After much cajoling, Long Hair finally finished her excruciating essay. Then, in the blink of an eye, she ran out the door—Yu Sheng watched her turn her hair into a glider and leap off Cloud Gazing Platform. Optimistically, she should have flown halfway down the mountain by now to meet up with Cinderella and the others.
Less optimistically, she was probably hanging from a tree by now.
Little Red Riding Hood put down her phone and, with an exasperated look, stepped forward to help Rapunzel clean up the pile of papers and workbooks she had tossed onto the coffee table the moment she finished them. She sorted them by category and put them into her schoolbag.
Yu Sheng watched from the side, and his eyes accidentally landed on the essay prompt again. His eyelid twitched.
"She's always been like that—she gets hyper around people," Little Red Riding Hood said casually. "Still, that's what makes her one of the 'parents' in the fairy tale. At least she's fairly reliable when we go out on missions."
"Sure. It's mainly that her essay was so unexpected..." Yu Sheng tugged at the corner of his mouth, then looked thoughtful. "But now that you mention it, she seems to have been the first one in the 'fairy tale' to call me Brother. A lot of the others seem to do it just to be polite, but she calls me that every day. I'm almost used to hearing it."
Little Red Riding Hood put away the pencil case, then thought for a moment. "Probably because she really had an older brother once."
"...Huh?" Yu Sheng was genuinely surprised. "She actually had a brother?!"
"Yes, a long time ago."
"A long time ago?" Yu Sheng frowned. "What happened afterward?"
"Her brother abandoned her." Little Red Riding Hood