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One morning whoever checks the mail will find that there is a letter and package in the mail with Alexis' name on it.




Growth Quest: Please have Alexis learn to speak English and read his story aloud to whomever you deem appropriate as an audience.
This quest should be between two and five posts and 800 and 2000 words. Please pm the mule when you are done and ready to grow.

The next day found the white-haired boy standing in front of two adults he'd never met before. One had small, feathery wings and the other's teeth were rather pointy. Both of them had the blackest eyes he had ever seen on someone who wasn't the monster. And they had been staring at him for several very, very, very long minutes.

“Kinda small, isn't he,” said the female sadly. She had an accent, very faint, but present. “I kinda expected someone a little, neh, older?”

The winged man shrugged. “Can't be picky. It's work.” He blinked at Alexis quite owlishly, then leaned forward so his elbows rested on his gangly knees. His accent was the same as the woman's, but thicker. “My name is Engel Rademacher, and this is my partner, Liadan Naoshe. We're going to teach you how to talk English, all right, Alexis?”

Alexis blinked.

“Oh, all right,” Engel said, obviously unenthusiastic about something. He couldn't quite tell what was making the man unhappy, but... whatever. It wasn't his job to make the other man happy, it was the man's job to teach him how to speak English.

They might have gone on like that forever, just staring, but Liadan jiggled her foot impatiently, too-black eyes darting from one face to another before she sighed loudly and tossed her brown hair over one shoulder. “Let's actually do this now, all right,” she snapped, lunging off the couch. She grabbed up Alexis's wrist and Engel's blonde hair and dragged the pair of them behind her into a room that was full of colorful toys. Though she set Alexis down in a small plastic chair nicely enough, her partner howled when she threw him into a basket of plush toys.

After that show of dominance, she turned back to Alexis with a pleasant grin. “Alright, boy,” she said, her vowels clipped and bright. “Let's see, let's see.” She traipsed over to him and tapped him firmly on the head; he reached up and covered his curly mop of hair with his hands. “Boy.” Firmly enunciated. Clearly she expected him to repeat her.

“Boy,” he said back. She nodded, then made a cyclic motion with her hand. In the background, Engel was extracting himself from the basket. He pointed to his other teacher and said doubtfully, “Boy?”

With a sad sigh as Liadan continued to talk and teach, he thought it was going to be a very, very long time before he looked forward to actually speaking a language that people understood, especially with this terror teaching him. Still, by the end of that day's session, he could correctly identify a chair, a girl, a boy, the sky, the ceiling, the floor, and a table. He could introduce himself fairly well. It was a lot easier than he thought it would be. These words fit into slots like he had always been meant to know them, and they stuck. Engel, particularly, looked pleased with his progress.

“Come back tomorrow,” they invited cheerfully as Rowan put the car in drive with a drawn look on his tan face.

Then he turned to Alexis with a wan smile and said, “It's not like we have a choice, is it?”

“No,” he responded sulkily, with a shake of his head. It wasn't like he had a choice at all.

He had been writing for almost ten minutes and only had a couple sentences. They read like this:

There was an old lady who lived in a wood.

This old lady had many nieces and nephews. They didn't visit her often, though, and she was very lonely. Because she was so lonely, she began to collect small animals and keep them with her. She talked to all of them, feeding them all the foods they liked and knitting them blankets like a grandmother would do.

He paused in his writing, chewed on the end of the pen. Alexis knew lonely like he knew the lines on the palm of his hand. Actually, he found it very nice and relaxing. You couldn't erase pen, though, so he shrugged and let the paragraph be.

One day she got afraid that the little animals were going to leave her, just like her family. So she put them all in cages.

“Now you can never leave me,” she said.

It was okay. The animals weren't happy so they stopped eating, but the old lady was so afraid of being alone that she didn't let them go. All the animals died. She didn't notice, except that they weren't eating any longer. She got worried about them, because she didn't know they were dead.

The pen stopped moving for a minute. Well, he was only going to read it to Charity and the monster. It didn't matter what he said.

It was almost a month later when

Something fell over with a loud crash. He jerked over to look at it, eyes wide and surprised; the book of writing paper fell off the couch with the pen with a much duller thump. The pile of books that had fallen off the bookshelf was a lot more interesting than his story, anyway. It took a bit of maneuvering, but he got to the pile and opened the very top tome, a thick old thing that smelled like mildew and was covered with dust. The edges of the pages were yellowed, and the words faded.

Wow. That was a cool diagram. A layout of the inside of the human body- bones and muscle and flesh. He traced the line with one finger. Why would Rowan have such a book? After all, he did stuff with music. Not the insides of people. Alexis turned the page. Now it was the insides of a frog. That was even more interesting than the human.

Someone walked past the door. He closed the book and shoved it back into the pile, then scampered into his spot and looked at what he'd last written.

It was almost a month later when

Rowan peeked over his shoulder and was quickly chased away with an incoherent grumble. Alexis grumped, having lost his train of thought, and re-read the fragment one more time. Where had he been going with that? Oh. Yes, he remembered now...

It was almost a month later when the old lady's family came to visit. They didn't like seeing her surrounded by all the dead animals, but she didn't want to leave them. She didn't want to be alone. So they took the lady and all the animals and went to the village, where they replaced all the animals with dolls.

It didn't matter anyway, because the oldest nephew brought the old lady to live with him. And even though she wasn't alone anymore, she still missed all her little animal friends. The dolls just weren't the same.

He looked out the window at the monster. “What do you think,” he lisped sweetly, holding up the painfully clumsy pages of writing so the black pits could see them.

There wasn't a response, except for the monster to run away. “Fine,” Alexis muttered, closing the book. “I think it's nice.”