"I have to admit," Carmen said once Samantha, Katie, and Keith finished explaining what they could of the game. "All of this sounds… hard to believe."

"We had to take a little while to adjust," Judy told her. "When we found out. With the evidence in front of us, we were able to accept magic existing a lot easier."

"And the part about the game?" Franklin asked. "The idea of your son being in such a horrid thing doesn't bother us?"

"It does," Alan answered. "A lot. But Nathan's a tough kid, and he made it through the initial round. I'd be more concerned about the possibility of Luke entering it once he's eighteen. He doesn't have any form of combat training, unlike Nathan, who's learned since he was three, and who – as you know well – has not had issue killing problems in the past."

"What are the odds of entering the game?" Carmen asked, paling at the thought of her younger son finding himself in it. "Are those known? There's been an increase in-"

"According to Master Torzin," Samantha said, noting the interested look from Nathan's parents. They probably didn't know about his truer nature. "A martial arts instructor and demigod who is helping teach us more combat at the facility, this isn't the first world it's occurred on. He said that in other worlds, it increases how many are initiated each year until everyone who turns eighteen finds themselves in it on their birthday. That takes fifteen years. So there's a higher chance that Luke will find himself in it than that we would."

The four parents gave each other uneasy looks.

"In other news," Keith cleared his throat. "Nathan and I are magical prodigies when it comes to enchanting. We're putting our heads together and trying to find a way to stop the game. Nathan intends on fully destroying it."

"Mom! Mom! Mom!" Luke came running into the room, rushing over to his mom, planting his hands on her legs, and shaking them in his excitement. "Nathan has a phoenix!"

Luke possessed the same brown hair as his parents, his bright green eyes filled with excitement. At the moment, he was dressed in a pair of blue swim trunks, swim goggles hanging around his neck.

"Are you going swimming?" Carmen asked.

"Nathan's taking me out back!" Luke nodded as Nathan came down the stairs. "Come on, Nathan!"

Nathan was dressed in a pair of dark green board shorts, a pair of dark blue towels slung over his right shoulder, and held a piece of paper in his left hand.

"Father," Nathan handed him the paper. "I need these items, if you can get them."

Alan skimmed the paper as Nathan began walking with Luke towards the patio doors in the dining room.

"Does this have to do with you wanting to destroy the game?" Alan asked.

"Keith and I are working on making a special kind of magic gun," Nathan answered. "Come on, Luke. Let's leave the boring people behind."

"Yeah!" Luke rushed out back, and Nathan followed him, draping the towels over the back of a pool chair as Luke ran over to the diving board. "Nathan, watch this!"

Luke ran to the edge of the board and jumped off of it, performing a flip before hitting the water in a dive with minimal splash. He resurfaced, then grinned at Nathan, who nodded, then ran to the edge of the pool and jumped, tucking his knees up to his chest and landing beside his cousin before the boy could escape the splash zone.

"Hey!" Luke spluttered when Nathan surfaced. "That was cheating!"

Luke splashed water at Nathan, who pushed his hand out, using force magic to push the water to his cousin.

"That's even more cheating!" Luke exclaimed. "I can't do that!"

The two of them began to horse around in the pool as everyone else came out back, Samantha untying Blake so he could join them.

"If I weren't ready to pop any day now," Samantha commented as she sat on a pool chair. "I'd probably join them in there."

"I can't even begin to wrap my head about how that works," Alan shook his head as he took a seat beside her. "You don't age, yet a pregnancy can advance and you still hit periods? It just doesn't make sense."

"It's magic," Keith commented. "There's a lot about it that doesn't make sense. Even Master Torzin, who is hundreds of thousands of years old, doesn't know many of its mysteries."

"Speaking of this Master Torzin," Judy looked at the magician. "Nathan-"

"Yes," Samantha said. "It's the same Master Torzin that Nathan found to train him after I turned him down and Cyrus passed away."

The Hunters gave each other uneasy looks.

"I found out… technically today," Samantha told them. "We were in the game earlier and he was mentioned. Why did I never know Nathan had a twin? How many times did I interact with Cyrus and think he was Nathan? How many photos of Nathan are actually Cyrus? Sorry if this seems a rush, especially with… that date coming up, but… Nathan isn't exactly the talkative type for most things. To him, talking is business in nearly all cases, and I don't think Cyrus is something he wants to discuss."

"The first time you visited the house," Judy said. "You greeted Cyrus thinking he was Nathan. Cyrus decided to play along and pretend to be his brother. Nathan caught that and was pretty upset, but agreed to let Cyrus hang out with you at the house, pretending to be him, since Nathan got to hang out with you at school and the dojo."

"Nathan and Cyrus attended different days at the dojo," Alan added. "You went on the days that Nathan did. Cyrus was also a bit of an academic prodigy, so we had private tutors for him, while Nathan went to school. I think part of the reason they'd come to that agreement was because Cyrus only got to socialize with Nathan most of the time."

"But even when we were older," Samantha continued as Keith walked to the edge of the pool and talked with Nathan. "I still never saw a sign, and I was even in Nathan's room – I saw his stuff."

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Cyrus pretended Nathan's room was his," Carmen shook her head. "I think they both developed crushes on you at the same time, too. I know they had an agreement that the first person you made a move on would be the one who got to date you."

"Weren't they worried," Samantha asked as Keith made his way inside. "About me finding out I was dating Cyrus and not Nathan if I asked him?"

"They'd planned on telling you when the move was made," Judy explained. "The only real difference in Cyrus was that he went by 'Nathan' and used Nathan's room instead of his. None of the rest was actually acting."

"And if I didn't make a move?" Samantha asked as Nathan started floating on his back, eyes closed. "What would they have done then?"

"They were pretty sure you would," Alan snorted. "You're a pretty independent woman, Samantha, and neither of them had a doubt you'd take initiative sooner or later if you had interest in them."

Samantha closed her eyes and thought over all of her interactions with Nathan at the house. It had been a few years since the last one, so she couldn't be sure, but she'd never seen a difference in the two Nathans.

She had crushed on Nathan, and she didn't even realize that she wasn't actually dealing with Nathan all the time, nor that the second 'Nathan' wasn't really acting beyond just going by a different name and using a different room.

Did that mean she crushed on both Nathan and Cyrus?

The sound of someone using the diving board caught her attention, and Samantha opened her eyes in time to see Keith's scrawny body hitting the water in front of it. He was dressed in a pair of white and gray swim trunks, and when he came up for air, Nathan and Luke got to work dunking him.

His white-and-gold familiar's marks stood out on his pale back, and Samantha noticed the other adults giving those curious looks. To them, they would look like a strange form of tattoo.

"Master Torzin," Alan said. "You said he's a demigod who's hundreds of thousands of years old?"

"If what he says it to be believed," Samantha nodded. "We know he's a demigod for sure – anyone with white mana, like him and Nathan, is a demigod. It's the one guaranteed sign of it, and I just realized what I just said."

"That I'm not Nathan's biological father?" Alan asked. "It's not something I didn't know. We'd tried to conceive for years, but it just wasn't happening. At the same time, my business was suffering, hard. We were losing a major case after my business partner went under for some illegal stuff. A vital piece of evidence simply didn't exist – we didn't have something we need to get a verdict. I practice honestly, and that was the first time I ever considered not doing so.

"Then a man came to us," he continued. "With an offer. He said that he could provide us with a guaranteed win for our case. The only exchange was that he slept with Judy one time, the night of our success. I didn't want to take the deal, but Judy knew how badly it was affecting us."

"So I agreed to it," Judy told Samantha. "My relationship with Alan was originally as a prostitute, sleeping with him for money so I could pay for my chef's training and to start my own restaurant. It was the one time since marriage I ever did it with someone other than Alan, and he understood why I did it, even if he didn't like it."

"It involved no birth control," Alan said. "But that wasn't too much of an issue, since Judy wasn't able to bear children, which was part of the problem with us trying to have one. Our concern was with STD's, which he proved clean of. After things continued to go downhill for us, Judy pushed me to accept. The day before the trial, I did.

"He provided us with the piece of evidence we needed," Alan continued. "It was like handing us the key to a goldmine. The one thing he gave us, just a small piece of information that was able to be verified quickly, allowed us to win the case and then some. It's what launched my career as a high-end lawyer."

"A couple of weeks later," Judy said. "I missed my period. We though it odd, but didn't connect it with, you know, the 'payment', since I simply couldn't have children. But then I missed the next one, and then had morning sickness and an intense craving for buttermilk pancakes and gummy bears.

"So we went to the doctor," she continued. "Where they confirmed I was pregnant. A few weeks later, we discovered it was with twins. We were sure they were this mysterious man's children, and that was confirmed when we did a DNA comparison after they were born."

"When we tried to contact him," Alan told Samantha. "We found it impossible – the man had simply disappeared after impregnating Judy. We decided that since he didn't want to be a part of our sons' lives, we weren't going to let them know. As far as we were concerned, I was their father. I suppose being a god would explain such a thing."

They considered how Nathan would have reacted to finding out, but outside of Katie, everyone there knew that the fact that Nathan didn't even mention it to his parents probably meant he didn't care that Alan wasn't his biological father.

Another thought that crossed their minds was that Nathan probably wondered what it would be like to sleep with a god – or in his case, a goddess.

"So," Alan decided to change the subject. "I take it you came with him after finding out what was coming up in a few days?"

"Yes," Samantha said. "He wants to name our son after Cyrus, which is how the whole thing came up. I still can't believe I didn't realize I was talking to two different people."

"This is how similar those two were," Judy laughed. "Even we couldn't tell them apart unless they intentionally acted differently or we got them doing martial arts or something academic. Nathan's an average student, Cyrus was an excellent one. Cyrus was an average martial artist while Nathan was an exceptional one. Other than that, their personalities were quite similar. And they always dressed identically, even without planning, which only made it more difficult."

Alan laughed.

"I remember the time," he said. "When they were ten, and we split up at the store, I with Cyrus, Judy with Nathan. The idea was to have them pick out outfits separately. Cyrus and I went to one store, Judy and Nathan went to the other, and we swapped stores after finishing. Neither boy knew what the other had gotten."

"I got to the checkout," Judy continued the story. "At the second store, and the cashier said, 'Not trying to be intrusive, ma'am, but his father was just in here with him, and they bought the same clothes you're getting now'. Alan received a similar response at the other store."

"Without even knowing what the other got," Alan chuckled. "They still picked out the same clothes – and it was a surprise trip to stores we hadn't been to before. If his children are twins, I wouldn't be surprised if something like that happened to you."

"Just one," Samantha smiled. "He likes the sound of his daddy's voice, too, and knows when his daddy's near. If Nathan's spooning me, his hand on my stomach, the little guy kicks in beat with Nathan's breathing."

"Blake!" Nathan hollered, and everyone looked at him. "Get your butt changed and get in here! Stop ignoring your brother! And stop ogling my girlfriend!"

"I was looking at Katie, not Samantha!"

"They're both my girlfriends!"

Blake froze for a moment, then went inside as Samantha chuckled.

"Samantha," Judy look at the young woman's stomach. "Have you been through the classes and such?"

"No," Samantha responded. "But during our latest run in the game, Nathan revealed that he'd brought along a bunch of books that covered it. In addition to reading to our baby, he read those to me. I'd forgotten how odd Nathan could be over the last few years."

"Well," Alan smiled. "I'm glad you two started talking again, he seems a lot happier."

"Oh, that's because he's going to be a dad," Samantha told him. "He's ecstatic for that more than anything. He's actually planning on doing some research with Keith before our baby is born so that we can use a special viewing orb to look at the baby while we're in the game. I'm all for pictures and videos, but Nathan doesn't consider that the same. Maybe I'll see it the same way once he's born? But it's technically the same as a picture, since time is frozen while we're in the game."

"How does that work?" Carmen asked. "They just freeze time somehow?"

"No one knows for sure," Nathan said, having approached with Keith without notice. "That's one of the things I might discover as I work to destroy the game. Now that Blake's playing with Luke, Keith and I are going out for a bit. We're picking up some stuff. Stay here and relax. We'll be back in a few hours."

"But-" she began to protest.

"Father," Nathan looked at his father. "We'll eat dinner while we're out. Please make sure Samantha gets something to eat soon, she's trying to not be rude by mentioning how hungry she is. Also, give her chocolate. Lots of it. Our baby likes it. Bye."