Chapter Five
And so Asima began teaching again.
She would direct the online classes, giving lectures from her computer at home, grading assignments sent to her through email or the school website, making up powerpoints and little instruction videos. The girls interrupted her a lot during online lectures at first, toddling through the room into the camera behind Asima to much student laughter.
Asima would whirl around. "No!" she squealed, embarrassed. "Not now! Time to go!" She would pick up one or more of her daughters and hurry them out of the room. Luckily, most of her college students seemed to find the interruptions hilarious instead of annoying.
Eventually, the girls did learn to understand the words "Mother is working." Strangely? This did not always stop the interruptions. As they got older, Asima's daughters would enter the room behind her just to make a weird face and a victory sign at the camera, then stroll or run back off. This became one of her students' favorite parts of learning with Asima, and soon her students each semester knew all of her daughters by face and name, and would sometimes greet them when they strolled casually through with a snack. The young Tammam sisters, according to an amused Grandma Umeiko, were somewhat famous around the physical Tokyo university campus Asima no longer visited.
Asima pretended to be exasperated, but really both her family and her job brought her great joy. She genuinely enjoyed teaching - for a while she'd forgotten just how much. It brought her great satisfaction, and she found that now that she was more relaxed, she had more humor and tolerance for student foibles. And this situation was the perfect compromise. The rest of the time she wasn't on her computer, she was with her daughters at home teaching them all the things she thought they needed to know.
Gaming was important. She took them through beginning strategy games, with an especial emphasis on chess and strategy- and roleplay-based video games. She taught them from a young age to think through every single individual move, competing against each other and sometimes even against Asima herself within the safe confines of their own home, usually sitting on the floor in front of the TV or over a table.
None of the girls were naturals when it came to gaming, not even Mai. Mai got impatient and frustrated easily with slower strategy games, shouting and refusing to play anymore, or losing her temper when she lost. Asima had to talk her through getting back into the game over and over again, keeping calm and even losing, when she lost, with dignity.
"Relax and keep serene," Asima would advise her. "Focus on thinking through the game. And remember, everyone loses sometimes. They key is to losing with grace. Next time you might win, remember, and you would of course want the other person to lose with grace."
Learning to keep a hold on her patience and temper was a slow process for young Mai. She had to find that fine line between intentness and calm concentration, and Asima tried to help her find it as best she could. "Intensity is good, but so is serenity," she would say. "Those two things together make for a deadly player. Never let your emotions get the best of you in a strategy game."
Shizuka had a different problem. She went slowly and got lost in lackadaisical daydreams. "I move my knight to, oh look at that bird out the window…" she would say dreamily, smiling, and her mother and sisters would become exasperated. Other times she would talk about the fascinating patterns the players made on the chessboard, or begin postulating on the troubling mental state of the characters in the video games. She was highly amusing, but slow reflexes and a wandering mind did not a good gamer make.
"Your job is to learn to focus on the right things," said Asima, somewhat pained. "Keep that cheerful, serene happiness and that cold inner strength. That's good. But combine them into a brave, focused, even-tempered person."
The normally brilliant Anzu turned out to be horrible at strategy. She lost and lost, over and over again, her mother painstakingly teaching her the ways of strategically organizing her moves that did not come naturally to her anymore than physical talent did. Anzu was a hard worker, however, and a fierce studier with a clever, crafty, vicious side and a bossy self confidence.
"You think through everything," said Asima. "Your job with gaming is to learn how to think through things in the right way."
Quirky, loud, and intensely concentrating, Anzu put her focus on strategizing her games, not just doing the moves that made the most sense in the moment. She shouted with an excited thrill of victory on the rare occasions when she won. Over time, those occasions became less rare.
Slowly, they grew.
Mai became fiery and acid-tongued but calm, smirking, sort of deadpan. Fire calmed by ice, an eerie lack of expression but an acidic wit and a fierce desire to win, became her calling card.
Shizuka became a bright, cheerful, serene girl with a cold inner fire, proudly different, but she also never lost sight of the present. She was present, in the moment, with good reflexes, surprising wisdom, compassion, and perception of people, and a deceptively clever and imaginative mind and thrill of competition - playful competition - that could be dangerous if one wasn't careful.
Anzu took her vicious, self confident craftiness and loud mouthed, quirky brilliance into the gaming arena. A fast thinker and a better strategist, capable of figuring out things no one else could, thinking on her feet, puzzling her way through any strategy, and noticing the tiniest of details, Anzu - to the surprise of her sisters - turned out in some ways to be the most dangerous and delightedly competitive gamer of all. She smirked as she destroyed her opponent.
Also came magic. "No one else can know you are capable of magic," Asima warned them from the beginning. "The magic in this family is a big secret. That's very important." When the girls had agreed they understood, Asima unlocked her trunk full of ancient Arabic spellbooks with a thrill of the old, instinctive fear. "I took these with me when I escaped from my family in Egypt," she whispered, almost with shame, to her adopted daughters. They knew all four of them had come from different families, so they nodded solemnly, accepting.
Asima's fears were soon waylaid.
She taught them Arabic. They learned how to speak it first, from a young age, but as they got older they learned to read it as well. As early as they started it, they gained a perfect accent. They also learned ancient Arabic, which was in some ways quite different from its modern counterpart, memorizing language and symbols and hieroglyphs. As they learned this alongside Japanese, as young children their minds soaked up the language and they learned very much very fast. This helped them read Asima's spellbooks for themselves.
She also taught them Egyptology, as she did her school students. They soaked up information about Egypt itself, particularly its history and its ancient counterpart.
In magic, she started them out with small things: using magic to move things around, create sparks or flints of ice that swirled around in their hand, transforming and rejecting tiny objects. Once they had come into contact with their magic, it was not uncommon to see a random toy, vase, or object floating aimlessly around the house, sometimes having grown furry legs or malformed into a strange shape. They also learned how to make beginner's potions, sleeping tinctures, tiny healers, tiny attackers - light kid's stuff, really. And she taught them to become in touch with the other world, with their subconsciouses - just to start out with feeling beginning visions for now. They put each other through beginning hypnosis and healed each other's cuts and bruises with flashes of light magic.
She did not teach them about the Netherworld or the ancient destiny legends and prophecies yet. Nor did she tell them the secret of why she had adopted them and taught them all of this, and as young children this was their whole world, so they never thought to ask. They did not question their world anymore than they comprehended destiny or death. All of that would come later.
Anzu was not a natural at magic, but she was an extraordinarily hard worker. She memorized advanced texts at young ages, and came up with increasingly clever uses for magic as she spent countless hours on it the way she did on gaming. Anzu channelled all of her brilliance into her potions, visions, and spells. Anzu was eager, practically soaking up every piece of knowledge she could get her hands on, working and practicing constantly. She seemed determined to become a jack of all trades, at least somewhat good at everything. She was also, it must be added, as crafty in magic as she was in games. With private magic duels in the house against her mother or her sisters, she was an extremely clever and shameless cheater.
Mai also fought dirty, but in a more direct and upfront way. Smirking and deadpan, fire in her eyes, she was absolutely vicious. She had a particular flair for the nastier and more controlling side of magic. The darker side of magic was her true forte, and from a young age she could inflict some extremely nasty attacks with skill. She was talented, and she believed in having nerve and never being timid or intimidated by anything. She was fiercely competitive and highly instinctual. This, naturally, made her deadly in magic duels and all nature of combat. She had raw power, even from a young age as a tiny person.
Shizuka was infuriating to magically duel, because she never lost her serene, level headed, smiling playfulness. This made her easy to underestimate. But Shizuka could do clever things that no one else had ever thought of before. Someone would send an attack and she would conjure a wall of twirling butterflies, shaped like a school of fish, to take the attack in her place. She was highly inventive, and Asima was often left wondering, "Where did she learn to do that?" She was good at seeing the things no one else did, at observing people and sensing hidden opportunities, and she had a particular flair for visions, dreams, and for all manner of light magic, including physical and psychic healing. She had moments of solemn calm, mixed with moments of cold, icy fury, and in both states she could be surprisingly deadly.
As their magic got stronger, so did their souls and their ability to handle powerful magical force. Asima was preparing them for the Shadow Realm.
As they were all horrible, strategic cheaters, magic duels as well as strategy games became very interesting. Each girl would try to outwit the others, Shizuka smiling competitively, Mai smirking, Anzu shouting in victory. They loved three-way duels, where inevitably one would always end up paralyzing the other two.
They soon, learning from each other, came onto an even keel. They were all, in different ways, of equal ability, and they knew each other so well that fights became interesting and furious, though (usually) good-natured. Sometimes, when they lost their temper with one another, Asima would make them fight it out in the house in a "safe" environment, upping the stakes of whatever magic duel or game they decided to play, forcing them to play calmer and better through anger and pressure and also upping the ante.
And of course, on a more boring note, Asima also registered as a homeschool teacher and put them through homeschooling.
She tutored them in everything from reading and writing to science, mathematics, and history. She was a strict instructor, having little time for creative or busy work, and expecting much from her young pupils. Here, in the school environment, she became severe. The flip side of this was that they progressed quickly in an academic environment and got lots of one on one time with a very good, always professional teacher.
All were quite intelligent and soon learned the art of professionalism, so over time as they learned the rules, rigor, and self discipline of school, Asima became very pleased with them.
They grew into older children amid this big fancy house and their beautiful shared bedroom, being sisters both fighting and loving, running around and having fun, playfully interrupting their Mother's work, doing chores and eating healthy foods, practicing gaming, magic, and two languages with their Mother, doing homeschool work with their Mother, playing with their indulging Grandma Umeiko, and they were allowed to play outside quite a lot. As they grew older, Asima also became less strict on the kinds of movies and the amount of TV they could watch, and they became better at hiding the secret of their magic even from Grandma. As they had grown up knowing they were adopted, they never once doubted the genuineness of their loving family. They took summer vacations to the seaside, celebrated holidays and birthdays together as one big five-person family unit. They started drinking tea, coffee, hot cocoa, enjoying dessert. They got their first electronics.
They grew into their own people, slowly becoming old enough that they would begin to remember events from their childhood for the rest of their lives. In their conscious mind, their earliest world had always been like this, and they didn't know it was unusual - not yet.
Asima was not sure if she would ever tell them about their family origins. She didn't want to hurt them, and thought this would protect them from harm.
Asima loved her daughters. They had changed her for the best, and she was proud of them. As they continued to grow, that never changed.
Author's Note: This is the last Asima POV / Asima centric chapter, at least for a long time. As you can see, I've been switching slowly over to the three girls, and next chapter we will start focusing mostly on them, their lives, and their thoughts. That transition will be complete.