“Alright kids, who wants to go with big sis to see the ducks?”

Vanessa “Van” vis-Oddmund, was actually a McBriar by both blood and marriage. The marriage was a short one. Ending in death, just like vows said.

Her father the Count, being the lecherous old thing that he was, already had far too many children.

Full grown young Lords and Ladies who’d been vying for his title for what felt like an eternity and a half, since long before young Vanessa came around.

Thus as soon as her mother sickened and died as tended to happen to all the Count’s younger concubines, she was kicked back to her maternal relatives.

The Oddmund clan main family didn’t want to risk the ire of the squabbling McBriars by looking like they were trying to get a horse into the race, for control of the County. So they made the girl into a branch member.

Most of the branch families were wary of catching the ire of either the McBriars, and even if that weren’t the case, in Otmar there were few who’d be happy to have to take on a new mouth to feed.

Thus she spent most of youth bouncing from branch family to branch family till she fell into the vis-Oddmund family where she was formally adopted.

She and Olivia vis-Oddmund the matriarch of the young vis-Oddmund household got along like an actual mother and daughter. And through her and Jarek, young Van eventually found her place in the rest of the clan.

Becoming seen as the vis-Oddman house’s responsible daughter. Someone more mature than her years.

Someone who could be trusted with little tasks like helping the maidservants carry the laundry and watching the family’s youngest brats when the grownups were busy.

As such, it would come to pass that the person that young Edwin vis-Oddmund would interact with the most during the initial years of his young life would be his adopted sister Van.

He’d barely been conscious during the first months after his birth, knocked out by the energy expenditure involved in adapting his machine-mind to his new biological body.

And by the time he “was” awake and aware, his mother was already up and moving about again.

Already making plans to resume working with the County protectorate to fight off the brigands and monsters that would do their damndest to try and take what little the people of this dreary, desolate little county had to their names.

(Namely their lives...Mostly their lives and their livestock…)

Meaning it was Van that changed the majority of young Eddy’s diapers. Van who gave him most of his feedings, while he was still not yet eating solid food. It was Van who taught him most of what he knew of the world.

And because of this young Eddy and fair number of the younger children who were born that year, or the year prior, had fairly good impression the young lady known as Vanessa vis-Oddmund.

No matter her gloomy disposition and a tendency to talk to herself, and few other idiosyncrasies that were par for course for someone with a blood relationship to the McBriar family.

Whose members were renowned for their cheery disposition, even tempers...and no...just kidding, they were known for being mad... (Rollicking, put boots on cats, mad.)

Van on the other hand didn’t much like Edwin at all. The other children were okay, but that was because as far she could figure “they” were actual children.

She didn’t know what little Edwin was, but he wasn’t a baby. In the three years since she’d basically become the vis-Oddmund family’s communal babysitter Vanessa had grown fairly familiar with babies.

Babies were things that lay in blankets and crawled about. Sometimes they cried. Sometimes they messed themselves. Often they’d just lie there and stare at you smiling like drunkards or frowning like old men, till they got annoyed by something, or bored, in which case it was time to cry again.

However the general standard expectation was that they were usually somewhere between houseplants and irritable cats, in complexity.

One just had to make sure a child stayed full, clean and moderately happy, which was admittedly much easier said than done, but asides from that children were fairly simple.

Even the older kids who added a bit of complication into the mix by getting into spats with each and occasionally trying to toddle off and either break something or themselves, were still fairly simple.

The simple fact was that despite having emotions and thoughts and personalities of their own, a developing child between the ages of one and three wasn’t all that complicated to understand. At least on a broad level. Especially when they weren’t your children.

Which for thirteen year old Van, wasn’t something she’d have to worry about for many years to come...Hopefully.

(So long as she could avoid the pervy uncles and pervy older cousins she sometimes ran into while doing errands in town, anyway.)

Edwin was an exception to these rule, an eerie, discomfiting, glowing eyed exception to the rules of what a baby was and wasn’t.

Babies messed themselves. Edwin didn’t. Which at first just seemed like a positive thing, except according to his mother, she’d never actually “had” to change of his diapers either.

Simply doing so, as perfunctory duty, and because it somehow felt like it would be unsanitary to just leave a diaper on, regardless of whether it actually got used or not.

He didn’t cry either. Nor did He laugh. Nor did he babble. In truth the child rarely made any sounds at all. Moving from place to place with a troubling noiselessness.

Even when he grew older and learned to walk, his steps made no sound. His very presence seeming to swallow up the rustles of the grass and the bushes and the scritch and crunch of the gravel.

He did stare though, but it wasn’t in the adorable slightly unfocused manner of a child. Little Edwin stared at her like she remembered her mother staring her, the very last time she saw. Just minutes after her death.

Her mother’s green eyes open, and clear like glass. Neither denying nor accepting the world they reflected. Beyond it all in a way that was just...wrong.

The boy would always stare at her in the same way a lake stares at the moon. His eyes weren’t eyes, they were water, cold water, deep enough for a person to drown in.

The child’s stares sometimes made her feel like he was secretly one of Embla’s alder-giants and she an ant.

Small and insignificant.

It was an uncomfortable feeling, like being dissected while one was still alive. Like screaming and hearing no accompanying sound. It was a feeling she hated...

So naturally, the one thing the boy would stare at the most, would be her, giving the little girl both the heebies and jeebies.

Not that there was anything that she could do about it.

In the end, at the end of every day when she’d go to Rus’s town square so that the mothers and servants of the Oddmund branch families could collect the children, he would be the one child still remaining.

The one that would follow her home like a clinging ghost, since the inescapable truth was, that little Edwin was and always would be her “precious” baby brother.