Several days later, Amelia woke to the smell of bacon and coffee. At some point, it had become easier to just let Forsythe into the apartment to start cooking breakfast in the morning. It was too much of a hassle to get up, be half awake, let him in, and then go back to bed. It was also kind of nice to wake up and have food being prepared. She had griped about it once, and he had simply stopped cooking and stared at her waiting for her to admit her error. She stared back, deciding she wasn't going to lose in willpower.

He then turned the heat off, told her he would prepare her usual, and then he took a food pill out and filled a glass of water and slammed it on the table in front of her. Staring at the food pill and then looking over at the breakfast casserole he was making, she had quietly apologized and he had resumed cooking. He kind of reminded her of a less patient version of her dad.

This morning as she entered the kitchen she looked at him expectantly. She was starting to think he had more cooking aprons than shirts. This one simply read on the front and back, '1 Waifu = King, 2 Waifu = No Laifu'. He was making bacon and nothing else. "Just bacon? I'm surprised." Amelia commented.

"You can't eat half a pound of delicious bacon?" He countered without looking back.

"Oh. Continue. I never argue with bacon." Amelia relented. She sat down at the table and tried her hardest to focus on it until the tablecloth patterns resolved into the correct image instead of a blur of mismatched lines. Forsythe poured her a cup of coffee. "Thank you," she greedily accepted the warm liquid and started blowing on the surface.

"While the bacon cooks, I will prepare deviled eggs and ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch. Nothing fancy today." He paused, and she smiled to herself. Half the reason he came over, she had decided, was because she was the only one who really listened and didn't badger him with question after question. "Would you mind delivering them to Raven and Aidan before class?"

"Sure. Where are they?" Amelia looked around, half expecting them to pop out of the cupboard.

"Raven is in her apartment's courtyard training a group of up and coming street thugs. Aidan is at the university cafeteria in the history building tutoring a group of students." Forsythe replied. He was busy cutting boiled eggs into halves and scooping out the yellow.

"Street thugs or tutoring. I don't know what to ask." Amelia admitted. "Let's go with tutoring, that seems stranger than Raven leading a gang."

"Aidan passed some history exam so he could do part-time tutoring. Something like 22nd century geo-global history." Forsythe explained. He put the plate of bacon in front of her and then started eco-bagging the sandwiches and deviled eggs he'd made. "Eat, and then off you go. I got a part-time job as a fry-cook on Green Street."

Amelia snickered. "Own that place by the end of the day right?"

"I will do my best," Forsythe replied, he had a slight smile, and he was even being pretty chatty today, you know, for Forsythe.

"Something good happen?" She started wolfing down her bacon.

"I went on a date last night," Forsythe said decisively, hiding nothing.

"Hunter came to the states?" Amelia raised her eyebrows in surprise.

"I went on an e-date last night." He reiterated, altering his explanation slightly. "We walked around the lake after Elisha logged off and spoke at length. I had an excellent time."

Amelia chewed on her bacon, showing him a smile and giving him a thumbs up. She wolfed it down as fast as she could after that and didn't ask for more details. He was trying to shoo her out of her own apartment.

----------------------------

"Avast, up ahead the crow's nest be tellin' me there's a whirlpool!" Raven cried. She was standing on a picnic table and had a fashionable eyepatch over one eye. She was wearing a long white button up blouse with long sleeves. One sleeve was rolled up, and the other one was tied in a fancy bow at the end of her stump. Amelia immediately saw that the gang of up and coming street thugs were actually kids. Maybe not even 10 years old yet. Old enough to be unsupervised in the complex courtyard, but not old enough to begin exploring out of window view from their parents.

"Arr!" Several of them were on either side of the table on benches, using sticks as makeshift oars to pilot what was no doubt Raven's Picnic Ship. "Captain! Enemy off … the left!" One shouted, spotting Amelia.

Small heads turned, and Raven followed his pointing and lifted up her eyepatch so she wouldn't have to turn her body. "Shall we fire the cannons?" The little twerp had grabbed a small fake lighter gun up and was making clicking noises like he was getting ready to light a fuse.

"No! Hold that cannon, do ye not recognize the most feared, the most ferocious, the strongest being in the entirety of the world!?" Raven turned on him completely hamming it up and scowled, "you'll get us all killed!"

"She doesn't look that strong." The boy insisted, looking doubtfully at Amelia.

Raven turned around and knelt as Amelia approached the table, reasonably sure she wasn't going to get fired upon by cannons. "Listen Saul, that person is like… like Finger Death Man on that show you like. She doesn't look like much, she doesn't look scary, but with one flick of her index finger, she could blow you to pieces! She wanders the world not looking for fights but for pleasure and exploration, but by god does she solve the problem if someone attacks her!" The rest of the children gasped.

"Notoriety gained. Thanks, Raven." Amelia muttered. Now she'd be having small children hiding behind their parents when she walked by.

"Ho Amelia, what offering might we give to spare us?" Raven flipped her eyepatch back in place.

"None today. Forsythe the mad has asked me to deliver you a small bag full of plunder." Amelia set the bag on the table. That's when it happened. One little girl was staring at her, face scrunched up in utter confusion, and she pulled her small, tiny hand into a fist and punched Amelia on the side of the thigh. She looked confused when nothing happened. There was dead silence at the table.

"Oh, merciful Poseidon! Spare Heather! She knew not!" Raven cried, stepping in front of Amelia and holding her arm out to one side trying to block Amelia. She winked at Amelia. There wasn't enough space between Amelia and the little girl for Raven acting as a shield to be very effective.

Amelia slowly reached passed Raven and brought her index finger back to her thumb in classic flicking position. The little girl actually fell backward onto the bench with nowhere to flee and quickly shut her eyes. The rest of the boys stared in horror, and then as Amelia reached out she very gently undid her flicking finger and ruffled the little girl's hair instead.

Everyone sighed in relief. "Oh. That is a spirited crew right there. You're about 10,000 years too early though. Don't fight if you can help it. You can only train your body so much."

"Then what do you do?" One little boy asked.

"Go to college." Amelia tossed a wave over her shoulder as she turned and left.

"Wow. Was that your lover?" The little girl asked Raven, amazed she wasn't exploded.

A couple of the kids reached out and touched her shoulders making sure she was okay in silent support.

"Are you kidding? There's nothing wrong with girl love Heather, but that woman is dating the Devil…" Raven made a face, and held her other shoulder with her one good arm and shivered.

"Woooooow." The children stared after her in wonder as she walked away, eyes wide. Amelia was snickering quietly to herself as she began walking toward the history building several blocks away. She was pretty sure she had just figured out Raven's mental age.

"Hey, he's in the history building. He got like a 12,000% on a tutoring exam." Raven called out to her back.

Aidan wasn't hard to find. He was sitting on a polysteel table while students gathered around him. From the look of them, they were mostly undergrads. They had their books opened and were scribbling occasionally. Mostly they just seemed to be listening.

"So it was a problem of economics more than a problem of alternative energy." Aidan seemed to be in the middle of something. "Most of the world economies were run by governments whose political parties gained huge donations from the big oil and petroleum companies. At some point the price was driven so high that the poverty level skyrocketed even in the more powerful and often considered wealthier nations. Unemployment, the politicians said, was really at a lower percentage than it used to be. Unemployment wasn't the problem. People had jobs but got home from working 8-12 hour days and had barely enough money to feed themselves and manage housing, let alone keep a vehicle maintained or seek some form of entertainment.

Families did better of course from shared income but it was tough starting out or being by yourself. Pretty soon people were truly working in order to live at the basest levels. These were the people who slept, ate, said goodbye to their families, and went to work. As college students, I'm sure you can relate that you need some sort of entertainment at the most minimalist of levels in order to function." He smiled, earning chuckles from the group gathered around him.

"Right but wasn't the great shift caused by the poorer nations? The ones that weren't living in what you suggest of as an entertainment-less environment but an environment where they were slowly starving to death?" One girl asked.

"Sure. The cause of that can be brought back to those same world-leaders though. Instead of devoting energy and resources to solving issues like hunger locally though, they were working on alternative modes of transportation…" He made a hand rolling gesture. "It was unaffordable and infeasible to provide food to those countries because the price of transportation made it implausible and unprofitable. Basically, the cost of transportation outweighed the cost of the food itself. As oil and petroleum prices increased the regions affected by this situation began increasing. Then you have the starving people in those nations looking at the lower and middle classes of the wealthier nations and they weren't sympathizing with them anymore, they were saying that at least those people could afford food for their families. The result was much the same though, a type of living that was unsustainable because no one was happy or really even living their lives, they were just feeding the corporations, corporations who would soon run out of the oil for the machine it had built. It was never a question of not enough food. Certain countries literally threw away ugly looking food because consumers had been told it wasn't any good. Entire crops rotted because it wasn't lucrative to move them. More than enough food for most of the populations."

"In your opinion is that the impetus for the 2180 riots and wars that broke out in the middle-east?" Another student asked.

"It didn't help. They didn't want the oil companies and foreign powers in their countries anyway. When they left, it was even harder for them. These companies had stolen all of the country's capital and squashed the education of its citizens, which might be unfair to say. Basically, there was no education because these people had been rebelling and fighting for so long there was no infrastructure. When the companies left they were literally sitting in a crater." Aidan explained.

"Is that when the 'Eat The Rich' thing was going around?" Another asked.

"Yes, it was around the same time. Good catch, I always thought it was the same social issues that caused that idiot to do what he did." Aidan nodded.

"Eat The Rich?" The first girl again.

"Yes, for those of you who don't know that was the name of a supposed terrorist group that targeted, most specifically, the 1% wealthiest individuals in the world. The name came from an economist on a talk show radio who was describing what would happen if taxes weren't based on income, and increased based on incredibly high income. He said that pretty soon there would be the richest people in the world sitting on their money, fine for a while, but the hungry people who could work all day and still couldn't pay all the bills would eventually begin to starve and would be looking around and asking each other what they could eat. Eventually, someone would look at that minority and they would say, 'well, why don't we eat the rich?'"

There was a scattering of snickers but Aidan shook his head. "Just don't laugh if it comes up in class. Eat The Rich was a terrorist who designed a flat-bomb. Something that was pretty much as thin as a piece of plastic or a card from a deck of cards that he could slip in. When it made contact with itself via folding or received a signal, depending on how it had been set up, it would explode. He actually killed quite a few of the wealthiest people in the world at that time by delivering newspapers and slipping them in the financial sections. They never found him until he was in an accident and was dying in a hospital bed. In his final moments, he admitted to everything." Aidan paused and glanced at the wall. "Looks like you guys better skedaddle. We'll talk more tomorrow!"

"One last quick question!" The first girl again. "Do you think the Eat the Rich guy made any impact?"

"He made everyone paranoid and made room for new 1%'ers, and he was a murderer. In the grand scheme of things his popularity and his impact were entirely the media's fault, not a reflection of any social change pushed by the actual deaths." Aidan spread his hands and elaborated. "Basically no, the media made more of a statement for him than the deaths of those people. Their deaths weren't a solution, because the money those people had amassed went to their corporations or their families. If anything, it shook the stock and shares of those companies and hurt the middle-class."

Amelia finally made her way to the table and handed him the bag. As he took the bag he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. "Ooh, what's this?"

"Lunch. To be delivered. Failure results in death." Amelia reported.

"Ah. Deviled eggs. He's hilarious sometimes." Aidan muttered, causing Amelia to blink. Then she started snickering. She hadn't even made the connection and wondered if Aidan was overthinking it.

"Are you educating the unwashed masses now?" Amelia asked. "You kind of even have that sexy young professor thing going."

"I have a certain advantage when it comes to tutoring 22nd-century history." Aidan smiled wryly.

"Yes. Being there would help I imagine." Amelia conceded.

"Class?" Aidan asked her, tilting his head.

"Nah. I can skip the midterm because I'm acing it. I don't think anyone has to take it in my class really." Amelia shrugged. "I was thinking of exercise in a bit."

"Wanna go for a walk then?" Aidan grinned.

"You and walks. Sure." Amelia held her hand out and he threaded his fingers in hers as he jumped off the table. "You know, Forsythe has a part-time job cooking and Raven is training her next juvenile pirate crew."

"Must be Tuesday." Aidan shrugged.

After they had been walking for a while Aidan nodded his head to a little girl that ducked out of sight behind a tree. They were passing Raven's housing complex. "What's her fascination I wonder?"

"Oh, I met her earlier. She's probably stalking me when I'm close enough." Amelia confided.

"What did you do to her?" Aidan asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I didn't explode her," Amelia replied confidently and magnanimously.

Aidan thought on that for a long time, and at last, gave her hand a small squeeze. "Girls are weird."