A few more years passed. I’m not even going to make a big deal out of it, because unlike the last few timeskips, nothing happened. No one got married. Alright, actually, that’s a lie. Ashley and Tommy got married. Then a few months later, Math Moth and the boy who made swords out of light, announced that they were having a baby.

Margot and Maci sent them her congratulations, and some lovely supplies for rearing children. Gifting them copies of all the little things that kept us sane when the kids were growing up. I sent my well-wishes as well, but not before prefacing it with some slightly mean-spirited laughter.

Those two had been a thing for quite a while. Then they brought in this other girl named Marie Ashlake. Who you don’t really need to know much about since I myself don’t really know much about her, beyond the fact that she’s a nice Mouse-kin girl, and she has a thing for daisies.

So actually, maybe I need to correct that and say, Thomas, Ashley, and Marie, got married. Now they formed the fledgling Yu clan, and now they were making babies. Which meant me, laughing my ass off.

Why? I’ll tell you why. In the hearts of many couples with kids, who were friends with couples without kids, there was sometimes a small monster, waiting till their idiot friends make the same decision they’ve made. For all that misery likes company, the “miserable” will still take some joy in taking the piss out of those who failed to take their stressed out state, as a warning for what lies ahead.

Seriously though, I wish them the best of luck, and I’m fairly certain they’ll be okay parents. Ashley’s no nonsense but she’s got a good heart and a good head on her shoulders. Thomas has always proven reliable and reasonably intelligent. Marie is a kindergarten teacher, which makes for a fairly random addition to their household of multiverse-administering superbeings, but based on my research, she’s good with children.

They’ll probably be fine, and if they ever need help, our Kaylan household is just one phone call away.

Then there was one other wedding. Margot’s cousin Bernadette and my former-nemesis Samantha ended up getting hitched as well.

It was a lovely reception. Bernadette was even kind enough to make sure we were seated amongst Samantha’s family’s side of the wedding, so as to keep us the hell away from the Wallaces, though that didn’t keep some of the more gutsy members of the Wallace clan from coming over to say hi.

It also made things a bit awkward, because a few of Samantha’s family were apparently at least partly privy to the fact that me and Samantha had some kind of history, even if they weren’t entirely clear on what kind of history the two of us had.

Beyond those two weddings however, nothing had changed, and I don’t really count them as being a big deal narratively speaking, because I doubt I would have dedicated an entire chapter to those events either. At most, I would have included them amongst whatever other nonsense was taking place in my life during that period.

Returning to what I was saying about the timeskip, nothing had happened in the last few years. The fact I’m even mentioning it, is because I can barely believe the amount of time that’s gone by.

The kids were older now. Seren and Dana were turning sixteen in a few months. Flannery just turned fourteen last month. Tau, Harald, and Blair were all twelve years old, and were already showing signs of making the leap from kid to teen.

I don’t really have much else to say about all that. My kids were growing up, but that’s pretty much an expected part of the whole parenthood-schtick. Life marches on, and you just take it day by day. There’s nothing else I can say on the matter that hasn’t already been covered by the protagonist in some middle-school level coming of age book, or country music song about getting older.

I’m just glad I can say that me and my wives had yet to see any evidence that any of the brats we’d sired were idiots. I’ll admit I was a bit nervous about that. If too much pride and too much humility were both arrogance, then the only thing I can do is admit that my Kaylan clan were kind of a big deal. Especially within, the territories controlled by Terminus-Earth.

My fear was raising a gaggle of young masters and young mistresses, whose entitlement, egos, and brainlessness, would ruin lives and possibly bring about my brats’ undoing. It was the biggest of my “oh no, I’m going to fuck up the kids” concerns.

Thankfully, it was a fear that ultimately hadn't come to fruition, though I’d have to see if that lasted as the kids were going through their teens. People were rarely ever more cocky than they were in their teens. It was that window in life where one got big enough and capable enough to start semi-justifiably thinking that one was hot shit. It was also the period before life started taking proper swings at you, because still weren’t technically an adult.

I’d already given Seren and Dana “the talk”. Flannery got two “talks”, because she took a little bit too much after Maci’s sister and grandmother personality-wise, and it made us concerned that she might end up proving precocious in ways that would require us keeping a closer eye on the girl.

According to Maci, the one Flannery took the most after was a younger, more well-adjusted, version of Maci, who was surprisingly a lot more similar to her sister and mother’s behavior than she liked to recall. This was apparently enough for Maci to say that it wouldn’t be too long before our Flannery brought home her first girlfriend and/or boyfriend.

That’s kind of a bummer, except, not really. Flannery’s still my little girl and I’m pretty sure if it weren’t for my fair of creating little monsters she would have been my biggest monster. In my eyes, that little girl can do no wrong. So I guess I’m just going to have to nut up and parent.

Setting clear boundaries, while also making myself available if she wants to talk about something. Making sure that she, and my other sprogs, know that even if I don’t necessarily approve of everything they get up to, I’ll always be there in their corner.

Guiding them as best I can, until finally they’re adults who can deal with their own problems, and then they have their own kids, and then I can laugh at them as is my due as the one who wiped their noses and asses for them for the handful of weeks before they were potty-trained.

There was one unexpected thing that happened, that I didn’t see coming. I got another kid. It technically falls under the list of things that didn’t happen during the timeskip, because its currently happening right now.

I was sitting in a car, in the middle of suburbs in Massachusetts. My wife was in the house. Picking up our seventh kid. As to how we gained a seventh kid, the answer is quite simple.

Around a year after my wife completely cut ties with the Wallace family, her useless parents decided to go and have another kid.

They had the child for all the wrong reasons. Margot’s departure had created a gulf between Vergil and Margaret. Margaret let Vergil get her pregnant in hopes that the new baby would smooth things out. Surprisingly, it worked. For a time, Vergil and Margaret could raise the new little life and pretend that the nastiness that happened with their last child never happened.

Then they got bored and wandered off to go explore another dimension, because the earth’s cooperation with the House of Antipodes had reached a level where they were able to open use of the dimensional gateways to the public.

Margot was livid when she found out what they’d done. She immediately understood their motives for having another child, and correctly guessed the outcome. Thus after a discussion between her, me, and the rest of our little household she secretly made deal for a some I won’t disclose, and a king’s fortune in rare resources, with the Wallace clan assuring that whichever clan member ended up being made the official guardian of the child would transfer custody to Margot, should her parents abandon their role as parents for a prolonged period.

We set this up years ago, and I didn’t bring it up because I was kind of hoping it’d be a non-issue. Clearly, Margot knew her parents better for all that she’d barely spent any time with them.

Vergil and Margaret Cooke were excellent mages, courageous explorers, and brilliant academics but they were too selfish and self-involved to stick around for the minimum of eighteen years that it takes for a parent to be done parenting. Being a Mom and Dad was something too boring to keep their attention for too long. There was too little fame and too little praise.

Technically, no court in the world would ordinarily uphold the contract we made. Which is why we then we called in a favor with the world-government and the US government to A)make sure the damn contract was made legally binding, and B) assure that her parents couldn’t swoop in years later and demand the child returned to their custody.

Now as of this moment, it had exactly been three years, since her parents had gone missing in a world carnivorous bees and quantum nightmares.

This was a world where the akashic record found it hard to cover the details of what was taking place, because everything was happening and not-happening due to the aforementioned quantum-nightmares. Imagine a universe where everything was being endlessly CTRL-Zed and CTRL-Yed, making it nearly impossible to know if anything that was being added or deleted, had actually been added or deleted.

The question of her parents’ life or death was up in the air, and I think the fact that Margot hadn’t even so much as suggested that I send some of the FC-fleet to search for them, says all that needs to be said about that particular relationship. Though you can be sure, I did so anyway just because I knew Margot well enough to know it’d probably haunt her when enough time passed for her to be less angry.

Margot’s main reason for taking custody of baby Juno, was to avoid the creation of a new Margot. Her childhood was dogshit. No one should have a childhood that dogshit. No one should grow up being that afraid. No one should grow up thinking they are nothing, and don’t matter.

The fact that the Wallaces had been willing to essentially sell her to us made us feel fairly sure of our decision. We couldn’t trust them not to screw up this kid either purposefully or by accident. We also didn’t want to enter a situation where they tried to use her to blackmail us, because she was probably the one.

Margot came out of the house with a toddler in two. Her sister, and new daughter.

If her parents returned within the next three years, we’d give her back with few questions asked. If five years or more passed, without them coming to look for their little girl, then they’d better have a damn good reason for being AWOL for so long. Otherwise, in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of our clan, little Juno was one of us, now and forever.