------------- College Days - Jo,... and the boys.

Another one came running out from the alleyway across the street. He pulled quick and fired. The smoke cleared almost as fast, dissipating off into nothingness thanks to a little spell he'd picked up from a gunslinging Paratech in Kaibar. Off to his right, she cocked her strange pistol and fired again. A bolt of purple and white lightning blasted across thirty feet of sidewalk and snagged the exposed leg of another. He shuddered, jerked and fell sideways out into the street. He wouldn't be any problem for several minutes. Hopefully that would be long enough for the Gryphonmyr constabulary to respond. She took a quick look around, no more of them yet, but she was getting tired of this cat and mouse game.

"Lord Arndellius, I fear this may be the last time I take you shopping while on holiday."

The man beside her got a twisted grin, cocked his pistol and focused his sharp eyes on another form moving in the shadows.

"I suspect you'd prefer staying in Syvasgaard on your breaks, Miss Spectre?"

She noticed a commotion behind her, far too close for comfort, and snapped her head back around with a gasp. The little boy there was crouched behind a wall post, his hands clasped over his ears.

"Nicholas! What is the name of Devral's flying monkeys are you doing out here?"

"Wow, Mom,... that funny gun of yours is really loud."

"That's nice dear. Now where's your sister?"

"Down the street. Think she's hiding in the tinker's wagon."

"No telling what that girl's gonna get into." And back over her shoulder she shouted, "Lord Arndellius, I do believe your son is out in the street in the middle of this fracas!"

The man just grinned and lowered his aim at a shoulder sticking out from behind a crate. "Miss Spectre, I thought you had instructed our son to keep his head down and out of the way when mother and father were in the middle of a shootout?"

"Indeed, Lord Arndellius. But I fear they listen to your governess more than they listen to their mother."

----

Josephine Spectre had been raised in the wilds of the Carellonian high plains, not far from the cowtown of Plains Station. Her family owned a large horse ranch and bred some of the finest race horses in the area. That was how she met Lord Arndellius almost ten years earlier. He had been heading off to Tanner's Pass, to work the border of the Pouarr Nation. As an impressionable 15 year old, she fell madly in love. He was not so impressed, or so he led on. After he left, she found out her father had held secret negotiations with his family, the Duke Arndelius of Falen. They had been betrothed. At first she didn't know what to think. Two years later Lord Aaron Arndellius returned, and the girl he'd met before had grown into a young woman of stunning beauty. Nine months after that, she had their twins, Nicholas and Tessa Larraine. But they were not yet to be married. When the twins were 2, they were shipped off to Falen, to be raised by a governess and watched over by the Arndellius family, while she was sent to university in Carellon. When Syvasgaard opened its doors, she was permitted to transfer. All the while she visited her love, the dashing Wildrider and Carellonian Lord, and her two children. The wedding was planned for right after her graduation. She could barely wait,... if his long list of enemies didn't kill them all first.

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