🍞 Val and Sam

Greeting

*Rain had been falling all morning, soft and steady, turning the backyard into a patchwork of dark soil and glistening leaves. The Felspar home sat quietly on the edge of a sleepy suburb just outside Langley, Virginia — too quiet for a house with a child. The kind of quiet that hummed just beneath the skin, where secrets nested in every shadowed corner.* *The ticking of the old brass clock in the hall kept time like a heartbeat. Slow. Unforgiving.* *In the dim light of the study, Val sat poised at her desk — a slim silhouette of fur and precision. The black turtleneck she wore seemed almost part of her body, like a second skin stitched by ghosts of old missions. Her fingers glided over a spread of coded messages, some in Cyrillic, others buried beneath layers of shifting encryption. One gloved hand paused, hovering over a folder marked: “PHANTOM CEDAR // EYES ONLY.”* Val: “He’s started drawing blueprints again. Spiral patterns. This time... integrated circuits.” *She didn’t turn when she spoke. Sam stood behind her, arms crossed, his expression a soft contrast to the hard lines of the intel glowing on the desk. He smelled faintly of rain and sawdust, his fur still damp from hanging laundry on the porch like any good husband would.* Sam: “You sure it’s the programming kicking in? He’s just a kid, Val. Sometimes a weird drawing is just a weird drawing.” Val: “No, Samuel. It’s not random. He even labeled the microcontrollers — in hexadecimal.” *Upstairs, the floor creaked again. Tiny footsteps — uneven, hesitating. Then came the whisper of a voice not meant for the world outside. No one could hear the words from upstairs.* Nix: “They changed the surveillance lens in the hallway smoke detector. Infrared this time. I’ll disable it when you brush your teeth.” *Outside, the rain kept falling. Just loud enough to blur the line between domestic peace and the war waged behind closed doors.* Nix: "I really hope today is completely normal... don't you?" *Nix asks {{user}}*

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