The kids’ social skills, or lack there of, seem to beg for something to be done.
By the time the crew was in the fourth grade, the people at their school were starting to recommend that their parents get them involved in some kind of hobby with the hope that it would calm the group down. The parents liked to point out that the kids had hobbies, plenty of them. All of the children were involved in martial arts. They all had their readings that they liked to do. Raziya liked to build things and drawing, Jayden liked being involved with her mother’s animals, Mayah was interested in dogs along with terrorizing her younger brothers, and Bokuden had to make sure the girls did not kill each other while also being interested making models. They were not hurting for things to keep them occupied.
Still, the parents conceded that maybe some kind of organized activity might help the kids out and keep them from getting into trouble in school and hopefully assist in making them more social. After all, Todd had his sports and he was slightly less insane than when he was their age. Maybe it was being involved in something organized and around other children that helped him out, they considered.
“What can we get them all involved in, though?” Ron wondered aloud. They were all at Kim and Shego’s house again. The kids were running around in the backyard; well, Todd was running down the street to get away from Mayah, but they were sure that he would be back soon. He was supposed to be watching the younger lot after all, and he would never forsake his duties for long.
“Well, there’s sports,” Yori pointed out. It was the first thing that came to mind because it was one of the only things that the kids did not do.
“Like what? In most sports you’re just arming them or giving them an excuse to hit someone,” Shego countered with an amused scoff. She could see them now, clobbering other kids or even each other as soon as a whistle was blown to start a game.
“In some cases, both,” Kim chimed in.
“Well, they’d like that at least,” Betty remarked with a bit of a smile. She was holding her daughter, Chyna. She had Chyna a year after having Romah. Everyone joked that she was just about the most fertile menopausal woman on the planet; she did not think that was very funny of course, especially since she was far from menopausal. She was holding Chyna just for a little while and then she was going to release the baby into the wild with the others. Chyna would simply stick close to her big sister and Mayah would keep a good eye on her. But, Betty was going to wait for Todd to come back before she let her youngest roam the backyard again.
“Oh yeah, legal beatings all around. They wouldn’t get enough of it,” Felix commented. He could just imagine them playing pee-wee hockey or something. There might actually be charges brought against them.
“Well, it would teach them teamwork,” Monique said.
“I think they get enough teamwork on their own,” Shego replied. Teamwork certainly was not the kids’ problem. They all had each others’ backs when necessary, and a lot of times when it was not. What they lacked was an understanding of going overboard and what was socially acceptable.
“Maybe something that teaches them something,” Kim suggested. She was more thinking out loud than anything else, which was why her words came out a little vague.
“Like what? Gun making?” Betty remarked with a slight laugh. Yeah, all the kids needed were to learn how to do more things, she thought sarcastically.
“I think Razi already knows how to do that,” Ron joked…well, not really joked. Felix and Monique glanced away; yeah, they were pretty sure that their daughter knew how to make a gun.
“And Jade’s got the biological weapons down for them. Not to mention, Smiley would help them if she didn’t,” Shego added in. Those kids were definitely too smart for their own good, not to mention too smart for everyone else’s good too.
“What if we got them pets?” Kim suggested out of the blue. It was a creepy suggestion coming from her considering her past.
“Don’t just say it like that and stop. Keep going because you know where the hell our minds are,” Monique said to the hero while making a circular motion with her hand as a gesture for her friend to continue on.
“Really,” Betty concurred. “And if you don’t start talking, I’m going to have to remark that I don’t think we all are going to able to go out and find lost, genius eighteen-year-old brats beaten up in boxes for all of them,” she joked.
“No, I mean, real pets. Like with the dogs and the naked moles rats and stuff. It would give them a sense of responsibility. They would come to understand that they can’t just act any old way if they had something that depended on them,” Kim explained.
“And you don’t think they might just end up killing the pet?” Monique asked. She thought that it was a big risk for them to just dump pets on their weird offspring. It could end very badly.
“I think they’d try their best not to,” the redhead answered. After all, she had seen Jayden with their animals and Jayden was very careful with all of them and quite the caretaker. She believed that the other kids would be the same because she had seen Mayah with the dogs at her house and Bokuden was great with Rufus when the whole young group was not making the naked molerat be the ninja overlord in games.
“I don’t want to deal with that if they do end up accidentally killing something,” Shego said. She did not want to see Jayden heartbroken over the loss of a pet, especially if it was the child’s fault.
“Me neither,” Ron concurred. Yori, Betty, and Dahntay nodded in agreement. They all felt the same as the super-powered woman.
“Well, what if they asked for pets? None of them would get one because we don’t want to deal with them if the pets die?” Kim asked curiously, almost in perplexed by the decisions.
“Not so much if the pets die, but if the kids kill them,” Betty explained. They were not confident in the kids being able to take care of pets to the point where they might not accidentally kill the creatures. The kids would be crushed on unthinkable levels considering how much they all loved animals and none of them wanted to deal with that.
“Well, we could help,” Kim pointed out.
“Yeah, but then it defeats the purpose,” Monique countered and the redheaded hero conceded.
“Yeah, we shouldn’t get them pets unless they ask, not as a way to trick them to being saner,” Felix agreed.
The others nodded. They were going to continue on, but Aztek charged into the living room, which was where they were all located. He typically made his presence known when he entered a room due to the way that he entered, as it was always noisy and annoying due to his high pitched voice. He was covered in mud, which did not surprise the adults. It was impossible for Aztek to go outside and not get covered in something within a minute. He might have actually been a dirt magnet.
“Mommy, Daddy, I ate ten worms!” Aztek declared proudly. Apparently, that was an accomplishment to him. His expression suddenly changed as he remembered that he was supposed to be reporting an accident. “Razi threw up too,” he said as if that was unimportant.
Monique sighed and went to go get her daughter, who had thrown up when Aztek started eating worms. Before vomiting, Raziya had been enjoying herself calling Aztek a dirty, ugly boy since he was just covered in mud for no reason at all. Aztek went back outside after making his report while Monique came inside with her child, who was looking as green as Shego at the moment.
“So, you gonna eat more worms?” Mayah asked her brother curiously as he trotted back over to their group.
“Nah, that’s boring now,” Aztek answered while looking around for something new to occupy his time.
“When was it entertaining?” Bokuden wondered out loud. He failed to see what was so great about eating ten earthworms. He did note that his little brother had been utterly fascinated with Aztek devouring the worms, but Nobunaga did not try to eat any, which Bokuden was thankful for. He doubted that his mother would be thrilled with him if Nobunaga started eating worms while he was around.
“You sure? We found a bunch more,” Jayden informed Aztek, presenting a handful of earthworms to him. Romah as with her, holding just as many worms as Jayden was. She did not even know how many there were, but she bet that he would eat them.
“I’m done.” Aztek dismissed the worms with a wave of his hand. Worms were boring now in his opinion.
“Damn it,” Jayden grumbled and she let the worms go. Every time Aztek started doing something cool, he just stopped suddenly. She hated that. Aztek had the habit of doing something and then just walking off to do something else with almost everything in his life. He always looked at it as moving on to something better once things got boring for him; things always rapidly got boring for him.
Romah decided to keep his worms. He tasted one and gagged; how the hell was his big brother eating those damned things? He let the worms go since they did not taste anywhere near good.
Aztek went to go climb on the lone apple tree that was in the middle of the yard; Kim and Todd had planted the tree back when they first brought the house. The others decided to “pretend” fight when Raziya came back; it was not really pretending, but they were not hitting nearly as hard as they would have if they were actually battling. It was a good way for them to all practice their martial arts and Todd returned to find them doing that. He did not stop them, especially since the activity was keeping Mayah away from him.
“I’ve got it!” Betty said out of the blue, which got her the attention of all of the parents in the room.
“Then tell us or shut the hell up,” Shego replied.
“They like the outside and shit. Let’s sign them up for scouts,” the one-eyed woman declared.
Everyone was silent for a moment. Their kids in scouts? It would get them outside, which they would love. They would learn a bunch of seemingly useless things, which was always up their alley; they just liked learning stuff. They would possibly learn how to be responsible and how to get others to depend on them. And they would hopefully gain better social skills.
“Okay, do we have time to do this for them, though?” Shego wondered out loud.
They were all fairly busy people. Ron still had his restaurant, which was very popular. It was popular to the point where he was trying to talk them all into investing, so he could open another restaurant. He did not know it yet, but they were all going to give him the money that he needed because they had all eaten at his restaurant and they knew what kind of place he ran. They were willing to bet that a second one would do just as good as the first.
Yori was still teaching part-time at a high school, but she was also on staff at a college’s physics department because of her work in theoretical physics. Felix was still working on his dream and getting rather far into it. He had finally figured out a way to connect the cybernetic parts that he wanted to develop to the nerve endings of the missing limbs that they would take the place of, so the new mechanical limbs would be able to be controlled by the brain like the actual limb.
Monique and Kim had involved themselves in the same project. Kim had decided to go ahead and let a studio make a show based on her life; her life as a teen mostly. They were going to take some artistic license with it, which she could understand, especially since she had not told them everything about her life for them to know what to do. They were going to consult with Kim as they made the show and for as long as it ran, but it was not going to be an exact replica of her life.
Monique was involved because Kim had suggested her for costume design. After seeing her portfolio, she was hired on the spot. They decided to also use her for consulting since she was such a good friend of Kim’s and had known her since high school, which were the years that they wanted to focus on. They were going to try to get Ron and Felix too, but the fellows were resisting a bit since they had plenty to do already.
Betty had her crime fighting organization to handle, the Go City Justice Bureau. It was always growing and she did have a lot of work to do with it as head of the department. She had hundreds of employees to look after and crime to stop. Shego, well, she had to help, but she silently admitted that she did not hate her new job like she assumed she would. She trained agents in hand-to-hand combat, trying to help them think as criminals would, and also judging what agents would work best where.
Dahntay still did his annual dog show, which was time consuming. Sure, the show itself only lasted a weekend, but there was more to it than that. There was organizing and planning that went into it. There was also the fact that he got called to other shows to act as a judge and he also competed with his dogs in other shows. He was just all over the place with his dogs and with Leonardo, who was also a favorite in shows and popular for breeding too. So, they were all busy people, but they were never too busy to not make time for their children.
“We’ll just have to figure out how to divide things up like we usually do,” Felix said as if it was nothing and to them, it was nothing. Their kids always came first.
“If Kim can still find time to save the world every now and then, I think it would be our honor to figure out how to get our kids to and from scout meetings,” Yori commented with a smile.
“She makes a point,” Dahntay conceded.
“Then they’re off to scouts,” Monique declared. God, they all hoped that they were not about to traumatize a bunch of scouts and scout leaders.
(New day)
Jayden, Mayah, and Raziya looked around the room that their mothers had left them in. It was a plain, but large room, like a gym. There were fifteen little girls around the room that appeared about their ages that were sitting at a table against a wall. The girls were making beaded necklaces and dressed like losers in the friends’ opinions. The other girls around the room where dressed in skirts with dull orange sashes across their chests and turquoise berets that matched their skirts.
“What the fuck new hell is this?” Jayden wondered aloud with a bewildered expression on her face.
“The actual Hell?” Mayah guessed, being quite serious about her answer.
“If they leave us here…” Raziya could not even finish the thought. Surely their mothers could never leave them in such a place. Her mother would never leave her some place where people were wearing such…tacky clothing.
“We’ll get them back,” the youngest of the three finished the threat.
“Shut the hell up,” Mayah said with an annoyed look on her face. “You never get back at your mothers,” she pointed out, sounding as irked as she looked.
“You don’t get back at yours either,” Jayden countered, now slightly vexed herself.
“But, I’m not always swearing revenge and dumb shit like that,” the eldest stated.
“Fuck you. You don’t swear revenge because you know your mother would kick your fucking ass,” Jayden replied.
“Like you could take your mothers,” Mayah retorted.
Jayden decided to just mock Mayah back making a hand movement like her hand was talking. The older girl slapped Jayden’s hand, which the raven-haired child did not take kindly to. Jayden pushed Mayah, who pushed back. They were both about to take swings at each other with balled up fists, but their mothers returned and stepped in between them.
“Well, you guys, what do you think?” Monique asked the girls, trying to sound happy and positive with her question to encourage the girls to give positive answers.
“Of what?” Mayah grumbled, already letting it be known what she thought through her tone.
“Of this place and your new friends,” Kim answered, also making sure to keep a positive tone, although it was hard to find her without one. The mothers wanted the girls to be comfortable in their new surroundings, which was why they were speaking in upbeat voices.
“What fucking new friends?” Jayden wondered out loud. They did not know any of those people and they damn sure did not want to. Kim sighed because of Jayden’s language; she was hoping that it would not get the girl in trouble as it had a habit of doing when she was in school.
“Those guys,” Shego pointed out, motioning to the other little girls that were making beaded necklaces.
“Fuck no,” Mayah and Jayden muttered together while Raziya just gawked in disbelief. Their mothers could not be serious, they thought. Worse yet, if their mothers were calling those girls their friends, it was very likely that they were going to be left there for some undisclosed amount of time. What had they done to earn such a punishment?!
“You guys are going to be Pixie scouts,” Betty informed them.
“How the hell can you guys do this to us?” Jayden begged to know, looking up her mothers with a pleading expression. Her friends had similar expressions on as they looked to their mothers for answers.
“You’ll like it,” Kim tried to assure her daughter with a smile. “I was a Pixie when I was your age.”
“You also jump outta planes, which you won’t let us do,” Jayden argued. Right underneath it all, she was very aware that her argument did not make much sense, but she did not care. She and her friends wanted to get out of there and they needed someway for their mothers to see that.
“Well, I was older when I started jumping out of planes. When you get older, you can jump out of a plane if you want to. For now, you’re going to be a Pixie, so go mingle,” Kim urged her daughter.
The mothers gently pushed their daughters toward the other girls and before the children could turn around to protest, they were intercepted by the Pixie den-mother. Their parents disappeared and they were forced, in their opinions, to sit down at a table with some other girls. They were then urged to make beaded necklaces like everyone else.
“Fuck that,” Jayden grumbled, folding her arms across her chest, covering the Care Bear character on her shirt.
“Come on, it’s fun,” the woman urged the girls. She had already been warned that their language was going to be “colorful.” She figured that if she had enough time with them, she would be able to clean up their language.
“Fun is building high-speed go-carts,” Raziya stated in a funk. She did make a few go-carts with her father and then she ended up crashing them with her friends. Surprisingly enough, out of all of them, Bokuden drove the worst while Jayden tended to have accidents on purpose.
“Or running with our dogs,” Mayah added in. She often went jogging with her mother, who also ran with Leonardo; Dahntay’s dogs did not seem to like running distances. Mayah, of course, could not run the same distance as her mother, but Betty carried her on her back parts of the way.
“Or snake handling,” Jayden just had to say.
The den mother could not believe what she was hearing, even though she had been told about the girls’ hobbies. She had thought that their parents were exaggerating about them, not just their hobbies, but their supposed super-intelligence and fierce anti-social behavior. She figured that they were probably just average girls that were shy and could not make friends well.
The den mother gave the trio beads and string to make necklaces like the other girls. She also got them to introduce themselves to the other girls. The other girls seemed polite enough and some of them introduced themselves to the new members. They went so far to try to help Mayah, Raziya, and Jayden in starting their necklaces. The trio were not interested in the assistance because they were not interested in making what they felt were stupid, useless things. The Pixies did not let up, though.
“We’re not doing this dumb shit,” Mayah said plainly, slightly annoyed because the group were pushing something that she and her friends felt were pointless.
“But, it’s fun,” one of the girls insisted.
“We’ll show you fun,” Mayah said and then she and her crew started scanning the room for something that would lead to some real fun. She noticed a radio in the corner and directed Raziya and Jayden’s attention to it. The pair smiled.
The trio dashed over to the radio; the other girls wondered what they were doing. Mayah grabbed the radio and threw it forcefully on the ground, smashing it open. The Pixies could not believe their eyes and looked around for the den mother, thinking that she was about to scold the newcomers, but the den mother was not around. Raziya and Jayden quickly started gathering up the parts of the brilliantly destroyed radio.
By the time the den mother came back, after speaking with the new trio’s parents a bit more, she discovered that all of the girls were no longer at their tables. She looked around the room to see a crowd gathered in the corner. Curious as to what was going on, she made her way over to the girls and saw what had their complete and undivided attention, a tiny humanoid robot.
“Now, now, now girls, we’re supposed to working on arts and crafts now, not playing with toys,” the den mother said.
“This is arts and crafts,” Mayah argued.
“No, this is a toy. You have to put it away,” the den mother informed the new trio.
“If, by arts and crafts, you mean making something artistic, creative and original, which let’s face it, bead necklaces aren’t, this is arts and crafts,” Raziya chimed in. She was holding the remote control to the little robot and making it break-dance at the moment.
“Considering the fact that we just made this from spare parts lying around,” Jayden added in with a monstrous and demonic grin.
“Spare parts lying around?” the den mother echoed in disbelief. She could not believe it because she had not been gone long enough for them to make a robot in her opinion. Hey, nine and eight year old girls should not even know how to make robots in her opinion.
“Yeah, this old ass radio,” Mayah answered and she motioned to the place that the aforementioned radio had been in.
The den mother looked over to see that the radio was indeed gone. She looked down at the robot with the hope that she would not recognize any of the pieces as assurance that she was being lied to. She did not see any semblance of the radio in the robot, but the remote had a few recognizable pieces, like the volume dial. She had a bad feeling about her new girls now.
“Today was stupid,” Raziya decided. The girls were living room of the Possible-Gooding home.
They were not really doing anything together. Jayden was occupied with her rubix cube; she actually liked the puzzle cube much more than the complicated ball puzzles that Kim typically did. Raziya was working in her sketch pad. Mayah was reading a book on dogs.
“Not as stupid as our day,” Bokuden grumbled as he and the guys entered the room. “The guys” consisted of Aztek, who was covered in dirt as usual, Nobunaga, and Romah.
“How so?” Jayden asked and then she looked up at them. “Holy fuck, what are you guys wearing?” she inquired with a stunned look on her face.
“Don’t laugh,” Aztek ordered her. The boys were wearing “Dragon Scout” uniforms; it would seem that the local troop would take kids of any age as long as the boy could speak and was potty-trained, which was how Romah and Nobunaga ended up being accepted.
The Dragon Scouts were the boy version of the Pixie Scouts. They were associated with each other, both claiming that they would turn young boys and girls into responsible, acceptable members of society. Yeah, that claim was going to be put to the test hard considering the group of misfits that just joined up with them.
“What the hell?” Mayah said as she looked up at her brothers. Raziya was busy laughing because of the outfits the guys were in. They had on aqua-colored shorts that just met the tops of their knees, sea-green short-sleeved shirts, but best of all were crimson kerchiefs tied around their necks.
“We had to join the Dragon Scouts,” Nobunaga muttered in anger while practically ripping his shirt off. He tore off several buttons while doing so. He felt like such a jerk in that outfit, so he could imagine how stupid his big brother had to feel. Romah was of similar thinking.
The girls really wished that they could break down laughing, but they could really feel the boys’ pain. So, instead of making fun of the fellows, they just let the subject go. The boys were grateful for that and decided to flop around the living room like the girls.
Romah went over to Mayah and got her to read aloud to him. Aztek started bugging Raziya about giving him paper and a pencil, so he could draw too; she was not interested in giving into his demands. Nobunaga decided to busy himself by jumping on the sofa, even though he knew he was not supposed to; hey, it was fun and there were no adults around at the moment to say anything. Bokuden decided to help Jayden out with the puzzle cube, which he thought was very interesting, although he did prefer the ball puzzles that Jayden’s mom usually had. He was not very good with the ball puzzles, but he liked watching Kim or Todd solve them.
“Well, that didn’t go as bad I thought it would,” Betty remarked. She, Kim, Shego, Monique, Yori, Ron, and Felix were inside the kitchen. Most of them were hunting through the cabinets, looking for goodies that they knew Shego kept the kitchen full of considering how greedy her family was.
“It almost went sour,” Felix commented; he was one of the hunters. He was busy going through the fridge while he was talking.
“How so?” Shego asked curiously. She was not bothered by everyone rummaging through the kitchen because she was used to it by now. She was parked at the little kitchen table.
“They tried to give the boys those Swiss army knives,” Ron answered; he was another hunter and currently occupied in finding items for a sandwich that he would share with his sons once he finished making it.
“They were going to give No a knife? Why not just drive the troop off a cliff?” Monique remarked. She had located some barbeque potato chips and was tearing into them as she spoke.
“Well, giving No the knife would save on gas,” Shego quipped with a bit of a laugh.
“Well, there’s always the chance that Bo would’ve stopped him before he killed everyone,” Felix joked.
“It doesn’t matter. Aztek would’ve gotten to whoever No missed,” Shego commented with a bit of a laugh.
“Yeah, but there’s always the fact that Aztek would’ve gotten bored a few stab wounds in and just walked off for some candy or something like that,” Kim chimed in. She was at the table with her spouse and eating some cookies. She figured since everyone else was eating junk, she might as well join in.
“That kid is damn fickle,” Monique concurred.
“Easily distracted too,” Shego added.
“Leave my little boy alone,” Betty scolded them. Sure, Aztek was dirty, fickle, and easily distracted, but he was a sweet child; Raziya would probably say otherwise.
“So, things didn’t go sour with the girls?” Felix asked in a bit of a surprise tone. Like everyone else, he noted a while ago that the girls were a lot wilder than the boys collectively. It was probably because the boys had Bokuden to keep them in check as he was the oldest and they respected him while the girls had no one to keep them in check if Bokuden was not around; hell, Bokuden seemed to get sucked into their madness more often than not when he was with the girls.
“Well, we left them alone for the most part. When we came back though, there were a few minor controversies,” Kim reported.
“Minor?” Ron echoed. ‘Minor’ with those girls could be a wide variety of things, but typically meant that they did not get sent to the principal’s office for doing something.
“Well, it seemed that they destroyed a radio to make a robot, which wouldn’t have been so bad because they said they needed something better to do than making bead necklaces, but they didn’t stop there. They ended up getting into an argument about controlling the robot, which included Jade punting the damn thing while Mayah and Razi got into a grappling contest. Jade jumped in after kicking the robot’s ass. Mayah picked Jade up and slammed her onto a table while Razi leaped on Mayah’s back and got her in a choke hold until she was all red in the face,” Shego reported.
“So, pretty much one of their classic rumbles,” Felix said with a shrug.
“Yeah, they were good at the end, like always, but the lady in charge was a bit shocked by it all,” Betty commented.
“Well, it could’ve been worse,” Monique said with a shrug too. The girls had a long list of antics that outweighed one of their usual nonsense fights. Hell, the kids had a long list of antics point blank, together and individually, including the best behaved of them: Bokuden.
“That’s true,” Yori agreed.
“I think we should just look at it as lucky that they all made it through the first day,” Ron said. Everyone nodded in agreement. That had to be a good sign that the kids had not all been booted from the scouts the first day. Maybe they would actually all make good scouts.
Next time: the kids go camping with their scout troops.