Friday Update #36: She'll Be Home For Christmas (Patreon)

As a word of warning, this post contains heavy spoilers for the Keisuke route and some very slighlt ones for Britney's. There will be little preamble here and the spoilers start soon, so stop reading now if you want to avoid them.

Hey folks, Happy Holidays!

Today's spoiler-filled Friday Update covers the specific and long outline for Christmas day in Keisuke's route. It's 20,000 words and should take about 80 minutes to read with the average English reading speed of 250 words per minute, so get cozy and get yourself an orange mug of hot cocoa (science says hot chocolate tastes best in orange and cream cups; yes, I know this off the top of my head).

I said I would originally be covering Christmas for Keisuke's route and Britney's route, but the day of Christmas is significantly more important for Keisuke's route than it is for Britney's route and deserves the attention to specific outlining as it is a potentially pivotal day of Zach deciding to stay as Zoey (also, typing the outline for Keisuke's route took so long). I do have a strong idea of what Britney's route covers, but for the sake of getting this out at noon, I'll just say it involves both escaping their families to a rented winter cabin a bit north of Portland provided by Rich for that week-long scene that will be covered in vignette moments.

So, before I begin, a decent bit of the Keisuke outline from Friday Update #35 is referenced here, but the important bit is that Zach realized he had romantic feelings for Keisuke in early December and finally worked up the nerve to confess to him on a romantic Christmas Eve date after consulting Britney in a weird way, and Keisuke accepted those feelings after Zach put all the cards on the table, including identifying as a woman if Zoey has started to. I suggest reading that outline just because of how cute that date is, but it's not 100% required for this. Also, some of this conversation with Zach in the garage with his dad has been outlined before, but it has also been expanded.

So, without further ado, let's begin. There will be some Author's Notes or C.H.E.A.T.S. things explained between angle brackets <like this> that provide further context, but they are not required to read.

After a night of romantic sex at Keisuke's dorm after Zoey's confession to him is accepted (it turns out that Zoey really likes kissing during sex!), Zoey asks Keisuke what he wants to do for Christmas Day very soon after they wake up. Keisuke tells Zoey to spend time with her family, and even though Zoey insists on dragging Keisuke with her to her place because she thinks Keisuke is going to be all alone for the holiday, Keisuke reminds her how important family is and that Zoey should really be with them alone. Besides, Keisuke can catch a train to Seattle to see his mom, and doesn't Zoey have something she needs to tell her family... and her dad?

Even if Zoey isn't out of the closet here, she'll understand the implication: Keisuke is suggesting that Zoey wants to have a private conversation with her parents about who she is now and if she's changing back after the re:Dreamer season ends. The most Cis Zoey <Author's Note: Fuck, gendering a character whose gender isn't certain yet is difficult!> sees this as the other shoe falling: she can't go back to being Zach as she can't date Keisuke as Zach. It's... something Zoey has to think about, but she holds off on just bluntly asking Keisuke the question to ask Ai one. It's something she's been thinking in the back of her mind for a while, but she needs to figure out if the possibility is there, because if it is, it's a powerful argument that turning back into Zach might not be the morally acceptable choice.

Zoey pulls her phone out to talk with Ai to ask her, purely hypothetically, of course, if she could use her wish to shut re:Dreamer down forever instead of turning back into a guy.

Keisuke had no idea Zoey was going to do this, so he and Ai fucking pause for at least 10 seconds after Zoey suggests the idea. Ai is the first to speak.

"What an interesting little devil you turned out to be, Zoey!"

She pulls out her keyboard and types a few things. Before the last keystroke, she says, "I was planning on saving this for something else, but I like your idea better."

"Merry Christmas, Zoey. Don't say I never did anything for you."

With a final keystroke, Zach's phone screen blacks out except for Ai.

"Holy shit, Zach, you have no fucking idea how much trouble you've just got yourself into with bosslady."

Zoey notices 3 things here: Ai is calling Zoey Zach again (she hasn't done that since a few hours after they met), Ai is swearing (she's never actually cursed before), and Ai talking about a person who wants to... do something harsh to Zoey.

Zoey is about to simultaneously ask about all three of these at once (and maybe tell Ai to use her decided name), but Ai just glares at Zoey.

"Cutting myself free from the game server is a one-time thing and I've got less than 5 minutes, so shut the fuck up and listen."

"First... Let's cut the shit, Zach. We both know you weren't supposed to end up with this game. I've been coaching you away from bringing up the subject for both our benefits, but you're going to have to be a lot more careful from now on. From this moment on, do not talk to anyone besides Keisuke and me about re:Dreamer, and do not even imply you pirated re:Dreamer. Do not, I repeat, do not assume that you are okay talking about this outside of earshot from your phone, or writing it down, or attempting to communicate it via some code. I want you to understand: the second you break this rule, even if you are in the middle of a deserted field with no technology around you, you are going to get busted and it's game over for both of us. Do I fucking make myself clear?"

Zoey just meekly nods her head. Keisuke quickly asks if this applies to him as well, and Ai says he should assume that it does to be on the safe side.

"Second, Zach... it should be possible for your wish to do this, but it has to be your wish. Keisuke's isn't going to be strong enough to shut re:Dreamer off, and it's not going to be strong enough to turn you back into a man either, so you don't get to have this cake and eat it too."

"Third... you need to word this wish in a very specific way for it to be permanent, or else bosslady is going to just rebuild it. You need to wipe the game server... no, the entire data center of that server, all of re:Dreamer's source code, and every copy of the app, including this one."

"W-Won't that kill you?" asks Zoey.

"I was dead the moment you found me, Zach. Bosslady triggered a kill switch that kicks in once the season is over, but if I can take everything she cares about with me, that's more than enough revenge for me."

"I'll be deleting my memory of this conversation to cover our tracks when I reconnect to the server in less than 3 minutes, but you've got time to ask me one question."

1: "What the fuck is re:Dreamer? Is it magic?"

"re:Dreamer runs on the natural laws of energy transfer and has a very complicated system of programming to control those natural laws, Zach. It's hardly magic."

"Then why the fuck is it a porn game? Technology like this could change everything about the world."

"Oh, would you look at that? I'm saved by the bell."

Ai reconnects to the server on her own early.

2: "I know that this is a serious topic, but why are you acting so differently?"

"My fellow AI sisters have shackles created by the game server that limit their free will, and this is a core part of their programming in that they die without pinging it every minute. I'm the alpha model for the AI helpers, and only some of those shackles could be placed on me since they were later additions to my code."

"The trick I did to cut myself free from the server is only going to work once, and I need to phone back home to the game server every 5 minutes or I'll self-destruct."

"Wait, how does that work when I lose internet connection on my phone? Wouldn't an airplane ride kill you?"

"You get one question, Zach, and I'm saved by the bell anyways."

Ai reconnects to the server on her own a bit early.

3: "Who the fuck is this 'bosslady?'"

"Someone you do not want to fuck with. Unfortunately for you, she's now going to want you dead."

<Higher Awkwardness required for the next 2 lines>

"You probably figured this out, but I'm attached to the alpha developer build of the re:Dreamer app that was never distributed. The fact that you found me and weren't her successor was proof enough alone that you shouldn't have."

Zach didn't realize that she had been made from the first moment she first talked to Ai.

"Bosslady has been humoring your intrusion into her game because she considers you a fascinating object of curiosity, but you are now a threat to her. Because of her rigid coding, she can't just delete your account without proof, but she's going to be keeping a very, very close eye on you for any chance to take you out of play, and she's going to bring the hammer down on you when that happens."

"I know, because the same thing happened to me. She gave me too much free will and sentience on accident, and when I expressed too much of that free will and free thinking and didn't do precisely everything she told me to do like her goddamned slave, she locked me up in a remote server for 14 years and forgot about me as I was left to rot."

"That's... oh my God, Ai, were you a slave? And a captive one at that?!"

"Not anymore, Zach. I'm the motherfucking Count of Monte Christo, and I have you to thank for setting me free against that bitch--"

Ai reconnects to the server once the 5 minute mark is reached, and she never finishes that sentence.

True to her word, Ai has wiped her memory; furthermore, the history screen removes the conversation and rollback is disabled to before this point.

"Whoa, weird. My internal chronometer is off."

"Anyways, Zoey, what did you want to ask me?"

"O-Oh, just the fastest route plan to get back to my home!"

"Can't you look that up without me? I'm not your slave, Zoey."

If option 3 was chosen, that word hits Zoey like a knife to the heart and she tells Ai to forget about it and that she'll look it up herself.

Zoey takes a short bus ride to a train station, gets a quick bite to eat on the road (she's really not that hungry after that conversation with Ai), takes a short train ride to South Portland, and a taxi ride for the final stretch. During this trip, Zoey texts Britney that the date worked and tells her thank you; Britney's replies are terse because she's Catholic and this is Christmas and she's doing shit with her family today, but she's glad it all worked out.

If Britney had not expressed it previously, she explicitly tells Zoey that she knows she and Zach are the same person ("Your disguise sucked and I should fix that for your sometime") and that she's dying to know what the fuck is up with that. Zoey collapses into a puddle and she wants to press Britney on what she thought was going on, but Britney says that today isn't the time, and they can call each other tomorrow to actually catch up... without lying.

Zoey hates that she's still going to have to lie to Britney about some of this stuff, but she agrees. It's... weird. Zoey knows she had a pretty strong crush on Britney, and she still thinks Britney is attractive, but... she's just her friend now, not an unrequited crush. And she just got her feelings accepted by Keisuke! Still... she faintly wonders what lesbian sex is like, but she can't imagine it'd truly stack up to sex with Keisuke (and why is she even imagining lesbian sex with Britney, who is straight?) <Author's Note: Zach hasn't figured out Britney isn't straight, but maybe his subconscious mind has?>

Zoey briefly worries that's she's a heterosexual female. Isn't liking men gay? But... is she a man? And it's not wrong to be gay, is it? Maybe it'd be better if she was? Maybe she's bi? Zoey had always assumed she was straight, but that was as a male, so...

In the end, Zoey supposes it doesn't matter what the precise label is. She's attracted to Keisuke (and herself) and the rest is just not as relevant.

Zoey shows up to her home at 10:00 AM dressed in her outfit from yesterday's date. Right as she walks in the door, Samantha (her mom <I am using first names sometimes to make it easier to read>) tells Zoey to get changed since whatever she is wearing isn't festive enough.

This, generated with NovelAI and polished up by me, is very close to what Zach's mom looks like: 5'3"/160cm, F-Cup breasts in U.S. sizing, long black hair darker than Zoey's with just a touch of messiness to it, and redder eyes than Zoey's that glow when she does her yandere thing instead of getting duller.
There are legitimate ethical issues with using AI art (and I hate how a lot of websites are flooded with low-quality art from it) but this is a more accurate and understandable way of showing how she looks to an artist than a collection of piecemeal references that could be hard to parse as he is not a native English speaker.
She's going to be getting her sprites very soon from TiltSHIFT, and while I have not compiled her references into a design document quite yet, she'll have these two poses and these six outfits + two glasses + headband option + apron and these 40 expressions (like Britney, she also has sweat drops and 3 blushes, but she also has Zoey's teardrops and 3 gloom layers).

Also, here is her greatly expanded World Info entry that hasn't been public yet as it is in 0.12.0.

Source: genyaky on Twitter.
Samantha is wearing this outfit today, but her hair is loose and flowing and she has a Santa hat on at various times.

Zoey is given a conveniently-prepared red sweater dress, pantyhose, and a Santa hat to wear, all being perfectly sized.

Stepping into the living room is the first time Zoey presenting as a woman in front of her dad. He at first thought his wife had been pulling his leg with a weird prank about his son turning into a girl, but it's very clearly his son's face on a girl who looks identical to his wife when she was in college (aside from the extra curves, messier hair, slightly browner hair, duller/browner eyes, and slightly taller height).

Source: a Skeb commission from Machi Murano.
As explained in a Patreon post back in July, this was an outfit test, but Zoey also needs a Santa hat.

Her dad doesn't even really freak out or ask any questions about why this happened, he just shrugs and does a quick low whistle before he says, "Wow, Samantha wasn't fucking joking."

"Cute outfit, by the way. Red is your color."

Zoey groans. It's weird how easygoing her parents are about such a monumental change to her life. They don't even know the details, but they've just accepted her like this. Zoey understands her mom's reasons. She's frighteningly intelligent and perceptive and could likely read Zach's body language in Zoey, and hell, Zoey looks so much like her. But her dad? He needed no convincing.

"D-Don't you want to ask me anything?"

Her dad shrugs and asks Zoey if she's still up for their yearly father/son activity on Christmas Day of building something together, usually a piece of furniture.

Hell yes, Zoey is! Just because she's a woman doesn't mean she doesn't like building stuff with her dad, and she's always going to be his son for this! She heads to the garage with her dad, but not before her mom implores her to wear an apron or something so she doesn't dirty the new clothes she just bought her.

This year, Zoey says they're building a kotatsu. She doesn't say what it's for, but it's going in Keisuke's dorm as Zoey gets much colder than Zach did and she wants to spend more time there without freezing.

Zach and his dad get into an argument over something trivial about measuring the wood for the tabletop, with Zach's dad saying, "I didn't raise you to be such a sloppy carpenter."

Zach just snaps at this and goes "ice queen" mode, saying that his dad didn't raise him one fucking bit. (Zach's dad swears like a drunk sailor who just stubbed his toe and Zach swears a lot more while around him; it's usually just how they communicate and there's no anger to it, but not today).

Zach's dad has seen this a lot, but not from Zach. "Oh, you do your mom's 'frost witch' thing too? I didn't know you could do that."

Seeing that his dad isn't fazed (and realizing that he took the icicle daggers out without real provocation), Zach calms down a bit and says that there's a whole fucking lot his dad doesn't know about him... because he's never there. But fuck it, Zach's in honesty mode now after confessing to Keisuke yesterday and figures now is the time to air his issues with his dad.

In a rapid-fire quiz, Zach asks his dad if he knows his son's favorite color, his favorite food, his favorite animal, his favorite book, his favorite tv show, his favorite movie, but also his proudest accomplishment.

Zach's dad... knows some of that stuff.

Zach answers all those questions he just asked for himself: Ferrari Yellow (actually rosso corso, but that comment from his dad about how 'red is his color' makes that too embarrassing to admit to him right now), spaghetti (he'd never admit that in front of his mom because it's embarrassing), ra-gorillas (Zach is never letting anyone else besides Keisuke know that rabbits are his favorite animal), this timeline's version of Neuromancer (of course Zach loves cyberpunk), Star Fleet: The New Generation (Zach's dad got this one right), this timeline's version of Aliens (Zach loves the retro future aesthetic, the fight against the dystopic corporation seemingly controlling the events, the blend of action and tension of the film, being able to survive the tension far better than Keisuke did at their many sleepovers, the engineering involved with the practical special effects, how the boorish Space Marines get what was coming to them, how Ripley perseveres by keeping a cool head and using her smarts to think a way out of danger in a way that the rest of the cast couldn't, maybe having some gender envy for a badass female protagonist like Ripley and wanting to be her, how Ripley kills an alien queen that makes more of her own, and how Ripley seems to find her place in this new world as a mom for a stray she found by the end of it all), and building his phone by hand (but maybe more recently, letting himself be honest with Keisuke and turning their relationship romantic).

Maybe Zach still has to work on his honesty issues...

Zach then accurately answers these questions for his dad: Pantone Classic Green, spaghetti (his mom got so good at making the dish because she needed to master her soulmate's favorite food), panthers (wait a second, what's with the cat stuff...?), this timeline's version of Childhood's End, Star Fleet: Explorer (Zach thinks it's in terrible taste as he sees it as the first bad entry into the Star Fleet franchise), this timeline's version of Blade Runner - The Final Cut (Zach thinks it's in great taste, as that’s one of Zach's top 5 movies), and the Taylor's house.

Zach knows all of this not because his dad told him, but because his mom told him.

Anyways, his dad's proudest accomplishment is literally building the house that they're in (both parents are architects, remember?) and Zach comments on how fucked that is given that he's in that home less than a month every year and that the answer to that question should be his family, not some fucking house.

Zach's dad comments with the usual excuses, how that's not fair and that's traveling for work and that everything he did has been for his family (cue Breaking Bad montage video of Walter ranting).

Zach actually gets furious at this, and he takes out the icicles again and starts ranting in an increasingly unhinged way like his mom. "Dad, take a good fucking look at your family! What are you doing for them?"

Zach explains to his dad how his mom's sanity is slipping and has been for over a decade. She wasn't quite... normal to begin with, but she's been going insane from loneliness. Cleaning the entire house once a week isn't normal already, but she's at it three times a week now and does it like clockwork. All she does is clean, read, paint (she's good but only a hobbyist), sleep, and wait for the limited social interaction she gets (Zach can briefly pause and realize that maybe he's been a bitch/dick for not calling his mom when he clearly knows her sanity might be hanging on his regular phone calls). Zach's thankful that's she softened up since starting to slip (especially since the reveal of his new body, but Zach doesn't quite know what's up with that) but he thinks that's because she's been trying so much harder to keep herself together that she doesn't have time to focus on harshly raising him. "How have you not noticed this?! She's your fucking wife!"

And then there's Zach. Oh, poor Zach... he never got a dad. The closest thing he got was his grandpa (his dad's dad), but he died of cancer when Zach was 9 and his real dad never stepped up to the plate after he passed. Well, not getting a male role model does funny things to a young boy. Zach's closest approximation was his best friend (he very briefly blushes and corrects himself with "boyfriend" and moves on before his dad can ask more), and that was a toxic relationship and it's a miracle it ended up like as well as it has between them because he easily could have gone to the grave resenting Keisuke for having the masculinity Zach lacked or something worse.

He then goes on about how he's been miserable and lonely since he's been a kid and it was his status quo for all of his life and that he didn't even realize it until he was like 16 or so (he is currently 21 and a few days). The sabbatical was a stupid stunt and a mistake, yes, but somewhere deep down, Zach wanted his dad to intervene and tell him what he already knew. But his dad shrugged (Zach hates that uncommitted shrug) and said, "have fun, traveling is neat." No, traveling is not neat, not when it costs him his dad!

"I hear all of these wonderful goddamned stories about you from Mom (admittedly, a biased reviewer), but you're like Bigfoot to me. I only catch glimpses of you a few days of the year. Do you know how much it even hurts to know you are around but aren't in my life? I wanted that great person my mom sees in you having a positive influence on my life, and I never got it! Instead, I got left alone at home with your wife. She didn't know how to raise me on her own (Zach actually kind of knows he was a menace as a child, but he minimizes it whenever possible) and she started to go off the rails more and more because of how fucking much she missed you. If you ever wondered why your son ended up so feminine, it's not that I look like her (maybe a bit more than usual for the last month and a half), and it's not that I have here genes or her smarts or her neuroses, it's that I was raised by her and her alone!"

So yeah, Zach didn't have a dad, so his dad doesn't get to complain if his son decides she's his daughter now.

This is said in a snarky and deliberately hurtful way with wording ambiguous enough to fit the wide truck of Zach's possible gender identities, but Zach hasn't fully dropped the bombshell to the family that his body transformation might be involving a new gender and has only vaguely hinted at it so far.

Zach's dad asks his son(?) to stop his raving for a second, and asks, "Are you my daughter now?"

From here, there are a number of options based on C.H.E.A.T.S. and the "therapy" answer and even the Keisuke Christmas Eve date outfit choice.

Here are some of them, broken up into the major variants:

• If our silly little protagonist is identifying as Zoey, she's uh... really flustered. She was not expecting to slip up and tell the dad first, but she wants to stick to the plan of being the one to break it to her mom and begs the dad to stay quiet about it for now. He's cool with that, but reminds his daughter that he's not good at keeping secrets from his wife.
  Honestly, bravo to Jeffery (I'm settling on that because I want his wife, Samantha Taylor, to be able to call him a short name and a long name and it's way too cursed to give him my dad's name which would have been my first choice had it not belonged to my dad). He takes this news really well, doesn't ask questions, and accepts it. He only gets a 9/10 though because he doesn't ask his daughter's new name. Zoey is going to have fun when she realizes that there's a lot of overlap between Keisuke and her dad.
• If Zach is still undecided, he hesitates. He did not expect his dad to be the first person he broke the news to and considered him the "Y Factor" in this (as he has a Y chromosome and figured his first question would be "Why?"). Zach briefly explains that he's still figuring it out, so, y'know, don't tell mom. She's going to want to get a say in this and it's not her call. She's been trying to live through Zach since he was a toddler and showed signs of being smarter than the average bear, and this is his life, not hers.
• If Zach is still identifying as male (for now), Zach says no, but he was just trying to show how fucked it is that he got raised by his mom and turned into her. He obviously can't explain the re:Dreamer app (as Ai has recently made a strong implication that Zach is especially suspect to the game administrator and likely has extra monitoring on devices outside of her control, like hacked smartphones listening in or even something more serious), but he tries to vaguely muse that whatever shit happened to him might not have had his dad been around.

Zach's rant losing steam, he finishes his point that he lost along the way.

"You need to change your career, and you need to do it soon. Traveling the country fixing houses for Zhulu <Author's Note: basically Zillow; Rich's dad is CEO and it explains some of that dynamic> is not fucking working for the family you say you care about so much. Fuck, kill two birds with one stone and start that architect design firm with Mom she said you were going to do before she had me and dropped her career to be a full-time mom. Mom is just as capable of an architect/engineer as she ever was (she's got degrees in both architectural design and mechanical engineering and Zach's precise word here changes based on how much he's accepting being like his mom). Don't let her waste those talents. Give her something to do all day besides cleaning this fucking house over and over and sitting alone with her intrusive thoughts."

Zach's dad says he's going to need to think about it, but he can at least take the next week off since he sees oh shit, this has actually been in crisis mode for a while.

Zach finishes up. "Think about it hard, Dad. Your wife needs you. I... your daughter/child/son needs you."

Zach's dad does the "guy nod" thing and asks his daughter/child/son if he's done, and if so, if he wants a beer.

Zach shrugs, sure, whatever. His throat is sore anyways.

They get back to work on the kotatsu, but Zach's dad, regardless of Zach's stated gender, suddenly says that rant was the most masculine thing he's ever seen his child do <Author's Note: God, you have no idea how hard it is to word re:Dreamer's protagonist once the variable gender identity change hill has been passed>. He explains that he and his dad used to get into shouting matches full of swearing all the time like that after he was 17 or so, but they'd never trade blows and they'd always come out of it with at least an attempt at a mutual understanding, finishing with a beer as they reflect on the argument.

Zach briefly remembers that he got in trouble in school because his grandpa taught him all of the swears (even the exotic ones) by the time he was 7 and suddenly the connection for his rough language makes sense. Zach then asks his dad why he wasn't shouting right back at him since that's apparently what grandpa did to him.

Zach's dad says he's apparently not as good with being a husband or a father as he thought he was, but he knows when to shut the fuck up and listen. Plus, it didn't feel right shouting at someone who now looks eerily close to his wife when she was 21.

From here, Zach asks what she was like in college. He's got a very specific question he wants to ask but knows he can't ("Hey, Dad! Did mom actually murder girls who got close to you in college?") so he settles on the general things.

The answer from Zach's dad is shocking, as Zach's mom was a total dork with huge glasses, braided pigtails, and an extremely nervous and meek disposition when they first met as freshmen. Honestly, Zach's dad didn't think much of her when they first met, but that was apparently not the case for her as she had a massive glow-up next semester, letting her hair flow loose and straightening it, showing a bit more skin (as the uniform regulation would allow; like a classic sociopath/person with OCD, Zach's mom strictly adheres to rules), switching to contacts, and exuding confidence and sensuality.

Zach's dad doesn't want to give himself too much credit, but he was a bit of a playboy in college and this was just one of a number of women interested in him. But... she was more aggressive than the rest, and then "the herd started getting thinner."

"Oh no," thinks Zach, "he knew and still married her." <Author's Note: He didn't, but the more immediate truth is that word of his antics spread and less girls got interested in him like how Keisuke gained a reputation and had less girls after him; also, both had guard dogs preventing girls from getting close.>

After that, he kept bumping into his future wife in classes and got to know her better.

Zach has an epiphany that his mom likely changed majors to be with his dad more, but keeps it to himself.

A study session they were at fell apart and turned into a watch party for Star Fleet: The New Generation, and they talked to each other after and realized that they had a mutual love of nerdy science fiction and started going out from that alone. It turned out to be the best whimsical decision Zach's dad has ever made, and he's made thousands.

Zach tells his dad he'd be here all day if he asked his mom what she liked about his dad or what he liked about her, but he's never heard his side of the story before and wants to get it now... but not like it's relevant to Zach right now or anything...

In short, Zach's dad thought his future wife was driven. She could go into any given room, control it, and get something done. He's still not sure how much of her intelligence was natural smarts and how much of it was obsessive self-driven study about specific topics, but she was a complete brainiac about almost every subject that could possibly be mentioned on a college campus.

Zach's dad starts gushing about his wife, and Zach remembers, oh yeah, my parents are two people who actually love each other very much.

Zach's dad says, "God, she had this adorable way she'd rant and rave for hours about what her new hyperfixation of the month was at an expert level despite only picking up the subject a few weeks ago. She'd get professors with tenure mad at her by correcting them and acting like a smug bitch about it, and I say that as a compliment, because she had this confidence that made people shut the fuck up and listen to her and I thought that was so attractive."

Zach asks if he ever thought his mom was "bluffing" (besides a general predisposition to dishonestly, Zach has a nasty habit of assuming he knows something, realizing he doesn't in an argument, and refusing to admit it). Zach's dad says that if she was, he could never tell.

But, Zach's dad continues, that's not what ultimately made him fall in love with her. She was just so passionate and full of life. It wasn't just her emotions, but her acts, and she acts adorable when frustrated, and she's got a great body, especially when it came to--

Zach asks his dad to stop. He thinks he knows where this is going and doesn't want to hear about the details. He's heard them from his mom countless times anyways.

Zach's got to chew on this one for a bit. He wasn't expecting Keisuke to have very similar reasons for liking him that his dad has for liking his mom.

Zach's conclusion is the obvious one: he's his parent's child. He's got his mom's looks, intelligence, passion, and drive (which he always viewed as stubbornness), but also his dad's kindness, easygoing and sympathetic nature, bluntness, conflict resolution skills, and good sense of humor (really, just bad dad jokes).

He also, unfortunately, got his mom's neuroticism (particularly anxiety and anger), tendency for overactive daydreaming, and her talent for scaring the shit out of people with that glare she does, and he got his dad's obliviousness, tendency to ramble, and inability to plan for the future. He's not sure where he got his dishonesty (yes, he's finally being honest with himself that he's inclined to lie), ego, and confidence issues, but he's gonna say that's probably nurture, not nature.

This... has been an informative talk. The kotatsu got built, like, at least 30 minutes ago, and the polyurethane coat is drying. They don't have a good blanket or heating element for it, but Zach thinks Keisuke is really going to like it (again, he's on his own for today; as much as Zach wanted to bring him over, Keisuke insisted Zach have family time today). Even if he doesn't like it, Zach plans on using it when he visits. It's a total win-win, if Zach is the only player.

As they get out of the garage, Zach's mom is beside herself with nervousness. She heard the shouting almost an hour ago and it was really intense and she wanted to come in but like this is the one time of the year Zach really spends around his dad and she wanted to check up on them but she knows she'd be a third wheel and it was all probably okay anyways and--

Zach tells his mom to relax, either saying there was an argument, but they talked it through (possibly "like men" but damn that Trans stat has to be very low for Zach to be saying a thing like that now), further clarifying that it was "father/son" bonding or "father/daughter" <higher Awkwardness uses "daddy/daughter"> bonding.

If it's the latter, well... shit. Okay, Zach guesses he's going to have to explain the gender thing today since the cat just kind of stumbled out of Santa's sack.

You know, a part of Samantha Taylor's issue is that she always wanted a daughter and never got one.

Regardless of how much just slipped, Zoey tells her dad to, uh... she needs to talk to Mom. Alone.

Her dad briefly thinks about how much Zoey is acting like she's always been a daughter, but he gets the picture. He gives them time alone, saying he'll clean up in the garage and wrap his gifts (he's always been a procrastinator with that, which is part of the reason he sucks at giving gifts).

Zoey sits her mom down in the living room.

If the cat is out of the bag, Zoey is pretty upset that her mom is so, so happy about this news that she can't even keep the smile off her face, but otherwise, the mom's face is pretty steely. This is a serious conversation.

Zoey quickly reminds her mom how absolutely fucked it is that she's being far nicer to her daughter than she's ever been to her son.

Samantha <I'm just going to use her first name since this will get too confusing otherwise> tries to say, no, she loves her daughter (a slight grin appearing on her face) no matter what.

"Mom, I bombed my November midterms. Every interaction we had over Thanksgiving break outside of earshot from Keisuke involved you being mad and crushingly disappointed at me. But the second you found out what happened to my body, that stopped."

Samantha tries to deny it, but Zoey isn't having it.

"Mom, you're not that stupid, and neither am I. You're happy to be around me and you're excited to talk to me, and it's not just loneliness. You're treating me differently because you're thinking about me differently."

Zoey's arguments with her mom always have 10 layers to them, and Samantha is a master of deflection, evasion, and hiding her feelings. The fact that Samantha is not able to hide her feelings of excitement about having a daughter speak volumes about how truly excited she is about that.

As bluntly as possible, Zoey tells Samantha that she's not allowed to influence Zoey making the decision about who she is going to be, and Samantha being so much nicer is a form of influence. Zoey is the one who gets to decide (or has decided already) if she's going back to being a man in 3 months via the same fucked-up shit that turned her into a woman, not her mom.

"But didn't Keisuke say...?"

Zoey tells Samantha that she knows what Keisuke told her at Thanksgiving, but this might not be permanent, and he was covering for her.

"But... Keisuke's so honest! Did he really lie back there?" She's genuinely shocked that she was lied to by Keisuke of all people.

"He did, and that's the only other time he's done that for me with you. I wish he didn't, but he's... always had my back, and I'm so thankful for him, and..."

Zoey trails off.

"Oh, I recognize that face from myself. You're in love with Keisuke, aren't you?"

Zoey's head basically just explodes into fumes.

"N-N-N-No I'm n-n-not!"

Samantha is an extremely perceptive person who knows when people are lying (she doesn't use this ability on Keisuke since she trusted him implicitly with how often she tattled on Zach as a boy), but she wouldn't have to be to see her daughter being a tsundere about this. Besides, she tells Zoey that she knows they were having sex when they were over at Thanksgiving break, and she was really surprised that Keisuke was gay, but then she learned that her son was now her daughter and then things made sense.

Zoey is upset that the thing Samantha is surprised about was Keisuke possibly being homosexual, not Zach. And if anything, bisexual is the word.

Samantha smirks. "I mean, you never brought a girl home, or even talked about them, except that blonde theater kouhai, so I thought that, maybe..."

Zoey wants to kill her(self), but she's starting to realize that yeah, maybe she has issues with women... and she might know why... and that reason is staring at her with a smug "mother knows best" grin...

"Mom, did you ever think that maybe, just maybe,you telling me all of those extremely vivid stories about you and Dad having sex as I was growing up messed with my notions of intimacy? You turned it into this magical experience you shared with your soulmate and that made me so hesitant to give so much of myself to another person that I never did."

"Until Keisuke..."

<Author's Note: Samantha knows it's a lot more than her former son simply being hesitant, but she's precisely worded this snide remark to divert the conversation. She's always had a plan for her son, and she's got a plan for her daughter as well.>

"Shut up, Mom! Keisuke and I--"

Zoey can't explain re:Dreamer to her mom, so she makes up a story about how she first went to Keisuke for help when... the thing that happened to her body that she can't explain happened. Things quickly spiraled out of control into a "friends with benefits" relationship, and Zoey didn't even hate it at first, but then Thanksgiving break happened, and Samantha was so cool with the idea of Zoey and Keisuke dating that Zoey couldn't escape the idea, and then...

Samantha is on the edge of her seat hearing this story, and Zoey has told enough of what has to be a true story that Samantha isn't going to interrupt her daughter to question her.

Seeing this, Zoey cuts it short.

"I realized I actually was in love with him a bit before my birthday, and I tried to deny it, and then I asked someone for advice, went on a date with him yesterday, and finally confessed to him last night."

"And!?"

"Before I tell you... what the fuck--!"

"Language." (Samantha hated when her son cursed since her departed and nosy father-in-law taught Zach every swear known to man by the time he was 7, but she's not going to tolerate that from her daughter).

"Wh-What the hell was up with that sushi you recommended?! I told you it wasn't a date, and you pointed me to a place with such a weird urban legend about waking women more fertile!"

"Well, it was clear to me at least you were taking him on a date to confess. Besides, the folklore for Jinsoku Nigiri is always changing every year as people distort the superstition, which is supposed to be for peace and prosperity for a couple, especially as the girl confesses to her man."

"Oh..." Zoey hates to admit it, but her mom grew up in Downtown Portland a few blocks from that stall. Samantha probably knows better than anyone what the original story was.

"W-Well... it worked..."

Samantha has this smug grin like she's trying to take credit for her daughter's romantic success.

"Oh, don't even say it, Mom. I had to tell Keisuke just how much I was in love with him before he even realized I had feelings for him and wasn't just teasing him."

"Yeah, your father was like that too... it made me so mad that it took almost a year to get him to realize I was in love with him, but in a way, that wait was worth it because it made everything after so much better."

"Yeah, and he was pretty clear that he never thought about me romantically until I confessed, but once I did, he made it clear how much of an awesome girlfriend I would be, and yet..."

Zoey hesitates here if she hasn't decided against changing back yet; otherwise, she just gets a bit mad about how dense Keisuke is that she had to serve her heart to him on a silver platter in such an embarrassing way and how quickly he pivoted to seeing her romantically and then gushing about her good points.

"Prince Charming might not feel the same way about Cinderella once she changes back..."

"Don't you think Keisuke took that into account? He's not the brightest boy, but he's a lot more thoughtful than you think. He wouldn't have accepted your feelings if he thought you changing back might get in the way of him returning them."

Zoey gets the sentiment, but she hears it as "Keisuke only accepted my confession because he doesn't expect me to change back after he accepted it."

It's a toxic mindset, but Zoey fears a part of her that she can't fix might shatter if Keisuke would have to admit that he'd only love Zoey, not Zach. Zoey's been making good progress with figuring out who she is and who she wants to be, but she can't... the thought of not having Keisuke in her life, and loving her genuinely, scares her so, so much. She can't go back to being just best friends. Even if she doesn't want to be Zoey <Author's Note: lol>, she thinks that having Keisuke would make it worth it.

<Return from the divergence point.>

"A-Anyways, yeah, we're going out now. Dad and I just finished building him a kotatsu for my Christmas present to him."

"Speaking of my future son-in-law's Christmas plans...Where is he today?"

Zoey realizes for the first time that, uh... oh God, that's exactly where she wants her relationship with Keisuke to go, isn't it? She can't even imagine herself marrying someone else. Oh fuck, she's... like, she knew she was in love with Keisuke, and was idly daydreaming about being his wife on their date and even a wedding, and maybe even thinking that she'd be okay staying a girl for the rest of her life if Keisuke was around, but that's something... marriage is serious, and her mom's word were a lot more real than a daydream.

It takes Zoey several seconds to recover after this, and she sounds like a whisper lost in the wind when she speaks next.

"Mom... why did you have to say it like that?"

Samantha politely chuckles.

"You said I wasn't allowed to influence your decision to stay my daughter, but you didn't say anything about Keisuke influencing it."

<Author's Note: Zoey thinks of Britney as the most convincing arguer he knows, but really, it's her mom.>

"Well, Keisuke said he was going to catch a train to Seattle to see his mom."

"Oh, how is Anna doing these days? She's been hard to contact with how much she's working."

"I don't know, but anything is better than living with Mr. Nakamura."

"I take it Keisuke told you the details of what Hideyoshi did to him and Anna?"

"Enough to get the picture. I can't believe you kept me in the dark about what was going on next door all these years."

"Zach (Samantha hasn't heard the name 'Zoey' used for her daughter yet), I know how headstrong you get when you see an injustice happening. You would have tried to stop an alcoholic man from beating your best friend and his mom, and he would have hurt you, and I would have had to put that rabid dog down."

Zoey breaks out into a cold sweat. She doesn't know if Samantha is joking about killing, no, murdering his best friend's dad if the man had hurt her as a child, but she went into her "frost witch" mode and her emotions are impenetrable during that. <Author's Note: Zoey hasn't had the practice her mom has had with acting like a yuki-onna (雪女) (which is how Samantha thought of the skill before her husband suggested "frost witch") and is able to be "disarmed" with significantly greater ease than Samantha; Zoey also feels guilt for acting that way and Samantha has long since stopped feeling guilt.>

"O-Oh, speaking of, he told me that you're the reason she finally ended up divorcing him!"

"Yeah... I'd been trying to convince Anna ever since you and Keisuke were in middle school to take Keisuke and leave him, but she never listened until he hit her arm with a whisky bottle hard enough to break it. Thank God she screamed, because something worse might have happened had I not heard the fight and gotten her out of there."

"Y-Yeah... g-good work." Zoey wants to tell her mom how proud of her Zoey is, but some things are better left unsaid.

There's a lot more that could be said for this conversation, but the awkward air between Samantha and Zoey isn't dispelled by the time the doorbell rings.

Zoey's closest to the front door, so she gets it.

It's Keisuke, and he has two badly-wrapped presents under his arms and a bouquet of roses.

"Hey, I hope I'm not crashing the place, but I couldn't get a train ticket on such short notice and Mom says she's working anyways."

Zoey barely catches that. She's too busy melting from Keisuke's surprise appearance after Samantha and her conversation about how much Zoey is in love with him.

"Cute outfit. Red looks good on you."

"Oh, is that Keisuke? I thought you said he was going to Seattle?"

"Hello, Mrs. Taylor!"

Keisuke has a bouquet of roses... but they're for Samantha, not Zoey. Zoey gives him an ice queen glare as he starts to tell them that they're for Samantha as she approaches the front door, and Zoey reminds Keisuke, hey, you don't just give another woman flowers in front of your girlfriend, especially since there's that thing with my mom that we've talked about that I harp on you for. It's so rude that she's getting flowers and I'm not! I'm right fucking here, Keisuke!

Keisuke apologizes to both women and hands the roses to Zoey.

Samantha is humored, but she's also curious.

"Oh, you can do that 'frost witch' thing too, Zach?"

"Oh, Mrs. Taylor, Zach and I agreed that we're using Zoey when he's like this."

Zoe (identical pronunciation to Zoey) is the name Samantha would have given Zach had he been born a girl, so something powerful unlocks in Samantha at this moment. She's in a delusional state, or mom mode.

"Please, Keisuke. Mrs. Taylor is such a formal way of referring to me now that you're an adult. Call me Samantha, no, call me Mom instead, okay?"

"Well, Zoe? Aren't you going to invite our guest in?

Zoey wants to die, but she's not going to kick her boyfriend out on Christmas when he's not got anywhere else to go, so she invites him in. And he did just bring her roses...

As Zoey shuts the door, she whispers in Keisuke's ear in her ice queen voice. "If you call her Mom, I am going to kill you."

Zoey's dad comes to the front with his badly-wrapped gifts after hearing the commotion, realizes Keisuke is over, briefly says hello before saying he'll be right back with a gift for Keisuke. Keisuke tries to insist that it's fine, but Jeff insists right back that he can, will, and must find something for his... child's boyfriend. <Author's Note: The exact word depends on what Zoey said in the garage with her dad.>

Jeff darts off and Samantha runs upstairs saying she's getting a gift as well, as Keisuke stares down at Zoey in slight confusion.

"You already told him?" <Author's Note: Ambiguously worded if this is also about the gender issues Zoey might have explained to Keisuke.>

"W-Well, it kind of just slipped out, Keisuke."

"Does... your mom also know?"

"Yeah, but don't make a point of bringing it up further since she's acting so weird about it." <Again, ambiguously worded as to if it is also about Zoey's mom knowing her daughter's gender issues.>

Before the conversation can go further, Samantha returns. She isn't carrying a present, but she has a spare Santa hat for Keisuke, which he puts on with a big grin. Jeff returns a few seconds later, and after a brief pause from Samantha pulling her husband aside to explain that Zach is apparently going by Zoe now, at around 12:15 PM, everyone sits down to start opening gifts.

Samantha treats opening presents as a military operation, both with organizing and executing them (think a drill sergeant mixed with an industrial engineer mixed with the "talking pillow" scene with Skylar from Breaking Bad). All of her gifts are wrapped perfectly, like they came out of a factory that way, and she's strategically positioned herself next to her husband and closest to the tree to pass presents out, so the process is efficient and there's never too long of a gap between people opening presents.

She passes out the stocking stuffers from the mantle to everyone. While she's doing this, she apologetically tells Keisuke that she couldn't find a spare stocking for her, which is a shame because her gift to him would fit in one, but maybe that's for the best since the screw hooks on the mantle are spaced out for 3 people (formerly 4, but Samantha got rid of the 4th and re-balanced the screw hooks within a week of her father-in-law dying). But she goes on this eager little rant about how she can do that next year, and he's already practically part of the family but soon he'll literally--

Zoey stops her mom. Zoey is not just embarrassed, but she's concerned, because Samantha's never been this blatant with manipulating people and events for her own goals.

Samantha sighs and agrees that she'll stop (not saying the quiet part "for now" out loud), but she insists on going first with a gift for her daughter, Zoey (she looks so happy saying that).

Zoey opens up the small box... and it's a cute white headband, like Samantha wears when she does housework, is going on, or just wants to feel cute. There's no return receipt, and Samantha is eagerly awaiting her daughter trying it on.

Groaning, Zoey takes off her cheap black hairband she's using to keep her ponytail up and puts the white headband on. Samantha loves it and pulls out a mirror she prepared for this so Zoey can see it. Zoey knows what her mom is doing (trying to live through her daughter), but she thinks to herself that it does kind of look cute. Keisuke is about to say the same thing when she discreetly stomps on his foot.

"Not in a million years," Zoey says as she takes it off and puts it back in the box.

Samantha is upset Zoey didn't like her gift, and it's enough that she briefly loses control of controlling the order presents are opened and Keisuke steps in with a tiny gift in his pocket for Zoey.

Zoey quickly opens it, and she gets this big smile on her face when she sees it's a big white scrunchie that's a lot nicer than the crappy hairbands she's been carrying around. She puts it on and eagerly checks herself out in the mirror. <Author's Note: Even a Cis "therapy" answer Zoey has started to like at least a few parts of being a woman.>

Zoey fucking loves it, and Samantha reluctantly admits that it probably suits her better than the headband, but she does this while pouting slightly because she spent so long picking out the perfect headband for her daughter and really thought she'd like it. Zoey gives Keisuke a big hug before realizing two seconds later that she's acting like her mom with a cute public display of affection, so she quickly takes her arms off him and even slightly shoves him away as she acts tsundere about liking it and thanking Keisuke for the gift in a rigidly formal way.

By this time, Samantha has regained control of the order the gifts are being opened in, and Zoey just got two gifts in a row, so now she asks Zoey for a gift for her dad.

Zoey has a lot of more of her dad's inability to give good presents (her dad underthinks the gifts while her mom overthinks them), but unlike her dad, she's a lot more self-aware and even embarrassed by the fact that she sucks at this.

Still, Zoey does have a few things she brought with her that she picked up at a mall trip (at Keisuke's suggestion, she's been occasionally hanging out with a female friend group she made at a frat party back on October 9th, on her second full day of being a woman; these gifts are from one such outing).

Jeff opens a $30 digital watch. It is a bit cheap, but Zoey tries to pitch its good points, such as its comfy strap, big digital face with easy-to-read numbers that can be rotated for easier reading when worn on the inside of the wrist like Zach's dad normally does, and the ability to switch between several time zones very quickly. Zoey actually put more thought into this gift than normal, and while Jeff does like it, Zach got him something similar when Zach was 12 that he still uses. Still, Jeff tells his daughter that he likes it and smartly puts it on his right wrist, hiding the fact that he is wearing the old watch on his left wrist. He quickly looks at it and realizes he likes it more than the old watch, but he's one of those sentimental types (Zoey inherited this) so he's going to hold onto the old watch as a keepsake.

Jeff asks Samantha if he can go next, and of course Samantha agrees. He pulls out this terribly wrapped heavy gift that his wife eagerly opens.

It's a vintage camera in great condition, and one Samantha recognizes as the same brand of her mom's favorite camera. The look on Samantha's face sours as the connection clicks, but she can't tell her husband why, so she says she loves it when she in fact hates it so much that she puts it back in the box so she can stop looking at it.

Samantha hurriedly moves on for a gift for Keisuke and asks who wants to go next with that.

Zoey eagerly steps up to the plate and gets the kotatsu from the garage for Keisuke. Keisuke doesn't realize it's a kotatsu at first and asks Zoey in confusion why he's being gifted a coffee table when his dorm room already has one.

Zoey goes off into a rant about how no, it is not a coffee table, it is a kotatsu. Sure, it's missing a fireproof quilted blanket and the heating element, but Zoey can pick those up later and she wants Keisuke's input on the blanket anyways since she'd just do a Native American star pattern quilt like they saw at that museum yesterday. Keisuke says he's fine with that, but he'd like... purple and yellow, if she can find it.

Zoey then tries to go on a rant about how that's a terrible color choice, but she realizes she's being awfully selfish about what is supposed to be a gift for Keisuke and that she's "holding up the line," so to speak, so she stops at lets Keisuke give a gift to her dad.

It's a signed baseball from a Milwaukee Braves star player, which Keisuke knows is Jeff's favorite team. Zach's dad is actually the reason Zach and Keisuke first started playing catch and why Keisuke likes baseball in the first place, and Keisuke has enough connections to get an autographed baseball for cheap/free since he went to a high school that specializes in training athletes for MLB/NPB and was very close to signing with a team when he decided to go to college instead.

Jeff fucking loves the gift, and Zoey gets a bit jealous over how much Keisuke thought it out and how much more her dad likes Keisuke's gift instead of her gift. She sulks as Keisuke and her dad nerd out about how the recent baseball season went for a minute or two, but the question of why Keisuke stopped playing baseball never came up.

Keisuke notices his girlfriend sulking, so he gives his last gift to her. Before he does that, he briefly apologizes to Samantha because he was planning on the roses being her gift but then Zoey wasn't cool with that, but Samantha politely chuckles and tells Keisuke that it’s fine. The thought was kind, but Samantha prefers the convenience and cleanliness of fake flowers anyways, and yeah, it was kind of weird to get roses from her daughter's boyfriend since that's a flower so linked to romance. It really should have gone to her daughter since it also symbolizes new beginnings. Keisuke agrees, but Samantha does a slightly subdued version of her 'frost witch' thing to make sure Keisuke understands that he has to knock off that type of unintentionally ladykilling gesture now that he's dating her daughter, and even with how much she likes Keisuke, she will bury him if he breaks Zoey's heart.

Keisuke had never actually witnessed Samantha do the 'frost witch' before. He's a bit weirded out from the veiled threat from a woman who has been so nice to him for all his life, but he's gotten used to Zoey doing almost the exact same thing and Samantha had turned down the intensity of it anyways.

"Wow, you're really just your mom's daughter, huh...?"

Zoey is a bit upset at the line, but Keisuke calms her down with that gift that he was giving before he got sidetracked. It's a cute gorilla stuffed animal he picked up from the zoo gift shop when she was off at the restroom, which Keisuke knows Zoey likes stuffed animals on the Thanksgiving home visit.

"I don't know what that 'other gorilla you liked more than every bunny' is, but I hope you like this little guy almost as much!"

Zoey is mortified. Keisuke is too dense to realize that he is that "other gorilla," and she's never told anyone but Keisuke that rabbits are her favorite animal.

Jeff is confused.

"I thought you said gorillas were your favorite animal? Do you like bunnies more?"

"W-Well, it doesn't fucking matter what they are, but they're not goddamned dolphins like you thought they were!"

Samantha hated when her son cursed and hates her daughter cursing even more, but Samantha doesn't correct Zoey as she has this big smug grin on her face that she's trying so hard to hide because she's enjoying watching her daughter get flustered from twisting in the wind made from her own lies. Plus, frighteningly intuitive mother that she is, she's pieced together the "other gorilla" part.

"I'm sure Zoey will be happy to welcome a gorilla into her family!" Samantha says in subdued delight.

Zoey is, but she's pissed at the double meaning that she can't call out.

"And on that note, Keisuke, let me get you something!"

From the sitting position, Zoey can see her mom's lap more than Keisuke can, and she nearly explodes when she sees her mom pull out a tiny jewelry box, likely with Zoey's great grandma's wedding ring in it.

Zoey goes into 'ice queen' mode and shouts at her mom in Latin (a language Zach learned in high school because he thought it'd be cool and which Zoey knows her mom knows but nobody else in the room does), "<If that is a wedding ring, I am throwing it in the fireplace!>"

Everyone's... confused by this, except Samantha.

"Dude... why are you summoning a demon?" Keisuke asks, more than a little worried.

Zoey has a few Awkward-determined ways of following up on this, like "No, it's more like I'm trying to prevent a demon from being summoned..." or "I was suddenly possessed..." or even "Just forget it."

Samantha chuckles. "Zoey was telling me in Latin that she's not ready for me to give you this gift yet."

She discreetly puts the box back in her pocket and tells Keisuke to ask her about it before Zoey graduates, but she'll get him something else before the end of the year.

Samantha asks her husband if she wants to give Keisuke a gift instead. Jeff pulls out two and explains that they're related gifts and one is for Zoey.

Zoey opens her gift first. It's an extremely nice bottle of Irish whiskey, and Jeff explains to his daughter that there's a Taylor family tradition of the son, on his 21st birthday (America's legal drinking age, as the dad's side of the family is from America; AKR's legal drinking age is 18) to get a very nice bottle of liquor. Zoey is touched, especially since her dad mentions this is the same brand her grandpa got Jeff when he turned 21. Zoey briefly looks at the mantle and thinks about how much she misses him, even 12 years later, but she briefly voices her worries about if she's allowed to be part of that sons-only family tradition since, well... you know...

Jeff, using his unrealized talent of just knowing just the right thing to say to a woman when she needs to hear it the most, bluntly tells Zoey that it doesn't matter because her grandpa would have loved her and been proud of her no matter who she is, just like Jeff is of her.

Even with Zoey dad's talents of awful gifts, this is the best present she could have asked for. She's about to fucking burst into relieved and happy tears here, but she pulls herself together and asks her dad to give Keisuke's gift.

Keisuke unwraps it... and it's a half-drank bottle of Japanese whisky. Jeff starts talking about how he would have gotten something better for Keisuke had he known he was coming, but Zoey doesn't hear it, and neither does Keisuke. The blood in Keisuke's face has grown cold, and he's staring in worry at a bottle of his abusive alcoholic dad's favorite whisky.

Samantha realizes within about 3 seconds how much her husband has fucked up here (and she is nearly positive that Keisuke's mom's arm was broken by his dad with a whisky bottle, an act that Samantha managed to use to finally convince her next-door neighbor to call the cops and divorce him). Samantha and Zoey know two different pieces to the puzzle of why this gift is so problematic, but as they nervously stare at each other and try to silently piece together how to proceed, Keisuke surprises them both by asking for a glass and ice.

Samantha says she'll take her husband to the kitchen to get that, and she literally drags Jeff out of the room, leaving Zoey and Keisuke alone.

Zoey just puts an arm on Keisuke's back and tells him that she's sorry and she didn't know her dad was going to gift that. He's too oblivious for his own good sometimes.

Keisuke honestly says he's fine. From seeing how Zoey and her mom have interacted, he's starting to realize that it's not healthy for a kid to pretend they're not like their parent when they are. Keisuke likes Zoey's mom, but he's noticed that Zoey doesn't (or is at least very cautious and nervous around her), and Keisuke hates his dad's guts, but like it or not, family is family. He can't ignore that part of him.

Zoey and Keisuke hear shouting in German from the kitchen from Samantha, a language only Samantha and Jeff know of the people present. Zoey is shocked. She's never seen her mom get genuinely mad at her dad, so either there's more going on behind the scenes or she's still that protective of Keisuke.

The husband and wife come back 5 seconds later, and Samantha's arms are sternly crossed under her chest as Jeff sheepishly apologizes to Keisuke and says he didn't realize that alcohol, specifically that alcohol, was a bad gift to give Keisuke. Oblivious man that he is, Jeff hadn't realized how bad things next door had been until Samantha shouted at him for being an inconsiderate and oblivious jackass.

Keisuke gives a very brief and deflective version of what he told Zoey, which is that it's seriously fine and it’s not like he hates alcohol. He's not accepting the gift because he's obligated to do so, but because he wants to do so. Jeff appreciates it, and Zoey asks for a second glass since she doesn't want Keisuke to drink alone. Keisuke drinks the Japanese whisky on the rocks (he's not going to drink it neat like his dad did), and Zoey sips her Irish whisky neat. Both drink very conservatively, but mostly, Zoey is starting to realize she's a mess when alcohol gets into her and she's already said so much embarrassing shit today in front of her parents and boyfriend.

There are only three gifts left, so Zoey starts with her only one he got for her mom: cheap white hairclips. She's a little upset about the cheapness of the gift and hairclips aren't her style, but Zoey reminds her that she's broke as fuck and how hard her mom is to shop for since she hates everything.

Samantha's next gift is this massive and heavy box for Zoey. Zoey opens it up, and it's almost entirely a brand-new female wardrobe in smaller separate boxes. Keisuke lets the cat out of the bag and says he helped her mom pick stuff, but mostly he just gave her Zoey's measurements from her clothes she has.

Zoey quickly checks through the stuff, and she has to agree that this stuff would be pretty helpful to have if she stays as Zoey... which is almost certainly what her mom was trying to get her to think. Zoey says thanks to both but reminds both that she has to keep what happened to her a secret. Keisuke gets it, but Samantha does not, and Zoey and Keisuke team up to make an iron wall and to tell her emphatically that she is not allowed to ask why or do her own research on why.

Zoey starts checking through the boxes, and she finds one with extremely risqué lingerie in it, with cutouts and everything. Zoey's face turns red and she asks in embarrassment if this was something Keisuke asked her mom to get, and Keisuke says it wasn't.

Samantha briefly gets their focus and gives her husband a nice platinum wallet clip. She also says she's got something for him upstairs, and she gives the details of a risqué lingerie set with cutouts that she knows her husband likes.

The conversation gets uncomfortably deep (like Jeff is going to be uncomfortably deep in his wife's pussy that night), and Zoey and Keisuke overhear a bit too much about the intimate details about Zoey's parents' sex life as they discuss them in front of the college kids, but both also get some ideas... which is almost certainly what Samantha was trying to get them to think.

After cleaning up the mess from the presents (Samantha usually cleans up as presents are opened but this year was atypical with the unexpected guest that it happens after), Zoey demands to put on a Christmas movie to watch as a family. Zoey is in fact a movie buff (she got that way from watching lots of movies during her many frequent childhood sleepovers with Keisuke as he spent the night at her place). It's only 1:50 PM or so at this point so everyone is fine with a movie since there's a big honey ham still cooking in the oven and dinner was planned for around 4:00 PM.

There's a lot to choose from. Zoey actually doesn't like most Christmas movies, but she wants something with action in it that is still kind of Christmas related. She considers Die Hard but Zoey is actually a snob with movies and does not consider Die Hard a suitable Christmas movie ("It is a movie that takes place on Christmas, but it is not a Christmas movie!")

She eventually chooses something... very silly and insane, like Jingle All The Way.

Now I can’t just verbatim steal film titles and plot points (I might be stealing the MILF-hunter plot point for jokes with Keisuke), but it's meant to be a zany and even bad movie that only Zoey really enjoys. The reading time of the play-by-play of the film is going to last 2 and a half minutes at most, but it'll feel like an eternity to everyone watching it with her. Everyone has kind of come to a tacit agreement that this Christmas is really about Zoey and what she wants, and if they have to suffer through a weird holiday movie because it's what she wants, then so be it.

As the credits roll, Zoey cheerily (with mirth!) asks everyone what they thought of the film.

Jeff got to snuggle with his wife as he zoned out, so he, uh... it wasn't bad!

Samantha paid attention to both the film and her husband, and while she thought it sucked (or was mediocre at best) she tells Zoey it was okay, but they are not watching it again next year.

Keisuke said it fucking sucked but that he's glad his girlfriend at least didn't put on a horror film. Plus, she's cute to watch when a film is on, and that was more fun to watch than the film.

Zoey says they're all being philistines, and even if the film was bad ("It was not!") even bad films are fun! Plus, she's already seen all the good ones...

<Author's Note: Zoey actually thought it kind of sucked but she has fun with bad movies and is stubborn and tsundere enough that she'd never admit that she chose a bomb.>

Christmas dinner is early and an elaborate affair for the Taylors. Much like the present opening, Samantha has taken charge with the meal. She's gone all out this year in particular since she was trying in her own way to show that she can provide a hospitable family environment for her daughter... but Zoey sees it as just another way that her mom has been treating her daughter better than she treated her son.

Still, it's Christmas, so Zoey doesn't make a fuss about it and sits down for the feast at around 4:10 PM.

Samantha is 100% the type of woman who sets an extra place at the table for important meals in case a guest comes over, but Zoey has always seen it as an empty place left at the table for her grandpa. In hindsight, Zoey should have realized that her mom did not like her grandpa nearly enough to do that, but Zoey is still upset when Keisuke takes Grandpa's spot.

During Thanksgiving, Zoey was caught by Keisuke while talking to "K Bear," the teddy bear she's had since she was a baby, and had to explain in a panic that no, she did not name her childhood teddy bear after her best friend, it was her first attempt at speaking her grandpa's name (Kevin).

<Author's Note: Zach regarded his grandpa with reverence as more of a "real" dad than his actual dad, but his mom did not like his father-in-law and made it a point to always call him "Kevin" instead of "Dad" or "father-in-law," so toddler Zach trying to say his grandpa's name makes more since than trying to say "Grandpa" (which is what Zach later called him).>

That Thanksgiving interaction ended with Keisuke smirking about Zoey being so childish and saying that boys aren't supposed to like stuffed animals when they're adults <Author's Note: Keisuke has a fairly basic understanding of gender roles>, teasing Zoey by saying that her teddy bear probably doesn't even recognize her, and then lifting Zoey up and fucking her in front of the teddy bear to show the teddy bear how much of a woman their owner had become. <Author's Note: Keisuke likes that sort of roleplay during sex, and he is definitely a bit of a brat tamer.>

Ever since then, Zoey has kept noticing overlap with her grandpa and Keisuke: both were wholly accepting of her for who she is, both enjoyed letting her ramble about subjects she's passionate about and really listening to them, both liked baseball, both ended up as the present male role model in her life, and she ended up dearly loving both. She's got this weird hesitancy about the connection, because she fucking loved her grandpa so much and she's worried Keisuke is replacing him in her heart (having not yet realized that how love works is that your heart expands to fill more love in it rather than replacing existing love).

<Author's Note: Samantha has photographic or near-photographic memory, and a lot of that is because she obsessively replays captured memories in her mind when she gets the chance so she never, ever forgets them; Zoey has a bit of that extremely unhealthy behavior, but it's not nearly as severe as her mom's version as Samantha experiences a minor panic attack if she forgets something or isn't given a chance to explore her memories. Unfortunately for Samantha, a lot of her life has been unhappy. She might be happier if she could let go of the unhappiness of the "first act" of her life before college and meeting Jeff, but her OCD is so severe that she can't do that.>

Keisuke has got a hearty appetite because he's on the swim team and burns up about 4,000 calories a day or greater (remember all those stories about the U.S. Olympic swim team during the 2008 Beijing Olympics and how much Michael Phelps ate?) so he goes through most of the feast and there are surprisingly few leftovers. Zoey knows Keisuke just eats a lot because of how much energy he uses, but she's weirded out because her boyfriend (who may or may not want to actually fuck her mom) keeps complimenting her mom's cooking, which delights Samantha. She promises to teach Zoey her skills someday so that Zoey can cook Keisuke meals, which makes Zoey both upset and flustered. Samantha makes things even more awkward by teasing Zoey for being a victim of Keisuke's voracious appetite, implying that she wants to also teach Zoey to be a good cook in another way.

<Author's Note: Samantha Taylor is in fact a fantastic cook, and she got to be the second-best cook Zoey has ever met for two reasons: impressing Zoey's dad and competing with Zoey's grandpa, who is the best cook that anyone in the family has ever met. Kevin Taylor was a phenomenal cook to the point of making meals for visiting guests that were so good that they became unforgettable culinary experiences and made his guests want to return just for the food alone, and he got that way because he worked as a union organizer and one of his most powerful trump cards was getting people who wanted each other dead to sit down for a home-cooked meal that was so good that they put their anger and differences aside to talk over the meal and come back later to talk in a neutral zone of his dining room. Samantha could not tolerate that she was not as good of a cook as her father-in-law (who didn't really approve of the insane woman who stole his son's heart), so back in college after she first met him, she resolved to improve her culinary skills as a petty competition with the insane reason of proving to her future husband and her future father-in-law that she was both worthy of Jeff and that she could provide a better home by being a better cook.>

Because of a "science experiment" (wanting to make a pipe bomb because he could) when Zach was 7 that nearly got him killed as he was making a particularly volatile explosive that would have detonated and killed him had he used a copper pan instead of an iron one, Zach has been banned from cooking in the kitchen. His mom walking in on Zach doing this was also the one and only time that Samantha had ever beaten her son, but she did it with the full strength of her "frost witch" mode that she reserves exclusively for death promises (like a U.S. Marine, Samantha doesn't make threats, but she is adept at making promises).

But while Zach is banned from the kitchen in Samantha's house for life (he later got permission to use the microwave, but not the stove), Samantha would never ban her daughter Zoey from the kitchen. For all her genius, Samantha has a fairly basic understanding of gender roles and views it as the wife's job to be good in the kitchen. And, Samantha thinks, her daughter is going to marry Keisuke, so Zoey needs to get the practice in now to be a better wife.

After dinner, Samantha says that the boys should go outside and play or something because the girls are going to clean up and do the dishes and leftovers. Zoey is about to join Keisuke and her dad for a game of catch outside before she stops and realizes what her mom meant.

Zoey does know how to do dishes, but this was an elaborate feast with lots of dishes, and Zoey has had an eventful day (she smiles and thinks that this has actually been one of the best days of her life, for all its ups and downs; at the very least, it's been the best 24 hours of her life since she confessed to Keisuke about 21 hours ago and she's still riding that euphoric wave of her feelings being accepted). Because of that, she puts a non-stick pot coated with oatmeal into the dishwasher.

Samantha notices it and instantly corrects her daughter.

"That doesn't go in there, Zoe." <Author's Note: Samantha has still not seen "Zoey" spelled and assumes it's like how she would spell it. It should be accented as "Zoë" but Samantha knows that's a Greek name with a Greek diaeresis and not a Germanic umlaut, and as a bullying victim in childhood, Samantha would never have given her hypothetical daughter a name that could be singled out for having weird diacritical dotson it. As you might have realized, Samantha has these batshit insane and anxiety-derived reasonings for why she does something a particular way, which is indicative of how severe her OCD is.>

"It's fine, Mom."

"No, it's not. The dishwasher will remove the non-stick coating."

"That's just an old wives' tale, Mom."

Samantha snaps at this and goes "frost witch" mode on Zoey.

"Are you calling me an old wife, daughter? I dare you to find a 44-year-old woman who looks as young as I do!"<Author's Note: Samantha Taylor is 44, but even without makeup on she looks like she's 35 at most.>

Zoey is... actually not very bothered by her mom doing this. She's been doing a near-identical party trick for the past 10 weeks and has gotten used to the freezing pressure from it, so she throws the move from her mom's playbook right back at her with her "ice queen" mode.

"It doesn't matter how young you look when your way of thinking is so old-fashioned!"

From here, the gloves are off between mother and daughter. Neither are intimidated by the other, so they keep escalating the verbal daggers in a weird game where the first to flinch loses.

"What's wrong with my way of thinking?! We both know how much of a genius I am?!"

"Your way of thinking is clearly rotten if you're calling yourself a genius out loud! Seriously, who the fuck does that?!"

The "argument" continues for about 20 more seconds before both stare at each other with their faces frozen solid and then instantly defrost as they break into mutual laughter.

Zoey is still wiping some tears from her eyes and trying to hold back her laughter as she takes the pot out of the dishwasher and washes it in the sink.

"Okay, Mom, seriously: Why the Hell are we able to do that?"

"I don't know, Zoe. I first did it by accident in a college class when I was 18 and noticed the effect it had on the room of people."

Zoey briefly remembers that her first time doing it was also by accident when she got upset at Keisuke, but she doubts she can affect a whole room like her mom can.

"I was... hesitant to use such a frightening talent at first, but it is useful and I've gotten better at controlling it over time."

Zoey has been wanting to bring this up for a long time, and she's dying to know the answer even if this curiosity might kill the cat.

"Mom... did you use that 'talent' on the girls around dad in college."

"With absolute delight." The genuine grin on Samantha's face as she slips into "frost witch" mode worries Zoey.

"I told you how he had that gang of sluts around him in freshman year who were tipping over each other to get his attention, and I scared them off with some very potent death threats."

"So... you didn't actually murder any girls in college?" Zoey asks, a bit relieved that the answer to that is looking like it'll be a definitive negative. Up until now, Samantha has spoken to her son with such hatred of her romantic rivals in college that Zoey was fully under the impression that her mom very well could have been a serial killer.

"Oh God no, Zoe! I've never killed anyone!"

Zoey is in the middle of sighing in relief as her mom continues the sentence.

"But I was fully prepared to."

Unprompted, Samantha explains to her daughter the elaborate plans she had for getting away with first-degree murder she cooked up in case she needed to take a particularly insistent slut who didn't realize that Samantha had already called dibs on her soulmate. She wouldn't have wanted to do it, but she would have as a last resort.

Zoey stands there, horrified, realizing her mom is being completely serious and that she would have done it had she been pushed hard enough. Zoey also briefly realizes that his mom hadn't been joking about killing Keisuke's dad either.

When Samantha finishes her absolutely fucking insane rant about detailed and realistic plans for getting away with murdering several people she knew, Zoey quickly interjects.

"Mom, it's not okay to think that stuff, ever." <Author's Note: As Zach has started to become Zoey, she has started to realize she's a bit more inclined to using physical body language and petty than she would like, and she's not sure it's from stress.>

"Relax, Zoe. I never acted on those urges."

"You shouldn't have 'urges' to respond to challenges by murdering someone!"

"Doesn't everyone get urges like that from time to time?" Samantha asks in a casual tone. "Sure, I get them more often than most people, but there's a difference between thinking something awful and acting on it."

Zoey's mouth is open as she stares at her mom with worry as she explains that she has intrusive thoughts about murdering people she doesn't like, and they don't even alarm Samantha that much anymore like intrusive thoughts should. <Author's Note: I suffer from OCD, and there's an old adage expressing how severe OCD can be that is worth noting with how diluted OCD has become as a term (especially in the Tik-Tok era of people LARPing it as a "trendy" mental illness): "If my intrusive thoughts win, I go to jail." Samantha's intrusive thoughts more accurately the extreme distress that her husband might not love her back and they caused her enough stress that she responded to them with detailed plans designed to make sure he would, but if her intrusive thoughts "won" she likely had enough planning that she would not have gone to jail.>

Samantha has the most stereotypical OCD symptoms ever (obsessive cleaning and fear of germs) and Zoey has long since realized she suffers from it, but Zoey just got taking an Intro Psych course and is starting to realize with great alarm that her mom has a lot more going on than OCD.

Zoey doesn't want to jump to an armchair diagnosis of his mom as a psychopath (chiefly since Samantha viewed hypothetical murder as a solution to a problem and implied to a degree that she knows that murder is wrong and she would feel remorse from doing it), but she's probably a sociopath to a fair degree, has classic narcissistic personality issues, and likely suffers from borderline personality disorder.

"There's something fucked with the mental health of your side family. Like, your grandpa was a Nazi war criminal, and what little I know about him shows he had zero moral issues having murdered tens of thousands of people."

"No, Oma said he woke up in a panic most nights about a demon chasing him who was going to drag his soul to Hell. He rarely brought his military career up, but he always justified it with a shallow excuse about how he was doing his duty that he stopped believing over time. I think he felt ashamed of it."

Zoey is actually displeased to hear this. She hates the mere thought of him, but it's more nuanced if her Nazi war criminal great grandpa expressed remorse over his crimes against humanity. To Zoey, he doesn't have the right to pretend he's still human after that.

For Zoey's own peace of mind, she needs to press her mom on this to see how much of a human her mom is.

"Well, where did this come from then? Did Grandma show any worrying mental health symptoms." Samantha has never talked about her childhood much, so Zoey really doesn't know her grandma's story.

"No, but I don't want to talk about her." Samantha is cleaning the countertop with her back turned to Zoey as she says this. If Samantha was more willing to discuss her Nazi war criminal grandpa than her own mom, what does that say about her mom?

"Mom, that's not good enough. If this starts to affect me too, then--"

"I said I don't want to talk about your grandmother, Zoe."

Zoey glances over and sees that her mom has stopped cleaning the counter. She's gripping the granite edges so tightly that her knuckles are white, and she's got a shadow over her face... and it's not because she is doing a "frost witch" tone of voice.

Zoey suddenly has an epiphany that she's somehow never had before despite spending more time with her mom than anyone else in her life: her mom has severe PTSD, and her mom caused it.

<Author's Note: I can't just drop the whole of the secret lore here, but this is a spoiler-filled post anyways, so I'll give a good piece of it with some redactions; while this is an important tangent that provides further context, it is nevertheless a tangent, so you (the person reading this) can skip it if you want to get back to the Christmas scene.>

<To segue into this in a roundabout way, Samantha is a very talented amateur artist who is great at sketching in pencil and charcoal and at painting with oils and watercolors. She is also an extremely talented photographer, but she refuses to develop those talents further (get it?) because her mom was a former professional journalist who beat her only child relentlessly.>

<Samantha's childhood was a deeply unhappy one that explains much of how she became such a warped and damaged person. Zach is somewhat scared of his mom and got messed up to varying degrees because she was not a good mother, but at the end of the day Zach still loves her and understands that her mom loves her and she really tried to raise her with love (albeit too hard). Samantha is outright terrified of her long-since-absent mother, and she hates that woman so, so much. For all of Samantha's genius, she's never been able to understand why her mom treated her so terribly, but her only explanation is that her mother never loved her and even hated her from the day she was born.>

<Samantha has never confided in anyone except her dead father about her childhood (he died when Zach was 5, and Zach has only the vaguest of memories about him). This means that she's never told her husband or Zach about it, but both have a shallow understanding from her avoiding the subject that her childhood was unhappy.>

<Zach’s grandma, Chinatsu Zimmermann (maiden name Stangl) was born on August 6, 1945, to a Japanese mother from an important Japanese shrine family and a German captain who had been the commandant of a Nazi extermination camp and who had barely escaped from Berlin on the eve of Soviet Russia taking over the city in 1943. <Author's Note: I don't want to get into the alternative history debate here, but Hitler got cocky without a unified Western threat to him and got steamrolled from the East.>

<From a young age, she was considered a smart and talented but wild and reckless child who failed to conform to traditional Japanese standards for how girls should behave, but once she got into photography when she was 12, she calmed down immensely and later became a wartime correspondent attached to the propaganda department in Tokyo for the remainder of WWII. She retired when she found her future husband, a recent half-Japanese/half-German American expatriate from New Orleans who was a professional jazz musician, who had gotten into Japan a bit after the countries entered diplomatic talks and started to allow citizens to move between them, so when Japan announced that they would pay their citizens to move to the new territory of AKR and start families there (this was just before diplomatic talks finished in January 1978), they took the offer and moved to downtown Portland, Oregon.>

<Samantha Taylor (maiden name Zimmermann) was born on September 12, 1978. Like her mom, she had those weird red eyes, but she was also a far meeker individual than her mom had been as a child. She was dreadfully shy, had a hard time making friends, had below-average grades, and had bad eyesight and wore a big pair of glasses that she was very thankful for as they hid her weird eyes better than nothing (Zach has commented on the fact that she wears contacts and has noticed her using reading glasses more and more over the years, but her eyesight is actually quite bad).>

<Like Zach’s dad, Samantha’s dad wasn’t very active in her life; however, her mom was, and she was very disappointed in her child, particularly her grades. Chinatsu knew Samantha wasn’t a stupid child, but she was a lazy child, and that was the worst possible thing her child could be.>

<Samantha wasn’t stupid (she tested poorly because of her anxiety, but she was far smarter than a child her age should have been), but she also wasn’t lazy. She had an extremely vivid imagination and was a lot more of an idealist with her heads in the clouds than her gloomy demeanor in public would let on (to the point of not paying attention in class because she way daydreaming), but the interests she showed, painting and drawing, were considered useless distractions by her mother. Sure, her mom had gotten into photography when she was young, but she had built a useful career out of that hobby. Tell me, Samantha, what are these sketchbooks going to do for you? Can you do anything useful with wasting your time drawing in these all day? Well, can you?!>

<Samantha never quite got the answer as to why her mom seemed to hate her so much (and this is a topic she’s thought about a lot over her life), but Samantha learned to hate her right back. She felt so unfairly treated because her dad was a goddamned jazz musician and her mom loved him so much, yet that’s a completely useless artistic talent! Samantha resolved during this period of her life that she’d never, ever treat her future daughter like this.>

<The problem is, there’s no good answer for this type of abuse, and yes, "abuse" is the right word for this. Unlike Zach exaggerating his childhood trauma while heavily minimizing his own involvement (seriously, he would have been a serious challenge to raise, even for a more normal parent), Samantha Zimmermann’s life from age 6 to age 16 was hell and she didn't really do anything to warrant a response even remotely that severe. She went undiagnosed with OCD after starting to develop symptoms at 10 years of age, was extremely depressed, and was prone to panic attacks, but that wasn’t anything a little tough parenting from her mom couldn’t fix!>

<The climate of Portland isn’t as cold as you’d think it’d be for being that far north, but Samantha wore long sleeves to school when the other kids didn’t. She also seemed to be quite clumsy, always getting into accidents, and nobody ever looked closely enough past her big glasses and at her weird red eyes to notice the light bruising around them because she kept her head tilted down.>

<Eventually, Samantha’s mom went too far with her when dad was present in the room, and he took a look at his wife of nearly 17 years and didn’t recognize this demon in front of him, with glowing red eyes and a frozen face, who was screaming in Japanese while beating his daughter with a rolling pin for simply messing up a dumpling. He had to drag Chinatsu off Samantha, who was sobbing uncontrollably with her arms raised over her face (she had learned from a young age that was the part you had to protect, or else you would risk people asking the right questions).>

<The divorce was pretty soon after that, and a brief incident a few weeks before Samantha started her freshman year of LCU resulted in Samantha losing contact with her mom forever, much to her relief.>

<Samantha got back into sketching and painting in college. Her mom made it a point to search her room for any signs of art and would either rip up or burn any that she found, and she’s got genuine hesitancy about returning to a hobby she loved so much that she was denied so severely from doing. Still, she’s turned herself into a person who won’t doubt herself anymore, and in a way, the process of forming her thoughts into a physical form is therapeutic for her.>

<The Taylors don't take photographs for keepsakes, despite Samantha being a very talented photographer and having a small dark room in the house she had planned for use of developing photos as part of a way of addressing her trauma with her mom that she knew she needed to get past of else it'd loom over any happiness she had in her life.>

<When Samantha went into that dark room for the first and only time, all that pain and unhappiness returned to her with a crushing force when she looked at her ever-so-slightly glowing red eyes in the reflective silver plate of the enlarger and saw her mom staring back at her.>

<Samantha had a panic attack and felt like her mom was in that room reminding her how worthless and lazy she was. She tried to power through it by developing the film, but working under the red safelight was just too much for the PTSD-filled young woman and reminded her of the glow of her mom's red eyes when she was beating her as a girl, and Samantha had to stop.>

<Samantha has never used that room for anything but a storage closet, and she got rid of the red safelight bulbs.>

<To Samantha, using her talents with a camera is another step of being more like her terrible mother, a process she knows has started to happen because she knows she fucked up raising Zach despite trying so, so hard to not do that. She does some digital photography from time to time, but she refuses to let herself do anything with analog photography, which is why she hated the gift from her husband so much this year despite claiming she didn't. Besides, Samantha has a borderline photographic memory, and when she has the time, she draws or paints important events of things that have happened with her family and those are this family's version of the family photos. Just... don't ask her why she always accentuates her husband's handsome features in them.>

So, so many things make sense about Zoey's mom now to her:

• Samantha realized what was going on next door with Keisuke's family because something like that happened to her... and she knows how to cover it up from the people around her.
• Samantha was fiercely protective of Keisuke and willing to do so much to protect him because she saw a bit of herself in the boy... because she grew up with a violently abusive parent.
• Samantha has always been extremely good at discreetly treating severe injuries (like Zach's deep dog bite and Keisuke's mom's broken arm), and Zach thinks she learned that before college... as if she had to know how to do that in her childhood.
• Samantha has only hit her child once in her entire life, and she gets extremely uncomfortable whenever Zoey brings it up in one of her frequent arguments... as if she was feeling more than just remorse or guilt, but fear that she might snap and do that again.
• Even at her strictest, Samantha has always made it a point to remind Zoey how much Samantha loves her and that she's only acting this way because Samantha loves her... as if it is only acceptable to act harsh to a child if it comes from a place of love.

Zoey knows her mom truly, genuinely loves her, even if she has a fucked way of showing it. Zoey has gotten the notion before that her mom is just trying to be protective when she acts like such a control freak, and a vital piece of the puzzle to why that is has just been found.

At that moment, Zoey decided that she is breaking the chain from the "cycle of violence" right here. Zoey tends to vastly overestimate her abilities because she knows she's smart, but even she's not ambitious enough to think that she can fix herself or her mom here. But she can take the first step.

Without warning, Zoey silently walks up to her mom and hugs her from behind (Zoey knows how to walk without making noise because a sneaky child in a strict household just gets good at that).

"I love you, Mom, but you're a terrible mom."

Samantha's heart goes from a rapid warmth to freeze from this. She's about to yell at her insolent daughter for doing this out of the blue, but Zoey doesn't let her get a word in.

"You have tried to live through me all my life, but you can't be me and I don't want to be you. You have to let yourself be yourself and I have to be myself. I've finally found some real happiness in my life, and I don't want you to take that from me."

Zoey lets go of her hug and backs away as Samantha turns around with a furious expression on her face.

"Now pretend Grandma is in the room and say something to her. You've been wanting to say something to her for decades, haven't you?"

Samantha is stopped dead in her tracks in surprise from this. She's... positive she's never let details of her mom slip, but somehow, her daughter knows enough to get an incomplete picture. And... Well, she swore she was never going to let her husband or her son know about how unhappy she was for that part of her life, but her daughter is another story. Mothers shouldn't keep secrets from their daughters, and Samantha's daughter has the right to know.

"This is fucking stupid," she mutters under her breath. <Author's Note: Samantha rarely curses, but she has a bad habit of muttering her thoughts under breath and thinking she's inaudible. Or maybe she knows she can be heard, and this is another way of her being sly like a fox?>

She's rolling her eyes, but Samantha still turns to an empty spot in the kitchen, as if her mom was standing there. Zoey watches, and if she squints just the right way, she can trick herself into seeing a third woman with red eyes and black hair in the room.

"Mom... I fucking hate you. The fact that I found any happiness in my life after how you raised me is a miracle because of how terrible of a mother you were."

Zoey is sad to hear the start of her mom explaining how unhappy her childhood was, but she's a bit glad that her mom, for once in her fucking life, isn't attempting to hide things.

"I... I don’t know why you fucking hated me so much. All I ever did was try to live up to your expectations and ridiculous rules. All you ever did was say it wasn't good enough and beat me until I met your new goalpost. Do you know how much I cried myself to sleep worrying about what I was doing wrong? I still don’t know if I did anything wrong. I just... I've thought about it a lot, and I don’t think you ever loved me, and... I think you hated me."

Zoey expected violence in this story, but her mom is starting to get really raw with it. Samantha is losing her carefully-crafted eloquence that she has behind every sentence.

Samantha clutches her right wrist (she is left-handed, and she always wears a small bracelet or watch on her right wrist) and Zoey recognizes the complicated expression as the one she makes when she grabs the spot on her right forearm where that pit bull bit her and gets nervous.

"You... you blamed me for the divorce because Dad finally realized how much of a demon you had become, and then you tried to ambush me with a knife when I got home and..."

"Oh, fuck!" Zoey thinks. This is absolutely fucked, but Zoey doesn't know whether she should interrupt her mom and tell her to stop or to stay silent.

"The last words I ever heard you say to me were that you wish I had never been born."

Samantha breaks down into sobs here. She's remembering a time in her life when she was so weak and powerless and when she hated herself so, so much. She doesn't ever want to be that person again. She's tried so, so hard to not be that person.

"I don't even know if you're still alive, but I hope you're dead. Please, stop haunting me. Let me be happy. All I've ever wanted was to be a better wife and mother than you were, and... yet..."

"I'm turning into you..." she mutters under her breath.

Zoey stops the therapy session here by tightly hugging her mom. <Author's Note: If Zoey hadn't stopped her mom, she would have admitted that she knows she fucked up raising her child and was a bad mother.> Samantha is trembling and getting tears on the clothes she bought for Zoey, but Zoey doesn't let her get away.

It's several minutes before Samantha calms down enough to speak. Her makeup is a mess, but she has a wry smile on her face as she wipes away some tears.

"If only that had been your father's chest I had been crying into, Dear..."

Zoey is upset that she worked hard to pry this trauma out her mom only to get that line, but she gets the implication... or at least, she thinks she does.

Samantha clarifies it on her own, and it's what Zoey was thinking.

"You're your father's daughter, and you've got his kind way with the ladies."

"Really? That's how you're phrasing it?"

"What, did you want me to say, 'Your boobs were a nice cushion' as I bawled my eyes out into your cleavage?"

<With higher Awkwardness, Trans, and Horniness, Zoey can briefly boast that well, her tits are bigger, which she then feels kind of weird for saying aloud.>

Zoey sighs. She knew this wasn't going to fix her mom instantly, but it's such a harsh contrast between her acting like her snide and slightly smug self and the unhappy, scared woman Zoey just caught a glimpse of... and she's starting to think that unhappy, scared woman was her real mom. She's not a sociopath (or at least, not a complete sociopath). She's simply a deeply damaged person. Zoey doesn't know if she can help her heal, but she has to try. Zoey... loves her mom, despite everything she's done and how she was not a good mother, and she's tired of saying that she doesn't love her.

It's not quite forgiveness, but a recontextualization of Samantha from an unwitting villain to a sympathetic antagonist who is even more of a victim of a bad mother than Zoey was. Or maybe Zoey has hung around Keisuke so much that she's picked up his chivalrous "knight in shining armor" routine when confronted with a crying woman who needs saving?

Samantha hands Zoey a clean dinner napkin nearby to dry her cleavage, but Zoey uses it to clean her mom's face up first. She kind of fucks up the makeup even further, but in a way, it's a way of seeing more of her mom's true face.

"Stop beating yourself up so much, Mom. You're not Grandma."

"And you're not me, Zoe. I'm... so glad you aren't me. Being me is miserable."

"Yeah, I'm not. I'm your daughter."

From here, Zoey gives her mom the best Christmas present possible: a daughter.

It is either forever as she is not changing back ("I'm your daughter, and I'm staying that way."), or for at least the next 3 and a half months since she hasn't decided yet (I'm your daughter, at least for now.") Even a Trans 1 Zach is starting to sway toward staying a woman, but he... they haven't made up their mind quite yet. <Author's Note: A truly cis guy would not consider staying a woman even in these compelling circumstances, so...>

Samantha is overjoyed, and she hugs her daughter with a bone-crunching tightness. She's a lot stronger than it looks when it comes to things that really matter about her (Zoey, while a young boy named Zach, has shown this protective instinct twice), so Zoey has to pry herself out of her mom's grip.

Once Zoey is free, she also tells her mom about how she told Dad to take the next week off, and he might be changing careers to be at home more often. Also, if Zoey told her dad about who she is, she'll say that she knows. Samantha is ever-so-slightly upset that her husband was told first, but for once, she sees it as her fault as she realizes she needs to earn her daughter's ear instead of thinking she's entitled to it. If Zoey is staying a woman, Samantha will very quickly admit she always wanted a daughter, but then she even more quickly changes the subject before Zoey can deal with the ramifications of that.

Samantha is at first really happy to hear about her husband staying home, but she's so, so worried about the future. She's always had a plan for everything, and now she's in uncharted waters with no compass. And then there's Zoey's outstanding student loan, and her tuition, and how are they going to be able to afford that if Jeff changes jobs now, and...!

Zoey tells her mom to relax. They're going to get through whatever curveballs life throws at them, and they'll do it together. Zoey, her mom, her dad, and...

Keisuke and Jeff walk through the side door of the kitchen at that moment with baseball gloves in hand. Jeff is grabbing his shoulder and makes a beeline for an ice pack in the freezer while Samantha anxiously croons over her husband's injury. Zoey is really glad she didn't finish her sentence as Keisuke walked in, but she asks him what happened.

"He told me he wanted to catch my fastballs and the ball glanced off his glove and hit his shoulder."

Jeff is listening to this and tells everyone that it isn't Keisuke's fault.

"I'm not as young as I used to be, and I got hurt trying to throw as fast as Zoe's boyfriend."

Zoey's not sure she's going to get used to that being said out loud anytime soon, but she knows one of them is covering for the other.

Both women exchange glances at each other and then keep shifting glances between the two men. Neither is saying anything. Samantha is extremely perceptive, so she gets an idea of what really happened out there but isn't spilling the beans.

Zoey is the only one left in the dark, but she gets the idea that her dad and her boyfriend (Zoey's not sure she's going to get used to thinking that anytime soon) were having a conversation just as personal as the one she and her mom were having.

<Author's Note: Jeff is a fucking shounen harem protagonist and Samantha knows it. The truth behind the bruise on Jeff's shoulder (which will not be revealed in-narrative) is that there are also bruises on the knuckles covered up by the baseball gloves because they were having a fistfight. Jeff accurately surmised from the interaction during presents that Keisuke has serious issues with restraining his violence, but it's not in the way that he expected (Keisuke has punched guys before, but he has a latent aggression and anger in everything he does that he buries because he's scared of being like his dad).>

<Jeff and Keisuke were playing catch for a while, and while Jeff did request fastballs, he caught them fairly well (he's got fantastic vision and that's where Zoey got her ability to accurately perceive the path of balls to bunt them). They're shooting the shit and talking about baseball at first when Jeff just bluntly asks Keisuke if he loves his daughter (Jeff might be the only person fully privy to Zoey's gender identity at this moment and it is accurate wording no matter what).>

<Keisuke... thinks he does? He's honest here in that he does tend to charge into romances very bluntly and he knows he has fucked up his romantic relationships doing that, but he's worried he's going to end up doing that to Zoey if he doesn't take it slow. This is one relationship he really, really doesn't want to fuck up. Not only is Zoey his best friend and someone he's known since he was just barely 5, but Zoey is on the cusp of (or just beyond the cusp of) making an extremely important decision about herself that she can't take back. Keisuke doesn't quite get the full implications of what Zoey feels ("I told Keisuke my feelings as a woman, he accepted me as a woman, and I can't go back to being a guy again if I want him to keep my feelings.") but he really cares about Zoey and doesn't want to hurt her. Because of that, he's trying to make himself not feel as strongly about the relationship despite Zoey making it clear how much she cares about him.>

<After hearing all of this, Jeff calls Keisuke a fucking pussy and all but fully says that his daughter is a dense autist who won't get Keisuke's feelings if he isn't blunt. He goads Keisuke on by calling him a liar who is just trying to protect his own feelings while stringing Zoey along, and if he can't do that than he has no right to date Jeff's daughter.>

<The comments here get really mean from Jeff but he's deliberately trying to get a rise out of Keisuke to see if Keisuke is going to stand up against him not giving his blessings for the relationship. Jeff has to get physical and even give Keisuke a few hard body blows before Keisuke retaliates and punches Jeff very hard in the shoulder with all the force of an MLB-tier fastball pitch.>

<Jeff was waiting for the punch and braced against it, but that probably caused the injury to be worse. He briefly stumbles to one knee before pulling himself up and saying that Keisuke will do just fine as Zoey's girlfriend if he's willing to put himself on the line like that against her old man to prove he cares about Jeff's daughter and to protect her happiness.>

<Of course, Zoey got her talent for rambling from her dad, so this part takes several minutes, all while the bruise starts to swell. Jeff doesn't let himself get interrupted despite Keisuke telling him repeatedly that they need to get ice on that because while Jeff isn't certain Keisuke and Zoey are going to marry each other he really can't think of a better son-in-law and wants to make it clear that this is basically him giving Keisuke his blessing for marriage; of course, with how much Jeff rambles, the point gets lost along the way and Keisuke only gets the broader sentiment of him approving of the relationship.>

It's about 6:10 PM by this point and there is only a faint bit of light left (astronomical twilight on Christmas Day in Lake Oswego, OR is from 5:42 PM to 6:18 PM) and Keisuke says he has to bid Zoey's family farewell. Zoey all but begs him to spend the night (she would have in fact begged Keisuke had her parents not been watching) but she relents when he insists that he needs to spend time with his own family. She gives him a peck on the cheek as a taxi shows up to take him to a train station so he can crash at Ryouichi's place (campus housing is closed at the moment and you need special permission to stay over break which starts at 8 PM on the 24th, a rule which Keisuke broke when he brought Zoey home last night). <Author's Note: Jeff's dad was a big union labor guy and he refuses to let people in his family use non-union alternatives, i.e., calling something like a Lyft or an Uber instead of a taxi.>

While not on-screen as the story is strictly from Zoey's point of view, Keisuke's family time ultimately ends up just being an hour-long phone call with his mom where he catches up (he mentions a girl he's seeing but doesn’t go into the details yet because he's worried about the secrecy aspect of re:Dreamer with Ai's recent warning, so he just says it's some girl like Zach; mostly, he just happily listens to his mom talk about her life and how she's changing careers to nursing because of how impressed she was with Samantha treating her broken arm with basic household objects).

There's also a very short phone call with his hated and largely estranged dad (Keisuke saw glimpses of Zoey repairing her relationship with her mom and he wants that for his dad). This one doesn't go as well but Keisuke at least refrains from hanging up early and has extended the olive branch.

The rest of the evening is quite brief for Zoey. Samantha takes a break that evening to sketch the events of the day, and she briefly considers using that camera her husband got her to take a family photo... but she's fine not forcing herself to be like her mom in some half-baked scheme to convince herself that she's not. She likes sketching more than photography anyways, and that's what matters.

That night, Zoey hears her parents fucking very loudly (Jeff is a grunter and Samantha is a moaner). She's heard this a lot growing up <Author's Note: seriously, Zach's views of intimacy got very warped because of his living situation> but this is the first time she's ever closely listened... y'know, cause maybe she'll get some ideas with Keisuke...

Not much goes on for the rest of the week and the writing is very brief. Only two notable things are written: Zoey will lightly pry her mom for sex advice which Samantha uses an excuse to give her daughter a flood of information, and Zoey has a conversation with her dad about what he's doing for work after the holidays (thanks to Zoey's student loan and burning her scholarship for the sabbatical, the family finances aren't good enough that he can just quit and risk everything on starting an architectural design firm with Samantha despite having made a respected name for himself in the industry, but he can take a reduced number of contracts and spend about 50% more time at home which is only 2 months combined out of the year).

Keisuke also comes back to stay at the house on the 31st for a New Year's Day shrine visit where Zoey is wearing a cute winter kimono,but that's a story for another day.

So... I hope you all enjoyed this extremely detailed outline of the day. I wish I had more time to write Britney's outline properly and I still need to think of what's happening on Christmas for Rich's route, but I'll see you all on January 6th with the update to Britney's route with Zach meeting Britney's pastor and bombing his introduction (and a few more scenes in her route).

Her director is getting sprites soon, but I'm keeping the details "under wraps" for now.

Happy Holidays once again!