A territory-slaughtering calamity had spawned in one of the Kingdom of Eumalia’s many wildlands. The kingdom had responded by sending out the strongest of its state-aligned elites. The result was a tidy victory with minimal cost of life.

“Well, it’s been a pleasure working with you as always, Countessa Dorothea,” said a knight armored in ballistic-padding and metal plate. Laughing as he wiped away the blood that had spattered his visor.

“Mhm, yes. Well, all in a day’s work, I suppose,” said Alanna Imogen Dorothea, Countessa, Former-Colonel in her nation’s military, and Current Representative of the Democratic Monarchy of Eumelia’s Parliament.

“So...We’ve finished putting down this little pest. How about we all go out for tapas? Maybe chat about that new 5-17-42 Motion that’s been all the rage in the news lately?” said a petite, green-skinned, in form-fitting ballistic-weaving balancing a spear on her shoulders.

“Ugh, Candace...Talking about work when we just got finished with work? Please, let’s table that for another day. Who’s up for getting good and hammered at the usual,” said another woman with butterfly wings at her back and two large pistols in her hands.

“Pft, as if you wouldn’t be using that to lobby us towards whatever pet agenda you’ve got going, Tiara,” said a man holding a sword that was taller than he was.

“Actually, fellows, I’m afraid I’ll have to pass this time. I have a prior engagement,” said Alanna. Shouldering the bow that she’d been carrying.

“Oh ho, where too?” said the swordsman.

“Nowhere, in particular, I’ve just got to pop over to Mirsada to see family,” giving a rough view of the truth because she’d long ago learned that being too secretive with this crowd.

“Ah, glittering Mirsada with the golems and pastries. Bring me back something scrumptious?” said the woman with butterfly wings.

“Mhm,” said Alanna. Just smiling and nodding. Aware that the other woman didn’t really mean it and was mostly kidding, but willing to bring back some Mirsadan cream-cakes anyway just to show that she had nothing to hide.

Alanna then walked away from the group. Leaving them and the survivors amongst the soldiers that had followed them out into the wilderness.

Trusting that her peers could handle the sky-scraper-sized, rock-bodied, Gorilla-Frog Tyrant that they’d just slain. What mattered most is that the city-erasing threat had been nullified. Now with her work for the day finished, Alanna could turn her attention to more personal matters.

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The scariest villains always wore some kind of uniform. It didn’t have to be an actual uniform of course. I wasn’t trying to make some statement about the misuse of power within authoritarian countries, and police states. No, I meant to say that whether due to a quirk in our messed up personalities, or simply because the world was subtly trying to point us out, villains were subtly and not-so-subtly forced to dress a certain way.

When one was a villain, rather than just some rando doing bad shit, you’d dress the part. Even if your dressing style didn’t necessarily fit into anyone’s definition of a proper uniform.

A little of this had still followed me into my current life. I always dressed for business. Even when I wasn’t doing business, I dressed for business. Even my hiking clothes still gave me the look of the kind of strange gentlemen you’d see lurking around a moonlit crossroads waiting for gamblers and desperate actresses, who’d be willing to make some thoroughly Faustian deals.

I lounged around in comfortable suits, ties, and button-down shirts. Even my t-shirts were a little bit too finely pressed. I had more shoes and boots than I had sneakers. Even when I was trying to dress down I still kind of looked like I was some banker, or loan shark, on my way to re-possess grandma’s farm. I dressed so poshly that I was commonly given second looks and nods of appreciation from the other evil rich bastards I happened to meet in the street, who’d somehow mistaken me for one of their own.

Funnily enough, I don’t particularly mind this little quirk of mine. It was something I’d lived with for so long, in nearly all the iterations of my life, that it’d feel a bit odd if I suddenly stopped looking like I was about to storm a boardroom or hop into a 1920s alternate-earth to do a mob hit.

The one exception to this rule of dressing to kill(whether literally or figuratively), was one day of every month since I’d returned to this world. On that day, I’d go out of my way to dress as normally as I could manage. I don’t know why I went to such effort, but almost against my will, I found myself doing so. As if driven by some instinct to hide my true nature.

“Okay, so, you’re sure you’re okay watching the shop?” I said.

Jo just smiled, rolled her eyes, and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“I can’t tell you to stop being so anxious...But I will say that I’ve been watching this shop for more than a year now. I think I know what I’m doing by now...and off chance I don’t, that’s what the figments are for,” said Josephine. Pointing to one of the pawns that was re-stocking a shelf.

“True...Alright. Well, thanks, and uh...Love you?” I said.

“Love you too,” said Josephine. Smiling and waving as I teleported away. Traveling to a city-state on the edge of the kingdom of Mirsada. Coron-Glaw, the address that was closest to being my “real” address, was closer to the Kingdom’s center. The city of Tywood-Fwrr was closer to the border of Eumelia and Mirsada, and every month, like spies trading sensitive data, that’s where my mother and I would meet.

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Alanna Immogen Dorothea sat waiting at the usual little cafe. She’d bought the place out like always. Paying extra so that she could have her security lock the area down. She mentally closed a message she’d just received from one of her people. The person she’d been waiting for had arrived. Rounding the corner from some street like he’d walked here, even though her people would swear up and down that there was no actual sign of the youth having been in the city until a few minutes ago.

Fifteen months ago, Alanna received a sobering call. A call that, if it weren’t some strange twist of fate causing her usual secretary to call out sick, she probably would have never received. The caller was one of the trusted older staff members of the Dorothea clan.

She was informed that one of her children, her second-eldest, the boy that would have officially become her heir, had played a prank on one of her other children. Then the prank was described at length, and it became increasingly clear that what had been described as a “prank” was closer to a serious homicide-attempt. One does “NOT” strand someone in the middle of monster-infested waters just for giggles.

Alanna Dorothea was many things. She was hardworking, she’d been an excellent student. She was an archer and a mage. She had become a highly decorated war-hero during her time in the Eumelian military. She’d quickly risen up the ranks of the military’s civilian operation when it came time for her to settle down and seek safer work, and from there she’d been able to rank a position in the Kingdom’s parliament.

That being said, with all those balls in the air, the one thing Alanna couldn’t afford to be, was being present. She was a woman with a perpetually overpacked schedule, and even when she did try to prioritize her family and make time for them, things were never easy. The time was never enough. People were always calling her back to the various offices that she worked at for some emergency or the other.

Up until now, at least, Alanna would have still defined herself as a good mother. A mother who tries. Now she couldn’t help seriously questioning those labels that she’d given herself.

A bit of aggressive inquiry scared the servant that had been tasked with “informing” Alanna of the situation into revealing that he’d been tasked by her husband Conner into softening the story and potential fall out as much as he could. This led to a very angry phone to Conner, who ended up letting slip that this wasn’t the first time her second-eldest Liam had done something that they’d need their butler to pass along to her, because Wendell had practically raised her alongside Alanna’s grandmother and knew how to “handle” her the best.

Alanna was ashamed to find that she’d found the argument initially compelling. As much as she hated that point of view, and did not at all appreciate the idea of being handled, she was as much part of that “boys will be boys” mentality as anyone. Then Alanna did a thing that she still somewhat regretted, but was also relieved she did, she started asking follow up questions. First off, she wanted to know what other things her second-eldest son was up to. Then after the horrified silence that followed, she asked why she hadn’t heard of any of those things. Then she had her people quietly investigate the matter at length.

Alanna would learn that Wendell’s go-to method of handling any issue was him essentially bribing Alanna’s secretary to delay telling her about the things that Liam, and apparently a number of her other children, their extended relatives, and even a few of the staff, had done to her child.

The secretary’s method of handling things was only telling Alanna when she was so busy that she couldn’t pay attention to any of it, and the time-sensitive nature of the events had passed. Or alternatively, the Secretary, the Butler, and her husbands, just wouldn’t tell Alanna at all. Trusting that she wouldn’t look too closely when she came home...because well, it was true generally. Though in this one instance, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten away with it as cleanly as they hoped.

The investigation by Alanna’s people unveiled a number of perplexing and disturbing things. The summation of which being, that there was a weird schism between her eldest son and the rest of the family that resulted in them treating the boy fairly monstrously, and their whole clan transforming into some of those bizarre cartoonishly evil characters that all gathered together to bully the protagonists of old dramas and soap operas.

Alanna had believed that her husband Conner was a good husband and father. Sure he could be a bit fluffed up, stuffy, and overly calculative but he was also caring and considerate to her and all their children. He was even gentle and nurturing to her second-husband Gregory’s children. She’d thought of her husband Gregory, as a kind of big burly, soft-hearted, old family dog. He was patient, he was laid back, he was someone she’d figured she could rely on if anything was up. If it was before this, she’d have believed that even if Conner failed her, betrayed her, Gregory would still be there for her, but now she wasn’t so sure.

Then there were the kids. She’d seen, heard, and read about in the news, how the kids of other big families like theirs could end up becoming dysfunctional or warped. She’d always believed herself one of the lucky few who’d escaped that. Her children didn’t get into trouble. They didn’t fight with each other needlessly. They were collaborative and caring to one another. They looked after one another, lifting each other up instead of dragging themselves and the clan down. She was struck with a sense of disbelief when she heard about some of the things that they’d been getting up to.

As for the staff and extended relatives...Alanna was afraid that she didn’t have too much of a hard time believing that. Her own experiences with the extended Dorothea clan had taught her that people’s hearts were often darker than they seemed. All she could do in this case, was fire those she could bear to fire, and ban those relatives whose actions would make her honor-bound to do something violent and politically disadvantageous if she saw them around her personal estate in the near future.

The long and the short of it was that Alanna had never believed that the people in her life were perfect people, but the things her investigators reported back to her were horrifying. The worst part of it all, was that it was all operating under her nose, and when she tried to confront her husbands and children, those who didn’t just lie to her face, just sort of looked perplexed.

Like gangsters who were confused about why their boss was questioning a hit she herself had called, or soldiers wondering why a general was inquiring about her own orders, as if she wasn’t the one who’d given the order. Which was the point where she realized to her complete bewilderment and dismay, that her family had believed that everything they’d been doing was happening with blessing, either expressed or implied.

That was what really set Alanna over the edge. It was also something that made it even harder for her to know how to respond to all that had been done. If she were a normal person, she could have quickly dismissed something so unbelievable and horrendous as just an absurd thought, but Alanna had always been good at being objective with herself and the world around her.

Thus it only took a minute of introspection to realize that her own tendency of purposely never looking at, asking after, or paying too much attention to, her eldest child might have given her family some very wrong ideas. Giving those who were more decent a belief that the child was a pariah to be avoided and a forbidden topic not to be touched, and giving the bastards and sadists a mistaken confidence that this child was one that held no importance, and harming the boy would hold no confidence.

In Alanna’s defense, if it could be called a defense, very little of this was on purpose. She just hadn’t known what to do with the boy...Her Ellis...His existence had been a very awkward one for her from the very beginning.

Once upon a time, a naive, overly worked, overly stressed, and lonely girl fell for the sweet words of one of her tutors at school. They drew close, the bastard took advantages that he shouldn’t have taken, and then when Alanna ended up pregnant he ran. Even going so far as leaving the server. If that wasn’t bad enough, Alanna’s least-favorite great-Aunt saw this as an opportunity to try and take Alanna’s grandmother down a peg or two.

Blowing up what should have ended with only painful memories and a discrete trip to the obstetrician into a huge scandal. Making it sound like Alanna was some depraved slattern, who'd been purposefully running around ruining the family’s good name, instead of a fifteen-year-old girl who’d made a mistake and had been preyed upon by someone much older. Using a young Alanna as a weak point to try and ruin the Dorothea main-branch’s standing. Alanna had a...very bad time...during that period, and she came through the end of it with much of her reputation and most of her relationships in tatters.

Eventually, Alanna was able to climb out of that dark place thanks to prodigious talent and diligent efforts. However, those dark memories would always remain. She escaped “some” of the fallout of the scandal her Great-Aunt had caused by hastening and then delaying Ellis “birth” by having the doctors induce labor early and then putting his fetus on ice. If it weren’t for the fact that the pre-natal cryo-stasis tech was still flawed at the time it was uncertain when, or if, Ellis would have ever been born.

The point is the timer ran out, and when it did, Alanna hadn’t really known what to do with the boy. For her, he was a living monument to that one moment in time where her life exploded, she was humiliated, shamed, betrayed, and forced out into the cold. While curiously, she “had” been able to eventually get over it, her Great-Aunt’s plan had been somewhat successful.

It had been successful enough that there’d been a not-so-small chance of Alanna's grandmother disowning her and kicking her out from the clan. That’s how tenuous her situation had been at the time. The boy was a reminder of that, his face which looked so much like hers, brought only painful memories.

If Alanna had had her way, she might have just given the boy up for adoption, but alas the Dorotheas were far too high-profile a family. People would talk and unfortunately, that was something Alanna couldn’t afford at that point in time, saying that the effects on her career would have been deleterious would have been the understatement of the century. In retrospect, she should have just sent the boy away to boarding school, or to some of her more distant relatives, but some twitchy, reflexive, part of Alanna’s mind didn’t like the idea of too many people knowing about him.

Thus, she kept the child close, hiding him amongst the rest of her family like some dirty secret, and the situation festered. She’d believed that the rest of the family would give the boy the care that she just plainly couldn’t, but they’d all thoroughly misread the situation and things plainly hadn’t ended as she’d hoped. The “prank”, the assumedly oh-so-humorous, sacrificial offering of one of their own to some eldritch sea-spirit, had just been the icing on the cake. The straw that broke the camel’s back.

Alanna was relieved to find that the child hadn’t died, and if that was all, after her investigations and her realizations regarding her and her family’s extreme culpability in this whole mess, she probably just would have retreated into the background. Maybe ending things with an apology note and a tidy multi-million credit payment to his accounts, because of course there’d be a greedy member of the household accounting embezzling the majority of the boy’s household stipend. If her family was willing to kick a kid in a wheelchair down the stairs, what would the point of drawing the line at a little theft be?

Unfortunately, the same special clan-head/family-head system features that allowed Alanna to know that her child was still alive, also informed her shortly afterward that the potential of the boy’s blood essence had been awakened. And of course, as if the universe were kicking sand on her head, the boy ended up awakening a level of blood essence so high, that she, as head of the Dorothea clan, was obligated to do whatever it took to try and bring the boy back into the fold.

Months of attempting to find the boy in person showed no result. Attempting to call the boy using the system also showed no results, because he’d understandably blocked all members of the family, after leaving that damned bay that her idiot son had stranded him on. Alanna had to spend hundreds in silencing-fees and freshly drafted confidentiality agreements to pay to use other people’s systems, and the expensive hard to find communication tech that almost no one was making, to contact the boy, and it was only after several months that he finally relented to a meeting.

The first meeting was an uncanny thing. The mother and son regarded each other uncomfortably. Despite everything Alanna was happy to see that the boy looked okay. He looked better than okay, actually. He seemed healthier and more hale than he’d ever been when she’d inadvertently run into him at home, which only further emphasized how badly she’d mishandled the situation.

She was also frustrated, but also somewhat relieved to find that the vigor of the boy’s blood essence was so high, that it made it clear that she and the security team she’d brought with her, would never be able to take the boy back home by force. Which meant that she could now discount that approach with a clean conscience.

Alanna ended up asking how the boy was doing. He said he was fine, but was very careful to not give her any details of his living situation, or actual address. The power emanating from the youth was so potent Alanna was all but forced to ask if the boy would be coming back to take revenge on the clan, and Alanna was relieved, but also somewhat pained to find that the boy had all but forgotten about the clan. Pushing them to the back of his mind, as she’d once pushed the child to the back of her mind.

From there the conversation just sort of went on. Alanna gradually learned that the boy was curious about her, as she’d been about him. Their prior interactions had been so far and few between, that he didn’t really know her, which had the happy consequence of making her the one member of their household that he didn’t hold any ill-feelings towards.

When everything was over, a tearful Alanna asked if perhaps they could do this again. First, he looked shocked, then the boy's expression became completely unreadable. He turned away and simply left, but then later she found that he’d unblocked his contact link. Thus every now and again they’d call each other, and once per month, they’d meet up to chat in person.

Alanna had not entirely forgotten her earlier intention to pull the boy back to the clan, but at the same time, her priorities had gradually shifted. Never mind the direct harm her family and loved ones had done. Though it was inadvertent she’d already done so much harm herself, that Alanna was driven by a fair amount of guilt and a desire to make things right.

There was a difference between non-service and disservice. The person who simply chooses not to do business, is better than the one that starts flinging cutlery at the customers mid-way through the meal...and her family had apparently been flinging fecal matter as well as cutlery.

Finally, Alanna was a mother. After twelve children, this label had become something key to her identity. She was the boy’s mother, for whatever that counted...and even if it was more than a decade late, now that she’d been forced to face her muddled relationship with the boy...there was a part of her that didn’t quite want to let that connection go.