AN: Had distant family over all this week.
AN: And I had a loss in the family today.
++++++++
Martha, Whitney, Ryan, and Abdul with their seven sets of arms carried the two sets of
quadruplet to the living room, which was uncharacteristically empty due to their medical
trouble.
Martha knew that they weren't their pups, but they were children in the house hold she as
an Omega had swore to serve and protect without question, and they had both just
someone who could never ever be replaced.
All possibilities, all paths, all things in life left to be explored, all of it, just gone, GONE!
Forever and ever. There was no magical resurrection, no cheating of death. They were
dead. They were gone now and wouldn't be coming back!
No one spoke for there were no words to describe this loss. Every part of a family was a
supporting beam of the whole, and now two of them had been stripped away, worse that
these eight had lost the two whose duty it was to teach them how to be women, how to be
adults, it wasn't right.
Martha had the mad thought of taking the eight cubs to an amusement park as a
distraction. However, she couldn't do that without permission from their fathers, and
Martha knew she couldn't have the girls be with only one or two carecakers, and at the
same time, with so many of the pack now either injured or in service to those who were:
Martha and her fellow Omegas couldn't simply LEAVE the estate.
Martha thought pragmatically, 'Too bad most rides aren't built to accommodate adult
lupmen and leoman and gargoyles ... felmans and humans don't have that problem.' It was
simply a matter of population verses the cost of making services practical to that part of
the population. Nobody liked it in the least, but it was a nasty truth of economics.
The Omegas deposited the cubs onto the couches like they were cloth dolls, most not
responding. Abdul turned on the television, the truth worthy pacifier of the century, but
the cubs barely responded to the colorful creatures bouncing around happily.
Mary came back, the reddish gold cub looking somewhat happy things considering. She
looked at her four half sisters, "Dad said that I could stay with you today..."
Moja didn't even look at her. Mbili looked at her and somehow managed a smile. Tatuli
and Neli leaned against each other like a pair of paper weights.
Tano, Sita, Saba, and Nane huddled around each other like they were almost trying to crush
each other together. Of course that didn't happen, could not happen, that wasn't how
things worked. No matter how others liked it to be. And there were some cheats, too big
for ANYONE or ANYTHING to allow.
Sighing, Martha turned off the television and began to dance. Her moonlight dance due to
cheating, and due to it not even being a full or new moon, wouldn't turn the cubs into
pups, but it was still a beautiful dance and was silent and was it's own. Whitney, Abdul and
Ryan soon joined in, the naked mutant wolves doing their best to give the G-Rated version
of this dance.
Saba's interest was perked from her sisters' huddle watching the dance, after all, the katas
done by martial artists were also practiced and memorized movements of the body that
were a form of art unto themselves.
Mary meanwhile hugged Nane... it was so wrong to see the impish little cub look so...
empty inside...
+++++++
1681 December 21st
The sixteen year old Giselle (her birthday had been earlier that year), felt proud of herself
of having turned the white leoman's cubs into his brother and sister instead: siblings were
much better to have than parents and didn't die before you either.
+++++++++
"You have to be kidding me." Lawrence interrupted then and there.
"She and her siblings had never had much in the way of rivalry like the majority of sisters
and brothers, and because they didn't have any long-term friends they didn't turn into
objects or animals outside their familiars and Marie Cruz in their dreams, they had a rather
skewed view of such things."
"That's not the half of it, and they were that powerful, AS TEENAGERS? Teenage girls with
that kind f power? That's frightening!"
"Not as frightening as you realize how badly all three of them had 'Peter Pan syndrome', a
refusal to grow up emotionally and socially. And while their power grew, their maturity only
crawled along, they never 'became the mask' of good manners like the majority of people
do as they enter adult years."
"But grown up scream, and shout and hit each other." Lilly said.
"... So do children... " Marie said simply. "And even as they entered adulthood themselves,
they once considered themselves 'one of them.' "
"No one ever considers themselves 'one of them' they also consider themselves 'one of us',
no one wants to be a 'them.'" Betty said simply.
"And that aside," Lawrence said, "There were countless diseases during that period!
Children died before their parents was NOT unheard of!"
"Not in the witchling's little word." Glass Marie said, "To them, the only problem wasn't
with the natural world... they thought of death only related to old age, or adults killing
other adults... they didn't think about how death happened in nature or the other ways
that death happened that wasn't the result of one's own choices."
"HOW could they have that kind of double standard?"
"People have double standards all the time, look at men and women."
"Huh?" Better said, "I know they're DIFFERENT standard, but I wouldn't call them DOUBLE
standards and--"
"You'd be very surprised." Glass Marie said very calmly.
+++++++
1681 December 22st (three days before Christmas)
The Omega groaned as she trudged along, with the screaming and yelling masses of cubs
from the Alphas and Betas, they were so hyper active! She hoped that European Holiday
called Christ-Mass never made to this side of the ocean, the last thing she needed was the
pack cubs even MORE hyper this time of year.
Of course people stared, but no one gave them trouble unless the cubs started it which the
Omega was doing her best to make sure didn't happen. The dark gray identical triplet boys
of course were playing their game again of 'guess who did what.' The Beta's children, all
plain brown. Grays and browns were the colors the children of the Gammas and Delta who
had come along purely for a chance to get AWAY from the estate which they considered
their prison more than their home!
They had read a lot of China and it's Emperor who was said he was forbidden to leave his
own home! The pups of the third ranked sub-pack could seriously sympathize. 'Pups are
the future. Pups are too precious to risk. Pups are too vulnerable to let into the outside
world when they don't need to be!'
This marked about the third time in their entire lives the Gamma-Delta pups had been
outside the estate (the first time purely by accident of wandering too far away, and the
second had lasted all of five minutes in their 'escape attempted' which had resulted in
bright red bottoms all around and being prisoners of their own room for a month!).
They had only been let out this time by begging, pleading, bargaining, and the good grace
of the new Alphas.
Griselle and Solome were also out shopping that way, buying the typical things needed, but
also some odd items here and there from traveling sales men who didn't drop by that often
least they attract the wrong attention.
She saw the plain beige Omega suffering, and she LOVED IT. These were the ones who
murdered Joella after all, they deserved everything they got!
However, there were still children with them: the innocent, the pure, those not yet tainted
by meaningless and dogmatic rules and laws that did nothing but constrain people and
make everyone miserable!
The brown pups were pulling on one arm to go one way, the beige ones were pulling her to
go the other way.
Finally the omega couldn't take it anymore and shouted, "NOW SEE HERE! As long as you're
outside the estate you're MY responsibility! Now listen to what -I- have to say!"
Griselle looked around, of course everyone was looking at the scene the pups were all
making.
Griselle and her sisters however had been tapping into the infinite chaos for the power they
loved the most, the one which reality healed itself around their changes, meaning once
they did truly destroy law, it would be like law had never existed! It would be so great!
Griselle through Solome used her power, on the spot did what had to be the most complex
spell to the altering of things since she had figured out how to turn people into fairies.
The omega's fur turned silver, (cause it was a nicer color) and then their head split in two,
then her arms, then her legs, then her tails, then her torso, in under a minute there were
now two wolf women where they had been one. Both stood at attention and each looked at
one side of the pups and said, "We are here to serve only you!"
Instead of screaming or cowering before her however, the lupman present somehow
realized it was her doing (maybe it was the two sets of glowing eyes), they all took one
look at her and said, "Whao! Cool!"
+++++
"That is just plain hypocrisy!" Maddex couldn't take it anymore. Lilly and Casandra actually
hugged each other surprised at the out burst from their father.
"Indeed. But of course Griselle didn't see it as such, as far as she was concerned, children
were naturally more pure, more clear thinking, more rational, and kinder than adults, so
making an adult a slave to children was easily justified and for the greater good."
"Those two word seems to get around a lot." Lawrence commented.
"And they can be used correct, and incorrectly... When Griselle told the others what she
had done, they figured it was a nice way to get back at the Lupmans for Joella's death. And
that was when thunder struck the three of them. Just as they gave bright colors as the
ability to escape to male Lupman cubs who were sick of being imprisoned inside their own
home, they realized they could give the same gifts to female leoman cubs who were tired
of being treated similarly."
"You think since male births are more rare with Leomans that the boys would be treated as
glass dolls." Betty said.
"Yes, but remember it was the male lion's duty to protect territory while the female's to
hunt. A male who hunted was considered odd in the head. A female who defended the
territory was much the same.... And by befriending themselves to the next generation of
the lupmans and leomans, the three of them began to build up their own little cult, while
their fellow humans continued to be fodder for their experiments in creating immortality
and total freedom from Law. And as each turned eighteen, both performed their own
ceremony in direct mockery of the confirmation they had gone through the motions of but
never in heart and took new names on their eighteen birthdays."
++++
As Millie did her hardest to drown out the casual chat about sex (she had enough of that
from her sisters) the nurses were taking in updates from Tab, the Yorks and the Glens.
Joy's awake middle head said, "Too bad more of the Pack can't be here to help."
Ingrid's own awake head said, "Don't even joke, the last thing we need is more
complications."
Michelle from her place on the table had to agree. Even with her mind fully open to the
estate and the emotions and thoughts of the various lupmen and leomen present, she was
struggling to keep them all straight and orderly.
Amber meanwhile as she ate breakfast was glade she didn't endure the playful and even
well meaning teasing from her half-sisters like Millie did hers. The NOT identical fraternal
twins Ruby and Emerald never teased the nearly thirteen Amber about her short height for
a lupman and her lack of other features. Amber had seen took much of the Japanese
lupmans to lament too much about her fate or wish for a bigger chest. She remembered
when she had spoke her envy to Eri, and the golden japanese woman had taken her aside
and spoken to her very harshly and very precisely about the trouble she endured from her
own features. She even strapped two heavy weights to Amber's chest for a day to get her
point across. Amber had never complained again.
'Garnet' sympathized with Amber, having her own share of bad luck over the years. As for
Coral and Tourmaline... the half-sisters cousins (their mothers had been sisters though all
six had the same father) at least didn't fill the stereotypical pink lupman traits (which were
the equal to human blonds).
Amber just wondered when the next letter from their mothers and father would come.. and
how to explain to them EVERYTHING that had happened since the Alphas' first born had
gotten their hot little paws on a turn of the game!