“Humph!” Zoe gave Arthur the stink eye, not even bothering to hide her discontent.

She gave his hand a tight squeeze ‘Ow! Ou! I’m sorry!’ before continuing with her explanation.

“Even if my scourgekins were starting to combine into a sentient, or maybe sapient being, there was still a major part of me that was a chaotic, unintelligent mess. I simply call it my chaos.

The chaos didn’t want me to… think. It just wanted me—us to keep on consuming, consuming, and consuming anything and everything in our path with even the slightest hint of life. I—I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. I felt my soul splitting into two parts, each fighting for dominance, devouring one another like mad. It… hurt.

Even now, I feel the past me and the current me are two different beings altogether.” Zoe had a sad look on her face as she got to this part. She let out a fatigued sigh, no longer squishing Arthur’s hand into a napkin.

“That’s why I started to look for a way to remove it…the chaos, once and for all. After trying for years with the feeble intelligence I had, the sapient me figured out a way to trap the chaos in magically sealed prisons. My cores.

Every fifty to hundred years, I would trap a bit of chaos into these cores and throw them away. Into seas, volcanos, space, and even extra dimensional portals! Every time I did that, I became weakened and went into deep slumber. After all, chaos it may be, it was still the most fundamental part of my being back then. I… don’t remember much of what happened because of that.

It was a very wasteful method. It took a long long time to become me. And finally, about two hundred thousand years ago, during the dawn of the 3rd age, I truly became who I am today. I became… a Zoe.

Before that, my memories felt episodic. I can still remember every feeling I experienced vividly, but the constant slumber made me grasping for the world around. Every time I woke up, the era changed. Few people I knew survived, never to be seen again. This repeated again, and again, and again!” The eldritch maiden let out a quiet scream. The cat must have felt the girl’s anguish. It perked up its ears, slowly squirming into her embrace. She gave Zoe’s red face a few licks.

The maiden giggled. Arthur himself was looking at her with a complicated expression. He was aware that he was forcing Zoe to lay her past bare before him. Yet he could not stop, no matter how guilty he felt.

He looked at his aching hand, his eyebrows squinted. Then with a heavy heart he wrapped the girl’s hand with his, bracing for impact.

Zoe smiled, and didn’t disappoint.

‘Ooowwiee! I.Do.Not.Regret!’

“Two hundred thousand years ago, there was just a tiny bit of chaos left. I had almost won. The cores, as wasteful as they were, worked!

But I soon realized that it was impossible to remove that final clump of chaos completely. It was as vile as the rest of scourges; not at all a mild darkness you humans have. It was a chaos that made a scourge, a scourge. If I remove it forcefully… I—I would die.” ‘

Zoe stopped and looked at Arthur with her glistening eyes. Even if she was an ancient horror, her height in human form was still shorter than his. She let go of his hand, the guilty look from before returned.

“I’m guessing the pendant was that last bit of chaos?” Arthur cautiously asked.

“Yes. I—I know it may sound like just an excuse, but it was actually Juliet, your mother’s idea! She miraculously found me twenty-five years ago! Your father, Patrick, was also there, sailing a yacht in the middle of a violent storm like it was nothing.

I was cooped up in a trench in the Tasman Sea, dealing with severe depression back then. For Two hundred thousand years I’ve raided the archives of almost all the major and minor powers on Earth and beyond. Orthodox, Unorthodox, and everywhere else. I tried so many methods, but none of them were helpful.

Those useless posers, always preaching how awesome their methods were and how everyone else’s were garbage. They’re all garbage! I know. If mysticism had PhDs, I would have earned a thousand of them at this point.”

‘So that must be one of the reasons why she disliked Liu Feng so much…’ Arthur mused, smiling at Zoe’s antics. Then he paused, ‘Wait a minute. She always grounded me when I tried to steal snacks from her pile! How come she gets to be the burglar! So hypocritical!’

Zoe didn’t notice Arthur’s slightly dark expression as she continued recounting her deepest memories, “By that time, the chaos inside me was trying to fight back because of my long periods of failures. It was regenerating! Devouring myself bit by bit to feed and grow.

I feared if I couldn’t get rid of it soon, I would return to being a mindless, consuming, unintelligent monster. Your parents, they… they saved me from that fate.” At this point, Zoe was softly sniffing. She probably didn’t realize she was squishing Arthur’s hand a little too hard again.

‘Ouch ouch!’

Whether she was crying because of guilt, or relief from escaping an almost inevitable doom, Arthur didn’t know.

Zoe wiped her tears with the Kotatsu cloth.

‘Hey!’

‘Sorry! Hehe.’

The maiden continued, “A lot of amazing things happened in those short few months. Your mother was already pregnant with you back then. She called you her sunshine, and you really were! I don’t know what secrets your parents were hiding to this very day, but they somehow knew you would be born different than most people...That was the key to everything.”

“She didn’t share her secret, but shared yours with me.” Her eyes looking at Arthur turned weird. It had passion, heat, possessiveness, fear, guilt, and a hundred other emotions in them as she looked him dead in the eye.

A cold shiver ran down his spine as he almost instinctively leaned back. But Zoe didn’t let him. She held both his hands tightly to her chest, making her way right in front of his nose.

She stammered with excitement, “I-It gave me a method of salvation! I remember what she said perfectly, ‘You’ve lived so long old lady, but you’re still so dumb. If the chaos won’t leave, and won’t listen, just ram it till it does.’ She was the cheekiest brat I’d seen.” Zoe laughed cheerfully. “As if I didn’t try any method I could possibly think of after thousands of decades. But yes, what she said was right! You helped me ram it to oblivion!”

‘Mom, a brat? You mean she was a thug, right?’ Arthur started sweating. One because Zoe’s gaze was turning more stranger, fierier by the second. Two, because he just couldn’t imagine that ruffian of a mother being a cheeky brat.

‘Wait, come to think of it, are dad and mum like… espers or something? Like the monk?’

“You were actually the exact opposite of me. You had no chaos at all! All perfect order when you were born, how weird is that! Some ignorant people might think that is a special ‘physique’ and whatnot, but I know for a fact it’s more like a disability. Scourges are all chaos after all. They are the king of mental disability.” Zoe exhaled slowly after speaking all that in a single breath.

‘You talking about yourself, lady?’ Arthur snickered inwardly.

Zoe was too into it to notice the sarcastic look on his face. “Your parents knew you would be unable to live a normal life as you were. You might even die unexpectedly because of the imbalance. Hell, there was no balance or imbalance. You need both chaos and order for that.

You would be an unfeeling being. Unable to comprehend pain, sadness, anxiety, jealousy, frustration… and love. You would have no wants or desires. It’s what those hypocrites in the council and temples strive for. It’s a perpetual state of madness if you ask me.” Zoe scoffed, retreating back to her cushion. The fiery redness in her eyes gone as if they were never there. The confused cat promptly jumped back onto her lap.

Arthur sighed in relief, happy that she was back to normal. He then pondered on what Zoe was talking about. She probably meant the Buddhist or Indian monks living in the Asian region?

‘Are they the same thing? No, I remember the majority of the Indian region being Hindu…’

“She asked me to give you my chaos, to dampen your order. And in return, you would dampen my chaos. That was, umm, the last pendant. The very last core with chaos. According to Juliet, with a bit of special preparation, you would be able to dilute both my chaos and your order into a stable form, reaching an equilibrium.

We tested for three whole years after you were born. It was a risky project for both you and me. The threat of failure and dying was real. But the three of us, and a few of your parent’s closest friends worked tirelessly day and night using all our wisdom. Finally, our simulations showed success. The results were very promising with miniscule chances of failure!

I crafted the final core, separating the chaos with a part of my soul. Before I died and perished, your mother successfully linked the core with your soul and order. The initial danger was successfully averted. All we had to do next was wait, wait, and wait! It’s because of that I was almost always stuck to you for a decade and a half. I’m so glad you didn’t think I was annoying.” Zoe looked a bit embarrassed as she said that, hiding her red face with the kotatsu blanket.

‘Oh no, you were definitely annoying. Annoying and super clingy!’

“Umm, I kind of got used to you being around. Like a big sister. Hahaha '' Arthur took care to maintain his ultimate poker face. He knew only hell awaited him if even a bit of discontent leaked through.

“Hehe. You probably don’t remember it. When you were a kid people used to think you were some kind of prodigious savant. You were so dumb when it came to some things, and so genius when it came to others.

“Over the years, you grew from a toddler to a teenager. The pendant was doing its job perfectly. At this point, I was having some trouble with cognitive abilities myself, as it was the last phase of the dilution. So, I decided to hole up in the lava tube below until the core completely reached equilibrium. I could still maintain human form, even though it was hard. That’s why I rarely spoke to you face to face back then. It was… almost completed.

But then, five years ago…”

“My parents disappeared. I remember you left soon after that …” Arthur finished her sentence with a sigh. He was starting to grasp the sequence of events.

“… They were caught up in some kind of mess. God knows what they were doing on Earth. I was always on the moon with you, because of the core. Your parents though, had their own matters to handle. They were investigating… something. For some reason or another, they never told me. I didn’t ask either.

A few days before they went missing, they came back. Do you remember?” Zoe asked. “Your father was injured too. It created quite a fuss in the family back then.”

“Yeah… Mother said dad got hit by a truck. Should’ve known something was up. The last traffic accident was almost two hundred years ago.” Arthur replied, remembering the lame excuse his mother made. His youngest aunt almost got into a fist fight with his mother over that.

Zoe was stumped at that for a few seconds. Then she laughed out loud, “You would think that would be the case, right? No! It was actually true. It wasn’t a traffic accident, however. It was another scourge called The Malum Machina. It’s basically a legion of machines calling for the destruction of all life that exists. They threw trucks, buses, and even his yacht at Patrick. That’s how he got hurt.”

Arthur’s eyes widened with shock, not bothering with the small misunderstanding. Zoe just dropped the biggest bombshell yet.

‘Yeah, they were definitely superhuman then. I can’t believe it! They kept it a secret from their only son!’

“They came back to Whitewood back then to hand me something important. What they didn’t know was that, the Malum Machina followed them somehow. It was very weird. I should know. Scourges, they don’t do that. They don’t have the IQ to make conscious decisions like that unless they were being subtly guided by a third party. According to Patrick though, that wasn’t the case.

It drilled into the lava tube from every direction. That’s why there were so many tunnels leading to that place. I covered up all the smaller ones but lost my sanities before I could fix the one leading to your basement. All I could do was seal it with my wooden offshoots. It was a big fight, after all. I had no time.

All I could do was cast a space lock before this part of the moon got devastated. It was hard to maintain my form, and your parents were not in their best form either. The three of us fought hard for a long time, and finally after grievous injuries managed to kill the scourge.” Zoe paused, taking a deep breath. Arthur patiently waited, figuring out the next part would be key.

Zoe didn’t disappoint, “Not before it did… something… to your parents. At the last moment of its unlife, before I completely dissolved and devoured it, it hit your mom and dad with a pulse of light. The pulse morphed into a mysterious beam that ripped space and reality itself apart. It was one of the strongest, and weirdest attacks I have ever seen in my long life.

The weirder thing is, your parents didn’t even try to dodge it. Instead, they jumped right into it. I still remember their faces back then; it was filled with ecstasy. As if they had found a treasure after searching for a long time. That’s what still bothers me. That’s what bothers me the most.” As Zoe spoke, she took out something from her stomach, literally. The palm phased through her sundress, and reached deep inside her tummy. She searched for a while, and finally brough her closed palms out.

‘This… is going to take some getting used to.’

When she opened her hand, there was a small, bronze coloured but bizarrely non-metallic, gear-shaped item, with a red gem embedded in it. There were weird inscriptions on the surface, and the ragged edges of the gear made Arthur doubt what its purpose was.

“This is what your mom gave me for safekeeping. Even now, I have no idea what the inscriptions mean, or what the gem is. It feels so familiar, but foreign at the same time. It’s the only clue I have, however. After that fight, I needed to recover urgently. But I had to look for them too. Why did they suddenly turn suicidal? It makes no sense!

For the last five years, I have sent out offshoots all over the world. It was useless though, as I didn’t find a single clue. Whatever they were doing, they covered their tracks perfectly. Still I can’t sense their existence. If they had died, I would definitely know. We had a familiar contract. It is still active, both Patrick’s and Juliet’s! The ends of the contract reach nowhere, nonetheless. It’s like they never existed.” She stopped and looked at Arthur. She seemed calm, but her eyes revealed the opposite emotion. She was bothered, and gripped by nervousness.

“Haaaaaaah.” Arthur exhaled out the breath he had subconsciously held. It was… a lot to take in, that’s for sure. Even just yesterday Arthur didn’t know a single thing about all this supernatural mumbo jumbo. Yet in the span of a few hours, he was knee-deep into it.

“I’ll be honest. Half of what you said still feels like rubbish to me. My heart tells me to accept it, but my brain says you are neurotic.” Arthur finally spoke after a while. He noticed the frown on his babysitter’s face. But after a while the maiden also sighed, the expression on her face loosening.

“It probably sounds a bit unscientific.” Zoe said.

“It is unscientific Zoe.” Arthur threw his hands up in resignation. “Let me ask you something else. For the last few months, I’ve been having rather horrible luck. Do you know anything about that?”

“Umm, yes. It’s probably the pendant too. In fact, your mum named it a negativity core.” Zoe replied. “The dilution process was actually completed a few months ago. The bad luck was probably a side effect of extending the process. I wanted to tell you to return it the last time you were here, but you didn’t even stay one day then! So, I missed the chance, since I couldn’t take human form or even communicate with others, being a hive of tentacles and all.”

“You could have called me! Geez, are the side effects permanent?” Arthur asked with concern clear in his voice.

Zoe blushed, saying, “I, umm, accidentally ate my cell phone…”

Then she hurriedly continued, “B-But there’s no more side effect! It’s all good now. There is a perfect equilibrium of chaos and order inside me now! A—And you’re not autistic anymore!”

‘Lady, what do you mean you ate your phone! Also…’

“Don’t try to comfort someone if you can’t do it properly.” Arthur yelled.

“Hehe~” The eldritch maiden just stuck out her tongue.

“Haaaah.” Arthur still had a few more questions to ask. But the information load was already way too much for one day. He kneaded his temples, saying,

“Okay, okay. I’m not blaming you for anything, stop making those puppy dog eyes. Ugh. I’m tired. Let’s continue this discussion tomorrow. I need sleep. I feel like my brain is overheating.”

“Umm, you’re not angry?” Zoe asked timidly.

‘I am. You called me autistic.’ Arthur glared at her, but gave up voicing that thought. “No, I am not mad. Now get off, I’m switching off the lights. And be careful with the cat. She ran under the kotatsu a moment ago because you were ignoring her. Don’t kick her.”

“I won’t!” Zoe protested.

Arthur knew it was impolite to suddenly cut off their discussion like that. It couldn’t be helped; Arthur needed some time alone to think things through.

He saw Zoe nervously shift in her place as if she wanted to continue their talk. He reassured her, “I’m not angry at you, honest! Just go to bed, it’s getting late. I have a bunch of questions for tomorrow too. Let me think them through for tonight. I expect you to answer them tomorrow honestly, you hear me!”

He dragged her up and pushed her to the second-floor stairs from behind. It was as much to hide his own uncertainty than to soothe her anxiety.

Even so, she probably noticed.