"Yeah."

He'd been thinking of her as something he'd already lost. Because he had, in that other life. He was in Hell, she would go to Arborea. There weren't visitation hours.

Illusion! She's shorter than the twins but not by enough that they could see over her head without resorting to tiptoe. She's got the same exact coloration they do, of course, and there's something about her ear shape and the place where her eyebrows meet the bridge of her nose, even if for the most part the boys have Tarquin's features. Elan's put her in the kind of outfit she typically wears to work, with her long hair neatly braided back.

"When I was little, she was a waitress, but now she owns the place! She's really tidy and… kinda tricky? Like, she organizes the liquor by the third letter of the second word in the name, or by the last letter if it's a one-word name, so that it takes people who aren't her longer to find what they're looking for."

He looks at her.

"Clever," his voice says. "Keeps a burglar from stealing the whole top shelf at the same time."

That's his mom.

"Really you want a couple of good traps with that kind of system." He scrabbles out of the brain-hole he's in for a second to add, "but probably she doesn't have traps on the liquor, because that wouldn't be very nice."

Elan laughs. "I think it would also slow her down too much!"

"Probably. It's embarrassing to fall for your own trap, though generally you shouldn't invest in one you can't dodge yourself."

He looks at her.

"What's her name?"

Canonically? Elan's Mother.

"Lena! But I still call her Mom."

"Father's name is Neal. But I still call him Father." When he's feeling courteous.

"Wow, we really do have so much in common!"

A thought hits him.

"I wonder what they would have done if we were triplets. Maybe name the third one Anel?"

He giggles at his own joke.

"Lane, maybe."

A True Neutral triplet, with completely average mental statistics. Not that he's going to say either of those things, because him being Lawful Evil is a secret and bringing up that Elan is dumb as a post is not only rude but overdone.

"Oh yeah, that probably makes more sense! Plus it would get him less teasing. Oh, wait, who would take him? Do we have an aunt or uncle on our dad's side?"

"Not by blood. He has his old adventuring buddies, but they're... well. I wouldn't want to leave any of them with a kid." Not that Father showed him the same courtesy.

It's still really weird thinking of his dad, someone that his mom liked a lot and got married to and he's pretty sure still misses really badly, as a big overgrown playground bully with a gang of other bullies.

"Uh-oh, what are they like?"

"...Laurin's a psion, and she's got a kid of her own, Hannah, about our age. She's really sarcastic. She always tried to be relatable when she was babysitting, like if Father was being weird she'd roll her eyes at me like we were both his buddies and he was embarrassing us both, instead of her being his friend and me being his son. She knows a lot about magic even though she doesn't use it, she gets super intense about not wasting food, she loves chili peppers..."

"When I was... I want to say eight? She was babysitting, and she had her daughter over, and I was being annoying. And I pushed Hannah, and she fell and whacked her funny bone on a table corner, and she started crying like crazy. So Laurin hit me with a psionic power that showed me exactly what it would feel like when I died."

"She was still my favorite of Dad's friends. Because she only did that once."

Wow, that sounds really bad! Especially because Elan was expecting the psionic power to just make him feel like he hit his arm too.

"… wow. Umm… when I was that age I got into the wine cellar and tried some. I didn't like it and I dropped the bottle and spilled it everywhere. And Mom… sighed, when she found out, and put her head in her hands, and showed me how to get rid of wine stains so I could clean it up. And the next couple of times I wanted to get ice cream she said no. And that was basically it."

"Mom sounds nice. I'm glad she got out with you."

Elan tilts his head.

"We stayed in the same place, though, so wasn't it you who got out?"

"I think Nale means 'e be glad ye dinnae hafta live with yer pappy and his friends."

"Oh. Thanks. I'm not glad that you had to, though, that's sad."

Right, the dwarf is still here. Listening to Nale trauma-vomit all over his brother's pointy bard shoes.

"I don't think anybody's glad of that. Not even Father, anymore, and that took some doing."

"Did you… explain that he and his friends were really mean and he felt bad and said sorry?" asks Elan in the tone of someone who doesn't actually think this is the case.

"Mostly I just made it very clear between the ages of seven and seventeen that I hated him and would happily dance on his grave. Then I set off several tons of imported dwarven explosives in his workplace and tried to kill him with a sword. He didn't like any of that."

Elan was really not prepared for his family drama to be quite this exciting! Well, "exciting" isn't really the word he'd use. It mostly sounds kind of sad. He's worried that maybe he's making a bad impression on Nale, though. He should think of something more interesting to say.

"It sounds like he escaped you trying to kill him with a sword. Do you think that he's going to try and get revenge?"

"It's been four years. He employs literally hundreds of assassins. If he was really trying, I'd probably be dead."

"Hundreds? That sounds like overkill."

Blink.

"Literally!"