“Okay, kids. Is everyone inside?” said Yijun.

“Yeah…” said a slightly sulky, irritated sounding Thad.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m here! Let’s go! Choo~ Choo~” screeched Emile. Seeming to have inherited her mother’s exuberance, and simply ecstatic to be out of the house.

“That’s a train, Em…Cars go vroom, dumbass,” grumbled Thad.

“Hey, now! Be nice, to your little sister,” said Ferdinand. Our father flicked Thad on the back of the ear, as he clambered into the big moving truck.

“Ow!” grumbled Thad. Rubbing his ear looking even more annoyed.

“Alright, that’s it. Everything’s packed and tied down. Let’s get this show on the road,” said Reina. Clambering into the driver’s seat of the truck, because somehow despite having married two construction workers, Reina ended up being the only adult in the household with experience handling big vehicles.

Tesson has spun around its little yellow sun three additional times, since the last time I’ve updated this log. Thad was twelve, and well on his way to becoming, your stereotypical surly teenager. I was nine. Little Emile was six and thrilled to finally be old enough to walk to school with us and start 1st grade.

As you might have guessed, the Dunkel family was moving. For the most part, this was a good move, not a harried move made under pressure. Ferdinand had managed to become one of the supervisors at the construction company. Yijun’s side-hustle as an artist was doing well enough that she was actually considering dropping her job as a painter for the construction company, to work full time doing paintings, trade design, comics, and illustrations. (What can I say? My new birth mother was a go-getter.) Reina had managed to go from being a humble clerk to getting a junior account-management position with the Grand Basin City (“GBC”) Municipal Bank.

Put plainly, the whole family was getting older, and the adults were doing a little better financially. Thus when we started hearing rumors of bandit gangs, mutated beasts, and shard-wraiths, being seen uncomfortably close to the city, we were part of the lucky few who had more options. Our parents could afford to pack up and move closer to the city’s better-protected interior regions, rather than fretting anxiously, and buying weapons they only vaguely knew how to use. Father and the Mothers had figured that it was about time we moved to a bigger place anyway.

Emile was over the moon, because she, and all the rest of us kids, had been promised rooms, and Yijun had promised to paint Emile’s rooms lilac with a lot of pretty flowers. Thad wasn’t pleased at all. He’d had a lot of friends in the old neighborhood. His awareness of the danger was faint and abstract at best, if he thought about the risk at all, I suspect he might have felt the family was jumping at shadows and our father and mother should have just bought a “cool” enchanted-weapon like some of his friend’s parents were doing.

As for me, I had a much clearer view of the situation thanks to natural and supernatural senses that now extended to several galaxies beyond Tesson. I wouldn’t say that the old neighborhood was on the verge of being overtaken by a ravenous horde. I was currently watching, and listening in on, troop movements by GBCs Municipal Defense Force.

The part of the city we’d lived in was close enough to the core parts of the city, that the Mayoral Office and city-councilors would have to do something about the threats that were pushing their way into the city. If only for the sake of their own interests. Yet at the same time, with what I now knew about the volatility of Tesson’s environment, economy and political climate, our parents had probably made the right call. Cities like Grand Basin City got wiped out with an alarming frequency in Tesson, and it was better for us to err on the side of caution.

After a not-so-short drive, we pulled up in front of our new home. A mid-sized single-family home, in an entirely different suburb that lay within the city’s secondary inner-walls. GBC was surrounded by three sets of walls. The richest folk lived behind the primary walls. Formerly, being lower-middle class, the Dunkels had lived behind the tertiary walls. Living behind the secondary walls was basically proof of the family properly becoming middle-middle class.

The unluckiest folk lived outside the walls altogether, living near the walls, with only the city’s status and the defense force patrols to protect them. That place could roughly be described as a slum, but it was also where the city placed its non-vital industrial facilities. There was a lot of crime in that part of the city because of the general neglect from the city, and the people there had long been getting hit by monsters and raiders.

Our new home was a medium-sized single-family home. The building was fairly spacious. The inside had three bedrooms, and three living-rooms, one of which was going to be converted into another bedroom. There were also two bathrooms, and a decent-sized kitchen and dining area. There was a nice backyard, and front yard, and the surrounding area looked and felt fairly quiet.

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“Where would you like me to take this, mother?” said the blank-faced youth, with red-brown eyes.

“Ah...Uh, be a dear and put them in the basement for me, will you, Eddy?” said Yijun. Her gaze locked onto the empty canvas that stood before her.

“Understood,” said the boy. Hefting the luggage case as if it weighed nothing, and exiting the spare living-room that their family had decided to make Yijun’s art studio.

After finally getting a sense of what she was going to paint this time around, Yijun turned her attention to the place where her son had disappeared. Her expression became warm, yet muddled, as she thought of the boy.

Even after more than a decade had passed, Yijun still regretted hurting her dearest friend, and nearly putting all of their relationships in peril as she had. Now that enough time passed, and the mostly satisfactory end-result, had allowed them all to recover from the injuries of that particular moment in their lives, Reina was able to joke and say that if it wasn’t Ferdinand cheating on her Reina, it would have been Reina cheating on Ferdinand with Yijun, or if the cards fate had played them had been slightly different, it might have been Reina cheating on Yijun, with Ferdinand, or some similar variation that ended with the three of them all becoming one big happy family.

The rough idea being that they were somehow always meant to end up one big happy family. Yijun for all her optimism was more of a realist, and she was flatly aware that in this one rare instant, in a world that punished even the small mistakes with death and suffering, she and they had all gotten lucky.

She, Yijun, could, and likely should have put some distance between herself and Ferdinand. She also probably should have put some distance between herself and Reina…Honestly, Reina’s joke was less of a joke than one would think, and there’d been some nights when the two women were working together, where things maybe got a little more messy than they should have. Yijun and Reina’s first kiss may or may not have happened long before they’d all become one family, though only Yijun seemed to remember it, after all the drinking that took place that night.

The warning signs had been there, she could feel her feelings getting out of hand, and it wasn’t like she was some animal in heat. And despite her fresh-faced looks, she wasn't some inexperienced teenager either. She and Ferdinand had done what they’d done with their eyes open, even if their minds had been somewhat muddled by the emotions of the moment.

That hour of pleasure could have easily torn them all apart, ruining Reina and Ferdinand’s marriage, and Yijun and Reina’s close-friendship. If Reina was a more spiteful woman, her connections with most of the GBC’s many of GBC’s working-class customers of the municipal bank, her friends throughout their part of the city, and her ties to the business association, could have essentially imploded the humble but enjoyable life Yijun was able to build for herself in the.

Thinking back on that period, Yijun couldn’t help feeling a sense of exhilaration, disbelief, and guilt. Yijun got the feeling one gets when you’ve done something crazy, or foolish, and somehow you not only survived, but you somehow won a prize afterward. It feels somehow off…Wrong…Like if your life was a story, some meddlesome censorship board would require that they end with a bad ending, because otherwise, it’d be somehow against public morals.

Yet, here she was. Happier than she’d ever thought she could be back when she was a depressed heiress, her wings clipped and her leg chained to the perch of a gilded cage. She was presently happily married to the two people she loved most in the world, with two wonderful children. It was almost too good to be true.

There was a part of Yijun that still felt like it was all some wonderful dying dream, and she was really lying in some ditch somewhere because it was too happy an ending for the silly and spoiled young thing that had run away from home with distressingly little knowledge about the wild and dangerous world outside her family’s estate.

The boy was proof that all of this was real. Which always seemed a bit ironic to Yijun because there was something about her Edward that always felt a bit…unreal, and out of place. It wasn’t to say that there was something about her son that she didn’t trust, though she had a strong hunch that her boy was keeping some fairly hefty secrets in that head of his. No, it was rather the boy felt a bit too fantastical. The vibe Edward had was like something out of a strange dream, and he didn’t act at all like normal children did.

First, there was the whole scare when he was a baby and he suddenly started getting sick, until they started feeding him raw meat, and buying blood from the local butcher for him to drink. Then there were strange bits of clearly magical phenomena when he was going through his thankfully not-so-terrible twos.

Then there were the night terrors he used to have when first started school. Edward Dunkel was a handful just like his daddy, albeit in different ways. It left Yijun wondering what would come next. Her delightful little oddity was a well-behaved boy, but he could be as strange as all get-up at times.