For Nicholas and Alexander on At Home

Bel Pierce

November 22, 2023 8:56 PM

For Nicholas and Alexander by Bel Pierce

Bel gave Berta a disbelieving stare. “They named him after who?” She didn’t get much news from the mountain these days, but she’d been at Amelia’s house when the ghost of her great-grandmother turned up to gossip, and started catching her up on all the developments of the last decade or so.

“Alexander the Great,” Berta repeated, and Bel goggled at the audacity, and also the parallel to Smallville. She was never calling that kid anything other than Lex. Merlin, she used to joke that she was the bastard love child of Lex Luthor, but now one of her cousins had actually given her a real life Lex? It was hilarious.

“And the other one?”

“Nicholas Flamel.” That was only slightly better. Bel looked at Amelia as if it were her fault her brother named his children like he expected them to take over the world and make the alchemical breakthrough of the century.

Amelia just shook her head. “Don’t look at me like that, I never even met them.” Not the twins who were her nephews or their father who was her youngest brother, born to replace her after Amelia had been disowned. Bel had at least gotten to meet Melinda’s children when she occasionally snuck onto Boyd grounds to clandestinely meet with her sister. She’d also met her own replacements, the Anns and their kid, once her younger sisters had a business she could just show up to as as a client.

Thad and his family were a bit more isolated and hard to reach up on Mt. Pierce.

“And they’re how old?”

Berta frowned. “Oh, I can’t remember birthdays, but they’re going into their third year at Sonora.”

She nodded. “Thirteen, or will be soon then.” Bel supposed that was as good an age as any to send an unsolicited gift, as she’d already missed nine, which would have been the appropriate age to exactly match Lex Luthor’s backstory. When she got home she went about ordering what she needed.

—-

Two days before the Sonora wagons would pick up the students for their new school year, two very encumbered owls turned up at Thad and Alicia’s house, bearing wrapped parcels.

One was addressed: To Nicholas: For changing the world. Inside was an advanced potions kit and a book on alchemy.

The other had a tag that read: To Lex: For battle strategy. That package contained a model of the city of Troy and little Roman soldiers that could be directed to patrol, stand guard, and fight battles.

Neither package was signed.

OOC: References Smallville’s season one episode two, where Lex Luthor says his father gave him his model of Troy when he was nine as a strategy tool.

1 Bel Pierce For Nicholas and Alexander 0 Bel Pierce 1 5

Alicia Pierce

December 02, 2023 6:43 PM

…I’m at a loss for a proportional response to this. by Alicia Pierce

“I should probably feel more relieved about saying this than I am,” said Alicia Pierce, “but I’m starting to think that there might not be anything here to find.”

In theory, that would be a good thing. It would mean people were not sending enchanted packages to her sons, trying to either curse them or bewitch them. Since people using or harming her sons in any way was a nightmare to even vaguely think about, a total lack of evidence that someone was making the effort should have pleased her. Nevertheless, she gave the packaging in front of them a dark look. If it was hiding something, then it meant she had more dangerous enemies than she had known about previously, and if it wasn’t, then at the very least someone had succeeded in making her and her husband waste an unacceptable amount of their time.

The packaging - which both she and Thad had checked for any hint of overtly hostile magic, and which she had just finished testing yet further for any identifiable traces of magic - did not appear perturbed by her glaring at it. It did not appear to do anything besides sit there, taunting her with her inability to know why it was in her house and who had sent it there.

Unfortunately, the notes attached did no more than the packaging itself to answer those questions. If anything, they just made more of a puzzle.

“‘For battle strategy’ just sounds like a threat - “a vague one, but still - “to me, but I’m not sure why anyone would want to threaten Alexander, or threaten us through Alexander. Unless there’s things he’s not telling us, of course.”

She made that concession with a slight grimace. There were many things she did not like about the boys getting older, but their increasing desire for and ability to claim independence from her was probably the things she disliked most. If she knew everything, then she could protect them from everything. Help them avoid problems and resolve said problems if they could not be avoided. On their own, though…if they were left to their own devices, then sooner or later, they would make mistakes. These might hurt them. Situations where they were hurt were not situations that were supposed to exist. She was not supposed to allow such situations to exist. But….

“But surely at least one of them would have better sense than to keep something important secret, if there was anything,” she concluded, putting her sentiments firmly aside for the moment in favor of being grateful that there was, at least, one person other than Alexander who would surely know if Alexander was in trouble. The idea that Alexander might get enmeshed in things even Nicholas didn’t know about was, at least, something she could dismiss out of hand. For now, at least. “Even if that does leave us with nothing else to work with except the idea of - someone - wanting Nicholas to change the world. Which isn’t something I can really imagine anyone we know wanting him to do.” Except maybe Selina Skies - Sonora’s Deputy Headmistress had turned out to be an utter disappointment; Alicia had always had the feeling, in her own school days, that Skies had never liked her as much as she should have, and she felt the past two years had confirmed that impression had been accurate and still held. The woman was as uncooperative as she could be without passing over the line into rudeness - but even Alicia could see that it would be unreasonable to seriously consider that idea. So, for all intents and purposes, nobody they knew had any reason to want to change the world. “So…I suppose someone could be trying to goad us into…something with the idea of the boys becoming revolutionaries, but that’s definitely grasping at straws,” she acknowledged. “There would have to be less bizarre and more efficient ways to do that, no matter what it was.”

OOC: Mentions of Thad and Alexander and Selina based on past conversation with their authors.

16 Alicia Pierce …I’m at a loss for a proportional response to this. 210 0 5

Thad Pierce

December 08, 2023 10:45 PM

I suppose we could just cautiously move forward by Thad Pierce

Thaddeus nodded in reluctant agreement that were no hostile magics on the packages. He'd tried every kind of detection spell he knew, and even a few divinations, but all he'd figured out was that there was an intelligent animation charm on something in Alexander's, not unlike the ones for wizard's chess, which would make sense for both 'battle strategy' and Alexander's interests, though the box seemed a bit large for a chess set. But if the sender knew he liked chess, they should also know Alexander was only ever called Alexander, not 'Lex'. That part was baffling.

He gave his wife a slightly odd look as she began spinning worst case scenarios and conspiracy plots. When the cards hadn't been signed, he'd definitely agreed some investigation was in order before giving the packages to the boys, but she seemed to be thinking it was far more serious than he'd assumed.

"Well, given the lack of hostile magic, I think it's safe for us to at least open the packaging and see what's inside," he suggested to Alicia. "We can seal them up again for the boys to open if we deem whatever's inside to be safe and appropriate, but I think a slightly more likely scenario is that they are slightly belated birthday presents from someone who forgot to sign their name, but I can't think of anyone who didn't already give a gift and nobody told me they were posting something to us. I'm just concerned because I have no idea who this could be from, and I don't recognize the handwriting."

"And who calls Alexander Lex?" he asked aloud, as that was the question he kept coming back around to as the most identifying feature of the mysterious gifter. "Do you think it's Ida, that girl Alexander likes? Maybe she has a nickname for him?" The inscriptions sounded a bit odd for a present from a thirteen year old, but he had no better ideas.

1 Thad Pierce I suppose we could just cautiously move forward 213 0 5

Alicia Pierce

December 12, 2023 3:59 PM

All directions lead that way eventually, I suppose. by Alicia Pierce

OOC: Ack, poor writing/reasoning seems to have occurred on my side; for some reason I…either started writing with the idea they already knew about the contents of the packages or forgot where I started somewhere along the way. Just the contents of the notes alone shouldn’t have elicited *quite* such a spiral, but my brain skipped a step or two it seems. Revised Alicia’s original post a bit in light of this. BIC:

Alicia gave a half-apologetic shrug in response to the look she got for her attempts to identify a conspiracy. It was, admittedly, hard to give the idea much credence just based on the current evidence. And she was, at least, no longer very concerned about the possibility of someone trying to put a spell on the boys. There were very few things she believed in, but their combined abilities made that list. Anyone who could get such a thing past her and Thad both was someone who almost certainly had better things to do than execute schemes that involved enchanting children who were barely thirteen.

“That…makes more sense than anything that I can think of, either,” she admitted when The Girl bestowing a nickname on Alexander was suggested as a more reasonable alternative to someone threatening him with…what? In Latin, ‘Lex’ meant something about legal propositions or stipulations; in Greek, she supposed there was lexis, ‘word,’ ‘speech,’ but that made even less sense. It was no secret that Alexander was in a debate club, and though she expected more people than not knew that he wanted to go into politics when he grew up, too, it wasn’t as if he was proposing much legislation at the moment, or like anyone who was involved in proposing legislation had any particular reason to target any of them that she knew of. “Actually - “ she couldn’t help but smile at the thought - “well, I hope I wouldn’t have actually written that out in an attempt to flirt with you if Sonora had had a debate club thirty years ago, but…” she shrugged. “It might have occurred to me. I was exactly smart enough to know that every line I ever came up with was terrible. She could be…a little less aware,” she joked.

Though, The Girl isn’t really a good explanation for Nicholas being involved in this, too…Does Nicholas want to change the world? And go around telling people at school about it? Surely Alexander’s little girlfriend couldn’t know such a thing when I’d never even considered the possibility….

She was confident of their mutual ability to detect anything harmful, but was still slightly relieved when opening the parcels did not appear to have any immediately negative effects on either of them. She was too puzzled by the sights of the contents, however, to take the opportunity to examine whether or not she was perhaps a shade too paranoid, especially when it came to any and everything that came into even the vaguest proximity to the twins.

“I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t for the notes to make both more and less sense than they did before,” she observed.

16 Alicia Pierce All directions lead that way eventually, I suppose. 210 0 5