I blame the lingering sunstroke.

(1) cookies

Ashni is six the day she learns what 'adopted' means. What it really means, not what Momma and Daddy say it means. She comes home from school and goes straight to the kitchen, pulls out sugar and flour and chocolate chips and begins cracking eggs with violence. Momma asks what's wrong, Nini doesn't have the sense not to tell her, and Momma must tell Aunt Mary Beth because two days later Sean apologizes to Nini and says it's because Aunt Mary Beth talked to Sean's mother. Meanwhile Momma and Daddy sit her down and explain the difference between the two words and how very much they love her and how rarely they remember and how little they care that she's not their born child, Lucy and AJ let her join in the games they've said before she's too little to play, and somebody calls Colorado Springs. A week later when Uncle Spencer's job lets him come off radio silence, he tells her again how Nini's mother went MIA a little after Nini was born and Great-Uncle Al was missing longer than Nini's mother has been (but Great-Uncle Asher, Nini knows, never came home) and Nini's father didn't think he could take care of Nini alone, and he knew enough about Clan Mitchell to know they'd love Nini like their own and he loved Nini enough to give her away. Just like Aunt Mary Beth and Aunt Danielle.

Nini believes Momma and Daddy, but she likes Uncle Spencer too much (he teaches her Arabic) to tell him everything he's just said is one of the words he wasn't supposed to teach her. Everybody she can think of who was adopted the Mitchells either married one or didn't have any family worth knowing beforehand. Her aunts' four parents got together every month so both pairs could see their born daughters. Nini's father sends postcards and calls her 'firefly', maybe because he doesn't even know her name.

Sean's right. 'Adopted' means 'abandoned'.

(2) a papier-mache Lego cross-stitch sketched nikomak: printed-off-the-Internet-and-glued-to-posterboard picture of the Romulus-and-Remus-with-the-wolf statue

(3) more cookies

(4) words might never hurt the stupid and poorly-read, breaking bones with sticks and stones might get her in trouble more than bad enough for the punishment to begin with "Ashni Eurydice Mitchell!", and fists might be less satisfying than either as well as hard on her hands, but fists do make nice bruises

Nini gives serious consideration to doing her book report on the Metamorphoses, but it's just so hard to decide which part to illustrate, and anyway it hasn't been quite long enough since the fistfight over how special Jesus can be for coming back from Hades when Orpheus (and lots of other people) did it first. So she goes for Life of Romulus instead, which she is relating to rather strongly at the moment; her father's quarterly postcard came yesterday. This year he's in Rome. 'Adopted' still means 'abandoned', and she and Romulus were both found by she-wolves—

She is rather more cheerful after she recovers from the fit of giggles instigated by the thought of someone referring to her as being raised by wolves; it was Sean she scuffled with over Orpheus, and Sean, Momma assures her, really was raised by wolves. The entertainment value of the thought carries her through a lot of the frustration of working on overambitious visual aids, and baking and running take care of the rest. (Come middle school, she is joining the track team.)

Nini makes sure to look at Sean when she's presenting her report and gets to the bit about Romulus and Remus being the sons of a god. She doesn't actually care who Sean worships and she doesn't much care why, and she's as Methodist as the rest of the Family herself, but it's a public service to make sure everyone around her has "why"s that make sense. Sean's don't.

She calls Aunt Theo later to practice her Greek and complain about her teacher. She knows Aunt Theo (unlike Mr. Grace) will believe Nini when she says she was too reading Plutarch.

(5) salad

(6) an escape

Ashni hears the doorbell ring, hears Daddy shout "Cammie!", and drops knife and carrot to join the mad rush to the door: it's been fifteen years since Aunt-Cammie-who-disappeared (and there aren't any other Cammies she can think of) disappeared, and Gran'ma hadn't given up hope that her daughter would come home, but Gran'ma is also the only one who thinks Great-Uncle Asher might still be coming home. "It's Carrie," the woman says, "I still don't remember anything before, well," and trails off, which means one of the only-possible-in-fiction stories about Aunt Cammie right before she disappeared is true. Ashni wonders if the other one is too; bracelets that make one disappear would be very helpful for every time she realizes she has again proven herself resident in Crazyville, population Ashni.

"Where have you two been?" Daddy demands right after the mandatory invitation to the kitchen, and a different voice says "Here, there, and everywhere." This must be Uncle Daniel who disappeared with Aunt Cammie, and those two thoughts slam together with 'invisibility bracelets can't be less possible than the Stargate' and her Uncle Daniel is the Doctor Daniel Jackson?

Adunatos.

"Is Ashni here?" Aunt Cammie-Carrie asks, which shuts up all questioners because they've been gone a decade and a half and Ashni's twelve. Ashni ducks around Lucy to get where they can see her.

"Let's talk in private, Hotaru," Uncle Daniel suggests, and Ashni stares, then goes to the nearest not-kitchen room because she wants to know how these people know her names. To say nothing of where her father's last postcard came from and what it said.

The next thing she knows, she is slamming the door of her room behind her and shoving her desk chair under the doorknob because there are crazy people in her house. The doorknob rattles. "Ashni, I'm sorry!" the man who says he's her father shouts through the door.

Adunatos and this makes six of those before dinner; if her room had a looking-glass she'd have fallen through by now.

She scribbles I don't care, I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me in her diary, in English because this bit (unlike the rest of it, which she's rendered gibberish by writing in Arabic or Greek and transliterating into the other one) is meant to be read eventually, and leaves it on her desk. Amaterasu's cave only had one entrance. Amaterasu was an idiot and Ashni has a window. She also has a half-full water bottle from her last practice (Momma abhors her habit of leaving the bottle in her room, and the water's warm, but it'll be a while before she dehydrates), a bank account with enough money to get her a Greyhound ticket to Aunt Theo and Aunt Ella Mae (she was saving for really good track shoes), a backpack that will hold a couple sets of clothes and a couple carefully if hastily chosen books, and a convenient distraction on the other side of the door.

She's three houses down the road, stealing Internet to find out exactly where the Greyhound station is, when Thalia the laptop tells her she has a call: it's Uncle Spencer, and isn't it convenient that he's onworld and at a computer right now. "They're not lying, Nini," he says.

"Which means you did," she snaps back, and hangs up.

Two minutes after that, it rings again, and this one's Momma, but it's the crazy man's voice saying her name.

"You left me on a mountain!" She realizes she's speaking Greek a moment after she remembers she is running away so as to not talk to the crazy people.

"Orpheus didn't dare look back," he answers. "Not until he knew they were both safe. That's why I named you Eurydice."

"'Ashni' was my idea," the crazy woman says. "Prettiest name we found that means 'lightning', and Lightning's the name I remember having longest."

'Adopted' means 'abandoned', a six-year-old voice taunts in her memory. She listens to an explanation of several more impossible things, to four people who say they're all her parents and they all love her, to a great deal of vaguely sensical nonsense (the invisibility bracelets are real, stolen off people who tried to kidnap Cammie, and Cammie had to run [like Ashni had to run] and Daniel couldn't leave her, and it's hard enough to raise a child when home doesn't move at irregular intervals and neither of them knew how), and she can't believe anything these crazy people say, but Momma and Daddy and Uncle Spencer believe them, and...Rhea Silvia didn't have a choice about keeping her sons.

Maybe Sean was wrong.

(7) friends

The reason Doctor Daniel Jackson was on SG-1, Ashni has discovered, is he knows everything about everything and is perfectly happy to share. She hasn't found out what she and Carrie have in common yet, but there's sure to be something. In the meantime, she can work on figuring out why her father looks so strange when she compares her mother to Athena.

[Oh, yes: this follows "Lonely is a Cold Hard Fact.]