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Months flew by. What with the constant demands, the tantrums and endless shopping, Quinton never got around to telling D-Corp just what they could do with their threats. The girl's "return-by" date had surely passed, although when it came to adoption he wasn't sure. Was it: try it for two months and if you aren't satisfied, send it back? Or a thirty-day money-back guarantee? The woman who had dumped Brianna off at his door didn't give the impression she was there for a Q&A, so he was doomed to never know.

Much as he hated to think it, Quinton was stuck. So he did the only reasonable thing possible - run to Mommy.

Brianna's head barely cleared the window, so as their tin-can car rattled laboriously up the driveway all she could see was trees. She was sitting in the passenger's seat because having her in back "made him nervous". The car coughed and spat to a halt at last. She wiggled round in her seat so she could peer out the window. The dirty windows of a grungy little hut stared back. It looked like a giant hand had come down and squashed it into the mud. If Brianna had owned that hand, she wouldn'tve stopped there - she'd squish it right out of sight.

"I HATE this place." she whined. "It's ugly!"

Quinton gritted his teeth. After hour upon hour of this, his jolly attitude had taken a severe beating. "Fine. STAY. But I'm going in."

"Fine!"

Bree scudded down in her seat into a little pile of orca, her arms crossed. Once Quinton had slammed his door shut and was was walking towards the house, though, she squirmed back upright. The orca girl was taking it all in when the door to the house opened and the most extraordinary person stepped out to meet Quinton.

Rose Clearwater had a formidable presence for a tiny woman. Presumably there was a sari wrapped around that little form, but the swathes of colored fabric that hung from her shoulders, wrists, neck and ankles hid it from sight. Her ears were studded brilliantly with river stones in vivid greens and blues. Although a plain brown tabby like Quinn, her bearing made the dark stripes on her arms and legs into bangles, around her neck into jewelry, and the black rims around her eyes into kohl. She was barefoot. Her hair was shorter than her son's, rumpled and thick with forest debris.

In short, Rose was the strangest person Brianna had ever seen in her short life. It had taken an hour to drive down to his parent's house in the middle of nowhere, and Brianna had not once stopped whining - but one look at Rose would've been enough to shut her up. Even without a toddler's vocabulary she would have been hard-pressed to describe the tabby woman's appearance. Appalling, perhaps. Look at that hair! Bare feet? What if she stepped on a worm?!

Brianna nibbled on a strand of her own perfect white hair. She was definitely going to hate it here.

She saw the two tabbies glance back at the car. Her face stared back, frowning and defiant. Her guardian made as if to walk back, as expected - then they'd get to go through their little ritual of banshee-screaming and seat-clinging - but the strange woman went and put her hand on his arm! And he stopped! Even worse, the woman looked directly at Brianna's gaping, disbelieving face...and smiled.

Then they walked into the house.

"I HATE YOU!" Brianna shrieked after them. Her pudgy hands tugged wildly at the door handle, rattling it til it gave way and sent her tumbling down into the mud. This only fueled her rage. The little mudbeast lurched upright and started kicking at the car.

It soon exhausted her, and she sat down. Actually, the mud felt fine - she hadn't taken a bath since they left and her skin was feeling a little dry. Bree was just considering having a lie-down when something came up behind her. "M'not going." she said loudly, but it wasn't Quinton. Brianna turned her head. What...was....THAT?!

It was one straw too many, that's what. The orca girl stared at the thing, then scrambled to her feet and ran screaming into the woods.

"Bawk?" said the thing, then gave up and proceeded to investigate the car.

Snow flew up in little puffs as Bree laboriously dragged a stick through the drifts in front of their house. The cold did not bother her, but the task did - she huffed and puffed and grumbled, tromping around in a pair of pink boots. The rest of the household was quiet, lulled to sleep by the false snowy dusk. She did not intend for that to go on.

About twenty minutes later, a slushball thumped Quinton's second-story window. When he didn't respond, she chucked another one. Brianna was just revving up for another throw when the window flew up. "WHAT?! Don't you realize it's..." A very disgruntled Quinton poked his head back inside to check the clock. "...one in the afternoon. Okay. Fine."

Brianna giggled behind a mittened hand. She pointed at what she'd drawn in the snow, once it was clear Quinton had lost his steam.

The tabby rubbed his eyes and leaned out the window. "EGG." he read.

"Ee gee gee. That's how you spell 'egg'!" The orca girl announced this with pride.

"BREE?"

"Bee ar (like a pirate!) ee ee!"

"CAT." As he scanned the row of neatly printed words, a lightbulb started to flicker in the sleep-dusty attic of Quinton's mind. He sighed and hung his head, coming to a conclusion at last. When he looked back up, he could see hope in Brianna's face, and knew it was right. "No, Brianna. I don't care how many words you can spell, you still have to do your homework."

Bree's howled, "Noooooooooo!" bounced off the closed window. Quinton winced and sat himself back down on the bed, resisting the pull of its siren song. This had been going on for weeks. When they'd brought the homework home, she'd taken one look at it and disappeared. Since then, the lengths she'd gone to in order to avoid it were really rather amazing. It was a lot more work than just doing the damn thing.

The problem was, Brianna had the attention span of a caffeinated gnat. Sitting down and carefully coloring in a pageful of letters would be absolute torture.

He cringed as another snowball splatted against the glass, and wondered what could be done.