Austin was my home, and I did love aspects of it. Unfortunately, Austin was a real city that existed in the real world, and thus had some downsides. And because it existed in America, one of those downsides is that if you didn't have a car, the city itself hated your guts and wanted you to eat shit and die.

As such, I had to let certain errands wait until Akane got back from class and I could borrow her car.

But, because Akane was neither an office worker nor a high school student, the time when I couldn't run those sorts of errands was fairly limited.

The week passed fairly quickly and unremarkably; half of the errands I ran were simply for replacing Lisa's personal affects, such as clothing, toiletries- she didn't care for the vanilla scent I favored, and insisted on orange for her own- and a laptop, although that one had been acquired at Radio Shack during our spirit-finding expedition. I had, briefly, entertained the thought of an involved custom computer project that incorporated the phone I'd given her, and then I realized that actually, that was stupid as hell, and I should just buy her a goddamn laptop.

I satisfied my desire for Projects by, instead, building her a custom chair whose design I pilfered from an old book and adapted with the addition of a removable and adjustable lap desk, and also some custom tailoring work. Lisa, being a shapeshifter whose body was responsive to her own thoughts, was transitioning somewhat faster than a woman who was just on E, and therefore preferred to not commit too heavily to the sorts of closely-tailored clothes one got when one roomed with a bored mad scientist with a sewing machine and a tailor's tape measure. However, Lisa was also a werefox who sometimes wanted to deploy her tail while still wearing clothes. As a result, I got to design and install covert slits and vents in the back of her skirts.

For some reason, Lisa was more appreciative of the thing she'd explicitly asked me for, and been somewhat skeptical of the project I'd undertaken on grounds I thought she needed it. I mean, okay, she came around on the chair pretty quickly, it was a good chair, but she didn't have to come around on the skirts.

My love language was projects only I cared about, ostensibly on behalf of others. And either Lisa's love language would come to include patiently tolerating this tendency of mine, or she would move out and stop talking to me.

Akane, meanwhile, was busy with grad school stuff she'd put off and let pile up, and after she complained to me about wrist pain on Tuesday, I'd made another Virtual Machine and implanted that in her head while she slept. It lacked most of the really weird features mine had, but the important part was that she now had a computer she didn't need to physically type on to use.

As for Veronica... she didn't tell me where she was going or what she was doing, and I didn't ask. It wasn't out of respect for her privacy, mind, I just didn't care.

Finally, Friday morning came, and so did Silas, with a lot of firewood and a dead sheep. He showed me how to start and manage the fire. He showed me how to mix up his mustard-based sauce, and apply it properly to the sheep. He left me with written instructions on maintaining the fire and checking on the barbecue, and then... all that was left to do was wait.

Around four in the afternoon, the doorbell rang, and Akane's mothers had arrived.

"You know, it didn't hit me until just now," I said, looking around at Akane's three mothers. "You were raised by a polycule."

"Is that what the kids call it these days?" Tanya asked. She was black, short, and fat, with a smile that lit up the room and a voice like honey. She'd hugged Akane the longest out of the three mothers, and while I couldn't quite pin Akane's affectionate nature on her exclusively, I felt it was pretty safe to say she contributed.

"Oh come off it, we all know what that word means," Samina said. She, in turn, was tall and lanky, and by my estimation, a Sikh; there were other reasons for an Indian woman to wear a steel bracelet on her wrist and a dagger on her belt, but not many; I was fairly confident in the estimation.

"Raised by a polycule, she says," Haruna added. She was, as far as I could tell, the one who had actually given birth to Akane, given that she looked a lot like Akane. A bit skinnier, though, and with a bubblegum pink pixie cut instead of Akane's shiny black waterfall. "The same way some heroes were raised by wolves?"

"In this case, cougars," I said, prompting peals of laughter.

"If you're not going to sleep with her, I am," Haruna said.

"I'm trying, okay?" Akane said. "Anyway. Roxy, you wanted to know why I wanted to pursue this research, right? Mom, do you mind if I tell Roxy about...?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah, go ahead," Haruna said. "It's not a secret."

"Ah, right, this," I said. "So, Akane, what's the secret-that-isn't?"

"Haruna Sakurai is the most intelligent person on the planet," Akane said. "That's her superpower, tremendous intelligence. And when she couldn't crack the riddle of superpowers on her own... she ran an experiment, to see how heritable superpowers were." She inhaled and exhaled. "I'm a direct genetic clone of Haruna Sakurai, and although I didn't inherit her powers, I did inherit the mission, the purpose. Figuring out how superpowers work is what I was born for, Roxy."

It occurred to everyone, myself included, that Akane making such a grandiose declaration about her purpose in front of her mothers could be... awkward.

"That's... not really accurate, Akane," Haruna said cautiously.

"Huh?" Akane asked.

"I've mentioned this before, but I had you as a way to work through the trauma of my own upbringing," Haruna said. "To create a version of me who grew up in a way she didn't have to recover from. The experiment was... not really a thing I was doing. I just happened to mention being mildly curious whether or not you'd inherit my powers, once or twice."

"I... that..." Akane blinked.

"I'm still in your corner if this is what you want to study," Haruna said, putting a comforting hand on Akane's shoulder. "It's important, not just to you but to a lot of other people. But all the same, Akane, I don't want you to feel like you have to do this because of me. I didn't make you so you could follow in my footsteps; I made you so I could follow yours."

"Okay, before Akane has even more of an existential crisis," I said, before pausing. "Akane, after this, remind me to walk you through the high points of Jean-Paul Sartre, it's very relevant. Anyway, where was I? Right, I have nitpicks. Haruna, you're a rocket scientist. How the hell did you clone yourself?"

"I'm currently a rocket scientist," Haruna corrected me, wrapping Akane in a tight hug. "But my power means I can master the state of the art in a given field in maybe a year or so, and then push beyond that from there. One of the first fields I studied was genetics."

"Ah. That'd do it. And... Akane having a noticeably different phenotype?" I asked.

"Part of it is just that she was raised differently, with different environmental factors," Haruna said. "But another part is that, before I decided to have her, I performed some genetic therapies on myself. It wasn't until after Akane was already born that I realized that I'd been a bit more thorough than I should have been, and she'd inherited them."

"I see," I said, trying to find a diplomatic way to say 'so that's why your daughter is so curvy.'

"Which is why she's got bigger tits than I do," Haruna said, reminding me that diplomacy meant something very different here. "I was designing gene therapies for myself at twenty five. When they stayed in the veins of someone a lot younger... well, they overshot the mark when Akane finally hit puberty."

"And you didn't fix the problem before it became a problem because..?" I asked.

"Performing medical procedures on people without their consent is generally considered unethical," Haruna said. "I waited until Akane was graduating middle school, which seemed to me old enough to understand what was at stake, and offered the choice. And she decided that she wanted tits more than she wanted athleticism."

"Alright. Well, one more question," I said. "Why did you create Akane as a clone, rather than just an unconventionally-conceived daughter with the admixture of someone else's genetics?"

"I... didn't have a happy childhood," Haruna explained. "Cloning myself was... something of a power fantasy. A chance to make right what had gone wrong, to raise a version of me properly."

I nodded. "Right, well, unfortunately, there's one crucial thing that the two of you seem to not be fully grasping: there isn't two of you. There is one of Haruna, and one of Akane, and the two of you have never been the same person in any meaningful way."

"Huh?" Akane asked. "Wait. Roxy, is this that 'you never step in the same river twice' thing?"

"I mean that's also true, but we don't even need to go that deep," I said. "The two of you don't even look identical. Akane is wearing dark colors with long sleeves and a skirt, and Haruna is wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. The hair is different. And Akane, I'm willing to bet that you chose inconveniently large boobs that ended your athleticism because it would further differentiate you from your mother."

"I... well, yes, but..."

"But nothing," I said. "She's not you, Akane, and you aren't her. She's your mother, and she's played a huge role in shaping the person you've become, but she shaped you differently, and it's important to acknowledge that." I grinned a little. "And while she may not give two shits about how or why superpowers work, you do, don't you?"

"I... well..." Akane blinked, looking away.

"Look, I'm not going to dock points from you because you didn't come up with an answer for why you care that satisfied me," I said. "For one, I actually can't dock points from you, because I'm not a schoolteacher and I'm not grading any assignments. But more importantly, there's no real deadline. I just wanted to get you thinking, and now that I have, you can take all the time you need to think. I'll be here for you the whole time."

"This is one of the weirdest barbecues I've ever been to," Tanya said, reminding me that I was not alone out here with Akane and her biological mother.

"One of?" Lisa asked, reminding me further that she was also here.

"Before my dad died, he brought this Greek kid to a barbecue and said, since none of his blood children could smoke worth a damn, he was adopting a son who could." Tanya smiled. "We came to like Silas pretty quickly, mind, but Dad made one hell of a first impression for him."

"Speaking of Silas, him and his family are coming," I said. "Now that we've established pretty clearly who's who, I'm gonna go check on the barbecue."

I glanced at Akane, wordlessly checking on her, and got a smile in return. It was a shaky smile, but still a smile, so I'd take it.