I do have to do that, though. It’s like I got a handicap in the metaphorical human race, and now I’ve got to work harder than anybody else just to keep up. I’m already tired of it.

“Is that everything, Reika? Was there anything else you wanted to bring?”

Saki’s voice snaps me back to reality, and I realise that I’ve just been staring at my hands for a little while while the adults watched. Maybe they thought I was having an emotional moment? I guess I was, but I don’t think it’s how they’re expecting it. I take a rustle through the clothes again just to show them it’s all checked – before my eyes drift toward the little doll on the bedside table.

My breath hitches a little. It’s not… really my doll. Nothing here is really mine; it’s all shared, belonging to the whole orphanage. They let me keep the clothes because they’re falling apart, but originally I was meant to give them back so they could be re-used.

But it’s my favourite. Kids come and go, but that doll’s been with me ever since I came to this orphanage. I used to talk to it from time to time, back when the kids wouldn’t talk to me.

I feel like leaving it behind would be like abandoning it. Like leaving behind a friend.

Geez… I can’t believe I’m getting emotional about it. Saki’s only been my mom for like fifteen minutes, but her dork aura is rubbing off on me. Not that that’s a bad thing. I’d rather be a happy dork than a miserable… whatever I am right now.

Saki catches on to where my eyes are looking. Her voice is almost painfully gentle. “Oh? Is she yours, Reika?”

She. I don’t know what it is, but I feel so much better hearing Saki call the doll a she instead of an it.

“No… She belongs to the orphanage.” My voice sounds so sullen it surprises me.

The matron sighs, and shakes her head. She puts her hand on my shoulder again. “Reika, if you want the doll, take it.”

“But…”

“Dear, I didn’t decide to work in an orphanage so I could take toys from the hands of children who need them.” Her voice is stern, as if she’s telling me off for being out of bed after hours. “If you’re worried about it, just donate a doll of your own to charity when you’re a little older.”

“Oh. So I’d be paying it back.”
“No.” Her voice is a little sharp. “Reika, I’d like you to listen carefully to what I have to say. The person who gave us that doll gave it away knowing they wouldn’t get anything in return. And when you leave her, we’re not going to present you with a bill for your room and board. We don’t want children to go through their lives feeling like they already have debts to drag them downwards.” She stooped a little, bending down to look me properly in the eye. “We don’t want you to pay us back, any more than the person who gave us that doll expects us to pay them back. We want you to pay forward, Reika. To, when you’re ready and you’re able, give some other girl a little bit of comfort, the same way that doll was given to you. Do you understand?”

To be honest, I’m not sure I do. If you’re given one doll and you give one doll away, you’ve just paid back the doll you were given, right? It doesn’t really make a difference whether you’re paying it back or paying it forward. But it doesn’t feel like I’m correct. I get the sense that I’m missing the point, which means there must be a point to miss.

“It’s okay if you don’t get it,” Saki says to me. “For this kind of stuff, I think the important thing is that you think about it.”

“Yup. That’s the tricky bit,” Iru weighs in.

Saki nods encouragingly, and after a second passes, I reach out for the doll.

“Sorry,” I say, hugging her to my chest.

“You mean ‘thank you’,” the matron corrects me. “Take good care of her, Reika. And live well.”

She takes Saki off to the office to give her some more documents before we leave – medical and dietary stuff, I think. Iru leads me outside where her bike is waiting, with the sidecar attached, and lifts up her seat to stow my bag away in the compartment. I know, in some strange way, that I will never walk through the doors of this orphanage again.

My matron’s name is Mrs. Stock. I didn’t really think I would bother to remember it once I left, but now I feel like I should.

I have to stop and throw up twice on the bike ride back. And there isn’t a goat to be seen for miles around.

Chapter Text

Wahaha! We are interrupting your regular story for a breaking announcement! Yes, that’s right! Please throw your hands up and jubilate, because it is once again Sumika time!

Some of you might not be familiar with who Sumika is, so let her fill you in! She’s an energy conscious data entity, master of pop-up pirate, and boomeranger extraordinaire with at least a hundred (future) fans on social media! Please shower her in your adulations! Actually she would like to be showered in allowance because her pocket money has been repeatedly garnished for so-called bad behaviour, but she will wait until she has at least a thousand fans before making monetary demands.

By the way, when Sumika says she’s amazing with data, she’s not kidding even a little bit. Before she had reviewed most of the data on Earth as part of her anti-Suguri strategies, but since infiltrating Suguri’s household she has devoured whatever data Earth has left. She’s a real super know-it-all! Admittedly she doesn’t know it all at once because she has limited storage space and she has to make sacrifices, but she has known it all very briefly.

By the way, Sumika has heard that normal people can’t handle data the same way she can. She thinks that’s very sad and you should aspire to be like her, even if it’s physically impossible. Humans are always saying “You can be whatever you want to when you grow up!”, so she’s challenging you to select the superior option of being Sumika. If you’re already grown up, she sends her condolences.

Anyway, if you could process data like Sumika does, you would know that it has all sorts of different textures and flavours! Data from way far back is very weird and stringy because a lot of it has eroded. Modern data is much more crunchy. It’s like eating potato chips, only instead of enlarging your waistline and clogging your arteries, you enlarge your brain and clog your RAM.

Obviously it goes without saying that she likes modern data a lot more, so she’s keeping on top of all the new data that comes in. That’s right! Sumika is in your computer, reading all your files! Woooooo! She sees all the posts you make on the internet! She even knows your browser history! If you would like to become Sumika’s disciple in exchange for a guarantee of anonymity, she thinks that now would be an excellent time. She’ll be watching her follower count closely!

But according to the human comics Sumika has been reading, great power also has great responsibility stapled to it. Sumika doesn’t care that much about responsibility, but great power also comes with great big electric bills, so she’s doing her best to make herself useful so that Suguri doesn’t kick her out or make her install solar panels on her hat. Not that Suguri has threatened to do that, but that’s what Sumika would do. But don’t worry! Sumika doesn’t go out very much anyway, so the solar panels would be useless. She’s already outsmarted her evil future self.

The first way she makes herself useful is by helping Suguri with the crossword in the morning. It’s so painful seeing her put all the wrong words in every time and squeezing them into boxes where they don’t fit! It makes all of Sumika’s data entry instincts cry out in pain. So she very helpfully puts the answers in ahead of time, so that Suguri can do whatever it is she does all day without worrying about crossword puzzles.

She also looks up a lot of recipes for her big sister, Hime. Hime is always going on about how important it is for Sumika to eat like a normal person even if she’s an artificial life form, but every few weeks she’ll go completely off the rails with her recipes. Last time, Sumika was sick for three whole days! When she put this body together she thought she had all the bases covered, but she should have totally installed an iron stomach!

She’s hoping that if she puts a lot of recipes in a binder and says they’re a thoughtful present for her favourite big sister, she can trick Hime into actually using some of them without adding all sorts of random spices. She doesn’t think it’ll work, but she’s got to try!

She’s not figured out a way to use her data powers to manipulate her other big sister, Sora, yet. That’s because Sora’s head is full of clouds, and there’s no space in there for anything useful. Also, she’s mostly occupied with her girlfriends, which Sumika doesn’t know how to feel about. On one hand Sumika thinks all romance is automatically gross, especially if it involves tongues. Tongues are weird in general, and she doesn’t know why normal people haven’t evolved past them yet. On the other hand, both of Sora’s girlfriends are very high up on Sumika’s internal database of cool people, and she wants them to adore her. Overall, she is tentatively supportive of their relationship because she gets cool friendship perks.

Actually it’s fine if she can’t manipulate Sora, because she doesn’t know what she’d even get Sora to do. She doesn’t want to say that her big sister is useless, because her big sister is very good at doing suplexes, but all Sora does is slug around and make other people happy, which Sumika could totally do by herself if she wanted to. Slugging is not a marketable skill! Just because you’re soothing to look at doesn’t mean you can just sleep all day!

Anyway, that’s not actually what Sumika wanted to talk about.

The truth is, Sumika has big news! That’s right, this is a special Sumika broadcast, bringing you never before seen footage of nothing in particular because she doesn’t want other people looking through her camera roll. It’s the inaugural broadcast of the Sumika Nightly News, where Sumika is not just the anchor but the entire ship!

Last night, she was cronching through all the data after Suguri and Hime had gone to sleep. Yes, cronching, like when you cronch down on a hard taco shell and all the filling falls out and you sigh in relief because Big Sis Hime put a bunch of weird powdery stuff in it and you’re not sure what it was. It was that kind of data.

While she was going through it all, she found something super interesting! Usually she just lets it forward into one port and then out of the other, but she keeps an eye out for certain stuff, like component listings for Sumika’s spaceship repairs, or reviews on boomerangs so she can gloat about how hers is definitely superior since she’s customised hers by painting stripes on it. The stripes glow in the dark, which is very practical for night boomeranging.

But while she was browsing through all the boring paperwork, her internal filters caught on something: an adoption form submitted in some weird country somewhere. And can you guess whose name was on it?

Saki’s! That’s right, one of Saki’s erstwhile sisters who haven’t even bothered to visit her has acquired a child for some reason, and Sumika is the first person to know about it! Well Saki probably knows about it. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe they just adopted the child to her without telling her about it, and they’re going to charge her for nappies and college tuition.

Either way, this means that Sumika is no longer bottom of the totem pole in our family! She has a new niece that she can impress and raise to be a loyal underling for her noble cause. She’s always wanted underlings. She was kind of thinking she could persuade Suguri to buy some roombas and make those into her minions, but this is even better!

And do you know what makes it triple better? It’s a secret that only Sumika knows about. That means she’s superior to Suguri, Hime and Sora, because she knows and they don’t. Take that, silver hair! Just because you’re macking on Sumika’s sister and letting Sumika stay in your house for free, it doesn’t make you better than her!

So, here is Sumika’s plan. Step one! Get her allowance back, so she can buy things and pretend to be gainfully employed. Step two! Continue scanning data from the local area to find out what her niece likes, so she can prepare gifts with her superior foresight! Step three! Somehow persuade Suguri and Hime to go and visit some random country where they don’t know their sister is! Step four: lavish gifts on her new niece to brainwash her into her loyal underling, while also scoring big points with Saki! Step five: dance in jubilation with her cute niece! This is the most important step.

By the way, just because Sumika is going to impress her niece into following her every command, it doesn’t mean she’s going to exploit her. That would be against child labour laws, and Sumika is not an animal. She is a mineral! Mostly mineral, anyway. The important thing is having underlings, not whether your underlings actually do anything. You, too, could be Sumika’s underling, and you wouldn’t even have to get your hands dirty! She wants you to consider it carefully, but not carefully enough that you say no. Just join the Sumiquad today!

So, that is your very important Sumika update. She’s going to watch and wait for the right time, and then she’s going to swoop in and impress everybody by being the perfect aunt. Not even Suguri will be as good an aunt as her! She’ll show all her big sisters, who babied her all the time on the spaceship. She can baby people twice as hard as they can! Count on it!

That’s all for this time, Sumika fans. Please don’t think about her too much, because it’s kind of creepy. Think about her just enough that you count as fans, but not enough that her names loses all meaning and starts just being noise. She will see you next time, with exciting niece updates! Goodbye!

Chapter Text

Once upon a time – a long, long time ago – I remember asking Hime if she was my mom.

I knew she couldn’t be Kyoko, Nanako, Kae or Iru’s mom. She looked nothing like them. But I thought she might be mine, since we shared a hair colour and, well, I kinda thought that was how it worked.

“You shouldn’t let that man hear you asking about such things,” she scolded me, smiling listlessly. She had already been bound to the core of the ship in those days, and spent a lot of her time asleep; I’d been lucky to catch her stirring. “He hates the idea of people having family. They start making very unpredictable moves if their loved ones are in danger, you see.”

I remember shivering, and wanting to throw up. The Core Room was meant to be off-limits. I was disobeying the Professor by being there, and my body was protesting violently. If he hadn’t repeated an order directly for a while they became easier to disobey, but ignoring a direct command was unthinkable, and doing something you knew was against the rules would make you break out in a fever or worse.

But I had to know. I didn’t know where the desire had come from, but back then, it was burning so fiercely that I could withstand my body trying to turn itself inside out, as long as I got an answer. “Are you, though?”

She closed her eyes for a long moment. I thought she had gone back to sleep, and started worrying that I had squandered this rare opportunity.

“No. No, Saki, I’m afraid not.”

“Why?”

Even looking back, it was a ridiculous question to have asked. I knew why. I didn’t have a mother. None of us did. Me, Iru, the others – we were all picked out of vats, our DNA spliced and enhanced until we could keep up with the robots that made up the main force. Sure, the genetic material had to have started out somewhere, but pretending that there was any one woman who could have been my mother was ridiculous.

But I’d been clinging on to some strange, false hope that it wasn’t true. That there was someone out there for me, waiting to be found.

I think Hime understood that. But I think she also understood that there was a question behind the one I thought I was asking. In my head, I was asking: “Why not?” But the question I really wanted to ask, and the one that Hime answered, was: “Why can’t you be?”

“Well, because I shouldn’t even know where to start. I never had one myself, you see. I think that perhaps being a big sister is the best I could do.” Her smile was a little brighter that time. “But I’m afraid we’re running out of time. You get back to your station, Saki. Don’t worry about the cameras. I dare say I can do something about them.”

I remember the blood draining from my face as I scurried out of the core. I heard later that day that the camera feeds had corrupted over a lot of the ship, and that Shifu had taken it out on Hime. He usually did when something went wrong. He used to beat her, but never too much. He was scared she’d snap and take the whole ship out with her. I think a couple of times she might have considered it.

Actually, I didn’t really know what a sister was, either. But as I turned the word over and over again in my mind, I understood it was something I really wanted. I taught the others that word, too, and they that was how we all decided: we’d be sisters. The Professor didn’t want us to ever have family, so this was the one way we could get one over on him. That was the weapon Hime gave me.

In retrospect, that’s probably how I figured out I was human. It sounds weird, but it was kinda up for debate, you know? We were surrounded by robots, and we knew from the Professor’s body that he could make something that looked human enough. But it was that instinctual need for family, for companionship, that set us apart from purely mechanical beings. It was written too deep in our DNA for the Professor to weed out.

I never did figure out what a mom was, though. And at the time, I never put any thought into the idea that I could be one. Hime was stronger, faster, more advanced than anything Shifu had managed to make; if she couldn’t do it, there was absolutely no way that any of us could manage it. It was as impossible as holding the stars in your hands.

But there I was, all those years later, with an adorable new daughter that was relying on me to be the mom she’d always needed.

We’d put Reika to bed a few hours ago, after she’d started tipping over in her seat. All the excitement of getting adopted – and the, uh, constant hurling – had tuckered her out. She probably hadn’t gotten sleep the night before, either; I knew I hadn’t. She was out like a light the moment her head hit the pillow.

That left me and Iru to sit down in the kitchen, enjoy some hot cocoa, and brainstorm what a mom was and what one did. Because so far, all I’d done as a mom was panic, which I think is one of the things moms do, but it probably shouldn’t be the main one.

“When I think of moms,” Iru said, folding her arms, “I think of dinner.”

I did my absolute best to look surprised. It was probably easier to count the things that didn’t make Iru think of dinner than the ones that did.

“Well, I’m definitely gonna cook for her. I can’t let her go hungry, and the matron says she’s not allowed to use the oven because it goes horribly wrong every time,” I replied. “Is there anything else?”

Iru thought to herself for another second. “…You have to do what they tell you. Probably.”

Even after half an hour of hard thought, that was all we’d really managed to come up with. But that was the bare minimum of what a mom ought to be. What a parent ought to be. Even I knew that.

But neither Iru or I had any experience to base our thoughts off. The closest we had was Shifu, which… yeah. Unbending authority and the tenuous promise of continued existence seemed about right.

I’d been thinking it for a while, but he really was… lazy. That’s the best way I can put it. He could have raised us to adore him. He could have had our absolute loyalty from day one, with just a little effort. But he didn’t. He just messed around with our brains and called it a day. If we had loved him, we might have tried to save him.

It was the same with Earth – or any of the other planets we came to first. If he’d had the patience for diplomacy, we could have settled on any of them. But that was too much work for him; rather than take the effort deal with people properly, he chose to wipe them out.

He jumped through all sorts of intellectual hoops to do what he did, but the moment it needed emotional effort, he ran away. All of us have mixed feelings about the way things ended, but it’s hard not to be sad about the person he could have been – if he had made the effort.

I didn’t want to Reika to ever look at me the way we looked at Shifu. I wasn’t gonna sit back and make everybody else do the work like he did. I was going to give it my absolute best effort, and throw all my cheerful energy into it! I just had to figure out what ‘it’ actually involved.

“Do you think any of the others would know?” Iru asked after a while.

“They didn’t have moms either,” I said, chewing my bottom lip. “The only one we know who did is Suguri, and that’s… um. Asking her is out of the question right now.”

Even when it came to my, ahem, ‘special contacts’, I wasn’t sure they’d have a clue. Amami was some kind of cosmic being and didn’t seem like the maternal type, so she’d be out. QP and Nacchan… I assume they had fairly normal parents, so they might be worth asking? Although if I took advice from QP, I might end up being more like a dog mom.

The closest one of us to actually being a mom was Tomomo, but… yikes. I knew she’d technically created people, which is about as close to being a mom as you’re going to get, but I don’t know if I’d really say she has children. More like… spawn.

“Don’t worry so much,” Iru told me, apropos of nothing at all. That was one of the best things about her: she only had three brain cells, and she never devoted any of them to worrying. “We didn’t have a mom, and we turned out fine.”

Hearing her say that made me want to put my head on the table and cry.

“Did we, though?” I asked, after recovering from the emotional bombshell. “We’ve all got something wrong with us. Kyoko struggles with people, Kae’s got her phobias, Nanako’s whole personality needs work, your brain is as smooth and cute as a baby sea lion, and I’m… well, y’know. I get pretty intense about certain, cute-related things.”

Even if we had turned out ‘fine’ now, that didn’t matter. Reika wasn’t fine. She was surviving, which is a different thing entirely. We’d survived until Hime and Suguri rescued us, but that wasn’t fair to ask from a girl with so much stacked against her.

“Anyway, I’ve been wondering. When are you gonna tell her about us not being regular humans?” Iru asked, changing the topic.

That was a tricky question as well. Ideally, I wanted to keep her as far away from things like ‘enhanced humans’ and ‘humanoid weapons’ as possible, for obvious reasons. It wasn’t like I thought it would awaken some weird forbidden memory cache in her head or anything like that, but better safe than sorry, right? She deserved a break from them, at the very least.

But keeping it secret was going to be tough, and the longer I did it, the more betrayed she’d feel when she found out her mom can just casually fly – never mind the other weird stuff surrounding me. It might be better to break the news to her once I was happy she was all settled in.

Besides, the sooner she knew, the sooner I could fly to the grocery store instead of walking. Three cheers for convenience! Hip hip hooray!

“I’ll let her know as soon as it seems like a good time,” I shrugged. “Anyway… When it comes to the mom thing, maybe I can just read some books on parenting. I hear they’re really popular on Earth.”

Iru’s face scrunched up; the idea of studying didn’t agree with her, even when it was second-hand. Honestly… She’d sit and read weapon specification manuals all day if you let her, but if it wasn’t something she was interested in, she got bored in five minutes flat. I’d always been more of a balance type myself, so it was hard to relate.

“You’ve got all of us, anyway. Even if being a mom is too tough for you by yourself, if you stack up enough people, it’s got to add up to one mom’s worth.”

I was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked, but… to be honest, it still made me feel better, knowing I could rely on Iru and my sisters here and there. They had that saying on Earth, didn’t they? ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ There were probably things that Reika could learn from my sisters that she’d never get from me. I wasn’t sure what they’d be, other than maybe arson, but they probably existed.

“Thanks, Iru. Let’s leave the mom stuff alone for now. Next, can you help me figure out what I need to get for the house?”

“First, a big bag of cereal,” she said immediately. “She’ll get sick of having croissants for breakfast every single day.”

“Uh-huh. And I bet you’re going to recommend me one you like, just in case there’s a chance to help yourself to a bowl when you’re passing by?”

“Hey, if I like it, you know it’s good.”

“If you like it, I know it’s edible. We’ll need to get Reika some clothes to go out in as well, plus some pyjamas… If I’m going to be doing a lot of reading, I also kinda want to get an armchair.”

“And a bubble pipe, right?”

“Yeah, and a… wait, how did you know I was thinking that?”

“I’ve been your sister for a while, Saki.”

Look, sometimes you just want to sit in a high-backed armchair in your long coat and smoke a bubble pipe while you read complicated books, alright? I’d never be able to work up the motivation otherwise. This is what self-care really looks like.

Speaking of learning, I’d need to get some textbooks for Reika. Due to how poorly socialised she was, they’d tried home-schooling her at the orphanage rather than shipping her off to a regular school, but it hadn’t gone well. According to the matron, she was a hopeless case; she had a defeatist kind of attitude, so she never put in any real effort.

My plan was to teach her how to bake, since at least then she’d have a trade under her belt to fall back on, but I didn’t want to lock her into that career path if she wanted to do something else. So education was a must. I was hoping that now she had a home, it would brighten up her attitude and she’d be ready to really sit down and apply herself.

After that, there were still toys, clothes, furniture to spruce her room up with… the list kept growing and growing. I wasn’t too worried about money; after all, when it came to baking, I had the kind of unfair advantage you normally only get after reincarnating into a different world. As long as I had the shop, I could count on some robust business.

Even if I wasn’t the single best baker on Earth, Suguri had made a standing offer to help any of us out if we needed cash, since she’d apparently gotten pretty wealthy over the course of her life. I’d dipped into that a little to get the premises for my bakery, but I really doubted she’d let us starve if I told her I was in trouble. That said, I didn’t want to rely on her help too much – or draw her attention too early.

“Anyway, Iru, how are you doing for cash? You took a few days off to help us out, right?” I asked. “We haven’t put you out too much, have we?”

“It’s no problem. I can take a few rush jobs to get back on track.”

‘Rush jobs’ were her euphemism for actually getting off her bike and just flying her packages around, which was actually much faster. Why did she buy a bike in the first place, then? Pretty much because she thought it was cool. Which it definitely was, judging by Reika’s reaction. I was a tiny bit jealous about that. Maybe I should try and make myself into a cool biker mom, too? Something told me it wouldn’t work, though.

I got up to refill our cocoa, and Iru trailed after me. Usually when Iru trailed after you it meant she was hungry, so I sighed and grabbed my rolling pin as well. Since I was taking out the cocoa powder anyway, midnight brownies seemed like a perfect plan. I’d make sure to set some aside for Reika to eat in the morning, too.

My mind quieted as I went about my recipe, telling Iru what she should mix (and making sure she didn’t lick the wrong spoons). Baking always seemed to make my worries float away for a little while – even though I had a lot more to worry about than usual.

But those were for the morning. Chocolatey goodness was for the now – and my job was to make it happen! I only wished that all my other jobs were quite that simple.

Chapter Text

Calling Nath ‘not impressed’ was a useless statement. It was true, but it was almost always true. She had been kicking around the globe for ten millennia, and had run out of things that impressed her by millennia five. No new information was imparted by saying it; however true it might be, your breath had ultimately been wasted on reminding people of things that were self-evident. The sun was hot, water was wet, and Nath was not impressed. That was the way of the world.

That said, the magnitude at which Nath was not impressed had risen dangerously in the last thirty seconds, and showed no signs of slowing down.

“Sham,” she said. Her tone was laced with patience, but it was the kind of patience that had a half-life of about the next sentence and whose decay chemists would describe as ‘energetic’, and everybody else would describe as ‘explosive’. “What is this, and why is it in my size?”

Sham, a master of diplomacy, charm and negotiation, reviewed her options, and decided that the best thing to do was play dumb. Playing dumb when you are undoubtedly the smartest person in the room was a novel tactic, but one she had employed in the past to some limited success.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“This,” Nath growled, lifting the offending item. “Explain it.”

“Ahaha… It’s a costume. Did you wanna, like, know the history of it, or…?”

“I’d like to know why you have it, when it obviously wouldn’t fit you in any universe.”

“Hey!” Sham said, balling up her fists in a vain attempt to be offended. “You take that back, madam! I’m sure there are universes where I’m tall!”

Calling Nath ‘madam’ was a mistake. ‘Madam’ was a word for rich girls in fancy frocks who had committed some minor crime and were being scolded by their governess. It was not a word you applied to a former career soldier who outweighed you by a factor of two and who could hang you from her neck without your feet touching the ground.

Sora, already wearing the costume that Sham had provided her, poured them both a cup of tea.

It was, of course, a maid outfit – french maid, as Sham had explained enthusiastically while helping Sora navigate a maze of petticoats and ruffles, and apparently worth very many cute points in Sham’s personal cosmology. There were costumes for all three of them, but Sham hadn’t had a chance to put hers own before Nath arrived.

“We’ve been over this before. Five times,” Nath said icily. “Don’t buy clothes and then pressure me into trying them on. Ask first, then buy. It’s not difficult.”

“But then you’d definitely say no!”

Nath glowered. “Yes. That’s the point.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Sham retorted huffily. “I didn’t buy them. I rescued them from a set my producer was running.”

“It’s not about where you got it. It’s about the principle.”

Sora watched on peacefully, sipping at her teacup in a vague attempt to look refined. She was enjoying the maid outfit, personally. It was very swishy when she moved, which was different from most of her clothes. The size was also perfect, right down to the lacy underthings, which hadn’t come with the costume but which Sham had insisted were very important for immersion. Nath’s wardrobe had already been quietly furnished with lacy underthings over the course of Sham’s visits, but these were the first ones Sora had gotten, so she was enjoying the novelty.

“Look, I’m madly in love with you, and that means I want to see you in cute clothes, alright?! I didn’t even shorten the skirt this time. It’s ankle length! Ankle!” Sham replied hotly. “Sora, show her!”

“Sora, put those ankles away,” Nath snapped as she got up and obligingly lifted her petticoats to show off the white socks and loafers beneath. “You can’t distract me that easily, Sham.”

“Quick, Sora! Show her the garters! We can definitely distract her with those!”

“Roger.”

Nath put a prosthetic hand to her forehead. “Sora, look, I – those are very nice, but I’m trying to have an argument here.”

“I see,” Sora nodded. “Let’s order pizza, then.”

The conversation ground to a halt as two people tried to figure out what pizza had to do with anything and one person tried to figure out if pepperoni was a good idea. It was not, Sora decided, a good idea. It made the whole pizza too oily. Chicken was better. Chicken and bacon was even better than that.

“Wait, wait, wait! Why the heck are we ordering pizza?” Sham asked, deftly intercepting Sora as she reached for the phone. There was a small skirmish as Sora tried to dart her hand through Sham’s defences and Sham waved it away.

“It’s to celebrate. This is our first argument as girlfriends, so it’s a big milestone.”

Neither of them felt like pointing out that Sora was not, technically, part of the argument. Nath might have rightly accused her of aiding and abetting the opposition, but she wasn’t the root cause of the conflict.

“…I just want you to ask me first,” she grumbled eventually, the air having well and truly gone out of her sails. “It’s nice when you ask me. I feel like… it’s a complement. My girlfriend thinks I’d look good in something, and she’s asking me to wear it. If you get the clothes first, it’s more like I’m being tricked, plus I don’t get a complement.”

“Nath, you look hot in everything,” Sham replied matter-of-factly. “I only get the clothes first because I’m worried you’d say no, and… well, y’know how candy tastes a lot better if you’re not meant to have it? It’s kinda like that. Plus I get to see you pout.”

“I don’t pout,” Nath pouted.

“Besides, you let Sora talk you into everything. Why is it different with me, huh?”

“She talks you into everything, too.”

“Do you think we should get sides?” Sora asked, continuing to talk them into celebratory pizza. (‘Talk’ was perhaps a strong word. Mostly she was just charging ahead by herself and dragging them along in her wake.) “Sham loves garlic bread.”

“Name me one person who doesn’t love garlic bread!”

“Sumika doesn’t.”

“Fine. We can have garlic bread,” Nath decreed. “But Sora has to serve the pizza. And you’ve got to eat it with a knife and fork. I only just got these fingers, and I want to keep them in good condition.”

“I see. That’s our punishment,” Sora said sagely, as if serving the pizza inconvenienced her in any way. She didn’t put on a maid outfit to not carry things around on platters. What would be the fun in that?

“You’re such a sweetheart, Nath. Even when you’re pretending not to be. No wonder Roger’s so spoiled,” Sham teased. There was no mistaking the affection in her voice, even though she was being ‘punished’.

“You’re twice as spoiled as he is.”

“Ahahaha. But whose fault is that?” she asked, looking at Nath, who immediately looked at Sora. Sora looked off into space, thereby shifting responsibility to the universe at large. “Anyway, that reminds me. Now that we’ve got the whole argument sorted out, let’s have a do-over. Nath, I’ve got this really nice maid uniform and I was hoping you’d try it on.”

“What a surprise,” Nath replied woodenly. “And what would I be getting in return?”

“Uh, my undying love?”

“I already have that, so I’ve been told.”

“You’re cute when you try to be smug,” Sham sighed happily, and abandoned the topic. She’d get her maid uniform Nath one way or another. She just had to figure out how. “I’m definitely in favour of pizza, though. You two have been going nuts on the exercise lately, and you’re not eating enough to compensate! It’s serious business, y’know? You’ll lose all your squidgeability!”

Sora pondered this. “That’s okay. I don’t need to be squidgy.”

If Sham had gasped any more theatrically, she might have accidentally transitioned into a swoon. As it was, she came dangerously close to knocking over the cup of tea that Sora had poured for her without asking.

“I’m going to have to disagree,” Nath interjected. “There are definitely parts of you where the squidgyness is… enjoyable.”

“Like what?” Sora asked.

Under the weight of her expectant gaze, Nath suddenly found herself becoming nervous. “Your cheeks, obviously.”

There was a paused as Sora and Sham convened. Or communed. They were doing their wavelength thing, which was never a good sign.

“It sounds like she wanted to say something else, but chickened out,” Sham opined, frowning.

“Mm. That makes it only a three out of ten flirt. I’ll have to dock you a slice of garlic bread.”

“Good. Make sure you eat it,” Nath said, reaching out to squidge the aforementioned cheeks. “Sham’s right. You’ve been dancing, sparring, digging up the garden, playing with Sumika… if you don’t start replacing some of those calories, you’ll regret it.”

“Muu.”

“Maybe we should argue more so she has an excuse to order pizza more often,” Sham winked.

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Hee,” Sham giggled. “Hey, hey. Would you still kiss me if I had garlic breath?”

“As if you’d let me.”

“Ahahaha. You got me. But if I did, would you?”

“I’ve done worse things,” Nath shrugged. “But mints are available.”

By the time the pizza arrived, the argument had mostly been forgotten about in favour of squidging Sora’s cheeks and admiring the needlework on her costume. She continued to pour cups of tea, at one point going mad with power and beginning to pour when the previous cups hadn’t even been drunk. Destiny had equipped her with this teapot, she told them. In a raffle.

Once again, gentle chaos won the day.

Chapter Text

They say that you can sell a house with the scent of freshly baked bread.

I don’t know who ‘they’ are. Estate agents, probably. Which means that estate agents and bakers have probably been colluding to keep the price of property high in some kind of get rich quick scheme. It stands to reason. After all, if goats can have a conspiracy to avoid me at all times, I don’t see why bakers couldn’t.

But if Mom – Saki – I’m not quite sure what to call her yet because ‘Mom’ feels weird on my tongue but calling your mom by their first name is also weird – has indulged in fixing the price of houses, I haven’t seen any evidence of it yet. There haven’t been any unexplained wads of cash lying around, and I’ve not seen her talking to anybody with a shirt and tie or a passion for beige walls.

From what I can tell, money’s not a huge issue for her – I mean, us – but it’s not like she has mountains of cash lying around, either. It seems like the bakery does pretty good business when we’re open, but how much can you really charge for a croissant? For the record, they’re amazing croissants, but there’s got to be a limit.

It’s the third day since she brought me back from the orphanage, and she’s opened the shop on two of them. Originally she said that I could come down to the shop floor and watch her, but it became pretty apparent that wasn’t gonna work out. I still don’t have any dresses that haven’t been patched twenty times, and people were staring at me even more than usual, so I stuck it out for an hour and then beat a hasty retreat upstairs.

Because we don’t have any employees, I’ve been left to myself for most of the last two days while Saki minds the shop floor. It’s… been pretty boring, honestly. Apart from the doll I bought from the orphanage, there aren’t really any toys to play with yet. I’m not even moving around to escape the other kids, or being harassed by goats. Like, I get it, it’s necessary, but… I don’t know. I just kinda thought having a family would be more exciting than this.

At least I got to spend a little time with Saki after she shut up shop, I guess. I could tell she’d been rushed off her feet the whole day, so I was trying to be quiet in case she wanted to chill out. But she grabbed me and chatted with me all the way through dinner, asking all sorts of questions about what stuff I liked. I kinda made most of my answers up, since I ran out of real answers pretty quickly, but she seemed excited anyway. That was new. People generally aren’t that excited to talk to a kid, never mind when the kid is me.

Today’s going to be better, though, because Auntie Iru’s got a day off from her courier job. That means she can help us with shopping.

Since we obviously can’t just close the shop every day, Saki wants to get the bulk of my ‘welcome home’ shop done all at once. She’s got a desk and a chair coming for me via mail order, but the stuff she wants me to pick out for myself – like dresses, toys, and wallpaper – we’re going to grab today.

I’ve never really been shopping by myself. Most of the stuff we got at the orphanage were hand-me-downs or donations, and anything new had to be run past the orphanage budget. So I’m a little excited, but also a little scared. I don’t really know what to expect. All I know is that if you break stuff you have to buy it, so I’m not touching anything I don’t really, really want.

But whatever happens, I won’t be bored. That thought cheers me up as I sit down at the breakfast table.

“Good morning, Reika. Did you sleep well?” Saki asks.

I always sleep well. There were tons of kids in the orphanage who couldn’t get to sleep, but I was never one of them. If I could have slept for a hundred or a thousand years, I would have done it, just to see if things were better in the future. Or even just, y’know, cooler. It’s not like I was that attached to anything in the present. Waking up was always my real problem.

But even that feels like it’s going to be a lot easier from now on. I don’t know whether or not fresh baked bread is really good at selling houses, but knowing you’ve got a loaf of it waiting for you at the breakfast table every morning is super motivating. Saki says she always sets one aside after she’s done in the bakery and has it with some warm soup, and that’s a breakfast philosophy I can get behind.

Something I’m really learning about her is that not only can she bake, but she can cook. She says it’s just because she got a lot of practice cooking for Iru when she was younger, but if she always cooked like she cooks for me, then I can tell why Auntie Iru got that way. I think I’m on the road to being that way myself.

Speaking of Auntie Iru, she’s already sat down and is greedily tearing off hunks of bread, dipping it in the soup and stuffing them into her mouth without a care in the world. If you want to learn how to cook, look at Saki. If you want to learn how to eat, go for Auntie Iru. She pauses for a moment as I sit down – just look enough to raise her eyebrows. Then straight back to stuffing her face again.

The reason she raised her eyebrows is because of my onesie. Saki rushed out and bought it after she closed the shop the day before last, and it is… honestly, horrendous. I don’t know what character or animal it’s supposed to be, but it’s pink and it looks like some weird cross between a koala, a rabbit and a marshmallow, and I’m pretty sure it’s a crime against fashion. Maybe against the Fashion Geneva Convention. But it’s also the absolute comfiest thing I’ve ever worn in my entire life, so I’m learning to live with it.

I nod my answer to Saki’s question, and immediately start reaching for the bread before Iru demolishes the whole loaf. Having Auntie Iru at the table is one of those law of the jungle situations – eat fast or don’t eat at all.

“Honestly, you two. You know you’ll enjoy it more if you eat slowly, right?” Saki asks, rolling her eyes.

“I am eating slowly,” Iru responds between stuffing bread into her mouth and chugging hot soup like it’s a sports drink.

The scary thing is, I don’t even think she’s kidding. Actually, come to think of it, that was a really momlike comment Saki made just now, right? Maybe. I’m not super sure, but I should probably give her some mom points, just in case.

Saki just makes a kind of unsurprised sigh, and pulls a second loaf of emergency bread from the bread box. She probably doesn’t have emergency soup in there, but I don’t have to compete for soup. I hope.

After Auntie Iru finishes demonstrating what ‘the survival of the fittest’ means at the breakfast table, we’re ready to start a brand new day of shopping.

I had the wrong idea about Auntie Iru.

Not as a person. As a person, I think she’s pretty simple, and that’s one of the best things about her. With Auntie Iru, you get what you see. You don’t have to worry about all the weird adult stuff she might be worrying about, because you just know that she totally isn’t. I like that about her.

It’s more that I thought that, when Saki asked her to help us out with shopping, she’d… you know, just be holding the bags and stuff, and then driving us home with the loot afterwards. She’s got big muscles, so I sort’ve assumed, yeah, she’s definitely the one who’s going to be hauling stuff.

But as it turns out, I’m the one carting bundles of clothes around, whereas Iru needs both her hands free for her real job: keeping my adopted mom under control.

“Ahhhhhh! Look at all this stuff! And it’s all super cute!” Saki wails, zipping from rail to rack so quickly I can hardly believe she’s human. “Why don’t they sell any of this stuff in adult sizes? I’m so jealous…”

It’s probably because if I imagine an adult wearing any of the stuff Saki’s picking out, they look like a super dork. Actually, if I imagine myself wearing any of it, I look like a super dork. Are dorks cute? Is that the conclusion we’ve come to as a society?

“Calm down,” Iru says, grabbing her by the collar with similar inhuman speed. Seriously, her arm went out like a rattlesnake. “Remember, we can’t carry infinite clothes.”

“I know, I know,” Saki sighs. “I just get so excited! Earth’s full of such cool fashion… It’s one of the best things about this world! I wish I got to wear dresses like this when I was growing up.”

“Just wear dresses now, then. But can you quiet down a bit? You’re embarrassing Reika.”

She gestures back at me, and Saki’s rampage slows to a halt. She’s already scooped up an entire armful of dresses, all of which look really pretty and doll-like and absolutely not something I’d ever wear.

“...It’s not that bad,” I reply in a quiet voice. “It’s kind of… fun.”

Sure, it’s a little annoying. And I can’t watch her with a straight face. But I like that my mom has a lot of energy. I’ve noticed that she smiles all the time.

Normal adults aren’t like that. Adults just come up to you with these serious, grave faces, and they in introduce themselves like you’re their boss in a business meeting, and they look tired all the time. They’re… I wanna say that they’re fuzzy. Like, they got all the edges knocked off them along the way, and now they’re all just this undefined, formless shape.

I think I might be that kind of fuzzy, too. Getting there, anyway. But Saki’s not. And neither is Iru. They’re weird and they’re loud and they do goofy stuff all the time, but they’re not like other adults. They’re not tired. They’re always smiling. And I think I like that.

Plus, if my mom’s weird, that’s like a built in excuse for me being weird. If people are staring at her, they’re not staring at me. So she can be my decoy for social interaction, while I loiter in the back and try not to look like an axe murderer. Not that I would ever actually be an axe murderer, obviously. My wrists aren’t strong enough.

Anyway, with my tacit permission in hand, Saki continues her rampage – but a little more quietly than before. Even though I’m meant to be picking out stuff for myself, it seems like she’s already filled about half of the clothes budget with ‘non-negotiable’ finds, so I start rifling through the racks myself to make sure I actually do get to pick something.

By the time we’re finished – which takes a while, because Saki spends ages making small talk with the cashier – I’ve got what should pass for a full wardrobe, evenly split between Saki’s picks and mine. Looking at them side by side, it’s obviously we’re selecting for different things. She’s going for cute things – there’s a lot of ruffles, a lot of character art, bright colours and fancy stitching.

But I picked most of my stuff for durability. Everything I picked is something I can repair if I fall over and tear it or something dumb like that, and I even got some dungarees for extra insulation. All praise the power of the overalls! They’re not cute, but they sure can take a beating.

The tricky part is that we aren’t done shopping, and now I’ve got to carry the loot around in these big paper carrier bags. You don’t realise how heavy clothes are until you’ve got a whole bunch of them. Luckily the handles of the bags are wide enough that I can loop them over my shoulders, but that messes with my balance even more than usual. I almost trip a few times on the way to the next shop, but either Saki or Aunt Iru notices and jerks me back upright every time. Their reaction speed is a little crazy.

“Urk,” I hear Iru moan as we reach our destination.

It looks like some kind of weird discount bookstore. When I imagine book shops, I always think of dark, gloomy places with mahogany facades and big old shelves with just the spines showing outwards, but this place has a cheap-looking sky blue sign at the exterior. Instead of shelves, everything is arranged on tables to show off the covers better, and the outer rim of the shop has all sorts of weird knick-knacks on display – bouncy balls, cheap wooden desk mannequins, glitter glue, jigsaws, plastic dinosaurs… that kind of thing.

“Can I sit this one out?” Iru asks, frowning. “Me and books don’t get along too good.”

“Sorry, Iru, but I’m gonna need your muscles on this one. We’re gonna get some cheap textbooks to help catch Reika up on her education, and they’re probably gonna end up being pretty heavy,” Saki apologises, although her tone soon becomes a little bit tongue in cheek. “I won’t make you read anything if you don’t want to. And, hey! If you’re good, I’ll even buy you a dinosaur!”

“I’m not a kid,” Iru huffs. “I can buy my own dinosaurs.”

“Attagirl. Reika, if you see anything you want, just let me know, okay? Clothes and books are good, but we should be on the lookout for fun stuff as well.”

After giving us our orders, Saki marches us into the shop and sets us loose.

My first port of call is the least populated corner of the shop, which is full of picture books for children ages 1-3. I’m not what I’d call an academic, but those are a little too simple even for me; that said, what I actually want is peace and quiet. Laying everything out on tables creates these tight corridors that families clump around in, and it makes it hard to move. Almost claustrophobic. My plan is to wait it out until I see an opening, and then drift my way around the outer wall bit by bit.

After five minutes, I’ve managed to advance to a spot that has racks of marbles, skipping ropes and jacks lined up – a kind of ‘traditional toys from the good old days’ section. I mostly ignore them. Stuff like this is a bit too outdoorsy for me. Going outdoors would expose me to the goat conspiracy, and anyway, the last time I went outside without an adult I got so lost they had to send a search team out to rescue me. Never again.

The marbles are pretty, though. Not pretty enough that I want them – I don’t even know how I’d play with them – but I like the little sworl in the middle of them.

Next is the jigsaw section, which I also ignore. I wouldn’t mind jigsaws, but it’s so easy to lose a piece and then the whole thing is ruined, and with my luck I absolutely know I would.

After another family clump has moved out of the store’s arteries, I come to a stairwell leading to a basement floor. At first I’m convinced it’s just an employee area or warehouse or something, but I can actually see displays down there. It also seems like there’s not as many people, so I slink my way down the stairs; the walls of the stairwell have a bunch of yearly diaries and calenders arranged, and I stop to look at one with a cat. I haven’t decided how I feel about cats. Probably better than goats, but that’s not hard.

The basement level is a lot less crowded, and I can feel myself relax all at once. I hadn’t realised how uncomfortable I was, or how tight my chest had gotten, until I escaped. With more room to breathe, I start looking around at my own pace.

The basement floor seems to be the place where they store all the books on… well, goofy stuff. Like tarot, the occult, and books that just collect weird sports trivia. I’m not saying that stuff’s bad, since it’s not like I really know anything about it, but apparently the basement is where all the wild books live.

None of them really interest me all that much, but there’s a wall of stationary and notebooks that I find a bit more promising. All of of them are cheap – all the pens are bright and plasticky, and the paper in the notebooks feels rough and tacky under my fingers – but I like cheap. Cheap means that if I lose it or break it, it’s not as big a deal. I pick up a page a day diary and start wondering if I should keep one, since it’s the start of my new post-adoption life, but… I don’t know what I’d write in it.

That’s the problem. I’m not really like other kids. I didn’t really play with anybody else or join in their hobbies, because they’d get all spooked and I’d have accidents and break everything. I don’t really have much to talk about, or any special talents. In other words, I’m boring. I wouldn’t want to keep a diary that’s full of just… nothing. I’d read it back years later and get depressed.

But as I put it regretfully back on the shelf, my eyes catch on the next section.

Art supplies.

Tubes of paint. Cardboard in every colour. Big old wooden carry cases of coloured pencils, with little plastic sheets boasting about their fifty colours and how much value you’re getting. Gift tags, glitter glue, glow in the dark markers.

They have easels and paintbrushes and palettes. They’ve got little packages of modelling clay, and big plastic sheets to protect your tables when you’re doing something messy. They have every kind of artist’s sketchbook, from small enough to fit your palm all the way up to ones almost as tall as I am – not like that’s particularly tall, but still.

Something inside me trembles.

I never did art at the orphanage. A couple of the kids did, and a couple of them were real good at it. And they always looked so happy, sketching away, even with the poor quality materials the orphanage could afford. But I never bothered. I thought I wouldn’t have the talent for it, and anyway, I’d just break all the materials by accident. I liked the pictures that the other kids made, so I didn’t want to take their art stuff away from them.

But I was always interested. Maybe even a little jealous. So seeing all this art stuff here is… it’s tempting. And it’s cheap. I look over longingly at one of the carry cases of coloured pencils, and I find myself thinking: Even if I end up breaking one, I’d still have forty-nine more. It’d take a while to ruin all of them, even for me. And when I do, it’s not like it was expensive. I don’t have an allowance yet, but these boxes are probably within that kind of price range. I could save up and get another box easily enough.

And they’d be mine. Just for me. No worrying about ruining things for the other kids, or having to apologise to the matron when things go wrong. I pick up the case and turn it over in my hands, looking at the price. It’s more than the marbles or the weird little toys upstairs, but maybe cheap enough that I could ask Saki to get it for me.

After that, all I’d need is paper. But that’s not all that expensive either. Can’t you buy, like, reams of five hundred pages of printer paper? It wouldn’t be ideal, but good enough for me.

I deliberate for a while, shifting my weight from foot to foot. All I can think about is how happy those kids looked when they’d finally finished their drawings and they could show them off. How focused they were when they sat down to draw. Like they were only thinking about art.

It must be peaceful – to be able to zone in like that and have only one thing on your mind for a while.

Maybe it seems like I’m overthinking it. I probably am. A normal kid would just pick up the pencils, show their mom and ask for them, easy as that.

But even though I have all these reasons I’ve thought up of to get the pencils, I can’t help the little pessimistic voice inside me that says: Don’t bother. You’re not good at art, and you’ll never be good at art. You’ll just break the pencils, or you’ll give up after the first time and never use them again. Something will happen, and you’ll stop drawing, and it’ll be a waste.

And that voice is probably right. I probably won’t be good. I probably will break the pencils. I probably am going to get bored or frustrated and give up. That’s what makes it hard. Hard to try.

So I need to overthink things. I need to give myself two reasons to try things for every one reason to not. That’s the only way I can get anything done, instead of getting stopped by pessimism. Or realism. One of the two.

“Oh, Reika! There you are. I was looking for you. Iru wants to know what kind of model T-Rex you want. There’s a traditional lizard one and there’s a more accurate one with a bunch of feathers, and she’s taking whichever one you’re not having, so – Ooh, did you find something you like?”

As I’m pondering, Saki swoops in like a whirlwind, and starts looking at the case in my hand. All of a sudden she breaks into a smile, nodding to herself.

“You want to get into art, huh? That’s a great idea! Let’s grab you a sketchpad, too. can’t wait to see what you come up with!” she says, with a smile that brightens the whole room. When people say somebody’s a ‘ray of sunshine’, is this what they’re talking about? “But be warned, I’m totally going to put your drawings up on the fridge. That’s an integral part of momhood, right? The fridge drawings? I’m not about to miss out on it!”

“...mm, but… I probably won’t be very good,” I mumble. She’s so enthusiastic that I can’t help but add some kind of disclaimer. Don’t expect much.

Saki shakes the thought away as if it was nothing, not even breaking her stride. “Who cares? If you have fun, that’s the main thing. And if you don’t, well, you tried! You don’t know what you’re going to enjoy until you’ve tried it, so the best thing to do is go out and try a whole bunch of stuff. Ooh! That reminds me, they’re selling these little harmonicas, so do you think we should grab one of those too so you can try out some music?”

She gently tugs the case out of my hands, and I realise that me getting the pencils is now non-negotiable. I flounder for something to say; I’ve never really had to deal with somebody being so enthusiastic about getting me things before. In the end I manage to mumble out a ‘thank you’, and Saki sticks her chest out like she’s won an award.

“Still, is that the only thing you’re interested in?” she asks. “You didn’t see anything else?”
“...I wanted the art stuff, so…”

“And? One art kit isn’t gonna last you forever. And it’s not like I ever said you could only have one thing, right? Let’s grab a bunch of stuff for you to try out.”

I finally notice that the basket hanging from her arm isn’t just full of books – there’s all sorts of little toys and trinkets in there, too. It begins to dawn on me that, whether I ask for things or not, Saki wants to give them to me. She wants me to have them.

Somebody who’s always looking out for things that will make you happy, even when you’re not seeing them yourself. I wonder if that’s what a mom is.

I start feeling a tiny bit choked up, and timidly catch the arm of her coat in my hand.

“What’s up?” she asks. “Is the upstairs a bit too crowded for you? We can stay down here for a little while if you like.”

“…I was thinking… that I’ll take the feathery dinosaur. That Auntie Iru was talking about.”

“Oh, thank goodness. She really wanted the classic look for herself, but she’s trying to be a cool aunt so she wanted you to have first pick,” Saki tells me with a conspiratorial wink.

“Auntie Iru is cool,” I say. “I think.”

“You should tell her that. But maybe wait until we get outside, huh? She can get pretty loud when she’s excited.”

I get the sneaking feeling I just heard the pot calling the kettle, but that’s fine.

We go back upstairs to join the crowd, where Iru and Saki have amassed a small arsenal of toys to keep me occupied – dinosaurs, paint by numbers books, even a wooden yo-yo. I try my best to clutch them close. I don’t have quite enough room in my arms for all the things they want to give me.

But I can’t quite bring myself to let any of them go.

Chapter Text

“Another early bedtime, huh?”

“Shh,” I hissed.

We were taking one last look at Reika for the night before Iru left for home. After our busy day of shopping, she’d just about keeled over at the table while I was making dinner, holding onto that little case of art supplies the whole time. We managed to keep her up just long enough to finish her food before we packed her off to bed. If I wasn’t as good at cooking as I am, she might just have decided to go to sleep hungry.

“She sure tires out easy, though. Maybe you ought to feed her a bit more,” Iru said breezily.

I gave her a gentle nudge with my elbow. “She got tired because she’s a perfectly normal human kid. They do that.”

That wasn’t the whole story, obviously. But the whole story would have been hard to explain to somebody like Iru, and even if I did, she wouldn’t really get it. That wasn’t the kind of person my sister was.

Make no mistake – Iru was a one hundred percent all-natural sweetheart. She was boisterous from time to time, but she didn’t have a drop of malice in her body. For her, being nice to other people was one of those things you didn’t have to think about. It just happened.

But that had its own drawbacks, you know? She was nice, but it was a blunt force kind of niceness. If you felt bad, she’d move heaven and earth to make you smile, but she wouldn’t really understand why you were sad in the first place. She’d just do the right thing without thinking about it, every single time.

Most people aren’t like that. At least, not all of the time. We’ve gotta take a moment to think: how do I cheer this person up? What’s the most effective way to be nice to somebody? How do I avoid screwing this conversation up? Asking those questions, which Iru never really did, was how you actually got to understand people on a deeper level, because you had to put yourself more in their shoes.

For example, I could tell you that the reason Reika got so tired is because she was emotional. Feeling things can really take it out of you, right? Everyone’s had those moments where they work themselves up into a temper and then feel exhausted afterwards. Being angry is the most tiring, but bouncing between all sorts of emotions can wear you down, too. Even happy ones.

That was one of the things I was learning about Reika. Maybe it was because she wasn’t socialised that well as a kid, but she had absolutely no poker face. She didn’t seem to realise it, but she broadcast her emotions like crazy. Her expression was always changing – she lit up when she was happy, and her whole body seemed to shrink when she was sad. And she bounced between them all the time, chewing her lip with worry one moment and then beaming the next. Maybe that’s what it’s like when you’re a kid.

To Iru, Reika being tired was weird because she hadn’t been running around or carrying anything that heavy. Sure, we’d been out shopping, but that shouldn’t be enough activity to exhaust a child her age. So, naturally, she worried that Reika wasn’t getting enough to eat.

But to me, Reika had spent the whole day bouncing from one feeling to the next like a pinball, thinking about all sorts of stuff. She wasn’t physically busy, but she was emotionally busy, and that was tiring too. Iru was always pretty stable emotionally (and didn’t really think about stuff), so she probably wouldn’t get that.

That didn’t matter, though. She was still my surprisingly reliable, empty-headed sister. She didn’t need to be anything other than what she was, and neither did Reika.

Well.

That wasn’t quite true. Reika needed to be happier, or else I couldn’t call myself a good Mom.

Speaking of which… as much as I wasn’t really looking forward to it, I needed to report back. I waved Iru off at the door, and prepared to get just a little bit ‘cosmic’.

Imagine, for just a sec, that you were having a dream. A really vivid dream. So vivid it might as well have been real life. Take the most vivid dream you remember (if you remember any, since dreams can kinda be that way), and crank the realism up a notch. Or twenty.

Now imagine that, in this crazy realistic dream, you’re beating up a dog.

Well, um, yeah. Long story short, that’s how I transcended mortality and became a god of sweets.

Look, I know that’s not a very good explanation, okay? But have you ever tried explaining to people that you’re a cosmic deity? You either come off as crazy, or they ask you to do something to prove it. And if you prove it, that makes its own problems. Yes, I could validate my argument by pulling a cupcake out of thin air, but then I’d just get people asking for free infinite cupcakes. Then I’d have to solve world hunger with my infinite cupcakes, and after that I’d be on the hook for all the diabetes and tooth decay caused by a diet consisting only of free infinite cupcakes… It’s just not worth it, okay?

Obviously, being a god is one of my biggest secrets. It’s right up there with my cup size and a list of eleven different herbs and spices that I can never reveal for any reason. I haven’t told my friends, and I haven’t told my family. The only people who know are the other gods of sweets, which is who I’d come to meet.

If you wanna set up a meeting with the divine, obviously you can’t just ring their cell phone. I mean, you can, I guess? Some of them have got cell phones, and in theory, they might even answer them. But they also live in entirely different worlds from mine, and interdimensional cell reception isn’t great.

The solution is that you just kinda let your divine essence shimmy out of your normal body for a bit, and then you can sorta wiggle through the dimension cracks until you reach Sweet Heaven, a place between worlds where we can all meet up.

What do I mean by ‘divine essence?’ It’s tough to explain, but there’s a part of me that’s divine and there’s a part that’s not. Normally, they’re so close together that you can’t tell the difference. But the divine part of you can kind scooch out to do god stuff when it needs to, while the regular you goes about your daily business.

Right now, I – as Saki – just finished tucking Reika into bed, and I’m reading one of my parenting books before I turn into the night. But at the same time, I – as Sweet Maker, which is my official Sweet God title – am floating off in space, surrounded by gum balls the size of planets and cotton candy asteroid clouds.

Actually, we used to just kinda bust through the dimensional walls with brute force and meet up physically instead of jumping through all these hoops, but we had to stop. You’d think it would be because of interdimensional instability or something like that, but actually, it was just that QP and Nacchan couldn’t make it on school nights, and Tomomo kept using overtime as an excuse to skip out on meetings. So we ended up doing this instead.

Speaking of QP, she’s the first one to show up, poofing into existence in a cloud of vaguely pudding-scented smoke. As soon as she sees me, she rockets towards me with a huge smile on her face.

Out of all the Sweet Gods, QP is probably the one I get along best with. Most of the time, she’s a cheerful, polite girl who’s mega friendly and likes being around people, so I can kinda resonate with her that way. The one major difference is that she has a kind of weird, pudding-based morality system that can make her difficult to predict at times.

I will admit that I’m a little bit jealous of her, though. Not only does she live in a more wacky and carefree world than mine, but she’s a dog girl too! That means she has real dog ears and an adorable fluffy tail! That’s just a level of natural cuteness I can’t get to, no matter how hard I try… You really can’t compete against animals in terms of cuteness, I guess.

Actually, she’s the reason I’m a sweet god in the first place. In my dream, I was fighting against her, and she gave me the position when I won. Or, uh, forced it on me. If we were vampires, she’d be my sire, but that’s a whole other type of story.

Looking back, I’m surprised I won at all. QP is… monstrously powerful. See, she was projecting into my world that time, and that means she had to kinda follow my world’s rules, right? But she still almost beat me, even when she kept running face-first into bullets because she didn’t know how to dash so they skim off your shield.

But we had a friendly match in her world later, and… yikes. She’s just an absolute wall of firepower there. Bullets everywhere, and dashing just wasn’t a thing. I wouldn’t say she’s particularly skilful without that incredible bullet density, which is probably why I won in my world, but I can’t imagine how to deal with that level of brute force.

Actually, her and Reika are the same kind of age, aren’t they? This might be a way to practice handling kids that age.

“Hello! It’s been a while. Kind of. I don’t know. Time gets weird when you hop between worlds,” QP says, by way of greeting.

Time does get weird when you jump between worlds. That’s why everything’s suddenly in the present tense. Time passes differently in different worlds, and sometimes you might even run into someone from the very far future of the world you come from yourself, so we’ve mostly agreed not to think about it and ignore the problem in all cosmic™ experiences.

“It’s good to see you, QP.”

“You too. How have you been? I heard you had a kid!”

“I didn’t have one. I just got one,” I correct her. I hold my hand out in front of me, and she obligingly rests her chin in my palm so I can scratch it. Her tail wags as I do. “How have you been doing, QP? School going okay?”

She whines softly, which is a no. For all her good qualities, QP is a bit of a pudding brain. When it comes to education, she’s the type who has to work hard just to scrape by with a passing grade.

Although… It’s not like I’m some kind of genius myself. Actually, my biggest worry about home schooling Reika is that I won’t be able to keep up. Shifu wasn’t exactly the best teacher – you can probably guess what he thought of the humanities. We got just enough maths driven into us to handle flight and bullet trajectories, and then we were on our own.

“You can always ask Nacchan for help, right?” I say, trying to comfort her.

“I already did,” QP moans. “She, Syura and I are doing a group project about the history of basketball. I don’t do history, Nacchan doesn’t do basketball, and Syura doesn’t do anything, so we’re stuck.”

“Ahaha… You guys have your own struggles too, huh.”

Within a few seconds, Nacchan – or, rather, Natsumi – appears herself. Unlike QP, who likes to make a dramatic and pudding flavoured entrance, Natsumi just blinks into existence with no fanfare at all. She’s a much softer, quieter girl in general.

“Good evening,” she says gently. “I can’t stay that long… I’m making curry for Mei and the penguins tonight, and I don’t like to take my eyes off the stove…”

“It’s fine, Nacchan. Your normal self’s almost as good a cook as when you’re a sweet god!” QP barks back.

In addition to being probably the most well-adjusted member of the group (opinions are pending on yours truly), Natsumi is also my comrade in cookery. We trade recipes all the time, and she always wonders how I can get my food to taste as good as it does. I always tell her that it’s thousands of years of practice.

It’s actually probably because she lives in a world and time that hasn’t had an apocalyptic war yet. That means mankind is still going nuts with industry and cranking pollutants into everything, so her ingredients are worse. Because Suguri cleaned up the planet and kicked humans into touch with the whole pollution thing, my world has some pretty incredible veggies, especially compared to what we could grow on the ship.

Despite that, she manages to keep up with my cooking pretty well. I’m sure that with a bit more practice and without the ingredient handicap, she’d blow right past me in the culinary arena.

We chat a little while we wait, and before long the others show up. As is traditional, they show up together, mainly because Sweet Breaker is holding Tomomo by the scruff of the neck.

Tomomo is… look, she’s got things going on, okay? I get that. She’s a Sweet God and a Magical Girl and she might have an office job somewhere but I’m not too sure, and there are just a lot of things in her life that would stress me out if I had to deal with them.

But the only time I’ve ever seen her outside her pyjamas is when Sweet Breaker forces her to change into real people clothes at gunpoint. Or gumball-point. Basically, with violence. She’s like the walking embodiment of unreliable, and even if you can get her to sit up and take things seriously, she’ll complain the whole time about how her back hurts and stuff like that. It kinda hurts to watch.

Don’t get me wrong. I know she’s not having a great time of things, and I sympathise. But that makes me feel like she’s kinda… pathetic, I guess? She evokes pathos. Let’s go with that.

That said, she’s apparently insanely powerful in a fight, if you can get her into one. And make her wear clothes, and actually try. Her job title as a god is Sweet Eater, She Who Consumes, and she’s more or less my equal and opposite counterpart. If my job is to fill the world with sweet things, hers is to make sure it doesn’t overflow. In theory, anyway. Somehow, I feel like my job is the tougher one of the two…

Sweet Breaker, meanwhile, is our senior and de facto leader, and she’s about as no-nonsense as it’s possible to be with this kind of group as your co-workers. She takes everything seriously, and honestly, she probably works a bit too hard – especially since her job is to eradicate any sweets that have grown powerful enough to warp the fabric of society, and she’s been known to be a bit quick on the trigger finger.

One of the biggest examples is the time she decided she wanted to eradicate pudding, which, uh, went down about as well as you’d expect with QP. Back then, QP was just a normal human – or dog, or whatever combination of the two – and she got so mad, she went straight up into space to stop Sweet Breaker herself. Somewhere along the way, her love of pudding turned her into an actual Sweet God. Did a semi-ordinary schoolgirl fly to space, fight a god, and win? Yes. That’s QP for you.

Nowadays, those two don’t exactly get along, but they at least have their roles down pat. Just like Tomomo is my equal and opposite, QP is Sweet Breaker’s; her job as Sweet Guardian is to stop sweets from getting to the point where Sweet Breaker needs to act, and stop her if she’s going too far. You can think of it like Sweet Breaker being a prosecutor and QP being a defence attorney. It’s that kind of vibe.

There is another Sweet God, and that’s Sweet Creator. Technically, she’s our boss. But she doesn’t tend to come to our meetings, and apparently she’s mostly interested in pranks anyway, so most of the time Sweet Breaker takes command.

“Argh! What the heck, Amami?! You didn’t even give me time to freshen up!” Tomomo howls, twisting in her pyjamas in an effort to land a clean right hook. She’s the only one who calls Sweet Breaker ‘Amami’; they’ve known each other for way longer than the rest of us have. QP, Nacchan and I are all basically new hires in godly terms.

“You refuse to get dressed, so it makes no difference,” Sweet Breaker replies impassively. Rather less impassively, she drops Tomomo like a hot stone in the desert. “You are as presentable as you ever get, so let us commence our council.”

She’s not really wrong. The only difference between a ‘fresh’ Tomomo and the normal one is that the fresh one smells like dry shampoo and men’s roll-on deodorant. (She buys it because it’s cheaper). Not saying that bit out loud is Sweet Breaker’s way of being nice.

“Grr… One of these days, I’m gonna teach you how to treat a girl,” Tomomo seethes.

“You mean a lady,” I say helpfully.

“That makes me sound like a grandma! ‘Magical Girl’ is my job title, so I’m sixteen forever, grammatically speaking,” she pouts.

Natsumi and QP look at each other, and decide wisely not to get involved in the oncoming debate. Good girls. Let the women of indeterminate age (myself included) sort it out amongst themselves.

Our meetings usually go like this. We’ll get together to give status updates about sweets, but somebody immediately derails it and it becomes a ten hour debate about whether it was immoral to give wine gums to teenagers. This time, however, is different. Sweet Breaker fixes Tomomo with an icy glower, and clears her throat.

“Saki,” she asks, her voice low and cool. “Have you made contact with the Lost Child?”

The ‘Lost Child’. It sounds so ominous. Well, it’s probably meant to sound ominous. Sweet Breaker has this thing about not calling people by their actual names and giving them weird titles instead. It seems like one of those things you just don’t draw attention to out loud.

“I have,” I confirm.

A murmur goes around the table. It’s mostly just to humour Sweet Breaker, honestly. QP and Natsumi already know, and Tomomo doesn’t care, but she’ll complain if we don’t make things seem suitably atmospheric.

“Is she cute?” QP asks. She has an ever-so-slightly smug look on her face, because she knows it’s exactly what I was hoping she’d ask.

“Mega, ultra cute,” I say, balling up my fists. “The cutest kid ever. Last night, we went out shopping, and she got so excited that she tired herself out and went to bed cuddling this art box we picked out together.”

Obviously, there’s only one mega ultra cute kid I could be talking about. It’s supposed to be a status update, but I can take the chance to brag about my cute adopted daughter just a little bit, right? Right?

“The Lost Child. Hoshino Reika,” Sweet Breaker intones. “You’ve done well, Sweet Maker.”

Well, technically, there’s no ‘Hoshino’ just yet. Her parents in our world abandoned her wholesale, and it seems like there wasn’t a second name supplied; she’s only got the name Reika. I don’t have a second name either, so we’re like peas in a pod like that. Or should I say, like mother and daughter? Eheheh.

“What’s so special about this one kid?” Tomomo asks grouchily.

“Oh my... Did you, um, not hear when we talked about it before...?” Natsumi asks, more gently than the rest of us would have bothered to.

“Obviously. I’m not deaf. I just wasn’t listening.”

“Then listen now. It began when…”

Um, so, I’m just going to summarise what she’s going over, because Sweet Breaker is very serious and diligent, and that tends to correlate with talking very slowly. She goes one sentence at a time and she pauses for effect a lot. Suguri does the same thing.

In Suguri’s world, mankind committed a grave sin.

They went to war. And when I say they went to war, I mean they really got into it. It was a war so long people forgot why they were fighting. A war that burned out both the people and the planet’s resources in equal measure, leaving the world and its humans a broken shell of what it had been.

In that war, many humanoid weapons – not that different from me and my sisters, the Shifu Brands – were created. Among them were a number of ‘ultimate weapons’, who would eventually decide the fate of the whole planet.

One of those ultimate weapons was Sora, a girl with an incredible talent for battle (and, according to Hime, approximately three functioning brain cells). That talent was only honed further by the military’s enhancements. But despite her power, she defected from both sides and fought for the dream of a clean and peaceful sky.

Because of Sora’s defection, the military powers scrambled to create other ultimate weapons who could match or replace her. And in the end, they made the one weapon that would end them all: Star Breaker.

We’re not sure of a lot of the specifics about Star Breaker, like who she was before the military got ahold of her, or how she was created. Rumour has it she died several times in the course of her enhancements, and was forcibly brought back from the dead. What we do know is that the process made her both incredibly dangerous, and monumentally insane.

It’s actually gotten pretty popular in history textbooks to look at Sora and Star Breaker as being two sides of the same coin – two people who wanted the same thing, but in different ways. Sora wanted peace. Star Breaker also wanted peace, but she wanted it to be the eternal kind, and she wanted to share it with everybody. In a, uh, very non-optional kind of way.

The two fought, and Sora (narrowly) won. If she hadn’t, Star Breaker would have sounded the death knell of the whole planet, and there wouldn’t be historians to write textbooks about the whole thing.

But there’s a bit more to the story than any history textbook can tell you. There is, in fact, a Cosmic™ bit.

As Sweet Gods, we’re… well, Gods. The wheel of reincarnation isn’t specifically part of our portfolio, but we can poke around it a bit more than most people can. Normally, when mortals die, they float around for a bit and then their soul gets cleansed, and they’re reborn in another body with a clean slate.

For Star Breaker, that didn’t happen.

Whatever she went through, whatever they did to her, it twisted her up so much that even after going through reincarnation, she still held a grudge against the Planet Earth and everybody on it. It was buried in her soul, and it wouldn’t come out even in her next life.

Sounds bad, right? Well, usually, it wouldn’t actually be a problem. Stuff like this happens. When you get into cosmic stuff, things get wacky. Time gets wacky, alternate universes get wacky, and even the afterlife gets wacky. There’s a bit of tolerance built in. If one time through the cycle didn’t work, just roll her through again, right? Like if you’re trying to wash a stain out of your favourite jeans.

But there was a teensy, tiny issue. Remember when I said she was carrying a grudge against Planet Earth? Yeah, well, it was mutual.

The Planet is not a neutral entity. She plays favourites. Suguri’s one of them, for example. And you gotta realise: just because the Planet’s beautiful, it doesn’t mean it’s gentle. The Law of the Jungle exists, and the Planet is the one who ratified it. And that Planet, who had come so close to death, wanted nothing to do with the girl who would have dealt the final blow if she had the chance.

So, when Star Breaker came to be reincarnated, everything in her new life went wrong, and she died young and miserable. And when she reincarnated again, she died young and miserable again. That grudge, nestled in the very fabric of her, just got reinforced, time after time. She and the Planet were feuding, and the Planet always won.

In situations like this, the Gods eventually step in. They say, okay, so this planet doesn’t want you – how about we reincarnate that soul into another world, for a totally clean slate? There’s plenty of alternate universes, after all. Just pick one where the Planet doesn’t hate her, let the grudge dissipate over time, and boom, you’re done!

But even that wouldn’t work, because of just how powerful that enmity was. It chained her soul exactly where it started.

That’s the true story of Star Breaker. She’s trapped. She’s not going around the wheel of reincarnation, but being ground underneath it.

And Reika – my super cute, adorable adopted daughter – is just the latest turn of the wheel.

But now, there’s hope.

I don’t know why, but Sweet Breaker saw something in that girl. Maybe it’s just because they both have ‘Breaker’ in their names, but according to her, Star Breaker has potential. Potential for something… sweet. She couldn’t live up to that potential as she was, but it was there.

And so, Sweet Breaker decided that for the sake of this one soul, this one lost child, the Sweet Gods would launch one of our very rare joint operations.

“Sounds kooky,” Tomomo opines, cleaning her ear with the tip of her finger. Don’t do that, by the way. You get wax build-up, and it makes you fingers smell. “If reincarnation won’t work, what the heck are we supposed to do about it?”

“...Our plan has three stages. The first stage: contact. This is Sweet Maker’s job.” Sweet Breaker inclines her head towards me. “The planet will beset the girl with misfortune, but the divine aura of the Sweet Gods can counteract it… probably. Saki will stay close to her, and allow her to live a normal, happy life. This should cause the grudge to fade somewhat.”

Next, she points a finger at Tomomo. “The second stage: transmigration. When she next reincarnates, you and I will break the barriers between worlds and reincarnate her into a different one. Specifically, Sweet Blogger and Sweet Guardian’s world.”

“And then we just look after her, right?” QP finishes, her tail wagging. “Even if she gets powerful and goes nutso somehow, I can use the infinite power of pudding to set her straight!”

By ‘the infinite power of pudding’, she means violence. I’m assuming Natsumi would try to get her to stop a bit more gently – kind of a carrot and stick approach, I guess.

We all look at each other. This is our mission. We’re the Sweet Gods, and, yeah, we’re all kind of a bunch of unreliable goofballs, But we’re going to move heaven and earth together to make sure Reika can get the clean slate she deserves.

It’s maybe the proudest I’ve ever been to be a Sweet God. Not that there’s all that much competition.

“Of course,” Sweet Breaker continues, “Sweet Maker’s role is the first and most important part of the plan. We’ll need regular updates on progress with the Lost Child. And should she need support, we will give it to her.”

“Alright!” I beam, and crack my knuckles. “Let me start from the top, I guess? So, on the first day I met her, she…”

I carry on bragging about how cute Reika is, disguised as a long status update. Tomomo rolls her eyes a little, but Natsumi and QP are into it.

I’ve said before that Reika has a lot of aunts who’ll look after her, no matter what. What I didn’t mention is that she also got some pretty literal godparents into the bargain.

And by the time I’m done telling stories, they’re gonna adore her just as much as I do.

Chapter Text

If there was one thing that Sham had learned over the past few months, it was that post-workout Sora was a powerful drug.

To be entirely fair, there was ample joy to be found at every station in the Sora workout cycle. For a girl who was quite as invested in sleeping as she was, Sora took unvarnished pleasure in the prospect of moving her body around. She would get slowly more excited as the time drew near, and sometimes – not every time, but enough of the time that Sham’s stomach fluttered every time they had a workout day scheduled – she would get excited enough to accidentally raise her voice a little. Sora raising her voice was still quieter than an ordinary person, but that was what made it cute. Pre-workout Sora was adorable.

During the workout itself, she was marked by a certain intensity. As the years of inactivity fell off and her skin flushed with colour, as her blood pumped and her muscles ached, Sora came alive in a way that was very visible and very noticeable. Suddenly she was powerful, purposeful, sublime. It was a charm that Nath was infamously weak to, but to which Sham was by no means immune, and the visceral reminder that the woman she loved was capable of great heroics as well as great cuteness was by no means an unwelcome one.

Post-workout Sora, however, was Sham’s favourite, because one of two things would inevitably happen. The first option was that all the exertion would stimulate Sora’s natural inclination for napping, and she would become very docile, very sleepy, and very amenable to hugs. She was never not amenable to hugs and would take as many as she could get, but after a workout, she would usually attach herself, limpit-like, to one or both of her girlfriends and drift off into a peaceful slumber. Was post-exercise narcolepsy an important trait to look for in a romantic partner? It was cute, so Sham thought so.

The other possibility was that, approximately halfway through the cuddling stage, it would occur to her that she would prefer her affection in a decidedly more physical format. It was not a proposition Sham or Nath were in the habit of refusing. Generally the only question was how to keep a lid on things until they got home from the gym, at which point the rest of the day could be spent in any number of enjoyable ways.

Sora, then, was a gamble, albeit one in which both outcomes were very much winning. Nath, by contrast, was more reliable. A creature of habit, her contribution to post-workout joy was… well, sitting down. Not many could accomplish this monumental task; indeed, few were brave enough even to attempt it.

But like so many things in life, it’s not what you do, but how you do it. Nath always sat leaning back, her chin tilted towards the ceiling, her chest thrust out and her legs parted very slightly, taking slow, steady breaths through her nose and exhaling through her mouth.

The net result was that her bosom was moving, her thighs were on display, and although she would have resented being described as ‘glistening with sweat’ – grumpily insisting that she was moderately shiny at best – Sham knew a good glisten when she saw one. When applied to a woman as well built as Nath was, it was a feast for the senses.

(Technically speaking, what Nath was actually doing was venting heat. She already ran hotter than most as a result of her enhancements, and exercise didn’t help the matter. She maintained that the open posture aided heat dissipation. She did have vents built into her arm connectors for emergency cooling, but thought it was quite rude to do in public. This did not prevent Sham from using them to blow hot air over her hands on cold days.)

Together, Sora and Nath provided enough concentrated joy to overcome Sham’s natural disinterest in the gym. She had spent a surprising portion of her life in gyms; her job demanded that she be kept in some kind of shape, despite all her efforts to the contrary, and the pains and pleasure of exercise were now simply a chore she was forced to endure.

What really irritated her was the lack of praise and the lack of progress. She was never there to hit a goal; if she became too trim and muscular, it would shift her audience and make her managers tear their collective hair out. She was limited to maintenance and nothing more, and nobody would give you a pat on the back for being exactly the same from one month to the next. It wasn’t dynamic. It was dull, and all the feel-good brain chemistry in the world couldn’t outweigh the endless bleak hours she’d spent achieving exactly nothing in either direction.

With her girlfriends around, not only was there eye candy, which Sham was just as passionate about as the regular kind, but there was a performance element to consider as well.

Prior to the Cuddle Puddle’s coalescence, she had been on trips to the gym with Sora and Nath. But they hadn’t been very fun. The problem was that they spent most of their time either working out like responsible adults (and where was the fun in that?), or looking squarely at each other.

She didn’t blame them for that. They were both attractive women with a certain sense of physicality, a nascent romantic entanglement, and more chemistry than a baking soda volcano. They were pulled together as if by magnetic force. But she’d been left on the sidelines more than she would have liked, and she couldn’t deny that it had stung.

But now things were different, and they were quietly admiring the body she had worked so hard for. What could she say? She was an idol, when all was said and done, and she thrived on attention. With her girlfriends’ eyes where they ought to be, there were any number of opportunities to tease, thrill, or otherwise extract some fun from the chore of exercise.

Today, however, those pleasures would be sadly curtailed.

Suguri and Hime had decided to join them at the gym. Or, more accurately, Hime had decided to join them, and she and Sora simply pulled Suguri into their sisterly gravitational field. Why Hime made this decision was a fair question, but the result was the same: Sham and Nath had to be on their best behaviour.

After all, Suguri and Hime were their prospective sisters-in-law. Or mothers-in-law. They were somethings-in-law, at any rate, and they had to be assured that Sham and Nath were able custodians of Sora’s future happiness. That, they had agreed, meant any shenanigans had to be kept to a bare minimum.

Predictably, they failed immediately.

“Muuuu,” Sora said woodenly. She was scowling, which didn’t come naturally to her. Most of her scowls were just implied through context or body language, but today she had pushed the boat out and mildly rearranged her expression into something which passed as displeased. “I got heavier again.”

The object of her displeasure was a large scale that had been recently installed in the entrance hall, and was somewhat of a novelty with gym-goers. It was technically rated for livestock rather than humans, but bored college students had begun a trend of weighing themselves in groups and seeing if they were equivalent to a cow.

The true purpose, however, was to weigh Nath, whose internal machinery made her just a little too robust for a traditional scale. When the Cuddle Puddle’s gym antics became a regular event instead of a one-off, she had quietly made her way into the manager’s office, some money had changed hands, and now the gym had a new tourist attraction that just so happened to fit her particular needs.

“Don’t worry, Sora! That just means you’re putting on muscle, right? Sooner or later you’re gonna reach your natural maximum, and that’ll be the most healthy weight for you!” Sham said, stroking her girlfriend’s hair. She’d wrestled it into a ponytail for the day and it had to be regularly placated, or else it would spring from its confines and into its usual fluffy configuration. “Besides, more weight just means more Sora, right? That’s the world I wanna live in!”

“But,” the ex-soldier said haltingly, “it’s not very feminine.”

“Who cares?! Toned thighs save lives! If you wanna be feminine, I’ve got three thousand cute dresses you could wear! Don’t worry about your weight. You can do all the exercise you want, and I’ll find you hot no matter what! Here, lift me above your head. I’m ready for it!”

Only a dancer’s lift would satisfy the boiling blood running through Sham’s veins, and Sora obliged her with only a mildly puzzled look on her face before setting her down and pointing her at Nath. Nath could also lift Sham above her head, and her head was higher than Sora’s was too. Inevitably, she was roped into the action.

As they watched, Hime sidled over and gently elbowed her sister in the ribs.

“Laying it on a little thick, aren’t we?” she asked.

“Mm. Sham likes it when I pretend I’m worried about how much I weigh,” Sora answered passively.

“Does she know you’re pretending?” Hime asked.

“Sham knows acting, and I’m not good at it anyway. She just likes to pretend. It’s called role play.”

Having gleaned insights into Sham’s character that she might have preferred not to, Hime coughed and made to change the subject via her favourite escape mechanism: Suguri. “Darling, I’m sure you could lift me over your head if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

Suguri blinked slowly, and wondered what the least dangerous response might be.

She had already done well for herself that day. She had awoken to Hime barging her (and by extension, their) way into attending Sora’s regular gym trip, and then presented with a sports bra and a pair of shorts so form-fitting they seemed more like something a car tyre would leave on the pavement after peeling out. Escaping those shorts quickly became priority number one – but she remembered, very dimly, a conversation about booty shorts in the last few days, and recognised that Hime was attempting to reap what she’d sown.

In the end, she managed to enact a clever rhetorical trick: she claimed that the outfit was simply too powerful to wear outside the house, and she would only wear it for Hime’s exclusive viewing pleasure. Phrased like that, it was a proposition the blonde AI couldn’t say no to, and she’d been allowed to attend the gym in her jacket and a pair of tracksuit pants instead. She now looked more like the dishevelled protagonist of a comedy isekai than a sleek protector of the planet, but her dignity had a price and that was it.

Hime herself had decided to attend the gym in thigh-high legwarmers and a black tank top, with some shorts tacked on at the last minute at Suguri’s request. Sumika, who had cronched the data of Earth, mentioned that she looked like she’d leapt from the screen of Flashdance. Nobody knew what Flashdance actually was, but it sounded steamy, and that was good enough for Hime.

Perhaps out of a sense of mercy, it was Sora who extracted Suguri from the social quandary she’d found herself in.

“I can lift you if you want,” she told Hime, in what she probably assumed was a helpful way. “I’ve been practising.”

“Sora, I appreciate the offer,” Hime began, and had to stop for a moment because the lie she had just uttered was rather large to have delivered in one go. “But I was rather more invested in Suguri, specifically, lifting me.”

“Are you sure? I’m taller, so you’ll be higher if I do it. You can reach things in cupboards more easily.”

“Oh yes. Think of all those high cupboards I’ll be able to reach at the gym. Why have you been practising lifting people, anyway? Another idol performance?”

“No,” Sora said, shaking her head. “It’s to protect my modesty.”

Hime rolled this statement around her head for a moment and decided that, like an errant jigsaw piece, it had no place in the current conversation. She knew she shouldn’t ask for more details, especially not from Sora, but her curiosity couldn’t be contained. “And how exactly would it do that?”

“It’s because,” Sora answered peacefully, “when I do suplexes, people can look up my skirt. So I’m thinking of doing power bombs instead.”

All the way over in Suguri’s house, Sumika shivered. She had begged off of the gym trip, claiming that “Sumika has a superior cyborg body, so she can just install ab protocols and get mega ripped that way. She’s not going to, because she’s already at peak physical attractiveness and she’s just waiting for everybody to acknowledge it. She doesn’t need to get sweaty and she’s working on a very important super secret project, so please go and commit indecent exposure at the gym without her.” But even a superior cyborg body could not suppress the instinctual chill of fear when Sora uttered those words.

“Absolutely not,” Nath cut in flatly, setting Sham down and loping over to join the conversation. “You don’t need to suplex anyone. Or power-bomb them. If somebody’s bothering you, leave it to me. I’ll handle it.”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t want people looking up your skirt, because that’s kinda our territory, but you might end up actually going overboard, you know?” Sham added. “Besides, power bombs aren’t very cute, right? Doesn’t wrestling have any cute ways of doing violence?”

“Mmmm,” Sora hummed, looking distinctly unconvinced by their arguments.

At least, Suguri put a gentle hand on her shoulder and fixed her with a stern gaze. “Sora.”

“Muuu.”

With Suguri’s timely intervention, the world moved closer to a lasting peace.

The next stop on their whirlwind tour was the treadmills, which were a point of much contention; in fact, they were one of the few things in life on which Sora and Nath had irrevocable disagreements.

Nath, who had a long stride, bulk to spare and only moderate aerobic fitness, found that they suited her needs quite well. She could set the machine to require a gentle jog, clear her mind and shake off the rust that had accumulated over the years.

Sora, however, had a problem, and it was that she only had two speeds: a leisurely amble, and a dead sprint. Jogging was not a thing she did. She had tried it and it did not bring her joy, so she had banished it from her life.

More to the point, there was no setting on which a treadmill could entertain her. If she set it to a gentle stroll, it hardly counted as exercise, and she got no enjoyment from it. If she tried to set it to a running pace, the machine simply couldn’t keep up; the kinds of speeds Sora’s body had been designed to hit were not compatible with consumer-level exercise equipment.

As a result, it had become her habit to gently break off from her girlfriends and wander the halls of the gymnasium until she found a vending machine. She would ponderously select her drink of choice – she treated spending her allowance with utmost seriousness, and never rushed the thinking process – and then drift back to the treadmills, where she would find a place to sit close to wherever Sham and Nath were running. She smile softly to herself, sip her drink, and contentedly watch her girlfriends climb the stairs of fitness together.

The vantage point she had of their backsides as they did so was, of course, purely coincidental. She was just fortunate enough to pick the spot with the best view every single week. Life was funny like that.

Less entranced by Nath and Sham’s display of gluteal fortitude were Suguri and Hime, who were also sitting out. The concept of Suguri on a treadmill was even more patently absurd than with Sora, and Hime maintained that if she wanted to walk she would do so outside, where there were flowers to sniff and cats to abscond with.

“So, if you don’t use the treadmills, what exercise do you do?” Hime asked, already fishing for something to do.

Sora thought about her answer for a second. “I do weights,” she said, glancing over at a set of barbells in the corner. “And then I go down to the boxing part and do the speed bag. That’s a lot of fun.”

Hime hummed. She took a glance at the barbell, then another at Hime’s arms, did some mental math regarding the diameter of both, and decided it was not on the cards. She also didn’t think Suguri the type to throw a punch. Surely she could, and it would probably sting, but there were simply more effective things for a Suguri to spend her time on in a combat situation.

“Do you do anything else?”

“I help when Sham and Nath do sit-ups. My job is to hold their feet down,” she explained.

“That sounds promising,” Hime murmured. Suguri’s feet were a much neglected treasure, seen little and appreciated even less. “I was under the impression that it’s better to do sit ups without anchoring the feet, though.”

“Mm. But it can be very tough if your torso weighs more than your legs. Nath and Sham have heavy chests, so they need help.”

“How very nice for them,” Hime muttered. “Do you not get bored just holding their legs?”

Sora shook her shaggy head. “Nath gives me a nose kiss every time she does a rep, so it’s fun. Sham does actual kisses, because she’s a bit more flexible.”

“I’m not very flexible myself,” Suguri said, apropos of nothing at all.

Hime sighed, as if lamenting the great unfairness of life. The world had seen fit to furnish her with, in her own unbiased opinion, the single best partner she could possibly imagine, and she adored every single part of Suguri. But she adored some parts more than others, and the part that insisted public smooching was off the table was somewhere near the bottom of the list.

“Well, what do you do while Sham and Nath are on the treadmills, then? Surely you have some way to entertain yourself.”

“I think about things,” was Sora’s answer.

“Oh, my. How very adventurous. What kinds of things, might I ask?”

“All kinds of things,” Sora answered, looking gravely into the middle distance. The middle distance happened to be where Sham and Nath’s posteriors were located. “Like… today, I was thinking about whether you had a belly button.”

Hime blinked, apparently completely blindsided by the idea. “Excuse me? Of course I do. You’ve seen my belly button, Sora. We’ve been to the beach and worn swimsuits together.”

“I wasn’t paying attention to yours. Also you said you were an AI, so I was thinking you didn’t need a belly button.”

“I don’t, technically,” Hime sniffed, folding her arms. “And I suppose when I was first instantiated, I wasn’t modelled with one. But I added one almost as soon as I learned how to edit my appearance data, and I refuse to remove it.”

Sora tilted her head; the empty space inside sloshed around soundlessly.

“It’s a statement of humanity,” Hime explained. “I don’t need it, but it makes me look more like a human and less like a featureless data entity. It’s an acknowledgement of the fact that I am more than a computer program, you see.”

“But you could get rid of it if you wanted to?”

“I suppose. But it would be a lot of work. Technically speaking, this body is just a physical projection of my data structure, which was stored in the core of the Sumika. I could make edits in real time.”

Suguri’s eyes narrowed; her mouth twisted into a frown. “So, you’re still tied to the core of that ship…”

Hime giggled. “I used to be, darling, but it seems like my data structure is being hosted elsewhere now. I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but these days I’m tied to a certain somebody with an incredible system inside her – one that permits a backup nearly the size of Planet Earth.”

“You’re…” Suguri’s voice went quiet as she grasped the implications. “You’re talking about me.”

“Ah, you guessed it! Well, kind of. From what I gathered, the planet seems to be doing most of the hard work in terms of projecting this form, and you’re the centre where the data is stored. If you had to project me yourself I’d only be able to materialise within a certain radius of you, but as the Earth has very kindly taken up that burden, I can stay as close or far as I wish. Regardless, my dear, I am never very far from your heart.”

Even as her ears began to turn red – this amount of public romance was just a bit higher than her tolerance levels – Suguri found herself making a troubled moan.

Ultimately, the Earth would not last forever. She might outlive it herself, but… would she have the capacity to project Hime’s body, like the Earth was now? She could only contained a limited amount of energy, after all. In that far future, Hime may not be entirely lost to her, and that was a blessing, but she would locked away inside her heart, just as she had been chained to the core of the Sumika not long ago.

“AI are complicated,” Sora said, having mistaken Suguri’s moan as one of confusion. “Is Sumika the same?”

“No, from what I gather. Her current body is a cyborg frame, so if she wanted a belly button, she would have to work rather harder for it than I did.” Hime smiled, as though having one was somehow a great achievement. “She should still be capable of using the matter projection methods I use in a pinch, though. I seem to recall her saying she’s designed a very energy-efficient alternative form for it, although personally I’m a bit too attached to this image to make any large scale changes like that myself.”

“Hmm,” Sora hummed, before turning her attention back to the treadmills. AI bodies and cyborg bodies were interesting, but not as much as Sham and Nath’s. “Oh, they’re finishing up.”

Sure enough, they soon ambled back to the group, stretching languidly and sharing meaningful glances. Nath, while unglistening as of yet, had worked her way up to a healthy sheen.

“Sorry we took a while,” she said, rolling her shoulders. Her arms and their connectors, while still attracting some stares, had become a familiar sight in the gym. “I decided to go a little harder than usual today.”

“Ooh.”

“Hey, Sora. You mind if we skip the weights and go straight to the bags today?” Sham asked, bouncing forward. “I know I don’t usually try out the bags with you guys, but it always looks like you’re having fun, so I wanna get in on it.”

Sora puffed her chest out. “I’ll teach you how to do all of them. It’ll be super fun.”

Sham grinned. She was actually pretty familiar with boxing as exercise, but just as she liked it when Sora pretended to worry about her weight, Sora liked it when she pretended to be impressed by her vast knowledge of hitting things. Did Sora know she was pretending? It was an issue for future historians to debate.

“So, what are we betting this time?” Nath asked.

“Hmm. If I win, I want to take you both out for dinner. And,” Sora continued imperiously, or as imperiously as she ever got, “I get to pay.”

Nath nodded. “Right. Well, if I win, we’re going out to the aquarium. There’s a nice one a few cities over, with penguins, seals and turtles. Should be enough cute to go around. They might even have crabs.”

“Ooh, ooh! And if I win, I’m gonna hit you both with a special Sham-patented massage therapy session and a lazy stay at home movie night! You’re gonna get so relaxed and floppy, you’ll slide out of your chair!”

“Not that it’s any of my business, but how does one win at hitting a punching bag?” Hime asked. “And, more to the point, why does it feel like the one who wins is the one paying out on the bet? It almost feels like it would be more beneficial to lose on purpose.”

“Ahahaha. Why would I do that?” Sham giggled. “If I win, I get to watch these two have a bunch of fun.”

“Right. Sometimes it’s a bit embarrassing to have someone pamper you, but if you’ve lost a bet, there’s nothing you can do but sit back and enjoy it,” Nath added.

“It’s a chance to flex our dating muscles. I don’t have much experience, so I want to practice a lot,” Sora declared.

They had, Hime noticed, carefully neglected to answer how they picked a winner in a non-competitive activity, but faced with three warriors burning with romantic fighting spirit, she decided the best tactic was to withdraw and let them tire themselves out, however they might do such a thing.

“Well, Suguri and I will look around for a moment and perhaps get some drinks, and then we’ll all meet up, shall we? Come on, Suguri. I’ll show you my fine mastery of vending machine diplomacy.”

Suguri allowed herself to be led away, her brow furrowed in thought the whole time.

She hadn’t heard a word of Sora, Sham and Nath’s flirting. Her mind was elsewhere, picturing a far flung future, the place she would have in it.

The Earth would not disappear overnight.

It would weaken, little by little, ageing gracefully as all her children eventually did. By then, humans would be long gone; even Sora, Nath and Sham, with their lifespans extended by human enhancements, would have gone to their rest.

Little by little, Hime, too, would fade.

As the Earth began to lose the energy to project her, her range would decrease; she would no longer be able to gambol through the skies as she once did, but would be bound to Suguri’s side. Perhaps she would become slower and weaker as her projected body slowly broke down, and concessions had to be made to the Earth’s failing energy.

She would, in a manner of speaking, experience old age.

She would need to be cared for and comforted in ways she probably couldn’t even imagine in the present day. Things that were so easy she didn’t think about them would become challenges too hard to surmount by herself.

Suguri would be there with her. Without a doubt. That was her role. She was to usher the planet, and the people and creatures that loved it so dearly, to their deathbed. She, who had brought the world back from the brink of death, would nurse it in its final days. And when it was gone –

When it was gone, she would let Hime sleep within her heart, and seek out some new place in the wide universe. Some green and verdant place, with enough energy for Hime to manifest and wander as she pleased.

That was her future. That was the future Suguri had selected.

It was a question that had plagued her for a long time, hidden in the dark recesses of what she knew: What would come after Earth? What would be left for her?

And, as always, it was Hime that had provided the answer.

She nodded to herself as she came to her conclusion, when–

“Whoops.”

Hime’s voice had a remarkably wooden tone, but she had no chance to think about it as she was shoved quite insistently against the wall. She opened her mouth to protest, but was cut off by a thump just to the left of her head.

It was, in almost every respect, a classic wall pin.

With the exception that Hime had not cut off her escape with a hand. That would have been too gauche, too cliché.

The thump was not Hime’s palm hitting the wall next to her head, but her foot. And now Suguri found herself facing down her her girlfriend, who had her leg above her shoulder, and wondering what to do about it.

“Can I ask why…?” she tried.

“I had the feeling that you were worryingly needlessly about something, my dear, so I decided I ought to bring you back to the present day,” Hime purred. “And, of course, I just felt like reminding you that this is a thing that I can do.”

“Right,” Suguri mumbled. She put a hand on the bottom of Hime’s legs and gently lifted it up so she could slip underneath. The sensation of Hime’s thigh against her palm was not unpleasant. “Could you maybe not do it outside the house…? Somebody might see.”

“So it’s fair game inside the house, is what you’re saying.”

“That wasn’t what I said at all.”

“Well, we’ll have ample opportunity to discuss it further when we get back,” Hime giggled. “But for now it seems I’ve gotten your attention, which means all is as it should be.”

“You can do that without pinning me up against a wall,” Suguri grumbled. “...and I was thinking about you, anyway.”

“Oh? In what capacity?”

“I was thinking about what it would be like to grow old together.”

Hime’s eyelashes fluttered. It was a sudden and strong flirtation, by Suguri’s standards. “Ohoho. Well, you’ll find that out in due time, correct? For the moment, we’re both still quite young and spry.”

“Young might be pushing it.”

“Is it? You know, I’ve been alive for more than ten thousand years, but I still feel young when I’ve with you.”

“I’ll ask again when we’re both 100,000 years old.”

“You’ll get the same answer.”

The knot that had formed in Suguri’s stomach began, slowly, to dissolve.

The future was vast, and that vastness scared her even to think about.

But the present was sweet, and it was insistent. Demanding to be savoured. That was what she felt as she walked back with Hime, side-by-side, occasionally gently bumping shoulders with her lifelong companion. Before she knew it, she had been led towards the yoga mats, where Hime’s mouth crinkled into a smile.

“For a trip to the gym, we’ve hardly been doing much exercise, have we? I think a few sit-ups are in order before we meet the others.” She dropped her voice to something a little more private, a little more teasing. “I’ve heard that Sham’s quite flexible, but as a fellow dancer, I don’t intend to lose in that department. Mark my words, Suguri. This will be something you can brag to Sora about later.”

Suguri sighed. She didn’t see public indecency as being something to brag about, but still sat down to hold Hime’s legs anyway.

Mostly for fear of what she might do with them otherwise.

Chapter Text

One of our croissants has escaped.

It sounds really stupid, right? But trust me. I’m a survivor of the goat conspiracy, so I know how to spot when something that should be there, isn’t. I know for a fact that we had twelve croissants in the basket, and now we’ve got eleven. Not a single customer has bought one, and nobody’s even picked one up, so something sketchy is afoot.

It’s not the croissant’s fault that nobody’s bought them, by the way. The croissants are great. They’re rich and buttery and flaky, and sometimes Mom – Saki – will cut one open a little with a knife and hide a square of dark chocolate in there for me when she makes them for breakfast, and it’s so good.

But today’s Wednesday, and that means it’s the one time a week that Mom makes our bakery’s speciality. It’s something she calls ‘pudding’.

Apparently it’s a sweet that used to be common in ancient times, but the recipe was lost somewhere along the way and Mom was the one who rediscovered it. It’s not even a baked good, really, but the fact that she’s the only one who makes it means that people flock here for it. That’s the reason she only makes it one day a week – if we did it more often, we’d turn into a dessert parlour rather than a bakery.

So, it’s not that the croissants are bad. It’s just that pudding is hogging all the spotlight. In fact, it’s hogging so much of the spotlight that people aren’t even staring at me, even though I’m studying right on the shop floor.

When I told her that earlier, Mom sighed. “Even cute girls can’t compete with this stuff, huh?” she muttered to herself, prodding one of the finished products with her finger. It wibbled smugly. I don’t know much about the world, but I know a smug food item when I see one.

So far, the only one who really seems immune to them is Iru. Don’t get me wrong – she likes how they taste and how fun they are to eat. But she keeps saying she can’t get full on them, and for her, that’s kind of a deal breaker.

“It’s because girls have a second stomach for sweets,” is what Saki told her.

“Then gimme something for my regular stomach, because that’s the one that’s empty,” was Iru’s reply.

She keeps telling me that if I don’t eat like her, I won’t grow up big and strong. If that’s what I have to do to get abs, I don’t think I want them.

Now that I think about it, Mom won’t care about a single missing croissant, since she gives Iru a family discount anyway. The discount is one hundred percent. In fact, she told me that if Iru drops by with a sack and stuffs every single thing in the bakery in it, we just hang up the sign that says ‘closed for lunch’, go into the back and bake some more. She also said never to let Iru know that’s actually an option, though.

With that, I put the croissant out of my mind. There’ll be more croissants. For now, I’m engaged in a life-and-death battle with my math homework.

I have complicated feelings about math. Obviously, it’s one of the (many) things that I am categorically Not Great at. But Mom’s really passionate about me getting an education, and she is kinda giving me a house and food and all the stuff for it, so I can’t complain.

But a lot of it seems really… pointless? Like, I’m working through a module on circles right now, and I can’t help thinking: is this what adults think about all day? They calculate the circumferences of circles and stuff? When they order a pizza, do they carefully calculate the angle of the slice so that John and Mary don’t think they’re getting cheated out of pepperoni goodness? I feel like that’s not the case, but the way the book goes on about it, you’d think everyone over the age of eighteen is hopped up on radians or something.

But part of it’s the fact that, well, Mom doesn’t seem that well educated herself, so math and home ec are the only things she can really help me with. I showed her my cultural studies textbook the other day, and her face just went totally blank. I thought she’d achieved inner peace or something.

“The world really is a wide place, huh…” she’d mumbled woodenly. I put the textbook away after that.

It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but the truth is that I don’t really know if I want to be good at math. On one hand, it’s one of the subjects Mom’s good at, right? So she’ll definitely be proud of me if I get good at it as well.

But if I’m not good at it, it means I can call her over and she can help me with it. And… and I like that.

I like… I like when Mom does ‘Mom’ things with me. I like when she puts me to bed and then stays in the doorway to look at me for a second before she leaves. I like when she makes me dinner and says “Reika, look, I made your favourite!”, even though it’s a dumb joke because we don’t know what my favourite even is yet and everything she makes is great anyway. I like when she wakes me up in the morning and says I’m a sleepyhead, but then she makes time to help brush my hair. I like it so much that sometimes I think I’m going to break down and cry.

Is that wrong? I don’t know if I’m allowed to feel like this. I’m meant to be a big kid, right? I’m thirteen and a half already. Usually that’s when you start growing apart from your parents. And I spent all that time in the orphanage feeling bitter and cynical about being adopted, so now that I have been, maybe I’m a hypocrite for enjoying it so much.

But I feel like I’ve been missing this. I feel like I’ve been starving. You know how if you don’t eat for a long time, it kinda hurts your tummy when you do, even though you still feel really hungry and you want to keep eating as much as you can?

I think that’s how I feel about Mom.

So I don’t want to do my math homework right. I want her to sit down and go through it with me. I want her to teach me stuff. And I want her to smile and me and say ‘well done’ when I get it right. That’s what I want.

I’m… really pathetic. I’ve only been here for a couple of weeks, and I’m already like this.

I’m feeling a bit too emotional to focus on circles and pizza slices, so I set my math textbook aside for later and pull out my sketchpad and my box of pencils.

Just like I predicted, I’m not great at art. And I’m already down to forty-five pencils out of my box of fifty, so that’s ten percent of them gone already. (There’s that math homework kicking in). But art’s… I don’t know how to describe it, really.

It’s not fun, I guess. It’s enjoyable, but not in a fun way? I don’t know how to put it, but I’m not sitting there grinning to myself as I scribble in my book, at least.

But it’s peaceful. I don’t think about stuff when I’m doing art. I just focus on what’s in front of me and time goes by. The little pessimistic voice in the back of my head shuts up, because I’m busy choosing colours and trying to get my lines less wobbly. I have wobbly lines. I’m not letting Mom put anything on the fridge until I get them less wobbly.

Plus, when I finish drawing I always have this weird feeling. Like part of my brain is tired, but part of it has just had a nap. Exhausted, but reinvigorated at the same time. It’s strange, but I like it, I think.

At first I just down some random lines, since I’m not sure yet what I want to draw. But then I think: the missing croissant. So I start to draw a croissant, badly, before realising that if it’s missing you can’t see it, so it should be invisible. Too late now, I guess.

Then I end up thinking, well, maybe it’s mid-escape. So I draw a little pair of wings on it. I don’t know why I think it’d fly instead of having legs to run away with, but I guess a croissant is kinda boomerang shaped, so they’re aerodynamic?

Then I start drawing a couple of tables and chairs, so it looks like it’s in the bakery and it’s fluttering toward the door. I think about drawing Mom looking at it from the counter, but I decide not to. I don’t want to draw Mom until I’m actually good and I can make her look okay.

But I feel like drawing Auntie Iru should be okay, so I put her outside the bakery doors waiting with her mouth wide open, like she’s gonna chomp down that croissant as soon as it flies out. Like, “homphf”. Swallowed in one gulp.

Before I know it, the picture’s done. It’s bad, obviously. I don’t know how to make things look 3D or use perspective yet, so it’s the most kiddy drawing you could possibly imagine. But I feel better after having made it. Better enough that I can have another try at my math homework.

I’m making myself a promise.

If I get stuck, I get stuck. And it’s okay to have Mom help me if I get stuck.. But only if I’m actually stuck. Luckily, I’m not great at math, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. And if there’s nothing I get stuck on in this module, I’ll just do another one until I find something too tough for me.

That way, it’s not cheating. I’m getting what I want, but I’m ‘earning’ it, in a weird way. That should make it okay, right? And maybe if I do well, I’ll treat myself to another picture break.

My pencil keeps moving. I tempt myself forward, little by little, with these tiny bargains just for one. And I keep going until my homework gets done.

Chapter Text

Before Reika first came home, I went out and bought a whole bunch of parenting books. When she came home, I bought a whole bunch more.

Now, listen. I’m not an idiot. I knew going in that no book was ever gonna teach me the secret arts of momhood. It’s like saying, oh, I read a book on martial arts, so now I can do kung fu. Maybe it teaches you a little bit about kung fu. Maybe it even teaches you how to think about kung fu. But sitting in a chair and reading a book doesn’t make you able to do a karate chop by itself, any more than it makes you able to paint or dance or… do anything, really. You can gain knowledge through reading, but you gain skills by doing. The knowledge just primes you to get there faster.

But, that’s the thing. I was kinda in a hurry to get my black belt in parenthood, because there was a lost little girl who couldn’t wait around for me to learn. I needed to at least get to the point where I wasn’t screwing up every five minutes, because every little screw-up I made while learning the ropes could have a lasting impact on her. So I prepped as hard as I could, and figured that even if each individual book wasn’t that hopeful, I could kinda collate the wisdom from all of them and come out with some kind of a framework.

Maybe it was working. Maybe it wasn’t. But between all the books and my kinda limited experience, I had learned one very important thing.

When you’re a mom, every single thing you do is a mom thing.

That sounds kinda dumb, huh? But it’s true. As far as your child is concerned, you’re the blueprint of what a person is. No matter what you do, they’re looking at you and they’re learning. Maybe you don’t realise they’re doing it. They probably don’t realise they’re doing it. But they are.

So when you cook them a good meal and you sit down at the table and you talk about your day together, that’s a mom thing. When you smile over the counter and give people an extra cinnamon whirl because they look like they’re having an awful day, that’s a mom thing. The way you laugh, the way you walk, the hours you keep – it’s all mom things.

But it works in reverse. When you blow up at somebody and treat them like trash, that’s a mom thing. When you can’t be bothered and you let your chores slide, that’s a mom thing. If you get blind drunk and start getting nasty, that’s a mom thing.

They look at you doing all that and they say, “this is how I do it.” You’re the blueprint. Just like the knowledge you get from reading a book can prep you to develop a skill faster, they’re using your example to springboard their habits later in life. You can learn to be a mean, grouchy person just fine all by yourself, but it’s a heck of a lot faster if somebody teaches you.

I’d already started to notice it with Reika. She was already out of true ‘little kid’ range, but she was still picking up on all my mannerisms crazy fast. Maybe it was because she hadn’t really had an adult figure she looked up to like that before? But whatever the case, even Iru had noticed it.

Like, there’s a really particular way I say ‘good morning’, and it’s not common in this area. Around here, they’re more like “goooood mornin’”, with a deeper tone and a stretched out drawl on the ‘good’, but I’m more like “good morning!” with a rising pitch at the end. It’s cuter that way, right?

But Reika was already starting to say it my way. Sometimes when the shop was busy I had her help out by carrying trays to the customers, and although she wasn’t quite brave enough to greet them all by herself, she’d at least say it back if somebody said it first. Most of the customers were nice enough to do it when they’d got some cookies in ’em.

Actually, she was doing really well with helping out, even though she refused almost point-blank at first. Bless her, she was super worried about the idea of tripping when carrying a tray and throwing hot coffee or croissants over somebody, or having people do their weird staring thing while she was serving them. I guess it’s natural she’d worry like that, after all she’s been through.

But this was my shop, y’know? The whole place was suffused with the cheerful divine energy of a Sweet God from beyond the stars! No dumb grudge from Planet Earth was getting through these doors. As long as she didn’t stray too far from the building, Reika’s supernatural bad luck would get counteracted by my residual divine aura.

Actually, even if she did leave the building, she’d probably have half a day’s worth of good luck ‘stored’, since she was spending so much time with me. Buildings just soak up all the sweet god goodness, but people are a bit different, so it’d only last for so long before she’d need to come back and recharge.

I knew all this, but obviously I couldn’t tell her about it, so she kept acting like the same accident-prone kid she’d always been. In other words, she was mega, ultra careful. Way more careful than I actually was… I was trying to be better about it now that I had to set an example for Reika, but before, well, I might have taken a teensy bit more advantage of my shield than I had to. You know, picking my chopping knife up by the blade, taking cookies straight out of the oven with my bare hands, pouring boiling coffee over myself by accident… Boy, being able to shrug off anything short of military ammunition sure was convenient in the kitchen.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that Reika copying me was the literal cutest thing I’d ever seen, and to make sure she wanted to keep copying me I needed to do my absolute best in everything I did, and keep my mom skills well practised and ready to go!

Right now, the mom skill I was practising was the ancient art of pretending to be asleep.

You see, Reika had been going through this adorable little phase where she’d wait until she thought I was asleep, and then creep out of her room to the upstairs kitchen. The first time she did it, I thought maybe she was sneaking snacks – which, I mean, why not? She was a growing girl. I made sure she got three square, delicious meals a day and that she didn’t have to fight over portions with Iru, but if she wanted a little extra then that was fine by me. There’s no finer food than a cookie consumed stealthily under the cover of night!

But then I started hearing actual kitchen sounds – chopping, mixing, struggling to get packets open, that kind of thing. Actually, Reika struggled a lot to open things. It took her ten minutes to get a bag of chocolate chips open once. She was convinced it’d pop if she put too much force into it, and she also thought she’d get hurt if she used the scissors… So cute.

Then I heard the oven turn on.

I’m not gonna deny that I got pretty worried. I could kinda passively mitigate most of her bad luck, but fire was a different story.

See, with fire, she kinda had the opposite of her usual problem – she had an affinity for it. Unlike Kae she didn’t actually have the capability to use that affinity at all, but it was almost as strong as my affinity for sweets. If Planet Earth hated her, fire loved her. And, uh, for a normal girl with a normal level of human fireproofing, which is none, that’s not really a good thing.

The good news was that I was pretty sure it was something she could learn to control when she got older. But it’d need confidence, and that wasn’t something she had right now. For her, fire wasn’t something you could control. It was something that lived in the oven and never, ever interacted with if you could avoid it. It was a big, scary thing, and someone with her affinity believing fire was big, scary and uncontrollable basically made it that way.

I could just about tamp it down with my domain over cooking, but it wasn’t something I could do passively. But if I rushed over and scolded her for using the oven without me, she’d never get that confidence and she’d never get things under control.

It was a tough choice. So I just kinda lay there, ready to jump out of bed and sprint to the kitchen in case anything went wrong, but hoping that it didn’t. The smell of cookies baking filled the air.

Then the smell of cookies burning.

Then there was the sound of Reika thumping her hand on the counter in frustration, wrenching open the oven door and hurriedly putting out the burning lumps of cookie dough she’d created. As it turned out, she was surprisingly good at putting out fires. Trying to use the kitchen in the orphanage had given her a lot of practice. She was done before I could even jump out of bed.

Then she sniffed loudly.

“I’m never gonna be able to surprise Mom like this…”

Reika was normally a quiet girl. But she treated that like it was an unchangeable fact, so sometimes she forgot to actually be quiet in the moment.

I’d been planning to ‘wake up’ and go to the kitchen to talk to her about fire safety, but now I knew that my adorable adopted daughter was trying to surprise me with breakfast cookies, what was I supposed to do? I channelled all my mom energy. I thought about all the things I’d learned.

I rolled over, and pretended very hard to be asleep.

The next day, she watched me like a hawk when I was in the kitchen. In particular, any time I used the oven. I made a show of ‘noticing’ it, and brought her over for some special Saki oven tuition.

“You know, Reika, for most things you can actually change the cooking time by adjusting the temperature,” I said. “For example, I could cook these cookies at a lower temperature if I leave them in a little bit longer.”

Her eyes glittered. “You can do that?”

“Sure! Here, I’ll teach you. We just have to do a little bit of math to get a good estimate. You did percentages for your homework the other day, right?”

She brought one of her notebooks over, and I went through how to adjust cooking temperature with her, and what the benefits were. Just like I thought, she wasn’t interested in cooking things faster at a higher temperature; she just wanted to turn the oven down. She also asked me a few questions about the knobs and dials on the oven, apparently just to make sure she’d been using it right.

And, just as predicted, I heard her sneak out of her bed again later that night.

Her late-night baking went better this time. Not that much better, though. From what I could tell, the cookies came out burnt but not actively on fire, which I thought was still a massive improvement. I think she tried one – I heard a very worrying crunch – and then there was a lot of coughing and something being spat into the bin.

She tried again the next night.

Reika might have seemed quick to give up on ideas before she’d tried them, but she was also used to things going wrong for her. So when she got it into her head to do something, it took a lot more than some minor setbacks to deter. That’s right, read it and weep! I had an adorable child who never gave up when she put her mind to something, and she was using that force of will to bake me surprise cookies! Mwahahaha!
That was how I wanted to brag about her, but obviously I had to pretend I hadn’t realised she was sneaking out of bed every night.

Tonight seemed like it was going to be a pretty good attempt. She’d actually been getting better every single time; sure, she failed, but she was noticing improvements, and that probably made her feel more in control. And for someone with her particular relationship with fire, feeling in control could do more than any amount of kitchen instruction.

“Ah… Maybe I could try that thing tonight…” I heard her mumble to herself. She forgot to be quiet again. So cute!

I didn’t really know what kind of thing she was planning on trying, though. I hadn’t taught her anything new the day before.

“It’s so… dorky, though…” she said to herself, pausing. “But… I guess it’s maybe worth a try…?”

Dorky? What the heck kind of kitchen stuff was she learning? I didn’t think anything about cooking could really be described as dorky. You were turning not-food into food! It was an act of creation! Culinary alchemy! What’s not cool about that?

But she kept on mixing, chopping and rolling for a good few minutes anyway. She’d gotten pretty good at it, although she was obviously super careful whenever she did any knifework, so it took her ages to chop anything up. That probably wasn’t gonna change anytime soon.

“Alright, well… Here we go,” she said, after closing the oven door. “R...roll out the dough with a pin…”

Oh, my gosh.

“P-poi… poi… Shape it, and press it in a tin… shun, shun…”

Why did she have to be doing this so late at night? Why couldn’t she do it in the day, when I could have gotten it on camera?! Wait, did I even have a camera?

“Bake it until it goes ding… poi poi… and save just a cookie for me.”

The next fifteen minutes or so were some of the most difficult in my entire life. You have no idea how much I wanted to wriggle about and dance around instead of pretending to be asleep. Being a mom is tough.

“Huh? They’re not burnt at all,” I heard Reika say from the kitchen. She was surprised that she was forgetting to even pretend to be quiet. “What the heck?! That actually worked? Am I going crazy?”

Mweeheehee. It’s my special, secret spell that guarantees good baking, you know? If you invoke the powers of a Sweet God in her own home, of course you’re gonna get results! You might not have known it was an actual spell, but don’t underestimate your mom, you hear?

“Mmmm,” Reika moaned. While I was exulting in bed, she was sampling her work. “They’re not as good as mom’s, but… they are good. Maybe just one more…”

I grinned to myself. That, right there, was the sound of an entire batch of cookies about to be eaten. ‘One more’ was never enough.

But heck, eating something you just successfully baked by yourself, for the first time, is an important life experience that everybody should have. So what if I had to wait another night to try my daughter’s surprise cookies? That was fine by me.

As she cleaned up and sneaked back to her room for the night, all I was thinking about was how proud I was of her, and how tomorrow was going to be super tough. I wanted to spoil her and reward her for baking her first successful batch of cookies! That’s understandable, right? But I wasn’t meant to know it had happened.

Haaah. If there’s one thing I’ve learned lately, it’s that being a mom sure is tricky. That, and I need to get a video camera. There's some things in life you have to experience more than once.

Chapter Text

Nanako held up a coin to the light, and squinted at it as glumly as a pulp detective looking inside his bottle to find a dearth of alcohol.

It was her last coin. Not that she’d had many to begin with. Coins as currency had gone out of fashion in the new world; the amount of mining, smelting and minting they required were considered burdensome and wasteful. Many places only accepted paper or digital money, and in the more far-flung reaches like this village, they’d skipped the middleman and reverted to a barter economy. She’d heard they used coins regularly where Suguri lived, and wondered why. Surely there was a story behind it.

Either way, in this part of the world, most coins were strictly souvenirs. If you wanted a useless disc of metal with a dead person’s face on it, you had to buy one. According to the saleswoman, people bought them as reminders of the past: a way to remember who came before them, their grand ambitions, and the mistakes they made. Nanako had listened with something approaching a smile.

Earthlings, she had concluded, were a weird bunch.

The past was the past. Why would you want to remember it all the time? Any time she and her sisters were reminded of their past on the spaceship, it ended in tears. In Kae’s case, hyperventilation. She’d thought the people of Earth would be similar, considering how much of their past involved nuclear fire, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

The coin glinted in her hands. The dead person’s face kept its secrets.

But it was funny. Now that she’d finally found a use for this stupid thing, she was loathe to give it up. She wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like they didn’t have other souvenirs. Their luggage was full of rocks and seashells and bric-a-brac that Kae adored, one piece from every place they’d visited on their globetrotting tour. Kae said that when and if they settled down, she’d paint some of them, or make necklaces, or something like that.

Nanako sighed, shook her head, and dropped her coin into the slot.

Against all odds, she’d found a payphone. All the way out here, in this village in the middle of the mountains. Like the coin she’d had to spend to use it, it was kept as a reminder of where humanity came from. When they arrived she’d just intended to borrow a phone from someone in the village, but as soon as Kae saw the phone booth, she was entranced.

“Nana, you need to use the phone, right? Use that one!” she’d said, at her usual incredible volume.

“Why? It’s just some old relic.”

“But isn’t it more exciting? You might never get the chance to use a payphone again!”

“Good,” Nanako had snapped. After all, weren’t they just plain worse than regular phones? But in the end, she’d gone to use it anyway, and given up one of her souvenirs to do so. It all felt so stupid.

But Nanako didn’t always understand the things she did. She’d had to live with herself for her whole life; she knew what she was getting into in that department.

The phone rang five times before someone finally picked up.

“Hello, this is Big Bang Bakery! We’re already closed for the day, but if you’d like to make an order to be picked up tomorrow…

Nanako rolled her eyes. Anybody else might have been fooled by Saki’s businesslike spiel, but she knew her sister, and under that professional sheen was an undercurrent of annoyance.

“Saki, it’s me.”

“Wha– Nanako?! I haven’t heard from you in forever! How are you and Ka–”

The call abruptly cut off. Nanako glared at the receiver, wondering if it had just fallen into disrepair now that nobody used it; after giving it an experimental shake, she sighed and put it back on the hook. Now that she thought about it, one coin probably didn’t go very far when it came to international call rates.

“Tch. Charging money just to talk to people… The humans of the past sure were a wily bunch.”

With that, she forced herself to calm down and shrug it off. Things hadn’t worked out the way she wanted. Big deal. They usually didn’t. She’d figure something out. Surely somebody out here would be in the market for some dumb muscle, something to put Kae’s incredible energy to good use. Plough a few fields, maybe scare off a few wolves…

The phone rang, and Nanako snatched the receiver as if she were grabbing a snake by the neck.

“Na-na-ko? Did you really just hang up on your sister?” Saki asked. The undercurrent of displeasure had returned with a vengeance. Nanako felt herself shiver a little; she knew that Saki’s little yandere act was fake, but hearing it from a girl with such a sunny disposition still unsettled her somehow. It always seemed to beg the unspoken question: if somebody as cheerful as Saki could be like this, then how mad could a regular person get?

“I didn’t hang up, I ran out of cash. You should be careful, too. It’s international rates.”

“Aw, don’t worry about it. I’m a business owner, so I’ll make it work. But we haven’t been in touch since you and Kae went out travelling! How are you? How are your adventures going?”

Nanako sighed, but found herself grinning. There were a few stories she’d like to tell. Some of them were about the sights they’d seen, but if she was honest, the majority were about Kae. If nothing else, the redhead made things interesting as a travel partner.

Even now, she was causing a ruckus in the village. Because of how friendly she was, the way she dressed, and her, ahem, proportions, she tended to attract a lot of attention wherever they went. Occasionally the language barrier got in the way, but never in any significant capacity.

But then, that was another little quirk of Old Humanity’s war. Decimating the human population had also culled off a lot of the languages they spoke, and the need for survivors to communicate in the aftermath had caused some kind of pidgin tongue to form. Most languages currently in use on Earth was descended from that root. Not all of them, by any means, and there had been divergences since, but enough that you could generally make a stab at conversing and expect at least one person in the room to puzzle it out.

Even if that hadn’t been the case, Nanako got the feeling Kae would have handled it. She always claimed that “Puppies and kittens can’t talk, so if I can get along with them, people should be easy!”, and somehow, she was right. Maybe she could do that because she truly believed it. Who knew.

In the end, Kae was an open flame. Warm, bright, probably more than a little dangerous, but fragile too. If you closed her off, if you deprived her of air and space, you’d extinguish her. In the dark and cramped hull of the Sumika, Kae had struggled; here, under Earth’s open sky, she positively glowed. Not that Nanako knew how to tell her that.

“Well, they’re just about over,” Nanako grumbled. “Like I said, we’re out of cash. It’s going to get tricky if we carry on.”

“Huh… You went through all the travel money Suguri gave you? Actually, didn’t she originally want to give you a lot more, and you told her off for it?”

On the other end of the phone line, Nanako scowled. “Tch. So you remember that, huh?”

In hindsight, and with a better idea of their travel expenses, the amount Suguri had wanted to give them would probably have been just enough to get them all around the globe at their current pace. Maybe she’d planned it that way. That was the power of ten thousand years of experience for you.

“Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What I wanted to say was that out of everyone, we’re closest to where you are, so we were hoping that we could stay at your place for a little bit.” A moment of silence. “Just until we get back on our feet.”

Even as she asked, Nanako felt annoyance flaring up in the back of her mind. She hated the idea of scraping for favours and mooching off her family. Maybe it was just her complex talking, since she was shorter and younger than the others and that meant she had more to prove, but she always wanted to at least maintain the appearance of being a grown-up, capable member of the family.

Most of the time, she felt like she achieved it. Sure, she wasn’t great socially because of how angry and irritable Shifu’s alterations had made her, but she was realistic, hard working and reliable, with no major weaknesses. Her other sisters could be reliable, in the right circumstances, but most of them had issues; Iru was painfully straightforward, Kae was easy to exploit and unpredictable if triggered, and Kyoko’s health gave her all sorts of trouble. Even Saki could be a bit flaky from time to time. Nanako was the sister that got things done, or so she liked to think.

And, she reminded herself, she got things done whether she liked them or not. Including asking people for help when she needed it.

“YES!” For a moment, Nanako was so surprised she almost dropped the receiver; instead, she settled for giving it a foul look, as if it had personally wronged her. “That’s actually perfect! It might be a little cramped with the sleeping arrangements since my place isn’t that big, but I’ve got somebody SUPER important I wanted to introduce you to, so it all works out! When are you planning to get here?”

Nanako knitted her eyebrows. Somebody super important…? That Saki wanted to introduce to her family? She shook her head, and let it pass her by; usually when Saki started talking like this, it was impossible to divert her.

“From here, it might take us a day or two if we fly over.”

“Right, right. I’ll make sure to get some beds set up before then. Oh, but can I ask you a favour? Could you maybe go to Iru’s place first, and let her bring you guys over? She’s in the area too, and she’s got transport. The person I want to introduce you to doesn’t really know about the whole ‘altered human’ thing yet, so you guys flying in would kind of be…”

“Iru’s there, too? Heh. I’m surprised she’s not eaten you out of house and home.”

“Oh, she’s trying. But she helps me out a lot as well, so it’s all good. Speaking of… you think you’d be okay to help out in the bakery for a little pocket money? We’re heading into the busy season… We should be okay even without help, but it’s taking up a lot of the time I wanna spend elsewhere.”

Nanako grinned. “You’re thinking of how to exploit us already? Tyrant.”

“Hey! You two always end up grumbling that you have nothing to do and then help out anyway, so I figured we’d get it sorted out in advance this time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nanako replied. “Give me Iru’s address, then, and we’ll see you in a few days.”

“Sure! Aw, Nana, I’m super excited to see you guys again! I’ll cook you up all of your favourites and we’ll make it a party. See you soon!”

After a little more back and forth, Nanako said some curt goodbyes and hung up abruptly. She had to consider her sister’s phone bill, after all. She went off to look for Kae, who she found giving piggyback rides to the village kids.

“Hey. I got us a place to stay sorted. We’re gonna go and stay with Saki for a bit,” she said, when Kae was done prising the current child from her neck.

“That’s amazing news! I can’t wait to try her cooking again!”

“I bet,” Nanako replied. As the last of their funds dwindled, they’d been cutting their food budget to compensate. It wasn’t something either of them really wanted to bring up, but she was pretty sure Kae had started to lose weight and muscle tone. Her hair wasn’t as glossy as it had been, either.

Kae tilted her head. “Hmm… Nana, did you just think something rude? You’re smiling to yourself again.”

Whoops, she thought. Shouldn’t be thinking about her like she’s a dog. “It’s your imagination. The other thing is… I think Saki might have gotten a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or something. She said she’s got someone real important to introduce us to, so it’s probably a romantic partner.”

“Wow, really?! She’s never been interested in that kind of thing, though.”

Nanako shrugged. “Well, who knows? Maybe she found someone good on Earth. She never shuts up about how she’s cute, after all, so someone probably fell for her.”

“Hm…” Kae murmured, apparently not convinced. Well, it didn’t matter. They’d soon see for themselves; all Nanako had wanted to do was warn her.

On that note, she should probably ‘warn’ the rest of the family. They were always thirsty for gossip, and she had a few stamps left. Anything that would keep the teasing eye of Hime away from her favourite ‘prodigals’. She’d send a letter before they left the village, and the slowness of the postal service probably meant they’d be out of Saki’s orbit before she found out and they had to face the music.

With her thoughts unblemished by gossip politicking, Kae was already moving on to other topics. “Nana, did you keep all those seashells I found? Let’s make a necklace for Saki as a souvenir!”

“Yeah, yeah. And you want me to handle it because I’m better with my fingers, right?” Nanako sighed. She didn’t actually mind it, but sighing felt appropriate. “You handle soup for tonight, then. We’re leaving in the morning.”

“Woo!”

There weren’t any hotels in a village this small. Once again, they’d be camping out tonight under the stars. The endless expanse they travelled through on the Sumika was still watching over them, even now. That spaceship had wandered the cosmos without any true destination; likewise, she and Kae were wandering the Earth.

But if she had to say, she had a lot more fun travelling these days than she did before. Maybe that made everything worth it.

Chapter Text

“Reika, sweetie. Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

My immediate reflex is to gulp. We’re in the afternoon lull when everybody who came in during the lunch rush has eaten their pastries and left, so it’s just me and Mom on the shop floor, and she’s standing over my table with her hands on her hips.

When Mom puts her hands on her hips, it’s bad news. You know how cobras flare out their hoods? That’s what Mom putting her hands on her hips is. It’s a warning signal. It’s a sign that if you don’t fix your attitude, she’s going to ruin your whole week.

Thankfully, I haven’t actually been on the receiving end of it too much. But I’ve seen people who have. The other day, this huge guy – I feel like he was as tall as Mom and Auntie Iru stacked on top of each other – came in, and got mad because the person in front of him took the last apple turnover. He started complaining about all sorts of stuff, like the wait time and the cooking and even the décor, and Mom just sort of put on her customer service smile and let him go off for a while.

“And why is your stupid brat on the shop floor? I thought this was a business, not a play pen. Keep your filthy kids away from the food,” he barked.

Even I got mad at that point, especially since I hadn’t even done anything. I was just sitting in the corner reading a book. What was he even trying to get out of complaining like this, anyway? Did he expect Mom to pull an apple turnover out of her butt just to make him happy? Baking takes time. Even a ‘stupid brat’ like me understands that kind of thing.

That was about the time when Mom put her hands on her hips.

“Are you finished?” she asked.

See, the thing about Mom is that she sounds cheerful even when she’s mad. But it’s a really thin kind of cheerful. It’s like you’re putting a white sheet over a grand piano – you can still see the shape of the piano underneath it, so you’re not really hiding anything. And the longer she talks for, the thinner and thinner that layer of cheerfulness gets. You can just see her winding herself tighter and tighter as she goes, getting madder and madder, and you start to wonder what’s going to happen to you when she snaps.

“So, let me get this straight. You’ve come into my business, my home, to tell me what I ought to do with my daughter? Is that all correct?” she asked. She was still smiling, for a given definition of smiling.

To his credit, the guy at least opened his mouth to answer. But then Mom took a step forward, and this guy – this huge guy, this guy with barrels for shoulders and kegs for thighs, who looked like he could juggle barstools with one hand – you’d better believe he took a step back. I think just about everybody in the bakery took a step back.

“I’m a paying customer… You can’t speak to me like this…” he croaked.

“Really? I don’t remember selling you anything. And even if you had bought something, so what? Do you really think I’m going to let you talk about my daughter like that? For, what, the price of a pastry and a cup of coffee? Grow up.”

She took another step forward. The guy took another step back. Little by little, she walked him straight to the entrance, and he just about tripped backwards out of the door. He looked almost relieved to have been kicked out, honestly, because Mom was so beside herself that she was almost vibrating.

“Don’t let me see you around here again, please. Ever,” she called after him. She was still smiling, but that veneer of cheerfulness was stretched as tight as an elastic band about to snap. She turned and walked back into the bakery.

“Reika, honey? I want you to remember something for later in life. If you spend your time and effort chasing after garbage customers, garbage customers are all you’ll ever get.” She sighed, shook her head, and the unsettling undertone to her smile faded. “Now, can you be a sweetie and make your mom a cup of tea? People like that really take it out of me, ahaha.”

So, uh, yeah. That was how I learned that, even though she’s usually super sweet, my mom’s actually got kind of a temper, and it’s not pretty when she loses it.

With her assuming her hands-on-hips battle stance with me as the target, all I can do is rifle through my memories desperately looking for what I might have done wrong. I don’t really come up with much. I’ve been super careful to stay on my best behaviour ever since I got here, and if I’ve done something bad, I don’t know what it was to apologise for it.

“Um… I don’t know?” I answer. Sometimes the honest answer is the one that makes you look the dumbest.

“Re-al-ly?” Mom asks, drawing out the word. It feels like when you watch the guillotine being drawn up before it falls. “So, you don’t wanna tell me what book you were reading with your flashlight under the covers last night?”

I blink.

Lately, my days pretty much boil down to this: I help Mom whenever it’s busy on the shop floor, I get my studying done, and if I have time after that, I take out my case of pencils and do some drawing.

But… you can’t draw infinitely, right? You get tired after a while. It takes up mental energy, and sometimes, it’s just frustrating. You can’t move your hand the way you want to, or you can’t capture what you’re seeing in your head, and you need to take a break.

So when I’m all out of art power, I’ve started reading books. It still kinda works your brain over, but not in the same way that drawing does. Besides, books are one of the safest forms of entertainment. Even if you get a papercut it only hurts for maybe half an hour, and I have tough fingers from when I’ve accidentally jabbed myself with needles while sewing. Even I can’t screw it up.

But when Mom realised I was going through my books so quickly, she was thrilled. I think she’s kind of a supportive person in general, but she got really excited about having an ‘adorable bookworm daughter’ and how cute I’d look with glasses and… it sort’ve got out of hand. In the end, she was so happy about it that she came up with a little reward card and said she’d stamp it every time I finished a book, and if I got five or ten she’d get me an extra little present.

After that, I started feeling really bad about the whole thing.

I mean, it felt great to be praised. It felt great to do stuff that made Mom happy enough to go on a half-hour ramble about ‘cute points’ or whatever. But looking at it from her perspective… Isn’t it kind of expensive? I feel like most adults, if I finished a book, would be like: Great, now I need to shell out for a new book. And then Mom wants to buy me presents on top of that? That’s like compound interest. I don’t really know what compound interest is, but I hear the customers talking about it like it’s some kind of financial black black magic.

All in all, I don’t want my reading habits to bankrupt the bakery. So I’ve started trying to read a bit more… y’know, sneakily. My main tactic has been getting to the last twenty pages and then stopping, so I don’t finish the book and therefore Mom can’t give me a stamp.

But that means I don’t get to read the ending, which really bothers me. So I’ve been waiting until Mom’s asleep, then sneaking out of bed, grabbing my book and a flashlight, and then reading the end under the covers. It’s not exactly tactical espionage action, but I thought I was getting away with it at least.

Looking at the grin on Mom’s face, it seems like I was wrong.

“Come on, sweetie. Of course I knew you were reading under the covers. Why do you think I left a flashlight in your room in the first place?” Mom asks, ruffling my hair. “I was a kid once too, y’know.”

Mom? As a kid? I honestly can’t imagine it. She feels like she has this timeless quality to her. I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s how it feels.

“And,” she carries on, “you always put your bookmarks back in the very middle when you’re trying to make me think you haven’t finished them. I always see them and think, oh, she’s gone back fifty pages somehow!”

I frown, and feel for a moment awed by the difficulty of tricking an adult. But then, I think, it’s not like I’m trying to trick just any adult, I’m trying to trick Mom, and she pays more attention to me than anybody else has ever bothered to.

I get the feeling Mom’s pretty hard to trick besides that, though. I think that little hair that sticks up on her head is some sort of antenna, and it senses lies. Auntie Iru says she’s not once gotten one over on Mom, although that might just be because Auntie Iru is pretty straightforward herself.

Mom sits down at the table beside me, helps herself to a cookie, and smiles. “But, Reika, I do wanna know why you keep trying to hide it from me. Finishing your books is a good thing, okay? There’s no reason to keep it secret.”

It still feels awkward, but it’s difficult to resist when she’s looking me straight in the eye, so I muddle through an explanation of how I worry about the cost of all these books I’m eat – reading. I don’t eat books. I was just thinking about it because Mom keeps calling me a bookworm and stuff.

As I talk, Mom breaks out into one of those giggly smiles and her eyebrows do a little yo-yo as she tries not to laugh. “Oh honey. You’re so sweet to worry about the shop, but trust me, we’re doing fine. If I couldn’t afford to treat you, I’d tell you.”

“Even though we keep having food go missing?”

For just a second, a frown flickers across her face.

As it turns out, the case of the vanishing croissant was just the tip of the iceberg. Since then, we’ve had a lot more of our bakery products pull disappearing acts. Packages of cookies, danish maples, even those oaty granola things that nobody really seems to like – they all kept disappearing from the shelves when nobody was looking.

Mom doesn’t have cameras in the store. She doesn’t like them. She says they make it feel like she’s always being watched, and it’s made her super uncomfortable ever since she was a kid. She always says that if anybody was going to rob us, they’d come right up to the counter and rob the cash register – and that they’d be categorically nuts to do so.

“Honey, you let me and Iru worry about that. You just focus on your schoolwork and having fun, alright?” She ruffles my hair gently, and it feels just good enough that I relax a little. “Now, let’s see that stamp card.”

I’ve got a little bag that I keep my art stuff and some books and study materials in when I’m on the shop floor, and I keep my stamp card in the front pocket. I dig it out, and Mom signs her name in not one, but three squares.

“There. Don’t think I missed the other books you finished, either,” she winks. “Actually, I kinda already asked Iru to pick your present up when she gets my magazines.”

Mom buys a lot of magazines. She’s subscribed, but they all get delivered to the newsagent rather than to our house, so Iru picks them up for us. I think it’s more of an excuse for her to drop by and grab some croissants than anything, which is fine by me since Auntie Iru is still the coolest person I know by far. Mom puts some of them out for customers to read while they’re waiting for freshly baked stuff to come out, but some of them she reads for herself.

The ones she actually reads all seem to be showbiz mags, and I can’t really make heads or tails of them. Last time there was a big scandal page with a headline like, “Popular idol announces career break after tragic burn accident! Has she fallen in love with a reclusive amputee philanthropist? Who is the mysterious blonde in the situation?”

People who read those sorts of magazines are nuts. It sure must be nice, having enough energy to worry about other people’s business like that. I can barely handle worrying about my own business. Of course, Mom’s got energy coming out of her ears, so she doesn’t struggle at all. She says she reads magazines like that ‘to keep an eye on the competition’, whatever that means. I don’t think some pop star on the other side of the world is going to be opening a bakery, but I’ve been wrong before.

“What did you get me?” I ask. “It wasn’t anything too expensive, was it?”

“Aw, it’s nothing big. It’s just a colouring book. You mentioned wanting one the last time we went out, didn’t you?”

I blink. I did mention it, but I wasn’t really expecting anybody to remember it. Right now, I’m struggling with art a bit because I feel like I can’t move my pencils the way I want to. Forget art theory, I can’t even use the tools right. The only way to get better is to practice, but actually drawing takes a lot of energy. But in a colouring book, all the lines and art are already drawn, and I just have to focus on making it look pretty. Plus, the whole point is to colour within the lines, so it’ll let me practice being careful with my pencils.

Art is fun. I’m enjoying it. But eventually, I want to make pictures that Saki can brag about. And I don’t mean bragging in that mom way where she knows they’re not very good but she loves them anyway so she can’t shut up about it. I mean something she can hang up on the walls of the bakery and people will tell her they like it and who’s the artist, and she can say “My daughter drew that.”

Even if it’s not art, I want to be good at something. Even if it’s something small and useless. I feel like everybody at the orphanage was good at something except me. Sure, I could fix clothes, but only because I was always ripping them. I was only good at that by accident. It doesn’t count.

I realise I’ve lost myself in my own thoughts again, and blurt out a hurried “Thank you.” Mom’s face lights up with a smile, but it’s a wistful one – like when the kids who were being adopted had to leave their friends behind.

“It’s okay, sweetie. I hate to say it, but it’s gonna need to tide you over for a bit… I’m going to be a bit busy over the next few days. Two of your aunts are going to be staying for a while, and I need to get somewhere set up for them to sleep.”

I nod quietly, because I know that usually good things have some kind of trade-off to them, before actually registering what was said. “Wait, two of them? At once?”

I know Mom said I have a whole bunch of aunts and she’s planning to introduce me to all of them eventually, but I suck at dealing with people. There’s no possible way I can impress two different aunts at once, especially if they’re as cool as Saki and Iru. Well, alright, I know Mom’s a bit too dorky to be super cool, but you know what I mean. They’re the two best adults I’ve ever met. What if the whole family is like that? What if every single one of my aunts is some amazing person and then there’s just me, who can’t do anything, stuck at the bottom of the family totem pole?

“Don’t worry, honey,” Mom says, and strokes my hair. I must have been making a face. “They’re both… uh, quirky, but they’re nice people, and they’re completely inseparable. It’s not like me and Iru are just gonna dump them onto you and watch, either. It’ll be okay. I promise.”

I feel like me and Mom might have different definitions of ‘quirky’. We might even have different definitions of ‘okay’. But I feel like we both know what a promise is. I think back to that guy, being walked out of the store by a woman half his size.

No matter what, Mom is always in my corner. I don’t know why, and I wish I did. I wish I knew why she’d go so far for some random orphan girl. I wish I knew what I did to deserve it, or what I can do to deserve it. I don’t feel like I do right now.

But whether I deserve it or not, I believe that Mom is on my side. And if she says it’s going to be okay, if she promises, then it will be. For a given definition of okay. That’s what I’m choosing to believe.

“I hope Auntie Iru gets here soon,” I find myself mumbling.

“Looking forward to your prize, hm?” Mom asks, smiling.

I nod, although it’s probably not for the reasons she’s thinking about. Even though I already tried drawing for today, I pick up my sketchbook for some more practice. I need to get better as soon as I can. So I can impress my new, ‘quirky’ aunts. So I can say there’s a reason for Mom to treat me as well as she does.

Even though the soothing scent of baking bread surrounds me. Even though my Mom is cheering me on as much as she can… I feel breathless on the inside. Like I’ve been running for too long and I can’t stop.

As I put my nose back to the grindstone, I think I see Mom frowning for a split-second out of the corner of my eye. But when I look again, she’s smiling just as widely as she ever was.

Chapter Text

“Yes, yes. It’s all very unfair.”

The cat, with whom I am commiserating, gives me an acknowledging shake of the tail before going back to meowing every six seconds. His name is Roger, as decreed by Sora for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, and as he eats my food and boldly saunters across my coffee table even when I tell him not to, I suppose that means he is mine.

Like all cats, he is charming and roguish when the mood takes him (or when he believes there’s something to gain from it), but today that has failed him, and now he’s fallen back on crying piteously until he gets what he wants. All my attempts to placate him have failed; he is driven, a feline on a mission, and cannot be dissuaded.

The great injustice that has befallen him is that Sora and Sham are in the kitchen, and they have shut the door behind them. Obviously, this will not do. Roger enjoys the kitchen; it has many fines scents, treats to be begged for and tiles on which to spread out and obstruct anybody trying to do work. He also enjoys Sora and Sham, who lavish him with attention and praise his resplendent whiskers. (They’re good whiskers, I suppose, but I’ve seen better.) Together, they equal a room with food and people to give it to him, an excellent combination for any cat that aspires to great girth, which is the majority of them.

Yet, despite him being cute, despite him being hungry, they have locked him out to starve in the living room, bereft of attention besides mine. Truly villainous.

It isn’t just him, though. I’m also on strict orders not to come near the kitchen. Today we’re going to be sampling Sham’s cooking, and apparently she’s very kitchen-shy and can’t perform if anybody’s watching her. I have my doubts. Sham and shy are not words that sit easily next to each other.

Of course, this doesn’t seem to apply to Sora, who left her alone for all of three minutes before going into the kitchen to ‘check up on her’, and hasn’t come out since.

I may be dense – apparently – but I’m far from an idiot, and I don’t think I’ll actually be eating food Sham has made today. I think that Sham went into the kitchen and pre-heated the oven, and then Sora came in to give two very generous helping hands with everything else. No doubt Sham will put whatever they’ve made into the oven and take it out exactly when Sora tells her to, and because she technically oversaw the cooking process that will make it ‘Sham’s cooking’ even if Sora does every other step herself.

It doesn’t matter to me too much, though. I’m sure they’re having fun; I would bet real money that Sora is patiently explaining how to do each task, and Sham is learning nothing but enjoying every single second of it.

I suppose it’s actually a net benefit, since the cooking will actually be Sora’s. I have lived for many years, and eaten many things; sometimes I feel wistful for recipes and chefs that simply no longer exist. I can’t say Sora’s cooking is the best I’ve eaten without lying horrendously. But it is the cooking I enjoy the most. Sham’s… well. I’m not afraid of food poisoning, but she’s got a little further to go before her food can be called enjoyable.

The door opens, and the cat screams into the kitchen like a firework, circling and meowing and winding himself around any vaguely leg-like objects in hopes that the heavens will be kind and a snack will be descend. No such luck, I’m afraid; Sora and Sham are carrying a covered dish full of what what I believe to be a pasta bake between them, wearing one oven glove apiece. (Neither of which is mine, for obvious reasons).

We sit down to eat, and the cat does not; apparently the meal, now he has had a chance to look at it, does not contain enough tuna for his refined palette. Instead, he skulks over to Sora to rest his head on her leg. He seems quite attached to her, perhaps because they share a mindset and perhaps because she rarely makes sudden moves. He is less enamoured of Sham, whose high-volume style of affection takes more getting used to.

The food, incidentally, rates a six-and-a-half out of ten. A seven, to be generous. But the experience of having my loved ones cook me a meal together can’t be expressed with simple numbers.

“Sham worked very hard,” Sora tells me meaningfully. Sometimes it’s difficult to work out whether Sora is being meaningful or not – much like whether she’s joking, or flirting – but this is the third time she’s said it.

“So I hear. It’s certainly a dramatic improvement compared to usual.”

“Ehehehe,” Sham giggles shakily, before abruptly funnelling the conversation away from any potential unearned glory. “Hey, did you guys see the article? What did you think?”

“Mostly fine,” I say, “although I’m not sure when I became a philanthropist.”

My eyes stray to a copy of the Idol Times (could they really not have called it the Idol Hands?) that was delivered a day or two ago. It’s possibly the most disreputable magazine I’ve ever owned a copy of, but it forms the basis of Sham’s daring new career strategy.

Of us three, Sham is the only one with an actual career to speak of. Sora is, of course, retired; while I have no doubt that she has it within her to intercede on the world’s behalf again if push comes to shove, nobody around her has any intention of letting things come to that. As for myself, I’m what I would call gainfully unemployed.

But Sham has a job she’s passionate about, and people around the world who are passionate about her. She’s been taking a career break with the excuse of working on an album (some of which I’ve listened to, and it’s good even if not quite to my tastes), but that won’t keep people’s eyes off her forever. Apparently she and her manager have had to engage in some back-of-shop skulduggery to keep the media off us even this long.

Luckily, Sham lives and breathes in the spotlight, and she knows how to play the media against itself. This recent article was more or less written by her, and fed to whichever magazine was the lowest common denominator – ‘putting blood in the water’, she says, so that bigger fish come sniffing for the bait.

She’s got everything planned out. But it does involve flirting with the media a little, which I’m uncomfortable with, and telling the occasional fib, which Sora isn’t comfortable with. So she’s making sure she keeps us in the loop to keep our worries away.

“We-ellll,” Sham says, fluttering her eyelashes (usually a bad sign), “that is kinda what you look like from the outside, y’know? You’re pretty dang rich, but you never talk to the media and you keep giving money away to medical facilities and animal shelters and stuff, so reclusive philanthropist kinda fits the bill.”

I frown. It’s true that I give a lot of money to charitable concerns, but it’s mostly to get rid of it. I made my fortune many years ago selling off relics of the old world, dug up in my search for my own design documents; at the time, I didn’t really pay attention to how much I was making, and didn’t bother to spend what I received.

Years and years of financial compounding later, I realised that even the interest on what I’d made was more than I’d use in a year, and people started sniffing around in hopes of prospects. I started making investments to try and divest myself of some wealth, but I got (un?)lucky, and they paid out more than I put in. Eventually, I switched to charitable concerns where I could, and saved investing for projects I wanted to personally guarantee – my current prosthetics among them.

Nowadays I gave away enough to keep my wealth at a stable level. Some people had challenged me about the ethics of hoarding as much money as I did, but since I’m spending the interest anyway, I see it as taking money away from banks and putting it into places I personally think are worth giving to.

“Sora, was there anything that bothered you?” Sham asks.

Sora nods, her piercing green eyes locked on Sham’s face. “You didn’t really have an accident.”

“I totally did!” Sham huffs, putting her hands on her hips. “It was just, y’know. A while ago.”

“Roughly ten thousand years back,” I say dryly.

“That’s a while!” she retorts.

“It’s at least one while,” Sora agrees.

“Right. And it was an accident! For me, anyway. Pretty sure it was deliberate for the other side, but actually me getting hit by it was an accident. A tragic accident.”

Sora nods slowly, apparently satisfied that even if Sham isn’t serving up the truth, the ingredients are at least all there. Her face clears. “I like the way they described me. I get to be mysterious,” she says, as though it’s some kind of rare treat. Me and Sham share a knowing look; people in town talk about Sora as though she’s some kind of local cryptid, and even we don’t know what she’s thinking all of the time.

“What’s the plan from here?” I ask.

“For now, I just lay low for a bit, and I keep my makeup off. Then, I’m going to start booking charity gigs for children’s hospices and stuff like that, especially the ones Nath donates to,” she says. “It’ll be a nice enough story for a while, but it’s too wholesome to get reported on for too long. When the media’s cooled down a bit, I can start bringing you two to my shows, get a bit of association going, and bam! People will be totally used to seeing us together.”

“Will we be able to smooch in public?” Sora asks. She always goes for the hard questions first. I can’t say I’m not interested in hearing the answer to that one, though. As much as I’m not a huge fan of public displays of affection, it would be nice not to worry about papparazzi every time I lean in.

“Well… Probably not for a while,” Sham admits, her eyebrows furrowing. “But that’s the end goal! In the meantime, we can introduce you as my new idol co-star while I’m working the charity circuit.”

“I’m nervous already,” Sora says, as placidly as ever.

“You don’t sound it.”

“That’s because I’m full of pasta.”

I’m not sure about the potential panic-dampening abilities of pasta, but by the time I’m finished entertaining their existence as a legitimate possibility, Sham jumps back into the fray. “Aw, I know you don’t like big audiences, but you’re fantastic on stage! And it won’t be like we’ll be doing normal audiences, either. It’ll all be kids or sick folks who need cheering up.”

Sora considers this. She seems to like children, at least judging from her handling of Sumika. “I’ll do my best,” she decides.

“Heck yeah! They’re gonna love you, Sora. We won’t stop until we’ve introduced your squidgeable cheeks to the whole world!”

I clear my throat. “Ignoring the sudden turn there,” I say, although I have my own feelings about Sora’s squidgeable cheeks and how much of them I would be willing to share with the general public, “Is this all okay for you, Sham? It seems like a big career shift.”

“...Well.” Sham hesitates, and I know she’s privately deciding whether to sidestep the question with cheerfulness or actually engage with it. “You are right, I guess… I’m not really gonna be in the spotlight anymore once the initial interest dies down. And when it comes out that I’m in a relationship, I’ll lose a lot of fans. That’s… kinda part of the idol experience.” She spreads her palms as a gesture of helplessness; the cat immediately puts his head in one of them, because if her hands are free then she might as well be petting him. “But it’s all cool, I think. I’m still going to be singing. I’m still gonna be making people happy. Besides, it’s not like it’ll be the first time I’ve hit the reset button on my career, y’know? I do this kind of thing every couple generations or so.”

Sora tilts her head, which means it contains a thought and we should all therefore be prepared for an uncertain future. “It’s a nice plan.”

“But?” Sham asks.

“I want to skip to the part with the smooches.”

It’s hard to keep myself from snorting. “Don’t we all,” I reply dryly, but there’s no mistaking the faintly hungry look in her eyes. Of the three of us, Sora is the most given to… ahem, physical affection. She struggles sometimes to communicate with words, but it’s difficult to misinterpret the other things she does with her mouth.

“Hey, Nath,” Sham interjects, her eyes slightly narrowing. “You’ve got a weird look on your face. What are you thinking about?”

“The future,” I reply, although it’s probably a more immediate future than the phrase suggests.

The cat, for the moment, is happy. In an hour or two, I will usher him into the kitchen, put down food and biscuits enough to keep him occupied, and then quietly close the door behind me when I leave. It will be an irony that, after begging so long to be let into the kitchen, he will find himself stuck there for a time.

But even Sham would agree that some things in life are best without an audience. In the coming months, we’ll be attracting quite a lot of media attention, so we have to seize what opportunities present themselves. That’s my excuse, anyway. At any rate, now seems like a good time to change the topic; Sham’s expression is too dubious to have been hoodwinked by my answer. I get to my feet with a sigh.

“You two made dinner, so I’ll do the dishes,” I tell them.

“I’ll help,” Sora says, standing up immediately.

“You don’t need to.”

“I do,” she says seriously, “because I didn’t actually cook dinner. I was just checking up on it, so I didn’t do anything.”

At no point in her explanation does she look me in the eye. For a girl with a natural poker face, she’s a horrible liar. Lack of practice, I imagine. Our shoulders bump together gently as we go into the kitchen; the cat slinks behind, slyly eyeing his food bowl.

As I run our plates under the hot water, Sora’s arms wrap around my waist from behind; I feel her lean her face against my neck.

“I thought you were meant to be helping,” I say, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s moral support,” she answers.

I smile, and say nothing. Nowadays, moments like this are why I get out of bed in the morning. And also why I end up in bed again long before I think I will. As I finish the dishes and distract the cat with his long-awaited meal, Sora’s hands begin to wander, and her moral support becomes just a tiny bit immoral.

Roger does not look up as I close the kitchen door behind us. As we rejoin Sham in the living room, the rest of the evening is for our eyes alone.

Chapter Text

“Reika,” my mom says gravely, a furrow appearing in her brow. “I never thought I’d have to ask you to do this, but… here. This is the weapon that’s been passed down in my family for generations: the Rod of Justice. Take it… I can’t wield it any longer. I’m relying on you to protect everybody in my place!”

Just, uh, in case anybody’s wondering: it’s a broom. It has bristles on it. Wooden handle and everything. A one-hundred percent perfectly ordinary piece of cleaning equipment. It still has the tag on it, because we never bothered to cut it off.

Sometimes Mom does stuff like this, and I have no idea how to react. She’s obviously joking, but does she want me to play along, or…? I don’t really get it. Maybe it’s just her long-suppressed dorky side breaking through, since she tries so hard to be cool and reliable the rest of the time.

“Uh. Okay,” I say, and accept the broom with roughly the same amount of gravity she’s presenting it to me with. “What, uh… Am I supposed to be protecting people from? Dirt?”

“Nah, just look after the store for a bit,” Mom replies, winking and going back to her usual, casual self. “I already turned the sign over, but you know how people are when it comes to baked goods.”

I do, unfortunately, know. I wish I didn’t. My opinion of people was so much better when I didn’t have to sell them stuff, or watch them turn up half an hour after our closing time to tap the windows and ask if we couldn’t maybe turn the ovens on just to bake them one last cinnamon roll. Alright, so maybe it wasn’t actually that much better before since I have words to say about adults and how they act, but it was a kind of different flavour of negative.

“I’ve gotta go out with Iru and pick up some bedding before Nanako and Kae get here, so I’m relying on you to keep everything ship-shape.” She winks again and boops me on the nose. “We won’t be long, I promise.”

“Why don’t I just come with you? We can just lock the doors.”

Mom chews her lip. “Look, um, sweetie. I’m super happy that you want to spend time with your mom, okay? But sometimes, moms have to do things they don’t want their kids to see them doing.”

I frown; in my imagination, I see Mom bowing down in front of an unscrupulous moustache-twirling bed salesman, begging tearfully for a discount so she can afford to house her sisters. Actually, no, wait. Given that it’s Mom, I feel like there’s a chance she’d actually just extort him with her hidden temper, with Aunt Iru standing behind her like hired muscle… Could I accept my Mom if she was some sort of bed mafioso and Auntie Iru was her mattress goon? If they came back with a bloodied baseball bat and a suspiciously cheap bedframe, could I sleep on that bed in good conscience?

I think that maybe I could. I don’t want to brag, but kids are a lot more adaptable than adults are. But I also think that as her adopted daughter, I should try to minimise Mom’s collateral damage wherever I can, so I quickly shake my head. “Mom, listen. Even if we can’t afford more beds, you don’t have to do anything drastic. You can just give my aunts my bed, and I can sleep on the floor.”

“You certainly can not!” Mom replies hotly, and my previously non-existent desire to sleep on the floor shoots up by fifty percent. “And I don’t know what you’re imagining, but we have plenty of money. I was more thinking about carrying the bedframes.”

I tilt my head. “Carrying the bedframes? Why wouldn’t you want me to see that?”

“Because I don’t want you thinking everyone in my family is some kind of… muscle gorilla,” Mom sighs. “And I especially don’t want you seeing me that way. I might be stronger than I look, but hauling furniture doesn’t fit my aesthetic at all! There’s nothing cute about it!”

I really don’t get Mom’s priorities sometimes. But does that mean that Auntie Iru’s muscle actually runs in the family? Between her abs and Mom’s proportions, it really sucks that I’m not going to get the benefit of those genetics. Adoption doesn’t fix everything, I guess.

“Anyway, you stay here and man the fort,” Mom carries on, and boops me on the nose. Again. I didn’t realise my nose was that boopable. “I’m going to lock the door anyway so there shouldn’t be any customers to worry about, but if there happens to be a cup of tea waiting for me when I get home, I won’t complain! Ehehe.”

With that, she picks up her coat and breezes out of the shop without giving me a chance to argue about it. After a few seconds of thought, I shrug, put down the broom – I don’t see anyone worth hitting with this particular ‘Rod of Justice’ – and settle down to read some of my schoolbooks. If Mom and Iru are both super buff, I’ll have to compensate by getting super smart. After all, anyone who takes one look at Auntie Iru can tell that brain power isn’t one of the fruits of this particular family tree.

After a while, I decide to go and read behind the counter – mostly because people keep spotting me through the shop windows and tapping them insistently. The doors are closed. The sign says ‘closed’. But because I’m here, they think they can try their luck, and it’s irritating. I lean my back against the counter and slide down to sit on the floor so I’m hidden from view, and only then can I go back to trying to lose myself in my textbooks.

Before long, I am lost, but less in the ‘extremely deep in concentration’ kind of way and more in the ‘extremely confused about what I’m reading’ kind of way. Learning is fun when you’re getting somewhere, but not understanding stuff sucks for about two minutes and then just becomes really boring because you can’t make any progress or see anything new.

I yawn a little and briefly consider taking a nap, but I think Mom would get angry about it since I’d be sleeping on the floor. I mean, I wouldn’t be sleeping on the floor. I’d be sleeping, while incidentally being on the floor. But I don’t feel like I could explain what the nuance is there or why it matters, so I’d better stay awake.

Of course, as soon as I think that, it gets a lot harder to resist going to sleep. I’m just starting to doze off when I hear a quiet click.

Instantly, I’m fully awake. I’m an orphanage kid. I’ve always slept in a room full of other people – kids tossing and turning, sighing, getting up for the bathroom. And I’m a victim of the Goat Conspiracy on top of that. I know which noises are safe to ignore when you’re dozing off, and that wasn’t one of them.

It almost sounded like a key in the door. But Mom never turns the key that quietly – she always does it quickly, in one smooth motion, and she never misses the lock no matter what. I peer over the counter, careful to keep myself hidden.

Sure enough, the shop door swings open. But there’s nobody actually there. It wasn’t the wind, because that shop door is pretty heavy, and the wind doesn’t pick locks. I grope around for an explanation to what I’m seeing, but I come up empty-handed.

Oh, right. Maybe it’s a Mom thing, though.

There’s a lot of stuff Mom does that I don’t understand. A lot of little things that don’t quite fit neatly with my idea of a normal adult, or a normal person. Not that I have a great picture to base that off, but whatever. To be honest, I’m halfway convinced she’s some kind of witch or something, and that’s why her dorky baking song worked for me despite nothing else changing.

When it comes to Mom, I can’t rely on what feels like normal. Maybe this is just one of those things. So I stop worrying about the whys and hows, and focus on keeping my eyes peeled so I know what’s happening. For a few seconds, nothing does.

Just as I’m starting to feel like an idiot, one of the our croissants starts floating.

I rub my eyes. Even squint. But apparently squinting at baked goods isn’t enough to strike them down mid-flight, and the croissant continues to hover – rudely, in my opinion, since I’m pretty sure it’s breaking some rule or another – at face height. Impertinently! That’s the word I was looking for. It’s the most impertinent floating croissant I’ve ever seen, and at this point I’ve probably seen more than the average human being so that makes me an authority on the matter.

Part of me wonders if I should maybe do something about this. Maybe I should try and catch it? But touching a magic floating croissant with your bare hands feels like it would be a bad idea. Maybe if I had a bug net? A croissant is kind of like a butterfly, after all. The curved shape is kind of like wings, and they do contain a lot of butter.

As I’m making my mind up, the croissant suddenly disappears – first one half, and then the other. Well, I guess that makes the decision for me, but it just begs more questions. A flying croissant, I can understand. But a disappearing one? Like, a quantum croissant? That’s just crazy.

Finally, the entire wicker basket we keep the croissants in begins to float into the air – and that, apparently, is where I draw the line. I’m fine with entertaining the idea that my Mom’s a witch, but she’s a baker, so her magic should only work on baked goods! That basket’s never been near an oven!

“Hey!” I shout, leaping from behind the counter. I kinda wish I had something to shout after the ‘hey’, but I don’t really know what you’d say in a situation like this. ‘Stop’, maybe? I guess I’m just not good at yelling. Add it to the list.

“Crap! The brat was here?!”

I stop in my tracks. I wasn’t really expecting a reply, but I got one, and one that had a distinctly un-croissanty voice behind it. This is just my opinion, but I think that a magical floating croissant should have a really deep, suave voice. I mean, they’re sophisticated and they contain butter, so I think it stands to reason. But the voice I heard was high-pitched and barely sounded any older than I am. If Mom really was behind it, I had to question her taste.

Having been startled, the floating croissants pause for a moment… and then hustle toward the door, basket and all. I hear the distinctive sound of something trying to get through a heavy door too quickly and nearly bouncing off, but then the door opens and the croissant basket is unleashed into an unsuspecting world.

I’m honestly kinda stunned by what just happened, but then some primal instinct fires in my brain and I’m running, full pelt, through the open door. I want to say that I thought about it, but I didn’t. The only thing running through my mind is the natural desire to chase something that’s running from you. As my blood starts pumping and I dash out onto the streets, my brain catches up and my feelings crystalise.

I never caught the goats. The goats were too crafty and they always hid from me, so even though I knew there was something weird going on, I never saw it. But the goats at least had the decency to keep their weirdness outside. The goats never came into my house. Whatever weirdness was going on right now had started in my space, and that’s just disrespectful. I can’t let that slide.

About five seconds after my feet start hitting pavement instead of floorboards, the actually smart bit of my brain starts screaming that this is a horrible idea. I don’t go out on my own; Mom asked me not to until I’m older, and I’ve never really wanted to anyway. The orphanage was a long way from here. I don’t know this city. I don’t know these streets. And running down them in hot pursuit of a floating croissant basket isn’t exactly helping me memorise any landmarks. I’m absolutely going to get lost. Heck, I might already be lost. We’ve already taken a couple of turns and I have no idea whether they were rights or lefts.

I should be able to ask directions later, since the Big Bang Bakery is probably pretty well known. But that’ll mean talking to people. Strangers. Adult strangers, which are the worst kind, probably. I don’t exactly know how receptive they’re going to be, given that I’m me and socialising hasn’t exactly gone well at any other point in my life, but that’s a problem for Future Me.

Future Me is also going to get both barrels from Mom, since I’m supposed to be watching the shop right now, and I just ran out without locking the door. I don’t actually have a key to lock it with anyway, but still. Future Reika’s got it rough. It’s gonna suck to be her in a few hours.

But weirdly, none of that even remotely makes me want to give up the chase. In fact, it makes me want to double down even harder. If I’m taking the fall for this, I’m at least going to bring somebody down with me.

Truthfully, though, that’s starting to seem like a tall order. I don’t exactly do a lot of exercise, and that floating basket apparently doesn’t skip leg day because it is quick. Every second I spend running is a second where I’m losing ground. My blood’s running hot but my breath is ragged, and I can feel the sweat on my scalp. My feet are already starting to feel clumsy, and given how accident prone I am, it’s only a matter of time before I slip. I can’t keep this up for much longer.

But I do. I have no choice. Now that I’m running, I feel like I can’t change the course I’m on, any more than I could pluck the north star from the sky and hurl it into the ocean. I don’t feel like I’m in control any more. I’m just along for the ride.

I carry on in hot pursuit, occasionally ducking out of the way of dumbfounded adults. Most of them are smart enough to get out of the way of the basket, because nobody wants to deal with this kind of voodoo stuff, but some of them attempt to reach out and ask me what’s going on. I ignore them because I’m kinda busy right now, but it’s still distracting.

Unfortunately, the croissants know this, and every time somebody calls out to me, they take the opportunity to make a sudden swerve or dash into some backstreet or alleyway. Soon enough, I’m rounding corners only to catch a glimpse of the basket going around the next one, charging blindly through a maze of streets. By this time, my chest is hurting and I can barely breathe; it slows me down, and when I round the next corner, there’s no basket to be seen.

I’ve lost.

I lean back against a wall and slowly slide down it until I’m sitting, trying to catch my breath. I don’t know where I am. Some weird alleyway next to a mechanic’s yard, separated by a corrugated sheet metal fence. I wonder how long I was running, and how far away I am from home. I know for sure that I can’t retrace my steps; there were too many twists and turns, and I spent too long with my eyes locked on the basket.

I feel so frustrated. I came all this way, and I didn’t even get anything out of it. I’m just lost. I want to cry, but I’m deeply aware that tears aren’t going to draw me a map. Or teach me how to read a map. Listen, you don’t go to an orphanage for geography lessons.

But then I spot something. Something you probably wouldn’t spot if you didn’t slump down against the wall for a good, old-fashioned mope. A section of the corrugated iron fence – barely higher than my thighs, and barely wider than my shoulders – isn’t quite flush with the rest of it. It’s recessed just a little, maybe half a fingernail’s length, from the rest of the fence.

Normally, I wouldn’t even bother to worry about it. But I’m hopelessly lost, so I have nothing better to do, and learning about the existence of magical floating croissants has put me in a curious mood. So I place my palm against it and give a hard shove.

It swings open easily. Noiselessly. It’s basically a cat-flap – one just the right size for a kid like me to wriggle on through.

My head’s telling me no. I have problems, and the only real way out of them is going to find an adult who can ring my mom and get her to take me home. Crawling through a crazy catflap into a junkyard is really not going to help with that.

But my heart? My heart’s telling me to go for it. To see the unusual. To chase adventure until the very end. The urge to push forwards is much stronger than the urge to shrink back. It seems like my head isn’t really in the driver’s seat right now; maybe that’s Auntie Iru’s influence at work.

I take a deep breath. Then I start wriggling through the iron catflap of destiny.

Surprise! The catflap in the fence of a mechanic’s junkyard leads to a mechanic’s junkyard. I emerge to towers of old car parts, burnt out engines, scrap metal piled as high as my head. The smell of motor oil – so much more familiar to me now that I live in an actual town and not a mountain full of conspiracy goats – is thick in the air.

But this is obviously an entrance. There’s an obvious and deliberate path, a straight line mostly devoid of junk. Only mostly, though, because I still find a way to stub my toe on a chunk of metal almost as soon as I start walking. Come to think of it, it’s crazy that this has been my first accident all day, but I guess my good luck’s running out.

The junk has been stacked so high it’s almost like solid walls to my right and left, hemming me in. I feel oddly nervous as I make my way through it; I don’t know if I want to run, or tiptoe, for fear that it’s all going to come crashing down on top of me. Either way, it’s deeply unsettling. Part of me wants to go back to the catflap and escape, but there’s still that impulse within me to follow the adventure to its end, no matter how tragic the end might be.

Eventually the walls start to thin, and the arrangement of junk becomes more random. After that, it starts to disappear entirely, and it seems like the space has been deliberately cleared. The few remaining bits of junk are arranged in a specific, oddly deliberate way: short pieces next to the disconnected bonnets of cars. Almost like a mechanical picnic table with metal ‘stumps’ as seats.

What really grabs my attention, though, is a pair of voices.

“…sorry, Boss. I really screwed up. I can’t believe they left that creepy kid home alone, or that she was just hiding behind the counter like some kind of freakazoid… I shook her, but we’ll have to be careful with how we hit that place in the future.”

“Nyahaha. Don’t I remember telling you not to hit it so often in the first place, girlie? Even with optic camo, people notice eventually.”

“It’s… it’s their fault for having such good sweets! And all the adults were out… how was I meant to pass that up?”

My head snaps to the direction of the voices. Two girls, both about my age, wearing mechanic’s overalls and peaked baseball caps, casually chatting over the hood of a burnt out car. One of them has purple hair and keeps their hands pulled up into the sleeves of her overalls so the empty cuffs dangle at her sides, and the other has striking auburn hair tied into a messy ponytail. The one with the ponytail also has a basket under her arm, and it’s filled with croissants.

My basket. My magic croissants.

“Hey!” I shout. This time, I actually have something after the ‘hey’, which is a step in the right direction. “I don’t know how you got those, but they’re from my bakery! Give them back!”

The auburn-haired girl almost jumps out of her skin; her face looks like she saw a ghost. Come to think of it, she was the one calling me creepy earlier, wasn’t she? Jerk.

But the other girl just stands there, her empty sleeves swaying. There’s a glint in her eye, and a sneering smile spreads across her face.

“You lost her, did ya? Looks like she didn’t lose you, girlie,” she cackled.

Her voice sends a shiver down my spine.

The way she speaks is a little rough, but she sounds no older than I am. Her voice is energetic, approachable. Almost the same way Mom’s is. ‘Cute’, in other words.

But almost is a critical word there. Unlike Mom’s, all that cute energy is only skin deep. Surface level. A thin veneer painted over something else entirely.

It’s an act. It’s all an act. Don’t get me wrong – Mom’s cuteness is an act too, kinda. It’s definitely deliberate. But with Mom, you can tell she’s actually trying to be cute, rather than trying to pretend she’s cute. There’s a world of difference between those two things.

There are a lot of reasons to pretend you’re something you’re not, but it usually boils down to one of two things. You’re either prey, trying to pretend you’re bigger and tougher than you are so you don’t get targetted.

Or you’re a predator, disguising your intentions until just the right time to strike and take what you want.

The purple-haired girl in the mechanic’s overalls… the hard glint in her eyes tells me exactly which of those she is.

“Well, well, girlie,” she says, addressing me now. “It sounds like you’re quite the little bloodhound, chasing my little protege across the city like this. But coming in here, to our turf? I’m thinking that’s a big mistake.”

I try to keep my gaze as steady as possible. To avoid showing weakness.

But honestly? I think she might be right.

Chapter Text

“Sora, Nath. Would you still love me if I was a worm?”

Nath raised an eyebrow. She was currently lying back on Sham’s sofa, attempting not to kick her in the face. Usually not kicking her girlfriend in the face was a task so easy she could accomplish it without thinking, and often did; however, today Sham had been given the privilege of painting her girlfriend’s toes, and Nath’s happened to be quite sensitive. She was not, overall, in much of a position to receive the most burning romantic question of an era.

“You’re not a worm, though,” Sora answered, helpful as always. “You’re Sham.”

“I don’t know,” Nath replied dryly. “She does wiggle a lot.”

Sham was indeed a woman full of wiggles, and each wiggle was full of meaning, none of which Nath was privy to. She had many skills, but being a wiggle whisperer was not one of them. She could tell an excited wiggle from a nervous one, but that was as far as her understanding went.

Sora, predictably, was far better with her wiggle interpretations. It was a well-known fact that hips did not lie, and Sora could puzzle out what Sham was saying with every delicate shake of her derrière. To be frank, Nath wished she would share her cheat sheet with the rest of the class, but it probably wouldn’t be good for her to pay more attention to Sham’s waist than she already did.

“Wiggling doesn’t make her a worm, though,” Sora replied back, and then paused. The beginnings of a frown began to shape themselves on her face. “Sham, were they leaving comments about you on the internet again? You shouldn’t listen to internet people.”

“Nah. It’s just a hypothetical, okay? I know I’m not a worm, but if I was a worm, would you still love me?”

It was at that point that Nath, in a fit of mercy, prodded Sham’s good cheek with her big toe. It was a quiet signal that this particular line of questioning probably wouldn’t end up where she was hoping it would.

Alas, it was too late. Sora had already begun to apply her formidable powers to the task. “What kind of worm?”

“Does it matter what kind?” Sham asked, slightly appalled. She had wanted to believe that Sora’s love was unconditional, no matter what kind of worm she might be.

“I think it does,” was Sora’s reply. “A lot of worms are very small, and they live inside you and make you sick.”

“Okay, okay! Let’s assume I’m not one of the gross parasite ones, then,” Sham replied hastily.

“But then what if you were a gummy worm? Then you wouldn’t be able to move, or talk, or anything. We wouldn’t know it was you. We’d probably just eat you by accident.”

Sham’s face fell dramatically as she realised that a question she had expected to be answer by a simple ‘yes’ had now ballooned well out of her control.

“Would you eat the head or the tail first?” Nath asked dryly. Sham and Sora often teamed up to tease her; having seen an opportunity to turn the tables and tease Sham for once, she found herself quite amenable to the idea.

“You have to start from the head,” Sora replied seriously. “It’s more merciful. If you eat the tail first, they have to feel an extra bite.”

“Alright, geez!” Sham interrupted. “Let’s say I’m an earthworm, then. Would you love me if I was an earthworm?”

“I don’t know much about earthworms,” Sora lamented. Her steady diet of nature documentaries had not, it seemed, educated her in the less exotic annelids living beneath her feet.

“If you cut them in half, both halves can survive. We could multiply the number of Shams we have.”

“Ooh, yeah!” Sham latched on to the idea with surprising enthusiasm. “Sora, you could be the filling in a Sham sandwich! Ehehe.”

“It wouldn’t be a Sham sandwich.” Sora corrected her with a baleful gaze. Sandwiches were very important to her personal cosmology. “You don’t call a sandwich by the outside parts. Then all sandwiches would be bread sandwiches, and you wouldn’t know what the filling was.” She paused, and thought. “I wouldn’t want to cut you in half, anyway. I think one full Sham is better than two half Shams. Nath, would you?”

“Well,” Nath said deliberately, “I don’t think it would be practical. I’m a larger lady, so I think you’d need more than two Shams to sandwich me.”

“Pfft. You can barely handle one of me. You definitely aren’t ready for double Sham action!”

Nath frowned. This was, unfortunately, true. And if Nath found herself unsuited for multi-Sham mayhem, the world at large was completely unprepared for it. There were probably other compelling reasons not to chop her girlfriend in half with a garden shovel, but preserving world peace was a potent one.

Sora raised her hand. “Oh! Can we turn you back from being a worm?”

Sham’s brow furrowed. “Uh?”

“If you turned into a worm, it must be magic. And if it’s magic, there might be a quest,” Sora said, with the kind of wistful tone that suggested she might quite enjoy having a quest, if one were to present itself.

“Supposing there wasn’t a quest, though, and I was just stuck as a worm forever?”

Sora frowned. “You can’t just turn someone into a worm and not give a quest to turn them back. That would be rude.” She paused for a moment, and her frown deepened into a scowl. “I don’t think rude people should be allowed to do magic.”

Nath raised an eyebrow, and shot Sham a meaningful look. Sora had come dangerously close to forming an actual political opinion, which was a sign that the topic ought to be summarily abandoned. The world was about as ready for Sora’s politics as it was a profusion of extra Shams, and they both knew it.

“Why are you worried about being a worm, anyway?” Nath asked, hoping to move the conversation on to fresh waters.

“Aw, I was just wondering if you’d still love me if I didn’t have this smokin’ hot body,” Sham giggled, a little ruefully. “I mean, at least you’d go on a quest to get the smokin’ hot body back, so that’s half marks, I guess…?”

Sora, who would probably have gone on a quest for three dollars and a fistful of candy at that point, nodded comfortingly.

“Plus I was just kinda distracting Nath while I did her nails. Here, take a look!”

Nath looked down at her toes, which had been daubed sky-blue while she wasn’t looking, and tried to summon an opinion from the ether. Sadly, having her nails painted did not seem to have inspired any poetry in her soul. “They… certainly are the colour that’s on the bottle.”

“It’s a pretty colour, though,” Sora weighed in.

“Well, duh! I wouldn’t just go around painting her nails in not pretty colours, right? I could have gone a bit more elaborate with it, but I figured it was probably better to keep it simple.”

Nath shrugged. “Probably a good idea. I’d chip it in no time, anyway. I actually use my feet for things, after all.”

“I mean, most people use their feet for stuff. They just don’t use them for the same variety of stuff that you do,” Sham quipped, and then patted the arm of the sofa. “Alright, you’re officially free to go. Sora, it’s your turn. You wanna go for something simple like Nath’s, or shall we get more complex with it?”

“I want the same as Nath’s,” Sora said slowly, “but with clouds.”

“Ooh, fancy!” Sham cooed. “I can totally make that happen. Oh, actually, why don’t we go with a sunrise, afternoon and sunset theme? You can be the sunrise, I’ll be the sunset, and I’ll just have to touch up Nath’s a bit for the afternoon sky.”

“You only just finished it, and now you want to do it again?” Nath grumbled, but her expression softened. “Well. As long as it makes you happy.”

“Ooh. She’s spoiling you. I’m jealous,” Sora whispered conspiratorially to her beaming partner in crime.

“I know, right?” Sham giggled. “I feel super lucky.”

The blonde shook her head. “No. I’m jealous of Nath, since she gets to spoil you.”

Nath cracked a smile. Sham was a wonderful romantic partner, but her big sister aura meant she was usually doting on people rather than being doted on. Sora was of course the most common target, but Nath herself was far from immune.

It was at that point that Sora wandered over and installed herself on Sham’s sofa. Sham’s sofa was made for two, but the assumption was that the two people would be sitting up rather than lying down; Sora solved this problem via the creative invasion of personal space.

“Nath,” she said, nuzzling up against her girlfriend. “Let’s do a plot about how to spoil Sham together.”

How they would manage to plot anything when Sham was at the end of the sofa painting their toes was an extremely good question. How would they communicate? Morse code tapped on each other’s shoulders? Vibration? Talking was technically vibration-based communication anyway, but that was besides the point. As always, Sora provided more questions than answers.

And, in fact, she had one more question to provide. This time, it was one she had borrowed.

“Would you two love me if I was a worm?” she murmured.

“Duh. We’d love you even if you were a slug.”

“I don’t think I’d want to be a slug. They leave slime everywhere and they keep trying to eat Suguri’s cabbages.”

“That doesn’t matter. You can leave Sora goop all over the place and we’d still love you just the same!”

“What about the cabbages?”

“I don’t have cabbages.”

“You should. They’re soothing.”

“Soothing, like, how? They’re not a pet.”

“They’re kind of a pet. If your robots can be pets, then so can cabbages.”

“Sora, my robots actually do stuff.”

“So do cabbages. They grow, mostly. And they absorb nutrients, and they take in carbon dioxide. And they get eaten by slugs. They have a lot of things they do.”

“I guess, but… What about you, Nath? You gotta weigh in on this, too!”

“I’d appreciate if you left your goop in Sham’s apartment instead of mine, but I feel mostly the same.”

“What about cabbages?”

“I can’t have cabbages. They make the cat irrationally angry.”

For half an hour further, the honour of slugs, cabbages and Sham’s robots was impugned without mercy, and peace reigned amongst the peoples of the earth.

Chapter Text

“So, girlee. What were you plannin’ to do, now that you’ve chased us all the way here? Surely you didn’t think you’d just pop out, point your finger at us, and we’d give you your stuff back without a fight. You’d have to be some kinda… uh… ooh, what’s the word?” The purple-haired girl’s voice raises an octave to a sickeningly cutesy pitch. “You’d have to be some kinda silly billy, wouldn’t ya? Just a little doofy head! A complete goddamn dribbling idiot! Just a grade A categorical moron, right?!”

I flinch back as her voice rises. Her eyes are glinting like the tips of my mom’s sharp chef’s knives. She doesn’t feel like a kid to me, not at all, but she doesn’t have the wariness that adults usually have when they look at me. No, this girl seems like she’s not really afraid of anything, but not because she’s brave. She just feels… wild.

“Hey. You got rocks in your ears, girlee? I asked you a question. Your mommy and daddy never teach you to speak when you’re spoken to?” Her tone is suddenly flat and dangerous. Without thinking, I take another step back.

“I… I only came because I saw my basket of croissants float out of the door by themselves! Who wouldn’t want to investigate that?”

There’s a shrill note of panic in my voice. I haven’t heard myself sound like that in a long time. When I was a kid, I’d panic and cry every time I had an accident, but then it happened so often that I just started getting tired rather than scared.

But, completely the opposite of me, the girl’s face lights up in a smile. She coos as thought I’m have favourite student and I’ve given her the right answer to a tough question. It’s fake. It must be fake. The way this girl switches from mood to mood can’t be anything but fake… but it’s still disorientating and uncomfortable.

“Aw, is that all? Well, I’d be happy to clear that little mystery up for ya. Watch.”

Her face shimmers for just a moment. And then, it vanishes entirely.

She disappeared. She just disappeared! There was nothing to hide behind, and there was barely any warning. Just a shimmer, and poof. Gone. She didn’t even say a magic spell. She could have at least said a magic spell!

It’s an absurd thing to be mad about. But this whole situation is absurd, and if I focus on how crazy it is, it distracts me from how dangerous this feels.

“Tch. You’re not even gonna yell or anything?”

The girl’s voice is low, and close. It feels like she’s speaking from right next to my ears. I can’t help but jump.

“Now that’s more like it, girlie. Y’know, seein’ people freak out like that is the one thing that never gets old.”

She winks back into existence – close. Too close. She’s almost nose to nose with me, close enough that I can see myself reflected in her eyes. Despite all her snickering and her posturing, there’s no mirth them at all.

“That’s how it is, girlie. That little trick right there? I can do it whenever I like. All my girls can.” She gives me a false smile and a wink. “Bet you thought it was just me and my little friend, didn’t ya? Didn’t even notice the other five of us closing in. C’mon, girls. Say hi.”

More girls appear from nothing, but not as smoothly. It’s a bit like watching the pictures load on the orphanage’s old computer – slowly, from the top down, with an odd pause in the middle. All the girls who appear are about my age or older, and most of them look like they’re not had a good shower in a while.

Just like that, I’m surrounded. Well, I guess I was surrounded before and just didn’t know it.

The purple-haired little girl, who seems to be their leader, grins from ear to ear. “So, there’s your mystery solved, kiddo. There’s no floating croissants. Me and my girls have just been helping ourselves to a few treats. It’s tough out here, y’know? A girl’s gotta eat. And y’know what else? We’re gonna keep helping ourselves.”

“That’s stealing,” I say. I don’t know what I really gain by saying it – demonstrating my grasp of the obvious, maybe – but my brain’s not really keeping up with what’s going on right now.

“Sure it is, girlie. I bet that makes you mad. But if you turn around and tell the cops that your croissants are being stolen by a gang of invisible junkyard girls, do you think they’ll believe you? Or will they think the baker’s brat got hungry in the night and started snacking on the merchandise, and came up with a silly ghost story as an excuse?”

I take a step back. She takes a step forward. I feel like I’m being backed into a corner, and not just by her words.

“So, I bet you’re thinking: what happens now? Well, girlie, I’m weally weally sowwy, but we can’t be letting people come nosing into our turf without some retribution, so we’re gonna have to give you a few bumps.” She grins in what is probably the most genuine smile I’ve seen from her. “And then? Well, you’re gonna notice some more missing merchandise from time to time. But you’re gonna keep your yap shut about it. ’Cuz if you don’t? Then I’m gonna turn up in your room one night, and we’ll have a nice long chat. I can just do that, anytime I like.”

“You can’t,” I blurt out, and then, without thinking: “Mom’ll hit the roof.”

Oh. Wait. That’s right. I don’t know why, but I feel like Mom would definitely… do something drastic. Could do something drastic. Whether she’s actually a witch or not, my instincts say that making an enemy of Mom is a really, really bad idea.

“Aw, kiddo. That’s cute. But I’m not scared of your mom,” the girl replies. Her grin has grown sharp and mean. “I’m not scared of anybody’s mom. Let me show you something really quick.”

She flicks her wrist – her arm, I guess, since her actual wrists and hands are covered by those long sleeves – at one of the old wrecked cars lying around. It’s only half of a car, with the back sawed off and the engine removed, so it’s just the cabin and the front wheels left. The air shimmers; when I half-closed my eyes, I can see these glimmering… strings? Strings, shooting out from her sleeve towards the wreck. I can only see them when the sunlight catches them, so it’s difficult to work out what’s happening.

Then she flexes her arm and pulls it back, and there is a horrible squeal as the wreck pulls itself free of dirt and metal.

She jerks her arm quickly, faster than I can see, and the car sails into the air, pulled by the strings coming from her sleeves. She whirls it around in the air with long, lazy motions, like she’s twirling a huge lasso; the sound of wind rushing through the gaps in the chassis of the car terrifies me.

Then with a final flick, she lets it go, sending it soaring towards a towering stack of junk. With a sound so loud that I’m scared it will rupture my ear drums, the whole thing collapses, strewing metal and debris everywhere.

The girl smiles at me, like a shark posing for a picture. She is supremely, infuriatingly satisfied with herself, and if she hadn’t just demonstrated actual superhuman strength I would have socked her in the jaw just to wipe the smirk off her face.

“So, there you go, kiddo. I might look like a delicate little thing, but looks can be deceiving. And if you think your mommy’s got what it takes to to tussle with me, well. Maybe I can make that happen, huh? Maybe mommy can get a few bruises, too.”

It feels like all the blood is draining out of me.

Saki. My mom. My new mom that I only just got, that I’m actually getting along with, who shows off for me and worries about what I think about her and does goofy stuff to try and look cool. This little girl who can chuck cars around like it’s no big deal is threatening to hurt my mom.

What if Mom gets hurt? What if she can’t work anymore, or if she even dies? What if she doesn’t want me around because I brought this crazy invisible girl into her life without thinking about it?

I don’t think I could go back to living how I did. The thought of it scares me far more than the car did. Maybe some people would think, oh, “now I know how good it can be so it gives me hope”, but I don’t think I’m like that. Now that I know what it feels like to have a family, to have people who love me… I think I’d rather die than lose them.

A bleak feeling bubbles up inside me. It’s a mix of panic, despair, and outright fury, like I’m trapped in the middle of a barren wasteland where nothing can live. I can’t contain it. It’s too big, bigger than me and bigger than anything I’ve ever known. I need to lash out. Nothing I can do can stop this crazy car-throwing girl and her invisible antics, but I can’t let her get away with it, either.

I find myself looking at her throat. Comparing the length of my fingers to the size of her neck.

“You can’t.” My voice is low and flat. “I won’t let you.”

“Hahaha! Aw, I didn’t think our l’il amateur detective over here would be such a mommy’s girl!” The purple-haired girl laughs, guffaws, hoots. Her eyes narrow spitefully. “You know she probably had you by accident, right? Just fooling around with some–”

“I’M ADOPTED, IDIOT!” My voice is so loud that it shocks even me, but I can’t stop myself. “She CHOSE me! How dare you say…”I’m gasping. Almost dizzy. I don’t feel well. I don’t feel like myself at all. But I feel like I’m stumbling towards an answer, towards a fundamental truth, and I reach out to touch it with my fingertips:

“People like you… People like you… just ought to burn.”

It feels right. It feels good. Why should it just be me that has to feel this way, all the time? Why should it always be my life that gets ruined? People like this, people like her… they’re the ones who really deserve it. So why always me, me, me? I want her to hurt the same way I was hurt. Even if it just makes everything worse, I want to drag her down with me.

But before I can lurch forward and try strangling her, I hear a sound so weird that I have to stop and look around for it. I’m not the only one; even the gaggle of stray girls around the junkyard take their eyes off me to search. If I had to describe it, I’d say it sounds a bit like:

“MAAAAAAAUUUURYYYYAAAAAA!”

The purple-haired girl is the quickest to react. She leaps back, and I’m surprised just how much distance she’s able to clear in a single jump. Then, two glimmering lights descend from the sky. They move in a strange, slowly undulating pattern, and they glimmer with all the colours of the rainbow. But when they hit the earth where the girl was standing only a second before, they send up waves of dirt and leave craters where they landed.

At this point I’m too surprised to even flinch as clumps of mud rain down in front of me. I think even if that weird little girl was within strangulation range, the moment has passed.

It’s at that point that my mom flies down in front of me. Not, like, in a metaphorical way. I mean she just kinda swooped in from the actual sky. No plane, no helicopter, no jetpacks or anything. She’s not even riding a broom. Just dropped down from the open air unassisted and landed safely on her feet, her long yellow coat fluttering as she did.

I take a moment to sit down. I think I’m done for the day.

The girl with purple hair, though, apparently still has gas left in the tank. “What the heck?! Are you crazy, lady?!”

“Shut up! To think that when I realised you guys were stealing from my shop, I actually let it go, because you looked hungry! But now you’re out here kidnapping my daughter?! Drop dead!”

W-wow… I sure was mad just a second ago, but it looks like nothing compared to how mad Mom is right now… It feels wrong to see her this angry. Like, isn’t she normally about being cute? It’s like the shock when a pet cat reminds you that it’s a carnivore by ripping the head off a mouse it just caught.

But while I’m thinking about cats and mice, a look of panic spreads over the purple-haired girl’s face. Not a fake, manufactured expression like almost all of the ones I’ve seen up until now, but actual panic. I almost feel guilty about how satisfying it feels to see that.

“Are you kidding me?” she hisses. But not at us. Instead, she’s turned to the girl with auburn hair who stole our croissants in the first place. “You just said you found a bakery with no cameras where the stuff was really good! You never said this broad was the one running it!”

“But, Boss… it doesn’t matter, right? You always said, you could take on anybody if they came sniffing around, even the police or the army… You said there were only a handful of people in the whole world who’d even stand a chance if you got serious.”

“Yeah, and what did you do? You went and picked a fight with one of ’em!”

“Hey! Stop messing around! This ‘broad’ has a lot of bones to pick with you, so–”

“Sis, calm down.”

The voice is Auntie Iru’s. She floats down from the sky and lands beside me, just like Mom did, but if we ignore the fact that my entire (somewhat shaky) knowledge of physics is screaming at me in pain right now, I’m incredibly happy to see her. I mean, it’s Auntie Iru. She’s always cool and dependable. Things are starting to go way, way off the rails, but if it’s her, then I’m sure she can calm Mom down and sort this entire situation out…

Ah.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. No, it can’t be. I refuse.

I rub my eyes. Blink. Try to tell myself that I’m going crazy. But the things I’m seeing don’t change at all.

No matter how much I try to deny it, that is definitely a gun. An actual, real-life, point at people and kill them machine. A gun! Auntie Iru has a gun! A gun has happened and Auntie Iru has it! I think I’m hyperventilating. I think people are talking and I should probably be listening, but there’s something about seeing a gun that makes everything else in the entire world not matter even a tiny bit and makes the gun matter a whole heck of a lot.

I am at least smart enough to scramble backwards, because the one thing I know about guns is that you really don’t want to be in front of them. That’s the worst place to stand, guaranteed.

Not everyone is as impressed by the gun that has Auntie Iru attached to it as I am. The purple-haired girl is actually sneering, although that bravado looks pretty false from where I’m standing. Which, to be clear, is not in front of the gun. The purple-haired girl IS standing in front of the gun, and I feel like the bravado looks a lot more false from there.

“I don’t know why you’re pointing that thing around,” she says. “You ain’t gonna– ”

The world in front of me lights up.

The human eye can’t really see bullets in flight. Maybe if I were some crazy superhuman warrior with inexplicable powers like apparently everybody around me what is going on right now I could, but that’s not in the cards.

But Iru’s gun fired some sort of wave of green light in almost a fireball, and the only way I know that is because that purple-haired ‘Boss’ stuck out her palms and made a translucent sphere of, I don’t know, thin air, and Auntie Iru’s shot hung there for a second, smouldering and raining sparks that left little molten potholes in the ground before it dissipated. Right. Okay. That makes as much sense as anything else today.

I decide to go back to hyperventilating. It seems like the best use of my time right now.

“Are you NUTS, lady?!” the purple-haired girl bawls. Whatever her weird forcefield is, there are now visible scorch marks, like a huge cigarette burn, on the surface.

Auntie Iru shrugs. Auntie Iru shrugged. I can’t. I actually cannot. “No. I’m just mad. By the way, I don’t point this at things unless I’m going to shoot them.”

“Yeah, and you’d have blown a hole in every house for the next three neighbourhoods if you had missed!”

“I don’t do that, either.” She tilts her head at Mom slightly. “Looks like some kind of camo unit, huh? You spot. I’ll shoot.”

Uh, Mom… I know you’re mad and all, but you’re not really going to go along with this, right? I was expecting Auntie Iru to calm you down, but she’s actually even worse, so… One of you has to be the reasonable one, right? Right?

“That little loudmouth’s the only one with integrated shield technology, so I gotta think the rest are just regular humans. We shouldn’t have to worry about them.”

“Good intel. Thanks.”

Oh my god. I’m the reasonable one, aren’t I? It’s me. It finally happened. It’s my first time being the reasonable one and if I don’t get it right then people are going to get actually shot in the head. I’m losing my mind.

But I still lurch forward and wrap my arms around Mom’s waist.

“Mom, Auntie, stop! They didn’t do anything! They didn’t kidnap me! I ran after them by myself because I caught them stealing!” I beg.

Mom looks down at me. She’s smiling, and I can see that she’s trying to be comforting, but there’s a faraway look in her eyes. “Reika, honey. They didn’t do anything yet. But they were planning to, weren’t they? Did they or did they not threaten to beat you up?”

“They… they did, but…”

“And did they threaten to break into our home and come up into your room to do something horrible?”

“You… heard all that?”

“Honey, my hearing’s really good when I want it to be. And when somebody starts threatening my daughter, I could probably pick it out from the other side of the city.” Her smile collapses. “What I’m saying is that this little creep is definitely guilty, so me and Auntie Iru are gonna do something about her. Okay?”

“That’s still no reason to kill her!” I shout.

“Aw, honey. We’re not gonna kill her, okay? We’re just gonna give her a few bumps.”

“With a gun?!”

“For starters.”

Why does diplomacy have to be so hard?! I just want this to stop. I woke up today thinking my Mom might be part of the bedframe mafia, and now my Aunt is shooting people in the face.

I don’t my Mom or my aunt to be murderers. I know that’s weird considering that I was pretty ready to throttle someone myself barely five minutes ago, but it’s not like I could have actually strangled a girl who can throw cars about. But Mom… and Iru… they can do anything. I never realised until now how scary that can be.

I’m tired. So tired. Right now, there’s only really one option available to me, so I take it. I burst, unceremoniously, into tears.

“Reika? Reika, honey? What’s the matter? Are you hurt?” Mom’s eyes flick to me, and then back to the girl; she really doesn’t want to let her out of her sight, since they’re fighting. But after a moment more, her Mom instincts reassert themselves.

“I want to go home.” It’s tough to talk between sobs. That’s what I hate about crying. Once you start, you just can’t stop. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I just… I just want to go home.”

I see Iru looking at her out of the corner of her eye. Mom bites her lip, but finally, she nods.

“Alright, honey. C’mon. Let’s get you home.” She gently strokes my cheek with her thumb, brushing away the tears, and stands up. I’m feeling more wobbly than I ever have in my life, but I manage to stand up as well.

Auntie Iru takes a step back too, but she’s still holding her gun and her eyes are still alert. She isn’t smiling. It feels wrong to see her without a smile.

When I’ve pulled myself together, my Mom shoots the purple haired girl one last look, and says, in a voice that is cold and hard and angrier than I’ve ever heard her: “Don’t let me catch you near my daughter ever again.”

The girl says nothing, and nobody tries to stop us when we leave. The walk back is even longer than I thought it would be.

Chapter Text

“Will you two be alright?” Iru asked.

Honestly? It was a pretty good question. I was completely wiped. After coming home with a bedframe on my back, I’d found the front door open and Reika missing, and knew something had to have happened. She wasn’t an outdoorsy kid. She’d go out with me or Iru if we asked her to, but she’d never shown any interest in playing outside, and even with us, she was oddly nervous. She said something about keeping her eyes peeled for goats? Something like that.

So when we realised she was missing, I immediately kicked my sensors into high gear and started a manhunt.

We didn’t have any time to lose. Scouting might have been my speciality, but finding a single, specific human kid in a city that’s full of other human kids? That’s tough. They’re all roughly the same size, they run roughly the same temperature, they don’t have any distinguishing cybernetic signatures… The truth was that a lot of my data gathering tools were either meant for compiling topographical and environmental data, or locating military threats. Stuff for invading new planets, basically. I’m kiiiinda guessing that finding lost little girls wasn’t too high on the that man’s priority list when he decided how to augment us.

When I first found her at the orphanage, Amami had given me a vague hint as to where she was, but that really only narrowed it down to the geographic region. I still had to basically canvas a bunch of orphanages and do a lot of legwork. Sweet God powers wouldn’t be useful in finding her at all.

Me and Iru were running around asking passers-by if they’d seen her when we got lucky and I sensed a powerful energy pulse going on and off. I’d been feeling a bunch of smaller pulses here and there the whole time I’d been living here. I thought it might just be something funky with the power network – I’d been told that they sometimes used scavenged old-world tech to meet output demands – but in retrospect, it was probably optical camo units being pulsed on and off.

My gut told me that it wasn’t a coincidence, and a girl’s gotta trust her gut sometimes, so we flew right off in search of it. Then we started hearing huge crashes, found the junkyard full of mangled cars, and, well…

Honestly, I saw red.

I was so angry. I mean, obviously I was mad at the weird kid who was sitting there making threats to my daughter. I mean, what the heck? That body with that personality is a huge waste of cuteness! Those cute points ought to be taken away and redistributed to more deserving owners!

And who the heck goes around launching cars and flaunting their old-world technology just to look tough to a thirteen year old, anyway? Seriously, who does that? Go and bother the military if you’re that bored! Go play catch with a tank shell or something, geez!

But in the end, I was more mad at myself.

I’d… well, I wouldn’t say I’d gotten cocky, really. But I was having too much fun being a cool mom and doing stuff with Reika that I stopped being cautious. I thought everything would be fine as long as I could keep her in the bakery, a safe place where her negative karma score couldn’t get to her. I was actually pretty grateful she never wanted to go outside that much, since it meant I wasn’t having to cage her in.

But the moment I left her by herself, all this happened. And, sure, you can rationalise it and say that it was a freak occurrence, and there’s no way I could have predicted invisible croissant burglars to break in and lead her into danger. That’s like a one in ten thousand chance, right? Probably. I don’t really know how common invisible croissant burglars are on Earth (besides that they’re way more common than I want them to be).

But that’s the thing, right? No matter how low the odds are, if someone rigs the game, it’s bound to happen. Planet Earth was rigging the game against Reika, and I knew that, but I still got complacent and left her alone. All because I wanted to look cute in front of her and not like some macho mom. Sure, it’s good to care about what I look like to my daughter, I think… but it’s still ego at the end of the day.

In other words, my ego almost got Reika hurt.

I was so mad at myself that I lost it, and Iru lost it as well. She’s always liked fighting and physical activity and stuff, so without me to hold her back, she just jumped straight in… I feel like Reika must have been more scared of her than she was of that little girl. I managed to reel things in at the end, but yikes.

Speaking of Reika, she was obviously a bit shell-shocked and hadn’t talked much on the way home. As soon as we got back, she plonked herself down at the kitchen table and hadn’t really moved since.

Even when Iru asked if we were okay, she didn’t really answer. She was off in her own world.

“Ahaha. It might take a little while, but we’ll be okay,” I answered for her.

It was kind of a lie. I was bummed out, and bummed out probably didn’t even begin to describe how Reika felt. But sometimes you just had to smile and get on with things. Moping around wouldn’t make us any happier.

“Alright. I’m gonna head out, then. Think I remember seeing that kid before at my old job. They must’ve had a file on her,” Iru said. Dang, I envied her. That dense attitude of hers made her kinda bulletproof, emotionally speaking. It was the definition of ‘reliable’.

Her previous job… was some kind of peacekeeping thing? And there was a government intelligence division involved somewhere? If so, it probably wasn’t that surprising that they’d want to keep tabs on an enhanced human brat with advanced camo capabilities.

“Let me know if you turn anything up,” I told her.

“Sure. If anything happens, call me. I’ll come running.” She waved a hand at us, and left. Probably grabbed herself a donut on the way out, if I had to guess. Well, she’d earned a donut, so I’d let it slide.

That left me alone with a scared child, and a very unpleasant task ahead of me. I stroked her head a little, and gently ruffled her hair.

“Well, honey. I kinda wanted to save this for later, but we need to have a bit of a talk,” I told her, as gently as I could. As it happened, I wanted to save this talk for a lot later – maybe a few years down the road – but there was no way around it now.

Reika looked up at me with wide eyes. They were bloodshot and pink from crying, which really ruined how beautiful they were usually. “...You’re gonna tell me off for running off and getting into trouble instead of watching the shop, right?”

I gave her my best smile, and tilted my head cutely. (I knew for sure it was cute, because I practised that exact gesture in the mirror for just such an occasion.) “I don’t know, honey. Am I?”

“You’re… not?”

“Well, let’s see. You understand it was bad, right?”

She nodded slowly. “...mm.”

“And bad stuff happened because you did it, right?”

“..mmm.”

“And you wouldn’t want to do it again, right?”

“Nu-uh.”

“So I don’t need to scold you, do I? You already learned your lesson.” I gave her a gentle boop on the nose, keeping my voice deliberately light. “I would only ever yell at you if I thought you’d get hurt or do something bad if I didn’t. Like, if you put your hand over a burner in the kitchen, I’d yell at you because you might get burned. But if you already got burned, you’re probably not gonna do it again, so there’s no point yelling at you after the fact. Right?”

“Mm.” She nodded again, slowly. “Today… sucked. I never want to do it again.”

“Right,” I nodded. “So, I’m not gonna tell you off. But we do need to talk, and it’s about something really important.” I paused. “But there’s something even more important that we need to do first.”

“What’s that?”

I stood up straight, and pumped my fist in what I hoped was an inspiring gesture. “We have to bake cupcakes, of course!”

Reika blinked, but before she could think too hard about it, I hustled her to the sink to wash her hands and started getting out the ingredients.

The people of Earth said that time healed all wounds. Sure, that was probably true. But cupcakes healed them quicker. Post-trauma cupcakes had helped me and my sisters make it through some of the suckiest days of our lives, and I had no hesitation about invoking their power now.

The thing about cupcakes were that they were really easy. So simple that I could have made them in my sleep. But it was still a process. It got your hands moving and your brain ticking. You could worry about whatever it was that had you feeling down later; for right now, there were eggs to crack and mixture to whisk. Then you put ’em in the oven and you had a little bit of time to think about stuff, but not that much, because you had icing to make. And when they came out, you got to fiddle around with the piping bag and make them look all fancy. You got to accessorize them with sprinkles and those little gold and silver sugar pearls, and they filled the kitchen with the scent of baking and vanilla and it was just a whole experience.

All in all, it just took your mind off things. Sure, you would still have the same problems when you finished as you did when you started. But you’d also have cupcakes, and that was a step in a positive direction no matter how you looked at it. Take it from a Sweet God – cupcake therapy is too powerful to resist!

At first, Reika seemed like she didn’t quite know what she was doing. But after doing all that baking practice making cookies at midnight, some of her muscle memory kicked in, and she started following along after me like a hawk, trying to remember all the steps. I sat her down with a cup of cocoa while we waited for them to bake, and then let her go ham with the icing, just to kinda get it out of her system. I mean, we’ve all been kids, right? We’ve all gone through that period where we feel like icing is the best part of the cake. It takes time and wisdom to resist the allure of icing sugar and see the beauty of the sponge beneath.

By the time we’d eaten six out of the twelve we baked, she was looking a lot more like herself again. Not totally happy, obviously, and I didn’t expect her to be, but she was back on Planet Earth and not staring off into space, ruminating about stuff. That was the main thing.

Now the only thing to do was work myself up for the conversation I was about to have.

“So!” I said brightly, as she was discretely eyeing cupcake number seven. I pushed it across to her with a smile. “Um, today gave us a lot we kinda need to talk about, but I guess the number one thing is… Well, I’m not exactly a ‘normal’ mom.”

She frowned a little. Dipped her eyes. Gave attention to the cupcake. I nudged her with my elbow to break the tension.

“Hey, this is where you say, ‘that’s because you’re a cool mom’, okay?”

“That’s a little…” she began, before shaking her head. I winced. Apparently cool momhood was still a little beyond my grasp, huh…

“But you get what I mean, right? Your auntie Iru and I, well, we’re not exactly normal people.”

She looked at me, her eyes suddenly big and bright. Almost excited. “I know. I figured it out already. You’re a witch, aren’t you?”

I almost spat out my cocoa.

“Excuse me? What the heck gave you that impression?! Wait, wait, wait, before that, why would you jump straight to ‘witch’? Can’t you at least say ‘magical girl’? Your mom’s got an image to maintain, y’know?”

Reika blinked, her face falling. “You’re not?”

“I’m not,” I said, firmly. I was still kind of reeling from the double emotional gut punch. First I’m not a cool mom, then I’m a witch… I guess it’s true what they say. Kids really do have a talent for cruelty. “Honestly, things would probably be simpler if I was.”

“So, if you’re not a witch and you’re not a regular person, then what is it?”

“We-elll…” I paused, wondering what the best way to explain it was. There were a few landmines I was going to have to dance around. “Do you remember something called ‘The Great War’? It was in one of your history books, right?”

She nodded. History was one of her weaker subjects, thankfully, so the fact that I was learning it all at the same time she did barely came up. “I saw it, but they didn’t talk about it a lot.”

That was… kiiiinda my fault. A lot of history books considered stuff on the Great War to be ‘already known’, if that makes sense. It was this big cultural event that echoed in the way people lived and thought, even ten thousand years later, so it was common knowledge. A lot of them didn’t go into it.

I had deliberately picked books like that for Reika’s education. The reason was simple: I didn’t want her learning too much about Star Breaker and it triggering some kind of reaction in her.

Reika and Star Breaker were different people, separated by ten millennia. But there was a deep connection between them, because of how Planet Earth had chosen to treat things.

You kinda can imagine ‘Star Breaker’ as kind of a ball-and-chain. At birth, that chain was attached to Reika’s ankle. It was the weight she had to bear in life. And every ‘Reika’, every incarnation or rebirth that came before her, was a link in that chain. When Reika died, she too would become a link in that chain, and it would be wrapped around the ankle of the next person in line.

Well, not if I had anything to say about it, of course.

But for now, that connection was still there. If Reika ever turned around and gave that chain a yank, she would find Star Breaker waiting for her at the end of it. The last thing I wanted was for that to happen while she was still young. All my childcare books had said that while you were growing up, your sense of self was still weak. I didn’t think it would survive an encounter with what ‘Star Breaker’ was.

So, I’d been careful to avoid any history textbooks that mentioned that name, or went too closely into the minute events of the war. Thankfully, it was fairly specialist knowledge by the standards of a thirteen year old’s education.

“Okay. Well, I’ll give you the short version. There was a huge war, ten thousand years ago. A lot of people died. And by the end, the planet was in a very bad way. So bad that people weren’t sure they could live on it anymore, or if it would ever recover. So, a bunch of them… left. They got in a big spaceship, and they went out to look for a new planet to make into their home.”

Reika nodded, following along. I noticed her leaning slightly toward me, as if to rest her weight on my shoulder. It almost felt like I was reading her a bedtime story. I wondered if she ever got that in the orphanage.

“Those people travelled for a long, long time. They wandered space, and saw a lot of planets. But none of them was ever quite right. At some point, they must have gotten turned around, because eventually, they arrived back at Earth! By then… Earth was lush and green again. So much time had gone by, and so many generations of humans had lived aboard that ship, that nobody recognised it.”

I tried to keep my tone light and my expression gentle. We were coming up to the bit of the story I didn’t really want to tell.

“But… over the many, many years, a bad person had taken control of that ship. He thought that the ship’s people should have Earth all to themselves, even though people already lived there and there was so much space. So he sent out weapons. Soldiers, whose job was to invade Earth and wipe out any resistance.”

Reika tilted her head. Well, I guess we had gone from a fairy tale into a sci-fi adventure story, after all.

“Those soldiers were enhanced humans, made with the same kind of technology that had been used in the war. They had all sorts of special powers and weapon. They were forced to obey that man’s orders, even though they didn’t want to, and they fought the residents of Earth. But a very, very strong lady appeared. She could fly, and she had a shield, and she could bring her weapons out of nowhere. She fought them all and beat them, and then she defeated the bad man that was controlling them. In the end, she even welcomed everyone aboard that ship to share the Earth with the people that lived there.”

Reika’s mouth dropped open. “Mom… That really strong lady… Was that you?”

I smiled, a little ruefully, and shook my head. Then I took a deep, nervous breath. “No, honey. Me, and all your aunts… We were the ‘soldiers’ that lady beat. I’m not a witch. I’m a human weapon, designed to invade Earth.”

Reika’s expression flickered through several different states of disappointment, panic, and then, oddly, jubilation. That last one stuck. She was so fired up that she leapt off her seat.

“So you mean… that when you came to the orphanage and got me, I was actually being abducted by aliens?!” she asked, gleefully.

“No no no no! Nope! It was all legal! I signed papers! It’s still adoption, even if I am an alien!” I yelled.

“But that means aliens are real! And the floating croissants were real, too! So that means the goat conspiracy is definitely real! I’m not paranoid and crazy!”

Goat conspiracy? She’d mentioned goats a few times, and they’d been kind of a running theme, but I always assumed she just liked them. I was thinking about buying her a goat plushie, actually. Was I wrong? Actually, no, before that –

“Aren’t you worried, honey? About, um, me not being a normal person, and instead being a weapon of war sent to invade your planet?”

She looked at me with the slightly sheepish expression of someone who had just been caught doing something wrong, but had no idea what.

“Well… I mean, you’re still my mom. Even if you end up taking over the world a tiny bit, that won’t change. Right?”

“I don’t want to take over the world, though. I never did! I just want to bake cookies!” I told her. “And don’t be so quick to sell out your own planet!”

She ignored that, apparently too excited to realise she was being scolded. “So, Auntie Iru is also a space alien?”

“She is. And so is your Aunt Nanako, and Aunt Kae, and Aunt Kyoko. And Aunt Hime, technically, but she’s a bit different from us. We’re all from space, and we’ve all been welcomed back home to the planet that our people left a long, long time ago. We’re trying to live our lives in peace and happiness now,” I said. “Which for me, means being your Mom.”

Although… I wasn’t sure whether I would say it qualified as ‘peaceful’, given the heart attack I’d had today. I kept that bit to myself.

I held my arms out for a hug. I was trying to have an emotional moment, because what Mom doesn’t want an emotional moment with her adopted daughter at a time like this? But it wasn’t really happening. Reika was much, much more excited at being adopted by an alien than I could have ever predicted.

“What kinds of superpowers do you have?” she asked, her eyes glittering. “You’ve got super baking powers, right?”

“Well, I can fly. And I’m a lot stronger than a regular person. I have a shield that makes it so that barely anything can hurt me, and a whole bunch of other stuff, too. I’m a regular supermom!” I said, grinning and flexing my bicep. “Oh, but I don’t actually have super baking powers. They wouldn’t be very useful for invading Earth. It’s all practice.”

Reika raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Really…?”

“Aw, c’mon! You believed I was an alien super soldier no problem, but you won’t believe that?!” I asked.

Well, it was kind of a lie since I was also a God of Sweets, but I wanted to encourage her to dream big! Me telling her that I was actually a divine agent sent to save her soul… well… that could wait until she was a bit older. Or a lot older, actually.

“But,” I said, wagging a finger in front of her nose, “the main thing I want you to remember is that if that little girl from before bothers you, Auntie Iru and I can totally whup her butt. I don’t care how many cars she throws, or how invisible she gets. We’ll handle her. So don’t be scared, okay? You’re safe. You’ll always be safe.”

Reika smiled a little uncomfortably, and finally gave me that hug I’d been wanting. Better late than never, I suppose. “Just, um. Don’t do anything crazy, okay? I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me.”

“Don’t you worry about that, honey,” I said, brushing the hair from her cheek. “Your aunts are all way crazier than I am, anyway.”

She didn’t look too comforted by that, somehow.

But it wasn’t too long before her eyes started to droop. She’d had a long day, a big discussion, a cup of soothing cocoa, and I’d dosed her with cupcakes for that sweet, sweet sugar crash. Bedtime was coming on very quickly. She tried to keep her eyes open and ask me a few more questions about me and Iru’s ‘superpowers’, but she conked out before she could even hear the answers.

Well, that was definitely a good thing, though. After that fake-cute purple kid ran her mouth like that, I was worried Reika would be too paranoid to get a good night’s sleep. Heck, I probably would, if I wasn’t technically a bio-engineered killing machine and also a god.

I finished my cocoa, then picked her up. Most kids don’t really get picked up by their mom at the age of thirteen, but I was made of sterner stuff than most moms. I took her back to her room, flying barely an inch above the ground so I didn’t jostle her and wake her up, and tucked her into bed.

It was the first time I would use my abilities as an enhanced human – a Shifu Brand – for Reika under that roof. But starting from tomorrow, I didn’t have to hide them anymore. I could throw my whole weight into making her as happy and cute as she could possibly be. It felt more exciting than I could believe.

...In the end, it was me that had trouble getting to sleep that night.

Chapter Text

The world looks different from a height.

You might think I’m saying that because, as it turns out, my mom is a space alien. She shoots, she flies, she juliennes fries! I’ve never actually seen her julienne fries, but I’m pretty sure she could, and actually I think there’s a good chance that she could julienne anything that has ever existed in the history of the world. At this point, it wouldn’t even slightly surprise me. Once you learn your mom is a space alien, every additional thing you learn about her can only ever be less surprising than that. The fact that she can fly meant I was now theoretically able to observe the world from the troposphere with her help.

But Mom had taken me aside and explained, in very certain terms, that she was opposed to using her space alien powers to ‘cheat at life’, because ninety nine percent of people in the world were not from outer space and I had to learn to live properly without her setting a bad example. Which sounded kind of like what I’d been doing for the last entirety of my life before she adopted me, but I didn’t think that logic would fly very far with her.

Basically, she was refusing to fly or blow stuff up or any of the other cool space alien things she could probably do. Unless, like, she really really had to, or it was convenient, or funny, or I wasn’t watching (probably). Effectively, she wasn’t go to airlift me to the grocery store to buy candy.

Nope, the reason that I now know what it feels like to look down on all puny non-tall humans is because I’m in the middle of a completely non-optional, mostly non-consensual piggyback ride on Auntie Kae’s shoulders.

I have known her for exactly three minutes.

Five minutes ago, me and Mom were waiting for Auntie Kae and Aunt Nanako (Mom was very insistent on that terminology) in the middle of town, because the middle of town is a lot easier to find than some random bakery and also Mom had some shopping to do before she brought them home. The shopping is for sleeping bags. Mom bought a bunk bed, she tried to make the bunk bed, and it just didn’t. At all. Apparently Mom is kinda bad at DIY, and not bad in the sense where she sometimes pretends to be bad at stuff because she thinks it’s cute, but more in the sense that she’s just not qualified to use a hammer.

She could definitely hit things with a hammer. Anybody could do that. But just like a true knight knows when to sheathe his sword, hammer mastery is all about realising that, just because you can, it doesn’t mean that you should. At least, that was the impression I had gotten.

Anyway, she spent the entire morning trying not to curse (and yelling “Oh, sprinkles!” instead), and eventually gave up. What was left of the bunk bed looked more like a modern art piece than anything else, because Mom had inserted the wrong tab As into the wrong slot Bs and then applied hammer until it sort’ve almost worked. It was one of those metal bedframes, so I really wasn’t sure how it now looked like a melted hedgehog.

“Why are the instructions a diagram?! Just put them as a list! I understand lists! You don’t make a diagram for a cake, so why would you make one for a bed?” she’d wailed.

I shrugged. I had been helping out by making coffee (badly) and staying vaguely within hugging range so that I could provide emotional support. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Anyway, she seemed convinced that Aunt Nanako could fix it, but equally convinced that it would annoy her and she wouldn’t want to do it on the first day. And we also had to buy a nightlight, because while Auntie Kae apparently wasn’t afraid of the dark, there were certain combinations of darkness and claustrophobia and loneliness that made her very agitated. So, we did our shopping, and then waited in the centre of town for them to meet us.

Mom had told me in advance who to look for, so I knew them as soon as I saw them. Even if I hadn’t, they kinda would have stood out. Aunt Nanako was super short – I was already taller than her, and I was still growing. But she had this really confident, focused look in her eyes that not a lot of kids get. At least not the ones at the orphanage. She had violet hair and a similarly coloured dress that, to put it politely, had seen better days. I’m not saying she looked bad, but you could kinda tell she’d been on the road for a while.

Auntie Kae was almost the opposite – tall and, like, aggressively stacked. I don’t think she had quite as much going on as Mom, but Mom did not wear tight black t-shirts or move around violently. I had just enough time to wish once again that I wasn’t adopted and could have taken some of the family genetics before she spotted us and started charging at Mom like a bull, whooping as she did. Aunt Nanako followed behind at a slower pace, tutting and sighing but smiling at the same time.

“Saki! Nana, it’s Saki!” Auntie Kae said, picking Mom up by the shoulders and twirling her in a circle before setting her down again.

“Well, we came her to meet her, so I’d be worried if it wasn’t,” Aunt Nanako retorted, before looking my Mom in the eye. “You’re looking well. You’ve gained a bit of weight, though.”

“Heh heh! Maybe an ordinary woman would get mad at that! But for me, it’s all according to plan!” Mom declared bombastically. “I’m in the middle of my image change. In six… no, twelve months, I’m going to be just as cute as before, but in a more mature way!”

“I wasn’t trying to make you mad, but whatever.” Aunt Nanako huffed a sigh and folded her arms – before finally looking in my direction. “Who’s the rugrat? Did you take up babysitting as a side job?”

I wasn’t really sure how I felt about being called a rugrat by a girl who looked way younger than I did, but Mom had given me strict instructions not to let Aunt Nanako get to me.

“Nope! Actually, this is the VIP I told you about,” Mom said, swooping in with the world’s smuggest look on her face. “This total ultra cutie is Reika, and she’s…” She paused for effect. “My daughter! Aka, your niece!”

I very vaguely remember Nanako looking surprised. The reason it’s so vague is because I could only see her for about 0.3 seconds before Auntie Kae exploded into a wave of noise and sprinted towards me faster than I had ever seen any human being – or space alien – move before.

“Whoaaaaaaa! Nanako, we get a niece! A niece!” she whooped, scooping me as if I weighed no more than a half-eaten doughnut.

That brings us neatly to the present. The reason I now know what the world looks like from a height? Because I’m enjoying – enjoying? Experiencing – a very non-optional, mostly non-consensual piggyback ride from Auntie Kae as Mom leads us back home.

“A niece!” Aunt Nanako mouths, apparently gobsmacked by the news. “How did we already get a niece? I knew you had a boyfriend, but I didn’t think you’d have popped one out already…”

“What? I don’t have a boyfriend. My cuteness can’t be monopolised by one person! Anyway, none of us can bear children naturally. You know that,” Mom says. “I adopted her.”

“But I already told Hime – oh, never mind. So she’s an orphan, then?”

Mom wags a finger. “No. She’s got a family, and it’s us! Right, Kae?”

“Yeah! Let’s take her fishing! Does she do baseball?”

I’m already getting the sense that Kae is a lot closer to Iru’s mindset than to Mom’s. She’s got a very… full-bodied way of thinking. And doing. I have never played baseball or fished before, but I get the feeling that Auntie Kae is going to be expanding my horizons a bit whether I like it or not.

Thankfully, Mom takes the reins and decrees that, not only will there be no baseball because I would inevitably get hit in the face by one of Kae’s ozone-cutter fastballs and die, but there will also be no fishing in the near future. Kae’s face crumples, probably; I can’t actually see it because I am flexing every single one of my meagre core muscles in an attempt to stay safely seated on her shoulders, but she makes a kind of whimpering noise so I assume that’s what’s happening.

I don’t think I’d mind fishing with Kae, though. I don’t think we’d catch anything, because fishing is supposed to be one of those quiet activities and that does not seem to fit with Auntie Kae’s skillset, but it would be fun, probably.

I don’t know why, but I already feel kind of fond of her. Maybe just because she’s so effusively jazzed to have me around. I don’t think that’s because of anything I did – I think anybody fitting the description of small, huggable niece would be just as valid – but that doesn’t feel like a bad thing. It just feels like the kind of straightforward, unconditional love that folks say you only get from puppies or children. Not that I would really know.

Aunt Nanako seems a lot more… I wouldn’t say wary, because just like Mom and Auntie Iru, she seems completely immune to whatever weirdness makes people uncomfortable around me. But I can tell she really wasn’t expecting me to be here and she doesn’t really know how to approach kids. A lot of adults are like that, so I don’t really think it’s on her, but I hope we get along. I don’t want to disappoint Mom.

Overall, they seem a little weird. But they’re space aliens, so it’s okay. A lot of the things I found weird about Mom and Auntie Iru started making a lot more sense when I found out they’re from outer space.

“So, you’re running a bakery now? Is business good?” Nanako asks.

“Sure is! Honestly, I’m super glad you two are here. It’s just me and Reika running the place at the moment, but I don’t want helping out in the store to distract her from her studies, you know?”

“Hmph. I’m not sure what you expect us to do, though. Neither of us are really cut out for customer service.”

Mom glances to the side, and I’m pretty sure she’s thinking that Auntie Kae would do fine. Sure, maybe she might not be a hundred percent professional, but she’s tall, pretty buxom, and she has an infectious energy. Even I know that can go a long way in the working world. I can imagine her zooming to and from the counter bussing tables or something.

“Actually, Nana, I was kinda sorta thinking you could be the manager for a little while.”

Nanako almost walks into a light pole. Kae also almost walks into the same light pole, and while I think that Auntie Kae would probably win in a light pole vs space alien battle to the death, it would spell bad news for anybody currently installed on her shoulders, i.e. me.

“Are you nuts?” Nanako asks sourly. “I don’t exactly have experience running a business.”

Mom grins dauntlessly. “Neither did I, before I went and did it! But actually, I think you’ll do great. You’ve got an eye for detail and you’re super good at multi-tasking, right?”

“True,” Nanako says slowly, “but that doesn’t mean–”

“I’ve been running everything by myself since there’s nobody else, but you know I’d be way happier if I could just focus on the baking and let somebody else worry about all the management stuff. Besides, it kinda distracts me from the important things in life.”

Mom shoots me a meaningful look. Personally I feel like she’s been giving me plenty of attention, but I wonder if she’s feeling guilty because of what happened with that crazy car girl. It wasn’t the bakery she was worried about at the time, though.

“Well, I suppose I did do all the budgeting for when we were travelling, and figured out all the supplies…” Aunt Nanako says, rubbing her chin and frowning. “I guess I could give it a shot.”

“Then I guess I can let you stay in my house,” Mom winks jokingly. “Seriously, Nana, I think you’re perfect for this kind of thing. You can avoid all of the customer service, and just think of us as your minions handling the real work.”

“Hmph. I’m not a megalomaniac.” She looks at me again, frowning. “And this kid – ahem. Reika’s going to help at the bakery? Are you sure about that? Doesn’t she have school or playtime or whatever it is human kids do? Why not hire a real employee?”

“Wee-ell…” Mom says, stretching out the word. “That’s kind of a little tricky. Reika’s missed a lot of school, so I’m teaching her at home, and she’s pretty accident-prone so playing outside is a problem… Also some people tried to abduct her the other day, so–”

Auntie Kae stops so sharply I almost go flying off, and have to squeeze her neck with my thighs to keep my balance. It’s like squeezing an actual stone column. She doesn’t look mega buff, but her space alien muscles are something else.

“They tried to steal her? Before we even got a chance to meet her?” Kae asks, outrage blossoming in her voice.

“Well, technically they tried to crush her with a car, but what I’m saying is–”

“I don’t care what you’re saying, unless it’s their name, address, and next of kin,” Aunt Nanako interrupts sharply. I can kinda get Auntie Kae being mad, since she seems pretty fond of me already, but I really didn’t get that vibe from Aunt Nanako.

“Believe me, Iru’s already on it. But yeah, since it’s a delicate situation, it’s better for me to keep her where I can see her right now. Plus, I want to train her as a baker, so she’ll always have a career path ready for her even if school doesn’t work out.” Mom sighs. “It’s not that I don’t want her to go out and play and do kid stuff. It’s just… tricky, right now.”

It seems like a heavy topic, so I decide to lighten things up a bit. “I don’t want to go outside. That’s goat territory.”

“You have goats?” Kae asks, suddenly excited.

“We don’t have goats. There just are goats. Everywhere. Watching. Judging.”

Kae immediately starts looking around for the goats, which of course are hiding just out of sight, like they always are. Mom smiles at Nanako in a way that I think is apologetic – one of those ‘don’t mind my crazy daughter’ kinds of smiles. Well, the joke’s on you, Mom, because space aliens exist and I’m surrounded by three of them right now, which means every other supernatural phenomenon is on the table. Including goats.

“Oh, right. But I, uh, have bad news. Y’see, I was trying to put together your bunk bed this morning, and, um, some stuff happened, and now it’s broken!” Mom said, changing the topic and sticking her tongue out with a wink. “So, we need to pick up some sleeping bags before we take you back. I’m super sorry.”

“We have sleeping bags! They’re warm and cosy!” Kae shouts. I… don’t see any sleeping bags. But then, Auntie Iru can just magic a rifle out of nowhere like it’s not a big deal, so maybe it’s just a space alien thing. The less I think about it, the better.

“Yeah, uh, no. No offence, but you guys… Um. How do I put this? You can tell you’ve been on the road for a while. You’ve smelled better, is what I’m saying. I’ll put your old sleeping bags in the laundry, but we need something to hold you for tonight.”

Mom is, uh, yeah. Pretty correct. I don’t know if I’m brave enough to say anything about it considering that they have space alien powers, but wherever they’ve been, it wasn’t a place with showers and body wash.

“Tch. I told you were ran out of money, didn’t I? If it’s food or showers, of course we’re going to pick food,” Nanako grumbles.

“Well, we’ve got food and showers, and you’re getting both. I’ll feed you two until you pop, you hear me?”

“Wooooo!” Kae erupts. She seems pretty much as excited about eating Mom’s cooking as she was about having a niece. I don’t blame her, honestly. Mom’s cooking is great, and I don’t think nieces are intrinsically useful for anything.

I hear a loud grumble, and all of us turn to look at Aunt Nanako. She glares fiercely back. “Okay, so I might have had to skip out on food a little bit too. Sue me.”

Mom puts her hands on her hips and breathes in, and I’m sure she’s going to start yelling, but then she looks at me and deflates a little bit. I realise that she was probably about to give Aunt Nanako both barrels, but didn’t want to embarrass her in front of me.

“Well, you won’t be doing that on my watch,” she says grimly. “Right. Before we get beds, lunch is priority one. Reika, is there anything you want to try?”

I’m caught a bit by surprise, since I wasn’t expecting to fall to me. I’m not exactly an expert, but wouldn’t the guests normally get to pick? But Mom gives me a wink and a laugh before carrying on.

“Don’t worry about these two. They’re not picky eaters, as long as you don’t go too spicy. And it’ll be the first time I’ve taken you out to eat as well, so you get to pick.”

“For the record, having likes and dislikes is not being a picky eater,” Aunt Nanako grumbles.

Well, it’s not like I would have picked anything spicy to begin with. Actually, what am I going to pick? It’s not like I have any idea of what kind of restaurants are in this area, and I get the feeling that they’re all gonna kinda not great in comparison to Mom’s cooking. I start glancing around, trying to spot anywhere that might be good.

After thirty seconds of frantic thought, I decide that the answer is burgers. They’re like the default of fast food, and they’re basically sandwiches. I’ve never actually had them from a fast food place, but it’s pretty hard to make a bad sandwich, so I figure that even if they’re not up to Mom’s standards they can’t be that bad.

When I tell them, Kae whoops and waves her hands in the air, which very nearly causes me to have a fatal encounter with gravity. Aunt Nanako, meanwhile, grimaces.

“Tch. I don’t mind burgers, but every time we get them…” she grumbles beneath her breath.

“I know, Nana, but it’s not like any of us can help it, right? Good food sometimes takes a lot of pain and effort, but it’s worth it in the end, so… um, suck it up, I guess?” Mom says, and puts a comforting hand on her shoulders.

Aunt Nanako nods sullenly, and I breathe a sigh of relief. It looks like we’re going for burgers after all, then.

“No, I don’t want the kid’s meal,” Aunt Nanako says flatly.

The cashier, who has that kind of round, non-threatening body shape that you usually see on school lunch ladies in TV shows, is unfazed. “Are you sure, honey? Our adult meals are a little bit big for a cutie like you. And the kid’s meal comes with a fun toy! Wouldn’t you rather have a toy?”

The air is getting dangerous, and I can almost hear Aunt Nanako gritting her teeth. I think she’s about fifteen seconds from lunging over the counter and dunking this lady’s head in the fryer, which probably won’t improve the taste of the fries. I kinda want to order quickly so I can get pre-cashier fries with my first ever burger meal, but I feel like trying to hurry the order would just ignite the little purple powder keg next to us.

“Ahaha. Actually, we’ll take two kid’s meals, and two standard meals, please,” Mom interjects, pulling Aunt Nanako back.

“Are you nuts? I just said I don’t want a–”

Mom throws a meaningful look at Kae, who is looking at the little plastic toy display thing with stars in her eyes. They’ve arranged them in a weird kind of diorama, so it’s a bit like there’s a small plastic toy soap opera going on.

“...Tch. Fine.”

When the food comes, I’m immediately disappointed. In all the advertisements, they made a big stink of the fact that the burgers were meant to be chargrilled. These ones look chargrilled, but some part of me automatically knows that they’re not. Is that what they call womanly intuition? Maybe it’s chef’s intuition. Maybe all Mom’s cooking lessons are starting to take root in my soul.

I guess they’re not bad, though. I can’t really tell. They’re the worst thing I’ve eaten in a while, but at this point I’m used to Mom’s cooking, which I think probably blows most things out of the water. Being worse than Mom’s dinners doesn’t actually mean anything, and I wasn’t really paying enough attention to what I ate at the orphanage to use the meals there as a point of reference.

My aunts seem to be enjoying themselves, though. Aunt Nanako’s adult-size burger looks huge in her hands, but she’s demolishing it with huge bites. Auntie Kae got the kid’s meal, and even though she had just as much food as I have, she’s already vacuumed up every fry, slice of fruit and burger crumb, and now she’s playing with the little plastic toy that came with the meal.

Mom nudges me with her elbow, and gives me a little wink. “They grew up with Iru, too. You learn to eat fast with her around.”

“Did Auntie Iru actually steal your food?” I ask.

“Hmph. She’s not that bad,” Aunt Nanako says, wiping sauce off her fingertips with a napkin. “She didn’t steal it, but she just kind of… hangs around and stares at you while you eat. Like a starving dog. It’s hard not to feed her.”

“Oh! Oh! Or she plays arm wrestling with you and the winner gets something from the loser’s plate!” Auntie Kae cuts in. “It’s super fun! I win about four times out of every ten!”

I glance at Auntie Kae’s biceps, which do not seem like the kind of biceps that go four out of ten against Auntie Iru. I say that as somebody with biceps that would maybe go negative three out of ten versus hers. But bicep size isn’t everything, I guess, which is a very comforting thought.

Auntie Kae is also glancing at my biceps, which is worrying. I don’t know if arm wrestling at the table is a family tradition, but I don’t really think it would be a smart idea to take part.

“Sweetie,” Mom says quietly, and nudges me again. “You don’t have to clutch your toy like that, you know? Nobody’s going to take it away from you.”

“...Mm.”

To be honest, I hadn’t really realised that I was doing that. I picked up the toy to look at it, but at some point, I started cradling it against my body like a jealous mother cat or something.

It doesn’t make sense, and I know it doesn’t. It’s not like this toy is actually worth anything; it’s just a bit of cheap plastic made to entertain a kid half my age, if even that. But… it’s mine. It’s mine, just for me. I don’t have to share it, like I had to share my doll when I lived at the orphanage.

I take a moment, relax, and gently deposit my toy on the table. I make sure to stand it up, ready to be played with. I can’t quite bring myself to leave it too far away from me, but that’s enough for now.

In a moment of solidarity, Auntie Kae puts her toy next to mine. Then she makes her toy headbutt it. She looks at me, her face glowing, and, well, I guess this is what we’re doing now. I barely ever played with the other kids at the orphanage, but here I am waging plastic toy battles with my adopted aunt, who is very enthusiastically making sound effects as our our toys fight.

Which… I don’t know. I feel like maybe that’s a life goal? Like, having toy battles with your niece is probably peak aunt performance, and Auntie Kae has managed it day one, hour one. She certainly seems to treat it like an accomplishment, and… I don’t know. I guess I like that. I thought that Auntie Kae would be way too loud for my personal tastes, but I can’t help but like her anyway.

Aunt Nanako, who has been watching from a respectable distance, folds her arms smugly. She doesn’t actually say it, but it’s a very ‘join the club, kid’ kind of gesture. That little bit of common ground makes me think I can probably get along with her just fine.

I’m not sure how things will shake out with them living with us, and I’m definitely not sure what’s going to happen with them helping out at the bakery. (I’ll let Mom worry about that.) But I feel like both of them are holding out a hand towards me, and welcoming me as a member of their big weird family.

And for right now, I think that’s all I really need.