Chapter 8: Slice of babylife

The Ashram, Mount Kailash, Unknown Time Period, A week after Tanya's birth

Oksana looked at the building she had been living in for longer than an ordinary pirate and sighed as she contemplated the structure thoroughly. No matter how beatific the structure was, or its symbolism, or how significant it was in her husband's culture, she had a choice to make.

So she sat herself down in her seat, took out her tool kit, and made sure that her canvas holder was stable, maybe after a bit of cheating on her path to coax the wood to spike itself onto the floor. Every day she abused her powers like so, knowing what it would cost her in the future, the amount of tears that she might shed over this.

Then she shrugged, smiled and shrugged to herself, knowing that she would never regret her actions of the past, especially the ones she would undertake over the next few days. She shifted in her seat, carefully moving her blank canvas on the holder, checked on her extremely-active-baby-who-seemed-to-only-wake-up-when-it-most-inconvenienced-her, and smiled in pure joy as she looked at her, and she was sorely tempted to just walk over to her cradle in the middle of the ashram, so that she could keep an eye on her at all times, just to make sure she does not cause some measure of chaos.

And so, Oksana, after making sure that her baby was sleeping restfully, with not a single sound from her cute little lips that she loved playing with sooo much because it irritated her, making her pout sooo cutely and- "wake up Oksana", she whispered to herself, "This will never be easy, let's do this now and finish this before I run away from this forever." And so, she well and truly began her gruelling task.

She began to paint her home of many, many, many a year, the little corner where her firstborn daughter, whom her husband had named Aanchal, for she had clung onto her clothes's ends all the time as a child, hanging about behind her ma all the time, and in his tongue, aanchal meant the end of one's cloth, and thinking that would be a poetic name for her firstborn as just Oksana and her husband, had seeked refuge in all the time, behind the little tree that used to be there, whenever she had somehow or the other managed to piss off her papa, or when she found some of the few snacks that she had hidden in her kitchen somehow.

That little cupboard where her secondborn daughter loved to keep her 'spoils of war', or in adult-speech, her older sibling and her twin sibling's personal effects she had somehow managed to get her greasy paws on, which for some reason, none of her other daughters ever suspected odf being the hiding spot, on the sole account that it was old and creaky and when asked, her oldest, who had then been in her very early teens, puffed up her cheeks, looked her in the eye, daring her to prove her wrong when she stated that her 'cool, stylish, sparkly new stuff could never ever be in an old creaky cupboard like that' with 'that' being infused with so much venom that Oksana would not be surprised if her cupboard melted to the ground. It was all she could do to not burst into laughter, right there and then. Her husband however, had a face that could be used to explain to the military what 'stoic' meant, and yet, she was sure he was laughing his guts off on the inside.

The front door where her fifthborn, the tallest of her kids, and the last to agree to move out, and solely on her own insistence that she had to see the world, repeatedly struck her head whenever she rushed through it for various reasons.

The upper floor, wherein resided her little family's individual rooms.

Oksana shuddered at her memories at the absolute hell her kids raised whenever she but put a toe out of line and entered the stairs to their rooms.

Her husband may have had a thing against personal space and privacy, but she sure as hell did not. She resolved to make her new home comfy for her (now) sole daughter.

She briefly wondered where her kids could be, and resolved to look for the thingy they each left behind to look for herself, the state of her kids.

And then she blinked, realising that she was freely shedding tears, "Oh this is not good", she muttered to herself as she looked up at the sky, tears still falling, no matter how much she dabbed at her eyes. "I must remain strong, I will join you soon enough, my mehbooba, but till then please wait, please, I wish to give our last daughter, true heir to both my line and yours, the happy childhood she needs and deserves." And so, she wiped the tears from her eyes, looked to the skies, and she could swear that the cloud formation she had shouted her convictions to had changed shape, to better fit her husband, and so, she turned away and looked to her artwork to stop the waterworks from restarting, and blinked.

She rubbed her eyes and checked the painting again.

She rubbed her eyes and checked the painting again.

She let out a low whistle as she looked at the art she had made while poring over her past and her connection to her home. The painting seemed to be as realistic as if she was simply looking through a window at her home, with her husband smiling widly in the veranda, waiting for her to-

And she snapped out of it, and immediately threw a cloth over the painting, and checked her reserves. As expected, there was a slight drop in it, about a day's worth.

She frowned in consternation at the drop, walked over to her tarp covered painting, took a deep breath, and tugged the tarp off the painting, and smiled with tears in her eyes, "worth it."

And then, just as she tried to get herself to haul herself and her painting to her basement, where it would stay before she finished... refurbishing her house into her new home.

Just as she was pondering over the dilemma of how to carry her painting to its destination, the events that occurred kind of took care of her problems for her. As she pondered over whether to carry her entire set at one go or to carefully carry each item so as to reduce individual damage as much as possible.

And then, Tanya woke up, and boy, she woke up with a bang.

"It would seem that Tanya has inherited your strength, husband mine." Oksana sighed and looked up at the debris that was rapidly growing farther and farther from her. She sighed once more as she saw the shattered remains of her seventh baby's cradle. All of her other children were perfectly normal humans, who had no inborn advantage. Tanya however, it was rapidly becoming clear that she had picked up the slack of all the powers skipping a generation, proving just as much of a pain her husband used to be.

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"Well, at least I won't be bored", Oksana laughed. And then she frowned, concentrating, and suddenly she appeared right behind her daughter, hefty tools and cumbersome canvas set and all. She carefully put them down a couple of feet from her destructive daughter with the black index fingers of destruction, infinitely cute though they may be. She slowly creeped behind her daughter, who currently seemed to be looking at her hands, which were glowing golden and cooing softly, eyes twinkling in immense joy.

So she popped in behind the (assumedly) defenseless baby and said baby proceeded to punch the lights out of her, and apparently granted her a flight visa, when she looked around upon regaining consciousness, she found herself resting in what she assumed was snow. Except, when Oksana tried to use the snow beneath her to prop herself up, the 'snow' caved in immediately and left an immensely huge trail in the direction she was facing, which was the opposing direction of her flight path.

She turned herself around, and waited until she was below the cloud layer, at which point, she stopped herself dead in the air, and checked around her for familiar landmarks, and blinked when she realised where she was. She promptly turned in the direction of her home, and kicked the air beneath her, launching herself at her home faster than she was knocked away.

She landed about a metre from her starting point, her baby nowhere to be seen, not that that was any surprise, it had been a week since she had been born and it would be totally normal for someone like her to do something so supremely out of the norm, simply by being herself.

"Tsk, I am getting rusty", grumbled Oksana, a woman who had been knocked a couple hundred feet by her super strong baby and had managed to launch herself back to her start position by just kicking the air that had been beneath her. She then looked around as she mumbled petty grievances to herself. She grew slightly more desperate, finding not her daughter in her home, despite her (in her own words) slight advantage in the aspect of searching for her daughter, both in terms of training and in unique powers. She frowned to herself, slightly concerned and did what she assumed that mothers everywhere did when their baby did inexplicably went missing, and did the same thing she did many times prior in many games of hide and seek with her children.

And so she upped the juice in her powers, expanding the radius of her search drastically, and then widened her eyes, for she had found her daughter.

Just one teeny tiny problem though...

Her daughter was... flying? Somehow?

And so Oksana shrugged, carefully kept away all of her knick knacks and effects (hey, those things have a lot of value to her and she just lost her husband, she would not chance losing her mementos of him as well), before screaming out like a banshee and jumping with all of her strength, leaving a cracked floor. This entire process cost her not more than a dozen seconds.

At the peak of her flight, she started to kick the air in a technique that might or might not lead to her having at least a couple decades in jail to stay in place before closing her eyes, reaching out around her, searching for signs of her daughter, and found her trying out her newfound flying skills (not that Oksana could begrudge that of her, flying is an experience everyone must know) some distance above her, and so, Oksana kicked the air and arrived in front of her apparently-desperately-trying-to-stabilise-herself-yet-madly-giggling-idiot-child and held her in her arms carefully.

As soon as Tanya reached the safety of her arms, she immediately fell asleep, excited smile on her face or not. As Oksana sighed both in relief and consternation, relief at the safety of her child, and consternation that said child even ended up in such a situation, whether or not said child could not have possibly done so if she were normal was not a fact she should think of in the future when she pulls off even more absurd things in the 10 years she had left with her.

"Appalling thoughts of the future aside, now, how do I make sure that I reach home in one piece without my kid somehow blasting me to 10 different places in the process, not that it would hurt, it would just be annoying and-", as her thoughts spiralled out of control and she thought of possible ways of moving without waking her baby up, which would be an impossible endeavour, as her method of flight depended entirely on her using her feet to suddenly change directions midair, her child kicked her right hand, she did not notice at the time on account of her getting too deep in with her thoughts, but her brain did register it some time later, as she gently laid down Tanya on her bed, and she looked to the child in fascination.

"Hmm, seems that she is an ordinary child, so what could have possibly caused her to break apart her cradle, knock me down a few hundred metres, and fly up to the sky?"

As she pondered this question, she suddenly had a thought and gently carried her child to her shoulder, as if to burp her, and patted her back, to look for the glowy wings she had clearly seen carry Tanya through the air.

She found no nubs, nothing on Tanya's back that was not there a week, a day, or even an hour prior, when she last checked. Not that she would know the difference, for there was one, just that the difference was a tiiiiiny black spot on Tanya's back, which faded away, promising of flight and her many other mysteries, to be solved as she gained the wisdom and maturity required to reattain the heights of her past.

Tanya was just as much a beloved child of the world as much as of her parents, and the world had decided that Tanya had to prove herself worthy of the title of 'Alchemist' once more, to talk to her now extremely chatty soul, and become one once more.

But that is a story for another day.

For now, the world shall turn, the seasons shall change, from oh-god-im-cold to oh-god-Im-COOOOOLD and back.

And Tanya shall turn three, normal in every way a baby her age would be if they also happened to be a genius of extreme proportions. And this is how she grows up into a fine girl under her mother's loving care, no matter how heavy that hand might turn out to be.

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