“What? Gaspard?! I thought the king locked you in the bathroom?!” said a teenage girl wearing a long white beard and a star-covered wizard’s robe

Another teenaged girl dressed like some cross between a police swat-team and a medieval knight flourished a rubber sword and said,

“Kekeke, you fools! Did you think a mere toilet could seal me away? I crawled the toilet and escaped through the sewers!”

“Oh...Oh, wow...This is amazing. Also, am I stroking out right now? Because I think the cuteness overload is frying my brains,” said Margot. Snacking on one of the gingerbread men I’d baked before we’d left the house.

Another girl entered the stage from behind the curtains to the left. The girl was dressed in your stereotypical superhero costume. Wearing a spandex onesie and a green cape. Her black and white hair was tied back in a long ponytail.

The girl in the knight costume turned around in surprisingly well-feigned surprise and threw herself at the girl in the superhero costume. The girl in the superhero costume dodged to the left and then an illusion was cast making it seem like she was blasting the girl in the knight costume with an energy beam. The girl in the knight costume fell and her helmet flew off, revealing a headful of vibrant green hair that had been done up in pigtails.

Margot and I were sitting amidst a collection of semi-bored, semi-excited, adults, teenagers, and toddlers. Everyone seated in the auditorium alongside us had gathered together to watch a play being performed by the students of the city of Prospero’s Watts Academy.

The play that they were performing was a rendition of former-President, Poet-king, and North-American Warlord, Wallace Chen’s seminal masterpiece, the “Fall of Kentucky”. Which was itself a dramatic retelling of a surprisingly insignificant battle that took place during the ENE. A battle that had little to no consequence to the world overall beyond the fact that there was a book written about it, and several plays were written based on the contents of the book.

Naturally, Mint and Filomena were listed amongst the actors. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. I don’t have any kind of strange hobbies that would make me want to watch something this perplexingly dry. Also, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have let me come if I wasn’t a parent-guardian, or relative, to one of the kids. Or at least I hope so. It’d be concerning if that wasn’t the case.

Anyway, I digress. Mint and Filomena were up on stage acting the little hearts out. Between you and me, though Filomena’s rendition of the famed heroine “Fairy Bolt” was fairly decent, it was Mint who’d managed to blow me away. I wouldn’t have thought she had it in her to act, after all, she was generally almost stupidly straightforward when she was at home.

There was this one time when somebody ate all the doggy-treats in the house. Nevermind, that of the four of us, there was only one person who ate those treats. When I asked her if she ate them, I was treated to ten minutes of her blinking her big green eyes and playing her with pigtails while trying to come up with some explanation for why they’d disappeared.

It was a hell of a story and none of it was believable. However, right now, I was seeing evidence of what could eventually develop into a fairly impressive stage presence. Right now, I believed that little girl was the infamous Gaspard Holloway, a minor figure from the age of the endless night.

Overall, the play lasted for almost two hours and they were a long two hours. Even if Filomena and Mint were killing it up there that didn’t mean the rest of the sprogs on stage were any good. One kid actually said the directions instead of his line. However, I’m willing to admit that I was probably biased since Mint almost did the same thing a few times there. Marring what would have been a praiseworthy performance with her diabetes-causing, adorable, slip-ups.

The play was terrible but I couldn’t keep myself from recording every second of it into my memory banks. I mean, technically, that would have been the case anyway, because I lacked the ability to forget things in the long term. However, even if that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t have been able to help myself.

After the play was over, and all the kids took a bow, there was a small meet and greet with the school’s Theatre teacher, Ms. Argo, a high strung, but whimsically dressed half-elf with yellow-green hair, and the school’s Principal, Mrs. Short.

The meet-and-greet was mercifully brief, so were soon able to go home. Filomena walked side-by-side with Margot. A gentle look of gratification and subtle happiness on her normally impassive face. Mint was jumping all over us. My hyper little, pistachio and mint, cinnamon roll, just like always.

“Did I do good? Did I do good? I did great, right?” said the green-haired girl. Her tail wagging.

I laughed.

“Yeah, you did great,” said I.

“In fact, you did so great, how about we go out to eat today?” said Margot.

“Yay!” said Mint.

“Hm, I could eat. How about pizza or Korean barbecue this time?” said Filomena. Her response was more even-keeled, though her eyes were just as bright and merry as Mint’s.

“Barbecue!” said Mint. Immediately, putting her vote in for whichever option would mean more meat on her plate.

Margot and I exchanged a look, and then Margot shrugged. Looking content. While she still wasn’t sure she was ready to be a parent yet, she loved the girls all the same. Treating them like they were her little sisters, or like she was their very young Aunt. You know...One of those ‘cool’ Aunts who are distantly aware of their senior role as the adult in the room but either doesn’t really know, or isn’t really sure, what to do about it.

When I really thought about it, the situation with the girls was kind of ambiguous because, despite their youthful human forms, neither Mint or Filomena was technically as young as they looked. Little Mint wasn’t a puppy when she turned back into her dog form, and Filomena’s actual birth date was all the way back before the ENE.

However, all that was immaterial because we all loved each other and in the end, that’s what really counted right. The fact that the girls had that bit of added maturity and self-sufficiency just meant I didn’t have to worry as much when I left them on their own or sent them off to school. Especially since I was technically supposed to be laying low right now, and there was still a large number of people watching me...watching us… to try and look for a weakness, or any sign that I was about to go all Ender-of-Days, on their asses.

“Barbecue sounds good,” I said.

Just as we were leaving the academy, I paused, feeling a disturbance in the flow of the world. I quickly sent Margot a telepathic heads up. She nodded and led the girls away. Teleporting home just in case, because even if the girls could hypothetically take care of themselves, I wasn’t willing to leave things to chance. Especially if someone was about to do something reckless.