I read two books to Cassie, and then managed to convince her that it was her turn to read to me. I got to close my eyes for a few minutes as she sat on my lap recounting Winnie the Pooh a la Cassie, which had way more turtles in it than the original text.

Hey, if I got to close my eyes, she could sing the Song that Never Ends for all I cared. Turtle stories were great. I tried to make thoughtful or concerned “Mmm” noises at appropriate intervals.

Eventually, she got bored of this and my respite ended as she started to complain that she was hungry. I opened my eyes to see that Micah had piled a huge stack of paper products in the middle of the floor and was sitting next to it cross-legged, looking bored.

“I got everything I could find, but you looked like you were resting,” he said.

“Thanks, buddy.” I set Cassie on the ground and started to get up. As I pushed down on the couch to stand, the cushion tilted slightly and Gavin’s eyes fluttered open, drifted to my face, then drooped shut again. The rush of relief I felt was nearly euphoric. He really was just sleeping. I’d been doggedly repressing myriad fears that this awful alien system had somehow done my six-year-old permanent damage.

Re-energized, I moved into the kitchen. We could actually cook dinner now, if I could figure out what to do with the smoke. If we’d had a fireplace, that would have been simple, but we didn’t. I’d have to make some kind of hole in the house if we wanted to have a chance of venting the smoke. I wasn’t excited about that, but the only other option I could see was just forgetting about everything in the freezers. That was a lot of food for one adult and three kids. The idea of throwing it all away without even trying to cook it was crazy.

Especially since the weird animals earlier had vaporized when I’d killed them. I’d been a little relieved; I had not handled the dissection unit well in Freshman Biology. But even if the idea of butchering an animal turned my stomach, I’d thought that might have been a solution to the food issue. If the system wanted us to fight beasts anyway, I’d thought it might send us edible ones. Figuring out if they were safe to eat would have been another headache.

I shook my head. Focus, I told myself. It could have been that way, but it wasn’t. There would probably be some other solution for food. Hopefully. Billions of humans starving to death wasn’t good entertainment, right? Until we found a solution, I’d make the food we did have last.

Time to be decisive. Our garage doors were thankfully made of wood. I grabbed the hatchet and sunk it full-force into one of the thinner panels between the crossbars. Cutting a small square out of the door was surprisingly fast. You didn’t often think to yourself, “The doors of my home could be easily breached by one person with 15 minutes and a $20 hand tool,” but it was true. Windows, sure, but doors?

I had the uneasy feeling that I was going to lose a lot of the illusions modern life had gifted me with over the next few weeks.

A creature out front glanced toward us, but seemed to dismiss the tiny hole. Good. I’d tried to make it too small for those things to fit through, but who knew how small they could scrunch down?

I grabbed some nails and hammered a large sheet of tinfoil into a sort of hood that came to a point at my hole, then spread some more against the garage door. I set a metal baking pan on the floor to hold the fire and used some pots to prop up the broiler rack over it. I threw a few pieces of scrap wood in the pan and called Micah over.

“Okay, buddy. Time to give that new ability of yours a workout.” Micah’s face lit up, and he turned towards the pan, hands raised. The wood instantly flared up. Oops. “Hey!” I said, spinning him to face me. “That was fine, but I need your attention for a minute. Remember what happened to Gavin?”

My oldest child stopped trying to excitedly peer over my arm at his nascent blaze, and actually focused on me, confused. “Uh, he fell asleep?”

I tried to pick my words carefully. I didn’t want to alarm Micah, but I did need him to focus here. “Yes. He fell asleep, after using his ability too much. That was fine since we were at home and he could take a nap, but what do you think would happen if we were out fighting monsters?”

“Ohhhh… That would be bad.”

Understatement award there, buddy.

“Yes. It would. So, what I want you to do is practice with your ability but also practice listening to your body. I want you to get a sense for how much you can use it before you start getting tired. I also want you to see what you can do with it. You can create flames. Can you move them? Put them out? Make them hotter or more gentle? This is a good environment to experiment. Carefully. Okay?”

Micah nodded, clearly wanting to get back to playing wizard.

“I’m going to bring a bucket of water out here. If things start getting out of control, just yell and I’ll put it out. Let’s not burn the house down.”

Cue dramatic eye-roll. “I’m not gonna burn the house down, Mom.”

“You’ve cast your ability exactly twice. I’m going to take precautions until you’ve had more practice.”

“Fiiiiiiine.”

I opened the chest freezer in the garage for the barest second. It was full to the brim and well-insulated. If I was careful about opening it, I thought the stuff inside would at least stay chilled for a full week. Maybe not frozen, but refrigerated. I whisked one of several bags of pre-cooked frozen chicken nuggets off the top. It seemed like a good target for a young pyromaniac’s first adventure into cooking.

I set Micah up with the grilling tongs, bag of nuggets, and a clean plate, with a bucket of water sitting a few feet behind him. Cassie had snuck up behind us while we were working, and was currently staring at the campfire with an expression of extreme awe. I grabbed a piece of sidewalk chalk and drew a box on the floor of the garage.

“Stay in this box, Cassie, or you aren’t going to be allowed to watch. Okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”

“This box is blue!”

“So?”

“I want to stay in a GREEN box!”

A thousand arguments rose to my tongue and died. Fuck it. I had the sidewalk chalk. Two seconds later, there was a green box on the floor and Cassie sat her little tush down in it smugly. Dammit, she’d won this round, and she knew it. At least she’d probably stay in the box for the few minutes I needed.

I grabbed a pile of blankets and pillows and pitched them down on the kitchen floor near the garage door, then carried Gavin over. I wanted to keep a close eye on him, and he’d probably be upset if he woke up alone and out of his bed.

On my next trip, I grabbed a big stack of Micah’s paper and books and sat down on the garage floor as I tried to figure out how we were going to turn them into armor. I didn’t remember how they’d done it on the show. My first thought was to punch a hole through a stack and tie it onto something, but that didn’t seem like a great idea. The weight of the paper would make it try to tear itself off the string, and our movement would only make that problem worse. There was no point in even thinking about staples. Maybe I could pound a nail through each stack and tie something to the nail? That didn’t seem much better.

As I pondered, I kept an eye on Micah. It seemed like a lot of the chicken nuggets were getting burned, and at least one had been dropped on the garage floor, but cooking was generally happening. Cassie kept trying to sneak out of her box and closer to the fire, until I picked her up and set her down inside the kitchen next to Gavin. I saw Micah shake his head sleepily, and I cut him off and took over.

“I’m still fine!”

“Yeah, but you’ll be more fine if you don’t collapse and fall face-first into the fire.”

He gave me an irritated look. “I’m not going to do that.”

“No, you’re not, because I’m taking over the cooking. Take the nuggets that you’ve finished with over and share them with Cassie. See if Gavin will wake up and have some too.”

Micah grumbled a little, but picked up the plate and left. As I arranged the remaining nuggets on the broiler rack I heard Gavin’s unhappy moans. Gavin always woke up like a zombie rising from the grave, but I don’t know if I’d ever been so delighted to hear a kid whining.

The water from the frozen nuggets hissed and popped as it melted on to the small fire below. The wood wouldn’t last much longer, but it should be enough to finish heating the nuggets up. As I used the tongs to flip a few over, I felt arms encircle me.

“I’m glad you are okay now, Mommy.” Gavin.

I raised a hand to squeeze one arm. “I’m glad you’re okay, honey. You took good care of me, but you need to be careful. Next time, just cast your ability a couple times and take a break, okay? You can ask me if you need to cast it more. How many times did you use it?”

“I don’t know. Lots.”

I turned around. “You can’t do that. I’m serious. Once you cast it three times, you need to ask permission to cast it more, at least until we figure out your limit. Okay? I’m worried you’ll hurt yourself.”

“But you were really hurt! I had to heal you!”

“Gavin Andreas Moretti, you need to listen to me. If you can’t promise me that you will only use your ability three times, I…”

Shit. What could I do about it? I had a policy of not making threats I wouldn’t or couldn’t enforce, but this stupid alien crap really left me awfully powerless. I couldn’t take his ability away. I couldn’t keep him from using it. I couldn’t even threaten not to let him come with us to fight monsters, since I apparently had to make sure he was ready to undergo some kind of forced deathmatch in the near future. I couldn’t even really threaten to take his stuff away as a punishment, because here I was already cutting up a bunch of the kids’ books to make armor, and who knew what I’d need to take in the future? I didn’t want the kids to feel like I was mad at them when I was just trying to keep them alive.

“You will what, Mommy?”

“I will find a way to make you sad. Really, really, sad. I am not sure how I will do it, but I will do it,” I glared at him, trying to make up for the nebulous threat with an intimidating gaze and an ominous tone of voice.

Gavin just stared at me, seemingly unsure if I was joking.

I sighed. “Look, just promise me. Please? I’m worried about you and I am trying my best to keep us all safe.

He gave me a Gavin smile. “Alright. I promise!”

Oh. Great. Yeah, I had a ton of faith in that holding up. It’s not that he wasn’t sincere, necessarily, it was just that literally no one in the world was as sincere as that kid looked when he smiled, and he knew it was a solid get-out-of-trouble card.

He wiggled down next to me, firelight glistening on wavy black hair. “Hey Mommy, what loot did you get from the leafenrats?”

“The leafenrats?”

“Yeah, the things you fought. They’re like weird big rats covered in yellowy leaves so I am calling them leafenrats. Did they give you epic loot?”

Leafenrats? Biggest rats I’d ever heard of. But they did move like rats, even if they didn’t look much like them or have the iconic tails. They’d needed a name anyway; that one was fine. The loot, though… “That’s a good question.”

I tried to remember if I’d seen anything solid left behind as the… leafenrats... had evaporated. Nothing came to mind, but I’d been pretty distracted at the time.

“I didn’t see anything.” My eyes rose to the narrow windows on the garage door. “It’s too dark now. We’ll have to check tomorrow.”

“You do not need to check,” squeaked Pointy, from the doorway. “My sensors are not potent, but I had ample time following the fight to observe the area in multiple spectrums. There was nothing left behind.”

That didn’t sound right. “The introductory message said something about the challenges bringing us strength and rewards.”

“Have you checked your interface?”

A good question. I pulled it up.

Meghan Moretti

Novelty: 6

Abilities:

Draw Attention (100%)

Points: 24

Money: 2

“I’ve got a couple new lines on it. Points and money. Seriously, ‘Money?’ Not, you know, dollars or credits or something?”

Pointy raised her shell in what I guessed was a shrug. “I can’t give you much insight into why they’re named that, or even what they are. Both sound beneficial. Perhaps if you accumulate more?”

Yeah, okay, real helpful. “How’s your progress on translating the alien language?”

“Not spectacular. The spoken communication seems widely divergent, based on the differing sound projection capabilities of the varying species. I’ve identified three different forms of written communication. Two seem reliant on being able to visually process a wide spectrum of color… one seems to be a logogrammatic form of communication, where each word has its own symbol, and I am guessing the other is phonemic due to the vastly lower number of characters. The third is a monochromatic glyph-based system that I believe is an alternative to the colorful phonemic system.”

That was both extremely detailed and extremely useless. “Okay, but can you understand any of it yet.?”

“I believe I have isolated and correctly interpreted the numeric characters in all three of the written languages.”

“That’s all?”

Pointy looked embarrassed. “I told you I do not have much processing power,” she muttered.

“So, what? You’re like an alien pocket calculator?”

“That is an unreasonable and flawed characterization,” Pointy said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“It is true that there were human computers that could complete computations faster than I,” she muttered, looking away. “Of course, my programming is far more elegant.”

“Of course,” I said soothingly.

Pointy shot me a glare. I wouldn’t have thought you could put that much venom in your gaze when your eyes were made of embroidery. “I will continue to work. As, I expect, should you? After you eat, you will have to work hard on this armor idea of yours if you want to be ready tomorrow morning.”

It was good advice.