"I WAS BORN WITH MY HEART ON MY SLEEVE, FIRE IN MY SOUL, AND A MOUTH I CAN'T CONTROL."
In which only one of the Cunningham sisters will make it out alive.
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Iris had babysat in her teen years a few times, but she'd never had a little under a dozen kids to take care of for months at a time.
It was the most chaotic thing she'd ever done, and she'd been in space. Twice.
Karen and she worked pretty well together: Karen worked, earning the pay to take care of them all, and Iris watched the kids while she was away.
The oldest kids weren't terrible, Ken and Blair were both fourteen now and had also taken part-time work cleaning up the streets. They were sassy at times, and the temper tantrums they threw were awful, but they helped to take care of the smaller kids, and that was more help than none.
The youngest of them was four, and in total, including her and Karen, there were a dozen of them in one penthouse. It was crowded, to say the least.
Three bedrooms would've been more than enough normally. Karen and her had decided to split into three groups: four in one room, and three in the other two, her and Karen in the living room, sharing the outrageously big couch. Occasionally, they'd let a kid sleep out there with them if need be.
Sharing two bathrooms between ten kids was also not ideal. There was almost always a line for the toilet, and it was even worse at bedtime. Karen had come up with the wonderful idea of giving the kids scheduled times to get ready for bed, and it worked pretty well, at least, better than it had before.
The hardest part was keeping them all entertained, and mealtime, and bedtime. Pretty much all of it, come to think of it.
Entertaining them after entailed Iris demonstrating small tasks using her abilities: summoning a book from across the room, lifting up the bed to find a lost sock, and flying her self (and very rarely a child) to the next room. It also helped with carrying the mountain of groceries up four flights of stairs. Or, as Iris did, taking them up from the balcony and levitating them into the kitchen (the kids insisted on watching every time.)
It was not all laughs and giggles, however, even subtracting the kids from the equation.
A half-populated New York City was apparently prime ground for local gangs and robberies galore, and Iris had her fair share of them, and so had the kids and Karen.
After the first attempted robbery, Iris fully understood why Karen had both a 9mm and a shotgun on standby. "Anna didn't like them, and neither did I," Karen told her one day. "But people are desperate, and I'll do what I have too to protect the kids."
