Two weeks later, Julia discovered Douglas playing on his bedroom floor with wooden alphabet cubes, Terrence apparently watching carefully.

"What are you doing?" she asked, bewildered.

"I'm teaching Terrence to read."

She burst out laughing. "You. Are. Kidding me."

He stood and defiantly crossed his arms on his chest. "I'm serious! I tell you, he's intelligent. He understands everything we say." He lowered his voice, sparing the Dalek a side glance. "It's kinda creepy, actually."

Strangely enough, Terrence averted his gaze. It was hard to interpret the expressions of this lone yellow eye, but Julia could have sworn he felt sad, or guilty, or something.

"One thing's for sure," she replied hesitantly, "he grows fast. And nobody's been able to tell what kind of animal he is. Even Dr. Laurel doesn't have the slightest idea."

She sat besides the young Dalek. "All right, do you want me to participate in teaching you to read?"

Terrence looked up at her and squeaked.

"Yeah," she thought, "kinda creepy."

One more week had passed when Julia was trying to program the brand new video recorder while her mother was out shopping –trying being the important word here. Douglas had already given up and was busy playing a game. The girl threw the manual to the ground in frustration. She looked at their tentacled pet, who was perched on her shoulders, and smiled jokingly:

"And what about you, hm? Your turn to try and set this damn thing."

Terrence jumped to the floor and glanced through the manual before he began manipulating the buttons with his tentacles. It only took him a couple seconds to set the recorder perfectly.

"O-kay," Julia whispered in a blank voice while Douglas had forgotten his game and was watching the scene with a big enough mouth to gulp all flies of Great Britain and half Europe, "I think we'd better not tell that to Mum. She's gonna freak out if she ever learns about it."

Terrence looked at them and blinked.

A few days later, Julia and Douglas were trying to teach him to write, which was proving much more difficult than reading a documentation and pushing a few buttons. Since they didn't want to risk their mother discovering their "pet" typing perfectly sensible sentences on the family computer, they were reverting to plain old paper, but holding a pen in his tentacles seemed almost impossibly hard. Terrence was very dedicated, though, so they weren't about to give up.

Suddenly, angry shouts disturbed the studious gang. The two teenagers immediately recognised the masculine voice who was replying to their mother, and they paled.

"Dad," Douglas said, and Julia silently nodded.

They ventured into the living room to see their mother pointing towards the door.

"Get out of here right now or I'm calling the police!" Claire screamed.

"Don't you dare use that tone with me!" He lashed out at her so hard she fell on the sofa.

"Mum!"

Douglas raced towards his mother while Julia attempted to look as tough as she wished she really were. "Leave us alone, Dad. You know they'll send you back to jail if they learn you came here."

He raised his hand to hit her, and…

Seething with rage, Terrence jumped at his throat, wrapped his tentacles around it and squeezed with all his might.

Everybody began shouting at once.

The Dalek had doubled in size since the children had found him and his strength had increased tenfold, and it took all their combined efforts to get him off his victim's neck.

Claire's husband, all anger now replaced with terror, backed away to the door while pointing accusingly at the nightmarish creature that had just attacked him:

"What… what the hell is that thing?! It tried to kill me! You tried to kill me!"

He didn't wait any longer to turn tail.

Once her father had left, Julia yelled at Terrence: "You can't go on strangling people! It's wrong, wrong, wrong!"

Claire put an understanding arm on her daughter's shoulder and spoke softly: "He doesn't understand, sweetheart. He's just an animal, he felt the agitation and wanted to protect us, that's all. You can't expect him to understand things like the value of human life."

Douglas opened his mouth to speak but a mute look from Julia silenced him. Nearby, Terrence was looking at the ground, all tentacles limp, as if awaiting punishment. The girl simply lifted him and put him back into the glass tank that served as his cage –which he had never seemed to mind; actually, the children suspected he was very well able to get out and in at his leisure and just considered it his "bedroom".

Late in the night, Julia couldn't get a wink of sleep. She went back to the living room, lifted a drowsy Terrence from his tank and sat on the sofa.

"I'm sorry I yelled at you earlier, but you mustn't harm people, you understand? Even bad people like Dad. It's wrong. Promise me you'll never do it again." As the yellow eye looked up at her and blinked, she went on: "I'll take that as a yes. Still," she added after a second, "thank you for wanting to protect us." Suddenly, she started sobbing and hugged the bemused Dalek.

Truly, he didn't understand her behaviour. Yet it wasn't the first time he'd seen her cry and he believed he knew how he was supposed to react: He gently wrapped his tentacles around her back, like he had seen Claire do. After a while, she calmed down and wiped her teary eyes. "Thanks."

With a hint of pride, just a hint, he thought he'd indeed managed to chose the appropriate action to take, as incomprehensible as the Barrys sometimes were. That Julia was back to her normal self was the icing on the cake.

However, Terrence's luck turned the next afternoon, as Julia's attempt at a first ever kiss fell short when he believed she needed hugging again.

"Just what do you think you are doing?!" she shouted after her tentative boyfriend had hastily left the house with no intention of ever coming again. Apparently, cuddling a greenish tentacled blob wasn't his idea of the perfect date.

And the Dalek was back to his tank, baffled and ashamed at a mistake he still didn't understand.

As time went on and Terrence's successes at predicting the right conduct in a given situation remained counterbalanced by almost as many failures, he felt increasingly frustrated and angered towards himself. Why, despite his best efforts to comply to the family's expectations, was it so hard to live up to them? Why was he unable to simply conform to the normality they were defining?

Just what was wrong with him?