Chapter Text
"I don't wanna go!" declared Emma to anyone in earshot. Taylor nodded and made a humming sound from behind her book. It was a book about dinosaurs, and she liked it a lot. Especially all the pictures. It must have been difficult to send people to Australia to take all of them (everyone knew dinosaurs came from Australia).
"You've got to go," said Grandma Lindt, looking away from her dog for a second. "It's the law."
"Why's it the law?" Emma re-joined. She seemed very impressed that she had mustered such an argument. Lindt floundered for a second – she'd never actually been to law school, so wasn't really sure why. Taylor luckily butted in.
"Learning stuff is important," she declared. Taylor liked words. They were like her friends only they knew more things and told her stuff. And were less boisterous.
"Not," said Rachel, who was busy lining up her cuddly toys on a shelf on the other side of the room. Most children hugged their cuddlies. Rachel used them as target practice for her NERF gun. This always distressed Emma, so she made a point of not looking.
"So too!" said Taylor. Rachel responded with a foam dart. It pinged off Taylor's book, which she'd raised hastily as a shield.
Emma, meanwhile, had not been quieted by appeals to legality. "But I don't wanna! I wanna stay here and play!" Lindt could sense an oncoming tantrum and was considering her options when Taylor closed her book with a snap and pointed an accusatory finger.
"You're just scared."
"Am not!"
"Are too! Like with the snail."
There was a faint thump as one of Rachel's toys – a large pink teddy bear – fell from its perch, a Velcro-tipped dart stuck over its stitched on heart.
Emma sat up, momentarily puffing out her chest. And her cheeks. She hadn't really mastered how air worked. "I was not scared of the snail."
"Yes you were, you ran away and screamed."
"That's because you threw it at me."
"I wanted to see what it would do!"
Lindt remembered this incident well. Or at least, the aftermath. There'd been a wet sounding squelch and then an ear-piercing shriek and an undulating wail as Emma ran down her garden.
"It wasn't nice," Emma huffed, crossing her arms. "And school is not like a snail. It's not sticky. I just don't wanna go."
"It's okay to be scared," Lindt said, searching the depths of both her empathy and vocabulary. "It's a new place. You don't know how to deal with it. I get it." Emma looked pensive at that. Taylor piped up for the pair of them.
"What should we do?"
Lindt remembered not to swear. Annette had been very clear about that. She really was remarkably scary for an English tutor but, then again, considering how absolutely terrifying her daughter was – would become, it was hardly surprising.
(Taylor, meanwhile, was considering how many pterodactyls it would take to lift herself off the ground.)
"Well. There'll be people there-"
"Duh," said Rachel, cutting her off before firing again at the steadily depleting line of toys. Lindt gave her a gimlet stare before continuing.
"Some will be nice. Some will not be nice. If they're nice, be nice to them. If they're not, stand up to them to assert dominance."
"What's dominance?" asked Emma.
Lindt wasn't sure if she was annoyed Alec wasn't there, or very relieved. Still, she was there now, and she had to explain. "Well, it means that you're too tough to mess with. That no one will be mean to you because it'll be bad for them if they do."
"Do…do you mean fighting?" asked Taylor nervously. She liked reading about fighting but not doing it. She wasn't a cape like Alexandria (who was her favorite).
Emma put it more directly. "I don't wanna fight anyone. That's mean and I'm not a meanie." Lindt considered the problem for long seconds, with all the acumen of those philosophers Lisa had prattled on about back in the…back in the future. Huh. Anyway.
"There'll be a teacher. It's their job to keep you all in line. If someone's mean to you, get a teacher to make them stop."
"What if the teacher doesn't listen? I read about it once," said Taylor. That was a lie. She hadn't read about it, mommy had just told her a story, but Taylor knew that saying you read something was better than listening to a story like a baby.
"Then," Lindt said flatly, "I'll sort things out."
---
The next day came around. The front gate of the pre-school was crowded with flotillas of parents, each dropping their children off. Some went willingly. Many did not. Emma was one of the latter. "I don't wanna go!" she wailed desperately into her mom's legs, trying to hug them.
"You've got to go, sweetie, it'll be fun," said Zoe, stroking her hair.
Alan decided to pitch in. He was excited to see his daughter off on her first day of school, of course, but a sudden influx of cases at work had left him exhausted. Plus, the new supervisor, Carol Dallon, was a real taskmaster, always brandishing folders and documents at people. "Remember," he said with the desperately artificial cheer of a man running on four hours of sleep, "you've got your friends with you. Here they come now!"
Despite his state, he was not hallucinating. Taylor was skipping along the pavement to their right, her arms out to both sides. "School! School, school, school!" Annette followed her. She also had not had a lot of sleep. Mostly because Taylor kept trying to plan her entire academic career all over the walls of her bedroom. Apparently, the current concept was for a doctorate in Action Paleontology. She'd even stolen Annette's old mortarboard and tried it on in the mirror.
Lindt, on their left, was crouching down next to Rachel on the pavement. She spoke in quiet, serious tones. "Remember, if anyone messes with you, I will destroy them. Alright?"
Rachel answered with a wide grin and wild eyes, hefting her NERF gun. "Only if I don't get them first." Lindt reached out and ruffled her hair, then stood to go. She had a lot of things to be getting on with, and Rachel could look after herself. Probably. Better than Angelica could, anyway, the proverbial pensioner of a mutt.
Emma, meanwhile, had managed to tear herself away from her mom's legs, much to collective parental relief. She regarded the rapidly and cheerily approaching Taylor with wide eyes, then shook herself. If Taylor could be happy about pre-school, so could she. Obviously. Anything Taylor could do, she could do just as well.
Except handle snails.
Snails were icky.
---
"Don't steal my play-doh," said Emma to the girl busily scooping the bright green stuff off the low table. She was ignored, so she turned to the teacher and gestured with incoherent outrage. "Miss Fletcher, she's stealing my play-doh!"
"Sophia. Don't steal Emma's toys," said the teacher, her voice cracking out like a whip.
"I'm not," pouted Sophia loudly. Pouts shouldn't be loud, as a rule, but somehow, she'd cracked the code on it. "And if I was, I'd use them better."
A foam dart bounced off her back, and she whipped her head around, looking like a scalded cat in search of its next victim. Rachel looked up innocently from playing with a little jade stone on a silver chain (the first gift she'd gotten from Granny Lindt), pulling it back and forth across the smooth surface of the desk with one hand. The other clutched something which seemed a lot like a NERF gun, trying to hide it under the desk.
Sophia, tired of her search, slunk off to go play with the plastic Army men in the corner with Madison and Julia, who had carefully been arranging them into neat rows. In the corner, Greg was sitting with a large mixing bowl on his head, considering whether to eat the orange or blue crayon first. No one paid him much mind.
Taylor managed to avoid the whole Sophia drama and came charging back to Emma's table with an armful of plastic dinosaurs. "Emma! Emma! I've got the thingies!" Emma looked at them with a critical eye.
"Don't be silly Taylor. We're making a model in Australia."
"Yep! That's why we need a T-Rex."
"They're not in Australia."
"Nuh-uh, Anne said they were!" Taylor challenged. Emma, flabbergasted by the impeccable logic of the argument, turned away.
"Fine. We can have dinosaurs and capes then." She knew Legend had fought an army of evil robo-dinos in Indonesia – Where in the World is the Protectorate had taught her that. Maybe she could pretend the dinosaurs were robot dinosaurs? There was silver paint over on the counter…
---
Approximately thirty minutes later, Emma, Taylor and Rachel – who, under protest, they'd roped into the whole situation – were standing in front of the teacher. "What did you do?" she asked.
"We painted the toys, Miss Fletcher," they chorused in unison. Rachel thought that was a bit unfair because she hadn't even been near a paintbrush, she'd been too busy waging war on the Madison-Sophia Axis, but she knew Granny Lindt would be upset if she didn't stick with her friends.
"Should you have done that?"
"No Miss Fletcher."
"Why did you do it?"
Two sets of eyes swiveled to look at Emma. It had been her idea after all. She really did have to explain herself. "Well," she said, drawing herself up. "We had Legend. And we had dinos. And Legend fought robot dinos."
"Okay," said the teacher, nodding, her tone a little softer. "Alright. But what should you have done first?" Her reward for the early attempt to foster self-reflection and critical analysis was a trio of blank stares. She struggled to suppress a sigh. "You should have asked me first."
"Oh!" The dawning light of comprehension began to spread across their features. "But what if you said no?" asked Rachel, feeling she had a burning question and knowing it was important to contribute.
The teacher really had been trying very hard not to sigh. All the manuals had been very clear. Stay calm, stay patient. But really, good lord. In Jessica's honest opinion, even managing a pack of villainous parahumans seemed an easy job right now.