Babies!

Then we started cranking out the babies. I had a single child - Thom - followed by twins - Kaylyn (the heir apparent) and Rikash - followed by triplets - Daine, George, and Jonathan. With no fertility treatment, just a lot of kids station workouts. So yeah.

Thom's traits:

Evil (Rebel trait)
Insane
Genius
Clumsy
Loves the Cold
Technophobe

Rikash (my favorite) has the traits:

Slob
Couch Potato
Workaholic
Genius

Kaylyn (the heir apparent) has the traits:

Good Sense of Humor
Neurotic
Virtuoso
Light Sleeper

Jonathan's traits are:

Good
Genius
Diva
Natural Cook (Score!)

Daine's traits are:

Good
Brave
Couch Potato
Schmoozer

George is:

Evil
Excitable
Athletic
Good Sense of Humor

I enabled spring as soon as possible. In retrospect that was kind of a bad idea. Oh well.

Jonathan is working on Artist, and aged up to teen with all the childhood metrics cleared. Alanna aged into an elder in plenty of time to get that squared away.

---

Dad says that Mom got really ... strange, after her big spell. He thinks it was the magical backlash - he was a scientist once, did you know that?

So first it was little things. She didn't like the same foods anymore. It started to hurt whenever she tried to cast spells. Then one day, she played until her fingers bled but she couldn't conjure so much as a single apple.

Then everything hurt, all the time.

She started forgetting things.

Like, she ranted and raged when the humans closed our local high school down for 'safety reasons,' and then she scolded us for not going to a school that isn't even there. 

Now she mostly just kind of sits in her rocking chair. Sometimes she mutters to herself. We have to take extra-good care of her now, because she's old and kind of fragile.

So hi. My name's Kaylyn, and Dad says I'm supposed to be the heir, because I'm a girl, and I'm a witch, even though Thom's got magic and he's older, and we're supposed to keep our magic s-e-c-r-e-t anyway.

Thom's okay with it because, he says, the voices don't like him very much, so he doesn't want to talk to them. I don't know, I don't hear voices.

I don't hear voices.

Thom says that I worry about 'silly' things a lot.

Like, for example, since we have running water, what if somebody left the water on? We'd go through our whole water ration and then the humans would come and kill us because they have guns and we don't even know how to use our magic.

Or worse, what if they shut the water off? We'd all die of thirst and nobody would ever know.

I check the tap a lot.

I'm going to go check it again just to make sure.



Okay, I'm back.

So I'm not the oldest. I've got four brothers and one sister. Well, there was another brother but we don't talk about him because the aliens took him away, Dad says, which is why he isn't a scientist anymore.

Thom is the oldest, like I said earlier, and he's kind of mean. But he's mostly mean to himself so like, we'll hear him yelling at himself in the bathroom. It's kind of scary and sometimes all the candles go out when he's mad, so we have to light them up again.

I guess it could be worse.

Then there's my twin, Rikash, who's kind of weird. He eats the bugs off of the old plates. Like I said, we have pretty bad restrictions on water so we can only wash dishes once in a long while. I mean, I guess he helps clean things up, in his own ... special ... way.

There are the triplets - Jonathan is really full of himself. Daine is really lazy, but she's a good enough sort, and George ... George. I don't like George. He's mean too, but he's more of an extrovert about it. He sneaks up on us and scares us when we aren't looking, he laughs when Thom trips over stuff - even when he hurts himself - and he says he's going to become some kind of Emperor of Evil or something and take over the whole world.

I dunno.

When Thom turned eighteen, the humans came and told him he was going to be working for some hot-shot politician. They said if he didn't, they'd kill him.

I don't think we get to pick what we want to do when we grow up anymore.