Lyn and I exit the lower room to find my team getting along with the kids. Bently and Norah race each other while giving piggyback rides. Orville patiently allows two of the girls to braid his white hair, which he’s been growing out recently. Penelope is doing her healing work, stoically treating one of the little ones while delightful chaos unfolds around her. One of said little ones immediately struts up to me and kicks me hard in the shin.

“Ow! What the fuck?” I snap.

Before I’m even done talking, though, she buries her head in my belly, arms squeezing tightly around my waist.

“Gone too long,” she mumbles.

I snort out a sigh, annoyance leaving as I hug her back.

“Well, I can’t say I disagree,” I answer. “It’s good to be back. You eat enough while I was gone?”

She nods.

“Orville got us lots of food before he left too,” she answers.

Did he? I raise an eyebrow his way, but he just shrugs. Well damn, I owe him now. I pick the little one up and go rushing after Bently and Norah. With her on my shoulders, we’re almost as tall as them. Tendrils pulsing in and around my legs, it’s time to see if I can actually beat our two martial experts with this new power. My little sister whoops and cheers as I run after my team, although to my annoyance they both slow down and simply let me catch up.

“Uh-ohhh,” Norah coos, tickling her passenger’s feet. “Looks like we have a new racer!”

She’d picked up the youngest one of the kids, or at least who I assume to be the youngest since he’s so small. I’ve never really asked. He giggles and cheers, though, which puts a smile on my face.

“So then, we have a new team!” Bently announces. “Vita aaaaand…!”

I glance up at the kid on my shoulders. What was her name, again?

“Angelica?” I hedge.

“Angelien!” she corrects angrily, drumming my head in protest. “I’m Angelien!”

“Yeah, that. Vita and Angelien, reporting,” I say, saluting blandly.

Norah and Bently both give me a weird look.

“What?” I demand.

“This is… your family, right?” Norah questions. “Like, you lived here?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I answer hesitantly.

“Vita never talks to anybody!” Angelien complains. “She never listens either!”

I scowl, not really refuting it. Norah and Bently share a concerned glance, but to my relief we just return to the races. The two of them chat with the kids as we run, their overly-excited voices laced with a condescending tone that the kids lap up. I guess when you’re actually a kid, it doesn’t hurt to be treated like one.

I manage to win a few races, but that happens less and less as I tire until eventually I can’t even come close to them. Norah’s endurance far outstrips mine, and as far as I can tell Bently never gets tired. His soul feels… weird. Like there must be more to his talent that I don’t understand. It’s not really my mystery to solve, though, and I wouldn’t know how to go about trying anyway.

“Vita,” Penelope interrupts tiredly, approaching us with a sweat-drenched face. “Your turn now.”

“Oh, all right,” I answer, removing the current child from my shoulders. Jarod, I think? Maybe Jari? One of those two. “Thanks again for doing this, Penelope.”

“Of course,” she breathes. “It’s good practice for me anyway. Now come on, I need you to lie down.”

I do as instructed, trying to shift so that lying on my belly won’t be horribly uncomfortable.

“Times like this I can’t help but be really glad to have met you,” I comment idly. “But then there are other times you’re just this conniving bitch and I want to rip your… uh, throat out. It’s hard to get a read on you.”

Penelope sighs, and from the way her soul sings a clockwork beat I can feel she’s measuring her response carefully.

“You’re still mad about Litia, aren’t you?” the biomancer eventually asks.

“Yeah,” I confirm. “I know you were doing it to save me, but… I still can’t forgive you for it. Maybe that’s dumb, but it’s how it is.”

“What exactly did you do to the two slimes that possessed you against your will, again?” Penelope responds coldly. “If anyone had a right to kill that creature, it was me. You know that. Besides, it was going to be found one way or another anyway. How would you even get back into Skyhope?”

I nod a little, scowling. I feel a little better after talking with Lyn about it, but I can’t help but be frustrated.

“Well again, thanks for treating everyone.”

“Mhm,” she murmurs. “Speaking of treating, I need to treat you to another spa day today. We’re introducing you to First Lord Erebus and you have to look your best.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“That’s your fiancé, right? The guy that basically owns me, now?”

“More or less, yes,” she answers. “We’ve caused a lot of trouble for the house, so I’ll need to reassure him that you’re worth it. Which means you need to make a good impression.”

“Well, as you well know, I have a long history of making great impressions on nobles,” I answer blandly.

“Hah. Yes, well, that is why I will be helping you prepare this time.”

I nod again, settling into the long treatment. It isn’t particularly comfortable getting biomancy shoved into my body, but at this point I’m used to it. Penelope was doing it the entire trip to Litia and back, after all. There’s not much else I want to say to her that’s safe to say in public, so I don’t. I wile away the time practicing cancel commands, wishing someone in my head could correct my mistakes for me.

Eventually, Penelope finishes. I get up off my increasingly sore chest to stretch, rejoining my team and ignoring the protests of the kids wanting them all to stay. I’m happy to let my team stick around if they want, and Orville apparently made the journey here a number of times alone without getting mugged so they should be fine without me. Yet with my mom hugged, the treatments done, and the food given, I have nothing else I need to do here. The others seem to want to follow me, and that’s fine too. The five of us head out, and as soon as we’re alone, Norah turns my way.

“Vita, what the actual fuck?”

“You’re gonna have to be more specific,” I tell her blandly.

“I can’t believe the people here look that sick,” Bently whispers.

“I can’t believe you don’t know your goddamn family’s names!” Norah exclaims.

“Lyn and Rowan are my family,” I counter. “The kids are… I dunno, they’re family now. But for the past year they were just bits of bread not going to my mouth, okay? Lyn and Rowan were my friends and kind of my family but the kids weren’t. They were Lyn and Rowan’s, not mine.”

Norah gives me a searching look, her face pensive.

“Even if you didn’t love them, you don’t think it’s weird that you don’t know their names?”

“It’s not like I ever had to get their attention. They knew better than to steal from me so we left each other alone.”

“But you care about them,” Bently insists. “If you care about someone, you should at least know their name.”

“I’m new to the luxury of caring about them, okay?” I grumble. “Sorry. I just… I guess I’m just not that empathetic.”

“If you weren’t empathetic, you wouldn’t be helping them at all,” Orville points out.

I shrug, not arguing the point. I still don’t know what Penta really meant by that. She never pushed it a second time.

“Well, as shitty as a sister as I may be, thanks for coming everybody. They seemed happy.”

“Yeah, no problem, Vita. It was fun.” Norah gives me a reassuring smile, though whether it’s reassuring me or herself, I don’t know. “Kinda reminded me of home.”

“You mean the one you have now or the one where everybody died?” I ask.

Orville, Bently, and Norah all wince at the same time. I look around in confusion. Did I miss something?

“The one where everybody died, Vita,” Norah manages to get out.

“Oh, okay.” I pause. There’s probably something else I should say, right? “Um, you can show me your current home sometime if you want. Y’know, since you’ve seen mine.”

“Sure, it’s a date,” Norah answers.

I wrinkle my nose.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

Everyone else bursts into laughter. Even Penelope!

“H-hey! What’s so funny?”

“N-nothing, never mind,” Norah chokes out between laughs. “I-it’s just an expression, Vita! I wasn’t asking you out. Like, you know, regardless of your actual age… you look way too young.”

“I don’t want to date anyone anyway, so that’s fine by me,” I grumble.

“Really? Nobody?” Norah presses. “Is there nobody you find attractive?”

“I didn’t say I don’t find people attractive, I said I don’t want to date anyone. It’s annoying. Heck, the last guy I thought was hot almost cut my head off.”

“I have to admit, Templar Dasil’s face was quite professionally done,” Penelope agrees.

“Into men, huh?” Norah grins impishly. “How do Bently and Orville stack up?”

“Hey!” Orville protests.

“Bently’s hotter than Orville,” I answer immediately. “They’re both pretty middle-of-the-road, though.”

“Hey!”

More laughter erupts, mostly from Penelope and Norah. I smile a little, not totally getting it but glad people seem so amused. As weird as they are, they’re my team… and since they’re mine, they matter.

“Well, as fun as this is,” Penelope starts, her chuckles fading away, “Vita and I need to go take care of a few things.”

“Ooh, you two off to do secret stuff without us?” Norah taunts.

“Yeah, pretty much,” I answer bluntly.

“It’s nothing too fancy,” Penelope insists. “I just owe her for getting that damn slime out of my head.”

“Wait, I thought you said I owe you for— ow!”

Penelope kicks me in the shin, which hurts like heck. I hop on one foot as I rub on the spot to ease my pain.

“I don’t know why I bother trying to be subtle around you,” she grumbles. “Now they’re going to be curious and bother us incessantly.”

“No, no, it’s fine! We’ll leave you alone.” Orville backpedals. “Right, Norah?”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Norah agrees.

The inner smugness radiating off of Penelope indicates that’s the response she’s been fishing for, but outwardly she remains prickly.

“Please see that you do,” she demands. “Now then, shall we, Vita?”

We head out, and at first I wonder why Penelope isn’t having us change clothes. Soon I realize, however, that she plans to buy us new ones. My protests fall on deaf ears as people I’ve never met before touch me all over, grabbing measurements and rushing to fulfill Penelope’s orders. I jab a tailor in the soul when she gets too touchy, causing them to let out a yelp of surprise and jump backwards… which in turn makes Penelope chastise their professionalism.

We don’t get the clothes right then and there; apparently mine have to be made from scratch. So soon enough my ratty ass is back in the rich district, feeling increasingly uncomfortable, what with my blood-covered hunter getup. At least Penelope is similarly dressed, if not similarly bloody. I don’t know how she kept so clean after tromping through the forest, but she did. Fuckin’ mages.

“Goodness, Lady Vesuvius!” the woman behind the counter gasps when we finally make it to the bathhouse. “Your friend looks like she got into quite the mess again!”

“Yes, hanging around outside the walls will do that to a woman. Dreadful place. I’d like a private room this time, if you would. There should be an outfit order in my name coming as well, so please have that ready for us when it arrives.”

“Of course, Lady Vesuvius,” the receptionist answers, bowing her head.

“It’s so fucking weird that you can make people act like that,” I comment.

“That’s how you should be acting!” she snaps. “Besides, you’re hardly one to talk about employing disturbing help.”

“Wh— hey! That’s unfair!”

“Life’s not fair. Now come on.”

Soon enough we’ve stripped, rinsed, and gotten into a lusciously warm tub. I let out a sigh of pleasure, my body and soul drooping as the relaxing waters flow over us. I reach tendrils up to comb through my hair, savoring the feeling of pulling my long, ratty nest into a more comfortable arrangement. Penelope raises an eyebrow at the sight, casting some kind of spell before speaking.

“Well. The kynamancy protections seem solid here, so we should be safe to talk. Therefore, I must ask… what exactly are you doing? Is that kineticism? Don’t tell me you’ve actually become dual-talented.”

“Huh? Oh. No, my soul just has tentacles now.”

“...Ah. Could you elaborate, perchance?”

“Boop,” I respond, poking her in the soul. The bottom part, of course, since it’s so adorably squishy. She doesn’t move, but I feel her almost put a plague on me.

“What. Was. That?”

“Tentacle,” I repeat. Didn’t I just say that? “When the Mistwatcher looked at me my egg hatched and now I’m an eyeball with tentacles. It’s neat. Now I’m kinda wondering if I’m related to the big guy.”

“What, like a demigod?” she asks sarcastically, rubbing her belly over where her soul rests. “As amusing as that would be, I somehow doubt it. Still… that is what rose the range on your abilities? You are very strange, Vita. I’ve never heard of a talent anything like yours.”

I puff up happily.

“Yeah, well, I guess I am pretty cool, huh?”

Penelope snorts.

“Anyway, you say the Mistwatcher did look at you? I imagine you’re sure because it caused your… hatching. Obviously, from now on, that did not happen. You were mistaken. Any time you are ever asked that, henceforth, you will say nothing else. To do otherwise will likely result in your death.”

I nod, slowly.

“I… okay. Geez, I can’t believe I’m double-illegal now. I guess it doesn’t really get any worse though.”

“Don’t say that,” Penelope groans. “It can always get worse. Speaking of, Johann—whom to you is exclusively Lord Erebus, or First Lord Erebus if you wish to really lay it on thick—needs to agree to my decision to make you part of his house. Which means we must convince him that you are worth angering Templars for… without revealing to him that you’re an animancer.”

“Don’t trust your future husband, huh?”

“He may be my fiancé, but I have no intention of having him as my future husband,” she answers immediately. “I’m not sure if he’d turn you in or decide to use you, and I’m also not sure which would be worse.”

“I mean, I’m sure which would be worse.”

Penelope snorts. I flick some water at her, which she ignores.

“In any case, we’re going to claim that you’re a natural metamancer, and that I need your assistance to continue my immortality research.”

“Wait, you’re doing immortality research?”

“Of course I am. Never mind that immortality would utterly tear apart our entire system of government, it’s more or less what I’m forced to research by every noble that has the ability to sway me. And, truth be told, cracking it would without question cause me to be declared a True Lady myself, so I admit that somewhat factors into my motivations.”

Well huh, okay. So all that brain stuff she does is her trying to figure out how to live forever. I don’t know how the two things are related, but presumably the biomancer does.

“So, why am I pretending to be a metamancer?”

“Two reasons. One: it’s the best way to disguise your deathtouch. When you kill something with it, the cause of death appears to be mana backlash, of all things. It’s the kind of death you’d see from a mage that bit off more than they could chew and failed to cancel their spell in time. There are metamancy spells with similar effects, though none as effective as yours that I know of.”

“And the second reason?” I ask, poking at my belly with my soul to watch the skin seem to move of its own accord.

“Because you are a metamancer, for all intents and purposes. A rather genius one.”

The woman leans close to me, a manic grin swallowing her face.

“You have Theodora’s soul, yes? And I have ‘taken care of’ her body. We need only a safe place to put her, and that genius is all ours.”

I nod, a smile of my own twitching at my lips without prompting.

“Two Theodoras, actually,” I correct softly. “The Nawra would know everything she knew.”

“You saved that soul too?” she asks, leaning back again. “Well, all the better. It won’t be hard to hide two Revenants when we’ve hidden the first. Funnily enough, Theodora taught me how. I’ll prepare the basics and she can finish them herself. Are you bringing back ‘Penta’ as well?”

“I think… no,” I answer, frowning. “She’s my friend. I would feel bad controlling her.”

Penelope rolls her eyes.

“Isn’t that an irony. Well, suit yourself. If things go as planned, we’ll both be getting all the power and knowledge we can spare.”

I can’t help but laugh at that, using my tentacles to massage my sore legs.

“And about how likely do you think it is that things will go to plan?”

Penelope shrugs.

“Mmm, well. Isn’t that the question. They do say no plan survives contact with the enemy, so we may have to improvise at some point. But beyond that… what do you think?”

I raise an eyebrow, smirking at her.

“Wait, do I even get a say in it?”

“Yes,” she answers simply. “Of course you do. I may have a sword hanging over your neck but I’d prefer you cooperate in spite of that, not because of it. You have many things I want, and I believe I have many things you want. This need not be a relationship of debt or spite.”

I frown, thinking on that.

“There is one thing I want that’s been bothering me,” I say.

“Oh? Do tell.”

“Well, I’ve mentioned this offhand a few times before, but I’ll come out and say it. Your soul sings your true emotions. It’s kinda scary how good you are at hiding them, but I can tell when you’re faking. Which is pretty annoying, since you’re faking almost all the time. Weren’t you the one that got on my case about that back when we first met? It’s gonna be hard to like you if you keep saying things that aren’t what you mean.”

She’s genuinely taken aback for a moment, flashes of surprise and irritation jolting through her melody. Most prominently, though, her soul is afraid.

“I think it is going to be even harder for you to like me if I do say what I’m really feeling, Vita,” she answers slowly.

“Well,” I counter, “let’s give it a shot anyway, cuz this ain’t working.”

A long pause stretches between us, her emotions twisting around in a chaotic tune I can barely follow. Dozens of potential answers pass through her mind, all of which she rejects. Which kind of defeats the point, of course, but I can accept that it’s likely a hard habit to break.

“During our biomancy sessions I have been secretly manipulating your body so that you develop into someone more conventionally attractive when you’re older,” she eventually admits.

I blink.

“What!?”