Olivia Albright stepped away from the tree she had just felled and took a moment to wipe the sweat away from her brow. It was kinda funny, if someone had told her two weeks ago that she was going to be out in the jungle cutting down trees that were bigger around than she was tall, using only an axe and her own muscles, she would have laughed at them. And then maybe smacked them. Because physical labor was so not her thing thank you very much.

She looked down at the big blue-trunked tree she had just chopped down all by herself, then over her shoulder at the five similar trees she had felled in the last hour.

If only her highschool friends could see her now. Katie McGonnigal would absolutely crap a brick. And Beth, who had been absolutely obsessed with female bodybuilding, would be practically in tears.

Olivia had to stop for a second and breathe deep through her nose as old memories bubbled up from where she had smushed them down in her belly. That old life was gone. No use thinking about it.

Even if Beth would have been totally jealous of her new muscles.

Okay admittedly, it wasn't all her own muscles. Dad's 'Many Hands Make Light The Work' power was doing most of the heavy lifting. She could feel the effect of the coins coursing through her. And while it didn't make her as effective as Dad was when he really got into it, it definitely upped her tree-chopping game like crazy. There were professional lumberjacks back on Earth, with modern tools and everything, who couldn't even touch what she was doing right now.

Magic is so cool, a little part of her brain squee'd. And she allowed herself to feel just a little bit of that excitement–not so much that she went jumping around like a five year-old in a bounce house, but just enough for that warm little glow in her guy that reminded her that yes, magic was real and she was using it and it was awesome.

Awesome enough that she didn't even mind using it to do chores.

She took a second to survey the clearing that they were quickly starting to call Home. She and Dinah were both on tree detail today, although Olivia was currently the only one chopping them down. Her friend and… adopted sister? Yeah, yeah she was exactly that, wasn't she? Anyway, when Olivia cut down a tree, Dinah was right there after with her own axe, taken from Dad's crafting table, chopping off big limbs and turning trees into logs.

But the sound of axes against wood wasn't the only sound filling the clearing. Over in the forge area, Bel was toiling away with hammer, tongs, anvil and steel. Her older sister had kind of taken to the blacksmithing station, especially after Dad had activated his [Many Hands Make Light The Work] consul power and she'd discovered that it made the work substantially easier.

"Nails up!" her sister called out, taking the metal spike she'd been working on and quenching it in a bucket of river water before dropping it into another bucket next to a couple dozen of its cousins.

"Hoo!" said Hoolio. The owl was currently riding on Onesie's large head as the Bargalest ambled back and forth between different stations, acting as pack mule for the various raw materials everyone was generating. He tapped the snake-creature on the side of his head, and Onesie ambled over to take the bucket of nails up in two of its dozens of hands.

Onesie was the reason things were going so well, if Olivia was right.

Because the art had been called 'many hands make light the work', and Onesie, with its plethora of limbs, had probably acted as an amplifier for Dad's Art, making it more potent than it would have been under normal circumstances. Letting them do things like chop down entire trees, or forge nails in just a couple minutes worth of work. Or…

"Boards up! Harry, come and get 'em!"

Luc was at the crafting table, converting the logs Dinah made into planks and sheets. Her brother had taken to the manual labor with a fervor that she'd never seen before… Although come to think of it, he had always seemed to have some kind of project of some kind going on back on Earth. At least, he had before things had Gotten Bad.

Guess he was making up for lost time. Olivia watched as Harry moved over and hefted four ten-foot boards with his trunk like they were made of paper, turn, and start carrying them towards the main work site.

Where Dad was building a house.

"Thanks Harry!" Dad called down from where he was perched on a growing platform about fifteen feet up in Billy's canopy. "Hah, who needs a forklift when you've got mastodon power, eh? Billy, mind grabbing those for me? Oh, and the nails too. Thanks Onesie, thanks Hoolio."

"Hoo," said Hoolio as he and Onesie wandered up next to Harry. The Bargalest let out a quiet hissing warble and shook itself, looking pleased with Dad's acknowledgement. Both the mastodon and the Bargalest handed their loads over to Billy, who used a couple smaller branches to pluck them and lift them up to Dad and the platform.

"I'm living in a friggin' Disney movie," Olivia said with a snort. "All we're missing is a princess and an annoying sound track."

"I could sing 'whistle while you work', if that'd help ya," Dinah said in that lazy drawl she'd been getting more and more into lately.

Olivia snorted and brandished her axe. "You do," she threatened her best friend, "and I'll turn you into lumber."

"You an' what army of lumberjacks, girlfriend?" Dinah shot back, grinning.

It had been something of a rude awakening this morning when, just after their bowls of breakfast soup, Mom and Dad had announced that things were going to be changing a bit for everyone. Olivia had kind of expected something was going on when she'd seen her parents deep in conversation last night after dinner, especially after the way the day had gone for everyone. It had been kinda chaotic, she couldn't lie. And she'd know that there was a lot that needed to be done.

She just hadn't expected her parents' solution to the problem would be chores.

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But it was kinda working.

She didn't know how she felt about that.

* * *

Isabel Albright paused to wipe the sweat from her forehead, blowing out a deep breath and stepping back from the hammer and anvil. She shucked off her heavy leather apron and sucked in a cleansing breath of cool air. Her hair was pulled back in a pony tail, and she'd knotted her shirt up to expose her midriff to the cool breeze blowing through the clearing. The skin on her hands and arms was practically cherry red from exertion and heat exposure, and her face felt like she'd been sunburned. Her hands hurt from wielding the heavy hammer, and her ears still rang slightly from almost three solid hours of pounding on metal.

And she felt good.

She yanked off the heavy leather gloves and placed them on the anvil before stepping over to the forge and pumping the bellows, sending air over the hot coals in the forge and bringing them back to white-hot life. Then she shoved in a couple steel blanks deep into the center of the forge and left them there to heat for a bit while she turned back to get some water.

She drank her fill and let out a satisfied 'ahh' noise. It was cold, straight from the river, and tasted better than anything she'd ever drank before in her life.

Work wasn't supposed to feel this good. It was like, against the law or something.

She hadn't really expected anything to come of it when Dad had shown her how to activate the magic of the forge station. She'd honestly expected it to be… Work. Hot, hard, and not her thing. But Dad's 'Many Hands' art had slammed into her like a wrecking ball, and as soon as she'd fed her own coin into the forge it was like her hands had started moving on their own and she'd just been left to hold on for the ride.

Which… Okay. The forging was cool. Working with red-hot metal, beating the hell out of it until it was the shape you wanted, then quenching it with a powerful hiss to temper it… It was not unlike being in charge of her siblings when her parents weren't home.

But the whole 'magic guiding her movements' thing?

Less cool.

She had enjoyed it at first, had loved the feeling of the steel taking shape under the hammer blows and loved watching her own hands do the work. But as it had gone on, she'd come to a realization. The movements weren't hers. She wasn't learning anything. As soon as the coin ran out, she'd be back to Isabel, and if she tried to make a nail on her own at the anvil, she'd probably wind up with a lump of mangled metal and a whole bunch of blisters.

And the more she made, the more her sense of dissatisfaction grew.

Because she wasn't really making this stuff, was she. It was the magic. She was just another piece in the machine, as it were. The magic of the coins took hold of her and used her hands to make the nails. And as cool as it was to see them taking shape under the hammer she held, it wasn't her that was making them.

And… Let's be honest… She wasn't that big into the whole 'something else is controlling my motions' thing. But so far it seemed pretty benign, so she wasn't exactly fighting it. But it would have been nice if all this practice was actually teaching her stuff.

And when she had that thought, she'd gotten just a little bit pissed. Because she wanted that sense of accomplishment, damn it! More than that, she wanted to be able to work the forge, because it was stone-cold cool.

So, about an hour in, she'd stopped marveling at her motions and instead had started watching. And that was where things had turned interesting. Because while the magic would guide her, show her hands how to hold the metal and how to wield the hammer, she found she could learn how to do it just from watching and from feeling the motion. It was subtle, but the more she watched, the more she focused, the more she found she was able to internalize the motions.

Magic was weird.

"How is it going, mija," Mom's voice said from behind her. Bel grinned and turned around. Mom was the only one not currently engaged in a 'chore', but that was because she was in full 'battle rattle'–her words, not Isabel's–with her rifle in her hands walking the perimeter of the camp. She was acting as a sentry while everyone else worked, but after seeing the results of the Sentinel's attack on the clearing, Isabel didn't mind that too much.

"Not bad," Bel said, gesturing to the bucket she'd half-filled with the long spikey nails that were apparently the best the forge station was capable of producing. They looked more like tiny railroad spikes than the ring-shank nails she was familiar with from the Before, but apparently Dad was finding them useable because he'd been hammering them in like nobody's business for the last three hours and kept hollering about running out.

"You are not pushing yourself too hard" Mom asked, with that Mom Tone in her voice that said she was worried about Isabel but also proud of her at the same time. "If you need a break–"

"I'll take one," Isabel assured her. "It's not hard work, not with Dad's Art turned on, anyway. It's hot and sweaty work, admittedly," she added, "And I'm not wild about letting magic control my movements… But it feels good when I finish up a nail. I think if I pay close attention, I'll be able to figure out how to make a pair of real swords for myself."

"estas bien," Mom said, smiling. Then a thoughtful look crossed her face. "Could you not make them now, while tu papa's Art is active?"

Isabel frowned at the thought.

"No…" she said, drawing the word out. "I don't think that'd work right."

She couldn't explain it… she just felt like she had to do it. If she was going to make her own blades, to replace the ones she'd torn off the face of her enemies, then they needed to be just as much made by her own hands as the ones she had now. And using her dads magic to do that…

She knew it wouldn't work. Not the way it needed to work. She couldn't have told anyone why, she just knew.

Mom watched her closely while the whole set of thoughts went through her mind, then nodded thoughtfully. "Well, I will bow to what you think best."

"Thanks Mom," Isabel said, meaning it. "How's everyone else doing?"

"Well, let me see." Mom turned to survey the camp, and chuckled at what she saw. "It appears that tu hermana is fencing Dinah with a long stick from one of the trees they've felled… Tu hermano is talking with Billy and drawing something in one of the notebooks I think he stole from Olivia… Onesie–"

"You mean 'Mister Handerson?' Still can't believe Dad named him that," Isabel grumbled.

"Indeed," Mom laughed. "He and Harry are helping tu papa move lumber… And that appears to be it."

"So what you're saying is it's about break time."

"I think that is a safe assumption, si," Mom said with a grin.

"Good. Because I need to go jump in the river. I am dying of heat stroke here."

Isabel started jogging towards the river, glancing around at the others as they goofed off from their chores. She had a feeling that Mom and Dad were letting them blow off just a little bit of steam before they were ordered back to work. And, much as she hated to admit it, their plan seemed to be working. The structure of chores, of work, did seem to be pulling everyone together more than the chaotic nature of the past couple weeks.

Now if she could just get the same results she was getting right now without having to become a sock-puppet for weird magic, that'd be great.

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