I guess I am a little ahead of myself – apparently no one has been sending any “reports” for a long time now, so there’s a lot to fill in. It seems Grandpa stopped writing them around the time Grandma Jane started to act weird. This was even before my cousin Alfirk was born. Grandma was always pretty odd, I hear, and around the time Mom became a teenager, she became obsessed with exercise. She’d always been a fitness nut, but she started working out multiple times a day, in the middle of the night, not sleeping or eating much. There were other weird things, too; family members would catch her in an empty room yelling at nobody, no one ever knew why. Finally, one day she just disappeared. Uncle Sadr found her a week later, back in the family museum, dead, with the door locked behind her. No one knew for sure if she’d been back there the whole time – no one really uses the place. I guess Grandpa built it with the idea that we’d store family memorbelia back there, and maybe hold wedding parties – though of course that won’t happen now, given that it’s haunted by her ghost. Yeah, I know, most people don’t believe in ghosts. But there certainly seems to be something going on around the house at night, and sometimes we just wake up feeling weird, like someone’s sharing the bed, you know? And the computers and tv are usually turned on when we get up in the morning, even if we’ve shut them off before bed. Anyway, Grandma Jane’s official cause of death was starvation, and almost every night leftovers go missing from the fridge. At first we thought it was Alfirk, heh. He’s pretty chubby, must be an embarasment to his Military mom, who’s an astronaut and once won a prize for being as buff as she could get. But the disappearing leftovers kept on vanishing even after they moved out, so I guess it really is Grandma Jane’s ghost.

Anyway, that was a big family scandal, and Grandpa passed on the job of “reporting back” to my Mom and really threw himself into work. He was a world renowned surgeon, really good at it, and very well respected even though he had blue skin and a crazy wife. He was really personable, never said a bad word about anyone, and people trusted him with all their secrets. Uncle Wazn had hoped to write a series of expose books based on Grandpa’s knowledge, but he’d only tell good stories. Wazn finally gave up and joined the medical profession himself to dig up the dirt – wrote quite a few bestseller books on the subject. Uncle W has been unlucky in love (his “special friend” Marta has commitment issues and would never even be his girlfriend) but really successful otherwise – his nonfiction books are famous, and he’s painted some masterpieces, in addition to becoming a successful surgeon in his own right. He said every time he finished a book about his current area in the medical profession, he had to get promoted so he could write another book. Uncle W is seriously nerdy, but he’s funny and a real genius. I can’t get out of him for sure whether he believes the whole alien thing or not. He just says it’s up to me to make up my own mind, since I’m potentially the family heir. (I have 3 siblings, but they’re all still babies.) Wazn has got pink skin, not blue, so he was never in a position to inherit. Apparently the tradition is that the heir has to be the child that looks the most like great grandpa Izar. Frankly, I’m a little surprised they didn’t chose Alfirk – he has brown hair but otherwise he’s the spitting image of Grandpa. But then, judging from the portraits I guess Grandpa got Izar’s skin and hair but otherwise looked just like his mom. The blue seems to be the top priority. Like I said, we don’t know yet for sure who the heir will be for my generation – I’m stuck “reporting” because I’m the eldest – the twins and Schedar (yeah, he is partly named after Grandpa) can’t even read yet.

What else? Oh, I should clarify that Alfirk is Zosma’s son. He was kind of an accident that happened when she got too involved with one of her married colleagues – apparently the life of a pilot is pretty stressful and sometimes the life-and-death atmosphere makes them get a little crazy around one another. Or that’s what she says. So Alfirk was unplanned, and not officially acknowledged by his dad (she didn’t tell anyone who he was, as far as I know), but Grandpa and Uncle W helped raise him, and his Mom loves him a lot. He’s okay. Totally obsessed with chess. He and his mom moved out when he became a teen, shortly after I was born, but they come over a lot.

School tomorrow, so I’m going to bed. I’ll write more soon about the rest of the family.

You thought I was never actually going to post this, didn’t you? Better late than never, I hope.

In case it isn’t clear, Mizar is Talitha’s son. He’ll tell you a little about his dad in the next installment.

LTW: Creature-Robot Cross Breeder

This will be the last post before the recap! I’ll include adult photos of Wazn & Talitha and their updated characteristics at that time.

Zosma, as the family party lover, took over the arrangments for her little sister’s birthday when she saw that no one else had started to plan anything. She’d been wanting to throw a formal dress party and her sister’s big day seemed like a perfect occasion.

On the afternoon of the party, Jane sat in the bathroom. The guests had gathered in the living room, all dressed in their fancy clothes, but somehow she just couldn’t face going out there. But she couldn’t disappoint her daughter on her big day, either. After several long minutes of handwringing, she opened the door and stepped out. She complimented her daughter on what a lovely young lady she was becoming, and fought back tears as she gave her a hug.

She then stepped back and watched Talitha blow out her candles. She tried to behave normally during the rest of the party, but couldn’t quite manage it. She avoided Beid, which confused him and hurt his feelings a bit. Talitha distracted him, however, by pulling him aside and giving him the third degree. Now that she was older, she wanted to get to know all her cousins. All the young people seemed to have a great time at the party.

Wazn, too, was interviewing his sister about all the explosions at the military base. She flatly refused to give him any details about the situations involved, declaring that the situations were classified, but she did get him a few interviews with the explosives experts on chemical reactions that kids could try at home.

Jane was feeling self-conscious about her anxiety attacks. On days when running on the treadmill wasn’t working, she began spending time in the memorial building at the back of the property. She knew that it was a safe place for her to rant or cry where she was unlikely to be disturbed; though the building had been built for remembering past relatives, so far no one in the family seemed inclined to visit the place.

Talitha got decent but unremarkable grades; she had been seated by the window, and sometimes in the afternoons her mind tended to wander to the outside world. She thought about all the plants that must be growing, and what the fish were doing, while she was cooped up inside.

Sorry about the lack of pictures… but as I said below I’m not going to try to go back and sort through hundreds of photos… I’ll start fresh with pictures when I do the recap.

Her father expressed concern that there were so many explosions going on, but Zosma just laughed. “It’s part of the business, Dad! They have to experiment with explosives and new technology at the base, rather than out where other people could get hurt. I agree, they could have better safety precautions – when I get higher up, I plan do to something about it. But there wouldn’t be any real danger if people were paying more attention. I stay aware of my surroundings, don’t worry!”

Jane herself was thinner than ever. She hadn’t been eating much lately. Or sleeping well, for that matter. She’d taken to examining her face in the mirror, looking for traces of her father. He had been close to the age she was now when he had died; she found herself thinking of him nearly all the time; what a bad father he’d been, and her fears that she really wasn’t much better. Only running and work seemed to distract her.

Zosma is a rockstar – she’s been to work 2 days and been promoted both times. I’m sure it helps that I’ve got her skills waaay past where they need to be at this stage plus she’s a workaholic and ambitious. Go Zosma!

I’m about to post a couple things that I had written but never uploaded, and after that the story is going to skip ahead a bit. If I force myself to go back through and try to write up all my notes, and sort through all the pictures… it will never happen. I’ll do a recap post and a new family tree soon. In the meantime… there will be one or two posts that I had written before, which may or may not include pictures.

Outside of work, she’d been given an opportunity to test out a new exercise tracking machine – when she completed the hour of jogging time and returned the device to Mr. Goth, she met not only Walter who she remembered from when she was a teen, but his brother Kenyon as well. She lingered in their driveway, talking with him until quite late. They didn’t share any traits in common that she could tell, but he seemed to be quite the virtuoso, and they got pretty fired up talking about military politics. It was the kind of argument that stimulated rather than frustrated, and she hoped she’d have a chance to talk to him again soon.

Her other siblings were also doing well. Talitha’s new favorite pastime was fishing in the park across the road. She wasn’t allowed to go by herself, but her father was happy to take her on the weekends and sometimes even after school. He even bought her some books about fishing so she could learn what baits to use for the kinds of fish available in the pond. Someday she thought she’d even like to try ocean fishing.

Wazn’s book had received a modest amount of success; perhaps not as much as he’d hoped, but he was already buried in his next book, about the realities of peer pressure and cliques in the high school and their effects on the learning environment. As a rather nerdy boy, he had some direct experience in this area, but he spent some time interviewing classmates to get a variety of perspectives and stories. This was how he met Marta Xiong, who even came home from school with him one day! True, she had agreed to come over because he had offered to help her with homework in return for an interview, but she stayed to chat and even seemed pretty impressed by his painting skills. Wazn had not neglected his painting in his efforts to write, instead finding that it was a great way to relax and let his ideas percolate. Some of his more recent paintings might even be considered brilliant.

I love this painting – it is definitely going up in the house somewhere! Perhaps over Wazn’s desk.

Jane brushed off all their efforts to talk about what was going on, and told them she was just stressed from work, and that there was nothing the matter.

Unfortunately, they decided to take her at her word, and her anxiety increased.

Not sure why Jane is throwing up – maybe she ate some spoiled food while I wasn’t watching? I was a little worried she Sadr might have had some autonomous woohoo, but no babies have been forthcoming.

I have pretty much been letting her go and do whatever she likes via free will – so of course she’s not sleeping or eating enough, and spends all her time working out or playing computer games.

He’d spent some time talking with his father about the publishing business. Wazn was starting to think that writing might be what he wanted to do for a career, but his father was a little dubious that it would support the family mission.

Naturally, after a bit of reflection, Wazn was able to come up with a solution to the problem; he proposed to his father that at least half of the books he would write would be non-fiction. Wazn would do research into a topic for a reference work, or write about things in his own experience; the resulting books could be sent in electronic format to the Star People alongside the normal reports. Sadr smiled at his son, and put an approving hand on the skinny boy’s shoulder. “An excellent plan. I think that will be very helpful to the Star People – a more in-depth study than they’d get from our regular reports. Good work, Wazn.”

Wazn flushed with pleasure at his father’s approval, and rushed off to the computer to start brainstorming for his first nonfiction project.