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Who: Dani, Magda, and Sven
Where: Cornerstone Books
When: Mid-afternoon
Weather: Overcast but not raining... yet.



"Look, these look fun." Dani's tone was measuredly optimistic as he held out two books for Magda to consider, and as her eyes flicked between them, Dani waved them from side to side. "I read Goosebumps when I was a kid. There's all sorts of stories... spooky, but they don't end the way you expect them to!"

Chewing her lip, Magda sunk down closer to the floor. "Maybe," she muttered, pulling the sleeves of her sweater over her hand. "I don't see why I've got to learn to read."

Dani's shoulders drooped slightly, her frustration building, though she struggled not to show it. Getting Magda interested in doing -- well, much of anything aside from making messes and terrorizing her mother -- was an uphill battle. They'd already gone through most of the books in the children and young adult section, and the only selections they'd made had been through Dani's enthusiasm. There would be something in there Magda would come to enjoy just through process of elimination, she was sure, but was it too much to ask to get her daughter to be interested?

"Because," Dani said pleasantly, glancing to where Magda was picking at the ends of her sleeves and biting back a comment on it. (It was an old sweater, it wouldn't hurt, it was a nervous habit, she was cranky from being awake in the daytime... there were so many reasons for Dani to just let it go.) "Reading will help you with everything in life, and it's fun."

Magda tossed her a skeptical look, lip curled. "Seems like a lot of work for fun."

"Books will teach you about places you may never go, people you may never meet, give you different perspectives... things that are real and things that aren't." Dani couldn't remember ever once not wanting to read, or having to make the case so strongly to someone else about the joys of literacy. "They can be funny, sad, scary... you never know what you'll find if you just grab a book off a shelf and give it a chance. Any book can surprise you."

Something in that seemed to pique Magda's interest, and she slid her gaze back to the shelves, catching her lower lip between her teeth and chewing.

Wanting to seize on her moment of indecision, Dani turned to the person closest to them both, a total stranger who happened to be passing by. "Excuse me - hi, you like to read, right? What kind of books did you read as a child?" She smiled brightly, watching Magda out of her corner of her eye. "You can just completely fall in love with a good book, right? Something fun like this," and she wags a Goosebumps book at him, and then bends to pick up another book from her steadily bulging bag, one that has a girl riding a unicorn on the cover. "Or this."

Magda stared at him from the floor, unblinking and perfectly still, as she waited for his answer.

Getting Magda to interact with strangers had been... a mixed bag, up to that point. Sometimes she just remained stonily silent, staring for as long as she could with all three eyes before she had to blink, and sometimes, she made terrible proclamations that were entirely false. (Or at least, Dani hoped they were false. They were both still learning exactly what she'd inherited from her soul and what she hadn't.) Where she was getting some of the things she said, Dani didn't know.

Well, maybe she did. She was trying not to think too hard about that particular angle, because if it was her mother putting these kinds of ideas into Magda's head - harmless as it seemed right now - Dani was going to have a fit.

She glanced down to where Magda still sat on the floor, gazing up at the stranger, and exhaled. "Sorry, sometimes she doesn't talk much."

Magda's eyes flicked to Dani, expression a little wounded for just a moment, before she grumbled, "You ruined the joke... I was gonna do the-"

"No," Dani said immediately, wagging the books at her daughter. (People warn traditional parents about the terrible twos, the fumbling toddler years, the moody teenage ones. For some reason, the idea of all that being accelerated in a Raevan hadn't quite hit Dani until Magda was actually there.)

Flinging her arms out dramatically, Magda asked, "Why would I want to read mysteries? Everything is already a mystery. Like the ghost that's floating beh-"

"Magda." Dani's tone was firm, one eyebrow raised.

Her lower lip slid out, teeth catching it, and she rolled her eyes. "Okay. Fine."

With a heavy sigh, Magda floated up to a proper height, gazing moodily at the mystery person. As Dani introduced them ( "Sorry, we just hijacked you, didn't we? I'm Dani Romero. This is my daughter, Magda." ) Magda took the time to inspect the other person a little more carefully, taking advantage of her mom's distraction to leisurely float around him to get a better vantage point.

Not very weird, she decided after careful scrutiny, and remained disappointed. No one, it seemed, was as weird as she wanted them to be - and just about everyone she'd met was depressingly human. That was fine when she could spook them a little bit, but Dani said that was bad manners.

Apparently, everything fun was bad manners.

"Nice to meet you," she crooned mournfully, testing out the ghastly, haunted tone she'd been practicing on her own. It sounded pretty cool, she thought, even if it made her mom do the eyebrow thing every time she brought it out.

"Oh!" Dani sucked in a breath, surprised and delighted in equal measure. Until she'd heard of the Lab from Yves, she hadn't even really known Raevans existed; it seemed like now that she had a charge of her own, other guardians were everywhere -- a fact she was eternally grateful for. "That's wonderful! Magda and I are always looking for more friends, aren't we?"

Magda's theatrically forlorn expression snapped into one of incredulity, and she burrowed down closer to the ground, hunching her shoulders up around her ears. "No," she muttered, gaze flicking mistrustfully back up at Sven.

The idea of being around too many people... she didn't like. Magda couldn't really say why, but it made her uneasy in a vague sort of way, and she knew that was a disappointment to her mom, who seemed to actually enjoy spending time with other people. There was just something about crowds that she didn't like, and the effort of getting to know people...

Ugh.

"A banshee?" Dani asked curiously, frowning down at her daughter for a moment in consideration. "Actually... that would be great. Wouldn't you like to meet someone who's a little more like you?"

The gentle, coaching tone that Dani used actually worked a little bit, even if Magda didn't want to admit it. Whatever a banshee was, it was apparently kind of like her, which would be... cool. Maybe it would be someone who didn't like crowds either, or someone who looked, as her grandma liked to put it, like something that should have been left to rest. (Magda hadn't told her mom about that yet. She was still chewing on what Grandma had meant, and ultimately decided she agreed, because Magda really liked to sleep.)

Unable to resist, Magda looked up at Sven. "Will your kid have freaky stuff like me?" and, pointing at her mouth with two fingers, she grinned widely, showing off rows of neat, pointed teeth.

"You aren't freaky," Dani interjected calmly, pointedly, as Magda forced her eyes to blink out of unison.

It didn't escape Dani's notice that this new guardian - Sven, he'd said his name was - had also been about to correct Magda. It made her smile tilt a little more toward genuine rather than perfunctory, and it boded well for a person who was about to have a Raevan with the soul of a banshee.

It was hard enough raising kids as it was, she imagined, and raising a Raevan brought its own unique set of circumstances. You sort of really, really had to be the kind of person who could handle whatever the lab threw at you. Then again, she knew the screening process for becoming a guardian was super strict, so it made sense that Sven would be a good guardian for his future child.

"There will probably be some kind of undead element," Dani agreed in a conversational tone, glancing over to Magda at the next question. "Zeke and the others would know better, but I think even they have a hard time predicting exactly how the essence and soul will combine."

She was glad, too, when he addressed the question of what her essence and soul were to Magda herself. It was interesting being the just add water! version of a parent to a pre-teen, but Dani could remember very distinctly that she'd hated being talked around instead of to, and she was trying to do her best to make sure Magda didn't feel like that.

"My essence and soul?" Magda asked, narrowing her eyes and looking between her mom and Sven, a question on her face.

"It's up to you if you want to share," Dani said, tucking the books she was still holding under her arm. "It's all right if you want to, and it's all right if you don't."

Magda mulled this over for a few moments, weighing her need to be mysterious and interesting over Sven's mild reaction to her teeth. Eventually, she settled on asking, with more curiosity than suspicion, "Why do you want to know?"

Magda considered his answer, dragging her lower lip into her mouth and chewing on it for a moment. There was something nice about being the focus of a conversation that didn't have the edge to it that her mom and grandmother's conversations often had, and now that she was waking up a little more with the sun going down, she was finding it less of a trial to be part of the conversation.

At the same time, having both adults' focus be solely on her was a little... unnerving, and made her sort of want to pull her sweater over her head, or something.

With a restless shrug, she decided on, "Some kind of Polish vampire or whatever, and a rust thing. But Mom told me those were just pieces of what made me, like she got her dad's eyes and her mom's smile, so I bet it'll be the same for your kid."

Surprise and fondness flashed over Dani's face, and Magda tried very hard to ignore the warm, happy feeling she got from doing something that made her mom happy.

She flapped her hands, rolling her eyes in sync. "So you can't figure out how to take care of 'em until they get here, because the banshee and the milk are just part of who they're gonna be, and the rest is mad science."

"That's right," Dani agreed, settling a hand on Magda's shoulder and squeezing lightly. "The rest is science, anyway. They're really good at giving you a crash course in what you need to know," she added kindly, looking back to Sven. "But there's also a whole network of us who will be more than happy to answer any questions you have. We're all figuring this out together, if you ask me."

Growing bored of the conversation, Magda twisted to look at the bookshelf, skimming her gaze over the spines and plucking a couple out at random. One didn't even have a picture on the cover, which -- boring -- so she immediately tossed it on the floor. The other had people in weird clothes, which was enough to at least momentarily distract her.

"Of course," Dani said immediately, not missing a beat as she dug around in her purse for her cell phone. It was refreshing, she thought, to have someone "Like I said, we're all in this together. Okay, what's your number? I'll text you right now."

Even as she asked, Dani glanced over to Magda, exasperated to see the slow-growing trail of books on the floor. That would be getting cleaned up before they went anywhere, even if Magda didn't think so. At least she was getting interested in the idea of reading, Dani supposed, even if she was mostly just making a mess all over the floor.

Magda glanced over her shoulder, saw that she'd been caught, and grinned cheekily. "I found one!" She announced, holding up a book with a couple of astronauts and a little green person on the front. "It looks weird. I like it."

"That's great," Dani enthused, pinching the books to her side and giving her a thumb's up. With Magda drifting further down the aisle, it put her out of earshot, and Dani turned back to Sven with a knowing look.

"I was... pretty freaked out myself, at first," she admitted, keeping her voice low. "I'm a nurse, so I struggled with the idea of capturing a soul to begin with. And she's not kidding about the vampire bit: I could've been killed."

Dani shook her head, recalling the grotesque, terrifying creature looming over her in a graveyard, remembering how shocked she'd been when it spoke to her.

"But... really, the scariest thing about all this is hoping you're doing it right." Dani smiled wryly, gaze sliding to Magda again. "And that's universal for parents, I think."

Dani input his number and saved the contact, immediately sending him a text with hers and Magda's names, and followed it up with her usual availability. Working nights meant she could get coffee right before work, though most people were winding down for the day and didn't usually want to dose up on caffeine, or she could swing by somewhere after her shift. In the latter case, she would force herself to have tea or something so that she could get at least a few hours of sleep, but either way, she'd make time.

Sven seemed like a good sort of guy, and she was more than a little intrigued by the soul he'd captured -- and by what that would mean for his future Raevan. She hadn't been kidding about wanting to find people for Magda to befriend who were more like her; it was important to encourage her to get along with all sorts of people, of course, but she also knew from her own personal experience how powerful it could be to have someone your own age you related to.

As a bisexual latina, she hadn't had that as a kid, and she was determined to do her very best by her own child. If there was a way to get Magda something that Dani herself hadn't had, she was sure as hell going to do it.

"Don't hesitate to text any time. I work nights, so my hours are weird," she added, grimacing a little. Graveyard wasn't her favorite shift by any means, but it was what she'd pulled when bidding went down, and that was how life went when you were relatively new to a hospital. Eventually, she'd have the seniority to get a better shift.

It was also nice to be up so that she could check her phone and be awake if Magda needed her, though. More and more, she was realizing her kid was nocturnal, which... made sense, when she thought about the Strzyga she'd met in the middle of the night, but was making socializing the girl prove to be difficult.

She was brought back into the conversation with mention of overcompensating on preparation, and she laughed, bright and loud. "Oh, you're preaching to the choir there, Sven. I didn't fully decorate because I wanted Magda to be able to put her own spin on things, but I've got binders full of prep work. Colored tabs," she added, grinning. "I probably bought five parenting books. I'm the queen of over compensating with knowledge, so you are in good company."