Page 27 of Inkpot Gods

David’s still trying to figure out his answer when the shouting from the front room reaches a fever pitch and Erin points to the open doorway, a dour look on her face. “You, go,” she says. “You were their age fifteen minutes ago, whatever that age actually is. Maybe you can keep them from killing each other.”

David laughs, and Máni laughs with him, stirring in the darkness of David’s hidden heart to remind him that he was once followed across the sky by a pair of children whose mythological significance has been so diluted and forgotten that they no longer manifest. He misses them, Hjúki and Bil, and if he has any regrets about becoming David, it’s only that David has no children or younger siblings of his own, leaving Máni with no one to take care of.

You’ll make a great dad someday, thinks David, and he means it. He does want kids, and it’s hard to think of Máni as being anything other than a fantastic father when he gets the chance.

He’s a little surprised when the only reply he receives is a feeling of overwhelming sorrow, weighted heavily down by regret. He doesn’t have time to press further, because he’s already stepping into the living room, where the teenagers on the battered brown canvas couch freeze at the sight of him, the boy’s hand still pressed flat against the girl’s cheek where he was shoving her away. They’re both clutching video game controllers, the wired kind, connecting them to the console under the television.

The living room is another of the house’s many oddities. It has at least four different, mutually exclusive appearances, which it rotates through depending on the needs of the household. There’s the one with the leather furniture and all the bookcases, which has been seen less and less frequently since the library was finished; there’s the one with the whiteboards and the bare walls covered with careful equations written in erasable marker; there’s the one with the big central table, and there’s the one that currently exists, with the comfy-looking couch that could have been stolen from the early seventies, the statistically normal number of bookcases containing a slightly statistically abnormal number of books (some things can’t be helped) about things like popular culture, local history, and the flora of California, and the massive entertainment center currently being used by the two resident teens to take out their bloodthirsty impulses without actually needing to clean the rugs.

“In my day, we just skipped straight to Mortal Kombat,” says David, strolling over to squish himself onto the couch with the pair. “Less chaos, but plenty of opportunities to decapitate each other.”

“We’re not supposed to play violent video games,” says the boy, dark brown hair flopping down to half-cover his pale, whiskey-brown eyes. They’re as unnerving as Roger and Dodger’s eyes, in their own special way.

Designer people. Sometimes David wishes he could meet the man who built half this household, just for a brief conversation. But Roger and Dodger got there a long time before he came into the picture, and from the stories he told, they didn’t leave much of the man for him to have a conversation with.

Pity.

The two teens are definitely twins: coloring aside, they have almost-identical faces, and they’re still the same height, despite the vagrancies of puberty working its will on them. The girl’s hair is white with a distinct undertone of cornsilk green. If she were paying to have it dyed that color, her stylist would be a genius. Since she’s not, and since her hair refuses to take dye of any kind, her genetics are cruel. She’ll always stand out in a crowd, much like Dodger does; she’ll always be a target. The people created to embody the Math side of the Doctrine are supposed to draw fire away from their Language counterparts, and they didn’t get a say in the matter.

Their names are Kimberley and Timothy, but everyone calls them Kim and Tim, the rhymes rolling easily off their tongues. It’s only since the alchemists were basically driven out of Berkeley that the two have relaxed enough to begin fighting like normal siblings, arguing in the halls and slaughtering each other in pixelated dream worlds. David’s not sure he understands the appeal of video games for the pair. The world they live in day by day is brighter and more fantastic in a lot of days—although they’re still attending normal high school with normal human students, so they probably have a lot of stress to work through.

“We only have two controllers,” says Tim, taking his hand off Kim’s face and leaning away from her on the couch.

“That’s cool.” David shrugs. “I’ll play loser.”

“Isn’t it normally ‘I’ll play winner’?” asks Kim.

“Yeah, but that just means the winner gets to keep playing, while the loser has to sit around feeling bad about losing. If I play loser, maybe they can win, and things keep changing up. It’s not more fair—someone’s still sitting out every round—but I think it’s more fun.”

The twins exchange a complex look before returning their attention to him. “You’re weird,” says Kim.

David shrugs again. “I’m a Moon. We’re supposed to be a little weird. This world was built for humans, and we’re just shining on it.”

And that, right there, is the real appeal of this weird house and the weird people it contains: nowhere else in the world can he look at a pair of non-Lunar teens and bluntly state what he is without being called delusional, or worse. There’s a freedom in being able to be truly open about his identity with people who aren’t already poised to shine down over the Impossible City, in being believed. There’s an almost drunken joy in the absence of cynicism.

“Judy’s a Moon,” says Tim. “She’s dating Roger.”

“Are you here because you’re going to start dating Dodger?” asks Kim. “Or because you think you’re going to start dating Dodger? Because you may want to reconsider that. Dodger doesn’t date.”

“Totally aware, don’t date women who are scarier than I am, but thanks for looking out for me,” says David easily. Their videogame avatars are moving again, racing faster and faster in their tireless pursuit of the finish line. “I am happily single, and enjoying the swinging life of a college football hero. It’s not the worst position to be in, trust me.” He pauses, coughs into his hand. “I mean, er. Study and get good grades and then when you get to college you can study more and get more good grades, and go into academia like your … I still don’t know what to call them in relation to you.”

“We like ‘guardians,’” says Tim. “Legally, that’s what they are. Biologically, they’re our closest living relatives, so there’s that, but they’re closer to siblings than aunt and uncle, and there’s no room in their lives for any more brothers or sisters. So go with ‘guardians.’ You’re right about the academia, though. I don’t think I could be happy anywhere else.”

“Me, either,” says Kim grimly.

“You don’t sound like you believe that,” says David.

She shrugs. On the screen, her little cartoon car is knocked off the rails by one of the computer-controlled racers. It falls, hitting the ground below with a sickeningly metallic crunch, then bursts into pixelated flames.

David is pretty sure it’s not supposed to do that. If he listens closely, he can even hear her character avatar screaming. Kim puts her controller primly on her knee, eyes remaining fixed on the screen as she watches her brother circle the track. Her character doesn’t respawn.

With only one active player left, the game is over quickly, confetti cannons erupting as cheery balloon words spell out TIM WINS! across the bottom of the screen. He dutifully hands David his controller, then gets off the couch.

“I’m going to go see when dinner will be ready,” he says, and exits the living room with more speed than is strictly necessary—but then, he’s a teenage boy. He may not be a particularly athletic one, but David remembers his own teenage years, which aren’t so far behind him as to have become anything other than crystal clear. There were days when it felt like his legs didn’t know how to walk, like there was a lever somewhere deep inside the machinery of his body that had been permanently jammed in the “run” position.

He almost misses those days, now that his body is figuring out how to slow down. He’s young and strong and has all the stamina he could ask for, but learning how to walk when he could be running still feels like the first step toward learning how to get old.

He waits for the sound of Tim’s footsteps to fade before lifting the controller and pressing the start button to launch the next round. “Everything okay with you two?” he asks.