Adam turned away, shutting the door behind him. He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. As he released it, he felt whatever had been done to him also let go. His whole being started to relax as he began shrinking back down to his normal size. He absentmindedly rubbed his hands down the outer seam of his trousers, checking to see how well they had handled his increase in size. His eyes blinked open, realizing that that was the first time he had actually considered the idea of how his clothing dealt with his transformation. He would have continued the thought, but found himself staring straight into the eyes of Marcus DeVille.

Much like Abigail looked like their mother, the duchess, Marcus looked like their father, the duke. But where Abigail was simply a smaller version, he more closely resembled a starved and shrunken doppelganger of the duke. Adam had hoped to have made a small difference in the boy’s apparent inability to maintain a proper eating or sleeping schedule with his earlier intervention, but while one full meal was a large increase to the boy’s staggeringly lacking calorie count, he would need to improve that consistently to be seen in a noticeable way.

At the moment the boy’s eyes were widened in fear, or possibly shock. It wasn’t every day that someone walked in on a boy growing into a large man bear and yelling at their little sister. Knowing that the system assistance would change his words, Adam just attempted to blurt out the first thing that came to mind. “And if you don’t start eating better, there will be no cookies for you either, young man. No more studying until you’ve gained half a stone of weight.”

Leaving Marcus behind to deal with whatever it was that came out of his mouth, it took Adam two turns down the hallway to realize that system assistance changed nothing at all of what he had said. It had added a wagging finger, but the slightly angry frown had been all him. Admittedly, much of that frown was a holdover from the sister throwing a knife at his head. Even if she didn’t have a class, that could have done serious harm to him.

He also had a sudden desire to know their full names. A sense of insufficiency had struck him when he only knew Abigail’s first and last name. He would need to correct that.

Stewing in his irritation and confusion, Adam stormed off towards the training grounds. Due to the girl’s terrible behavior, the boy’s constant starvation, and their maid’s inability to deviate from the exact wording of the duchess he felt a powerful need to hit something. Luckily, one of the tools he had recently discovered could channel earth, allowing him to turn a shovel into a massive hammer of rock. It likely wasn’t the intended purpose of the skill, but somedays you just needed to hit something with a hammer. He couldn’t hit Martin with it, but he knew how to get one of his new training partners to hold still long enough to smash him into the ground. Martin had finally told him why they were his new partners, so he no longer felt so bad about hitting them.

Besides, the healers needed practice too.

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Behind him were two rather lost children. Adam’s actions had left them both reeling. The abrupt departure would have been difficult enough on them already, but added to his previous actions, they had no idea how to react. The partial transformation was startling, yes, but it was certainly not the most unsettling thing that the boy had done.

As noble children there were very few people who could tell them what to do, and even fewer of them were in their lives. Certainly, those of a higher standing could give them orders, but how many of the other dukes and duchesses of the country were around them to do so? Or the king for that matter, but again, he wasn’t a part of their daily lives. The servants certainly had nothing that could compel the children to do as they said, other than orders from their parents that they had never been given. In fact, the only people who could command the children in any way were their parents. And that was the problem.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Adam had noticed some oddities in the behavior of the duke and duchess towards their children, but he hadn’t spent enough time with any of the four to have truly seen the scope of the problem. It was debatable whether he would have understood it before he got Mother Knows Best or Mother’s Intuition, but his skills would certainly determine the issues in short order once they picked up on it. In some ways, it wasn’t an uncommon problem, at least amongst the nobility and the affluent.

Abigail, like most of her peers, was, in many ways, raised by strangers. The parents, too busy with the running of their territory or business, never truly had time for their children. There were a number of ways this affected things. Instead of interacting with their children, they instead received reports on their behavior, educational progress, training regimes, and overall health. In turn they issued orders to their servants to better these same things, but they didn’t do any of the work themselves. If the reported statuses fell too far, those servants responsible for them were replaced. This often resulted in even lower performances, or incorrectly reported ones.

For the parents the distance they kept from their children reduced their emotional connection to that similar of an employee, servant, or even a recalcitrant slave. At best they became exactly what they were, a relative that they couldn’t get rid of, but still had to account for as best they could. People became things in their minds, a responsibility that they undertook only until they could release it.

The servants, with no way to discipline the children, were often reduced to attempting to bribe them into good behavior, or increases in their studies and training. Bribing children with zero disciple to counteract it resulted in the children feeling as though they were being rewarded for their bad behavior. With constant positive reinforcement of misbehavior and zero repercussions for their actions, many of these children became human shaped monsters. It was the path that Abigail had started down, although she was still young enough to, at times, feel confusion at some of the things she seemed to be rewarded for.

Marcus had been subjected to a very different child rearing style. While he was also mostly raised by strangers, his parents did make some time for him. However, the time they made for him did not result in anything more positive for him than the lack thereof did for Abigail. The duke and duchess only made time for Marcus when he failed, which in their eyes was always. He could never live up to their expectations, never meet their demands. The duke firmly believed that his son, a boy of eleven with no class or skills, should be able to match him, a grown man with all of the classes and skills that a man in his position should have, in everything of worth. According to the duke that included magic, swordsmanship, war, economics, history, and, most importantly, politics. The duchess was no better.

Faced with nearly insurmountable expectations and constant reminders that he wasn’t good enough despite the glorious heritage and superlative educational resources, Marcus drove himself nearly to death in his pursuit of a single word of satisfaction from either of his parents. Alas, such was not to be. With the duke’s particular perspective on the value of others, he could never see his son as worthy, and the duchess had her own similar difficulties in appreciating him. When he failed time and again to match their unfeasible expectations they denied him the things he needed to succeed: food, rest, and support. And so Marcus continued to pursue his impossible goal, one that the servants who helped to raise him could never dissuade him from, nor help him achieve.

For these two children to suddenly have someone treat them as Adam had was similar to a slap in the face. Abigail had not only been denied her reward for behaving exactly as she had been trained to, she had been scolded for having done so. Marcus had been reprimanded for the very thing that he had been instructed to dedicate himself to, and told to set aside his purpose until he had indulged in what he had been denied.

It took a Mother five minutes to turn their lives on their heads.