Gavin really hadn’t earned any points after we left the meeting today. Both his abilities were touch-based. He’d earned his 400-odd points almost entirely by using his squirt gun, but I’d asked him not to use it while we were traveling with all the dogs and people without eye protection. Too much chance of friendly fire.

He had helped heal several minor injuries, but that had always happened after combat. No points for that.

I couldn’t blame him for feeling angry. He’d helped, but not in a way that was rewarded. It really wasn’t fair. I promised him we’d find him a ranged ability the next time he leveled and snuck him a peppermint. It was funny; I always felt like we’d had way too much candy in our house, but now the same amount looked like hardly anything.

After I’d calmed him back down, I checked in with Micah. My nine-year-old had spent some time going through his options, and after I’d rejected Zap (“encourage lightning to strike a target”) for similar reasons to Channel Electricity, we’d reached an uneasy compromise on something called Shockwall. Shockwall said it would let him “create a visible wall of electric charge at target location, shocking those who pass through.” I wasn’t as comfortable with it as I was with Shocking Touch - there seemed to be clear capacity for accidental friendly fire - but my oldest child was stubbornly insistent on controlling lightning, and he wanted something he could see.

It scared the shit out of me. I wanted to tell him not to take lightning abilities at all, but as they say: a good general never gives an order she knows won’t be obeyed. I acquiesced, trying to comfort myself with the fact that Micah talked with me and listened, at least to some extent. This was definitely far less dangerous than the freeform electric abilities he had first been drawn to. He had promised to be careful.

Shockwall had a 70% synergy with each of his previous two abilities, boosting it immediately to 240%. I let Micah cast it on our front lawn, but without previous usage to compare it to he couldn’t tell what bonus he’d gotten from his high percentage. It did leave a smoldering patch in our grass, so I asked him to try to position it a little above the ground in the future.

I also asked Micah to see how high he could jump now that he’d taken his third ability. He soared noticeably higher than earlier. He was elated, and I hoped he took me seriously when I told him to be very gentle with people from now on, especially Cassie.

After that, I only had a little time to work on the house before darkness fell, so I focused on the upstairs playroom. That’s where I figured we’d sleep from now on. If monsters were going to start entering homes soon, that room was far simpler to secure than the ground level rooms, which all sported extra-long windows. The playroom had only one, and it was much smaller. I took two baking sheets and nailed them across the inside. That made it dark in there - really dark. That was fine for sleeping, but made the room useless for much else. I folded down the futon couch into a bed and dragged Cassie’s toddler mattress upstairs. Good enough. I got the kids to grab their pillows, got an armload of blankets, and headed upstairs to sleep.

I was glad I’d already decided we’d stay home tomorrow.

…

The next day started off very well. I used up the last of a box of pancake mix we had in the cupboard. I didn’t add any chocolate chips, and my efforts to make them into hearts and other fun shapes didn’t turn out well, but it was still a fun breakfast.

I played one board game with the kids before I got to work - a quick round of Dragomino, Cassie’s choice. Then I left Pointy overseeing (and assisting Cassie with) a game of Gravity Superstar while I went to search the house for anything I could use to strengthen the downstairs windows. I’d never realized we had 13 freaking windows on our first floor! Fourteen, if you counted the glass block window in the master bath, but I wasn’t planning on messing with that one. Three-inch-thick glass blocks had to be pretty tough to shatter.

Even leaving that window out, I had a ton of work ahead of me.

One step at a time, I told myself.

I took the legs off our kitchen and dining room tables and removed the headboard from our king-size bed. Once I’d nailed those up, I was out of really large pieces of wood and I’d only fully covered one window and partially-covered four more.

“Mommy, do you want to play the next game with us?” Gavin asked.

“Actually,” I said slowly, “I think I’m going to need you guys to help me. Can you start carrying everything out of your bedrooms? You can take your clothes to the playroom and pile anything else in the dining room. There’s lots of space there now that the table is gone.”

“Why?”

I tried to keep my voice light. “Well, there are a lot of windows in there and I’m not sure we have enough wood to really block them. I think we’d better just take our stuff out and shut the doors.”

The kids looked at each other, dubious, but started to work. I took a break from construction to grab the boys’ mattresses and drag them upstairs - we’d been a little crowded last night. That, at least, was easier than I expected. The mattresses were still large and unwieldy, but to me, they weren’t heavy anymore. Once I got them out of the boys’ beds I could just trot up the stairs with them, no problem at all.

The kids weren’t the most focused helpers, but they moved some stuff out. I ended up dumping a lot of things in the house on the floor as I scavenged for barricade material: bedframes, shelves, closet doors, bookcases, dressers. Many things were held together with hidden screws or wood glue and couldn’t be easily taken apart. I had to use the hatchet to separate a lot of the pieces, activating Assisted Strike so my wild swings actually landed where I wanted them.

It was hard work, and I took a break after lunch to play Chicken Cha Cha Cha with the kids.

“How are you guys doing? Having a nice day?” I asked.

“It is good inside! There are no monsters in here!” said Cassie.

“It’s okay,” said Micah. “Gavin and Cassie won’t play Galaxy Trucker with me.”

“That game is too hard and you always win!” accused Gavin.

“That would be really hard for them,” I said, amused. “Lots of rules. Lots of pieces. More of a grown-up game.”

“You should play with us more,” said Gavin. “It’s more fun when you play with us, Mommy.”

I sighed. Gavin played board games, but he was a more active, social kid than Micah. He would have enjoyed the day more if we'd spent it playing soccer or tag outside, but, well... that wasn't going to happen. “I’m playing with you now, but I think I’ll have to get back to work after we finish this game. I’ve got more than five windows left to cover, even if I’m not doing the ones in your room.”

Gavin groaned.

“Hey, as soon as I get done, we can play the rest of the day, alright?”

“I guess,” he said, sullen.

I wish I’d done something else then. I don’t know what I could have done or said, without actually realizing what was coming. I knew Gavin was a little unhappy, but I thought I could put some effort into cheering him up later in the evening, after I’d finished with the windows.

But I didn’t realize. I didn’t think. I just finished the board game and grabbed an armload of wood I'd chopped from the boys' bedroom furniture and went to nail it up.

It was easy to get focused on my work. What was a good way to secure our wire closet shelves across the windows? Maybe I could bend the nails around them? I was trying to figure out the best solution when Cassie started horsing around.

“I’m a leafenrat!” Cassie yelled. She was still saying her Rs and Ls interchangeably with her Ws, so the way she said it sounded like “wefenwat.” It was adorable. I was happy to hear her playing pretend about the monsters. It was a big step forward from the cringing terror she’d been reacting with ever since our first trip outside.

“Owwwww!” Gavin yelled. “Cassie, that HURT! Don’t DO that.”

I turned around. “What happened?”

“Cassie hit me.”

“I’m not Cassie. I’m a leafenrat. I hit him with my leafenrat claws.”

“Cassie, you can’t do that. It’s fine to pretend to be a leafenrat, but we don’t hurt our family! No hitting.” Something occurred to me. “And no biting, either! Tell your brother you’re sorry.”

“Sorry, Gavin!” Cassie’s voice rang out cheerfully.

“Don’t DO that,” said Gavin, surly. I knew he hadn’t been badly hurt. Cassie could still only hit with the strength of a normal three-year-old.

“She won’t do it again,” I said. “Right, Cassie? Tell me you won’t hit your brothers.”

“I will not hit my brothers. I promise.”

I shook my head and went back to work. The shelf had sagged off the wall. What I’d been trying wasn’t working. What I really needed were some of those big staple-looking nails, but we didn’t have any. Maybe I should hold off on trying to hang the wire shelves until I could raid some of the surrounding houses for supplies. That had been what I wanted to do tomorrow anyway.

I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been when Cassie yelled, “I’m a badblanket!”

It registered, on some level. When I heard Gavin shouting at her to get off of him, I did raise my voice to tell her to leave him alone. But I had one hand full of nails and the other was keeping the shelf from falling, and I figured I could separate the kids in a minute if Cassie didn’t back off.

I realized my mistake only after Cassie started screaming.