Room 307, Wednesday Afternoon

[justbeingbay]

Bay was having a perfectly nice day -- some Netflixed anime, a little sketching, a little calculus -- when her brother had to get in touch and ruin it.

Apparently, Angelo had gotten some other woman pregnant. No, wait, it was better than that: Angelo had gotten another woman pregnant, hadn't bothered mentioning it to his wife or his daughters, and, according to Toby, seemed to want to avoid responsibility again. And Toby had found out by accident and invited the woman over for dinner. Which was both classic Toby and something Bay had to come home for, because there wasn't much point in the mother of Bay's biological half-sibling coming over if Bay herself wasn't around.

So. That was going to be Bay's weekend. Unless she killed Angelo with her mind first. She mulled over the possibility as she reached for her sketchbook. She'd call him after she drew his grisly death a couple times to calm herself down.

[OOC: Set-up for canon catch-up. Cracked door, open post.]

Comments

[justbeingbay]

Regina and Angelo were the special judgement twins, as far as Bay was concerned. It was the one thing they had in common.

"Definitely lucky me getting to be here," Bay concurred. "It's funny how much it's cut down on the drama in my life."

[arsenicmauls]

"You know there are actually people in this town who claim this place is more hectic than the outside world?" Gert said. "I say bull. Case in point."

[justbeingbay]

Bay smiled. "Exactly. Though maybe I got lucky. No random boy parts, no dead people bugging me last weekend. I can see where it might be worse here if the island's really mean to you."

[arsenicmauls]

"It's not like it's my favorite place or anything," Gert disclaimed, "but at least the soap opera hijinks are kept to a minimum." Discounting Soap Opera Weekend, of course. "I didn't have any of that stuff happen to me either, though, so. Lucky us."

She swung her arms a bit before it occured to her to ask, "So is your mom pissed?"

[justbeingbay]

"I haven't talked to her yet, but knowing Regina I'm guessing yes with a side of duh," Bay said. "My other parents aren't happy either."

A pause.

"My family's weird. In sort of a soap opera hijinks-y way. But hey, no supervillains, so ... I got that going for me."

[arsenicmauls]

"The absence of supervillains is kind of a good thing," Gert remarked. "Or it could just make it harder to call people out when they're being assholes, if you don't have a dozen years of mass murdering to cite as evidence." She'd thought this through, clearly. "So -- you're, what, adopted? Do the others suck less, at least?"

[justbeingbay]

"Pretty much?" Bay offered. "I was switched at birth. The Kennishes raised me, but my biological parents are Regina and Angelo. The Kennishes are ... kind of depressingly perfect and way too involved in my life."

She finally glanced up from her sketchbook. "And you're the first person I've told here. I was enjoying not being the girl who got switched."

[arsenicmauls]

"Huh." That was... definitely soap-opera-y, yeah. "I'm pretty sure I would go insane," Gert assessed after a moment. "One pair of parents was enough for me. Congratulations on surviving."

"And I won't tell anyone, but I can't speak for the squirrels," she promised. "...Anywhere else, that squirrel thing would be a really crappy lie to avoid being blamed for spreading gossip."

[justbeingbay]

Bay waved a hand. "If the squirrels seriously have nothing better to talk about, go them. I can be the entertainment of the day tomorrow. Anyhow, we only figured it out last fall. Maybe it just hasn't had time to make me totally nuts."

[arsenicmauls]

"At least if you have to have two sets of parents, boarding school's probably the way to go to avoid having to answer to all of them," Gert offered. "Is it, like, double the micromanagement now when you're at home?"

[justbeingbay]

"In theory they said 'no coparenting' but in practice they all get up in my business all the time," Bay drawled. "But Daphne -- the girl I was switched with, the deaf one -- has it worse than me. My parents have been dying for a kid like her."

[arsenicmauls]

"I'm guessing that's referring to something besides 'deaf,'" Gert drawled. "But yeah, that's parents for you. If you're not perfect, they're on your case, and if you are perfect, then they never stop nagging you to be even more amazing. Not that I speak from experience about that last part."

[justbeingbay]

"No, no, not that she's deaf, but she's pretty, athletic, good at school, friendly..." Bay trailed off. "I wonder if any kid on earth has ever been amazing enough to make their parents totally happy."

[arsenicmauls]

"Typical popular girl," Gert filled in, instinctively making a face. "And I doubt it," she added. "Well, maybe some clean-cut superhero types from my world who've never let themselves have any fun in their lives. Seems like a pointless exercise, but maybe that's just me."

[justbeingbay]

"But she's a really sweet person, so you can't even call her a bitch with an eating disorder behind her back," Bay said. "And I'm with you. Life sucks enough, you have to make room for some fun."

[arsenicmauls]

"Exactly." Oh, Gert liked you, Bay. "Being Little Miss Perfect's fine if you plan to live in your parents' house until you're thirty, but I figure if you're only spending a finite amount of time there, you might as well not invest more pointless effort into making them happy than necessary." Could you tell she felt strongly about this?

"I always thought trying to be perfect like that would turn people into bitter assholes behind their parents' backs, though," she added. "Not Daphne?"

[justbeingbay]

Bay shook her head. "I don't think Regina put a ton of pressure on her or anything," she said. "I think Daphne just ... does good stuff because she wants to. It's weird. Maybe it's fair that she gets my parents, who are pretty decent as parents go, and I get Regina and" -- wrinkled nose -- "Angelo."

[arsenicmauls]

"Uh, yeah, no," Gert said, one eyebrow going up. "Pretty sure no one deserves a dad who abandoned not one but multiple babies. Can't say I'm picking up on anything you two have in common from that description. Anyway, the nicest girl I know had supervillain parents just like me, so I'm pretty positive that parents aren't distributed based on fairness."

[justbeingbay]

"See, intellectually I even know that," Bay sighed. "Wait, so there are a bunch of people with supervillain parents? Do you hang out together?"

[arsenicmauls]

"We did," Gert sighed as Old Lace curled up to doze off near her feet. It was possible that the dinosaur had heard this story one too many times; it was also possible that she was just trying to make sure that Gert well and truly forgot that they'd planned to go for a walk at some point today. "It was kind of like a club, if you count six teenagers hiding out together in an abandoned cave a normal club activity."

Few people did.

"The whole thing lasted about three months ever since we found out about our parents. We're all at different schools now," she added, then amended, "Mostly."

She wasn't quite sure how to describe the Karolina situation, so she left it at that.

[justbeingbay]

"Bummer," Bay said, both because the splitting up part was sad and because it was pretty clear from Gert's tone that awesome was the wrong answer. "Um, dumb question, but ... how come a cave?"

[arsenicmauls]

"The Ritz-Carlton would have been nicer, but when we took off, we were trying to keep our parents from tracking us using our debit cards," Gert explained. She didn't sound like she minded the question; after all, she'd just been asking Bay tons of things about her life, so it was only fair. "Turned out the muscle of our group knew about some abandoned cave he'd been using as a weird hideout for a few years, so we went there."

She paused, then added, "It actually didn't suck. The beds were queen-size."

[justbeingbay]

"Weird," Bay opined. "I've never seen a cave that just had beds in it. Maybe I need to spend more time spelunking."

[arsenicmauls]

"Probably more likely to find them in California," Gert added. "We figured it was some rich guy's mansion that collapsed in an earthquake, not just a really well-furnished geologic happenstance. But spelunking is always cool, as long as you avoid cave-ins."