Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ The Magicians of Gundam Wing ❯ The Winner Resource Satellite ( Chapter 7 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Loyal Readers, I apologize in advance because this chapter turned into a prolonged introduction to the next chapter! When I started out, there was supposed to be a lot more stuff in this chapter, but I kept not getting around to it and then I hit my minimum chapter length threshold and decided I couldn't put in all the other stuff I had originally planned. So if this chapter seems a little boring, I'm sorry! And I know I've been neglecting Wu-Fei! He was supposed to turn up in this chapter, but then so was every one else and I never got around to that part. So I promise, everyone will be in the next chapter and lots of exciting new things will happen. Pinky-swear!
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Chapter 7: The Winner Resource Satellite
The Winner Resource Satellite loomed large ahead of the shuttle and Quatre slowed down.
“That's my home, Roku. This is where my family lives.”
“It's big.” Roku, in human form, stared at the satellite. “May I land the shuttle?”
Quatre smiled. “Not this time, dear. It's a little tricky. It's better if you just watch the first time.”
“Ok.”
Quatre flipped on the radio. “This is Quatre Reberba Winner requesting permission to dock.”
Welcome home, Quatre! Permission granted!
“Thank you.” Quatre guided the shuttle through the gaping doors of the hanger bay and executed a neat landing. The doors rumbled shut as he and Roku unlatched their seatbelts. “Now remember, Roku,” Quatre said, “try not to change shape in front of anyone, ok? We're trying to keep a few secrets, if possible.”
“I'll try, Mama.”
Quatre patted him on the head. “Let's go.”
Outside in the hanger bay, people were already clustered around the shuttle, smiling and waving.
“Welcome home, Quatre!”
“It's good to see you, Master Quatre!”
“Will you be staying long, Master Quatre?”
Quatre tried valiantly to greet everyone and answer all the questions. But inevitably, someone asked that question:
“Who is that with you, Quatre?”
Quatre swallowed. “Here we go…” he muttered under his breath. Out loud, he said: “This is my son, Roku.”
His statement was greeted with a moment of dead silence. And then all hell broke loose. Everyone began talking at once.
“What?”
“He's who?”
“Did you say your son?”
“How could that be?”
“When did you have a son?”
“Who is his mother?”
“No, who is he really?”
“Did you adopt?”
“Where's he from?”
Roku edged around behind Quatre's back and Quatre held up his hands and made shushing motions to try to restore order and quiet.
“Please, everyone!” Quatre called out. “If you would just be quiet for a moment and listen. Please!”
After a few moments, silence fell and everyone stared at Quatre expectantly, or craned their necks to get a better look at Roku, who was now almost entirely hidden behind Quatre's back, with just the edge of his face and one eye peeking out.
“Umm…” Quatre said, a little flustered now that everyone was waiting for him to say something. He spoke in a rush. “Let me just say that Roku is my offspring, I gave birth to him myself, and he received genetic material from multiple fathers.” He smiled brightly. “So you see, he's my son.”
Among the crowd staring at Quatre and Roku, there were more mouths hanging open than closed.
“Uh…” someone finally managed. “You, uh, gave birth to him… yourself?”
“That's right!” Quatre continued to smile brightly.
“Was it some kind of genetic experiment?”
“Sort of.” Quatre reached behind him to put an arm around Roku's shoulders and coax him back out into the open. “It was sort of an accident that just worked out really, really well.”
“An accident?”
“Yeah. Say hello to everyone, Roku.”
“Hello,” Roku said in a small voice. “It's nice to meet everyone.”
There was a chorus of “Hello”s and “Nice to meet you”s and Roku favored them with a tentative smile.
“He's really cute!” someone from the back exclaimed.
“He certainly is,” said a woman's voice and Quatre turned toward her with a smile.
“Mirabel!” Quatre stepped forward and embraced her. “Roku, this is one of my sisters.”
Roku stepped forward and held out his hand. “How do you do, Aunt Mirabel?”
Mirabel shook his hand with a fond smile. “I'm very pleased to meet you, Roku. This is an unexpected and pleasant surprise.” She turned to Quatre. “I look forward to learning how you produced a boy this age without anyone knowing.” She spoke in a calm, measured voice, but her eyes were alight with curiosity.
Quatre grinned weakly. “Yes, well, it's an interesting story…”
“I imagine so.”
“It should probably wait until the whole family is present.”
“Of course. You can tell us the story over dinner tonight. I know our sisters will be as eager to learn as I am.” Her eyes sparkled.
“No doubt,” Quatre agreed faintly.
Quatre and Roku accompanied Mirabel out of the hanger and everyone else went back to whatever they had been doing before.
“How long will you be staying, Quatre?” asked Mirabel.
“I have about a week before I need to get back to work.”
“Oh? Will Roku be staying here with us?”
“Ah, no,” Quatre said quickly. “I prefer keeping Roku with me.”
Mirabel was surprised. “But isn't your work rather dangerous for a boy his age? How old is Roku, anyway?”
“Roku is nine years old. And he can take care of himself very well. These days, I mostly just ensure peace. That's not very dangerous.”
Mirabel lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “I find that hard to believe.” But she was interrupted from pressing the point any further by the arrival of more sisters. Quatre began introducing them all, but after the first dozen or so, Roku began to look a little dazed.
“Will my aunts be very offended if I don't remember all their names right away?” Roku whispered to Quatre. “There sure are a lot of them.”
“I don't think so,” Quatre whispered back. “Just call them Auntie, or something like that, when you're not sure.”
“Ok.”
At dinner though, Mirabel was clearly determined to get to the bottom of Roku's creation and none of Quatre's other sisters seemed inclined to interrupt her. They were all clearly very curious.
“So,” said Mirabel, “I believe I heard you say you gave birth to Roku yourself. How did you manage that? And given that you were clearly not pregnant when I last saw you a month ago, how is it that he's nine years old now? I shouldn't need to point out that he's over half your age.”
“Um, well, you see,” Quatre stammered, “there were some special circumstances around his birth…”
“I can imagine.”
“And so, in the end, he ended up like this.” Quatre produced a sickly grin.
Twenty-nine pairs of eyes stared at him. No one was buying it.
“Perhaps a little more detail would help,” Mirabel suggested pointedly.
Roku was happily stuffing food into his mouth. “Tell them about when you were a girl, Mama.”
“Mama?” several of his sisters echoed.
“You were a girl?” Mirabel questioned.
Quatre hung his head. “Only for a few days,” he mumbled.
“What was that?”
“I was only a girl for a few days,” Quatre repeated more loudly. “But during that time, I, ah, became pregnant and, ah, gave birth to Roku later on.”
“How interesting.” Mirabel looked around at her sisters. “I've heard of some amphibian species that can change sex in the presence of a single sex environment, but I've never heard of that happening with humans.”
“It wasn't like that!” Quatre exclaimed hastily. “I had… well… an accident and…” he trailed off.
“A sex-changing accident?”
Quatre put a hand over his face.
“Mama, you're making it sound really weird.”
“Out of the mouths of babes…” someone muttered.
“Ok! Ok!” Quatre exclaimed. “It did start with an accident, but I can't explain that part. We crashed and somehow traveled through time. We ended up in Arthurian England and I studied magic with Merlin. I was trying a new spell and accidentally turned myself into a woman. That's the whole truth.”
The sisters exchanged glances.
“All right,” Mirabel said. “There are clearly some plausibility gaps here, but we'll overlook them for now. I also think I heard you say that Roku had multiple genetic fathers.”
Quatre flushed. “Oh, that! Yes, well, as to that…” he trailed off again.
One of his sisters leaned forward. “Do you mean to say you had intercourse with multiple partners in the few days you were a woman?”
Another sister spoke up. “But having multiple partners does not result in multiple genetic contributors.”
“That's true,” said a third sister.
“I agree,” said a fourth. “Some kind of recombinant reproduction would have to occur.”
“Precisely!” said the second sister.
“That normally doesn't happen in the human womb,” said the fourth.
“No, but the magic might have played into it somehow.”
“Assuming one chooses to believe in magic.”
“Our little brother was pregnant.”
“Good point.”
“So, assuming some kind of magical contribution and multiple partners, a human child could have multiple genetic fathers.”
Everyone looked at Quatre again.
“So who were they?”
“What?” Quatre, feeling panicked, had lost the thread of the conversation.
“Roku's fathers? Were they anyone we know, or were they men from the past?”
“Oh, lord,” Quatre moaned. He hid his face in his hands.
Roku piped up again. “I have four papas: Papa Heero, Papa Duo, Papa Trowa and Papa Wu-Fei.”
“Aren't those your four fellow Gundam pilots?” Mirabel asked.
Quatre nodded without taking his face out of his hands.
“So,” continued Mirabel, “if you became a woman unintentionally, why did you decide to have a child? Or was that also unintentional?” She smiled sweetly at Roku to take any hurt out of her question.
“Don't ask me that!” Quatre mumbled into his hands.
“Oh dear!” someone exclaimed. “Were you violated?”
“Papa Duo says Mama was a very pretty woman,” Roku volunteered. “He said they all liked Mama very much that way.”
“Sounds like they liked him really well!” someone whispered loudly and snickered.
Quatre groaned.
“But wait a minute,” another sister spoke up. “Didn't you say you were a woman for just a few days? When was Roku born?”
“It took less time than normal.” Quatre dropped his hands onto the table in resignation. “We used magic to accelerate the pregnancy. A side-effect of the magic caused Roku to age unusually fast for the first few months. He's really about seven months old.”
“Seven months!”
“That's amazing!”
“Can we take a genetic sample?”
“No experiments!” Quatre declared sharply.
“But…”
“Absolutely not! No one's doing any experiments on my little boy. Period.” Quatre glared around the table.
Roku leaned over to Mirabel and spoke softly. “Mama's a little protective. It's better not to argue. He turns people into stuff when he gets angry.”
Mirabel stared at him. “Excuse me?”
Quatre groaned again. “Roku, what did I say about keeping a few secrets?”
“You said I shouldn't change shape.”
Quatre put his hands over his face again. “This is even worse than the Maganac base.”
“Roku can change shape?”
“Yes, but Mama said I shouldn't do it in front of people.”
“What do you change into?”
“A tiger, mostly. I was born a tiger.” Roku stuffed more food into his mouth.
Everyone stared at him and then looked at Quatre.
“He was born a tiger?” Mirabel questioned. “How did you manage that?”
Quatre wondered why he had never learned a teleportation spell, so he could escape all those curious, staring eyes. “I wasn't about to give birth on my own,” he mumbled. “It hurt. So, I… well… I changed into a tiger because I thought it would be easier, and it was, but then Roku came out as a tiger cub, so he tends to stay in that form.” Quatre clamped his mouth shut, determined not to say any more.
Mirabel turned to Roku. “Can you show us?”
“Sure.” Roku shifted into his tiger form.
Everyone gasped in surprise and amazement.
“Why not?” Quatre muttered. “Why not let all the cats out of the bag?”
“But Quatre,” one of his sisters said, “doesn't that mean you can change shape, too?”
“Yes, but I only do it when I need to.”
“So you can really do magic?”
“I told you, I studied with Merlin for several months. I can do all kinds of stuff.”
“I do hope you'll show us something while you're here,” Mirabel said with gentle encouragement. “I can understand why you were trying to keep this a secret, but we're family. Family shouldn't have secrets from each other.”
“At this rate,” Quatre said with a mournful sigh, “I won't have any secrets and you'll likely see a whole lot more than you bargained for.”
“Just don't turn anyone into anything, Mama,” Roku admonished with his usual sweetness. “Papa Trowa gets upset when you do that.”
Quatre laughed. “I'll be good, Roku. But you had better change back before someone else sees you. My sisters are one thing, but we have lots of employees here on the station and they don't really need to know anything.”
“Ok.” Roku shifted back into human form.
“That's fascinating!” Mirabel exclaimed. “What happens to your clothes?”
Roku proceeded to explain the technical details of shape-changing, although he couldn't really explain how it worked, just that it did. After that, there were lots of questions about magic in general and life in Arthurian times. They talked until Roku was gaping huge yawns and it was clearly time for him to go to bed.
Quatre took Roku to the room he lived in when he was on the station.
“You're a lot cleaner than normal after dinner,” Quatre noted.
“I was being neat!” Roku proclaimed proudly. “I want my aunts to like me.”
Quatre smiled. “Roku, everyone likes you, even when you coat yourself with food at meals.”
Roku giggled and then he yawned again. “What are we going to do tomorrow?”
“Well, now that my sisters know everything, I suspect we will end up showing off our talents.”
“I'm sorry I didn't keep secrets better, Mama.”
“That's ok, sweetie. I don't think I'm very good at it either. But I suppose there's something to be said for having no real skill in lying.”
“One should always tell the truth,” Roku said gravely.
“A good rule to live by, Roku. Let's go to bed.”
“Ok. Good night, Mama.”
“Good night, Roku.”