“Peter has the best story,” said Cez. “That one is so amazing.”
“Not really.” Storm brushed cookie crumbs off her lap. “That was awful. But come on. Shouldn’t we all read The Night Before Christmas and sing Christmas carols like a normal family?”
“But we aren’t a normal family, Storm,” Kal said innocently. As if to prove this point—
“Mouse!” Brock jumped off of Theia’s head, landing on the floor. The small brown mouse darted between his paws, ran around behind him, and, using his tale like a ramp, up to his head. She crawled up between his ears, leaning forward, just as Brock had done to Theia just a little bit ago.
“Hi Xed,” she squeaked.
“Gah!” The cat shook his head furiously, side to side, trying to dislodge her. “Geoff me!”
“Gotcha!” Nien came sailing above them, pushing Mouse off Xed’s head and punning her. “Victory is mine!”
“Ow!” Mouse hit Nein’s paw repeatedly with her tail, though it wasn’t doing much good. “Ow, I think you broke my leg.”
“Nah.” Nien took a few steps back. “You’re just being wimpy.”
Theia rolled her eyes, scooping Mouse up off the floor. “Be nice,” she ordered the cats.
Brock saluted.
“What were we saying?” Reese asked.
“Um, that we weren’t a normal family,” Kal reminded her. Everyone nodded. “Anyway, The Night Before Christmas isn’t PC since we have a Jewish person and a dragon present.”
“What does being a dragon have to do with anything?” Storm asked, and was rewarded with a puff of smoke to the face. “Okay, okay, fine.”
“You should tell the Peter story,” Theia said cheerfully. “Otherwise I’m gonna sing.”
“No no no.” Storm shook her head. “Peter. Right. I’ll tell the Peter story to the… how many people haven’t already heard it?”
“Cez, Cara, Tay, Luna, Neon, Jed, Critic, Juliet, Des, Ellen, Jason, Ten, Bianca, Draco, Rachel, Lola, Andy, Reese, Jess, and Shadow,” Peter recited. “You never tell that one.”
“Because if everyone knew it it might get us arrested,” Storm muttered.
Silence ensured.
“You can’t just stay silent after that,” Bianca said fairly.
“Watch me.”
“I can tell it,” Theia volunteered. “Stormeh is just paranoid.”
“Paranoid? They searched our castle.”
Another deep, cleansing trance crept upon everyone, and Storm sighed. “
“Fine.” Storm paused. “Okay, so, basically… he’s our most recent kid, but I don’t really know if the others knew what was going on. Hell, I didn’t know what was going on.
We had just come back from a family trip to Korea, and were unpacking. Ave and Thorn were fighting over the slinky, and it was because of that that we didn’t hear the bell at first. It’s a big castle. But eventually Kayla showed up and told us that there was a ‘weird looking man’ standing on the drawbridge demanding entrance.”
“How old was she then?” Asked Andy from where she was sprawled on one of the sofas.
“Six, seven, maybe? But all our children ended up as prodigies, so it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, so I stood up to go and tell that strange man to state his business or stay the—”
“Mummy!”
“—away from our castle, when Theia suddenly grabbed onto my arm and asked Kayla if the man was wearing a suit. Kayla said that yes, he was. Theia asked if the suit was blue and it was. She asked if it had certain logo over one pocket and it did.
And then Theia started freaking out.”
“I do not freak out.”
“’Scuse me. Theia went into a minor state of panic, just like most mortals do on my occasions. She told me to walk really really slowly down to the gate.
At that point I was wondering what law she’d broken and was going through the list of our financial assets wondering if there was a lawyer I could bribe as I lowered the drawbridge. And then I wondered if I shoudln’ just push the suited man into the moat and be done with him, but alas, I decided that that might be in bad taste.
“Is this the castle of Theia Rising?” he asked, all official-like. I asked him how many other castles were in the fandom, and he asked to come in.
I couldn’t decide between stalling and asking him if he liked ice cream and if so what kind or just going back in, since I didn’t really want to play a part in Theia’s various illegal activities. But her getting arrested would be annoying, so I just asked him why he was there.
“We have rumors of child smuggling,” he said, dead serious.
I laughed, which probably didn’t help our case.
“Child smuggling?” (and then I wondered if it had something to do with any of the kids, but we’d adopted all of them, legally.) “We’ve got the adoption papers and stuff.”
“Actually no adoption papers were filed as one would need the consent of the parents.”
“But why wouldn’t someone have told us? All the girls have been here for years.”
Now he was the one that was confused. I might possibly have been flipping out internally.”
Storm stopped for a few seconds.
“Well, what was I supposed to feel when a random guy accuses my spouse of child smuggling? Anyway. So he said something like “how can he have been there for years?” I told him that we didn’t have any children of the male persuasion, and he agreed that we did not because he was not adopted and had, in fact, possibly been kidnapped.
I asked him what the fuck he was talking about.
“Can I come in?”
Figuring that Theia had already done whatever she’d been planning—how the hell could she smuggle a child without telling me? Or more importantly, why would she do it without telling me since she knew I’d hit the roof until all the dust fell on her head—I brought him inside.
And then he shows me a search warrant and leads a bunch of artfully concealed goons across our moat. So while they start going through the mess Shadow made of the living room on his last visit, I went upstairs to find Theia—“
“And asked me what the hell was going on.” Theia tried to speak around the sugar filling her mouth. “Right. So I sort of shrugged all innocent-like and went downstairs. And the random goonians asked me if I was Theia Rising the 47th. And I said no, I was the Theia Rising and that I could kick their asses if I so chose and so what were they doing in my castle?”
Ten headpillowed.
“So they showed me their shmancy search warrents and told me that they had orders to search the house. And Storm comes down saying something like WTF, but she didn’t actually say WTF. And she sort of glared at me, but I’m used to that, so I just ignored it. And so they went out and wandered through the castle…. You know, I’m pretty sure two of them got lost and never came out.” She blinked innocently.
“Yeah. So I’m trying to figure out what they’re looking for, and Theia isn’t telling me anything, and they won’t tell me anything. So after awhile they leave after even checking behind all our pictures—“
“As though we would be so cliché as to have a hidden passageway behind a picture—“
For… god, I think it might have been days but it was probably just a few hours. They even watched our surveillance tapes, but Theia kept them from rewinding because she just claimed that her cousin-in-law and her cousin-in-law-in-law had just had hot sex in a guestroom and if they went back she’d accuse them of inappropriate conduct.”
“Hey!” Kay protested. “I never heard that part.”
“But it’s true,” Theia said. Kay glared at her. “Oh, come on, Kay. Everyone could hear it—“
Everyone put their hands over their eyes and tried to cover their ears.
“Scarring images,” Luna said sincerely. “Moving right along.”
“Ah, yes.” Theia nodded. “Where were we? Oh, right, hot sex in the guest room. So anyway, after awhile they left. And Storm was pestering me like you wouldn’t believe—”
“I’d totally believe it,” Jason muttered.
“Okay, imagine that but ten times worse. And I wait a couple days to make sure it’s safe—“
“To annoy me, you mean—“
“Lol.”
“Laura.”
“Sorry, I mean, yeah, mostly. And then I went and took Peter out of the printer cartridge.” Theia snickered at the stunned expressions of everyone present. “See, what happened, was that when we went to Korea there was this little boy that kept on following me around all miserable. His parents had escaped North Korea and he tried to go home and ended up getting hopelessly lost. And so then he decided that I was an awesome person—he has excellent judgment—and so I was like, okay, I’ll bring him home. And so I smuggled him onto the airplane. But then when someone reported a bag that breathed, they tracked me down to our castle. But then I hid Peter in a printer cartridge.”
“…A printer cartridge.”
“It’s true, Rachel.” Peter nodded. “I remember it. Quite small and cramped in there, it was. Even though it was a larger than average cartridge and I was a smaller than average child.”
“It would’nt have mattered if they found him. When he came out he was completely pink,” Theia recalled. “So Storm sees this pink kid running down the hall, and she had a cow… I’m pretty sure the cow is still wandering around up there too.”
“Sometimes,” Sheva said in a low, scary voice, “Visitors to the castle have heard a mysterious mooing sound in the night. If you hear it… it’s Storm’s cow.”
Everyone laughed. The awkward, strained sort of laugh one hears at the end of a sary story, when you’re just realizing that the danger has passed. The relieved type.
The tired type.
The clock chimed quarter to midnight, and a fight broke out over the last cookie.
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