Date Point: 14Y 5D AV
“Outside”, as it turned out, was a relative term. Gillian emerged from her room, having changed everything she was wearing from head to toe, including shoes that were declared to be cute and a matching headband that was similarly declared to be super-cute. Liina took it in stride, naturally, as the criteria for being either “cute” or “super-cute” was never made clear. She chalked it up to being a human thing, not knowing that she was only half right.
“C’mon! I’ll show you my fort Papa made me!” shouted Gillian, bouncing down the stairs. Liina followed at a more sedate pace. “What’s wrong?”
“I think your gravity is catching up with me,” Liina said. “I’m not used to it.”
Gillian frowned. “Oh, that’s right. Your gravity is lower, isn’t it?”
“By quite a bit, actually,” Liina said. “Everything is heavier than I’m used to. I’m just tired.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try to slow down….but come on, you need to see my fort! It’s amazeballs!!!” Gillian, true to her word, slowed down and stopped running ahead, but she bounced on her toes. “I know! I know! We can play ‘Hunters and HEAT’!!! C’mon, it’ll be awesome! Having somebody to play with all the time is totally going to rock.” Gillian turned and took several steps further towards the fort, impatient to begin.
She realized a moment later Liina had stopped. Gillian looked back, and saw Liina looking back at her with ears splayed back and an obvious disapproving-sort-of-expression on her fuzzy face.
“How do you play…. ‘Hunters and HEAT’?”
“Oh. Right. Well, maybe that wouldn’t be the best game right now, on account of…stuff, but it’s really fun, my friends and I play it all the time!”
“No, I mean…how do you play?”
“Um. Okay, so, if you’re the HEAT, then you put on like five or six sweaters so you’re all big like them, and you have to kinda flex a lot and go ‘Ho! Ho!’ a lot?” Gillian explained.
“Ho….ho….” Liina tried experimentally.
“They’re super happy most of the time, ‘specially that really big guy that’s Chief Ares’ son, I think? Anyway, they’re super tough and everything, and then if you’re the Hunter, you have to put on a mask with big scary teeth, a billion eyes, and you gotta have claws, and then we try to sneak up on each other and get each other. It’s like tag, but we’re both kinda monsters! The HEAT tries to stomp on the Hunter and the Hunter tries to eat the HEAT.” She giggled a little. “Eat the HEAT. I wonder if anybody has ever said that before.”
“I think I would rather not play that right now, if that’s okay.”
“Oh, sure, um. Yeah! Well, we can find other stuff, and besides, it’s a fort!” Gillian led the way across the back yard to her fort, which turned out to be a relatively palatial affair as childhood forts went. At ground level, there was a big open space bounded by the four corner posts, with one large post in the middle supplementing the floor joists to support the second floor. A ladder in one corner led upwards to a trap door and the second floor.
Liina pulled herself up the ladder with some difficulty, her claws scrabbling at the wood a little. Gillian, of course, was already within, looking back down at her as she came up.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine, just…my arms don’t move like yours. Ladders…aren’t as….easy….for me.” She pulled herself up into the fort onto a handy rug and shut the trap door behind herself. “Wow.”
The second, and main, floor of the fort was a testament to Gillian’s father’s belief that every kid needed to have a proper backyard fort from which to launch kid shenanigans. On one side, there was a squooshy sort of soft couch/chair thing that would have been a bean bag if it had had less structure to it. All four walls had windows with actual glass, and there was a door out to a covered open porch that faced the house and a somewhat more-convenient access ramp. Several bins sat under one window, crammed to the top with various toys of every sort. Rugs covered the floor.
Liina sat on the floor, taking it all in. and Gillian, with a sly look, flomped down on the chair and produced her tablet from under her sweater. “Look, I’m still connected to the drone.” Liina chittered a little and moved over to sit next to her. “Here, you’re better at controlling it.” She handed over the tablet.
Liina took the tablet and prodded at it a little. “The connection isn’t as good.”
“Yeah, Daddy ‘splained that to me. It’s on the Wifi through the house instead of the Bluetooth connection we had inside. We must be too far from it now.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. Having a second or two of latency if it’s just sitting still is no big deal.”
“Laten…oh, you mean the, uh, delay?”
“Yeah.” Liina tinkered with the controls for a moment, trying to get a view of the inside of the home that was a little less blocked by their cover from the chandelier where she’d stashed it. Below the hovering little drone, Gillian’s parents had returned to the table and were sitting at one end.
”Sorry I woke you up.” Papa said.
”Well, I did tell you to, and I’m glad you did. I don’t know about getting back to sleep now, though.”
Papa looked over at the siiding door that led out to where Liina and Gillian hid in the fort. ”You know….I have an idea about that.”
”Oh really ?”
”Well…just saying…they’re likely to be out there for a while playing. And it’d help you sleep. Just doing my husbandly duty, you know.”
”Oh, is that how it is? I see. So, nothing in it for you, of course, this is completely selfless?”
Of course.” Inside, the two adults had gotten up and were making their way up the stairs. Gillian gasped a little, wide eyed as Papa reached out and did something to Mama’s rear end that made her yelp and jump, then start giggling as their bedroom door closed. Liina looked at her, puzzled.
“They’re….they’re gonna do it!” Gilllian said, her jaw open in shock. “That’s…..EEWWW!!!”
“They’re gonna do…what?” Liina asked, puzzled.
“You know,” Gillian said, a little exasperated, and poked one finger through an “O” made from the other and a thumb.
“Oh, they’re gonna have a cub? That’s great!” Liina said, relaxing. “I thought something was wrong.”
Gillian had her face in her hands. “EEEEEeeeeeeeeew….gross.” She feigned swooning and laid down on her side. “I don’t think Mama can have more kids. She said something once when she didn’t think I was listening about tying tubulars or something, and I think that means she can’t have kids now.”
Liina’s ears were back in shock. “You mean….wait. What?”
Gillian rolled back up and propped her head up on one hand. “I guess it’s something grownups do, to make sure they don’t accidentally have more kids. I don’t know much ‘bout it, we haven’t started sex ed in school yet.”
Liina took a moment to parse out the most alien sounding sentence she’d ever heard, then came back to one point that she understood. “So…they aren’t going to have a cub then. Well then, what are they doing?”
Gillian sat back up and thought for a minute. “Um. I don’t exactly know, I guess. But it’s kinda gross, whatever it is.”
“That word doesn’t really translate. What do you mean? I mean…that’s where you came from. They signed a contract, and made a cub. That’s where I came from, same thing. That’s how cubs are born!” Liina set the tablet down and waved her paws around. “How do you think they made you?”
Gillian put her hands over her ears and squinched her eyes shut. “Noooooooo….augh, right in the childhood!!” She opened her eyes back up and giggled. “No, I know that’s how babies are made, I’m not a kid. Well, I am a kid, but I’m not that much of a kid.”
“….Humans are weird.” Liina said finally.
“Weird!? You’re the one talking like it’s all normal and stuff.”
“It is normal. Adults do that. A lot, apparently. I didn’t know humans did it when they couldn’t have cubs, though. That actually is kinda weird. What was your word? Gross?”
“Gaoians don’t…do it all the time?” Gillian asked, finally aware that there was something different about what Liina was describing. “I know my parents do, I’ve heard them, and I walked in on Mama doing…something…once,” she shuddered. “But they’re always pretty good about doing it when they think I’m asleep or whatever.”
“I think they do mostly when they want to make a cub, and there’s always a contract for that,” Liina said reflectively. “I haven’t gotten too far into that part of my training either, but…stories about Males forcing a Female are, like, Keeda tales, you know? They always get what’s coming to them in the end, and it’s always really really bad. And we…cubs, I mean…don’t really encounter Males very much till we’re older. They aren’t allowed in the Communes at all without guards and a reason to be there, although I think a lot of them do come in just to see us. Females like Males who like cubs.”
“Your Papa doe…didn’t live with you?” Gillian asked. She thought about it and realized she didn’t really know how Liina had been brought up.
“No, I’ve never met my true-father. I don’t know who he is, and I probably never will,” Liina said. “I might get some clues when I grow up – having a brownie coat means he is part of a labor clan like Stoneback or something. I know he isn’t an Emberpelt, though.” She chittered.
“Why is that?” Gillian asked.
“Emberpelts all have this kind of super-kinky fur. It’s really dense and curly. They have to have that, though, because they work with fire a lot and it doesn’t light nearly as easily. They’ve also usually got kind of a reddish color to them, and I don’t have that either.” She looked down at her silvery top coat with its deep chocolate brown undercoat and unconsciously smoothed it out.
They were silent for a minute, and then Liina broke the silence, shaking her head from side to side as though she had cobwebs on her muzzle. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Okay!” Gillian said. She stood, and went over to one of the windows with toys in a bin under it, and was about to rummage through it when she stopped. “Liina.”
Liina looked up from the tablet, which she’d been using to pilot the drone inside the house towards Gillian’s bedroom. “What?”
“Look.” Liina got up and came over to look.
The height of the fort’s second floor, with the comparatively low fences of most of their neighbors, meant that Gillian and Liina had a bird’s-eye view of the next several yards…and two yards down, a pair of Gaoian youngsters and the Ekhardt twins were actively wrestling in a four-being fur-flying free-for-all that was at least partly friendly going by the shrieking laughter and the mock snarling/chittering going on.
Gillian rolled her eyes. “Ugh. Boys,” she said in the most deadpan, dismissive voice possible.
Liina chittered a little. “I wonder who the girls they’re showing off for are.”
“You think they’re showing off for somebody?” Gillian turned back, having punctuated her disgust with action. “Where?”
“Look there,” Liina said, indicating with one paw. Sure enough, peeking over the fence on the other side of the other yard, and almost hidden in the greenery poking up along with it, were another couple of curious human and Gaoian child faces, all girls. They giggled together for a minute, watching the chaos unfold. Thankfully, as it had rained overnight, there was no accompanying dust cloud, but the boys were getting increasingly filthy.
“We should go over there,” Gillian said suddenly. “Mama is always saying I should play with other kids, but it’ll be more fun if we both go, definitely, and plus, I won’t get in trouble if I don’t tell her and Papa, since they’re busy doing it.” She ended the last two words in a deadpan ‘hurr durr’ voice with her top teeth stuck out and eyes crossed.
“Maybe we should go see the other girls and skip out on seeing the boys wrestle each other. I used to have males as friends, but lately they get all dumb when I try to talk to them now.” Liina spoke matter-of-factly, lost in the spectacle.
“No, hey! I know! We can ask them to come down here, and they can ask and then nobody gets in any trouble at all, and we can all play in here, and maybe make fun of the boys too while we’re at it!” Gillian blurted it out all in a rush. “We can even send the drone down with a note.”
“That’s sneaky! Definitely a Whitecrest way to handle it, good thinking.” Liina pounced back on the tablet and began working on getting their little drone outside.
“What’s a Whitecrest?” Gillian ventured, watching her friend adeptly pilot Airborne through the door and across the yard. She caught it as it came in.
“They’re super spies, and they know lots of really secret stuff, and they’re like master assassins and stuff. Covert operations!” Liina rushed. “They’re super sneaky and smart, too, like, you can talk to one, and never know you’re telling him all your darkest secrets.”
“That sounds kind of scary actually,” Gillian said. She looked around for a pen and paper, found some in a bin full of such things, and sketched out a note quickly.
“COME…DOWN….TO…THE….FORT! Signed, Gillian,” she said as she wrote it out and signed it with her best attempt at cursive for her name. She cocked her head at it and thought. “I better make that clearer. ‘G..I…L…L…I…A…N.’,” she wrote out in much easier to read capital letters.
Liina stuck the note in a clip she attached to the front of the drone. “I hope this thing has enough range to get down there and back.” She took the tablet again, and flew the drone out the open window, high across both yards to avoid the ongoing fray, and down to just behind the still-peering faces on the other side of the fence.
At first, they didn’t see or hear the little hovering device, until Liina doinked one of them in the head with it gently. She took the note, and looked around.
“Oh, they don’t know where we are!” Gillian realized. “Come on!” She went out onto her covered ‘porch’ and began jumping up and down and waving with both arms. Presently, her intended audience realized what she was doing, waved back, and both faces disappeared. “We should go open the gate in the front. Come on!” She dashed down her ramp, and across the field without waiting to see if Liina was following, which she wasn’t.
Gillian had to stretch, but she managed to trip the latch on the back gate, allowing it to swing open with a rusty creeeeaaaak. It got caught by the spring, and bounced back a little, coming almost back to latch position. She pushed it a little further open so that it could be seen from the outside, and waited. Presently, it was tugged back open, and another girl about Gillian’s age accompanied by a young Gaoian Female came in.
“Molly!” Gillian said, giving her a big hug. “Hi!! Oh my gosh, you guys, c’mon, you have to meet Liina!! Hi!!” she greeted the new Gaoian. “I’m Gillian! What’s your name?” They walked in a group towards the fort, where Liina was still on the porch guiding the little drone back taking a roundabout route and exploring a little.
“I’m Soni,” the young Female said softly.
“Hi!!” Gillian said. “This is so awesome!” She led them up the ramp. “This is Liina. Liina, this is Molly and Soni!” She bounced on her toes a little.
Liina set the tablet down, having gotten the Lego drone hovering right next to her finally. “Hi,” she said. She reached down and did something to the translator hanging around her neck, and then said something in Gaori to Soni, who did the same and replied. They embraced, Liina said something again, and they both chittered a little and turned their translators back on.
Gillian thought for a minute. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “We need snacks! And drinks! And…I gotta go tell Papa!” She started to turn, and Liina caught her arm.
“You…should wait a few minutes,” she said. Gillian flushed in embarassment and looked down.
“…Right.” She perked up after a minute. “C’mon! Let’s go in the fort…and I’ll ask Papa about snacks later.” Ignoring the curious look from Molly, she marched into the fort with an air of determination.
Several hours later
Two things suddenly crashed into Samuel’s awareness, as he sat and tried not to doze in his living room. He hadn’t quite managed to drift off to actual sleep both because of his efforts to stay awake and because of a niggling feeling that he was missing something.
First, the house was quiet and Gillian wasn’t at school today…and it had been that way since right before he’d gone upstairs with Clara.
Second…there was someone on his front porc…
knock knock knock
Groaning, he extricated himself from his chair and shook his head to clear out the cobwebs. Distantly, he wondered what time it was. He opened the door to find their neighbor, Jenny Gardner standing there with a somewhat confused expression and an expression of fatigue that mirrored his own on some level.
“Hey, Sam. Is Molly here?” she asked, before he could say anything.
“You know what, I was just wondering where Gillian had gotten to. I don’t think they’re in the house, it’s been pretty quiet and I was trying to stay awake.” He realized he was hearing music from somewhere nearby that was both distant and close at the same time. “What the…?”
“I think it’s in your back yard.” Jenny walked in, past him, and towards their back door. Not sure what else to do, he followed. She opened the door, and immediately it was clear where the music was coming from.
“Wow,” he said, unable to come up with anything else that was suitable in the moment.
Gillian’s fort had always been something of a draw to the other kids in the neighborhood. There had been several instances of extra kids materializing in their backyard, and he’d always tried to impress on Gillian the need to make sure that the adults in her life knew about it…although, he’d been kind of busy for a bit.
The addition of Gaoian cubs had not in any way diminished his daughter’s fort’s attraction to the neighborhood, apparently. The fact that there were not one, or two, but multiple human children egging them on and/or actively participating was just the cherry on top. The lawn was being torn up by the claws of several young Gaoians all chasing one anothers’ tails, and there was some sort of ‘king of the hill’ going on, with one Gaoian youngster atop the fort itself making a noise that sounded for all the world like a Tusken Raider victory cry. Inside the fort itself were most of the girls, of both species, and it was from there that the music was coming. Evidently, some enterprising youngster had raided her family’s pantry as well, because they had snacks and almost-certainly-unauthorized levels of carbonated drinks.
“What’s going on?” came Clara’s voice from behind him. “….Oh.”
“Well,” Sam said, regarding the swirling vortex of fuzzy chaos and shrieking laughter of children. “Perhaps we can do something with this.” He reached in front of Jenny and slid the door shut. Outside, none of the children seemed to have noticed the adults at all.
“I can’t decide if I want to just sit and watch this with a bowl of popcorn, or if I need to go out there and calm things down, honestly,” Clara said after continuing to watch the chittering, swirling, shrieking chaos outside. “They are going to end up being filthy.”
“After what they’ve been through – the cubs, I mean – letting them play is probably not a bad idea,” Jenny said reflectively. “And the less Molly spends sitting in front of that damn screen her father got her, the better.”
“I was thinking of seeing if Sister Leya from the Commune could come back by. I mean…we know how to deal with our own kids, but Gaoians do things a little differently. For all I know, this kind of wild unstructured playtime is something they need,” Samuel said. “We’re all learning, here.”
“That’s a good idea,” Clara replied. “We need to know how they’d approach this.”
Samuel walked back to the living room, where he’d left his phone, and pulled up Leya’s number. He walked into the other room; despite the relative soundproofing of the house, it was nonetheless distracting. Jenny and Clara stood at the back door watching through the glass in nigh-identical amused/concerned poses of mothers everywhere, unsure whether to fight their natural child-herding instincts or not. Samuel walked back out after what sounded like a very brief conversation, phone in hand.
“She said she’ll be right here. I told her to just come in through the front doo…oh, crap. That’s not good.” He handed his phone to Clara, slid the door open, and hustled out to break up what appeared to be about to develop into a brawl between a human boy and two Gaoian male cubs. Although the music continued playing, the festive atmosphere immediately evaporated at the sudden intervention of a male adult, and Human and Gaoian child alike stopped what they were doing to watch.
“Okay, hang on. You three. Come here. Now.” Samuel said loudly enough to be clearly heard across the entire yard. With the species-universal body language of shit, I just got caught shoulder slumping and downward looks, the three miscreants did as they were told. The two Gaoians stood together an arm-length away from the boy, who had a visibly bleeding scratch down one cheek that had narrowly missed an eye and still-clenched fists.
“I didn’t see what just happened, but I want an explanation. Todd, you first, and then I will hear from you two,” he said, addressing first the boy and then the two cubs. “No interrupting. Everybody gets to tell me what happened, but you’re going to take turns. Talk.”
“He scratched me, and it hurts,” Todd said defiantly, indicating the larger of the two cubs. “We were just playing and he scratched me on purpose. In the face.”
“Okay,” Samuel said. “Anything else?”
“No.”
“Your turn,” Samuel said, indicating the cub that Todd had pointed at. “Tell me what happened. And..what’s your name?”
“I’m Choru. He’s Gaan,” the cub said, indicating the other cub standing with him. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I didn’t even have my claws out. I was trying not to land on him when I jumped, and my paw hit his face, and I guess dragged down.”
Samuel nodded, and looked at Gaan. “Anything to add?”
“No, Father,” was the reply.
“Okay. Todd, I’m going to get you cleaned up in a minute, and I’ll explain to your mother what happened before you go home so she doesn’t freak, okay?” Samuel said. The boy nodded, obviously fighting the impulse to cry a little. “Now. Before we do that….” he raised his voice. “…The rest of you, come over here. Gillian, you and your friends come down from there. I want to talk to all of you together.”
In a moment, there was a crowd of children gathered around. Samuel sat on the edge of their small porch and addressed the group.
“Okay, everybody paying attention here?” He looked around, and got nods and murmurs from wide eyes. “Okay. I think this is something I want all of you to remember, because this is probably going to come up again. You kids see Todd’s face here? Humans don’t have fur that protects us from bumps or scratches, it’s one of the reasons we wear clothes and shoes like we do. Choru, you could have actually hurt Todd pretty badly with your claws if you had meant to. Especially if you’d gotten his eye. See?”
There were nods all around, and a little whispering going on. Samuel pressed on, inspired a little to make it a teaching moment for everyone.
“By the same token…Todd, what do you think would have happened if you had actually punched Choru or Gaan?” There was no answer, although it was obvious that all of the boys in the group were quickly mentally connecting the dots. “Human fists are hard, sturdy, and dense. They’re one of the few actual natural weapons we have. Todd, would a Gaoian have much defense against being hit by you?”
“Nossir,” Todd said, tears forgotten and eyes a little wide.
“That’s right. Because unlike humans, Gaoians don’t have skeletons that are adapted to gravity this high. If you hit another human, even one a little smaller than you, you’d have to probably hit them in a pretty sensitive spot or hit them a lot to hurt them really badly, right? If you hit a Gaoian, though, you could break bones and do really bad internal damage.” Todd nodded soberly.
“I’m sorry, Choru, I should have known you didn’t do that on purpose,” Todd said suddenly.
“Are you okay?” Choru asked hesitantly. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“He’ll be okay,” Samuel reassured the Gaoian. “Todd, come on inside, let’s get the bleeding cleaned up. I don’t think that’s as deep as it looks, it’s just bleeding like that because it’s on your face. Come on.” He stood and led the boy back inside. Unsure whether they were supposed to follow or not, Choru and Gaan looked at each other guiltily.
“You two go with him. See through what you started,” came the voice of Leya from inside, who had arrived during the brief discussion. “As for the rest of you – go on playing, but not as wild, please. Go on.” The crowd of children dispersed gradually, the mood broken.
“Hi, Sister. Thanks for coming,” Clara said. “Samuel had to step in and intervene there, and that seems to have calmed things down a bit.”
“So I see. He did a good job. Clearly the cubs listened to him,” Leya said, looking out the window.
“We were concerned about handling it right. None of us really, you know, understands how your cubs are raised,” Jenny said.
“They often need a firm touch. Male cubs usually need a lot of physical activity, which increases once they reach about the age of five. Keeping them in line, and making sure that that activity is teaching activity as much as possible turns out much more rounded males.” Leya pointed out a pair of younger males that were mock-snarling and rolling around on each other.
“Those two – that play-fighting serves an important purpose for them. It’s more than just social posturing, or exercise. It’s also how they deal with change. They reassert their early Degree. Females tend to do things a little differently. Usually.” She chittered softly. “There are exceptions, of course. You’ve heard of Sister Myun.”
“She’s the Mother-Supreme’s Guard-Captain now, right?” Clara asked.
“Yes. Her pedigree is about as ‘brownie’ as it gets. Brownie cubs, even Females, tend to be much more…kinetic learners. We try to watch for that and implement it; their earliest education begins with including physical activity in everything, and then those cubs that don’t have such a strong need for it move on to learning that is less…active.”
They stood, watching the more sedate pace of play by the chastened children. Clara slid the screen door closed, and opened the glass slider enough that they could hear without it being overwhelming.
“Here. Let’s sit down. I want something hot to drink.” She indicated the table, with Samuel’s abandoned mug of tea sitting a little forlornly at the far end.
“That would be wonderful,” Leya said, sitting. “If you have any green tea, I like that better than black. The Starminds have been diligent in getting us to try many different sorts of teas from Earth, and I liked that one better.”
“I believe we do. Jenny?” Clara asked while rooting around in a cupboard and putting their kettle on for the fifth or sixth time that day.
“Chai for me, if you have it, please, Clara. Thank you.”
Clara busied herself, mismatched mugs clinking on the tile as she set them on the counter and got out several spoons. In moments, the kettle was singing its welcome song, cups were poured, and she handed each of them a mug before turning to make herself something involving creamer and sugar. Leya’s nose twitched as she sat.
“What’s that one you are drinking?” she asked Clara. “I’ve had chai.”
“Oh, this is just Earl Grey. It’s a base of black tea, with bergamot and some other oils, and then I added some sweet creamer and sugar,” she replied. Leya sniffed again, inhaling the dense fragrance of the cup.
“I think that would be too strong for me,” she said, finally. “I like the scent, but there isn’t much that’s subtle about it.” She was forestalled from further comments by the return of Todd and the two Gaoian male cubs, followed by Samuel. Todd’s scrape had been cleaned up, and obviously dabbed with an antiseptic ointment of some sort.
“You three,” Leya said, “are going to go back to Todd’s home. Choru, you will explain to Todd’s parents what happened, and you will tell her how you will avoid this in the future.”
“Yes, Mother,” the two cubs said in unison. Todd gave Clara a complicated and inquisitive glance, which she answered only with a firm nod.
“Okay, Mrs. Peterson. Can we come back later?” Todd asked.
“That will depend on your mother, Todd. If she says you can come back, all three of you are welcome to come back and play…but I think maybe she will want you to have lunch first.”
“On that note,” Samuel said from behind the boys, “I think it might be a good idea for everyone to head home now for some lunch. I don’t think we can feed everyone. Off you go, boys. You can come back another time.” They filed out. It would have been difficult to say who was the more dejected of the three; the one injured, the one that did the injuring, or the moderately innocent bystander.
“Agreed,” Clara said. “I think I’m going to finish my tea at the moment, however. You’re welcome to take charge and do that, if you like.”
“Nah, Imma let you finish, but… actually, I think I’ll have something too…maybe heat this up again.” He topped off his drink and mixed it a little, adding something from the cabinet and sitting at the table with the other adults.
They were silent for a long moment, each sipping their beverage and considering. Jenny frowned into her chai as she thought, and then took a breath as the other three looked at her.
“You know…” she said. “What if….” She trailed off.
“What, Jenny?” Clara asked.
“Well…okay, look. The Gaoians do things in groups of kid…cubs, communally, right?” Clara and Samuel nodded. “What if…what if we took an example from that and adapted. Say, as a neighborhood, worked on taking turns supervising everybody when they aren’t busy in school?”
“What, like a co-op for daycare?” Clara asked.
“We all have jobs, but with the Governor-General asking for us to act as foster parents, there’ll have to be some flexibility. We can’t ask the Clan of Females to cover it, they have enough to worry about right now.”
“You’re thinking of, like, a neighborhood watch or something like a homeowner’s association or whatever, maybe just not as formal?” Samuel asked.
“That’s a pretty good idea,” Clara said. “Keeping the children…of both species…busy would work out for everyone. If we get a lot more kids, maybe even work it into some kind of youth organization, or something. Who knows?”
“One thing I know, though,” Jenny said. “We aren’t going to be the only parents in Folctha that are looking for answers.” She yawned suddenly. “I’m going to have to think about this, but not right now. I think I’m going to take Molly and Soni back to our house for some lunch.”
“I’ll help you clear everyone out,” Samuel chuckled. Leya watched with interest from the kitchen table as the two of them began to pair children and cubs up, sending them back to their own homes in a reverse Biblical tide of fuzz. Predictably, when the cubs all saw a Mother present, their behavior suddenly and mysteriously improved dramatically. Presently, only Gillian and Liina were left, and came in looking somewhere between nervous and pleased with themselves.
Gillian broke the silence. “Papa, I’m sorry I didn’t come say something, but first Molly and Soni came down, and then the Ekhardt twins came down with their new friends, so we had to call Crystal and the cubs at her house for reinforcements, and then it was Molly’s idea to have some music, and then Todd came over, and he had two cubs with him, and then everybody else showed up and it all just kind of blew up and I forgot I was s’posed to come tell you, and I’m sorry, and I hope I’m not in trou….”
Samuel reached out and put a finger across her nervous chattering. “Hush, Peanut. It worked out fine, it’s fine. Next time, try to say something, huh?”
“We didn’t know you were having a party until we looked out the back door,” Clara said. “It’s fine if you want to have friends over, but Molly’s mother didn’t know she and…Soni? were here.”
There was a long moment while the children absorbed that.
“You girls look hungry,” Clara said. “Let’s have some lunch.”
“Ooo!” Gillian exclaimed. “Can we have bacon???” Liina looked at her, a little puzzled.
“What’s ‘bacon’?”