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Chapter Text

“Almost as old as the country itself, Eden Academy is a paragon of Ostanian pride and virtue. From the age of six, students are instilled with the moral characteristics and high intellect of an upstanding Ostanian citizen. The ability to converse with the elite at ages as young as twelve is not uncommon in a school like this, and the range of topics on which students become experts is vast. Such a school is only open to the academically and financially gifted, the ultra-rich and famous, and the exceptionally elegant children who can pass not one, not two, but three rounds of admissions testing.

Of these brilliant young minds, there are a few truly exceptional students. These Imperial Scholars are the elite of the elite, the experts in not just their classes but their fields, earning Stella for their hard work. Among the experts are the benevolent, those who earn Stella for their charitable acts and proud Ostanian spirit, as well as the athletically and artistically phenomenal. Being an Imperial Scholar requires not just intelligence, but spirit and vigor. 

Even among the Scholars, there is a hierarchy, one that dictates the philanthropy and cultural projects of Eden Academy’s secondary schoolers for the year. This hierarchy has its head in the Eden Academy Student Council. Composed entirely of Imperial Scholars, the Council President is voted on by the entire secondary school student body, with the Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer chosen by the President. These Councilmembers dictate much of Eden Academy’s student life for their term of election. 

Of course, even the best of the best teenagers are still teenagers, so the Student Council is advised at the beginning, middle, and end of each half-term by Housemaster Henderson, who ensures no power is being abused. Otherwise, the Imperial Scholars chosen by the students for the students are left to their own devices.

Even Headmaster Goodfellow cannot overrule a President’s cabinet pick. Only an arrest warrant can do such a thing. Cordiality and common sense are expected and assumed by the student body when voting. Teenagers are fickle, but they aren’t idiots, especially not these teenagers.

Take Student Council President Damian Desmond, for example. In the few classes he doesn’t rank first, he ranks second only to his Vice President. He is not only the son of well-respected former President Donovan Desmond, but he is polite, elegant, and smart, taking a personal interest in history and preservation of school and Council records. His firm grasp of government, history, and politics makes him an exemplary President. The determination Mister Desmond applies to preserving Council records is second-to-none.

One might also look at Student Council Vice President Anya Forger, one of only students in Eden’s history to get a non-academic Stella in her first year, and the only one to get one so soon into her academic career. Miss Forger’s track record of philanthropic projects and athletic prowess leaves no room for doubt that Eden Academy is in good hands. Miss Forger’s work assisting doctors at Berlint General, teaching children classical languages, and putting out educational shows for elementary students makes her the embodiment of what it means to be an Imperial Scholar.”

- Barbara Authen has been writing for the Daily for forty-five years, reporting on education, elections, and cookie recipes. Barbara lives in Berlint with her her husband of fifty-seven years, Sigmund.

-

He sheaths the article in a plastic sleeve before closing the binder. He made a copy just in case, but…well, it’s just to be safe. 

Athletic prowess, his right hand. Forger is good at volleyball, sure, but she’s no Olympian. She’s good at classical language and is on par with him in government. She only beats him in the rankings when it comes to foreign languages, psychology, and anatomy. Honestly, it’s more concerning than cool. No seventeen-year-old girl should know that much about rigor mortis. Yeah, Doctor Forger is a psychiatrist, so she’d obviously do well in psychology, but anatomy? He’s not a surgeon, but his daughter can identify bones easier than she can remember the order of operations. It’s weird. 

And languages…she just has a knack for it, which bothers him. It’s like a fly! There’s no explanation for that; she is just better than him. 

The language doesn’t matter; if people speak it, she knows it. If people don’t speak it, she knows it. If people encrypt it and encode it and write it invisible ink and whatever else people do to hide the contents of a message, Anya freaking Forger will know it.

And he chose to make her Vice President. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t rue that decision. 

“How goes your stewing in your own misery?” 

“Shut up, Blackbell,” he grumbles at the Secretary.

“Yeesh. Girls must love that attitude.” Her voice is thick with sarcasm and exhaustion. Blackbell and Forger both have volleyball practice before Student Council meetings, so the room is usually empty until around 4:00. The meeting can’t start until both of them get here. George usually makes himself scarce.

“I don’t particularly care about what the girls think of me.” He hands her a copy of the plans for a charity day. 

Becky looks at him in disbelief as she tosses a braid behind her shoulder. It’s a childish hairstyle, but it could be worse. She could still be wearing it in pigtails instead of what she’s got now. She kept the star clip from when they were kids though.

“Don’t be a jerk, Desmond,” his Vice President says as she walks in, fighting thick pink hair with a ribbon clamped between her teeth. “Becky, can you pass me your hair oil?”

“Yes, ma’am,” she says.

“How would you even know if I was being a jerk?” he asks.

“Instinct!” 

“In…stinct…”

“Yeah, instinct. I’ve known you long enough. You know me that well too!”

“What? No, I don’t.” He does. He knows everything there is to know about Anya Forger. Some of that information is freely given: She’s the daughter of Loid Forger–her biological father–and Yor Forger, her adoptive mother. Her dog’s name is Bond. She’s really good at languages and medical stuff. Her skill set and intelligence are primarily intuitive rather than intellectual. She’s sporty. She thinks service to others is a cornerstone of good morals. 

Some of it is not so easily found. Some of it is stuff she hasn’t told him or that he found out by accident, he swears. She’s a little…off at the new moon. She’s a bad test taker but a great student. She can recite the alphabet forwards and backwards. She hates crowds and has no fear of needles or blood. Her singing voice is beautiful; her hair is so thick it hurts to tie up sometimes, and–

And, unfortunately, none of this is good blackmail material, which was his plan when he started observing her a few years ago. It’s infuriating! Couldn’t she have, like, just one skeleton in her closet? Why couldn’t Dr. Forger just be a spy or something similar? Then he could stop doing this!

“What are you looking at?” he yells. She’s giving him a wide-eyed, entirely blank look, hands frozen in her hair.

“Ah–nothing!” She hands Blackbell her hair oil.

He swivels his chair around so he’s facing out the window and takes the minute to bury his face in his hands. He has to get it together. This kind of behavior is unbecoming of a Desmond. He’s so angry the blood is rushing to his face. He’s so red his ears could be sold as a set of brake lights. 

“You good, President?” Becky asks. He can hear the smirk in her voice.

“I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh. It’s just instinct. Like, we’ve all known each other so long I bet we could guess each other’s favorite colors without ever knowing it.”

It’s green. Her favorite color is green, but if he says that…

He’ll look like a total creep!

He spins around in his chair to see Forger is done fiddling with her mountain of hair and is looking straight at him. Blackbell is sitting on one of the couches sipping tea and reading through a report.

But what if she wants to smoke him out? What if she wants him to admit he knows way more about her than anyone else? But why would she do that? She couldn’t possibly know he knows this stuff. He’d have to admit he did his homework, but maybe if he plays it off as doing his due diligence when he chose his VP, she won’t notice…no, she’s too clever for that. He could always guess wrong, but then she might call him out for lying. She’s freakishly good at pointing out liars too!

Freaking Forger. Is her entire family like this? He’ll never put a psychiatrist’s kid on his Council again. 

“Well?” Forger asks, hand on her cocked-out hip, stubborn as a nut. Another one of her endearing qualities aggravating flaws. “What’s my favorite color, President?”

He could just play it off as a guess. She has green eyes. Plenty of people like their eye color. What’s the harm? But…no. Blackbell’s occasional flicker of her gaze to him is not helping. 

“I–I can’t,” he grumbles.

“No, he can’t,” Becky chuckles into her tea, narrating for an invisible audience or something.

“Sure, you can! Yours is green, right?”

“Yes, b–but I couldn’t possibly know yours! You’re so freakishly intuitive about everything; it’s hardly fair! Just because mine is green doesn’t mean yours is too!”

“I wonder why.” The statement is punctuated by an eyeroll of epic proportions.

What in the world is Blackbell implying? Who cares?

“My favorite color is green too. Dark green. Like pine needles.”

Becky’s side eye is so pronounced it has to be a natural talent. A look like that just cannot be taught. 

“That’s a weird kind of green, though! It’s more brown than green! Bright green is better, like tree leaves and pistachios and fresh limes!”

“Nuh-uh! Pine green is better. It persists even in winter, and it’s the color of some of the coolest animals ever! And it’s a beautiful color for eyes and hair!”

“So is bright green!”

“You cannot seriously be saying bright green hair looks good,” Forger scoffs.

“Okay, maybe not hair, but bright green eyes are!”

Forger’s eyes go wide and Blackbell raises an eyebrow a fraction. Did he just– he basically said he thinks she has pretty eyes, didn’t he? 

“In general!” he sputters. “There are plenty of beautiful people with green eyes!”

“So, you just…like bright green eyes,” Blackbell supplies. “On anyone?”

Anything to save face. “Sure. I guess.”

He won't even entertain the concept that he just likes Anya Forger’s eyes. That’s preposterous. 

“Something to say, Blackbell?”

“Just wondering how you developed this thing for green eyes, is all.”

“The Desmond Gardens, obviously,” Anya says. He turns around faster than a drill spins. “They’re gorgeous in springtime. Mama’s jealous of the greenery there. No doubt, he got it there.”

Becky’s expression is blanker than printer paper. “Sure thing.”

He latches onto the alibi his interrogator has so conveniently handed him. “Yup! Forger’s got it! And it’s not a ‘thing.’ I’m not, like, attracted to green eyes or anything.”

“Uh-huh.” Blackbell finally stands, setting the edited report on his desk before she hops on the edge of it. He wishes she wouldn’t, but she's Becky Blackbell, so she’d just have her dad blow up his Estate or something if he told her no. “Anyway, my favorite color is pink.”

He can’t help but look at Forger. It’s totally expected, right? She’s the pinkest thing in the room with that stupid hair. Pink is a fine color. It’s not particularly special, though…

When Forger’s hair catches the light, it’s kinda pretty. In an artistic, painter viewing the painted, not romantic, purely academic, and totally technical way. The light gives a sort of dimension to her hair, dappling the darker, sun-avoidant pink beneath with the light the first layer of her hair is used to. It mixes the deep pink with bubblegum and the occasional dark pink strand, and it’s honestly the kind of thing even a master painter would–

“Earth to Desmond! Helloooo! Anybody home?” Blackbell snaps her fingers in front of his face a few times.

“Huh? Hey! Stop!”

Anya’s just looking at him with a strange expression. He can’t place it, but it looks…nice. No, cute. No, not that. Fine. It looks fine. It just looks fine, nothing else.

“Let’s just go over the food drive plans, okay,” he grumbles.

“Sure! Oh. Your ears are red though,” Forger says, “Are you sick?”

“Now he is,” Becky snorts in the background. What is that woman thinking?

“No, I’m fine,” he says. “Just a little hot.”

Forger pulls his fringe back a bit. Does she know what she’s doing? This is totally against protocol! A Desmond would be banished from the family for this sort of behavior! “Promise?”

He has to get out of here. “Yup! Promise! Why don’t we move to the couch so George has a seat if he decides to show?”

“Let’s!”

Chapter Text

She's annoyed at Damian (not new) and sore (not new) and not wanting peanuts (definitely new) when she gets home. So when she trudges up the steps of 128 Park Avenue into their apartment, the first thing she does is drop her bag on her bed with a thud and tell Mama she's taking Bond on a walk. 

“Okay,” she says over the sink. “Just change out of your uniform before you do, and be back before dark, please.”

“Alright.” She runs back to her room, shrugs on the black sweater dress and white bow, and runs back out with Bond’s leash and her purse in hand. 

“I’ll call if we get held up!” 

“Thank you, Anya. We’ll see you soon.”

She practically races down the steps and out the door, Bond following her as they charge down Park Avenue. 

Mama and Papa are so…stupid. Really. It's been ten years since they met and they still have no clue about each other! They tiptoe around each other like sharks, and it's only gotten worse as Anya’s gotten older. 

It's not like telling each other would do much. Mama doesn’t have many customers until the next election, and Papa’s permanently stationed here. 

That said, maybe they have told each other, and she just didn't hear it. She misses things sometimes, especially since Auntie Sylvia and Uncle Scruffyhead gave her her magnets to shut off her mind-reading. As a bonus, they clicked into place right under her hair ornaments, so she didn't feel weird about them. 

They gave her a break. But even breaks had drawbacks. Some things she just couldn't know.

“Good afternoon, Anya!” the shopkeep quips as she and Bond enter the convenience store. “Peanuts?”

“Not today! I'm looking for something else.”

The woman's husband walks out of the back on time to catch his wife fainting from shock. He looks halfway there himself. “No…peanuts…?”

“No. Not today.” 

From the back of the shop, where the coffee and hot foods are, she hears a noise of pained surprise. “What?!”

“Becky?”

Out of nowhere, her best friend has her in a vice grip. “No peanuts? None? Are you okay? Have you been possessed? Did your Mama train you so hard she altered your brain chemistry?”

“Stop sha-a-a-aking me-e-e!” Anya catches her breath around the same time as the shopkeep comes back to consciousness. “I'm fine! I just want something sweet today.”

The woman smiles. “Oh. Why didn't you say so, then?”

She tried to. She definitely did. 

Becky helps her pick some. “Why are you here? I thought Martha would have someone with you.”

“Huh? Oh, my father gave me a thing to try out for emergencies. It's like having a telephone in your pocket! I can call him or Martha if I'm in trouble. I mean, she's obviously nearby, but this is great too. So, I'm going with just this as a sort of test.”

“Woah! So cool. How's it work?” 

“Well…” Becky fishes in her school bag to pull out a flat, heavy thing that looks like one of the department store TV screens and is just shorter than a chocolate bar. 

“You turn it on. And then you have the call button, and you tap the number instead of dialing all the way round. And then there's the mail button, but that only works if you have a computer, so I use it for Martha and doctors and Damian, but that's it. My dad wants to get a, like, mini-mail system going too.”

“Mini-mail?”

“Like, mail that sends so fast you can get the response instantly. It's more for tiny pieces of text, so you wouldn't have to say something like, uh… ‘Student Council meeting today!’ In a big, clunky message. It would be smaller, but obviously, he'd need wayyyy more people using these for that.”

Sometimes, Anya doesn't understand Becky's family. Rich people confuse her. But this seems cool and practical. It's the kind of thing her Mama would like her to have. Her Papa would like it too, after he took it apart and reassembled it and brought it to Auntie Sylvia and turned it into an untraceable brick. 

“What if he put the mini-mail thing onto a few of these and then the Student Council could test it for him?” Anya asks as they browse gummy bears.

“Ooh! There's an idea! He'd love that. I'll ask him straight away.” 

“Yay! My Papa will search it inside out though.”

“That's fine. It's probably a good thing to have someone looking it over.” Becky offers to pay for both their things, which Anya thanks her for. Papa hasn't gotten her allowance yet. 

“Your Papa is so smart too. Are you sure he's not, like, a spy or something? He's so calm all the time! And he's so orderly too!”

Anya has never been happier that Becky grew out of her puppy-love phase. “I mean, you always joke that I'm a mind reader,” she says, stepping into the cool air of the outdoors.

“Then you'd definitely know.” She does.

“And that would be so cool.” It is.

“The only way it could be any better is if your Mama was, like, an assassin, or something.” She is.

“That sounds a little too coincidental,” she deflects. Becky is just joking, but she's hitting every ball out of the park! 

“Which is why it would work, of course! Spies always do their due diligence.”

“Then why would he marry an assassin?” She says, giving Becky a duh look.

“I don't know. Perhaps it's the same reason you would be Damian's VP pick.”

“Those are two totally different things,” Anya protests. They really are. Mama and Papa married for convenience, but Damian picked her as VP because…because…

That’s a good question, actually. “Why did he pick me for VP?”

“You seriously don’t know?”

“Nope. I thought he hated me.”

“You…you…no.”

“No?” Anya thought it was extremely obvious. Reading his mind only reinforced it. Every time he thought about her, it was with the air of someone who would rather bite his arm off than do so much as ask her favorite color. “He’s never liked me.”

Becky sips her cocoa and sighs heavily. “Well, I bet you accepted the position because you liked him at least a little. You have to like something about him.”

“I like his hair,” she says, “It looks soft, he styles it well, and it’s a nice color.”

Becky gives her an extremely blank look. “Uh-huh.”

“There’s nothing weird about that though! I like your hair too; that’s not weird.”

“Nope.”

“And, like, it’s not the only reason I’m there. There’s the letter of recommendation that Henderson writes for Council members.”

“Ya got that right.”

“And if I had to be VP, I’d want to be the VP of someone I already knew, of course!”

“Mm-hmm.”

“So, Damian is the most reasonable choice.” 

“What about Bill?”

“Absolutely not.” Bill doesn’t have the head for inter-College politics Damian does. That’s why he’s only on the sports committee and not a permanent fixture on the Council. He does have a vast board game collection though, she’ll grant him that. 

“But we’ve known Bill just as long!” Becky teases, hands securely around her cup of ten-pent cocoa. “So why Damian?”

Anya lists everything she just thought of. Becky's stare remains as confused as ever. 

“You two… just kiss already.”

Kiss? Him? No. Absolutely not. Not in a million years. She'd rather launch herself into the sun. No. No way, count her out, adios, au revoir, dasvidaniya, hasta la vista, sayonara, and ave atque vale mi amice. “I'd rather die.”

She fiddles with her hair clips, because she has to know what Becky is thinking about this. 

“Yeah, right. The only thing greater than your vocabulary is your density. You rival Jupiter!”

She slides her magnets back into place. “Even if I did, which I don't, he wouldn't want to! He obviously hates me.”

“Obviously?” Becky asks as they pass by the dog park. 

“Yes, obviously. He gets angry every time he sees me!”

“You think he’s angry?” Becky asks slowly.

“What else would he be?”

“How did such a loving couple raise such an idiot,” her friend whispers to the clouds. “How.”

It probably has to do with her parents being idiots, but that’s a very different scenario. Her parents actually love each other. A lot. They’re just tip-toeing around it. She and Damian can’t stand one another. There’s a very big difference. Duh. 

“Mama and Papa are actually in love, for starters,” Anya protests, “To be in love with him, I’d have to like him first.”

She cannot stand him. Like, really? Nice hair doesn’t make him any more likable than anyone else. Yeah, he’s tall and attractive by conventional beauty standards, and smart, and certainly masculine, and athletic, but that doesn’t make him nice to be around.

If anything, it makes him more annoying to be around, because he has so many traits she’s supposed to like. All that does is make him insufferable. She swears her face gets hot with rage when she sees him. How can someone make being perfect a bad quality?

-

“You’re upset,” Papa says as he looks over her physics homework.

“Just…annoyed.”

“With what?”

“...President,” she mumbles, resting her head on the coffee table.

“Ah.” He takes his glasses off, which means he’s about to go into Dad Mode and be about as emotionally dense as two tons of basalt suspended over the surface of Jupiter. “Is Damian bothering you again?”

“He’s just so infuriating!” she yells. “He’s so perfect all the time, and he’s got this stuck-up perfect posture, and he’s tall and smarmy, and he’s so–argh!”

Her mother’s lilting, birdsong laugh comes in through the room. As expected, Papa turns to her faster than arsenic takes effect.

“What?” Anya asks.

“Oh, nothing,” Yor says, “Nothing at all.”

Anya would surreptitiously slip her ears off, but she doesn’t have the energy for things like thinking right now. Besides, then she’d have to explain why she has them in the first place, and Auntie Sylvia and Uncle Scruffyhead made her promise to keep them secret for a little while longer. She keeps her horns tightly affixed instead.

“Oh, Papa,” she says instead. “Becky’s Papa is working on a new phone thing.”

“Really? What’s it do?” She doesn’t need to read his mind to know he’s curious about Becky’s family. 

“It’s like a telephone you can put in your pocket. Her Papa is trying out stuff like mail through it too, kind of like you do at work when you tell the apothecary to put in prescriptions through the computer.”

“That’s interesting. Anything else it can do?”

“They want to make a mini-mail feature. That’s what Becky called it. Like a system that sends mail so fast it doesn’t need its own separate screen.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of something like that. It’s very experimental though.”

“Becky’s thinking of asking her Papa if the Student Council can test out the mini-mail thing to see if it works between a group of people.”

Her Papa seems on the fence. It’s not like this is a given yet. She doesn’t know if Becky has even asked, let alone gotten the devices yet, but her Papa takes anywhere from 3-5 business days to make these kinds of decisions.

“I think that’s a great idea!” Mama says from the kitchen. “I would have loved something like that as a kid. It would have reassured me to be able to check in on Yuri while he was away at college.”

And just like that, Papa is wholly on board.

-

The next day, Becky drags George in by the ear to give them all the same mini-telephone she was holding yesterday. Damian dons his usual look of impossibility and attitude.

It makes Anya want to punch him. 

Still, Becky’s gift works really well once they get the hang of them. She tells them to let her know if they have any idea for improvement, since this is her Papa’s passion project. 

“Did he get that group mini-message thing off the ground?” Anya asks.

“Yeah! If I just put all our numbers in the send field, we should all be able to talk to each other.”

There’s some clicking of nails on glass, then a tiny chime from three of their phones.

2592531125: Hiiiii!

“Can we add a name to a number?” Damian asks. 

“Yeah! Dad thought it would be confusing otherwise, since all the codes for our phones have the same starting number.”

“Why’s that?” George asks.

“It’s a code to tell you that the number is from Berlint. It’s an organizer for him, I think. If they get popular, I’m sure there’ll be more. But he did the math and apparently seven unique digits is enough combinations for a phone number before changes in location organizers. He even made ours correspond to our names!”

“Really?” Damian asks, squinting at his pocket telephone. “Four-One-One-Four…I guess it spells out Damian if you switch the numbers for letters…”

Anya isn’t paying attention to that. She’s adding everyone’s numbers to her phone. “So…we should be able to talk to each other…whenever we want.”

“As long as you aren’t in the middle of a warzone or something, yeah,” Becky says with a shrug. “Just need to be near a Blackbell-owned property. We’ve got little radars in each place that let us communicate with everyone through the computer.”

“Rich people…” Anya mutters under her breath. She really does not get her friends sometimes. 

“Neat,” George mumbles, “Can you turn off the sound?”

“It’s the side button.”

Anya turns it off, and she only knows a test comes in when Damian’s phone chimes.

Becky: boo!

Sy-On Boy: only scary thing here is your face.

“Wow!”

George: if there’s nothing else to do, I’m going home.

Anya: Same! Papa’s gonna want to poke around this.

“Is your dad one of those weirdos who thinks we should still be writing on slates and using primers?” Damian asks.

She knows for a fact he thinks super highly of Papa, so if he was, Damian would probably be evangelizing for traditional learning and the revival of the one-room schoolhouse. “No. He’s just a nerd.”

Damian huffs and crosses his arms. “Makes sense for a psychiatrist, I guess.”

She rolls her eyes and shoots him a glare. Even standing right next to him, she has to stare up at him. Not that it makes her less intimidating than him, or him more intimidating than her, but he has a lot of leverage against her, being six-two and all that. No teenage boy should be that tall!

“Becky, can you send individual people messages too?” George asks, gloomy as his last name implies.

“Yeah! As long as you have their number.”

So Anya could…! Or Damian could, but what would that mean? It could be purely professional, strictly Council-related, but that’s why the Council chat was formed. Or it could be a surprise, like a birthday party for Becky or George, but their birthdays are too far apart to not include the third person in that discussion. Maybe he’d text her for…for what? 

Advice on how to ask a girl out? What do boys talk about? Something about that sits poorly with her. Damian Desmond doesn’t need the help. For goodness’ sake, he ticks every box. He’s Student Council President, he’s tall, he’s pretty, he dresses well, he’s smart, and he’s strong, and he’s nice to anyone that isn’t her, and he’s just—

He just doesn’t need any help in the romance department!

Certainly not from Anya Forger. 

But she doesn’t want him to go to Becky either! That would be tantamount to asking her on a practice date, and a practice date is still a date. Even if he’s just asking about restaurants or flowers, he’s still asking for romantic advice, which could be interpreted as wanting a romance with her! 

That misinterpretation could lead them into dating territory! It would throw the Council into chaos. The power imbalance could destroy their current, highly effective structure!

There’s no reason to send him a single private message. If he decides to send her one…she’ll deal with that then. 

Becky renamed the group: council besties! 

George: ???

Sy-On Boy: it is one in the morning. We have school tomorrow.

Becky: you can turn the ringer off!

Sy-On Boy: Why are you awake at all?

George: Videogame

Becky: homework :(

Sy-On Boy: … is Forger awake too?”

Anya: Anya’s here!

George: are we all doing homework or something

Sy-On Boy: I know you’re not

Anya: Not Anya

Sy-On Boy: then what ARE you doing

Anya: trying to program this with a classical language keyboard. This doesnt have macrons, and im in Papa’s work office so i have time.

Sy-On Boy: when did you have time to learn to code?!

Becky: geez, you’re invested

Sy-On Boy: i am not.

Becky: are too!

Anya: shut up! I wanna sleep!

George: oh NOW you guys want to stop talking

Anya: -_-

-

She’s happy when Becky’s Papa gives Mama and Papa their own pocket telephones after the initial week of everything going so well. Papa takes his apart like, five times, then passes it to Auntie Sylvia, who decides it’s fine. 

“Becky’s father is just a big tech guy. Not much else to it,” Auntie Sylvia says when they walk Bond and Aaron that day. “I’m glad you have it, but don’t make a habit of using it too late into the night.”

“You try that when there’s a Desmond boy involved,” Anya bites out through gritted teeth.

Auntie Sylvia shakes her head and gives her a teeny tiny smile. “You’ll just have to find a way to ignore him.”

Auntie Sylvia just doesn’t get it. He’s impossible to ignore.

Unfortunately.