Chapter Four: Something New and Wonderful

Six years passed and the two babies had grown. Peter and Mary-Jane had a healthy baby girl named Hillary, who had inherited her father's mutation. Hillary had been growing accustomed to using her gifts in the house. Not necessarily for the good of all mankind, but for the good of candy and chocolate chip cookies. Mary-Jane had quite gotten used to living with spider-people.

Peter and Mary-Jane sat reading a book on the sofa, in the quasi-quiet of New York after dark. A shadow appeared in a dark corner and stopped. It gazed down at the couple with it's shimmering, green eyes. The figure crawled in the shadows and rested in one cast on the ceiling by the lamp.

It shrieked and jumped down at Peter. Peter looked up and held his hand out. He put pressure on his palm with his two middle fingers triggering the web. The web shot out and caught the small girl and threw her to the sofa. She had an enormous grin spread across her face and she began giggling.

Mary-Jane looked over and smiled at their daughter, "Hillary, you know you need to get ready for bed," she stated.

"Please? Can I stay up with you? Bed's no fun," Hillary pouted.

"No sweetie," her mom replied.

Hillary turned to Peter. "Daddy, can I?" she asked.

Peter glanced at Mary-Jane. His wife shook her head. "Sorry Hil, but Mom's right. You need to go to bed. Otherwise, you'll be very tired in the morning, and that wouldn't be good," he said.

"Why not? I'm always tired on Saturday," she protested.

"Yeah, but tomorrow's your birthday," Mary-Jane said.

"You're gonna be the big oh-six. And we have a fun place to go," Peter added.

"Where?" Hillary asked anxiously jumping up and down with her hands clenched into fists.

"I can't tell you that, but I can tell you that you've never been there before, you'll like it, and that we're leaving very early, so hurry to bed!" Peter pushed.

Hillary shot a strand of web from her wrist and stuck to the wall. She climbed down the hallway and into her room. The little girl dropped into her bed and waited anxiously for morning to come.

Mary-Jane shook her head and laughed softly. "You have talent, tiger. I can't get her to bed if I paid her a million bucks."

"You just gotta know how to speak their language," Peter replied slyly.

Mary-Jane smiled at her husband. "And when tomorrow night comes?" She leaned closer to him.

"Well, tomorrow night it's your turn," he replied. Mary-Jane punched him in the shoulder. Peter put his arm around her and hugged her. They started reading their book again, enjoying the picture slowly forming in their minds.

XXX

Otto sat at the desk in the room he used as his office. The actuators floated around him as he drummed his fingers against his laptop's touchpad. Rosie and Anna had gone to bed hours before, but Otto was determined to get at least two more pages of his new book written. …or rather, Rosie's new book, since they were publishing under her name. The first book had been written on fusion, but this second was on artificial intelligence and the technology used in building his smart arms. A combination of scientific literature and a warning document all in one. It was… therapeutic to write about the actuators, and they certainly seemed to enjoy it.

Do not forget our link with your emotions, they chirped happily.

"I won't," Otto replied. "This chapter isn't about that, though. Plus, I'm not sure how in depth about that we should write."

The actuators clicked and bobbed. Of course we should write about that!

It is important!

"To us, yes, but I don't know how much Rosie would have been able to pick up, realistically, and I can't put her into suspicion."

The actuators whirred: almost a sigh. The argument is true.

We must protect ourselves, above all else.

Protection… Otto set to typing with this new inspiration until he had a full paragraph. Reading it over, however, he was not satisfied and he ended up deleting most of it. Protection, protection... Their instincts… but how much could Rosie have gathered by observation? This would be so much easier if he were publishing it under his own name.

A soft sound like the pitter-patter of raindrops approached and while Otto stared despairingly at the screen, one of the actuators turned at the sound.

Annabelle is here.

Otto looked over his shoulder and saw the small, blonde-haired girl in a nightgown and bare feet standing in the doorway. Her cheeks were stained with tears and her big brown eyes welled up with more.

"Anna," he greeted with concern. "What's wrong?"

"I had a bad dream," she said almost too quietly to hear. Anna clenched her teddy bear harder as more tears ran onto her nightgown.

"Oh. Well, come here." He swiveled on his chair to face her and held out his arms.

The little girl ran into her father and Otto lifted her onto his lap. She had his body build and Rosie's beautiful light hair. The tears began to fall and her voice came out in sobs.

"I don't like my imaginary friends anymore," she cried.

"Why not?" Otto asked. "You have so much fun together." Anna had a thriving imagination and Otto was often roped into trekking through the jungles of the kitchen with her and her imaginary friends. She drew pictures of them and created stories about the adventures they had had before they met her.

"They kept talking and I couldn't get them to stop," she explained, "Even when I told them to. And they weren't talking to me: they were talking to each other. But when I told them to stop, they started talking to me. I just want them to be quiet!" she hugged him tighter, trying to squeeze the voices away.

Otto stroked her thick backbone tenderly. "There, there," he comforted, "It was all just a dream. I'm here now and I'll keep them quiet." He wiped the tears from under her eyes gently with one of his fingers.

Anna swallowed and slowly calmed down.

"Do my imaginary friends talk to you too?" she asked.

Otto's brow furrowed. "Why do you say that, Anna?"

"'Cause you answer questions when nobody asks them a lot and you talk to yourself. Are you having a bad dream too, Daddy?" she asked innocently.

Otto hesitated. "That is a very good question," he answered with a brave smile. He glanced at his actuators that curled around them both. "I'd have to say… sometimes. But I always wake up."

"Oh. That's good."

"You know Anna, good things can come in the midst of bad dreams. For example, if you face your fears in your dreams, that builds courage. If you run and hide from something in your dreams, that builds sense and helps you to panic less if it ever happens in real life. And sometimes they help you appreciate your family and friends." Otto was trying his hardest to give her good advice. "Do you understand?"

Anna processed the information just given her. "I can come get you when they're being mean," she offered.

"Yes. And I have you to hug whenever I feel sad," Otto added giving her a hug.

Anna giggled. "And I have you to hug too." The little girl sighed. "Thanks Daddy. I feel a lot better. And they stopped talking. But, just in case they come back, can I stay up a little while with you?" she asked.

Otto hadn't been having much luck writing anyway.

"Of course you can," he agreed with a warm smile. Anna's eyes lit up and she snuggled into the sweater Rosie had altered for him: quite ingeniously simple, actually. She had cut out the bottom half of the back of all his shirts and sewn a string on each side of the bottom hem that he tied below his lower actuators. He wondered why he hadn't thought of it himself.

Otto saved his progress and closed the laptop lid. "I don't know about you, Anna, but I feel like watching Land Before Time. Want to join me?"

Anna bounced up and down with excitement; the actuators clicked their exuberant approval. "Yes please! Can we watch the one where they meet Chomper?" she asked as Otto helped her off his lap and stood. He held her hand as they walked out of his office, actuators quietly helping him along.

"I don't recall which movie that one was," he admitted.

You do too.

Anna couldn't believe him. "You don't? It's the one with 'Friends for Dinner,' and those egg stealers were being mean all the time…"

They walked into the living room and Otto sent Anna to the bookshelf where they kept their movies. The top right tentacle stretched to the couch and turned on a table lamp as the other three helped Otto get the television ready. Anna handed the correct volume of cartoon dinosaur adventures to one of the actuators and Otto covered them both with a blanket on the couch as his top left actuator put the DVD in, closed the drive and brought the remote. Otto slipped his arm around his daughter's shoulders and she sighed, relaxing naturally into the crevice beneath his arm. She jerked up.

"Daddy," she giggled, pushing a bit of the blanket between them. "Your super belt is cold!" Otto smiled and helped her put warm blanket between them and then hugged her close again. Anna had dubbed his harness the "super belt," like a super hero's utility belt.

As the opening credits rolled across the screen, Otto pondered what his daughter had told him. Voices? She had heard voices? If she had been anyone else's daughter, he might have been mildly concerned, but because she was his, he was paranoid. He worried that, somehow, he had passed the actuators on to her. But that didn't make sense, he reminded himself, because she had no tentacles of any kind. He had kept a close watch on her development progress in her first two years of life, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Plus, Rosie's imagination was so active she almost lived in two worlds. Maybe Rosie had been this way when she was little.

Apprehensions showed themselves, but he pushed them back down and rationalized them away. They were just paranoia. There was no way his inventions could have made it into his genome. No way at all.