Chapter 25: Won them over with a story!?

Claire was clinging to me the entire time we slept, it was a bit uncomfortable, but when I finally woke up, she was smiling. So, I guess it doesn’t matter in the end, as long as Claire is happy.

“Good morning, Claire.” Her eyes slowly open, and before I even get a chance to react she kisses me.

“Good morning, Logan.” Claire smiles at me full of energy.

“Aren’t you oddly full of energy just after waking up?” I make a confused expression as I ask Claire. Normally, she takes a few minutes to even register that she has even woken up.

“I wasn’t sleeping just now. I woke up a while ago… but it was too early to get ready for school, so I climbed back into bed and started hugging you until you woke up. That, and various other things…” Claire sticks out her tongue at me after she says this.

Various other things? What can someone do to a person while they are asleep? Kiss me? Draw on my face? I don’t really know.

“Well… I guess we should get ready for school, right?” Claire nods as she lets go of me so that we can get out of bed.

“It feels like it’s been a while since we’ve been to class. Also, we don’t have to worry about student council duties either. The first of every month is a break day. What do you wa-” Claire is cut off by her phone starting to ring on the table beside her. “Hello? Who is this? Aunt Lynda? I haven’t heard from you in a while, how are you? Me? I’m great, just getting ready to go to school with my husband. Oh? Girls’ night out? What about your kids? You have only met him once… are you sure? Okay then. I’ll confirm details after school is over. Talk to you then.” Claire hangs up her phone and plops onto the bed.

“What’s wrong Claire?”

“How do you feel about watching two kids about half your age?” Claire looks at me with a solemn expression.

“Is it that bad!?” I lower my head and sigh, “So are we going to look after them for a night?”

“Nope. You are. I want to spend time with my aunt. Please?” Claire looks at me with a smile.

How could I say no to that!?

……

I really wish I said no earlier.

It was now after school and Claire’s aunt had met us at the front gate of the school with her two children. They were twins. Nine years old.

They looked like mini versions of Claire… which to be honest, makes me a little uncomfortable. I mean, Claire is my wife, so what do you think when you see two people that just look like smaller versions of your wife?

Me… I think of them as what a child between Claire and I would look like.

Am I overthinking it? Or am I just avoided the inevitable by pushing this to the side?

“Logan, my aunt and I are going now, please have fun!” Claire smiles at me.

“Thank you so much for agreeing to watch my children. Having you do it makes me feel better than keeping them at home with maids and butlers.” Claire’s aunt happily looked at her children as she pushed them towards me.

Wait!? You want me to watch them here!? I don’t know what to do here! Okay… this will be fine… how hard could it be to take care of two nine year olds?

“Ah, no problem…” I look at her with a wry smile. How should I address her?

“Just call me Lynda. It’s so nice to see young men like you so willing to take care of children. I’ll bring Claire back in a while, hopefully before midnight. See ya!” Lynda walks back to the car that she arrived in. “Oh yeah, the one with the bow in her hair is Jenna, and the one without the bow is Jessica.”

“I’ll see you later Logan!” Claire gives me a quick kiss as she gets in the car.

Okay… Claire just left me like that. Well. This may be a test!

Challenge accepted!

The two girls look at me with smiles on their faces. They walk with one on either side of me.

““Feed us peasant!””

This is going to be horrible.

……

“Saunderson, this is your chance to make it up to me. We need food… for four people, not including you. I am taking care of Claire’s cousins. Twins. So please. Be fast.” I close my phone and look at the twins that I had managed to distract temporarily by rushing to Dominic’s dorm room. He had a console that seemed kid friendly and luckily enough we had a game that sorta… kinda passed.

It was a multiplayer racing game. The girls that started the races were questionably dressed, but we managed to fix it by choosing longer races, so they didn’t appear very often. We also dodged any questions asked about them with the grace of a whale on land… wait… that’s a bad comparison.

“Hey… Logan…. How in the world did you get stuck with this job?” Dominic was whispering to me to try and not get the attention of the twins.

“I don’t really know, but I think it is a test, to see if I can properly take care of children.” I quietly whisper back to Dominic.

“I see, but shouldn’t you be spending time with them in that case? I mean, they may only be nine, but they are rich kids. They should be fairly versed in such things. The more time you let them play these games by themselves, the less reliable you will see to them, and they will tell their parents bad things about you.” Dominic pats my shoulder, “After you feed them, try taking them around the school and showing it to them.”

“Yeah,” I smile weakly, “I guess I don’t really have a choice.”

The twins quietly race each other in the game… is it really racing? They are in dead last…

……

“So… Jenna?” I look to the girl with the bow in her hair. “If I were to take you on a tour of the school where would you like to go first?”

The small girl goes, ‘Hmph!’ and turns away… Did I get the name wrong?

“What would you two like to do? There are tons of fun things we can do here at school. We can… um… tour the school. Enjoy the food from cafeteria… but we just ate… anyways! What would you girls like to do?” I talk to the girls that are just walking beside me.

“I’m bored!” Jessica shouts this out, causing Jenna to shout out also.

“Bored!”

“I don’t know what to do! Would you girls like to hear stories?” I give a last ditch attempt to entertain them.

They had eaten, and then left Dominic’s dorm room. Saunderson ate with us, but stayed quiet the entire time. The girls had been given many opportunities to do things… but refused almost all of them.

“Story?” Jenna looks to me with a curious expression on her face, “You want to tell us stories?”

“I like stories!” Jessica smiles and jumps up and down.

Finally! A breakthrough!

“What kind of stories would you like to hear? Fairy tale, adventure, fantasy with swords and magic, romance, or something else?” I happily ask the girls as they find a random bench and sit on either side of me.

“I want adventure!” Jenna, on my left, said with a large smile.

“I want fantasy with swords and magic!” Jessica said on my right with enough enthusiasm to drown a man.

“Okay then… let’s go for a simple story.” I take a deep breath and start the story.

“There was once a man who had lived for longer than you could ever imagine, but he liked to believe it was a simple life and chose to work office jobs, changing them every couple of years to make sure no one caught on to his real age.

This man was a powerful wizard. A man with the ability to use magic as freely as a bird can fly. The man was bored and started to research what came after death. No one knew what was going to happen and many thought that he was crazy for trying to play with the laws of the world.

This old man cared not for the rules, always saying something along the lines of, ‘If you don’t try something new, you will never try anything at all!’

After a long time, the old man had finally figured out ways to cheat death, even if he died. The old man was then attacked by his partner that had helped him with his project. The old man had perished in battle and his theory was immediately put to test.

However as a twist of fate, he failed, but managed to be born as a child in another world, the world of fantasy.

The now young man had gone through training as a swordsman, despite keeping his memories from before he came to the world he was currently in. He went towards a school, but was denied because he couldn’t impress the nobles, so he was not allowed to enter the school.

The man had refused to leave it at that, so he went to the nearby adventurer’s guild in order to build up his status as an adventurer, just to prove that single noble wrong.

The man had a rough start and was treated unjustly by many of the experienced adventurers, but he managed to gain fame through his advanced uses of magic that the world he was I had not ever seen.

After a while of gathering herbs to help the alchemists make potions and medicines, he stumbled across a shady area of town. He was called over by a man that looked like a merchant, ‘Eh. Ya want sum companions?’

The man was going to ignore it, but he figured, what could he lose just from looking around? He had made quite a large sum of money from adventuring, so he thought he might buy something if it was interesting enough.

It turned out to be a slave market. As a man coming from a world that had long since abolished slavery his first reaction was pure shock, but he quickly recovered. The man was shown the sick slaves first and one of them caught is eyes more than the others. It was a female that looked incredibly thin despite the merchant saying that she was roughly twenty years old.

The man quickly bought her and healed her with magic. He didn’t know why she caught his attention. He just couldn’t leave her alone in the slave market.

Months passed as the two adventured around the small land that they knew. The two had fallen in love despite the one being a slave. The man did not care as he was from a world without slavery, so he treated her as fairly as he could. However, the female slave was the one with more common sense and made sure that their relationship never sprouted.”

“I don’t like where this is going!” On my left was a complaint from the audience.

“Don’t worry.” I gently pat her head, “The story gets better from here.

“Continuing on, the man and the slave had now ventured around and had been noticed by many nobles and they were trying to bring them to their sides so that the nobles could use them in order create a more powerful force in order to become more powerful nobles.

However, the guilds took noticed and forced a high rank adventurer to join them on journeys to help protect them from powerful people that tried to use them.

It was a female knight. The slave didn’t take a liking to this and started to disregard her status as a slave, and started to allow the relationship between herself and the man grow.

The knight was raised as a knowledgeable person, so she knew how crazy it was for a slave to want to be in a real relationship with her master. The man overheard one of their conversations one night, and put an end to it by abolishing the slavery symbol using powerful magic, setting the used to be slave free.

Shortly after he set her free and told her she could do what she wanted now. He proposed to her and asked if she wanted to be with him for the rest of time.

She quickly said yes while many tears came from her eyes. The female knight returned to the adventurer’s guild after seeing that the man was powerful enough to take care of himself.

The man and his now wife, had set out to become the ruler of the continent they were on.

Many years later, they became the King and Queen through many twists and turns. Life and death situations. The man abolished slavery and punished all the nobles that had treated people unfairly.

In the end. The man looked back on his life, he looked at the bad, and he looked at the good. He realised that all his choices in life led him to where he was now. Sitting happily beside his wife on the throne.

He hoped that people would be able to realise that they should not regret the choices they have made in life, but make the most of whatever outcome they are given.”

The two girls start to clap. Tears at the edges of their eyes.

“Amazing!” The right side shouted happily.

“Encore!” The left shouts almost directly into my ear.

“Um…” I cover my ear on that side to prevent more damage, “I am pretty sure that an encore is only applicable when a band is on stage. I don’t know if I will be able to come up with another story like that.” Suddenly my phone starts ringing, “Hello.”

“Hey Logan, where are you guys? We finished the girl’s night out already… Aunt Lynda got bored.” Claire laughing says this on the phone.

“Ah, we’ll be there in a bit. I was just telling them a story. They seemed to like it.” I look towards the smiling girls as I gesture for them to follow me, “Come on, your mother is here to pick you up. We have to go to the front of the school.”

“I want to hear another story!”

“The last one was cool!”

Claire laughs on the other side of the line as I quickly make my way to the front of the school with the girls.

As we arrive the girls cling to me.

“Can we take him home?”

“He tells cool stories!”

The two girls try to convince their mother to bring me home. After a little bit of persuasion, in the form of promised ice cream, they agreed to let me stay with Claire.

“Thanks for taking care of my children. It seems they really like you. I told them to give you a hard time too. It’s amazing you actually got them to approve you so highly.” Lynda was smiling as she held on to her kids.

“No problem. They were really quite nice. As a note, without the bow… I don’t think I could tell them apart. After talking with them, I might be able to tell who was who, but just by looks, there is no way I would be able to tell them apart.” I smile as I talk to Lynda.

“Oh my. They really are quite different in terms of personalities. Anyways, I should get home before my husband starts to have a panic attack. Thanks again for taking care of my kids.” Lynda slowly starts to head back to the car.

“Yeah, great kids. Have a safe drive home.” I wave as they enter the car.

“See you again soon Aunt Lynda!” Claire waves to them as they leave too.

I turn to Claire after the car leaves from the front of the school.

“So, that was an easy test to pass. Those kids were easy to please with a simple story.” I laugh as I grab Claire’s hand to start walking to our dorm room.

“If you have time, could you tell me the story too? It sounds like it might have been a really good story.” Claire smiles as we finally end our long day.

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Hello everyone!

So... How are you people?

*Awkward silence*

Anyways, I was glad that the idea for one of my stories that never made it to paper, was finally used. As a child's story. But oh well, it was fun writing this chapter.

Also, I plan to post a chapter everyday until friday again. Why? because I feel like it.

Have a great day/night!