Chương 140: B3. 3.3 - Daughter Duty Calls

"You took after your Aunt Jemma, dear," said Mom, combing my hair with her fingers, as she always did when talking about my height.

"And no, don't comment on what you didn't inherit from Jemma," she hastily added, noticing me looking down on my chest with a smirk on my face.

"I wasn't going to," I said, grinning. Inside jokes between mother and daughter. Duties that I had to tick off whenever we met. It kept Mom happy, and I kept my face consistent. Everything was in order if I did my part as was expected of me as a daughter.

"Presents!" Mom excitedly raised her finger. She opened her luggage while people passed around us.

"I have plenty of presents for you, girls. Chocolates and gingerbread from Switzerland—Shirley told me that their gingerbread is quite different from the American version. You like sweets, don't you, dear?"

"Yes. Thank you," I said with a forced smile. No racism towards gingers—the root vegetable thingy, not redheads—but they shouldn't be in any dessert. This was the fault of Europeans for creating the abomination that was the gingerbread. Actually, it was the fault of the Crusaders for bringing back ginger from the Middle East. As if the Crusaders didn't already cause enough damage with pillaging and massacring.

"Then I got this 'kaya' thing from Singapore," Mom continued.

"Some sort of coconut jam, I don't know—""Mom, we can do this later at the condo. We're blocking the way." I closed her suitcase and put it back up. Once Mom set her mind on doing something, she didn't care about what others would think. I had to be a bit pushy so that she'd listen to me. Amusing that I'd be the one who cared that we didn't bother other people. This wasn't even about Rule #4. We were already conspicuous as it was, with Mom and Deen's appearance.

Mom didn't need to hand out presents here like she was Santa Claus while clogging the path of the arriving passengers.

"The condo!" Mom blurted. People looked at her as if she were crazy.

"I have to be a mother and ask if you—""Yes, Mom. Everything cleaned. The pantry is stocked if you want to cook."

"I helped with Erind's chores," Deen said, raising her hand. Despite being worried about getting scanned, she couldn't let herself go uncredited.

"I could sleep on the couch if you want to stay there, Mom." Just offering. I didn't want her to be at the condo, and no way I was sleeping on the couch. Even if Kelsey was no longer hiding at my place, I much preferred to be alone.

"Don't worry about me," said Mom.

"I've already booked a hotel close to you. But before heading there, I want to have dinner with you two. Is it okay if I cook even if it's late? We'll have a family meal. You're included, Amber."

"I'd like to be part of your family, Mrs. Hartwell," Deen said.

"And Erind calls me by my second name, Deen." The fuck? Was Deen trying to replace me? I had seen a movie before where a psycho was jealous of her friend, copying everything about her—fashion style, speech pattern, even food preferences. At the end, the psycho killed her friend and wore her bloodied clothes. Well, that wasn't happening here because Deen wouldn't fit into my clothes. While we were in the car, Mom animatedly declared all the dishes she wanted to cook while on her four-day vacation.

Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be for her first night. Some top guy from Greaves called her for a rushed presentation and meeting in an hour. We ended up ordering takeout hot wings and fries from Jimmy's.

"Good old American fast food," Mom said as the smell of grease filled the car.

"I can't believe that I missed this. Everything is so expensive in Switzerland, including fast food. Much better to order regular food because I just can't bite a burger that costs around fifty percent more than it does in this country." Upon reaching my condo, I offered Mom my room so that she could work in peace. But Mom took her place on the kitchen counter, saying that she'd call us once her meeting was over. Deen and I were in my room, holding a mini-council of two Bs.

"Your mom is very busy… like mine." Deen checked the kitchen outside before closing the door.

"I guess so," I said, shrugging. I didn't know and didn't care about the schedule of Deen's mother.

"But your mom still spends time with you." Here we go again. Time to change the topic.

"Don't worry about Mom's bionic eyes. She just likes to make it glow to surprise people, but she doesn't use its features. Scanning things is too distracting, she always says. And your Guardian Angel would warn us if Mom has an issue with your Core."

"Ye-yes… She would've mentioned it if she had noticed it."

"There's something else on your mind. You have that look. You can't keep things from me, your best friend." It wasn't difficult to notice that Deen was concerned, with out-of-place creases on her poreless forehead. Deen thought for several seconds before asking, "Have you thought of telling your mother?"

"Telling Mom about what? That I'm an… Adumbrae? That I also have an artificial Core? Everything, basically?" Deen nodded.

"Everything. Once you reveal that you're no longer human, your mom will want to know about everything else. And you'll have to tell her so that she can help—""No way I'm bringing her into this," I interjected. There was a reason that many main characters in stories had dead or absentee parents. They just cramped the style of the main character. Cramped the style—did people still use that expression? Parents would get in the way of adventures.

Anyway, I was lucky that Mom was mostly away for work, making me eligible to be a main character.

"Your mom will accept you," Deen said.

"You're her daughter. I can feel that she loves you with all her heart, unlike my mother. If I told my mom about everything that's going on, she'd probably forget the next day. It probably won't take her that long to—" You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"It's not happening, Deen," I said. Deen was usurping my main character status with her sad backstory.

"I know Mom will accept me, but I'm not going to tell her."

"Your mom won't report you to the BID if that's your fear. She'll do everything she can to cure you."

"There's the problem—everything that she can do. There's not much that she can do, even with her connections. Like, find scientists or something? And she can't ask around that much, or she'd draw attention to herself. In contrast, I… we can do a lot of stuff. Illegal stuff. Stuff that Mom wouldn't allow me to do if she knew about it, like fighting monsters and such."

"Erm, you're right. Mrs. Hartwell will want you to be safe."

"It'll be mutually exclusive. Either Mom's way or our way. Once Mom knows, it'll be her way that will be followed. If I'll just end up fighting Mom, then better not tell her. She won't allow me to go Core hunting or, I don't know, fighting against the Professor's organization. The first thing she'd probably do is find a place somewhere far to hide me. India?"

"I can see where you're going with this," Deen said.

"But doesn't she—?"

"Oh, India's the world's largest producer of ginger?" I said, searching it up on my phone.

"I'm not going there. I've decided to dislike gingers today. But I'll test the gingerbread to see if—""Erind, be serious!" Deen grabbed my arm and shook me, as if I were a misbehaving child. I looked her straight in the eye. She released my arm and stepped back.

"I-I'm sorry… I didn't mean to. You weren't taking this seriously."

"I am serious. And I'm seriously not going to tell Mom. I know that she'll want to keep me safe and stuff, but I also want to keep her safe. There are a lot of people after me—the 2Ms, the PCM, the BID, the IRS. Oh, wait, I don't know about that last one." Deen frowned.

"Just kidding," I said, rolling my eyes.

"But you get what I mean?"

"Many might target Mrs. Hartwell to get to you. Isn't that all the more reason that she should know?" I shook my head.

"You're not getting me. If the bad guys want to take Mom hostage or even kill her as revenge for what I did to them, telling her about it won't help. She could hide in India or… maybe somewhere in China, but they'll still hunt her down. I don't think Mom will go into hiding anyway, and I can't force her to. Instead, I plan to pretend that I'm a full-fledged Adumbrae."

"Do you mean that you'll act as if… as if the Adumbrae in your head were fully taken over your body?"

"Exactly. An Adumbrae wouldn't care about the human parents of their host, right? I'm Red Hood. Not Erind. Red Hood is an Adumbrae continuing her human life as a cover. There's no point in going after my mom. She'll be safe. As for me—us, we'll continue with finding a cure. We have some progress already." Deen nodded as she stroked her chin.

"You've thought of this."

"I actually do that sometimes—thinking." My attempt at comedy didn't land. Deen's brows were furrowed.

"Erind… You're still Erind, right?"

"I am," I replied. What was her issue now? It must be tiring being Deen, always having a problem with stuff.

"The Adumbrae hasn't taken over me. And our minds have connected via the Pino link. You know that I'm me."

"During the time that you go on a rampage, when you kill and eat people… is that still you?" Uh-oh, this is a tough one. I couldn't say that I had full control because duh. But if I say that there were bouts of the Adumbrae's mind surfacing, controlling my body to commit heinous acts, Deen would also be worried. Heinous. I liked the sound of that word. What was the way to go here? The main problem was the eating stuff. I never expected to reveal my real identity to Deen, so I just had lots of fun at the docks.

And I shouldn't forget that I ate Kelsey's limbs. Choosing the progress of my face should also take into account Kelsey and Myra.

"Erind? Deen?" Mom's voice pierced through my room's door.

"I'm done with my meeting! Let's eat!" Saved by the Mom-bell.

"Deen, I'm me," I quickly said, holding her shoulders.

"We can't help but kill people while fighting. You've also killed, too." Her worried face told me that she wasn't assured.

"But that's different!"

"It's the… instincts of my transformation affecting me," I said. Much better than saying that the Adumbrae took over sometimes, but it was still the same worry.

"Don't worry, I'm getting the hang of it. We'll talk about this later. We can't keep Mom waiting." It was almost ten. Still, Mom insisted we gather for dinner and eat the desserts she brought afterward. I knew that Deen had a rule not to eat this late, but she didn't refuse Mom. Deen seemed to have forgotten our conversation, excited at the prospect of having a family dinner with a mother not her own. And I was strangely having fun. Maybe a break from my solitary life was good sometimes. Normalcy, I guess?

How long would these normal times last? Not forever, that was for sure. To control the conversation, I opened by telling Mom about my bet with Deen at the airport. Deen lost the guessing game because Mom's appearance was super far from a reasonable expectation.

"Mom's hair started graying when she was in her early twenties, I think?" I turned to Mom for confirmation. She nodded.

"I was twenty-two, to be exact, a year younger than you, when I started to notice that the number of white hair strands I had wasn't, let us say, average."

"It doesn't seem like I inherited that." I dyed my hair black last time to hide the white strands caused by Spooky Erind. Or maybe it was Mom's genes? Too fast and too many to be natural.

"It wasn't good news for a flourishing young woman. People were quick to notice. It was also around the time I started dating your father. Imagine my embarrassment. By the way, Erind dear. Speaking of dating, Erind, you should ask Deen to help you find a—""And so, Mom decided to bleach her hair," I said to stop her annoying line of thought before she could snowball and be unstoppable. Deen giggled.

"I'd like to learn more about your hair, Mrs. Hartwell." Mom dropped her bullshit 'mom talk' about guys.

"In retrospect, perhaps I should've let my hair be. I didn't even know why I bleached it, of all things. It would've been much better if I dyed it hazel brown, its original color, or experimented with red instead of trying to uniformly turn it white."

"I think red would look good on you, Mom."

"After several years," Mom said, "I realized that people didn't care about my hair color at all. Only I did. Any self-esteem issues I had were all in my head. I suppose that I knew it all along—I simply didn't want to accept it. As the gray strands multiplied, your father would tell me that it was a fashionable accent of sorts." I wanted to comment that's just how Dad was, but I could barely recall him. My memories were hazy because he had been gone from my life for the past decade.

"But I didn't listen to him and went ahead bleaching my hair. I probably should have. Anyway, we can't change that. And this white color has been tied to my identity for a long time, so I'm also not changing it. And here we are." Mom fluffed the ends of her locks.

"Your hair looks beautiful, Mrs. Hartwell," said Deen.

"Thank you, Deen sweetie. Now, about Erind's dating life—what can you tell me about it? Spill all her juicy sec—""That's the story of Mom's hair color," I said, glaring at Mom.

"Next are her eyes. It's a very interesting story that I'm sure Deen wants to hear about."