The Persson household had a rotation system for chores, and today, Paien and Wiseman were on shopping duty. Wiseman was, naturally, not very pleased about having to leave his precious workshop for more than a few minutes. He was the very foundation of product development! Why should he have to do chores? He was really close to figuring out how to recreate the scent of bubblegum, too!
“Father. I feel that my energy would be best used elsewhere.” Wiseman reasoned that his father could always be won over with reason and statistics! He hadn’t actually won him over with that before, but he assumed that’s how it was based on his inherited memories. “I can manufacture at least 20 bottles of perfume in the time it would take me to complete a round of shopping.”
“Go get dressed. Comb your hair, too. It’s a mess.” Norman responded without missing a beat. One of the perks of having a half-clone of a son was that he knew how he worked. He used to try to reason with his own father in the same way. “Wear your human clothes, not the lab coat.”
“You’re my least favorite dad, you know,” Wiseman grumbled with all the emotion of a brick wall. He was a more emotional version of Norman, but that didn’t really mean much. Wiseman was more emotional than his father, like a slug was faster than a snail.
“I love you, too. Go get dressed.”
[DID YOU HEAR THAT? I’M THE FAVORITE!]
Swaan’s market was always bustling with activity. Stores were for permanent and premium items, but the market was for anything and everything edible. Paien led his older brother around by the hand, excitedly chatting about all the kinds of treats they sold. “They’ve got strawberry flavored cream! Don’t that sound yummy? Can we get some?” Unlike his little sister, Paien understood that while Wiseman was his precious little brother, he was an adult, and therefore, an authority figure.
“Depends on how tasty it looks,” Wiseman nodded along. He had taken a real liking to food despite being unable to digest any of it. Sure, it was inconvenient to have to open his stomach and manually wash it out, but the ability to throw up in his mouth and eat his meal for a second time like a bird made up for it. They do that, by the way. If they eat something tasty, they throw it up just so they can eat it again. “Father said to teach you about money while we did this, so I guess we have to do some math.”
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“Why don’t ya call him papa like we do?” Paien asked as they approached the nearest fruit stall. It was run by an elderly goat woman who always gave him an extra piece of fruit for being so polite and working so hard on learning math. “He’s our papa, you know?”
“Sounds too similar to Pappa, so it’s confusing.” He shrugs, not elaborating further. The word Pappa referred to Norman’s father in his mind, and he would feel weird using it. However, he didn’t know why that was. “We need ten apples and seven pears. Count them and put them in the bag.”
“How come you n’ Rosie look like Papa, but I don’t? That ain’t fair, you know?” The harpy boy asked between bites of his strawberry cream dessert. He understood that his Papa had nothing to do with his birth, but he didn’t have anything to do with Primrose’s birth either, yet she looked like him. Even Shimri looked more like his Papa than he did, even though Shimri wasn’t even Papa’s son.
“Mmh, well, I look the same because I’m a clone.” Wiseman responded with a mouth full of food, “Rosie looks like him because she can shapeshift. She doesn’t really look like him, she just chooses to.” He didn’t know why anyone would ever want to inherit his father’s ugly mug, but maybe he had a warped view of things. “I think you look like him, too, though.”
Paien furrowed his brows, inspecting his hands just in case his skin color changed to be the same as his Papa’s. It hadn’t, of course, and his hair hadn’t turned black either. “I think you’re fibbin’,” He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, readying himself to be the butt of a joke he didn’t understand.
“Nah, not physically. You look really different in that way.” Wiseman agreed, he wasn’t gonna lie to the kid and tell him that they looked related. They really didn’t. “I meant the way you do things. Like the way you eat food. You hold your fork in the same weird way, and you both start with the thing you like the most instead of saving it for last.” He didn’t know if it was because he had been around Norman the longest, or because they were more similar than they looked, but Paien had picked up a lot of his father’s habits. “You also sneeze the same way.”
Paien hadn’t thought about it before, but he was similar to his Papa in a lot of ways, wasn’t he? Sure, they didn’t look the same, or even sound the same, but anyone who spent a bit of time with them could tell that they were family, especially when it came to sayings and exclamations. Sometimes his Papa would say something in a language he had never heard before when he was surprised or frustrated, and Paien found himself saying the same things despite not knowing what they meant. “I don’t sneeze the same. He sneezes real weird.”
“It’s the exact same. Accept it, you sneeze weird.” The big little brother teased his little big brother as they walked home from he market. It wasn’t as horrible as he thought it would be. He would even go as far as to say that it was nice.
“Nuh uh! Don’t tease me! I’m ya big brother! Ya gotta respect me!” The little big brother declared while skipping to keep up with the wide steps of his big little brother.
