"Why does she have a weapon?" Lira asked, interestedly.
"Her group was betrayed, and she’s fighting her way free." Laura made certain the looped braids were even and added: "There, you’re done. Do you like it?"
Lira considered her image in the mirror. She was a beautiful girl, and normally confident in her appearance, but the Ruuel Devlin family had a rare public engagement that day, and everything they did, said, and wore would be minutely discussed by their millions of fans and critics. Nearly-fourteen—in Muinan or Earth years—was a difficult enough time for any child, without the added pressure of such intense scrutiny.
"It is…yes, I like it," Lira said. "Thank you, Unna Laura."
"You’re welcome," Laura said, giving the girl a tiny hug. "Is it time to hurry, Cass, or is it more of a leisurely stroll?"
"Stroll," Cass said. "When Kaoren’s involved, we hardly ever get to the hurry stage." As Lira headed out of Laura’s bathroom, Cass lingered for her own hug. "Thanks Mum. She really needed something extra today."
"All the time I put into helping your aunts cosplay certainly is coming in handy. Does Lira find public appearances harder than the rest of the children?"
"There’s a lot more focus on her. I think she could handle that well enough, but there’s always discussion about whether she’s visibly aged, and…and how long she’ll last. Not being real is a genuine nightmare of Lira’s, and they practically have betting pools about it."
"That talk isn’t dying down, now that it’s been a couple of years?"
"Oh, a bit," Cass said, switching to interface conversation as they headed out to the patio. "And she is at least an inch taller than she used to be—but I think it’s going to be with her her whole life. The Ionoth girl."
Lira—unlike Ys, Rye and Sen—was not a survivor of the moon world of Nuri. Instead, she had been born on Muina, centuries ago. The last recorded Touchstone before Cass, she had been kidnapped and used as a power source for a giant, reality-distorting machine—and had not, technically, survived the experience.
Exactly how Lira came to regain a physical form, and how long it would last, was a subject of much debate and scientific study. To all tests and scans she was as human as Cass, but there was no way to prove that she was not a creation of the Ena, just a different sort of Ionoth monster.
Lira had paused with Rye to examine the strawberries, and Laura promised them that tomorrow they could harvest the ripest. Then Julian, neatly dressed, with his hair combed flat, arrived with only mildly dragging feet, and they headed down the hill.
"Cass," Laura continued, over their private interface channel, "when you say Lira is nearly fourteen, do you mean fourteen in Earth years or Muinan years?"
Cass produced an expressive grimace.
"Both, sort of. They told me the kids' estimated ages in Taren years, at first, and I converted that to Earth years, and we picked rough birthdays for them. But I should have converted them to Muinan years, and when Ys realised and pointed out that most of them were really a year younger in Muinan years, none of them—not even Ys—were willing to actually change their supposed ages. Since we don’t have official birthdates for any of them, we let them have their way."
"I, on the other hand, have embraced being thirty-nine instead of forty-four," Laura said. "Don’t the school officials and so forth object to incorrect ages?"
"They’re letting it slide. A lot of the things you can and can’t do under the laws here are based on passing tests rather than a strict age cut-off anyway."
To Laura’s delight, there was a large version of a flitter waiting for them at the docks, hovering patiently beside the bank. Only Tyrian, and Kaoren’s sister Siame—who was visiting to play babysitter—were skipping the Thanksgiving ceremony, and Arcadia’s residents had six additional Setari along to play bodyguard. Mostly for Cass and Lira, who weren’t actually allowed to travel without at least two guards each.
"Does it still bother you?" Laura asked Cass through the link, after they had boarded. "That you can’t go anywhere alone?"
"It’s bothering me more for the kids, now. Lira’s the only one that has a mandatory guard, but there’s no way any of them could go wandering about Pandora on their own. We’re lucky that guard duty is usually rostered to Setari we consider friends." Cass glanced pensively at the rest of the occupants of the flitter. "A lot of them have much the same problem, anyway—they’re heroes, and plenty of people will always be completely obsessed with the Setari. I’m sorry you all get stuck with it, though."
Laura had tried to avoid becoming too caught up in the notoriety of being "Kaszandra’s Mother", but she had certainly been left disinclined to wander about the city after reading a few of the interface sites frankly discussing everything from her appearance to her known purchasing choices. All the Terran transplants were the focus of great interest, and not even Sue particularly enjoyed it.
Today, that interest was at highest intensity. First a Thanksgiving Ceremony held in the vast Moon Piazza, where an audience of thousands—not even counting those watching over the interface—cheered constantly, either at Cass or the Setari. Next came a family-oriented, VIP-only picnic lunch in a park area, where a truly formidable number of people asked Laura what she thought of Muina, and told her how proud she must be of her daughter.
Cass herself was a small revelation. She had not become a chatty social schmoozer, but the day was clearly within her coping abilities. She gave a short speech, politely if briefly responded to the questions of various dignitaries, and constantly tag-teamed with Kaoren and their Setari escort to keep an eye out for her family and guests. Laura had never expected to be rescued by her daughter during social situations, but Cass very neatly extricated Laura from an extremely intrusive man, and deposited her with Alyssa, Nick and Sue instead.
"We’re clustering for protection while we wait for the signal to leave," Sue said, cheerfully. "If we all stand frowning seriously at each other I figure it’ll be at least five minutes before someone butts in to ask what Cass was like as a child."
Since she’d been asked exactly that at least two dozen times, Laura could only smile thinly, before saying to Alyssa: "I wasn’t sure how Maddy would cope with the crowds, but she seems to be enjoying herself."
"That’s Sen. She always works Maddy into a silly mood. Does it deliberately too. For a six year-old, Sen’s an uber-manipulator."
"So long as she never turns her powers to evil…" Nick murmured.
"Have you decided whether to go ahead and send Maddy to school?"
Alyssa nodded. "I was against it a few weeks ago, since she’s well behind the rest of us in language because of the delay in installing her interface. But the other kids do seem to distract her from missing home. Once she’s there, we’ll move on to what the heck now for us."
"I’m concentrating on passing the adulthood exams," Sue said. "I find it oddly disturbing not to be legally classed as an adult. My first few attempts were shambolic, but I’m determined."
"It’s not that they’re difficult—it’s that you can’t use the translation program in the exam environment," Nick agreed. "We have to push our comprehension skills. After that…" He and Alyssa exchanged glances. "We’re going to join KOTIS."
"For serious?" Sue said, surprised. "This is the first I’ve heard of this."
Alyssa nodded. "When Nick says join, he means do a lot of work so that we can qualify to apply, but yeah, I’m sold on the idea. I’m not sure we would have thought of it ourselves—we started out asking Kaoren whether anyone would object if we went and got jobs in a store or restaurant or something. We can’t just sit around on Arcadia living off Cass' money, after all. And even though they have this base level concept here, where everyone gets necessities for free, it’s always going to be more fun to have more of an income."