Chapter Text
It’s more convenient if the infants are all in one place. Unfortunately, the pink beings are useless as they are now, Sir Reginald wants little to do with them. So the man puts out an ad. Nannies wanted for seven peculiar children.
The man has been on earth for years but he still struggles to tell the youths of the planet's intelligent life apart. They all are shaped the same and act in the same manner. It would be useful to his tests and research if he could tell them apart. So he devised a system. The children were to be numbered, 1 through seven in no particular order. Everything a child owned would have that number on it. A simple way to organize his results, and their things.
He had meant to name them, but he was simply too busy to do so. By the time the nannies came, he hadn’t yet come up with any, so just continued to refer to them by numbers. He could tell the young ladies rearing his new wards weren’t happy with it, but the sum of their salary let them look the other way.
Of course, with such an extraordinary birth, the children themselves were extraordinary beings. When his nanny stopped reading a book, Number Six spawned some sort of appendage from his chest, which writhed in rage. He had been hard pressed to get the girl to stay on staff at that. From that point on, the babe’s skin would pulse, as if something was pushing at it to get out. From five months and on, Six was extraordinary.
Number Four was prone to staring at nothingness, and in stray moments when no held by his own caretaker, to float into the air where he would bob gently. Thankfully, the nanny dealt well with the non-offensive abilities. He was special from the moment he entered the man’s care.
Although mentally advanced, Number Five lagged behind the physical milestones of his siblings. Rather than learn to walk or crawl to a destination, the infant would disappear with a blue flash, before reappearing at a certain point. His nanny had yet to figure out means to coax the child into learning his own body. He was extraordinary at 8 months.
One of the two girls, Number Three loved to babble. So far it was mostly gibberish or sounds, but at times unnatural things happened after her ‘talking’. At one time, Three’s nanny had rushed into his study carrying a giggling girl, moaning about her own previously-brown, currently blue hair. She was four months of age and she too was extraordinary.
Number Two was a fairly happy child but often gave his own watchers a heart attack. His first nanny was fired for negligence after she left the child unattended in a bath for more than a few moments. While she screams at finding the baby completely submerged, the infant in question was fine and blew a bubble under the water. This event marked him as special at two months.
The strongest of them all, Number One is a serious baby. He seldom smiles, and once he manages to grasp something for the first time, delights in his own shows of strength. The first time he wrapped his tiny fist around a nanny’s finger, with minimal effort he crushed the offending object. The index finger was mangled to the point there was no saving it, and it had to be amputated. She and her family had to be handsomely paid off to keep the affair quiet, and the man fitted her with a state of the art robotic replacement. His number was checked off as extraordinary at three months.
While the others caused hundreds of dollars of damage, Number Seven’s cost has already soared well into the thousands. For the first month, all was well, but soon after she showed a level of ability far above her siblings. When she cries, the world cries with her. When she screams, anything surrounding her is obliterated. The first time she giggled, she caused the death of her nanny following the blinding white light emanating from her body. It was only discovered later when the infant’s hungry cry was investigated, and the ashen remains of the nanny were found. A suitable replacement was found, warned and the nanny was reported as missing. She, in Sir Hargreeves mind, had the greatest potential.