Ooooh boy you have no idea what you have just unleashed.
Lydia is Ian and Mira’s first kid. She’s got her mother’s eyes and hair, but runs a little closer to her father in colouring. She’s quiet, observant, and has a dry, wicked sense of humour that always surprises people who don’t know her. She grows up to be taller than anyone expected her to be considering her parentage and lanky, given to dark colours, deep greys and muted plums. She’s a bit of a bookworm and often has a hard time shaking herself out of her comfort zone.
(Ian spends entire nights watching her when they first bring her home from the hospital, just making sure she keeps breathing.)
Violet is their second child, and she’s almost as different from Lydia as it’s possible to be. She’s darker than her mother, stockier than anyone else in her family and built like Korra, and wears her thick black hair bobbed for basically her entire life. She’s athletic, gregarious, and has a vicious love for pranks and bright colours. She likes team sports and theoretical physics.
(It takes Ian and Mira almost no time at all to figure out what’s going on when the anxiety she inherited from her father starts to manifest in near-obsessive exercising and calorie counting.)
Joy is their third and youngest, and looks nothing like either of them. She’s small and blonde and blue-eyed, round-faced and rosy-cheeked, and about five feet of pure icy Machiavellian calculation under her pigtails. She’s cute, she knows it, and she uses it wherever possible. She likes winding people up, creeping people out, existential philosophy, geometry, and vegan baking.
(Ian took one look at this tiny pigtailed orphan with wide eyes and wobbling lip, her hands clasped sweetly in front of her, giving him a gap-toothed smile and asking in a childish lisp, “Awe you going to be my new daddy?”, and recognised a kindred spirit who was going to need some guidance on how not to overdo it, and fast.)
Just as Mizar the Magnificent is a love letter to Mira, Ian makes a show for the girls as well, a Calvin and Hobbes-meets-Beetlejuice confection about three small girls and their eldritch uncle (and snarky fairy godmother who is constantly at odds with him) and their adventures (which usually quickly devolve into surreal borderline horror that alarms adult watchers and delights children).
We tend to think, at fourteen, that we can do a great many things that as adults we look back on and wonder why we ever thought we were capable of doing. This includes, but is not limited to, singing, sweet skateboard tricks, drawing manga, and talking to girls. And that’s important! If we didn’t think we could do anything, we wouldn’t, and then we’d never find the things we’re really good at, or that we’re willing to work to become good at. But inevitably, along the way, you run through a few things that you look back on later and wonder why you were so convinced you were so good at basket-weaving.
Fortunately for Ian, his youthful interest in codes comes in handy when he’s creating Mizar the Magnificent (and sowing fear and uncertainty amongst its fandom).
Quick sketch of Rosa from the Reincarnation Blues!
A winter Mira, from Reincarnation Blues.
Rosa Darling from marypsue’s amazing Reincarnation Blues. Not sure about the hair, the only description I could find was gelled, so it ended up a bit spacy.
Warning, as has become common for this fic, for mentions of eye trauma/eye injury. I promise to be kinder to people’s eyes in the next one.
…
The child huddled in the alley was probably one of the most pathetic sights Dipper had seen in his considerable lifetime. Despite the near-freezing temperatures, the boy was dressed only in a pair of threadbare pyjamas, which might once, in the distant past, have been blue. They didn’t look like they could fit a child of much more than about seven or eight, but the boy was still nearly swallowed by them, frayed cuffs stained nearly black draping over small hands and bare feet. Every bone in his shoulders, just visible through the gaping collar of his oversized shirt, and every vertebra of his birdlike neck were clearly visible. When he looked up through his limp, shaggy fair hair, for the briefest of instants before burying his face in his knees again, a look of utter abjection crossed the boy’s hollow-cheeked face.
Last chapter! There’s only a short epilogue remaining after this (and possibly a highlight reel from Santa Grenda ComicCon, but that’s a story for later)! I want to say a huge thanks to everyone who read, who left such thoughtful comments and encouragements, who made art or wrote fic(!!!!! seriously this is probably the first time I’ve received fic of my fic in this fandom and it’s such a thrill!), and an especially huge thank you to seiya234 for being my creative consultant, fact-checker, resource on anxiety, and beta reader (and Twin Peaks reference authority)!
Warning for mentions of eye trauma and cartoon ponies.
…
“Then we have a deal.”
Alcor’s grasp is firm, almost clutching, and the blue fire burns, and the forest outside with all of its eyes is burning, burning –
backup 