Lovina’s mother Italia and Italia’s twin brother, Roman, came as Lovina was in a screaming match with the other teachers that came out to help me.

When her mother and uncle tried to force Lovina to go with them, Lovina had taken out her mother by ripping off one of her mother’s arms and hitting her with it, but her uncle Roman, a mated novus with all the glorious, terrifying benefits of that, easily put Lovina down, spanking her in front of half the peacekeepers that had come to assist. He then physically dragged her along the floor the entire way back to her grandmother.

It was on the news and everything.

And that was the last I saw of her for years.

Lovina was married not long after that, but kept in the matriarch district to finish her schooling.

Terrance was very firm on not wanting any sons, which I was fine with, but it was damned near impossible to get any novus girls and we’d never be able to get a sapien, boy or girl.

There were a lot of kids in our church, though, so there were a lot of church events for young families that needed someone to help with, so I was kept busy – not just for holidays, but something every week, sometimes even a few a week so parents could get a break and kids could make friends.

The Saturday hunts were a big hit, where we’d send the kids out to hunt down any animal that had gotten out, and if none were missing, then one of the local dogs would be volunteered and let to run lose in one of the extensive city parks. They’d find the dog and bring them back for a prize. A few really young kids would bring back an unfamiliar dog or cat and they would get a prize to – we had a lot of strays that ended up spending time in our apartment, several of which became official church buddies, since animals helped keep the children, novus in particular, calm for the hour or longer sermons.

But adopting was difficult, since there really weren’t any non-male novus that were up for adoption.

At my school, however, there were several from The Wilds and didn’t have families.

A lot of males in The Wilds went blind because they didn’t have easy access to medicine in the uncivilized world, and if a novus child went blind young, they were sent down to Greater Lakes or a city in East Campora called Trinity. Trinity was designed specifically for blind novus so they all knew their own spaces, everywhere divided off but massive walls with directions etched into them, and though it had branched out in recent years, it had always been a city built for those with poor eyesight.

Greater Lakes, of course, had a lot of resources, and so many blind novus children were first brought here, but they were kept with other children from The Wilds that were sent down, and the facility was not one that made it easy for them or be safe without their vision.

And many were in my class.

That was kind of how Terrance eventually came around to adopting a little male – I was very attached to my students, especially the ones that didn’t have families local, and so Terrance agreed that we could foster my students that didn’t have families local so they had a place to live and be taken care of.

We also agreed that the best place to do that wasn’t in Greater Lakes.

We went and spoke with the matriarch, and she agreed to fund what was needed for a small town that would be somewhere that wasn’t Trinity for blind novus to be raised and be able to function in. She sent us to the town of Bridgeway, which was small and after he and I went around and talked to all the locals, they agreed that they would all take part in making it an environment for blind novus to be raised, made easy by the fact that a few of the residents were blind.

And then Terrance and I built the new branch of our church, which had our home across the street from it for the children to live with us while we were trying to find them families.

Our town was small and easy to navigate for the boys because it was kept clean and slowly we all worked to make it more easily accessible for the children and blind novus that moved to town.

Mostly novus weren’t entirely blind – they could still make out shadows usually – but we all did certain things that made it easier for them to be independent. There were a lot of old world customs that had been developed back at the dawn of the novus before treatment were developed and it was almost guaranteed that novus would lose most of their eyesight after a certain age.

Most of it involved scents and sounds.

For instance, a certain flower with a certain scent was hung over all entrances so they would know that it was a door that could be opened or closed suddenly and they had to be careful, the locals hanging little bundles above the doorways. Our church provided small devices for cars and bikes that made a distinct buzzing sound for free so the boys would know to be mindful of traffic.

It sort of started a trend in town, and soon there were more and more boys adopted from The Wilds that were either mostly blind or as blind as a novus could get. Some had families that would come down and stay at the church to see their child once in a while, but we also arranged so the children could call their parents and send them letters if that as allowed in their tribes. Most parents wanted to continue to have some relationship with the child, and Terrance and I worked to ensure that happened.

After a couple years, we were really taking off, especially once Lovina became the matriarch, since she loathed to send anyone to Trinity, where she was apparently having some sort of power struggle with.

Instead, any blind novus boy would come and stay here with Terrance in me at our home across the street from the church while we figured out where to place them, but usually, most stayed with us on a semi permanent basis until they were old enough to live in the apartment complex Lovina had built in town for them.

So while Terrance stubbornly refused to admit it because I think he was embarrassed about having resisted having sons for so many years, he and I actually had many, many sons.

Dozens, in fact.

They all called Terrance ‘Tizzy’ because he was always ‘in a Tizzy’ but they called me Dad, which Terrance always encouraged. He was just to prideful to admit that they were our sons, but everyone knew and called them our boys and treated them as such.

When our boys got married we would give our blessing and serve as their advocate when they had courted their spouses, and their children all called us Grandpa Tizzy and Papa Ford.

Most of the boys that we fostered (but pretty much adopted) were from the Castiel region of The Wilds, which ironically was around where the man that replaced me in the colony had been from. A lot of the boys we got were in fact second or third cousins from each other, and so it was easier to help build those bonds between them.

Because of that, Lovina stressed that they had to go to college in Greater Lakes – where she would pay for their education – so they didn’t become closed off like Trinity had and made connections in Greater Lakes. And so most of our boys ended up with pretty advanced degrees, usually in social sciences that had to relate to relationship between the civilized and uncivilized.

A lot became therapists, anthropologists, sociologists, and translators, all of which were focused toward helping those that came down from The Wilds integrate into the civilized world. The ones that didn’t enter the social sciences worked in the offices for the peacekeepers in Greater Lakes, usually as counselors.

Terrance and I had a pretty good track record with our boys, and even though most were Type A, we never lost one and most were married before twenty to girls from the wilds that wanted to live in the civilized world. Most of our boys stayed in town where we lived, others lived in Greater Lakes, but they all had kids that went to school down here in our town during their primary years, the same school I was the headmaster at and still taught blind novus children. The ones that lived to far away sent their kids to stay with us during the summer to go to school and see how to be advocates for blind children as well, even though they themselves weren’t blind.

None of the grandkids went blind, of course, as we had much better medical treatment here in the civilized world, and to Terrance’s amusement, not a single one of the novus grandkids were boys – all were girls. Every single one of our boys had only daughters, which was a constant joke in our family.

But it also made the school entirely uneven.

The only local boys in the grandkid generation that were novus – the only males in a school of over three hundred girl novus, most of which were cousins to each other - were the Duponte brothers, who were were all Type A novus and all died young.

One of our granddaughters - Morgana, but I called Anna – was one of Terrance’s favorites and spent a lot of time with us as both of her parents worked in Greater Lakes. She took very strongly after Terrance in his mannerism and ended up entering the peacekeepers as soon as she could to be like him, but after she was injured, she had married the last Duponte boy, a sapien named Howard, and actually followed in my footsteps to become a school teacher.

She taught in Greater Lakes where her husband went to school and worked, and ended up adopting a novus distant cousin of hers from The Wilds, one that wouldn’t just because the longest running MAN of Greater Lakes since Lovina’s uncle Roman, but his daughter Joy became the matriarch after Lovina.

I was tickled pink when I found out that Joy was the descendant of Heaven and the man that replaced me in the colony, something that Lovina enjoyed as well, telling me she thought it was fate that her heir came from me not joining the colony, and that it was her punishment for her actions against me that led to her never having a blood heir.

Lovina and I ended up making peace, though she always avoided Terrance, and when she finally passed, I received a beautiful gift delivered by Joy and Morgana after Joy’s coronation, which Terrance and I attended at the same church I had been an elder in.

Lovina had put together a file over the years of what had happened to my family, and it was then that I found out that about ten years after Terrance and I came to Greater Lakes, my family and their entire church – The Fellowship of the Sun – had left Victoria and gone to New Haven.

I had also been made the head of the Richard clan after Victoria and it’s clans had been thrown into chaos, a deal that Lovina had made with the Westwoods.

Joy told me that if ever there was an occasion that New Haven was invaded and any of my family or their descendants were taken as prisons of war, they were considered assets of mine and I would ultimately decide their fates.

Which I thought was a very weird thing to say.

But apparently, not that weird.