This year's interview day seemed to have lasted a full 30 hours. There was no possible explanation, but it was the only thing that made sense.

Murdoch Swan leaned back in his chair and stared down at his notebook on the table in front of him, listing the families that had finished their interviews. Or rather, his head was pointed in the general direction of the notebook, even if all his actual facial features were otherwise occupied. His eyes were focused a good fifty feet away and half-closed on top of that. His mouth drooped open in preparation for a lunch break that could not come soon enough. His nose wrinkled at the tea that Henderson insisted on chugging by the gallon at every meeting instead of using the perfectly good coffee maker in the teachers' break room. His ears did nothing, acting as nearly perfect filters to the jabber that Evans and Henderson insisted on using to fill up the room.

The admissions interviews were the worst part of the entire year, his brain decided, having successfully cut itself off from the outside world. All these stupid kids and their suck-up parents, the same questions over and over and over, then the long meeting with the other teachers to sort out the least stupid and the best at sucking up. If he had his way nobody would get in. Just let all those families sweat it out when they came to the front of the school and saw a big blank board, hah, that would be fun...

"Mr. Swan. I beg your pardon." A voice drifted in from parts unknown. Swan grudgingly followed it back to the surface, and blinked at Henderson from across the break room table.

"What? What is it?"

"We were discussing our selection for initial recommendations," Henderson said, that idiotic mustache wiggling with every word. The man probably had to clean it with a wire brush after every meal.

"Well? Go on, then," Swan said, settling back into normal space for the moment. The sooner this was over with, the better. Theoretically the board would be making its own decisions based on their input, but a firm recommendation was practically guaranteed admission. He just had to pay attention long enough to name a couple dozen names, then get out of here and back to the recliner in his apartment

"Very well," Henderson said, looking down into his notebook, leather bound with neat gold-thread stitching. "Near the top of my list I have the Forgers. An exemplary family in my opinion. In all my years I have hardly ever seen such elegance burst forth from an interview."

"Yes, I remember the Forgers," Evans said, flipping through his own notebook, one of the standard ones they gave to teachers. "You're right, they were a lovely family. With a very well-behaved daughter, too. I'd be happy to recommend them."

Swan made a show of looking into his own notebook, which aside from the list he had copied down was mainly full of doodles of cubes and an insulting poem he had written about his ex-wife. Forgers, Forgers... which ones were the Forgers again?

Oh, that was right. The Forgers! Swan had gotten the size of that whole family after he took one look at the wife's face. Swan knew women, and he could see a cold black heart through two feet of lead. There was no mistaking the look of hatred that Forger woman gave her husband every time she glanced his way. He had seen it on his ex-wife's face too many times. Swan had hardly said a word during that whole interview; he had been too busy trying to keep from laughing.

"Sure, why not? Let them in," he said, making a show of closing his notebook with a snap. Maybe Mrs. Forger would try to stab Mr. Forger on campus. Then at least Swan wouldn't be the only one.

Anya bounced happily up the stairs leading to their house, leading Mama by the hand. She sang to herself in a rough approximation of rhythm with each step, in a tune of her own composition:

"Gonna go to school! Gonna go to school! Gonna go to school! Gonna go to school!"

She would have been the first to admit that it was lacking in style and production values. After all, the brass section she heard in her head completely failed to manifest behind her, Papa refused to provide backing vocals on the chorus "Gonna go to school", and Mama only joined in a monotone when prompted. But who cared! This wasn't about style, this was about celebration! Anya had made her Papa and Mama proud, and she was going to go to school and peace would reign throughout the land!

"Gonna go to school!" she concluded, hopping onto the landing on their floor. She looked around, hoping to see an audience who could appreciate how well she had stuck the landing, only to meet a pair of beady eyes behind thick rimmed glasses, both stuck on a stubby body standing in front of their front door.

"Scruffy!" Anya said.

"Oh, hello, Franky," Papa said, coming up from behind her and Mama. Oh no, what now? "What brings you here?"

"I heard the good news. Figured some congratulations were in order," Scruffy said. He held up one hand, showing off a brown paper bag holding a bottle like the ones the man from the orphanage used to drink. "Didn't think I'd beat you guys back here. Come on, let's celebrate!"

"Loid... who is this?" Mama said, focusing on the bottle in Scruffy's hand like she thought she could make it explode with her eye. Maybe she could. "I don't believe we met, sir."

"Sorry, dear. This is my old friend Franky, I've told you about him. Anya knows him, too. Franky, this is my lovely wife Fiona," Papa said, positioning himself at a tactical distance between them. He had picked up that Mama didn't seem to want Scruffy interrupting them. Scruffy, on the other hand, had not.

"Franky Franklin! A pleasure to meet you, ma'am!" he said, cheerfully waggling forth the hand that wasn't clutching the juice that made people sleep.

Mama regarded Scruffy's hand for a second, then politely reached and shook it, saying. "Nice to meet you too, Franky." That was all Papa and Scruffy saw, Anya guessed. They didn't see the long list of alternate possible sentences flow through Mama's head, the big list of ideas now being drawn up internally labeled "Excuses to Make Him Leave", the quick math she had done on whether she could have used the handshake as an opportunity to throw him through the window.

Scruffy smiled warmly, and the phrase I think she likes me drifted through his head on buoyant winds.

"Well, I just thought-"

"I'm sorry, but I don't think we'll be able to celebrate with you today," Mama said, driving her sentence through his like a truck through a busy intersection. "Anya's obviously done very well, but this is just the beginning. I was planning to spend the rest of the day evaluating her academics, so we can shore up her weaknesses before the start of the school year."

Scruffy's glasses drooped, and he shrugged. "Well, keep the bottle, then. As a gift from me," he said, pressing it into Twilight's hand. "We'll do it some other time, yeah?"

"Some other time," Mama repeated. Anya giggled to herself, not able to believe that Scruffy could fall for such an obvious lie. Mama had had those sorts of thoughts before but never gone through with them. After all, there was no such thing as studying before school starts, right?

Anya looked into Mama's head for a moment, and began to grow concerned.

"Eden Scholar's Mathematics for First Years," Nightfall said, handing Anya the textbook. She accepted it, wide-eyed, mouth open about to say something, but Nightfall had already reached back to the pile on the table for the next one.

"Zemsky's History of the World for Young Learners. Berlint Publishing's Elementary Theory of Grammar. Berlint Publishing's My First Encyclopedia," Nightfall intoned, handing down volume after volume until the pile began to hide Anya's face. "Eden Scholar's Civics for First Years. A dictionary. And finally, Dr. Atom's Fun Adventures in Science. I have marked the fun illustrations with colored tabs for your convenience."

Nightfall looked under the stack of books, and saw that the stubby pair of legs supporting it was beginning to wobble. "You don't have to keep holding those, Anya."

Anya dropped the stack onto the coffee table with a noise like air being let out of a tiny balloon.

"Do I really have to read all of these, Mama?" she said.

"Of course not. They're reference materials, used to supplement your knowledge when memory fails," Nightfall said.

"Oh."

"You do, however, have to read through all these workbooks," Nightfall said, handing down another stack. "And complete all the questions, of course."

Nightfall felt that the reaction she got here was unfair. It was a much smaller stack, after all.

An hour into Anya's education, Twilight brought over a tray with cocoa and coffee.

"How are things going, Anya? Learning a lot?" he said, cheerily, channeling a children's television host filming his last show of the day.

"Mmmghmmmgh," explained Anya, head bent over her history workbook, a pile of broken pencils already growing beside her.

"The results on the evaluation quizzes I gave her are in line with the scores from her admissions exam," Nightfall said. She sat on the couch beside Anya, double checking the hard copies against her notebook. Before her on the table sat the reference books, several stacks of spare paper, a stopwatch, and now her coffee; on the other side of the couch next to her sat containers for every possible writing implement they might ever need, including an industrial-sized bucket of red pens. "She did worse, in fact. If we want her to be at the top of her class we've got a lot of work ahead of us in every subject."

"Just remember to take regular breaks. There's no need to burn her out," Twilight said, settling into the chair next to them.

"Of course, Loid. The leading theory in psychological development is that human concentration reaches its peak after twenty minutes or so, after which information retained begins to decline and overall learning is impaired."

"Oh. Good."

"That's why we're going to change subjects every twenty minutes."

Twilight gave her a look that could generously be described as "delicate". It annoyed Nightfall, somehow. Did he think she was pushing Anya this hard for no good reason? Life was full of standards you couldn't meet and goals you couldn't achieve without training and constant self-development. This was as true for Anya as it had been for Nightfall and Twilight. Some intensive studying was nothing compared to what she had gone through in her first days at WISE. She couldn't help reflecting on the memories.

A snapping noise from beside her meant that Anya had broken her pencil again. Without looking, Nightfall reached into the drum by her side and grabbed a replacement.

Two hours into Anya's education, Nightfall's coffee had gone cold.

She handed back Anya's spelling workbook, covered with red ink. "You missed six words on that last quiz. Be ready to review them."

"But we're doing math now!" Anya said, struggling to interpret a diagram of Adam selling five apples to Johnny.

"And we will be doing spelling again in an hour and fifteen minutes. So be ready to review them," Nightfall said. She looked back down at her notebook, reviewing the next step of the spelling lesson plan and trying to decide how Anya's complete inability to spell words correctly might affect things. Just then she felt the tingle on the top of her head that she knew meant Twilight was looking at her. But far from the warm glow this usually gave, instead it just filled her with the desire to keep her head bent and focused on her work.

"Anya," Twilight's voice said from behind Nightfall's bangs. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm going to keep studying, Papa," Anya said grimly. "I'm gonna be smart and understand spelling like Mama understands paintings. Mama and Papa need me to be the best super scholar the world has ever known and that's what I'll be."

This managed to bring Nightfall's head back up. She hadn't expected an answer like that, even if it was partially lifted from the hero's monologue in one of her cartoons. Maybe she understood the importance of what she was doing more than she let on. Good for her, in that case.

Anya smiled confidently, and held up the completed page in her math workbook. "How'd I do on this one, Mama?"

Nightfall took one look down.

"Poorly."

Four hours into Anya's education, some disagreements were developing.

"It's been four hours, Anya," Nightfall said.

"No!" Anya said, pointing a wary finger at the dread specter of torment that was their living room clock. "We were just doing math, and you said the big hand goes around every half-hour, and the, the small hand is the one that means minutes, and, and. That means it's been ten hours!"

"The small hand means hours. The long hand means minutes. We started with the small hand on the two, the small hand is now on the six. It's been four hours," Nightfall said, patiently. Very patiently. Nightfall had reached the stage of the evening where every moment of her internal monologue was buttressed by reminders that she was supposed to be the patient one in the room at all costs. Patience consumed her like a flood consuming a dammed river valley.

Anya chose not to pursue the argument any further, instead going back to her science workbook and this frustrating new thing she persisted in calling "the water bicycle".

Twilight had left the living room by now. He had said he was going to submit a formal mission report to WISE, but Nightfall suspected that he was just tired of watching them struggle. She couldn't blame him.

Nightfall looked down at her hands, in the middle of grading one of Anya's latest attempts. She didn't know why she bothered picking up a pen at this point, her hands were covered with so much red ink that she could have just fingerpainted her corrections.

Eight hours into Anya's education, things had reached the breaking point.

Anya's head was on the table, face first on a page from her history book explaining the formation of modern Ostania. Nightfall knew it was nearing time to wrap things up for the evening. Anya clearly wasn't absorbing much knowledge here, unless it was through her pores.

Still. There was no point in going this far without following proper procedure. "Alright, Anya. Let's take one last quiz on history, and then you can go to bed."

Sullenly, and slowly, like she had to remember all the necessary motions one at a time, Anya raised her head off the table and opened her history workbook. Nightfall watched as she filled in all ten questions. Twilight watched tensely from his chair as she handed the workbook over to Nightfall, who marked off nine incorrect answers.

Anya barely reacted as Nightfall handed the book back. "I'm sorry, Mama," she said quietly, bags under her eyes not disguising the sadness in them.

"It's alright, Anya," Nightfall said, almost as tired as Anya looked. "You're not going to do everything right on your first day. We can try again tomorrow."

"Okay," Anya said quietly. A thought slowly caught up to her behind her tired eyes, and she looked back up at Nightfall. "Mama. How long are we going to be studying tomorrow?"

"Maybe longer, since we'll have the whole day free," Nightfall said. "We'll see."

A longer moment passed before Anya opened her mouth to speak again. "I'm going to miss Bondman."

"We can tape it," Nightfall said tersely. "You can't always have fun whenever you want. We're going to have to work hard from now on."

She turned back to the table, and started putting away all the study materials they had used today. Sorting through all this mess was going to take a while. And she had only gotten started when she heard a quiet voice next to her.

"I thought this was going to be fun."

Nightfall turned back to see Anya slumped over, not moving a muscle, just staring blankly into space. "I thought having a Mama and Papa was going to be fun. This isn't fun. And now I can't even watch cartoons anymore," she said in the same quiet monotone.

"Do you want us to take you back?" Nightfall snapped. And just as the words slipped out, she realized how wrong they were.

Still sitting motionless, still keeping her head pointed straight ahead, Anya screwed up her face and began to cry.

"Anya?" Nightfall said, reaching over to her. She was stopped by a firm hand gripping her wrist. Twilight pushed her back against the couch and picked up Anya, who began to sob deeply into his shoulder.

"That's enough, Fiona," Twilight said. He reached up behind Anya's back and began stroking it clumsily, obviously not quite knowing what he was doing but determined anyway. He took a step back from the couch and turned, keeping his body between himself and Nightfall. He glared into her eye. "I've been worried about this from the start. I was hoping you would be able to adapt, but clearly I was wrong. Maybe you've forgotten, but we aren't here to make children cry."

By now Anya was heaving deeply into Twilight's shoulder, her little body shaking with every sob. Twilight continued stroking her, looking less at home holding her like this than he would holding a live bomb. "It's alright, Anya. We're not going to take you back. This is your home, I promised you. Where's your home, Anya?"

Anya reached a break between sobs. "Here," she said softly.

"That's right. Let's go, it's time for bed."

They left Nightfall alone in the living room, lit by the lamplight next to Anya's spot on the table. She rose from her seat, walked over to the kitchen, and steadily began scrubbing the red ink off her hands.

Nightfall woke on the couch when it just barely became light outside. She hadn't slept well, even as tired as she was. The couch was lumpy and not quite long enough for her legs, but there had been no question of trying to join Twilight back in their bedroom. She still remembered the words he had said to her, the way he had looked at her like she was some monster who had come out of Anya's closet. It would actually have been better if he had come back to yell at her after putting her to sleep, but the bedroom door was still closed and silent. Her chest hurt whenever she looked at it, and she could barely keep down a glass of water from the kitchen when she tried to drink.

She looked back down on the stack of workbooks on the table, still askew where Anya had left them. Nightfall picked them up and began poring over her work from yesterday, hoping she could glean some sort of insight into Anya's learning process, but mostly hoping to distract herself from the dull ache at the bottom of her stomach. The results were as terrible as she expected; Anya had not retroactively become a good student in the few hours she'd been asleep. This history quiz, terrible, only four right answers. This math question, terrible, three correct answers and one was probably a lucky guess. This grammar quiz, absolutely terrible, no right answers, and they had gone over that one right before...

Wait. Wait, no.

It was a horrible idea, but Nightfall was not trained to ignore ideas just because she didn't like them. She organized all of the worksheets by time she had made Anya take them, hour by hour, and marked down the scores. The results were immediately apparent. Math, history, grammar, science. All of Anya's scores had dropped steadily as the hours had gone along.

All of strategy Nightfall had put into their studying, the intense pressure she had put into the session. Pushing her hard enough to make her cry. It had only made her perform worse.

She dutifully began to double-check her figures, knowing she hadn't gotten them wrong but still hoping. It was a repetitive, mind-numbing process that allowed her mind to drift, and when it did it settled on one smoldering question.

What, exactly, did Nightfall bring to this mission?

Anya's role was obvious. She might not be a child prodigy, but she was cooperative and happy with Twilight as her assumed father. And Twilight was Twilight. It was no secret that he was the most effective agent currently active at WISE, possibly the most effective they had ever had. What could Nightfall hope to add to that? Who was she fooling? All of her talents were just redundant next to him. What Twilight needed wasn't an effective agent, he needed somebody who could support the domestic side of the operation. And, as the debacle tonight had readily proven, that person wasn't Nightfall.

Her eyes settled on the bottle of wine Twilight had left on the counter. His friend the informant had brought that over. If Nightfall hadn't been here, they would have spent the night celebrating.

Nightfall organized the papers, wrote some final notes for Twilight on her findings, and left them on the table for him to find. She double checked that the windows were closed, that the stove was off, and that all her personal effects were put away. Then, locking the door behind her, she walked out into the morning mist and away from Twilight and Anya's home.