After a lot of hard work fishing, Todd, Scott and Udagawa finally realised their collective dream.

All three of them felt a huge sense of accomplishment at creating a perfect aquarium, as the older brother and sister they’d never met, Cameron and Annalise, had done before them.

Bebe and Asa cleaned out the tanks Annalise and Cameron had once used to display their children’s new collection of perfect fish.

With their mission accomplished, it was time for the boys to leave home.

They decided to move in together and resurrect Cameron and Annalise’s business.  Udagawa vowed to join them once she’d left school.

It wasn’t just the boys’ birthday, though, it was also time for Wendy and Willow to grow up.

Inspired by her elder siblings and her mother and their dedication to the natural world, Wendy vowed to one day become a scientist…

…and Willow made the same decision.

As always, the various members of the extended family were present.  Asa and Seona’s youngest, Cassidy, looked much more like a combination of both parents than older sister Natasha ever had.

Like her half-sister Edna, Shawanda was showing strange signs – glowing eyes, a pallid skin colour and a fondness for odd-shaped fruit.  Bebe half-wished she was still based at the science lab so she could experiment.

The same idea was forming in the minds of Bebe’s youngest children, as they plotted a future career in which they could explore all the strange beings in Sunset Valley – being unusual themselves, they wanted to know more about people like them, people who were somehow different to the majority.

Vikram, meanwhile, was still enjoying experimenting with handiness and building his logic skill.  He occasionally saw his father, Glenn, who helped him to understand a little more about why he was the way he was and why wanting to eat metal sometimes was actually a biological urge he had, and didn’t make him weird.

The Populous family were incredibly well-off financially, thanks to their large crop of money trees and omni plants and so Bebe decided to look into employing a butler.  She called the agency to send some candidates for interview.

The first candidate who arrived was Kurt Woodruff.

He offered to demonstrate his superior massage skills… and before long…

…he was demonstrating some of his other skills as well.

As Bebe bid farewell to Kurt, she decided that maybe she’d gotten all she needed from a butler and wouldn’t be employing him after all.

Part-way through her pregnancy, Bebe got a call from her son Nick.  He and wife Meghan had made Bebe a grandmother once again.

Dexter had inherited his father’s skin tone and Bebe thought he was just the most adorable little boy.

She delighted in caring for him, as she did for all of her grandchildren.

Her great-great granddaughter, Barbara, was pregnant again, and she asked Bebe and Asa to babysit her son Lorenzo while she went for a checkup.  The boy was full of questions – if Bebe and Asa were his grandparents, why did Barbara call them Granny and Grandad as well?  Were they really Barbara’s parents or not?  Why did they look so much younger than his friends’ grandparents?

Bebe and Asa found it difficult to explain to the boy, Bebe’s great-great-grandson, and Asa’s great-grandson how such a thing was possible.  Their use of ambrosia, though a common source of local gossip, was still something they felt reluctant to explain in too much detail.  They told the little boy it was ‘magic’.

Lorenzo was unimpressed that his ‘grandmother’ was still having a baby when she must, in reality, be really ancient.  He couldn’t understand why Bebe and Asa didn’t seem to want to grow old, why they kept using magic.

As he left, Bebe was full of doubts – doubts that had been raised by Annalise’s ghost some time ago and that she’d never really been able to shake. She’d wanted a town full of her offspring and their descendants – but now she had that. Her initial dream had been fulfilled a long time ago. Maybe it really was time that she stopped having children and learned to grow old. She touched her stomach and felt a tear form as she realised that this might genuinely be her last baby.

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