Ice Pie [SpyxFamily][Si]

xxxxxxxxx Yor POV


“Anya, it’s time to wake up,” Yor prompted, sitting on the little girl’s bed where she was face down in the crack between her pillow and the bed.

“Mmph. Scratch my back,” the girl pleaded sleepily.

Obligingly, Yor began scratching her adopted daughter’s back. Slowly at first, then increasing speed. The pink haired girl grunted happily and contorted beneath her hands, luxuriating in the stimulus and arching her back like a cat.

When Yor stopped, she didn’t whine or complain, she merely sighed happily and lay still for a moment, but immediately started climbing out of bed as soon as Yor stood up.

It was quite early in the morning, and Yor found it interesting that, while the girl positively delighted in sleeping until quite late in the morning, she was also happy to get up and join Yor in her morning exercises.

Yor had work to go to, and did require a fair bit of time to bathe, dress, and apply makeup, but to keep herself in shape she also usually needed about an hour and a half for a proper morning exercise.

Loid, too, had been joining her, proving to be both capable of keeping up with her and similarly devoted to his exercise regime. Although if left to his own devices, he’d generally do it much later in the morning, he was perfectly willing to adapt to her schedule. He didn’t require the same amount of primp time she did.

Mindful of her new family, she kept herself to a light workout. A good pre-workout stretch, followed by two hundred each of handstand pushups, inverted situps, and a series of slow ballet moves which trained strength, balance, and endurance, all followed by a thirty minute run, which usually worked out to be about five kilometers since she was just jogging.

Loid actually kept up with her through all but the ballet moves, which was both surprising but also extremely gratifying. She’d never noticed it before, but working out could be lonely. Having someone there with her as a partner felt good.

Little Anya couldn’t come close to keeping up, but did her best to at least follow along with easier pushups and situps, starting with an easy twenty each. Unlike Loid, who moved on to a more traditional martial arts exercise, Anya did her best to follow along with the ballet moves. Although it cut into her own exercises, Yor didn’t mind taking the time to help Anya begin the training to start ballet.

Her morning run was also easily adapted to the company. She and Loid did wind sprints back and forth on the block while Anya did her series of sprints, then a cool down jog. At first they often had to carry their daughter back to the apartment, but as everyone learned how to work together, they judged things more accurately. Anya would go back inside and clean up first, then start breakfast prep while they finished their runs.

Loid would then take over and cook breakfast while Yor bathed. The lies they told during the school interview notwithstanding, Yor’s culinary skills were limited to bakery bought goods and simple fixings like muesli with milk. Loid was incomparably superior, though Yor had been making efforts to learn.

They’d eat together, then he’d quickly clean up while she and Anya washed the dishes, then Yor went and dressed. He generally even had time to shave before he had to finally surrender the bathroom to the goddess of fashion, at least until Yor left for work.

Anya was perfectly okay with the early morning efforts, especially since she generally had the time to grab another hour or two of sleep after breakfast.


xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx


It was the weekend, and Anya glanced around curiously from her position in the passenger seat of the rented car. She had a couple of maps stacked beside her, and was trying to follow their route as they passed street signs.

Yor smiled faintly as she drove.

Ordinarily, Loid would be the one driving, but even though he didn’t have any work related tasks to do this weekend, Anya had requested to go with just Yor, and make it a mother-daughter day.

They were headed to an area bordering the Miriquidi forest in lower east Ostania, an area pointed out by Franky as a good place to hunt for old, near-rotten stumps, which her step-daughter Anya needed for… some reason. It was just over 180 kilometers away, and Anya intended to bring back some things, so Yor had needed to rent a car with a sizeable boot in the back.

While there were doubtlessly closer places to look, removing natural features from a park would be a crime, as would be trespassing. But the area Franky had found was a large bit of hilly land near the Ore mountains that had been used for timber for generations, and the owner lived in Berlint, so it was a simple matter to get permission to visit.

Anya was decently helpful as a navigator, not that Yor really needed the assistance, but it was appreciated. Mostly, they spent the approximately three hour trip in a mix of conversation and contemplation.

“…That’s why you must be careful with light colors,” Yor explained. “While they certainly feel cool and summery, the least little thing can leave an embarrasing stain.”

“Wouldn’t pure white be better than pastels or brights, then?” Anya asked. “Because then you could just use bleach.”

“That’s true, but it weakens the fabric if you use it very much. That’s okay with some things, but not with others,” she replied. With how active she had to be in combat at times, any weak spots in her clothes had an awfully embarrassing tendency to tear.

“Oh, yes. You do move like a superhuman gymnast,” Anya said, out of nowhere. “I can see how rips would be a problem. But what about other stain removers? I’ve heard hydrogen peroxide is good on blood stains.”

Yor glanced at the girl in surprise before turning her eyes back on the road. They’d been talking about dirt, grass, and ink stains beforehand. Sometimes it seemed like her stepdaughter had very morbid thoughts. “Well, yes,” she agreed, a touch awkward. “Peroxide is good at removing blood stains, but it does cause bleaching on many colors.”

Anya’s face lit up in realization. “Oh, yeah, the oxygenation! I suppose that would mess with many dyes.”

They sat in silence for a while, Anya clearly thinking hard.

Yor left her to it. Anya’s thoughts, while often seeming to come out of nowhere, were frequently interesting, at the least.

Still, it nearly startled her into a swerve when Anya suddenly yelled:

“MEAT TENDERIZER!”

“Hah?!” Yor replied, her heart pounding.

“Bromelin! It’s an enzyme in meat tenderizer used for cooking. It breaks up proteins, and I’m pretty sure it breaks up some other kinds of chemical bonds, too. I think it would work for removing blood stains, and should be safe for fabrics, too,” Anya gushed excitedly.

Yor had never heard of anyone using meat tenderizer as a stain remover, but Anya was a genius, after all. “So how would you use it?” she asked, smiling at the excited girl.

Anya opened her mouth. “Ah… Hmm. Probably just use it as a paste. But you have to let meat soak it in for a while. That might just be to let it actually get into the meat, but it might be a reaction speed thing? Hmm. Well, we’ll just have to experiment, also known as just messing around, but you write down the results. SCIENCE!” Anya cried, her tiny fist shooting up.

“Science!” Yor echoed with a smile.

They ultimately had a very pleasant day driving out to the forest lands. Once there they prowled around, hiking through the hills and valleys. Anya had several botany books, and Yor carried a bag full of tools.

It took a while, as Anya was searching for something specific according to her own inscrutable standards, but near a small creek flowing between two hills, they finally found a small tree stump she liked.

It was about 30cm across, and the wood had turned black with age and rot. It also had a coating of green moss, and several shelf mushrooms growing on its side, which Anya had, after some effort with her books, identified as either blushing brackets or a particularly brown example of mossy maze polypore.

Neither species was edible, unlike the several clusters of sulphur shelf mushrooms they had collected during their hike.

The stump was somewhat rotten, but still firm enough to not crumble under their touch. It had several spreading roots, but was reasonably compact overall. Anya loved it.

By herself, she couldn’t have done much with it. But while Yor was no ditch digger, neither a shovel nor a saw was hard to use, and she plucked it from the ground with less than thirty minutes of work. Most of the time was spent just being careful.

Once they had it removed, they bagged it up in a large canvas sack and carried it home.

Anya nattered about her plans for it as part of an art piece, and Yor drove.

‘This motherhood business isn’t so bad,’ Yor thought happily to herself.

Anya leaned over from the passenger seat and gave her a hug.

AN: Kinda short, but Yor is hard. Next chapter is a bit longer, and features Franky. It's on my Patreon.

Note: I am writing again. I had stopped my patreon about a year ago, because I got a new job and didn't have much time for writing. Things went well for a while. New insurance helped me pay for my meds, things looked good.

Then I got sicker. And sicker. And lost the new job.

I am now unemployed and on medicaid. I'm broke. I'm also pretty sick, and it doesn't look good for getting better. This is probably the downward spiral.

So the Patreon is back up. I can't promise a rigid schedule due to health reasons. But I AM writing as much as I can. There's new chapters of both Then Be Batman and Ice Pie on my patreon.

Nugar | creating Original Fantasy and/or Scifi, and occasional fan proje | Patreon

Some other new stories and new materials are also incoming. Your support is appreciated!

Edit: I forgot the link. I have a new story up, Then be Batman. Let me know what you think.

 

xxxxxxxxx Chapter 15: Interlude Franky


Franky paused in the doorway and took a cautious sniff.

The rotten stump Anya and Yor had brought home wasn’t just covered in fungus, it was also full of mold. That wasn’t a problem when it was fresh from the wilds and damp with moisture, but by the first evening, when he’d come over, it had dried out and released spores everywhere, to the detriment of all present.

“I said I was sorry,” Anya told him with a roll of her eyes as she stared up at him. “For the record, I sneezed all night, too, even after we put the stump outside.”

“I spent two days dusting the place,” Loid said with a small smile as he invited Franky in. “Twice.”

“I helped!” Anya insisted.

“Yes you did. Everything you could reach,” Loid agreed.

Everyone glanced at Anya’s diminutive form and looked away innocently. The little girl pouted at having her efforts dismissed.

“Welcome again, Franky,” Yor greeted.

Franky still found it hard to believe that Loid had just… went out and found an intensely beautiful woman who was willing to pretend to have been married to him for more than a year. One who didn’t mind that he had a kid, even.

Though, admittedly, Anya was weird enough she might just be hanging around to see what the little goblin did next.

Still, Yor was a gracious host, and not at all unpleasant to be around. She was pretty quiet, not at all inclined to get involved in most discussions, but it wasn’t that she was stupid. The black haired woman actually had very keen eyes and seemed to carefully follow their conversations, but only spoke up if she felt she actually had something meaningful to say. It was actually an interesting contrast in the different types of intelligences people could have.

Loid viewed words as just another tool. He didn’t mind speaking, but when he spoke, he always had a goal in mind. With Franky, he was generally trying to convey information, or receive information. With most other people, he was either trying to convince them to do something, or trick them into doing something.

Yor, on the other hand, seemed to have a rather cautious relationship with words. Yor was a thinker, a watcher, and a doer. Getting into a conversation didn’t really seem to scare her, but she also didn’t place much personal value in it. For Yor, words were just something she had to do sometimes, and it was best to be short and succinct about it. Ordinarily, Franky would have kind of looked down on that sort of attitude as the kind of thing fit only for brutes and manual laborers, but Anya had been talking him around, bringing up various psychological studies, and telling him of some saying by an American scientist, something about fish climbing trees. And for all that Yor was completely bizarre for just going with the situation Loid proposed, it was clear that she was far from dumb.

He’d watched her and Anya perform a long series of experiments testing ways of getting blood out of clothes, and while it was definitely Anya’s idea to start with, Yor was quick to think of ways of testing things like fabric tensile strength and color fade afterwards, in repeatable, controlled methods. Maybe it was just her womanly fashion knowledge, but she did genuinely seem to have a good idea of how to put things together.

Speaking of Anya, there was another, rarer kind of intelligence he didn’t think he’d ever really ran into before. Anya loved words. She played with them. Instead of something to avoid, like Yor, or merely a means to an end, like Loid, conversation with Anya was like playing with a toy construction set. They had a bunch of parts, words, and Anya liked sharing the task of putting them together to see what new thing they might create.

Maybe that was just her being a child.

Maybe.

She certainly didn’t act much like a child in other ways.

That wasn’t a complaint, though. He practically shuddered to imagine the difficulty of their mission if Anya had been just another whiny, needy child, instead of a logical and mature co-conspirator.

After a bit of basic hospitality, they all gathered on the couch. Several low tables had been set up, with one bit of secondhand furniture occupying center focus.

But before that, he had a delivery to make.

“Here you go, kid,” Franky announced, opening his bag and pulling out a cube shaped contraption.

At first glance, it might seem similar to the relatively recently released ‘Rubix Cube’, a toy that had been internationally released in 1980. Anya had one of those, actually, and had quickly solved it. She dismissed any idea that solving the cube was an intellectual challenge, pointing out that, while it might be a difficult for someone just seeing the thing for the first time, actual solutions were based on mathematical parity and memorizing a few simple patterns, algorithms, were all it took to solve the thing.

Privately, Frankie had thought much the same thing, having had little trouble with the toy himself. You just needed to think logically.

The cube he presented was smaller, and made of a mix of brass and plastic. The concept was Anya’s, though he’d had to show her how machine shops preferred to have their designs laid out. Each side of the cube had some sort of interactable switch.

“So this is what you were talking about, Anya,” Loid mused as he looked at it.

Anya took it, then passed it to the others. Yor took it first, and turned it over in her hands to examine it from all angles.

“What does it do?” Yor asked.

Side one had three rocker switches. One was a simple on off, the middle one had a neutral middle setting, and the last one was based on a rheostat and would stay in whatever position you put it in.

Side two had nine pushbuttons, which would stay down on the first click, or pop back up on the second click.

Side three had a simple ‘pop’ membrane button, which just made a pop when clicked.

Side four had a little wheel along one edge that would click like a ratchet as it spun one way, or spin freely the other.

Side five had a little stick sticking out of it with a rounded top. The stick wanted to stay centered, but could be wiggled in any direction.

And the last side, side six, had a metal ball set in it, so that about a third of the ball protruded from the side. The ball could be spun in any orientation.

“It doesn’t do anything!” Anya replied proudly as Yor worked some of the buttons, which produced satisfying clicks. “I call it the Fidget Cube!”

“Eh?”

“Okay,” Anya announced, going into lecture mode. “Have you ever been bored? Pretty much everyone has. Okay, imagine you’re bored, but you’re in, say, an office environment. You have to be there. You can’t just get up and go for a walk. You also can’t just pull out of a book and start reading. Reading is ‘doing something’,” she said, making air quotes. “You’re supposed to be working, so you can’t ‘do something’ else, right? But for the moment, you don’t actually have any work. That’s kinda why you’re bored. So, for most people, kids especially, you pick up something and toy with it. A pen, or a pencil. Maybe you sharpen it a bit. Or dig your fingernail into it and scratch it. Maybe you find a paperclip and bend it.

“It’s especially prevalent with us kids, right? Generally speaking, we haven’t really learned patience yet. As you get older, you get more patient, you learn to live in your head, imagining things or remembering or whatever, but that’s hard when you’re young. But it’s not just the young kids, either. A lot of savants, or people with some savant traits-“

Here she and Loid shared significant looks. Franky understood, the topic had come up a few times between he and Loid as well.

“-just need some sort of stimulation. So that’s what this is. A source of easy, tactile stimulation that will fit in a pocket. It doesn’t do anything. There’s no point in toying with it. And yet, if you have it at hand, it’s exceptionally easy to just… let your fingers poke at it while you think.”

They all turned to look expectantly at Franky.

He blushed faintly.

“She’s right,” he admitted. “I couldn’t keep my hands off it earlier today. I think I’m going to have one made for myself.”

“Exactly!” Anya said proudly. “Ideally, we’d sell the idea to a toy manufacturer for a percentage or something, though I don’t know if it’d actually be worth the trouble.” She nodded deliberately at her adopted father, and caught Franky’s eyes, too. “By itself maybe not, but I’ve been refining some of my other ideas, and maybe if I have a big enough portfolio?” Anya shrugged. “You know I’ve been working on the ‘Spin Duelist’ idea, and the associated ‘Fairy Flier’.”

Yor passed the now named Fidget Cube to Loid.

“And the Fidget Spinner,” Loid reminded.

“Yeah, if they ever finish making them,” Anya agreed.

Franky knew that the devices were being made by a shop back in Westalis.

“I was also looking at the vacuum when we were cleaning up the other day, and I think I can make a better one. That’s the kind of thing that might make some real money,” Anya admitted.

“Does it spin?” Franky joked. So far, basically everything the little genius had made involved spinning in some form or another. He’d made a few jokes poking gentle fun at her before.

Anya snorted. “Ah-“

She cut herself off suddenly, a conflicted expression on her face.

Franky laughed at the sight of it. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“Shit,” she said in a defeated voice.

“Anya!” Loid and Yor both exclaimed.

“Sorry!” she replied, blushing. “Sorry. Sorry. Didn’t mean to.” She glanced at the angry and disappointed expression on her adopted parents faces and hastened to explain. “It sort of does spin. I mean, obviously there’s the motor itself, and the turbine. But the idea is, right-“

They were still frowning at her foul language. Loid had even stopped fiddling with the cube and set it down on the table between them.

“Current vacuum cleaners just suck up dirt and blow it into a bag, right? Some have the suction turbine in front of the bag, so the exhaust is what goes in the bag. That’s great for initial suction, but rough on the turbine. Any rock or other hard object that gets in the turbine can break off blades. Others have the turbine behind the bag. The suction pulls the debris stream through the bag, which traps the dirt. That keeps the turbine safe, but reduces suction power.

“And both types have the fundamental problem that, as the bag and filters get clogged with dirt, the air has a harder time getting through it. You lose suction power from the restriction of the bag, and you really lose suction power as it clogs. The whole thing is really kind of inefficient.”

Her parents expressions were starting to lighten as they considered what she was saying.

“So what we need to do is to remove the dirt from the air stream, but without using a filter that will clog up. That’s hard to do, but it came to me earlier,” Anya explained.

“You spin it,” Franky said thoughtfully.

“Yep! So, yeah, I know, it seems like everything I think of involves spinning, but that’s just because spinning is easy. So, you know what centrifugal force is. When you spin a thing, it wants to leave the spin and fly out according to the angular momentum. The faster you spin, the more force there is.

“So what we need to do is spin the air. Like a cyclone! Like a tornado. Take a cylinder. Something smooth sided. Or maybe even a cone. We’d have to experiment. But anyway, have it so that the air, as it enters, goes through a ring of ports that puts it into a spin. If you have a fast air stream, which you want anyway for suction power, and you tighten the spin, we should get enough centrifugal force to yank the dirt right out of the air! The clean, light air can find an exit in the middle, but the dirt is left behind. The advantage is a higher overall suction power for a given motor power, and it won’t clog until there’s literally so much dirt the cyclone is blocked. Hold on, I made some sketches.” She quickly ran out of the room.

Franky and Loid shared a Look. A mutual commiseration for the surprising trials of dealing with a genius. Loid sat the Fidget Cube down on the table.

Yor just looked vaguely proud, but she did glare at Franky.

“Have you been teaching our daughter to swear?” Yor demanded.

Franky shook his head frantically.

Fortunately, Anya returned quickly with a notebook, which she passed around.

“While you look at that, here’s what I’ve got going on for the stump,” Anya announced. “Since the mold or whatever on the stump proved to be an allergen, we had to clean it up, but without altering its looks, because looking like a mossy stump covered in mushrooms is the point. So we got a large tub and soaked it in methanol, wood alcohol. That killed everything living in it, washed off most of the spores, and dehydrates the moss cells. Then we drained it and soaked it in a glycerin solution, which fills the moss cells back up and preserves them. I also did some of the other mosses we collected, but most of this we just bought at a flower shop. It’s easier.”

Franky had never heard of preserving moss like that, but apparently it was a known thing if you could just buy it at a shop. Anya read a wide range of books. He was a reader himself, but mostly stuck to technical manuals.

“So here’s how this goes together. We’ve got the little table we found,” she said, indicating a small round table they’d found at a secondhand shop. It currently had the stump sitting on the top of it, with the roots trimmed so that it didn’t hang over. “The stump goes on top, obviously. And I’ll use moss and some filler to make sure it looks natural sitting up there. I also need to find a way of inclosing the bottom, or part of the bottom, between the legs to hide the electronics. And it goes like this.” She began to pick up various bits and pieces arrayed before her.

A bright white lightbulb would be put into a mirrored, parabolic housing, so the focused light could only escape through a clustered trio of holes that made about a third of an arc circle.

There, the light would pass through a round, spinning, colored filter. A whole rainbow of colors, from red to purple, made of strips of overlapping filter media turned into a wheel. This wheel had to be spun by an electric motor. The three separate holes would focus the light through three different sections of the filter wheel, resulting in a progression of colors for each one in the group, and a changing gradient for each one individually.

“We want variable speed, so it needs a rheostat. And it needs to be able to go pretty slow, so we might need to gear it down. But mainly we need it to be quiet and efficient. That’s where I need your help, Franky. We need to hit some electronic shops and put this thing together,” Anya explained.

Once the now colored light passed through the filter, it entered each of three oddly shaped glass bottles.

“I’ve got mock-ups made with clay, here. I honestly don’t see any way of getting it made short of just going to a glassmaker and asking them to make it. It needs to be very clear glass, too.”

The three clay mock-ups looked like cylinders designed to sit in close proximity to each other, and each one terminated in a third of a dome on top. When put together, they would direct each color of light in a different direction, both out and up. They would need to coat it in a mirror solution, which wasn’t the hardest thing to do, but they had to leave a number of gaps in the mirror coating.

“We’ll probably just coat the outside. I can just put wax over the places I want light to actually go through, like the bottom where the light comes in through the filter, and the places on the top I want it to leave. And once it’s mirror coated, we’ll fill it up with a bleach solution that will keep it clean and let the light shine through properly.”

At the top, across the dome pieces, a half dozen clear spots would be left. These would each be mated with another piece of glass, hollow and partially mirrored just like the main one.

“I originally intended for it to be all one piece, but I think it would be too hard for the glassmaker to actually make,” Anya confessed. “So I broke it up.”

The light would go through the tendrils and exit the end of them. But each tendril would end inside various decorations, mostly mushrooms Anya had made, which she had been spending her days working on.

“Most are made of colored silicone gel,” she said, showing them off. Toadstools and shelf mushrooms and fat little button mushrooms. “I made some of them by shaping them by hand, and others I made through a lost wax process to get the fiddly bits right, like the veils and gills. A couple are made of actual hard wax, and I tried using some clear plastic for one but I don’t think it turned out well. I’d like to get a couple of glass ones made, too.”

Again, Franky exchanged a look with Loid, who just shrugged.

“So, obviously, the point is that we hollow out the underside of the stump and run all this glass through it. The mirrored surface and the bleach solution will channel the colored light to everywhere we want, without losing much brightness. These mushrooms are translucent or transparent, so when the light hits their underside, they’ll glow. The color wheel is there so that they’ll turn a rainbow of shades as it spins. We even might want to stop it sometimes. It’d be nice to be able to select one specific color by hitting a button, but it’d probably be easier just to have a knob that can control the speed, and you stop it when it hits the color you want.” She shook her head. “Anyway, isn’t it going to be pretty? A magical fairy sort of setting. An old mossy stump covered in magical glowing rainbow mushrooms. I want to make some fairy figures to sit on it, too, but mainly I just need to get the lighting done first.”

Franky could see it in his head. That would actually be kind of pretty. Not really a money making sort of idea, but the kind of art piece she could carry to school to impress people.

Because ultimately, that’s what this was about. Anya, as a precocious genius, needed to have a backlog of precocious genius examples, or it’d be weird that she’d show up to school and excel in everything, but have no history.

It was kind of interesting.

Franky followed Loid more out of personal loyalty than any real sense of ideology. Yes, he agreed that war sucked and people shouldn’t do it, but the kind of all-encompassing motivation for peace that Loid showed had sort of passed him by.

But being with Anya helped him understand. How many other Anyas were out there, orphaned by war and never getting a chance to show what they could do?

Well, that was the point of all this, he supposed. Not just a career as a spy, but working to keep the ever paranoid and xenophobic Ostania from restarting the war.

Belatedly, he realized that at some point, he’d picked up the Fidget Cube and was playing with it again.

Although, partnering with a little genius to make a bunch of money didn’t sound bad, either.



xxxxxxxxx

AN: Loid's interlude is up on my patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/Nugar

I'm a little slow at the moment, but I'm supposed to get new meds after the start of the new month which will hopefully help. Did you know that medicaid limits you to 6 medications a month that they'll pay for? Because they do. What do you do when you need more than six?

Fuck you for being poor and sick, amirite?

 

xxxxxxxxx Chapter 16: Interlude Loid


Loid sat at the dining table, stacks of papers in various piles around him. On one corner, a brass, three lobed 'Fidget Spinner' steadily lost speed.

Along with the seven little toys, HQ had sent backdated and carefully aged 'notes', purporting to track the precocious development of his daughter. The notes were based on data gathered from other studies, but adjusted here and there based on his observations of Anya. They were fairly informally styled, to sell the idea that he, a psychologist, made them out of curiosity, but had no intention of publishing them as a case study.

The tragic loss of his wife, Anya's subsequent withdrawal, and the shattering of their lives meant that any interest they might have had in fame had been thoroughly squashed under the necessities of putting their lives back together.

He liked that. It seemed nicely plausible, covered many holes, and saved him from a lot of problematic work.

In the kitchen, Anya and Yor were nattering on about cooking. Yor was a terrible cook, but Anya insisted that it had to be a skill issue and she just needed careful instruction and a chance to gain experience.

Anya was not a particularly great cook, either, but she wasn't hopeless. She could follow a recipe and understood the principles, but was generally stymied by the physical issue of being 101cm tall.

Also, she tended to get distracted and overcook things, or even burn them. Her mind raced like a car engine, and tended to overlook the small stuff when she was excited. Anya was, at least, aware of the issue, and made liberal use of an egg timer to remind her to check what she was cooking.

Loid was currently looking through her art portfolio, which was sure to be a major topic in their upcoming meeting with the school. The 'Fairy Stump' was nearly done. It had only taken a few days for a glassmaker to make the required 'light pipes'. They had coated them in mirror silver the night before, and Franky was scheduled to come back over in two days for the light filter installation.

Anya was already considering trying to make little fairy doll versions of the three of them to sit under a big mushroom on the very top of the stump, and had gotten both Yor and him to sit down for some sketches, which honestly came out fairly well, much to her excitement.

The plan was to take most of her art to the school, as part of their plan to get more Stella Stars. He had a clear progression of material, starting with stick figures and coloring book pages, and terminating at the stump. All of the art was even her work. HQ had sent over art examples of what she should have created at different ages, and she'd redone them in her own style, successfully mimicking the lack of sophistication.

Arguably her greatest piece, or at least the most poignant, was a sketch of her 'mother'. Going by her description of what she vaguely remembered as her actual mother, and combining that with a list of dead women with acceptably vague histories, they'd managed to put together some 'old photographs' of the family, which were 'hidden' so as not to offend Yor. Anya had taken one and, with deliberately crude but also painfully exacting lines, drew her several times in an 'old' sketchbook.

Then sprinkled little drops of water all over it for authenticity.

She was so proud of herself.

Loid, however, was left with the question that came up all too often with his adopted daughter.

Where the hell did she learn these things?

Anya came back from the kitchen and hauled herself up into a chair, then leaned forwards and gave the spinner an enthusiastic flick, setting it going again.

"Wow," she said. "Mama could burn cereal, and she's got no sense for spices at all. But her knife work is impeccable. She could get hired at the fanciest restaurant in the country as a prep cook in an instant. She knows the difference between cubed, chopped, and diced better than I do, and she's so fast!"

"Is she safe to be left alone in there?" Loid asked quietly.

Anya gave him a thumb's up.

"We're not doing Bavarian beef stew this time, but more of a tomato based one," she explained. "Fewer steps, and it doesn't use wine. She's just putting stuff in the pot at the moment."

They had the Bavarian version once every week or two, which used beef cubes braised in a red wine sauce. Loid actually had noticed that Yor was exceptionally skilled at meal prep, if not the actual cooking.

"Where did you learn the recipe?" he asked his daughter curiously.

"Previous family," she said very very quietly, then resumed her normal volume. "Bone broth and tomato sauce base, with beef, potatoes, and every kind of bean you can find. The only spices are salt, black pepper, and a little bit of thyme."

He nodded thoughtfully. That sounded nicely hearty. Sometimes, he wished he could meet the previous family that had adopted her. Some of the things he heard about them seemed wholesome. Others… just made him want to slap them and ask what the hell was wrong with them that they would essentially discard a child as special as Anya.

Though she did admit that she'd pretended to be a normal, unexceptional girl in front of them, but what kind of events made her even think about something like that? It was clear Anya had learned deception before the married couple had ever lain eyes on her.

"How goes the presentation?" she asked, glancing at his materials.

"It's a large project, but it should pass scrutiny. Thank you for your efforts," he praised.

Anya gave him a bright smile.

The ding of an egg timer cut their conversation short, and she gave the spinner one last flick, then hopped down and hurried back into the kitchen.


xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx


"No, Anya. Let Franky do the soldering," Loid chided gently.

She pouted just a little. "Fine. But I'm going to need my own tools eventually."

It was the night of the final assembly for the Fairy Stump. Only nine days remained until school officially started, and they needed to go three days early for a meeting with the faculty about Anya's placement.

The mirrored glass pipes had been inserted in holes carefully drilled in the old stump, and capped with the fake mushrooms. The hardest part, at least for them, had been the boring of a large hole up from the underside of the stump, which had required the dual efforts of both Yor and Loid, working with large drill bits, a wood borer, a keyhole saw, and chisels.

At some length, however, they had managed to get the three big light cylinders inserted and mated to the branching glass pipes. When a flashlight was shone into the bottom of the main cylinders, the corresponding mushrooms had obligingly lit up. Franky was doing the final installation of the filter wheel, gearbox, and motor, as well as the controls.

"We already compromised on the knife set you wanted," he countered. "I agree that you're responsible, but you're still very small, and lack dexterity."

"Eh, the whale knives are as much an art project as anything else. I wish I could make them myself, it'd mean more, but yeah." She sighed. "I'm just so small." Anya shook her head. "Do you think they'll have them done by the time school starts? Is that the kind of thing we should carry?"

"I don't see why not. You're going to be using them for your art, right? Their cutting edge is no bigger than a penknife, it should be fine," Yor, expert in all things bladed, interjected.

Down on the floor, atop a drop cloth and slab of wood brought for the purpose, Franky finished the final connections and sealed them in rubber tape. Once he plugged in the power cord and checked to make sure there were no shorts, everyone gathered close for the test of the switches and dials.

The table now had a 'skirt' of thin, bent wood hanging from the table top, which would hide the filter wheel mechanism. It was sanded and polished and stained the same color as the original table, and bore a small array of controls set in the wood, each carefully labeled by engravings filled with white crayon.

There was a master on/off rocker switch, which powered the assembly. Next was another switch labeled 'continuous' and 'timed'. Setting the switch to continuous made the sixty watt white mercury lightbulb in its parabolic housing light up. Like a flashlight, the only way out for the light was through a hole on one side, which focused the light properly. Also, a small, quiet fan turned on, which would circulate air to keep it from getting too hot.

Next was an adjustable rheostat with a turnable knob. Franky carefully twisted it clockwise, and with a soft click, the electric motor started to spin. They'd been forced to use a gearbox with a chain of small gears, more so they could set the motor to the side and out of the light path than any real need in gear reduction, though it did end up at a 2:1 ratio. Franky sped it up and slowed it down several times, and while there was a noticeable buzz of gear noise at full speed, it wasn't overwhelming.

The last of the controls were those of a timer. The lights could be set up to turn off after a custom set of time, or, with the push of a single large button, the whole setup would turn on, run for fifteen minutes, then turn itself off.

The idea was, if Anya needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, she could hit the button from her bed and have a nightlight that would last until she got back in bed, and turn itself off about the point she was falling back asleep.

"Well, it looks good so far," Franky admitted. "Let's install everything now."

Boards had already been cut and pre-fitted. As an art piece showcasing the clever use of light, the whole thing had been made to come apart easily for demonstration, with wingnuts holding things in place instead of screws, and plenty of insulation on the wires. All they had to do was put on the color filter wheel, put things in place, and hand tighten the appropriate wingnuts. Except for getting the filter properly affixed to the shaft, it took less than five minutes.

Loid poured three glasses of wine and one glass of cider. Franky packed his tools. Yor got the lights, plunging the room into darkness.

Anya hit the switch.

The mercury bulb took several seconds to reach operating temperature, meaning the glow, when it started, was subtle, but it quickly built.

Since there were three light pipe groups, the glowing mushrooms had three distinct groupings going around the stump, with one including the largest, central mushroom sprouting from the top of the stump. Each pipe also matched a different area on the color wheel. The left group was on yellow-green, the middle and front was on blue, and the right was on red. The bright colors gave the dark wood and matted moss an ethereal, fey quality, as intended.

Then Anya turned the dial, and the colors changed. Slowly, the light advanced, a literal rainbow of color dancing around the stump in a spiral of playfulness and imagination.

It was all too easy to imagine tiny little fairies dancing around the stump, flitting to and fro, and sitting under and on the magic toadstools, giggling the while.

Loid glanced at Anya.

Her eyes were shining.

They all toasted the art piece's success. It had taken most of the month, and he knew Anya still wanted to add some fairy figurines, but it was basically done, and in time for them to show it off for the administration at Eden Academy.

"It's lovely, Anya," Yor said softly.

"Pfsh, I barely did any of it actually myself," she scoffed. "And I bet the school people don't believe it was really me, either. That's why I wrote everything down, all the steps and whatnot."

"Kid, you handed me a wiring diagram," Franky countered. "Whether those stuffy old teachers believe you or not, this was your idea. There's no shame in contracting out specialty work. I'd have to hire people, too, if I was your size."

Anya bobbled her head in mild agreement. "Well, like I said, I wrote down the steps. It's not like this thing is all that important, what's important is that it shows the process. I gotta have a reputation for doing stuff like this, so it's more believable in the future when I pull out something new. I don't want to be a one hit wonder, after all."

"Somehow, I doubt this is the limit of the surprises you have in store for us," Loid said wryly, thinking about what he knew about his co-conspirator.

"Heh. Yeah. Speaking of which, we need to find out what the legal situation is for inventing things at school is. Obviously, I want to invent some stuff very publically, under the eye of the teachers, where no one can doubt me. But if I make something at school, do they get ownership, or part ownership of the idea? If it's on school time, and all? I don't want to give them anything valuable. I think it'd be nice if we could monetize some of my stuff."

Franky and Loid exchanged another Look.

"Why would they have any claim to anything you come up with?" Yor asked. "If it's your idea."

"Well, some enterprising teacher could immediately go file a patent and claim it was his. Or the school could say that, since I did it during time I was supposed to be conjugating verbs, it's theirs. Or maybe they'd say that, since I invented whatever using school supplies, the school owns the prototype. I don't know, Mama, and that's the point. We don't want to get blindsided by some clever, greedy a-ah, uh, person." The tiny pink haired girl gave them a grimace in the rainbow fairy light.

"O-oh. I suppose greed can make people do some terribly, terribly unwise things," the woman replied, her own face a stern mask that, for a moment, made Loid pity anyone foolish enough to attempt to cheat Anya out of her due.

"I'll look into it, and we'll discuss it at the upcoming meeting," Loid promised. "We won't be caught unawares." He paused. "I do have to remind you, however, that you don't have to go that far. You're already a prodigy, you don't have to have a portfolio of inventions on top of that. It's not necessary," he stressed.

"Maybe not, but it might make things easier," Anya countered. "A smart little girl is one thing. A smart little girl that keeps coming up with valuable inventions, inventions that can raise her comfortably upper middle class family into the nouveau rich? Investment opportunities for the elite and wealthy? Let's see them ignore us then."

She twisted the dial all the way to the right, and the gentle rainbow waves became a pulsing strobe, a riot of color and potential.

"Their children will read my stories and play with my toys. Their servants will use my inventions. They will buy my art. And we?" She turned, so her face was hidden in shadow. "We will succeed, Papa."

She paused.

"Muahahahah!"

"Seven out of ten," Franky announced.

"Pppfth, what? That's a ten out of ten, and you know it!" Anya cried out, offended.

"Mmm, you know how the Russky judge is."

As his friend and daughter started squabbling, Yor turned on the lights again and went to the kitchen. She returned with a plate of what Anya called 'oatmeal candies' or 'no-bake cookies', another recipe she'd learned from her previous family. A chocolatey, peanut buttery cookie filled with oatmeal, which was sweeter than it sounded.

Loid sat there and stared at the Fairy Stump, which was still glowing, though it was washed out by the living room lights.

He had a mission. A mission for peace.

Really, the mission was almost a retirement, of sorts. He had a great track record, a service history full of successes. But that kind of running, gunning, and sneaking around was a young man's game, and Loid had recently passed thirty years of age. Old injuries were catching up to him, and while his skills were as sharp as ever, eventually he was going to make a mistake he couldn't afford.

Transitioning from active spy to long term embedded asset was a way for him to still contribute, but lower his risk profile. And it wasn't as if it was just a make work mission, no, if he could gain the ears of Ostania's elite, he'd be able to do more to keep war from breaking out than he ever could meeting shadowy figures in the dark.

To that end, getting a family had been a necessary bother. Ideally, a suitable female fellow agent would have been his wife, and the trials of an adopted daughter could be managed.

Of course, problems came up in every mission.

'Marrying' a local, unaffiliated girl was acceptable. Yor was pleasant, didn't pry, and fit right in. He liked Yor. At this point, he'd pick Yor over another agent, and he hoped that everything continued to go smoothly.

But a big part of the reason everything had been going so well was Anya.

Never, in all his years, had he had the kind of out of nowhere advantage Anya presented. A true genius, a prodigy that would shake the world, hiding out as an orphan in a run-down orphanage. If it wasn't for the fact that he knew there was no way anyone could have predicted he'd go there and pick her, he'd almost wonder if he was being pranked. You just didn't run into people like Anya.

But who was Anya?

A genius, yes, but that's just what she was. Who was she? Where was she from? How did she know the things she did?

Why was she as devoted to deceiving those around her as much as he was?

Anya didn't just help create the backstory, she understood the need for a backstory, and how to add believability to it. Her contributions added verisimilitude to the fabricated history.

There was no reason for anyone to doubt the veracity of the Forger family.

They were a bright, happy family with a bright, precociously creative child, who was advancing fast, but not unrealistically fast. Then a tragedy, followed by a long period of grieving where she abandoned many of her previous hobbies and became more introverted and disinterested, but found solace in reading, absorbing facts about a wild range of topics.

Then her father found a new love, and the adaptable Anya embraced her new mother, finding new, feminine interests and a role model with wildly different experiences. Yor was no intellectual, but showed excellence in her own chosen fields equal to any of the more cerebral works of the father.

Unfortunately, some damage was done, the girl missing out on some of the formative periods of socialization other children would enjoy, but more of that was about her being unable to relate to age peers than a true lack of opportunity. Thus, the family goal of putting Anya in a school of such quality that she could find other prodigies like herself, as well as giving the girl the kind of learning opportunities and challenges she would never find at lesser institutions. With support, education, and socialization, she would brim with ideas.

The mission honestly looked great. His only real concern at this point was that she was almost certainly far more advanced than the young son of his target, Damian. While the boy would have had access to the finest tutors and attention available, there was a big difference between 'decently intelligent child with the finest education' and 'serious contender for most intelligent child in the world'.

But Anya had that covered. She was going to be an Imperial Scholar, that wasn't in doubt. And there was another Desmond scion already a part of that group. She would attack from both angles, attempting to befriend Damian by appealing to his interests, and trying to gain the attention of the older Demetrius through a mix of writing, art, inventions, and sheer academic prowess. Even if the children proved reticent, surely Lord Donovan would be interested in the ongoing spectacle that was Anya.

Loid certainly would! He could barely believe the things she did, and he lived with her.

Some of the people back at HQ did not believe his reports. Only the weight of his impeccable service history allowed him to convince them to provide the kind of records a prodigy of her caliber required.

Things like the Fidget Cube and Spinner, those were within the realm of belief. A child inventing a toy is hardly unheard of. The Fairy Stump was pushing the envelope. The artistic idea wasn't overwhelming, but the use of light and color seemed almost beyond what a six year old could imagine on their own, for all that he had quite a few pages of her notes on exactly the train of logic that had resulted in it.

Her idea for the 'Spin Duelists' and associated 'Fairy Flier' weren't too bad, until she proudly showed them the design for the dual use launcher, which would drop the spinning top, or release the flying doll respectively. But, sure. No one would believe that she really designed that on her own, clearly some adult had a hand in it.

Anya's design for a 'cyclonic vacuum' had, if you'll forgive the reference to her art piece, stumped him.

There was no one she could crib from. It didn't exist. No one had patented it, and when asked, she couldn't point to any reference books that talked about the principles of the idea, other than topics about cyclones and centrifugal force. Somehow, his adopted daughter had spontaneously come up with a serious engineering marvel in her head because she didn't like their vacuum cleaner.

And she had more ideas, things which might be just as inventive. Ideas she knew that she had to somehow make believable before she even told her family about them! The face she presented to him was itself a deception, one made not to inflate her importance, but to downplay her abilities! He'd caught her mumbling about them sometimes, and matched them to cryptic notations in her journals.

Most concerning was the quiet conversation with herself he'd overheard one day while she was writing.

'No, that's too many inventions this quick. Got to slow down, space them out into something plausible. No one's going to believe a little girl came up with this stuff. Got to have a reputation first. Invent it in front of people so they can see me do it.'

Anya talked to herself fairly often, especially when distracted. He supposed it was the result of being without a conversation partner for most of her life, with only books to fill the void. Honestly, it was a terrible habit for a spy, and could very easily tank the mission if she did it in front of the wrong person about the right topic.

But he didn't want to train it out of her. Not yet. Not until he knew.

Not until he understood.

Why did Anya know what she knew?


xxxxxxxxx

AN:

The scene in the anime where Yor deftly cubes some steak and throws it in a pan with a red wine sauce is almost certainly bavarian beef stew.

I was raised making 'oatmeal candies', which I learned later in life are more commonly called 'no bake cookies'. We called them oatmeal candies because oatmeal cookies were so obviously something entirely different. They're really good but I can't have them anymore, heh.

'Oatmeal Candies'
There are other recipes out there, but this one is mine.

Combine the following in a large pot (I don't recommend non-stick pots, you're gonna have to stir vigorously and scrape the sides)
2 1/2 cup white granulated sugar
1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter
4 tablespoons cocoa powder
2/3 cup (one small can) evaporated milk (usually carnation evaporated milk, NOT sweetened condensed)

Slowly bring to a slow boil, stirring frequently to mix the ingredients. With relatively little liquid, it has a bad tendency to stick to the pot and burn, so bring the temp up slowly and stir and scrape the sides and bottom. Once a slow, steady boil has been achieved, start a timer. Boil for four minutes, then turn off the heat.

Add
2 tablespoons vanilla extract and stir.
8 heaping tablespoons of creamy peanut butter and stir until thoroughly mixed.
2 1/2 cups of dry plain oatmeal and stir until thoroughly mixed.

Spoon cookie sized lumps out onto a large non-stick baking pan. This recipe amount usually fills up two pans depending on spacing. They're quite good warm and gooey, but given an hour or so to cool, they will turn hard and crumbly and cookie-like. The flavor is chocolaty and peanut buttery and oatmealy, but with subtle flavors of vanilla, too.

If you boiled it too long, or put too much sugar, or too much oatmeal in it, it will get very stiff, the oatmeal will stay fairly white, and the resulting cookies will be super dry and crumbly. Add a little bit of hot water while adding the oatmeal and mix thoroughly to soften and moisten the final result.

If you added too much condensed milk, or too much peanut butter, or didn't boil it long enough, the result will be tasty but gooey and never really get hard. You can save this at the final step by adding a bit more oatmeal, or plan ahead of time by adding more sugar at the start.

Practice makes perfect!



These are the whale knives mentioned. https://www.echefknife.com/search?type=product&q=kujira They are nice little paring/utility knives in fun shapes.


This is the inspiration for the Fairy Stump. I've actually got most of the stuff I need, and have done some of the work, on making my own, but then I got sick and the project is on indefinite pause. These days, you'd just use a few cheap RGB LEDS and some fiber optic line. The whole thing with the spinning color filter and the mirrored light pipes is just making do with primitive tech.


Next chapters of Then Be Batman and Ice Pie are out on my patreon. There will be another chapter of Ice Pie before I go back to Then Be Batman.

Nugar | creating Original Fantasy and/or Scifi, and occasional fan proje | Patreon

Also, as requested by people who justifiably hate Patreon, I have a Ko-Fi now.

https://ko-fi.com/nugar

Thanks for all your support! I'm mostly caught up on meds and supplies now. Next goal: An eye exam and new glasses.