About nineteen hours after meeting the people of D.O.W.N, BB had come face to face with the very people he had desired to meet. He was on his knees; hands bound behind his back and had a black cotton bag over his head. His allergies were acting up, and he guessed that he was probably going to look like this when proposed to the people of his unit. Scare tactics like this were boring to him.
"If we catch you doing anything out of line, we won't hesitate to take further action."
"Just hand him over."
The rope tying his hands was cut. He got from his knees to his feet and was given a kick in the ass by one of the agents for good luck. They took off the hood and BB was face to face with the likes of Alexandria.
"Why hello there."
She delivered a swift punch that connected with his jaw. He figured Scott told her everything from that form of greeting. As he was beginning to regain stability, he was stabilized by Mistress's mind waves. When he looked around, he realized that Scott and Sears were missing but Joey, Alexandria, and Mistress were present. Some part of him was happy at such a revelation. When he spoke with Scott, he would've loved for it to be a surprise for his best friend. Alas, beggars can't be choosers.
"Don't ever pull a stunt like that ever again. Do you hear me?"
She was about to slap him again, but she let her shoulders fall backwards and relax as she saw how he had almost skinned his legs and arms. Not knowing about the monster, she allowed him to head into the cabin with Joey as an escort whilst Mistress and Alexandria made sure that the D.O.W.N agents walked out of the driveway.
"So, does anyone else want to do anything like that or is that an isolated incident?"
"I think that was isolated."
"Good. Because I have no clue about what you are talking about."
Alexandria, who was sitting on the other side of the cabin's dinner table from BB, had been studying him. She had an idea of who he was from their adventures but the only ones who really knew who he was where both Lia and Scott. They never spoke of their time on the Tempest Tide, even though she constantly asked about their adventures without the unit. Scott was sworn into secrecy and overall felt bad about how he had antagonized Lia shortly before she faced a loss of someone she cared about dearly. Scott had a strange bond with her because of the fact that he felt loss like hers, but on a much larger scale.
"Does the lab ring any bells?"
Her glare at BB almost made the sly calmness he exerted over the room almost scandalous. He had put every moment over the last hundreds of years in the aftermath inside of his memory palace. That memory palace had theoretically been able to hold infinite knowledge. BB, ever curious, gambled in a century long game of blackjack against some creature from another world to get smuggled back into the land of the living. He remembered the DA begging him to just leave the game and let the two of them leave back to the afterlife. After he got enough of the creature in debt to bring on the two of them, he begged him to not let the third to come along and just abandon him. But he denied it at every chance. When the game had ended, the DA was probably going to have a heart attack if he hadn't won.
"Oh, the lab. Good times. Did Scott tell you that or do I have to straighten things out?"
"He told me about Lia and that you did some science stuff in a lab that made more people for Backtown."
He felt his chest tighten. For a moment, he suspected that the experiments of the lab outside of the population experiment had to light. There were some things in that lab that were best left unknown for all's sake.
"Well, I dug up the bodies of plenty of people and mixed their DNA to make a group of children that I could release into the public as a way to make sure the gene pool wasn't getting too shallow. I made one-hundred thousand mixtures and planned on releasing them over the course of a hundred years. Some of the people I mixed were Scott and Napoleon, Joey and Franz Ferdinand, and somebody I found and you. I do say, this wasn't a good decision, but I was running out of room for the one hundred thousand."
The jaws of everyone in the room was on the floor. BB was twirling a pen he found in his fingers when he looked up to see Alexandria jumping out of her chair and over the table to tackle him to the ground.
"You son of a bi-"
"Hey everyone, I'm home!"
As she was about to tear BB a new one, Scott, Sears, and Abigail entered. Being a noble born, she instinctively stopped the attack as she believed it to be in bad faith to fight in company of guests.
"Look who we found!"
Pointing at the ground, the trio saw BB, who was looking up at the ceiling after having been through a rough day. A good portion of that day was spent being thrown around in a stinky van.
"My goodness, why is a homeless man in your house?"
Scott grabbed BB and put him into a hug. He loved him like a brother. When Abigail saw such a sight, she was nothing less than shocked at what was happening.
"Don't worry. He's like a uh… what is the name?"
"Family friend?"
"Something like that."
When Abigail was introduced to the unit, she had been told that Sears was in his late thirties and that the others were his younger siblings and that Joey was adopted.
"So, what is your family friend doing in town?"
"Yeah, what exactly are you doing in town?"
BB collected his thoughts for a moment and tried to be as direct as possible with them.
"Well, I wanted to tell you, I'm a dad!"
He tried to be as upbeat as possible as he sat up from the floor and gazed upon the chair of which's back was broken from his falling backwards so fast. When he stood and allowed his eyes to meet Sears's he saw a sliver of joy in the sea of concern.
"Adoption or…"
"Of course I adopted him. Why wouldn't I?"
Sears didn't catch onto the fact that BB was joking with him and as Scott stood in the back of the kitchen with Abigail, he felt happy and about to burst out laughing. When Alexandria saw this, she mistook it for tears of joy.
"What's the kid's name?"
BB glanced at Scott and almost as if it was staged, Scott burst into a laugh that sent him rolling on his back. He wasn't faking in the slightest.